Third Sunday of Easter
22 April 2007
Ezekiel 47.1-12
Mortal, have you seen this?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Not too long ago my daughter Paige mentioned in passing that she used to collect her thoughts about the many distresses of adolescence by hiking down through the woods behind our house in Indiana to a special place by a creek that ran along our property line. We lived on just a few acres, but our hillside was so difficult for loggers to access that it was still dense with trees, some of them over two hundred years old. Paige could be alone at the creek with her contemplations, which were complicated in all the usual ways for a teenage girl—and also, of course, complicated in the particular ways that her own life handed to her.
I was so deeply touched by my daughter’s offhand recollection that I often think of it still. There have been such turmoils that I’ve seen my children suffer with that, no matter what I ever thought of to do to ease them, I could not quiet their hearts and make life okay. But there was a reliable presence in our very back yard with which Paige found peace. So I am comforted that she had found a certain place that was nature’s equivalent of Psalm 23, our familiar psalm of comfort.
Nature’s equivalent of Psalm 23. That, of course, gets it the wrong way around. Psalm 23 is the poet’s equivalent of nature. “He leads me beside still waters,” the psalmist has written, “He restores my soul.” The restorative waters of our natural world impart the wordless power of God to cure the sickness and anguish in our soul, and a teenage girl knows the power of these waters intuitively. The author of Psalm 23 recalls of the truth of nature’s gift of still waters, and it would be at least ungrateful, and probably unfaithful, if we were to forget it.
The prophet Ezekiel must have spent his share of days around waters, and so waters began to slosh around in the caverns of his soul. One day, waiting for God to tell him something about the way of life, a vision of waters flowing from below the threshold of the temple came to him. Like his vision of the valley of dry bones that all come together and gradually come to life, Ezekiel’s vision of waters sounds as if it was inspired by a fantasy novel. It all sounds very interesting, but we can’t imagine it ever happening. What it’s high time for us to understand, of course, is that Ezekiel’s vision really is true. It may not be true in the sense that it could have turned up as a video clip on YouTube, but it is true in the sense that Psalm 23 is true. If you think about it long enough—and at a time when you really need a truth for your soul—Ezekiel’s vision will be the truth that reminds you what your faith is, what it’s for, and what to do about it.
Ezekiel sees the water pouring upward from the depths below the temple threshold, where we find God not dominating things from way up high and far away but enlivening things from way inside and very near. In Ezekiel’s vision, God does not send down decrees or plagues or victories in war but rather sends out the vitalizing element of water to sustain entire systems of life. In this vision, in fact, God is more than sustaining the life systems of a place—God is restoring them. Where the waters flow through, and then out of, the Arabah valley, there is the Dead Sea—full of salt, empty of life—but then come the waters that flow from the life-giving river. “Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live,” Ezekiel’s vision tells him, “once these waters reach there.”
If ever I prayed that a vision in the Bible be literally true, this may be the one I want the most. The little creek that gave my daughter peace runs with lovely, cool water, at least a trickle, all year. That part is like Ezekiel’s vision, the loveliness of the water, but there is another side to it. I would not have let her drink from the creek. There was the potential for sickness from giardia, which is only due to so many animals, but then there was the chemical runoff from lawns that have a bright, big tank truck pull to them up once a month for killing grubs and things. So the creek, with its parasites and chemicals, has become only symbolic of Ezekiel’s vision, having lost the full life-giving quality it had when only God and nature made it what it was.
If that were the worst of it, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. We can treat the water with chlorine to cleanse it of parasites, or we can pump safer water from a well. As middle class Americans, we can still afford safe water, which is better than a lot of people can say. At least my children have had clean air to breathe, not like the air I grew up with in Los Angeles. In those days, the air was so bad during the summer that our lungs hurt when we played outside, and we had come indoors to lie down and recover our breath. Fortunately, back in those days, people believed in the ability of a society to solve problems. So society, through the government my parents elected, did make the air in Los Angeles clean enough that my nieces were able to breathe much more easily growing up there.
But that’s when my parents and their parents were electing the government. Today, we’ve been told so relentlessly that the government we’ve been electing can’t do anything right that so we pretty much leave it up to God to send clean water from under the ground and clean air from out of the heavens—or we’re not going to have any. Not that we couldn’t find a way to clean things up, if we wanted to and would sacrifice to, but it would just cost too much. Well, cost . . . and our moral position that other people in other counties should have to go first.
My parents and their parents lived by the quaint notion that they were moral exemplars, which persuaded them to do selfless things in the belief that their leadership would induce better moral conduct in others. Starting with a lot of people in my generation, the idea of a moral vision has evolved. It is now someone else’s turn to do what we tell them is right. So we’re not going to sign any Kyoto climate treaty or enforce any standards for carbon emissions (unless the Supreme Court makes us) or drive smaller cars or take the occasional train.
It is not our concern, as I read the news from Washington, that virtually all recognized climatologists agree that the atmosphere is warming considerably due to human causes. Our position is that we’re conducting an experiment with the carbon that we admit we’re pumping into the atmosphere at a rate dwarfing anything in history. When someone finally proves that we are irreversibly changing the climate to a condition that will not support life as we know it, fine, we’ll consider changing. Only then will we deem the experiment a success. Until then, the experiment is inconclusive. We expect our children to accept the results of our experiment on the planet we’re leaving to them.
Of course, this is the point where my sense of my own character feels shaky to me. I don’t have the kind of nerve to gamble confidently enough to expect to win a poker game like this. I think about my daughter and her sister and brothers, and my grandchildren, and I start wanting to fold my hand. I’m too afraid of what’ll happen if I lose. Not that I think my children would ever stop loving me, even if I ruined the planet for them. They’re too good for that. But I do think about how disappointed they will be in me. I’ve protected them, guided them and raised them with care, for which they’ll be grateful, but I’m afraid that if the planet I gambled with to pay for my lifestyle turns brown and dies, they will come to wonder if I ever really loved them.
