Why Are You Weeping? - Easter - A - John 20:1-18

Easter - A
John 20:1-18
April 24, 2011

Why Are You Weeping?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

The author of John’s gospel tells us that the stories that are found in it are “signs” that have been “written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”¹ If this story is supposed to be a sign, then I am confused.

I see lots of signs every time I go somewhere. Signs point to something. That’s what makes them signs. Signs label streets and highways. Signs tell us where to stop and how fast we may go. A lot of signs try to sell something. They point to a product or a service we could buy. Sometimes these signs merely offer information. It might be good to know where I can get a plumber when I need one. Other signs try to stimulate a desire in me for something I didn’t even know I wanted. But always signs point to something and it’s usually something pretty obvious.

So what is it that this story is pointing to? This isn’t very obvious at all.

The story begins with Jesus dead and buried in a tomb. I picture a cave cut into a hillside, with room for more than one body. A large circular stone is rolled in front of the entrance to seal the grave. In our story Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early on Easter morning. In John’s gospel she is one of the women who are part of the inner circle of disciples. She does not have red hair as she has been portrayed. Nor had she ever been a woman of questionable morals.

Mary went to the tomb early in the morning only to find that the tomb has been unsealed. She jumped to an unjustified conclusion. She ran to wherever the disciples were hiding out and breathlessly announced: “Jesus’ body has been stolen and it is missing!” This is not what she saw. What she saw was merely a disturbed grave, not a plundered one.

Then two of the disciples ran to the tomb. We presume that it was their way of responding to Mary’s news. One of them was Simon Peter, who was well-known then—as he is now—to every Jesus follower. The other isn’t named, but we all know who he is. He is the “other” disciple. We might conclude from that fact that he isn’t very important, but we would conclude wrongly. He is also “the one whom Jesus loved.” He is nobody in particlar and he is extra special. I have a sweatshirt that my youngest sister gave me. It says, “Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.” I can’t wear it anywhere, but I love it. It could have belonged to the “other” disciple.

There’s something weird going on between the two disciples, between the well-known disciple who is no one special because Jesus didn’t love him and the “other” disciple who is extra special. They start running toward the tomb and the first thing you know they’re racing to see which one can get there first. Simon Peter, the unspecial disciple, loses the race. But wait, they’re not done. The “other” disciple stops at the entrance of the tomb. Why? We don’t know. Peter goes into the tomb first, so I guess he wins. But wait, they’re not done. The “other” disciple follows Peter into the tomb and is the first one to “believe.” Believe what? We are told what he didn’t believe: he didn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. We are not told what he did believe, but he believed, and that’s important in this gospel, so I guess that makes the “other” disciple the winner.

Scholars tell us that this little testosterone-driven contest between Peter and, we assume, John reflects a struggle between groups within the early Christian community, some of whom counted Peter as the founder of their tradition and others of whom counted John. Not surprisingly, this gospel, which comes from the John group has John winning this contest.

But then to what does this story point as a sign? If the writer has let a church squabble shape the story just so he can step back and tell the Peter group, “Nyah nah na nah nah!” this story is a sign that people in church have a hard time getting along with each other and that’s not news to us. How this sign is supposed to prompt us to “come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing [we] may have life in his name” isn’t clear at all.

Then there is the question that is asked of Mary Magdalene. She looks into the tomb after the men have gone away and she sees two angels. They ask her, “Why are you weeping?”

If the question came only from the angels then I could understand it a little more easily. Angels in the Bible are notoriously inept around humans. Apparently they are fairly intimidating, since people’s first reaction is almost always fear. But they don’t show up gently. They don’t knock on doors or call from another room. They just pop in. Words like “suddenly” and “immediately” are pretty common in stories about angels. And the first thing they usually say is, “Don’t be afraid!” And it’s always too late!

I get it, then, why the angels would ask such a clueless question. “Why are you weeping?” Mary has followed Jesus for the better part of three years. He has been her friend. He has been her teacher, giving her and other women a place in the inner circle of disciples that they would have had with very few other teachers. She has given herself heart and soul to Jesus’ teaching and ministry. She witnessed him executed, the victim of the empire’s counter-insurgency strategy. And now he is dead. Not only dead, but she can’t even find the tomb where his body is buried. And the men in the group of disciples have been entirely unhelpful. She is distraught, beside herself with grief, and all the men can think to do is have a foot race. “Why are you weeping?” It’s a pretty lame question.

But the angels aren’t the only ones who ask it. Jesus asks it, too. “Why are you weeping?”

Her answer is that the body of Jesus is missing. But of course behind that, we notice that she is not fully aware of what has happened. This ignorance runs through the whole gospel, but we’ve seen it twice in our story alone. We are told that the “testosterone kids”—the racing disciples—do not understand “the scriptures” and so do not know that Jesus must rise from the dead. And then when Mary is questioned by Jesus about why she is weeping, she fails to recognize him and supposes that he is the sexton.

