Category Archives: SERMONS

Sermons preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Newmarket, Ontario

While Preachers Dutifully Ponder the Doctrine of the Trinity, Our Congregations Shrink???

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This Sunday is Trinity Sunday.  In anticipation, preachers all over the world are dutifully pondering the Doctrine of the Trinity desperately searching for something to say to encourage their congregations.

Preachers will trot out tired old clichés conjuring up images of triangles, shamrocks around, or point to H20’s ability to appear as water, ice, or steam while still maintaining it’s unified essence. Or have you heard the one about the 3 blind men and the elephant in the room. That old chestnut is trotted out by many a desperate preacher struggling to put flesh on the doctrine of the trinity. But for the life of me I can’t see how 1 blind man touching the elephant’s trunk and presuming that there is a tree in the room, while a second blind man catching wind of the elephant’s ear is convinced that there is some sort of giant fan in the room, while a third man grabs hold of the tail and is sure that he has hold of a rope, helps you to conclude that just because they’re all sharing a room with an elephant you can now confess that God is indeed Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever amen. But all sorts of mental gymnastics will be exercised in the vain attempt to make some sort of sense of the doctrine of the Trinity!

On Trinity Sundays, mindful of the fact that trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity usually leads to heresy: dusty theological books that have not seen the light of day since last Trinity Sunday have been poured over to ensure that the formula’s learned in seminary are repeated correctly and heresy scrupulously avoided. The imaginative among us have attempted to baffle our congregations with our theological intellect, the pragmatic among us have attempted to baffle our congregations with something akin to BS, while the desperate among us have simply tried to survive the Trinity Sunday hoping against hope that no one will notice that we haven’t a clue what we’re talking about.

Perhaps only dear old Dr. Martin Luther possessed the theological integrity sufficient to save a preacher from the perils of preaching on Trinity Sunday. So, before I launch, forth, let me remind you what the instigator of the Reformation had to say on the subject of the Trinity. Martin Luther warned that: “To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation; to try and explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”

I will confess that Martin Luther had much more at stake, literally at stake, than I do, because the truth is that for centuries the punishment for heresy would have found many an ancient preacher burned at the stake. But while the death penalty for heresy has been lifted, the risk to one’s sanity remains.

Now, I will confess that when faced with a particularly difficult theological knot, I prefer to begin by quoting Jesus and not Luther, but alas Jesus remained silent on the issue of the Trinity. So, I did try to find something helpful in the words of the Apostle Paul. But alas, without some really amazing theological gymnastics that are beyond my abilities to comprehend, even the Apostle Paul remains mute on the issue of the Trinity. So keeping in mind Dr. Luther’s dire warning that to,  “To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation; but to try and explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”

Let me remind you that the Trinitarian formula appears in Scripture only once, in Matthew 28, during what is called the Great Commission, when Jesus commands the disciples to go forth, baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But the doctrine of the Trinity does not appear in the Bible

– The doctrine of the trinity, as we know it, was first formulated in the fourth century, by a couple of guys named Gregory and a woman called Marcrina.

– The doctrine of the Trinity was then developed over hundreds of years

– The doctrine of the Trinity was at the heart of several wars

– Thousands of Christians were killed because they came down on the loosing side of arguments over the doctrine of the Trinity

– No one has ever been able to adequately explain the Trinity

– Every explanation of the Trinity that I have ever come across includes some form of heresy

By the way, just so we’re clear, I rummaged through some of my previous sermons on the doctrine of the Trinity and I must confess that if this were the twelfth century, an angry mob would be stoking up the fires beneath my feet  because based on things I have proclaimed on various Trinity Sundays a charge of Modalism could very successfully be laid against me, as could a charge of Sabellianism. You might be interested to know, that more traditional preachers than I, will no doubt preach sermons this Sunday which will prove them guilty  of Arianism or at the very least Subordinationism. All of these heresies in a bygone age would have left us with a severe shortage of clergy in the church, as many of us would be smoldering at the stake for our crimes. Deciding who is right and who is wrong, who is in and who is out is a deadly preoccupation of humanity, a preoccupation that the church has not been able to escape.

So, with apologies to Dr. Luther, I’m going to go ahead and risk my salvation by declaring that the doctrine of the trinity is but a feeble attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible mystery of the very nature of our God.  We can echo all the creeds of Christendom with as much confidence as we can muster, and as enlightening as some of those creeds may be, they cannot begin to unravel the mystery of the creator of everything that ever was and ever shall be, nor can they fully describe the magnitude of the revelation provided in the life, death and resurrection of the one we call Christ, and when it comes to the power of the Holy Spirit, all our creeds together cannot tell the story of her wondrous beauty.

The doctrine of the trinity is just a tool to help us along the way, the trinity is not God, nor is God the trinity. The trinity is merely a way to speak of the unspeakable. And yet down through the centuries we have used the doctrine of the trinity as an idol and demanded that we worship the trinity as if it were God’s very self.

We have worried more about believing in the trinity than relating to the very One whose relationship the Trinity attempts to describe. For when it comes down to it, what we know of our God finds expression our attempts to describe God as a relational being. For what is the doctrine of the Trinity if it is not the declaration that God is Creator, Christ and Spirit, intimately connected as One; at God’s very core we find a relationship. This should be our first clue that any understanding of God must begin with relationship. Surely it is more important to experience God than to explain God. Surely it is more important to relate to God than it is to preserve a doctrine that has long since failed to describe God.

You’d think that after nearly 2000 years the Christian church would have learned to be more humble in its declarations about God. And yet, today, as we strive to learn more and more about creation, some things remain out of bounds. The church remains unwilling to revisit long established doctrines, choosing instead to insist that we simply believe, because what was good enough for grandma ought to be good enough for us. And if we should doubt the doctrine of the Trinity then all we need to do is study harder and we will eventually understand. And if we are unwilling to work at understanding the Trinity we should simply trust that folks much smarter than us have figured it out so we should simply stop questioning and simply mouth the words. Let the tired clichés and the worn out illustrations suffice, forget about our questions and simply drink the kool-aid and our doubts will somehow magically disappear. And so together we focus on believing what has been handed down to us. And for a great many people that’s good enough. All we really need to do is believe, to have faith and all will be well. But oh so many more of us have grown weary of the tired insistence on belief; you only have to think of the children missing from our churches to know that our doctrines are failing to engender relationship.

I’d like to be able to say, here just learn this and believe this and all will be well,  all we need to do is figure out more up to date methods to deliver the same old doctrines and your grown children will learn to believe, but  I too have my doubts.   You see I don’t believe that the point of a religion is to engender belief. I believe that the point of religion is much bigger than belief. For if a religion does no help you relate to God or to God’s creatures, or enhance your experience of creation, then religion is not life giving and all its doctrines are but fleeting attempts to deny death.

It is far more important to have a relationship with our God than it is to understand doctrines about God. In so far as the doctrine of the trinity helps us to relate to God then it can be said to be life-giving. When the doctrine of the trinity helps us relate to God’s creatures and to God’s creation, then it can be said to be life-giving. But reduced to a formula that we must believe the doctrine of the trinity runs the risk of inhibiting our experience of God and robbing us of a life-giving relationship with God and with the world that God loves.

I am convinced that the only way to ensure that the doctrine of the trinity remains life-giving is to free it from the confines of the past. Despite it’s fear, the church must re-examine its creeds and confessions, open up our dusty doctrines to the light of the 21st century so that those that fail to enhance our relationship to God and to one another can be given a decent Christian burial and those that nurture our relationship to God and to one another can thrive.

