Tragic Consequences?

            “Everything happens for a reason.”  Is that what you think?  Lots of people do.  I don’t know whether I agree or not.   That is because I’ve no idea what people mean when they say that.  Do they mean that there is behind the scenes an all-knowing and perhaps all-powerful God that ordains events to happen just as they do?  Do they mean that God might not be manipulating events, but is indeed working through them to bring about God’s own purposes for God knows what reasons?  Do they mean that there is a non-personal but very real meaning in any or all events that, if you have enough courage and discernment, you may discover?  Do they mean that life is just full of endless lessons to be learned and that we humans have the possibility and capacity of learning those lessons from whatever happens to us? 

            Some of these positions make more sense to me than others.  The Bible and the larger Christian tradition certainly make plain that God does not always get what God actually wills.  Yet there is no denying that ultimately, God’s Will is sovereign.  In the end, God’s will for love and justice and peace will indeed win out.  Stories bear that out on a small scale.  And in the larger scheme of things, Christian faith sees that there is an end towards which all things are moving, and that in the end, God will be all in all. 

            Because Christianity is often, and in my opinion quite incorrectly, assumed to be a system of belief rather than a way of life, such thinking as the notion that God’s will finally will be victorious, supreme, indeed ultimately uncontested, seems to provide considerable comfort to a great many people.  I myself find it attractive, and like lots of other people, can fill my mind with images of a world that is healed, a humanity no longer full of people at each other’s throats, a creation restored to pristine beauty.  I am, as possibly you are, able to imagine that God is at work in human efforts, willing to bring about peace, equality, justice, and shared abundance, through the very energies we exert towards those things.  They are the will of God, aren’t they?

            But then there is tragedy. You are familiar with tragedy, because the way we know about it at all is that it continually shows up in our lives.  Tragedy has its own particular niche in our experience.  It is different from disaster, which might be caused by natural forces or by a collision of things that happen to get in the way of each other and spoil life for any and all things touched by the resulting wreckage.  Tragedy is different, too, from stories that simply have sad endings, even terrible endings, as melodramas frequently do.  Tragedy in the sense that I am talking about it involves a good person who is in many ways exemplary, whose very strengths become the impetus for a bad mistake—an error in judgment.  You will notice that your very strengths are the things that give birth every once in a while to such an error, usually when your strengths tempt you to go beyond human limits, so that like a misguided Icarus, flying for the first time, you get carried away with what you can do and fail to take into account that what goes up must come down.  Tragedy results when such a failure leads to ruin, misery, and even death. 

            David in today’s story is a tragic hero.  Indeed in the story of the Absalom rebellion, he is more tragic than hero.  If you have been tuned in to the unfolding story the last several weeks, you may recall that things start to unravel one afternoon in Jerusalem, when David, left in his palace while his army was off fighting, notices a woman bathing, sends for her, lies with her, and gets her pregnant.  Bathsheba, the woman, is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, exemplary boy scout.  David has him come home on leave, does his best to get him drunk so that he will sleep with Bathsheba, fails to crack Uriah’s moral vow of sexual abstinence, and sends him back to the front with a note pinned to his uniform meant for the Commander Joab, saying, “Please kill me.  Send me to the front.”   For doing such a dastardly deed, Nathan the prophet assures David that the sword will never depart from his house and that what he has done surreptitiously will in fact be done to him when his neighbor invades his harem and sleeps with his wives in the sight of all Israel.

            Darling of God, a man after God’s own heart, David has royally messed up.  He knows it.  He admits it.  But that does not avert the tragic consequences.  The example that he has set is one that his sons quickly pick up on and emulate.  Amnon, oldest son and heir apparent, seduces his half-sister Tamar, rapes her, and then spurns her.  Tamar goes public with the story.  David professes anger, but does not say quite why he is angry or at whom.  Absalom, next in line, is Tamar’s brother who bides his time to avenge his sister’s shame.  After a couple of years, he kills Amnon, for which deed David banishes him from the royal court.  More time passes.  Absalom is determined to get David’s attention and burns the field of General Joab to do just that.  David welcomes Absalom back, yet won’t quite reconcile with him.  Perhaps David knows that Absalom is a real threat to his own kingship.  Again, Absalom bides his time, interjects himself into the judicial system where David is obviously weak, wins the hearts of a large slice of the population, and ultimately sets himself up as king, ensuring thereby that civil war has begun. 

            Brilliant and charismatic though he is, Absalom is no match for the wily old king, who knows just what to do to bring down the rebellion.  He and the royal entourage flee Jerusalem, while Absalom comes into town and proceeds to fulfill the prophecy of Nathan by sleeping with all the royal concubines.  While keeping some spies in Jerusalem and by making sure that one of his trusted allies infiltrates Absalom’s circle of advisors, David is nonetheless anxious.  When the day of battle arrives, in his headquarters down near the Jordan River, the king gives orders to his commanders to “deal gently with the young man Absalom” for his, David’s sake.  They do no such of the kind.  Riding through the thick Forest of Ephraim, Absalom is caught by his beautiful hair in the branches of an oak, while his mule goes on riderless.  Told where he is, the impetuous, efficient, loyal, no-nonsense General Joab takes three javelins and spears Absalom through the heart as he remains hanging in the oak.  Joab’s men surround Absalom and finish the job.  They throw his body into a pit and cover it with stones.

            David hears the news from the Cushite messenger.  “May all the enemies of my lord the King be like that young man.”  And the tragedy has come to its head.  David is deeply moved.  As he goes up to the chamber over the gate, they can hear him grieving:  “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom.  Would I had died instead of you!  O Absalom, my son, my son!”

            What to do about tragedy:  that is the question.  We cannot undo the past.  We cannot go back to some afternoon years ago, when passion got the best of us and we lost our heads there for awhile.  We cannot retreat to several years ago when it seemed so right to hold on to our grudges while somebody else squirmed.  We cannot erase injudiciously chosen words, spoken in anger, or take back poisonous gossip we have injected into a conversation.  We are lucky if bad choices do not get away from us causing more damage than we could fathom.  Nor can we ease ourselves off the hook by noting that whatever tragedy is unfolding is somebody else’s tragedy, not our own.  For if it is happening to somebody in your life, even remotely in your life, it is indeed your tragedy.  For all Jerusalem and all Israel pay the price for the tragedy of David.  Sometimes one terrible negligence can set off a bombing or a shooting spree or an assassination that plunges half the world into chaos and mourning.  So it is with the choice of somebody else’s wife or husband on a spring afternoon.  Tragedy unfolds with no denouement until hell has been paid right and left. 

            There are various kinds of tragedy, as different people have pointed out.  Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche all looked deeply at tragedy and saw if from differing angles.  Sometimes people are caught in the grip of circumstances that they simply cannot escape.  Sometimes a Hamlet will carry so much loathing and disgust that his spirit is weighted down to death long before the sword fatally pierces him.  Sometimes a Lear will rave in the wilds about treacheries that have only taken place in his warped and paranoid mind.  Many times, as in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy a Clyde Griffiths will be so enchanted with society’s promised trophy of success that he will kill rather than risk losing what he can never really have.  Sometimes, as in Faulkner’s tale, Absalom, Absalom, the hate-filled, racist structures of society will conspire to wreck the lives of people who on occasion try to act nobly but cannot find a way to do it.  What do we do about tragedy? 

