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

Polar Opposites

Do you have the same trouble with much Christian teaching and preaching as I do: the faith frequently being presented as something that is transparently clear and subject to no debate when you know perfectly well that nothing is quite so clear and that everything worth anything is worth at least a little wrestling and debate? Do you? Just asking.

As the psychologist Carl Jung, for one, and the philosopher Hegel, for another, argued, reality is not one-dimensional, but a set of contradictions or polarities that can be integrated or united, but which are still here to stay because neither pole can be eliminated and neither can be collapsed forever into its opposite. Life is made up of such polarities—good and evil, nature and freedom, the same and the other, matter and spirit, light and dark.

What leads me to start out this way is that the lessons ingeniously present us with a polarity today, one that can better be described in pictures than in labels—indeed, one that in some sense requires the medium of story simply to be halfway understood. On the one hand we have the character of Jonah, God’s unwilling little prophet, who is the picture of running away from God with all deliberate speed. On the other hand are the figures of the first pairs of disciples that Jesus called, all of whom, as pictured in Mark and captured in the words of an old hymn, “without a word rose up and followed” their new Master. How’s that for a polarity? “Ah!” some will say. “That’s no polarity. That’s just a pair of stories that illustrate what not to do and what to do in relation to God. Simon and Andrew, James and John model the proper, faithful response to Jesus, whereas Jonah totally illustrates exactly what not to do when God calls.” Well, you’ve got me there—so you may think. But I want to look behind the stories, and perhaps in front of them, and see beyond easy moralizing about “good” and “bad” responses that Jonah and the disciples represent and speak to a polarity that exists now and has always existed in human beings. It could be called by a variety of names, but for now I’ll call that polarity “resisting God” and “accepting God.”

Let’s start with Jonah. Some of you have probably not heard of Jonah, or, if you have, you got wind of the news that he was supposed to have been swallowed by a whale—which, since it isn’t even in the story itself is worse than not having heard of him at all. The little book of Jonah, only several pages long, is really quite unique among its neighbors in the Bible. It is in fact a novella, or a short story, if you will. The story starts out with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah telling him to go to Nineveh, a great gentile metropolis, and preach to the inhabitants that they should repent of their wickedness. Jonah immediately packs his bags and flees expressly to get away from the presence of the Lord. He finds a ship bound for Tarshish, pays his fare, goes aboard.

A terrible storm comes up. The sailors first throw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. The captain goes down into the hold and finds Jonah fast asleep. The captain tells him to get up and pray to his god, as everyone else is doing, so that the ship won’t perish. Meanwhile, the sailors cast lots to see whose fault it is that the storm has come up. Sure enough, the lot falls to Jonah. They want to know what on earth he has done, what is his occupation, where he comes from, what his country is, what people he belongs to. Jonah tells all, including that he is running from God. The sailors, instead of jumping him, ask him rather politely what he thinks ought to be done with him and Jonah rather suicidally says, “Well, just throw me overboard. That ought to calm the sea.” Interestingly the sailors defer, row as hard as they can to reach land, and only when they have no success do they themselves pray not to be guilty of innocent blood, and with that finally toss Jonah overboard. Sure enough, this calms the sea. The sailors, who must have been pretty pious, really are scared then, and offer a sacrifice and make vows to Jonah’s God—a god, by the way, whom none of them knows.

But Jonah does not get off quite so easily as he intended. Rather, the story goes, he is swallowed by a fish, in whose belly he takes residence for a total of three days and three nights. Now if this reminds you somewhat of Pinnochio, you’re on the right track, because remember that this work is a novella, and like all good stories it contains not a little humor. And part of the humor of this story (at least I find it funny) is that inside the belly of the fish, Jonah composes a psalm. The narrator-creator of the story probably is not so amused as I am—and the psalm itself is pretty good poetry—but surely that same author must have chuckled when he composed my favorite part, which is that immediately after Jonah recites his psalm the fish vomits.

