With Breathless Anticipation (Romans 8:18-39; Pentecost; May 24, 2015)

With Breathless Anticipation

Romans 8:18-39
Pentecost
May 24, 2015

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

Why do I love Pentecost so much? Maybe it's the small community of Jesus´ followers waiting, half in hiding. Maybe it's the sudden rush--or at least the sound of the rush--of wind, a siroco perhaps, the desert wind that sweeps red dust out of the Sahara and blows all through the Mediterranean world. Perhaps it's the flames appearing above or perhaps even on the heads of each of the men and women gathered in their hide-out. Or it could be the languages unknown to the speakers, but known to the visitors to Jerusalem. Perhaps it’s Peter's sudden boldness, indeed the community's sudden boldness. Maybe it's the explosive growth of the little fellowship into the world.

Or maybe, it's just because of all the festivals that Protestants celebrate, Pentecost is the only one that uses the color red. If we were Catholics or even Episcopalians who observed what is called the sanctoral calendar, the calendar of saints, we would hang up red every time we remembered a martyr. But as it is, we only get this one shot at it.

Red was my favorite color as a kid. What do you want for your birthday, Johnny? A red bicycle, not a blue one or, God-forbid, a pink bicycle. Red. Like my taste in food, my taste in colors has become more sophisticated as I've grown older. I like subtle flavors and subtle colors. But deep down I still love red. So today's the day for it.

Of course, red is a little disturbing as a color and maybe that's part of the attraction. Red is the color of blood. Whenever I work with tools--and not just power tools either, hand tools, too--I end up with nicks and scratches and I bleed some of that red blood. Red is the color of the blood that we spill and have spilled on battlefields far away and on our city streets right here at home. Blood is a good thing when it is where it belongs: in our veins and arteries, doing the work of carrying life and its by-products through our bodies. When it is no longer where it belongs, it's pretty scary. When and where did we ever get the idea that we are allowed to spill each other's blood? I don't recall ever getting permission, and yet we act as if we didn't need permission. We act as if violent death were natural when our Story tells us that it is not. Maybe red reminds us of all that, so it is, as I say, a little disturbing.

Red, too, is one of the colors of fire, and fire, like blood, can go either way. When it is where it belongs, it gives heat and light which are blessings when it's cold or dark. A campfire calls us to gather around it in a circle for singing and telling stories. But when it's where it doesn't belong it can be destructive and even deadly, racing through the house of a sleeping family or through a dry forest. So, fire is a sign of both good and bad things. It is what academics call a "polyvalent signifier."

Red reminds us of fire and bicycles and cherries and strawberries and blood and all in a chaotic swirl of barely-glimpsed connections of images. Red is the martyr's color. Red is the Spirit's color. Red reminds us that the Spirit is not in any way under our control. It comes and goes wherever it wants to, as John's Jesus reminds us. It comes and fills us with fire and then it's gone and leaves us flushed with excitement. Or perhaps it puts us up to doing things we wouldn't do otherwise, like Peter speaking to an almost hostile crowd, and then, when it's gone, we are left embarrassed and blushing, maybe, red-cheeked. Red is the color of Pentecost.

Red reminds us of the fire that we will surely need in our bellies if we are to resist the forces of death at loose in the world, forces that not only kill with IED's beside the highways and Hellfire missiles from drones buzzing overhead, but also kill by seeing dollar signs instead of people, dollar signs instead of the other living things that share our home with us, dollar signs instead of the hills and rivers of our home planet. Red reminds us of the transformation that we still await in order to able to be caught up into God's dream. Or maybe we need to be able to be caught up into God's dream in order to be transformed. I'm never sure which, but here's a story that might help. Or it might not. But it belongs here whether it helps or not.

In the early church there were men and women who lived in the deserts of Egypt and near the towns of Syria. They gave their lives to spiritual devotion and, because they lived away from inhabited places, there were called monastics. The women were called "Amma" (mother) |and the men were called "Abba" (father).

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can I say my little office [his daily prayers], I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."[¹]

We could become all flame: a tantalizing possibility, held out before us, of a life lived, not for our own purposes, nor in fear of what might happen to us, but for God's sake and for God's love.

We could use some saints to remind us that we can't use our humanity as an excuse for not becoming fully human. We could use someone like Abba Joseph. We could use someone like Monseñor Romero, just so that we don't think we can give up, or that we should simply settle for the little glimpses we get of red flames and passion-fired blood and winds red with desert dust. No we are waiting, waiting in suspense, waiting in anticipation, waiting in Jerusalem, until God comes to us, comes upon us, as God has promised to do.