Jesus and the angels know something important that Mary and Peter and John do not. Even the narrator knows it. It’s something about “the scriptures” and Jesus rising from the dead and the fact that the tomb is empty. It’s important and we’d like to know it, too.

Because we, too, are weeping. Oh, I know we’ve put our sorrows aside for the day. It’s a day of joy, after all. We’ve pushed our pain into a corner. It’s a an American kind of thing to do. We’re not very good at coming to grips with unpleasant realities. We’re inclined to believe that with a little positive thinking or the right kind of therapy or a trip to self-help section of local bookstore we can solve any problem, eliminate any discomfort or pain, and finally be a peace with ourselves and our world. Our national disposition is in this direction. So most of us haven’t been all that willing to walk the whole Holy Week journey—too much suffering and sorrow. We like to bounce from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the joy of Easter without going through the pain of Good Friday. And who can blame us?

But we’re still weeping. In the little corner of our souls where we’ve shoved aside our sorrows, we are weeping. We weep for many things, some sad, some silly: We weep for those whom we have loved and love still who have died and we still hear them in the other room or see them sitting in their favorite chair, but they are not here and we know it. We weep for our poor planet—torn, exploited, damaged—and the scars left on it by one of its more successful and ambitious life forms. We weep for ourselves, for chances lost, for roads not taken, now closed to us. We weep for our race—the human race, that is—and our seeming inability to share with each other this world and the good things that it offers to us. We weep for children in Afghanistan and Libya. We weep for parents in the slums of San Salvador and our nation’s capital who struggle to make a living where there are quite simply no jobs at all while outsiders tell them that their poverty is their fault and they don’t deserve anyone’s help. We weep for breeding dogs in puppy mills and chickens in egg factories. We weep for the sick, for the war-wounded, for the abused and oppressed.

We don’t weep for all these reasons. If we did, we’d be overwhelmed. We know that, so we’re careful to limit our exposure to these things, careful not to allow ourselves to be confronted by them in ways that we cannot deny. We construct walls of rationalizations and we reduce our lives so that they will fit behind those walls. But still, we know what pain and suffering there is in the world and we weep while keeping our weeping a secret, even from ourselves.

And so Jesus asks us, “Why are you weeping?” And we are at a loss. Why are we weeping? Because there’s all of that and we’ve tried as hard as we could and it’s still there and we had thought that you would fix it or at least keep us and those we love safe from it all, but we’re not safe from it and people die even though we love them and they hurt in ways we can’t fix and how can we possibly not weep?

I know that’s not the conscious question we brought with us this morning, but you know how it is. Sometimes someone who knows us well has a way of asking a question or making a comment and suddenly we see ourselves clearly, more clearly than we had ever wanted to. And that is what Jesus has done to us. And we try to come up with some sort of response that will sort of answer the question without really answering it in hopes that we won’t have to come to grips with the real problem and that is that we are afraid that we are alone or that we will be.

And Jesus speaks a single word to Mary, a name, her name, and her weeping is transformed from an outpouring of grief to an expression of joy. Here is the turning point of Mary’s story and it’s the turning point of ours as well. The point of Easter is not that Jesus’ body was resuscitated. The point of Easter is that we are called by name by Jesus who has walked our path—all of it, even the parts of our journey that lie on the other side of death itself. He addresses each of us, knows each of us, and promises each of us that wherever we may have to go, whatever we must face, whatever we must endure, we will not be alone. We will be accompanied.

That doesn’t erase our sorrows or sponge away our pain. But after ever hurt we bear, every loss we have suffered, every fear that eats at us, Jesus write “yes, but...” Jesus contradicts our loss and our brokenness and our anxiety, and takes them from the main text of the stories of our lives and places them in the footnotes. Our lives are no longer about them. Our lives are no longer about absences; now they are about presence. They are no longer about brokenness; they are about wholeness. They are no longer about death; they are about life.

It turns out that Mary was right, after all. Jesus’ grave has been plundered. The grave has been plundered by life! Christ is risen! So is Mary! So are Peter and John! So are we!

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1John 20:31.

“Just as I have loved you...” - Maundy Thursday - John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Maundy Thursday - A
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
April 21, 2011

“Just as I have loved you...”

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It would be nice if we could get our story straight.

Here we are, gathered together on one of the holiest nights in Christian reckoning. Tonight we observe the foundational feast of the Christian movement. All the other meals that Jesus ate with his disciples have looked forward to this one. All the meals we have eaten since then have looked back to this one. Tonight we remember it, observe it, and celebrate it.

It would be nice, then, if the five written witnesses would at least agree on what happened. It would be nice if what we say about this meal bore some resemblance to any of our written witnesses. It would be nice if we could get our story straight.

In 1 Corinthians we have the earliest version of the founding of this meal. Much of it is familiar, but the setting is different than in the other four witnesses. This meal takes place “on the night when he was betrayed” with no further explanation. As we read on we also discover that the meal as observed in Corinth was more like a potluck supper than the sacrament we celebrate. We hear some members of that church criticized for digging in without waiting for everyone else to be served. We also hear rich members of the church criticized for bringing their own food to eat, so that they wouldn’t have to join in the common table.

