Don’t Be Afraid (Matthew 28:1-10; Easter A; April 20, 2014)

Don’t Be Afraid

Matthew 28:1-10
Easter A
April 20, 2014

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

Jesus was dead to begin with, to steal a line from Charles Dickens.  This must be understood from the outset otherwise the story that follows gives rise to no wonder and no joy.  Jesus was dead and the authorities intended that he stay that way. 

So determined were they to keep Jesus dead that they took precautions to make sure that there would not even be a rumor of his being alive.  They posted guards to make sure that the tomb where Jesus was buried would not be tampered with. 

Jesus had challenged the authority of the powers that be in Jerusalem.  The powers had reacted to protect themselves with an act of judicial murder.  The grave was sealed and guarded.  The authorities were safe.  Their power was secure.  They were confident in the strength.  The threat to their power from the Galilean prophet was over, finished, done with, yesterday’s news.  End of story. 

This story is much like countless other stories in the Bible.  Cain, smarting after his offering was rejected and Abel’s was accepted, caught Abel alone and killed him.  So much for Abel.  David, having stolen the wife of Uriah the Hittite, had Uriah killed by Joab his general.  This was the end of the matter of Bathsheba.  Ahab and Jezebel, king and queen of the Northern Kingdom, had Naboth killed so that they could steal his vineyard.  And no one was the wiser.  This is the way that the strong operate.  They think they can get away with anything.  They go straight for what they want.  Then they put together their cover-up and that, they think, is the end of the story.

But that is where our story begins.  It was dawn and Mary of Magdala and the “other” Mary, presumably the mother of James and John, went to the tomb in which Jesus had been buried.  It was a tomb that had never been used before.  Joseph of Arimathea had donated it for Jesus’ burial. 

Of the disciples, only the two women, the two Mary’s, Mary of Magdala and the “other” Mary, kept their wits about them.  They had followed the burial party to Jesus’ tomb and went back at dawn on the first day of the week, wanting “to see the tomb.”

Suddenly there was a great earthquake, caused by one of God’s messengers, an angel, rolling back the stone that had been used to seal the tomb’s entrance.  The angel was clothed in white and its appearance was “like lightning.” 

Now, angels tend to be scary creatures.  At least many people in the Bible tend to react to them with fear.  When, for example, an angel appears to Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, early in Luke, Zacharias is terrified.  Likewise when the angel appeared to the shepherds, the shepherds were terrified.  Cornelius the centurion was terrified when an angel appeared to him.  Often the very first thing that the angel says is, “Don’t be afraid.”  And, of course, in most cases it is already too late.

In our story, when the angel appears, the guards are terrified.  They shake like leaves and then they faint.  These men, mind you, are presumably Roman soldiers, loaned to the religious authorities by Pontius Pilate for the purpose of securing the tomb.  They have seen their fair share of battle.  There is not much that fazes them.  But they faint from fear.

But not the women.  They don’t shake.  They don’t fall down and grovel on the ground.  They don’t faint.  Maybe from force of habit, the angel says, “Don’t be afraid.”  The angel shows them the empty tomb and tells them to take the news to the disciples: “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

The two Mary’s turn from the tomb and no sooner do they begin to run to tell the news than they run into Jesus.  “Greetings!” he says.  They fall at his feet, but this is not because they are afraid.  It is because this is how they were taught to worship.  In the ancient East worship was not something you did seated.  They did not act out of fear.  But the next thing that Jesus says to them is, “Don’t be afraid.”

These repeated assurances, these commands not to fear, are not responses to their fear at meeting an angel or the risen Christ, as I had originally assumed.  They are the heart of the resurrection message.

Don’t be afraid.  Don’t be afraid.

That’s a tall order.  We’re afraid of a lot of things.  We’re afraid of (in alphabetical order): Alzheimer’s, big government, big money, African Americans, cancer, carbohydrates, cellulite, child abductions, Christian fundamentalists, climate change, conservatives, death, failure, fat, food additives, gun control, guns, immigrants, Islam, liberals, losing our civil rights, losing our jobs, Obamacare, running of money in retirement, snakes, spiders, strangers, success, terrorists, vaccinations, and young men in hoodies.  Some of those fears are rational, some are not, some of those fears are relatively harmless, some are not, but they are all real fears.

We live in a culture that manufactures fears.  Politicians do it on both sides of the aisle, bewailing the awful things that will happen if Senator X has his way.  Advertisers of all sorts create fears and then offer us the products or services—from home security systems to anti-bacterial soap—that will protect us from the exaggerated threat that stokes our fears. 