We need to prioritize relationship and experience over ancient creeds and doctrines, least our preoccupation with correct belief causes us to miss an encounter with our God.

Trying to understand the very nature of God, is, when you think about it actually an arrogant thing for simple creatures such as we. We cannot hope to understand the nature of God.  So perhaps the most faithful sermon on the Trinity is one that merely sniffs around the edges of the mystery, hunting for something closer to an experience rather than an understanding.  God is the elusive stranger.

Sometimes it is possible to identify God, before God gets away. But most of the time we only recognize God after God is gone, like the drifter who wants to tell you his story only you do not have time, so you hand him a dollar and walk away.  Or the woman with the tearstained face who disappears while you decide whether to ask her what is wrong; or the bewildered child whose mother scolds him for being alive and whose sorrowful eyes catch yours just as she drags him away. These are the strangers who lay claim to our hearts, although they make no claims for themselves.  In their presence we fail them.  It is only after they are gone that we know who they were.  That is why it is so easy for us to sacrifice them.  We did not know.  How could we have known?  Who expected Christ to show up looking like that?

Is it possible for us to attend to our peripheral vision, to see out of the corner of our eyes, to notice those faint sounds of birdsong in the background, to catch those elusive fragrances, that might well be God, the Holy One, coming to us in ordinary space and matter, longing for an intimate encounter?

Let us be ready to notice the Spirit of God in a burning bush, to turn aside for a moment in order to encounter the mysterious, intimate God who comes to us, so that in the power of the trinity we ourselves may be made holy!

            Heirs with Christ –  inheritors and distributers of all God’s love.

            There you see, I’m not suggesting that we toss it all away.

            Down through the centuries God has revealed so much.

            I’m simply pleading that we walk humbly with our God.

            And revel in the mystery.

In a dusty library years ago, I discovered a pearl about the Trinity, which I treasure. It came from St. Augustine, a 4th century bishop who helped to craft the doctrine of the trinity.

            Augustine’s metaphor for the Trinity is that

            God is:  Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.  

            May we learn to walk humbly with that love.

Beyond Tribalism – 21st Century Pentecost

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Ideas gleamed from Clay Nelson, John Shelby Spong,

John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg

The splendid preacher Clay Nelson of St. Matthew-in-the-city, Auckland, New Zealand, opened me up to a new way of seeing Pentecost.  Nelson tells this lovely little story written by fellow Kiwi Judy Parker, entitled simply “The Hat.”

A priest looked up from the psalms on the lectern, cast his eyes over all the hats bowed before him.   Feathered, frilled, felt hats in rows like faces.  But there was one at the end of the row that was different. What was she thinking, a head without hat.  Was like a cat without fur. Or a bird without wings. 

That won’t fly here, not in the church. The voices danced in song with the colours of the windows.  Red light played along the aisle, blue light over the white corsage of Missus  Dewsbury, green on the pages of the Bible.  Reflecting up on the face of the priest.

The priest spoke to the young lady afterwards:  “You must wear a hat and gloves in the House of God. It is not seemly otherwise.”

The lady flushed, raised her chin, and strode out.

“That’s the last we’ll see of her,” said the organist.

 Later:  The organ rang out; the priest raised his eyes to the rose window.  He didn’t see the woman in hat and gloves advancing down the aisle as though she were a bride.            The hat, enormous, such as one might wear to the races. Gloves, black lace, such as one might wear to meet a duchess.  Shoes, high-heeled, such as one might wear on a catwalk in Paris.            And nothing else.

Now some people might ask, “Is this a true story?”  And I’d have to answer that this story is absolutely true!  Now for some that answer might not be enough and they’d want to know, “Did this actually happen?”  Well, I’d like to think so.  But I doubt that it actually happened. But whether it actually happened or not, most of us know that the truth in this story lies in the power of metaphor.

Metaphor, which literally means:  beyond words. The power of metaphor is in its ability to point beyond itself to truths beyond those that are apparent.  And the metaphor in this story points us to buck-naked truths about tradition, worldly power, patriarchy, hierarchy, orthodoxy and many more truths about the very nature of the church itself and religion in general.  And it doesn’t matter whether or not this actually happened or not. What matters is what we can learn about ourselves and our life together from this story.

The heroine in this little story demands to be heard as she puts all her listeners on notice that the Spirit of God is out of the box and wearing a hat.  The story of Pentecost is just as stunning.  Even though we’ve managed to pretty much domesticate the story by literalizing it and insisting that yes indeed Pentecost really did actually happen just as it is described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, the story of Pentecost refuses to play by our rules as the power of metaphor turns the Spirit of God loose on our silly notions about history.

Truth is as elusive as it is blatantly obvious and yet we continue to try to deny the paradox of truth. Truth is as colourful as the rainbows that stretch across the sky and yet we continue to try to limit the truth to the simplicity of black and white.             All too often truth’s refusal to fit into our neat little boxes causes us to deny the obvious truth in  favour of a truth of our own creation.

The story of Pentecost is a case in point. For decades historians, New Testament Scholars, and theologians have been telling us that the story of Pentecost is not history.  Like all sorts of stories about the origins of things, the story of the church’s birthday is shrouded in myth and legend. That doesn’t make the story of the church’s beginning at Pentecost any less true, it just means that it isn’t history.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles, was written by the same author who wrote the Gospel According to Luke. We have no idea who this writer was, and the name Luke does not appear on the early manuscripts. The name Luke was applied much latter, by something called “tradition”.  In those days ‘tradition” meant “the church”.  

The Acts of the Apostles represents the voice of someone living in a community at the turn of the first century.  The writer, let’s follow tradition and just call him Luke, the writer known as Luke writes a Gospel also now known as Luke, which tells the story of the life and times of Jesus as known by his community.           Luke also writes the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which chronicles the story of the early followers of Jesus, who managed to hang together after Jesus was gone and established a movement that changed the world.

Luke writes his account of the founding of this movement out of the context of his community and addresses the needs and concerns of his community.          And in both the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts, the writer makes it clear that he is writing to a character named Theopholous, which in Greek means, Lover of God. Luke addresses his writing to a lover of God and right from the beginning he confesses that he is writing so that you may have faith.  As lovers of God we read these ancient stories so that we may have faith. We do not read them so that we can know the history of events as they actually happened.

Marcus Borg suggests that in reading the stories in the Bible we must ask ourselves two important questions:  1) Why did the writers write the stories that they wrote?  and 2)  Why did they write them the way they wrote them?

When we ask those two questions about the story of Pentecost we begin to see all sorts of truths as we strip away the layers of tradition that have held this story captive to history for far too long. Why did the writer known as Luke write  the story of Pentecost and why did he write it the way he wrote it? 

I suspect that the answer to both of those questions begins to become clear when we pay attention to the story from the Hebrew Scriptures that is often told at Pentecost. Recorded in the Book of Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel would have been a familiar one to the people of Luke’s community. The story of the chaos that ensues as a result of humanity’s hubris contains truths about tribalism that would have been as familiar to a first century audience as they are to a 21st century audience. 

The perils of tribalism which pits one people against another and one culture against another were ingrained in the religious traditions of the first century.     The writer of Acts uses the story of Pentecost to point to the truth of the Jesus experience. Their experience of Jesus with his radical ideas about a loving God, lead the early followers of the way to a new understanding of faith.          Empowered by Jesus full embodiment of love, the early followers felt compelled to share their experience. Faith did not have to be lived out in fear, even in the face of death. Being faithful was not about being exclusive or tribal, for love knows no boundaries. It wasn’t even about religion which is so often used by the powerful to oppress the powerless. Faith was not about purity but compassion, healing and justice. Faith didn’t need to be destructive if it heightened our awareness that the creation of which we are a part is an interconnected web.

