Tag: Easter

It’s STILL Easter!

Psalm 4:7-8 You have put gladness in my heart, more than when grain and wine and oil increase. I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep; for only you, Abba God, make me dwell in safety.

Introduction

Good news! It is STILL Easter! (And will be for another four weeks!). On Easter morning we proclaimed the good news of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and, at the same time, experienced the good news of our own resurrection into new life out of the old life that was buried in the past and captive to what was. Easter season is a continued celebration of the miracle of resurrection that is not merely a historical story but also has present tense impact. This is more than a story of something that happened long ago; it is more than a myth that has ceased to have any relevance. It is our story TODAY. It is relevant for us TODAY. It is the very foundation and source not only of the Christian Church (visible and invisible), but of our life corporate and individual.

Easter reminds us that life is unlimited and death is limited. Death is thrust up against the walls of its tomb and forced to reckon with its demise. Jesus’s resurrection is the divine yawp summoning all of us out of our tombs into new and active life in God and with God and by God. We are neither the sum of our past deeds, nor are we forced to always define ourselves by them; Easter is our summons into new and recreated life. Real life! Life to live in vibrant and authentic ways; life lived with faces turned forward, feet planted firmly on solid ground, and our ears turned and tuned to the voice of our shepherd calling us into unending life, love, and liberation in God through faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

All of this is ours by faith and by God’s love; even though, as Peter says below, we are part of the problem, the ones who opted to kill Jesus, the ones who confused good and evil.

Acts 3:12-19

The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our forebears glorified God’s servant, Jesus, whom you, you handed over and whom you, you denied in the presence of Pilate, after judging [Jesus] to be released. But you, you denied the holy and righteous One and you, you demanded a murderer to be freely given to you, but the author of life you killed, whom God raised from the dead…And now, siblings, I have perceived that you acted according to ignorance just as also your leaders [did] (Acts 3:13-15, 17).

Luke puts us at the feet of Peter and John after a healing. Our ears and eyes are turned to Peter who is talking with the people of Israel who were amazed by the healing. But the point of the story isn’t the healing as much as it is an opportunity for proclamation of God’s great activity made known in the resurrection of Christ. In this way, the healing isn’t the miracle, per se; rather, the miracle is Peter and John truly witnessing to Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ.[1] In a way the “man lame from birth” now healed (v.2) isn’t very different from the two men who were blind to who Jesus was and now believe him to be the Christ, the long awaited Messiah of God’s beloved. All three were healed through Jesus, alone.[2]

Without missing a beat, Peter launches into exposing and “dangerous” language as he accuses the Israelites of their guilt against Jesus and God.[3] The temptation here is for us to remain as simple observers in the far distant audience, looking in at a “family argument” that has nothing to do with us; but that isn’t the case, not according to Good Friday.[4] For we ourselves are guilty of transposing good and evil, falling victim to comfort and familiar, and being held captive by our own security and letting innocent people suffer for our ease; thus, Peter’s keen insight (painful insight based on memory[5]) is not only for the children of Israel but for us; we are called and summoned here.[6] Like Israel, we are ignorant and guilty; or, in the language of 2024, we are captive and complicit.

But Peter’s accusation doesn’t end with accusation and condemnation; there’s hope. Repentance and absolution. You repent, therefore, and turn towards [God] so that your sins are blotted out (v. 19). In this way and in spite of the action of the crowd (the children of Israel and us), the action of the One Messiah, Jesus the Christ, is emphasized; Jesus, the one so raised by God from the dead, is the one who bestows life not to those who have earned it but to those who are dead in their trespasses![7] Here, in this moment between Peter and the crowd (between Peter and us), the tendencies of the crowd come into a full on collision with the action of Jesus.[8] The good news is that our tendencies don’t survive and God’s love does.

Conclusion

To close I want to quote Dorothee Sölle from her book, Choosing Life,

“To participate in the resurrection means that our lives don’t lead towards what is dead, are not exposed to death’s magnetic attractions. To be a Christian means that death is behind us. it no longer lies in wait for us. What awaits us is the love of which we are a part.”[9]

By being grafted into this story, we get the same confrontation with Jesus that the Israelites had as they stood before Peter and John and heard their guilt. And yet, they also heard their acceptance; thus, so do we hear our acceptance. Today, we are reminded that Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is the undoing of our poor (down right bad) judgment and that divine Love triumphs even when all seems lost. We live today. We are recreated today. We rejoice today. Today, by faith in Christ, the incarnation of God’s word of love, life, and liberation, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we celebrate our new life that is abounding with God’s love, teeming with mercy and forgiveness, spilling over with joy, infused by God’s grace, swelling with divine pleasure. Beloved, continue in your Easter, resurrected life with Christ!

[1] Willie James Jennings, “Acts”, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 42.   “The miraculous is not only the one healed but Peter and John, who now live on the other side of the journey of Jesus as his true witnesses.”

[2] Jennings, “Acts,” 42. “No one is healed by the power or holiness of witnesses, but only through Jesus of Nazareth.”

[3] Jennings, “Acts,” 42-43. “Peter’s words then move into the profoundly dangerous arena of accusation and guilt. Peter speaks to a specific crowd, the children of Israel, and invokes the same behavior seen in Jesus.”

[4] Jennings, “Acts,” 43. “But Peter speaks to his people. This is an in-house conversation. We have lost the sense and struggle of this family argument, this cultic contention. But what he speaks captures a reality for all peoples and their leaders. Peoples often do act in ignorance or malice, killing the innocent and allowing murderers to go free.”

[5] Jennings, “Acts,” 43. “Peter and John carry the memory of a crowd that called for Jesus’ death; But now Peter’s speech marks the path through such agonizing knowledge with its temptation toward self-indulging intellectual narcissism.”

[6] Jennings, “Acts,” 43. “Told from this angle the story of servant Jesus highlights the weakness of the many, the ease with which the crowd could be deceived to choose against their won well-being. If the many can be deceived, then what must it be like to see their deception? Luke positions Peter in that painful position of seeing and knowing what others don’t fully see.”

[7] Jennings, “Acts,” 43. “The point here is not the actions of the many but the actions of the One. The man healed is now a sign of the man resurrected from the dead, the author of life itself.”

[8] Jennings, “Acts,” 43. “Now the actions of the one confront the wayward propensities of the many.”

[9] Dorothee Sölle, Choosing Life, (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1981), 91.

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Resurrected from the Past; Liberated from What Was: Easter Life!

Psalm 118:22-24 22 The same stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. On this day Abba God has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Introduction

The psalmist declares: “There is a sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous: ‘The right hand of Abba God has triumphed!’” (118:15).

Let’s add our triumphant proclamation: Happy Easter! Christ is risen!

Today is a glorious and beautiful day! It is the day where we get to experience the proclamation that Christ is Risen, that death couldn’t hold him, and that life wins! It’s this day, this very morning where we hear the great echoes of God’s maternal roar, sending death backward, reeling, stumbling, and coming to rest in its own tomb, thus, giving love, life, and liberation free reign in the world.

This means, for us, our individual agony and communal limitation, our local turmoil, national chaos, and global tumult find restriction. These can only go so far considering God’s revolution of divine love, life, and liberation in the world on behalf of God’s beloved. No matter how much tumult, chaos, turmoil, limitation, and agony tantrum, rage and stomp about, they find their end in the light of God shining forth from the once sealed tomb daring to contain God’s very Son, the divine child of humanity, our brother! Good news starts today because God sounded God’s divine yawp and sent everything threatening human flourishing and thriving running for the hills, desperate to find protection from that piercing, exposing, and redeeming light of lights!

But there’s a problem I foresee coming: we will leave here today euphoric with warm and celebratory feelings only to arise on Monday as if nothing even happened. Our alarms will summon us from sleep, and we will lumber through the day as if nothing transpired between Friday 5 pm and Monday 8 am. Those who have been summoned to life this morning with Christ by faith will, in 24 hours, be those who roll over and continue to sleep as if enclosed in a tomb.

But what if … What if this ancient, whacky story of divine activity in the world, the overruling of death, the radical reordering of actuality and possibility has meaning for us today? What if it can release us from being buried in the past and captive to what was?

John 20:1-18

Now Mary had remained at the tomb weeping outside. Then, as she was weeping, she stooped low to look inside the tomb, and she beholds two angels in brightness sitting, one toward the head and one toward the feet where Jesus’s body was laid. And they say to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She says, “They took my Lord, and I do not know where they placed him.” After saying these things, she turns around and looks at Jesus standing there, and had not perceived that it is Jesus. Jesus says to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Appearing to her that it is the gardener, she says to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, answer me where you placed him, and I will remove him.” (John 20:11-15)

In John’s gospel, we meet Mary at the tomb. John brings us straight there. There is no lead up as there is in other gospels. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, the two Marys and Salome, as they go to the tomb, are worried they will not access Jesus’s body (preparing it for burial) because the stone will be too heavy for them to move. In Mark’s gospel, there is anxiety and concern. But with John, we are immediately at the tomb in the early, dark hours of the morning (v.1). Thus, John brings us straight into the crisis of Easter morning.[1] We are with Mary, we are in the dark, and we are just as startled by the things we see…The stone is rolled away, and the tomb is open.

Mary sees the tomb is opened, and instead of going further to investigate, she runs back to Peter and John (the beloved disciple). Her message—They removed the Lord from the tomb, and I have not seen where they laid him” (v. 2b)—provokes John and Peter to run to the tomb. John arrives first and stoops low to look (without entering) and sees Jesus’s death linens laid on the ground (v. 5). Then Peter follows John’s lead but enters the tomb, and he gazes at the pieces of fine linen lying there, and he sees the head cloth for the dead which was upon Jesus’s head and is now not lying with the other linens but is separate, having been rolled around into one place (vv. 6-7). Then John enters. Here it is declared, he saw and he believed; his faith in the risen Christ is kindled.[2] For never before had they remembered the writing that it is necessary that he was raised from the dead (v. 9). For John (and Peter) faith in Jesus blossomed that morning into the full faith in Jesus the Christ, the resurrected son of God.[3] They saw, they remembered, and they believed.

Then they leave the tomb and ran back (v.10). But Mary stays at the tomb, weeping outside; then, she stooped low to look inside the tomb. As she does, she is greeted not by death linens and shrouds, but by two dazzling, brightly illuminated angels, sitting where Jesus’s body was initially laid to rest (vv. 11-12). The angels ask her, Woman, why are you weeping? And she explains, they took the body of my Lord, and I do not know where they placed him (v. 13). The text does not tell us anything else about the angels; we are only told that Mary turns away from the tomb and then she sees someone whom she thinks is the gardener, but it’s Jesus (v. 14). Jesus speaks to her and asks, Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking? Still, she does not recognize who he is. [4] She is stuck. Jesus is dead, for Mary. She cannot hear his voice because her focus is on Jesus’s being dead—answer me where you placed him and I will remove him (v. 15). For Mary, Jesus should still be in the tomb. Though she is facing Jesus, she cannot see him[5] because she is captive to what was, she’s buried in Good Friday. She needs to be called out of the tomb of yesterday into the resurrection of today.

