Holy God!

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

Leviticus is not a name that engenders much applause among forward-thinking Christians. The third book in the Bible, in some ways the crown jewel of the Torah, with its elaborations of the Ten Commandments, is one that a number of us find nauseating because it has been hurled so frequently as a weapon against sexual minorities. But there are some things that are not so rough in the Book of Leviticus—not so rough, that is, unless you are really ethically challenged. Leviticus sees a deep connection between the nature of God and profoundly ethical behavior. The headline of the whole work is, “BE HOLY, FOR I THE LORD YOUR GOD AM HOLY.”

More than any other word we could think of, “holiness” expresses what we mean by “the sacred.” It is not something that is owned by one religious tradition. In his book The Idea of the Holy, written many years ago, German theologian Rudolf Otto noted that holiness is peculiar to the sphere of all religion, and is only secondarily transferred to the sphere of ethics as well. It is the experience of the holy that blasts the neat categories of the rational and puts us in the terrain of the inexpressible. We have come to use the word “holy” to mean completely good. Well, that’s not quite accurate. The holy is the real innermost core of any religion. Only in relation to that core can actions and behavior be said to be “holy.”

It is important to get our minds straight on what the holy is, because frankly it is not on the list of the top things that most Americans want to be. Or think they are. But the truth of the matter is we are created to be holy. Or, to be more precise, we are created with the capacity of being Godlike, else it would make no sense for God to issue the command, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Sometimes I muse about where we human beings get that idea. Of course, the tradition is that God actually spoke in revealing terms laying the notion out plainly. And that may well be. But you have to allow for the possibility that God could speak on and on about holiness—or this, that, and the other—and it would all be for naught unless human beings had the capacity to hear it. And that is to say that we carry around with us the idea that it is possible to be different from what we would be if we were just left to our own devices and desires. Left in the wild, so to say, we would revert to basic mammal behavior, looking after ourselves, our young, and our own kind, with loyalties only to our den, our pride, our herd, our flock, our warren. Left to ourselves, we could quite easily behave more as reptilians than gods. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is perhaps still the classic narrative of what happens to a community of humans that, with all constraints of civilization removed, goes down into the sinkhole of savagery. Boys will not only be boys, but savage boys if left completely to themselves.

But let us not make the mistake of thinking that there is anything necessarily godly about civilization itself. We continue to make that mistake by thinking and believing that anything that controls human behavior, that produces ostensible progress, that shapes human community is necessarily a good thing. We ought to know better. Crowns and thrones perish, kingdoms rise and wane, civilizations come and go. And while all that is happening there is in the center of human experience an impulse to live differently. And while that impulse may not in every instance equate with the current of holiness that comes out of the nature of God, still that impulse keeps surfacing. We humans keep grasping every now and then the idea that we are being called from outside ourselves to live differently, to lay aside some of our most intuitive and automatic behaviors. And the Book of Leviticus testifies that that call is from nowhere other than Yahweh, God, Lord. Yahweh frees and also commands, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The slice of Leviticus that we heard read today is not particularly hard to get a handle on. Indeed its ideas are very popular with many people, religious and non-religious. Don’t render an unjust judgment. Treat the poor and the rich alike. Do not go around slandering people. Do not hate your own kin. Reprove your neighbor, because you both are a part of the same community and what each of you does affects the other. Don’t be vengeful; don’t bear grudges. Love your neighbor as yourself. Who could take issue with those things? If this were all that is involved in being holy as the Lord God is holy, most of us would sign on without hesitation. We have Jesus to thank for teaching us that it is not so simple as that. Being right with God involves more than being ritually pure and legally flawless. And we have Paul to thank for hammering home the point that the essence of wholeness or salvation is not the keeping of a set of rules, no matter how sensible. We become holy by participating in the divine nature that Jesus embodies, and which through baptism and life in Christian community he shares with us.

And what is that divine nature, that holiness of God that God invites us into practicing and living? You won’t be surprised if I tell you that it cannot be neatly summed up, will you? No, it cannot be, precisely because the holiness of God stretches through all space and time and oozes as well into every cell of your body. We cannot cram it into the category of moral perfection, or even boil it down to right relationships, for holiness is like the source of all the energy in the universe, driving the entire cosmos. We cannot pick out a theme here or an idea there and say that we have laid hands firmly on what it means to be holy, because by its very nature, the holy eludes us. Nor can we reduce holiness to rational ideas or concepts, because what Otto called “the numinous” is trans-rational, mysterious, beyond our ability to describe and prescribe. If we had to choose some basic element by which to depict holiness, it would doubtless be the metaphor in which holiness most often appears in the Bible: fire. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who saw the world itself as an everlasting ball of fire, the tradition sees the holiness of God as a consuming, purging flame, licking up everything opposed to the nature, truth, and faithfulness of God. So we may well scratch our heads and wonder what on earth or what for God’s sake does God mean by “Be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.”

And yet, among all the ritual regulations and liturgical directions and sexual proscriptions in Leviticus, there is something that arises out of the Holiness Code that beckons us forward and upward in the progression from primal protoplasm to the God-nature shot through with glory. It is generosity. There is something about God that, when all is said and done, is exceedingly kind and generous. The fact that we would even be conscious of such a thing is itself a remarkable gift, for on our best days we realize that this life we are living can be so much better if we are not concerned only with our own safety and livelihood, but with the welfare of others, and that is a godly thing to think. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien, for I the Lord am your God. You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; I am the Lord.” That is not all there is to holiness, but that is a key aspect of it. God’s hand is generously open with every gift humanity could possibly want, let alone deserve. And our hands are to be no less open. For we are to be holy, as the Lord God is holy.

And that brings us to the stretch of weeks which we inaugurate today, a season you have become accustomed to if you have been in this or some other church for much time at all. For this is fall, and it is the time when we talk about money and the virtue of generosity and such things. I want to level with you. I do not mind talking about money (Jesus talked more about it than any other single subject). I do not mind asking you to give generously to St. Stephen’s, where we try our level best to do ministry that we perceive the Body of Christ cannot not do. But I mind very much wrapping an exhortation to give your dollars for ministry in some kind of religious sophistry that constantly edges away from the plain fact that ministry costs. The older I get the more I realize that the things that cost much are not necessarily the things that are worth much, but the things that are worth much frequently cost a great deal. The relationships in my life that make my heart sing require gentle tending and nurturing. The things that I do that make much difference in mine and others’ lives cost time and effort. And the causes and communities that actually help make the world a better place for all God’s creatures deserve as much money as I can possibly share. The practice of stewardship is about nothing else than practicing the virtue of generosity–not just in church and to church, but everywhere. It has to do with how you tip the wait staff and how you give your time and whether you listen to someone else’s story as well as to how you give to St. Stephen and the Incarnation. It has to do with the attitude we have—or don’t have—which cherishes our neighbors the way we cherish ourselves, or ought to cherish ourselves. Generosity is the spark of holiness that lights the way for us to live intentionally the life of the One who says, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011










 

Just Imagine

Ignatian Prayer and Scripture

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

Over the years I have heard about everything in the liturgy criticized for one reason or another. But this week I have wracked my brain trying to recall if I could remember someone’s suggesting that scripture not be read in church. Perhaps there has been such a time, but I cannot recall it. Some have wondered why we read three lessons, as opposed to one or two. Some devotees of The Great Vigil of Easter want to read as much scripture as possible. But virtually no one suggests that we ought to dispense with reading the Bible. The reason to read it seems obvious. It is the sacred story of the Covenant People. Nearly all Christians, although they may disagree on how to read scripture, assume that the Bible has something to say. And if you ask folks what they most want out of a sermon, they will nearly invariably say that they want the preacher to show how the Bible is relevant to ordinary daily life.

Along comes a pair of passages like the ones from Isaiah and Matthew today on the theme of God’s vineyard. The meaning of them is not particularly obscure. The Isaiah passage, sometimes called “The Song of the Vineyard,” describes the House of Israel as God’s vineyard. As the planter and owner, God sees a vineyard that has not lived up to expectations. Instead of bearing lots of fruit, the vines have grown wild grapes. Thus God will destroy the vineyard. The parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew is even less obscure, since Matthew has taken care to put it in allegorical form. The prophets all come to Israel and one by one are rejected. Finally the Son comes and is thrown out of the vineyard and killed. It certainly conforms to what Matthew knew was the story and fate of Jesus.

Although their meaning may be fairly plain, what are we to do with passages like these? What are we to make of them? In a larger sense, this is the perennial question facing the community of faith in every generation: what are we to make of any scripture? How do we use it? How does it inform our life? One sermon, of course, cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of interpreting scripture. What I’d like to do today is to look at the way this image of the vineyard is used and to see what that has to tell us about hearing the message of scripture in general.

I

Picture a singer standing at the entrance of the Columbia Heights Metro station, singing something that sounds like a ballad. She begins with what sounds like an ancient couplet, “I will sing a song for my friend, a song of love for his vineyard.” We don’t have to know much about vineyards in Washington, DC, for such a singer to get our attention. What we need is for the singer to be good—good enough to get a couple of people per hour to pause and listen. But she is better than good. She is amazing. She halts our rush to Target or to Starbucks just to pause and listen to the sweet strains blending words and melody. By the time she gets to the second verse, we begin to realize that this is a tragic poem that she is singing. She begins to sing of how her friend who owns the vineyard despairs of vines that only produce sour grapes, good for nothing but to be spat out. The intent listener begins to wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Is the story about some disease that has invaded the vineyard? Is the singer an environmentalist making a point about the dangers of pesticides? We listen on. The riddle is solved, but in a way that is alarming. We, say singer and and song, we the people of Washington are the vineyard. And the lover who so sweetly planted us is the Author and Giver of Life. We are the ones who are his darlings. Then, in a plaintive, haunting lament, the singer ends the song, and by now several dozen people have stopped to listen. The vineyard planter looks to us to have produced justice but instead found only injustice. Instead of right relationships, he hears only a cry, only a cry. Only a cry. The singer stops, slips through the crowd and is gone.