We aren’t the first culture to be so dominated by fear, although our media are past masters at creating and stoking our fears so that we can be motivated to buy or vote or tune in or click in the way that they want us to.  Rome created and used fears, too.  They used a carrot and stick approach.  Mostly, though, the elites got the carrots and the ordinary folks got the stick.  Jesus’ execution was one of thousands performed during the Roman occupation of Palestine that were intended to strike fear into the hearts of Roman subjects, intended to stifle criticism of the Empire, intended to make any alternative to Roman rule unthinkable.  It was a brutal policy, but it was also effective.

But on Easter Sunday morning, the two Mary’s discovered that the strangle hold of Roman hegemony on the imagination of its Jewish subjects had been broken.  An angel appeared and the tomb carefully sealed by the authorities was thrown open for all to see that it was empty.  The Roman troops who were feared everywhere they went had fainted away from fear.  Jesus, the man who proclaimed God’s empire as an alternative to Rome’s, the man whom the authorities convincingly, thoroughly and completely killed, this man was alive.  They not only heard the angel’s report, they met Jesus himself. 

The message of the angel and the message of the risen Jesus is the same: Don’t be afraid.  Don’t fear the Empire, don’t fear the authorities, don’t fear the grave, don’t be afraid.  That message has rattled down through the centuries and springs forth once again.  

Don’t be afraid.  Each of us will die.  As Americans we don’t like to talk about it or think about it, but that won’t change it.  Each of us will die.  We don’t have to be afraid of death.  We don’t have to pretend it will never happen.  We don’t have to obsess over it.  Until we die we will live unafraid.

Don’t be afraid.  By the year 2043[1] the non-Hispanic White population of the United States will fall below fifty percent.  The United States will no longer have any racial majority.  For some this is a frightful prospect and I’m convinced it lies behind much of the racial nastiness that has emerged in the last few years.  But even though this is a new situation for all of us, we don’t have to be afraid.  We don’t have to project our guilt or our fears on any group of people.  We can learn to live differently as neighbors sharing a great land.  We don’t have to be afraid.

Don’t be afraid.  Some of us are terribly worried about the United Methodist Church.  As an institution it faces threats from disunity and from falling financial support.  Globally, the center of gravity in the church is shifting overseas to Africa and Asia.  But we don’t have to be afraid.  The risen Jesus is not a Methodist, or a Lutheran, or a Catholic.  Whatever changes we face in the United Methodist Church, we can know for a certainty that the Jesus movement will go on.  We don’t have to be afraid.

The Easter proclamation is a summons to fearlessness.  With so many forces counting on our fear, in our day fearlessness has become a subversive act, a counter-cultural movement.  The grave is open and empty.  The authorities have seen their power slip through their hands.  They are ones who should be afraid.  The threat to their power from the Galilean prophet has just begun.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Cooper, Michael, “U.S. Will Have No Ethnic Majority, Census Finds.” Cited 19 April 2014. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/us/us-will-have-no-ethnic-majority-census-finds.html.

A Day of Remembrance (Exodus 12:1-14; Maundy Thursday A; April 17, 2014)

A Day of Remembrance

Exodus 12:1-14
Maundy Thursday A
April 17, 2014

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

I’ve been enjoying having our daughter and granddaughter visiting with us this week.  It’s got me to thinking about family and what makes people into one.  How does someone become a Caldwell?  You can ask Carol about that.  Legally, she became a Caldwell when she married me.  On her driver’s license it says that her last name is Caldwell.  But that’s not how she really became a Caldwell.  No, that happened over the next several years as we spent holiday dinners around my family’s table.  She learned the Caldwell stories, like the time when we lived in Texas when my dad was in flight training in the Air Force and the oldest three of the four siblings, having been warned never under any circumstances to go near the base dentist’s office because there was a nest of rattlesnakes under it, went to the base dentist’s office and looked under the building to see if we could find the snakes for ourselves and how, though she had not yet been born, our youngest sister Jenny remembers it as if she were there herself.  And in a way she was.

Carol learned the peculiar ways that Caldwell’s talk.  In our family, “Tut, tut,” means that we should be prepared for rain and “You’re not so dumb as you look” is a compliment. 

Carol learned more about me than I ever wanted her to know.  When I was thirteen or so I showed Jenny who was maybe six how to crawl out of the windows on the second floor dormer of our house and, by holding on to the underside of the siding shingles, make her way along the gutter to the end of the dormer and then to the roof.  It was a really stupid thing for me to have done, although, in my defense, Jenny had caught me exiting my window and had threatened to rat me out if I didn’t show her how to do it.