            Frederick Buechner, writing about David’s tragedy, said that when David wished he had died instead of Absalom, “he meant it, of course.  If he could have done the boy’s dying for him, he would have done it.  If he could have paid the price for the boy’s betrayal of him, he would have paid it.  If he could have given his own life to make the boy alive again, he would have given it.  But even a king can’t do things like that.  As later history was to prove, it takes a God.”* 

            That is the gospel.  It is not that God wills everything to happen just as it does.   But it is that a Divine Presence, a thoroughly moral Presence, makes itself felt in the midst of the deepest human tragedies.  We may or may not learn from them, but God does not appear to give up providentially watching over us, nor to withdraw a loving-kindness that extends to the most broken of us.  God is at work on human made crosses to loosen the grip of death in what we call resurrection.  God takes the stupid blunders made by the best of people and redeems both the people and their blunders.  The tragic Hamlet himself says to his friend Horatio, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”  No purpose of God can ultimately be thwarted.  And though we do not know and may never know how to avert the tragedies in which we are the main characters and supporting characters, we do know that our Redeemer lives, and that at the last day, he will stand upon the earth; and though our bodies be destroyed, yet shall we see God, whom we shall see for ourselves, and our eyes shall behold as our Friend, and not a stranger.

*  Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures:  A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco:  Harper and Row, 1979), p. 6.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Political Theatre

            Sometime during the last year I saw for the first time Richard Strauss’s one-act opera, Salome.  The story is based on the passage that you just heard proclaimed as the Good News of Jesus Christ a minute ago, namely the beheading of John the Baptist.  Strauss, upon seeing Oscar Wilde’s play by that name which Wilde wrote in French, composed his German opera, giving to audiences in 1905 something so stunning and shocking that the work was banned for several years in London and then performed only with alteration.  The Vienna State Opera did not perform it until 1918.  And when it premiered in New York in 1907, wealthy patrons insisted that further performances be canceled and kicked up a fuss trying to get the British composer Sir Edward Elgar to join them, an invitation he flatly refused, calling Strauss “the greatest genius of the age.”  Such drama!

            Salome, a name not given in the Bible in connection with this story, is in the opera the daughter of Herodias.  Her lecherous step-father Herod persistently flirts with her.  The Strauss opera builds to a climax when Salome dances the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” for King Herod until, having removed one veil at a time, she finally lies naked at his feet.  She then demands the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.  No one, to my knowledge, retched at The Kennedy Center when in a final act of decadence Salome passionately kissed the lips of the beheaded prophet; but it does not take much to appreciate how audiences of an earlier day, unused to the stage and cinematic violence that we see all the time, were totally repulsed by the scene.  Wilde, of course, and Strauss, boldly embraced just such shocking eroticism partly, perhaps, because doing so jolted a prissy and repressed public with images calculated to dent, if not smash, their hypocrisy.

            So far, no one seems terribly sickened by all this on a warm July Sunday in 2012.  Not only do we have little trouble appropriating the grotesque, inured as we are to blood and gore in everything from cartoons to computer games; but also we have at best only the vaguest sense of unease about the biblical story to begin with, caring not very much about John the Baptist’s ill fate, and understanding even less what it all has to do with anything remotely touching our lives at the moment.  I am making a heap of assumptions here, to be sure.  I allow that it is possible that you may be indeed feeling a little queasy with the thought of a severed head, even if it is found in the pages of the Evangel of Jesus Christ according to Mark.  And I allow that you might be disturbed that on this, of all Sundays, I should preach on the gospel as opposed to another passage about a dance, namely the exuberant, handsome young David, dancing with all his might before the Ark of the Covenant.  There is plenty of eroticism in that story, too, which would make a good opera if someone were inclined to compose it.  But let’s stick with this gruesome gospel tale today.  It might have something to say to us worth our hearing.  And, who knows?  There might even be some good news here before we are finished.

            What is the story even doing in Mark’s gospel?  It is the only story in that short book that is not directly about Jesus.  Why would he have included it?  Its style, so different from Mark’s rather crude Greek, reflects the fact that he borrowed an already existing story, perhaps even one circulating in print.  Why?  For one thing, he inserts it exactly at the point at which Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs, giving them authority to cast out demons and to anoint and cure the afflicted and diseased.  Mark says that Herod got wind of all this because Jesus’ name was beginning to be in the news.  Folks, ever quick to jump to conclusions, were saying that John the Baptizer had been raised from the dead (the idea of resurrection in those days was not the stumbling block that it later became).  Others were saying no, that Elijah or one of the other old prophets had reappeared.  Herod no more heard the name “John the Baptizer” than he flipped into a terror imagining that one whom he had arrested, imprisoned, and later executed had indeed risen and come back to life, perhaps to haunt, or at least to embarrass him, Herod.

            The digression into the ghoulish story of John the Baptizer’s death functions for Mark as a time-filler while the pairs of disciples are out doing their work.  When the story ends, the disciples return and report to Jesus all that they have done and taught.  But surely there is more to the story than that.  In fact it does have something to do with Jesus.  Harking back to the Old Testament, the scene of Herod and Herodias recalls another king and queen, namely Ahab and Jezebel.  Jezebel had a serious problem with another prophet, Elijah.  She tried every way she could to have him put to death.  So, Mark seems to be saying, this is the kind of thing that happens to prophets who speak truth to power.  What happened to Elijah back then and to John the Baptist more recently is exactly what is in store for Jesus.  He too will suffer death at the hands of the politico- religious establishment.  One does not take on the big boys without paying dearly for it. 

            If you follow Mark’s story really closely, you cannot help but see that it is laden with messages to disciples, followers of Jesus.  Of course it is, for that is what gospels are for.  Mark, however, is quite obviously conscious of disciples specifically as targets of persecution.  There is more than a good chance that the very thing that motivated him to write a gospel was the first, or at least a very early, wave of persecution that tested the faith and mettle of disciples.  Why should one confess the faith of Jesus Christ if to do so means to die, perhaps a painfully violent death?  What is to keep one, feeling the breath of lions and seeing one’s buddies torn apart for sport just because they happen to be Christian, from quickly rethinking the value of following Jesus and tossing in the towel before it is too late?  Mark’s basic answer is that faith in Jesus is worth the risk because Jesus is truly the Son of God, and hence the Truth.

            It is not incidental that the story of John the Baptist’s fate takes the spotlight just as the disciples are being sent by Jesus on a mission with authority over unclean spirits.  Those who are sent are apostles, for that is what the verb “αποστελλω=to send” means.  And apostles are sent not into a friendly, hospitable world, but into a world that is riddled with evil, bewitched by power, and largely in the grip of forces that sooner or later will turn with a vengeance on anything that attacks their entrenched interests.  Apostles had better watch out.  John the Baptist opened his mouth one too many times about immorality in the royal household.  Jesus paid the price by taking on the powers and principalities.  Disciples, apostles, will pay dearly too.

            There are, of course, many people in many places in the 21^st century who know this all too well.  One thinks of Jawani Luwum, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even some like Nelson Mandela who have survived.  The narrative that Americans cherish is that we in this country are spared those awful outcomes of Christian witness.  Don’t be too sure.  Although we can be thankful that many lives are protected from outright persecution and death, we need to understand some basic things.  One is that the essential meaning of the gospel is precisely that one cannot in fact be a follower of Jesus unless one’s loyalty to what he called the Kingdom of God or the Realm of God is paramount to national and political ties.  Telling the truth, whether in protesting the massive imprisonment of black men, or supporting those whose status puts them outside the law, or opposing political parties and politicians that lie, cheat, and steal on many different levels, will land today’s disciples in deep trouble with power structures.  In that sense, this society, while restrained by a constitution and laws, is little different from any other political culture.   Prophets, apostles, evangelists, and ordinary faithful Christians are not in the business of being popular, but rather of being loyal to the God of Justice, Peace, and Love.  We have to make up our minds whether we are going to go on the mission of Jesus or sit it out.  But one thing is for certain:  discipleship costs.