Who was that singer? Where did she come from? Is she just another religious nut stirring up guilt? Shouldn’t we know the name of someone who is that good a singer? Her song hangs in the air; and the ending: what can we do about the ending? We walk away, not knowing exactly what, and get it out of our heads by continuing up the street, avoiding a street vender, ducking into Tynan’s for a cup of coffee, eventually being absorbed in the wave of people oblivious to anything but their own lists.

Look at what has happened, just in the last two or three minutes. A text—or even the oblique reference to a text—has caught our attention and in some way begun to work on us. You know what that experience is like because you have had it. You have seen a movie that has done slightly less than change your life, but that has entered your mind like hot steel, cleaving your soul, leaving you wondering, wondering. Or you have read a book that you can’t quite let go. That is what Isaiah intends to do. As he proceeds to show, the Song of the Vineyard was simply to get the attention of Israel so that they could identify with the plight of the vineyard, take responsibility for their own devastation, and know that the One to whom they owed their life was none other than Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah then proceeds to articulate a series of woes—seven in all—that implicitly indict those who have betrayed the covenant by undermining right relationships and by subverting justice. And why does he do all that? Ultimately his aim is to bring his hearers around to changing. It could be said that he is foretelling the future, and that might be true. But equally likely, he is describing a situation that is unmistakably true and present in the community’s life. His short-term goal is to proclaim the absolute trustworthiness and righteousness of God. His long-term goal is to bring the people into a renewed covenant relationship with God.


II

Jesus might or might not have told the parable of the wicked tenants the way we hear it in Matthew’s gospel. An older version appears in Mark. Unlike most of the parables it is an allegory, wherein everything and everybody represents a person or an idea or an event. Whatever else Jesus did, it is quite likely that he used the image of the vineyard straight from Isaiah to make his point. His hearers, the authorities of Israel, knew well enough the Song of the Vineyard. But Jesus introduces the figures of tenants, suggesting that the problem was not the vineyard at all, which unlike Isaiah’s vineyard, produced perhaps bumper crops of good grapes. The problem was rather that those who had tenancy of the vineyard were scoundrels. When slaves come from the owner to collect the produce, the tenants beat them up. Finally the owner sends his son, who he is sure the tenants will perforce respect. Wrong! The tenants, perhaps knowing that as tenants they have rights of possession, proceed to assassinate the one who stands in their way, the heir.

As a good storyteller, Jesus then sets up his hearers for the inevitable response. What will the owner do? The answer is obvious. He will avenge the death of his son! He will put the tenants to death, the hearers answer (Jesus does not comment on that!) and lease the vineyard to other tenants who would give him his produce in due season.
Then Jesus does something that later tradition was to make much of. He quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” He does not spell out the allegory but tells plainly its meaning. The kingdom of God will be taken away from the religious leaders (the tenants) and given to a people producing the fruits of the kingdom. He then issues a not-so-oblique threat, saying that the “stone” that was “rejected” will cause anyone who falls on it (stumbles upon it) to be broken to pieces and anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.

So here is another way that scripture is used. A metaphor, the rejected stone, referred to in scripture, is mined out of its setting and used to drive home a point, in this case a prophetic warning. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point all right. They know that he is talking about them. And they react with characteristic and predictable rage, determined to arrest Jesus. It is absolutely fair to say that this was indeed the result that Jesus intended. The entire passage in Matthew’s gospel suggests that Jesus intended to press the point with the chief priests and Pharisees—and by extension the ones whom they led—that their days in charge of God’s community were numbered.

The story does not stop there, of course. Either the Church found in the tradition this nugget of a parable traceable to Jesus that it could confirm as a keeper precisely because sooner or later it came true. Or it doctored up the parable to bring it in line with recent events. Either way, it is a story that demonstrates what happens when those in charge of God’s vineyard are faithless, and a story of what happens in history when the rejected one (Jesus) becomes the keystone or cornerstone.






III


But the most important question perhaps is always, “So what”? That is indeed the question that The New Testament is forever addressing. One typical response to those who read the Bible, and especially to these kinds of things in the Bible, is to jump to a moral meaning, a “moral of the story,” as it were. That is not always bad or inappropriate, especially if one gets from Isaiah the message that we need to reform our ways and get ourselves on the side of justice; or if one gets from Matthew the message that we need to produce the fruits of the Reign of God. An unfortunate response that some make is to use such passages as anti-Jewish propaganda, projecting onto present-day Jews the profiles of ancient Israel ironically drawn from texts out of the heart of Israel’s own sacred tradition. A counter-response that liberals typically make is to silence Matthew and others from saying what they have to say because we are embarrassed at what can be and has been construed to be words and images that put Jews in a bad light. Another reaction can easily be that we treat all this material as far too abstruse to be of much use, all the historical issues having been settled, and the symbols and language too incendiary to risk using.

St. Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises uses a method of pondering scripture that could help us here. He takes a passage, like the parable of the wicked tenants, for example, and encourages the listener to move into the content of the passage with one’s senses. What colors, odors, sounds do we hear in the vineyard? And whom do we relate to? The tenants? The slaves? The owner? The son? Typically one uses one’s imagination to move into an experience like that being described, always for the purpose of coming closer to Jesus, clearer in one’s relationship with God. In that way, reading scripture is definitely a form of prayer, a piece of communication with God that is continuous with external life as well as with internal psyche.


IV


If the central question is, “So what?” surely the second question is, “What difference does it make?” What happens when we read scripture imaginatively, opening ourselves up to have the scenes, the words, the ideas make a deep impact upon our consciousness? Little by little—or perhaps on occasion, in a leap—we change, and that is the heart of what the entire gospel is up to. That can probably happen only when we begin to see ourselves in the stories. Are we the poor slaves who are just trying to do the master’s bidding, beaten and abused by the powers we confront? Are we the tenants who have robbed the owner by arrogating to ourselves what does not belong to us? Or are we some of both, depending on which day of the week it is and where we find ourselves in a particular pecking order? What is the Word that God is speaking and that Jesus is embodying right now? And do we rejoice at the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, or become angry and depressed because in so doing he overthrows our own power? It is marvelous in our eyes or noxious to us, quite honestly?

The gospel, indeed the whole Bible, can be good news or bad news for us, depending upon who we are and where we are in any particular story. But that is part of, maybe the biggest part of, the challenge to which we open ourselves by opening the book in the first place. It is the likelihood that when we read or hear the scriptures, we will come to a moment of recognition. A split second later, we may well find ourselves having to decide exactly what we are going to do with this Jesus who shakes our foundations, how we are going to respond to this God who hounds us demanding justice. Such a moment came to the chief priests and Pharisees when they realized that he was speaking about them.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Lows and Highs

Prayer and the Mind of Christ

Philippians 2:1-13

“Son, don’t act like you’re going to die just because you are feeling a little puny,” my mother said on more than one occasion. “You’re just like Uncle George. The minute he got to feeling bad, he was moaning and groaning and telling Aunt Nora that he wasn’t long for this world. Just like him.”

Although I am not one of these people who hasn’t been sick a day in his life, I have been remarkably healthy for the most part for over five decades. Yet when I feel the first scratchiness that presages a sore throat, and especially if I succumb to lying in bed with a virus, as happened twice several winters ago, I begin to hear Mama’s voice overriding my own moaning, “Son, straighten up. You’re just like Uncle George.”

Mine must not have been the only mother who says such things, nor mine the only family where people get pegged as copies of ancestors. We come to this earth not only trailing clouds of glory, but, like the little girl on the Morton salt box, pouring behind us indications of undeniable DNA. I hear myself talking sometimes and have to stop and think if the voice I hear is really mine or if it belongs to my father. Or my mother. Or Uncle George.

In a very real sense, the project of Christianity is the project of changing human beings. As a faith system, Christianity is about transformation, a remolding or remaking the human person to be different. Partly, of course, it has to do with our moral training, despite the fact that many Christians remain dreadfully confused about exactly what is moral. Simply put, the entire effort of the Christian Church is essentially about the creation of a community that so catches the Spirit of Jesus that we manifestly live in a way that is unmistakably like him. Not to put too fine a point on my mother’s dictum, it is as if someone might see or hear us, observe us as individuals or as communities and say, “You’re just like Jesus, no kidding.”

Now the second thing you may want to say to this is, “No way.” The first thing you may want to say is, “But how do we know what Jesus was like? How can we be sure?” Hold on a minute. There is something more fundamental at stake here than our rush to react to what might seem a dubious proposition.

That fundamental something is the fact that Jesus deliberately gathered a community. For the average Christian, this is so unremarkable as to be taken for granted or ignored entirely. But did you ever wonder why the disciples were even necessary? Forget the canned explanations. Ask yourself why Jesus would even have bothered with them. He selected what seems to have been a monumentally obtuse bunch, don’t you think? Yet the tradition is not the least bit in doubt about the fact that Jesus chose a community to share his ministry and in some sense taught them. He did not choose instead to be a lone ranger. Christianity is not about individual projects of personal salvation; it is about a community in where all the members work out their salvation together, even if it means doing so with some trepidation and nervousness. Why? Because we are all in this together. It is the nature of humans to form community because we are interdependent, no matter what some politicians or the financial establishment argue to the contrary.

