Tag: Divine Love

For the Love and Glory of God

Psalm 148:1-2 1 Hallelujah! Praise Abba God from the heavens; praise God in the heights. Praise Abba God, all you angels; praise God, all his host. [May these words praise God!]

Introduction

In 1984, Tina Turner asked, “What’s love got to do with it?” And looking around our local and national environment, I think that’s probably the question we should be asking. But just hollering into that caustic and vitriolic sinkhole, “Just love one another!”, is adding more fuel to the fire because we often don’t know what we mean when we say it. The reason for that? Most people, on either side of the divide, truly think they are acting in loving ways. So, hollering, “We just need to love one another!” is met with blank stares in response because, well “I AM!”

We truly believe that love will solve our problems, sooth our tensions, eliminate our divisions; and I agree with this. But the thing is, we must get real about what it means to love…We must start at the beginning and notice how God loves the cosmos and how God in Jesus Christ loved the neighbor. We must embrace that to love doesn’t always make one comfortable and cozy—either the beloved or the lover. We must be willing to take our love beyond good feeling and allow Love (capital “L”) be the force that guides our actions in the world causing us to prioritize the well-being of the neighbor o according to what they need and not what I think they need. So, I’m glad John is here to walk us (back) through what it means to love…

John 13:31-35

Our passage falls near the end of Jesus teaching his disciples about love in the upper room before his crucifixion. Essentially, we are—for all intents and purposes—back at Maundy Thursday. The chapter opens with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. At the conclusion of this event, Jesus gives a teaching on what it means to be a disciple of Christ: to serve each other and not to be served. Then Jesus tells of his betrayal. Here Judas is just flat called out and dismissed from the table to do what he is going to do. Then we come to our passage for today where Jesus explains what is happening and then gives his disciples a new commandment (to love). Chapter 13 closes with Jesus promising Peter that he will not be able to go where Jesus is going, but that Peter will deny Jesus three times. In this chapter, love has a lot of work to do.

John writes, Therefore when [Judas] went out, Jesus said, “Now the son of humanity was glorified, and God was glorified in him. If God was glorified in him, then God will glorify him in God, and God will glorify him immediately” (vv. 31-32). Jesus isn’t speaking abstractly here; he’s speaking very literally. His death comes as Judas goes out; the present moment is binding together what was with what will be.[1] The “now” there is doing a lot of work and emphasis should be placed on it. In this moment, among the disciples, there is a collision of time: what was is becoming what will be right then (now!). Jesus has glorified God in his active love in the world and this glorifying of God will become Jesus’s future glorification in the resurrection from the death that is coming now (because Judas left and all that is coming by his betrayal is as good as done). In other words, the Cross and the Resurrection are going to be the full culmination of what was colliding with what will be and creates an entirely new now for the disciples of Christ.[2] It is this new now that the disciples are ushered into by faith (and which is only accessible through faith).[3]

Jesus then addresses the disciples personally, Dear little children, I am still with you a little bit [longer]. You will search for me, and just as I said to the Children of Israel, “Where I, I go my way you, you are not able to come,” and to you I say [this] just now. After a pronouncement of God being glorified (both past and future) in and through himself, Jesus informs the disciples that the way he is going is his way alone and they are not able to come. Jesus’ presence with them is coming to an end; the disciples will no longer be able to walk (literally) with him and they will learn that it is necessary for them to be abandoned by Jesus (in his death and also in his future ascension). What he did with them will have to be enough…for now; the disciples will be stripped of their teacher, left to their own devising.[4] Or so they think…

Then Jesus speaks into their burgeoning doubt and threatening despair and promises that even as he leaves, he is with them. How so? Through a new commandment that has to do with the disciples loving each other as Christ loved them. Jesus exhorts, A new command I give to you: you love one another. Just as I loved you, you, you also love one another. In this way, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love among you. As Jesus’s time with the disciples wanes, he gives them a commandment that will transcend any epoch and era and any country and continent. In a swift motion, Jesus redirects their attention away from themselves and toward something in the future; to this command they can cling because it is not clinging to a stone tablet but a real person by faith; in it resides the entirety of Jesus with them, and if Jesus then God, too.[5] In loving one another like Christ loved them, they are never abandoned and are always with Christ and also with God. This is not a cold command to love as if it was of one’s own power; this is a command that is founded on and in and by the love of Christ for them, which is the love of God for them. [6] If the disciples love in the way of and like Christ loved them, then their discipleship status will be noticed by all people because in this love Christ will be proclaimed.[7]

The new command doesn’t replace Jesus, this would then make Jesus and faith in Jesus superfluous. Rather, the new command becomes the “essential nature” [8] of the burgeoning new community that follows this new way of Christ in a world that will find this all very strange.[9] (And, according to John, this love does start first among the new community. [10]) This new command of love is not feeling loving emotions toward someone; that is not how Jesus loved the disciples. Jesus loved the disciples (and others!) through acts and deeds of service that brought love, life, and liberation to them in both material and spiritual ways.[11] Thus, the disciples’ activity in accordance with this new command reinforces that the disciples are never far from Christ because this liberative love is the very love of Christ. And it is distinct and new because it is not the love of the kingdom of humanity but of the reign of God bringing life where there is death, Easter where Good Friday refuses to leave.[12]And if the disciples are never far from Christ in this liberative love, then it will be easy for all people to know they are HIS disciples.

In this way God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation continues in the world as Jesus goes his way and the disciples remain behind. The mission doesn’t end with Jesus; it is just the beginning of the advent and incarnation of the reign of God overhauling the kingdom of humanity, bit by bit, moment by moment, in this era and that era. [13] And, as this new community of disciples loving each other as Christ loved them goes into and through the history of the world, God is glorified in them because Christ is the glory of God and where this community is and loves as Jesus loved them, Christ is there and brings God glory.[14]

Conclusion

So, “What’s love got to do with it?” Well, according to John, everything. This command was not just for the disciples there with Jesus at the table but is timeless and knows not a static captivity to the past. The new commandment transcends time and space, it goes and is wherever there are those who gather in the name of Christ and love as Christ loved. This new command is for us today: it guides us, teaches us, corrects us, forms and reforms us, and it is still the way all people will know we are the disciples of Christ. They will know us by our love because our love will be liberative and life giving, it will be more than “thoughts and prayers,” more than some sort of comfortable message, even more than abstract Christian colloquialism that never hit the rock bottom we hit. This love will not bring death, indifference, and captivity; it will not hold up legalism, traditionalism, and dogmatism over the well-being of anyone (those here and out there) [15]. It will cause us to relinquish our excess to meet the needs of others and to abandon our self-imposed isolation to find deep community with others. It will be the source of our unrestrainable hope that will radiate out from here infecting others as it streams through the world to its farthest recesses. It will bind us to God, thus bind us to that and to those whom God loves: creation and our neighbor. Dorothee Sölle writes in her book, To Work and To Love, “The God who created the universe, including our planet, and who delivered us from slavery is the same God who raises the dead to new life, so that we who were dead and without hope might become resisters and lovers of life. ‘Lover of the living’ is an old name for God (Wis. of Sol. 11:26). So shall it be our name for evermore.”[16]

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 523. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “It is that νῦν, in which past and future are bound together, stressed particularly at this point by the paradoxical juxtaposition of ἐδοξάσθη (v. 31) and δοξάσει (v. 32).”

[2] Bultmann, John, 523-524. “The subject is that δόξα which is at the same time the Son’s and the Father’s: καὶ ὁ θεὸς ἐδοξάσθη ἐν αὐτῷ. What has already happened sub specie aeterni unfolds itself in the temporal future; and because this is so, the word δοξάσει (as if this future were at a distance from the νῦν) can be picked up again in καὶ εὐθὺς δοξάσει αὐτόν, which is a reference to the immediately imminent passion. It draws our attention again to that paradox inherent in the concept of δόξα, viz. that the δόξα becomes apparent precisely in the cross; and it also indicates a rejection of the naive primitive Christian eschatology, for there the revelation of Jesus’ δόξα was expected only at his coming Parousia (mk. 8.38).”

[3] Bultmann, John, 524. “The period of his personal presence has come to an end…His own will miss him; they will not realise the full significance of that νῦν immediately. Their faith has to stand the test.”

[4] Bultmann, John, 524. “…to some extent the believers are in the same position as the men of the κόσμος. Of course the situation does not contain for them, as it does for the latter, that element of the ‘too late’; but both look back in the same way on a ‘no longer’, and the beginnings of despair are there for the disciples too. They have to learn that the Revealer has not come to be at their disposal through their faith. What now lies in the past does not guarantee the future, but is called into question by it. Jesus, in whom they believed, disappears from them, and they are left with no security.”

[5] Bultmann, John, 525. “Then how can their relationship with him be retained in the face of this isolation?…The future is subjected to an imperative! Their anxiety was centred on their own actual existence, but now they are directed towards an existence that has the character of an ‘ought.’ The illusion that they possess him in such a way that he is at their disposal is confronted by another kind of possession: one which consists in fulfilling a command. Their despairing gaze into the past that is no more is redirected to the future, which comes and lay sits obligation upon them. An unreal future, which would only be a persistence in the past, is made into the real future which demands faith. And in so far as the content of the ἐντολή is ἵνα ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, the care for oneself is changed into a care for one’s neighbour.”

[6] Bultmann, John, 525. “But since it is precisely this becoming free from the past and from oneself that is subjected to the imperative, the future that is grasped as command coincides with the future that is promised for loyalty of faith; for it was freedom from the past and form oneself that was promised to the believer. Thus the imperative is itself a gift, and this it can be because it receives its significance and its possibility of realization from the past, experienced as the love of the Revealer.”

[7] Bultmann, John, 528. “…all loving becomes the proclamation of Jesus—which means that it can always become an offence too, not just in the individual case, but especially because the association formed by this kind of love cuts across the associations of the world in a special way.”

[8] Bultmann, John, 527. “But Jesus’ command of love is ‘new,’ even when it has been long-known, because it is the law of the eschatological community, for which the attribute ‘new’ denotes not an historical characteristic but its essential nature. The command of love, which is grounded in the love of the Revealer received by the disciples, is ‘new’ in so far as it is a phenomenon of the new world which Jesus has brought into being; and indeed 1 John 2.8 describes this newness as that of the eschatological event.”

[9] Bultmann, John, 527. “V. 35 states that the new world becomes reality in the community: reciprocal love within the community is the criterion of the discipleship of Jesus for those outside. The fact that the command of love is fulfilled there demonstrates the strangeness of the community within the world, and results in the world calling those who love the disciples of Jesus. Not just because there is a community in which love is both an injunction and an actual practice. Much rather because love itself there takes on a form that is strange to the world.”

[10] Bultmann, John, 528. “It is no general love of mankind, or love of one’s neighbour or enemy that is demanded, but love within the circle of disciples. Naturally this does not mean that the all-embracing love of one’s neighbour is to be invalidated; but here it is a question of the very existence of the circle of disciples. How does the departing Revealer remain present for his own? By the vitality of the gift of his love in their love of each other, and by their representation within the world of the new world, which became reality through him.”

[11] Bultmann, John, 526. “Jesus’ love is not a personal emotion, but is the service that liberates; and the response to it is not a mystical or pietistic intimacy with Christ, but the ἀλλήλους ἀγαπᾶν.”

[12] Bultmann, John, 526. “The significance of the past lies in the fact that the encounter with Jesus was experienced as his service which made the believer free; thus the significance of the future can only be that in it this freedom is brought to fruition. And this take s place int eh fulfillment of the command of love. Because this command and its fulfillment are grounded in the Revealer’s love which has actually been experienced, the believer always remains bound to the Revealer’s service and is never centered on himself.  And to put it the other way round, the faith which has accepted that service can only continue to come to fruition in the attitude of service, i.e. of love.”

[13] Bultmann, John, 529. “But the community itself fulfills its commission to the world…only if the ἀγαπᾶν remains the response to the love of Jesus, and so long as it does note exchange it for an ἔργον of the world, or for efficacy within world-history. It is not the effect it has on world history that legitimates the Christian faith, but its strangeness within the world; and the strangeness is the bearing of those whose love for each other is grounded in the divine love.”

[14] Bultmann, John, 526. “Only if they are themselves loving do they who belong to him remain in the experience of his love; in the same way they can, and do love, only on the basis of this experience. Thus the believers’ past and future are bound to each other like the former and the future δόξα of the Revealer himself: the future receives its meaning form the past, and the past becomes significant in the future. But that means that in the future, despite their separation from him, they remain united to him. In their action, his act is present.”

[15] Bultmann, John, 528. v. 35 disciples “…a definition of their essential nature. The association with Jesus, therefore, is not realized by possessing articles of knowledge or dogmas, nor in institutions or experiences of individual piety, but in pupil-hood,’ in obedience to the command of love.”

[16] Sölle, To Work and Love, 165.

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Like Paul and Peter

Psalm 23:3-4 Abba God revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for their Name’s sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Introduction

My favorite thing about the book of Acts, is the way the narrative camera focuses on the human beings left behind to participate in God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation without Jesus by their side. As human as the Gospels can be, they still feel—to me—just outside of my experience in the world. As far as I know, I’ve not been—literally—summoned by Jesus to come follow him and leave my—literal—net behind. I’ve not witnessed with my own eyes the healing miracles and the awesome casting out of demons. I did not run and hide with fear on Good Friday, nor feel the warmth burn in my heart as Jesus taught me on the way in his resurrected state. I didn’t witness the ascension or suddenly speak in a foreign language (no matter how much my charismatic evangelical background wants to think I have). I am just an audience member from 2025, listening to these ancient stories mixed up with a healthy amount of faith and doubt, skeptical and hungry.

