Homily: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [June 28, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

Today's Gospel--the entwined stories of the raising of Jairus's daughter and the healing of the woman with the flow of blood [Mark 5: 21-43]--comes in what some biblical scholars call a "Markan sandwich".  There are several places in the second Gospel where Mark enfolds one story within another, thereby allowing each to comment on and amplify the other. The raising of Jairus’s daughter gives us the bread, the woman’s healing the filling.

 

Today's two stories are related on several levels.  They both feature desperate people--a man whose daughter is near death, a woman who cannot stop bleeding.  They both tell of miraculous healings--Jairus's daughter is restored to life, the woman's blood flow is stopped.  But to my mind, the most important feature these stories share is that everyone in them takes a risk.

 

What's so risky about this Gospel?  An establishment figure dares to seek help from someone outside the official religious system. In going to Jesus, Jairus risks both his position and his reputation. Then, a person who is ritually unclean dares to touch the garment of a holy person.  In touching Jesus, the woman risks punishment for violating the boundaries of Israel's purity laws. 

 

But they're not the only ones taking risks here.  Jesus has no choice about the woman's petition--she touches him and he feels the healing power leave him.  But he does have a choice about Jairus's daughter, and in choosing to restore her to life Jesus risks the rejection of those around him.  "The child is not dead but sleeping," he says.  They respond by laughing at him. But when he tells her to get up, and she does, they respond not in derision but with amazement.

 

Healing and resurrection, derision and amazement. And now to the windows. Many of you probably know that I have called for Washington National Cathedral to remove two windows on the south side of the nave that depict the lives of Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and display the Confederate battle flag. 

These windows (along with their inscriptions) seek to reframe the Civil War and present the two generals as saintly, exemplary Christians.  Let me say a word about each issue.

 

First, the battle flag.  It is a common image in American culture, but in the wake of the shootings in Charleston the week before last we have all become aware of how deeply offensive this image is, especially to African Americans.  Like it or not, the Confederate battle flag has become the symbol of white supremacy in America.  There are many white southerners who will say that they intend no disrespect when displaying it.  But as a preacher I know a lot about the difference between intent and impact.  I may not intend you to hear something when I say it, but if you do hear it, I am still responsible for what you hear.  And so it is with the flag: as benign as the intentions of some may be in displaying the Confederate battle flag, the fact that many find it offensive should be enough of a reason to fold it up and put it away.

 

There simply is no excuse for the nation's most visible church to display a symbol of racism, slavery, and oppression.  None. I believe all representations of this flag should go from our public spaces. In saying that, I do not want to whitewash history.  But I don't want to celebrate a cause whose primary reason for being was the preservation and extension of slavery in America.

 

As President Obama said on Friday at the funeral for Clementa Pinckney,

 

Removing the flag from this state's capital would not be an act of political correctness.  It would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers.  It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.

 

Second, the windows themselves.  Some have suggested that we merely excise the flag images from the windows and leave the rest of them intact.  But if you go look at them after the service, and I encourage you to do so—they’re on the south side of the nave, just this side of President Wilson’s tomb--you'll see that the flags are only part of the problem.  The Lee-Jackson bay was installed in 1953 after a long campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy both to fund and approve them. The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a group mainly concerned with fostering respect for southern heritage.  But in proposing these windows they went beyond heritage and created a memorial that puts a decidedly saintly spin on two leaders of the Confederate Army.  The inscriptions portray them as exemplary Christian gentlemen.  But the windows contain no reference to the sin of slavery which both men fought---and one died--to uphold.

 

Some have accused me of wanting to whitewash history.  I do not seek to whitewash history.  I seek to celebrate history in all its fullness and complexity.  In calling for the windows to be removed, I am asking not to rewrite the past but to tell the story of the past honestly--in a way that honors not just one side but everyone involved in a painful time whose effects are with us yet.  The great southern American writer William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." America’s cathedral should represent America in all its fullness and tell our story without trying to make saints of men who served an unjust cause. 

 

We can live with some contradictions until we can't.  I'm not unaware that the dean who installed these windows--Francis Sayre--was one of the great activist civil rights clergy of the 1950s and 1960s. Apparently he saw no contradiction between supporting the Lee-Jackson windows in 1953 and Brown versus Board of Education one year later.  He could live in that tension, but I cannot, and I believe this cathedral cannot.  It is time for those windows to go and live elsewhere in our buildings as part of a historical display.  It is time for us to commission new ones for the nave that will tell the full, painful, yet hopeful story of race and justice in America.