We are waiting, but not alone. All creation waits, so we are not the only ones in bondage. All of creation is in chains. We can see them sometimes. We can see the chains in the crude oil spilled on the California coast. We see them in the melting glaciers and the melting Arctic. We see them in the missing milkweed plants and monarch butterflies and in the dying beehives.

We are waiting and so is the whole world, waiting for us. The world is waiting for us. We are waiting for God. At least we think we're waiting. Maybe we're only stalling and the time for waiting is over. It's Pentecost: A wind is blowing, a fire is burning. If we look closely, we can see the chains. If we see them well enough, we may get angry. If we get angry enough,
maybe we'll even start seeing red. It's my favorite color.

[¹] Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Vol. 59. Cistercian Studies Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984.

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Since We’re Already Dead (Romans 6:1-14; Seventh Sunday of Easter; May 17, 2015)

Since We’re Already Dead

Romans 6:1-14
Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 17, 2015

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

I like watching the world outside our windows. It's hard to call it nature, exactly, since the landscape has been profoundly shaped by human activity, unless, of course, we consider that human beings are just as much a part of nature as anything else. Whatever we call it, there is certainly a lot of life happening out there. I am amazed by it. I enjoy watching the birds, the deer, and the occasional racoon or coyote most. They go about the business of living with focused effort.

I like to see some of it up close, so I put out seed for the birds. The bird seed also attracts the racoons, so I have to bring the feeders in each night. My youngest sister Jenny and I have a good-natured running argument about racoons. Jenny works at a licensed wildlife rehabilitation center in Delaware. She is especially fond of racoons. I agree with her that they need rehab, but I have something else in mind. When I forget to bring in the feeders, the racoons will steal all of the seed and wreak whatever additional havoc crosses their sinister little minds. They have torn through the porch screens and raided containers of bird seed (that I now keep in dining room where they do not really fit in with the decor).

But I can't really blame the racoons. They're just going about the business of living. They are fond of being alive. Most of us are. I certainly am. Everything I can see outside of our windows is busy making or catching food or trying to avoid becoming food. Sometimes this struggle takes place in plain sight as when a Cooper's hawk sits on a branch waiting for a mouse to make a wrong move or when a nuthatch wedges a sunflower seed in a crack in the wood and works on it to "hatch" the seed from its husk. Sometimes the struggle can't be seen as when, for example, a tree subtly alters its chemistry to make itself less appealing to pests.

I'm part of this struggle, too, although I have more time for other things, like watching this cosmic drama. It's great privilege not only to be alive, but to be aware of life. It's a privilege I try not to take for granted.

Everything living tries to stay that way, often with enormous effort. I remember a man I used to visit in a nursing home who was tired of life, tired of the effort it took, tired above all of being tired. Ernst wanted to die, actively wished and prayed for it. Two or three times he got really sick with pneumonia and each time he would shake it off and recover. "Why?" he would ask me. I told him I didn't know, except that something in him very much wanted to stay alive. We have a drive toward life. It can't be justified. It just is. As far as I can see all life is like that.

Institutions are like that, too. They struggle to keep going. Like other life forms, sometimes organizations aren't too fussy about who or what they eat in order to stay alive. Other living beings become aroused when their lives are threatened, organizations arouse anxiety in their members.

I will never forget a certain meeting of Iowa United Methodist pastors. It came during a hard time. Within a few weeks the gambling addiction of one of our best pastors became public, another was hospitalized with anorexia, and a third committed suicide. Bishop Palmer called us together for some "holy conferencing." During the course of our conversation one pastor whom I will call Tom--because his name is Tom--stood up and announced that there was an elephant in the room. In a voice cracking with emotion he proclaimed what he said everyone knew but no one had the courage to say. "The fact is," he said, "our church is dying!"

I have a reaction to anyone who claims both to be privy to the hidden truth of our conversation and to be the only one with the courage to speak it aloud, but I dare say he wasn't the only one in the room who entertained that thought.

Just this week, the Pew Research Center published the results of a telephone survey of 35,000 people all around the country.¹ Their chief finding is that in the seven years since the last survey of its kind, the share of Americans who claim to be part of some religious body has shrunk by nearly eight percent. The greatest losses have come from mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. The greatest gains have come among the folks who are atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular." Especially troubling for the future is the fact that while the average Mainline Protestant is older, the average non-affiliated person is younger than seven years ago.