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this meal is set within the celebration of the Passover, the Jewish freedom festival, celebrating the liberation from slavery in Egypt. The acts of the Passover meal and the giving and receiving of the loaf and cup of the Christian Eucharist are not really distinguishable, as if Jesus has not founded a new feast, but reinterpreted an old one. In Luke there seems to be an extra cup! In Mark and Luke we drink the cup as the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, but in Matthew it is also for the forgiveness of sins.

Then, in John’s gospel all this takes place before Passover. In fact, John seems to have arranged the story so that Jesus’ dies at the moment that the Passover lamb in the Temple would have been killed. This makes sense. Remember that when Jesus first appears in John’s story, the first thing said about him is said by John the Baptizer, who says, “Here is the Lamb of God.”

The meal in John is placed firmly in the background. All we hear about it is that the events of the story took place “during supper.” There is no further mention of the meal and certainly none of the preparations that are found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Instead of the founding of a meal, we have Jesus taking a towel and basin and washing his disciples’ feet.

It would be nice if the five witnesses could get their story straight. We, of course, have taken these five stories and woven them together, like we’ve done with the Christmas story, until we had shepherds and magi all gathered around an infant Jesus, all the inconsistancies resolved and much of the power of both stories safely removed.

We have our own ways of doing the same thing with the stories of the days just before Jesus’ death and with the meal that Jesus left in our hands. Two methods stick out.

The first is to turn this meal into a commemoration, sort of like the Civil War reenactors who wear itchy underwear and grow their beards long to “remember” Gettysburg. Somehow we have to “remember” an event from which we were absent, having been born at least one thousand nine hundred years later. I am being a little snarky hear, and I apologize. My point is that what we mean by “remembering” is quite different from what it meant to these folks. This kind of memory is not the kind that we use for a spelling quiz or for finding our car in the parking lot at a large mall. This is not a mental exercise in the recalling of fact. Nor is it the detours that we take when we try to tell a story about something that happened to us and end up arguing about whether Uncle Freddy was there or whether he and Dorothy had already divorced.

It’s the kind of memory that happens when I hear the music I grew up with and suddenly the past is no longer past but present and I am a part of it once again. It’s the kind of memory that happens when I walk into church on Easter Sunday morning and smell the lilies and am suddenly walking into the church of my childhood and the lilies are arranged in their dozens in the front of the sanctuary and the preacher is smiling for a change and the choir composed of warbling ancients sounds young and strong again and my new suit itches a little and I can hardly sit still. It’s that kind of memory; it’s re-membering; it’s becoming a part of something once more.

Instead of celebrating this meal we “cerebrate” it. That is, we have turned it into something that takes place between our ears.This is one method for taming this story and the meal that goes with it, the other is privatizing it. We take our cue from Paul’s critique of the snobby rich and the greedy gobblers of the 1^st United Methodist Church of Corinth. We turn this shared meal into an intense, private event between us and God. The first trouble with that is that there is nothing private about following Jesus. It is at times intensely personal, but it is never private. It is a public covenant about public allegiances and public behaviors.

The second trouble is that this meal is a social event. There is a host—Jesus—who has invited us. We gather around a common table. We join in asking God’s blessing. We eat it together. Like every other meal that Jesus ate with his friends and followers, this one is a shared meal. Food has never—until very recently—been about meeting the nutritional needs of individuals. It has always been about forming and maintaining groups. The worst part of the traditional Arabian punishment of cutting off the right hand of a thief is not the loss of the hand, as bad as that may be. Since meals in traditional Arab culture were eaten from a common dish with the right hand, the real punishment of a thief was that he or she would never again be able to eat with others.

This meal is a shared experience. It’s a social experience rather than a psychological one. It’s an exterior rather than interior event. It’s about us not about me.

It’s even about more than us. It’s about the world and humanity’s future in the world.

All five of the stories point to the future. Paul says that we do these things to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”¹ In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus points the disciples toward the coming reign of God. Even John’s story is about Jesus showing us how we are to live with each other after his death.

What this meal does is to present us with a dream made real, the dream of God’s future for us. In this future men and women, adults and children, gather around one table. There they become “companions,” a word refers literally to those who eat bread together. All of Abraham and Sarah’s children come from east and west, north and south, and are made companions: Jews, Christians and Muslims. The whole human family joins in this reunion. The walls that keep us separated from each other, that allow us to imagine each other as less than human and therefore as enemies that we could or even should harm or kill, those walls have collapsed and it is no longer possible to “exact the work of war.”² The wealthy and the poor will look at each other and see brothers and sisters. The poor will come and their wants will be satisfied. The rich will come and lay down the burden of having more than they need. Our communion will not be just with God, but with each other.

John saw this clearly. So the story that John tells is about menial service that Jesus gives to his disciples, who by rights should be washing his feet, not the other way around. But this is an example for us and a new commandment. John knows that this business of loving each other is not an abstraction, a pretty idea. I once saw a poster that read, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” And that’s exactly it. It’s easy to harbor warm feelings for people who are far away. It’s our neighbors we have a hard time with. They are close enough to keep us awake with their loud music at night, close enough that their unraked leaves blow into our yards, close enough to get on our nerves.

