Tag: Encounter

Not for Law But for Love

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[1]

Introduction

What, in our lives, brings God glory? I’ll say two things up front: 1. It’s not what you think; and, 2. It’s harder than you think.

Luke 13:10-17

Luke tells us that Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath (v10). Luke gives us a location that Jesus hasn’t been in a while—not since chapter 4, when he was teaching on the Sabbath about bringing “good news to the poor” and “release the captives.”[2] Therefore, given this new scene and its corresponding component parts, Luke is providing his audience a reminder about how Jesus spoke of and understood his mission from God: liberation of the people from oppression. (This is our backdrop.) Also, since he’s in the synagogue on the Sabbath, we can safely assume that another conflict will emerge between Jesus and the religious authorities[3] as human tradition and power is confronted by divine love and mercy. [4]

Luke then tells us, And, behold!, [there was] a woman having a spirit of frailty for 18 years—she was bent double and not able to lift toward the uttermost (v11). Another character is introduced: a woman who was bent over so severely she could not stand up straight for 18 years. She is “burdened” by a spirit that is causing her to suffer, she is doubled-over under the weight of its presence, she is oppressed by evil and the demonic and this evil spirit has refused her the vitality and dignity of divinely created human life.[5] She was minding her own business, going about her task, and was not seeking either attention or healing. However, Jesus saw her[6]—God of very God saw her and cared about her. Then, Now, after perceiving her, [he] called and said to her, “Woman, you have been released from your malady,” and he placed his hands on her, and instantly she was restored/straightened again and she as giving glory to/glorifying God (vv12-13). The healing Jesus brings to this humble and burdened woman is one of “release” and restoration: she is not only released from her malady of being doubled-over but also from the spirit causing the burden; she is also returned to community (Jesus calls her to him in the midst of the people).[7] In a word, Jesus rebukes the evil spirit by declaring she is no longer oppressed and follows it up with laying his hands on her. The word of God spoke, the hand of God touched, and she was liberated, loosed from/set free from her captivity (ἀπολύω). Jesus’s word and touch bring God glory because God’s praise is found on the lips of the one liberated.

But Jesus isn’t the only one who perceives and calls. Luke tells us that the ruler of the synagogue—being indignant because Jesus healed on the Sabbath—answered and was saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which to toil; therefore on these days come and be healed and not [on] the day of the Sabbath” (v14). The religious leader isn’t wrong, it is his job to faithfully keep and study the law[8] and he’s referring to scripture here (but not quoting it (Dt. 5:13)).[9] The Sabbath was a divinely instituted law of God, what “ought to be done” was rest and not work. Here Jesus finds himself confronted by the evil Spirit in the woman, and the evil spirit[10] deeply embedded in the atmosphere around him personified by the ruler of the synagogue: law has privilege over the people.[11] This ruler of the synagogue—privileging the law over the person thus participating in the evil embedded in the atmosphere[12] —would’ve added “another umpteen centuries” to this woman’s burden rather than “break” the law to release her. Jesus, however—privileging the person over the law and thus confronting the evil embedded in the atmosphere[13]—liberated and released her even on the Sabbath. Which action caused God to be praised?[14]

Not only is Jesus’s ministry being characterized as one of “release,”[15] the very laws of God, God’s word, God’s son, God’s mission in the world is also being so characterized by “release.”[16] Luke tells us that Jesus, the lord, answered and said [to the ruler of the synagogue and the crowd], “Hypocrite! Do not everyone of you releases their cow or donkey from the manger and after leading it away gives it water? But this woman—being a daughter of Abraham—Satan bound her ten and eight years, was it not necessary [for her] to be loosed from this imprisonment on the day of the Sabbath? (vv15-16). Luke emphasizes Jesus’s authority to challenge the authority of the ruler of the synagogue. Even though the ruler of the synagogue tried to challenge Jesus and reassert his authority,[17] Jesus returns the favor. He also quotes scripture, but highlights the hypocrisy in that, according to the text, not even animals are supposed to work, thus Dt. 5:14 goes ignored.[18] Here Jesus becomes the one who has the authority to both interpret the law and scripture and God’s will and purposes in the world and opts to break the law to liberate a daughter of Abraham.[19] Here the ruler and the crowd are exposed as the ones who do not know God’s will and who do not understand the law and it’s purpose.[20] Here Jesus responds to the ruler’s “ought to be done” with his own “ought to be done”: healing, release, restoration, liberation for all humanity,[21] especially those who are a [children] of Abraham. She not only has some place in the children of Israel, but has a significant place marked by being one of the people of God who has dignity and deserves to receive God’s mercy and liberation[22] and is given a voice to glorify God which is the characteristic of the people of God.[23]

Luke closes with telling us that not only did the woman praise God, but so did the people who witnessed the deed and the subsequent exchange.[24] Luke writes, and all the crowd was rejoicing because of all the glorious things that were happening through him (v17b).

Conclusion

So, again, I’ll ask the question: What, in our lives, brings God glory?

I mentioned earlier that it’s not what you think. By this I mean that it’s not by adhering to some austere and severe way of life, it’s not embedded in some form of self-harm/mutilation (either spiritually or materially), it’s not at the end of a pilgrimage or fast or bible-study/reading, it’s not the pot of gold at the end of being strong and powerful, it’s not in our success no matter how much we give God the credit, it’s not about perfect worship and excellent doctrine, and it’s not even by clinging to the law (either human or divine) and upholding it without fail. Why? Because none of those deeds puts God and our neighbor first, and it, frankly, devalues human life to the point of being unimportant and down-right disposable, only any good by ho it serves some law. In any of these actions, as good and holy as any of them sound, there is no room for God and for our neighbor.

I also mentioned, earlier, that it’s harder than you think. By this I mean that even though it’s not about the deeds mentioned above it doesn’t mean that we bring God glory by just going along with the crowd and adhering to the kingdom of humanity and its rules and structures without question. It’s also not as easy as just choosing to be nice and people pleasing. It’s hard because we must find our identity not only in Christ but also find ourselves empowered by the Holy Spirit to be as Christ in the world and this means, in many ways, participating in the mission of God as Jesus did. Thus, it’s hard because we must be curious; we must be willing to be the fodder for challenge; we must find our voice to ask questions—specifically against the powers that control the narratives and institutions of the kingdom of humanity; we must locate the gumption to call out lies and falsehoods knowing that it might/will cause our social, political, ecclesiastical, occupational, and (even) physical demise. We must allow our faith and love of God and others to determine our posture in the world, and we must do so daily and without foreknowledge. Why is it harder than you think? Because to bring God glory caused Jesus to lose his life.