 

And that brings me back to today's Gospel--two entwined stories about faithful people taking risks. Like Mark's Gospel, America itself tells two interlocking tales--one of equality and liberty and freedom, another of oppression and violence and segregation.  We will never live into the fullness of our destiny as a people until we live into the fullness of the interconnectedness of these two stories.  In 1865 we ended a war over slavery and began, as blacks and whites, to live together as full equal citizens of our shared land.  150 years later we still have not completed the work begun in that war’s end.  Washington Nation Cathedral is called, as our nation's most visible church, to lead the faith community and our nation in healing America by facing into racism, its history, and its encampment in our own hearts.  We cannot do that if our building only tells one side of the story. We cannot do that while the Confederate battle flag shines in our windows. All our artworks, like our scriptures and those who preach on them, must always strive to tell the truth. And sadly, our understanding of truth emerges only over time.

 

Jairus dared to risk by seeking out an itinerant preacher for help.  The woman dared to risk by touching a holy man when she was sick.  Jesus dared to risk by promising he could bring a dead girl to life.  Everyone laughed, and then they were overcome with amazement.

 

We can live with some contradictions until we can't. Here is the question the Gospel poses for us today, and we could not find a clearer sharper moral problem if we tried.  In light of the risks taken by Jesus and these others, do you and I have the courage to do something risky as well?  Can Washington National Cathedral--this great, glorious, temple of our nation's religious establishment--can this cathedral dare to risk on behalf of our best shared vision of America? Do we have the courage to revisit our assumptions and admit when they are inadequate or false? Can we risk admitting that we can no longer live with the contradiction between justice and oppression, that we can no longer celebrate both slavery and freedom in the same space?

 

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." This cathedral will continue to honor all sides of the American story. What it can no longer do is pretend that slavery was a value worth fighting for. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee were men of courage and valor.  They fought for their homeland with courage. But in choosing to serve a nation founded on slavery they were wrong, and they fought under a flag that many across America equate with racism, bigotry and hatred.  It is time for our cathedral to replace their memorial with one that does justice to the sacrifices of all involved in that terrible and bloody conflict. It is time for this cathedral, like the Jesus we follow, to dare and risk.  People may laugh, but if we are faithful and persistent, they will be "overcome with amazement" at the loving, forgiving, and liberating grace of the God whom we struggle, by fits and starts, to follow.  Amen.

 

 

 

Sunday Statement on Shootings at Emmanuel AME Church [June 21, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

 

Sunday Statement on Shootings at Emmanuel AME Church

 

We gather this morning in the wake of last Wednesday night’s shootings at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  As many of you know, Bishop Budde and I issued a statement on Thursday morning which read, in part:

 

We and all people of good will are compelled to name this tragedy for what it is: the [result of the] conjoined sins of racism and violence. For too long, our African-American sisters and brothers have lived in the shadow of a reign of terror that has targeted churches, homes and businesses in the false notion of white supremacy. Such a visceral hatred for people of color has no place in our country, our homes or our hearts.

 

The bishop and I also attended (along with cathedral colleagues Stuart Kenworthy, Ruth Frey, Patty Johnson, and my wife Kathy) a community prayer vigil Friday afternoon at Metropolitan AME Church here in Washington. And Preston Hannibal, Stuart, and I represented the cathedral at a diocesan prayer vigil at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Friday night. The response of the black church in America has been, for me, the purest expression of authentic Christianity I have seen in my life as a priest. Their powerful expressions of forgiveness and love remind us all of what it means really to follow Jesus.

 

Many people have asked me, “How is the cathedral going to respond?”  I want to say that we are going to respond in three ways:  first, we respond by standing with our African American brothers and sisters in this moment and by showing up to mourn with them.  Second, we respond by joining with them in naming this murder for what it is:  a hateful expression of racist white supremacy.  This hate crime is not about mental illness, or drugs, or the persecution of Christians.  This killing was an act of terrorism designed to intimidate and silence people of color in the United States. We need vocally to resist all attempts to explain the shootings away as anything other than a race crime.

Third, we respond by moving the cathedral’s work on racial justice to the very top of our missional agenda.  As the most visible Christian institution in the United States, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to gather the faith community in calling America come to terms with its history of racism, violence, and segregation.  There are many issues—each of them serious and worthwhile—that claim the cathedral’s attention. But nothing is more important in this moment than for us to lead American people of faith not only to healing and repentance but to the hard and freeing work of taking the lid off a past we would rather ignore, exploring that past’s ongoing effects in the present, and working together with men and women and children of good will across the ethnic and racial spectrum of America to build a future in which racism, violence, and false notions of supremacy will cease to have a place.

 

The shooting of nine Christian martyrs in Charleston calls each of us to examine our own participation in systemic and cultural racism.  It calls all of us to forge real relationships outside the comfort zones of our own racial identities.  And it demands that we, as a cathedral community and as a great church for national purposes, act to lead church and society into a new way of being together in America.