John saw this clearly. So instead of giving us a meal that might already in John’s time have become a little abstract, John’s Jesus takes a towel and a basin of water and washes the feet of each of his disciples. John’s Jesus knows that whatever this meal is, it is about love. The love that John’s Jesus is talking about is about real people who have real and possibly unwashed bodies and growling stomachs and smelly feet.

So, in the name of John’s Jesus, I invite all of us to this table, to eat and drink, to share this meal, to remember ourselves as members of each other, to step into this dream once again, to get a glimpse of our future, the future that God is giving us.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

11 Corinthians 11:26.

2John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.”

Acompañamiento - Palm Sunday - A - Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday - A
Matthew 21:1-11
April 17, 2011

Acompañamiento

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I love parades. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching Thanksgiving Day parades on television. We like our parades in Decorah. There are the Fourth of July parade and the parade during Nordic Fest. Give us a decent excuse we’ll have others besides. Every town that I’ve ever lived in has its parades. We once lived in a town so small that we had the Fourth of July parade twice so everyone could be in it and see it. (I’m mostly kidding about that. But it would have been a good idea!)

In a time without video entertainment I imagine that parades attracted even more attention than they do now. Jerusalem had its share of parades. They had processionals for the major religious holidays. They had military parades on Roman holidays, like the emperor’s birthday. I’m sure that these parades were a welcome relief from the dullness of ordinary life.

But parades aren’t just fun. Whether it is a military parade that puts the armed might of an occupying power on display before a subject people or a religious processional that declares and celebrates the power and providence of God, parades are messages in motion. They place an imagined world before the spectators’ eyes. There is a certain order to even the most informal parade. They tell stories.

As members of the SisterParish delegation last month, we got to be part of a parade. It was a commemorative processional. The thirty-first anniversary of the assassination of Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero fell during the time that we were in El Salvador. On the Saturday before the anniversary, there was a processional in San Salvador. It began at the hospital were he was shot and killed while he celebrating mass and made its way downtown to the Cathedral of San Salvador where he is entombed.

There were seven or eight thousand of us. Most people were carrying candles. Many were carrying signs. There were people walking alone, in families, or in small groups. There were organized groups: church youth groups chanting slogans at the top of their lungs, members of political parties ranging from liberals to unembarrassed leftists. There were children—some of them being carried—and old people with canes. There were trucks with speakers mounted on them blaring live broadcasts of radio stations. All to celebrate the witness Archbishop Romero, that outspoken prophet of peace and justice.

Everyone there knows the story: of how Father Romero, the son of one of the ruling families in El Salvador, a priest with impeccable conservative credentials, was elevated to be the bishop of the most important diocese in El Salvador. He was supposed to have been a safe choice who could be counted on to support the regime. He was supposed to spend his time as a sort of chaplain to the ruling families, attending tea parties and raising money for charitable work that would provide some relief for the poor but also keep them firmly in their place.

Then the government started killing his priests, the ones who were preaching that the poor were God’s beloved and had a right to be able to earn with their labor a decent and secure living. Some of these priests were killed and some were “disappeared” by shadowy paramilitary squads. Somehow it became clear to Monseñor Romero that the government was making war on the poor and somehow—in one of those very rare grace-filled moments in the human story—he was converted. He met a different Jesus than he had been raised on. He met the Jesus who sided with the poor, with the widow, with the orphan, with the stranger. He met the Jesus who spoke out against the abuse of the poor by the rich and the mighty. He heard this Jesus calling to him to follow him. And follow he did. For the next two and a half years, Monseñor Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor of El Salvador and against the abuses of the ruling regime. The poor heard him gladly. They saw him as making a different kind of church available to them, a church they had never experienced before, una iglesia del pueblo, a People’s Church.

He condemned violence of both the right and the left, but also the violence of the system that left so many in such suffering. He called for an end to the killings and the kidnappings. He called on the Army and the ruling families to be converted.

They did not listen. Instead they complained to Rome and did everything they could to silence him. When other measures failed, a squad of assassins entered the hospital chapel and shot and killed him. Everyone in El Salvador knows this. They also know that the officers who commanded these men—officers who have never been brought to justice—were trained in the United States. They know this. And it was obvious to them as we walked with them through the streets of San Salvador in the falling night that we were North Americans. If nothing else we were given away by the presence of a rather tall Viking with us. We were North Americans and yet no one looked on us with anything less than an open welcome. There is room in the People’s Church, la iglesia del pueblo, even for us.

This processional was many things. It was a religious event as the participants remembered the faith and witness of this Christian martyr. It was a social event. Groups enjoyed being together. I dare say that there were young people who used the opportunity to perform the complicated dance of flirtation. It was also a political event, as the crowd asserted its right to control Monseñor Romero’s legacy and its right to tap into the power of that legacy so that they can withstand the forces that threaten them today as the U.S.-backed regime threatened them some three decades ago.