Sadly over the years all too many Christians have seen the story of Pentecost as simply a reversal of the Tower of Babel story. But here we have so much more.      In the Tower of Babel  we have a story speaks to the origins of a kind of chaos that is the result of human arrogance. This chaos leads to disaster. And the response of the people is to adopt a kind of tribalism where eventually only one tribe becomes the chosen people. The chosen tribe then chooses to exhibit a kind of uniformity which defines who is in and who is out. 

Boundaries are established. The religious practice that emerges strives for order and uniformity.  Order is established and the faithful are encouraged to live within the rules. But in the Pentecost story the chaos and disorder is not created by humans but by God. The Pentecost story is about chaos and disorder; about God who is running amok. Boundaries are crossed. Taboos are broken.           Suddenly, like the rush of the wind young people have visions and elders have dreams; dreams and visions that threaten the established order.

Luke’s story speaks directly to his community which has become accustomed to a religion that is a product of its culture; where faith reflects the values of the tribe. Religion is used to give members of the community a sense of who was friend and who was foe. It played to their fear of others who were beyond the tribe. It grounded their xenophobia and ethnocentrism in righteousness.  It served as the glue that told its adherents who they were and who they weren’t.           Religion gave people an illusion of living in an orderly and predictable world.

Outside the boundaries of their religion was a place of chaos. Its inhabitants were judged to be demonic or subhuman. In the early history of Israel those who worshipped gods outside the culture were labeled idolaters. Identifying idolaters gave the faithful of the local religion a target for their contempt and hostility and someone to blame for their disappointments and failures. Along comes Jesus who challenges the status quo along with the powers that be who maintain order by force of might. Violence, greed, and force become the tools to the Pax Romana, which insisted that the way to peace was through force. First you conquer a people, then you wield your power over them to control them so that you can tax them and the status quo is the only kind of peace one can hope for.     And along comes Jesus who points to another way to peace through justice.             People want to believe they want to follow Jesus but their fearful of the chaos that might ensue.  Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.          Chaos is frightening.

Into that mix the writer of Luke offers his story of Pentecost which displays the Spirit of God at work in the midst of chaos. The followers of Jesus are calling their communities out of the constraints of the religious practices of their day. 

The Pentecost story reflects the early Christian understanding of Jesus as a leader who didn’t just address the Chosen People but who engaged the Syrophoenician woman, the Centurion, and the Samaritan leper.

Luke, in the telling of the story of Pentecost, already knew that Christianity had spread to the edge of the known world and to its very centre in Rome.    Christianity had already transcended tribe and tradition.  Jesus inspired a religion of the poor and the powerless without an enemy or enmity and yet inclusive in its membership.

Christianity was as outrageous as a woman who wore a hat, gloves, shoes and nothing else. Sadly, it didn’t take long for the early Christians to try to put the Spirit back in the box.

The story of Pentecost shows the Spirit of God out of the box, prancing about in the town square and intoxicating the people with the sheer beauty of her audacity.

Luke’s Pentecost story served to remind those first Christians of the Jesus call to diversity. That call to diversity has the power to contradict the power of the status quo of tribalism that was exemplified in the story of the Tower of Babel.

The followers of the Way are able to declare that in Christ there is no East nor West, no North nor South, no Jew nor Gentile, no man nor woman.

Luke has crafted the story of Pentecost that declares that in Christ there is no longer Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappodocia, Pontus, Asisa, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the ports of Libya around Cyrene, nor even Romans.  All are one as Christ is One.

In Jesus the followers of the way are challenged to think beyond tribalism, to dream dreams and see visions.

Luke’s Pentecost story calls us to a similar awakening.

An awakening that begs the question:  What kind of Pentecost stories are we called to craft?

Can we 21st century followers of the Way produce Pentecost stories that will boldly declare that we are one with our Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Taoist sisters and brothers, and what about atheists, agnostics and all the poor and the powerless?

I hope that the audacity of God’s Spirit can call us out of our status quo religious practices that keep us from exploring the wonders of the chaos that lies beyond our established religious order.

Imagine a 21st century Pentecost where rather than speaking in languages that we’ve never understood before, we begin to listen to those who we’ve failed to understand before.

Imagine a 21st century Pentecost where Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Baha’is and adherents of all sorts of native religions that we’ve never heard of begin to listen to one another. 

Imagine an audacious Spirit calling us beyond Christianity’s exclusivism.

Imagine a vision of Christianity that celebrates not denigrates the truths of the worlds great religions.

Imagine a vision of Christianity whose first impulse is to listen rather than speak; a Christianity that is willing to share its truths in a spirit of co-operation without an emphasis on conversion.

Imagine a vision of a church full of curious Christians, who share a goal of dialogue that seeks not just to create new Christians, but to learn from other religions so that we can become better Christians and those with whom we listen and speak might become better practitioners of their faiths.

Imagine a vision of Pentecost where the wind and the fire represent God out of the box.

Do we have the courage to strip ourselves of the trappings of status quo Christianity and venture out into the world free of the taboos of tradition? Do we have the courage to listen and learn from the truths of other tribes? Do we have the wisdom to embrace divinely inspired chaos?  Some dreams and visions have to be believed before they can be seen.

If the Reign of God is to be realized in all its chaotic splendour, we must put on a new hat, and strip ourselves of the ethnocentrism and chauvinism that cloaks our faith and walk brazenly down the aisle.

The Ascension Never Actually Happened – Ascension is Always Happening

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Leaving Behind the Miraculous Jesus to Welcome the Human Jesus

The celebration of Jesus’ Ascension is a church festival that I have always chosen to ignore. The ancient tradition that has Jesus floating up into the clouds stretches the credibility of the church to such an extent that I’ve always assumed that the less said about the Ascension the better. But last year I was challenged by a parishioner to try to make some sense out of the Ascension story so that 21st century Christians would not have to check their brains at the door should they happen upon a congregation that still celebrated the day. What follows is a transcript of my attempt to leave behind the miraculous Jesus in order to be better able to welcome the human Jesus down from the clouds. I am indebted to Bishop John Shelby Spong together with Clay Nelson of St Matthew-in-the-city for their liberating insights.  

Traditionally, on the 40th day after Easter, the church celebrates the feast of the Ascension. But because so few people in the 21st century are willing to come to church during the week, the Ascension is celebrated by the church on the first Sunday after the feast of the Ascension. Since I have been your pastor we have not celebrated Ascension Sunday. But as this particular Ascension Sunday follows so closely after Jack Spong’s visit with us, I thought that it was about time that rather than avoid the Ascension, I’d like to try to confront it.

Jack has been telling his anti-Ascension story for quite a few years now. Just in case you’ve never heard it or have forgotten it, let me remind you. It seems that Jack was speaking with Carl Sagan, the world-renowned astronomer and astrophysicist. Jack says that Carl Sagan once told him  “if Jesus literally ascended into the sky and traveled at the speed of light, then he hasn’t yet escaped our galaxy.”

With that said, let me just say, that the Ascension never actually happened. It is not an historical event. If a tourist with a video camera had been there in Bethany they would have recorded absolutely nothing. 

I know what the Nicene Creed says, “Jesus ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” But like the members of the early church, I do not have a literal understanding of the scriptures. And so, as I do not understand the Bible literally, neither do I understand the Nicene Creed to be a literal interpretation of the faith. Like all creeds the Nicene, Apostles and Athanasian creeds are snapshots of theology as it was at a particular time in history.