            It is frankly much harder to jolt an easy-going, peace-loving population like the great array of the American middle class (if there is still such a thing) with a message like Mark’s or Jesus’ than it was to crash into Victorian morality with a character like Salome.  Notice what gets peoples’ dander up and their blood boiling these days.  Generally it is stuff about as relevant to our lives as a Salome making love to the severed head of a man of God whom she has repeatedly tried to seduce.  It is a bevy of things like nudity, pornography, and sexual orientation and behavior different from the norm.  None of that is especially threatening to power, political or otherwise, though many in power would have us think so.  Then, too, people argue on and on, talking about things that no one can disagree with, antiseptic things like “creating safe environments” and “relieving stress.”  None of it gets at the root of the evils truly infecting humanity and the planet.  Hyperbolic phrases like “the undoing of civilization,” “the moral decay of the nation,” “the undermining of the sacred foundations of society,” and other such claptrap is sounding brass to cover the real noise of economic injustice, the damage done by unbridled greed at all levels, racism, militarism, gender inequality, and financial vulnerability, not to mention more global crises like inhumane prison conditions, genocide, the persistent rape and poisoning of the environment by economic engines, and the wholesale rip-off of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable by powerful corporate interests that own whole political systems and protect them with armies and navies.  I am not talking just about the United States.  I am talking about Egypt, Sudan, Syria, China, Russia, and a host of other places that participate in versions of the same macabre games that silence Truth by chopping its head off and then in tawdry scenes, kissing the relics and memories of dead radicals as if they had blessed them all along. 

            Is there any good news, or do you hear this as just one more rant that can be classified loosely as liberal Christianity echoing in an empty room?  Well, there is good news, but you have to listen very closely and very quietly to hear it sometimes.  Believe it or not, there is some good news in that little ending of Mark’s beheading story when the disciples of John the Baptist come and take his body and bury it in a tomb.  In the midst of violence and wholesale degradation, there are pockets of Presence that pick up the pieces.  There are disciples that nurse the sick, who care for the wounded, who look out for children, who feed the monks and nuns that pray and the prophets that protest.  Burying the dead might not be a glamorous job, but it is one that makes the grief of the world a little easier to bear.  And it is good news that some disciples do that.

           

            That is only one piece of the Good News.  If the bad news was that John was not in fact raised from the dead, the Good News is that Jesus was.  And Jesus is still being raised from the dead, just as creation itself is still in the process of happening.  Communities of disciples gather together to share the kind of love that Jesus modeled and taught.  One by one, people are bringing into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the name of the Living God and of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Two by two and sometimes in larger numbers, disciples are going out into the world with a real sense of authority over unclean spirits, taking on the powers of disease and insanity, speaking up for Truth, defending the orphan and the widow, taking time to listen to the powerless and dispossessed, feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant, and welcoming the stranger.   Herod is still on the throne in many places, and Salome is still doing the bidding of her irate mother.  But,

            Though the cause of evil prosper,

            Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong,

            Though her portion be the scaffold,

            And upon the throne be wrong,

            Yet that scaffold sways the future

            And behind the dim unknown

            Standeth God within the shadows

            Keeping watch above God’s own. [1]

[1] James Russell Lowell, "Once to Every Man and Nation," 1845

 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

When Kings Fail Us

            The stories we hear today are not particularly strange, as far as Bible stories go.  One is about the anointing of David.  Though it has its strange features, it seems to be the kind of thing in which Bible writers specialize:  the last and the least and the least suspected gets to be the star of the show.  We have seen that elsewhere many times over.  Another story is the parable of Jesus about the seed growing secretly.  Probably few people remember this parable from one time they hear it to the next, because it is not particularly memorable.  No Good Samaritan, no Prodigal Son, no pearl of great price, just an ordinary farm story that does not appear to say much.  The other story is that of the mustard seed, which is hooked in many people’s minds to another saying of Jesus about how if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we could do impossible things.  But the parable, as it stands, is at first glance mundane.  All of this is enough to draw from you a great big yawn.  So go ahead.  Yawn. 

            But something else is going on in the story from Samuel.  It is about the disappointing King Saul.  The Israelites had come to their leader, Samuel, who functioned as something of a prophet and priest and de facto potentate in the period of Israel’s history known as “the Judges,” when the tribes were held together in a loose confederation with no central government.  People grew weary of the weaknesses of tribal conflicts and political confusion.  They went to Samuel and petitioned him to establish a monarchy.  Samuel warned them of the dangers of what they were asking.  But he relented.  He wound up anointing Saul of the tribe of Benjamin to be the first of Israel’s kings.  Saul was a dreadful choice.   He was pious to the point of being stupid, as when he once called for a fast before a major battle when the troops needed all the strength they could muster for the fight.  He made politically unwise decisions.  We can infer from the stories that he experienced the onset of mental illness, or at least severe personality problems.  He had no models for kingship and was in way over his head.  Because he did not follow the details of the command to enact the herem or total annihilation of the Amalekites, Samuel assured him that Yahweh had utterly rejected him as king.  He became insanely jealous of David, who had entered into his court either as a musician or as a rustic military hero, depending on which story you follow.  Saul became increasingly paranoid, politically vulnerable, personally isolated, a totally tragic figure.  When he is killed in battle on Mount Gilboa, an eerie silence seems to fall over the story, which seems to have been moving towards some sort of denouement in which sadness and relief strangely mix. 

            But before all that has happened, there is today’s story.  After their abrupt parting and the resulting estrangement of Samuel and Saul, the old man still grieves the outcome of the once-promising monarch.  Perhaps it was because Samuel himself had played a part in that tragedy, at least one tradition being that from the outset Yahweh God had opposed the idea of a king.  What do we do when kings fail us?  That is the question raised by the story today.  We have, of course, no king; but we do have kings.  We have those in authority over us, whether appointed or anointed or elected.  You probably think that I am going to light into Kwame Brown or Harry Thomas, two members of the DC Council that have recently fallen from grace because of criminal activities.  I could do that, but I won’t.  I want to talk about another king.  I am specifically thinking about God. 

            What do we do when God appears to fail us?  For some people that is unthinkable, because God is always associated with the Good, the right, the just.  God never fails.  But for hosts of others, God is little short of a total failure.  Nature is cruel.  Human life is a mess.  Evil gets its way.  Systems are out of control.  God seems to have been neatly caught in a net cast by conservative, pious people, and poor God seems helpless to do anything about it.  Pitiful human beings are left to fend for themselves against tsunamis, earthquakes, famines and other disasters.  Where is God when we need God?  Certainly not everyone, but hosts of people are deserting God in droves, convinced that “he” is a sham, a farce, an empty shell of the very idea of a deity.  By and large the fans of God seem to be people who treat God as a piece of personal property, not unlike a GPS system.  Pull him out, plug him in, and he will take you to wherever you want to go.  If things in the universe go wrong, well, it is because God is justifiably and understandably mad at human beings for having Mardi Gras or Gay Pride parades or for being too politically liberal.  Religious leaders in this country have actually said all of those things in the last decade or so. 

            “But,” you protest, “we believe in God and we don’t think any of those things.  God is alive and well in my life.”  Furthermore, you may think that there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between all these fulminations about God and the Saul story.  But there is a connection.  And that is that Samuel and the Israelites and Saul himself operated on the assumption that God was active in the story.  First God chose Saul.  Then God rejected Saul.  God even admits to being sorry for ever making Saul king.  That is a very different kind of God than the one who is supposed to know everything and manage everything flawlessly.  The truth of the matter is that it is Samuel and the rest of the people who have had a major change of heart about Saul.  Whatever God might have thought about it all, they were sorry, Samuel leading the pack.  And that connects with us.  For in our disappointments at the way things go, we imagine that God is just as disappointed as we. 