 

It is time for America to face into the open wound of race relations in our nation.  It is time for Washington National Cathedral to reach out to our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques to build a new community of love and justice that can help all of us do right by the nine who died in Charleston and for our nation, finally, to do the right thing. I will dedicate the rest of my time here as your dean to that purpose. I ask that all of you join me and my cathedral colleagues in this work.

 

 

Homily: Cathedral Staff Eucharist [June 18, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            We woke up this morning to the horrific news of the shooting deaths of 9 people at Emmanuel AME Church, a historic African American congregation in Charleston, South Carolina.  It seems painfully and uncomfortably fitting that a cathedral community like ours—one that has identified gun violence and racial injustice as our two highest missional concerns—should find them both conjoined in this terrible incident. I’ll come back to it later, but for right now let’s hold the people of Emmanuel Church and Charleston in our hearts as we think together about our scripture readings.

            The first lesson, from 2 Corinthians, [2 Corinthians 11: 1-11] sounds like a memo from a boss who has gone totally off the rails. When Paul asks that the Corinthians bear with him in a little foolishness, he is being sarcastic rather than playful. In warning this congregation about the false prophets who have come after him, Paul winds up into an exhortation that is at once hostile, defensive, self-justifying, and—well—paranoid.  Just like the memos that I draft in my head but never send.  It’s too bad Paul didn’t have someone like Tish at his side who could gently talk him down before he pressed “send”.

            As cringe-worthy as his performance is, though, Paul still has a point. He’s telling the Corinthians that he did not take any money in support from them because he wanted them to be able to give to the “home office” in Jerusalem. Always robust in his own self-estimation, Paul will continue to boast about his ongoing generosity.  “And why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!”

            Now this sounds a bit like the contemporary slogan, “Beatings will continue until morale improves,” but it does have a certain logic. Paul had founded the Corinthian church, but after he moved on he discovered that they had come under the influence of some bogus preachers.  He is angry and hurt, but more than either he is worried.  He’s fearful that the church he founded will be corrupted by dangerous influences.

            So here’s point one:  those of us who serve the church do so because we love it.  That’s true whether you serve a big cathedral like this or a small congregation in the inner city or the countryside.  But sometimes our love for the church can blur the boundaries between appropriate engagement and obsessive overfunctioning.  When reading this passage from 2 Corinthians, I want to shout back at Paul, “Hey, buddy, I know you love the Corinthians.  But take a couple weeks off, OK?”

            As important as it is that we work hard, it is perhaps even a bit more important that we “step back onto our side of the line” as a former colleague of mine used to say.  We all have wonderful, important, and fulfilling jobs.  But they are, after all, only jobs.  When we get our whole identity from our workplace, we run the risk of forgetting who we really are.  And frankly, if we don’t know who we really are we are of limited use in the living and working out of God’s purposes for us.

            We have just gone through an incredibly productive and exhausting year at the cathedral.  I am deeply grateful for the way in which each one of you has sacrificially given of yourself to make this ministry not only possible but also excellent and worthy of the transcendent space and role we occupy in Washington and in the nation’s life.  But Paul’s little hissy fit reminds us that we can all get overly engaged.  It’s time, as the kindergarten teachers say, for a time-out. We all need to find some time this summer to disengage, to rest, and to recover a sense of who we are when we’re not in the cathedral building or on the grounds.

            That’s point one. Matthew’s Gospel steers us to point two. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his hearers how they ought to pray:

‘When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. [Matthew 6: 7-15]

He then goes on to give them the Lord’s Prayer as the model for how we all ought to address God.  It’s simple; it’s direct; and it’s rooted in our need both to praise God and to seek forgiveness for ourselves, each other, and the world.

            I don’t know how to make sense of the Charleston shootings. I don’t know how to make sense of all the injustice, suffering, and pain I see in the world.  But I do know that if a place like this has any final reason for being, it’s rooted in what Jesus offers us in the simple prayer we will say together as we gather around God’s table.

            Washington National Cathedral exists to hallow God’s name, pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, call for the abundance of daily bread for all, and to seek and offer forgiveness.  The shootings last night in Charleston call us back to remembering what the church—even and especially a great church like this—is here for.  It’s a simple and a noble purpose, and sometimes the tyranny of the urgent can distract us from it.  But what we are up to together is the most important and ennobling work there is.  It is God’s work, and we do it in this blessed but imperfect community where sometimes we lose our tempers or our patience, but where we always deeply value, respect, and (yes) love each other.

            I am grateful for this work we do together.  I am grateful for this beautiful place in which to do it.  But more importantly, I am grateful for you as my companions on this journey. I guess Paul said it best. “And why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!”

            Let’s love and support each other so that we can love and support the Charlestons and Newtowns and Fergusons of the world. God knows what we need before we ask. For today, that assurance is enough.  Amen.