And that’s what Jesus does. He calls her, Mary. Her response is one of elation and joy, Rabboni! No one can say your name like the one who loved you to the end. [6] And then Jesus adds this paradoxically cryptic yet perfect statement, “Do not fasten to me, for I have not yet ascended to my parent and your parent, my God and your God.” In other words, this is not a resuscitation of the old idea, of yesterday, of the ordinary and expected, thus the status-quo; it is something completely new, different, unexpected, unknown! [7] To be encountered by God in the event of faith is to be ushered into a new life with the Risen Christ not shuttled back into what was.[8] Mary was not called back into the tomb, but further out and away from it; she was called to lift her eyes and follow the voice of the Risen Christ unto God’s new work in the world where death no longer has the final say, yesterday is no longer a tyrant, and the past can no longer hold captive.

Conclusion

Beloveds, today begins a new era of looking forward into the light of life of the living and not into the darkness of the tomb of the dead. Why are you weeping? The Angels ask Mary. Whom do you seek?” Jesus asks Mary. Today, these questions are for us: why are weeping for what is of yesterday? What and Whom are we seeking? These two questions are one in the same question. In seeking we realize we’ve lost something; in realizing we’ve lost something we weep. In weeping we search for that which we lost. But we tend to go backward, we tend to reach behind us, to stoop low and focus on the death linens and shrouds of the things of yesterday. We are so consumed by our grief of what was and is now no longer that we cannot perceive that the loving voice asking us these questions is the divine, loving, voice of God summoning us out of and away from the tomb holding the dead. For God is not there; Jesus Christ is risen; life is not in the tomb but out in the world. Divine life, light, and love released into the world to bring God’s great revolution of love and liberation to all those who are trapped in captivity to what was and buried in the past.

  • Rather than feel helpless in the face of global tumult, we can speak a new word: a word of peace that is prayerful action. We can dare to feel helpful.
  • Rather than feel hopeless in the face of national chaos, we can speak a new word: a word of mercy that is taking a stand to protect those lives being ignored in derisive debate. We can dare to feel hopeful.
  • Rather than feel pointless in the face of local turmoil, we can speak a new word: a word of solidarity that is active presence with our neighbors. We can dare to believe that there is meaning.
  • Rather than live succumbed to the mythology of our Christian limitation, we can speak a good word of God’s love for the cosmos that is a word of Gospel proclamation in word and deed. We can dare to reclaim God’s story and believe it abounds with great possibility.
  • Rather than becoming numb to our personal agony, we can speak a new word of life that is a word of resurrection (now!). We can dare to live as if death cannot eclipse life.

So, today we stand up and take hold of the love, life, and liberation gifted to us by God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Here we raise our Ebenezer because, Here by God’s great help we’ve come![9] And we go forward and seek God among the living not among the dead. Dorothee Sölle writes, “He who seeks [Jesus] among the dead, accepts as true something that happened to him or seeks him among those who are not yet dead, ourselves. He who seeks [Jesus] among the living, seeks him with God and therefore on this our earth.”[10] Therefore, today I pray we hear our names and the name of our community called and we leave behind the linens of yesterday and the shroud of what was and step toward the one calling, beckoning, and summoning us forward into divine life! Today we celebrate because we have been loosed from the captivity of what was and resurrected from burial in the past. Today we dare to stand in the love of the present and step boldly into the life of the future. Because today God lives!

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 683-684. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “But unlike Mark’s narrative no mention is made of the purpose of Mary’s coming, and therefore there is no reflection on who could roll the stone away from the door of the grave (Mk. 16.3); it is merely reported that she sees that the stone is removed. From that she draws the conclusion (v. 2) that the body has been carried away, and—without looking into the grave?—she hastens, shocked and perplexed, to Peter and the beloved disciple in order to bring this news to them.”

[2] Bultmann, John, 684. The beloved disciple does not step into the grave; Peter does; the beloved disciple then follows and their faith is kindled.

[3] Bultmann, John, 684. What faith? “In this context the faith that is meant can only be faith in the resurrection of Jesus; it can be signified by the abs. πιστεὐειν, because this means faith in Jesus in the full sense, and so includes the resurrection faith. As to the two disciples, it is then simply reported that they return home (v. 10).”

[4] Bultmann, John, 686. She doesn’t recognize the Risen Jesus. Even when he asks her a question.

[5] Bultmann, John, 685-686. The Risen Jesus is standing behind Mary and she only sees him when she turns away from the tomb.

[6] Bultmann, John, 686. “It is possible for Jesus to be present, and yet for a man not to recognize him until his word goes home to him.”

[7] Bultmann, John, 687. “Of a surety, Jesus’ άναβαἰνειν is something definitive, and his promised (πἀλιν) ἔρχεσθαι…is not a return into an ordinary mode of life in this work, such as would permit familiar contact. The fellowship between the risen Jesus and his followers in the future will be experienced only as fellowship with the Lord who has gone to the Father, and therefore it will not be in the forms of earthly associations.”

[8] Bultmann, John, 688. “The real Easter faith therefore is that which believes this [v. 17]; it consists in understanding he offence of the cross; it is not faith in a palpable demonstration of the Risen Lord with the mundane sphere.”

[9] Come Thou Fount, v. 2.

[10] Dorothee Soelle, The Truth is Concrete, trans. Dinah Livingstone (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 60. Originally published as, Die Wahrheit ist konkret, Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1967.

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Why Do You Stand Looking Up?

Psalm 68:3, 5-6a: But let the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; let them also be merry and joyful. Parent of orphans, defender of the widowed, God is in God’s holy habitation! God gives the solitary a home and brings forth prisoners into freedom…

Introduction

I had hamsters as a little girl; two: Peanut Butter and Jelly. Having hamsters as a kid taught me two very valuable lessons. The first was practical: hamsters and cats don’t mix; no matter how high up you store that hamster habitat, the cat—like a stealthy ninja thief—will break into it. The second was existential: humans and hamsters hold the tendency of running and running in circles in common. To be honest, as tragic as the first lesson was to learn as a young girl, the second lesson was even more tragic. While it’s not great to come home from school to catpocalypse having descended upon our humble home, it’s worse to find out for yourself you can be moving and moving and not going anywhere.

Sometimes we spend a lot of energy running in place, going back (again) to the same thing—behavior, thought, framework, tendency—to find help and yet those things leave us wanting again and again. We can feel a lack and purchase something only to be left (again) with feeling the lack. We can return to old habits to find that the same consequences still manifest. We can keep thinking we can beat the system by playing the system, only to find out that once again the system is way better at this game than we are. If you’ve ever thought, uttered, mumbled the words, “This is just how the world is…”, listen closely for the squeak, squeak, squeak of that hamster wheel. All in all, the comfort of our hamster wheel and the feeling of moving perpetuate the false notion that we are getting somewhere. We are running and running and all we are doing is standing still.

So, what if we stopped running? Maybe we need someone to throw a stick in the gear to force us out of our little round, squeaky comfort zones. But it’s always good to remember that we aren’t—in fact—hamsters; we can get off our wheels. We can leave our tube-errific habitats and fight back catpocalypse with our own armadoggon, walking as liberated beings with in the world bringing life and love to other captives so stuck in place.

Acts 1:6-14

“…but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses: in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and until the end of the earth.” And after saying these things while they were watching [Jesus] was lifted up and a cloud received him from their eyes. And as they were gazing into the heaven while he was going, behold! two men stood by them in bright robes, and they said, “Men of Galilee, why have you stood looking into the heaven?…”

Acts 1:8-11a (Translation Mine)

Luke tells us that those who were gathered around Jesus came and asked him if he was going to restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus, according to Luke, uses this question to navigate towards a discussion of something else than kingdom restoration: the reign of God extending beyond humanmade boundaries defining this or that kingdom; this is the advent of the new order, not a return to the old one.[1] The disciples are still stuck in thinking in terms of people groups and kingdoms; but God, in Christ, is thinking about the cosmos, the people of God, the entire world. In fact, this is the point of the book of Acts. We think it’s about the disciples and what they did, but it’s more of a testament to the power and action of the divine Spirit and what the Spirit will do by moving the disciples to spread the message of Christ—the message of divine love, life, and liberation—to the ends of the earth.

God isn’t interested in Israel standing still because God doesn’t stand still.[2] See, as a people who partake in the divine image, as God self-discloses so too do believers participate in that self-disclosure. God moves and is on the move: creation speaks to this, the history of Israel speaks to this, the incarnation speaks to this, the resurrection speaks to this, the ascension will speak to this, and so to the coming fulfillment of the promised descent of the Holy Spirit. So, as God moves so, too, do those who have new life in God by faith. While humans like to think God stands still causing us to have to go “back” to find God, the reality is something else: God is always a couple steps ahead of us, and in being ahead of us is able to be with us guiding us toward something new of God.[3] Thus, believers do not stand still, rather they are to be witnesses, moving, proclaiming witnesses of God’s power over death.

This is the point of Jesus’s promise that the Holy (Divine) Spirit will descend and come upon the disciples; herein the likeness to God takes on more distinctive features. Like Jesus’s life was a message of divine love, life, and liberation to people held captive and pressed and pushed to the margins, so, too, will the disciples become these very story books or divine love letters to more and more people.[4] They—by their bodies in word and deed—will announce not the establishment of human empires but the divine revolution of God’s love in the world seeking and searching for the beloved.[5] Here the ends of the earth are brought together at one point: as the disciples move by the power of the divine spirit, God’s love eclipses the notion of the villainy of otherness and the tyranny of us v. them. For where there is life-giving and love-sharing there is liberation from the captivity of death and hate (here, otherness is refused and the battle between us and them rent asunder). This isn’t about going out and making converts to a singular way of thinking—believer or die! Rather, it’s about spreading divine gifts of love, life, and liberation to all people, incorporating all people into the family of God’s life and love.