            Now this may seem to be a major switch, but turn and have a look at the first of those two little parables that comprise the gospel lesson today.  “The kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “is as if someone should scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.  The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.  But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”  Now what is strange about that?  What?  Nothing!  It is an apt description of exactly what happens all the time.  We plant a garden, we leave it alone, seeds sprout and grow and we do not know how.  Of course, we can tell in a few sentences precisely how seeds germinate:  how water, temperature, oxygen, light and darkness trigger the growth of the plant embryo contained in the seed.   But we are clueless as to why there should be germination of seeds and equally unable to state what this thing called life actually is or why it should exist.  So the Kingdom of God is like nature.  It just is.  Processes are in place culminating in a harvest.  Notice that Jesus says nothing here about any symbolism of the harvest, nor does he make any comparisons between the growth process and the progress of the human soul.  He simply says that the Kingdom of God is like the scattering of seed that sprout, live, and produce. 

            How might that parable help to understand something like the collapse of the kingship of Saul?  Could it be that we have in both the seed sprouting and the monarchy tottering certain processes in which something bigger than the eye can see or the mind adequately imagine is involved?  Could it be that something divine (the Old Testament calls it Yahweh; we would more likely say “God” or maybe more specifically “The Holy Spirit”) was involved in the selection of Saul, and also involved in the failure of Saul, and also involved in the death of Saul, and involved in everything about Saul from beginning to end?   In just the same way, is it not possible that we can leave the pages of the biology textbook which accurately and adequately describes all that happens in seed germination, and imagine that something divine is present in the creation of the seed, in the patterning of the plant embryo, in the accidents of germination or empty seeds with no chance of germinating, in the conditions for growth or death, in the development of the plant, of the final harvest?  Could this not as well be the way of the universe:  a divine Spirit moving through the density of the mass that exploded in the Big Bang, and has been present at every black hole and the birth of every planet and the death of every star and the creation of oceans and  seashores and marshes and reptiles and wrens ever since?  Is there a crime committed by a two-bit officeholder in which God is not involved, or a lie told by a politician at which the Truth of the universe is not insulted, if not ashamed?  Is there a tear falling on the cheek of a mother ape that does not have the molecules of God in it, or the crunch of a foot on a cockroach that the Creator does not feel? 

            Is your God big enough to be responsible for the evil in this world, or is your God limited to presiding over only the good?  Is it unthinkable that God would be responsible for the failures of kings and Congresses at least in the sense that God created the flawed and twisted human beings that, scrapping to survive in an untamed sea of evolution, sometimes create havoc with the very systems that promise light and life? 

            Maybe this sounds like no big deal to you, and perhaps it isn’t.  But  I think that, quite possibly, the great frontier for Christian—perhaps all human—thinking is to begin to see on a much more significant scale than ever that God is not a tribal deity around for the birthday blessings and the get-well wishes and the partisan prayers and religious rallies, but rather a Presence alive in every cell of our bodies, in every atom in the whole universe, a Truth so hot and so powerful that it is impossible to imagine that God would look on us as a human would, but would rather see to the heart of things and people.   When we begin living in an awareness of so magnificent a Presence, perhaps the old world and its littleness will have passed away, and we will indeed ourselves be a new creation in Christ.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Sue Mosher: What Is This Thing Called Christ?

Universalist National Memorial Church: What Is This Thing Called Christ?

A provocative and helpful sermon preached by a friend of fellow-traveler of mine.  

Can't Bear It Now?

            One very nice thing about Pentecost is that Hallmark has not yet found out about it.  Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day cards crowd out any possibility that one could find a nice card with doves or flames, touting, "Happy Pentecost!"  One not-so-good thing about Pentecost is that Hallmark has not yet found out about it.  Hallmark and a lot of other people don’t have a clue as to what Pentecost is or means.  Christians, and not nearly all of them, are in churches today saying things like, “The Spirit of God fills the whole earth,” and no one outside hears a thing.  Nothing seems changed from yesterday afternoon. 

            But the point of Pentecost is not how popular it is, but how true it is.  Truth does not have to do with what really happened once upon a time.  Truth has to do with what holds for all time, and thus eternity.  That is something that is at once so simple and so hard for people to grasp, perhaps because we have mostly been brought up to believe that what is true is whatever we can see, measure, demonstrate, validate, prove, corroborate, and so on.  Experience itself teaches us otherwise.  Ask most people in Washington today, for example, what is the most important thing in the world and a good many, if not a majority, will likely answer “love.”  But take the conversation further and ask them what love is and you will quickly run aground, because, although we know love when we feel it or experience it, it is almost impossible to describe except by analogy.  This most important thing in our lives is something that we can barely describe, let alone pin down, and even more remotely measure in any sense.  But we know it when we see it.  We know it when we feel it.  We know it when we receive it.  And yet, love is like quicksilver:  it can deceive, so that what we are most certain is an experience of love might turn out to be a hoax.  Still, such hoaxes and disappointments rarely leave us believing that there is no such thing as love. 

            Pentecost is like that.  It is an affair with the Presence of God.  It does not lend itself to neat quantifications or solid explanations.  Pentecost is neither a fact nor an idea, neither a symbol nor a proposition.  Pentecost happens whenever the reality of God erupts in human experience causing a profound change in human behavior. Pentecost happens when the Presence of God invades ordinary rational boundaries upending set priorities.  Pentecost happens when the Presence of God strikes a blow to human suppositions, as when the weak are empowered, when the frightened are strengthened, when the downtrodden are treated with respect, or when the outcast are invited in. 

            Pentecost, in short, is a celebration of God among us.  That is the whole thing in a nutshell.  The Spirit of God, as distinct from the Creator who is behind all things and as distinct from Jesus, is the God we know in our presence, in our bodies, in our stories, in the multitude of little incidents that comprise our lives.  God present with us.  

            But there is more.  Jesus says to his disciples that it is a good thing that he is going away, because otherwise the Advocate—the Spirit—would not come.  But, since he is going, Jesus will send the Advocate.  Then he says something very interesting.  “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  What things?  We may well wonder.  And yet it is apparent to us, two millennia later, that things which were imponderable in the first century have clearly been the work of the Holy Spirit in the intervening time.  It is the nature of God with us to lead us into all Truth.  The band of disciples that Jesus was talking with in John’s gospel could never have imagined women in places of leadership as they now assume in the Church.  They could not have borne a discussion about table fellowship of Jews and Gentiles, let alone a community inclusive enough to welcome and respect homosexual persons.  They could not have borne to hear many things that even today many people cannot bear to hear and to ponder.  But the Truth is that the Holy Spirit leads us into all Truth.  There will always be some who imagine that the full Truth of everything was apparent right in the beginning, and that any additions or accretions since have been error, not Truth.  But the Spirit will never leave it at that, because the Spirit is God present at work in the world about us, nearer than the air we breathe, exposing the incompleteness of the last generation’s grasp of Truth, leading us to embrace new things, to sing new songs, to speak in new languages that only a short while ago we could not have borne the idea of doing. 

            Wonder of wonders, when we begin to open our minds and our imaginations to the possibilities of God, we begin to see how limited our former notions have been.  It is not unlike looking back at something we painted as a child, or something we wrote as a teenager, or something we wore twenty years ago.  We don’t necessarily reject what we did or wore or were, but we are not infrequently amused, a little embarrassed perhaps that what seemed so fitting (and was!) at one stage, seems to be so outgrown and outworn now.  But that tends only to happen if we are growing, and not busy trying to justify to the rest of the world or to ourselves what we think or believe we know.  For the Holy Spirit to lead us into all Truth, we have to be on some level willing to follow, and almost always that means a willingness on our part to embark on journeys into unfamiliar, sometimes terrifying, territory.  But it is in such places that we find ourselves able to embrace what but a few years ago we could not have borne.