So, what does bring God glory? Jesus forever sets the answer to the question for us: by making sure people are liberated from oppression (both spiritually and materially). This means, quite frankly, that we participate in the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation, being willing to break the law as necessary to make sure our neighbors—burdened by the evil of the age that weighs them down and prevents them from having fully life—are released from their captivity within the kingdom of humanity. As Christians who have been liberated by Jesus to love God, let us also love our neighbor in and through the love that God has loved us in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, and let us bring life where there is death, and sweet divine release and liberation where there is captivity. Love releases and sets free; therefore, beloved, let us love as we have been so loved by God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

[1] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[2] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 520-521. “There, when teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath, Jesus proclaimed ‘good news to the poor,’ ‘the good news of the kingdom of God’…Recalling that well-established script, we may assume that Luke has chosen at this fresh point of departure in the narrative to remind us of a the central concerns of Jesus’ ministry and, thus, to present Jesus engaged in the characteristic activity by means of which he fulfills  his divine mission.”

[3] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 173. “This well-known passage is a further sign of the growing controversy between Jesus and the religious Leaders of his nation.”

[4] Gonzalez, Luke, 173. “For in this text we have not just a miracle of healing, but the convergence of ancient and seemingly invincible powers, all coming to meet that Sabbath day in that synagogue.”

[5] Gonzalez, Luke, 173-174. “The point is that the woman cannot stand up straight, and that is demonic…With that woman there comes into the synagogue what we religious folk often try to forget: the reality of the power of evil, the reality of human suffering.”

[6] Green, Luke, 522.

[7] Green, Luke, 522-523. “When Jesus sees her, he does not go to her but calls her to him, thus inviting her to join him in front of those gathered and so to join him at the focal point of this scene. Locating this woman of such low status thus is not unrelated to the healing moment, but is directly relevant as a symbolization of her restoration within her community.”

[8] Green, Luke, 523. “The role of the synagogue ruler was to maintain the reading and faithful teaching of the law…”

[9] Green, Luke, 523. “He does not even cite the relevant texts, but grounds his view in what ‘ought to be done’—that is, in the divine will.” The woman can be healed tomorrow.

[10] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “The confrontation points to the always lurking possibility that very good religious principles may be turned into allies of the powers of evil.”

[11] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “On the one hand, in that woman’s suffering Satan himself confronts him. On the other, in the entire atmosphere around him, in the very law of Israel, in the leader of the synagogue, the weight of tradition seems to say that there is nothing to be done.”

[12] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “The leader of the synagogue was defending religious principles derived from the very law of God. Yet in that very defense he was siding with the powers of evil that held the woman bent.”

[13] Green, Luke, 521. “From this ethnomedical perspective, the, this woman’s illness has a physiological expression but is rooted in a cosmological disorder. Because Luke has presented Jesus as the divine agent of salvation in whose ministry the kingdom of God is made present and in whose ministry the domain of Satan is rolled back, Luke’s depiction of this woman’s illness prepares us for a redemptive encounter of startling proportions.”

[14] Gonzalez, Luke, 174. “Jesus faces the bent-over woman, oppressed by the weight of Satan himself. To her oppression of eighteen years the religious leaders would add another of umpteen centuries: It is the Sabbath! It is a day for religious matters! Jesus saw the woman, and he called her, and he spoke to her, and he laid his hands on her, and immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”

[15] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 518.

[16] Green, Luke, 519. “…Jesus’ encounter with this woman and his ensuing interpretation of her liberation as a necessary manifestation of the divine will, an outworking of the presence of the kingdom, on this day, the Sabbath. That is, the intrusion of the indignant synagogue ruler into Jesus’ encounter with the women bent over (v 14) provides Jesus the opportunity to interpret that healing as a fulfillment of God’s purpose ,and, thus, of Jesus’ mission (vv 15-21).”

[17] Green, Luke, 523. Ruler of the Synagogue addresses the people and not Jesus, “In this way he publicly challenges Jesus’ authority as a teacher and reasserts himself as the authorized interpreter of Scripture.”

[18] Green, Luke, 524. Ruler of Synagogue’s allusion to Deut 5:13 causes Jesus to return to that text “in order to remind this debate partner that the prohibition to work extends not only to human beings but also to oxen and donkeys (Deut 5:14).”

[19] Green, Luke, 520. “…Luke introduces Jesus as ‘Lord,’ then presents him as one with authority to interpret God’s salvific purpose. Directly or indirectly, both synagogue ruler and Jesus appeal to the Scriptures, but Jesus is represented as the divinely sanctioned hermeneut.”

[20] Green, Luke, 524. Setting up a series of parallels with ref. to Deut 5:14, “From this exegesis of the Deuteronomic law and contemporary practices based on it, Jesus is able to expose the ruler of the synagogue and those who think as he does as ‘hypocrites’—that is, as persons who do not understand God’s purpose, who therefore are unable to discern accurately the meaning of the scriptures, and therefore, whose piety is a sham.”

[21] Green, Luke, 524. “On a deeper sense, though, Jesus seems content to engage the argument just as the synagogue ruler had left it, with reference to the devein will. What ‘ought’ to take place, he insists, is this: This woman out to be set free from satanic bondage on the Sabbath.”

[22] Green, Luke, 525. “…Jesus’ God’s covenantal promise and the extension of God’s covenantal mercy to Abraham….She is ‘a daughter of Abraham,’ and appellation that might signal heroic faithfulness in some other literature, but with a profoundly different significance in the Lukan narrative. She is thus presented as one of those persons denoted by others has having no place among the people of God, normally excluded from social intercourse and certainly not highly regarded for their fidelity, and yet raised up by God as children of Abraham in the sene of becoming the recipients of the mercy reserved for Abraham by God.”

[23] Green, Luke, 525-526. “She and other children of Abraham in the Lukan narrative evidence how God’s promise to Abraham is fulfilled through the activity of Jesus and how the recipients of liberation through Jesus’ ministry are thus confirmed as Abrahm’s children.”

[24] Green, Luke, 526. “He had attempted to shame Jesus but, in the end, he and those with him who oppose Jesus are shamed as the crowd sides with Jesus This also means that they side with the narrator, attributing to Jesus the status of authoritative teacher and recognizing in the ‘wonderful things he was doing’ the gracious hand of God…”

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“The Life Giving Breath of the Church”

Psalm 104:34-35, 37  I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please Abba God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless Abba God, O my soul. Hallelujah!

Introduction

Unintentionally and unwittingly our Christian talk (and God-talk) often sounds as if we’ve forgotten the role of the Spirit in our praxis and doxology (practice and worship). I’m sure many of us, including me, keep the Spirit tucked away back in the recesses of our mind, and we don’t feel like we’re forgetting anything or anyone. I mean, come on, we, Episcopalians, are good Trinitarian, Creedal Christians; we believe in all three persons of the God head. But I get the impression from others—including from myself—that we don’t often take the Holy Spirit—the divine Spirit of God, God in God’s self—seriously. Any form of the pastoral don’t forget about the power of the Spirit is met with yeah, yeah, yeah, the spirit…whatever. (The last part mentioned silently as we turn to continue to do things of our own mind and power.)