In very much the same way, the parade that Jesus led into Jerusalem was a mixture of all sorts of things. It was religious in nature, as the people appealed to God with that ancient prayer shout: Hosanna!, which seems to have been either Hebrew or Aramaic and meant roughly, “Help!” or “Save!”¹ It was a social event, as people seized an chance to see or be a part of something out of the ordinary. It was most certainly a political event. In fact, it was a piece of political theater as Jesus laid hold of and reinterpreted the legacy of King David. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the traditional mount of royalty was a deep criticism of the ruling regime.

People have sometimes complained to me about “religion getting mixed up in politics.” I try very hard to keep the proclamation of the good news from becoming a part of any partisan platform. The Christian church is neither the Republican nor the Democratic party at prayer. Or, as Jim Wallis has put it, God is not a Republican or a Democrat. But if by keeping religion out of politics or politics out of religion, they mean that I or anyone else who is a Jesus follower should criticize neither the policies of any government (ours included), nor the values being served, nor the gods being worshiped, then I will have to refer them to Jesus who not only mixed up religion and politics, but beat them into an emulsified froth. On Palm Sunday, I’m afraid, we are invited to mix up our religion and our politics and join Jesus’ parade.

Seeing that invitation has led me to be able to see something else in the two stories—the story of Jesus on Palm Sunday and of Monseñor Romero’s witness. I have often thought of the Palm Sunday parade as a metaphor for Christian life. Being invited to be a Christian is, in effect, being invited to join in Jesus’ parade. But I’ve been reflecting on the incarnation and on two parades and now I’m wondering.

There is room for all sorts of Jesus-followers. But we Jesus-followers who are also Christians have always said that in Jesus we meet none other than God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all. We say that God was incarnate in a human being, that God became flesh, that God became one of us. And we Christians have always said that this act on God’s part is the source of the power of the good news to set our world and us aright. In Jesus God comes into our story. In Jesus God comes alongside us as one of us. God accompanies us, journies with us.

In one meeting in El Salvador I heard an organization refer to its role as “accompanying” others, especially women, in finding their collective power and learning to use it well. As I have reflected on these things, something has clicked into place—the vital importance of what I am calling acompañamiento, roughly translated as “accompaniment.” It means the act of “accompanying” others in their journey.

We tend to think of God as someone of whom we can ask favors. We tend to regard prayer as one way to tap into some sort of divine treasury. We may pray for ourselves or we may pray for others, but we see God as rich and us as poor. And we see our well-being in God’s gift to us of some of God’s wealth.

But it may be that our health and well-being, or what we used to call “our salvation,” don’t depend on what God gives us. We depend instead on God’s decision to live alongside of us into our story. Our lives depend on God’s decision to live with us in acompañamiento.

When I’ve told people why I was going to El Salvador or why I had been, and I told them that I was going with a church group, the next question was always, “What are you building?” The assumption, of course, is that since we are rich and they are poor, we go there to do something for them. Our relationship will be defined as donor and recipient. We will come away having given them something. As donors we will be the ones with the power and those who are poor precisely because they have been denied the power that is theirs by God’s gift, will continue in their powerlessness and their poverty. And the common assumption is that this is way it is and even the way it’s supposed to be.

But I’m wondering if Jesus didn’t tell a different tale on that day in Jerusalem when he started a parade. He did not so much lay out his agenda that day as he acted out the agenda of the deepest hopes and longings of the poor and powerless of his day. He did not so much invite people to join his parade as he offered his willingness to join theirs. Jesus did not so much offer an invitation to join his church as he offered his blessing on la iglesia del pueblo, the People’s Church. He offered them his acompañamiento. That was the most important thing that he had to offer. Acompañamiento is so powerful that it can change the world. The ones who liked the world just the way it was were willing to kill to keep it that way. They still are.

Monseñor Romero offered his people something that no bishop of San Salvador had ever offered before: acompañamiento. And the government killed him for it.

Acompañamiento is the most powerful and important move that God can make. Acompañamiento is the most important and powerful thing that you and I can do for each other. Acompañamiento is the most important and powerful thing that North Americans and Salvadorans can do for each other.

People ask me what I did in El Salvador and I tell them, I helped to maintain and strengthen a bridge. They nod in approving understanding. And then I tell them that it’s not a bridge to move people across a river; still less is it a bridge to move drugs north from Columbia or weapons and money south from the United States. It’s a bridge that can carry only one thing: acompañamiento.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1. 1F. Wilber Gringrich, Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

"Can These Bones Live?" - 5th Sunday in Lent, A - Ezekiel 37:1-14

5th Sunday in Lent – A
Ezekiel 37:1-14
April 10, 2011

Can These Bones Live?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It had been a rough patch for the clergy members of our Annual Conference. Within the space of a few months, one pastor had been put on leave of absence and admitted to an eating disorders treatment program, another had surrendered his credentials in the wake of the discovery of his gambling addiction during the course of which he had embezzled church funds to support his habit, and a third had committed suicide. The first two were among the finest preachers in the conference. The first was an excellent administrator. The third was newly ordained and showed great “promise of future usefulness” in the Wesleyan phrase.

