New Advent

Mark 13:24-37

Amazing to me is the fact that there always seem to be some people who are ready to believe that the world is about to end, just about to go up in smoke and (bam!) disappear.  More amazing still is the fact that many such people apparently think that that is a good thing.

Was Jesus such a person?  If, as I believe, we can say with some assurance that Jesus expected the end of the world as we know it to occur within his lifetime or at least within a few years beyond, we either have to say that he knew something we don’t know, or he was just plain mistaken.

It isn’t very attractive for Christians to imagine that Jesus was wrong about anything. In fact, it sounds to most ears nothing short of sacrilege to suggest that Jesus was anything other than perfectly accurate about everything.  So let’s not rattle ours or others’ cages by insinuating that he made a mistake.  Let’s imagine instead something very different when we hear his prediction that

the sun will be darkened,and the moon will not give its light,and the stars will be falling from heaven,and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.[And] they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.
 

Now, it is true that we could imagine that he was talking about something ages and ages in the future—at least as far out as our own age.  But maybe there is something else going on here besides the physical world—earth, universe—collapsing.  Maybe instead what we have here is something like our creation story: eternally true but never intended to be technically factual. 

That in fact seems to track with what Jesus said about the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Reign of God. It is elusive, surprising, hard to pin down, more a state of heart than a product of rational thought, hidden, silent, beneath words, and, above all, “at hand,” already present within and among us. 

So what is this, then, that we try to grasp in the language of apocalypse?  What would be like the sun going out and the moon fading into nothingness?  What would be like the stars vacating their orbits and crashing into earth?  What would be so stupendous that it could only be described as the very powers of heaven being shaken?

What would you do if I told you that what causes the world to change in drastic ways begins as something so imperceptible that it is on the order of drawing a breath?  It is the tiniest decision to live differently. 

Let me explain. 

A friend of mine, John, once worked alongside a guy whom John found to be extremely difficult.  He was irritable, even irascible, critical, unpleasant, and totally self-absorbed.  He embodied every attitude that seemed negative.  John, a kind of hale-fellow-well-met, did his best to humor his workmate.  Nothing worked.  Finally, John was at the point of totally giving up on him.  Then it occurred to John that he would quit expecting anything.  He would simply think good thoughts, good wishes, and send a little bit of love toward his adversary.  He decided to love the guy without telling a soul.  Time went by.  One day a year or so later, it dawned on John that the fellow was behaving differently.  In fact, he was beginning to exhibit some strange characteristics.  He had become less critical.  He had begun to say positive things more and more.  He had in fact started becoming actually likeable.

I have heard this story countless times from dozens, maybe hundreds of people.  I have demonstrated it in my own life, prompted to do so by examples and testimonies of people like John.

Who would imagine that John had, in a split second, decided to do something that actually changed the world?  Yet he had done just this—simply by deciding to live differently.  Some will argue that, well, that was only one person, and not all that impressive.  What about all the evil people who are truly beyond being affected by niceness?  What about all the structures that limit and destroy the creatures of God—racism, sexism, heterosexism, and all manner of injustice?  Deciding to love some old grump in your workplace is not quite the same as reforming a world that is hell-bent on war and destruction.  No, it is not quite the same.  But there is something that we can count on.  All change is relational.  Change in people, and for that matter change that is transpersonal or non-personal, happens in the context of relationship.  So if we want to do battle with the forces that oppress, corrupt, twist, and damage the world and its creatures, ultimately we have to do it by being in relationship with others.  Not only do we have to join hands with our like-minded sisters and brothers committed to our ideals and values, we have to engage the hearts of those who resist the change.  And we cannot do that by refusing to be in relationship with them.  We will never conquer our adversaries by force and turn them into anything but victims and more hardened adversaries.  If we are to change the world, we have to learn and practice the power of unleashing love. 