So, this is why I love acts. Watching Paul get knocked off his donkey and onto his donkey through the proclamation of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit—having his misdirection redirected—brings the story home. I too have needed to be knocked down a peg or two, put in my place, reminded of my creaturely status before the Creator. I have thought myself to be so right and on point that I was completely misdirected toward what God was doing and celebrated the tendency of the kingdom of humanity to perform acts of violence and needed to be redirected. Witnessing Peter’s rapid exposure to the new movements and actions of God made known first in Christ and made real in Peter’s heart through the power of the Holy Spirit, is something I can confess to, too. I, too, have been graciously, generously, and patiently reinstructed that all are in and none are out, relearned God’s merciful divine activity that extends beyond skin, sex, and superficial boundaries, (re)experienced (manifold times) the pathos of God for the Beloved, and have stumbled about while desperately trying to walk in this new way, talk with new words, love with a new heart, think with a new mind, and see through new lenses all crafted and created by a God who so loves the cosmos that God won’t spare Gods self to save it.

I read something somewhere that said the best way to explain the book of acts is to see it as the movement and activity of the Holy Spirit rather than of the disciples. Are they central to this story building in the book of Acts? Yes, they are. But they are not the only performers on the stage. The Holy Spirit takes up their role and whisks and moves these human forms, destroying notions of autonomy and free-will, taking them hither and tither, bringing them into contact with those whom they would never ever be in contact with, reducing them through exposure, and building them up through love and liberation into new life defined by the reign of God. Last week we received the story of Saul and his “conversion”; this week, we are exposed to Peter walking in the way of Jesus, doing the initial things that will become some of the hallmarks of what it means not only to be Christian, but also Church.

Acts 9:36-43

We jump quite a bit forward in Acts 9. We move from Paul’s conversion to the beginning of Peter’s radical exposure to the law of God which is the law of love for all God’s beloved, transcending national and religious boundaries rather than creating them. Starting a bit earlier in the chapter than our lectionary suggests, we find Peter in Lydda, having been brought there by the Holy Spirit to the those who are called “living saints”.[1] By using the word “Saints” Luke highlights that the divide between the secular and the sacred is diminishing; every day regular people are indwelled with divine holiness, a holiness that will not fade away and creates a new way of being in the world as God’s vessels bringing divine life, love and liberation to others like themselves.[2] (This is very good news for regular people like you and me!) So, Peter is with these everyday saints, and he is there to heal a man who was paralyzed for 8 years. Through Peter, the Holy Spirit heals this man, and the story of his healing becomes a source for those in Lydda and the surrounding area (Sharon) to praise God and turn to Christ in faith (vv. 32-35).[3] In Lydda, Peter is doing as Jesus did: healing and liberating the oppressed and bringing glory to God.[4]

While Peter is in Lydda, over in Joppa there was a certain disciple by [the] name Tabitha, which [in Greek] is translated as Dorcas, she was full of good works, and she was doing acts of mercy. But it happened in those days she [became] sick and died; when she died, they washed her body, writes Luke, and they placed her body in an upper room (vv. 36-37). The saints of Joppa are grieved over this loss. Rightly so. Tabitha was a woman and a representative of Christ[5] in spaces too often neglected by both human and divine presence (read the prophets!). Not only is Luke elevating the role of women in the work of the gospel and in his narrative about the movement of the Holy Spirit (which should expose us in our own context),[6] he is also highlighting that losing this one who brings well-being to her neighbors and glory to God, leaves a massive gap in bringing God’s presence to those who need God’s presence the most: the widows…whom God cares about very much! So, the disciples having heard that Peter was in Lydda, and Lydda being close to Joppa, they sent two men [to Joppa] beseeching Peter, “Do not hesitate and pass through [and] come to us immediately!” (v. 38).

Peter’s response? Now, after rising Peter went to them (v.39a). Peter doesn’t waste a moment to help these saints over in Joppa who lost a beloved representative of Christ. Luke tells us more, After he arrived, they brought him up into the upper-room, and the widows stood by him weeping and showing [him] tunics and many cloaks Dorcas was making being with them (v.39b-c). These poor and too often neglected widows lose the one who cares for them, the one who made them feel seen and heard and loved; this is what Peter enters when he arrives.[7] But it’s more than comfort Peter is bringing. For Luke (and Peter) in this moment a massive (divinely inspired) statement is occuring: women matter, their works matter, their bodies matter.[8] Luke tells us, Now, after Peter cast everyone out [of the room], he also placed [his] knees [on the ground] and prayed, and turning to the body, he said, “Tabitha, rise!” And she does. Now her eyes opened, and after seeing Peter she sat up. Peter acts like Christ and commands the dead woman to rise. Those held captive to death (both Tabitha and the widows) are not held captive anymore; they’re liberated, by this regular person through the power of the Holy Spirit who works in them and through them to overturne the kingdom of humanity and establish the reign of God.[9] Just as the women were the first to hear of the resurrection of Christ from death, so too did a woman first experience the life out of death that is characteristic of the reign of God wrought by the Holy Spirit moving through regions bringing God glory![10] Luke tells us, Now, after giving her his hand he raised her, and after calling out [to] the saints and the widows, he presented her [to them] living. Now it became known throughout all of Joppa, and the many believed in the Lord. And the Holy Spirit is not only moving through acceptable regions but is breaking down false boundaries[11] originally demarcating clean and unclean: the glory of God and God’s divine mission to liberate the captives know no walls and barriers. Luke concludes, Now it happened [Peter] stayed a sufficient number of days in Joppa with a certain Simon the Tanner. Just like Paul, Peter is in the clutches of a God on the move, caught up in the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[12]

Conclusion

Peter and Paul present to us the two best examples of regular, human beings—like you and me—who are caught up in the transcending and unyielding resurrection life that starts with Christ and continues with his disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think Peter and Paul are intimidating to us. I think it’s easier to ask WWJD rather than WWPD because their recorded actions bring the divine pathos down to our level. It’s safe when Jesus does something because we can kind of dismiss it: well…he’s like the Son of God…so… But when it’s the former know-it-all and the former fisherman, the flames of those actions burn close to our skin. Because, as it turns out, like Paul and Peter, we have skin in this game and this game participates in the divine passion for the cosmos. Peter, a regular guy, calls Tabitha into (new) life from death and liberates Aeneas from the captivity of being paralyzed; this puts us on the hook as we begin (again) to walk in the way of the ascended Jesus and the Spirit that is to come. Both Peter and Paul ask us to think about what it means to be Christian and to do Church. Beloved, like Peter and Paul, we, too, by and in Christ, get to bring love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

[1] Willie James Jennings, Acts, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 99. “He is on the road and comes to Lydda to be among the living saints.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 99. “Jesus is God drawing the everyday into holiness, into God’s own life. Everyday people are made holy in Christ. Everyday people are made holy by Christ, and this is a holiness that will last, not be episodic, and constitute a new space for living life and knowing ourselves.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 99-100. “Once again a marvelous act, a touchable miracle, will turn people to the Lord (v. 35). This is repetition that illumines the inexhaustible riches of Gods love for the fragile creature and Gods desire to constantly touch us, hold us, and announce the victory over death. There is yet more for Peter in this journey as he is approached by two disciples form another city (Joppa) for the sake of one disciple who has died.”

[4] Jennings, Acts,99. “Peter returns to center stage and engages in a bit of wayfaring life, echoing again his history of following Jesus and doing as his savior had done.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha’s life even in the fragments we gain in this story, hangs together beautifully as someone devoted to helping people, especially widows.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha, the disciples of Jesus—Luke opens her story inside of Peter’s journey and in so doing makes a point more powerful for us in our time than probably for him in his time. Tabitha, a woman, is a disciple of Jesus. Whether this vignette is evidence of Luke’s positive view of women or not he has certainly gives us a plateau from which to view a new future in which men and women in Christ have a different way of seeing themselves—as disciples.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Widows, that group of people vulnerable in ancient and current time, made vulnerable by death’s sting, have always been a special concern for God and here for Tabitha as well. …So the widows weep. They weep for her and maybe for themselves. We do not know if Tabitha was in fact one of them, but we do know that they claimed her as one of whare for them. Here glory joins strong grief because to lose someone who cares for the weak and vulnerable, whose life is turned toward making a difference in the world and who is making a difference, is a bitter loss. The widows have lost Tabitha and a disciple is gone. This is what Peter steps into in Joppa.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Peter’s presence declares an unmistakable truth: women matter. This woman matters, and the works she does for widows matters to God. It matters so much that God will not allow death the last word. Others had been raised form the dead in the Gospels and in Luke’s Gospel…but this is different. This not a little girl or the brother of a friend of Jesus; this is a disciple raised from the dead. Tabitha is not finished in life or service.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 100-101. “‘Tabitha, get up.’ Peter repeats Jesus. Tabitha is an activist who lives again in resurrection power. Her body has been quickened by the Spirit, and her eyes are opened again to see a new day. She has work to do and joy to give to the widows: you have not been abandoned, dear widows, God has heard your weeping and returned her to you.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 101. “It is not accident that the first disciple to have this little tase of the resurrection isa woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection. And Peter is there once again to see a miraculous sign point to faith’s direction—many who found out about this believe in the Lord (v. 42).”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 101. “The story, however, does not end there with Tabitha, because Peter stays in Joppa, and who he stays with points to an earth-shattering future.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 101. “He stays with Simon, a tanner. Tanners worked with death flesh—the skin of animals and tanners were, theologically speaking, unclean. Few if any pious Jews would normally or easily stay with a tanner, but here was Peter with Somin the tanner. Peter is indeed moving from saints to saints, and soon he will find out just how far the generosity and mercy of a holy God reaches. Soon he will see just how far God will extend holy place and holy people. Peter is with a man who touches the unclean, and soon he will see God do the same.”

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“Rescued from Danger…Sealed for Thy Courts”: The Path of Easter!

Psalm 118: 14-16a Abba God is my strength and my song and has become my salvation. There is a sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of Abba God has triumphed!

Introduction

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen!!

This morning, our calcified hearts prone to wander from God find rest in divine sealing made known in the unsealed, empty tomb. We who are enticed and attracted to the shiny bobbles and fluffy lures of the kingdom of humanity are now ushered into something truly new, truly beaming, truly spectacular, truly built of the divine, eternal, never tarnishing substance that is the love of God for you, the Beloved. This morning, despite our wandering, we come face to face with God in Christ, the one who lives and doesn’t die.

Even when we decided to wander from God, to turn our backs, to forget the ancient and good story, to tread and tromp on everyone and everything, to estrange ourselves, to misjudge and prejudge others unto their condemnation, and even when we preferred acts of violence and death, God sought us and found us as we were wandering “from the fold of God”[1] and set us right. This morning, the exposure we felt on Friday becomes the warm light of the risen Son, bringing us into himself, into the lap of Abba God, and wrapping us up like newborn babes in the warm blanket of the Holy Spirit. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death.

Today we’re a people set back on course, eyes lifted, faces turned, fleshy hearts thumping with divine love, hands and feet eager to spread the liberation we have received, and voices ready to call forth life even when all that surrounds us in the world is death. Today we become a people who dares to believe this crazy, far-out story because today become a people brought to life by this good and ancient word of God.

Luke 24:1-12

Now after the women were made full of fear they bowed their faces to the earth; [the two men in clothing shining like lightening] said to the women, “Why are you seeking the one who lives among the dead?” (Luke 24:5)

At the end of chapter 23, Luke mentions that the women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary mother of James, and some other women (24:10a)—saw, from a distance, where Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus’s body (v.55).[2] It’s these women who now take center stage in the reception of the good news that Jesus is raised. As the men fled, the women held their ground initially in the distance and now the first ones on the scene in Luke’s resurrection story.[3]

Having seen where Joseph placed Jesus’s body (23:55), and it being the first day of the week and still in the depths of early morning, these women went to the tomb bearing the spices they prepared on Friday night (v.1 and 23:56). Keeping in mind that they prepared spices on Friday night, these women are not examples of blind faith despite the facts; for them, as well as for the men, Jesus was dead—very dead. They planned to anoint his body,[4] which wasn’t done in the rush getting his body down from the cross and into a tomb before the sunset and curses arrived (cf. Dt 21:23).

Now, when they arrived at the tomb, they found the stone having been [mysteriously[5]] rolled away from the tomb (v.2). Curious to see what happened, the women entered the tomb. And after entering the tomb they did not find the body of Jesus (v. 3). Luke then writes, while the women were perplexed/in doubt about what had happened, behold! two men approached the women [dressed] in clothing shining like lightening (v.4). The women were confused, and now they became full of fear; upon being approached by two men in dazzling clothing, Luke tells us, they bowed their faces to the earth (5a). In other words, they suddenly dropped to the ground because they were full of terror. While this is a natural and biblical response to angelic visitors, it’s also a human reaction. These women came to anoint Jesus’s body, and not only is it missing (stolen, maybe?) but now two men show up and approach them (Are we in trouble? Are they going to harm us?). Luke does a marvelous job wedding together the spiritual and temporal realities of this story growing in dramatic tension.