So when Paul writes to the Philippians, in the warmest epistle he ever wrote to a community, he betrays a certain concern that perhaps they still have the a bit of the Old Adam in them, what Mark Twain called, “ordinary human cussedness.” It was likely coming out in the form of petty jealousies and rivalries, things that are the very best ways to undermine community. Why else admonish them to “be of one mind, being of one love, sharing accord” among themselves? Then he launches into one of the most sublime passages in all his letters, perhaps in the entire New Testament. Maybe he was quoting from a hymn that he knew churches like the one at Philippi frequently sang in their worship. Or maybe it was a creedal poem that he or someone else had written. “Have this mindset, or attitude, or frame of mind,” he writes, and then proceeds to describe the “mind” or “thought” that Jesus had. The community is to exhibit the character of its mentor and master. Or, to borrow from one of Paul’s metaphors elsewhere, the body was to follow where the head led. Since there is plenty of encouragement in Christ, since there is the incentive of love, since there is mutual participation in the life of the Spirit, since there is shared affection, there is plenty of reason and abundant strength on which the Philippians can build a more solid community.

This “mindset” or “orientation” that Jesus had is not so easy to get a grip on. The essence is this: Jesus had every opportunity to be or to remain exalted, since he pre-existed this life as God. But in fact he chose not to “grasp” or “cling” to equality with God, but did the opposite. He emptied himself. The rich for our sake became poor. The powerful divested himself of all power. He submitted himself so thoroughly that he became the willing slave of all, humbling himself to experience the totality of human life, including death itself. And not just any death, but death on a cross, the ultimate badge of rejection and dishonor. It is totally counter-intuitive for human beings even to imitate that, let alone to choose to do it because we want to. Quite the contrary. We are taught, especially in this culture, from day one that the goal of life is to succeed, to acquire, to compete. It is not too much to say that the very narrative of Jesus has been warped and twisted by knaves to seduce many a marginal population into servitude on the strength of the notion that to be relegated to scut work, to be underpaid, to be knocked around and ripped off is to be like Jesus, or at least to be like the poor who he said would be with us always. But the essence of Jesus’ community is not to be cringing dogs who slink away from abusive masters, but rather self-giving individuals whose identity is not what we can get for ourselves but what we can give for others.

The project does not extend only to the people who happen to sit in church on Sundays. It goes well beyond the borders of the community. The Church in fact exists not for itself alone but for the sake of the world that Christ died to save. If he emptied himself, so do we. If he gave his life for the sake of the world, so do we. This is what the Church has not learned terribly well. In many places we still cling to old behaviors and old mindsets, which, though not necessarily divisive and destructive, are desperate measures to hold on to what we have and to who we have been. The model of Christ is just the opposite. Let go, let God, let grace guide us into continually spending ourselves for the sake of the world.

Fine. We can say those things and even maybe believe them for a few moments during a sermon. But how can we actually live them? Can we actually live them? And, if so, how? Notice that Paul, who is no stranger to scolding people, does not wag a homiletical finger at the Philippians trying to shame them into behaving differently. The whole point he is making calls them to ground themselves right where he grounds his argument: in the foundational story of Jesus. Think as he thought. Do as he did. The community can hardly do that without being committed to serious prayer and assiduous practice.

The truth is that if transformation is to happen, we have to open ourselves to the process of change. Prayer pries us open. Praying opens us up, of course, to the suffering of the world when we notice and care enough to intercede for those who hurt and ache, indeed for the entire creation that is groaning in the pain of abuse and misuse. But praying is not just, or even primarily the opener of the soul in that sense. To have the mind that we see in Christ Jesus involves our constantly turning to and gazing upon Jesus himself. Obviously a place to begin is the gospels. But Jesus is not just found there. Jesus is also present when the community gathers to share bread and wine, his body and blood. Yet Jesus is not just there either. Jesus, if you believe what he says, is present when two or three are gathered together in his Name. But Jesus is more than that, too. Jesus is in the faces of the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the marginalized, the condemned, the executed, the hosts of men and women who are dragged through the courts and sentenced to die just as he was. Prayer sharpens both our sense and our senses to behold the Body of Christ in every part and every cell of his creation, each of which bears the unmistakable stamp of the Word which calls all things and all creatures into being. And prayer can also be shutting off the lights, turning down the sensory data, stilling the tongue, putting down the pen, pulling the shades down so that we, retreating into our deepest selves, meet the One who is resplendently alive in the heart of darkness and silence. It is not one kind of prayer or the other, but both. Activists need contemplatives and contemplatives need activists, and no matter which we are, we probably need to practice some of what does not come so easily to us in our prayer, just so that we can learn something of the fullness of him who emptied himself and submitted to death.

It is interesting that the Philippians hymn goes on to say that God has highly exalted Jesus as a consequence of his self-emptying. God has given him a Name that is above every Name, that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father. You may think that that piece of it has nothing to do with you. And perhaps you are right, inasmuch as it really goes beyond what Paul is saying about unity in the Church. But maybe there is something embedded in this old hymn, this majestic poem that is so true that it goes beyond even the confines of the Jesus story. Maybe the Truth, as heavy as gravity itself, is caught up in the paradox that giving is oddly the way of receiving; that abasement is followed by exaltation; that emptying oneself of power and prestige is the true road to glory, not just for Jesus but for all. Don’t count on the world to document that terribly finely. But every once in awhile somebody bothers to believe it and it makes all the difference. You can almost count them on your fingers and toes, they are so rare. Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, St. Margaret, St. Elizabeth,… No, you can’t count them. The numbers stack up. There are more than you would think, more than you can number. Some are sitting right here who have given up a day to be arrested in the cause of justice or who have given up an evening to intercede for Troy condemned to die, who have gone to Israel to wage peace, who slug it out for the spurned immigrant. Long grows the list of ways in which ordinary folk do not count themselves as the darlings of God, but empty themselves and become obedient to the most human of all things, the leveler Death. Wherefore their names, united to the Immortal Son of God, are written in heaven.

© Frank Gasque Dunn

Ten Years After 9/11/01

The following is a speech I made at the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, on September 16, 2001. I shared the program with at least a dozen other clergy, most of whom invoked the Bible as a warrant for retaliation against the enemy. It was assumed by nearly everyone there that we would certainly go to war, which turned out to be accurate. But that is not the only thing that was accurate, as it turned out.



I speak in the name of God, the Creator of all, the Redeemer of all, the Sanctifier of all.

When the nation was clamoring for revenge and retaliation for civilian American lives tragically slaughtered by the enemy, and every avenue to avert war had been exhausted, the President of the United States signed the Declaration of War. Then he put his head down on the cabinet table and wept.

The President was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1917. And the day was Good Friday.

America entered a war that had begun with a terrorist act: an organized assassination. It was the cruelest and ghastliest of all wars this planet had ever known. You can read the Books of Remembrance in British churches and see page after page of names of young men who were slaughtered in the trenches of France. Literally a generation of the young was wiped out in the horror that ensued.

I don’t know why the President wept on that Good Friday afternoon. Did he weep for himself? Did he weep for America? Maybe it was because he knew, as he told a veteran news correspondent and editor, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance….” Or was it because he sensed the deep irony that on that very day when the Christian world was remembering the death of Jesus, he was signing the death warrant for Christ to die all over again in young doughboys who would lie beneath crosses in places like Flanders Field?

We meet today at the monument of the turning point of another great war. We meet in a town where an incredible number of young lives were wiped out in an invasion that ultimately would mean liberation from a regime of unprecedented horror and evil. America entered that war only when, on a quiet sunny morning, enemy bombs had made mincemeat of The United States fleet. President Roosevelt was outraged. The country was shocked. December 7, 1941, is still a day that lives in infamy.

Today we are faced with another momentous occasion. This time, another sneak attack. This time, an act of obscene hatred and violence carried out again against unarmed citizens. But this time, a complicated enemy hard to detect, difficult to pin down, capable of cloning its own violence hundreds of times. And an enemy convinced in righteous indignation that it has God on its side; that its acts of terror and destruction are not only justified but also holy; that its program of retaliation is compelling enough for its warriors gladly to yield their lives to fiery deaths, so right they are.

I talk today about history because human history is exactly what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands to be the sphere of God’s activity. And if we are going to speak about God, we have to look at history, God’s lesson book.

What have we learned? One lesson that we have learned is that violence breeds more violence, and terror begets more terror. We cannot play into that! If, in the best judgment of our leaders, this nation must engage in military action, no doubt the country will support them—no doubt at all. But do not be deluded into believing that that violence will not come at great cost! Far more than the lives we will lose in any one military action, the cost will spiral into an ever-broadening wildfire of hatred and revenge. Through our cries for retaliation and revenge, in so many throats this week, we need to hear and heed the words of Ghandi. He said, “If we live by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be both blind and toothless.” Pour out instead your prayers for peace and healing as you have never done before. Envision a world wrapped in its Mother’s arms. If this dreadful attack is a wake up call, let it rouse us to double our efforts for peace: peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace for our planet.

What have we learned? We have learned that religious intolerance and hatred, no matter of what stripe, are tools of evil. Hear me carefully. I speak in the name of the Prince of Peace. If we, individually and as a nation, turn against one another in disrespect and outright hatred, we are replicating the same bigotry and self-righteousness of the terrorists themselves. There is no difference between Islamic fanaticism and Jewish fanaticism and Christian fanaticism except the labels. All are life denying and peace shattering. God calls all people of this world into unity with God and one another. Let there be no place in this society, under attack in part because of our openness and acceptance, for finger pointing and blame laying and scapegoating. Reach out in support to Arab Americans. Join with Muslims as with all others in the family of religions and assure them of your good will. Live with courage the words of the hymn, “Who loves the Father as his child is surely kin to me.”

What have we learned? We have learned that God shows up at the least likely of times and in the worst stenches imaginable. Julia Ward Howe wrote that we have seen God in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. Well, this week we have seen the face of God: in exhausted firefighters, in strangers reaching out to hold the grieving, in physicians and nurses and technicians aiding the wounded, in hands digging down into the rubble to clear a path for life where there is life. “Where charity and love dwell, God is truly there.” In the Persian Gulf War, when some Iraqi soldiers finally came out of their bunkers expecting to be killed by Americans, they found themselves instead washed and fed and treated humanely. That is the spirit of Christ. That is the face of God.

