Giving Our Church Away (5th Sunday of Easter; Acts 15:1-18; May 14, 2017)

Giving Our Church Away

5th Sunday of Easter
Acts 15:1-18
May 14, 2017

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

Church is hard. It's no wonder so many people opt out of it. Most of us have heard that one of the fastest growing responses to polling that asks what religious body people belong to is the "Nones." These are folks who do not belong to a church or any other religious group. They may or may not have had much in the way of religious instruction in any tradition. They feel free--in the words of The Life of St. Anthony wrenched violently out of context--"to imitate a wise bee gathering nectar from many flowers." They pick up this idea from one tradition and another idea from another tradition and sew them together in a spiritual patchwork quilt.

Of course, there are problems with this approach to the spiritual life. Among the most important problems is the fact that ideas, values, and practices are rooted in their traditions. It's hard to make a garden by yanking flowers out of various other gardens, sticking them in ground, and hoping they will grow. But this is the age in which we can roll up corned beef, sauerkraut, some cheese, and Russian dressing in a tortilla and call it a Reuben burrito, so I suspect that this cafeteria-style of shopping for spiritual practices is going to continue.

The children of Nones are even less tethered to any tradition. Some of them--by way of reaction--are looking for Tradition with a capital "T". Some of them find themselves drawn to high liturgy with "smells and bells". Others are simply floundering in a sea of disconnected practices and ideas.

And then there is a relatively new group that has been named the "Dones". They have been members of churches, sometimes highly committed members, but for one reason or another they are "done", not just with a particular congregation, but with the whole idea of membership in any congregation. They are "done" with the Church. They are often not done with God nor, especially, with Jesus. His teachings are still central to their lives. They've just had it with the Church.

Polling people are interested in this group. They have a pretty good idea of why the Dones are a rapidly growing category in America today. These folks are done with being told what they have to believe. They are done with exclusionist preaching and teaching that tells them that their friends are outside the circle of God's love and acceptance. They are tired of the politics of intolerance. They are tired of being told that being a "real" Christian means voting for a particular candidate for President, or Senator, or Governor, or dog-catcher. They still want to follow Jesus. But they have come to believe that they will be better able to do that without the Church.

Church is hard. There is a kind of what I call "given-ness" about any congregation. A congregation always has the people it has. When we join ourselves to a congregation we get the people who are part of the congregation and get them "warts and all." This is usually okay, since they get us, too. And each of us comes with our own rough edges. I have said, and believe, that church, like family, is God's way of giving us a laboratory in which we can learn how to love people whom we sometimes don't like very well, and to do this as people who too often aren't very likable ourselves. That is hard work. But it is the hard work that--if we stick with it--nudges us along toward becoming the people that God has in mind for us to be. Church is a sort of rock polisher. In we go, all rough edges.
We come out as polished stones, showing an unsuspected beauty. But it's torture in between. being tumbled against each other, banged against each others' rough edges. Church is hard.

That's not new, of course, as we heard in this morning's reading. The context is a conflict in the early Church. As many of these conflicts were this one is about boundaries: Who is in the Church and who is not? What happens at the border of the Church? What are the credentials that anyone seeking entry needs to show?

The conflict had simmered for a while, but in the congregation at Antioch things came to a boil. The Antioch church was visited by those who had come "down" from Jerusalem. The visitors didn't like what they saw. There were people there calling themselves Christians who had never become Jews. The Judean visitors insisted that this was a requirement. There were 613 mitzvot, commands binding on ordinary Jewish men. People who wanted to become Christians had to obey them.

Paul and his co-workers insisted that it was not a requirement. They pointed to all that God was doing through the non-Jewish members of the congregation. The lives of non-Jewish followers of Jesus were being transformed. Their conversions were genuine. At least for those who had no Jewish background, being Torah-observant Jews had nothing to do with being followers of the Jewish Jesus.

Neither side could convince the other. What to do? Conflict is one of the hardest things about the hard thing we call church.

There are times when we have done conflict very badly. One of my favorite examples was supplied when Carol and I visited Scotland for the first time. I am fascinated by old things, even things that are only old by American standards. You can imagine how annoying I was in Scotland!

We visited the parish church in Stirling. The Church of the Holy Rude, that is, the Church of the Holy Cross, is old, built in 1129, destroyed by fire in 1405, and then rebuilt. It has seen a lot of history, including the coronation of the infant James VI of Scotland who later became James I of England. This was James of the King James Bible fame.

For our purposes, though, there is an instructive story. Some time after the Scottish Reformation there was a conflict in the congregation at Holy Rude. Some were Scots Kirk folks and others were Free Kirk people. They were both essentially what we would call Presbyterians, but they disagreed on how pastors should be called. Scots Kirk people argued that the local laird or, in their case, the City Council, had the duty to call the pastor. The Free Kirk folks said that the pastor should be called by the Presbytery, the regional governing body.

Scots are fond of fighting. Their resting state is DEFCON 4, so you can imagine that the dispute did not go well. The congregation was deadlocked. Their governing body, the Session, was deadlocked as well. They appealed to the City Council. But the Council was a divided as the congregation.