Luke then writes that the two gleaming men said to the women, “why are you seeking the one who lives with the dead? He is not here but was raised” (v.5b-6a).For one moment, suspend your judgment and how well you know this story. Stay here with the women hearing, for the first time, that Jesus—whom they saw crucified on Friday and sealed up in a tomb—is not dead but alive because he is risen! Instantaneously, your world is turned upside down…again! As they looked at each other (now more in astonishment and less in fear) they begin the journey of faith as it dawns on them (in their hearts and minds) that death itself has a mortal weakness: God…Is it possible? Is  Jesus alive? Imagine the grief they carried giving birth to hope…hope daring to rise to life in the depths of a tomb meant for the hopelessness of death…

Then Luke tells us that the two men exhort them, remember what he spoke to you while he was still in galilee, saying it is necessary that the son of humanity be betrayed into the hands of sinful humanity and to be crucified and on the third day to be raised up.” And as the men remind them, these women remembered [Jesus’s] words and after returning from the tomb they announced[6] all these things to the twelve and to the all the remaining people (vv. 8-9). That which they hadn’t fully grasped they did as the celestial men spoke to them;[7] they heard,[8] they believed, and they went.[9] If there were ever three phrases that sum up good discipleship, these are they.[10] The women didn’t linger, tarry, hesitate, debate, and didn’t dismiss because this message didn’t align with their social, political, or religious status-quo. They ran home and immediately told the disciples what they heard. Good news arrives!

And then it’s dismissed. Luke informs us, [the women and their words] appeared before [the men] as if silly, idle nonsense; they were disbelieving the women (v.11). The good news the women brought falls flat at the feet of the men they told; [11] save one. Peter is the only who listened and is intrigued enough to run to the tomb, and after stooping to look he saw only the piece of fine linen and then he departed toward home marveling at what had happened (v.12). According to Luke, Peter not only denied Jesus but then didn’t tell the others that the women were correct; he just remained silent and amazed. [12]  Here, Luke draws purposeful attention to the faithfulness of the women who proclaimed the good news even when it sounded ludicrous.[13] They didn’t linger among the dead; inspired by faith,[14] they ran straight into (new) life, spreading the good news of the one who is living, the risen Jesus the Christ. In this moment filled with swelling divine life, the women were resistant to wandering. They ran toward the risen Christ boldly entering a new reality and order where death succumbs to life.[15]

Conclusion

For us who are prone to wander because we forsake and forget the way of the reign of God, this morning we are given Christ himself—all of him—so that we never forget or forsake the way. For us who are addicted to treading on and tromping about the land and on others, we have received a new way to walk in the world demonstrated by the running feet of the women: swift and sensitive, eager to bring good news rather than pain! For us who find ourselves estranged by our own doing and having become strangers to God, to our neighbor, to creation, and to ourselves we are beckoned out of the oppressive col of self-imposed tombs of isolation and are given a community with God, with others, with creation, and with ourselves built on and by the love of Christ. For us who know the pain of being caught in the captivity of misjudging and prejudging others according to our own human standards, we are refused that plumbline and, instead, we are given divine love, life, and liberation as our new metrics of good and right. For us who are drunk with violence and death, we receive what we do not deserve this morning: peace and life eternal.

This morning we’re given something completely new, completely different, completely strange to the kingdom of humanity. We are given life, love, and liberation. And while we benefit from this, we are given these things specifically so we can participate in God’s divine mission of the revolution of love, life and liberation in the world for the God’s beloved. We are refused the option of living as if we’ve not heard, seen, felt, tasted, smelled the good news. We are charged to take up the way of Christ and live as if the Cross isn’t the end of the story but the beginning. The women who were encountered in the empty tomb were charged to stop looking for the living among the dead; their lives were never ever the same.[16] So it is with us: our call to be disciples taking up their cross and follow Jesus isn’t gone, it’s the only way we have because the path we learned from the kingdom of humanity is forever blocked off.[17] This morning, we’re not the same as we were yesterday morning; this morning, we’ve encountered an empty tomb and heard the announcement from the celestial realm: he is not here he is risen! How could we ever live in the old way? Everything is now new.

Today, our willful and chaotic wandering collides with the steady path of Christ that is dangerous and not careful, that is risky and not safe, that is radical and not status quo, that will afflict and not always comfort.[18] Today we live under the weight of the question, Why are you seeking the one who lives among the dead? (v. 5). Go, Beloved, and live radically and wildly in the name of God and for the well-being of your neighbor and do so in a way that brings God glory and might get you in a little bit of good trouble. You’ve been summoned into life not death, into love and not indifference, into liberation and not captivity.

[1] Fom the hymn “Come Thou Fount”

[2] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 272. “In 23:55 Luke directed our attention to the women who were present at the burial, and now he continues telling us about the activities of these women once the Sabbath rest had passed.”

[3] Gonzalez, Luke, 272. “It is interesting to note that here again Luke will tell parallel but different stories about the women disciples and the men…These women have been present, but have remained mostly in the background of the story, even since Luke introduced them in 8:2-3. In the narrative of the passion and burial, even while others deny Jesus or flee, these women stand firm, although at a distance. Now they come to the foreground as the first witnesses to the resurrection.”

[4] Gonzalez, Luke, 272-273. “They, no less than the rest, believe that in the cross all has come to an end. It is time to return home to their more traditional lives. But before they do that, they must perform one least act of love for their dead Master: they must anoint his body.”

[5] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 837. “How was the stone removed? Luke’s account neglects such detail, for he wants to move quickly to the pivotal discovery of an empty tomb.”

[6] Gren, Luke, 838-839. “‘Luke underscores the faithfulness of their testimony by noting that they announced ‘all these things’—that is, what they had observed, what they had been told, and the new significance they attributed to Jesus’ passion and the absence of his corpse.”

[7] Green, Luke, 837-838. “These women come looking for Jesus, but they want to minister to him, and as they quickly discover, because they lack understanding, they are looking in the wrong place. The angels first admonish them, employing language that is reminiscent of Jesus’ rejoinder to the Sadducees in 20:38: God is not the God of the dead but of the living! That is, in spite of their devout intentions in coming to anoint Jesus’ body, these women have failed to grasp Jesus’ message about the resurrection and, thus, have not taken with appropriate gravity the power of God.”

[8] Gren, Luke, 838. “The antidote for this miscalculation is remembrance. The women are addressed as person who had themselves received Jesus’ teaching in Galilee, and the angel’s message fuses Jesus’ predictions during the Galilean phase of his ministry…Thus they are reminded that the career of the Son of Man blends the two motifs of suffering and vindication, and that in doing so he fulfills the divine will.”

[9] Gonzalez, Luke, 273. “The women do not see the resurrected Jesus. The two figures at the tomb (presumably angels) simply tell them that he has risen just as he had foretold, and they believe. Luke does not even say, as do Matthew and Mark (Matt. 28:7; Mrk 16:7), that they are instructed to tell the rest of the disciples (an injunction they follow in Matthew, but not in Mark). They simply hear the witness of the two men at the tomb, and apparently on their own initiative go and tell the others.”

[10] Gren, Luke, 838. Seim qtd in. “Their reception of the resurrection message ‘confirms their discipleship and the instruction they have received as disciples.’”

[11] Green, Luke, 839-840. “The gap between male and female disciples widens, as the faithful account of the women falls on the cynical and unbelieving ears of the men. Nothing more than useless chatter—this is how their announcement is evaluated and discarded. This can be explained in at least to aways. First, the earlier situation of the women disciples is being repeated int eh case of their male counterpart; failing to grasp Jesus’ teaching regarding his suffering and resurrection, they cannot make sense of the news share d with them. At the same time, however, Luke’s ‘all this’ (v 8) cannot but include the message they had received form the angels, so that the men were given access to the significance of recent events. The dismissive response of the men is therefore better explained with reference to the fact that those doing the reporting are women in a world biased against the admissibility of women as witnesses.” Peter’s response is all the more positive.

[12] Green, Luke, 840. Amazement is not faith nor does it hint at the eventual genuine faith. “Unlike the women, [Peter] returns home with no new message to share.”

[13] Gonzalez, Luke, 273. “The contrast is such that one cannot avoid the conclusion that it is purposeful, and that Luke is stressing the faith of these women who have traveled with Jesus from Galilee, and who were the only ones who remained true throughout the entire story of the betrayal. Even though the later course of church history, with its expectation of entirely male leadership, would lead us to think otherwise, it is they who bring the message of the resurrection to the eleven, and not vice versa.”

[14] Green, Luke, 836. “The Evangelist has repeatedly noted the incapacity of the disciples to grasp this truth…but now he signals a breakthrough on the part of the women. If the male disciples continue in their obtuseness, and thus lack of faith, at least Peter response to the witness of the women by going to the tomb. His behavior portends at last the possibility of a more full understanding of Jesus’ message on their part.”

[15] Gonzalez, Luke, 274. “The resurrection is not the continuation of the story. Nor is it just its happy ending. It is the beginning of a new story, of a new age in history.”

[16] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “But the truth is that the resurrection of Jesus, and the dawning of the new with him, poses a threat to any who would rather continue living as if the cross were the end of the story. The women on their way to the tomb were planning to perform one last act of love for Jesus, and then would probably just return home to their former lives. Peter and the rest would eventually return to their boats, their nets, and the various occupations. But now the empty tomb opens new possibilities. Now there is no way back to the former life in Galilee. Even though Luke tells us that Peter simply went home after seeing the empty tomb, we will soon learn that this was not the end of it: Peter himself would eventually die on his own cross.”

[17] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “The resurrection is a joyous event; but it also means that Jesus’ call for his disciples to take up their cross and follow him is still valid. The road to the old ways in Galilee is now barred. The resurrection of Jesus impels them forward to their own crosses, and indeed, we know that several of the disciples suffered violent death as the result of their following and proclaiming the Risen One.”

[18] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “The full message of Easter is both of joy and of challenge. It is. The announcement of unequaled and final victory, and the call to radical, dangerous, and even painful discipleship.”

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“Prone to Wander”: Into the Tomb

Psalm 114:7-8 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of Abba God, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.

Introduction

A day of silence. A day of eyes dampened with doubt, confusion, fear, anger, and even despair. It’s not just the women who cry; the men cry, too; no one is exempt from the overwhelming barrage of emotions that comes when hopes are dashed, expectations go up in flames, and faith feels shattered. The one whom they loved, the one whom they followed, the one whom they would die for—so they claimed—had been killed, and his body lay in a sealed tomb, guards flanking the massive stone. They didn’t even have time to prepare his body properly before the Sabbath moon rose gently in the sky reminding them that what was was no longer …

In the silence of that Sabbath, thoughts of what happened, how could this be, what was it all for, is this really it paraded about the minds of the disciples as they forced themselves to rest, no recourse to business of banal tasks to keep their minds occupied. They were stuck in this moment of death, like Jesus in that tomb. The extra layer for some (all?) is that they didn’t stick around, defend, follow Jesus all the way… They ran, denied, hid, betrayed. Their consciences were plagued with loss and confusion and burdened with the uncomforting, weighted-blanket of failure and guilt—heavier for some, lighter for others. These precious souls (no matter their guilt and failure, their denial and betrayal) had to endure the sun-down to sun-down plus a few more hours to receive the actual ending of the story. On this night, all those years ago, the disciples of Christ sighed, wiped away tears, and wondered what it was all about… Death, and all its children, held them hostage like Christ sealed in the tomb.

On this night, all those years ago, the disciples died with Christ. What they didn’t know was that the story wasn’t as over …

Romans 6:3-11[1]

In Romans 6, Paul anchors the silence of Saturday into the death of Good Friday and the life of Easter Sunday. For Paul, those who follow Christ follow him in the ways they speak and act and through deep identification with Christ even if it means going into the tomb with Christ on Good Friday. For Paul, this identification with Christ in Christ’s death is the key to the identification with Christ in his resurrected life. For Paul, this is how believers participate in the entirety of the Easter event, from beginning to end, from death into new life. In other words, our Romans passage is a clear distillation of what is happening as we transition from death to life through the silence of Saturday.

Paul begins with a question (v. 1) that he then (passionately) answers in v. 2: What therefore will we say? Should we persist in sin so that grace might superabound? Hell no! How can we who died to sin still live in it? In this portion, Paul addresses the new life believers have in Christ: this is absolutely not a continuation of what has gone before and is something completely new! There is a clean break between what was sealed up in the tomb with Christ on Good Friday, and the new life the believers step into on Easter Sunday Morning.

Because there is no continuation between what was by deeds of the flesh and what is now by faith in Christ, Paul feels compelled to ask the Romans, Or, do you not know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (v.3)Meaning, there’s a lie floating about that those who believe in Christ don’t suffer Christ’s fate, that we are exempted from that death. For Paul, while we weren’t nailed to the cross in literal terms, we do suffer a death like Christ’s, and this is actualized in our participation in the waters of baptism. (Being submerged under the water is to buried with Christ, to come up out of the water is to be raised with Christ.) For Paul, it is imperative that we take seriously the reality that we die like Christ; for Paul (and thus for us), THIS IS GOOD NEWS! Paul writes, Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of Abba God, in this way we, we might also walk in the newness of life (v.4). Through what God did in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, death that leads to life is the only path for believers. What is ruled out? Death that leads to death. Why? Because those who journey through a death like Christ’s receive resurrection into new life that cannot die like Christ cannot die (and this new life is both internal and external, spiritual and temporal!).[2] Thus why Paul can then write, For if we have become united together with him in a death like his death, we will also [be united with him in his] resurrection (v. 5). We live unafraid of another death because we live eternally in and with Christ.

