Stories on the Threshold

Sermon for Easter 6 from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs

During this Easter season, the theme of Father Mark’s preaching has been that of Story—How the Great Story of creation and salvation relates to our story and our reading of The Story. So, building on that–sort of–; All I really need to know about reading the Bible, I learned from Sherlock Holmes. *

While that may not be quite the way my New Testament professor would put it, it does accurately describe an important way of engaging, and even wrestling, with Scripture. When reading a good mystery—my favorite kind of reading for relaxation—I enjoy watching the story unfold to its (hopefully) surprising conclusion; surprising because the author has invited me to look at things from a different perspective. Viewed through a new lens, the facts reorganize themselves into a different picture and I’m graced with an “aha!” moment: “Of course! NOW I see it!”

Of course, the purpose of reading Scripture isn’t to find the culprit in a crime, but to discover what God is saying to us, through this story, at this particular time. Engaging with a Scripture passage isn’t a one-time event. We are invited to come back to it over and over, and because life changes, our perspective changes, and we are invited to see it in a new way. This is a form of critical engagement that is vital to an effective and fruitful understanding of the great Story of God’s relationship with humanity and all of creation.

Take, for example, the three passages we have heard today. This particular time is the sixth Sunday of Easter. It is also the occasion of a baptism; so how nice that all three lessons are connected to water. In Acts, we encounter a conversion by a river. In John’s Revelation, we see a tree with healing leaves by the river of the water of Life. And in John’s Gospel Jesus heals a man by the Pool of Beth-zatha in Jerusalem.

Yes. All three share water in common. Undeniable. But a patient reading—that means reading a second and third time, offers a shift in perspective, and thus reveals that there’s something else happening here. Listen again: A conversion by a river. The tree of life beside the river of the water of life. A healing next to the pool of Beth-zatha.

It’s not just about the water. It’s where things happen in relation to it. By. Beside. Next to. These lessons all put us in liminal space.

“Liminal space” is a Seminary Phrase, probably because seminarians spend so much time there—in liminal space. It simultaneously connotes two things: both a threshold and being on the edge and/or the verge of things. When you think about it, ‘liminal space’ isn’t just for seminarians—it’s a place many if not all of us are familiar with at some point in our lives.

To be in liminal space is to be between; it is to be off-balance—almost off one foot before setting down the next—teetering between old and new, known and unknown. To be in liminal space is to find yourself with a choice. Forward, or backward. Remaining in the doorway is not a sustainable option.

Did Lydia know she was on the verge of something new? Nothing we know about her indicates that her life was at a tipping point; she was well-to-do enough to deal in purple cloth, which was a valuable commodity. She was evidently a free woman of independent means, possibly a widow since she had her own household. But something about hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ either beckoned from in front or nudged her from behind because there, at the edge of the water, she crossed a threshold into a transformed life in the Body of Christ.

What’s interesting is that you don’t always know you’re in liminal space until you’re faced with the fact of it; you just realize that something is about to change, and regardless of what you choose, life will not be the same again.

In a report on NPR a few weeks ago, I heard about a museum director in Ronneby, Sweden named Dagmar Norberg, who found herself at just such a liminal point.

She was walking beside the tracks at a train station on a cold November day last year when she observed a young man dressed only in a t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. Thinking he was just some whippersnapper without the sense to dress properly, and being, as she says of herself, “now at that age where I can just say things,” she sternly exclaimed, “It’s winter!”

The young man didn’t ignore her; nor did he talk back. He simply replied politely, “I know, ma’am.”

Dagmar says, “That was the first time I heard Wali’s voice.” Perhaps it was his accent—the story doesn’t say– but she was prompted to look closer and realized that this young man was one of many Afghan refugees who had arrived in Sweden with little or nothing but the clothes on his back, certainly unprepared for a Scandinavian winter. She said that he was so stressed he was sweating in spite of the cold.

The young man, Waliullah Hafiz, was trained as an electrician and had been a successful businessman in Kabul before a severe beating at the hands of the Taliban drove him from his country.

Dagmar found herself on a threshold. As she put it, she could either go on with her life or help him. “I just knew I had this choice here and now,” she said, “and whatever I do will have consequences.”

This is where Jesus meets us; where the margins meet the thresholds in our lives; it is in this space where we are challenged; in this space where healing and grace can lurk both expectantly and unexpectedly.

Thanks to Dagmar’s help, Wali is now applying for asylum for himself and his family, he has a place to live and he is learning a new trade. He has found a new beginning because a stranger met him at the edge of the railroad tracks and the end of his rope, and walked with him through a threshold to a place of welcome and sanctuary.

The man at the Pool of Beth-zatha was on the edge in many ways; unable to walk, chronically ill for decades, he yearned to bathe in waters that had reputed healing powers. The pool was probably an artesian well that periodically moved and burbled as pressure equalized, and when this happened people believed that it was stirred by an angel’s wings. This was a marginal place in Jerusalem—a place of disease, infirmity, and desperation. Imagine the rush and the chaos to be first in the pool, the sense of despair as, once again, the man could not get there, lacking friends or family to help him.

This marginal place, filled with marginal people, was the kind of place where Jesus could often be found. And when he saw the man he asked a simple question: “Do you want to be made well?” The threshold; a future on tiptoe in the doorway.

“Stand up, take your mat, and walk. At once the man was made well.” The man wasn’t in the pool. His healing took place on the edge.

Lena Gates is on an edge too. I watched her last Sunday in the Stearns room, on the threshold of crawling—tottering on her belly like Supergirl, scooching and rolling her way toward mobility and a whole new world to explore (to her father’s mixed pride and dismay). And today she is about to be taken down the aisle to the water—the water of baptism, which will splash her head and welcome her as a beloved member of the Household of God. If we were Baptists we would dunk her right in and then back out to symbolize Christ’s death and rising to new life. But regardless of how we do it—dunking or sprinkling—the point is that Lena doesn’t stay in the water. She comes out of it, onto the proverbial shore—she has to because it is on the edge and in the margins where she needs to get to work as a member of the Body of Christ. She will grow up, and with God’s help live into her baptismal covenant to proclaim the Good News, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

Liminal space isn’t just the stuff of individual story. John’s Revelation shows us that liminal space is a characteristic of the Kingdom. The tree of life, with its healing and fruitfulness, are found beside the river. This is the Great Story; the story where liminal space is the nature of things. It’s who we are and what we are called to; a constant process of transformation as God beckons and nudges us, expectantly and sometimes unexpectedly, across the threshold into abundant life.

*With apologies to Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

May 1, 2016 0

Enlarging the Single Story

In the adult forum last Sunday at St Martin’s we began to talk about the experience of our community reading of The Story. This is a re-editing of the Bible to accentuate the narrative flow that tells of the relationship between God and humanity, as recorded and interpreted within the Judeo-Christian experience.