So, in the mid-1650s or so they did the only logical thing: they built a wall down the center of the nave, the sanctuary, and split the congregation into the West Church and the East Church. On Sundays each congregation could hear the muffled voice of the other pastor invoking God's wrath on the schismatics on the other side of the wall. Time passed. A long time passed. Centuries passed with the building "shared" by the two rival congregations.

The dividing issue was long since resolved as the Scots Kirk adopted the Free Kirk method of calling pastors. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and reduced attendance rendered supporting two congregations not just silly, but financially foolish. In 1936, the church was remodeled and the dividing wall removed, and the congregations merged, a mere 280 years after the dispute split them.

Fortunately for us, the dispute in Antioch was not handled in this way. The congregation chose Paul, Barnabas, and others to be delegates to the leaders of the church at Jerusalem that was, at this point, still considered to be the founding and leading church of the Christian movement. The delegates traveled from church to church on their way south, "up" to Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem leadership heard from the two sides of the dispute. Everyone had a chance to speak, though, and in the Jewish practice, the youngest were first. There is a reason for doing it this way. Rather than have the leaders speak first and inhibit the conversation, the junior members of the community could speak freely without having to contradict the elders. This was part of an informal leadership development strategy.

Peter was an important apostle so he spoke late in the process and reminded the community that he had himself played an important role in opening the doors to Gentiles becoming Christians. Barnabas and Paul, also apostles, spoke next. Last to speak was James, the brother of Jesus, the senior leader of the Jerusalem church. James rendered the decision, after having heard all the speakers.

James judged that non-Jews should be admitted to the fellowship of Jesus' followers on the same grounds that Jews were admitted: That they turn toward God and refrain from immorality. No special requirements were to be laid on them. From the story and from what he himself said, he seems to have taken this position for three reasons: 1) There had already been signs in the Church's story so far that this was the trajectory that they were on. Peter's experiences in the household of Cornelius were taken very seriously. 2) It was obvious that God was blessing the non-Jewish Christian community with what John Wesley would have identified as the "increase of love of God and humankind." 3) There were clear statements in the prophets that it had always been God's purpose, not only to choose a particular people, but through them to extend that choice to include all the peoples of the earth.

So the dispute was officially resolved. That did not mean that partisanship disappeared overnight and everyone was happy. If Acts is anything to go by, the question of how Jews and non-Jews would relate within the Jesus movement lingered for as long as the time covered by the book.

None of us should underestimate how difficult this decision was: difficult to make, difficult in its implementation. Church is hard, remember? Nor should we underestimate how far-reaching were the effects of this decision.

When we welcome a visitor, we hope to make them comfortable. We hope that they will feel at home among us. We also, well at least I also, secretly hope that they won't change things too much. Change is hard, too. I secretly hope that they'll fit in, that they won't demand that we change to meet their needs. But that is at best a thin version of hospitality.

What the leaders in Jerusalem did was something far more radical. Not requiring that non-Jewish converts to Jesus become Jews meant that these non-Jews would come into the Church without the long process of formation that all Jews had simply by being Jews. They would do the work of being Christians in a different culture, speaking a different language, and bringing different sensibilities to the task. They would not just be Christians but Gentile Christians. There were many more non-Jewish than Jewish folks in the Mediterranean region. The decision to allow non-Jews to become Christians without becoming Jews first meant that eventually the Church would no longer be a Jewish community with a few non-Jewish members, but a Gentile community with a few Jewish members.

They moved beyond tolerance of differences. They moved beyond diversity. James, the brother of Jesus, and the other leaders in Jerusalem did what few leaders have ever done and they led a community to do what very few communities have ever done. They gave away their power. They de-centered themselves. They led their community to abandon its own privilege within the Jesus movement.

Now, I don't know whether this "actually happened" or not. I do know that in telling the Church's story in this way, Acts sets before us a radically different way of conducting ourselves in the Church and in the world. This way is open to others. It is open to its own conversion for the sake of others. It is willing to give away its power and its status. It is willing to give up its own life so that others may experience God's love. It is, in short, Christ-like. Now that would be a new thing. Or at least a very old thing remembered and made new again. Yes, church is hard. But together we can do hard things and the world will become wonderful in new ways when we do.

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.

Eunuchs and Other Deviants (4th Sunday of Easter; Acts 8:26-39; May 7, 2017)

Eunuchs and Other Deviants

4th Sunday of Easter
Acts 8:26-39
May 7, 2017

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

Jerusalem was famous for its Temple dedicated to the strange, invisible God of the Jews. Herod the Great had remodeled the Temple and greatly expanded the Temple area. It was beautiful by all accounts. Of course it was visited by Jews from all over the Graeco-Roman world, but it was also visited by gentiles like this Ethiopian.

From far away he had heard about Jerusalem and thought that it was worth a trip. This nameless official in the court of the queen of Ethiopia was not alone in thinking that. Many travelers in the ancient world wanted to visit religious sites and sacred places. Given the number of gods worshiped and the stories told about them that were often set in places that people could visit, there was plenty to see.

There were a variety of reasons for this kind of travel. At one end of a range of possibilities were people motivated by a tourist's desire to see something unusual. At the other end there were those went for what we would have to call religious reasons. Where this eunuch fit along that spectrum we can only speculate.