Paul continues to elaborate about this identification between the believer and Christ, Knowing that our old person was crucified together [with Christ] with the result that the body of sin is abolished, so that we are no longer a slave to sin, for the one who has died [with Christ] has been declared righteous from sin (vv. 6-7). Paul anchors the believer in the death of Christ so that their body of sin—not their existence as fleshy creatures, but their defective orientation resulting in sin thus death[3]—is put to death and this is liberation because it cannot weigh the believer down anymore. Another way to say this is that by virtue of identification with Christ in Christ’s death, sin and its consequence, death, are put to death.[4] What was ushered in by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, has been put asunder by the death of death that is brought in and through Christ’s death and resurrection. And if this is the case, then with Paul we can say, And if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live together with him (v.8). Captivity itself is now held captive and the captives—the ones formerly held in captivity to sin and death—are liberated.[5]

Paul then writes, Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead no longer dies, death no longer rules over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God [always]. Thus you, you also consider yourselves to be dead to sin and only living to God in Christ Jesus. For those who follow Christ, to live is to live unbound by death, released from captivity, no longer controlled and threatened by sin. According to Paul, it’s not that believers now no longer sin; they do. Believers will miss the mark, they will shoot and not score, they will mean one thing and do another, they will harm, they will mar, they will wound. What Paul is getting at is that the believer—while still a sinner—is liberated from the effects of sin which is death. The believer—now declared righteous although a sinner still (simul iustus et peccator)—has died once and for all (like Christ) and never needs to die again to sin (though sin is going to happen).[6] In other words, the believer does not need to intentionally sin so that they can die again to sin and again be declared righteous. Doing so is unnecessary and declares the grace of God unnecessary (Hell no!), as if being made righteous can come by any other means apart from grace and faith in Christ.

Because Jesus died once for all, believers in union with Christ by faith will never really die (they will “fall asleep in Christ”) because death has met its own death, captivity its own captivity. [7],[8] Rather, like Christ, they will live by the grace of God and for the grace of God.[9] This is an eternal living because the believer—by faith and God’s grace—lives in Christ and Christ who is now the Lord of life is no longer subject to death and its lordship—thus, those who live in Christ have life eternal because Christ is now eternal even in his raised and ascended body.[10] Even when sin shows up in the believer’s life—and it will—this eternal living is not hindered or hampered. Rather—through easy access to forgiveness and absolution—the believer can get up, wipe the dust off, and try again to live the life that reflects their eternal life in Christ.[11] Here the spiritual can manifest in the temporal, the outer aligns with the inner, God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Conclusion

For the disciples, the deathly silence of Saturday was palpable. For (about) 36 hours, waiting for the Sabbath to pass, waiting for the dawn of second full day after Christ’s death, they died, each one of them died with Christ—in grief, loss, shock, doubt, hopelessness, helplessness. They despaired of themselves, they released all that they thought was, and they came to the absolute ends of themselves. And here, in their ignorance to the divine movements, amid their darkest doubt, their deepest despair, surrounded by a void of sound or word, God was about to usher them into a brand-new conception of what it means to live in Christ, to live in love, to live liberated from all that was. As the host of heaven held its breath and as the disciples cried, God was on the move raising the greatest gift for the cosmos: the fulfilment of God’s glorious promise, Jesus the Christ raised holding death itself captive to death.

Tonight, we move from death to life. This service dives in deep to the silence of Saturday, the despair of a missing messiah, the stripping away of hope. At the beginning, we are all stuck in our sin, set on a path toward death eternal, forever held captive by its threat and presence, stealing from us any sense of peace—for how can anyone really have peace if they are always scrambling away from and fighting against death and its fruits? But in the blink of an eye, God moved, the heavenly host exhaled, and we find ourselves shrouded in the mystery of Christ being raised from the dead to be for us the source, sustenance, and sustainment of divine life, love, and liberation for all people, the entire cosmos, forever and always. As those who are prone to wander, God has come in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit to be our new life marked by remembering and not forgetting, walking and not tromping, gathered and not estranged, accepting and not judging, peaceful and lifegiving and not violent and death-dealing. Today we are new creatures with a new life and a new way to walk in the world for the wellbeing of our neighbors and to the glory of God.

Hallelujah! Christ is Risen!

[1] All translations from Romans are mine unless otherwise noted

[2] LW 25:309. “For having put on our mortal flesh and dying only in it and rising only in it, now only in it He joins these things together for us, for in this flesh He became a sacrament for the inner man and an example for the outward man.”

[3] LW 25:313. “The term ‘old man’ describes what kind of person is born of Adam, not according to his nature but according to the defect of his nature. For his nature is good, but the defect is evil.”

[4] LW 25:310. “Eternal death is also twofold. The one kind is good, very good. It is the death of sin and the death of death, by which the soul is released and separated form sin and the body is separated rom corruption and through grace and glory is joined to the living God. This is death in the most proper sense of the word, for in all other forms of death something remains that is mixed with life but not in this kind of death, where there is the purest life alone, because it is eternal life. For to this kind of death alone belong in an absolute and perfect way the conditions of death, and in this death alone whatever dies perishes totally and into eternal nothingness, and nothing will ever return from this death because it truly dies an eternal death. This is the way sin dies; and likewise the sinner, when he is justified, because sin will not return again for all eternity…”

[5] LW 25:310. “This is the principle theme in scripture. For God has arranged to remove through Christ whatever the devil brought in through Adam. And it as the devil who brought in sin and death. Therefore God brought about the death of death and the sin of sin, the poison of poison, the captivity of captivity.”

[6] LW 25:314. “The meaning is that we must undergo this spiritual death only once. For whoever dies thus lives for all eternity. Therefore we must not return to our sin in order to die to sin again.”

[7] LW 25:311. “Because for death to be killed means that death will not return, and ‘to take captivity captive’ means that captivity will never return, a concept which cannot be expressed through an affirmative assertion.”

[8] LW 25:311. “For the entering into life can, and necessarily must, become a departure from life, but the ‘escape form death’ means to enter into a life which is without death.”

[9] LW 25:313. “Nor can he be freed of his perversity except by the grace of God…This is said not only because of the stubbornness of perverse people but particularly because of the extremely deep infection of this inherited weakness and original poison, by which a man seeks his own advantage even in God himself because of his love of concupiscence.”

[10] LW 25:315. “For just as the ray of the sun is eternal because the sun is eternal, so the spiritual life is eternal because Christ is eternal; for He is our life, and through faith He flows into us and remains in us by the rays of His grace. Therefore, just as Christ is eternal, so also the grace which flows out of Him is from His eternal nature. Furthermore, just because a man sins again his spiritual life does not die, but he turns his back on this life and dies, while this life remains eternal in Christ.”

[11] LW 25:315. “He has Christ, who dies no more; therefore he himself dies no more, but rather he lives with Christ forever. Hence also we are baptized only once, by which we gain the life of Christ, even though we often fall and rise again. For the life of Christ can be recovered again and again, but a person can enter upon it only once, just as a man who has never been rich can begin to get rich only once, although he can again and again lose and regain his wealth.”

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“Prone to Wander”: Human Judgment, Judged

Psalm 116: 1,10 I love Abba God, because Abba God has heard the voice of my supplication, because Abba God has inclined Abba God’s ear to me whenever I called upon Abba God. How shall I repay Abba God for all the good things Abba God has done for me?

Introduction

Our journey through Lent to Holy Week has brought us to the reality of our situation. We have seen that we’re prone to forsake and give up following the way of the reign of God; we have seen that we’re prone to tromp and tread on the land, on our neighbor, on God, and on ourselves; we have seen that we’re eager to estrange ourselves and become strangers to God, thus to our neighbor, thus to ourselves. While we would love for the exposure of Lent to be over, our exposure is, only now, getting personal.

Maundy Thursday isn’t really about “foot washing” or about finding ways to make yourselves smaller and more servant-like to your neighbor—even though such acts are exposing and can bring a certain (healthy) amount of humility. Rather, Maundy Thursday is about Peter being exposed for what he doesn’t understand about who Jesus is and what his mission on earth is all about. And, thus—if it’s about Peter being exposed—it’s about us being exposed for not really getting what Jesus is truly up to. While we claim all year to know what God’s mission is in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we don’t really know and we often forget what it is once we’re told, and we conflate it and force it to conform with our own desires, and (then) walk away from it completely. Maundy Thursday is designed to drive some of those final and big nails into our coffin of exposure. As we gaze upon Christ in the gospel story, watch him remove his clothes and don only a wrap around his waist and begin to wash the feet of his disciples, we should feel the urge building up to blurt out, with Peter, “‘You will never wash my feet!’” A simple statement meant for respect yet exposing how much we really don’t understand what is happening or why Christ is here. On Maundy Thursday, our judgment is called to account for itself, and it will be found lacking.

We are prone to bad judgment because we are prone to wander from our God of love.

Exodus 12:1-14

Here in our First Testament passage from the book of Exodus, Moses and Aaron receive the instructions for the Passover event. The Passover marks the beginning of a new era for Israel. While the exodus event through the Sea of Reeds is the tangible component of Israel’s promised liberation, it is the meal that marks the beginning of the new era defined by redemption. [1] It is this Passover event that is, for Israel, the break in time and space between what was and what will be. Their liberation begins in believing God, trusting God’s word—faith manifesting in action; this is why the Passover event of liberation becomes the mark of a new year for Israel and will always be a mark of a new year: each new year will solicit a new faith to enter the dusk setting on yesterday and dawn rising on tomorrow.[2]

The response of Israel built on faith in God’s trustworthiness and truthfulness is to prepare, eat, and perform a meal in a specific way. God informs Moses and Aaron that on the tenth day of the month all of Israel is to take an unblemished, one year-old, male lamb (one per household or one per a couple of small households), and on the fourteenth day they must slaughter their lambs at twilight. The blood from this sacrifice is to be painted onto the doorposts and lintels of the households where the Passover lamb must be eaten. God then gives very specific instructions regarding the eating of the lamb and the Passover meal:

“They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.” (Ex. 12:8-11)

This isn’t any other meal; it’s a meal that’s refusing enjoyment, merriment, and lingering. Every part of this meal must take place with intention and presence; it’s to be done in haste as if the threat of death looms on the boundary of the meal—because it does loom.[3] “The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt,” (v.13). They will eat this meal, putting all their faith in God and that God is faithful to God’s promises that those who follow what has been told to Aaron and Moses will be exempted from this final curse of the passing over of God and the execution of divine judgment on all the firstborns of the land.[4]

The Israelites must suspend their own judgment. They must step into the void from where God beckons them and faith lures them. They must not pause and consider what is common sense or what aligns with what they know to be good and right. In this moment, human judgment comes under attack by the unstated, whom do you love? The Israelites, individually and as a community had to give their answer. That night, as the angel of death swept over Egypt striking down all the firstborn of the land, divine judgment was executed; that night as families woke up human judgment received its verdict.

Conclusion

Would you? Put yourselves in Israel’s shoes. Would you kill the lamb, paint its blood on your door frames, and eat that meal in haste? Would you risk the life of your child, the life of your sibling, the your own life to appease what made the most sense to you? While we read this as a myth, it’s still a myth with a purpose to expose us. The question comes to us through these Ancient Israelites stuck in captivity and oppression. Would each of us, would we as a community, be able to see the depth at which God is doing a new thing in our lives to liberate us from captivity? Would we be able to trust that God is doing this thing and that God is truthful and trustworthy and will make good on God’s promises? Would we be able to suspend our judgment long enough to let God be God?

I’m neither advocating for “blind” and “uninformed” faith no affirming that voice in your head you think may God’s Spirit telling you to do something a bit uncharacteristic (always have those ideas checked by scripture and teaching!). What I am advocating for is this: are we able to suspend our human informed judgment long enough to see when God is doing something new in the world even when it contradicts our conception of what should be done in the world? Are we able to suspend what we think is right and good long enough to see when God is working a new thing for the wellbeing of our neighbor, which ends up being (ultimately) for our own wellbeing? Are we able to unplug our eyes and ears from what we have grown accustomed to seeing and hearing long enough to see and hear when God is calling us into liberation, into love, and into life and away from captivity, away from indifference, and away from death? Would we be able to learn something new about God’s divine mission in the world so to echo Peter’s eager and desperate response to Jesus, Wash not only my feet but my whole body, inside and out!? Would you be able to suspend your judgment long enough to let God be God?

The bad news is that we, as fleshy meat creatures prone to wander, will deliver our answer; the good news is that God knows this and comes to do something about it.

[1] Jeffrey H. Tigay, “Exodus,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 125. “Preparations for the exodus” “Israel is to prepare for the coming redemption with a sacrificial banquet while the final plague is occurring and is to commemorate the event in the future on its anniversary by eating unleavened bread for a week and reenacting the banquet. This banquet became the prototype of the postbiblical Seder, the festive meal at which the exodus story is retold and expounded each year to this day on the holiday of Pesah (Passover), as explained below.”

[2] Tigay, “Exodus,” 125. “Since the exodus will be commemorated on its anniversary every year…the preparatory instructions begin with the calendar. Henceforth the year will commence with the month of the exodus, and months will be referred to by ordinal numbers rather than names….Since the number will mean essentially ‘in the Xth month since we gained freedom,’ every reference to a month will commemorate the redemption.”

[3] Tigay, “Exodus,” 126. “The Israelites are to eat while prepared to leave on a moment’s notice.”

[4] Tigay, “Exodus,” 126. “In most European languages, it is also the name of Easter (as in French ‘Paques’). The translation ‘passover’ (and hence the English name of the holiday) is probably incorrect. The alternativity translation ‘protective offering’ is more likely…”

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“Prone to Wander…”: Desecrating Sacred Ground

Psalm 63:7-8 For you, Abba God, have been my helper, and under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice. My soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.

Introduction

I mentioned recently that, “Come Thou Fount” is not only one of my favorite hymns but is the inspiration for my messages through out Lent. As our sign out front says: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.” While the third verse is my absolute favorite, the other two are remarkable. For this week, the first verse aligns well with our First Testament passage.