The idea of there being the story is highly misleading. As we are beginning to discover from our reading together of The Story, there are in fact multiple stories. The Story, while trying to preserve the narrative flow achieves its purpose. However, there is a risk of an enterprise like The Story glossing over the fact that the Biblical record is not one story but a compilation of multiple stories, not always fitting together in a way that our modern attention demands. To make matters even more complex, there are not only multiple storylines but also multiple interpretations of the same storyline.

St Martin’s has embarked on a community reading of The Story as one of the fruits of a program for spiritual development called RenewalWorks. In our community reading of The Story we are starting on what will be a longer process of embedding the Bible into an unfolding of our story, as a parish, as a community.

As we gathered last Sunday in the adult forum, people began to have an opportunity to talk about how they felt about the storylines recorded in the Book of Genesis. Because The Story covers the whole of Genesis in three chapters, it glosses over huge chunks of the book in order to bring out the essential elements of the narrative flow. This device concentrates our minds. We experience not on a distanced dispassionate reading, but on an intimate feeling-full reading that confronts and leaves us feeling a range of emotions among them, shocked and angry.

The story begins well. Genesis, chapter 1 opens on a grand vista of creation with humanity as its crowning glory. Men and women seem equal and God seems to hint at the possibility of humanity being a reflection of divinity itself. But things thereafter seem to go pear shaped. From chapter 2 on, God increasingly is portrayed as authoritarian. In chapter 2, women are inferior and subservient to men. Events in the garden further stigmatize women. I was pleased to see that people were able to give vent to the visceral nature of the impact of this kind of portrayal, upon them. We then enter the saga cycles of the patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, all who strike our modern sensibilities as morally compromised characters and far from the honest Joe’s of Sunday school fame.

Someone commented, why do we have to read this stuff? My answer is because we are storied beings and we are shaped by our faith-family narrative. We read this stuff because we need to know our faith-family history. But we need to know that this is where that narrative starts. It’s important to remember it’s not where it ends. It’s only where it starts. Like most things in life, it’s always helpful to start at the beginning.

I was delighted to see people struggling with their feelings and being honest with each other about how they felt. There was a level of engagement and excitement in the room that spoke volumes about the seriousness with which middle class, highly educated, professional Episcopalians like those at St Martin’s on Providence’s East Side are beginning to engage with the raw material of a shared faith journey. Don’t miss our next discussion installment of The Story’s chapters 4-6 on May 15^th.

In his op-ed piece in the New York Times on April 19^th, David Brooks spoke about the danger of a single story. He takes his title from his inspiration with the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TED talk The danger of a single story. Brooks is concerned, and I believe rightly so, that the current political race to the White House is favoring candidates who are able to offer a single story to account for the state we are in as a nation. The difficulty for Clinton and Kasich is that unlike Trump, Cruz, and Sanders, their worldview is not comprised from a single explanatory narrative. We see how little appetite there is in the general population, at least at this point in the game, for anything that is not a single story explanation.

Single stories are seductive, but they also do grave violence to the multiple complexities of real life. The paradox of reading The Story is that we need to start somewhere, but the danger is we develop an overview of the flow of the narrative at the risk of reducing the history of salvation to a single storyline. Yet, to return to the point I made above, we need to start somewhere. Single storylines get us going. They are places from which to begin our explorative journeys. The problem is when the single storyline becomes the only explanatory narrative, leading us to an already predetermined endpoint along the pathway already well trod. What is needed are storylines that open, even jolt us onto new paths; ones forged through learning from the mistakes of the past instead of simply repeating them. It seems that at St Martin’s our experience of The Story is helping us to work through our realizations that God is not a single storyline, God is a complex multiplicity of storylines that offer the potential for us to set out on new paths.

***

At first sight, the compilers of the Lectionary seem to have taken leave of their senses in offering us on Easter 5 the same gospel verses that ended the one read on Maundy Thursday. I mean, get real, don’t they know the storyline has moved on since then? Between Maundy Thursday and Easter 5, an event called the resurrection has changed everything.

We are here being presented with a challenge to our assumption that the meaning of a story derives from its linear flow, i.e. it follows a straight line from beginning through its middle, to the end. Hearing John 13:31-35, which is the promise at the end of the story of the events at the Last Supper five weeks on from Easter reminds us that part of the complexity of life is the we are never in the same place twice. This means the same storyline opens to fresh meanings when we encounter it at a different time, a different location, i.e. now and not then.

On Maundy Thursday, we heard John narrating events at Last Supper. We listened to verses 31-35 but we didn’t really hear them. In 31-35 Jesus goes off into one of his enigmatic Johannine explanations of the nature of his true relationship with God – something about glory and who is glorified, and by whom.

When we hear the same story on the fifth Sunday after Easter, we do so now in the fuller knowledge of what Jesus actually means by the promise of becoming gloried. On Maundy Thursday, it’s a promise of something new, the outlines of which are still enshrouded in future mists. But when heard on Easter 5 it’s no longer in the future, it is now in the immediate past-present. In this location, we hear it not as a promise but a direct invitation to participate in the experience of new life.

****

The story of new life is what’s happening now. The hearing of the story is now. Now it is an invitation, if we can allow it to be, to not just believe in it, but to live it. Last Sunday at St Martin’s in the adult forum we had a particular experience of living it.

How so? We live the promise of new life when we take our God story seriously. We do this when we explore it, when we allow ourselves to be affected by it. We explore our God story when we feel angry, disillusioned, or repulsed, or inspired, attracted, encouraged, and moved through our engagement with it. Our story about God contains all these possibilities because it’s a narravtive with multiple storylines, multiple interpretations on each major storyline. It’s not a single story. I followed up Brooks’ reference to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She ends her TED talk with these words:

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.”

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. Our world takes on the qualities of the stories we tell about our experience in it. When we come to realize that there is not a single God story, but many stories of our human perception of God, we come to see that faith is not an accept all or reject all proposition. Elements in our God story can give us permission to dispossess, malign and scapegoat others. Mostly, however, our God story supports our desires to embrace, empower and humanize. In the story of raising Jesus from the dead, God invites us into a new story with wide-ranging implications for the way we can live our lives. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie again:

I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

To paraphrase a line from the second reading for Easter 5 from the dream of the Book of Revelation:

See the home of God is with humanity. God will dwell with us; we will be God’s peoples.

April 23, 2016 0

Storied Lives

It’s Saturday morning. All around me people are rising late, plans are being made for a day that does not involve work, perhaps sport with the kids, or a visit to the farmers market, or a long bike ride in the sunny cool of a New England spring day. My mood is partly resentful, party curious. Resentful, because my Saturday morning invariably finds me sitting at the computer screen instead of riding the bike I have yet to buy along the bike trail from Providence to Bristol or up into the Blackstone Valley. Alas for me, Saturday is sermon writing day and I am curious to see what stirrings the Spirit has in mind.