Liturgically, the feast day celebrating the arrival of God’s Spirit to dwell in sinner-saints pales in comparison to the way we celebrate Christmas and Easter. Maybe it’s because Pentecost lacks a precursory penitential period like Christmas and Easter; there’s no obvious demand to sit and wait like there is in Advent or an inspiration to fast like there is in Lent. Frankly, this Sunday feels like just another Sunday; once Easter hits, all the BIG feast days are done, now it’s time to relax… Don’t worry, I’m implicated here, too. I’m aware of my own slackened posture toward everything that follows Easter Sunday’s setting sun.

For the Christian Church, the Church doesn’t exist until the Spirit comes, until today. Christmas doesn’t cause it to exist; Easter builds the foundation for it but not the structure. Pentecost establishes the Church in both its seen and unseen expressions; the Spirit is the reason why the Church will never die even if it ceases to exist as it does today. The Spirit is at the core our Christian Identity, both individually and corporately. It is the Spirit who brings all of us together in sibling like unity while celebrating our radiant and beautiful differences is certainly divine work, as Paul says,

Romans 8:14-17

For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these ones are sons [children] of God (v.14). Paul, addressing the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Roman, declares to both parties that anyone (“whoever”) has the divine Spirit of God is by default a child (“son”) of God. It is these ones who were indebted to the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of the flesh (clean/unclean; wise/foolish; free/slave), who are now indebted to the Spirit.[1] In this way, their obligations to and association with others must take on a different vibe: one informed by and structured on the unity created by the Holy Spirit. [2] Another way to say this is, Christian Romans—both Jew and Gentile—are dependent on the Holy Spirit for their identification with Christ and their union with God by faith and this makes them more than just a group of individuals; it makes them one body.

Paul goes further, though. It is the Spirit, according to Paul, that makes those who follow The Way of Christ, family. Thus, why Paul then says, For you did not receive a spirit of captivity again into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption by which we cry out, “Papa, Father!” (v. 15). The divine Spirit, who is the source of their identity as “Christ followers” and of their union with God, is the one who ensures that whoever is carried by the spirit, whoever is dependent on the Spirit can call God “Papa!” (By the Spirit, God becomes “Papa!” and is the one you run to in distress rather than flee because of fear.[3]) The theme of adoption Paul employs here carries with it the legal connotation familiar to the Roman society: a person who is not related to you by birth is designated as one’s heir.[4] According to Paul, and this will sound offensive to us[5] as it probably did to the Jewish Children of Israel, no one is a child of God by birth (creation) but only by adoption through the presence of the Holy Spirit,[6] …the same Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (v. 16).

Does this mean that the “children of God” are only Christians, and it is these who are worthy of love, life, liberation?[7] The answer to that is “No.” Recalling v. 14, For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these are sons/children of God, the “whoever” expands the definition, broadens the scope from those who look, act, are a certain way to whoever is so imbued with God’s Spirit and whoever thusly acts like children of God (cf. Romans 2).[8] Said in another way, those who love/anyone who loves those who and that which God loves are the children of God because to love as God loves is the result of the presence of God who is love.[9] Concurrently, Paul is talking to a community threatening division over identities,[10] to this Paul says, Stop it! You are all the children of God, no group more so than the other; we are all children of God who have this same Spirit affirming us and helping us all to cray out “Papa, Father!” (Αββα ὁ πατήρ being both Aramaic and Greek father addresses[11]). Thus, their obligations are to each other—no matter previous religious affiliation and sex (Paul switches from “sons” (υἱοί) to “children” (τέκνα) or other facets of identity[12]. If this, then, following John from last week, those outside of the church will know these ones follow Christ and encounter Christ thus God through the community in unity’s witness in the world by the power of the Spirit.[13]

Our passage ends with Paul saying, Now if children then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs of Christ, if we suffer together/are affected by the same thing so that also we might be glorified (v. 17). According to Paul, those who are guided/carried by the Spirit of God, are those who become children of God, who have God as their Abba, Parent, and are those who are joint-heirs with Christ. Heirs of what? Well, not heirs of the honor and glory and power offered by the kingdom of Humanity, but of suffering. What type of suffering? Well, the suffering that Christ suffered. Those who are children of God are siblings of Christ and if siblings than they will also speak and act in the world as Christ did and this brings suffering and not human defined glory and success. Why? Because Christ didn’t identify with the strong and powerful, but with the weak and powerless and this, by faith and the power of the Holy Spirit yoking us into the family of Christ and God, means that we identity with the least of these, too, as Christ did;[14] in this way, we do not create our own glory defined by the kingdom of humanity, but receive glory from God in the reign of God.[15] How the disciples of Christ, the Church, treat the most disenfranchised and oppressed of society, speaks to their identification with Christ and whether or not the Spirit is present in and among them.

Conclusion

Every Sunday, we say this about the Spirit:

We believe in God within us, 
the Holy Spirit burning with Pentecostal fire,
life-giving breath of the Church, 
Spirit of healing and forgiveness,
source of resurrection and of eternal life.

This is no small declaration. God dwells within us in the Spirit, who inflames our hearts and bodies to participate in God’s mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation, the Spirit is the means by which we are healed and how forgiveness (both God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others) is worked out, and it is the Spirit that is credited with our daily resurrection and the the hope we carry of our bodily resurrection into eternal life at the time of death. The Spirit is the “life giving breath of the Church”; in other words, without the Spirit there is no Church. Our first reading highlights this point: Peter and those with him receive the Spirit and can now speak in different languages thus proclaiming the good news of God that is the incarnate word of Jesus the Christ. From here, the church begins to be a thing in the world, a place carved into time and space to make room for an encounter with God in the event of faith through Jesus preached and, by the power of the Spirit, Christ heard. It is by the Spirit that people, from anywhere and everywhere, can gather and be one as Christ and Abba God are one and be made into the representatives of Christ in the world (ref. John 17). It is by the Spirit that these people so gathered can grow into the likeness of Christ, to become those who can hear the leading of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven and follow the divine footsteps toward the beloved who are fighting to survive in any generation (ref. John 16). It is by the Holy Spirit that the ones so gathered can become the mature Christians of Ephesians who find themselves flexible in receiving and responding to God’s continuous self-disclosure even when it contradicts the kingdom of humanity (ref. Ephesians 4). And it is by the power of this Spirit of Love, that those who hear and gather can consider themselves to be God’s children, thus heirs with Christ of all that is of Abba God.

[1] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 139. “Although he does not explicitly state the further implication of no longer being debtors to the flesh, it is clear form what he has said previously that we are debtors instead to the spirit.”