There has been a lot of scrambling to explain or explain away these findings, but they are not anything that we haven't suspected before. We know that we have fewer people than we had in 2007. We had a conversation about this last week in the Finance Committee as we continue to come to terms with a "giving base" that has gotten smaller and is likely to continue to do so. We had another conversation about this last week at the Ad Council meeting as we are working out how to look ahead and plan for our life and work in the next few years.

We're pretty sure we can't keep doing things as we have done them. When we think about it, which we don't like to do very much, we're anxious about the future. Some of us may even be worried that our church is dying.

This brings me back to Tom. Tom's elephant wasn't the only one named that day. Before the meeting was done we had enough elephants to repopulation vast swaths of Africa, but his was the one that stuck with me. I chewed on elephant for the rest of the meeting.

By the time I was in my car headed home, I was ready to ask Tom some questions. I come up with my best questions in my car on the way home! Here is my part of the imaginary conversation I had with Tom: Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you are right, that our church is dying. It might be true or it might not, but let's suppose that it's true. Our church is dying. Why do you think that this is a bad thing? We are, after all, the followers of the one who died and was raised from the dead by the Spirit of God. Why do we think that, if we are dead, we, too, won't be raised from the dead? Why is it a bad thing for the church to die?

Paul in today's reading pushes us even further. It's not just that, if we die, God will raise us from the dead. It's that we have in fact been baptized into Jesus' death, as Paul says. This was in order that we be raised to new life. Our death is not just something that might happen, in which case God has a Plan B that involves our being raised. Our dying with Christ is God's Plan A.

Our church is supposed to die. Our denomination is supposed to die. Our annual conference is supposed to die. We are supposed to die.

But, of course, we don't want to do that. We put every bit of effort we can muster into staying alive. Our institutions do the same. We reorganize; we restructure; we conduct campaigns; we reframe our appeals. We do all of this on the assumption that death for the church is a bad thing and must be avoided at all costs. Our leaders are anxious and their anxiety spreads faster than an Ebola outbreak through the institutions of the church, through the annual conference, through congregations.

Anxiety, of course, is seldom helpful. Anxiety makes us less able to see nuances and subtle changes, less able to think in new ways, and--most importantly--less able to hear the sound of sheer silence² that is God's voice.

But we don't need to be anxious. We aren't dying; we are already dead. We are baptized; we are the community of the baptized. We have been buried with Christ. This is accomplished fact. This is not something we have to dread or try frantically to avoid. It has already happened.

So, since we're already dead, since our denomination is already dead, since our annual conference is already dead, since our congregation is already dead, our circumstances are changed. If I woke up tomorrow literally dead, there's a whole list of things that are on my to-do list right now that I would cross off. They would no longer be important.

Paul says that, since we're already dead, there are lots of things we can cross off our to-do lists. We can give up sin. For whose sake would we sin, anyway, if we're already dead? We can give up being afraid, too. Whom will we fear? What can anyone do to us? Can our feelings be hurt? So what if we are fired?

In the church--local, regional, or global--there is also a list of things that we can give up. We can quit holding on to forms of ministry that used to be our way of mattering in the world, but aren't any more. We can let them go. We don't have to worry about keeping our church the way we want it. We can let go of our quarrels over turf and territory. I dare say we could let go of our arguments about who may love whom. We can let go of our worry about offending financial supporters if we should actually proclaim Jesus' message in our day. We can let go of our anxiety about the future. We can let go of being afraid to fail.

We can let go of all these things and, if we do that, it will free up all the energy that we've been using to manage our anxiety. We can let the worried voices in our heads run down and we can begin to listen to what God is trying to say to us, what God has been trying to say to us. We can listen and we can answer. We can, as Paul tells us, present our bodies to be used to do justice. Since we're already dead, there is no reason we should not do all that and more. Since we're already dead, there is nothing left for us but God's new life, the same new life that is in Jesus, the same new life that is transforming the world into God's dream. There isn't really anything we can't think or try or dare, since we're already dead.

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.