Tom Shadyac grew up not far from here in Falls Church, Virginia. Tom had a fantastically successful career as a comedian and filmmaker, producing such zany films as “Liar, Liar” and “The Nutty Professor,” winning academy awards and making tons of money.  He had already begun re-examining his life when he had a serious biking accident that severely injured him and incapacitated him for months.  As he began to ask what, if he were going to die, he wanted to tell the world, he came up with a documentary called  I Am.  He interviewed scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists and philosophers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Lynne McTaggart, and Howard Zinn. The film asks two central questions:  What’s Wrong With the World? and What Can We Do About it? In the film, Shadyac answers that question, or rather hears that answer from others.  “I Am” is the answer that G. K. Chesterton once gave when asked, “What is Wrong With the World?” Shadyac discovered through his own amassing of money and things what was wrong with the world:  our ever-growing addiction to materialism.  “I am” what is wrong with the world.  And the cure?  Human connectedness, universal respect for all creation, the power of one to effect change.

This is the stuff that moves stars, that shakes the powers of heaven, that alters the course of the universe.  This is the apocalypse that we are not only waiting for but are engaged in bringing about.  And how does it begin?  By someone’s deciding to love rather than to fulminate in irritation.  With a Rosa Parks who decides to keep her seat rather than yield to the force that is simply following uncritically a cultural script.  With a Mohandas Ghandi who refuses to resort to violence but whose persistence inspires millions and brings an empire to its knees.  With a Nelson Mandela that holds on to hope for years refusing to concede all hope for an end to apartheid.  With Peace Brigades International who dares to believe that ordinary people can take action to stop war and human rights violations, even when their governments cannot or will not.  It begins, this unearthly change, when one of you who decides when going through a divorce that it is better to love your way through hostile territory than to try to kick your adversary into poverty.  It starts when another one of you decides that you will defend yourself or your family from emotional or physical abuse without becoming counter-abusive yourself.  Is any of this easy?  Ask the ones who get thrown in jail for their witness.  Ask those who have let goods and kindred go, and have risked mortal life and the integrity of their own bodies in the cause of human dignity.

When Jesus says, “You don’t know either the day or the hour, so keep awake,” he is stating the basic requirement for starting the Advent of deep change that shakes the universe to its very foundations.  Keep awake means to be conscious.  The Advent the world yearns for is the new creation that depends upon yours and my being conscious of the way we settle in for the long haul with the forces of repression, narrowness, and hate.  True Advent begins when we take one small step to live from the heart.  From that moment, creation begins to be made new by the One who, living in you and me, makes all things new.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014

End of Our Rope

Matthew 21:23-23; Philippians 5:2-11

Religion is a rope that consists of three strands.  Those strands are the spiritual, the institutional, and the moral.  The spiritual strand includes the things like prayers, worship, rites and rituals that people associate with the divine, called by whatever name.  The institutional strand encompasses all the structures, buildings, systems, hierarchies, rules and regulations, that  maintain, regulate, and control the activities of the religion.  The third component of the rope is morality:  setting boundaries, mediating relationships among people, and differentiating between right and wrong behavior. 

A perennial problem is that, no matter what the religion, folks tend to confuse these things.  For example, those invested in the institution frequently equate loyalty to the institution with moral uprightness, with the result that those who are detached from institutional religion are seen as flawed, bad, wicked, or even evil.  And sometimes those who have a moral passion for justice, for example, look down on those who withdraw to pray, imagining that they are less than they ought to be because instead of slogging it out for rights and liberties for the masses, they are busy going to masses, saying their prayers, and generally not very much helping to right the wrongs of the world.  Likewise, those who think that religion is fundamentally personal and is about doing whatever one finds personally rewarding are quick to miss the very powerful force for social change that sometimes religious institutions can effect, change that can be quite difficult to make if one is disconnected from an organized, focused religious community.

Jesus ran into a good bit of this tendency to confuse one strand of religion with another. He appeared overturning apple carts all over the place, calling accepted behavioral standards and institutional practices into question.  That did not go down very well with the religious establishment of his time any more than it would today. When he began to suggest that those who were outside the religious community, labeled immoral by the religious authorities, were actually more responsive to God than were the religious authorities themselves, he was inviting trouble—and he got into plenty of it.  Today’s gospel lesson is a vignette from that conflict that very much defined Jesus’ ministry. “Who gave you the right….?” “By what or whose authority are you doing these things?” These are questions that come straight out of the heart of the institutional regulation dimension of religion.  There is a good bit of evidence that Jesus was not unsympathetic to institutional religion in general—after all he was a rabbi teaching in the temple in this very story.  But what seems to have driven him nuts, so to say, was that the institutional crowd had gotten morality all backwards.  Hence his little parable about the two sons.  One refused at first to do the will of his father and later changed his mind and complied.  The second agreed to do what was asked and then reneged on his commitment.  “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”  If you had to throw an insult into the teeth of the religious establishment, that would be the line you would use. 