What we have yet to learn is that Jesus was not joking when he said, “Love your enemies.” “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.” That is the lesson that the world needs to hear, and that is the way to the healing that we so deeply seek.

Whatever the reason, President Wilson was right to weep, just as he was right to sign the Declaration of War. Sometimes we have to do what we most fear. But, in the end, if we are as open, as humble, as loving as we can be, then, in the long march of history the world will become as God created it to be: free, and whole.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Good Behavior

Praying and Living Forgiveness

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

When I was in elementary school, we got report cards every six weeks. Six weeks zooms by now, but in those days it was like a semester, a term of months on end. As the weeks dragged by, I was never ever worried about what grades I would get; but sometimes I sweat bullets about what comments the teacher would write on the back. The word “conduct” named the category that was my greatest challenge. Teachers would threaten to write bad reports to parents if we talked out of turn, broke into line at lunch or recess, took up unnecessary class time with silliness, or were generally impolite to other students. I am not sure what would have happened had we spoken disrespectfully to a teacher herself. Such was so far from anybody’s mind that it was never discussed.

One grading period, my second grade teacher, Eva Stone Long, otherwise known as “Sister Long,” wrote a comment on the back of my report card. Among a couple of compliments, she noted, and I quote verbatim, “…likes to talk too much.” I was horrified. Not because it was not true, of course, but because I knew I would catch it when my parents read it. And I was totally right. Interestingly, I cannot remember what Mama said, although I am sure it was plenty. But Daddy, I recall, virtually came uncorked. The message I got from his protracted lecture was that it was fine to make any grade I made, but what would never ever do was to get a “conduct” comment. The least I could do, he pronounced, was to go to school and behave.

Good behavior generally means conforming to somebody’s idea of deportment, like Mrs. Long’s. Those of you who have grown up in a more permissive society probably have no idea of the weight that people my age and older (and maybe some a few years younger) carry around in the form of ethical baggage. It really isn’t ethical, of course. It is internalized fear of being called down for misbehaving. Now, to be sure, some people have escaped that heavy burden by kicking over the traces and becoming utter nonconformists. Such people are not likely to show up in church, not at least until they have made a bit of peace with social expectations, even in a rather freewheeling place like St. Stephen’s. And the reason is rather obvious. They see the Church as being in the business of policing people’s behavior, and they don’t necessarily want theirs to be policed. It is all right, of course, for the Church, like other institutions—school and court, for example—to nurture good behavior in other people (including our children) inculcating in them good behaviors and sharpening their distaste for bad. At the same time, this idea that the Church is all about making people nice and culture gentler is exactly what draws some people to it.

Something is terribly, tragically wrong with all this. And it is wrong not because there is anything the matter with being nice and well behaved (I want to say nothing to discourage either), but because we have somehow managed to warp the notion of good behavior to mean conforming to prevailing social expectations and specifically to exclude several kinds of behaviors that Jesus seem to think were pretty important. One of those practices is forgiveness, a theme that fills our scriptures today. I do not mean to say that forgiveness is not integrated into the fabric of societal expectations, because to some extent it is. Polite society expects that folks will apologize for oversights and mistakes, and that generally those apologies will be accepted. But forgiveness in the radical sense described in today’s gospel or in the Genesis story about Joseph and his brothers is far past anything that can be described as accepting an apology. It comes out of a different way of looking at reality. It reflects values so qualitatively different from our cultural norms that this kind of forgiveness can be rightly called subversive.

As some of you are aware, my sermons this year all look at the practice of prayer from some angle, and today’s focus on forgiveness is no exception. In its simplest state, prayer is practicing the presence of God. It is practicing being Godlike. Right there emerges some boundaries of what we do and do not pray for. To the extent that we know anything about the nature of God—and we Christians claim to know a right good bit, inasmuch as we have identified Jesus as the embodiment of God—we can say with assurance that one does not pray for the destruction of one’s enemies for example. No, one may pray for protection, for the enemy to have a change of heart, for strength to withstand the assaults of the enemy; but the Christian stops short of praying for the destruction of enemies for the simple reason that Christ commanded us to love them. He did not, by the way, suggest that we do so because it would be immediately rewarding or because it would save us lots of time resolving conflicts or yet because it would be a popular practice or easy.

The parable of the unforgiving slave is crystal clear. The slave is enjoined to treat his fellows as the master has treated him. God shows mercy on us, therefore we show mercy on others. “Forgive us our sins” is a prayer that is predicated on the assurance that we will forgive those who sin against us. Now how it is that we can pray such a thing day after day, week after week, year in and year out, while harboring grudges, driving wedges between ourselves and others, collecting injustices, hating those who have wronged us is, well, not so big a mystery. Quite simply, we do not believe what we say. We do not believe what we pray. And when we come right down to it, we don’t believe Jesus.

Need I point out that ten years ago today the People of the United States of America—certainly not without exception, but on the whole—gave to their government permission to wreak vengeance on our enemies. You may argue that the teachings of Jesus are no way to conduct a foreign policy, and I suspect Jesus would indeed agree with you, disinterested as he was in the foreign policies of empires. But that does not get us off the hook, because the hook is consistency and honesty. If you are going to wage war, wage war; but don’t try to baptize it and call it “Christian.” It you are going to hate your enemy, whoever he or she is, go ahead and hate; but don’t turn around and expect that God will show you mercy when you show none yourself. Punish your enemy if you must; but be aware that it leaves you defenseless when you pray a hollow prayer, “…as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

That is strong stuff! You will no doubt point out to me that nobody can live this way; that the nation would be in tatters if we tried it and your own life would be untenable if you risked it. Moreover, I suspect that some sitting right here could point out that the preacher today has no earthly idea of what it is to suffer untold abuse at the hands of tormentors, that your own experience of victimhood qualifies you as an exception to the ethic of forgiveness. Fair enough. I could respond by saying, “You know, you’re right. This is too hard a teaching to take really seriously. It is after all an ideal, one of those many that the gospel—indeed the Bible—is packed with. God, being really sweet, has no intention of making us feel bad about our propensity to hate, but wants us rather to feel quite affirmed. Thus, the notion of being forgiving is a nice one but altogether unworkable, a fact of which our Omniscient God must surely be aware.” And so forth.

But something else is in play here. Look at it this way. Why do you suppose that God would actually care whether we are forgiving or not? What does it matter? Why would Jesus have put so much emphasis on forgiveness? For an answer to those questions, I turn to the last chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph and his brothers finally come to terms about the brothers’ dreadful misbehavior in selling him into slavery and then lying about it, and Joseph’s response to it all. Years have passed since the brothers conspired to get rid of their pesky little arrogant sibling. Still more years have passed since famine had driven them from Canaan to Egypt in search of grain, only to find there that the presumably lost Joseph has become vizier to Pharaoh. All this while the brothers have had an uneasy conscience about their guilt, and now with the buffer of their old father gone, they wonder if Joseph will cash in on the grudge he might rightly bear against them. So they first send him a message, restating what the old man had said about how Joseph ought forgive their trespass. Joseph responds by weeping. They get up the courage to go see him, and kneeling down, present themselves as his slaves. Then Joseph says something profound. “What you meant for evil against me, God meant for good.” With that statement the story utters a profound truth. God is bigger than our projects and prejudices. In the long sweep of human activity—indeed of the world itself—the very guilt behind the heinous crime, the evil intention, the awful deceit: God has pulled all this together into the great pageant of salvation in which nothing is lost. Through the whole tragedy, God has caused a remnant to be saved, bringing long-term good out of short-term evil. Joseph thus has no effective choice but to forgive his brothers, for to do otherwise would be to pose himself against the very Word that God had already spoken.

We do, I hope, get the message: that forgiveness is the very nature of God, because God’s purposes are always to bring about good. That is what the world cannot give through the machinations of empire and the assertion of one group or one person over another. For God’s good to happen on a human scale inevitably entails more than a few Josephs who can see beyond the moment to the overarching Providence that holds all souls in life and all the world in its healing embrace.

That is the real ethical agenda of the Church. It is to continue to be the community that God has created to express this urgent push towards life, to embody the fierce compulsion to save. One cannot join or long belong to the forces of good if one’s focus shifts from forgiveness to revenge, from community to tribalism, from merciful to unmerciful. God’s work is healing and wholeness, and so the vocation of Joseph and of you and me is that same healing and wholeness that conquers hate and evil, bit by bit, when we live the words we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Desperate Housewife

Prayer and Desperation

Matthew 15:21-28

America’s Four Gods is the name of a book I am reading. It is an intriguing investigation into what we as a people say about God and what that says about us. The authors, sociologists, in their research discovered that there are five types of people in this country when you divvy them up according to what they think about God. There are those that perceive God as authoritative, those who believe in a God who is benevolent, a third group who thinks of God as critical, another bunch for whom God is distant, and the fifth group who are atheists and don’t believe in God at all.

I suspect that, like many typologies, this one breaks down at several points. I simply say so based on the fact that I am not so sure I have only one basic view of God, but rather an image of God that shifts and changes depending on the day of the week. I doubt that I am alone. Still, the authors make a persuasive case that these four notions or images of God are swimming around in the minds of people in our culture, and that they have a great deal to do with the arguments we have in this country generally called “culture wars.”

It is not so much on culture wars that I’d like for us to focus today as it is the question of what idea we have of God and how that affects the way we pray. I should pause to point out to a great many of you who have joined us in the last several months that my year-long project in preaching is to look at each Sunday’s scriptures with a view to what light they can shed on the practice of prayer, a quintessential religious activity that we sometimes don’t understand very well.