Thus barfèd out upon the land, Jonah hears the word of the Lord a second time telling him exactly what it had said the first time: “Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you to.” So he does. And he is successful beyond his wildest fears. The cussed Ninevites, heathen Gentiles all, hear, respond, repent, and proclaim a fast, don sackcloth and even dress the animals in sackcloth. And God, seeing all that, changes the divine mind and holds off thrashing Nineveh. That makes Jonah livid. He tells God exactly what he thinks and flatly states that he knew better than to come to Nineveh precisely because God was gracious and merciful and would do something really stupid like relent from punishing the heathen. So just let him, Jonah, die. Because after all, if believing in God didn’t get you anywhere, and if your status as one of the chosen did not in fact make you any better off, why live in the first place? Sulky Jonah goes out of the city, sets up a booth, and waits to see what will happen. Up grows a gourd vine that shades him. Jonah likes that. Along comes a worm that bites the gourd vine in half. Jonah doesn’t like that. Up comes a desert storm. Jonah has a pity party. “Let me die.” God asks him if he is right to be so angry and Jonah says, “You’re mighty right I’m angry. Angry enough to die.”

And this merciful, gracious, inclusive God replies, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand form their left, and also many animals?”

End of story.

What is the point? In a nutshell, it is that God is not a tribal deity who is the exclusive property of Israel, but is rather the God of all the earth, of nature, and of every nation. The irony is that serving such a God seems pointless when the wicked get off scot-free, so why not just wish for death? It is exactly that sort of desperation that the narrator addresses, calling out the self-absorption and sourness of people who want to cut God down to size so they can have God all to themselves. And the patent hope of the storyteller is to lure the hearer into changing heart, mind, and theology, ironically accepting without rancor the greatness of God’s compassion.

You will no doubt note that there is something very familiar about Jonah and the people he represents. We do not like having our gods take pity on our enemies, as a general rule. We much prefer a portable, tribal deity that our team can pray to and who will bring us a win. Not only do we prefer that, we spin various stories asserting that that is exactly what kind of god we have, and invest considerable energy in trying to get others to sign on to the team that clearly owns this god, for after all the team is made in the image of this god so they look and act exactly as he and vice versa, right?

We may protest that we believe no such thing. We are not even sure whether there is a god, let alone one that is a comic book caricature. But we probably will admit that such a god gets great press in the blogs du jour, either being admired or condemned. And that is enough to light a fire under us making us run as fast as we can to get away from such a demon. And there we have it. Whether we are running away from a compassionate God simply because we cannot stand the depth and breadth of divine compassion, or running from the god who we sense is the silly invention of small minds, there it is in plain view: the “God” from whom we want at all costs to distance ourselves. Say it isn’t so!

But then there is the other story. If we only had these few verses in Mark (1:14-20) and knew nothing else about these disciples, we might imagine that they were plastic figures who lacked brains or soul or common sense or something, which lack would account for their rising up and following Jesus without the slightest hesitation. But we do know more about them than that. We know that confusion, pain, sorrow, fear, and—if a mix of story and legend are to be believed—suffering and martyrdom awaited nearly every one of them and the others eventually called.

But Mark presents the calling of the first four disciples with the spotlight clearly on Jesus’ call and their response. We know nothing about them beyond the fact that they were fisherfolk, that they were brothers, that two of them were with their father, and that they were on the job. Whether it was raining or sunny, whether they loved their work or loathed it, whether they had succeeded or failed at other things, whether or not they had ever seen or heard tell of Jesus: none of this do we know because in the end it is unimportant. The Reign of God has come and the one who reigns is Jesus. His calling, “Follow me,” and their immediate response is the reign of God. The very response exemplifies what that reign is all about. They do not have a job description of changing the world by preaching, teaching, healing, or anything else, though before it was over with they would do all those things. They simply get up and follow. Life unfolds from there.