How does someone become a Caldwell?  Carol became a Caldwell by learning the stories, learning the language, and participating in the family rituals.  That’s how a Caldwell becomes a Caldwell.

I have told you these things, not so that you, too, may become a Caldwell, but because there is little difference between how a Caldwell becomes a Caldwell and how a Christian becomes a Christian or how a Jew becomes a Jew. 

On the face of it, our reading from Exodus seems to be a history of one of the events that are a part of the story of the Israelite’s liberation from slavery in Egypt.  Looking more closely we see that it is a set of instructions for how the Israelites were to prepare and eat their last meal in Egypt.  They are to eat a roasted lamb.  When they slaughter the lamb, they are to splash some of the blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses.  They are to eat the lamb quickly, dressed for travel, with sandals on their feet, their robes girded up so that they can walk easily, and with their walking sticks in one hand.

This will be a night of terror and of freedom.  Yahweh will be passing through Egypt on a murderous rampage, killing the first-born of every household.  The blood that they have splashed on their door frames “will be a sign for [the Israelites]”, but it is clear that this is, at best, a stretching of the truth.  The blood will in fact be a sign for Yahweh who will see the blood and pass over the homes of the Israelites, killing only the first-born of the Egyptian households. 

This, as I said, is one part of the story of how Israel was set free, how Israel became God’s people, how Israel began its march toward the fulfillment of God’s promises to their ancestors.  But it is more than a history, more than a story of “once upon a time in a kingdom far away.”

It is also a set of instructions for the reader: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”  This is a story that is told and acted out every year, as our Jewish friends are doing this week. 

This is how a Jew becomes a Jew.  She grows up hearing the stories told around the family’s table at Passover and Rosh Hashanah.  She hears the stories of her great Uncle Shmuel who survived Auschwitz and of her great grandparents who did not.  She hears all the stories of her family, but framing these stories and providing their foundation she hears and acts out a larger story, the story of God’s people and their liberation from slavery.  She eats roasted lamb on Passover and she is ready herself to search for the promise of a life of justice and peace.

Grounded in this same story of liberation is another story.  It is the story that we tell of a night like this one, a night of freedom and terror, when Jesus gathered with his friends.  It was right around Passover time, perhaps, if Matthew, Mark and Luke are to be believed, it was even Passover itself.  Jesus and his friends gathered around a table and Jesus gave them a new meal, also a meal to celebrate a coming liberation, a meal that looks forward to a promise kept. 

Paul tells us that this meal had already become a part of the Christian tradition.  “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” he said.  This is the language of a tradition that is received and transmitted.  Paul may have shaped this tradition; everyone who passes on a tradition shapes it a little.  But Paul did not make this up.  Paul received this meal tradition from someone in the Church.  Paul passed this on to the Corinthian church.  And so it has come to us.

How does a Christian become a Christian if being a Christian is more than saying in public that we accept certain beliefs, if being a Christian is more than acting decently toward each other?  How does a Christian become a Christian, if being a Christian is a matter of identity, a matter of who we are?  A Christian becomes a Christian by learning the stories, learning them and becoming a part of them, acting them out.  A Christian becomes a Christian by gathering around a table with other Christians and becoming a part of the long story that begins with frightened Israelites huddled in their houses on that night of terror and freedom, becoming a part of the long story that takes a new turn when Jesus gathered his friends, took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body that is broken for you.  Do this to remember me.”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

A Royal Waste of Time (Matthew 21:1-11; Palm Sunday A; April 13, 2014)

A Royal Waste of Time

Matthew 21:1-11
Palm Sunday A
April 13, 2014

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

Who doesn’t love a parade?  Maybe the people who have to put up and take down the saw horses and traffic cones to block off traffic or the people who have to clean up after the horses.  But most everybody else loves a parade.  We like to watch them.  We like to be in them.  (Grownups, especially Iowa grownups, don’t want to admit that they like being in a parade, but they like it nonetheless.)  I don’t suppose that the people of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day were any different. 

A parade began and they were there, dropping whatever else they had been doing.  Sellers’ booths closed: there was no point in staying open since the customers were at the parade.  In this parade, I think it was hard to tell who was a “parader” and who was a watcher. 

Of course, this wasn’t like one of our parades.  Jesus didn’t get a permit.  No roads were blocked off.  No extra police were posted to help keep order.  Jesus planned this event, it’s clear.  It’s also clear that the planning committee was very small and did not include the disciples who styled themselves as Jesus’ inner circle of followers.  According the Matthew, there was just one float: Jesus, riding a donkey accompanied by its colt.  The rest was supplied from materials ready to hand: cloaks and branches. 