There probably is no story in the New Testament that better illustrates the crisis of prayer than the gospel lesson we have today. The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel (15:21-28) has a serious problem. In fact she is desperate. Her little daughter is demon possessed. But on top of that, the woman is an outsider, not in her own territory—that was Gentile and so is she—but because she stands outside Israel, and thus separated from the source of healing that Jesus brings. He is, as her address indicates, “Son of David.” If the woman were American, and were studied by the sociologists Froese and Bader to find out where she landed on the God question, it is quite likely that she would fall in the group that sees God as benevolent, engaged in the affairs of humans, but not a punitive, judging God.

How could we make that guess? Well, if her notion of God were that God is authoritative and thus judgmental, she would more than likely believe that he daughter was demon possessed as repayment for something the daughter or mother or somebody had done to anger God. If she believed in a critical God, likewise she would see that God was judgmental, but she would hardly believe that God had time to intervene on her behalf. If her view of God were that God is distant, God would be neither interested in her plight nor judgmental, but utterly unconnected with what was happening in her life. As it is in Matthew’s version of the story, the woman cries after Jesus and pesters the disciples with her cries and pleas. The disciples want her gone. Jesus does not answer her. Yet the woman keeps it up. Finally she gets a word from Jesus. It is not clear in the story whether it is to the disciples or to her that he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” but either way that does not stop her. She comes and kneels in front of him, in the posture of worship and implores him, “Lord, help me.”

There are only three prayers—“help,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” So the Canaanite woman’s is pretty direct. “Lord, help me.” We could make up all kinds of things about the woman that might or might not reflect who she was. We don’t in fact know if she was rich or poor or somewhere in between; whether she was a single parent or not; whether she had other problems and issues or not; whether she had done anything else or seen anybody else to secure help for her daughter. But the point of this story is not to report a historical incident, nor to inspire speculation about the woman. The point is that this outsider, this Gentile woman, this mother, in her desperation takes Jesus on and stands toe to toe with him. So when for reasons best known to himself Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” she is undeterred. She comes back at him giving him as good as she gets from him: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Much else can be said about this woman and her role in Jesus’ life and ministry. But skip all that and simply look at her tussle with Jesus, for that is what prayer is, isn’t it? Is the woman not you in some hour of your own desperation? Is she not one of us, determined not to give up fighting for one utterly dependent on her and whose cause is a matter of life or death? Although Jesus is for us a divinity unseen, our prayers to him—to God—the two are interchangeable for the purposes of our discussion—our problem is that the concealed God is hard to get ahold of, hard to get an answer from, hard to move into action. That is of no great importance perhaps until the situation gets desperate, and then we’ll take whatever crumb we can get. Our Canaanite friend reminds us to beat God’s door down, to pester the living daylights out of disciples and saints and onlookers that stand in the way, or who look at us askance, or who try to shoo us in another direction. She exhorts us to stop at nothing until we get satisfaction from this unresponsive God who seems to mistake human beings for dogs!

OK. That is putting it a bit harshly, I admit, and maybe taking it all a little too far. But I think there is some warrant for believing that the story actually addresses the issue of desperation in prayer. From Luke’s gospel we can take a lesson from the little parable sometimes called “the importunate widow,” who pestered the unjust judge until he granted her request just so she would shut up. How much more, asked Jesus, will God grant justice to the ones who cry to God day and night? That message seems consistent with the Canaanite woman’s experience: keep on and don’t lose heart.

When we are desperate, someone hardly has to convince us to pull all the stops out. And more and more people are getting desperate as they approach the drowning point amid the tumultuous waves of this economy. People are losing jobs right and left. They are short of cash. They are out of food. They have no money for essential medicine. They are maybe a paycheck or two away from being unable to pay their mortgages or their rent or their electric bills. What has all that to do with prayer? Those who believe that God is engaged in the world, who believe God actually takes note of what is going on, whose eye is on the sparrow, have no trouble understanding that this is not a theoretical problem. And those who believe in a benevolent God—whose love is enduring and whose mercy is endless—do not get snagged by the notion that problems accrue because we have somehow angered a wrathful deity, much as one might foolheartedly arouse the anger of a mother bear by threatening one of her cubs. But what if you believe in a distant, impersonal, detached God? Do we need to convince you that prayer works? Do you need me to demonstrate how in your own desperate circumstances God is available and engaged?

The deeper I get into this, the more I realize that the way we pray—especially when we are between a rock and a hard place—is directly related to who and what we believe we are praying to. If you believe that God is actively involved in the world and in our lives; if you can even allow for the possibility that God cares about what is happening to you and me; then it does not matter much which of the four God-camps you belong to, God invites you to grapple with God and pour your heart out doing so. No room for niceties here, the careful phrasing of a collect or the beauty of liturgy. Just go to it. Pray, “Help, Lord, help!” If your God is distant and you have trouble seeing what sense it makes to pray, well, pray in whatever way you can, not in whatever way you can’t.

Maggie Ross, who is an Anglican solitary, wrote a book some years ago that I cannot part with, called The Fire of Your Life. In it she says that when she was living in Manhattan she had trouble praying and asked a friend what she should do. “Oh,” he said, “pray for things like taxicabs when you need them. If it makes you feel safer, don’t ask God for them, but pray to something inanimate like a fire hydrant.” So Maggie says that she spent several weeks experimenting with that and, when she was late for an appointment, she would pray to the nearest fire hydrant for a cab. Taxis would appear from nowhere. If ten people were along the block signaling for a cab, the one taxi that appeared would pull right in front her. She could get taxis at rush hour, in the rain, on the Friday of a three-day weekend. Then there ensued the dark night of the taxicab, and the joke was over.

That may seem bizarre to you, but I think I understand it. The reality of God has little to do with what we think of God—and that is true no matter what one of the groups, including atheist, that you might fall into. Prayer is giving ourselves over, heart and soul, to the great Mystery of the universe, crying out our need, doing what the Canaanite woman did when she interceded for her daughter, clamoring in the darkness for the Bread of Life or for healing. That God would turn and listen, respond, get with us in our weakness, hear our panic and soothe our fears is as improbable as praying to a fire hydrant would produce a taxi. But time after time, person after person, reports that it is true. For those who doggedly stick to their notion of God—whether that God is a strict judge or a critical impersonal deity or a remote force not interested in us—it takes perhaps more of a leap than they are willing to take. In the end, it does not matter what you think or what I think. Reality is reality. And until we throw ourselves on the mercy of the universe tossing ourselves upon the breast of the universe’s God, we’ll never know what works or what does not.

But you and I both know that it is not so simple as all that. At the end of the day we cannot just pray in desperation expecting God to appear out of the sky to rescue us from all our ills. A friend of mine once said that it is easier for the Holy Spirit to get you somewhere if you are already in motion, not inert. If you are hungry, either for bread or for spiritual sustenance, do something about it. Probe, investigate, ask, seek. Keep moving, talking, looking. If you are looking for work, network, talk, do all that you can to keep moving. If the Canaanite woman had sat at home and said her prayers and done nothing else, chances are her daughter would never have been healed. When she got herself up and out and on the street, determined to find the healer who could help her, she found Jesus and eventually got the assistance she sought.

And perhaps that is what prayer mostly is anyway. It is not technique or formula or theology or philosophy. It is simply moving into the Presence with audacity and courage. It is wrestling and struggling with whatever is tormenting us and giving voice to the deepest desires and yearnings of our hearts. It is taking God to task without fear and without groveling. It is letting fly with gusto and doing everything we can with the energy we have. It is when she did that that our Canaanite friend heard his word, “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done to you as you desire.”

Who knows? Will you push on and out of desperation until you hear that too?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Hope Springs

My very first sermon in seminary was on the text Romans 8:18-25. Somewhere in the bottom of the barrel I probably still have it. But I don’t have to dig it out and re-read it to remember most of what I said. Like many a fledgling preacher, I did my best to do justice to the text, and did my darnedest to make it interesting to my theoretical hearers. Many people would say that, when it comes to St. Paul, you can do one or the other but not both. Either you can unzip his writing and do your best to figure out what he was talking about; or you can seize some spark that flies off his words and use it to shed some light on contemporary life or perhaps to create some heat of excitement about God or Jesus that people can get worked up about. But it is highly unlikely that the preacher can do both these things.

So, lest you mistake my purpose in preaching today,I am going to let you in on the fact up front that I would like to spark you to get fired up about the gospel if you already aren't, excited about Christian living, enthusiastic about what Jesus Christ means for you and your world. And to come quickly to the point, the key to the message I hear is this verse, which I translate slightly differently from what you have already heard: “When an object of hope is seen, there is no further need for hope. Whoever hopes for what one sees already? But if we hope for something that we do not see, we wait for it patiently.” This slice of Romans is about hope, and that is where we begin.

One of the reasons that a number of people have great difficulties with St. Paul is that their view of life is so different from his that much of what he says makes little sense to them. I might also point out that one of the reasons that some people love St. Paul is that they assume what he is talking about is what they are talking about—and that he therefore agrees with them. But the truth is that Paul’s outlook on the world, history, and the future are hardly at all in sync with what the average person—even the average Christian person—even the biblical literalist—thinks and believes in the 21st century. In short, Paul believes that Jesus Christ, especially through his death and resurrection, has brought about the swift end of the world as we know it and has inaugurated an age that is radically new. Paul has sense enough to know that the world “as we know it” has by no means disappeared. He believes, however, that it is on its way to conclusion. Christ has made possible an entry into a new age by those who believe in him. This is not a matter of going to heaven when you die, as a great many people would in time come to believe. It is a matter of living a qualitatively different kind of life here and now, a life that will continue past death but which begins not at death but with our union with Christ through baptism.

If you will stop and think about that for a minute, I believe you will recognize that you have heard something like that before. It is not entirely strange language. But it surely is different from what a lot of folks think Christianity is about. It is clearly not about living a pretty decent life with the hope that you will be rewarded with eternal life in heaven when you finally die. And it is definitely not about having God at your beck and call so that when you have a physical or spiritual need God will jump to answer you the way you want. All of that may be fine, but it certainly is not what Paul has in mind.