Most Christians, whatever their favorite strand of religion, imagine that they are doing exactly what Jesus would approve.  But the question for us today is what is the new frontier to which Jesus’ power is pulling us?  Into what new age is Jesus calling us?  Not everyone will answer that question the same way.  For some it will be immersing themselves in the battle for justice and equality.  For others it will be helping people to find their center through prayer, meditation, bodywork, or mindfulness.  For others it will be healing, or educating, or building, or art, or comedy, or parenting, or organizing.  The list is endless and includes things that have to do with one, two, or all three strands of religion or maybe a dozen or a hundred things outside any of the elements of what we usually consider to be religious.

 

So what, then, is the Center?  What pulls us together and holds us in community?  I can think of few other places where the answer is better articulated or more obvious than the one you have already heard this morning. “Let the same mind in you,” wrote Paul to the Philippians, “that was in Christ Jesus.  “Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” 

If there is anything that the Church needs today it is not to argue which strand of the rope is superior to the other strands, but to see what the rope itself is for.  It is not God, but it is the thing that gets us into contact with the living God.  Ironically, it is not holding on to the rope, and certainly not to just one or two strands of it, but letting go of our grip on the rope or any of its parts.  Or at least holding it so lightly that we can follow where it leads rather than have our hands be blistered by gripping what we hold too tightly.  It is, in short, following our Master, our model, our hero.  It is having in us the mind that was his, that emptied himself and embraced physicality, acquiesced to death, because the most godlike thing he could do was in fact to be an honest human being, living life with integrity, even if it meant dying on a cross.  That is why his name is above every name, and why at the name of Jesus every knee bows and every tongue confesses him Lord.  Well, not every knee bows nor does every tongue confess.  But the knees and tonguest that do belong to those who know that the center, the focus, and the whole purpose is in fact to come to the end of our rope—exactly what we are afraid of—where we will find ourselves totally surprised to be not tied to the rope, but tied to nothing, free as the God who made us.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014

Mealtime

Exodus 12:1-14

Perhaps the most surprising feature of today’s worship is that we hear the Story about the institution of the Passover Seder from the Old Testament that normally we hear half a year away in Holy Week on Maundy Thursday.   Isn’t it about time for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?  Why Passover now?   The reason is that we are in the process of systematically reading through the books of Genesis and Exodus and it just happens to be the week when we come to the story about the Passover and the Crossing of the Sea.  They are the combination of worship event and liberation event that are the foundation of Israel’s identity. 

Let me assure you that what you see hanging in front of you this morning is indeed a cross, and that I have not forgotten that this is a church, not a synagogue.  But what many folk here and in other churches might not realize is that more than a little of Christian identity is wrapped up in this story of Passover.  The way we have the story is not necessarily the way things actually happened.  For example, people are not accustomed to invent religious rituals while they are on the run trying to get out from under the thumb of oppression.  Indeed, a part of the story has to do with one of the components of Passover, namely the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  It makes sense that when people have less than a few hours to flee a war zone, in effect, they don't have time to wait around for loaves of bread to rise.  But the Passover part—the killing and roasting of a whole lamb—is different.  It takes awhile to roast a lamb, even if you prefer it rare. And the fact is that the instructions for roasting the paschal lamb are inserted into the story at a much later stage in its development.   So there are these two things—unleavened bread and lamb—that form the basis of the Passover meal commemorating the way the angel of death passed over the homes of the Israelites while slaying the firstborn in all Egyptian families.  All of this comes to have great meaning for Christians.  The Passover has its Christian counterpart in the Holy Eucharist.  Everything we are doing this morning has its roots in this old Exodus story.