[2] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “When we leave the law of sin and death to follow the law of Spirit and life, we exchange one set of obligations for another. Our new obligations are established not by a system of patronage but by being brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. This relationship is what determines our responsibilities to one another.”

[3] LW 25:358. “For in the spirit of fear it is not possible to cry, for we can scarcely open our mouth or mumble. But faith expands the heart, the emotions, and the voice, but fear tightens up all these things and restricts them, as our experience amply testifies. Fear does not say Abba but rather it hates and flees form the Father as from an enemy and mutters against him as a tyrant. For those people who are in the spirit of fear and not int eh sprit of adoption do not taste how sweet he Lord is…but rather He appears to them as a harsh and hard, and int heir heart they call Him a virtual tyrant, although with the mouth they call Him Father…”

[4] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “To further stress the relationship of being brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul uses the image of adoption, a legal practice in roman society of designating someone who is not one’s physical offspring to be one’s heir.”

[5] Lancaster, Romans, 140. The modern conception of “children of God” based on our being all created as God’s children is not the image Paul has. “…Paul speaks of being children of God by adoption, not by creation. Although it does capture and expand concern about our obligations toward one another, this understanding of all humans as children of God does not help to understand what Paul means in these verses.”

[6] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The status of child of God is not given to all humans simply by virtue of being human. It belongs specifically to those who have been led into this relationship by the Spriit.”

[7] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The idea that ‘children of God’ is a more restricted group than all humans leads to the question about who belongs in that group.”

[8] Also building here from Dorothee Sölle’s conception that anyone who identifies with the least of these and meets their real, tangible, physical need are those who represent Christ to humanity. See her Christ the Representative.

[9] LW 25:358-359. Shifting from spirit of fear to spirit of love can only happen if “we have His spirit, so that in the same spirit we love the same things which He loves and hate the things which He hates in the same way that He does. For we cannot love those things which God loves unless we have the love and will and spirt which He has. …And those people are called godlike men and sons of God because they are led by the Spirit of God.”

[10] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “Paul is still addressing the whole community (‘you’ plural and ‘we’). His intent is not to break down community in competition over who is a child of God and who is not, but rather to underscore the new community we have when we are in Christ.”

[11] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “…Paul has included both the Aramaic and Greek forms of address to God. The inclusion of both languages makes sense in a community made up of Greek and Jewish followers of Jesus, and since both words indicate the adopted status of the ones who cry out, each group needs to recognize its common inheritance with the other. Because the word ‘heir’ calls to mind Paul’s discussion of inheritance regarding God’s promise to Abraham (4:13-14) the direct address to God in both Aramaic and Greek reinforces the common spiritual ancestry of the followers of Jesus, whether they may be Jew or Gentile. Neither group has a lesser place in the community, and they need to see and treat each other equally as brothers and sisters in Christ.”

[12] Lancaster, Romans, 141. Word play in Greek between huiothesias and huioi “The Greek wordplay between “sons” and “son-making” also calls to mind that in 8:3 Paul says God sent the Son into the world to deal with sin. Through Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, we come adopted sons and therefore join heirs with Christ. The masculine language in Greek has a purpose in connecting all these ideas, but Paul drops the masculine language in 8:16-17 to speak instead of ‘children’ (tekna). By shifting to language that is not gender -specific, Paul makes clear that women as well as men are heirs with Christ, thus breaking down on of the traditional hierarchical barriers between people in Romans society and opening the way to think of how other barriers are also overcome in Christ. Adoption makes the followers of Jesus kin to one another, brothers and siters in Christ, regardless of their place in society.”

[13] Lancaster, Romans, 141. “The presence of the Spirit in the gathering for worship leads the followers of Jesus to cry out to God as a parent, confirming that they are not slaves but children of God. Their allegiance to the dominion of the Spirit presents them with a new set of obligations—not obligations of slave to master but rather the obligations of joint heirs because of their common adopted status.”

[14] LW 25:356. “‘To be led by the Spirit of God’ is to put to death our flesh, that is, the old Adam, and to do it freely, promptly, and gladly, that is to despise and renounce all that is not God, even ourselves, and thus ‘not to fear death or the friends of death, the fierce race of penalties,’ and likes ‘to give up the empty pleasures of the world its corrupt and sordid prices,’ and freely to relinquish all good things and embrace evils in their place. This is not characteristic of our nature, but is a work of the Spirit of God in us.”

[15] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “Of course, the inheritance that joint heirs with Christ receive comes through being baptized into his death. Suffering comes before glory. Just as the son took on the vulnerability of weakness, which brings social shame, the joint-heirs with Christ must give up the mindset of the flesh that would seek glory in status and power and instead follow the Son’s example of accepting the suffering that accompanies weakness in order to gain a more secure glory. The passive ‘be glorified’ indicates that glory is not ours to be own, but rather it is God’s to give.”

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Like Paul and Peter

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Acts 9:36-43

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summoned out of Death and into Life

Psalm 30:1a-b,2-3 I will exalt you, God, because you have lifted me up… O Abba God, I cried out to you, and you restored me to health. You brought me up…from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.

Introduction

Have you ever been dead set that you were absolutely, positively, without any doubt, completely and totally, 100% right? Like, nothing was going to drag you from that throne of being right. Like, you knew you were right and then your knowing knew and then that knowing knew you were 100%, beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt right? Like, the level of right that makes you wager bets when you don’t like to wager bets ever. Like, that confidence bordering on smug arrogance type of knowing you’re right…

I’m sure you’ve never been there, but I’ve been there. Whether as a mom, a wife, a scholar, a priest there have been times where I’m certain I’ve got all those little knowing ducks in a row. I know this: this thing, this person, this concept, this best method, this ritual. But the reality is that everything I do know changes. Human beings don’t stay the same, they grow and change; concepts are always subject to change with new information and research; best methods change, it’s why parenting looks so different today than it did yesterday—same goes for any industry moving along with rapidly changing technology; even sacred rituals change, anyone here looking to head back into the catacombs to do church? In short, things change (animate and inanimate). When we are absolutely, positively convinced that we know we are right, everyone else will become wrong, and we will absolutely, positively promote death rather than life, indifference rather than love, captivity rather than liberation.

Acts 9:1-6

According to Luke, Saul enters the scene at the very beginning of chapter 8, right after the death of Stephen. Stephen the first deacon of the church and the first martyr of those who follow the way. He was condemned to death for preaching the gospel and exposing the Sanhedrin for what and who they were. Luke tells us in 8:1, And Saul was pleased with the destruction of [Stephen].  Saul then disappears from the narrative for the rest of chapter 8 only to resurface at the beginning of chapter 9.