By any measure these were tragedies. One came quickly on the heels of the other. The were left reeling. Whatever pains the rest of us were enduring, whatever secret suffering, suddenly seemed too real and too public to ignore. Our pastor, Bishop Palmer, called us together to reflect on these events and on their meaning for our own shared life and ministry. The mood that day was somber.

During the course of the meeting, one of my colleagues was among those who stood up to share with the whole group what was on his heart. He announced his belief that there was an “elephant in the room,” a reality that was driving our conversation and our life, an unnamed reality, he believed, we had carefully steered our way around, which reality he was going to name. He announced in trembling voice, with naked anxiety bordering on panic, “The reality is our church is dying and we have to do something!”

His observation is not groundless. The United Methodist Church and its predecessor denominations were a nearly insignificant presence in the years that led up to the 1784 founding the Methodist Episcopal Church.It grew from very small beginnings to its peak in the 1970s and 1980s of nearly 11,000,000 members. As a percentage of the population of the United States, we began at about a percent and a half in the 1790s and grew through the 1800s until we peaked between 6 and 7 percent. Since the 1950s we have suffered a steady decline, so that we now amount to about 3 percent of the U.S. population.

The Iowa Annual Conference has paralleled our national experience. We peaked in Iowa in the 1960s and have, with only a few exceptions, showed a decrease every year. A couple of years ago in his annual report to the Conference, Chuck Smith, our Conference statistician, told us, perhaps unhelpfully, that at the present rate, the last United Methodist in Iowa would turn out the lights in the last United Methodist church in 64 years and three months.

I believe that we are being pinched by several trends. The cultural context in which we do ministry has changed. It will keep changing. Our membership has changed, too, as we undergo a generational shift that is changing nearly everything about our shared life. It makes us anxious.

When our anxiety level is high, and we are fearful for things that matter deeply to us, it's very hard to think our way through a complex of factors. Late at night the voice of fear whispers, “Our church is dying and we have to do something.”

I imagine it was like that for Ezekiel, the prophet of this morning's reading. Like us, his community lived in pretty good times. Babylon was a successful empire and it was rich. Even the poor who live at the imperial center benefit from empire and Ezekiel's community of exiled Judeans were by no means poor. They had done well for themselves. They lived in nice houses. They drove nice cars. They could afford to take time off and spend time with their grandkids.

The trouble was, their grandkids were living in a world that their grandparents didn't really understand and certainly didn't embrace. Their music sang of and to different gods, the gods of the empire, and it expressed different values. “Aw, lighten up, grandpa,” their grandkids would say, “It's just music. It's what everyone's listening to nowadays.” But they weren't reassured, “Have you listened to lyrics?” “Whatever,” was the dismissive reply.

In some ways it made perfect sense. It's hard to live in exile, especially when the exile stretches over several generations. At what point do folks say, “This is our home, now. We're tired of being different, of sticking out. It's time to sink down our roots. It's time to stop pretending to be different, better.”

The leadership of the Judean community could see where that was headed. So they went to Ezekiel the prophet and told him, “Our life has been bleached out of us until we are like dried bones. Our community is dying and we have to do something.”

I wonder what Ezekiel thought. You see, he was a prophet. Prophets in the Israelite tradition knew that the measure of success is seldom what people think it is. When things are going well, that's when prophets get nervous, because they know that while everything on the surface may be fine, there can be deep structural problems in the life of the covenant people that are about to erupt. They know that faithfulness is the only genuine measure of the success of a people who live in covenant with God. Faithfulness cannot be measured by the empire's yardstick.

I'm not sure what Ezekiel thought. I know what I thought when I heard my brother and colleague give voice to his anxiety. My thought was this: “You're convinced, or at least very afraid, that our church is dying. Are you certain that this is a bad thing?” I know that this is a deeply disturbing question. Especially living as we do and as the exiled Judeans did in the heart of the empire, where everything is measured with the yardstick of growth. It's not the sort of question that conference statisticians usually ask, nor bishops,nor district superintendents.

But it is the sort of question that prophets struggle with. Oh, and Jesus, too, struggled with this. During the season of Lent we are reminded that at the moment of Jesus' greatest faithfulness, the membership count of his congregation had fallen to zero. Willing himself to follow God's call, willing to let his faithfulness cost him everything, willing at last in the garden to drink from the cup offered to him, his whole congregation had fled, leaving him alone. I can see him filling out his year-end statistical report: “Membership at the close of 2009. Members received by profession of faith, by transfer from other United Methodist churches, by transfer from churches of other denominations. Members lost by death, transfer, withdrawal and removal. Membership at the close of 2010.” His report didn't look very good. A day later and he himself was dead. And what became of his movement, his message? How can you be faithful if you're dead?

“Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely,” the people complained to Ezekiel. “How can we be faithful if we're dead?”