My grandchildren are so sweet and innocent, these days, and some day they will find out what I did and why it caused their life to be whatever I caused it to be. I have every reason to expect to see them graduate from high school and even from college—I’m that young!—but even by then it could feel awfully uncomfortable to listen to the graduation speeches about how it may still be possible to prevent the global catastrophe so many are already describing.
But hopefully we won’t have to face that. Some people think that climate change may be the way God always intended to end history, so we could be happy about it all. Others are sure that God will just make the problems go away—with a miracle—because God always provides. There are not a few who are so confident in human ingenuity that they fully expect inventions to appear that will solve everything.
There are countless reasons for us to accept no responsibility for the conditions we’re creating on the planet. So why am I so troubled?
Hard to say. You could argue that I’m not smart enough to be troubled, which may be true. Among the people who think climate change is God’s strategy for the end times are some authentic geniuses, as there are also geniuses who are sure either that God will save the planet or that human ingenuity will. People way smarter than I am are not troubled, so why should I be troubled?
I am troubled, because when I read my Bible, I feel something deep in my bones. When I read that God sends water from below the threshold of the temple to feed rivers and freshen the seas, something deep within me stirs with wonder. When I read that every living creature swarms wherever the river of this water goes, my soul thrills with joy. When I read that “people will stand fishing beside the sea” spreading nets to gather the “great many kinds” of fish, my heart swells with gratitude. When I read that there will be swamps and marshes that shall not become fresh, that they be “left for salt,” I bow to the balance between purity and taint, between stream and bog, between the fruitful and the barren.
When I read Ezekiel in my Bible and then look at the planet as we are remaking it, I am troubled. In Ezekiel’s vision I see God restoring Paradise to earth, not humanity preparing earth for the Apocalypse. I see in Ezekiel’s vision a natural order with human beings playing a glad and humble role, not arrogantly rolling of the dice. I see in Ezekiel’s vision the submission of human invention to the glory God’s artistry, not the glorification of human genius over the delicacy of God’s balance. When Ezekiel’s guide to his vision asks, “Mortal, have you seen this?” I have to admit with the prophet that, yes, I have seen it. I have seen it all very clearly; I know. So when I also see too much human action clash with Ezekiel’s divine vision, I am troubled.
Now there are, these days, people who have watched all that our culture and technology has been harming our planet with, and their moral faculties are surfacing in ways that bring them together and rouse them to action. One day, Sue Everdyke sent an email to several people she thought might share a common sense of responsibility, as people of faith, for not only doing better in their personal life, but also for leading better in their religious and social life.
People met, and the work of what became the Green Team took on a life of its own. Rick Walton agreed to chair the team, but what you also see is a self-motivated group of people with a sixth sense for collaboration. The result has been the very significant program for Earth Day out of Park Presbyterian Church which reminds Newark of the long-standing leadership our community has come to expect from this congregation. The world will be just a little more beautiful for what we are accomplishing as a church, and our contribution to the life-saving work of environmental responsibility also yields life-giving energy for the congregation. Ezekiel would be pleased. God will be pleased.
We may be participating in a transformation in our society from passivity in the face of a global crisis to the rallying of humanity’s best moral, personal and intellectual resources. Even if we are for a time a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, the integrity of our resolve will make us more whole, more clear, more resolute and more faithful. We will remember the unifying power of such integrity as Christ afforded to his disciples since his days with them in Galilee. We will look forward in the hope of redemption for the broken life around us and within is.
In the course of creating our present day comforts and pleasures we have been un-creating the atmosphere and the conditions of our oceans. To do that we have to consider our current generation the most important generation in history, the only generation that will really matter, after this. I just don’t believe anyone here thinks that.
I suspect we must of us think like Annie Dillard. “Our life,” she wrote, “is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.” Though some people may feel insulted at this suggestion, it is really a great honor to be a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. It’s like being those people fishing on the banks of Ezekiel’s river. They’re not the whole picture, but they love the part of it they inhabit. They inhabit it responsibly and with gratitude. So they take great enjoyment in the trees growing on the river’s banks, bearing fruit in every month—enough for everyone, enough for all of history. “Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail,” for the fact of which the people take comfort.
I like the idea that we all of us, hungry in spirit and sick in our soul, as carelessness has sometimes made us, may trust this about the trees by the waters of the river: “Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” Amen.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
April 15, 2007 - Something they're not telling us
Second Sunday of Easter
15 April 2007
John 20.19-31
Peace be with you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Jeff died a year and a half ago in a car accident on the way home from work. The next day his wife Liz called me. I was out of town. When I got home, we planned Jeff’s funeral. Jeff had grown up in the church where I was the pastor but was going off to college just as I arrived, so I actually got to know Jeff and Liz when they counseled with me in preparation for marriage. There was something about him, some sensitive and thoughtful quality, that made me feel always close to him, even though I only saw him when they were in town to visit family, usually the holidays.
But now I was counseling Liz by herself, and it is always the main challenge just then to bring forth from a bereaved heart just what it is that would be most true, most hopeful and most comforting to say about the loved one who had just passed into God’s eternal care. Jeff was in his late 20’s, and it is hardest for someone so young. I asked Liz about this sense of connectedness I felt with Jeff. Did Jeff feel it, too? Did she know what I meant?
Liz knew exactly what I meant, but it was hard for her to describe. It had something to do with thinking that they kept meaning to belong to a church, but they only felt connected themselves when they were in church with that pastor who married them. Maybe that comes from the personal involvement, I guessed, and Liz supposed that had something to do with it. There was something else, though.
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Jeff never thought there wasn’t a God, but when we went into churches together, I could tell there was something not right for him. What Jeff used to say about being in church was, ‘There’s something they’re not telling us.’”
That was all I needed to hear.
I have loved and admired Jeff in the way I have loved and admired Thomas the Doubter. These were people who had a deep capacity for belief in truth and a tireless faculty for examining its veracity. In the spirit of full disclosure, it is only fair to tell you that I am one of these people, too. I feel great tenderness for my fellow travelers, for I know what those whose lives and power are threatened by truth are willing to do to suppress the questions of those who simply want to discover and confirm what in this life is so.