Perhaps like many, he was attracted to the God of the Jews. The Jewish God was free from the sort of scandal that stuck to the Roman gods. Yahweh didn't kidnap beautiful young women or men for his own pleasure. He didn't commit adultery with the wives of other gods. That was strange to Greek and Romans. Also strange to them--and oddly attractive at the same time--was that Yahweh not only demanded worship, but also ethical behavior from the covenant people. There was a whole list of things they must or must not do. The Greco-Romans gods typically didn't really care much about what people did to each other as long as they got the appropriate sacrifices.

Some would have become devotees of the Jewish God, but there were barriers in the way. For one thing, the Jewish God refused to allow the worship of other gods. That would have made life hard for the rich and powerful because so much of civic life revolved around pagan religious observances. The dietary restrictions seemed silly: What in the world was wrong with eating bacon? or shellfish? or horse meat? And last, but for the men, far from the least of all, there was the matter of circumcision. The social life of upper class Greco-Roman men often involved the public baths that were so important to Roman culture everywhere. The notion of a man volunteering to be mutilated in a way that would become a matter of public knowledge was scandalous.

But, if they were not interested in actually becoming Jewish, there were many men and women who were certainly willing to imitate the life of the covenant people as far as they could.

The Ethiopian eunuch had been to Jerusalem, had seen the Temple and the related sights. He had picked up some souvenirs from his trip, among them a copy of the Book of Isaiah, perhaps in Greek translation. He was reading it in the back seat of his limousine. Well, okay, he was reading it in his carriage. He found it hard to read. So much of it seemed to have, or at least allow for, multiple meanings.

At this point he was clearly a man who was attracted to the Jewish God and to the life of this God's people on some level. At least on his way home he was more than an idly curious tourist. Perhaps he was on his way to becoming a God-fearer. Perhaps he was already there. But he could not become a Jew. And not because of the reasons that I mentioned earlier, however strong those reasons may have been. Even if he were willing to limit his worship to the Jewish God. Even if he were willing to follow the dietary laws. Even if he were willing to undergo circumcision, there was something else in the way: he was a eunuch and as a eunuch he was not allowed to be a part of the "assembly" of God's people. The prohibition is found in Deuteronomy:

No man whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off can belong to the Lord’s assembly.¹

No eunuchs, in other words, need apply. No matter how much this eunuch studied Isaiah, no matter how generous or compassionate he was, no matter how ardent a defender of the Jewish community he was, no matter how devoted he was to God, there was no place for him among the people of God. He was cut off. Pun intended.

Now, if he had read far enough in the Book of Isaiah, he might have come across this hint that this exclusion might not be forever:

Don’t let the immigrant who has joined with the Lord say, “The Lord will exclude me from the people.” And don’t let the eunuch say, “I’m just a dry tree.” The Lord says: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, choose what I desire, and remain loyal to my covenant. In my temple and courts, I will give them a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give to them an enduring name that won’t be removed. My house will be known as a house of prayer for all peoples, says the Lord God, who gathers Israel’s outcasts. I will gather still others to those I have already gathered.²

There in Isaiah, the very scroll he is reading, is the promise that whatever the current barriers to a eunuch or an immigrant taking part in the whole of the life of the people of God, God is determined to overcome them. But would the eunuch have regarded that promise as something he would experience in the present or as applying only to the still-distant future? We don't know.

What we do know is that, while puzzling over the meaning of these strange writings expressing the character of a strange God, the eunuch was joined by Philip. Philip ran alongside the carriage and heard the eunuch reading aloud (like almost everyone did in those days). Philip was surprised to hear that the man was reading from Isaiah.

Philip offered himself as an interpreter of the text and the eunuch invited him to ride along with him. The eunuch was reading the rather famous text from Isaiah 53, that introduces the so-called "suffering servant" of Yahweh. Interpretation of it was hotly contested. Is II Isaiah referring to himself or to some other individual? Or does this refer to the whole of Judah newly returned from exile whose suffering has in some sense become redemptive? Or does it refer to Messiah in some way? Christians, Philip among them, have typically preferred the third reading. So, Philip told the eunuch about Jesus and pointed to other texts that could be seen as having been fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection.

As they passed by a place with water, the eunuch saw it and asked Philip, "What would keep me from being baptized?"

Of course, Philip could have said, "I'm sorry, my friend, but you don't qualify for baptism because you're a eunuch." It's not as if Philip couldn't have known this simply by looking at the man. In the ancient world, bright young slave boys were castrated so that they might enter civil or domestic service. The expense of the procedure and of the training were well worth it in the increased value of the slave. As these boys grew, they never developed the typical characteristics of men: deepened voices, body and facial hair, and a higher level of lean muscle mass. While there were arguments to the contrary, the consensus was that these men were less likely to cause trouble in a household--whether the home of a wealthy citizen or the palace of a queen--especially if their work brought them in contact with women a great deal.

Philip could have raised objections. But that's not what Philip did. Philip could have refused baptism. But that's not what Philip did. He didn't "pray on it." He didn't ask the other apostles at the next cluster meeting. He didn't consult the Book of Discipline. He didn't ask his bishop's permission. He didn't form a commission.