Then we get to my favorite moment in this story. As Jesus ascends—not to abandon the disciples but to be with them in a more personal and intimate way[6]—two men appear dressed in bright-like-light clothing. These two men find the disciples staring up into the sky, still, stuck, and motionless. Then they ask the most perfect question, My Dudes, why in the world are you just standing there staring up into the sky? Granted, and to be fair, the disciples have a lot going on at that moment, but the point is made: it’s time to move, move forward. It isn’t about looking up or looking back, but looking ahead; it’s about interrupting what’s grown old even if comfortable and embarking on something new. As Willie James Jennings says,

“We must never discount the next step that must be taken at the sight of Jesus’ leaving. Such a step is understandably a labored step, unsure and unclear. Nevertheless it must be taken because faith always leans forward to Jerusalem, toward the place where God waits to meet us. We are always drawn on by God to our future.”[7]

Conclusion

“People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into the heaven?” Or, People of God, why do you keep running on that hamster wheel? Our life of faith is dynamic and active. It’s not about sitting and reverencing and standing far off. It’s about standing up, and acting, and coming up close and personal—to God and to others. Our life of faith is not about just accepting things as they are, shrugging, and just rolling over; it’s about saying something new, doing something different, taking a risk, and living liberated and responsible in the world to the benefit of God’s beloved who is your neighbor.

Jesus’s ascent into heaven does not limit the spreading of the proclamation of God’s love for the entire cosmos, but, in fact, ensures that it can (and will) spread. As Christ was and is embodied, Christ can only do so much with a body—as we know. But with the promised divine Spirit that will come to the disciples to anchor and yoke them to God, this message of Christ—the incarnated proclamation of God’s love for all people—can now very much and very literally travel to the furthest reaches of the earth. It is a message that is now unrestricted by culture and context, unbound by dogma and doctrine, and unleashed from time and tense.

As the beloved of God you, by faith, are liberated by love and given new life. This is part of our Easter story. But it doesn’t end with Easter; it doesn’t end with Ascension…it is just beginning. So, again, let me ask, People of God, why do you stand looking up into the heaven? As those who have been encountered by God in the event of faith in the proclamation of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit: Go. Go forth into the world carrying and sharing the grace and mercy of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing God’s love to all…

[1] Willie James Jennings Acts Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. Louisville, KY: WJK, 2017. 16. “He will seal this new order, this revolution over death and the power of violence through the Holy Spirit. The Sprit is the promise of the Father to the Son and those joined to him. Indeed Acts narrates the journey of the Spirit even more deeply into the way of Jesus and the journey of Jesus more deeply into the way of the Spirit. The Spirit, companion with Jesus and his disciples, will soon spread the body of Jesus over space and time opening his life as a new home for the faith of Israel.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 16. “Geography matters. Place matters to God. From a specific place the disciples will move forward into the world. To go from place to place is to go from people to people and to go from an old identity to a new one. Jesus prepares them for the journey of their lives by holding them in a place where the Spirit will be given to them in that place, and from that place they will be changed.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 19. “Jesus ascends not only to establish presence through absence, but he also draws his body into the real journeys of his disciples into the world. He goes to heaven for us, ahead of us. He goes with and ahead of his disciples into the real places of this world. He is Lord of time (past, present, and future) yet walking in our time, and he is Lord of space (here and there) yet taking our spaces and places with utmost seriousness.”

[4] Jennings, Acts, 18. “They will be an irrefutable presence. They will also be witnesses of divine presence. They will give room to the witness, making their lives a stage on which the resurrected Jesus will appear and claim each creature as his own, as a site of love and desire.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 18. “The disciples will be formed by the Spirit as witnesses. They will be turned out to the world not as representatives of empires but those who will announce a revolution, the revolution of the intimate, God calling to the world. They will enter new places to become new people by joining themselves to those in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. As Jesus announces this divine desire, he ascends.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 19. “Jesus’ ascension is in fact God claiming our space as the sites for visitation, announcing God’s desire to come to us. Gods desire will be seen in the pouring out of the Spirit in a specific place in order to enter specific places and specific lives. He ascends for our sake, not to turn away from us but to more intensely focus in on us.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 19-20.

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“Nothing Seems to Satisfy”: God in Our Hunger

Psalm 118:22-24 I will give thanks to you, God, for you answered me and have become my salvation. The same stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. On this day God has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Introduction

What Death tried to seal in a tomb, God liberated with one proclamation: “Let there be life!” And life burst forth, sentencing Death to its own tomb. Nothing gets between God and God’s beloved!

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen!

What a day. It’s the singular time in the Christian liturgical calendar where the resurrection of Christ is told in the present tense and not as some distant future mythology for a special few who get their faith just right. Today, resurrection is for everyone. Today, God is for everyone. We declare today that God shook heaven and earth and liberated God’s beloved from death as the first born of all creation, the enduring symbol that death is not the final word for anyone. (Full stop.) Today we proclaim that life wins, love wins, liberation wins. Hallelujah!

Today in our encounter with this story of God’s radical activity in the world through the resurrection of Christ, I get to remind you that not only does life, love, and liberation win, but these become the foundation under our feet, the thread holding together the fabric of our existence, the substance of our individual and corporate life together, and the motivation for our activity in the world. It’s this message that makes the church the Church—visible and invisible. Without it, the church doesn’t exist. This awkward, weird, scientifically baffling, nonsensical, proclamation—Christ is Risen!—is meant to be the very characteristic establishing the church—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

What’s haunting me is how quickly we prefer to move on from Easter Sunday into this makes more sense Monday, and let’s be rational Tuesday, and that’s just mythology Wednesday, and so on. We are too quick to truncate the possibility of this announcement, relegating it to the simplicity of premodern people, some single historical event, a “picture painted on a wall.”[1] I think I’d be fine with this if we, as “enlightened” and “scientific” people, didn’t have so many of our own beliefs that don’t make sense, that are “irrational”, and that qualify as “mythology”. We have our own versions of the very things we criticize previous eras of human existence for. So, I’m wondering, what if… What if this ancient, whacky story of divine activity in the world, the overruling of death, the radical reordering of actuality and possibility has meaning for me, for you, for us today?

What if it can actually recenter and stabilize? What if it can create space and hold time to find identity? What if it can shatter alienation and encourage relationality? What if it can break through false expectations and give us ground to build community? What if it means—no matter what—we have solidarity? What if it’s true?

Matthew 28:1-10

Now, the angel answered and said to the women, “You, you do not fear! For I know that you are seeking Jesus the one who has been crucified. He is not here; for he is raised just as he said. Come (!) and see (!) the place where he was laid. And quickly go and say (!) to his disciples that he is raised from the dead; and behold! He is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him. Behold! I bid you!” [2]

Mt 28:5-7

Matthew seems to have a flair for the divinely dramatic side of story telling that seems, to me, absent in the other three gospel accounts of the resurrection. Mark, Luke, and John have the women (of some number) showing up and the stone already rolled away. But Matthew? Nah. That’s not his style. Let’s go big, or let’s go home!

Matthew tells us that the women, the two Marys (Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”[3]) came to look at the tomb.[4] Now, while our text makes it sound as if Mary and (the other) Mary were merely there to express their silent condolences, there was a purpose for this “looking”: to confirm Christ’s death.[5] These two women came assuming they’d affirm the actuality of death; they weren’t expecting to leave declaring  the possibility of life. Then, out of the blue…

[B]ehold!, a great earthquake happened; for an angel of the Lord descended out of heaven and drew near and rolled back the stone and then was sitting upon it…and from fear of [the angel] the guards shook and they became as dead.

A massive shaking of the ground, an angel in dazzling brightness descending and rolling back a massive stone, and big guards falling over, stiff as boards because they are terrified. Matthew skips no beats here in adding scientific perplexity to vibrant narrative pizzazz; he’s got a point and it’s not just for entertainment. What’s his point? This: Jesus didn’t need the stone removed to leave the tomb.[6] The Angel does it for pure divine dramatic effect. So, this is Matthew hollering at the top of his lungs: JESUS IS RISEN! And God had everything to do with it! this isn’t a “resurrection” story, it’s a “he is not here!” story.[7] It’s a “No one gets between God and the Beloved!” story.

The angel beckons the two Marys to come and see, because the angel knows they are seeking Jesus, the one who has been crucified.[8] Then the angel charges the women to go and proclaim to the disciples that Jesus is not dead, that he has gone on before them into Galilee, and that they’ll see him there. These humble women, dismissed by much of society, are charged by the angelic visitor, a representative of the celestial estate, to be the first to proclaim[9] good news to the sorrowful, to the regretful, to the ones who ran off, to the one who denied three times. It’s these very ones Jesus declares as “my brothers”;[10] they in the midst of their alienation, isolation, loneliness, shame and regret are summoned unto God, affirmed as the beloved because nothing…not-one-thing can separate them from the love of God.

Conclusion

Today, we celebrate, let our voices ring out with the splendor of heart felt Hallelujahs!, throw our hands up in the air, dance with delight like children, and rejoice that death doesn’t triumph over life. When everything looked as it if was dead and gone, God stepped in and breathed life into dry bones.[11] When our hostility toward God felt like an eternal fracture, God bent low and mended it.[12] When our tongues grew parched from reciting unfulfilled promises, God brought us the water of heaven.[13] When our bodies grew exhausted under the constant threat of the thunder of doom creeping about our lives and relationships, God cleared out the clouds and let the light of God’s countenance shine over us.[14] Today, in the resurrection of Christ, God comes near to you, to me, to all of us and is for us.[15]

Today God is in our hunger for stability; we are stabilized.
Today God is in our hunger for identity; we are irreplaceable.
Today God is in our hunger for relationality; we are with others.
Today God is in our hunger for community; we are seen, known, and loved here.
Today God is in our hunger for solidarity; we are not nor ever will be forsaken.

Today, in the resurrection of Christ, sola suspicio, reaches its limit; it has nothing to say to a people who are aware of their hunger, no longer satisfied with consuming themselves to death. Today, in being confronted with this radical story of divine love, life, and liberation we are awakened in our spirits. Today our hearts quicken with possibility, with what if and why not. Today our imaginations are reinvigorated, daring to dream of a world filled with justice, peace, mercy, love, and life. Today, wrapped up in the story of He is not here! we have the audacity to defy nothing with something, what-is with what-could-be, captivity with liberation. Today we come face to face with our hunger, with the reality that resurrection is not of the past but is right now, that we desire more than what we have grown accustomed to accepting and receiving. Today, we realize that our hunger is God’s hungering divine passion for the beloved; thus, today, we see that Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is a summons to us to rise from the dead and join the living and God’s divine revolution of love, life, and liberation in the world for all people.