Thomas got the usual treatment. From the very beginning, Thomas’ eagerness to be sure about the presence of Christ in the upper room has been treated with scorn, even if, in the case of John’s gospel, the gentlest of scorn. John has Jesus asking Thomas, “Do you believe because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The comparison leaves Thomas looking, well, barely adequate. We are left to conclude that if he had real faith, he would never have asked to validate his deepest hope. Ever since, people have called him Doubting Thomas. It is never a compliment.
But it’s a compliment from me. I think Thomas was the disciple with a healthy, independent mind—and a sturdy soul.. Thomas had the capacity to wonder. He had a drive for clarity and the courage to establish the truth, however it looked and whatever the cost. Thomas will forever be our example of one who stands before God and expects answers to the tough questions in a crisis. In the days of crisis following the cross, the death of hope, Thomas knew how important it was to base his hope in something real.
Thomas demanded to examine the unvarnished truth and was prepared to accept the results. If Jesus didn’t pass the believability test, Thomas was willing to know that and move on to base his faith in God some other way. Because of Thomas, the other disciples were able to wake up the next morning without considering the possibility that their minds had tricked them. If Thomas had failed to doubt, others could not have been certain, but because of him they were. Nobody ever thanked him. So let me say it for the record: “Thank you, Thomas, for your doubt.”
The interesting thing is that Jesus didn’t seem to mind the examination. He willingly submitted to it. Whatever Thomas asked to do, Jesus invited. Jesus never seems to feel insulted. So think about that. When people get mad today at the doubters of the world, who are they trying to protect? Apparently, not God.
Christ does not seem to mind doubt. Christ actually engages doubt. If we think of Christ as God, which Christians do, we have to suppose that God is interested in all our questions. God is not afraid to be tested. God is not insulted at being asked. God does not avoid a challenge. As deities go, God is eminently self-possessed. There isn’t an experiment devised by the human mind that God feels unable to pass. There isn’t a philosophical system that God cannot survive without our help.
So why do some people get so edgy about the questions people ask about God? Why do they have apoplexy when someone challenges the facts as reported in the Bible? Let’s grant for the moment that the Bible is God’s favorite book. If God doesn’t mind someone poking at his mortal wounds to see if they’re real, does it make sense to insist, say, that it would offend God to compare the first chapter of Genesis to a text book on biology? If God doesn’t feel insecure about being examined by sincere examiners, why should we feel insecure?
It may be the question of our security, or insecurity, that’s behind it all. Some people feel insecure at the notion that the truth we’ve long believed in might be, on further examination, incomplete—or even, in places, mistaken. They feel uncomfortable that the details on which they have based their faith may be up for revision. If God didn’t create the universe in six days, then what else in the Bible might be inaccurate? Some times this insecurity gets so bad that some of these people want to make sure that everybody will have to believe in the details they believe in, and they get themselves elected to school boards so they can force teachers to tell our children only what they want our children to know. Now, they feel insecure, and the thing the rest of us must understand is that all they want is to feel sure. Who can blame them? They feel conflicted, and they want to feel peace. No blame.
So I want to affirm at the outset one part of the Bible that I take to be literal, unchangeable truth. When Jesus says, “Peace be with you,” I think he means that we all of us are meant to reach in our soul a state of peace. Absolutely, without reservation, literally. If someone wants to feel at peace, and the way he can feel it is to believe that Genesis 1 is science and evolution is poppycock, then God bless him and grant him peace. Jesus wants him to have peace, and that’s good enough for me. Amen.
Then there are people like Thomas and Jeff and me. We like believing in good things, which you can see from our personal histories. I, all my life, loved and trusted and waited for the good thing called Santa Claus, who, now as a grandfather, I still take to be a good thing. Also, one day, while still a child, something about Santa Claus didn’t add up for me. Something happened for me, I suspect, like the day our daughter Emily comes to her mother and says, “Mom, is Santa Claus real? Tell me the truth.” If a kid just asks the question, you’re not sure what the best answer is. Maybe she wants reassurance; maybe she wants a straight answer. When she also insists on the “truth,” she’s ready for it, even if there’s some disappointment.
I’m like this. Thomas was like this. Jeff was like this. People like us have readily believed in the Jesus we first met in the cradle at Bethlehem. When we sang Martin Luther’s song about it, we believed that no crying he made. We have been further inspired by Jesus’ teaching and moved by his compassion. We enjoy our solidarity with all the many believers in life and in history that have followed Jesus, and we have committed our lives to the kind of faith in him that changes who we are and that is part of the salvation of the world. At one point, though, we revised an early belief about Jesus the non-crying infant. That didn’t add up, and we changed that belief about Jesus.
Here’s the point. When evidence presents itself that doesn’t go along with what we’d been expecting, we have new questions at just the places where others prefer the old answers. We want, no less than anyone, to have the same enchantment with God we once felt, but it occurs to us that our hearts don’t feel enchantment when our minds see a disconnect with reality. We want the truth.
For people like Thomas, Jeff and me, the truth of God and the universe may be unchanged and unchanging, but our minds are always accommodating to the vastness of the truth of God and the universe. We don’t believe that everything that can be known was already known by the time the last i of the Bible was dotted. We do seek peace, too. We seek the peace of Christ with all the longing and hope the most literal reader of scripture seeks the peace of Christ with, but the literalist’s peace is not our peace. We find peace through the questions, not instead of them.
We experience the Spirit of God in our seeking and would lose our own spirit if we stopped. Feeling confident about things is relaxing, but wondering about things is life-giving. We are like Voltaire, when he said, “Doubt is uncomfortable; certainty is ridiculous.” We’re willing to live with the discomfort, because there’s an even greater discomfort than the discomfort of doubt that unsettles us.
We feel like that influential contemporary poet-philosopher from just down the road in Buffalo, Ani DiFranco:
Faithful doubters have a suspiciousness about how easy it is to adjust what is remembered to what happened after that. American memory adjusted what happened to the Indians according to what happened to the Indians after that. Slave owners adjusted what God thought about slaves according to what happened to slaves after they bought them. History—including religious history, including Christian history—has adjusted what happened to fit what happened after one side won and the other side lost.