            Over the door of the Bishop Payne Library of Virginia Theological Seminary are the words of Dr. William Sparrow, one of the professors in the 19^th century.  “Seek the Truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.” That is the work of the Holy Spirit.  And that is the work cut out for you and me.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

No End

 If ever there was an Easter story cut out for the skeptic, it is what you just heard from Mark. That may well be true because Mark might have been writing to skeptics. Some things that Mark says in his gospel hint that he was writing to Christians who were being tested, and very likely persecuted. Nearly everybody who studies Mark seriously concludes that he was writing to folks who were under considerable pressure. And not just ordinary pressure, but life-threatening pressure. Jesus spends a couple of chapters in Mark teaching his disciples about suffering, beginning with a heads-up about his own impending passion, which he predicts and discusses no fewer than three times. Suffering and betrayal, wars and strife, displacement and terrorism have a way of making one a zealot, a martyr, or a skeptic. A great many of us, hauled off by police or threatened in court, not to mention possibly staring our execution in the face, are prone to become skeptics, wondering if what we have been giving our lives to is really worth the bother, feeling that the system that presses the juice out of human beings is rigged against us permanently. There are many reasons to lose faith. There are many reasons not to trust.

Maybe that is why several Easter stories begin in the dark, for that is where we find ourselves at least some of the time, especially under threat or pressure. In Mark, the sun had risen, and in English this comes off as a pun, though I doubt that Mark had English in mind. It was “very early,” and the three women braved it, carrying a load of spices, padding toward the cemetery. No matter how much light was breaking over the purple east, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were positively in the dark. They, like all lovers on their way to see a corpse for the last time, were dark with grief. And they were in the dark, too, about what had happened during the night.

It happens with some frequency to the skeptic that clouds of one kind or another gather, keeping out the light. You may think that by noting this I have a black eye to give the skeptic. Not so. I assume that you, like me, are one, or have been one. Skeptics are not those who are mean or dull or stupid, nor those who lob grenades into intellectual discussions just for the fun of the explosion, or who delight in smacking down others’ piety. Skeptics (we get that word from a Greek one that nowhere appears in the New Testament) are those who are thoughtful and reflective. They are not ready to jump into believing something just because somebody says to, or because it might make them feel good. Sometimes the skeptical were born skeptical, probing and questioning and challenging and suspending judgment from the beginning. Other times, however, events and other people teach us to be skeptical. People that we once trusted let us down. People who we thought we could count on don’t show up. Systems that we once pledged allegiance to turn out to be run by those who care nothing about us. Ideals that once gleamed in our eyes become relics of disenchantment. Any of those clouds can bring on gloom. And though a skeptic need not be gloomy, give one enough clouds a-clustering and they will pry loose the firmest grip of simplistic faith.

These women go to anoint the body of the dead Jesus because that it what the situation requires. We can excuse them for wondering who will roll away the stone, for one does not necessarily create in advance a plan to deal with all the eventualities when one is distressed. We can appreciate their not jumping to conclusions about the stone having been rolled back. They enter the tomb.

Interestingly, the stories of the empty tomb seem to have come into Christian lore later than stories of the resurrected Jesus. Paul, for example, makes no mention of the empty tomb, which had nothing to add to his experience of meeting the Risen Lord on the Damascus road. The Letter to the Hebrews, another product of very early Christianity, says a good deal about the temple, but nothing about the tomb. This, of course, means nothing about the factuality of the tomb—but it does suggest that, with the passage of time, people, like Mark’s readers, began to connect their lives to those lives in the old stories about the resurrection. That is the way any of us begins to get meaning, and inspiration, and guidance. We see or hear something, often a story, that sheds light on the very dark we are going through. More frequently, we form a relationship with a person—perhaps even a person in a photograph, a movie, a book—some human being that we can bond with. I once knew a man who, when he was a boy, grew up in abject poverty, without caring parents, without friends, without encouragement from any human being. But there was stored in the barn an old 19th century framed picture of some Scottish ancestor, dressed in Highland garb. When he would sneak away to the barn to avoid the noise and abuse going on in the house, he would look for hours at the old Scot in the frame, who became his model of manhood.

These women entering the tomb form such a picture—one of ordinary people in a bleak, but not uncommon, situation, one that we can relate to. They were expecting to find a corpse, but instead they saw someone very much alive. They were expecting silence, and instead heard a proclamation. “Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, overcome with terror and amazement, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And that is the end of the Gospel according to Mark.

Scholars have speculated and argued for a long time about whether that is the last of it, or whether we are missing a page. You will notice in some Bibles two attempts to supply what clearly Mark did not, a hodge-podge of resurrection stories with a few new details thrown in. But I think, if there were anything ever inspired in Scripture, it is the ending of Mark’s gospel with the women fleeing from the tomb, terrified and amazed, unable to say anything to anybody. Why? Because the ending of the story has to be written by you. You get to decide whether you simply adopt somebody else’s ending or supply your own. And the way to do it is to go to the tomb yourself.

There is a tomb, and it is right here where you are. We call it the baptismal font. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. Water comes up over us when we are being baptized just as real as the forces of death that overtook Jesus on his cross, just as palpable as the cold stone of the tomb in which his dead body lay. Down under that water we go, as if for a minute we were breathing the last breath of a ruined creation. And suddenly, the stone is rolled away. The power of God seizes us, and draws us up out of the death-waters into the light of day, so that the death-waters become the birth-waters of new life, and the tomb becomes a womb. From that moment on, our feet are firmly planted in the Way of Christ. What we do with the rest of our lives is in a very real sense what we make of the resurrection of the body.

You would think that a church full of flowers, trumpeting its best music, clad all in the white and gold of joy would have no room for skepticism in all this. You might say that the deck is stacked against any who would look the least bit askance at the proclamation that he is risen. You would be wrong. Don’t forget that we remember. We remember that at least this Easter story tells us that the prospect of a Risen Lord, not to mention one who brings us body and all into his own New Life, is startling, amazing, even terrifying. No less a woman than the Magdalene, known elsewhere in gospel tradition as forthright and courageous, flees from the tomb, afraid to tell a soul—at least for the moment—she is so shaken. And that is sometimes what one must do when one has come out of the water of baptism, or more likely, when one has renewed the baptismal promises to follow Jesus along the Way. And it is especially true once we really do begin to believe it, heart and soul. To be a part of a community that actually vows in all earnestness to love as Jesus loved, to pray, to give, to serve, to forgive: well, all of that is enough to shake us like an earthquake and to shut our mouths to any easy platitudes.

 But do you want to stop the gospel story there? Stop with nothing more to say than a faint, “I doubt it”? Or do you want to finish the chapter, or write another, telling of how you went home, as if to Galilee, and found him there just as he said he’d be? Do you want to search for him in the world among the poor and the war-wounded and the dispossessed? Do you want to learn on deeper levels what actually happens when you go from symbolically washing another’s feet to the place where you actually pour out yourself not only for the sake of people you like or love but equally for people you really can’t stand? Do you want to know the power of resurrection if that power unleashes in you talents that you get nervous thinking you might express? Would you really forego the possibility that, trusting in the power of the Spirit that raised Jesus and raised you, you could have a life that would take you to places you would rather not go, but where you would find inexpressible joy? Can you write in your life a story of resurrection that is about how you learned in the last quarter of your life how to let go of control and put yourself in the hands of others, without fussing, without whining, and without fear? Do you want to follow the Truth you hear in Jesus, even if it means getting arrested, offending your family, taking up a politically unpopular cause? We need not fewer but more skeptics, people who are thoughtful and reflective, people who, like Jesus, question authority, people willing to entertain the notion that the conventions everyone else seems to live by are not all there is to God’s universe. And if, like the three women in the chill of a Jerusalem morning long ago, you find yourself fleeing the dark tomb and its promise of New Life, write the story you want to be a part of. Compose something that you can believe. There is a Galilee out beyond unquestioned faith and endless faithless questions. He will meet you there, as he said.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

The Answer

“Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

I wonder if you and I have in common the fact that every year we come to Holy Week and find ourselves asking the meaning of it, almost as if we had never been through Holy Week or ever figured out what it means. It would seem that the opposite would be the case. Millions of people discover themselves deeply moved by the depth of his suffering, the enormity of the abuses he endured. Others are impressed by what they hear as something that was always in the Mind of God, foretold fairly explicitly by the old Hebrew prophets, and obediently endured by Jesus. Still others are horrified by the thought that a good and merciful God could possibly have sanctioned, let alone planned, such suffering and cruelty, a notion that leads them to appropriate Holy Week quite differently, often seeing it as part of the continuing struggle of innocence against oppression, of good against evil.