Let's suppose that my colleague was right. Let's suppose our church is dying. Let's further suppose that this is a bad thing, even if it puts us in good company. Even supposing those things, is it true that “we must do something?”

God took Ezekiel “in the Spirit” or “by the Spirit” and placed him in the valley of the dead, with the dessicated bones of countless corpses scattered and jumbled and piled all around him. “Can these bones live?” “I have no idea,” Ezekiel answered.

“Well, preach to them,” was God's reply. I had an appointment like that once. Every week a handful of people would drag their bleached bones into church and defy God to make them alive again. But that didn't keep me from preaching. I'm a preacher and that's what preachers do. That's what Ezekiel did.

And you know the rest. Ezekiel preached and the bones rearranged themselves, joining the scattered bones. Ezekiel preached and the bones were clothed in flesh and skin. Ezekiel preached and the breath entered the corpses and they were alive again, Judah reconstituted, the people of God raised to new life.

Ezekiel did none of it himself, of course. Ezekiel preached and God acted. God was the one who did it all. But Ezekiel was faithful. He did what preachers do. He preached. And he preached honestly, too, I note. He testified to what he had been told and then he testified to what he had seen and what he believed about it.

The truth he told the bones was the truth that God had told him. The truth that he told the people was the truth that he had seen in this vision of resurrected bones. God is fully able to give new life to God's people. And more unlikely than that, God is willing to give new life to God's people.

It was just a vision, you know. And his preaching was just words. And this story of the resurrected bones was just a metaphor. Just a metaphor. Sometimes I suspect that the phrase “just a metaphor” is a contradiction in terms. This metaphor about new life was itself the source of the new life Ezekiel's hearers longed for. It held out hope, the hope of return, the hope of homecoming, and the hope of being sustained as a people until that day.

Ezekiel laid it all out for them, right down to the dimensions of the new temple that they would build when they returned. Of course, other people had different ideas of what it would be like. So a discussion began about the plans. And a funny thing happened. As they talked about the details, their assumptions changed. It was no longer a matter of whether they would come home. That was now assumed. A metaphor changed their future..

That's all I have to offer, too—a metaphor. All I can do is to tell the truth with images that are contrary to the facts. It's all I can do because I'm a preacher and that's what preachers do. So here's the truth, as I seen it in this text: There is no future for Judah that does not go through the valley of dry bones. There is no new life that does not require their death first, that does not require their dying thoroughly, thoroughly enough that their bones would be dried, scattered and piled in a heap.

The truth is that there is no Easter without Good Friday. There is no resurrection without death. Life is a gift from God, whether it's Jesus' life or Judah's life in exile or our life in Decorah. Life is a gift from God; there is nothing we can do to earn it or deserve it or force it to happen. But there is a condition. God gives new life only to those who are willing to lay down their old life. God raises from the dead only those who are willing to die. The resurrection happens in a tomb, in a valley of dried bones, in a church that is willing to give up its life for the sake of being faithful.

My colleague was right: the church is dying. And it's a good thing, too. Otherwise, it can never live.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

A Community of Outcasts (John 9:1-41, 4th Sunday in Lent)

4th Sunday in Lent
John 9:1-41
April 3, 2011

A Community of Outcasts

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Who’s in? Who’s out? Who gets to decide? Or, to put it in a more learned way, “How does a group set and maintain its boundaries? And how do individuals negotiate those boundaries?”

A visitor comes to our church and finds their way into our sanctuary. The most important question they bring with them is, “Could I be a part of this body of people if I wanted to be?” To put in a more learned way, “Is the boundary of this group porous enough to allow me to cross it if I choose?” They’re probably not thinking in learned terms. They probably just want to know if they could belong here if they chose to.

The need to belong to a group is a core need of human beings. We are social animals. The prospect of abandonment arouses deep anxiety. The need for others is hard-wired in our species. Even those of us who like our solitude, who value the times when we can be alone with our thoughts, would panic if we were faced with permanent aloneness.

The flip side of this is that we all like to be liked. Being liked by a group can be a powerful drug. It’s one we’ll do almost anything to keep getting. We know just how painful withdrawal would be.

Groups use this carrot and stick combination to get their members to act the way they want them to. Street gangs and combat units in the military—as different as they are in some ways—are alike in their need to get their members to do two things that most people are very reluctant to do: face physical danger and kill other human beings. The alternatives of rejection and acclaim are powerful ways of shoving people toward doing these things.

There are plenty of less dramatic examples. With a little thought, each of us could name many of them. A group of co-workers always eats lunch together. Their conversation grows oddly quiet whenever someone who isn’t part of that group sits at the same table. A clique of girls in the junior high school makes it very clear with snide comments and shared laughter who is and who is not one of them.

We’d like to think that we wouldn’t deliberately exclude anyone who wanted to be a part of a group that we belong to, but an odd thing happens when a group feels like it’s the “right size.” We start to take less and less notice of the outside of the group and focus more and more on the inside. It’s what some people have called the “hedgehog effect.” When alarmed a hedgehog curls up in tight ball. Inside the ball it’s warm and soft and safe. That’s the inner experience. On the outside, though, an alarmed hedgehog—and that’s the only way I’ve ever seen them—is cold and prickly.