Chances are you know what that is like, because if you have lived very long, you have done it. You have given your heart to another because you could do nothing else. You have said yes to someone or to some task or to some love that called you, and you did it without calculating the pros and cons, without over-analyzing the costs and benefits. You gave yourself away because there was in the moment nothing else to do. And I would add—and argue—that you did it—we do it—because our desire to say yes to the Promise of Meaning is the other one of those two poles running right through our existence and experience.

Ask us in the abstract if we would, like Simon, Andrew, James, or John, rise up and follow Jesus, no questions asked. We would likely say no—not a chance, in all honesty. But the issue here is not whether we respond instantaneously or take some time to think it over. The issue is: will we respond to the Presence of God here and now? Will we follow the one whose life and death embodies that Presence? Will we follow him outside the margins of acceptable society? Are we going to follow him beyond the confines of common sense and provability into the world of mystery and wonder? Are we going to follow him in breaking down the barriers that separate human beings? Will we follow his shadow, even when we do not yet know him, to the point that we will come to call him our Way, our Truth, our Life, our Bread, our Center?

Some days we are Jonah, irritated with the very notion of God, impervious to any Word from God. Other days we are at the opposite pole, ready to give our lives to God. The polarity will never completely go away, because polarities never do. No use pretending. But there is good reason to hope that our experience of following Jesus will be so life-changing, so positive, so unbelievably good, that we will want more and more to follow in his steps, even when we feel the impulse to shut our ears to a new challenge to go to some new place simply because he bids us go and leads us there.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Choosing

Every year it seems a bit strange to leave Jesus in the crib one week and come back the next and have him be a full grown man going on his own to be baptized by John in the Jordan. Except for one story about the adolescent Jesus in Luke’s gospel, we have only legends and silence between his infancy and his ministry. Sometimes I think it is a kindness that we know nothing for sure about Jesus’ childhood and youth, because I suspect he would be presented as such a sterling example of goodness that we would not believe him to be a real human being. Or, if a tale or two had sneaked into the tradition about some mischief he got into, it would totally confound all those who have an idealized image of Jesus as thoroughly special. Better that we are left wondering, or at least spared the disappointment of having Jesus spoiled for us.

To Mark, writing his gospel before many questions about Jesus had gelled into full-scale controversies about his nature and identity, none of these matters seems to have been important, if they occurred to him at all. He has no birth narratives with shepherds or angels or wise men. For him, Joseph gets no mention, not even a biographical footnote. And Mary, far from being the Blessed Mother that she becomes in the three later gospels, is thoroughly dumbfounded by Jesus’ behavior and joins his other siblings in seeking to get him to leave off his preaching and come home, fearing perhaps for his safety, probably embarrassed or perhaps anxious from the rumors that Jesus was out of his mind (Mark 3:19b-17; 31-34; 6:3-5). Mark is definitely interested in showing us that Jesus is the Son of God, but that means something quite different to him than it generally means today, and even something different from what it would mean a decade or two after he wrote his gospel. The story of how Jesus was baptized and what happened to him then was of great importance to Mark, because for him the baptism was clearly the beginning of Jesus’ special status. The baptism was public enough, one supposes. But, unlike the account in Matthew’s gospel, all that happened—heavens opening, dove descending, voice speaking—were for Jesus’ eyes and ears only, not for the crowds. These elements of apocalyptic symbolism were enough to confirm Jesus’ sense of his own identity, from which he never wavers in Mark’s gospel, not even in his dereliction on the cross. From the moment of his coming out of the water, Jesus was a Holy Spirit-filled person. And that Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness on what you and I might call a search to unpack the meaning of it all.