We would do well to remember that the Creeds were developed to answer questions about the faith in a time when people understood the cosmos to be comprised of a flat earth, where God resides above in the heavens and located beneath the earth were the pits of hell. I know that the universe is infinite.  I also know about gravity. I also know that it is highly unlikely that Jesus had helium flowing through his veins.  I’ve flown around the world, and I can tell you that there is no heaven above the clouds. So, I can say with confidence that:  The very present Jesus of resurrection faith did not literally elevate into heaven while his disciples looked on.

The writer of the Gospel according to Luke and the Book of Acts are one and the same person. The same writer wrote the Gospel according to Luke to tell the story of the life of Jesus and the Book of Acts to tell the story of the Holy Spirit at work in the followers of Jesus.  Although we don’t know who the author was, we do know that he was not an historian. Neither Luke nor Acts are historical accounts. They are both addressed to a character named Theopholus. Theopholus is  Greek for lover of God. The books are addressed to the lovers of God, that’s you and me and the author makes it clear that he has written these books so that we, the lovers of God, can believe and have faith.  The books were written somewhere near the end of the first century. Somewhere between 50 to 60 years after the death of Jesus.  Perhaps between 80 and 95 of this Common Era.

The important question for most biblical scholars is not whether the Ascension actually happened but rather, what did the Ascension mean to the author in his context. And to that question we might add a more pressing question: Given what the Ascension meant in the first century, does it continue to have any relevance for those of us who live in the 21st century?

I believe that the followers of Jesus experiences of Jesus the man were so overwhelming that they saw in him the human face of God. I also believe that in very powerful ways the followers of Jesus continued to experience Jesus presence.

Those powerful experiences of Jesus after his death were so intense that they defied description. Given that Jesus was now dead and gone, yet his presence still seemed to be with them, the followers of Jesus used the Hebrew story of Elijah and Elisha to construct a belief about the Spirit of Jesus continuing to be powerfully among them.

By the time the writer of Luke and Acts got around to writing these stories down, there were different versions of the story being passed around in the early church. The writer of Luke/Acts paints a picture of a re-formed bodily Jesus going up into the heavens in the Ascension and a windy, fiery Spirit coming down at Pentecost. The writer uses powerful familiar Hebrew images to portray the experiences of Jesus’ followers after his death.

In order for us to move beyond the literal and beyond the historical and even beyond the metaphorical meaning to arrive at the meaning that the story of the Ascension can have for us today in this time and in this place, I’d like to tell you two stories that I heard about from a preacher who serves an Anglican parish in Auckland, New Zealand. Clay Nelson is a friend of Jack Spong who tells great stories.  The first story is an actual, literal, historically accurate Ascension story followed by a metaphorical Ascension story.

The literal historical Ascension story took place in 1982. But it the story that actually began some twenty years earlier when Larry Walters was just 13 years old and he saw weather balloons hanging from the ceiling of an Army & Navy surplus store. It was then that Larry knew that some day he would be carried up to the heavens by balloons. Sure enough when he was 33 years old, on July 2nd 1982, Larry Walters tied 42 helium-filled balloons to a lawn chair in the backyard of his girlfriend’s house in San Pedro, California. With the help of his friends, Larry secured himself into the lawn chair that was anchored to the bumper of a friend’s car, by two nylon tethers. Larry packed several sandwiches and a six-pack of Miller Lite and loaded his pellet gun so that he could pop a few balloons when he was ready to come down. His goal was to sail across the desert and hopefully make it to the Rocky Mountains in a few days.

But things didn’t quite work out for Larry. When he cut the cord anchoring the lawn chair the second one snapped, launching Larry into the skies above Los Angeles. Instead of leveling off at about 30 feet as he’d planned, Larry rose to 16,000 feet and at that height Larry couldn’t risk shooting any of the balloons.    So he stayed up there drifting cold and frightened for more than 14 hours when he found himself in the primary flight approach corridor for LAX.

Legend has it that a Pan Am pilot was the first to spot Larry and quickly radioed the tower telling them that he’d just passed a guy in a lawn chair with a gun. The Federal Aviation Administration was not amused. Larry started shooting out the balloons to start his descent but accidentally dropped the gun. After drifting for a couple of hours he eventually landed in a Long Beach neighbourhood entangled in some power lines. Larry survived without any serious injuries.

Now that is an historically accurate ascension story. It’s a funny story and a true story, but it is not a life changing story. But Larry did inspire a wonderful Australian movie, called Danny Deckchair, which is untrue, is in fact full of truth. Now when a New Zealander recommends an Australian movie, I take notice, so yesterday I watched Danny Deckchair and I do believe that it is a modern metaphorical interpretation of the Ascension.

The movie’s hero, Danny, is a bored labourer who drives a cement mixer. Danny is an unlikely Christ figure whose story is similar to Larry’s. Danny ascends from his backyard in Sydney during a barbecue and lands less than gracefully in a small town in the Australian outback. By this act of departure and arrival everything changes not only for Danny, but also for those he left behind and those he meets in the outback. Danny’s unique departure inspires those at home to take risks of their own: to live life more boldly, to act on their dreams, to become all they can be.

In acting out his dream, Danny finds new confidence and becomes the source of inspiration and affirmation for the townsfolk in the outback who used to see themselves as backwater hicks, but now see the importance of their actions in the life of their town. Everyone is transformed by Danny’s ascension. New Life and love accompany his resurrection.

The writer of Luke/Acts two versions of Jesus’ Ascension are not true like Larry’s lift off but are true like Danny Deckchair.  While the event certainly did not happen in a literal way, the story does attempt to capture the quality of a real man whose coming and going in their lives changed them forever.  The writer of Luke/Acts Ascension story is not so miraculous after all. The Ascension story is about the joy the disciples felt about the ongoing ever so real presence of Jesus after his death. The God they saw in Jesus they found in themselves. In Jesus’ departure they discovered that they could love as wastefully as he did.  They could live abundantly as Jesus did. They could heal and reconcile just as Jesus did.  With Jesus pointing the way they had found God and while Jesus was gone, the God that Jesus pointed to was everywhere, even in them.

If we are to move beyond the literal, beyond the historical, beyond the metaphorical to the life-changing meaning of the stories that have been handed down to us, we may just have to give up our tenacious hold upon the notion of Jesus as some sort of miracle worker who defies the laws of gravity, and time and space.

If we are to engage the stories about Jesus in a way that allows those stories to intersect with our lives we will have to embrace Jesus’ humanity. My Kiwi colleague Clay Nelson puts it like this:  “If your faith is sustained by a miraculous understanding of Jesus that has to ignore what you know about the real world, then let me ask you: Is it a faith that can sustain you in the real world?             Eventually this world of advancing scientific knowledge, that no longer requires a personal God to create, heal and sustain life will make the God we have had irrelevant, if it hasn’t already. I think God would rather be dead than irrelevant.             And if God is irrelevant, Jesus, who has been portrayed by the author of Luke/Acts and the church as the incarnation of this God, will suffer the same fate. If he hasn’t already.”

Nelson reminds us that Jesus was human and the human Jesus does not suffer the fate of an irrelevant god.. “The human Jesus, instead of only showing us God in all God’s glory, also shows us in all of ours. This Jesus becomes a window through which we can glimpse the mystery of love and life and being we are all called into. This Jesus through his radical love of even his enemies invites us into that mystery that surrounds us and is part of our very being.  This Jesus becomes the doorway through which I’m willing to walk into that mystery. For this mystery, I am willing to die to have new life. Mystery makes sense to me, the miraculous doesn’t. The mysterious Jesus inspires me and calls me to new levels of being. The miraculous Jesus helps me as much as telling a child that Santa comes down chimneys. The mysterious Jesus sustains my faith.  The miraculous Jesus impedes my faith.”