I don’t think my current happy life ever needed to depend on the atrocities committed against innocent people, but I am in fact enjoying to this day benefits from my forebears’ atrocious exploits. If I can see it coming, I don’t ever want to be a willing contributor to such acts against other people, and therefore I doubt some of what the now dominant view forbids me to question. It would be safer for my status if I weren’t like this, but it is safer for my soul when I am. Therefore, even if others lose their peace because of my questions, I doubt. Even when they rage and assail my peace, I doubt. I could not have the peace of Christ if I failed to doubt. I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye.
And just there is a kind of peace. It may not be your kind of peace. Or maybe it really is, but you have been too discouraged to seek it. If that is so, remember that Jesus keeps saying, “Peace be with you,” including the peace that happens when your faith prods you to wonder. Wonder leads you into life. If when you became a parent, you were awed by the wonder of the infant you were holding, you followed your wonder deeply into the unfolding life of that child. All wonder is like that. It is to be enjoyed in its moment, of course, but faithfulness to wonder means following it more deeply into life than what you already understand.
Our very words teach us that doubt is part of wonder. If you stood in wonder at holding that child, you might have said of that moment, “I can’t believe it!” That doesn’t mean that you dismiss what is before you, but it does mean that everything you have ever experienced has not prepared you for the wonder and power of that moment. We express wonder in terms of doubt, because we know that how we explain the world must in some way be enlarged and deepened in order for us to fully participate in the mystery. Far from the denial of mystery, doubt is often the doorway to it. From Einstein to Bach to St. Francis to Paul to Jesus to Isaiah to Moses, the imaginations that have disclosed life’s holy mysteries have had to let go of such certainties as could resist doubt only so long. The memorable people of history began their work on the understanding that, as young Jeff once said, there’s something they’re not telling us.
So if you find peace in wonder, if you find peace in deeper truth than the truth you know so far, if you find peace in following where Christ is leading at least as much as the peace you’ve found with Christ so far, then doubt may be a state of grace for you. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says three times in the twelve verses that describe two brief visits with his disciples. It is the beginning of life after the life which the cross has ended. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says, perhaps for reassurance, but perhaps also as a goal for them to live toward. The one disciple who does something about what Jesus says is Thomas, and Jesus satisfies Thomas and brings him peace. God will do that for you. If you ask.
Amen.
15 April 2007
John 20.19-31
Peace be with you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Jeff died a year and a half ago in a car accident on the way home from work. The next day his wife Liz called me. I was out of town. When I got home, we planned Jeff’s funeral. Jeff had grown up in the church where I was the pastor but was going off to college just as I arrived, so I actually got to know Jeff and Liz when they counseled with me in preparation for marriage. There was something about him, some sensitive and thoughtful quality, that made me feel always close to him, even though I only saw him when they were in town to visit family, usually the holidays.
But now I was counseling Liz by herself, and it is always the main challenge just then to bring forth from a bereaved heart just what it is that would be most true, most hopeful and most comforting to say about the loved one who had just passed into God’s eternal care. Jeff was in his late 20’s, and it is hardest for someone so young. I asked Liz about this sense of connectedness I felt with Jeff. Did Jeff feel it, too? Did she know what I meant?
Liz knew exactly what I meant, but it was hard for her to describe. It had something to do with thinking that they kept meaning to belong to a church, but they only felt connected themselves when they were in church with that pastor who married them. Maybe that comes from the personal involvement, I guessed, and Liz supposed that had something to do with it. There was something else, though.
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Jeff never thought there wasn’t a God, but when we went into churches together, I could tell there was something not right for him. What Jeff used to say about being in church was, ‘There’s something they’re not telling us.’”
That was all I needed to hear.
I have loved and admired Jeff in the way I have loved and admired Thomas the Doubter. These were people who had a deep capacity for belief in truth and a tireless faculty for examining its veracity. In the spirit of full disclosure, it is only fair to tell you that I am one of these people, too. I feel great tenderness for my fellow travelers, for I know what those whose lives and power are threatened by truth are willing to do to suppress the questions of those who simply want to discover and confirm what in this life is so.
Thomas got the usual treatment. From the very beginning, Thomas’ eagerness to be sure about the presence of Christ in the upper room has been treated with scorn, even if, in the case of John’s gospel, the gentlest of scorn. John has Jesus asking Thomas, “Do you believe because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” The comparison leaves Thomas looking, well, barely adequate. We are left to conclude that if he had real faith, he would never have asked to validate his deepest hope. Ever since, people have called him Doubting Thomas. It is never a compliment.
But it’s a compliment from me. I think Thomas was the disciple with a healthy, independent mind—and a sturdy soul.. Thomas had the capacity to wonder. He had a drive for clarity and the courage to establish the truth, however it looked and whatever the cost. Thomas will forever be our example of one who stands before God and expects answers to the tough questions in a crisis. In the days of crisis following the cross, the death of hope, Thomas knew how important it was to base his hope in something real.
Thomas demanded to examine the unvarnished truth and was prepared to accept the results. If Jesus didn’t pass the believability test, Thomas was willing to know that and move on to base his faith in God some other way. Because of Thomas, the other disciples were able to wake up the next morning without considering the possibility that their minds had tricked them. If Thomas had failed to doubt, others could not have been certain, but because of him they were. Nobody ever thanked him. So let me say it for the record: “Thank you, Thomas, for your doubt.”
The interesting thing is that Jesus didn’t seem to mind the examination. He willingly submitted to it. Whatever Thomas asked to do, Jesus invited. Jesus never seems to feel insulted. So think about that. When people get mad today at the doubters of the world, who are they trying to protect? Apparently, not God.
Christ does not seem to mind doubt. Christ actually engages doubt. If we think of Christ as God, which Christians do, we have to suppose that God is interested in all our questions. God is not afraid to be tested. God is not insulted at being asked. God does not avoid a challenge. As deities go, God is eminently self-possessed. There isn’t an experiment devised by the human mind that God feels unable to pass. There isn’t a philosophical system that God cannot survive without our help.