1Pew Research Center. “New Pew Research Center Study Examines America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Accessed May 16, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12ew-pew-research-center-study-examines-americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

2 1 Kings 19:12

What We've Got Here Is Failure to Communicate (Acts 13:1-3; 14:8-18; Mothers' Day, Teacher Appreciation, Senior Recognition; May 10, 2015)

What We've Got Here Is Failure to Communicate

Acts 13:1-3; 14:8-18

Mothers' Day

Teacher Appreciation

Senior Recognition

May 10, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

It was a pivotal moment for the early Jesus movement, but, of course, even more so for Paul and Barnabas. They had both been engaged in the work of Christian ministry in Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria, now in southeast Turkey. There was a large Jewish quarter in Antioch and Paul—or perhaps we should say Saul—would have felt right at home. Sharing his work with Barnabus, Simeon Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, Saul had the assistance and comfort of many co-workers and the broader support of the community of Jesus followers. The work wasn't easy, but we can imagine that Antioch was a comfortable place for Saul and he had learned a great deal. He would continue to learn, but there comes a time in every Christian’s life when without ceasing to be disciples of Jesus they become apostles—Christ’s representatives sent into the world to be the seeds of a new world. That time had come for Saul and Barnabas, so their community gathered together, blessed them, and sent them on their way, a little like we do today for our graduates, only more so.

So off they went on a grand adventure from one city to another in the Eastern Mediterranean world until their travels brought them to the city of Lystra in southern Galatia where a remarkable confrontation took place. Paul and Barnabus were working the streets when Paul saw a beggar sitting and listening to them. The man had been born with legs that would never be able to bear his weight, yet Paul saw that he was open to the impossible hope of healing. So Paul ordered him to do something he had never done in his life and the man did it: he got up on his own two feet and walked. The people were ecstatic, not just because the man was healed—surely they rejoiced in his good fortune—but because the healing was a literal epiphany, a word that properly refers to the recognition that a god or goddess has been or is present.

“The gods have taken human form and come down to visit us!” the crowds cried. Healing is powerful stuff and the people assumed that Paul and Barnabus were powerful gods: Zeus and Hermes.

The crowd was celebrating their own good fortune of receiving a visit from the gods. The priest of the temple to Zeus just outside the city gates heard the noise and quickly brought Zeus’s favorite sacrifical animals, garlanded bulls, and got ready to offer them to Barnabus and Paul.

At this point, Paul’s Jewish sensibilities kicked in: The people thought they were gods! Instead of being the instrument of the people’s enlightenment, he saw the danger that they would simply reinforce Lystra’s pagan religion. The sacrifice had to be stopped. And so he shouted, “People, what are you doing? We are humans too, just like you!” And then he went on to preach a very standard Jewish sermon against the worship of idols.

Paul comes off in this story as the ardent defender of the Jewish (and Christian) orthodoxy that there is only one God who is the creator of all who must not be worshiped in the likeness of anything made by human hands. Jewish (and Christian) orthodoxy always saw the worship of idols as the supreme foolishness: that we humans would take anything that we have made—a painting, or a statue, or in later years a flag, or even an idea—and worship it as if it were a god who had made us. For them this root foolishness was the source of all the world’s immorality and sin. Of course, Paul had to confront it when it threatened to turn an apostle of the one true God into a god himself. He must have breathed a sigh of relief when he managed to call off the sacrifices.

Paul wins this face-off, but his victory seems a little hollow, even tragic, to me. That’s because the Jesus movement was born in a time when the culture of the Mediterranean world was undergoing a deep cosmic shift.

Up until that time the cosmos was thought of as having three levels. One level is the one we live on: the earth that we see. We plant and grow our food on this level. We marry and have children, we go to school, we graduate, we celebrate special days, all on this level.

This level, the earth that we see, is supported on pillars. Don’t ask where the pillars end; it’s pillars all the way down. Other cultures have elephants or tortoises, but the Mediterranean world had pillars. Under the earth, amidst these pillars was the underworld, the place where the shades of the dead went after a person died.

Above the earth was the sky or the heavens, a dome across which the sun and moon and stars traveled in their regular courses, and the planets wandered irregularly. Above the dome of the heavens the gods lived.

Compared to later ideas this universe is cozy. And because these three levels are not completely separated from each other, the gods could and did rather often leave the heavens and travel among mortals. Every place you could go in the Mediterranean world had its stories of the gods who had been born in this cave, or had visted that mountain, or who had kidnapped someone from this field, or punished someone for a slight in that forest. The landscape of this three-story universe was rich with stories that suggested that anyone or anything could be divine. It was best to treat things with respect so as not to insult a god or gods who had gotten bored with life on Olympus and gone slumming, as Paul and Barnabus were suspected of having done. The three-story universe was small, cozy, and filled with places made sacred by the visits of the gods.

Before the Roman empire, each people had its own geography that gave special prominence to local places and local stories. The gods and their stories were everywhere in the Mediterranean, but in every place they were local gods and local stories. There were no gods or stories big enough to be for the whole empire. (This, I think, was the fundamental religious problem of the empire, a problem for which Christianity offered itself as the solution.)