At the beginning of chapter 9, Luke tells us, Now Saul, still breathing threats and killing the disciples of the Lord, approached the high priest and asked for letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus so that he might find certain people being of the way, men and also women, and after binding them he might lead them into Jerusalem (vv. 1-2). Not only did Saul approve of the death of a deacon proclaiming the liberative gospel to a people stuck in captivity, he also continued in hot pursuit of the people who, because of proclamations like Stephen’s, began following the way (the way of faith in Jesus the Christ, God’s son). These who followed the way, for Saul, were those who were no straying from God and God’s law, they were heretics and blasphemers, and this deserved nothing less than imprisonment and death. What Luke is painting for his audience is a picture of a devoted zealot of the law of God; Saul’s mission was to make sure no Israelite strayed from the right way, the one he knew, the one upheld by decades and centuries of tradition. Saul isn’t a deviant or miscreant; he is a killer as one who kills in the name of the law and has authority to do so. Saul is absolutely sold out that this one way, the way he knew, the way he had been trained in, the way he had been raised in and schooled in was the one and only way that God could and would work. According to Luke, Saul was willing do whatever it took to ensure that what is remains as is even if it means imprisoning and executing anyone who lives, believes, says, and does otherwise.[1]

According to Luke, Saul is closed in on himself and what he knows and believes to be true and right; he is, as Martin Luther would say, curved in on himself and violence thrives among people curved in on themselves, convinced of their own rightness and goodness, and devoted to their ideologies reinforcing their status quo which encourages their curved-in-ness.[2] Against this type of person, this one that Saul is, the disciples and followers of the way have absolutely no chance; their way of seeing the world and understand justice will collapse under the weight of Saul’s because there is no one stronger and more resistance to listening and seeing than the one who is curved in on himself.[3]

Saul, in being dead-set, absolutely and positively right is on a collision course with the reality of God—a God who is all about the interruption and disruption of the status-quo holding God’s beloved captive unto death.[4] Saul, the pursuer, is about to realize that he is the one being pursued.[5] Luke tells us, But while he was going near to Damascus, it happened that a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him like lightening, (v. 3). Saul collides—full steam—into God by way of his errant misconception of the world and of God’s activity of the world. Notice that the text does not tell us that Saul was eagerly searching for God because God was hidden and Saul couldn’t find God. Notice that the text tells us very plainly that God found Saul when Saul wasn’t looking for him. Saul was interrupted and disrupted on his way—stopped in his tracks by being tossed to the ground—and divinely readjusted and corrected and set on God’s way and on God’s track.[6]

Because of Saul’s encounter with God, he gains deep insight into who this God is. This is not the God of the cold tablets demanding blood sacrifice for disobedience or imprisonment for fracture. Rather, the God Saul encounters is a God who intimately knows the pain of those whom this God loves. And, Saul is not only disrupted and interrupted, but altogether unmade under the weight of a very intimate question:[7] and after he fell to the earth he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (v.4) Saul can’t answer the question because of the exposure: Saul isn’t absenting God from the pain and suffering he is causing; he’s directly hurting God, the one whom he thought he was protecting from offense and pain.[8] The only thing Saul can do is ask his own question in response to God’s question posed to him: And [Saul] said, “Who are you, Lord?” And [Jesus said], “I, I am Jesus whom you, you are persecuting…” (v.5). Saul is crushed under this divine revelation, in this divine encounter[9] with a God who resides in the flesh of Israel and not an abstract God hiding behind tablets.[10] Saul’s entire person and being, soul and body, mind and heart will be beckoned forth from that death and into the new life God has planned for him: being guided by the justice and rightness of God revealed through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and not according to his own conception of justice and rightness.[11]

Conclusion

Just as God felt the pain of the Israelites suffering under the oppression and violence and death of the government of Egypt, so too did God feel the pain of God’s beloved as Saul sought out and imprisoned and executed the followers of the way; just like in Easter, if you mess with God’ beloved you mess with God because nothing stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death and those who believe they have the power and authority to deal in it.[12]

When the women who entered the empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning, they were asked, why do you look for the living among the dead?I believe this morning, when Jesus asks Saul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”, it is the exact same question. While the women were looking for the living among the dead, Saul was dealing out death where there was life. Both are stuck in an old way and order of understanding God in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Anyone can become stuck in death in one of two ways: passively by assuming God can’t do something new and actively by being convinced God would never do something beyond what you absolutely positively know to be right.

So, we are put on notice today by Luke’s words. It’s not about us being right and assuming we know what God is up to because of the way it’s been done for years and years. When we become dead set on being right, we will bring violence and death to others as we force them to comply and obey by dragging them into the prison of “our way or the highway”; this always will lead to sanctioning death. As we proceed through this Easter season, we are continually beckoned into that new life, new love, new liberation we received through the empty, unsealed tomb. Beloveds, we are of light, love, liberation, and life; let us live like we believe it.

[1] Jennings, Acts, 90. “Saul is a killer. We must never forget this act. He kills in the name of righteousness, and now he wants legal permission to do so. This is the person who travels the road to Damascus, one who has the authority to take life either through imprisonment or execution. No one is more dangerous than one with the power to take life and who already has mind and sight set on those who are a threat to a safe future.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 91. “Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their logic. Their authority confirms their argument and their argument justifies heir actions and their actions reinforce the appropriateness of their authority. Violence, in order to be smooth, elegant, and seemingly natural, needs people who are closed circles.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 90-91. “The disciples of the Lord, the women and men of the Way, have no chance against Saul. They have no argument and certainly no authority to thwart his zeal. They are diaspora betrayers of the faith who are a clear and present danger to Israel. This is how Sauls sees them his rationality demands his vision of justice.”