So why do some people get so edgy about the questions people ask about God? Why do they have apoplexy when someone challenges the facts as reported in the Bible? Let’s grant for the moment that the Bible is God’s favorite book. If God doesn’t mind someone poking at his mortal wounds to see if they’re real, does it make sense to insist, say, that it would offend God to compare the first chapter of Genesis to a text book on biology? If God doesn’t feel insecure about being examined by sincere examiners, why should we feel insecure?
It may be the question of our security, or insecurity, that’s behind it all. Some people feel insecure at the notion that the truth we’ve long believed in might be, on further examination, incomplete—or even, in places, mistaken. They feel uncomfortable that the details on which they have based their faith may be up for revision. If God didn’t create the universe in six days, then what else in the Bible might be inaccurate? Some times this insecurity gets so bad that some of these people want to make sure that everybody will have to believe in the details they believe in, and they get themselves elected to school boards so they can force teachers to tell our children only what they want our children to know. Now, they feel insecure, and the thing the rest of us must understand is that all they want is to feel sure. Who can blame them? They feel conflicted, and they want to feel peace. No blame.
So I want to affirm at the outset one part of the Bible that I take to be literal, unchangeable truth. When Jesus says, “Peace be with you,” I think he means that we all of us are meant to reach in our soul a state of peace. Absolutely, without reservation, literally. If someone wants to feel at peace, and the way he can feel it is to believe that Genesis 1 is science and evolution is poppycock, then God bless him and grant him peace. Jesus wants him to have peace, and that’s good enough for me. Amen.
Then there are people like Thomas and Jeff and me. We like believing in good things, which you can see from our personal histories. I, all my life, loved and trusted and waited for the good thing called Santa Claus, who, now as a grandfather, I still take to be a good thing. Also, one day, while still a child, something about Santa Claus didn’t add up for me. Something happened for me, I suspect, like the day our daughter Emily comes to her mother and says, “Mom, is Santa Claus real? Tell me the truth.” If a kid just asks the question, you’re not sure what the best answer is. Maybe she wants reassurance; maybe she wants a straight answer. When she also insists on the “truth,” she’s ready for it, even if there’s some disappointment.
I’m like this. Thomas was like this. Jeff was like this. People like us have readily believed in the Jesus we first met in the cradle at Bethlehem. When we sang Martin Luther’s song about it, we believed that no crying he made. We have been further inspired by Jesus’ teaching and moved by his compassion. We enjoy our solidarity with all the many believers in life and in history that have followed Jesus, and we have committed our lives to the kind of faith in him that changes who we are and that is part of the salvation of the world. At one point, though, we revised an early belief about Jesus the non-crying infant. That didn’t add up, and we changed that belief about Jesus.
Here’s the point. When evidence presents itself that doesn’t go along with what we’d been expecting, we have new questions at just the places where others prefer the old answers. We want, no less than anyone, to have the same enchantment with God we once felt, but it occurs to us that our hearts don’t feel enchantment when our minds see a disconnect with reality. We want the truth.
For people like Thomas, Jeff and me, the truth of God and the universe may be unchanged and unchanging, but our minds are always accommodating to the vastness of the truth of God and the universe. We don’t believe that everything that can be known was already known by the time the last i of the Bible was dotted. We do seek peace, too. We seek the peace of Christ with all the longing and hope the most literal reader of scripture seeks the peace of Christ with, but the literalist’s peace is not our peace. We find peace through the questions, not instead of them.
We experience the Spirit of God in our seeking and would lose our own spirit if we stopped. Feeling confident about things is relaxing, but wondering about things is life-giving. We are like Voltaire, when he said, “Doubt is uncomfortable; certainty is ridiculous.” We’re willing to live with the discomfort, because there’s an even greater discomfort than the discomfort of doubt that unsettles us.
We feel like that influential contemporary poet-philosopher from just down the road in Buffalo, Ani DiFranco:
you can doubt anything
if you think about it long enough
cause what happened always adjusts to fit
what happened after that
Faithful doubters have a suspiciousness about how easy it is to adjust what is remembered to what happened after that. American memory adjusted what happened to the Indians according to what happened to the Indians after that. Slave owners adjusted what God thought about slaves according to what happened to slaves after they bought them. History—including religious history, including Christian history—has adjusted what happened to fit what happened after one side won and the other side lost.
I don’t think my current happy life ever needed to depend on the atrocities committed against innocent people, but I am in fact enjoying to this day benefits from my forebears’ atrocious exploits. If I can see it coming, I don’t ever want to be a willing contributor to such acts against other people, and therefore I doubt some of what the now dominant view forbids me to question. It would be safer for my status if I weren’t like this, but it is safer for my soul when I am. Therefore, even if others lose their peace because of my questions, I doubt. Even when they rage and assail my peace, I doubt. I could not have the peace of Christ if I failed to doubt. I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye.
And just there is a kind of peace. It may not be your kind of peace. Or maybe it really is, but you have been too discouraged to seek it. If that is so, remember that Jesus keeps saying, “Peace be with you,” including the peace that happens when your faith prods you to wonder. Wonder leads you into life. If when you became a parent, you were awed by the wonder of the infant you were holding, you followed your wonder deeply into the unfolding life of that child. All wonder is like that. It is to be enjoyed in its moment, of course, but faithfulness to wonder means following it more deeply into life than what you already understand.
Our very words teach us that doubt is part of wonder. If you stood in wonder at holding that child, you might have said of that moment, “I can’t believe it!” That doesn’t mean that you dismiss what is before you, but it does mean that everything you have ever experienced has not prepared you for the wonder and power of that moment. We express wonder in terms of doubt, because we know that how we explain the world must in some way be enlarged and deepened in order for us to fully participate in the mystery. Far from the denial of mystery, doubt is often the doorway to it. From Einstein to Bach to St. Francis to Paul to Jesus to Isaiah to Moses, the imaginations that have disclosed life’s holy mysteries have had to let go of such certainties as could resist doubt only so long. The memorable people of history began their work on the understanding that, as young Jeff once said, there’s something they’re not telling us.