Homily: The Fifth Sunday of Easter [May 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Last Wednesday I took advantage of a bit of free time to watch a couple of innings of the Orioles-White Sox game.  Happily for Orioles fans, Baltimore won that match 8 to 2.  But sadly for us all, the game was played in an empty ballpark.  Watching it was a bizarre experience:  images on the Jumbotron, music between batters, a full cadre of cameras and announcers, and no one in the stands.           

Last Monday’s civil unrest in Baltimore was disturbing on so many levels.  The then-unexplained death of Freddie Gray in police custody was just one more instance of an unarmed black man dying at the hands of police in a year already overloaded with such incidents.  The violence itself was unsettling first because it changed the character of what had until then been an entirely peaceful protest. And, as in all such disturbances, the violence further damaged a neighborhood already stressed by poverty, unemployment, and crime.

            Wednesday’s ball game wasn’t the only TV I saw last week.  On Monday night I watched some of CNN’s live coverage of the disturbance, and I was less shocked by the images than I was by what one of the CNN anchors had to say. “It is hard to believe this is happening in a major American city.”  “I don’t remember seeing anything like this in the United States of America in a long time.”  “This is a scene that a lot of us never anticipated seeing in a city like Baltimore.”

            Really?  I grew up in Los Angeles, and I still remember 1965 in Watts and 1992 in South Central L.A.  And then there’s Ferguson, Missouri a mere five months ago. CNN’s memory lapse wasn’t the worst. The people on Fox News characterized violence as positively un-American, one of them saying that Baltimore “looks like some riot in a third world nation”. Violent protest may be upsetting, disturbing, and disappointing, but it certainly isn’t un-American.  We’re a country that got its start with a revolution and solved its biggest social problem with a civil war.  Violent protests are not something new in American life.  There was Shay’s Rebellion in 1796, the New York draft riots of 1863, the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886, the Bonus Army March of 1932, and of course the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and Washington’s own riot after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 to name a few.  Baltimore’s response to Freddie Gray’s death is only the most recent example of a longstanding American practice of taking it to the streets. Violent protest is as American as apple pie.

            And now, thanks to the charges filed against six Baltimore police officers last Friday, we have an inkling of the originating act of violence that caused the death of an innocent young man who was ridden around roughly and then blamed for his own death. Violent street protest is almost always a response to an originating act of violence. Slavery, segregation, economic injustice, aggressive policing—all these are acts of coercive force which sooner or later will necessarily provoke a violent response.

            That Baltimore officials have acted decisively to charge the officers involved is a cause for hope in an otherwise depressing routine being played out in American cities right now.  Just as in 1967 and 1968, something is desperately wrong in the racial politics of our nation. God is saying something to us in the streets of Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and New York. We have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to read the current moment and respond.

            The theologian Karl Barth once said that Christian preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. How might we put the Bible and the newspaper together today? This morning’s Gospel is relevant here.  It gives us Jesus’s well-known allegory of the vine and the branches [John 15: 1-8], a familiar yet challenging text. Here is the part we always remember: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower,” says Jesus.  “Abide in me as I abide in you. “ Here is the part we always forget: “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”

            “I am the vine, you are the branches”—a saying that has brought comfort and joy to Christians over the centuries, an extended metaphor suggesting our unity, our oneness in Christ.  The vine, of course, was also a traditional metaphor for the people of Israel [Psalm 80].  In John’s rendering, Jesus himself is the new Israel and all of us who believe in him are what Paul would call “members one of another.” [Romans 12:5] But the more we press on it, the more we see that Jesus’s use of this figure is not just about Jesus and the church. To say that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches is to suggest something about the nature of God and the world.  All of us are woven together in one fabric of life.  We are all in this together.  So one thing we hear in today’s Bible-newspaper dialogue is a word of human solidarity even in hard moments like Ferguson or Baltimore.  We cannot look at these events—the protests or the violence that occasioned them—and not see ourselves implicated.  Jesus is the vine, we are the branches.  We are all in this together.

            But what are we to make of God’s role as the vinegrower? “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”  The Greek verb here (airo) suggests both cutting and cleansing.  The cheering news is that we are all connected to each other through our oneness in Christ.  The sobering news is that God is at work in events that try and test and shape us into the people God intends us to be.  Just as you would not let a rose bush grow wild but would cut it back to enhance its fullness, so it seems God uses hard events in our personal and social lives to shape us for God’s own purposes.  To describe this process of trial and testing, the Hebrew prophets often compared it to the smelting of precious metals. Jesus uses the figure of the gardener and the vine.