[4] Willie James Jennings, Ephesians, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 90. “God disrupts the old order by interrupting lives. Luke has removed every temporal wall that might separate in our thinking the God who moved in ancient Israel from the God present in the world in Jesus from this God of untamable love. This is that same Holy One, and Saul too will fall into the hands of this desiring God.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 91. “But what Saul doe not yet know is that the road to Damascus has changed. It is space now inhabited by the wayfaring Spirit of the Lord. Saul pursues, but he is being pursued.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The long history of the church has turned the Damascus road into shorthand for a life-changing experience, and rightly so, because Saul, the closed circle, is broken open by God. Yes, a killer was confronted and stopped in his tracks, but equally powerful, the rationality for his murderous actions was shattered.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 91. “There is no rationale for killing that remains intact in the presence of God. The power of this event almost overwhelms its textual witness. Luke is handling holy fire now. The question comes directly to Saul. This is a question too massive for him to handle because it is an intimate one.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The question casts light on the currencies of death that we incessantly traffic in, and it has no good answer. The only good answer is to stop. But now this is God’s question. It belongs to God. It belongs with God. Hurt and pain and suffering have reached their final destination, the body of Jesus. Now the divine presence will be revealed to Saul, not simply divine revelation, but a new revelation.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 92. “Saul turns form defending the name of the Lord to serving Jesus, and for this we will soon suffer. He has crossed that line that separates this faith from all others. He has heard the voice of a crucified God. There is a stark truth here in this conversation to poignant that we sometimes ignore its abiding effect on us. Saul experienced the Lord Jesus. He encountered him, and this made Saul vulnerable. Experiencing the Lord Jesus makes us vulnerable.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “The Lord has a name…This is the bridge that has been crossed in Israel. The Lord and Jesus are one. This is the revelation that now penetrates Saul’s being and will transform his identity. He turns from the abstract Lord to the concrete Jesus. A future beckons in the pivot from holy faith to holy flesh. …Saul moves from an abstract obedience to a concrete one, from the Lord he aims to please to the One who will direct him according to divine pleasure.”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “Discipleship is principled direction taken flight by the Holy Spirit. It is the ‘you have hard it said, but I say to you’—the continued speaking of God bound up in disruption and redirections.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 92-93. “Jesus is one with the bodies of those who have called on his name and followed in his way by the Spirit. Their pain and suffering is his very own. This too is scandal. This too is a crossed line. They mystery of God is found in human flesh, moving in and with the disciples who are a communion of suffering and witness to life Saul is meeting a God in Jesus who is no alien to time, but one who lives the everyday with us….Yet just as he confronted Saul, this God is no passive participant in the suffering of the faithful, but one who has reconciled the world and will bring all of us to the day of Jesus Christ. Saul has entered that new day.”

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“Prone to Wander…”: Desecrating Sacred Ground

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Exodus 3:1-15

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[9] Tigay, “Exodus,” 111.

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

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By This Word Alone

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

Introduction

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

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

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

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[10] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

[11] hiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Existential Anguish of the Christian Life

Psalm 48:1, 13 Great is Abba God, and highly to be praised; in the city of our God is his holy hill. This God is our God for ever and ever; Abba God shall be our guide for evermore.

Introduction

At times there are great highs in this Christian life, and then there are great lows. We see love come and then indifference; we see liberation come and then captivity; we see life come and then death. We are caught in what feels like a great tug-of-war between power eager to bring life, love, and liberation and power eager to eliminate it. To be in the world but not of the world is to have a foot in the temporal realm and in the spiritual realm, with neither feeling all that much like home while we are still here in the body. We will have joy, and we will have pain. At times our hearts will swell with gratitude; at others, they will deflate with despair.  But this is part of our Christian journey in the world and so is the anguish we feel at times when injustice seems to win over justice, war over peace, death over life. This anguish causes us to feel pointless and hopeless, purposeless and directionless. But it’s here, in this very real human weakness, where God summons us to step further into the void…

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Concerning this thing, I beseeched the Lord three times so that it might [take leave] from me. And he has spoken to me, “My grace suffices for you; for power is reaches perfection in weakness.” Therefore, I will gladly boast all the more in my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell upon me. That is why I am resolved in weakness, in insult, in constraint, in persecution, and great distress on behalf of Christ; for whenever I am weak, at that time I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10)

Paul begins this portion of his letter to the Corinthians by telling them about a person who—fourteen years ago—was caught up in an ecstatic encounter with God, brought up to the third heaven and that this person then heard unutterable utterances which a person is not permitted to speak. Paul speaks as one who is not sure about the details of the event—whether in the body I have known not, or outside of the body I have known not; God has known—thus the reader/hearer is led to believe it is someone else of whom Paul is speaking. So, who is this person caught up into the presence of God?[1] Most likely it’s Paul. Paul is not one to practice futile self-boasting, so he phrases the story in the third person and avoids any notion that he is any different than the Corinthians.[2] In this way, Paul speaks about divine encounter that takes one to the peaks yet without creating a chasm between himself and his audience; he didn’t do this, [3] God did.[4] In other words, as other leaders are trying to lord their power over others,[5] Paul is just like his audience because there is no hierarchy among the believers, because in God’s reign hierarchies are destroyed—all are brought low in Christ’s death to be raised in Christ’s resurrection.

So, Paul refuses to boast in himself unless he’s speaking of his own weakness—on behalf of such a one I will boast, but on behalf of myself I will not boast except in weakness. His goal is to send all attention to God, to Jesus Christ, to the power of the divine Spirit. To boast of his own encounters with God would send the attention directly to himself and away from God;[6] people would focus on him, revere him, worship him, would elevate him above themselves and make him into something he isn’t.[7] This misallocation of reverence due God perpetuates the misuse of power, exacerbates the violence of hierarchies in the kingdom of humanity, and would detract from Paul’s message: depend fully on God and God’s word and love your neighbor to God’s glory. Paul wants the Corinthians to judge him not according to one off encounters with God but by his day in and day out living by and in accordance with the gospel and in this way glory remains with God and not with Paul.

With this we get to the main message of this pericope: for Christians our weakness is the intersection of the waning of human power and the waxing of divine power. Paul tells us, On which account so that I might not be raised up, a thorn for the flesh was given to me—a messenger of Satan—so that he might strike me with a fist so that I might not be lifted up. Paul confesses that he struggles with a recurring “thing” that is a thorn in his side,[8] it is this that keeps him humble especially since his petitions to the Lord to have it removed are met with, My grace is suffices for you; for power reaches perfection in weakness. If Paul could, he’d remove this “thing,” but he is fully dependent on God to work through this recurring and persistent weakness; he is reminded of his creaturely posture before God.

Many scholars speculate about what Paul’s thorn was—something physical,[9] a person, something mental—and while I will defer to their expertise on what the particular thing is, I’d like to draw a correlation to something a bit less literal, to a correlation between Paul and his thorn and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Based on what Paul has shared about being taken up into the presence of God and overhearing unutterable utterances, I believe Paul takes a share in the divine anguish for the world. His recurring thorn is those real moments where that anguish seizes him, where his heart breaks, where he pleads with God to take this cup from him, and God’s response is to usher him forward through his weakness to allow for God’s divine power to be made known through that weakness. While not one-to-one, this is not unlike Jesus’s presence before God in the garden pleading for this cup to pass, sweating blood, feeling the weight of the task before him, burdened by his share of existential anguish over the world and God’s beloved. Jesus was brought into this moment of weakness because of his love for humanity and the world and it would be that same love that would be the source of divine power summoning him out of the earth on Easter morning. And if for Jesus, then for Paul, too. Paul was raptured with God’s love not only for him but for the beloved of God, thus this love brought him to ultimate weakness, and it was at this point, too, where he threw himself upon God and that same love reached perfection through Paul.[10] It isn’t that Paul found strength in God’s love to muscle through. It’s that he died under the weight of that divine love for the world only to be made alive by that love; in this way, Christ’s grace is sufficient because God’s love is sufficient especially when it means bringing to life out of death.