So if you find peace in wonder, if you find peace in deeper truth than the truth you know so far, if you find peace in following where Christ is leading at least as much as the peace you’ve found with Christ so far, then doubt may be a state of grace for you. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says three times in the twelve verses that describe two brief visits with his disciples. It is the beginning of life after the life which the cross has ended. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says, perhaps for reassurance, but perhaps also as a goal for them to live toward. The one disciple who does something about what Jesus says is Thomas, and Jesus satisfies Thomas and brings him peace. God will do that for you. If you ask.
Amen.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
April 8, 2007 - Are you in this movie?
Easter
8 April 2007
Luke 24.1-12
Are you in this movie?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
It was always just before Easter that in my family we sat down to watch the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. We watched it on our black and white TV, so we didn’t see the radiance of the Land of Oz revealed in color, when Dorothy woke up to its splendor. Kansas had been plain and gray, but Oz was bright with its whimsical gnomes and magical possibilities. Yet, even before we could see Oz in color, we children were captivated. There was a good witch with a wand and wondrous powers. There was a bad witch who shot lightning from her fingertips. There were trees that hurled apples at unwitting trespassers. Once we let go of any notion that such things could not be, everything became possible.
We fell in love, every year, with the idea of that artless girl, whose sulky resentment against the dreariness of life led to the accident that cast her lost into Oz. We loved the idea that she might yet again find her way through the dangers and snares of that unpredictable realm. We’d seen her do it before, of course, but every year, we also saw again that she wasn’t sure she could do it. Every year, Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion had to find out again if they could believe their way to safety, to home, to the fullness of their hope, to the fulfillment of their humanity. Scarecrow’s great challenge to work out thoughtful solutions to the most difficult problems of life. Woodman ached to be able to care and hurt and love, while Cowardly Lion had to face his fear of fearfulness. If they could keep hoping and keep seeking, would they become real and whole? We kept wanting to see, every year, if they would. We loved the story of their finding out.
When the women who have loved Jesus go, every year, to the tomb, we watch to see what they’re going to find out. They, too, had parts of them they hoped would become real and whole. They wanted to be fulfilled, as much as Dorothy, as much as her three fellow seekers. Come to think of it, we all of us want to be fulfilled as much as any of them. We want to be real and whole. We want to think out our most impossible problems. We want to banish our fear. We ache to feel in our deepest self the truest goodness and widest love of the human heart. Maybe the women at the tomb long for these, and it could be why they followed Jesus. It could be why they come to bring the tender care of preparing his beaten, torn and dead body. They have wanted so much to be fulfilled—to see the fulfillment of their greatest hopes, not only in themselves but in the world—that visiting Jesus in death is a way of sweetening the sorrow of the death of those hopes. If you can no longer have your hopes, they may have thought, at least you can love the memory of them as they die.
So we have this scene before us—we, like children huddled again before the glow of the television—and we are ready to love again the story of desperation and loss interrupted by a rekindled hope for life. The women arrive at the tomb, their fingers grasping bottles of oil and jars of spices, burial cloths half falling out of their arms, dust kicking up from their feet. Somebody stayed behind to watch the children. Maybe they should have brought the 12-year-old nieces, at least—they’ll have to learn to do this someday—but this particular day it is all the women can do to get themselves through it all. Sometimes a death is just another death, but some deaths open a wound in the universe so wide and deep it’s all you can do not to fall through them. Still, here they come, the women.
But now at the tomb, the stone has been moved. This is not good. Has there been mischief? Or did some other women think they were meant to make up the corpse? Who do some people think they are? And at a time like this. Who needs that nonsense? But the women go in. They look; no body. Great. (I heard Paula Poundstone on the radio saying that, being a bit obsessive-compulsive herself, her favorite part of this story from another gospel is that the linen wrapping is rolled up and set tidily in its place. We love the details, because they remind us of how we feel like we’re in this story.) So there they are, the women, and us with them, staring at nothing, where death was supposed to be.
This is the part where we find out if we’re in this movie or not. The women, they have a choice. Was Jesus and his teaching about the salvation of humankind for real or not. Was it a scam? Probably not. Jesus was nothing if not sincere. But was it all, in the end, such a grand vision that it could only fail? Jesus’ idea of salvation was so ambitious—the idea that the creation should be about harmony and not dominance, that abundance be the hope of all and not the privilege of the few, that peace might come from honoring the dignity of others rather than asserting the primacy of ourselves, that love shall become the one core value against which any other values must be measured. If Jesus meant the salvation of the world to rise that far above the world as we have made it, then he should have had at least the normal span of a natural life to get us there. So he didn’t live his natural life, and so we can’t see getting there. End of vision.
But if Jesus is not in the tomb, then what? Luke reports the presence of two figures standing “suddenly” there with the women; in dazzling clothes. When sudden dazzle appears out of nowhere, you pay attention. Someone would later suppose that either their eyes were deceiving or their story was deceit, but that’s what you get when you believe in more hope than other people can handle. Still, the women, while they’re still at the tomb, have to choose between the big hope of Jesus’ vision for the salvation of humankind or no hope at all.
If you’re in this movie with the women, you go with the big hope. You decide. You look at the empty place where the body was supposed to be, and instead of seeing a theft of hope, you see a gift of life. If you need to see two figures in dazzling clothes to believe, you look around until you do. If it terrifies you to hope that much, then you bow down your face to the ground. But you don’t stop yourself from hoping, not if you can help it.
I see people who can’t hope anymore. Some of them are proud of it. Some people can’t hope that war can end. They glory in their self-style valor and deal death while they may. Some people can’t hope that broken relationships can be healed. They glory in their resentments and cast their disdain for others in bronze for all to admire. Some people can’t hope that a society of common women and men can find a purpose and bind themselves together to achieve it. They brandish their social cynicism and condemn the culture with the invective of false religion. Some people can’t see the good in philanthropy and compassion toward the poor. They flaunt what they like to pass off as realism and comfort themselves with selfishness.
The world is rife with people who can’t hope. They get a lot of mileage off of those who fear they’d look stupid if they did hope, but a little hope from even the most tentative nobodies does an amazing thing. When the women—code, in the New Testament world, for nobodies—when the women go back to tell the apostles, the male disciples, that in a vacant tomb they saw the proof of hope, “it seemed to [those apostles] an idle tale.” Okay, we could have expected that.