He didn't warn the mutilated Ethiopian that, while he could certainly be a part of the Christian assembly, there were certain places in the life of the God's people where he would not be welcomed. He could be baptized. He could come to the Table. He could give his money. He could sing in the choir where, in fact, his soprano voice might well be cherished. He could serve on committees and boards. He could be the chairperson of the Ad Council. He could even be the Lay Member of Annual Conference. But under no circumstances could he be ordained as a leader of community even if every sign of the Spirit's blessing were obvious to everyone in the community. If he managed to get ordained, when discovered he would be put on trial, and his credentials would be stripped.

He didn’t say any of that. As far as we know he didn't even think any of that. He didn't hesitate, hem, or haw. He went down into the water with the Ethiopian and baptized him into the assembly of the followers Jesus of Nazareth, into the body of the people of the Way, into the Church--our Church, the same one into which all of us have been admitted by virtue of that same baptism.

This is a pattern in the book of Acts: every time there is a question about whether a person or a group should be excluded or included into the full life of the people of the God of Jesus, every time the choice is to include them. Every time. Every time.

At its best, the church today makes the same choices. When you come to the table desiring to meet up with God's love, we do not quiz you on your knowledge and acceptance of the Apostles' or Nicaean or Chalcedonian creeds. We do not check your photo IDs and your membership cards to see whether you belong. We do not ask if you have been castrated or mutilated. We do not ask what party you belong to. We do not ask whether you are conservative or liberal, alt-right or progressive. We do not ask whether you watch FoxNews or MSNBC or even PBS. We don't ask if you're rich or if you're poor. We don't ask if you are queer or straight or neither. We don't ask if you're young or old. We don't ask your race. We don't ask how much education you have. We don't ask what gender you identify with. We don't ask whether you're a Methodist or not.

We ask only these things: Do you want the life of a follower of Jesus? And do you need the nourishment that is offered here?

And if the answers to those two questions are Yes, then there is, to paraphrase the Ethiopian, nothing to prevent you from coming. And when you come, when anyone comes, we will welcome you all every time. Every time. Every time.

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.

1 Deut. 23:1.

2 Isaiah 56:3-8.

Doing Justice (Third Sunday of Easte;r Acts 6:1--7:2a, 44-60; April 30, 2017)

Doing Justice

Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 6:1--7:2a, 44-60
April 30, 2017

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

This is long reading with two parts. There is a part about the selection of deacons to run the church food pantry. Then there is a part about one of the deacons, Stephen, who got stoned, well, who was stoned by a crowd for alleged blasphemy. There are two sermons in there, too.I was going to preach the one about how Stephen got stoned, but my eye was caught by something, something in the first part of the text. I noticed, and not for the first time, that the seven men who were chosen to supervise the food distribution to the widows all had Greek names: Stephen, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus. Yep, all Greek names. And then I started thinking about how those men were chosen and it occurred to me that there is something very unusual going on in this reading. Let me see if I can show you just how unusual.

The "church" had grown in Jerusalem. I put church in quotation marks because it wasn't really very organized. It was still very much in the movement stage of things. There were a few men and women who were leaders, but their roles were still fluid. There were no policy manuals, charters, or by-laws. All of those things, even our own Book of Discipline, were very much in the future and were often responses to various crises.

This was the first such crisis, a result of growth in numbers of the Jerusalem community of Jesus-followers. They had a program to distribute food to widows. Widows were often in a tough spot. As far as their family of origin was concerned, they were part of their husband's family. To their husband's family they were considered non-family members who were in possession of extended family wealth. If they had no grown sons to support them they had few allies or sources of help.

So the community of Jesus-followers undertook to provide the widows who were part of the movement with their daily bread and more. I imagine that this policy aided their evangelistic work among widows.

What complicated this was that the community was basically bi-lingual. At this early point most of the community spoke Aramaic. The rest of the community spoke Greek, the common language of the eastern Mediterranean world. This wasn't just a language division, but also a cultural and even ethnic division. Outside of the community of Jesus-followers, there was a certain amount of negative feeling--of mistrust and even dislike--between the two groups.

As we heard, this negative feeling also existed inside the community. Not only that, but it was being reflected in how the food pantry was being run. Aramaic-speaking widows, that is, widows from Judea, were getting three grocery sacks of food, while Greek-speaking widows, were only getting two. The Greek-speaking part of the community thought this was unjust, so they complained to "the Twelve." The Twelve in turn called the whole community together. It wasn't right, they argued, for them to stop preaching in order to wait on tables. So, pick out seven qualified men to organize and reform the food distribution program as needed.

Okay, first of all, now I'm thinking this wasn't so much a food pantry as a community meal program, where the Aramaic-speaking widows could go back for seconds, but the Greek-speaking widows could not.

Second, weren't there any women who could have overseen a food distribution program to support widows?

And, third, I'm wondering if pastors haven't been given an effective complaint-reduction strategy here. When someone complains, put them in charge!

Well, none of that is remarkable. What is remarkable is what came next: the community appointed seven men. The mostly Aramaic-speaking community appointed seven Greek-speaking to be deacons, a Greek word that means minister, which is a Latin word that means table-waiter.

We don't have any of the minutes of the meeting other than what the Twelve say and what the community decided, but the conversation must have included something like this from the majority, Aramaic-speaking party: You Greek-speaking folks say that there is an injustice in the way our community has supported widows. We believe you. So we would like for you to run this program the way you think it should be run. Decide what needs to be done. Show us what justice for your widows looks like. And that's what we'll do.

