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.

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.

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.

Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’ (Acts 10:1-17, 34-35; 3rd Sunday of Easter; April 19, 2015)

Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’

Acts 10:1-17, 34-35
3rd Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2015

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

Who are we? It’s a simple question that has no simple answer. Who are we? We’re Americans. Fine, but what does that mean, exactly? We’re Methodists. And who are Methodists? We’re Decoran. And what is a Decoran?

Who are we in an easy question with no easy answer. Maybe that’s why we are so quick to resort to “othering” when pressed for our identity. Who are we as Methodists? Well, we’re neither Catholic nor Lutheran. We’re not them; they are the Others.

Who are we as Americans? When I was growing up, the answer was, we’re not Communists, like the Soviet Union or China. They were our Others. With the collapse of the Soviet-style Communism we were left for a while with no Other, that is, until September 11, 2001, when Al Quaeda came to our rescue by providing us with a new Other. Now we’re not freedom-hating fanatical jihadists. That’s our new Other.

An Other is a mythic character, remembering my definition of a myth: a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. The Myth of the Other is the simplest myth, but it never seems to go out of style. We are not them. We love our freedom, but they don’t. We are civilized, but they are barbaric. We are kind and generous; they are mean and brutal. We value women and men as equals; they subordinate women to male oppression. We value science and reason; they are stuck in the dark ages of fear and superstition. It’s a simple myth to give a simple answer to the simple questions, Who are we?

The beauty of the Myth of the Other is that none of it needs to be objectively true for the myth to work. In fact, the less true the myth is, the more tightly we will cling to it as our way of defining who we are.

The appeal of the Myth of the Other grows when who we are is in question. I’ll risk a prediction: as we get closer to 2040 when English-speaking white people will not longer be in the majority in the United States, the Myth of the Other will kick into overdrive. In our history the Myth of the Other has always expressed as some form of racism. Therefore I predict that, the closer we get to 2040, the uglier and more common overt racism will become. As part of our country drifts into conscious racism, we would-be followers of Jesus will have to choose between going along to get along or publicly reminding folks that Jesus did not die and rise from the dead so that white folks could be in charge.

I see this coming because I know that the Myth of the Othyer gains its power from the fear people have when their group identity is threatened.

Now, if we can say anything about the Jewish people of Roman times, we can say that their group identity was threatened. In Judea, and in Galilee, too, Jewish identity was under pressure. Under Roman occupation Jews had little political or economic power and no military power at all. Greco-Roman culture was sophisticated and alluring and many Jews were simple melting into the populace at large. Any active resistance to Roman culture and rule risked bringing down the might of the legions.

Jews struggled with each other at to the best strategy to adopt. With divisions inside and threats outside, you can believe they were “othering” like crazy. Their Others were the non-Jews, the Gentiles, the “nations” or “goyim as it is in Hebrew. Mufh of their othering took the form of rule about contact with non-Jews. Jews did not have Gentiles as house guests, for example, and they didn’t enter their homes. Gentiles were ritually unclean. Jews were contaminated by contact with non-Jews and had to go through a ritual of purification. The rite was not really a burden, but it served to underscore that the division between Jews and everyone else was the same as the division between clean and unclean. Imagine that someone felt compelled to wash their hands after shaking your hand, not because it was flu season, but because of who you were. Or imagine that you felt the need for a post-handshake hand-washing because someone was black or gay or a Muslim.

If we let that sink in for a bit, we’re ready to consider the story of Peter and Cornelius. Cornelius was Peter’s Other. He was a Gentile, a Roman, a retired soldier. He had been responsible for oppressing Jews. He was everything that Peter hated about the unclean, non-Jewish world wrapped in ribbon and tied with a bow. Of course, the story says that Cornelius and his household were “God-fearers,” Gentiles who worshiped the Jewish God. I’m not sure that worked entirely in his favor, though. I’d be surprised if in some dark corner of Peter’s mind there were not a voice that said something like, “He and his kind took our land, our freedom, and our dignity. Why do they have to take our religion, too?”