As yet, I don’t know. Which is why I am easing myself into something yet to be born through idling away in self-preoccupied reflection. No matter how hard I try, how much I read around the text in the days preceding Saturday morning’s arrival, I am never ready to write until this moment. Saying this kindles a feeling of acceptance. I look ahead to emergence of a story. Sermon as story, now there’s an idea to play with!

At St Martin’s, we have begun a community reading of The Story. Some are clearly asking themselves, why? My answer is because the perceived wisdom about a community’s spiritual deepening involves something called embedding the Bible. I think this might be a very good idea. The Story, is a rendition of the Bible with all the bits that divert attention away from the narrative flow, skipped over. The Story preserves the flow over time of the Judeo-Christian account of the human relationship with the divine. The Story is aptly named because there is always a narrative element in our self-understanding.

Despite this, there is a modern idea that our understanding of the world results from direct observation. But direct observation has to be put into a framework that gives rise to meaning. All such frameworks are narrative. Joining up so-called objective observation results in the weaving of explanatory narrative. This weaving of explanation is always an internal, psychological process that results in the telling of a story. We are the stories we tell, has become my oft-repeated mantra.

The opening chapter of Genesis begins an epic story. To our understanding of narrative, the flow of the story is often frustrating to follow. There are so many loopholes made by statements seemingly without explanation. It seems enough to simply assert that an improbable thing happened. It’s also a story many of us are not sure we like very much for many of the characters, including God, are not much to our liking.

From the opening grandeur of the first creation story in which humanity arrives as the crowning glory of creation, it goes downhill fast. Beginning with humanity being made no less than in the image of the divine community of creation, a piece of the creation seemingly intended by God to be not only self-reflective but reflective of divinity itself, the story descends from this lofty height into one in which human beings are reduced to being naughty children who need to be punished for being disobedient; so much for the equality of the divine image. It seems that being made in the image of the divine community has two inbuilt restrictions that contradict the original intention. Adam and Eve are free to romp around the garden of creation but the fruits of the trees of eternal life and the knowledge of good and evil are off limits. It seems there is a limit to how much God, who self-refers using the plural pronouns wants us to be like them.

Yet, for Christians and Jews, this is how the story starts. Talking with my neighbor Rabbi Voss-Altman from Temple Beth-El this past week, I was reminded how differently Jews and Christians hear our common story. And maybe that’s the point of story. A story shapes us not only through its construction and articulation but fundamentally through the way it is heard.

For Christians the story that begins with Genesis reaches its crescendo in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whom we believe fits into the trans-generational story as the Christ or anointed one- the long awaited Messiah. This is the point at which the Christian and Jewish hearing of the story take different paths having reached a fork in the road. From here two new stories branch away from each other.

Sunday-by-Sunday, through the Lectionary we are given four selections from the overall story of salvation, each taken from a particular stage of the story. In the Old Testament and Psalm lessons (I deliberately use lesson rather than reading because we are intended to learn something) we have snippets from the Jewish stage of the story. In the New Testament lesson, we hear from the emerging Christian understanding of the story. In the Gospel, we are given a snippet from the story of the life of Jesus.

In John: 10, John is telling part of the Jesus story intended for the ears of his community of Jewish Christians using the metaphor of the sheepfold. He writes in such as way as to offer his listeners a story that helps them understand the world they find themselves in. Being rejected by the authorities of the Second Temple, John’s community needs to find an explanation for their exclusion and persecution. They find it in the rejection of Jesus himself by the very same authorities. Later generations of Christians down into our own time have heard this story, not as John intended it, but as a justification for the development of anti-Semitism. So my question is how do we, a community now intent on the so-called embedding of the Bible as the foundation for a new phase of our spiritual deepening, hear this story?

In an age of rationalist reductionism the battle cry is: where’s the proof? We live in a world where according to the rationalist point of view, we no longer have need of story. This viewpoint seems oblivious to the fact that a belief that humanity has now grown beyond the need for stories to explain the world is itself, a story.

We hear the Temple authorities asking Jesus to substantiate his claims, to our modern ears an absolutely reasonable request. Jesus could have responded with: you want proof, let me give you proof. Don’t you remember that when I was in X I was able to do Y? Don’t you remember when I was at M, I said C and do you recall what then happened, J was no longer blind? You don’t want to believe the evidence of your own eyes and ears. Look it’s no good me telling you anymore, because you have no intention of accepting who I am, so don’t fudge this by pretending that you are only seeking simple verification.

This part of the conversation is very familiar to our ears as we every day face the questions: is the story true – if so how do we know it’s true – how can we convince others its true, because if we can do that then maybe we might really be able to believe its true ourselves?

These are not just the external questions that our rationalistic world asks us for proof of the truth of what we believe. Being shaped by the modern world, these are also our internal questions. Unless we reject out of hand the story of modernity – and some do –we have to struggle in the tension as people shaped by rationalism and yet, also the heirs of an older story, or at least wanting to be shaped by a different story.

The thing about story is that they are neither true nor false. I don’t mean that stories can’t embody truth or falsehood. I mean more that stories should be judged as effective or not effective. Does the story we live by help us understand the world and our role in it in ways that enhance our quality of experience? Or do they hamper us in this endeavor? Jesus continues to tell the Temple authorities that the only way they can be satisfied about him is if they stop asking for proof and come into relationship with him.

The Gospel stories are not unproblematic. Many Christians still choose to hear Jesus’ response in John 10 as a validation of Christian exclusivism, i.e. you are either in the sheepfold or outside it, you are either one of the sheep or you are not. Trying to make sense of this as something to live by in the 21st-century, what I hear in this exchange is Jesus saying that his identity is not a matter of propositional truth, it’s a matter of relational truth. Jesus is repeating God’s invitation echoing down the ages: my people come into relationship with me and let us sit down together.

I said on Easter Day that resurrection is not something to be believed it is to be-lived. What I mean is that the Christian story is not propositional but relational, truth. It makes sense through the way it shapes our relational choices, i.e. who and what is important in our lives, what enriches our experience of life, through whom and how do we give back in life. The Christian story is not the only relational story. Billions of other lives are given meaning by other relational stories, some more complete than others, at least seemingly so from our own storied location. All we can say is that Jesus is our relational story. Our only claim is to be able to say that this is our story. Jesus is the religious story that brings new meaning and an ever-expanding depth into our lives.

Everyone needs a story to live by. The question is not which story is true, but which story makes us fruitful. Is it effectiveness in our lives? Can our Christian story bring us into a relationship with the divine dimension that guides and informs us in negotiating the complex relationships with the world around us? Through living out this story the choices we make and those we reject will determine the quality of our fruitfulness, i.e. determine how we make a difference for good in this world.