A majority Aramaic-speaking community with Aramaic-speakers in charge, showing favoritism toward Aramaic-speaking widows turned over its power to the Greek-speaking minority to arrange a part of the community's life more justly. That never happens!

I imagine that it didn't happen without a struggle. Like I said, there were no minutes from the meeting, just the apostolic charge and the decision. But I'd be surprised if there weren't some voices who objected: Yeah, but if we let the Greeks run things then our widows will be the ones getting short-changed. At very least some of them thought this. It was a risky move. Yes, the Greek-speakers could have simply turned the tables. To trust that they wouldn't was taking a real risk. But they believed and trusted the Greek-speakers and took the risk. And we do not hear that their trust was betrayed.

It's hard to imagine any community acting the way this early Christian community acted. I know how people in power usually deal with these things. For as long as they can, they deny that there is a problem. Or they tell the victims that change is coming, but it will be slow. Or addressing this injustice isn't possible yet because there are other more important priorities.

Then, if they are forced into acting, they'll set up a commission with representation from all sides: six Greek-speakers, six Aramaic-speakers, and a Latin-speaking moderator. They'll do everything they can to shift the focus from justice to fairness. The commission can look at the rules of the game as long as no one questions whether the game should be played at all.

In the end, they will do as little as possible as long as they can avoid the appearance of unfairness. That's what people in power usually do.

Imagine if they didn't!

Imagine if the Ferguson Police Department sat down with the Ferguson community and said to them, You have said that law enforcement in your community is unjust. We don't completely understand why you say that, but we trust that you're speaking honestly from your experience. What needs to change? How do we make this right? You tell us and that's what we'll do.

I know there would be voices that would say, Are you crazy? Crime will run rampant! Police lives won't be worth anything! You can't put them in charge!

It would be risky. The people in charge would have to decide that doing justice was more important than being in charge. They would have to decide to trust the Ferguson community to know what justice would like in Ferguson, MO.

In the United Methodist Church we put our LGBTQ clergy on trial for whom they love. Clergy who perform weddings for every adult couple who want to commit themselves to a lifetime of loving are brought up on charges. We declare that the consecration of an elder in good standing to the office of bishop is illegal, because she is joined in love and marriage to a woman. We appoint commissions with tiny minorities of LGBTQ people to have conversations about the full range of human sexuality, fully prepared to reject their conclusions at the special General Conference in 2019.

Imagine instead that the Council of Bishops sat down with LGBTQ clergy and laity and said to them, "Tell us what justice for you would look like in the United Methodist Church. And that's what we'll do."

The radical approach to doing justice in the real world practiced by the early Christian community is easy to overlook. It lies just at the edges of what it is even possible to imagine. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't live toward it. This is one reason why I'm so enchanted by the model of Sister Parish. When we go from North to South, we don't go with money bags; we don't go with a list of things that would make their lives better if only they listened to us; we don't go convinced that we know what good news would be for them. We go to listen and to learn. We go to form tentative new relationships, afraid to do or say the wrong thing, worried that we'll misunderstand or be misunderstood. We find instead people who are willing to take the risk of befriending Americans. Given the history of our country with the nations of Latin America, we do not underestimate how risky that might seem. But they do it anyway. They forgive our mistakes. They welcome us into their homes. They share what they have. They tell us their stories of struggle and resistance and survival.

It is that trust and willingness that allow me go to Potrerillos, Chilatenango, El Salvador, where lives are so difficult for so many because of policies that help make life so easy for me, and say to them, I know that grave injustices have been committed and continue to be committed against you by my nation. I have an intuition of what injustice looks like and I see far too much of it. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me. Tell me what justice would look like. I will believe you. I will stand with you. I will work to make it happen.

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.

Holy Heartburn (Second Sunday of Easter; Luke 24:13-35; April 23, 2017)

Holy Heartburn

Second Sunday of Easter
Luke 24:13-35
April 23, 2017

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

I've really come to enjoy our Wednesday After School Program. Eight or so kindergarten through sixth graders come straight to church when school gets out. We have a snack that some of you help provide. (Thank you very much!) Then we have a lesson that Steph Folkedahl has prepared with a Bible story and crafts (sometimes edible!), worksheets and a video. The curriculum is produced by Cokesbury, our denomination's publishing house, and is called Deep Blue. It's well-written and it anticipates how the kids are going to respond pretty well.

Pretty well. Kids being kids, though, and not having learned that you're not supposed to ask questions, ask questions we didn't anticipate. This week, for instance, we asked for some examples of where we can see God. Of course, we know that this is shorthand for "where we can see traces of God at work," but, again, kids haven't been completely read in on our jargon yet. So one of our kids, having heard a few answers--"in the flowers", "the green grass", and so on--objected. "I don't see God. I don't see God anywhere." That wasn't in the lesson plan!

We often say that theology isn't important. We often say that it isn't what's in our heads that counts, but what's in our hearts instead. And Methodists have a long tradition of underscoring how important heartfelt religion is. And it is. At the same time the importance of a relationship with God that is rooted in our hearts doesn't mean that our brains are not important. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, when I hear "it isn't what's in our heads that counts," it's a commitment to intellectual laziness. Sometimes, "it isn't what's in our heads that counts" should be translated, "Thinking is hard. Don't expect me to think. It's too hard!"