            As I have thought about Baltimore this week and what God might be saying to us through it, I have continually been drawn back to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered just weeks before his assassination in 1865.  We all remember his stirring words, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” We often forget the words that precede them.  Looking for divine meaning in the civil war then drawing to a close, Lincoln poses this question:  is the war God’s judgment for the sin of slavery? If so, then his conclusion is inescapable:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

            It is hard to look at the events in our cities in this year alone and avoid the conclusion that we are still living out the scourge of which Lincoln spoke. As a people, as a nation, we are still paying for the sin of slavery and its subsequent mutation into racism, segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, and a massive disparity in economic opportunity.  We cannot live in true harmony in America until justice prevails. As Jesus reminds us, we are all branches of one vine. And as Jesus warns us, we cannot escape the consequences of actions done by us or on our behalf. 

Revolt and unrest will continue until we attend to their causes.  We cannot observe the events in Baltimore and not see ourselves implicated in their origin. Jesus is the vine. We are the branches.  God uses history to prune and shape us to God’s own purposes.  We have a ways to go to be the healthy, fruitful people God wills and calls us to be.  If we look to Baltimore and dismiss it as a city of lawless thugs we will be missing the message we should take from this moment. The sin of racism is alive and well in our nation. Our job, as God’s people and Jesus’s followers is to face into it and not look away.

As Christian people, we must read the death of Freddie Gray and the protests that followed it as signs of the work we all have yet to do. We are members of each other. We will only heal our nation as we attend to the lingering effects of slavery, the originating act of violence that still ricochets through our history over time. The events in Baltimore are painful, but let our pain be that of a pruning moment that heals and shapes us into a people formed for justice, compassion, and love.  In this hard news there is good news.  All this suffering, injustice and pain can bring us to something healing and hopeful and new. In the words of the Psalmist [Psalm 19.9] and our 16^th president, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”  Amen.

 

           

 

 

 

Homily: The Third Sunday of Easter [April 19, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            There are several occupational hazards that go with being an ordained minister. Whenever people swear in your presence they immediately feel they have to apologize. The actors who play clergymen on TV shows are best described as wimpy, bookish nerds. And then there are all those questions you get regularly about the afterlife.

            I can’t tell you how many people over the course of my career have asked me some variant of this question: “What happens to us when we die?”  I don’t know how to say this politely, but the best answer is probably, “How would I know?”  I can tell you what Christians hope happens when we die, but I cannot tell you what we know about life after death.  No matter how worn out and frail I may look to you, I’m still alive.  I haven’t died yet.  I have no first-hand knowledge of what it is to die. I have met a few people who have had near-death experiences, and they talk very persuasively about how peaceful and transcendent they felt on the way out.  But I haven’t had those experiences myself.  So I cannot tell you what I know.  I can only tell you what I hope.

            With regard to the beyond, all of us live in a contradiction.  We think and hope that there is more to life than the here and now, but we do not know what that “more” might be. Emily Dickinson, our great poet of faith and doubt, has a poem that gets at this conundrum. (#373)

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond - 

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles - 

Philosophy, dont know - 

And through a Riddle, at the last - 

Sagacity, must go –

 

 

As Dickinson says, something calls to us from beyond this world.  “It beckons, and it baffles.”  It is invisible, as music.  And we’ll only finally know it firsthand when we go through our own death at the last.  We sense that a larger life is out there, and we desire assurance that it is available to us and to those we have lost.  But all the pulpit thumping in the world will never satisfy our longing.  Each will have to live with this riddle until we finally get the answer.  As Emily Dickinson says,

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll - 

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul -

 

Something of this riddling curiosity about what might be next is on the minds of Jesus’s companions in this morning’s Gospel (Luke 24: 36b-48). The disciples are frightened when Jesus appears.  Who wouldn’t be?  They think they have seen a ghost or a disembodied spirit. The Greek word (pneuma) we translate “ghost” here can also be rendered as “spirit”. But the risen Jesus is not a spirit. He is a flesh-and-blood human being. When we talk about death or heaven in our popular culture or theology, we tend to think of a life beyond this one as something gaseous.  But when Jesus appears to his friends he is not a translucent apparition. He is a concrete physical person. He shows them his hands.  He shows them his feet.  He eats a piece of broiled fish. They may think him a spirit, but he is a person with a body.

            “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. . . . They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.” What do we know about life after death?  Very little.  What do we hope about the resurrection?  A fair amount. It all comes down to hands, feet, and a piece of broiled fish.

            Why are hands, feet and, fish so important?  They’re important because they stand for what we might call the earthly part of the resurrection.  Popular culture has turned the afterlife into a kind of immediate transportation to the beyond. (“Beam me up, Scotty!”) But for real Christian faith the resurrection of Jesus has always symbolized more than his survival of death.  It has always signified a new life.  And not only a new life: Jesus’s resurrection stands for a whole new creation.  In Jesus’s new and risen life, both spirit and body are renewed.  His resurrection is not just about life after death.  It signifies a new heaven and a new earth.