Like my Kiwi colleague Clay, I no longer need to believe in a miraculous Jesus in order to experience the mysterious Christ who lives and breathes in with and through Christ’s body here and now.

The writer of Luke/Acts is preparing his audience of God lovers for the arrival on the scene of the very Spirit of God that lived and breathed in with and through Jesus.

So, as we approach the celebration of Pentecost, may you find in these stories handed down to us by our ancestors in the faith an inkling of the powerful presence that Jesus’ first followers experienced after Jesus had left them.

May the joy they felt at the realization that the God they saw in Jesus they now found in themselves. May the realizations that those first followers experienced in Jesus’ departure, when they discovered they could love as extravagantly as Jesus did, that they could live as abundantly as Jesus did. That they could bring about healing and reconciliation just as Jesus did. 

May these realizations live and breath and have their being in you. May you know the joy of seeing Jesus point the way, the joy of finding God, may you know the God Christ points to who is everywhere, even in you. May you love as extravagantly as Jesus loved. May you live as abundantly as Jesus lived.             May you be Christ’s Body here and now, in this place in this time!

Read about the real Lawn-chair Larry here

MOTHERS’ DAY – Peace is the Way

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Most of us think of Mothers’ Day as a kind of conventional holiday that celebrates traditional family values; the kind of traditional values that encourage women who are mothers to keep on keeping on.  But celebrating the traditional motherhood is definitely not what Mothers’ Day was originally intended for.  The very first Mothers’ Day was intended to be a celebration not just of mothers, but rather it was designed to be a call to action by all women. 

One of the first founders of Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis back in 1858.  Anna Jarvis gathered women of the Appalachian mountains together in what she called mother’s day work clubs. Where women worked together to eliminate poverty.  When the Civil War came about, the mother’s day work clubs created medical camps.  They were places of nonviolence for men from both sides who were wounded in the war. 

At the end of the Civil War, Anna Jarvis organized the Mother’s Day Friendship Day, which was a call for radical peace.  Anna Jarvis brought together the leaders from the north and the south for a time of reconciliation.  Mother’s Day was originally about reconciliation and peace.

Then along came a  woman named, Julia Ward Howe who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Julia Ward Howe called for women to protest the cruelties of war everywhere and to gather together to call for peace.  She called for a national day of peace for all women.  She issued women’s’ declaration, and from the streets women shouted :

“Arise then women of this day, arise all women who have hearts, say firmly our husbands shall not come to us reeking with the carnage for caresses and applause.  Arise women of peace.” 

Anna Jarvis’ daughter also named Anna Jarvis approached President Wilson and petitioned for a national Mother’s Day.  It was Woodrow Wilson who called for the second Sunday of May to be the national Mother’s Day. Shortly thereafter, n anti-suffragette movement spoke out against the women who were calling for peace.  So instead of being a day for women who were active and present in the world, it became a day to celebrate mothers who stayed at home with the children.

Anna Jarvis the founder of Mother’s Day was so angry with Woodrow Wilson that she filed a law suit, that petitioned the courts to put a stop to Mother’s Day because as the court papers insisted, instead of it being run by women, suddenly Mother’s Day was being run by men in an effort to keep them in the house barefoot and pregnant. 

Sadly, the world was not ready for such strong willed women to shout out loud. And so, Anna Jarvis was arrested at a Mother’s Day celebration and she spent the rest of her life in a sanatorium? 

On mothers’ day we would all do well to remember Julia Ward Howe’s Mothers’ Day Proclamation.  Dated 1870 but sadly it is still so very relevant today:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

PRACTICING RESURRECTION – Sermon April 15 2012

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This Sunday I tried something new: introducing a video clip into the sermon! You can view the video within the written text of the sermon below or listen to the audio version provided. I am indebted to the work of James Rowe Adams for much of the New Testament Scholarship in this sermon.

The Scripture texts were John chapter 20:19-31 and Acts 4:32-35

Audio Version of the Sermon click here

Practicing Resurrection

Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen indeed!  Alleluia!

So, Christ is Risen!  So What???

What can it possibly mean to you and to me, that a rag-tag bunch of Jesus’ followers gathered together in an upper-room and talked about their experiences of Jesus and decided that not even death could extinguish the life that they experienced in Jesus? What difference does it make to you or to I that Christ is risen?

The truth is that it can make absolutely no difference what so ever. Now there are a whole lot of people who will tell you that the important thing about resurrection is that you believe it. Those same folks absolutely love the story of doubting Thomas. And so every year on the second Sunday of Easter we read the story of doubting Thomas as a kind of inoculation against Thomas’ disease.

I sometimes think that the designers of the lectionary were trying to build up our resistance to doubt. Having problems believing in resurrection, well don’t do what Thomas did, don’t doubt, because you’ll be proven wrong. Jesus is alive, the wounds in his hands proved that to Doubting Thomas, so have no doubt about it the resurrection happened!  Believe in the resurrection!

The trouble with believing in stuff is that it belief can make absolutely no difference what so ever. I can believe in justice for all, but unless I’m prepared to seek justice, to be fair, or to resist injustice, it makes absolutely no difference what so ever. You can shout, “Christ is risen!” all you want but unless you are willing to live it, the resurrection means very little at all.

In order to live the resurrection you have to begin practicing resurrection. In order to practice something, you have to know what it looks like, what it sounds like, or what it feels like.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to show you what resurrection looks like in the flesh. Then I remembered a video that’s been doing the rounds on the internet, so I want you to watch this modern miracle of resurrection.

WATCH THE VIDEO CLIP FROM:  Alive Inside

Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen indeed!  Alleluia!

            2000 years ago a bunch of rag-tag Jesus followers were huddled together in fear. Their beloved leader had been brutally executed by the powers that be and they were terrified that they would be next. Paralyzed by their fear, hiding behind a locked door, something happened that gave them the strength to burst forth from their own tomb and change the world.

Ever since they began to practice resurrection, people have been trying to figure out exactly what happened; what could have changed these bumbling, terrified, betrayers, abandoners, who seemed to be always getting things wrong, into a bunch of leaders who began a movement that spread through out the Empire within their own life-times and then based on the power of their witness, spread throughout the world and continues to nourish and sustain millions of people from generation to generation?

Now there are those that insist that it was the power of Jesus having been physically resuscitated from the dead that motivated his followers to change their lives and the lives of millions who have come after them.  But we live in the 21st century and we have access to all sorts of information that the generations who have gone before us did not. Most of us, myself included, are not swayed by arguments about a physical resuscitation of Jesus’ body. But I can tell you without a doubt that I do believe in resurrection and I know that Christ is risen and I also know that the same power that the early followers of Jesus used to change the world is available to you and to me.  And now more than ever the world needs us to start using that power. It’s long past time for us to start practicing resurrection.

So, if they weren’t talking about a physical resuscitation when they spoke of Jesus’ resurrection, what did the early followers of Jesus actually mean when they spoke of Jesus having been raised from the dead? During the first century many Jews had adopted a vision of the future that dealt with the prevailing question of the day:  “How could a just God allow his people to suffer endlessly at the hands of their enemies?” Or as Dom Crossan puts it:   When was God going to clean up the world so that justice could prevail?