“The word of love lives, it happens, it is spoken and it is heard. As this word, Jesus is raised from the dead. The story of love does not end on Calvary but begins there.”[16]

Today we taunt death with the fullness of life and dare to follow Jesus out of our tombs; today we are bold to say beyond the limits of reason and suspicion:

“I believe in the crucified Lord who is alive, the failure which didn’t fail, the defenceless man whom God did not forsake, the man who loved, with whose cause God identified God’s self. God says yes to what we usually, with good reason, deny. God makes him the lifebringer, whom we thought of as lost in unreality. … God did not arm the defenceless man, God did not let him come to grief, as reason would suppose, but God approved of his defencelessness, accepted and loved him and raised him up. To believe in [Christ] means to follow his way. He who seeks him among the living, seeks him with God and therefore on this our earth.”[17]

(for part 1 click here, part 2 click here, part 3 click here, part 4 click here, part 5 click here, Good Friday click here)

[1] Luther qtd in Soelle, The Truth is Concrete, Trans. Dinah Livingstone. New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1969. 58.

[2] Translation mine unless otherwise noted.

[3] ἠ ἄλλη Μαρία

[4] Θεωρῆσαι τὸν τάφον

[5] Anna Case-Winters Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. Louisville, KY: WJK, 2015. 336. “The effect of these visits was to confirm death. The women who come to perform this sad task of confirming death instead find themselves running tor Joy, announcing life. Waiting and watching in sadness, they have become the first witnesses to the resurrection. Once again the last are first. They are also first to worship the risen Lord.”

R. T. France The Gospel of Matthew The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Gen. Ed Joel B. Green. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007. 1097. “The action of the angel in removing the stone from the entrance to the tomb draws attention even more clearly than in the other gospels to the fact that Jesus has already left the tomb, while the stone was still in place.”

[7] France, Matthew, 1098. “This is not an account of the resurrection of Jesus (as some editors still unaccountably describe it in their section headings), but a demonstration that Jesus has risen. We are not told at what point between the burial on Friday evening and the opening of the tomb on Sunday morning Jesus actually left the tomb, though the repeated ‘third day/three days’ language (and even more the ‘three days and three nights’ of 12:40) presupposes that he was in the tomb for most of that period. What matters to the narrators is not when or how he left, but the simple fact that now, early on Sunday morning, ‘he is not here’ (v.6).”

[8] Ἰησοῦν τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον

[9] France, Matthew, 1101. “The women are not only themselves the witnesses of the empty tomb, but also the chosen messengers to convey the amazing news to Jesus’ male disciples.”

[10] France, Matthew, 1103. “my brothers” “This time, however, it follows the abject failure of the Twelve to stand with Jesus when the pressure was on, a failure which was hardly less shameful because Jesus had predicted it in 26:31. But now it is time for the second half of that prediction to be fulfilled ( 26:32), and that Galilean meeting will eventually restore the family relationship which they must surely have thought had come to an end in Gethsemane.”

[11] Reference to Lent 5 Sermon, Ezekiel 37:1-14.

[12] Reference to Lent 3 Sermon, Romans 5:1-11.

[13] Reference to Lent 2 Sermon, Genesis12:1-4a.

[14] Reference to Lent 1 Sermon, Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7.

[15][15] Reference to Good Friday Sermon Isaiah 53

[16] Soelle, The Truth is Concrete, 80-81.

[17] Soelle, The Truth is Concrete, 59-60. The masculine pronouns for God rewritten as God/God’s

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A Good Man…

“Jesus was a good teacher and man,”
a statement most people like to say.
But, the statement causes me pause:
“Would you have said this in that day?”

We make this claim, so certain of ourselves
that this one man in history was quite good;
but the people in that crowd didn’t think so,
as they clamored for the nails and wood.

Maybe I’m too negative, refusing moral
evolution; but are we actually improved
in making sound judgments than those
who lived in eras and times far removed?

If we were them and they were us, everything
would occur as it already did. We’d demand
his life be given and then release Barabas;
that choice they’d examine and reprimand.

We don’t like rabble-rousers any more now
than we did then. One need only to mention
“Malcolm X” of “Martin Luther King Jr” to recall
how we treat those who light fires of revolution.

“Jesus was a good teacher and man,”
they say as if it’s a universal statement.
In many ways, it is very much true; he was.
Jesus was good, in the way “good” is meant.

But hindsight is 20/20, we say this now.
Though…we wouldn’t have said it then.
One thing I keep coming back to on this point
is that all should be silence from way back when.

Nothing should have survived the trials of time,
Jesus should have gone the way of the wind…
into the distant whirling dust devil that is the
constant erosion of time’s battling headwind.

The only reason we have the audacity to say this,
“Jesus was good,” is due to the very early Church
feeling it necessary that if anything held through time
twas a whacky claim: the Son of God wasn’t left in a lurch.

Through the words of Paul, that extreme and energetic guy,
and the reply of those other four writers some years belated,
we have with us a story of divine activity rejecting
death, which is a story to people weekly narrated.

Jesus wrote nothing down, neither did any of his disciples.
For all intents and purposes, this man should never be known
for how good he was or wasn’t; Jesus should have slipped
into all that was and never will be again, the great “unknown”.

But we do because small groups of people dared to retell
something crazy, a thing which caused them to live in a way
different than the rest, a story so crazy their own lives were
not worth keeping if they couldn’t tell what they had to say.

“Jesus was a good teacher and man,” so good God raised him
from death into life so that we could also partake in this, his, life.
We owe this hope to scared people, desperately clinging to crazy
words of a crazier story, ignoring other words threatening antilife.

Had these small sects of people, scattered in the middle east,
never thought this worth their time, not worth this great danger,
we’d be now without such a story of metaphysical engagement
starting in the midst of hay and straw, a mere babe in a manger.

“Jesus was a good teacher and man,”
I say now with an eye to this humble past.
Thank you kind people for passing on this
crazy story surviving time in words that last.

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Our Stories This Story: A Revolutionary Story

I recommend reading/listening to the sermon from Ash Wednesday, which functions as an introduction to this Lenten series. You can access it here. For the previous sermons in this series, (“The Youth”) click here,(“The Parents”) click here, and (“The Worker”) click here, (“The Old”) click here, (“The Others”) click here, and “Us” click here.

Sermon on Luke 24:1-12

Psalm 118:15-17 There is a sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of [God] has triumphed! the right hand of [God] is exalted! the right hand of [God] has triumphed!” I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of [God].

Introduction

Death dared to stand between God and the Beloved and did not survive; like a mama bear eager to protect her cubs, God roared and death became dust; God’s beloved was liberated. Happy Easter! Hallelujah!

Today, we are people of story.

Today, on this beautiful day of celebration, of praise, of great and big Hallelujahs! we become a people of story. We become a people created and crafted by a radical and profound story of God’s abundant, steadfast, unconditional, never-giving-up, mama-bear-like love for the cosmos.

Today our posture uncoils, and we boldly turn our faces toward the outer edges of the universe letting the rays of the risen Son shine down upon us. All that was has come undone; everything is now as it should be according to God’s story of love for the world and all people.

Today, we get to stand (literally and metaphorically) in the realm of life in the aftermath of the exposure that we do not know what we are doing. Today, we get to float in the wonderful amniotic fluid of divine love soothing over every wound and trauma, we get to dance freely to the manifold melodies of liberation, we get to drink in the waters of life, consume the food of the word of God of love, and hear the comforting declaration that even when we did not and do not know what we are doing, God does know what God’s doing.

Even when we were determined to terminate God’s story, God met our determination with God’s story of love and forgiveness, mercy and grace; what we sentenced to death and thrust into the dirt, God made alive and caused the very ground under our feet to burst open. In the resurrection of the Christ, we receive the splendor of God’s story and watch it eclipse our own feeble stories hallmarked with pain and sorrow, captivity and complicity, sickness and trauma, and death. Today our stories become living, breathing testaments to the revolutionary love of God.

Today we are a people of story.

Luke 24:1-12

Now, on the first [day] of the week at the deep of the early dawn, [the women] came to the tomb carrying spices that they prepared. And they found the stone having been rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus; they became perplexed about this. And then, Lo!, two men in lustrous clothing stood by the women; [the women] became full of fear. While bowing [their] faces to the earth, [the two men] said to the women, “Why are you seeking the living among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised. Remember how he said to you while in Galilee saying ‘it is necessary the Son of Humanity is handed over into the hands of sinful humanity and crucified and on the third day raised up.’” And the women remembered his words…

Luke 24:1-8, translation mine unless otherwise noted

“And the women remembered his words…” This is the profound moment when these brave women[1] who were previously lurking in the background of Luke’s story surge to the foreground.[2] In addition to that, this is the moment when they begin to grasp the depth of what they’ve encountered: God…the awe inspiring and undiluted power of God’s fulfilled promise to liberate the captives even.

Luke tells us: coming to the tomb early in the morning, bearing their spices, they were prepared to meet Jesus’s dead body. Make no mistake, these women are no heroes of “blind faith”, as if they obstinately held to some whimsical fantastic fiction denying what had happened, refusing to accept reality. They knew what happened; they were grounded. They were (literally) carrying spices for burial. They expected to fight against larger-than-life stone to access the decaying body of Jesus of Nazareth and anoint it.[3]

They expected to encounter death; they were ready for that. Instead, they encountered life, and were thrown back on their heels.

Two men greet them in lustrous and dazzling clothes and tell the women: why are you looking for the living among the dead? Let’s imagine the two men ask the question and then smile, knowing (full well) what these women were expecting and knowing (full well) they are seconds away from dropping all those prepared burial spices on the ground. Try to listen to the lilt in the question as it falls on the astounded women who are becoming more perplexed… the living…? …among the dead?

The familiar aroma of the paradox of comfort and chaos lingers in that hewn out hole in the rock. For these women, the world is turned upside down…Jesus is alive and not among the dead…The story just took a radical turn. In a moment, these humble women are wrapped up (and lead! [4]) in what will become one of the revolutionary stories of divine love for the world. A story so radical many people and churches will and do suffer persecution and death to tell it.

For these women, nothing will ever be the same. As they leave the empty tomb and return home proclaiming this divine revolution against death in Jesus being raised from the dead, their own stories change for good. What follows, what comes after this encounter with God is not a continuation of what went before…everything is being made new! A new order is ushered in.[5] This isn’t some happy ending where everyone lives happily ever after; this is a brand-new story, a new chapter in history, in the history of these women, in the history of the world.[6] God’s battle with death is won in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit; everyone who collides with this story, will be forever changed in one way or another.[7]

Conclusion

Today,

  • We are a people who passes on story rather than mess
  • We are a people who passes on story rather than isolation and alienation
  • We are a people who passes on story rather than toil
  • We are a people who passes on story rather than utility
  • We are a people who passes on story rather than exclusion
  • We are a people who passes on life rather than death

Today, we become a people who passes on story rather than not-story. As those who encounter God today, in this story, we are changed for good. What was before is eclipsed by this moment. The stories we bring here today—the ones we were given by others who couldn’t love us as well as they wanted to; the ones we were given by those who hated us; the ones we were given through pain, sorrow, suffering, illness, grief, trauma, bullying, and death; the ones we give ourselves—all of our stories, one by one, are rendered to dust as we are enveloped and wrapped up in this new story of God’s for us: Beloved. In this “Beloved” we are called, we stand up, we rise, we are resurrected, and we enter into the divine revolution of God’s love loosed against the remnants of death and its destructive systems.