April 16, 2016 0

From Saul to Paul

I have always had ambivalent feelings about St Paul. As one reads the New Testament, Paul emerges as a contradictory figure if one believes the tradition which imputes him to be the author of 13 of the New Testament’s 27 book. Herein lies the problem. For if this is true, Paul clearly changed his mind a lot.

Ancient conventions dictated that disciples wrote in the name of their master. A number of letters in the New Testament once attributed to Paul’s own hand are clearly of a later date, reflecting later developments in church communities, now large and secure enough to concern themselves with matters of good order and hierarchies of authority. These are not the communities Paul writes for in the middle decades of the 1st-century.

Therefore, scholars now universally agree that Paul did not write First and Second Timothy, nor Titus or Hebrews. Many scholars question his direct authorship of Second Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians. This leaves seven undisputed letters: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Philemon, Galatians, Philippians and First Thessalonians as displaying the characteristics of Paul’s own concerns. I want to cry out -would the real Paul please stand up.

Paul was once Saul. Saul was a man who had blood on his hands. Saul was the young man who was more than complicit in the stoning to death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Saul not only approved of Stephen’s death but held the cloaks of the men who murdered Stephen; hard men consumed, like Saul with righteous indignation. Saul is the man who breathes fire and murder as he relentlessly pursues the followers of the Way, seeking out both men and women for imprisonment and in some cases death. History contains a sorry record of the results of righteous indignation masquerading as religious faith.

This Saul while traveling to Damascus has an encounter with Jesus that contains all the elements of the theophany that stopped Moses in his tracks before the burning bush. Saul is blinded by a divine light. He hears the voice of the Lord searing every fiber of his consciousness. Following his devastating encounter with the voice of the Lord, his companions pick him up off the ground and lead him, a man now helpless into the city. Here, Saul spends a symbolic three days neither eating nor drinking and probably not sleeping either. His three days of blindness are symbolic of Jesus’ three days in the tomb. With the arrival of one Ananias, a messenger sent by the Lord, Saul arises and receives back his sight and much more through the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

A Damascus road experience has found its way into the language as an idiom for a 180-degree change in someone’s life or view of the world. After his experience on the road to Damascus, Saul has a kind of death, resurrection, and Penetcost experience rolled into one. Now he too can claim to have experienced the risen Lord. Like Peter and the other disciples he is changed, no longer a persecutor of the Church, but one of its apostles. Saul becomes Paul.

During the 40 days of Lent, we walked with Jesus on his road to Jerusalem and the cross. Our human experience well acquaints us with grief and suffering, and so we have little difficulty identifying with Jesus on the road from Galilee to Jerusalem. Eastertide is a season that also lasts 40 days, but is for us a road less travelled. Resurrection is beyond the normal repertoire of our emotional experience. How can we emulate the transformation of the disciples into apostles? This is a process we are totally unfamiliar with because the road from the empty tomb is very much a road less travelled. How can what happened for the first followers of Jesus, happen for us?

And so, I breathe a sigh of relief that Lent and Easter are behind us as the temptation to return to business as usual takes hold. I know this feeling intimately, and it disturbs me because if it’s just to return to business as usual what has been the point of the spiritual effort I’ve made during Lent and Easter? I don’t want to return to business as usual. I’ve invested a lot and I long for some kind of change. After all is this not the promised result of the resurrection – new life, lived abundantly?

Luke describes this process of transformation through the narrative he weaves in The Acts of the Apostles. At times, his account smacks a little of Early Christian propaganda. Yet, behind the dramatic inflation lies the reality that lives were changed by the resurrection. New attitudes were embraced, and as in the case of Paul, a 180-degree change in worldview took place. Paul left behind the God of righteous anger and rage, the God who needs us to find an endless supply of scapegoats to carry our own unacknowledged guilt and fear – and encountered the God of acceptance and love.

I am struck by Jesus’s question to Saul. He asks not why do you not believe in me, but why are you persecuting me? Jesus questions not Saul’s faith but his action. After Damascus, Paul is changed, his view of God and his sense of himself is utterly altered and he begins to live a different life.

Our experience of the world is articulated through the stories we tell, both to ourselves and to one another. We are shaped and our world is given meaning by their telling. This is a good and a bad thing, because if the story is a poor one, by which I mean it does not have enough room in it, we become constrained in our sense of identity and worldview. On the other hand, if the story is an expansive one, allowing us space to grow then our sense of self and view of the world expands to include more and more of what is needed.

The resurrection is an expansive story. It’s not a story to be believed or explained but to be lived. In living it, the resurrection story shapes the way we understand the nature of the world around us. So the question I ask myself is one I also put to you – how do we live the resurrection story?

What might some of the signs be of living into the resurrection story?

Do we believe that some objects are more special than others or that all objects are made holy through their use and debased by our misuse of them?
Do we believe that actions speak louder than words?
Do we accept that belonging precedes believing, or put another way believing flows from belonging?
Do we agree with Tertullian that one Christian is no Christian, meaning being Christian necessitates membership of the community that is Christian?
Are we committed to being present within the community when it gathers for worship to hear the Gospel message and to break the bread?
Can we live as those who genuinely respect the dignity of every other human being?

You can see these as a list of requirements to be fulfilled or as signs of God’s invitation to come into the promise of a new story. This is nothing short of an invitation to become:

the eyes that behold Christ in everyone we meet
the lips that speak nothing but the Gospel of love
the ears that hear the cries of the poor
the hands that reach out to others in need
and the feet that run to those who love us without stumbling

For some of us like Saul, being changed by an encounter with the risen Christ is a dramatic and devastating indictment on our former lives. Yet, for most of us, we encounter the risen Christ in the subtle opportunities for change amidst the routines of everyday life. We encounter the power of the resurrection story:

when we chose to be more courageous and less risk adverse
when we become more accepting and less judgmental of difference
when we face down our fears and cease being driven by them to seek others to blame

Today as we look at our world, among those who claim to speak for God it’s not hard to distinguish Saul’s voice from Paul’s. So many politicians and church people speak with the voice of Saul. This is the paranoid voice that demands the protection of religious liberty as the fig leaf for continuing to discriminate against LGBT people. This week Pope Francis confronted those among his brothers who would champion purity of doctrine heedless of the need for compassion in the face of human emotional and spiritual pain.

For Saul, persecution, imprisonment and murder were all necessary tools to protect an angry God not able to withstand the imagined trauma of human questioning. For Paul, all that was needed was the law of love made manifest in vulnerability. After his experience on the Damascus road, Paul knew that it was because of his vulnreability and weakness that God chose him to be the greatest apostle of the law of love.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

Perhaps thinking of his former self, Paul says:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. First Corinthians 13 NKJV

April 9, 2016 0

Issues of Trust

Sermon for Low Sunday – Easter II from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs

In no way will I believe.

you wonder where Thomas was on the first Easter evening, when his friends had locked themselves away in fear? Was he simply the last to arrive by coincidence? Had he gone out to get some food for his grieving friends? Regardless, when he arrived and heard that Jesus had come and gone in his absence, his reaction was not tepid. In fact, the original Greek has been watered down in translation. He doesn’t just say, “…I will not believe,” he says, In no way will I believe. It’s as though he said it in underlined boldface italics.