Come thou fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace!
Streams of mercy never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! Oh, fix me on it,
mount of God’s unchanging love.[1]

Remember that the season of Lent is about taking a deep, long, hard look in the mirror. The reality is, while we may not think about it often, we are prone to wonder from God. And by “we” I mean *all of us*–you, me, and whoever is sitting next to you. And this verse exposes us in a very subtle yet real way.  The verse weds the concept of teaching through singing and music making with being fixed on God’s mountain. The solicitation of the fount of every blessing—God—is the source of our blessing, of our singing, and the ground of our sure foundation. As in, as our feet are anchored in and on the “mount” of God’s unconditional, never stopping, always and forever love, we find ourselves on terra firma. God’s love for us is the solid ground from which our life, love, and liberation spring eternal; from this place, we should not wander.

But we do. Sometimes we wander because we forget that where we stand and on what we stand matters. Forgetting that we stand in and on the firm foundation of the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, leads us to treat the very ground under our feet—the ground from which springs our very sustenance (food, shelter, clothing)—as if it has no essence of its own and is *only* there to be an object in our grand schemes to acquire power, prestige, and privilege, mere product for our grist mills. In forgetting where and on what we stand, we find ourselves tromping about and treading all over other people (our neighbors, the beloved of God), devaluing their alterity, their identity, their irreplaceable presence, demanding that they look and act more like the dominant group. When we forget that the mount on which we are fixed is the mountain of God, we desecrate sacred soil, leaving our shoes on as we step wherever and on whomever we need and want.

We are prone to tromp and tread about because we are prone to wander from our God of love.

Exodus 3:1-15

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of God appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When God saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

The First Testament text is from Exodus and highlights God’s calling of Moses. An interesting story in its own right; nothing beats a spontaneously combusting bush from which God’s voice beckons a person minding their own business. In my research, I discovered that this story is not a smooth, cohesive unit. Rather, it’s a merger from two different sources according to the Hebrew words—there’s different names for God and Pharoah, textual redundancies, and a textual intrusion.[2] I know that sounds like mundane, academic chatter; yet, knowing this actually helps the goal of this sermon. This splicing together of the text indicates that there’s an important theme being preserved and emphasized: God’s self-identification to Moses, Moses collision with God, and Moses’s subsequent sending by God.[3] From this moment on, the ground under Moses’s feet is going to be the mount of God’s unchanging love for God’s beloved, the people of God whom Moses represents and to whom Moses will (soon!) represent God. For it is there on Horeb—“the mountain of God”—where Moses comes face to face (flame?) with God on sacred, holy land.[4]

The text tells us that as Moses is on Horeb, he notices a bush that’s burning. This isn’t just any spontaneously combusting flora; it’s God’s presence,[5] and it’s intentionally trying to get Moses’s attention.[6] As the bush burns and doesn’t burn up, Moses is curious and comes closer. Then the text tells us that this is part of the reason for the flame: to get Moses’s attention—not just anyone but this one, the son-in-law of Jethro, the one called Moses. So, the bush calls out to Moses using his name twice. (The double use being an affectionate calling.) After Moses responds to the divine voice coming from the bush, God stops Moses from coming any closer and commands him to take off his shoes. Why? Because there are some places that are holy and sacred where one must walk carefully and tenderly; places where one must come and enter humbly and vulnerably. Everyone walks a bit different with shoes on, faster and with less concern for where they place their feet. But as soon as shoes come off, we walk slowly and with more concern for where we place our feet, being aware of both our ability to damage and be damaged.

In this sacred place and in this vulnerable position, Moses receives God’s self-disclosure. God tells Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” In this self-declaration, God also becomes the God of Moses. Standing on the mountain of God, face to face with the divine flame, shoeless and vulnerable, Moses received not only God’s self-declaration thus God’s self (coming into personal contact and experience with God like his forefathers[7]), but also his calling. After explaining that God has heard (and felt! cf. Ex. 2:25) the painful and tormented cries of Israel dying under oppression and alienation, God is going to deliver God’s people into liberation, and Moses will be the one through whom God will conduct this promised exodus. Here, Moses goes from shepherd to prophet.[8] Everything Moses does and says—from this moment onward—will work toward the liberation of God’s people from the oppression of Pharoah. From this day forward, everywhere Moses walks is sacred ground for God promises to be with Moses[9] for God will be who God will be:[10]that is, the one who will go with Moses and Israel.

Conclusion

None of what is in this passage from Exodus is about Israel forgetting where and bon which they stand. In fact, it’s about Moses being made aware that he’s on holy ground and will be as he walks into Pharoah’s throne room and demands the children of God be released and all in God’s name for God is with him. But here’s the thing, the bulk of Exodus is about exhorting Israel to stay with God, to keep their eyes on God, and walk with God thus walk with their neighbor and correct the wrongs in the world. But why? Why is this story a focal point in Israel’s history? Because, well, Israel has a history of finding themselves tromping about, shoes on, causing violence to the neighbors and to themselves, eager to bring glory to themselves, and forgetting the holy ground on which they stand with God. They will forget that their ground is hallowed and that they should tread tenderly and vulnerably. I say this not only because I’ve read the book; I say this because in a few chapters in this text, Israel will be liberated and will rejoice with singing and dancing and then swear that Moses is trying to kill them by leading them into this wilderness. Whether intentional or unintentional, Israel will begin to forsake God, to forget, and to wander away from their God whom they love and thus to also begin to see their neighbor as a threat, their land as theirs, and live as if they (and the promised land) weren’t intended to be a blessing through whom all the world (including other nations) will be blessed. Israel will get caught up in the lie that power and military might equal peace and safety, tall walls and ethnic purity equal security and blessedness. They will forget God is the source of their identity and create their own identity by their own means, with their shoes on, disconnected from the hallowed ground, the mount of God’s unchanging love. They will stand on their own land and wander from God and thus from their call. Moses knows this, God knows this.

So it is with us. And as we go through this third week of lent, let us consider our times of forgetting the hallowed ground we stand on, the times we forgot that there is tender earth under our feet, the very ground God walks with us as our neighbor. Let us consider how we’ve forgotten our calling to be a blessing of love, life, and liberation to our neighbors especially the least of these. Let us consider how we’ve forgotten the good story, forgotten that our terra firms is, was, and always will be God, and that without the heart of our Christian identity (Christ, God of very God) we cannot bear such an identity. As wonderful and miraculous as we are, we’re fleshy, meat creatures prone to wander. The good news is, God knows this and comes to do something about it.

[1] https://hymnary.org/text/come_thou_fount_of_every_blessing

[2] Jefrey H. Tigay, “Exodus,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 110. “The current narrative is the result of an artful combination of the two early sources, J and E. This is intimated by the different names used for God in 3.4a and b, but the clearest indication is the fact that 3.9-15 seem intrusive: vv. 9, 10, and 15a are redundant with, respectively, vv. 7, 18b, and 16a; the people never ask for God’s name as Moses expects in v. 13; and vv. 10 and 18 describe the goal of Moses’ mission to Pharoah differently and use different terms for the Egyptian king. VV. 16-18 in fact read like a direct continuation of v. 8.”

[3] Tigay, “Exodus,” 110. “The consistent use of the name ‘God’ (‘elohim) in 3.9-15 identifies its source as E; the remainder of this section is mostly from J with a few other passages from E (such as vv. 1, 4b, 6b, and 20b). By incorporating material from both sources the redactor preserved important themes, such as the explanation of God’s name in v. 14 € and the fact that God both ‘appeared’ to Moses (3.2, 16; 4.1, 5 from J) and ‘sent’ him (vv. 10, 12-15, from E).”

[4] Tigay, “Exodus,” 110. “Horeb, alternate name for Mount Sinai (in E and in Deuteronomy). It is generally thought to be located in the Sinai Peninsula, though some believe it is in northwest Arabia, near Midian. Its designation mountain of God may indicate that it was already considered a sacred place, or it may be anticipatory. The first possibility may gain support from Egyptian inscriptions of the 4th  century BCE that refer to an area, apparently int his region, as ‘land of the nomads, Yahwe’; this might also be understood as ‘land of the nomads who worship Yahwe.’”

[5] Tigay, “Exodus,” 110. V.2 “a manifestation of God. Angels (lit. ‘messengers’) usually take human form, but this one takes the form of fire, a substance evocative of the divine because it is insubstantial yet powerful, dangerous, illuminating, and purifying.”

[6] Tigay, “Exodus,” 110. “The burning bush is both a means of attracting Moses’ attention and a manifestation of God’s presence.”

[7] Tigay, “Exodus,” 110-111. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob: This phrase later became the way that God is addressed in the ‘Amidah prayer. The repetition of ‘God’ before each patriarch is explained in ‘Etz Yosef a commentary on the Jewish prayerbook, as meaning that, like the patriarchs, each person should believe in God on the basis of personal investigation, not merely tradition.”

[8] Tigay, “Exodus,” 111. “I will send you as a Prophet, Moses’ primary roles is to serve as God’s emissary. Phrases with ‘send’…typify the selection of prophets…”

[9] Tigay, “Exodus,” 111.

[10] Tigay, “Exodus,” 111. “God’s proper name, disclosed in the next verse, is Yhvh (spelled ‘yod-heh-vav-heh’ in Heb; in ancient times the ‘vav’ was pronounced ‘w’). But here God first tells Moses its meaning: Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, probably best translated as ‘I Will Be What I will Be,’ meaning ‘my nature will become evident form my actions.’ (Compare God’s frequent declarations below, that from His future acts Israel and Egypt ‘shall know that I am the Lord [Yhvh]’…Then he answers Moses’ question bout what to say to the people: ‘Tell them: ‘Ehyeh’ (‘I will Be,’ a shorter form of the explanation) sent me.’ This explanation derives God’s name from the ern ‘h-v-h,’ a variant form of ‘h-y-h’, to be.’ Because God is the speaker, He uses the first person form of the verb.”

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By This Word Alone

Psalm 138: 7, 8a, 9b-c: Though God be high, God cares for the lowly; God perceives the haughty from afar. Though we walk in the midst of trouble, you, Abba God, keep us safe; Abba God, your love endures for ever; do not abandon the works of your hands.

Introduction

Last week I referred to the reality that we have been exposed for having lost our voice in the world thus our place and relevance in the world because we’ve forsaken the message of Christ in word and deed and have traded our spiritual authority of the reign of God for the acceptance and amicability of the kingdom of humanity. In our pursuits for intellectual validity in an age ruled by the rational and reasonable, we’ve whittled down the gospel into something easily digestible as post-enlightenment, (now) post-modern, scientific, fact and data driven, educated people. Few people (if any) are currently running to the church for help or find themselves desperate to hear what the church will do or say. The church may be stepping in to help here and there, but being a “force to be reckoned with” in the temporal realm? Nah. The mainline non-denominational, big-box churches are already in the pocket of the rulers and authorities of the kingdom of humanity eager to uphold the status-quo and gain their bit of power and prestige. And the mainline denominational churches desperate to make traditional spirituality great again were seduced into the siren song of ambiguous statements of love to make sure they kept the few they had in the pews. And let us not forget the overwhelming amount of toxicity and violence that has come from the hand of those charged to do right and keep safe the beloved of God. So, fam, we’ve achieved exactly what we were desperate to avoid: we’ve lost relevance.

To find that relevance once again, we must return to the age-old yet intellectually awkward proclamation of Jesus Christ—the one who was crucified and raised by God, the one who sets the captives free by word and in deed, flips tables, yells at winds and waves, exposes people, calls the least of these his friends and family, and has absolutely no problem confronting rulers and spiritual leaders of all stripes and types in the kingdom of Humanity. And by getting in touch with this weird, pre-modern, mythologically laden message, find ourselves (re)oriented to God, faces brazen with God’s glory and presence. In returning to the proclamation we’ve been given, we will also step in under the gracious, merciful, beautiful, light yoke of God’s expectations for us as the church—love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly.

In other words, the foundation of the church is completely and totally dependent on the whacky and far-out stories of Jesus of Nazareth whom faith declares is the long-awaited Messiah of God and who is God—God of very God. It is precisely in and on these stories, these myths, where the church finds its unique identity to live and its concrete truth to speak into the world.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

For I make known again to you, siblings, the good news which I preached to you, and which you received, and in which you have stood, through which you are being saved by what words I preached to you if you holdfast, except if you believed at random. (1 Cor. 15: 1-2)

Paul gives us a clear and crisp definition of the “good news” on which, through which and by which the Church stands or falls and finds its unique identity and its concrete truth.[1] This is not some story that Paul came up with, but the very story that started the tradition of the church and will keep the church embedded as a force in the world for good and God’s glory and the wellbeing of the neighbor. Paul says clearly to the Corinthians, I am telling you all again, my siblings, the good news I (have already) announced to you (v. 1a-b). In other words, Paul is reminding the Corinthians of the word of God that is the good news that God has proclaimed and promised from the beginning of the cosmos. He’s keeping this story very straight and clear and expects the Corinthians not to veer—in any way—from this tradition they’ve received from him. Thus, why Paul then says, and which you received (in turn[2]) and in which you have stood, and through which you are being (and will be) saved by what words I preached to you (vv. 1c-2b). They must remain on course because it is the ground under their feet. According to Paul, it is important for the Corinthians to hold fast to this particular message and not one of their own or a hodge-podge from what he said. Otherwise in straying and believ[ing] incoherently[3] (v. 2c), the Corinthians are not on solid ground and are not being saved.