Now it is important to see that the core of what Paul is driving at if we are to understand anything much about hope. If for Paul, hope is not about going to be with Jesus when you die, let alone doing so because you have been good and deserve to live in heaven forever, neither is hope about extending your prosperity or your influence or your position here on earth. Hope is what keeps us going towards the realization, the fulfillment, of this new age that Jesus has begun. Hope has to do with the redemption of our bodies from the old world—the one we presently live in—and the transition of our bodies to the new world, a world which he describes as “glory.” That world is indeed a world that has not yet fully come into being. And it is indeed a world that, like Christ himself, will never end. We are on our way to its fulfillment, but be sure of one thing: that world has already begun. We, if we are “children of God,” believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, are right now living in it.

All this is not a matter for preachers and theologians to slug out. It has practical impact for everything the Christian does from Monday through Saturday, as it were. Now here is the thing: you do not have to understand or even agree with Paul’s world view in order to see that the important dynamic here is hope. Paul sees hope as not just a factor in human psychology—the thing that keeps us moving towards a better future that we can imagine either in this or some other world—but a dynamic built into the very fabric of the universe itself. He sees that the entire natural world, while marked by a bondage to decay and death, is groaning in anticipation of being renewed, liberated, brought into a new life of freedom that the children of God share through Jesus. That is important for a couple of reasons. One is that the natural world is not just a disposable playground for the human race, but is itself thoroughly redeemed through Christ and therefore has some lasting importance. I don’t know that we can argue that Paul sees the world as being put in good shape the way modern ecologists would imagine that, but it certainly has an importance that rules trashing it totally unacceptable.

The question is: what are we hoping for, as Christians, and what difference does our hope make? If we take Paul seriously—even if we have a different view of the world from his—it seems to me that we will see that the essence of our hope is for a radically different future for ourselves and for our world. When Paul goes to spell out what Christians actually practice, he uses such phrases as “walking by the Spirit.” By that he means that we give our allegiance to a Christ who brings us into a life that is vastly different from the way the world ordinarily lives. Instead of greediness, it is a life of sharing. Instead of a life of self-preservation, we live lives of compassion. Rather than a life of fear, it is a life of confidence. We do not behave inconsiderately or arrogantly, but with understanding. We understand that whatever sufferings we endure for the sake of living this life in union with the Risen Lord are nothing compared with the glory that we are on our way to sharing fully, as little by little our very selves are transformed. Rather than being motivated by the fears and divisions and ethnic clashes and economic fluctuations and political rivalries that fill the workaday world, we are directed by the Spirit of God that lives within us, producing such things as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Day by day we hope to live more of God’s life and less of a godless life. And we see ourselves moving into a future that looks more and more like the risen Christ. Paul calls it “glory.”

So our hope is not about pie in the sky by and by. It is about a thorough transformation of life right now, not because we think that by living in a new way we will gain eternal life, but precisely because living in this new way is eternal, unending life. That kind of hope cannot help but make a tremendous difference in the way we view the meaning of our lives. And the more we live in this kind of hope the more the whole world changes. The more we practice working for justice in the world, the more just the world becomes. The more we struggle for equality for all those who are oppressed, the more equitable the world becomes. The more we give ourselves to be living sacrifices, totally dedicated to God’s purposes, the more light shines through even our cracked places, illuminating the world with God’s goodness. When we bless those who persecute us, when we love our enemies for the sake of Christ, the more we add to the total energy of Christ in the world. When we live as peacemakers and reconcilers rather than warmongers and hotheads, the more chance of the world reflecting the Spirit of God more strongly.

Be ablaze with light and joy as you live out this hope! The darker things get, whether economically or politically or socially, the more the world needs you to walk by the Spirit in the apparently foolish hope that your life can make the world a better place for all God’s children and creatures. Keep the vision of the future before you, and don’t let those who pit tribe against tribe, race against race, who rouse the rabble for their own ends, enlist you in their service. Remember your baptism, and spend as much time as you can making every life you touch feel the glory of the Spirit of God which is the love which lives in you. Let every pain you ever feel unite you to the suffering of the Lord Christ, and turn each ache into a new occasion to shower compassion on the aching world.

About the bleakest, most hopeless novel I have read in the last few years is one by that wonderful author Cormac McCarthy. It is called The Road, and pictures the world after an apocalyptic catastrophe has destroyed civilization. A father and son cling together against terror and the constant specter of death as they pursue the long road to the sea. Their very journey is a journey of hoping against hope that they can somehow find a way to survive, drawing on everything they have ever learned and all that they can remember. At the end of the road is death, but also the promise of life in the form of a small human community that might be able to make a new start. It is small, but it is a hope. Most of the time, thank God, our lives have not come to quite so stark a place. But even if they should, we have those things that abide—faith, hope, and love—and the one that keeps us moving towards God’s future is hope.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Numbers Game

Trinitarian Musings

In a remote forest miles from the nearest Guatemalan village, on a windy and downright cold morning in August five years ago, I stood in a group of indigenous people, descendants of the ancient Mayans, curious about the religious rite I was about to witness. They had a great idea on that cold morning during the rainy season, also known as “invierno” or winter there, and that was to build a bonfire. Shivering in my summer clothes, I could hardly wait. Women clad in colorful native cottons, began laying the fire, placing incense discs in a cruciform pattern. They scattered ample grain around the circle that was to be the base of the fire. On top of that they placed the pastel petals of bunches of chrysanthemums. After the wood was gathered and laid on the fire, shamans, including at least one woman, oversaw the burning of various objects—including cigars, beans, coffee, grain, and various liquid drinks, all poured on the sacred fire. Facing in turn the four directions, the assembly invoked the winds and the gods, summoned the spirits of the ancestors, and ultimately had what looked to me like a Christian healing service, the shamans taking persons one at a time and laying on hands over their whole bodies, praying for healing, prosperity, success, wholeness.

It didn’t feel so strange to me, this ceremony with roots more ancient than Christianity. Partly, no doubt, that was because it included any number of elements contributed by Roman Catholicism and various other Christian expressions from the past several centuries. I came away with the distinct feeling that I had worshiped that morning, though the language was one I did not know and various ritual practices were outside my experience. I would not want to do those modern Mayans a disservice by calling their ceremony “Christian,” because it clearly wasn’t. And yet I recognized elements of my own community’s practice, including the building of the New Fire at the Great Vigil of Easter, that bore out the fact that so many religious symbols and practices are the dances that human beings do around One God.

And that brings me to the occasion we are here to celebrate today: Trinity Sunday. Anglican Christians have been rather reserved in celebrating doctrines and dogmas. The Book of Common Prayer makes some provision for celebrating Corpus Christi, for example, but ten to one, half of you don’t miss it or even know what it is about. No reflection on you; that is just par for the Anglican course. Not so with the Trinity. Every year, joining with most liturgical Christians, we celebrate the Blessed Trinity a week after Pentecost Day. Most of the time, in my experience, preachers on Trinity Sunday either try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity or complain that it is so hopelessly complex that there is no earthly use in trying to do so. Both approaches, frankly, irritate me to the point that I usually arrange to take Trinity Sunday off, or, if not, like today, preach on it myself.

I presume to understand what the doctrine of the Trinity is driving at, which is different from saying that I presume to understand the Trinity. But understanding is not my aim today, but rather what I would call encouragement—or perhaps exhortation—or maybe, with luck, even inspiration. I would like to convince you of the value in assuming that God is so great that we cannot possibly understand God in limited rational categories. And, if that is true, then the question I pose today is how come it is “Trinity” Sunday, rather than “Plurality” Sunday? I’m not joking. Why only three ways—primary ways—of thinking about God, as if somehow God can be squeezed into that particular formula? Hold off, all ye who are traditional theologians! Give me a little room here. Let me press my point before the wheels come off your wagon.

As far back as the Priestly document that we read today as Genesis 1, and much farther, the ancient Hebrews were using “Elohim” as one of several words to denote God. The word is plural, no doubt a vestige of an even more ancient past when before “God” our ancestors had a pantheon of gods. But even when Moses molded Hebrew monotheism, there were some aspects of God that couldn’t be quite neatly pressed into the container. They were not other gods, but certainly they were dimensions of the One God that were somehow more than characteristics or descriptors. Take, for example, the Hebrew word “Shekinah,” which in later Hebrew writing is a circumlocution for the holy nearness of God to God’s people. Although we don’t find the word itself in the Bible, we do find the idea. And it comes to have great importance in the New Testament, because it is akin to the belief that God peculiarly dwelt in the person of Jesus.

While the presence of God is connected with various places, and above all with the Ark of the Covenant that goes before Israel in battle symbolically representing the presence of Yahweh, God in the Old Testament frequently appears as “the Angel of the Lord.” In a number of stories, it is clear that “the Angel of the Lord” is a way of talking about God, as is the case, for example, when Jacob wrestles with the angel. It really is God that Jacobs wrestles with, as Jacob himself says, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” In fact, the “face of God,” while clearly a metaphor, is another way of talking about the divine presence, in perhaps a stronger, more intimate way. And a third way is to speak about the glory of God. Ultimately, that is what “shekinah” comes to mean perhaps most directly.

Now, to be sure, these don’t come close to being rival gods, or different beings. But there is still another term in Hebrew literature that becomes the focus for a whole body of literature in itself. That is wisdom. You have encountered that notion. In fact, it played a part in the Great Vigil of Easter. The books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom depict Wisdom as a helpmate to God in fashioning the world. Wisdom is clearly God, even possibly an aspect of God, but at the same time she can be spoken of as a separate person. She is the one who fashions the works of God. One can see similarities between the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit and Wisdom, as well as similarities between Wisdom and the Word of God, which becomes incarnate in Jesus.