What is the writer of John’s Gospel trying to tell us here? The conventional wisdom over the millennia is that Thomas doubts the Resurrection until he can see the proof in Jesus’ body. And people have staked out their territory on either side of the argument about whether or not Thomas got a bad rap for being a doubter. And it’s a good topic for pondering and exploration—the value, or risk, of doubt and question in a life of faith.

But perhaps something else is going on here; something hinted at by the emphatic quality of Thomas’s response to his friends’ news of the Resurrection. In no way will I believe.

The Gospel of John was the latest of the four canonical gospels to be written; in the late 1st- and early 2^nd centuries. It was probably written and edited over time not just by someone named John, who may have been John the disciple, but by others of his community; which is why we sometimes hear of the “Johannine School”—(that’s your new phrase for the day.)

The Johannine project was all about identity; specifically two forms of identity. The first was the identity of the Christ. This gospel is where we find the first evidence of the theology of Jesus and God as the same and coeternal, that is, Jesus and God existed from the beginning and together, Father and Son. We hear this in Jesus’ farewell discourses at the Last Supper, where he says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me…” In the same passage Jesus also speaks of sending of the Holy Spirit, just as in today’s story where he breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” So it is John’s Gospel where we see major stirrings of the identity of Christ as part of the Trinity. This is the theology that we see codified in our creeds. So it was very important that the hearers of this Gospel understand Who Jesus Was: The Word. The Christ. The Son of God, with God and in God; human and divine.

The second priority for John’s Gospel is the identity of the community, and that’s our main focus today. Jesus’ Great Commandment was to love one another. This was a signature point behind the washing of the disciples’ feet and the mandate to wash the feet of others; and in Jesus’ last words to his mother and the Beloved Disciple as he hung on the cross; “Behold your mother—behold your son.” Jesus gave them to each other as family, indicating that family extends beyond blood ties. Our love of Christ bonds us in Beloved Community. Those ties are important—vital to the spread of the Good News and the realization of God’s Dream.

And what does all of this have to do with our friend Thomas?

Consider what has happened within his circle of friends. One of their number turned Jesus in to the authorities for trial and crucifixion. The heartbreak and despair of Jesus’ death was compounded by the knowledge that it was brought on by betrayal. Betrayal of Jesus. Betrayal of trust. Is it any wonder that Thomas, who wasn’t fortunate enough to see the resurrected Jesus, disbelieved the testimony of the others that he was alive? His trust, and that of the disciples, had been broken by Judas, and the wound was raw. Why in the world should he trust his friends with such a crazy story, of a risen Jesus who comes through locked doors and offers his wounds as proof? Seriously?

In no way will I believe! Does he shout it? Pound his fist on the table?

The issue here isn’t Thomas’s faith in Jesus—it’s Thomas’s trust in his friends. When Jesus comes a second time to the locked room and invites Thomas to touch his hands and side, Thomas doesn’t do it. He doesn’t need to. He instantly registers Jesus’ presence and identity with a simple declaration, “My Lord and my God,” no further argument. But. The damage in the community of disciples has been done; first by Judas, who violated trust, and then by Thomas, who, once burned, refused to believe the word of his friends. This is a cycle of broken trust that threatens the Beloved Community. And this is the lesson that John offers us when Jesus says, “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet come to believe.” It is not just an admonition to the post-Resurrection Christians who were not around to see the Risen Jesus; although of course that’s part of it. But it is also a warning to the community that the Great Commandment to Love One Another is woven throughout with the importance of trust; to be trustworthy and to trust one another. A community that lacks this vital ingredient is wounded from the start.

People and institutions violate our trust. This is a tragic fact of human nature. I’ll wager that everyone here can name a time when we have felt betrayed, or have violated someone’s trust in us. It hurts a relationship, and healing is often a tremendous challenge. Sadly it is also in our nature to attribute human qualities to God. Hence, if humans and institutions can fail us, then God can too, right? Well, no… But. Admit it; at least for some of us there does seem to be a disconnect between faith in God, and trust in God. Even though they are defined almost exactly the same, even to the point of using the word trust to define faith and faith to define trust. It may seem to be a distinction without a difference, but to me it does seem possible to have complete faith in God’s overarching power and presence while at the same time not trusting that God is still at work with us and within us. Especially in instances when we feel that our trust has been violated.

This may have to do with the concept of time. Our chronological time demands that things happen how we want and when we want them, while God’s time is broader, more fluid, and the ways in which God does work just don’t conform to our expectations of how and when things should turn out. (I like to say that God doesn’t follow instructions well.)

And so our trust falters. When we are called to be patient–to wait and trust that God is still at work in our lives, we can become disillusioned. Because we’ve been burned before by our fellow humans—by our community–somewhere deep down we feel that God will burn us too.

Thomas’s story is a cautionary tale. His outburst of mistrust was rooted in the tomb, in the darkness of fear and disillusionment. John points us to Thomas, not so we can impugn his faith in God, but so we can let him teach us. Let Thomas’s story teach us that our encounters with darkness and betrayal need not define us or those around us. Let it teach us that our faith and our trust in God can be one, as Jesus and the Father are one. Let it teach us that our calling—our identity– as people of the Resurrection is one rooted firmly in the light of the Risen Christ.

Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.

April 3, 2016 0

Love Trumps

Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Herein lies an unusually complex problem for our modern scientific-technological mindset. What is the resurrection? What did or didn’t happen? If it did happen how, when, and where, did it happen? The Biblical accounts seem inconclusive from our modern perspective.

John does not tell us how the resurrection happened – only that it happened. In Acts: 10, Luke tells us how the effects of the resurrection changed Peter to tell a new story about the inclusivity of God’s love. The first Christians didn’t so much believe the resurrection as much as they experienced it and became transformed into a community of change agents. In short, the resurrection was a conclusion the first Christians drew from their lived experience.

Can you believe this story? Take a moment to ponder your answer in the privacy of your own thoughts. Our emphasis on the verb believe or it’s opposite, not believe seems to me to go to the heart of why the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is an unusually complex problem for us. A popular view of religion is that it gives answers. The reason many reject religion is because faith poses many more questions than it answers.

In our community, those of you who know Fla Lewis will know that Fla has a mischievous sense of humor. This last week, through the post came a Peanuts cartoon. I knew it was from Fla because who else? Fla knows that I need to lighten up a bit. In the cartoon a conversation between Lucy and Linus is taking place as follows:

Lucy: I have a lot of questions about life, and I’m not getting any answers!

Linus: Looks at her blankly

Lucy: I want some real honest to goodness answers….