But let’s not get ahead of our story! We were just noting that all of this happens, as it were, out of the blue—no tidy series of steps carefully bringing Jesus to the Jordan and to baptism, so far as we know. Yet we do know more than that. We know that Jesus, like any young Palestinian Jew of his time, had several options. One was, of course, to be totally submissive to the tradition of his time and society, dutifully bowing to received wisdom, essentially questioning nothing. (That is always a human option.) We know that, smart as he turned out to be as theologian and thinker, he could certainly have identified with the Pharisees, for example, the group most interested in applying the Torah, the Jewish Law, to life with unrelenting rigor. He had the talent to be a scribe, and no doubt could have made a name for himself (if for no one else) by becoming a religious lawyer. Moreover, since he was to give clear evidence of interest in communal life, it is entirely possible that he toyed with the idea of joining the Essenes, a religious community with a monastery not too far from the place where John likely did his baptizing. With the Essenes he would have had the chance to parse and ponder what we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which they produced. Or with his passion for justice and compassion for the downtrodden, Jesus might well have become a Zealot, one of that band that wanted to foment rebellion against the Romans. Off to the hills he might have gone to join the political revolutionaries.

But none of these roads did he follow. Instead, he walked the dusty trail from Galilee down the river valley towards Jericho. He had either heard of John the Baptizer or he discovered him along the journey. Was Jesus searching for something? We can only imagine, we cannot know. But what we do know is what he found and what he identified with. He found someone out of the heart of the old prophetic tradition, straight off the pages of the Prophet Isaiah: “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, makes his paths straight.’” We know that he heard and identified with a call to repentance. And the story is that this John kept telling people that one was coming who was more powerful than he, and who by comparison was infinitely more worthy, one who would baptize multitudes with something way beyond the power of ordinary water—the very Spirit of God. One wonders. Did Jesus hear that statement, standing among the crowds? Did John’s words fall on him like a burden, pierce him to the quick, excite him, inspire him, galvanize his young vision for ushering in the Reign of God on earth? Was he already primed to believe he had a vocation? Did he, searching for a moment of clarity, hear what John was saying and immediately know that it was he who would be the one to baptize with Holy Spirit?

The Church has long had a habit of making up stories about Jesus, stories that fill in the gaps between the pages of scripture. And Christians have generally had the habit of believing those stories. One of the strongest and most long-lasting of those stories is that Jesus never had a moment’s doubt about anything. If you are one who believes that story, you probably have little interest in even imagining that he ever had to search for a thing, and certainly not a vocation, an identity. But there is some chance, perhaps even a large chance, that you are one who for whatever reason finds it perfectly plausible that Jesus was so uniquely powerful that existing scripts—Pharisee, scribe, conventional rabbi, Essene, Zealot—did not suit him or interest him. Perhaps you are willing to entertain the notion that he was a mold-breaker, or that God it was who broke the mold out of which Jesus was formed so that there was not nor could there ever be another quite like him. In that case, maybe you find yourself imagining that it was a restlessness that led him to leave his Nazareth home and make his way miles down the country to join a movement that dared to believe in things like radical forgiveness, utter dedication to the Reign of God, and the availability of healing and feeding for all comers. Perhaps something is going on in your own life, a dissatisfaction with things as they are, maybe even an anger at the conventions that people live by, which they use to pass as moral and upright. Maybe something is stirring in you that finds your own Nazareth far too confining, something that has made you strike out to make a difference in the world, maybe even by finding and living in the Commonwealth of God. Perhaps you see in Jesus a kindred spirit, a mentor too authentic to settle for half-truths and easy answers, and maybe you want to lurk in the shadows long enough to see if he might be the One to follow.

If that sounds like you, then the way to the Jordan is this way—right straight to the water of baptism. If you have never been baptized maybe you want to consider it. If you have been baptized, maybe you want to reconnect with your baptism. If you have been living your life faithfully, perhaps you want simply to say Yes again. In any of those cases, it is possible—not guaranteed, but possible—that you will be plunged into a totally new kind of life, one in which you will feel, even as the water is running out of your ears, the heavens split open, and an indescribable peace settling upon you, dovelike, as your Yes is answered by a Yes: “You are my child, my beloved.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Christmas Present

Luke 2:1-20

I often wonder when we come to Christmas what you out in the pews are thinking.