The action begins with an answer to prayer, but, against our expectations it is Cornelius, the Gentile, whose prayer is answered. An angel appears with instructions to send for Peter. He is staying in Joppa with a man named Simon who is a tanner. A tanner is someone who turns animal skins into leather. Now, while leather is not unclean, animal skins are. The theme of ritual uncleanness is already firmly established in the story and it has hardly begun.

Cornelius sends servants as instructed to fetch Peter. The next day as these servants are nearing Joppa, Peter is praying while waiting for dinner. He’s on the rooftop and the cooking smells are wafting up and he’s hungry and the sun is warm and Peter falls asleep and dreams. Naturally, he dreams about food, but this is not ordinary food. Not a bit of it is kosher, clean, permitted. It’s all unclean. In this dream he is told to kill and eat something, but he refuses, protesting that he had never eaten anything unclean or impure. The food is take away. The dream repeats itself twice.

Peter is disturbed by this dream and is trying to figure it out when the messengers from Cornelius arrive. They are at the gate call out for Peter.

Gates are important in the story. They mark the boundary between inside and out, between us and them. The messengers are waiting at the gate. It’s only polite, but in this case it’s doubly important. The messengers are Gentiles. The household is Jewish. The Gentile messengers would pollute the house by entering it. Imagine that! They would render unclean a tannery, a place where animal carcasses are processed, just by walking through the gate.

Peter, hearing the commotion, is told by God to go with them without hesitation. but instead of going with them, he invites them into the house. I wonder how Simon the tanner felt about that.)

The next day they all went back to Cornelius’s house in Caesarea. Cornelius met Peter at the gate. Why? Because Cornelius knows that Peter can’t come into his house without becoming unclean. And yet Peter not only goes with Cornelius into his house, he stays for several days. Why? Because of what the voice told him when he was dreaming: “Never consider unclean what God has made pure!”

Because of this Peter invited the messengers into his host’s house, traveled with them them, went into Cornelius’s home, baptized Cornelius and his household, and stayed several days as his guest. In doing these things, Peter did not simply break a few rules. Peter dismantled his own world. He recognized his brothers and sisters in the faces of Others. The categories that he had used to make sense of his world collapsed and his world collapsed with them.

It is a kind of death, you know, when the assumptions on which we have built our world crumble. But what Peter is beginning to learn is that there is new life on the other side of that kind of death. There is resurrection on the other side of the loss of a world. There is hope even when optimism is impossible.

Peter faced a choice between keeping the safe and familiar world he had made for himself by othering Cornelius or finding his new life in the new world into which the God who makes all things clean was calling him. He chose the new world, new life, resurrection.

Again and again, as we encounter neighbors who are not middle class, not English-speaking, not white, not Christian, not straight, not a dozen other things we use to divide the world into us and them, we will face the same choice. May God grant us grace to choose new life over old comforts, strange new brothers and sisters over familiar Others, resurrection over safety.

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Unto the End of the Present Age (Matthew 28:16-20; 2nd Sunday of Easter; April 12, 2015)

Unto the End of the Present Age

Matthew 28:16-20
2nd Sunday of Easter
April 12, 2015

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

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” We know these workds as the Great Commission. If I’ve said them right. you were able to hear the capital letters. The Great Commission.

If you were like me you’ve had this drummed into your head since your Sunday School days: “…go and make disciples.” I heard that a lot, especially every time a missionary visited. I remember hearing it, but I didn’t really see much actual going. We collected money or used clothing or other stuff. We sent money, but someone else went. We didn’t go. We stayed. But still in some sense we saw ourselves as fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Great Commission for us was as central to what Jesus taught and who he was as the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule. “Our Father who art in heaven…” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” I got the impression that, if you got those three things right, you pretty much had being a Christian handled.

It’s strange, then, that the Great Commission is only given once in the four gospels. John’s Jesus’ last earthly act is to settle a dispute between Peter and John, or perhaps better, among their disciples. Luke’s Jesus sent the apostles to preach the forgiveness of sins to all nations, but says nothing about whether anyone will be persuaded to be Jesus’ disciple. In Mark, no one even finds out that Jesus has been raised since the women who say him “said nothing to nobody, because there were afraid.” Why, then, did we latch onto this set of instructions for how to be the Church, especdially since most of us have no intention of going anywhere?