But then one of the apostles holds off his skepticism just a moment longer. It was Peter: Gung ho Peter, always excited at the first hint of heroic drama; Peter, who turned tail at three out of three opportunities to act like a hero. Peter weighed in his mind just long enough the decision of whether to live with hope or without it, and the decision seemingly made itself. The others did not believe the women, Luke says, “but Peter got up and ran to the tomb.”
Peter could have sat there with the rest of the apostles. He could have stewed in his disillusionment a little longer. He could have questioned what he ever saw in Jesus and why he would consider giving Jesus another chance, if Jesus was even around somewhere to give it to. Peter could have let someone else take the risk for once. He could have decided he’d had it with 25 percent of the apostles doing all the work—Peter, James and John; seems like it’s always those three. But Paul leaves all his cynicism and all his skepticism and all his disillusionment to float out there in the air until just the lightest gust of a hopeful breeze blows it away. Then, while the air was clear, Peter got up.
Are you in this movie?
There’s always been a lot of fussing about the facts of Easter. People say all sorts of things. It wasn’t Jesus body, some have guessed, that got buried. Or it was his body, but someone stole it. Paul says the resurrection is about a “spiritual body,” not a “physical body.” Others say that you have to have believe in the resuscitation of a literal physical body, or you’re not faithful. The resurrection, some reckon, was made up. Or, the resurrection wasn’t exactly made up, but it was “seen” by people who so desperately needed to see it that they thought they did. Some people, over the last few months, have thought they’ve found where Jesus was buried, and, uh oh, his bones are there. Lots of fussing.
Me, I can’t be distracted by that stuff. Those people seem to have time to argue about it all. I don’t have that kind of time. Here’s how I look at it. If the hope of the world’s salvation that Jesus brought is true, I have a lot of work to do to live out my part of it. I can’t be distracted. There are hungry to feed and naked to clothe and prisoners to visit and water to carry to thirsty millions. And there is everyone who hungers and thirsts for righteous, and those who mourn, and the meek, and the poor in spirit. I could spend my lifetime in ministry to any of these that Jesus called blessed. I have a lot to do, if I am in this movie.
I am in this movie. I’ve decided. I am in it even when I barely have the brains or the heart or the courage to get out of bed. Make fun of me for skip-stepping down a yellow-brick road, for all I care. I am in it, with or without an argument for the proof of what happened to the body. I am in it, even when people call me idealistic and foolish. I am in it, even when people condemn my compassionate embrace of those whom most of my own co-religionists despise. I am in it with my heart and its conflicted wants, with my mind and its misdirections, with my soul and its dark regions, with my strength and its weak moments. I am in this movie.
If Peter got up, I guess I’ve gotten up, too. Look! Yes, it seems that I have. And you, what have you decided? Maybe you’re tired of sitting in that pew after all this talking and can’t wait to get up. Good for you! Maybe that’s your decision! Here, there’s a hymn to sing! The church has been singing this very hymn for sixteen centuries! You’re fidgeting, and you’re itching to get up and sing a one-thousand, six-hundred-year-old song to the new life of Christ!
Well, you’re on the set. The cameras are running. Get in the movie. Amen.
8 April 2007
Luke 24.1-12
Are you in this movie?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
It was always just before Easter that in my family we sat down to watch the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. We watched it on our black and white TV, so we didn’t see the radiance of the Land of Oz revealed in color, when Dorothy woke up to its splendor. Kansas had been plain and gray, but Oz was bright with its whimsical gnomes and magical possibilities. Yet, even before we could see Oz in color, we children were captivated. There was a good witch with a wand and wondrous powers. There was a bad witch who shot lightning from her fingertips. There were trees that hurled apples at unwitting trespassers. Once we let go of any notion that such things could not be, everything became possible.
We fell in love, every year, with the idea of that artless girl, whose sulky resentment against the dreariness of life led to the accident that cast her lost into Oz. We loved the idea that she might yet again find her way through the dangers and snares of that unpredictable realm. We’d seen her do it before, of course, but every year, we also saw again that she wasn’t sure she could do it. Every year, Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion had to find out again if they could believe their way to safety, to home, to the fullness of their hope, to the fulfillment of their humanity. Scarecrow’s great challenge to work out thoughtful solutions to the most difficult problems of life. Woodman ached to be able to care and hurt and love, while Cowardly Lion had to face his fear of fearfulness. If they could keep hoping and keep seeking, would they become real and whole? We kept wanting to see, every year, if they would. We loved the story of their finding out.
When the women who have loved Jesus go, every year, to the tomb, we watch to see what they’re going to find out. They, too, had parts of them they hoped would become real and whole. They wanted to be fulfilled, as much as Dorothy, as much as her three fellow seekers. Come to think of it, we all of us want to be fulfilled as much as any of them. We want to be real and whole. We want to think out our most impossible problems. We want to banish our fear. We ache to feel in our deepest self the truest goodness and widest love of the human heart. Maybe the women at the tomb long for these, and it could be why they followed Jesus. It could be why they come to bring the tender care of preparing his beaten, torn and dead body. They have wanted so much to be fulfilled—to see the fulfillment of their greatest hopes, not only in themselves but in the world—that visiting Jesus in death is a way of sweetening the sorrow of the death of those hopes. If you can no longer have your hopes, they may have thought, at least you can love the memory of them as they die.
So we have this scene before us—we, like children huddled again before the glow of the television—and we are ready to love again the story of desperation and loss interrupted by a rekindled hope for life. The women arrive at the tomb, their fingers grasping bottles of oil and jars of spices, burial cloths half falling out of their arms, dust kicking up from their feet. Somebody stayed behind to watch the children. Maybe they should have brought the 12-year-old nieces, at least—they’ll have to learn to do this someday—but this particular day it is all the women can do to get themselves through it all. Sometimes a death is just another death, but some deaths open a wound in the universe so wide and deep it’s all you can do not to fall through them. Still, here they come, the women.