Conclusion

As those who believe in Christ we share in Christ’s anguish over the world. The love that forsakes its own comfort, forgoes its own life to bring comfort and life to the object of love, the beloved. As those so caught up in this type of divine love, we will experience the thorn of existential anguish as we are forced to witness the world reject love, life, and liberation. Our hearts will break. Our hope will wane. Our strength will falter. But in these moments we must find recourse to drive ourselves further into God through prayer, to cling tighter to the Gospel of God (Jesus Christ the incarnate word), and to collapse into the presence of the divine Spirit. It is here at the end of love where love summons us back to life and brings us forward into the world to continue participating in God’s loving, life-giving, liberating mission in the world.

This existential anguish that is a part of our love of God and the world is an essential part of our being Christian. There is no loop whole making an easier way or some winding path around having these heavy feelings and experiences. We must walk through it, one step at a time. As weak clay vessels, we must walk, eyes wide open, ears tuned to God and to the cry of our neighbor, ready to use our hands and feet to summon forward God’s love, life, and liberation for the beloved to the glory of God. And when we can’t may we throw ourselves (once again) on the mercy and grace of God because God’s grace in Christ is sufficient for us because God’s love reaches perfection through the love that has rendered us weak.

[1] [1] Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I Howard Marshall and Donald A Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 840. “It is probable that this was Paul’s cosmology, so that when he says ἕως τρίτον οὐρανοῦ, ‘right up to the third heaven,’ he mans ‘into the presence of God.”

[2] Harris,  Second Corinthians, 835. The experience is about Paul, “…he was embarrassed at needing to engage in fruitless boasting (v.1) and found in this objectifying of his experience a convenient way of distancing himself from this necessary but futile boasting that in itself did not contribute to the common good …Again, this literary technique enabled him to avoid suggesting that he was in any sense. A special kind of Christian.”

[3] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “Paul’s ascent was not the result of a self-induced trance or any other form of psychological preparation.”

[4] Harris, Second Corinthians, 835. “From first to last the initiative lay with God.”

[5] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “…Paul’s purpose may have been to draw attention to his prolonged silence about the episode; it was only the present contest with his rivals, brought on by the Corinthians’’ disloyalty to him, that had forced him (cf. 12.1, 11) to break that silence and reluctantly mention his privileged ascent to heaven.”

[6] Harris, Second Corinthians, 847. “…he was not prepared to boast about himself, about the ‘extraordinary revelations’ given him (11:7), because that would detract from the Lord’s preeminence and would suggest his own distinctiveness and eminence as a Christian or as an apostle.”

[7] Harris, Second Corinthians, 848. “He had good reason to boast if that was his wish. But he repudiates that option of self-promotion so that the Corinthians should form an accurate estimation of him and his ministry—not an opinion based on his boasting but an assessment that relied on their own observation of his conduct and their own evaluation of his teaching…”

[8] Harris, Second Corinthians, 851. “The ‘thorn,’ … was a recurrent trial that could incapacitate and humiliate him at any time. Being both past and present, ‘weakness’ was integral to Paul’s experience.”

[9] Harris, Second Corinthians, 859. “The present writer believes that some kind of physical ailment…”

[10] Harris, Second Corinthians, 863. “But we should probably find a still broader reference in ἀσθένια, a reference to attitudinal weakness, the acknowledgment of one’s creatureliness and of one’s impotence to render effective service to God without his empowering.”

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Joining Our Voices to the Divine Symphony

Psalm 1:1a, 2-3 Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked…Their delight is in the law of Abba God, and they meditate on that law day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.

Introduction

The church visible is a specific community of human beings with a specific summons in the world; and as the church invisible it is called to be in the world but not of the world because its fabric and substance is cultivated from and of divine spiritual essence. People both make and do not make the church. There is no church without the people (visible), but the church is not restricted to a certain group of people (invisible). Every church is called to participate as a locus of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation in the world and in this way the church visible partakes of the long surging presence of the church invisible. We as a visible church are yoked to the larger invisible church extending through time, and we find our place in this history as we are, where we are holding space for God to show up and work through us as a site of divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.

In this way, the church cannot find its comfort in the material realm, but rather it must find it in God through dependence on Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s from this posture that the church can bring comfort into the world. Thus, the metrics of success offered by the world fall flat when judging the church; it is not always the largest, the wealthiest, and the building with the most things that is the one most closely aligned to the reign of God. To be in the world and of the world is to relinquish the message of Christ for the message of the world and therein stifle the life-giving proclamation of Christ crucified and raised; a message that breaks in and interrupts the messages of the world. To sacrifice the message of Christ for an acceptable message according to the world is to sacrifice a true message of a substantial and enduring comfort for the saccharine and temporary comfort of the world.

But the church, which is built from the dust of the ground, is animated by and dependent on the breath of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God found in the encounter with God in the event of faith in Christ. The church is to be in the world and not of the world because the world and its inhabitants need a good word, a new word, a word of love, life, and liberation, one they didn’t come up with themselves.

John 17:6-19

Jesus prayed…“I am no longer in the cosmos and they, they are in the cosmos, and I, I come to you. Holy Elder, take care of them in your name which you have given to me, so that they are one just as we [, we are one]. When I was with them I, I was taking care of them in your name which you have given to me, and I guarded [them] and not one of them was lost if not the son of destruction…I, I have given to them your word, and the cosmos detested them, because they are not of the cosmos just as I, I am not of the cosmos.” (Jn 17:11-12b, 14)

This is the “Farewell Prayer.” Here, Jesus prays for his disciples, the ones he called to himself and thus to God and the same ones he is leaving. Jesus called each one by name and ushered them into the reality of God; they have been given new eyes to see, new ears to hear and thus they are now no longer of the world even though they are in it. The goal of the prayer is to make sure that the disciples whom Jesus is leaving behind in the world will remain in the truth that is God’s self-disclosure revealed by Christ (vv. 17, 19), and not fall prey to the oppression and hatred of the world thus cease remaining in Christ to seek comfort in the world.[1]

A thread that runs through the prayer is “oneness.” This oneness is part of the truth of God revealed in Christ: Jesus and God are one thus those who encounter Jesus encounter God; where Jesus goes, God goes, too.[2] When Jesus called the disciples, God called them. When they followed Jesus, they followed God. In being so summoned and in following, they become the community whose beginning is not of the world but of God even if they are in it.[3] Through Christ they have come to know God and are thus taken out of the world because they are substantiated by the word of God incarnated in Christ whom they follow and from whom they received the word of God.[4] The disciples—the ones called to form this community—make up the community that is of Jesus thus of God and this belonging to Jesus is the unique source of the community and the unique essence of its presence in the cosmos. Thus, the community cannot be of the world because its source and foundation is not temporal but spiritual; it is literally born of the spiritual substance of the word of God that is Jesus Christ and is made to be God’s incarnate presence in the world but not of the world.[5] Therefore, to try to exist outside of this divine source and be in the world and of the world will render the fledgling community nothing but a social club.