But one young person at least is asking us to do the hard work of thinking carefully and well about how we talk about God. One young person needs good theology. So let's see if we can do some good theology for their sake, if not for ours. The story that serves as our lesson for today will give us a place to start.

On the day that we call Easter, but they were still calling the third day after Jesus was killed, two disciples set out to walk the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus. One of the disciples is named--his name is Cleopas--and the other is unnamed. And yet, with unanimous confidence, every artistic rendering of this story I have ever seen portrays two male disciples walking with Jesus.

Christianity has a problem when it comes to women. The New Testament writes past them like they weren't even there, and then every once in a while it says, "Oh, look! A woman!" And then it promptly goes back to ignoring them. The tradition since then is even worse, changing the names of an apostle to turn her into a man, painting Jesus' disciples as all men, when even the New Testament admits that there were women among them, and turning Mary Magdalene--a strong leader of the early Jesus movement--into a former prostitute who spends all her time weeping.

In the ancient world, if two people were mentioned and one of them is a man who is named and the other is not named, we can safely assume two things: the "other", unnamed person is a woman and the woman is the named man's wife.

So the story begins with Cleopas and his wife walking to Emmaus. None of the paintings that I have ever seen has gotten it right. We may assume that they live in Emmaus and are going home from Jerusalem.

This married couple who were part of Jesus' circle of disciples and had been caught up in the events of the last few days had been stuck in Jerusalem over the sabbath. They were not allowed to walk seven miles on the sabbath. They had decided to give it up, pack it in, go home, and pick up whatever was left of their lives.

They were grief-struck. "We had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel," they said. "We had hoped..." Are there any sadder words in the English language? Their hopes had been dashed. Jesus had been brutally and publicly murdered. They might be next. They were afraid, certainly, but more than that they were in shock. The earth had opened up beneath them. Their world had come to an end.

They took some comfort in each other's company. They talked about what they had experienced. Walking helped a little, too.

It's at this point the Jesus joined them. They didn't recognize him. People who are deep in grief are often pulled into themselves. Sometimes they don't notice everything going on around them that they would have otherwise. They looked at Jesus, but they didn't see him. They didn't see him anywhere. There was only this stranger who asked questions and let them tell him their story.

What do we say to someone in grief? "Tell me, what happened?" isn't bad place to start. When grief is deep and new, our lives stop making sense; telling the story is one way to begin to make sense of life again. So they talked and he listened: "There was power in his words and his deeds, but our leaders had him killed, ending our hopes. Oh, and, some strange stuff happened this morning. Some women went to the tomb and saw glowy people, but not his body. Others went to the tomb, but the glowy people weren't there. Neither was Jesus."

Then Jesus--and remember, they still don't see him--did what I do not recommend that you do with grieving people: He called them foolish people with dull minds. Don't do this. It isn't helpful. Then, he launched on a tour of the Law and the Prophets to demonstrate that his (Jesus') suffering was a necessary part of his journey.

By the time he was done, they were walking though Emmaus, the couple's destination, but Jesus (still unrecognized) didn't to plan to stop. They urged him to stay with them for the night. Travel by day wasn't without risk, but travel by night was dangerous. It wasn't something people did, especially if they were traveling alone. So Jesus (still unrecognized) accepted their invitation. When the supper was ready, Jesus (still unrecognized) took his place at the table. Or maybe he took Cleopas' place at the table, because what he did next was to take over the role of the host. Get this. In a culture that set great store by a hospitality governed by strict rules of etiquette, the guest acted as host forcing the hosts into the role of guests. He took the bread. He blessed it. He broke it. He served it to Cleopas and his wife.

And then things happened very quickly. They both recognized that it was Jesus. Something in those actions of Jesus reminded them of other times when Jesus had done these very things: in the upper room, in Peter's mother-in-law's house, along the roadside, anywhere the little band of followers ate together. At the same time, Jesus disappeared from sight and they were, once again, alone. They also named what they had experienced before, while still on the road: Their hearts had been "on fire" while he had been explaining the Bible. It was holy heartburn.

It was too late to travel, but they had to be with the rest of the band of Jesus followers in Jerusalem. They didn't hesitate at all. Back out into the night they went and walked--or did they run?--the seven miles back to Jerusalem, back to "the eleven" and their companions. They heard that Jesus had also appeared to Peter and they told in their turn what had happened to them "and how Jesus was made know to them as he broke the bread."

Now back in the eighties, Protestants were rediscovering the pattern of worship in the early Church. In all humility, let us note that we noticed it because Catholics and Episcopalians had already discovered it and had put it into practice. We had noticed that the ancient pattern could be seen in this text: the pattern of Word and Table. Early Christian weekly worship consisted of two parts: a service of the Word in which lessons were read and interpreted and hymns and psalms and prayers were sung or said; and, a service of the Table in which the bread and wine were taken and blessed, the bread was broken, and the bread and wine were shared with the whole community. And here is that same pattern: first Jesus cited the scriptures and interpreted them, and then he presided at the table where bread was taken, blessed, broken, and shared. There was the two-fold pattern in its most basic form.