The main point of connection between the two meals, Passover and Eucharist, is that both are tied to the seminal event of liberation.  The Passover celebrates deliverance from Pharaoh.  The Eucharist celebrates deliverance from death.  The Passover is a festival about how Israelites were spared death.  The Eucharist is a festival about how in Christ we are delivered from the death of sin and raised to newness of life.  The Passover celebrates the passage of our forefathers and foremothers from the bondage of slavery through the sea into the ultimate freedom of the Promised Land.  The Eucharist marks the passage of Jesus’ community from the bondage of sin and death through the water of baptism into the freedom of resurrection and ultimately to our Native Land where we are united with God through the power of Jesus Christ.  The Passover leads to the covenant of God and God’s people first articulated in the Ten Commandments.  The Eucharist celebrates the New Covenant of God and God’s people which is summed up in the New Commandment that Christ gives to his community:  “Love one another as I have loved you.”  The Passover meal celebrates the making of a nation.  The Eucharist celebrates the opening up of that nation to include all nations, races, sexes who populate the New Israel, the Church.  The modern Passover meal ends with the hope, “Next year in Jerusalem!”  The Eucharist nourishes the vision of a New Jerusalem as a new age, a peaceable kingdom in which the lion lies down with the lamb, and the wolf and the bear eat straw like the ox, and the child and the adder are not enemies, and no one hurts or destroys anyone else on the holy mountain of God.

I am sometimes amazed at how many of us make so few connections between various stories and experiences within our faith tradition.  And sometimes the connections we make are not at all what is intended.  I remember one Easter many years ago when the State of Israel and the government of Anwar Sadat’s Egypt were struggling to reach what ultimately became the Camp David Accords, brokered by President Carter.  That year at the Great Vigil of Easter, after we had sung the Song of Moses celebrating the Passover of Israel from Egypt and the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, two parishioners jumped on me for keeping the old enmity between Israel and her neighbors going.  I was stunned.  I naively thought that people made distinctions between ancient Israel and modern Israel, between ancient Egypt and modern Egypt.  So I imagine that there are some here today who can’t quite shake loose from awareness of the dynamics that embroil Israel and Palestinians in ongoing war.  I am deeply concerned about the situation in the Middle East.  I hope you are.  It is complex and emotion-laden.  Suffice it to say that the meaning of Passover does not neatly line up with support for the State of Israel in its present pursuits, nor is participating in the Eucharist simply a political affair.  As far as I am concerned, the theology of Passover is as much about Palestinian, Ukrainian, Salvadoran, Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek liberation as it is about Israeli liberation.  And the Eucharist is the meal of a community that is international, inter-racial, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian, not one that belongs only to a segment of the world.

The formative event for Christians is the resurrection of Christ.  He is our Paschal, or Passover, Lamb.  He is our Risen Bread, given for the life of the world.  Eucharist, like Passover, is not just a commemoration of something that happened “way back when,” but a reality in which we are invited to participate.  In every age, say some Passover Haggadahs or liturgies, there arises a new threat to freedom that must be dealt with as was Pharaoh.  And in every age there are forces, within us and without, that militate against living the life of the resurrection.  One of the most virulent enemies of the resurrection is the persistent notion that resurrection is about going to heaven when we die.  It is not about that.  It is about following Christ by sharing the radical vision of a new community that actually exists to embody and practice the sacrificial love of the crucified and risen Jesus.  Loving one another as he loves us is what ultimately will be not just our own Passover experience, but the passing over from death to life of this world he died to save.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014

Heads Above Water

Matthew 14:22-33

            When someone says, “ I do not have enough faith,” you might ask, “if you had more faith, what would you do with it?” 

            Today’s gospel ranks in the top five stories (but who is counting?) that seem to be about believing in the impossible.  The phrase “walking on water” has come to mean being able to do something superhuman, or to be morally or otherwise superior to ordinary people.  A former parishioner of mine, who, it is fair to say, held me to a standard I could not meet when I was her priest, came to see me some years after she and I had both left that parish.  She was talking about her then current rector and all of his faults.  “In retrospect,” she said to me, “you walked on water.”  Well, of course, I did nothing of the kind.  Not even metaphorically.  But hers was high praise.  And on my less than good days I might even think that she was correct.