Linus and Lucy now gaze into the near distance

Lucy: I don’t want a lot of opinions … I want answers!

Linus: Would true or false be all right?

Stories

I remind the community at St Martin’s that we humans are storied beings. However, when we hear the word story we think of something less than true, something made up. Because we are conditioned to think that hard description is the only language that conveys truth. Stories are what we tell children when they are too young to comprehend rational scientific- technological descriptive language. When I use the word story I am describing truth-plus. Stories convey the multilayered complexity of the meaning of life.

Our stories are our attempts to make sense of the world. Our identities are constructed through the quality of our stories. The bigger the story, the more room it offers for a sense of self within an expanded experience of the world. The smaller the story, the more constrained our experience becomes. 21^st century scientific- technological realism is a very small story indeed. Without a necessary component of transcendence, it offers so little room for a big vision of humanity.

If you don’t believe me just look at how the popular imagination today is dominated by stories of the supernatural, superhero sagas infused with magical realism. It seems that when it comes to religion especially of the WASP variety, the supernatural or theologically speaking, the transcendent is no longer tolerated. Here in lies the root of our disaffection. Technological progress always offers more than it delivers, i.e. alone it does not seem to make us happy or contented.

Each time we hear a story new challenges confront, new meanings emerge, new understandings dawn for us because we are never in the same place twice. In story, meaning is never fixed, it is always fluid, constantly morphing. If we really listen to our stories, storylines change because either the story is never told the same way twice, or if it is, as, in the case of the Gospel record it is never heard in the same way twice because we are never in the same place twice.

I thought this year I would look back of my Easter Day sermons of the last few years in the hope that maybe I could retread the tire as it were. What I discovered was that despite the sheer brilliance of my previous Easter Day sermons, that was then, and this is now. Today is 2016, I hear John’s account of the events at dawn, three days after the death of Jesus, not as I heard it in 2000, nor as I heard it in 2014, or 2015. I hear it from where I stand in 2016, a new context, a new location, no longer then, but here, and now. Even when compared to this time last year, today the world looks and feels to be a very different place. It is astonishing, what a difference a year makes.

There is a particular poignancy to John’s account of the resurrection as we listen to it from within the current American context of political and social polarization. Today’s discriminatory political rhetoric, which only a year ago seemed if not exactly unthinkable was certainly publically unsayable, is now loudly and proudly trumpeted openly as certain politicians struggle to trump each another with even more incendiary claims. Like Lucy, many of us are seeking answers –real honest to goodness answers We seem ready to accept simplistic true or more often, false answers that offer the illusion of solutions to the things we most fear. As we grasp after real honest to goodness answers we fail to notice the violence taking root in our hearts.

This story

We receive the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection in 2016 in a world in which the threat of global terrorism is today more real than before. In the face of an escalating environmental catastrophe, strident voices of denial attempt to mislead us with the age-old sorry tale of humans putting the short-term profit motive before that of our long-term survival.

The resurrection is an epic story. The resurrection is the big story of the Christian people. From within the Christian perspective, we believe that this is the tipping point event in the history in our relationship with God. In raising Jesus from the dead, God has done a new thing after which everything is changed. In 2016, we hear this story on the cusp of a new tipping point in the political and environmental stability not only of our own nation but of the world.

Our attitude towards change is paradoxical. A kind of back to the future mentality often grips us. We fear and resist change, preferring to retread old tires with threadbare answers, while at the same time we long for some kind of change, any kind of change to break the seedy cycle of business as usual[1].

The first Christians, those who came at dawn on the third day after the death of Jesus on the cross didn’t worry about whether they could believe the seeming impossible evidence of their own eyes. In fact, we can see, reading between the lines, that they didn’t believe in the impossible any more than we do. In time, they came to understand God’s raising of Jesus to new life because they experienced a profound transformation in the way they lived their lives.

The first Christians deliberately chose to use the word resurrection to describe this experience in their lives. For 1^st century Jews, this word did not mean what we think it might mean, i.e. a supernatural experience – spiritual life after death. For them, it had a clear meaning. It meant the experience of a return to physical life, after life after death[2]. Like our discovery of dark matter, they came to believe it not because they could see or measure it, but because they felt its effect upon them.

The first Christians became transformed people no longer afraid, no longer looking for scapegoats to carry their fear.

Lucy would not have had much time for resurrection because like most important things in life it cannot be understood through the prism of yes/no answers. Resurrection is not primarily a belief that is either true or false. Resurrection is an experience in living. To borrow a term familiar to card players resurrection is an action through which love trumps violence, love trumps hatred, love trumps fear. Love encourages us to resist the easy answers of true or false; answers peddled by the hard men of this world, concealed behind the seductive masks of their firm certainties.

Our story

In 2016, as I listen to this story of events at dawn, three days after the crucifixion of Jesus, the key question comes down to this. Do I have the courage to let this story empower and transform my living? On my own, I’m one person and my doubts are huge and the answer is – I am not so sure. Yet, my doubt evaporates when I consider that I am part of a community that owes its origins to this story, a community of solidarity shaped by this story, a community that because of this story keeps faith with those who otherwise inevitably will become the scapegoats for my fear.

We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Our reality is constructed from the stories we tell each other about how we see the world. Resurrection is our story of the promise of transformation. If we are brave enough, it transforms us to become together, the change we long to see.

[1] People are hurting and are desperate to see some change, even if all they can only conceive of is in the form of a reversion to old solutions that have failed us in the past.

[2] A comment the biblical scholar and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright is fond of using.

March 27, 2016 0

Verbs

Maundy Thursday sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs.

March 27, 2016 0

Good Friday Love

Meditation for Good Friday.

Some say love it is a river that drowns the tender reed, some say love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed, some say love it is a hunger an endless aching need …

We are required to go deeper, beyond being spectators recalling Jesus’ suffering on his way to the Cross. The human heart has an affinity with suffering, nevertheless if we go deeper we begin to realize that Good Friday is not about Jesus the noble victim sacrificing his life for the sins of the world. If we just stop there, no matter how thankful we might feel, we fail to see that the way of the Cross is God’s invitation to become transformed not by suffering, but by the power of love.

I say love, it is a flower, and you its only seed. ….

The Cross requires of us nothing short of a transformation in our moral, emotional, and spiritual way of being. God invites us to enter into the way of love not by standing back and beckoning us from a distance. In Jesus, God takes the initiative and leads us through example. Our acceptance, our entry into the way of love involves risking as Jesus risked. Risk is the raw material for transformation, for it is

the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live. ….

Entering into the way of love leads us to challenge the status quo and risking the consequences. As a community, it means uncovering and challenging the cosmic forces of dehumanization woven into the very DNA of our culture. It means risking loving without expecting acknowledgment. Yet, above all else it means accepting an invitation to become transformed into a new way of being, one step at a time. In this transformation we are God’s collaborators and not merely, grateful children.