For a parade, this all seems very spontaneous, very playful.  It was less like a parade and more like a flash mob.  The disciples put their cloaks on the donkey’s back.  Others lay their cloaks on the ground.  People cut branches from the trees, presumably palm trees, and spread them on the road as well.  “This is like a royal processional, isn’t it?  Let’s shout ‘Hosanna!’”  So they did.  Children swarmed around Jesus, running ahead and then doubling back, all the while shouting, “Hosanna!” 

Very little of this was scripted.  And yet it played into a script, the script of conquest, with victorious Roman generals entering Jerusalem on horses.  But Jesus was no general and his donkey was no war horse.  Jesus didn’t just play into a script; he played with it.  With his “royal steed,” his rag-tag band of followers, and the unwashed crowd he gathered, Jesus made mockery of the powers that be.  He mocked the Romans with their pageantry and love of show.  He mocked the Jewish leaders for being impressed by Roman pageantry.

In a way this was serious stuff, but then, play is often pretty serious.  Watch a little girl “host” a tea party.  She fills real teacups with imaginary tea and serves it to dolls and stuffed animals who are imagined to be her friends.  When they prove unable to drink the “tea” themselves, she picks up their cups and places them to their lips.  She is absorbed in her play; she is having fun.  Nonetheless it is serious business. 

A girl playing at hosting a tea party is practicing for a vital role in an important social ritual.  Play is rehearsal.  There are very precise rules that might not be obvious.  But just you try sipping your pretend tea from a saucer instead of a cup and you will quickly discover these rules.  Play is an act of experimentation, of trying on various roles and rules to see which ones might fit and how they fit.  Important things are happening at that little folding table with the imaginary tea and cakes.  It’s never “just play,” any more than it’s ever “just a game” or “just a toy.”

But play is also fun.  It’s engrossing, absorbing.  It calls forth our best efforts and yet it isn’t toil.  It helps of course if you don’t have to wash the tea set when you’re done.  But even if you do, there is a moment when you are the one who has the power to create a space in which a doll and a teddy bear may find themselves at home and able to form a lasting bond.  There is a moment when the play is everything, the whole world and its future distilled into one moment and one place.  There is a moment when we forget ourselves, when we are no longer aware of ourselves as anything separate from what we are doing, when we have given ourselves to the game.  Greeks described this experience as one in which we “stand outside” of ourselves. Their word for that was ek-stasis.  This is, I think, the most common example of ecstasy. 

Jesus played at being a king. The kind of king Jesus was playing at was quite different from the kinds offered to him and to his people by their world.  The disciples and the crowd were caught up in the game.  In their imagination, they welcomed a humble king, a king who had no legions to keep enemies at bay, no intelligence agency to gather metadata, and no media specialists to control what people said and thought.  In their imagination they saw Jesus as a king who came to serve and not to be served.  And it made sense, a lot more sense than so-called reality.

Jesus’ kind of king wasn’t seeking power and did not need to use violence.  And yet, by the time Jesus’ game of “let’s pretend” was over, the powers that be had been shaken to the core and were prepared to use violence to stop him.  Jesus had taken the crowd away from its work for an afternoon of play that produced nothing except a street littered with palm branches.  From an economic point of view—and that’s the only one that counts for much in our world—it was a waste of time.  And yet, with this waste of time, Jesus laid waste to the powers that were preserving the status quo of his world. 

It was a waste of time, but we’re still remembering it.  Once a year we get some cut branches, find some kids to wave them around, and have our own parade.  We even sing our own Hosannas.  For a few moments we are caught up in this long-ago event.  We are caught up out of ourselves.  For a few moments it’s just us and the kids and the palms.  We are caught up into a different world.  In that world there is a king who isn’t a king, a king who doesn’t seek power and shuns violence, a king who comes riding on a donkey.

And that’s what worship is.  We come away from our seller’s booths.  Our labor ceases.  We stop working.  We join a parade.  We are imaginatively sucked into a different world, a world in which our ancient unanswered prayer is answered once and for all, a world in which God’s will is done on earth as in heaven, a world in which God’s name is made holy, a world in which God’s “empire” is realized among us. 

Nothing is produced that can be turned into cash.  This hour doesn’t count for much in our world.  It’s a waste of time.  And yet, it plants a seed in our imaginations, in our hearts.  It plants a dream, a dream of a world free of violence, a world in which we learn to live in peace with each other and with this fragile planet we call home. 

Nothing is produced and yet the foundations of the empire are shaken.  From the perspective of the empire it is a waste of time, and, done right, it is a dangerous waste of time, but it is a royal waste of time.  empire is shaken and we get palm branches.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.