Now, as the prayer goes on, the community so prayed for by Christ is to take up the mission of God in the world that was revealed in and through Jesus’s self-witness in the world; the community is, like it’s source and forebear, to call into question the things of the world, to challenge the domination of the kingdom of humanity.[6] This is the hardship for the disciples left behind by Jesus; they will be homeless in the world but by being thusly homeless they will find their home (their being and substance, their source) in God. Here, nothing of the world can comfort them or justify their existence; they are solely and completely dependent on the Word of God in Christ.[7] And in this way they are perpetually at risk for falling into the lure of the world, thus why Jesus prays for them. They must resist the urge, and they must abide in the vine.[8]

It is through remaining and abiding in and with the vine (ch. 15), clinging to the Word of God, and being recipients of the divine, life-giving sap that is the fulfillment of the joy of Christ that is made complete in the community left behind.[9] The holiness (the consecration, the sanctifying) of the community is found in ὁ λόγος ὁ σὸς ἀλήθείᾳ έστιν (v. 17b). The identity of the community in the world is formed by the word of God that is truth; thus, it is not defined by the word of the world that is not truth. Anything apart from this word, for this community, disempowers its presence and leads it astray from the source of its life and identity and renders it merely pruned kindling; the holy community cannot depend on anything but the word of God for its love, life, and liberation in the world for the world.[10] From here and only from here anchored in the Word of God, like Jesus, can the community of Christ take up God’s divine proclamation of life, mission of love, and revolution of liberation in the world.[11]

Conclusion

Our hope as the church visible today is not to forget the source of the life of the invisible church. Now is the time to push more into the Word of God, to recall and retell the stories of Christ and the radical divine action made known through him. It is in pressing into this identity as the holy community formed and founded on the radical proclamation of God’s Word incarnate that is how we find ourselves further in the world though never of it. To press into God and God’s word is not to go backwards to some archaic time or to cling to legalism or fundamentalism; this is death because God’s word is living and breathing, not something of a year now long gone (this is to live under the kingdom of humanity). To press into God’s word and God is to press into life and movement forward into something new, different, and something that can summon the world to look up and forward (this is to live under the reign of God).

As tempting as it may seem at times to jettison this ancient and rather whacky proclamation for one a bit more tolerable to the world, I assure you that is the surest way to forfeit our identity as the Christian church in the world and give up our seat in this history. Without the foundation of the Word of God in Christ, we no longer have a unique message to bring into the world and will just blend into the background of the world’s cacophony. We cannot depend on our doctrines and institutions, some claim to God’s law, or some static conception of God of another era; recourse to this language is just the same as the world’s language…it’s recourse to temporal things that have no part in establishing spiritual realities. It is to try to grasp at dust returned to dust.

Rather as part of this long-ago prayed for community, we must hear the divine summons, dare to let go of the rope, and fall deeper into God. We must let ourselves become consumed with God’s passion for the world, for the beloved. It’s in this full dependence on God and God’s word that brings us in line with God and begins to spark the flames of divine revolution in our midst; reformation (revolution) always starts in God’s church with God’s word. In this we can join our voices to the celestial symphony and demand life where there is death, love where there is indifference, and liberation where there is captivity in the name of Christ to the glory of God.

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 498. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “For the evangelist—and for the source too—the imparting of the name of God is not the transmitting of a secret, power-laden word, such as in the mysteries, or in the soul’s heavenward journey, or in magic, take effect by being spoken; rather it is the disclosure of God himself, the disclosure of the ἀλήθεια.”

[2] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 498. “In the work that Jesus does, God himself is at work, in him God himself is encountered.”

[3] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 498. “…by [the disciples’] faith they testify that their origin does not lie in the world, but that from the very beginning they were God’s possessions. As those who preserver God’s word, mediated through the Revealer, they form the community for which he prays.”

[4] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 499. “From this kind of faith grew the true knowledge, και ἔγνωσαν ἀληθῶς…, which in turn is the means whereby faith comes to itself, καὶ ἐπίστευσαν. For what is known and what is believed are in fact the same; ὅτι παρὰ σοῦ ἐξῆλθον and ὅτι σύ με ἀπέστειλας mean the same thing. And the meaning is this: to understand Jesus as the revealer and so to come to know God (v. 3). This therefore is the Christian community: a fellowship, which does not belong to the world, but is taken out of the world; one that owes its origin to God, and is established by the Revealer’s word, recognised as such in the light of the Passion. i.e.. in the light of rejection by the world; a fellowship, that is to say, which is established only by t the faith that recognises God in Jesus.”

[5] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 500. “The community belongs to God only in so far as it belongs to Jesus; i.e. it has its origin in eternity only in so far as it holds fast to its origin in the eschatological event that is accomplished in Jesus. To say that it belongs to Jesus is significant only in that it thereby belongs to God (τὰ ἐμὰ πάντα σά έστιν) that it belongs to God becomes a fact only in in that it belongs to Jesus (τὰ σὰ ἐμά).”

[6] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 501. “But what is he?  As the revealer of God he is the Judge of the world, through whom the world is called in question; and he has his δόξα in the community inasmuch as it too means judgement for the world, and that through it the world is called in question.”

[7] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 501. “His δόξα cannot be seen at the present time like the glory of a Messiah. There is no way of point to it in the world, except paradoxically, in that the community which is a stranger to the world is also an offence to it. Thus the community cannot prove itself to the world. Nor can its members comfort themselves in the things they possess…”

[8] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 502. “From what has gone before it is at once clear that the prayer for their protection is the prayer that the community which stands in the world be protected from falling back into the world’s hands, that it be kept pure in its unworldly existence.”

[9] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 506. “To say that this joy is to be shared by the disciples πεπληρωμένη, is to say, as in 15:11, that the joy they have already received through him will be brought to its culmination; the significance of turning to him in faith is found in the believer’s life becoming complete as eschatological existence.”

[10] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 509. “Marked off from the world, the community is to live in the world as holy community. But it can only enjoy this state of separation from the world in virtue of the revelation on which it is founded, which is nothing other than the word of God transmitted to it through Jesus. Hus its holiness is not due to its own quality, nor can it manufacture its differentiation from the world by itself, by its rite, its institution, or its particular way of lie; all this can only be a sign of its difference from the world, not a means of attaining it. [The community’s] holiness it therefore nothing permanent, like an inherited possession: holiness is only possible for the community by the continual realisation of tis world-annulling way of life, i.e.. by continual reference to the word that calls it out of the world, and to the truth that sets it free form the world.”

[11] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 510. “The community has a task analogous to his, and rooted in it…But it does not take over this assault or the duty to win the world solely by embarking on missionary enterprises; it does so simply by its existence.”

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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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