And this is just the beginning. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all have traditions of Names of God. And in each of the monotheistic religions there is a tradition of disclaiming that any one of them is absolutely definitive or descriptive. We are heavily agreed—certainly Judaism and Islam are—that there is but one God, no matter how many names that God can wear. Christianity is slightly different because we talk of God in three persons, while insisting that all the persons are expressions of a oneness that we call—guess what?—God.


Human beings are remarkably united in the belief that there is a “higher power” or some “higher powers” in the universe. When it comes right down to it, is there any difference between the Mayan ceremony out in the woods of Sacatepequez and us who are singing “Holy, holy, holy” today? Is there any difference between the 99 Names of God in the Quran and the various names we give Jesus and the Holy Spirit, not to mention God the Father, in Christian tradition? Have we simply taken the old pantheon of divinities (such as the Greek gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus) and rolled them all into one? Is our monotheism functionally different from, say, the Hindu understanding of Atman, Brahman, and Vishnu, and all the many avatars that Vishnu, for example, can assume?

Maybe it really does not make much difference at all what we take God to be. But I have a slightly different take on it. And here is where my exhortation comes in. It is possible that the worst disservice we can do to God, or at least to the idea of God, is to assume that God is small enough for the human mind to contain God. That may be far worse than our getting mixed up and thinking the wrong things about the Trinity or getting confused about what is an aspect or what is an avatar or what is a persona of God. God is not much on being domesticated, trained like a pet or controlled like a not-too-bright friend, always doing our bidding. To live in God, far more than merely believing that there is a God, involves opening oneself to mystery, to the power of story, to the presence of paradox in life. In other words, there is no way we can get it all down to the very simple so that we can move on to the next thing. God is far more than we can sketch out with textbook definitions.

And here is what inspires me and what I hope inspires you. There is no part of life, no experience, no feeling or thought, no problem or challenge that somehow doesn’t involve God. This marvelous and messy life we are living is a process where everything and everybody is caught up in things like light and shadow, good and evil, struggle and peace, giving and taking, failing and succeeding, dying and living. God is involved in all of it in one way or another. God’s business, so to say, is not just with the nice, polite and tame parts of life, the kinds of things your grandmother thought you ought to be preoccupied with when you come to church. God is also down and dirty, in the grit and grime, in the tick bite and poison ivy, in the untamed sexual expression and the hideous birth defect. There is no place that God is not, and no part of life where God is somehow above showing up. But the Good News is that in all these things, the nature of God is community. The crucible for discovering community is relatedness. And the goal of human relationships is to express love.

And before you know it, we are back from a list of a thousand things and from a list of 99 Names to a very short list of basics. Three, in fact. There is the undifferentiated creation and the God who is present in it all. There is the marvel of community, made possible when Love emerges in human flesh. And there is energy that keeps forming human community mirroring that Love we keep striving for and which, though it eludes us, still drives us onward.

And when you give a name to those three things, they are not a proposition to be debated but a way of life in a community of utter belovedness. You can call them Creator, Savior, and Life-giver. Or you can call them by the ancient names of Abba, Son, and Holy Spirit. Put aside words and labels, and draw closer to the Fire. It is the Truth that warms and changes you until you become aflame with love itself.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

In-Flow

Experiencing Pentecost

John 20:19-23

We still have a few hours of Easter left. The alleluias still ring. The Paschal Candle still burns. Pentecost is a part of Easter. Indeed, John’s gospel folds the heart of Pentecost—the giving of the Holy Spirit—into the story of the Day of Resurrection itself. Luke and later tradition break them apart, and there is a good deal of value in that. But John and much of the Early Church saw Easter as encompassing all the mighty acts of the Risen Lord, including the coming of the Holy Spirit.

A part of the Resurrection story is that the Jesus empowers his disciples to carry on his work in the world. To take that out of the Easter story is to leave Jesus risen, but high and dry. The whole point of the Jesus story from conception to ascension is that it is as much about us as it is about him. We are united to him. We are infused with his spirit, Holy Spirit. We are alive with him, sharing his Divine Life.

But wait a minute. You have heard all that before, certainly if you have been hanging around St. Stephen’s for very long. What difference is it making? What does it mean in your life and in the life of this community?

I think you have had the experience of Pentecost, and I don’t mean coming to church on Pentecost Day. I believe that, perhaps more than you realize, you have experienced the infusion of power. On some occasion you have been faced with something quite beyond your known capacity. You might have been fearful, overwhelmed at the thought of doing something so strange and daunting. You have had a speech to make, an athletic feat to perform, a role to play, a song to sing, a particularly challenging interview, or possibly the problem of coping with an illness—yours or someone else’s—that totally knocks the props from under you. Somewhere there comes to you an uncanny power, perhaps an unexpected calm, a surge of confidence, or perhaps a kind of “zoning out” that curiously positions you to drive the ball or sway the crowd or do the task you simply would never have imagined you could.

What does it feel like? Does it feel as if something came and settled on you, some power from an external source? Or does it seem that you have been able to reach deep inside yourself and grasp a hidden strength you may never have known you had? I want to suggest that it hardly matters whether the sensation is that help comes from outside or inside. Either is an experience of “Holy Spirit.” And that is to say that both are experiences of God. God is not external to us, nor internal to us. God cannot be nailed down to such categories, but transcends them.

A few years ago Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published his popular study called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It is a fascinating attempt to articulate what happens when we get “in the zone” or “in the groove.” Going with the flow, in that sense, is more than likely what Tiger Woods feels when he hits the sweetest of shots, or what Joshua Bell must feel like when he makes the violin practically weep for his audience. I think a good argument can be made that “flow,” while an optimal experience, is indeed a relatively common one. On the one hand, we cannot be coached into getting into the flow—it is a gift. But we can be taught how to do things, how to perform or play golf or preach or write, so that eventually something extraordinary begins to happen. Skill and temperament, passion and delight align in such a way that an enormous joy abounds. The human being is peculiarly alive and able to do quite astonishing things.

That is a good percentage of what the event of Pentecost is about. It is about stepping outside one’s fears and giving oneself over to the flow of the Spirit. When that happens, power is unleashed and we are able to do astonishing things. That is in fact what Jesus promises in John’s gospel when he repeatedly teaches the disciples that he lives in them and they in him. They will do, he says, the works he does—and in fact greater works than he does—because he goes to the Father. The Father will send the Advocate who will teach them all things, bringing to mind all that he has taught them. Jesus gives his life for us; we give our hearts and minds to Jesus. Jesus comes from Abba and goes to Abba. Abba sends the Spirit to us enabling us to be the community of love that lives out the commandment that Jesus gives us to love one another and so prove to be his disciples. You can see that all of this is about our being connected—to Jesus, to Abba, to the ever-present Spirit, to each other.

But this is not quite all of Pentecost. Jesus comes into the midst of the scared disciples and greets them with Peace. Then he breathes on them, imparting his breath, his pneuma, his Spirit to them. They are overjoyed on seeing him, and they are empowered by him. Being in the flow of the Spirit means authentic peace, incredible joy and amazing power. And that is what I think is a well kept secret. It is about time we blew the lid off and let each other and the world know that this thing of living in community with Christ is not essentially about onerous chores associated with organizational life. It is rather a wild ride of sheer gladness. Sometimes it is being deeply centered in a way we can only speak of as being peaceful. At other times it is hilarity and great fun. At still other times it is incredibly stunning, this life, in its capacity to speak Truth to worldly power, to fight for justice instead of giving up, to insist on equity instead of capitulating to prestige, to resist making pacts with oppression. Being in the flow of the Spirit is not just about an optimal experience for the sake of the experience (though there is nothing wrong with that!). It is being centered, charged, and empowered to do the right thing. It is about being in the forces aligned with the Truth of the Universe, which is nothing less than God.

Yes, there is scut work to do. No, it is not all attractive. Yes, if we don’t watch it we can get burned out and become relatively useless. No, we don’t have a guarantee that we won’t become self-righteous and have to be taken down a peg or two. Yes, there are days when we tire of stomping grapes in the vineyard of the Lord. But every time one of you speaks up for justice, the Spirit of the Lord has found a voice. Each time you opt for kindness instead of arrogance in public spaces, the Spirit of Jesus walks again on the earth. Every occasion when St. Stephen’s opens its doors to the homeless and musicians and artists and truth-seekers and the hungry and the jobless literally welcoming the world to come find a home in this place, the Spirit has inched closer to changing the face of the world into the face of Christ. Every time we proclaim the gospel in words that may be strange to some but which communicate with a new population, including those who have not yet met Jesus, a new outbreak of Pentecost occurs. When we look for ways to put it all together, so that Peace and Joy and Power all find a nesting place here, then Wind of the Spirit blows through anew, shaking the foundations, drawing us tighter into its mighty flow, sweeping us forward to the future of the One who still stands among his disciples, nail-scarred but dazzling, saying, “Peace.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Them Sheep

Acts 2:42


I have confessed to you before that I am not a fan of sheep, though I must say that it is only roast leg of lamb that ultimately will stand between me and being vegetarian. Lambs are one thing; sheep are significantly different. There is all the difference between lambs and sheep as there is between teddy bears and great big black bears. Every year I have to go through a kind of uncomfortable adjustment on the Fourth Sunday of Easter trying to figure out a way to deal with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and my implicit role as a sheep.

You have no doubt heard, or perhaps have personally experienced the fact that to be called a sheep is not a high compliment. Sheep are not bright, are easily led, quite nearsighted, subject to all sorts of dangers, and rather defenseless against predators. While they have been for ages a highly valued commodity, they do have some notable drawbacks, one of which is, at least to my mind, a rather unpleasant odor, though in so saying I do not wish to offend any shepherds, certainly.

Nonetheless, the image of Jesus as a shepherd is one that stuck in the mind of the Church, and lots of Churches of the Good Shepherd are quite happy today on what is their equivalent of a patronal festival. The church in which I was ordained priest has a stained glass window depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. I used to look up at it as I was celebrating the Eucharist as a young priest and see something that reminded me of the pastoral vocation to which I had been ordained. Pastor, of course, is the Latin word for shepherd, so all those traits of sheep that give me pause are ironically the things which define my vocation in a way.