I find myself staring at the Passion of Christ much as I remember looking at the Grand Canyon for the first time—seeing something that exceeds all the stories I have ever heard, grander and more terrifying than all the photographs and paintings could possibly convey, a tragedy at once easy to follow and yet impossible fully to grasp.

Most intriguing of all is the figure of Jesus himself. No matter what gospel you read, all of them portray a Jesus not the least bit interested in saving his hide. The four canonical accounts that we have of the Passion differ in a number of details, some of them mutually contradictory. But in all of them Jesus is clearly in control of his fate. That is not to say that he experiences no struggle. In Mark’s account he goes to Gethsemane and is “distressed and agitated.” But when he is arrested by the Temple police and brought before the Sanhedrin, as charges are flying back and forth, false and conflicting testimony given, he is silent and gives no answer. When he finally opens his mouth, it is to answer the high priest’s question, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

Ah! That question is the one that we keep asking, isn’t it? We ask it even if we have firmly answered it in the past. We ask it even if we know that the answer is not going to change from what we heard when we last asked the question. Thank you, Mr. High Priest, for saying out loud what I was about to ask but a little bit afraid or embarrassed to. I have no idea what the high priest was thinking, short of the obvious need to come up with a charge that would stick, one that could be used to justify the death penalty. And blasphemy was not such a charge actually. Nonetheless, where there is a will, there is a way, especially, it seems, if the will is evil.

Momentarily your mind is off the questioner and the question as you sit looking at Jesus, waiting for his answer. Silent he is. And in that silence there opens a corridor stretching back through your whole life. Look at all the things that have defined you since you can remember. You were a daughter or son, a sister or brother. A few years later, someone labeled you with a word or phrase or name that seemed to fit. “Smart,” or “troublemaker,” “shy,” or “talkative,” or “insecure” or something. School defined you for awhile. And the sports or music you excelled at. Maybe you chose a work that became your life. Perhaps you fell in love with someone or ones. Maybe in time you became the mother or the father of someone, the friend, associate, lackey, sidekick, flunky, boss, chairperson.”

As you go down the corridor, do you hear yourself forming your response to all those who might have asked you the question, “Are you…?” Are you this or that? Who are you, what are you? Amazing that most of those personas we have worn from time to time have something to do with a role or a function, maybe even a relationship, but few of them have anything to do with the core of who we are. And we know it. That is what makes for increasing pain, frankly, as we continue the project of living. There is something down deep inside us aching to express itself, something like the archaic crying that we let out when we were babies, crying so far back we can’t possibly remember it. Something is at my core and your core that transcends roles and won’t fit into categories of function and work and career and relationship. Maybe it is something so inchoate that it feels like a piece of ourselves aching to be born. Does it feel like a passion that has not yet quite figured out what its name is? Does it lodge somewhere in your chest, feeling like an old hope or a dream that has not dared describe its contours? We are talking here about something that is deeper than any of the surface things about you, something that is wired into your core Self, indeed maybe your core Self itself. And the high priests question, “Are you?...are you?” put to Jesus echoes the voices that keep asking us who and what we are, most of the time perhaps our own voice asking just that.

Out of the silence, Jesus answers. “I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” This might be the all-important moment in Mark’s story, perhaps even the all-important moment in Jesus’ life. The interesting thing about it is that, if you take his answer at face value, it is beyond debate. Mark must have known that none of the members of the Sanhedrin were around to read his gospel, and all of them (with possibly an exception or two) died presumably without having seen anything like what Jesus was describing. Quite clearly, his “I am” spills over beyond the borders of human history, and surpasses what can be quantified, proved, or conventionally described. “I am,” Jesus says.

On one level we hear in his answer all that we need to hear, whether we love it or dread it. He is the one who stands at the center of life and meaning. His ministry, his teaching, his suffering, his death, all that had preceded the trial and all that was to follow, are caught up in his answer. The high priest obviously didn’t believe him—he tore his robes and called it blasphemy, maybe out of grief, maybe out of anger, or some combination of the two—and it is equally possible to hear it today and contest it, discount it, or lament it.

But you may choose to take the story as trustworthy and true. More importantly, if you hear something in Jesus’ response that spurs you to give your life to him, to take him as the way you learn God and therefore what is most true in the Universe, then it will not be long before you begin to sense that the way he speaks Truth is the way you have to speak Truth, beginning with your own truth. If you accept and embrace who he is, the chances are heightened that you will find in him the power fully to accept and embrace who you are.

And that is just the beginning. It does not explain Holy Week. It does not necessarily make the terrible tragedy of Jesus’ Passion less difficult to swallow. It does not explicate the nuances of scripture or give a solid answer to all of your questions. But what it does is launch us on a quest, and for some of us already long launched, to spur us on to hear the truth and obey the truth and be the truth. Simply to keep following him is enough, for deep down we find ourselves wanting to live always and only for the Son of Man, seated at the right hand of the Power, coming with the clouds of heaven. Though life may beat us, spit on us, close all the doors to us, shut out the light from us, we know we are loved and kept by the One who is “I am,” One who touches that place deep within us causing us to say, “In you, Jesus, so am I.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Second Story

During the summer between first and second grades, I went to the Horry County Memorial Library in my hometown. Little church mouse that I was, I perused the room with the Dewey Decimal .220 collection in it, full of Bibles and storybooks, located next to the children’s section. I checked out a great big fat brown illustrated book of Bible stories for children, probably printed in the 1920’s. I brought it home and began reading. I could hardly put it down. That is where I first learned much of what is in the Bible.

I don’t recall, of course, exactly what I thought when I came upon a story such as the one in Numbers today, where Moses fashions a serpent of bronze and sets it up on a pole so that all the snakebite victims among the Children of Israel could look upon it and be healed. But I am sure of one thing. I did not approach the story critically. I did not wonder how the serpent worked healing powers, nor why Moses did not get blasted for such a thing when a few chapters away his brother Aaron gets roundly trounced for fashioning a calf out of gold. I don’t think I took the Bible stories as if they were just some other interesting stories, such as Uncle Wiggly and Nurse Jane. I think you could say without stretching a point that I read the stories naïvely. They conveyed to me a sense of the Presence of the Holy One of Israel, with whom I had a complete fascination. To my boyish mind, nothing seemed beyond God. And yet I don’t recall ever being afraid of God—don’t ask me why.

Not until I hit adolescence did I begin to sense some dissonance between some of the Bible stories and the world around me. But even then the dissonance did not pose a crisis for me. In high school I had the good fortune of having a teacher who taught the Bible as literature. She taught me how to ask critical questions in a way that led me more deeply into the meaning of the texts. The process continued in college. I learned to plumb the scriptures and the layers behind the scriptures to understand things like the culture that produced them, the language that expressed them, the meaning they probably conveyed to the first generation of readers or hearers. At such a place in my development, I would have appropriated the story from Numbers about the bronze serpent as perhaps a piece of pious folklore, or perhaps the signature story of sympathetic magic, a spin-off of some Egyptian serpent-magic captured in the famous headgear of the Pharaohs with its protecting cobra. I might have made the connection between the bronze serpent Moses fashioned and the story about how that very artifact was destroyed by the reforming King Hezekiah, centuries later, who smashed it in the Temple of Jerusalem where people had developed the custom of making offerings to it.