For I handed over to you first and foremost what I also received… (v. 3a-b). What is the message that Paul preached and handed over and received and the Corinthians are being exhorted to hold fast to and not stray from? Each part of the crazy and whack story about Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. That Christ died on behalf of our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas and then by the twelve[4] (vv. 3c-5). This is the good news, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (the gospel) Paul referenced back in v. 1, this is what he received and handed over[5] and through which the Corinthians are being saved;[6] this message, not part of it, not the comfortable bits, not another rendition. And it’s this message and its coherent grasp that is the foundation and the means by which the Corinthians are coming into an encounter with God by faith through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is by this message and this alone that Christian faith and identity have its foundation, substance, and truth.[7] For Paul, the way this all works out is more than dogmatic (forced) confession and adherence, but the truth and actuality of a personal confession that is born of experiencing the summoning to life out of death of this good news.[8]

Paul then tells the Corinthians that Jesus in his resurrected state was seen by more than 500 siblings once for all, many of whom many remain until now, though some fell asleep. Afterward, he was seen by James [Jesus’s brother[9]], then by the all the apostles (vv. 6-7). Affirming the actuality of Jesus’s resurrection, Paul then presses in on the reality of the theme of Corinthians 15: God is God[10] and it’s this God who is God who is the one who brings the dead to life by grace and promise.[11] Paul writes, Then lastly as if one miscarried he was seen by also me, for I, I am the least of the apostles, of whom I am not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God; but by the grace of God I am who I am, and the grace of God toward me has not become fruitless, but to a greater degree I worked harder of them all, but not I but the grace of God in me. Through Paul’s confession and witness, those who are stuck are liberated, those who are afflicted are comforted, those who are untimely born are reborn in time, and those who are dead are made alive. According to Paul (by confession and experience), it’s the unmerited grace of God that is the breath of new life. [12] Thus, if for Paul than for the Corinthians[13]—individually and as the community.[14] It’s the promise of God fulfilled in and through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ that is the word of God that brings the dead to life,[15] gives authentic identity in the place of a sham identity, and replaces falsehood with truth.[16] It’s the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that is, according to Paul, the firm foundation of the church; [17] apart from this there’s nothing to stand on, nothing to substantiate, nothing of relevance for the Christian community, the Church. Every part of Corinth’s existence is by God or not at all.

Conclusion

When the church fails to adhere to this message, when it decides what parts are worthy, reasonable, and rational at the expense of the other parts it will lose itself. In that moment, as it steps out from under and out of God’s grace and God’s word, the very thing it fears will happen: the church will cease to be relevant. But, according to Paul, the Church, sits precariously balanced on the solid word of God found in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit; when the church stands on this word, proclaims this word, believes this word—as scary as that can be at times—the church finds itself square in the grace of God and supplied with God’s grace to carry on.[18] It is in adhering to this ancient claim that creates the timelessness of the church—it is the very essence of the invisible church, the ties that bind beyond human-made boundaries randomly drawn in the ground, beyond separations of generations of time, and beyond seemingly uncrossable expanses of space. It is this word that brings light where there is darkness, love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death. It is on and by this divine word—the word of Christ crucified and raised—and this word alone that the church is the church in the world to the well-being of the neighbor and to the glory of God.

[1] Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1169. “The cross…remains ‘the ground and criterion’ of Christian existence and Christian identity.”

[2] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1185. “The readers have in turn…received it. This is a happy rendering…to indicate transmission of a tradition for which the thrice-repeated καί is scarcely accidental.”

[3] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1186. “Here Paul envisages the possibility of such a superficial or confused appropriation of the gospel in which no coherent grasp of its logical or practical entailments for eschatology or for practical discipleship had been reached. Incoherent belief is different from believing in vain.”

[4] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1205. “…the twelve became a formal title for the corporate apostolic witness of those who had also followed Jesus during his earthly life, and who therefore underlined the continuity of witness to the One who was both crucified and raised.”

[5] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1185. “Paul declares the gospel as that which is not only revealed (cf. Galatians 1 and 2) but is also ‘both transmitted and received’ and therefore in principle constitutes ‘the premises of the audience’ which provide the foundation on the basis of which Paul will develop his argument about the resurrection of the dead.”

[6] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1184-1185. Both italics and bold are part of the original text; when my emphasis, it will be noted in the footnote. “We must understand the gospel in 15:1, therefore, to denote more than the message of the resurrection, but not less. It denotes the message of salvation; in vv. 3-4 Paul endorses the shared pre-Pauline tradition which both proclaims the death and resurrection of Christ and interprets it in terms of the saving and transforming power of the God as this receives explanation and intelligibility within the frame of reference provided by the [Old Testament] scriptures.”

[7] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1186. “Paul does, however, refer to a continuity of handing on and receiving which constitutes, in effect, an early creed which declares the absolute fundamentals of Christian faith and one which Christian identity (and the experience of salvation) is built.”

[8] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1188. “There is a very close relationship between the dimension of proclamation or kerygma which declares a gospel truth claim and the dimension of confession or self-involvement which declares a personal stake in what is asserted.”

[9] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1207-1208. “…we have independent evidence that. Paul clearly regards James the Lord’s brother as an apostle…’…Paul certainly indicates that he regarded James as an apostle.’ This anticipates the point that for Paul the term apostle is always wider than the Twelve.”

[10] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

[11] hiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

[12] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1208. “The emphasis lies in the undeserved grace of God…who chooses to give life and new creation to those reckoned as dead, or, in Paul’s case, both a miscarried, aborted foetuswhose stance had benhostileto Christ and to the new people of God.”

[13] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1213. “‘Ecumenicity’ is not the lowest common denominator in a miscellany of individual experiences. For Paul it is defined by the common kerygma of a shared, transmitted gospel tradition, anchored in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as ἐν πρώτοις.”

[14] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1194. “…the promise of God which remains steadfast…depends entirely on God’s sovereign will and gift of grace to give life to the dead…, who as the dead have no power to create or to resume life as God’s chosen community.”

[15] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1210. “Given Paul’s association of this encounter with the resurrected life as one of new creation…it seems most probably that Paul perceives himself as one who was unable to contribute anything to an encounter win which God’s sovereign grace was all, even to the extent to giving life to one who was humanly beyond all hope. This precisely reflects the theme of resurrection as God’s sovereign gift of life to the dead…”

[16] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1195. “…the transfer ‘from death to life’ thereby provides a new identity for a new community: God can ‘raise up’ children of Abraham from the stones….hence Paul uses this figure of the ‘nothingness’ of death to expound the establishing of the divine promise of life and identity  to the nothings, to the disinherited, to the Gentiles.”

[17] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1211. V. 10 “We come to the heart of Paul’s point Underserved, unmerited grace (χάρις) which springs from the free, sovereign love of God alone and becomes operative in human life not only determines Paul’s life and apostolic vocation but also characterizes all Christian existence, not least the promise of resurrection and the reality of the activity of Christ as Lord.”

[18] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1212. “The emphasis on labor reminds us that difficulty and cost in Christian work, far from suggesting an absence of God’s grace, presupposes the gift of such grace to prosecute the work through all obstacles…The theme of grace in and through ‘weakness’ is one which Paul constantly urges to Corinth.”

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We Are Exposed

Psalm 84:3,5: Happy are they who dwell in your house, Abba God! they will always be praising you…Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.

Introduction

We are in times that are exposing who we are and what we stand for. We are in times that are exposing what we believe and how those beliefs inform our actions. We are in times, as a church, where we have been exposed and have been found lacking.

I’ve watched the last week and a half unfold; I’m an observer, it’s my preferred mode through the world. So, I’ve watched as things were said, actions taken, and when an Episcopal bishop preached. Focusing in on the last part of this abbreviated list of events, I listened to the bold and biblical sermon by the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC, Bp. Budde and watch it take over the stage that was to be reserved for a new president taking oath and office. What caught my attention, though, wasn’t the sermon itself. From what I can tell and conceive to be the event of proclamation and preaching, Bp. Budde was well within her sphere—as a bishop in the Episcopal church—in explicating the scriptures in the way she did, preaching Christ, and offering a humble plea to an incoming leader in the way she did.[1] (Church history is literally filled with such sermons.) What caught my attention was how people reacted: either people were astounded by such a sermon, or they were angered. Hmmm, such drastic responses; seems somethings afoot…

Why? I kept wondering. Why were people so flabbergasted for well or for ill? Why were people stunned by the sermon or clutching their pearls over it? Then it dawned on me. Ah, we don’t expect a denominational preacher, let alone a mainline, liberal leader, to be so bold and confident to, figuratively, stand toe to toe with a leader of the temporal realm and assert her spiritual authority within her spiritual realm. We’ve stopped expecting this level of proclamatory confrontation because it has ceased to be given to us. We’ve stopped expecting this boldness of preaching because we’ve grown lukewarm over the decades—preferring our own comfort while fearing the power of big donors in our churches. We’ve opted to sacrifice the radical Word of God’s revolutionary love for the beloved on the altar of our intellectualism in the name of demythology. We’ve allowed the gospel of Christ to be stripped of its power to summon the sleeping awake and the dead alive, sending into the world empty and vacuous notions of good news. We’ve been exposed; we’ve forgotten what preaching is about: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, awaking the sleepers, called the dead into new life, and bringing Christ close to God’s beloved by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Malachi 3:1-4

Our First Testament text is from the book of Malachi; it is situated in the Persian period when the temple was rebuilt and sacrificial worship was underway.[2] Malachi means “my messenger;”[3] according to rabbinic sources, Malachi was considered not only one of the last prophets (along with Haggai and Zechariah) but a sage, too.[4] This prophet-sage messenger came to the people of Judah, those who seemed to have everything back in order and brings God’s message and word of judgment. Malachi is holding up a mirror to the people of Judah and asking them to take a long look; is everything as great as it seems? Malachi asks the people to consider how they fail God and themselves—day in and day out, personally and publicly.[5] Unlike other prophets who focused their attention on the leadership of Israel allowing God’s word of judgment to illuminate the sickness and decay, the violence and death embedded deep in the leadership, Malachi is exposing the people. According to Malachi, everything is not great even with the rebuilding of the Temple and the reinvigoration of sacrifices; Malachi’s people have grown comfortable while ignoring their own spiritual malnourishment wreaking havoc on their relationship with God and with themselves: they’ve neglected Torah, the hearing of Shema; they’ve ceased to hear so deeply that they follow God and God’s word of Torah.[6]

So Malachi comes and exposes the people for who and where they are; Malachi exhorts the people back to Torah, which has just been canonized.[7] One of the neat things about the text, the nitty-gritty exposing parts of the text, is that the exposure is not strictly built from the fear of God’s judgment, but rather getting the people to identify with the “evil-doers” within the text[8]—just as the prophet Nathan did with King David. In this “identification” not only do the hearing and reading people find words to say to God (for the “evil doers” speak and are heard in the text), but they are also asked to examine themselves, to see where they fall short, and to repent.[9] When we speak along with the characters of the story, we, effectually become and identify with those characters and their words become our words and that can be exposing, especially here for Malachi’s people.

Thus says the Lord, See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight– indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Malachi 3:1-2)

While we don’t really know who the messenger is in our passage (v. 1), we Christians tend to see this messenger not as Malachi himself (though he is a type of messenger here), but as Jesus the Christ, this person who is God.[10] With this in mind, the “prepare the way” is a reference to the preparations needed in the heart of the people. This heart need preparing because it’s this heart that is calcified and looks for God in many places (even the Temple) but never finds God because the seeking is oriented toward that which resonates with the kingdom of humanity and not with the reign of God. God works in and through the heart of God’s people, causing them to hear so deeply that they heed and harken to God’s Word by faith and in action.[11] For Malachi, this heart must be prepared to receive the messenger.

These two verses emphasize that the messenger of God is coming to the people.[12] The messenger comes, and the messenger represents God to the people. Considering this messenger coming, the human question is asked: who can endure? Rightly, our response, when looking around and taking honest stock of our captivity and complicity in and to the kingdom of humanity, is: no one! No one will be able to endure; and this humility is part of the desired preparations mentioned earlier—preparation that reorients the creature to their creaturely status before and to their Creator.[13]

But humility isn’t the only form of being prepared mentioned by Malachi; he goes on:

For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

The people will be humbled, and they will be purified by fire and cleansed with a “sharp cleansing agent” (think: lye). The messenger, the one who comes as God’s representative, is both the “Purifier” and the “Purification”, the people will be stripped of their complacency and comfortability.[14] It is here, at this point of exposure, humility, and purification where God can, once again, work through and with the people. God’s exposure brings life to God’s people; they are found wanting and God provides.

Conclusion

I know it’s uncomfortable to be exposed; but exposure leads to healing and health. Being exposed allows us to locate ourselves in the mess and then find a way out of it, the path out is illuminated by the light of the Word of God that is the calling of our names in the proclamation of Christ. To be exposed by this messenger, by the Word of Malachi, by our Christ is to be exposed and accepted and received and not exposed and condemned and sent away.

Just as Malachi held up a mirror to his audience (reader and hearer), asking them to take a long and hard look, we too are being addressed and being asked to do the same by God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit found here in these ancient words. If we take this moment seriously, we will see that we’ve lost our focus, we’ve lost our words, we’ve lost our orientation toward God, taking on everything else we’ve deemed to be good and right. If we’ve allowed our spaces to be acquired by the kingdom of humanity, we’ve forfeited our voice and have forgotten what God expects of us as God’s beloved children. Hope is not lost though, because exposure has come and we can rejoice because we were blind, but now we see, we were deaf but now we hear, we were dumb and now we speak. We can find ourselves relocated before God, oriented to the Creator as their creatures, we can reclaim our space in the world as the manifestation of the spiritual realm, and we can, once again, find our voices to speak into the darkness of the kingdom of humanity and remember exactly what God expects of us as followers of Christ baptized by fire and the Holy Spirit. If we don’t hear our names called by Bp. Budde when she addressed President Trump, then we’ve missed the entire point of that sermon. And what does God expect/”require” of us? To love Mercy, to do Justice, and to walk Humbly with our God.[15]

[1] It was quite good, appropriate, and within the rights and privileges vested in a consecrated Bishop of the Episcopal church. Briefly, this vocation—the vocation of Bishop—has been, is, and always will be principally about two things inspired and informed by the Holy Spirit, faithfully and prayerfully: caring for the beloved of God in Christ as Christ (directly and indirectly through their priests and deacons) and protecting the faith of the church by maintaining the proclamation of God’s Word made known in Christ and pointing the church to Christ.