            This hope for a new creation is deeply embedded in our scriptures. Our Bible tells us how, with Adam and Eve in the Garden, we blew it the first time around.  The scriptures tell a sorry story of God’s attempt to transform human enmity, selfishness and sin into love, compassion, and faithfulness. The story culminates in our taking Jesus, the one who perfectly embodies God’s attributes, to the cross.  But the story doesn’t end there.  God will not let us rest in our sinfulness.  Jesus comes back in a new and transformed life. God will not leave us to our own devices. God will not be stopped until everything and everyone is renewed. With Jesus and the empty tomb, God is enlisting us in a process that will heal all the pain and suffering and sin and death we know in this old creation and make us new people in the bargain.

            As we do with so many other religious experiences, we make of resurrection too light a thing.  We have personalized it, turning resurrection into an individualized consumer experience. “I’ll take one resurrection, please.” But resurrection is not only about you or me or the people we love.  Resurrection is about a new heaven and a new earth.  In raising Jesus, God has taken the first step in the remaking of creation.  Not just Jesus and not only his friends, but the whole world is being renewed.  When it is all over, creation will resemble what God originally intended.   A new heaven and a new earth are on their way.  Jesus’s new life is our first sign of this divine renewal of God’s world. If we only hope for our own individual survival, we are not hoping for enough.  We need to start hoping for what God actually promises: a world that will reflect God’s love, justice, compassion, and mercy. We can be the new people who inhabit God’s new world. There is new and risen life for us, too. But only as the whole creation is renewed.

            When I come down from the pulpit we will all stand together and say the Nicene Creed, one of the church’s primary faith statements.  When we say it you’ll notice that there is nothing in there about going to heaven. Instead we say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” I am sorry to say that I do not know what happens when we die.  But the resurrection of Jesus gives me the courage to say that a new world is coming and that you and I can be part of that new world now.  Resurrection is about body and spirit, heaven and earth.  Jesus’s new life brings new life to all of us.  It means, here and now, we are part of something that will transcend our losses and our fears and calls us to new, visionary, and courageous life.

            We make of resurrection too light a thing.  As long as we confine its meaning to “going to heaven when we die”, all the world’s suffering, injustice, and pain can continue unabated.  As long as I will be OK, what’s the difference?  But when we dare to allow Easter to expand to its fullness, resurrection takes on real implications for us in the here and now.  When the disciples finally “got it” that Jesus was neither a spirit nor a ghost but a new creation, they didn’t go out and buy columbarium niches or cemetery plots.  When the disciples finally got what Easter meant, they dropped what they were doing and began working to change the world.  They spread the Gospel.  They fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited the prisoners, and gave up their own possessions to share what they had with the poor.  Resurrection changed them, and it changed their world.  Because they knew they would be part of God’s new creation they became fearless advocates for peace and compassion and love. 

            When asked, “What happens when we die?” I have no pat, easy answer.  All I can do is point to Jesus who showed us his hands and his feet and ate a piece of broiled fish in our presence.  Resurrection is more than life after death. It is about a new heaven and a new earth. It is about a new life today. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” Resurrection has implications.  As we look for our resurrection, let us build God’s new world.  The justice and peace we hope for in heaven can be true for everyone now on earth—including us. As we work together with God to bring on the new world we long for, we’ll know that, like Jesus, we are for once and all truly alive.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

Reflection: Good Friday Evening [April 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

This Lent I’ve been reading Helen Macdonald’s wonderful new book—part memoir, part nature-essay—H is for Hawk. Helen Macdonald is a writer and a scholar of the history of science at Cambridge in England. In H is for Hawk she tells a double story—one strand recounts her grief at the sudden death of her father, the other her deepening relationship with a female goshawk named Mabel.  It’s a deeply engaging book, and it lets you look into a process of loss, recovery and personal transformation that is both surprising and undeniably true.

Here is how Helen Macdonald describes the unlikely connection between knowing a wild animal and surviving a human loss:

I repeatedly dreamed of goshawks after my father died and some unconscious compulsion told me that training a goshawk was necessary. You can’t tame grief, but you can tame hawks. And the goshawk, as I explain in the book, wasn’t just a deep distraction. It was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed and free from human emotions. I didn’t want to be me anymore. I wanted to be something like a hawk: fierce, living entirely in the present and untouched by loss.—[Helen Macdonald, Salon interview, March 9, 2015]

 

            “Fierce, living entirely in the present and untouched by loss”—those words pretty well sum up our fantasies of human independence.  Yet tonight, as we gather in the wake of the cross, we experience ourselves as the antitheses of those wishes.  We are, if anything, humanly dependent.  When we grieve, we live not in the present but in the remembered dream of the past.  We are anything but fierce.  We are overwhelmed by loss.