The cat leapt out of the bag last Sunday and suddenly the whole congregation knew that I was marking forty years that I have been a priest. That means for forty years I have been engaged each Christmas in examining the story, listening to it, pondering it, sometimes fretting over it, all with a need to open it up afresh and find in it the thing that will make the whole festival somehow come alive, move, inspire, speak to—to whom? To you, but equally to me. It is not unlike the annual drama of Christmas morning. People go digging into presents, tearing through wrappings and popping off ribbons, pulling out things that sometimes call for gasps—oohs, ahs, “Darling, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have”—a tumultuous party of surprises and delights, if, of course, you’re lucky enough to be able to have all that. Well, that is the kind of experience, though in a spiritual idiom, that I itch for Christmas to be on this holy candlelit night. For that to happen, somebody, though not necessarily I, must arrange a moment of connection. That in turn forces the question of who needs and wants to connect, with what or whom, and how.

Over the decades I have gathered a little information on what you are thinking, though it seems awfully sketchy to me. It appears, for instance, that many folks assume that the tale of Jesus’ birth is a piece of biography, much like any birth narrative. And, since popular imagination stitches together the very distinct and in some ways incompatible accounts of the two gospels with birth stories, the popular mind imagines that shepherds, wise men, angels, Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus were all right there somewhat on top of each other. Add “manger” and soon you have a full-blown barnyard, with oxen, asses, camels, lowing cattle, even chickens and the occasional duck or goose. It is all quite a lot of fun; and preachers, for example, don’t get very far by trying to deconstruct the entire scene. “That is just the way it all happened,” the average worshiper might say.

Still, people wander into church on Christmas, looking for only God knows what, and I wonder about them—about you, if you are one of that number. Is it the power of the old carols to awaken dormant memories of your youth? Is it the smell of greens and the flicker of candles that can transport you to a space where Mystery does not have to elbow its way through mindless crowds in order to draw you in, warm your heart and stir your soul? Do such as you give a dip of figgy pudding about somebody’s doctrine of the Virgin Birth or the meaning of the word “Savior”? Or do you deep down wish someone would explain those things to you because you sense that they might actually have to do with the Truth you need to live your life by?

The default position of the Church has long been that it is up to us insiders, and especially the learned, professional caste, to put on the show and tell the story, and let the audience get what it will. And that might not be too bad an idea. But suppose we want to push the boundaries a bit. Suppose we might wish to pause the tape and rerun a slice of the dialogue, and run it again to get a closer, sharper view of the characters in the story. Is it possible that there actually might be a layer or two of meaning that we never have considered? And might one or more of those layers of meaning actually help us, change us, alter us so that we get to, say, New Year’s Day and find that our whole approach to life has shifted ever so slightly, or even more than slightly?

In some ways the most intriguing feature of Luke’s story is the presence of shepherds. It really is not strange, considering that Luke’s setting is Bethlehem, the City of David, who himself was out keeping the sheep when the prophet and king-maker Samuel came, obeying the Word of God, looking for a potential king among Jesse’s sons. The shepherd, who happened to be the youngest, was exactly the one whom Samuel was looking for, as it turned out. And now, centuries later, perhaps in those very fields, other shepherds were minding their business when suddenly an angel appears with a peculiar announcement. The story is different, but the parallels are obvious enough to evoke a connection between an ancient anointing and this birth of one who has sprung from Jesse’s root, a new Davidic king. But something else is in play, too. Shepherds in first century Jewish society were among the least powerful and respected people. That fits very nicely into the gospel that Luke is proclaiming, with its continual emphasis on the marginal, the misfits, the underestimated, even the despised. The words of the Magnificat, the pregnant Mary’s song, are still ringing in the ears of the reader: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the humble and meek.” The shepherds are a case in point.

Romanian Shepherds, photo by Dennis Carlyle Darling

They become the very first ones in Luke’s gospel narrative to go looking for Jesus. Imagine. In the middle of the night shift, nothing much going on, suddenly they are in the middle of an other-worldly episode, seeing and hearing an alien being, having an eerie experience which can only be described as “glory” shining round about them, filling them with fear. And after a multitude of angels have appeared and then disappeared, the shepherds say to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing.” And they go in search of the child wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.