            But the truth of the matter is that most non-literalistic rationalists who read or hear this story about Jesus walking on water immediately conclude that it couldn’t possibly have been so, since everyone knows that human beings don’t walk on water because they can’t.  Literalists conclude that the story proves that Jesus was in fact God, who alone can walk on water should he take a notion to do so.  And the moralists are sure that the story is all about Peter, who couldn’t do what any human being presumably actually could do if only that person had enough faith.  So we are left with basically three alternatives:  don’t believe the story; or believe that the story proves the divinity of Jesus; or believe that the story implies that if we are not walking on water it is because we are guilty (note the word) of having too little faith. 

            As is usually the case, these rather simplistic views obscure what the story is all about.  It is clear that for Matthew, the story is one about discipleship and the disciple’s dependence upon Jesus for strength and power.  It is about the community of faith, pictured as being in a boat on a wind-tossed sea, trying to make headway on their own since Jesus is absent.  It is about how that community is surprised—shocked—by the very appearance of the one who can and does save them.  It is about the hesitancy of the disciples to believe in the reality of the Risen Christ, always testing him, saying, “If it is you, then do so and so.”  It is about Jesus finally getting in the boat with his community who at last acknowledge who he is and worship him accordingly.  Matthew himself writes the part of the story about Peter, who for Matthew, is the icon of the disciple, not always (as this story indicates) a good model of discipleship, but a reliably accurate example nonetheless.  And the problem with Peter is that he seems to be afflicted with what the Church generally considers to be the chief of deficiencies:  doubt.

            So let’s face the question:  if Peter’s doubt was his problem, and thus the problem for the Church, and thus the problem for you and me, what can he, we, or Jesus do about it?  What might we do if we had more faith?

            It might behoove us to consider what faith is.  And that isn’t as simple as it sounds.  Faith, in scripture, can mean a host of things including belief in a religious system, confidence in a person, being attentive to and responsive to God, hoping confidently in a particular outcome for a set of circumstances, and giving one’s heart to another, something that causes faithfulness and reliability, a solemn promise or oath, a proof or pledge, a special gift or virtue, and so on.  But in the Bible faith overwhelmingly means actively taking risks in trusting or confiding in another.  That is what characterizes faith in God, for example, the prime example of which is Abraham, who embarked on a journey the end of which he had no way of knowing. Jesus consistently teaches that faith is taking a risk:  asking for what one might not get, trusting in what one cannot prove, casting one’s lot with the Kingdom of God when every other kingdom is clamoring for one’s loyalty with nearly irresistible promises. 

           

            Ultimately, then, faith has to do with relationships.  It is not so much a matter of giving mental assent to a series of propositions by saying, “I believe” in this, that, or the other.  It is about being in a relationship with God or Jesus or somebody else in whom you place your trust, to whom you give your heart and life.  And that really is what the story about Jesus walking on the water, and Peter’s near drowning, are about.  They form a narrative portrait of how the relationship of Jesus and his community work.  We are all in a small craft on a storm-tossed sea, with no visible God anywhere around.  Suddenly there is a Presence, we don’t know who or what.  No matter how many times that Presence reassures us, saying “Take heart!  It is I.  Don't be afraid,” we cannot get it through our skulls that he really does show up in the darkness.  So we test him, “If it is you…”  And he responds, “Come.”  Then comes the moment of faith.  Getting out of the boat, which seems our only means of survival, requires an immense amount of courage.  Winds rage.  Waters swamp.  Our hearts sink.  That is the moment of judgment—not the judgment that wags its finger saying, “You don’t have enough faith,” but the judgment that reveals the Truth:  we cannot make it without him.  It is not so much that we take hold of him as he takes hold of us.  And the journey of faith takes us to where we never imagined we would go, which is back into the boat—the community—that continues to discover the power and peace of Jesus.  Living in that reality is what we call living the resurrection.  It is what we call taking up the cross and following Jesus.  It is what we know as the moment of transcendence. It is our healing.

            Does it always work this way?  Maybe so.  Maybe not. (Can you think of a better way?)  The whole thing is a matter of getting out of the boat with no assurances, only with the trust that God will show up when we least expect, and that God will sustain us  and empower us to do far more than we could imagine.  True?  Who knows?  That is why it is called “walking on water.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014