An emotionally satisfying answer was found in a fantasy expressed in one of the visions attributed to the prophet Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones: “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel.  They say, ‘Our bones re dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God:  I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”

The idea that God would one day raise up the dead was not particularly popular with the priestly party in Jerusalem, perhaps because they had come to terms with the occupation forces of Rome, but it appealed strongly to some Pharisees who insisted that God would see to it that ultimately justice would prevail.

Biblical scholars suspect that Jesus and his followers shared the Pharisees’ hope for resurrection.  Each of the synoptic gospels tells a story about how members of the priestly, party known as the Sadducees, came to Jesus with a trick question that was intended to show the absurdity of the resurrection, but in each story Jesus cleverly avoids their trap.

That the editors of the first three gospels chose to include these stories, suggests that at least by the end of the first century resurrection imagery was important to the followers of Jesus. But exactly what they meant by resurrection is not clear. In the Christian writings, two Greek words are translated as “resurrection”. Each of these words evolved from a verb that translates into English as “raise”.

The first word, “anastasis” comes from the verb, which meant to stand up. The second word, ‘egersis” is from the verb that meant to wake up. When early Christian writers used these terms they may have been thinking like Pharisees and insisting that God would prove to be just.

Many New Testament scholars see the stories about the risen Christ as examples of hymns of praise or poetic expressions of the faithful whose lives had been transformed b their encounter with the Jesus story.

The apostle Paul never mentioned the empty tomb and his own description of his encounter with the risen Christ is one of a vision of Christ rather than an actual physical encounter. Paul uses the Greek verb for “appeared” when he describes both the apostles’ encounters and his own with the risen Christ.

But New Testament scholars can parse the words of the gospels forever and they are never going to be able to tell us exactly what the early followers of Jesus meant when they said that Jesus is risen.  What we can know about their understanding of resurrection can be found in the events that followed Jesus’ execution. Crucifixion was designed by the Romans to terrorize the nations they occupied. Corpses were left on display so that the people would understand that if they stepped out of line in any way, the horror or crucifixion was all they could hope for. The terrorizing of the population worked well for the Romans. For a while Jesus’ followers were terrified. But death could not contain the power of their experiences with Jesus. And it wasn’t long before they were living not as terrorized citizens of the Roman Empire, but as liberated followers of the way, banding together in communities of compassion, sharing their wealth, ensuring that none were needing among them.  Risking it all, for the sake of Jesus vision of God’s reign of justice and peace.

When I read the accounts of those early followers of the way who abandoned the tomb of the upper-room to gather together to build communities of compassion it is clear to me who was raised up by images of resurrection. The followers of Jesus were lifted up from a crouching or cowering position as they boldly proclaimed what they had learned from Jesus. The followers of Jesus stood up and got on with the business that was begun by Jesus. The followers of Jesus began to understand themselves in a whole new way.             The Apostle Paul wrote:  “We who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

By merging the pharisaic image of resurrection with the image of the body of Christ the first Christians could declare with confidence that Christ is risen. When followers of Jesus in the first century and in the twenty-first century talk about the resurrection of Christ we are proclaiming that death did not have the last word in the Jesus story because his followers were raised up to be his now body.

When we say that we believe in the resurrection of the dead, we are proclaiming that no matter how dead someone may appear to be, new life is always possible. Practicing resurrection begins when we huddle together refusing to let our fears entomb us. Practicing resurrection happens when we gather together to build communities of compassion.

Our friend in the video came to life not through any power of his own, but through the compassion of his caregivers who struggled to reach him. Caregivers are empowered to do their work by the gathered community. Resurrection is not a solitary endeavour.             Practicing resurrection requires that we gather together sharing our gifts, talents and treasure for the good of all. Practicing resurrection happens when we build communities of compassion that live fully, love extravagantly and empower people to be all that they were created to be.

Let it be so among us. Let us be a community of compassion. Let us always seek ways to empower our neighbours and ourselves to live fully, love extravagantly be all that we were created to be. Let us practice resurrection here and now!

THE RESURRECTION OF MARY – An Idle Tale

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St. Mary of Magdala the Apostle to the Apostles

As our Easter celebrations continue, the readings for this coming Sunday quickly move our attention to the story of Thomas.  Poor old doubting Thomas.  It’s the same every year.  Thomas’ doubts greet the faithful on “low Sunday”.  But before you let Thomas’ doubts capture Easter’s hope, consider exploring the resurrection of Mary.  Perhaps my not-so-long-ago encounter with a visiting New Testament scholar will entice you to follow Mary out of her tomb and beyond the streets to her place at the head of the fledgling community that became the church: 

He just said it for the third time! “Harlots!” He keeps calling them “harlots”, while I rack my brains to come up with one harlot. Then he points to the text and his charges become clearer, he says, “she is a “prostitute!”

My carefully reigned in anger is unleashed. “Where?  Where?  Where? Show me where it says this woman is a prostitute!”

As he refers to the Gospel text and insists that, “It is there, right there in the text”,

I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to wipe the bemused expression from his face. I want to rub his nose in the damned text. Instead, I begin the uneasy process of reigning in my anger. I slow my speech, I try to erase the tremor from my voice and I ask him to, “Show me, show me where it says this woman is a prostitute.”

He consults his text and says, “a woman in the city who was a sinner.”

“A sinner not a prostitute.”  I respond.

He insists, “Yes a prostitute.”

“Where?” I ask.

Again he insists, “A woman who was a sinner.”

I demanded to know, “Where does it say she was a prostitute?”

He insists, “The author means that she was a prostitute.”

I lose control, “How do you know?  What words does the author use to say that his woman was a prostitute? Show me in the text where it says she was a prostitute?”

He still doesn’t get it, “What do you mean? It is clear that this woman was a prostitute.”

Once again I push, “Show me.  Show me where?”

He continues to say, “She was a woman from the city who was a sinner.”

I know that the text says that, so I implore him to tell me, “The Greek… What does the Greek say?”

He replies, “amartolos”.

I push, “Does that mean prostitute?” We both know that it does not.

He replies, “Sinner. But the context clearly shows that she was a prostitute.”

Still pushing I ask him to “Show me.  Show me how the narrative says this woman was a prostitute. Show me where it says her sins were sexual.             Show me where it says so in the narrative.”

He says, “It’s clear.”

Clearly we disagree, so I try again, “Clear to you.  Show me. Show me!”

As he fumbles through the pages, I offer him a way out, “Okay.  Even if I concede the point that her sins were sexual, show me where it says that these sexual sins were nothing more than lust or adultery, show me where it says that she was a prostitute.  Show me!”

He couldn’t show me.  It’s simply not there.

Nowhere in the New Testament does it ever say in Greek or in English that Mary of Magdala is a prostitute.  But over and over again scholars, theologians, popes, preachers, and dramatists, have continued to cast Mary of Magdala as a prostitute.  

In the years that have transpired since than day in seminary, when a visiting New Testament scholar insisted that “the context clearly shows that she was a prostitute,” I’ve delighted in being able to participate in the phenomenon of Mary’s resurrection as the first Apostle.

I’ve gobbled up all the many books that have recently been written about the woman commonly known as Mary Magdalene. Some of them have been great scholarly texts like Jane Schaberg’s tome entitled “The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene.” While others have been little more than a salacious romp like Dan Brown’s:  The Davinci Code. But whether its scholarly speculation on the nature of Mary’s leadership in the Early Church or scandalous speculation on her sexual exploits with none other than Jesus himself, what these books hold in common is their ability to touch an insatiable curiosity about this enigmatic biblical character whose feminine attributes have ruffled the cassocks of those patriarchs of the priestly persuasion for centuries.