It is not only the shepherds who are key to this story; it is the search they undertake in the middle of the night. It will not do simply to have a birth unremarkable and unremarked. The Messiah does not show up in any way that could be expected, much less in a manner that is self-explanatory. No, that is the point. The birth of this marvelous person is so ordinary, so commonplace that it could be entirely missed. William Cowper’s words are sometimes taken to be scripture themselves: “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.” That is true. But the most mysterious thing of all is the way God performs wonders through very natural processes, like human birth, processes that are so much a part of the fabric of the universe that there is no reason to stop and pay attention to them at all.

Whether you have heard the message of Christmas so much and so often that it has become a part of you, or whether you have only the vaguest clue as to what it has to do with you if anything, the search is not only possible but highly rewarding. But be sure of one thing: it is a search. Bethlehem is even today not all that big a place, but you may be certain that running around trying to find a baby in a manger is no cinch. Luke does not tell us how many hours it took to find the Christ, nor how many alleys the shepherds ran down only to find nothing, nor how they might have made mistakes by following the sounds of other infants’ cries. We only know that the shepherds left their field and went to Bethlehem, seeking.

So the search is what ultimately leads to Christ and thus to the Great Joy which shall be to all people. That is a challenge for many people in our culture to get their minds around. We are not used to searching, but rather to having our desires instantly gratified. Even those who fancy themselves committed to a certain rigor in their faith and in their way of living have difficulty sometimes understanding that the meaning of the Messiah is not something that one can pick up by a quick internet search or a rapid read-through of a paperback edition of a paraphrased Bible. And why, you may wonder, does the search for Christ have to be hard? It is not the difficulty of the search that distinguishes it. It is rather the nature of the one being sought. Searching for Christ is not exactly like searching for the best bottle of wine for the money, or for precisely the right gift for the one who has everything. It is not quite like the scholar’s search for an obscure manuscript, nor like the researcher’s quest for the drug that will cure a disease, nor the explorer’s combing unknown territory to probe its secrets. Although searches are searches and share some things in common, the search for Christ is different because it is fundamentally a search for you.

And here is where the search of the shepherds is not necessarily the pattern for you and me. They are looking for something that matches the sign which has been given them by the angel. They are looking for somebody or something that, however important or even divine, is outside themselves. You and I can search for the Savior too, but the search means rifling through the bits and pieces of our lives, filtering the experiences that we have had and are having. If you are going to find God, you are going to find God in the details of your own life. True, you might decide to go on a pilgrimage to some holy island or sacred mountain. You can go on a retreat or go work among the poor—but these are only settings for your life, contexts for the search. The search itself, no matter on what island or mountain or sofa or desktop, is a search through the recesses and corners of your own life. The Bethlehems to which we go are inevitably the hard places in our lives. It is generally the places where we are sore from suffering, where we are most challenged, where some addiction is bleeding us, where some weakness has worn us thin. These are frequently the places we need to look for God’s gift. Don’t be surprised if these Bethlehems, these places where God shows up in your life, are not too far from the places where you are quite strong, where your passions burn the brightest, where your talents shine. For they, too, are places where you can and often will find the startling Babe.

This is what real Christmas, and therefore real Christianity, is about. It is not about going through the motions approved by society or family or even church. It is about searching for and ultimately finding Christ and therefore finding God and therefore finding this Peace on Earth and therefore discovering the One who can save us from uselessness and meaninglessness and deadly boredom and living hell. It is about opening yourself to the possibility of Mystery. It is searching for Christ even if it means fearlessly calling into question the points of view you hold dear, the habits that are the most comfortable to wear, the structures that frame your everyday routines. This baby lying in the manger, when he grew to become a man, said in one of his most shocking pronouncements, “except you become as children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that is what we are searching for: the child, the infant, the new life in ourselves, new life that is often struggling to be born in a dark night, new life that we find in unlikely places, like a manger, like a cross.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011