The sign outside a church says, “All are welcome.” Every member will tell you that what they like about their church is that it’s so friendly and warm. Talk to a visitor after they’ve visited and you will get a different story. “All are welcome” isn’t quite true. At least, it’s not the whole truth.

These questions about groups and boundaries and the enforcement of group standards, questions like, “Who is in? Who is out? And who gets to decide?” are very much in the foreground of the story that we heard from John’s gospel.

Jesus and the disciples came upon a man who had been born blind. The man’s congenital blindness raised a theological question and, since it was Sunday, it was a good time for theological questions. It was clear to the disciples that the blindness was a direct result of individual sin. Someone had violated the Law or, to put it differently, had behaved in a way that violated the group norms in the contemporary Jewish community. That was clear. What was also clear was that the man’s blindness was punishment for that violation.

The only question left was just who it was who had sinned. Was it the man himself? But he was born blind, so when was it he had sinned? But if not him, then who? His parents? It would surely be harmful to them for the son they had counted on as their retirement plan to be unable to earn his own living, let alone support them. But that didn’t seem quite right, either. Why should a man be punished for something his parents had done? A neat sort of conundrum, the sort that makes for a good conversation over Sunday dinner, or better yet in a bar after a couple of beers.

But Jesus short-circuited their conversation by healing the man. No blindness, no guilt, no sin. Only the glory of the God who makes whole. And that’s when the trouble began.

First were the man’s friends who at best only barely recognized him. Then there were the officers of his congregation. This couldn’t be a proper miracle because it was done on a Sunday. The healing violated the standards of behavior of their community. They said it violated God’s law, but groups are always blaming God for their rules. The healing was done on a Sunday, therefore the man who did it was a sinner, therefore the miracle could not have come from God, because God wouldn’t listen to a sinner. End of discussion. Case closed. QED.

But the man himself did not have the luxury of taking this for an exercise in theological thinking. This was about him. His was not an armchair theology. What it came down to was this. Apparently there was a choice between two different versions of God. The first was a God whose universe made perfect sense. In that God’s universe good things happened to good people and bad things happened only to the bad. Comfortable people could count their blessings twice, once for all the things they enjoyed and a second time because all those good things were proof that God loved them best.

The other God was a God who had little interest in figuring out who was to blame. That God was more interested in making this man whole, in giving him the dignity of work so that he could support himself and help his parents. If that God’s universe was puzzling, well, so what? He could see and that’s all that mattered to him.

If it came to a choice—and apparently it had—between those two versions of God, he would take the latter and his eyesight and leave neat theological systems to those who could afford them. He stuck by his testimony. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he said. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

Now a blind man, excluded from meaningful work, reduced to begging, unable to help his aging parents, and convinced that, somehow, in God’s eyes it was his fault was an acceptable member of this congregation. His presence gave people a chance to practice their pity and it was powerful evidence of the cost of sin. Him the congregation leaders could accept.

But a man born blind and now able to see, a man whose very presence confounded their notions of moral symmetry, a man whose presence suggested a God who didn’t care about community norms nearly as much as they did, a man who furthermore was eloquent in his testimony about his own experience and the conclusions about God to which that experience had led him, that man was a living accusation of comfortable armchair theologians. He was a rock in their shoe. He was a pain in their backside. He gave them indigestion and several other clichéd metaphors. So they spit him out, expelled him, excommunicated him.

They called a quick meeting of the Administrative Council. They never specified the charges against him. They never allowed him counsel. They didn’t even bother to consult The Book of Discipline to see what they proper procedure for a church trial against a layperson might be. They just said, “All in favor of kicking this guy out, say ‘Aye!’ All opposed say, ‘Nay!’ The ‘ayes’ have it. He is outta here!”

Who is in? Who is out? And who gets to decide?

When Jesus had heard that the man he had healed had been kicked out of the congregation, he made a point of seeking him out. If he had been cast out of his congregation, he was welcome to join with the Jesus followers. And so he did that. He took his stand with Jesus as Jesus took his stand with the God who stands with the outcast and outsider, the God who does not blame the poor for their poverty, nor the oppressed for their oppression, nor the blind for inability to see.

Who is in? Who is out? And who gets to decide? Well, according to Jesus, it wasn’t the Administrative Council of this man’s congregation. It was the God whose love is so large, whose arms are so long, whose embrace is so wide, that it can include us all. For those of us who need a world that makes perfect and complete sense, this will not come as good news. But for those of us who long for peace, for those of us who believe that there should be a place at this table for all who seek to eat here, for those of us who just knew in our hearts that God’s love would embrace everyone no matter what preachers or armchair theologians may say, it is the very best of all possible news. Everyone who wants to be in is in. No one who wants to be in is out. God says so.And that, as far as Jesus was concerned, is the end of the matter.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.