[2] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1268. “The book of Malachi is set in a period when the Second Temple was rebuilt and sacrificial worship was resumed. It was composed in the Persian period, and is addressed originally to the inhabitants of the Persian province of Yehud (Judah).”

[3] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. Malachi = “My Messenger”

[4] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. “Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are all understood by the Rabbis as the last of the prophets, and the Talmud mentions rulings and saying s by this prophet that seem to characterize him as an early sage, in addition to his being a prophet.”

[5] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. “The readers of the book of Malachi are asked to look at some pitfalls in everyday life and in the cult of the Temple, and particularly at how they affect the relationship between the Lord and Israel, resulting in a lack of prosperity.”

[6] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268-1269. “Messages of cultic reform and proper worship are deeply interwoven with the conviction of the coming of a future day in which the Lord will trample all evildoers. Such optimism about an ideal future is typical in prophetic works. Further, the book asks its readers to identify proper behavior in these and all matters with following the Torah (or Teaching of Moses.”

[7] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1269. “As a whole, the book is aimed at persuading its readership to follow the Torah of Moses, or at strengthening their resolve to continue to do so. This message must be understood within the book’s historical setting, soon after the canonization of the Torah.”

[8] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1269. “The use of disputation format in much of the book contributes rhetorically to that purpose, for it allows the arguments of evil doers to be heard, in order to be countered and neutralized. Further, it allows the reader some limited form of self-identification with the actions of the evildoers, and as such serves as a call for them to examine themselves and repent.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1273. “The identity of the messenger in 3.1 has been highly debated. Is My messenger (Heb ‘malakhi’) Malachi? Or is there at least a pun on the name of the prophet? Is the messenger the angel of the covenant, a zealous, powerful enforcer of the covenant who is like a smelter’s fire and like fuller’s lye (i.e., a purifying, caustic treatment)? Is he Elijah (see v. 23)? Does the text indicate an expectation of a priestly Messiah? …The New Testament merges this v. with Isa. 40.3 and identifies the expected messenger is John the Baptist (Matt. :0; Mark 1.2; Luke 7.27).”

[11] Martin Luther, “Lectures on Malachi,” in Lectures on the Minor Prophets I: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Malachi. LW 18, trans. Richard J. Dinda, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1975), 409. “That preparing, then, is to make humble and to arrange things so as to allow God to work in one. You see, the way of the Lord is where He himself walks. The prophet mentions nothing about our ways except that we should abstain from them.”

[12] LW 18:409. “Behold, He comes! The repetition indicates certainty.”

[13] LW 18:410. “2. But who can endure the day of His coming? In Hebrew this reads: ‘Who will regulate or control the day, etc.?’ or, ‘Who will provide?’ It is as if he were saying: ‘Remain in your fear, then. Stay humble. Let that Messenger prepare you.”

[14] LW 18:410. “Blazing, or purifying….[Hebrew word] means a sharp cleaning agent or soap that washed great stains out of garments…The kingdom of Christ is a mystical smelting furnace that purges out the impurity of the old Adam. …Christ is not only the Purifier but also the purifying agent. He is not only the blacksmith but also the Fire; not only the Cleaner but also the Soap.”

[15] This is an adaption of Micha 6:8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” NRSVUE

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We’re Our Own Problem

1 Samuel 2:8a-b Abba God raises up the poor from the dust; Abba God lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.

Introduction

Our relationship with our ideologies will be the end of us.

I know that’s not the greatest way to begin a sermon in a place that should bring comfort, but it is the truthiest way I know how to begin. (This place is as much about comfort as it is about truth.) While I think there are good ideologies and worse ones, the reality is—and to quote last week’s sermon—we do this. There are ideas we have and ideals we strive for; then there is the calcification of those ideas and ideals that we turn into ideologies; we do this. They aren’t inherently embedded in the universe, waiting for our exploration and discovery. Let’s go on a thought journey: imagine earth making its way about the sun without humanity anywhere. In this image, what is happening on the face of the earth? Flora is flora-ing, fauna is fauna-ing, Things get warm, things get cold; things enter night while things enter day. Things are just going. Are animals fighting, sure. Are trees dying because of beetles, sure. But it’s all just going, organically, day in and day out.

At no point in that image is there a discussion about “good” and “evil”, of “progress” and “conserving”, of “individual” and “communal”, of “this” and “not that”. Why? Because we bring that stuff into the mix. To be clear, I’m not arguing for a human-less world; I very much enjoy my time here as a human, doing all my humany things. I’m also not arguing that those discussions, dialogues, and dialectics aren’t important; don’t forget, I’m a theologian and political ethicist, my academic career depends on such things be engaged with and vigorously. But what I want you to see is that part of being human is making and creating systems and structures  that reflect ourselves into the world, materializing what we hold most dear. Did you catch that emphasis? What WE hold most dear, how WE see the world, what WE think is best. Every philosophy, theology, ethical program, religious expression carries a certain amount of personal bias that then resonates with others experiencing the world. Every. One.

The problem is that we don’t see these ideologies as things we make, like tables and chairs. We see them as parts of us worth defending as if our lives depended on it. Here, three things happen, a). (individually) we lose ourselves to them (as in, they become a part of our personhood, being, and identity); b). (corporately) we lose the number one thing that makes us most human: relationships with others, with our kin and with our neighbor (as in, we will cling to ideologies harder than we will cling to each other because we have allowed them to define us more than our relationships); and c). because we have invested so much in these ideologies, we can’t let them be wrong because then we become bad (as in, we’ve succumbed to the false binary that right=good and wrong=bad). In other words, too close an identification with what we believe to be the way will mean that we lose others and in losing others we lose ourselves. In other, other words, we lose our humanity and let the very things we created have domination over us, and we are thrust back into captivity; our ideologies are none other than immaterial golden calves causing us to curve in on ourselves more and more, forsaking our neighbor, thus forsaking God. We will become so turned in on ourselves that we won’t even know God’s left the building.

Mark 13:1-8

And then, while they were leaving out of the temple, one of [Jesus’s] disciples says to Jesus, “Teacher, behold(!), how magnificent the enormous blocks of stone and how magnificent the sanctuary!!” And Jesus said to him, “See these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left stone upon stone, not one at all(!); all will be overthrown.”

Mark opens chapter thirteen with Jesus leaving the temple—the one he’s been in for a while teaching. This leaving functions in two ways: 1. it provides a conclusion to the teaching of the disciples that has been ongoing for chapters now; and 2. Jesus physically severs his connection with the temple (he’s not thrown out; he leaves as the “unquestioned winner in the contest”).[1] In other words, Mark sets up an important visual for his audience: God is leaving the building (recall Mk. 1:1).

As Jesus and his disciples are leaving the temple, one of them (who goes unnamed) marvels, to Jesus, about how magnificent the building is and the stones! “Teacher, behold(!), how magnificent the enormous blocks of stone and how magnificent the sanctuary!!” These structures were fantastically remarkable, the place you’d go if you’re touristing about Jerusalem. One scholar explains, the temple “occupied a platform of over 900 by 1, 500 feet, and the front of the temple building itself stood 150 feet tall and 150 feet wide, made of white stone, much of it covered with silver and gold”; don’t forget, his disciples aren’t city mice, they’re country mice[2]—what they witnessed firsthand as the sun played with the precious metals, stones, and cuts was truly marvelous and awe inspiring.[3] But even though a building is remarkable and speaks to the beautiful ingenuity of human minds and hands (and conjures horrifying images of the many oppressed bodies that were used to build it…), and even if it is dedicated to the most upright purposes, it doesn’t mean that somehow God is trapped therein, obligated to reside (forever) among the stone and precious metals.

So, Jesus says, “See these great buildings/sanctuaries? Not one stone here will be left stone upon stone, not one at all(!); all will be overthrown.” What the unnamed disciple saw as magnificent, Jesus sees as the cite of God’s revolution of love, life and liberation in the world. For Mark’s Jesus, there’s nothing of the temple that is glorifying to God;[4] rather, it’s a testament to human glory, and the leadership therein is dead set on their one way to do things, the one way that brings them the most power and the most glory (remember Mk. 12:38-44). Like the pharisees in other instances and the scribes just before this, this is nothing but a well decorated tomb of human made ideologies[5] destroying God’s beloved, oppressing them, tearing them apart, rendering them grist for the mill of the corrupted authority. As Jesus leaves the temple and promises its destruction, he emphasizes that the temple is going to be replaced with something new.[6]

Jesus then, according to Mark, goes to the Mount of Olives and sits down. It’s assumed he leaves the temple by the east gate. The imagery here would not have been lost on the original audience, but it might be lost on us. Mark is harkening back to the book of Ezekial and God’s abandonment of the temple through the east gate and resting on the mountain to the east of the city.[7] Thus, Mark positions Jesus going out of the east gate to the Mount of Olives and sitting down opposite the temple (a position of judgment).[8] According to Jesus, Jerusalem and the temple are no longer the primary focus of the divine government.[9] God has (definitely) left the building.

And the next part of our passage is Jesus’s cryptic reply to Peter’s question (on behalf of James, John, and Andrew) that speaks to “‘the end of the old order’.”[10] Peter asks, “Answer for us when these things will be, and what the sign [will be] whenever all these things will intend to be accomplished.” Jesus’s response is a (prophetic[11]) litany of various wars and skirmishes, lies and deceits, none of which are literal signs that are predictions; Jesus knows that his disciples will be prone to being misled by wars, rivalries between nations and kingdoms, and even by false messiahs.[12] Rather, these things will happen not because they are signaling something divine (the collapse of the temple) but because they are the fruit of humans being human; we cause wars, we intentionally deceive others, we allow our anthropocentric megalomania to dare to believe we can save ourselves (politically and spiritually). WE DO THIS! The collapse of the temple is because of human intoxication with itself; the temple will collapse under the weight of human made ideologies and God’s refusal to be held captive by them. As we said last week,Unless Abba God builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless Abba God  watches over the city, in vain the watcher keeps their vigil.

But Jesus doesn’t leave them without hope. For Jesus, part of the economy of the kingdom of God is that death precedes life, just as incredible trial and pain precede the birthing of new life.[13] The promised destruction of the temple is but one of those things that will liberate the people into something new [14] and the disciples need not get caught up in conspiracy theories and false messiahs[15]. They are to stay the course,[16] they will need to keep their head about them and refuse the temptation to be driven and controlled by cultic conspiracies. They must fix their eyes on something else, someone else who came to liberate them—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.[17] And it is this fixed focus on Jesus, the source of love, life, and liberation that the disciples will participate in liberating all of God’s beloved from captivity (to the temple, to religion, to philosophy, to theology, to dogma, to doctrine, to law, to themselves, to their power, privilege, and prestige) into real liberation that brings with it robust love (for God and for the neighbor), vibrant new life focused on pulling together and not apart, uplifting and not tearing down, listening and not dismissing. Here in, in this pulling together, in this community, in this solidarity within humanity is the temple to be found.

Conclusion

If you’re tempted to think this is a first century Palestinian problem, please think again.[18] The Church, the Christian Church, the American Christian Church is not the new temple; we are as at risk of turning this building into an empty tomb as our ancient siblings. The new temple will always be in Christ and where Christ goes; and it will be those who follow Christ (by faith and in action) who live within the new temple of the reign of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Sirit. It is these who will be with Christ who bring Christ to others and participate in God’s diving mission of the righteous revolution of love, life, and liberation.

So, for us here today, Beloved, we need liberation, we need interruption, we need to get our heads on straight. We must heed the words of Christ to his disciples and think clear and smart and always choose that which brings much love, that which produces the most life, and that which causes the greatest amount of liberation—about these we must also be adamant, these are our guiding ideas and ideals, these are our dives and motivations. If our ideologies cannot do that or have stopped, we must—must—choose love, life, and liberation over our ideologies…we don’t have a choice; God’s about to leave the building, if God hasn’t already left.

[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 494. “…already in 12:1-12 and increasingly since 12:34…Jesus has taken the initiative, posing the next question himself (without receiving a reply) and going on to denounce the representatives of religious power and to overturn conventional values of importance an status. It is thus appropriate that the whole episode ends not with the authorities taking action against Jesus…but with Jesus now the unquestioned winner in the contest, himself severing the connection by leaving the temple and pronouncing its down fall.”

[2] France, Mark, 496. “The unnamed disciple’s admiration of the temple buildings would be typical of a Galilean visitor to Jerusalem.”

[3] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 184-185. “It is understandable that Jesus’ disciples, mostly from the countryside, would have been impressed by the temple Herod had built. It occupied a platform of over 900 by 1,500 feet, and the front of the temple building itself stood 150 feet tall and 150 feet wide, made of white stone, much of it covered with silver and gold, by far the most impressive building any of them had seen, glowing int eh sunlight. Little wonder they were amazed by it all—and then little wonder at Jesus’ frustration that they had not yet understood his teaching that God was not present in him and not in the temple.”

[4] France, Mark, 496. “Splendid as the structure may be, its time is over.”

[5] France, Mark, 494. “The unnamed disciple’s superficial admiration for the magnificence of the buildings, contrasted with Jesus’ declaration of their ultimate bankruptcy, furnishes yet another example of the reorientation to the new perspective of the kingdom of God to which the disciples are committed but which they remain slow to grasp, and which Mark expects his readers to embrace.”

[6] France, Mark, 494. “The old structure of authority in which God’s relationship with his people has hitherto been focused, is due for replacement…As Mt. 12:6 has it, ‘Something greater than the temple is here’. The discourse which will follow in vv. 5-37 will fill out the nature of that ‘something greater’.”