Then one morning, a few years after I had become a priest, from the Old Testament (which is the name we Christians give to the Hebrew Scriptures for theological reasons, not because “old” means inferior), —I was reading a story about how the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens, and I realized some minutes after finishing it that I had made it through the entire story without having once questioned its veracity. Instead, I had pondered the many unlikely ways in which God providentially fed me. Elijah’s ravens had become signifiers to me of experiences—maybe physical, maybe spiritual—in my own life. That was an incredibly important day in my life, because on that day I was aware for the first time that I entered what I later learned the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the second naïveté.” My “first naïveté” belonged to my boyhood in which I took bronze serpents and food-bearing ravens at face value and the stories about them quite literally. The second naïveté, however, was made possible because by then I had learned to question, to probe, to think analytically, in fact to doubt. Although I never had gone through an atheistic phase, I can readily appreciate those who do, for it clears away tons of baggage, liberating people from taboos and superstitions that have nothing to do with God but everything to do with social control. Freed from literalism, I could engage the symbols and the stories on another level. In that way, the serpent became to me a life-bearing symbol, which I could experience as (let me put it this way) a messenger of something divine. I say “divine” because I have come to believe, and take responsibility for believing, that God is in fact True, and reaches out to me—to us—using the very data of our everyday lives (including what we see, read, and meditate upon) as ways of opening us to layers of Reality that sustain and nourish our souls, help us to grow, enable us to evolve into the persons we have the potential of becoming.

Now this is where the bronze serpent story gets really interesting. In this “second naïveté” I could, as I did with those ravens feeding Elijah decades ago, simply imagine the poisonous reptiles to represent the darts and arrows and venomous stings that arrest me in the middle of my self-absorbed ranting and griping, just as apparently snakes did to those Israelites in the desert. That would be a fairly good discipline for me, I’ll warrant. But the story is more than that. On what, please tell me, may I look and find healing? Ah! Before you jump the gun and point me to Jesus on his cross, an obvious reference in the gospel story wherein he talks to Nicodemus using this very image of the bronze serpent, hold on. Stick with the old story about Moses and the pole for a moment.

The story says that Yahweh God said to Moses to “make a poisonous serpent” and “set it on a pole,” so that “everyone who is bitten” might “look at the serpent of bronze and live.” Remember that this is the same Yahweh who, the story says, sent the poisonous serpents among the people in the first place, snakes whose bites killed numbers of the people. It happens that the word for “poisonous or fiery” [serpent] comes from the same root as the word seraph, and the seraphim, of course, are first-class angels in Hebrew vocabulary. They burn. So these fiery serpents stinging the fire out of Israel mean something more than ordinary desert reptiles. They are divine messengers (that is what angels are) that ironically wound and heal.

Deep in the consciousness—really the unconscious—of humanity is this ironic marriage between wound and healing. All over the world there are stories about how the hero who delivers and saves must first taste the bitter pain of being wounded. If this is beginning to sound familiar, that is because it is. You know that truth on two levels. One is your own personal life. You know the irony that the wounds you bear, from the gashes carved into your soul by rejections, to the stigma and shame you carry in your body or your mind about your body or your mind, is exactly where you meet the ultimate questions of self-worth. Your wounds are the battleground itself where you either have found or will find grace and strength, a widening of your compassion, and a deepening of your capacity to love. The struggle for your destiny is won or lost there. The other level on which you know this truth, or will know it, is that the life-giving story of Jesus is precisely the thing that opens us up with decisive intensity, deflating our puffed up egos, bidding us take us off our defensive armor piece by piece. At the same time, Jesus is the one whose wounds and indeed whose death is the balm that heals us, the salve that soothes us, the medicine that ultimately makes us whole and sane.

Having been bitten by a copperhead at age ten, I have a short list of things I don’t particularly like to think about and looking on a replica of that fiery serpent is on the list. I don’t particularly relish the idea that Jesus is in any sense a snake. But there is a deep connection between what we most fear and what gives us life. This strange story from the desert wanderings of the Israelites tells us that the divine is somehow at work in even the most hideous of circumstances, working to bring about a realignment of our purposes and God’s own. I can see, not just in a snakebite but in the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, a God whose saving purposes are running through my life, my words, my fears, my self-doubts, ultimately bringing me together with all humanity into a land flowing with milk and honey at the other side of whatever desert it is that we happen to be passing through.

So it is not with a simple naïveté, but rather with a second naïveté that, encountering Truth on a whole new level, we can look upon the Son of Man, lifted up on the cross, and have eternal life. We can see in his story the outlines of the old incident told in the tales of our forebears’ wandering. He rattles our cages, overturning the tables we depend upon in our economies and in our temples; he is toxic to our systems of denial; he strikes out relentlessly against our penchant for oppressing others; he recoils at our hypocrisies; he calls into question our own retreat into self-loathing and exaggerated notions of worthlessness. Human beings, as a rule, even the self-proclaimed religious among us, cannot stand him, and join with the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov telling him to go the hell back where he came from and leave us alone. Over and over again the Christ in flesh and spirit is tacked up on a pole, crucified, a horrifying sight to any with the guts to look at him. But look at him we do, our eyes unable to avert a sight so compelling. Look at him we do, and see our paltry efforts at being like him nearly laughable. Look at him we must, and see in his wounds, his hands, his feet, our own wounds. How does it happen, we wonder. How can it be that this broken body seems to strengthen us, seems to say to us, “You are forgiven, though you know not what you do”? How can it be that we feel ourselves taking courage from him precisely at the moment we are ready to call it quits? How can it be that we can look on him and know ourselves to be healed in the only way that matters?

Nevermind how. The answer to how is yes.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that were an offering far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Just a Moment

A couple of days ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote and asked me where to find in the Bible a passage that says the dead have no consciousness. I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. I pulled down my exhaustive concordance to find that there are about 358 appearances of words translated “dead.” I could not find one on the list that remotely resembled anything he might be referring to. When I wrote back, he explained that he and his boyfriend were mentoring two castaway brothers who knew nothing about how to live and behave. They wanted to teach them something about the Bible. Wasn’t it true that only a hundred thousand or so people would make it into heaven? Didn’t the Bible say that we are at peace when we die until God comes back and takes us to heaven?

It is almost impossible to give people a handle on something so massive as the biblical tradition when they understand virtually nothing about it. And if you feel anywhere between ignorant and less-than-secure about the Bible, be aware that you are not alone, nor in this place will you be put down because of what you do not know. On the other hand, we don’t want to encourage illiteracy. So, I pointed my friend to the online Book of Common Prayer and the Outline of the Faith that it contains, which is a totally accessible summary of Christian teaching at least having the virtue of being dependably accurate without being simplistic.

If you happen to pick up a copy of the King James Version of the Bible, you don’t have to read beyond the title page to hit upon the main idea in the whole book. Because on the title page you will see “Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments.” The word “Testament” is the same as the word “Covenant.” And there you have the point of the Bible. It is a book about covenant.

Today, as always on the Second Sunday in Lent, we focus on the seminal story of Covenant in the entire tradition. It is, of course, the story of Abraham. There are several stories of the Covenant involving Abraham. The one we hear today comes from a priestly writer who lived several hundred years before the time of Christ. It is based on much older stories, and probably reflects even stories that are older than anything in the Bible itself. Because the quintessential story of humanity is the story of a journey, and that is essentially what the story of Abraham is. A few chapters before our reading today, God calls Abram to leave the land of his upbringing and to move to a totally new place. Abram obeys. He strikes out on a journey of faith. There is no covenant at this point, only a call, a promise, and a response. A little later on we discover what the journey is all about. It is about the unfolding intention of God to create a human community that will respond in faithful obedience in a way that the first humans did not.