What was, ended; all that lies ahead is the divine material that is the foundation of our new life and new creation, our liberation and belovedness, our faith, hope,[8] and persistence.[9] This new life—this rising up and resurrection[10]—becomes our praxis in the world. As resurrected new creations, our posture in the world and toward others is completely altered. In this new life we participate with the Holy Spirit in the liberation of the captives.[11] As those summoned from death, from slumber, from the myths and lies we’ve been telling ourselves, we become those who wake up and see, hear, feel, and speak the profound good news of liberation for the world[12] from the captivity of death. In doing so, we demonstrate to the world that resurrection is for now and not strictly for the future.[13] As we bring good news to the oppressed, disenfranchised, poor, lonely, isolated, excluded, used up, and the burnt out, we bring resurrection into the present and push back the expired tyranny of death and usher in the reign of love and life. [14]

I want to close by way of a poem I stumbled across in my studies this week. The title of the poem is Threatened with Resurrection, by Julia Esquivel a poet and Guatemalan exile. I’m quoting the final few stanzas:

No, brother,
it is not the noise in the streets
which does not let us sleep.

Join us in this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
Then you will know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep,
to live while dying,
and to know ourselves already
resurrected![15]

Julia Esquivel, “Threatened with Resurrection”

By living into this story we’ve been given today, we live into resurrection now, living lives joining in the “vigil” of those who suffer under what was and those who are threatened with the violence of not-yet, we live “already resurrected,” we live “while dying,” we “dream awake”, and keep watch even while sleeping. When we dare to let the resurrection of the Christ be the divine revolution in the world that it is, we dare to live resurrected now, we dare to become those who don the love of God and spread it to everyone, and we dare to be those who pass on liberation, pass on love, pass on life…those who dare to pass on the story.

[1] Ernesto Cardenal The Gospel in Solentiname “The Resurrection (Matthew 28L1-10) “Thomas Pena: ‘The got up early because they wanted to. And they were brace, because they weren’t scared of the National Guardsmen that were on duty there.’” P. 618

[2] Justo L. Gonzalez Luke Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. Louisville, KY: WJK, 2010. 272. “…Luke will tell parallel but different stories about the women disciples and the men. In this particular case, however, the story about the women comes first. These women have been present, but have remained mostly in the background of the story, ever since Luke introduced them in 8:2-3…Now they come to the foreground as the first witnesses to the resurrection.

[3] Gonzalez Luke 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 last act of love for their dead Master: they must anoint his body.”

[4] Gonzalez Luke 273. “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.” See also, Cardenal Solentiname “[Cardenal]: ‘In those times nobody paid much attention to women. And that’s why those women maybe didn’t run any risk, as Laureano says. Their role was only to go and weep and then embalm the body of Jesus. A humble role. But this Gospel assigns them a more important role: they were witnesses to the resurrection.” P. 618

[5] Gonzalez Luke 273

[6] Gonzalez Luke 274. “The resurrection brings about a new reality, a new order. Things do not continue as before … 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…The victory is won. What now remain are no more than skirmishes in a battle that has already been won.”  

[7] Gonzalez Luke 275. “Thus, in the areas that were part of Christendom as well as in the rest of the world, Christians have been rediscovering the significance of the resurrection as victory over the powers of the old age, and as the beginning of a new order and a new history pointing to the final establishment of the reign of God.”

[8] Gollwitzer Way to Life 141 “Nothing is lost, nothing is in vain. Tribulation is not the last thing, joy, arrival at the goal will be the last thing, and for this reason we shall be able to hold on in faith and in hope, hearing the primes ever anew.”

[9] Helmut Gollwitzer The Way to Life: Sermons in a Time of World Crisis Trans. David Cairns Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981 (eng) p. 139 [German version: Wendung zum Leben München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980. “The whole Gospel calls to us ‘look forward!’ however things are going with you. Look forward! Hope will come to you form that direction, and staying power. Look forward, you see there what gives you the power to hold on!”

[10] Dorothee Sölle “Uprising and Resurrection” The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984. Pp. 71 “Rising, uprising, and resurrection belong together factually as well as linguistically. Rising is a word that describes what an individual does in the morning, uprising, what a people does when it shakes off political sleep. Both of them mean learning how to walk upright, in a way that is still perhaps unfamiliar. To rise up means not to cringe anymore, to lose fear.”

[11] Helmut Gollwiter The Rich Christians & Poor Lazarus Trans. David Cairns Edinburgh: St. Andrews Press, 1970 (eng) p.3 [German version: Die reichen Christen und der arme Lazarus München: Chr. Kaiser Verlad, 1968.] “Only by altered attitudes in this world, not by assertions about divine truths, which are claimed to be true ‘in themselves,’ can we bear witness to the relevance of our confession of faith. Therefore John A. T. Robinson is right to ask his question ‘Do we affirm the Easter faith in these days, when we insist that God raised Jesus from the dead—or when we dare to gamble our lives in the faith that God will raise us from the dead? Can we do the former, without doing the latter.’ And indeed, keeping our eye on the liberal reduction of faith to humanism, we shall also have to add, “Can we do the latter, without doing the former?”

[12] Sölle Strength 71-72 “We rise from sleep; we are resurrected from death. An uprising is a rising from political sleep, from a kind of death in which people are deprived of crucial elements of their lives and are commandeered by others.”

[13] Sölle Strength 76 “The price we have to pay for a truly human life has not become less since ancient times, much as we may want to believe that it has. People are still being tortured today because they have fought for justice. People are still dying today from the indifference of others who do not want rebellion and do not need resurrection. But despite the betrayal of the revolution and, God knows, the betrayal of Christ, we see happening again and again what we all need most uprisings of life against the many forms of death; which is to say, resurrection.”

[14] Cardenal Solentiname 619 “I: ‘And he goes on showing us that he’s alive, us, gathered here twenty centuries later; and he’s present in the midst of us.’ WILLAM: ‘-The important thing is that he’s alive wherever there’s community.’”

[15] Julia Esquivel Threatened with Resurrection for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Esquivel. I’ve ordered her book of the same title; more to come!

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Behold, Christ’s Feet

Psalm 4:1 Answer me when I call, O God, defender of my cause; you set me free when I am hard-pressed; have mercy on me and hear my prayer. (27)

Introduction

I’m not afraid of physical pain—the sore and strain of bones and muscles.[1] As an athlete, one must endure pain to be good. To build muscle, muscle must be torn down and rebuilt, a painful process. I am eager to learn new skills, so, know the demands for discomfort that comes with learning. It’s physically awkward to learn new moves, new postures, new holds. I wasn’t afraid to enter 14 hours of heavy contractions without medication as my son Jack attempted to make his debut on a hot August day in 2008. (With every contraction, Jack hit every bone he could before the midwife called the c-section—his head being too big to pass through my structure.) I’m that ridiculous person who says: no pain, no gain. If something is too easy, I immediately think: what am I doing wrong. Always looking for the next level because, to quote Will-I-Am as Pedro in the animated movie Rio: “Come on! This ain’t the level. The next level is the level.”

However, throw in a sudden shot of mental anguish and everything changes. While I won’t flee from physical pain, mental anguish is something altogether more painful to me. The mind takes over and anxiety surges in the body. Chaos starts to swirl in my mind and around me; my refuge of safety—my mind palace—is under siege. I am ushered into the crevasse opening under my feet, threatening to swallow me. Trying to fight against the discomfort (working, reading, running, tasking, scrolling, etc.) or pretending that everything is just fine (#fakeittillyoumakeit), makes it worse. The harder I fight and ignore, the worse the discomfort gets. I am no match to resist this Apollyon[2] seeking to destroy me on this journey, eager to drive me to the brink and edge of myself into oblivion.

Luke 24:36-48

Now, as they were saying these things, Jesus himself stood in the middle of them and said to them, “Peace to you.” But being terrified and becoming full of fear, they were thinking they were looking at a spirit. And Jesus said to them, “Why are you disturbed and why are thoughts coming up in your hearts? Experience my hands and my feet that I am[3] myself. Touch me and experience that a spirit has not flesh and bones just as you behold me having.” Then after saying this he showed them [his] hands and feet.

Luke 24:36-40

Luke is clear about the mental anguish of the disciples when Jesus appears in the middle of them.[4] He is clear: Jesus showing up didn’t immediately bring the comfort we might think/hope it would. The language Luke uses is thematically like the language Mark used to describe the women arriving at an open tomb on Easter morning. Divine movement in human time and space is terrifying even if it’s good.[5],[6] Divine activity here always alters reality as we know it—there’s nothing comforting about this. When God moves, things will change; we don’t like change, especially when it destroys what we know to be true. The tomb is opened; the women were terrified and seized with fear. The Crucified Christ shows up; the men are terrified and full of fear.

Jesus declares: Peace to you! Yet, fear and trembling persisted. Even if this declaration of peace was understood as the shalom that is peace with God thus salvation, it wasn’t all that the disturbed disciples needed.[7] These men were in mental anguish; speaking “peace” wasn’t enough. Jesus recognizes this. His response? He names what is going with these men: why are you disturbed? Why are reasonings coming up in your heart? I am myself![8]In other words, I see you and feel you. Jesus is truly there with them; in solidarity with them. But calling a thing what it is isn’t all Jesus does.

He knows something else must happen to relieve the disturbedness. Behold my hands; gaze upon my feet; see for yourself that I am who I am and that I am here with you! These terrified people needed to touch Jesus to know he was real. It wasn’t enough for Jesus to speak peace; he needed to show them his wounded hands and feet. He stood among them and held out his hands, experience the holes from the nails that held me to the cross; gaze at death’s feeble attempt to keep God and my beloved apart; behold, not even death can exile you from me. And they touched him. When they did, their terror and fear turned to doubt because of joy (v.41); this was too good to be true. Doubt still existed, but it’s source was the good news they felt with their hands as they touched the body of Jesus.[9] They reached out with trembling hands, like the shepherds did back at Christmas, and touched the very flesh of God and were not reduced to dust but into new life. The Lord is Risen!