[7] France, Mark, 494.

[8] France, Mark, 495. “Moreover, he goes from the temple onto the Mount of Olives (v. 3), presumably leaving by the east gate. it does not take a very profound knowledge of the Book of Ezekiel to recall the dramatic description of God’s abandonment of his temple as the chariot throe of God’s glory rises up from inside the temple, pauses at the east gate, and comes to rest on ‘the mountain east of the city’ (Ezk. 10:18-19; 11:22-23). So now again the divine presence is withdrawn from the temple, and it is left to its destruction.”

[9] France, Mark, 497-498. “The mutual hostility between Jesus and the Jerusalem establishment has now reached it culmination in Jesus’ open prediction of the destruction of the temple, with its powerful symbolism of the end of the existing order and the implication that something new is to take its place. This is to be a time of unprecedented upheaval in the life and leadership of the people of God. Jerusalem, and the temple which is the focus of its authority, is about to lose its central role in God’s economy. “the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, is to find a new focus.”

[10] France, Mark, 498.

[11] France, Mark, 508. “What we know from Josephus of the forty years or so between Jesus’ ministry and the destruction of the temple amply illustrates these warnings.”

[12] France, Mark, 508. “The disciples, and those who following them will read these words, are called to discernment and warned against the sort of superficial impressions of ‘fulfillment’ which have been the bane of students of apocalyptic and eschatological literature ever since. Sometimes false impressions are self-inflicted, as people naively read off from world events the ‘signs of the end’ (vv.7-8). Sometimes, however, they are deliberately fostered by those who have something to gain by working on the credulity of the faithful (vv. 5-6). Jesus’ disciples will be liable to both kinds of misinformation as they look for the fulfilment of his words about the destruction of the temple. They must be on their guard.”

[13] France, Mark,509. “There is a birth to be looked forward to, but the wars, earthquakes, and famines of vv. 7-8 show only that it is coming, not when it will come. Even to speak of a birth at all is perhaps to press the metaphor too far, in that such an expression as ὠδῖνες τοῦ θανάτου does not seem to envisage a birth, only pain; but as the discourses proceeds, we shall see that the coming destruction of the temple will bring with it a new beginning.”

[14] France, Mark, 509. “The answer given to the disciples’ questions in the first four verses of the discourse is thus a negative one, clearing away the natural tendency to look for signs of the temple’s destruction in the stirring and ominous events of the coming years, in the areas both of politics and of natural disaster. The disciples must not allow themselves to be misled. They will have enough to do to maintain their own witness to the truth through these difficult days…”

[15] France, Mark, 510. Those claiming to act in Jesus’s name, “So we must assume some meagre contextual guidance is that they were not so much claiming to act on Jesus’ authority as in fact aiming to usurp his place, not by claiming to be Jesus redivivus (surely too far-fetched a concept in this context) but by arrogating to themselves the role which was rightly his, that of Messiah…”

[16] France, Mark, 511. “The disciples are to be calm and not to jump to hasty conclusions.”

[17] Placher, Mark, 185. “They want to know what is going to happen, and Jesus says that many terrible things will happen (a safe bet in first-century Palestine), but that they should not jump to the conclusion that bad times announce the immediate end of the present age.”

[18] Placher, Mark, 185. “Christians in any period who see the end at hand need to remember that such predications came within a generation of Jesus’ death and have been coming, on and off, ever since.”

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Imagine Another Way

Psalm 127:1-2 Unless Abba God builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless Abba God  watches over the city, in vain the watcher keeps their vigil.

Introduction

We’re marching forward here in the gospel of Mark and learning, in every which way, what it looks like to be a disciple of Christ. And while I’ve stressed (because Mark has stressed) that it’s hard and can be (very) uncomfortable, the actual point is that following Christ, being a disciple of Jesus, is really and simply about being human…fully, and totally, materially and spiritually, from the inniest parts of our souls to the outiest surfaces of our body. For Mark’s Jesus, being fully and totally human requires a few things, full dependence on God through faith in Christ by the power of the indwelling divine Spirit. It’s this triune foundation that nourishes us in the amniotic fluid of divine love, bears us into the world swaddled in divine love, and continues to grow us toward divine love that is faith making itself known in the world through acts of love for God’s beloved. As the psalm tells us this morning: “Unless Abba God builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless Abba God  watches over the city, in vain the watcher keeps their vigil.”

In other words, when left to our own devices and to our own cleverness we create kingdoms and orders that remove us from not only God but from our own humanity. It is not some evil force that makes even well-intentioned systems and structures inhuman, it’s our own doing. We create hierarchies, in groups and out groups, uses and thems; we determine who is worth saving and who isn’t; we fabricate narratives elevating some above others because of wealth, skin, gender and sex, religion, age, abledness… We do this. And Jesus came, according to Mark, to expose these tendencies of the inhabitants of the kingdom of humanity and to usher them into the reign of God as citizens who make a difference in the world just by being willing to be utterly and completely human by loving (in word and deed) those whom God loves. By faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, disciples of Christ become those human beings—fully dependent on God—who see through elaborate presentations of power and prestige and dare to imagine another way, a better way, a more human way defined by the reign of God and to the wellbeing of the neighbor.

Mark 12:38-44

And then [Jesus] was saying in his teaching, “You perceive from the scribes, those who desire to walk around in the apparel of the elite and [be] greeted deferentially in the places of assembly and [desire] the most honorable seat in the synagogue and the chief place at the table at dinner, the ones who take material advantage of the households of widows and for pretexts pray for a long time; they, they will receive a greater judgment…” (Mk. 12:38-40)

Apart from what we experienced last week between Jesus and the scribe who “got it,” we are back with Jesus’s continual denunciation of self-aggrandized power run amok.[1] Literally. Jesus has zero tolerance for these scribes[2] and exposes their “general character” manifesting as “ostentatious, exploitative, and hypocritical”.[3] Jesus proposes to his disciples, in this passage, another way of being (and leading) in the world, a way he, Jesus, the Son of God and of Humanity, will take which is the way he expects his disciples[4] to take, too.[5]

If you thought that the politics of Jesus emphasized being nice and tolerant, this passage blows that notion to smithereens; Jesus is thoroughly polemical[6] right now, and that’s why he broad brushed an entire group of Jewish authority[7] when he says: You perceive from the scribes those who desire…. The “you perceive” is a command, meaning YOU look….LOOK! And the “those who desire” modifies the scribes as those who have the ambition to abuse their power and to exploit the people. In other words, Jesus is saying, Look, LOOK!, look at how the scribes not only exploit the people but that they desire to do it… They desire[8] the glory their fancy/celebratory robes[9] bring them, the deferential greetings[10] their rank demands from those who are inferior, the best seats, and to siphon the livelihood from widows through being paid for their long prayers.[11] And when it comes to leaders who opt for arrogant self-involvement at the expense of God’s people—especially the weak and least of these in society like widows[12]—God takes massive issue and divine judgment comes…not for the people so deceived and duped, but for those in authority who capitalized on and benefited from such deception. This is quite literally what the major and minor prophets are all about, and this is why Jesus then says, they, they will receive a greater (divine[13]) judgment!

Then, according to the text, Mark tells us, And then after sitting down opposite the treasury he was looking at how the crowd is throwing money into the treasury. And many wealthy people were throwing in much. And then a poor widow came and threw in two of the smallest amounts of money[14] (which is a quadrans). This scene is jarring, it doesn’t seem to fit with what has just come before. Or is it? Seems there’s some ostentatious public[15] demonstrations of the rich throwing large sums of money[16] into the various thirteen “trumpet chests” [17]. It’s here where there’s an overlap: Jesus, again, has zero tolerance for ostentation and zero tolerance for exploitation. Thus, it’s not so much an attack on the rich per se but on the desire to show off how much one can and is giving thus drawing attention to oneself (like the Scribes in the marketplaces in their robes).[18] In this way, it can also be (potentially) an attack on institutions that allow the exploitation and extortion of widows their business for their own benefit—donations for the poor were done elsewhere apart from these trumpet chests.[19]

Jesus, in response to witnessing the widow’s offering, according to Mark, says, Truly I say to you—so take notice—that the poor widow threw much more into the treasury than all others; for all others threw in out of that which abounds, but she threw in out of her poverty all she was having, her entire livelihood. We’ve often made this offering a type of virtue even to the extent that some churches have suggested that you must give all you have to prove your faithfulness. It is possible that Jesus is glorifying her self-sacrifice and even honoring her heartfelt gift. It could be, too, that Jesus is placing a certain amount of emphasis on the reality that this widow just gave to the temple the means of her next meal when it may have been better for her to eat and live another day.[20] It is possible that Jesus is calling out the narrative justifying stealing from such people their very livelihood.[21] Thus, like the scribes, the human religious authority, consumed by the ideologies of the kingdom of humanity, have turned the temple into a money making institution, granting more and more power and privilege to the themselves (thus the cycle repeats from the beginning).

Conclusion

What do we take away from this? It is not to give all you have, though, during pledge month…give what you can! But more importantly, the point of this passage for us, today, is that humility carries way more currency in the economy of the reign of God than self-aggrandizement. This isn’t about not tooting your horn once in a while because you did something great or something great happened—you need not resort to just saying, “It’s all Jesus!”, Jesus wants you to receive the credit, too! This is about how we participate in systems and institutions that are prone to extorting and taking advantage of the least of these (and some of these least of these includes you). It’s about our faith in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, that we, as disciples of Christ, become human beings—fully dependent on God—who see through elaborate presentations of power and prestige and dare to imagine another way, a better way, a more human way defined by the reign of God and to the wellbeing of the neighbor. We are to be truly and fully human in a world demanding to grow ever more inhuman.

[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 489. “Apart from vv. 28-34, it is true, all the scribes we have met in this gospel have been critics, if not openly enemies, of Jesus, and here in Jerusalem their hostility has come to a head as Jesus had predicted…But there is no comparable denunciation of the priests or elders.”

[2] France, Mark, 491. “In that case the subjects of these participles are not a new group, or even a subgroup of the scribes, but must still be the scribes in general.”

[3] France, Mark, 489.

[4] France, Mark, 490. “These remarks, too, are addressed specifically to the disciples….and do not form part of the public denunciation of the scribes. Jesus again calls those who follow him to abandon the world’s conventions of importance: the first are to be last and the last first.”

[5] France, Mark, 489. “But the warning here is not related to what they. May have in mind to do to Jesus, but to their general character as ostentatious, exploitative, and hypocritical…In this context the effect is to offer the crowd a choice as to the sort of leader they will follow, and Jesus pulls no punches in exposing the shortcomings of scribes in general.”

[6] France, Mark, 490. “What is now recorded, however, is not so much teaching as polemic.”

[7] France, Mark, 489. “…this is polemics in the context of a highly charged and potentially fatal confrontation, and a suitably broad brush is applied.”

[8] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 181. “Beware of those who hold the chief seats, Augustine writes, ‘Not because they hold them, but because they love them.’ Those who are condemned put on a good appearance of piety praying long prayers, but what they seek is honor and wealth.”

[9] France, Mark, 490. “a στολή is not an everyday garment, but a festive or celebratory robe…and suggests ‘dressing up’.”

[10] France, Mark, 490. “Deferential ἀσπασμοί are a mark of social standing…”

[11] France, Mark, 492. “…προφάσει would naturally describe the fraudulent means by which it is achieved. In that case the reference cold be to the sort of payment for the prayers of a religious professional which became common in mediaeval Christianity.”

[12] France, Mark, 491. “The vulnerability of widows is a recurrent theme in biblical literature, so that to defraud them is particularly despicable.”

[13] France, Mark, 492. Κρίμα a reference to “….God’s eschatological judgment, of which Jesus has spoken so vividly…”

[14] France, Mark, 493. “The λεπτόν was the smallest denomination of currency in use, a copper coin less than a centimetre in diameter and worth less than one hundredth of a denarius (which was itself half the value of the half-shekel temple tax).”

[15] France, Mark, 489. “The scene is in the Court of the Women, so-called not because it was a specifically for women but because it was the nearest point to the temple building proper which was open to women. Here stood a range of thirteen ‘trumpet chests’…designed to receive monetary offerings, including not only the half-shekel temple tax but also ‘freewill offerings’. The half-shekel was obligatory for men, but any contribution to the other chests was voluntary, and would be noticed by anyone who, like Jesus and his disciples, was watching…perhaps it was a recognised tourist attraction.”

[16] France, Mark, 492. “χαλκός is strictly ‘copper’ or ‘bronze’, and the widow’s two coins would be of copper.” And, “But the large sums donated by the rich would presumably be in silver or gold coins… so that χαλκός is here used in its more general sense of ‘money’.”

[17] France, Mark, 492. “γαζοφυλάκον…its reference here to the collecting chests in the Court of the Women is demanded by the context…”

[18] France, Mark, 489-490. “Jesus’ comment on the widow’s offering is not an attack on wealth or the wealthy as such, but rather on the scale of values which takes more account of the amount of a gift than of the dedication of the giver. It develops further the new perspective of the kingdom of God which Jesus has been so assiduously teaching his disciples on the way to Jerusalem specially his comments responding to their astonishment at his treatment of the rich man in 10:23-27.”

[19] France, Mark, 493. “All contributions were therefore for the work of the temple; charitable donations for the poor were made separately.”

[20] France, Mark, 493. “While Jesus was not averse to exaggeration to make a point, it is quite possible that in first-century Palestine the donation of two [copper coins] would have left a poor widow without the means for her next meal.”

[21] Placher, Mark, 182. Alt reading: the widow mistakenly gives into a system that is bleeding her dry “Jesus lamented the widow’s contribution”

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