            The book of Job is the biblical text that gives the fullest expression to the shared human experience of grief and loss.  At one point in his sorrow and pain, Job says this to God:

 

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days. [Job 14:1–2; 5–6]

 

“Look away from them,” Job demands.  Since our life is already short and we cannot do anything to extend the days you have allotted us, perhaps it would be just as well if you left us alone.  This sounds blasphemous. We are always tempted to upbraid Job for his impiety.  But we cannot blame him for his truth.  Who but a deeply faithful person could talk to God so rudely?

            One of the drawbacks of our polite and learned style of Christianity is our tendency to make our religion too intellectual.  Because we value ideas, we make Jesus into more of a teacher than he probably was.  Those who followed him came and stayed because they knew him as their healer and friend.  It was his teaching and preaching that got Jesus into trouble with the Romans.  It was his healing and compassion that built the community that gathered around him in life and continued after his death.

            Tonight we--who are Jesus’s companions as much as his Galilean friends were—we gather to move with Jesus to the tomb in the reality of his death. We acknowledge that we have lost not a philosopher but a brother, not a guru but a friend.  But before we ask what the death of Jesus means for us, we have to ask what it means for me. When we lose someone close and important to us, we experience the loss as personal and private. As Helen Macdonald reminds us, “Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.” As George Herbert asks in his great poem “The Sacrifice”, “Was ever grief like mine?” Jesus is speaking in this poem, but his question could be posed by each of us.  “Was ever grief like mine?”

            In the evening after the events of Friday afternoon, each of us must come to terms with Jesus’s question.  “Was ever grief like mine?”  Our bereavement drives us apart.  Yet clearly our own loneliness cannot be our final destination. Again, my guide here is Helen Macdonald:

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later. . . . What I should have realised, too . . . is that what the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

 

            Tonight, as we move with Jesus to the tomb, we move more deeply into the experience of bereavement, and the loss of Jesus helps us know and claim what it is to lose those others in our lives—parents, spouses, partners, friends, and God help us, even children. “Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”  You don’t really know what it means to lose somebody until you experience the loneliness yourself.  We may all gather in the same physical space, but in relation to the death of Jesus, we are each of us alone.

            And only in that loneliness can we begin to imagine a new and deeper form of human connection.  As we move through our losses we begin to reach out to “pick new fathers from the world” and “pick new selves to love them with”.  Because we know our own losses, we can begin to feel the pain of others. Because we have been changed by grief, we can engage each other and the world in new and empathic ways.  What you know after you lose someone close to you is that you emerge from grief a different person than you entered it.  Before Jesus died, his companions were a pretty sorry bunch of customers.  After Easter they changed the world. They were made into new people who could love and serve others not in spite of but because of their loss.

            But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  It is enough tonight to rest, with Jesus, where he lies. As we sit in our loneliness, let us remember what it is about Jesus we will miss the most.  Again, from Helen Macdonald:

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. [Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk]

 

                        Jesus has died, just as many we love have died.  Jesus has died, just as one day we will die. We cannot truly live with ourselves and others until we take this in. We cannot become the people God is making us into unless we let down our guards and accept that life is precious precisely because it is so fragile. Acknowledging our vulnerability can drive us into isolation, or it can bind us together in new and life-giving ways. If we let it, our time tonight alone, with Jesus, and each other will do God’s work within us to heal and remake us and those we have lost.

The last word belongs to Job: 

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days. [Job 14:1–2; 5–6]

Amen.

Medittation: Good Friday Noon [April 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Karen Armstrong begins her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, recalling the way our religious forbears ritualized the transfer of their sins on to sacrificial animals:

Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement.  He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere.  In this way, Moses, explained, ‘the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.” [Leviticus 16: 21-22] [Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, p. 3]

 

            The first animal was the sacrificial victim.  The second was what we have come to call the scapegoat. In the Christian history of Good Friday meditations there is a lot of talk of Jesus as the human symbol of the first but not as much about how we relate to him as the second.  We seem to be more comfortable thinking of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away, by his death, the sins of the world.  We’re a bit more uneasy acknowledging the way we use him, in Armstrong’s words, to place the blame elsewhere.

            Today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom closely parallels the Suffering Servant Songs of Isaiah, and it rather uncomfortably reminds us that Jesus is not only the exalted Saving Victim dying for our sins but also the one on whom we have projected the parts of ourselves we cannot bear:                                      

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. . . . Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. [Wisdom 2: 1, 12-24]

 

By his or her very existence, the righteous person reminds us that we are not righteous.  We want him not so much to die for our sins as just to go away. 