The similarities between that pattern and this story are not an accident, but here is a question, and it leads us into the theological question that lies behind our friend's observation. Which came first, the story of the resurrection with its two parts, or the pattern of worship with its two-fold nature? Did the structure of worship come from this text? Or did the structure of this text come from the pattern of worship?

Let's ask this question: Why is this story in Luke? Remember that neither Luke nor any of the gospels were written to tell what happened. Luke was not written to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. It was written for a community that already believed that. Because it came from documents that had gathered oral traditions in the church, the episodes described were news to no one who read Luke, even for the first time. What was new was how the stories and sayings were arranged, and how they were told.

To read the gospels as sources of information instead of as particular tellings of information we already know and have is to read them backwards. To imagine that this is a story about Cleopas and his wife--rather than a story about us--and the risen Jesus is to read this story backwards.

This is a story about the risen Jesus and us. Jesus is alive and very much with us and we look straight at him and don't see him. We don't see him anywhere. We could kind of shuffle along through our days and years in his company and never have the slightest clue that he is shuffling along with us. But then we start to tell stories and not just the stories that get told in the beauty parlor or the barber shop or on MSNBC or Fox. We start to tell our stories, the stories of our hopes and our disappointments, the stories of our broken hearts and lives, and we find our way somehow to the stories about Israel's hopes and disappointments, about the life and broken heart of Israel's God, and something begins to stir. We sit down at a simple meal, perhaps even the barest possible meal--a little piece of bread to eat and a little sip from the cup--and suddenly something falls into place. We become aware once again and once again we a part of all the meals that Jesus had with us in the upper room, in Peter's mother-in-law's house, along the roadside, and at a couple's home in Emmaus.

We don't see Jesus. We don't see him anywhere. But Luke tells us where he is whether we see him or not. He is wherever two or three of us are gathered to retell the stories and respond to them in the deepest places of our hearts and mind. He is wherever two or three of us gather at the table and the bread is taken, blessed, broken, and given. He is at lot of other places, but Luke suggests that here is one place to start. We don't see Jesus, but he is here and our hearts are warmed by the stories. We don't see Jesus anywhere, but he is here and can be recognized, even unseen, in a flash, in the breaking of the bread.

And with this key we can begin to attend to other places where the risen Jesus is present even though unseen. We can recognize him, even if we do not see him, in the supportive fellowship of a congregation, in the unexpected kindness of a brother or sister who normally makes us crazy, in the undeserved welcome from those whom we would turn away, in the illness of the sick, in the shivering of the poorly dressed, in the hunger of the starving, in all the places where Jesus chooses to be. We can't see him; we don't see him anywhere. But that doesn't keep us from knowing where he is. That doesn't keep us from being where he is. That doesn't keep us from the telltale holy heartburn of his presence.

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That's How the Light Gets In (Festival of the Resurrection; Luke 24:1-12; April 16, 2017)

That's How the Light Gets In

Festival of the Resurrection
Luke 24:1-12
April 16, 2017

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

If you were here last Easter--or pretty much any Easter--you would have heard me say, "Of course I believe in the resurrection of the dead. I'm a Cubs fan!" See? See? What did I tell you?

There are glimpses of resurrection--of new life--all around us. And not just in the return of a once great baseball club to the winner's circle after a long drought. In the Northern Hemisphere Easter lines up with spring. Even the word Easter itself is simply borrowed from the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre for whom the month that we call April was named. The only thing we know for certain about her comes from the Anglo-Saxon historian known as Bede the Venerable who wrote in The Reckoning of Time,

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.¹

I suspect she may have been a fertility goddess of some kind, but Bede doesn't say so. Whether I am right or not, the signs of renewed life around us seem to resonate with the theme of resurrection. My grass, which badly needed mowing last fall when I ran out of ambition, has come back fresh and green and is, even as I speak, laughing at me and my plans to keep it under control. Birds that have been absent over the winter have returned. Trees have a green cloud around them, a hint that leaves will soon unfold. Decorah's bald eagle chicks are once again the wobbly stars of the Internet. Pasty-skinned Decorans have emerged from their winter shelters, into the bright spring sunlight, blinking and shading their eyes, grateful to have survived another winter. This is the sort of resurrection with a small "r" that we look for in the spring.

There are other, less seasonal, resurrections with a small "r" as well. Part of our life might be an annual round of tests and an appointment with our oncologist to review them. It's just part of the regime of watchfulness that every cancer survivor knows. Our doctor tells us that the tests show no sign of cancer's return and we didn't realize that we hadn't been breathing, not really breathing, until the news sinks in and we are suddenly more alive than we had expected to be. That's resurrection with a little "r".

Or we have buried a spouse. The death was foreseen, but still a shock, and we have never been in such pain. We knew that our life was ended and yet, somehow, we kept living. A year or more later we are surprised when we have days with no tears, days with a little joy even, and we discover that having grief as a companion is not incompatible with resurrection with a small "r".

But these resurrections with a small "r" are not quite what we are talking about on Easter morning. Some of these are expressions of the changing seasons. Our anxiety over the coming of winter is eased by our experience that winter is followed by spring. We are upheld in our grief, at least a little, by the knowledge that other people have survived the experience. Good Friday and Holy Saturday have been followed by Easter and Easter, at least an Easter with a small "e" can be expected.