But now at the tomb, the stone has been moved. This is not good. Has there been mischief? Or did some other women think they were meant to make up the corpse? Who do some people think they are? And at a time like this. Who needs that nonsense? But the women go in. They look; no body. Great. (I heard Paula Poundstone on the radio saying that, being a bit obsessive-compulsive herself, her favorite part of this story from another gospel is that the linen wrapping is rolled up and set tidily in its place. We love the details, because they remind us of how we feel like we’re in this story.) So there they are, the women, and us with them, staring at nothing, where death was supposed to be.
This is the part where we find out if we’re in this movie or not. The women, they have a choice. Was Jesus and his teaching about the salvation of humankind for real or not. Was it a scam? Probably not. Jesus was nothing if not sincere. But was it all, in the end, such a grand vision that it could only fail? Jesus’ idea of salvation was so ambitious—the idea that the creation should be about harmony and not dominance, that abundance be the hope of all and not the privilege of the few, that peace might come from honoring the dignity of others rather than asserting the primacy of ourselves, that love shall become the one core value against which any other values must be measured. If Jesus meant the salvation of the world to rise that far above the world as we have made it, then he should have had at least the normal span of a natural life to get us there. So he didn’t live his natural life, and so we can’t see getting there. End of vision.
But if Jesus is not in the tomb, then what? Luke reports the presence of two figures standing “suddenly” there with the women; in dazzling clothes. When sudden dazzle appears out of nowhere, you pay attention. Someone would later suppose that either their eyes were deceiving or their story was deceit, but that’s what you get when you believe in more hope than other people can handle. Still, the women, while they’re still at the tomb, have to choose between the big hope of Jesus’ vision for the salvation of humankind or no hope at all.
If you’re in this movie with the women, you go with the big hope. You decide. You look at the empty place where the body was supposed to be, and instead of seeing a theft of hope, you see a gift of life. If you need to see two figures in dazzling clothes to believe, you look around until you do. If it terrifies you to hope that much, then you bow down your face to the ground. But you don’t stop yourself from hoping, not if you can help it.
I see people who can’t hope anymore. Some of them are proud of it. Some people can’t hope that war can end. They glory in their self-style valor and deal death while they may. Some people can’t hope that broken relationships can be healed. They glory in their resentments and cast their disdain for others in bronze for all to admire. Some people can’t hope that a society of common women and men can find a purpose and bind themselves together to achieve it. They brandish their social cynicism and condemn the culture with the invective of false religion. Some people can’t see the good in philanthropy and compassion toward the poor. They flaunt what they like to pass off as realism and comfort themselves with selfishness.
The world is rife with people who can’t hope. They get a lot of mileage off of those who fear they’d look stupid if they did hope, but a little hope from even the most tentative nobodies does an amazing thing. When the women—code, in the New Testament world, for nobodies—when the women go back to tell the apostles, the male disciples, that in a vacant tomb they saw the proof of hope, “it seemed to [those apostles] an idle tale.” Okay, we could have expected that.
But then one of the apostles holds off his skepticism just a moment longer. It was Peter: Gung ho Peter, always excited at the first hint of heroic drama; Peter, who turned tail at three out of three opportunities to act like a hero. Peter weighed in his mind just long enough the decision of whether to live with hope or without it, and the decision seemingly made itself. The others did not believe the women, Luke says, “but Peter got up and ran to the tomb.”
Peter could have sat there with the rest of the apostles. He could have stewed in his disillusionment a little longer. He could have questioned what he ever saw in Jesus and why he would consider giving Jesus another chance, if Jesus was even around somewhere to give it to. Peter could have let someone else take the risk for once. He could have decided he’d had it with 25 percent of the apostles doing all the work—Peter, James and John; seems like it’s always those three. But Paul leaves all his cynicism and all his skepticism and all his disillusionment to float out there in the air until just the lightest gust of a hopeful breeze blows it away. Then, while the air was clear, Peter got up.
Are you in this movie?
There’s always been a lot of fussing about the facts of Easter. People say all sorts of things. It wasn’t Jesus body, some have guessed, that got buried. Or it was his body, but someone stole it. Paul says the resurrection is about a “spiritual body,” not a “physical body.” Others say that you have to have believe in the resuscitation of a literal physical body, or you’re not faithful. The resurrection, some reckon, was made up. Or, the resurrection wasn’t exactly made up, but it was “seen” by people who so desperately needed to see it that they thought they did. Some people, over the last few months, have thought they’ve found where Jesus was buried, and, uh oh, his bones are there. Lots of fussing.
Me, I can’t be distracted by that stuff. Those people seem to have time to argue about it all. I don’t have that kind of time. Here’s how I look at it. If the hope of the world’s salvation that Jesus brought is true, I have a lot of work to do to live out my part of it. I can’t be distracted. There are hungry to feed and naked to clothe and prisoners to visit and water to carry to thirsty millions. And there is everyone who hungers and thirsts for righteous, and those who mourn, and the meek, and the poor in spirit. I could spend my lifetime in ministry to any of these that Jesus called blessed. I have a lot to do, if I am in this movie.
I am in this movie. I’ve decided. I am in it even when I barely have the brains or the heart or the courage to get out of bed. Make fun of me for skip-stepping down a yellow-brick road, for all I care. I am in it, with or without an argument for the proof of what happened to the body. I am in it, even when people call me idealistic and foolish. I am in it, even when people condemn my compassionate embrace of those whom most of my own co-religionists despise. I am in it with my heart and its conflicted wants, with my mind and its misdirections, with my soul and its dark regions, with my strength and its weak moments. I am in this movie.
If Peter got up, I guess I’ve gotten up, too. Look! Yes, it seems that I have. And you, what have you decided? Maybe you’re tired of sitting in that pew after all this talking and can’t wait to get up. Good for you! Maybe that’s your decision! Here, there’s a hymn to sing! The church has been singing this very hymn for sixteen centuries! You’re fidgeting, and you’re itching to get up and sing a one-thousand, six-hundred-year-old song to the new life of Christ!
O Jesus, King of gentleness,
do all our inmost hearts possess,
and we to you will ever raise
the tribute of our grateful praise.
Well, you’re on the set. The cameras are running. Get in the movie. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