Today, which happens to be our Annual Meeting Day at St. Stephen’s, I want to shift the image from the Good Shepherd to the sheep in the pen. I want to climb right down and get with the sheep, hearing their bleating and smelling them, seeing them jammed into their small space. I want to look into their gray-blue watery eyes and feel the cockle burrs stuck in their fleece. I want to imagine for just a brief moment that the feelings I get at being with such animals—the curiosity and fascination, interest and some pity, concern and a slight revulsion—are not unlike the feelings that any good shepherd, or even a not-so-good shepherd might experience. I imagine that the Good Pastor himself might register such a range of feelings with his flock of human beings on any given day.

For purposes of comparison, let’s take the line from Acts 2:42 that we hear fairly frequently because it occurs in the Baptismal Covenant which we renew with some regularity. “They continued in the apostles’ teaching, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers.” Human flocks, of course, do that; sheep don’t. But let’s say that human flocks, specifically Christian ones, need to do those things in order to be good flocks as much as the sheep in a sheep pen need to bleat and grow wool and rub up against one another and compete for food and water and set about grazing when the shepherd opens the door of the pen and leads them out to pasture.

In this human sheepfold called the Church are packed a fair number of Christians, some of whom are prize-winners, but most of whom are just ordinary. Several weeks after Easter, when Jesus had finished his work, had risen from the dead, and appeared in glory, all the angels are said to have gathered around, asking him how things went on earth, and what the high points and low points were. Jesus recounted his ministry, putting it in terms that the angels understood, describing his community as a flock and himself as their shepherd. “Oh,” asked an angel, “so what are the flock up to now, seeing that the shepherd has come home?”

“Come see my flock,” said Jesus. “These are the ones that are going to do greater works than I did!” The angels peered down from on high and saw a little band of people that Jesus referred to as his “sheep.” A look of horror spread across the faces of angels, who exclaimed in unison, “Them?”

“Them,” said Jesus.

Centuries went by. Jesus is said to have been walking about one day when an angel stopped him and asked for an update. “So, Jesus, how is that flock of sheep coming on?”

“Oh, they have their good days and their bad days,” said Jesus. “On the whole, they do some pretty stunning things. They continue in my teaching. They break bread together. They pray for one another. And they constantly talk about how they can widen their little sheep pen to include more and more people in it. You should see them.”

“Well, let’s,” said the angel, summoning some of his fellow angels to the moment.

Jesus led them to a precipice. They looked over and saw a scrawny bunch of somewhat sheepish people in a pen called “St. Stephen and the Incarnation.” A look of horror spread across the faces of the angels.

“Them?” one of the angels cried.

Jesus, gazing at his sheep, said, “Them.”


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Gone to Hell

Grief and Easter

Luke 24:36b-48

It is easy to forget, when we are two weeks past Easter Day, that despite all our trumpeting of the resurrection of Jesus, Easter begins in an experience of profound grief. Not only is the crucifixion the background and necessary prelude to resurrection, but between Good Friday and Easter Day there is a descent into hell. I am not talking about a mythological notion of Jesus going to hell on Holy Saturday and preaching to the dead—whether he did that or not is neither mine to argue nor the point I wish to make. Rather I am talking about the hell that is thorough loss of the divine companion, hell that is total loss of knowing what to do, hell that is the gut-wrenching grief that rises up with a metallic taste in the mouth about a day after the funeral when the fact that he or she is no longer living begins to sink in. Say “alleluia” all you want, and it won’t make hell go away, not if death is real and not if grief breaks your heart.

Tempting as it is to gloss over such painful stuff and certainly to keep it out of any sermon whose purpose is in part to convince you that faith pays dividends—just you wait and see—we need to stick with hell for awhile just to make sure we are being ruthlessly honest. So it is to Luke’s gospel that we turn today to get a glimpse of this profound grief that Jesus’ community is going through in the wake of his horrible execution. Cleopas and his companion are headed to Emmaus, presumably their home. Back to business as usual, just as in John’s gospel Peter says after it is all over, “I’m going fishing.” Back to the familiar, except that instead of filling the void, home is in this instance more like the place where we crash when there is nowhere else to go.

Two disciples they are, on the road and talking about all the things that had transpired. This is what humans do, particularly in the aftermath of tragedy, but then, really, all the time. I sometimes wish it were different, but I doubt that it ever is going to be. When Bin Laden is captured and killed, we have to have day after day after day of stories about what happened, how it happened, how it didn’t happen, how it happened differently from how it was first related to have happened, how it should have happened but didn’t, how it might have happened. And the story keeps changing. That is not only a function of news media, it is the way human beings consistently make sense of the world. We work something over and over again, trying to get it to fit a narrative framework wherein it can possibly make some sense. We tell ourselves things such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” and, “There is something to be learned from all this,” though we do not know what the reason might be nor what it is that we should learn from it all. That is what the two disciples are doing as they walk along.

A stranger appears so subtly that the two seem not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes strangers do such things—on the bus, for example. They seem to be reading their novel or diddling with their phone, oblivious to the world around them; yet sometimes one will interject a comment into what would seem to be an utterly private conversation. It might or might not fit, and it might or might not be welcome. “What things are you talking about?” the Stranger asks. When you are grieving, you imagine that the world must register what seems to you to be a seismic event. They stop, looking sad.

“Are you the only stranger…?” Cleopas finally asks. Stranger. Must be one of the people who has been in Jerusalem for Passover and is now, like them, returning home.

“What things?” asks the Stranger. Thus begins a conversation. It is a great story, because we know more than the two disciples. We know who the Stupendous Stranger is, and thus we anticipate a moment of revelation when the Stranger’s identity will be disclosed. Luke lets us overhear the conversation. The Stranger gives his fellow travelers the space to tell their tale, their version of the events.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they say, giving a hint of their sorrow.

He upbraids them for being so foolish, so slow to believe. That might have tipped them off at once, since Jesus has at least in parts of the gospels a reputation for upbraiding disciples for their lack of faith and their slowness to believe. But, of course, the story is not quite ready for the climax. We have a way to go, and so do the disciples, who have not yet arrived home, and in any case, are kept from perceiving who the Stranger is because their eyes frankly can’t behold the mystery.

That, too, is one of the ways grief works. We simply don’t see clearly when the world has stopped turning and the birds have hushed singing. Of course it could be quite the opposite. Sometimes when grief is intense we imagine that the dead are right before our eyes—indeed there are stories galore of how they do appear as clear as day. It is hard then to know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary.

“Won’t you stay with us?” the disciples ask. This is not Washington, DC, where it would be fine to say thank you and goodbye and walk on one’s way. This is the Near East, and the Ancient Near East at that, where hospitality suggests, if does not dictate, asking a conversation partner to supper at nightfall. He makes as if to be going—in retrospect one wonders exactly why—but they insist. In a minute we will know why they are so insistent. But first, this strong urging on their part sets up the scene for the climax. Somehow—we are not told how—the guest becomes the host. Suddenly he is the one not being served, but in the role of taking, blessing, breaking and giving the bread. And that is the all-important moment. Immediately the disciples’ eyes are opened and they recognize who the Stranger is. This is what must happen for hell to be vanquished. And, frankly, it seems impossible that that something could ever come to pass. It is nothing less than a revelation of the Risen Jesus himself.

Why had they insisted so strongly that the Stranger come stay with them? Because their hearts had burned within them as they listened to him expound and interpret the Scriptures. His had been the words that had not only opened their grief but began to make some sense out of what seemed nonsense. Little wonder that they were not eager to let go of him! And of all the things that both make Christianity appealing and at the same time threatening, it is this peculiar mystique of Jesus. Not everyone experiences it, of course. There are some to whom Jesus is little more than a historical figure, a dead hero from ages past, or even as Algernon Charles Swinburne once called him, “A Pale Galilean,” with whose breath the world has grown grey. But for countless others, he is not dead but living, not pale but robust. And there is nothing theoretical about resurrection. It is a present reality, just as he is a present reality. How is it that we can go with the heaviest heart to the Table, hear again the story of what he did on the night in which he was betrayed, and do those four familiar things—take bread, bless bread, break bread, and give bread—and find ourselves healing on levels we cannot explain in ways we cannot quantify? How is it that a bite of bread and a sip of wine can be so much more than bite and sip—a feast, a wedding of soul and God, a passageway into a parallel universe, a healing of grief, a forgiveness of sin, a taste of something more real than our very flesh and the blood coursing through our veins? Partly, of course, it is that we choose to believe it, and thus it becomes a ballast that gives our lives a kind of steadiness. But partly it is that when we have gone the distance we can go with rational thought, we come to the great abyss of mystery. We either stare into it paralyzed and disbelieving, or we step forward into the fog, sure that we will either cross the chasm by grace, or fall into it and ironically find ourselves finally at home with the universe and the universe’s God. There is no explaining mystery, no justifying it, no rationalizing it. Like all the states we know well enough but cannot explain—such as love in a time of fear and courage in the face of annihilation—the simple Supper served by the Stunning Stranger persistently renews us, we know not why.

Yet that is the way that hell keeps being conquered, the way grief keeps being healed, the way we keep growing beyond the boundaries we erect to keep ourselves safe and sane and usually stunted, too. Just about the time we can say, “Ah! Jesus! It’s you after all!” he vanishes from sight, and we are left to ponder the mystery, usually second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we were taken in by some sleight-of-hand by the Trickster in our own mind.

Then is the hour we need to get up, go find some other disciples, share with them what we have experienced, and entertain the possibility that the Resurrection is for real, again and again and again. No one can convince you to do it. But once you invite the Stranger into conversation, you’ll find yourself exclaiming, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” And even when he eludes you, that burning will suffice.



© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011