The recent resurrection of Mary has offered up portraits of a character whose historical roots go all the way back to a relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. And that relationship situates Mary at Jesus’ right hand. Now you’d think that someone whom all four gospels declare to be so very close to Jesus, ought to be someone your hear about in the church all the time.  You’d think that someone who the gospels record as having supported Jesus fledgling ministry out of her own resources, someone who if the gospels are to be believed, followed Jesus all the way to the cross and to whom the risen Christ first appeared and who is the first to be sent by Christ to proclaim the good news of the resurrection, you’d think that such a someone would be heralded down through the centuries, from pulpit to pulpit across the length and breadth of Christendom as the First Apostle. For indeed the literal definition of apostle is “one who is sent”. And if the gospels are to be believed,  Mary was sent by none other than the Risen Christ, so you’d think she would be honored by the very church that professes to follow Christ.  

But there’s just something about Mary….  that has made priests and preachers down through the centuries abhor her.  That the historical evidence clearly points to Mary’s role as a leader, perhaps the foremost leader of the first, fledgling followers of Jesus Christ, has not seemed to help Mary’s case. Indeed, it may be that her leadership position as the Apostle to the Apostles, the first witness to the resurrection and the first to proclaim that Christ is alive, is the very thing that set the proverbial cat among the priestly pigeons.

Now I know that there are those who would say that the swirling conspiracy theories that abound around any discussion of Mary are little more than the rumblings of ill-advised detractors who seek to undermine the teaching authority of the church.  But the evidence is clear that dear old Pope Gregory the Great, whether it was by accident or design actually misrepresented the Scriptures when he pontificated in a way that only popes can, about a woman’s sexuality. That this particular woman happened to be a close confidant of the one his holiness Pope Gregory called, “Lord and Saviour” did not save her from falling (pardon the pun) falling prey to his holiness’s foibles as he confused Mary Magdalene with the woman caught in adultery and made the perilously, presumptuous leap from adultery to prostitution.  And low and behold for 14 centuries after Gregory’s not so great condemnation, Mary has remained relegated to the ranks of those whose bodies are bought and sold for the sake of those who care little for the female gender. And despite biblical and historical evidence to the contrary, Mary has been denied the titles that befit her rank.

But if you want to believe that it is merely a coincidence that the denial of Mary’s rank coincides with the church’s adamant denial down through the centuries that women could ever hope to enter the ranks of the priesthood, well I’m sure that God will forgive you, I’m just not sure Mary or her sisters will.

So what do the scriptures tell us about the disciple whom Jesus loved?             Well for starters Mary was a woman whom Jesus healed.  The gospel according to Luke tells us that:

“With Jesus went the twelve, as well as some women he had healed of evil spirits and sickness;  Mary of Magdala, from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons; Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza; Suzanna; and many other women who were contributing to the support of Jesus and the Twelve with their own funds.”

Evil spirits and sickness; 7 demons, no mention of sex.  No mention of prostitution. Now I don’t know about you, but if a prostitute showed up at your church tongues would be wagging.  And whoever wrote the gospel of Luke was more than capable of passing on a sexual tidbit or two. In fact just before he tells us about the women who support Jesus’ ministry, the writers tells the tale of a woman caught in adultery. But the writer never mentions that Mary was a prostitute.

Now there are some who insist that Gregory the not so great was simply confused by this story and so we should understand that it was an easy mistake to make. But to accept this is to accept that adultery and prostitution are the same thing. Now I get that popes are not well versed in matters of sex, but sadly that’s never stopped them from pontificating.

What irks me more is that a 20th Century New Testament scholar, who ought to know better, could suggest that adultery and prostitution are the same thing or indeed that one woman is the same as the next.

Okay, I’ll admit that I have an ax to grind. Many women do. But can you blame us?

Gentlemen.  I know that I have the rare privilege of serving in ministry with the most enlightened generation of men any woman has had the privilege of serving. You guys are great! So, please don’t hear this as some sort of angry tirade against men. Because sadly, the attitudes that have confined Mary to walking the streets at night are not confined to men. The entire church culture is steeped in antiquated attitudes that will take all of us, women and men together, decades to recover from.

But recover we will.  We will recover the witness of St Mary of Magdala, whose dedicated faith in Jesus, helped her to follow Jesus, despite the fact that all of the Twelve Disciples abandoned him, Mary stayed and followed Jesus all the way to the foot of the cross and beyond. Even in her grief, while the disciples remained locked behind closed doors because they were afraid, Mary ventured out to perform with her ointments ready, not knowing how she would be able to roll the stone away, only knowing that they could not fail to do what she thought would be the last loving act for her beloved Jesus.

It is long past time for the church to celebrate the resurrection of Mary of Magdala, the Apostle to the Apostles. 

Mary faithfully ventured forth, not knowing how; only knowing that she must.  And it was Mary who recognized in the face of someone she thought was just a gardener; Mary recognized the face of Christ. In Mary Magdalene we see a woman whose love of Jesus pushed her to keep going in the face of torment and death. It was Mary’s love of Jesus that sent her into the garden alone. Even though she though that her beloved Jesus was dead and gone, her love helped push her forward and she discovered that everything old has been made new through love.

So, looking back to Mary, I wonder what it would take for us to proclaim, “I have seen Christ”?  Where can we find God in our lives and thereby find new life, new hope, new love?  Where can we find what Mary found; Mary who when she found this new thing, was able to go on to found a community of followers of Christ who endured despite the odds against them.  A community who although their writings were suppressed by the powers that be, they could not be kept silent. A community whose gospel lay buried for centuries, and whose restoration preserves the traditions if not the words of Mary who encourages us down through the centuries with these words:

“Do not weep and be distressed nor let your hearts be troubled. For Christ’s grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise Christ’s greatness, for Christ has joined us together and made us true human beings.”(Gospel of Mary and no I won’t supply the exact reference, in the hope that you might just read the entire Gospel)

Mary saw the risen Christ in the face of a gardener. Were can we find the face of Christ? Can we begin to see the face of Christ in the human beings that surround us?  Perhaps when we begin to share Mary’s faith that the risen Christ can bee seen, we will begin to see the ace of Christ in those around us; in face of the stranger we meet on the road, in the face of the homeless man as we sit and share a meal with them, in the face of a child we reach out to lift up out of poverty, in face the woman upon whose shoulders we stand, in the face of our opponent as together we struggle for understanding, in the face of our enemy as we work for peace, in the face of our tormentors as we strive for justice, in the face of the sick as we seek healing, and in the face of the poor as we offer aid.

When we can look into the face of those we meet and see the face of Christ then perhaps we can follow in the footsteps of Mary and all the world will know by our love, that we too follow Christ.

St. Mary of Magdala, the first Apostle, the Apostle to the Apostle, the one in whom the Risen Christ entrusted the good news of eternal life.

May the power of Mary’s witness inspire you to see the face of Christ in the world.

PREPARING TO PREACH ON GOOD FRIDAY. Searching beyond the talk of sacrifice to see the Good News.

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The Church’s Good Friday obsession with talk of  “sacrifice for sin” has been breed into the bones of this particular preacher.  I have been trained to speak the language of the Church.  I know full well the many doctrines of atonement that have been proposed to explain the reasons Jesus died upon a cross.  I’ve been studying the historical context and the theological consequences of Jesus’ death for more years than I care to admit.   Yet every year, I find myself wanting to book a vacation or call in sick so that I can avoid the awesome task of preaching on Good Friday.