Conclusion

The only way the disciples moved from their fear and terror at Jesus’s presence was through and not around. So it is with us. The only way for me to pass through my mental anguish, my fear and terror, my panic and anxiety is to sit and feel, to face and acknowledge, to look it in the eyes, touch it, call it for what it is, and exist there. Referring to the EnneaThought for this past Friday, “…if we stay present to our discomfort, we will also feel something else arising—something more real, capable, sensitive, and exquisitely aware of ourselves and of our surroundings.”[10] The beginning of release comes in facing the reality of what is and moving through and from there; this becomes our sure foundation: embracing the truth, naming the feelings, and admitting our weakness and problem.

When Jesus walked the earth, he overturned condemning material systems birthed from human judgment. In his resurrected material[11] life, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, flips time and space—like he did tables in the temple—and brings with him the women and men whom he encounters into the divine reign. Christ’s resurrected material presence on earth among people indicates that God’s reign is not merely spiritual, but physical, too; this (all) is God’s good creation.[12]

The rest is in making our home where we live and standing in solidarity with our neighbors rather than escaping it through fighting against Apollyon and turning blind eyes.

The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
You left me in the dark
And no dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart

I took the stars from my eyes, an then I made a map
And knew that somehow I could find my way back
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
So I stayed in the darkness with you[13]

Florence and the Machine “Cosmic Love”

The material presence of Christ with the disciples makes it impossible for us to reduce problems and their solutions of our world to the spiritual. In other words, our presence in the world toward our neighbor must be more than “thoughts and prayers” or the ludicrous assertion people should pull themselves out of their suffering and oppression by their own bootstraps. We must look at the violence in our country and call it what it is: life denying and anti-human. To quote the biblical scholar, Justo Gonzalez, “The Lord who broke the bonds of death calls his followers to break the bonds of injustice and oppression,”[14] that which causes death. The material presence of Christ with people after his resurrection is a sure sign that, to quote womanist theologian, The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas of Union Seminary,

The resurrection asserts the sanctity of human life as it overcomes all the forces that would deny it. The resurrection in effect makes plane the ‘wrongness’ of the crucifixion, and thus of all crucifying realities. It shows that death does not have the last word. [15]

The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground

In our encounter with God in the resurrected Christ of Easter in the event of faith, we are made into new people in the world. In our new life in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit we are called to love God with our whole selves and to also love our neighbor as ourselves. In this encounter we are remade and reshaped (the product of repentance[16]), we will be “wholly transformed” through death into new life to conform to the image of Christ in the world.[17] If we think this means merely speaking peace and not attempting to perform this divine shalom into the world, then Jesus is still in the tomb, and we follow phantoms.

But we don’t follow a phantom; we follow the materially risen Lord Jesus Christ who fully affirms life (for all people, and especially the oppressed and suffering people[18]). Hope is not lost; faith is not abandoned. Prayer informs our praxis, rendering the space of our activity divine space. We are indwelled with the holy spirit, God of very God. Where there is death, we bring life; where there is midnight, we shine light; where there is hunger, we bring food; where there is terror and fear we, the beloved, bring comfort to the beloved. Our hands extend to the downtrodden and we lift up, behold Christ’s hand. Our feet stand in solidarity with black and brown bodies threatened at every turn; behold Christ’s feet.

[1] I’m not including here physical pain from chronic illness. I group that under mental anguish because of the toll it takes on the mind and body. Also, as someone who has not suffered with chronic illness, I cannot speak to it. I wanted to add this here so people know I’m aware of the physical pain of Chronic Illness.

[2] Reference to the antagonist in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

[3] The εγω ειμι here is a loaded term, so I emphasized it. The Greek reads “…εγω ειμι αυτος” thus a literal translation would be “I, I am myself.” Whenever you see the personal pronoun with the verb in Greek there’s a needed emphasis. I also think Luke is intentional with the wording and order; the great I AM is with them. God is with the Beloved.

[4] Gonzalez Luke Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds. Ay Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. Louisville, KY: WJK, 2010. 279 “The theological emphasis of this passage lies on the true, physical resurrection of Jesus. The disciples think that what they are seeing may be his ghost, a story parallel to the reaction of other disciples in Acts when Peter returns to them unexpectedly.”

[5] Joel B. Green TNICNT The Gospel of Luke Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1997. 852 “…the Evangelist [Luke] places a premium on ‘seeing.’…Initial points of contact with accounts of angelic appearances signal the wonder of this moment, while points of contrast indicate the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. …Luke’s narrative affirms a resurrected Jesus over against these other options for the afterlife current in the Hellenistic world.”

[6] Green 855, In re Luke’s use of “Joy” “What they were experiencing was simply too good to be true.”

[7] Green 854, “Within the Third Gospel, ‘peace’ is metonymic for ‘salvation,’ so that, in this co-text, Jesus’ greeting takes on an enlarged meaning. The Emmaus travelers imagined that his rejection and crucifixion had rendered Jesus incapable of serving as Israel’s redeemer; here, following his death, though, he communicates or transmits continue salvation to those gathered.”

[8] Green 854-5, “…Jesus is now represented as alive beyond the grave as an embodied person. Jesus’ affirmation is emphatic—‘it is I  myself!’ ‘It is really me!’—intimating continuity between these phases of Jesus’ life, before crucifixion and after resurrection.”

[9] Green 855, “Nestled between these two demonstrations of materiality is a transparent indication that such exhibitions are insufficient for producing the desired effects This is consistent with the emphasis through ch. 24 on the inherent ambiguity of ‘facts’ and, thus, the absolute necessity of interpretation. Not even controvertible evidence of Jesus’ embodied existence is capable of producing faith; resolution will come only when scriptural illuminate is added to material data.”

[10]The Wisdom of the Enneagram, 37

[11] Gonzalez Luke 279, “The Jesus who repeatedly ate with his disciples, with sinners, with publicans, wand with Pharisees now eats his last meal before leaving his disciples in the ascension. He does this in order to prove that he is not a just a vision or a ghost, that he has really conquered death.”

[12] Gonzalez Luke 279, “The one whose life the church shares in Word and Sacrament is not a ghost or a disembodied spirit. He is the risen Lord. Those who serve him do not serve a moral or religious principle, nor just the natural spiritual urges of humankind; they serve one like themselves, yet Lord of all.”

[13] Florence and the Machine “Cosmic Love”

[14] Gonzalez Luke 280, “And, because his resurrection is not a merely spiritual matter, they cannot limit their service to purely spiritual matters. The Lord who showed his resurrection to his disciples by eating with them invites his followers to show his resurrection to the world by feeding the hungry.”

[15] Kelly Brown Douglas Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013. 187 Here’s the full paragraph for context: “The resurrecting power of God is made fully manifest in the defeat of the ultimate power of evil represented by the cross. The resurrection is God’s definitive response to the crucifying realities. It clarifies the essential character of God’s power—a power that values life. The resurrection of the one who died such a hideous and ignominious death firmly established that God does not in any way sanction the suffering of human being. The resurrection asserts the sanctity of human life as it overcomes all the forces that would deny it. The resurrection in effect makes plane the ‘wrongness’ of the crucifixion, and thus of all crucifying realities. It shows that death does not have the last word.”

[16] Green 858, “Repentance’ will be a key term describing the appropriate response to the offer of salvation in Acts, and connotes the (re)alignment of one’s life—that is, dispositions and behaviors—toward God’s purpose.”

[17] Green 854, “‘Heart’ has already been used in vv 25 and 32, reminding Luke’s audience of the importance in these sense of the need for the inner commitments to these persons to be reshaped in light of the resurrection of Jesus. They must be wholly transformed—in disposition and attitude, cognition and affect, as well as practices and behaviors—but they continue to lack the categories for rendering this new experience of Jesus in a meaningful way. As with Jesus’ companions on the road to Emmaus, they are obtuse, slow of heart (v 25).”

[18] Douglas Stand Your Ground 188 “What the resurrection points to…is not the meaning of Jesus’s death, but of his life…The resurrection of Jesus thus solidified God’s commitment to the re restoration o life for the ‘crucified class’ of people. It reveals that there are ‘no principalities or power’ that can frustrate or foil God’s power to overcome the crucifying death in the world that not only targets but also creates a ‘crucified class’ of people  To restore to life those whose bodies are the particular targets of the world’s violence is to signal the triumph over crucifying violence and death itself….The crucifixion-resurrection event points to the meaning found in Jesus’ life, not his death. By understanding he resurrection in light of the cross, we know that crucifying realities do not have the last word, and, thus, cannot take away the value of one’s life. The meaning of one’s life, in other words, is not found in death and is not vitiated by it.”

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In the End the Beginning

Psalm 118:22-24 The same stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (41)

Introduction

“On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it,” (Ps 118:24). Are there any words more fitting than those for today? Today we rejoice in the activity of God by the power of the Holy Spirit in the risen Lord Jesus Christ: the one who was crucified, died, and was buried, the one who descended to the dead, and the one who was raised from it. What appeared to be gone, was the furthest thing from. What sounded like bad news, wasn’t. What looked like sure failure became a means for something else. All because a rock was moved, and a tomb was opened. What seemed the end, was the beginning.

Today is a day—according to this story—where everything that was, is (now) not the only thing there is. Today is the day we celebrate an action so divine in substance and impact that someone walking out of a tomb—who had been sealed in—became possible. That’s not the trajectory of activity when it comes to tombs. When you’re sealed in with a massive stone, you do not come back out. But divine action made the impossible possible; the new was ushered in.[1] On this day the possibility opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to this story—where all the doors of the building are thrown open. Today is the day we celebrate a redefinition of what it means to worship God and to be God’s people. What was restricted to wood and stone, to brick and mortar is now set loose into the world in spirit and flesh. The very thing that kept God separate from the people was destroyed. The temple veil was torn in two, and the holy transcended and coupled with the common bypassing the rulers and authorities, seeping into the fringes and margins of society.[2] On this day the temple opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to this story—where the entire sky bursts forth with love and hope and peace. Today is the day we celebrate the cessation of incessant rains[3] and the rising of the sun with healing in its wings.[4] This sun shines down, enlivens and invigorates chilled and tired bodies drained from resisting and enduring separation and silence. The sun breaks through the clouds of chaos bringing comfort and peace to those minds exhausted from trying “…to be a man with/A peace of mind/Lord, I try/I just can’t find/My peace of mind”—borrowing lyrics from a talented former student of mine.[5] On this day the sky opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to this story—where the very ground underneath violently shook. Today is the day we celebrate great divine movement of the earth opening again. This time, God and God’s self dropped into the pit of Sheol; drawing light to shine among the darkness of the dead.[6] Here God searches and finds and looks upon the face of Korah, and as God’s hand extends God declares: Beloved, not even the exile of death and the pit can separate you from me. On this day the earth opened. In the end, the beginning.