But there are some experiences of Good Friday, some experiences of Holy Saturday, for which there is no guarantee of Easter. Eleven days ago a woman who called herself Om Ahmed, a woman from the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria where poison gas killed about eighty people, had this to say to a reporter for the Washington Post:

If the world wanted to stop this they would have done so by now. One more chemical attack in a town the world hasn’t heard of won’t change anything. I’m sorry, my son died yesterday. I have nothing left to say to the world.²

This is what Holy Saturday looks like when there is no promise of Easter.

And what will become of the signs of spring when there is no longer any winter to speak of? When apple trees bloom in February? When polar bears can no longer swim from maternity dens on land to the edge of the pack ice where the seals they feed on live? Can we still speak of the cycle of the seasons when the cycles have spun out of control?

This is what Holy Saturday looks like when there is no promise of Easter.

I know it's Easter and you did not come here to hear how badly we are doing. you came to hear reassurance and hope. I don't have much hope myself. I have none at all, if hope is confused with optimism, for I am not at all optimistic. We are taking a shrinking window of opportunity and gleefully giving it away to the extractors of oil and coal so that they can show a profit for a few more quarters, no matter what the cost to everyone else in the long run. The day is coming when I will have to say to my granddaughter and grandsons, "I did what I thought I could. It wasn't enough. I am sorry." This is what Holy Saturday looks like when there is no promise of Easter.

So what do we do when it is Holy Saturday and there is no promise of Easter? Perhaps we bury the dead like the women in Luke 24. That work had been interrupted by the sabbath sunset. They went back to the tomb with the burial spices they needed and, oddly, found the tomb open, the stone rolled away. Entering the tomb, they saw what Laura Arnold describes as two "glowy" people, but of Jesus there was no sign. I don't know how you typically react when you see glowy people, but the women were frightened and they fell on their knees and bowed down with their faces on the ground. The glowy people--men, the text says, but how can you really tell when they are glowing?--asked what is perhaps the oddest question in the entire Bible: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Well, because, we were looking for a dead person? But of course, once reminded of it, they remembered that Jesus had said something about being raised, though what he had meant they didn't know. After all, Jesus often said important things that made little sense to them.

They had come to the tomb to complete the death and life cycle. There were things that had to be done for the dead body of Jesus, important things, things required by their tradition so that his death would make as much sense as it was ever going to. But their intentions were thwarted, their plans set aside, the smooth progressing of the cycle interrupted. And then they heard strange things from two glowy people, things about Jesus having been raised. To say that there were cracks in their understanding of the world and the way that it works would be to greatly underestimate their shock.

They went to tell the men what had happened. The men didn't believe them. Well, at least that hadn't changed. Peter didn't believe them, either, but still ran to the tomb to see for himself. There was nothing to see. Just a linen cloth. So he left, "wondering what had happened."

At this point on Easter morning we have the testimony of two glowy people that Jesus is alive. We have Jesus' hints about what would happen after he was killed. But all any of us really know--the women included--is that the body is missing.

It is possible that nothing in the world has changed at all. That violence still trumps justice. That death is still the last answer, to every question. That Jesus is really and completely dead. In which case, there is no space for the dream that Jesus cultivated among us to take root and grow into reality. When we started we still thought the world could change. Now we know better. Now we know that no other reality is possible.

But something has changed. There is a crack in what had seemed to be reality. There is the slightest shift. It's only a shift in the imagination. It's only a few questions at this point. Is Jesus still dead? Does violence always win? Does death have the last word? Are the glowy people right? It's only the slightest shift, but there is now a space in theimagination to think and feel the world otherwise. There is room for a different possibility than the one that claims to be reality to take root and grow and maybe even bear fruit.

Every revolution begins in the imagination and it begins the same way that Easter did, with little cracks in the brittle certainties that convince us that the Romans have won and Jesus will stay dead, that there is no future for the polar bear, and that the death of Om Ahmed's son is meaningless.

What we have in the story of the women, the glowy people, and Peter, and perhaps the best we can do right now is not exactly hope. It is the place just beyond the place where optimism died. It is the place in the imagination where something is working otherwise to reality. It is the place where the smugness of the powers that be is confronted with something that doesn't quite fit. There is a new reality coming into being. It is fuzzy still; its outlines are not yet clear.

Like the women we can only say what we have seen and heard. Like Peter we still wonder what happened. But that might be enough for now. That might be enough for us to stop taking as gospel the thin stories of our days, the stories about the usefulness of violence, the untrustworthiness of our neighbors, and the consummate value of being comfortable. That little piece that doesn't fit just might be enough for us to distrust the lies of the advertisers and the politicians and even the lies that we tell ourselves to explain to ourselves why it is we can’t change things.

It's not quite hope, but it is the place where hope might emerge, hope that would let us say, Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Now that would be resurrection with a big “R”.

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.

1 The Venerable Bede, De ratione temporum (The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis, Liverpool University Press, 1988, pp. 55), 15.

2 Louisa Loveluck and Zakaria Zakaria, “World Health Organization: Syria Chemical Attack Likely Involved Nerve Agent,” Washington Post, April 5, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-blames-syrian-rebels-for-devastating-chemical-attack-in-northern-town/2017/04/05/ba173c76-196a-11e7-8598-9a99da559f9e_story.html.