There are all kinds of covenants, both in the Bible and outside it: covenants between friends, between equals, between kings and vassals, between superior and inferior parties, between husbands and wives. God is clearly the initiator of the covenant with Abram, and its everlasting nature is rooted in the sovereign will of God, not in human behavior. What is interesting is that Abram does not ask for anything in this story. He does not have to. He is offered “the world,” so to say. “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Get that. This is not a covenant that encompasses just one people, but a whole array of peoples. Moreover, the covenant involves not only a whole new relationship, but a profoundly new identity. Abram and Sarai are no longer known by their old names but as Abraham and Sarah respectively, "Ancestor" and "Princess." A part of the covenant is that Abraham and his descendants will have a land to call their own, and another part of the covenant is the way it is sealed: with the rite of circumcision. And most important, God says, “I will be their God.”

This has everything to do with you and me. This is our story, our holy story, because the story has claimed us. And I am not talking about “us” as an in-group. I am speaking of anybody in the entire human race who cares about finding a place in this world, the meaning of his or her life, a way of living that accords deep joy, a ground of hope for the future, and a profound sense of identity. It is open to you and me, and while the expectations and demands of living in a covenant relationship are serious and rigorous, it is the most freeing—and free—thing you can imagine.

You can claim your part in the heritage of Abraham, if indeed you have not already done so. And if you have, you can renew your place in that great caravan of people that are more numerous than the sands on the seashore and who have it in them to outshine the stars of heaven. But be aware. This story, and its facets like covenant and blessing and promise, is not the only one out there, nor the only one competing for your attention and allegiance. And the stories that have the most appeal tend to be the stories that claim to be valid expressions of the Will of God. I am not talking, of course, about other religious traditions, but certain versions of the very biblical story itself. There is a quite popular gospel of prosperity that hooks up religious affiliation and behavior with material success. There is also a version of so-called biblical religion that presents the relationship with God as fundamentally making no demands whatsoever beyond what we consider to be our convenience. And there are versions of our own story that twist it beyond recognition into a program for self-aggrandizement and tribal promotion. You know what I mean.

But the covenant story that we inherit from Abraham and Sarah is quite different. It is, if nothing else, counter-cultural. And it is so precisely because it cuts across cultures of all sorts. It started out as a simple story of God calling a man to move and start a new life. Before too many centuries had passed, it became a story that his descendants used to ground their identity. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” became a way of referring to God that distinguished them from other tribes and peoples. But the story did not stop there. The covenant came to be seen as embracing all people everywhere, and the covenant people came to be called a light to the nations, so that all could be drawn into this community that acknowledged the God of Abraham as the universal God, indeed the only God.

But the Covenant did not stop there either. Centuries rolled by, and, as usually happens among humans, people took the very instruments of covenant and made them not a way to include the human family but a way to exclude those who somehow did not measure up to the terms of the covenant. God’s initiative in inaugurating the covenant was replaced by increasing emphasis on human behavior. And when humans messed up and transgressed not necessarily the covenant itself but various human interpretations of it, group upon group found themselves outside the covenant, which more and more became regulated by a power group. Sound familiar? It is, because it is that ordinary human cussedness that continues to assert itself and play itself out in human history.

Then, out of the blue one day, so the holy story goes, there appeared a messenger from God to a girl in a very improper town in a remote section of the Land promised to Abraham, which had been overrun time and again by armies and occupiers. Its people were worn down with waiting, and the dream of God’s community, when it had not become a nightmare to the disenfranchised, had dimmed beyond recognition. Like her ancestor Abraham, the girl said yes. “Be it unto me according to your Word,” said she to the messenger. The covenant was on its way to being renewed in a way that no one—no one in the world—could have predicted.

The girl, whose name was Mary, gave birth to Jesus. From the beginning he was the instrument by which God initiated once again the construction of a new humanity. His life manifested a breadth of acceptance that set the teeth of those controlling the covenant community on edge. Full of Spirit, everywhere he went he made things come alive. The sick recovered. The hungry ate. The blind saw and the lame leapt. Good News finally got preached to the poor, and the old idea of Jubilee took on new meaning as joy ran through the wadis and wastelands of Israel. Suddenly the Promised Land was abloom, and looked as if God might actually be walking around in it; for how else could one explain the dead being raised to life? The Covenant God, El Shaddai, the Mighty One, who had appeared to Abram at age 99, and who had delighted old barren Sarah with the promise of a child in her old age, was known to bring life out of bodies as good as dead. Now in the person of Jesus people saw the old power return with indescribable results.

In the middle of it all arose a thing called baptism—which initially was a simple ritual bath outwardly signifying an inner change of heart and mind. Jesus’ disciples took it over from a prophet known as John the Baptizer, and made it the way of making disciples that would follow the Way that Jesus walked, an entrance into a radically reshaped covenant community. But one does not reshape communities radically or otherwise without running into resistance. Conflict brewed. Fear proved to be just the heuristic needed to manipulate the right people into doing what Power always needs, which is to secure itself. Again, you know what I mean, because it is a dynamic you see every day. Power had its way. Jesus was executed. Not only did Jesus die, so did the dream of God. But if there is one thing God knows how to deal with it is death. In bodies as good as dead, like those of the Ancestor and the Princess, God had stirred new life and brought forth the first birth in the covenant community. So God did it again. In a tomb, in a lifeless body, God stepped in and became the midwife of a new birth.

It took awhile for people to realize what had happened. But clearly what had happened was not just the raising of a corpse, as wonderful as that might been. It was the raising to new life of the ancient dream of a covenant community. It dawned on them what Jesus meant on that night before he was handed over to suffering and death when he had given them bread and wine saying, “This is the New Covenant in my blood.” The covenant had not died, but had rather awakened in a new body. And that body was this group of people that Jesus had managed to collect around him. They took this thing that they had been using to make disciples—baptism—and realized they could no longer pour water all over people without staging something that looked quite like burial and resurrection. Within a few years what had once been a simple bath became the community’s way of broadening the covenant community to include all comers. No longer did one become a member of the covenant people by circumcision—by definition and nature something reserved to males only—but by birth-bestowing water, a gift from God to women and girls as well as men and boys. The covenant community was at that moment blasted open so that every man, woman, and child in the entire human race had an invitation to join the caravan—as equals.

And join they did. The covenant community grew. Persecutions could not stop it. Martyrs’ blood merely nourished it. They surprised themselves, and maybe even surprised God. For something like four or five hundred years they took seriously for the most part that they were not just ordinary people on a pilgrimage to self-actualization or something of the sort, but indeed the body of Christ, doing what he had done, healing and feeding and teaching and guiding.

Through the years and centuries the covenant has been sidetracked, hijacked, warped, twisted, manipulated, bought and sold. And every now and again, such as in the thirteenth century, there appears a Francis of Assisi who, like Abraham, says yes again. Or in the sixteenth century, a Luther who, like Mary, says something memorable like, “Here I stand. God helping me, I can do no other.” And the covenant struggles with the birth-pangs of renewal, as the community, sometimes stalled, sets out anew on its pilgrimage.

And that is where we are, you and I, today. This is a moment in some ways like any other. But so was the moment just before El Shaddai appeared to Abram saying, “I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. I will make my covenant with you and make you exceedingly numerous.” So was the moment before Gabriel appeared to Mary saying, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with thee.” So was the early morning before the sun had risen and some dejected women padded their way through the darkness to a tomb. The world is waiting for the covenant once again to take on new life, hesitant to believe that it really could be true that God will once again open up the future, call together a liberating people, and announce through them to all the world, “I shall be their God and they shall be my people and I myself will be with them.”

Where is Abraham? Where is Sarah? Where is Mary? Could one of them be hearing this?


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012