Mark 16:1-8

Then very early on the first day of the week [the women] went to the tomb after the rising of the sun. And they were continuously talking to themselves, “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?” (Mk 16:2-3[7])

Mark 16:2-3, translation mine

Mark highlights the humanity of the women, thus showcases the divine action of this story.[8] The beginning of the gospel passage opens with what feels like minutia. At the completion of the Sabbath, being Saturday night,[9] the women—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—purchase spices and perfumes to use on Jesus’s entombed body. Then, early the next morning, they head out.

Apart from Jesus being buried in haste the previous Friday evening, none of this is worth writing home about. Nothing—so far—is out of the ordinary. In fact, Mark robes the story in so much humanity, he writes about the women worrying as they walk to the tomb. The greatly great stone occupied their conversation as they walked. Our English translation misses the extent this stone bothered the consciences of the women. In Greek, it’s an imperfect verb indicating a continuous action. Thus, they didn’t just ask themselves once about who will roll away the stone; they literally talked about it the entire time.

And then looking up and beholding/gazing that the stone has been rolled away; for it was exceedingly great.

Mark 16:4

Then suddenly all conversation comes to a dead halt. The women lift their eyes and behold: the very thing they were worried about is removed. The stone was rolled back. What was a regular scene is now an irregular one enveloped in supernatural activity.[10] Our translation loses the emotion here. The women didn’t just look and see. As the tomb comes into view, they lift their eyes up from having been talking among themselves, and, as they draw near to the tomb, they see…it…#wut? They gazed and beheld the scene: the greatly great stone was rolled away. Their hearts raced as they gazed in disbelief while trying to make sense of an impossibility made possible. Everything changes here.[11]

As they step inside the tomb, they do not see the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth, which they expected to see. Rather they encounter one whom they did not expect: a young man clothed in bright light, an angelic being.[12] Thus, onto disbelief there is added great astonishment and fear. Their entire world does not make sense.[13] Then, adding to the topsy-turvy situation making itself known, the brightly clothed young man says, “Do not be greatly astonished! You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene the one who was crucified; he was raised, he is not here. Behold the place where they placed him” (Mk 16:6). The tomb is open, there’s an angelic being casually seated inside, and Jesus’s body is not there with the declaration that he is risen.

And they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and bewilderment was holding the women; and they said nothing to no one; for they were terrified.

Mark 16:8

For these three women, fleeing and running in fear and trembling is a very human response considering a remarkable and an unbelievable encounter with the impossible being made possible. He whom they saw crucified and dead was raised[14] and gone out.[15] When time and space shift and change, when the narrative takes a surprising turn, when the thing that is going to happen does not happen, fear and trembling is a right response. When something overhauls reality, you are put on a collision course with the possible and reality reshaping and altering; it’s terrifying. It’s why real love is scary and hard to accept and receive (as Rev. Jan brilliantly made note of on Thursday). Real, unconditional, nonperformance-based love is terrifying because it undoes everything you think you know to be real, to be true, to be actual. The narrative you’ve been given by the world and crafted in your head about you and the world is exposed as myth by real, unconditional love. Thus, good news can be as terrifying as bad news because it radically alters and transforms the reality of the one who hears such good news.[16] And so, the women run and are afraid. But, in the end, the beginning.

Conclusion

As Mark’s gospel suddenly ends on a note of fear, we are propelled back to the beginning.[17] As the women run from the tomb afraid and in silence, we follow and find ourselves located back at Mark 1:1, “The beginning of the good newsof Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”[18] The end of Good Friday is now the beginning that is Easter. This is the source of our hope that springs eternal. Today we come into encounter with this God who raised Jesus of Nazareth the Christ from the dead. And today our world is turned upside down by the “mystery of divine love…acted out in human history,” to quote Rev. Emil. Today, in the end the beginning.

Today is a day—according to our story— where everything that is, is not the only thing there is. Today is the day we dare to embrace this divine event and step into the possible. Today we dare to dream of what could be for us and for all those around us. Today we dare to reject what has always been and believe, anything is possible with God. Today, the possibility is opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to our story—where we sit in a similar predicament as did the founders of this humble church. Today we are eager to (re)claim our building, to enter it, to be bodily present with others. Yet, we are asked to reconceive what this building means considering divine activity redefining the temple. Can we open the doors and throw open the windows extending divine love to the fringes and margins, spreading good news in word and deed? Can we remember that we were once homeless and without shelter?[19] Do we really believe that God is not restricted to a building but resides in each of us? Today the temple is opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to our story—where the sky is illuminated with love and hope and peace. Today is the day we celebrate the rising of the Son with healing in its wings for bodies drained from enduring a pandemic, witnessing human life being destroyed, social upheaval, confusion, and isolation; for bodies exhausted from trying to find peace where peace doesn’t reside. Today the sun shines down, warms and energizes our chilled and tired bodies, rejuvenating hope and bringing forth the sapling of long desired peace. Today the sky is opened. In the end, the beginning.

Today is a day—according to our story—where the very ground underneath our feet shook. Today is the day we celebrate the fracturing of old structures and the exposure of the errors and faults of our human judgment and human made systems and kingdoms as the God of life and liberty reigns victorious over death and captivity. We rejoice in the freedom and liberation that is brought in the divine love for the whole world. In the risen Christ, we hear and feel chains and shackles dropping as all the captives are released from the effects of sin and death into new life. On this day the earth opened. In the end, the beginning.

[1] Jeremiah 31:31-34; https://laurenrelarkin.com/2021/03/21/and-the-possibility-opens/

[2] John 2:13-22; https://laurenrelarkin.com/2021/03/07/and-the-temple-opens/

[3] Genesis 9:8ff; https://laurenrelarkin.com/2021/02/21/and-the-sky-opens/

[4] Malachi 4:2

[5] Cameron Seaton “Peace of Mind” Cry Me A Song 2020

[6] Numbers 16, Psalm 88; https://laurenrelarkin.com/2021/02/17/and-the-earth-opens/

[7] All GNT translations are mine in this portion of the sermon

[8] R.T. France The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text NIGTC Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2002. 675, “The setting for the discovery is remarkably down to earth, with the women coming to fulfil the previously omitted duty of anointing Jesus’ body with perfumes, worrying bout how they were to get into the tomb, meeting there a young man who tells them that Jesus has risen and gives them a message for the disciples and Peter, and running way frightened from this unexpected encounter. This is not the stuff of a heroic epic, still less of a story of magic and wonder, and yet what underlies it is an event beyond human comprehension: the Jesus they had watched dying and being buried some forty hours earlier is no longer dead but rise, καθως ειπεν υμιν. It is in this incongruous combination of the everyday with the incomprehensible that many have found one of the most powerful and compelling aspects of the NT accounts not of Jesus’ resurrection…but of how the fist disciples discovered that he had risen.”

[9] France Mark 676, “As sabbath finished at sunset on the Saturday, the phrase διαγενομενου του σαββατου probably refers to the Saturday evening, the first time after Jesus’ hasty burial when it would be possible to buy perfumes.”

[10] France Mark 678, “Rather than arranging with Joseph’s servants to come back with them, they were now trusting to luck that someone would be around to help. But from the dramatic point of view their anxiety is important as the foil to their discovery that the problem was already solved…The unexplained removal of the stone thus begins to create a sense of superhuman agency in the narrative.”

[11] This is Mark’s written intent. The Greek here at the beginning of v.4, και αναβλεψασαι θεωρουσιν…, is an attendant circumstance construction of an aorist participle and a present indicative main verb. The attendant circumstance indicates that something brand new is happening, there’s new action on the table and the author wants you to take note of it.

[12] France Mark 678, “Other features of Mark’s description add to the supernatural impression: he is wearing white, and the women are terrified.”

[13] France Mark 679, “For εκθαμβεομαι…conveys a powerful mixture of shock and fear, and this is followed by τρομος και εκστασις leading to a precipitate flight from the tomb in 16:8. Such a reaction is more consonant with a meeting with an angel than with an ordinary young man, and his first words to the women convey the same impression…”

[14] France Mark 680, “τον εσταυρωμενον, however, poignantly describes what the women at present believe to be the truth about Jesus. Having themselves watched him die on the cross, they have now come to attend to that tortured body, and that is what they expected to find in the tomb. That whole tragic scenario is reversed in the simple one-word message, ηγερθη, though the clause that follow will spell out more fully what this dramatic verb implies.”

[15] France Mark 680, “The women, even if they were unaware of Jesus’ predictions, could not mistake the meaning of this verb in this context. But the νεαωισκος goes on to make it clear that he is talking not merely about survival beyond death but about a physical event: the place where Jesus’ body had been laid…is empty. The body has gone, and from the promise made in the following verse it is plain that it has gone not by passive removal but in the form of a living, travelling Jesus. However philosophy and theology may find it possible to come to terms with the event, it is clear that Mark is describing a bodily resurrection leading to continuing life and activity on earth.”

[16] France Mark 682-3, “…in Mark the sense of panic is unrelieved. The words the women have heard were entirely good news, but their immediate response is apparently not to absorb the message of the words but to escape as quickly as possible from the unexpectedly numinous situation in which they have been caught up.”

[17] France Mark 680-1, “The announcement of Jesus’ resurrection is not an end in itself, but the basis of action, which for the women is the delivery of an urgent message, and for the disciples to whom that message is sent a journey to Galilee in preparation for the promised meeting with Jesus…Life, discipleship and the cause of the Kingdom f God must go on.”

[18] France Mark 672, “…the Mark who began his story on an overt note of faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God (1:1) and has reminded his readers quite blatantly from time to time of that faith, is not likely to leave any room for doubt about its reality at the end. By the time mark wrote his gospel the message of the resurrection and the soties of meeting with the risen Jesus were so widely in circulation and so central to the life of the Christ church that there was in any case nothing to be gained by concealment: what is the point of being coy about what everyone already knows.”

[19] Reference to a document about the early history of Nativity by Bruce Jones

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The Cedar Sprig and The Baby

Ezekiel 17:22-24 (Homily)

*I don’t believe in Bible reading plans, but I do read my bible every day—a chapter on some days, a small passage on others. I take my time and meditate on what I’m reading as I go. One cold, winter morning, back in Colorado, my attention was particularly pricked as I was reading through a part of text from the prophet Ezekiel. The book of Ezekiel of the Old Testament is full of mysterious imagery and prophecy of Israel’s exile and destruction. While there is a word of hope of restoration, the bulk of the book is rather troubling. But none of that caused me to stop and contemplate. It was a portion about a tree planted on a mountain that snapped me out of my early morning mental fog.

I lived in the high desert, so maybe the idea of a great big cedar providing shade and comfort from the burning sun of the summertime or the cold wind and snow of winter sounded good to me. Or, maybe the idea of anything green and verdant appealed to me considering it was the middle of a white Colorado winter. Whatever it was, this tree caught my eye.