When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose. ….

The meaning of Good Friday lies in accepting entry into the way of the Cross of Christ. This is the way of love, which leads through risking into believing, hoping and loving. This is not a hero’s path, Jesus shows us that it is a very human path. On Good Friday, God shows us the way of love, motivated not by an abhorrence of sin, but by the impossibility for God, of not loving.

The italicized text comes from The Rose by Bette Midler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzisVBFMMdE

March 25, 2016 0

Then and Now

Worldly context

History informs us that what we see going on in the current primaries to elect candidates for the presidential election later this year is a manifestation of our national state of crisis. History teaches us that at such points of crisis shared civic consensus fragments under the influence of reemerging tribal instincts. Tribalism is the stage of human social organization that most closely equates to herd mentality. Leadership in this context either calms or inflames the collective fight-flight instinct, the primary instinct that distinguishes us from them.

Between the states of fight or flight, between hope and fear lies a complex mental state called ambivalence.There are moments when I find everything within me rising in hope and I cry out: save me, save us -hosanna! Then in the next moment the impossibility of my hopeful exultation crashes under the weight of a defensive cynical realism, quietly giving voice to my fears and whispering: crucify him!

Spiritual context

Palm Sunday disturbs me by the contradiction of one moment blessing palms and singing Ride on, ride on in majesty before minutes later, hearing a crescendo cry of crucify him, crucify him.

In 160BC after seven years of guerilla resistance, Judas Maccabeus led the triumphant Jewish Resistance back into a Jerusalem newly liberated from the yoke of the Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus Epiphanies. The Jewish forces carried blessed palm branches with which to begin the cleansing of the Temple; a Temple that had been defiled by the image that Antiochus Epiphanies had placed of himself in the Holy of Holies. The Maccabean Revolt was the last time the Jews could point to a successful assertion of their independence from foreign domination.

I find drawing a connection between the Maccabean cleansing of the Temple and Jesus being welcomed by the crowds bearing branches cut from the trees gives an insight into the hopes and aspirations of the crowd that welcomed him into the city. They saw in Jesus a liberator, a new son of David, a re-embodiment of Judas Maccabeus – one who would liberate them from the foreign Roman domination, and cleanse the Temple of defilement at the hands of its collaborationist, religious caste. Jesus could have inflamed Jewish tribalsim. Instead he chose a different path.

We know the end of the story. We know that as the events of Holy Week unfold, things didn’t go in the direction of fulfilling public hopes and expectations. Hopes turn to disappointment that fans an angry disillusionment. Ambivalence is too hard to tolerate. So the crowd turns on Jesus, seeking a sacpegoat to blame.

Correlating contexts

I began with a reference to our current political process in which we see clear signs of politicians playing upon our tribal fears. The profound disillusionment of the crowd at large, and of Jesus’ own inner circle, in particular; a disillusionment that Judas eventually gives voice to, plays well in our current experience of the world. Many people today are struggling with the loss of hope as we feel control over our lives and our futures slipping from our grasp. They have become afraid and thus vulnerable to the resurgence of a collective admiration of brute strength, and a willingness to find scapegoats to provide the illusion of easy answers to complex problems.

We approach Holy Week and the great three days of Easter caught in an ambivalence between our worldly and spiritual contexts. We can approach the spiritual context from a ringside seat, viewing it as a great epic drama of events set in a time, long ago. We can travel through the events of Holy Week and Easter as if they are consecutive performances of a Shakespeare history play or the demanding three days of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. We emerge from the experience moved, disturbed, elated, saying to one another: gee that was powerful! However, is being a spectator really satisfying?

I keep reminding my community that Episcopalians are liturgical people. Liturgy is commonly misunderstood as a spectacle to watch. This could not be further from the truth. Liturgy requires our participation. The word liturgy means the work of the people of God. Liturgy is not a play we watch. It is a drama in which we join the action as fellow participants with Christ. Liturgy demands that we lend a hand to that work of the people of God. We do so through being present. Through liturgy the I becomes the we.

There are two ways to change the world. The first is to engage in concerted action, following a political or social agenda. The second is to become changed from within, to become the change we seek to bring about. Through our participation in the great liturgies of Holy Week and the great three days of Easter, we participate in the cosmic triumph of love over fear. We contine to be transformed as Sunday-by-Sunday we participate in the work of God’s people by being present in the liturgy.

On Palm Sunday, I see myself in the crowd crying both hosanna and crucify him. I am full of hope and longing for my world to be transformed beyond the maintenance of the status quo, the endless repetition of business as usual. Yet, my very hope and longing also terrify me. So often it’s safer to resist the change I most long for in order to protect myself from my fear. Can it really be true that sacrificial love can change the world? Can it really be true that sacrificial love is enough to confront the misuse of power through the threat or actuality of violence? Alone, I am not so sure. But, what about as a member of a community?

Through liturgy and this is especially true of the great liturgies of Holy Week and Easter the I becomes we. My fear of what an allegiance to self-sacrificial love might cost me, what following Jesus to the other side of the Cross might demand of me becomes manageable when I join with others and together we participate as members of a cross-bearing and love-affirming community. This is the message our current nation and world needs so urgently to hear.

March 19, 2016 0

A Scandalous Evening in Bethany

There is a 1^st-century backstory that lends a poignancy to John’s portrayal of a particular evening in 12:1-8 evening. Both Lazarus and Jesus are in danger of assassination by the Temple authorities, who after Jesus’ calling of Lazarus back from death have put out a contract on both their lives. Here, in an atmosphere of events of enormous import looming, an anxiety fuelled by the uncertainty of their outcome, there is a tone of urgency, there’s no time now to lose. It’s now or never. Social convention, fear and anxiety cannot be left to stand in the way of expressing love and affection; not only love and affection, but also anger fuelled by growing disillusionment.

Approaching John’s story of the dinner party that Lazarus, Martha, and Mary throw for Jesus six days before the Passover from within the subjective experience of living in March 2016 attunes me to the way society constructs different meanings for different bodies. This is a story about bodies – Jesus’ body, Mary’s body, and Judas’ visceral, bodily reaction.

Bodies

In our time, white, heterosexual male bodies matter. They matter because they are accorded a privilege that is denied to non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual bodies. The politics of race, gender, sexual and gender identity, poverty and wealth confiscation are currently playing out around us with increasingly ferocious effect. We all feel that events of momentous, but unpredictable import are building all around us.

There appear to be no black, gay or transgendered bodies in this story. That is, at least as far as we can tell. Because black and gay bodies are usually invisible in the patriarchal gaze, it’s important we don’t confuse invisibility with absence. Rather the female body of Mary in this instance seems emblematic of the black and gay body experience in John’s story. I also think black and gay body experience is represented in Jesus’ non-white, non-patriarchal, male body – evidenced in his unusually open and accepting response to Mary.