A new view of the universe was emerging. It would eventually be put forth in comprehensive way by Ptolemy, a philosopher who worked in Egypt in the middle of the second century of our era. But the pieces were around before his work and they were disturbing: The earth was not a cozy disk with a solid dome overhead. The earth was a ball. Why, look at the moon during an eclipse of the moon: the shadow of the earth that is cast across it by the sun is curved no matter what part of the sky it appears in. The only shape of the earth possible was a sphere. Around the earth, the heavenly objects revolved: the Sun and Moon, the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond the orbits of these objects was the sphere of the heavens on which the stars were fixed. If there were gods at all—and this question was being raised by many educated people—if there were gods at all that weren’t metaphors of some kind, they lived beyond the heavenly spere.

If we move from the three-story universe to this new model that came to be called a Ptolemaic universe, we have to notice how barren it is, how far removed from the life of the gods. The gods grew to become cosmic in scope and size and their interest in mortals must then have shrunk. We are abandoned and forlorn, bereft of the cozy world we once felt at home in and bereft of its gods and holy places. The world is reduced to a thing filled with other things. And we are only a tiny, tiny, tiny part of it.

No wonder the people greeted the healing of the lame man with such joy! In front of their very eyes they saw the gods at work right here in Decorah, I mean, Lystra. In the form of strangers—quite strange strangers at that!—they had come to visit, to work wonders, and to receive the grateful response of the Lystrans. It all made sense to them. It eased their anxieties about a world too large to be home and gods too distant to care about humans. Of course they wanted to offer sacrifices! It was what such an occasion called for.

And Paul, of course, with his Jewish sensibilities about idols and the unity of God, had to talk them out of it. That, too, must of left his audience confused. Why don’t the gods want our worship? Why would they heal a man and then refuse our thanks? It must have been a painful puzzle. Paul certainly offered no help to them in solving it.

Paul and Barnabus had come to bring good news and instead had left them feeling anxious and bereft. The tragedy is that this wasn’t their intention, but the missionaries and the Lystrans never understood each other and so never found their way to a better place.

We don’t read this story very often, or, if we do, we read it as a hero story with the good and noble Paul and Barnabus demonstrating their character as humble servants of God and so bringing light to the ignorant masses and defeating the wicked priest of Lystra. Perhaps if we read it more often, we might see past the spin to the tragic tale we in the Christian movement have reinacted time and time again.

We went to Gaul and the British Isles. There we found Celts who regarded groves of trees as sacred places. We persuaded them of the good news that no group of trees is sacred, thus reducing the forests of Old Europe to mere sources of lumber and impediments to agriculture.

We came to North America and discovered there a group of people who lived in circular homes with the doors facing toward the rising sun. Their villages in turn were arranged in a circle with an opening toward the rising sun. All movement in their homes was counter-clockwise around the fire in the center of their home. They moved with the sun. In this way their daily lives were meaningfully connected to the sun and to the earth to which the sun gives life. We rounded them up, and gave them the good news of square houses built along streets facing any direction that seemed convenient, houses with rooms that broke up the sunwise movement that connected them to their universe.

We went to Africa and there we discovered chieftains with more than one wife, These wives we should say saw no particular need for wearing shirts. We gave the good news of wearing shirts to the women and of turning out of their homes all their wives except one to the men.

We simply failed to understand, because we failed to listen. People who are convinced that they have the whole truth don’t have to listen. So we didn’t. Sometimes our unwillingness to listen results only in the smallness of our own lives. Sometimes, when we are powerful, it results in death and destruction to the lives of others. Always, we miss opportunities to understand.

There is an alternative, suggested by the negative example of the story of Paul and Barnabus in Lystra, an alternative that might have something important to offer to us and especially to our graduates. Each of you is moving from a small town or a small college to a larger world; it’s sort of like moving from a three-story universe to a Ptolemaic one. The world becomes bigger and less cozy and the gods are far away and not very interested in your fate. In the confrontation of world views everyone has something to say, something about which they are absolutely certain and no one seems very inclined to listen and understand. They talk past each other. They walk away from each other anxious and bereft.

But there are other ways to engaged the world than with absolutely certainty or, on the other hand, a credulous willingness to accept the first ideology that seems to explain why the world is so broken. We could have real conversations instead. To do that we have to know our stories and listen to the stories of others. 

 

Knowing what our stories are and who we are gives us the confidence with which to treat others with respect and hope. This grounding allows us to understand and understanding allows us to find common ground. We need common ground because we have problems to solve that are bigger than any of us. Our world can’t afford another failure to communicate.

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.