             I’ve put it off tackling the Good Friday texts as long as I dare.  So today, I picked up my copy of “The Last Week” by John Dominic Cross and Marcus Borg, together with my copies of John Shelby Spong’s “Resurrection: Myth or Reality” and “Jesus for the Non Religious” and spent the day in pursuit of a sermon.

            What follows is not the sermon I will preach on Good Friday, but rather, the notes I made to remind myself not to fall into the trap of talking about the events surrounding Jesus’ death in the way I was trained to speak of those events.  I offer up my notes hoping that those who are engaged in the struggle of grappling with how to talk about the cross in the 21st century might find some solace in a fellow struggler’s ruminations. 

            For those of you who don’t have to come up with a sermon for Good Friday, I offer these notes as my humble attempt to see beyond the rhetoric about the cross to the Good News.

            As always I am indebted to Dom and Jack for their scholarship. 

    There are many ways in which our focus upon the cross is disturbing.   Not the least of which is the way in which we as Christians tend to talk about the crucifixion as Jesus’ passion.  I have always thought it a tragedy that we should describe the events of Jesus’ crucifixion as Jesus’ passion. I’ve always understood talk of an individual’s passion to be concern with those things that people lived for. And so to insist that Jesus’ lived to die a horrible death might sooth those who seek to turn Jesus into some sort of preordained blood sacrifice.

            But for those of us who look to Jesus in search of the face of God, such talk seems is indeed a crime against divinity. For what kind of petty, sadistic god would engineer the birth of, foster the life of, and then engineer the death of a beloved child. Surely such a god is no more than a wicked illusion of our own making.

            I wonder what Jesus himself would make of the god we have created. I wonder what Jesus himself would make of our Good Friday commemorations? I suspect that if Jesus is anything like the accounts of his life suggest, he would be mortified, and I mean that literally…I think that Jesus would be mortified …mortified ie shamed to death…of what has become of his life’s passion; for if Jesus’ was passionate about anything, he was passionate about life. Jesus declared, “I have come so that you may have life and live it abundantly.” Jesus’ passion was about living. Living fully, abundantly. 

            Jesus passion was about a world where everyone could live life fully and abundantly. Jesus went from town to town urging people to live. Jesus struggled to free people from their narrow understandings to, open themselves to the wonders of creation, and to praise the Creator who he called Abba, in ways that honored God by loving. Indeed, Jesus defined Abba as LOVE itself.

            Jesus was so in tune with this LOVE that he was able to say, “I and the Abba are ONE.” Jesus embodied LOVE.

            I believe that Jesus was so open to the power of the LOVE that is God that he was able to live his life fully without fear. I believe that Jesus wanted more than anything else for his followers to be so open to the power of LOVE that is God that they too would live their lives fully without fear. I believe that that’s what Jesus meant when he said,   “I have come that you might have life and live it abundantly.”

            I believe that Jesus lived life abundantly and that means that he loved abundantly and without fear.  Jesus was so open to the power of LOVE that is God that Jesus would not let the powers of darkness stop him from loving and living fully. The kind of LOVE that Jesus embodied and taught has no boundaries.

            No darkness, no power, no fear, not even death can limit the power of LOVE. For if LOVE is limited by death, then love will always be qualified and quantified.

            That Jesus was willing to LOVE without boundaries came at great cost to himself. But Jesus was willing to pay that price to show us the way; the way to LOVE without limit, without fear, without boundaries.  LOVE without boundaries is abundant life.

            That Jesus’ LOVE endured the worst that the world could send his way, that Jesus LOVE was for all the world, dead and buried, and yet bursts free from the grave, bears witness to the power of LOVE.  That Jesus LOVE could not be destroyed, not even by the thing we fear the most, death itself, saves us from the need to fear death. For Jesus has shown us the way and we can live abundantly lives that are free from the fear of death. Because Jesus has shown us the way we are free to live fully, love extravagantly and be all that we were created to be.

            Jesus taught us that life without fear freed us from the powers of darkness that enslave the world. Life without fear is the first step toward justice.  And justice and not violence is the way to peace. And peace is God’s will for creation.

            The early Christians stood out in the world for a reason.  Those first Christians were called followers of the Way. The Way that Jesus taught them was the path to peace through justice. Jesus called us to usher in God’s reign of peace in the world by seeking justice for all of God’s creation. For justice and not violence is the way to peace.

            Jesus was so passionate about his belief that living life abundantly, without fear would lead to justice that in turn would lead to peace on earth that he was willing to live his life as the embodiment of the LOVE of God. Jesus died not for our sins, but to show us the way. To show us that God’s ways are not our ways: that our ways of greed, injustice, and violence lead only to war and death. But God’s ways of love, grace, and justice lead to peace and life.

            Jesus believed so passionately in the ways of love, grace, and justice that he was willing to live a life that embodied love, grace and justice so that all the world could see the way to peace and abundant life. And that leads me to the other thing that disturbs me about the way so many Christians talk about the crucifixion.

            That we should look upon the cross and see only the symbol of our personal salvation is a travesty that fails to see the magnitude of Jesus life and witness. How can we fail to see the truth that Jesus life and witness were so powerful that death could not contain them is?

            Why do we find it so easy to forget that in Jesus life and witness those first followers of the way were so moved by the power of Jesus life and witness that when they looked upon the cross they saw the Christ, the anointed one, the very face of God on earth?

            Does our preoccupation with our own personal salvation blind us to the reality of Christ?

            We need to broaden our vision.

            We need to see Christ crucified in order to see the terrible reality that Christ continues to be crucified over and over again.

            For just as surely as Christ died upon the cross, those who follow the ways of Christ, the ways of grace, of justice and peace, those who embody Love, continue to be tortured, battered, abused and hauled up upon crosses and executed by the forces of darkness, violence and death.

            The crucifixion didn’t happen once and for all, way back when. Christ is crucified over and over again as the ways of greed, violence, war and death exact their punishment on the innocent victims of the world.

            Christ is crucified all over again when calls for peace through justice go unanswered.

            Christ is crucified all over again in the countless deaths that are claimed by our lust for power and quest for stuff.

            Christ is crucified all over again when creation, scarred and wounded is poisoned by our arrogance and greed.

            Christ is crucified again and again, when we fail to see the face of God in our sisters and brothers of every clan and race.

            Jesus was passionate about his desire that we should have life and live it abundantly.

            Jesus was passionate that the way to achieve abundant life for all of God’s creation was through justice because justice is the way to peace.

            Jesus was executed precisely because the ways of justice and peace threatened the ways of peace through victory.

            The powers that be sought to conquer their enemies rather than love them; to vanquish and kill their way to a peace that could only be maintained through injustice and was only peace if you could number yourself among the conquerors, the victorious, the strong, and powerful. And no peace at all if you were among the weak and powerless.

            Jesus took a stand on the pathway that leads to peace.  And the powers that be nailed him to a cross believing that his death would ensure their power.

            But Jesus life and witness were so powerful that in Jesus people saw the face of Christ, and death could not and will not contain Christ. The powers of darkness will have their day.

            But not even death can contain Christ.

            For Christ comes again and again and is embodied in those who work for peace through justice, grace and love.  And that dear sisters and brothers is the Good News of Good Friday.

            Not even death can contain the life and witness of Jesus who is the Christ the very face of God in our midst!

            May God continue to dwell with us so that we too can bear the face of Christ to the world.

            The gift of life is ours.

            Live it abundantly.

            Let all the world know that we are Christ’s by our love.


Ash Wednesday – Embracing Eternity

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Click here to listen to the worship service:  Ash Wed Service

Click here to download the worship bulletin Ash Wednesday Feb 22 2012