Mary

Mary literally lets her hair down. This is an action remarkable for its potential to cause a scandal. In patriarchal society, women cover their hair. This remains as true today in much of the Islamic world, as it was in Jewish 1^st-century society. Even today in ultra-conservative Jewish and Christian worlds, women still cover their heads because hair expresses a woman’s sexuality and female sexuality is considered a subversive thing to be controlled. This may well be the reason that Mark, Matthew, and Luke identify this Mary as Mary Magdalene, a more fitting candidate because of her reputation as a prostitute. Only John identifies the woman who anoints Jesus feet with the respectable Mary, the sister of Lazarus.

In the secular West, we feel we have become more enlightened and we scoff at male sexual anxieties being aroused by the sight of a woman’s hair in the same way as we laugh at Victorian male anxiety provoked by the sight of female ankles and legs. Consequently, we miss the counter-culturally sensuous flagrancy of Mary’s action.

Smell is our most potent and evocative sense. Mary fills the room with the sensuous aroma of the ointment and then proceeds to anoint Jesus feet with her hair. Note feet not head. Unlike in the other Gospels, in John, Mary does not anoint Jesus’ head, a respectable part of his body, but his feet. Later in this week, Peter will object to being washed by Jesus, because Jesus insists on washing his feet, an action that suggests both subservience and provocative with intimacy.

Mary uses her female body to express her deep love for Jesus. In contemporary America, we may no longer so clearly associate a woman’s hair as an expression of sexuality. Yet, the death throws of patriarchy continue to play out with disastrous effect for women’s bodies in contemporary America. There is a photograph of George W. Bush, taken in 2003 signing into effect laws tightening the availability of abortion. It’s striking to note the line up of men behind him in the photograph. There is not a woman legislator in sight.

My point here is not to come down on either side of our society’s conflicting views on abortion itself, but to highlight the legislative attempts to restrict a woman’s rights over the management of her own body. This is a male impulse as old as patriarchy itself. Abortion is something I am not in favor of unrestricted access to. Yet, as far as I can judge abortion is not the issue here. The issue is the privileging of male heterosexual anxiety’s need to control women’s bodies.

The curious thing about patriarchal anxiety is that in a sense male patriarchal identity transcends gender, for women who support patriarchy also share this anxiety. Yet, this anxiety has its roots in male sexual anxiety and a consequent need to control the female body. It extends well beyond the debate on abortion to increasing attempts to control all aspects of female reproductive health – a contemporary instance of the age-old male denigration of the female body.

Judas

Against Judas’ attack, Jesus welcomes Mary’s actions and defends her extravagant wastefulness and the use of her body to honor him. John sticks to a simplistic portrayal of Judas as a thief, who is provoked by Mary’s wasteful extravagance, not out of regard for the plight of the poor, but because of the diversion of resources out of his control. John may have had his reasons for portraying Judas so, but I don’t buy his depiction.

Judas is angry. We can argue with John over the reason for his anger. I prefer to see him as less venial and more political. Judas is politically disillusioned. He sees the way things are beginning to go and he fears Jesus is betraying all Judas’ messianic hope and expectation for a better world, at least, a better world in terms that he can understand. It’s not his desire to steal the money that could have been realized by the sale of the ointment. His anger is fanned by his perception of valuable resources being diverted away from the central cause of messianic liberation. Thus, he comes up with a clever pretext of wasting resources that could have been spent on the alleviation of poverty.

Jesus responds to Judas with strikingly contemporary anti-welfare reasoning, appearing to be saying: Judas, don’t worry about the poor there is nothing that can be done for them, they will never change and throwing money at the problem is no help to them. This interpretation of Jesus’ words runs contrary to every other statement and action of Jesus’ recorded not only by John but Mark, Matthew and Luke. Jesus is portrayed always as the friend of the poor and he unequivocally proclaims economic justice as central to God’s expectations for the coming of the Kingdom.

Jesus facetiously sees through Judas, as so many today are finally beginning to see through the 30-year dominance of the doctrine of trickle-down economics.

Although I don’t go along with the simplistic characterization of Judas as a common thief, as we listen to this story in the opening decades of the 21^st-century issues of theft are alarmingly current. We are witnessing a seismic rejection of the political culture spurred by anger and disillusionment. Whether you vote for Donald or Bernie, the common thread is you are likely to be someone who is feeling angry and disillusioned by what you experience as a betrayal by the economic and political establishments.

Among the Donald followers:

Globalization has sent what they once believed to be American companies, working for our common good off in pursuit of cheap labor with the consequent loss of jobs and the prospect of earning a living wage.
The unbridled greed compounded by the failure of regulatory oversight has lost many the only investment they had- investment in home and hearth.
Changing demographics threaten a loss of white racial and male gender privilege.
The adulation of naked brute power as a panacea among those who feel most powerless.

Bernie is a lightening rod for a completely different set of dissatisfactions:

The abandonment of higher education to market forces has left our young people with astonishing levels of debt and profound doubts about education being the route to social mobility and the kind of future many of their parents took for granted. For the first time since 1945 things are not going to get better.
Non-universal healthcare as a protection for the profits of insurance companies and healthcare providers continues to result in health poverty for the poor, and unsustainable economic burdens for the middle classes.
The organized manipulation of wealth by large corporations working against national interest.
Dirty industry’s purchase of political protections that allow the steady degradation of the environment in the interests of profits.
A financial system that colludes with wealth creation and accumulation of power for the now proverbial 1%.

Whether Judas is a thief or not he experiences a visceral – in his body- alarm and growing disillusionment. It is this that leads him to make the wrong choice.

Jesus

Finally, how do we see Jesus in John’s story about the dinner party at the house of Lazarus and his sisters six days before the Passover? Jesus appears to be fully aware of how events are going to unfold. Jesus seems to know that the way things are going to play out will result in his death. His foreknowledge is not of the omniscient variety, as in God knows all things ahead of time and has planned for Jesus to die. Jesus knows his future because he is keenly aware of the contours of the human heart. He knows the consequences of speaking truth to power. He knows also that there is no other way through the darkness into the light of a new order in creation. In Jesus God confronts the darkness of the human heart.

The days of Lent are ebbing away as we transition into the time of Jesus’ Passion. All around us, millions seem easily seduced by the promises of political saviors who have no power to fulfill their messianic promises. Speaking truth to power is not the road to easy answers. It is instead, the hard road to change. As we receive this story from John about events at a dinner party six days before the Passover, we come to see that things are never what they at first, appear to be.

The power of Scripture lies in the way it mediates for us an encounter with God that is literally of the moment. The power of Scripture lies not only in the objective elements of story but in the subjective impact of the narrative upon us, an impact we register only in the here and now. Subjectivity means that no subsequent reading of the story produces the same affect as the previous reading. We are never in the same place, twice.

March 12, 2016 0