In this portion of our passage, God is promising to plant a great and “noble cedar” from a sprig God is going to break off from another. And God will plant this sprig, this tender one on a high mountain, so that it will become a “noble cedar.”

You know what grows on the top of a high mountain? Nothing. Well, nothing substantial, nothing qualifying as “noble.” The top of a mountain is typically bald because the environment is too frigid and the conditions too treacherous for foliage to grow let alone allow for a transplanted cutting to take root and grow and become mighty. What caught my attention that morning was God promising to plant a “tender one” on the top of a mountain; certainly, this is sure death for a cedar sapling. What a precarious thing for God to do.

In the midst of a book that is primarily [1] comprised of prophetic utterances of judgment against the current, corrupt, oppressive, militaristic, and hopeless monarchy of Jerusalem and Israel, [2] why prophesy about a great cedar on a mountaintop planted and grown from a sprig?

Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the forest will know that I the Lord bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.

Because the tree is the word of hope in this passage—not for the leadership of Israel but for those who are suffering under the leadership.

The tree will be so mighty in stature that winged creatures of all kinds will be able to find shelter in its boughs. Cedars protect those creatures who find shelter in them from harsh and inclement weather—they are the perfect safe-haven from cold winds and bitter precipitation. This particular cedar planted and nourished by God will be a beacon of hope to all who look upon it, and they will know that God is still active, that God’s power is still magnificent, and that God hears the deep cries and intimately knows the suffering and oppression of God’s people (Exodus 2:25; Acts 9:4-5).[3]

This cedar will stand as the promise of an answer to the repeated cries of the troubled, downtrodden, and the broken hearted. But even more than being a static symbol of hope for the people of Israel and Jerusalem, it’s a dynamic word for the people: God is on the move. This great tree is on a collision course with God.

That God so loved the world he sent his son into it as a vulnerable baby: a baby conceived by the Holy Spirit was born of a virgin woman; the fully divine and fully human Christ would enter the world defenseless, naked, and tender. What a precarious thing for God to do.

And just as God promised that the sprig in Ezekiel would become a great and mighty cedar, so too will this baby grow to be great, becoming the Son of the Most-High God (Luke 1:32). Through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension the cosmos receives her loving messiah, her merciful king, her faithful high-priest.

The sprig of the high mountain top and the baby of Christmas have the same fate in Easter: to be the final answer to all of humanity’s pain and suffering, to bear the weight of sin and bear life into the world, to break down strongholds and redefine justice. For this great man, Jesus, who is God, will carry this great cedar to the top of a high mountain. He will climb upon this great cedar, and this great cedar will bear the entire weight of Christ as he bears the entire weight of our sin and the brokenness of the world succumbed to the powers of sin and death; and this cedar will holdfast those three nails.

Like the winged creatures mentioned by Ezekiel in our passage, in the boughs of the cross and the limbs of our crucified and resurrected Christ, we receive our comfort and the fulfillment of our hope, it’s in the safe and protective shade of the Cross where we hear the divine “it is finished” to our pain and suffering, to our grief and fear–where the rejected are accepted, counted as God’s own, children and heirs of the long awaited great king; where the captives are set free, the oppressed relieved, the hopeless are hopeful, the voiceless have a voice, and the refugee finds refuge.

 

 

1 “Ezekiel” The Jewish Study Bible Tanakh Translation Eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler JPS Oxford: OUP, 2004. 

2 Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament Vol. 1 Trans. J.A. Baker. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. “Jeremiah and Ezekiel look from the monarchy of their own day, for which they can see no future, to a new order established by Yahweh himself, in which the ruler appointed by him will have become a theocractic official very different from the contemporary political and military king…This opinion on the part of the prophets was certainly strengthened by the fact that in despots like Ahaz, Manasseh and Jehoiakim they saw on the throne particularly blatant examples of human self-will in hostility to Yahweh” (Eichrodt 451) 

3 “The cedar, the grandest of trees, will tower over all the other trees, and all will see the power of God, who is responsible for the fall and rise of Judah” (Jewish Study Bible). 

 

*A longer version of this homily was given at The Cathedral Advent. Birmingham, AL, in 2017.

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The Silence of God, God of the Void: A Reflection for Holy Saturday

Silence is disturbing. Personally, I’d rather know bad news than sit with myself in the midst of silence of reply. I’d rather a verbal explosion go off, leaving word shrapnel strewn about; that’s something I can tangibly make sense of, examine, create order with. Give me baskets piled high of “what-you-actually-think”, and no matter how much pain I may have, at least I have something to work with and to fight with. The whole idea that “no news is good news” escapes me; I find no comfort in having nothing with which to do battle against. I can’t kick against silence; there’s nothing to fight in the void.

God gifted me with the ability to be a very good and efficient problem solver. A MBTI INTP, I live to order chaos, to make precise connections over vast intellectual distances, to build and construct and expand and to push and to see just how far this *thing* can go (be it object, idea, or my own person). Thus I would naturally expect that God would meet me as I am: give me riddles to solve, puzzles to put together, ask me to follow along a trail of thoughts dropped by God’s divine hand so that when I arrive at the end I can, as if by intellectual paint-by-number, assemble these thoughts to get the full picture I’ve been desiring.

But rarely is this so. Rarely?…Better yet: never. That I expect God to meet me in such a way is my own demand on God, it is my own form I’m forcing God into. I forget that God self-discloses God’s self. The reality is that my encounter with God in the event of faith is often in the midst of total silence, where I feel as if I am suspended and hovering above a void and an abyss that it is threatening to take me into it. Where my repeated whispers of “Why?” are pulled from me only to float off into the distance and seemingly evaporate like a lone cloud does as it floats over the dry Colorado desert. Where my “Where were you when…?” stack up and collect dust and become brittle, like old books long forgotten. Where the word “hope” has no value and where doubts of God seem to ontologically define my spirituality and my personhood.

I’m not alone in this particular encounter with God in the event of faith. According to one scholar, Elie Wiesel has a similar conceptualizing of God,

“For Elie Wiesel the struggle of the survivor is not merely an inquiry with the mind while knowing in the heart but a shattering of that knowledge, that trust in God. Wiesel’s God is not a God who gave man freedom in history but rather a God who promised deliverance and remained silent in the hour of Israel’s greatest need, a God who made it impossible to believe in the promise of future deliverance. Wiesel’s theodicy is a theodicy of the void. His God is a God of silence. Wiesel’s struggle is to live in the face of the void.”[1]

Everything that has been held dear is shattered and rent asunder. Like Wiesel, everything I’ve put my “hope” in is and has been demythologized. The stories become like playground taunts to my pain and suffering, to my deep abiding questions. The God I’ve historically worshipped is, in the silence and in the face of the void, demythologized; and I come face to face with God’s Thou-objectivity as it is and not as I assume it to be. I’m exposed as the one who has worshipped the stories and not the one to whom the stories point: God. Thus, I am demythologized.

Recently I was reminded of a concept Luther articulates early in his lectures on Galatians and one that I use frequently with my students when explaining the journey of faith. Faith is a journey into darkness[2] not up and into the light but down and into the darkness, being lead by the hand and not by our own sight. Luther writes,

“Here let reason be far away, that enemy of faith, which in the temptations of sin and death, relies not on the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, of which it is completely ignorant, but on its own righteousness or, at most, on the righteousness of the Law. As soon as reason and the Law are joined, faith immediately loses its virginity. For nothing is more hostile to faith than the Law and reason; nor can these two enemies be overcome without great effort and work, and you must overcome them if you are to be saved. Therefore when your conscience is terrified by the Law and is wrestling with the judgment of God, do not consult either reason or the Law, but rely only on grace and the Word of comfort. Here take your stand as though you had never heard of the Law. Ascend into the darkness, where neither the Law nor reason shines, but only the dimness of faith (1 Cor. 13:12), which assures us that we are saved by Christ alone, without any Law. Thus the Gospel leads us above and beyond the light of the Law and reason into the darkness of faith, where the Law and reason have no business.”[3]

In the event of faith, we are ushered out of the light and into the darkness; we are completely undone unto death of the self that was. Where faith is undone unto it’s own death. Where our self-created depictions of God are undone unto their death. Where we are thoroughly and completely brought to nothing in the divine silence and in the void.

“Therefore we are nothing, even with all our great gifts, unless God is present. When He deserts us and leaves us to our own resources, our wisdom and knowledge are nothing. Unless He sustains us continually, the highest learning and even theology are useless… Therefore let no one boast or glory in his own righteousness, wisdom, and other gifts; but let him humble himself and pray with the apostles (Luke 17:5): ‘Lord, increase our faith!’”[4]

In the silence, stalwart faith turns to haunting doubt; hopeful stories are exposed as hopeless myths; reason is exposed as enemy; and I am left naked and exposed and in what feels like certain death. I let go of the things I’ve had a death grip on and give in to the pull of the void. Arms clinging to unsubstantial things go limp and unfurl to the left and right; head drops back and eyes close waiting to be sucked in and all the way down into nothing, in to the void.

But in this silence, in this seemingly deathly void, there is life. The “I am who and what I am” is. I am in God’s intimate embrace, locked deeply in the divine kiss summoning me from death–resurrection from the dead–and as I wake and the divine kiss pulls back, one word, “hope”, remains, trailing on my lips.

We rush from Good Friday to Easter Sunday clinging to the stories therein as if these were our only hope. We skip over Saturday because it has no story to offer us, no story for us to anchor our faith in, no words that we can cling to when we face doubt and despair. We skip over Saturday because silence is disturbing and the void feels most threatening. But maybe, maybe it’s the silence of Saturday that is the most divine because we are brought deep into the darkness, into the silence, into the void and asked to die to everything we’ve held on to for life.

To have faith in God’s activity in the world depicted in the stories handed down to us makes sense but is not the substance of faith but of the rational. Rather, to have faith in the wake of the cessation of divine activity, when words aren’t spoken and heard, where there’s nothing to cling to but God’s ambiguous and alarming “I am” is the substance of faith. To have faith today, when it doesn’t make sense because all seems lost and gone, is the substance of faith. And this is the substance and demand of the silence and void of Holy Saturday.

 

 

[1] M. Barenbaum “Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel”. See also, Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God and his reference to Elie Wiesel’s Night, pp. 273-4.

[2] Dr. David W. Congdon mentions this concept of Luther’s (via Rudolf Bultmann) on this episode of Whit Hodge Podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/whitehodgepodcasts/s2-e1-everyone-be-saved-dr-david-congdon

[3] Martin Luther Lectures on Galatians: Chapters 1-4 LW vol. 26. Pp. 113-4. Emphasis, mine.

[4] Ibid, 114.

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