            Jesus was not the first scapegoat in human history, and he certainly was not the last.  As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We look at Jesus and, though a large part of us responds to him, another part cannot stand what we see.  And so, in what feels from a distance like a perverse process, we come to hate him for the way he shows, or refuses to show, ourselves back to us.  In many ways Jesus is a clarifying mirror of human nature.  We see in him what we aspire to.  We see in him what we are and what we are not.  It would all be so much easier if he would just go away.

            As we gather on Good Friday, our experience with Jesus asks us to ponder a couple of questions about what is going on here.  What are we doing with Jesus?  What is God doing with us?

            When I think about it honestly, the ritual of the scapegoat makes a lot of sense.  It would really be nice if I could find someone else to take on all the negative stuff about being human.  I love life and I love all the good things about it.  Indeed, the culture I inhabit tells me I deserve all those good things and that, if I do things right, I can limit my experience of life only to the enjoyable part.  The image of the good life offered us by late Capitalist consumer society is a picture of healthy, fulfilled, happy prosperity.  Happiness is presented as the norm. If you’re not happy, if you’re not healthy, if you’re not prosperous—well, there’s just something wrong with you.  It would be best for all of us if you just went away.

            One of the things we learn from following Jesus through Holy Week is how deeply false this consumerist vision of life really is.  The fantasy of a human existence without suffering, loss, and pain is just that—a fantasy.  The hard truth that some of us never own up to is just how fragile and finite we people really are.  Like it or not, we are all mortal.  Like it or not, we are not in control of the universe.  Like it or not, we are subject to events and forces beyond our control.  If my vision of the good life implies that I must always be happy, I will leave this world thinking myself a failure and wanting to project the things I can’t accept about me onto someone else. If my vision of the good life acknowledges that a full life involves loss and gain, sickness and health, failure and success then I might just have a chance of being a real and rounded person.  I might become a bit like Jesus.

            So what, on Good Friday, are we doing with Jesus?  In Karen Armstrong’s words, we’re making him a scapegoat, “transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto [his] head . . . literally placing the blame elsewhere.”  In so doing we’re vainly trying to forget, deny, and reject our own finitude.  By making Jesus the scapegoat, we are expressing the sad and childish hope that all the pain, suffering, and loss of life will come to him and not us.

            That’s what we’re doing today with Jesus.  What is God doing with us?

            Last month, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer—winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature—died after years of incapacitation.  In 1990 Tranströmer suffered a massive stroke which left him partially paralyzed and totally unable to speak.  Yet he continued to write and publish poems of stark and transcendent beauty. In his poem “Out in the Open” he says this:

 

The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low,
throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.
A man crouches over something in the field.
The shadow reaches him.
For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross.

I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches.
Sometimes it seems like a snapshot
of frenzy.

—Tomas Tranströmer “Out in the Open,” from The Deleted World

 

Something—represented in this poem by an airplane, but standing for what, God? the world?—something throws the shape and shadow of the cross over the form of a human life.  We are in the middle of that cross.  It is not only the shape of Jesus’s life.  It is also the shape of ours.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We would all rather that shadow passed us by.  We would all rather send the scapegoat out of the city.  We would all prefer not to be reminded that a full human life must comprehend both suffering and abundance.  So here’s what God is doing today with Jesus: God is refusing to let us make him our scapegoat. Because we cannot stand at the cross very long and deny or forget or reject our own vulnerability, weakness, and mortality.  In the crucifixion of Jesus we see the fullness of human frailty and the depth of divine love.  You cannot stand at the cross and come away thinking that life is only what we see in advertising.  You have to come away having looked into some of that reality that we human beings cannot stand.

It always perplexes that we call this Friday “Good”.  Yet if we let it, our forced engagement with the reality we cannot stand can be a transforming experience.  We have brought Jesus to the cross much in the way ancient priests transferred the people’s sins to the scapegoat.  In showing us ourselves to ourselves in the ugliness and pain of this moment, God has put away forever the wish and fantasy of the scapegoat.  There is no scapegoat. Each of us must bear our own burdens.  Each of us must acknowledge our own sins.  Each of us must accept that as we crouch over something in the field, the shadow of the cross above us will put us at some point in its center.  God, the world, and we are cruciform.  We are made in the shape of a cross.

And so this Friday is Good Friday.  God has shown us ourselves in all our fullness. We can no longer pretend that the hard things in life happen only to other, less deserving, people.  We now must admit that they happen also to us.  And if they happen both to them and to us, then we have the possibility of a new kind of community. I no longer need to shun the poor, the sick, the sorrowful, the defeated because I now can see something of myself in them and something of them in me.  Good Friday opens the door not only to the fullness of being human; Good Friday also opens the door to a new possibility of community and compassion with each other and the world.  That is why we call this Friday “Good”. And that is why, together, we proceed to give thanks.  Amen.