Would it surprise you to learn that using these verses as the basis for our mission is relatively recent? This text hardly ever got mentioned when peo[ple in the ancient church talked about mission. They didn think that their mission was to make Christian disciples of everyone; they thought it was enough to have some disciples everywhere, so that God’s praise could be spoken and heard to the ends of the earth.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that the idea that everyone should be converted to Christianity became popular and these verses became the basis and slogan for the modern missionary movement. We could say that we were just really slow to catch on to the obvious, that it took us eighteen hundred years to notice Jesus’ instructions. Maybe so.

I’m always a little suspicious though when a text that has languished for centuries is suddenly in vogue, suddenly becoming the foundation on which the Church builds its whole notion of what it means to be followers of Jesus. When I see that happen, I look around to see what else was going on at the time and if they are perhaps connected. When I ask why there verses because so popular in the middle of nineteenth century and what else was happening in our country at the time, I can’t hape but notice that we were in the middle of building an empire. We were finishing the centuries-long work of expelling the original inhabitants of our country, shoving them beyond the our frontiers, enclosing them in reservations, or just simply killing them. Local militias and the Army had the major roles in the effort, but the churches had their part to play, too. In reservations and scattered through the country were Iindians from various nations who had had their cultures smashed to bits and who were demoralized. Others were angry to their core, looking for some way, any way, to strike back at those who had destroyed their lives. (Let me assure that it was not because they hated our freedoms.)

Making these defeated nations in disciples of Christ not only seemed like obedience to these newly-discovered verses. It was also part of the project of “pacifying” the Indians so that we could enjoy in peace in places like Decorah the land we had taken.

Then, the continent fully under white control, we turned our eyes abroad to places like Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, and the rest of Central America. The Army, Navy, and Marines imposed our will around the world to make it safe for our companies. And everywhere they went, missionaries followed, making disciples out of heathens and “real” Christians out of the Catholics of the former Spanish colonies. It was the golden age of imperialism and the Great Commission supplied the slogans for a cheerleading Church.

When we read a text from the Bible, what it means is not the only important question. It’s also important to ask how a text has been used. This text has been used to oppress the weak, to shatter cultures, and to secure power and possessions on “our” continent and around the world.

In spite of all that, though, I think there is something here that calls us to sanity, health, and even holiness. And it hjas to do with the direction of the movement in the text. It’s in that one word, “Go!”

We used to talk a great deal about “Go and make disciples” but we never actually went. The work of securing and empire and the work of the missionary movement–and, really, they were always two sides of the same coin–were the job of specialists: sailors, soldier, and marines on the one hand, and missionanries on the other. A few people were “called” to go, but most of us were not. Instead, we stayed hojme and supported their efforts with our taxes and our offerings. The frontier–the boundary between the Christian and developed capitalist world and the un- or under-developed and non-Christian world–was far away.

In the churches we worked on getting people to come to help us support those souls brave enough–braver that we were–to actually “go and make disicples.” The rest of the time we tried to be good citizens who paid our taxes so that the frontiers could be held or maybe even pushed back.

But all of that has come unraveled. We still send our military overseas, but they only seem to make us enemies faster that we can kill them. We try to secure our borders, at least the one between us and the countries with brown-skinned people, but the frontiers feel more porous than ever. Now Christians in Korea and Africa send missionaries to us.

Maybe we had only fooled ourselves before, but our country no longer seems all that Christian. Even our little newspaper here in Decorah tell the story. On Tuesday we learned that someone who thinks about these things has rated Luther Collegew as the best of its kind in the state. How did they do that? They compared the costs of attending with the income of its graduates. Then on Tuesday we read about the unhappiness over the later start of the school year, a change mandated by the governor, not for its educational benefit but for the good of the tourism industry that needs teh cheap labor of high school students for its profitability. It’s hard to square either of these stories with the man who taught us that “you cannot serve God and money.”

The frontiers have shifted. We live in the midst of a culture that talks a great deal about God, but that has apparently never heard of the God of Jesus. The missionary frontier begins at the doors our church. Our main concern thirty years ago was how to get people to come to church. We’re still thinking that way. We worry about empty pews, last Sunday not withstanding. A parents tells me, his vboivce breaking with anxiety, that we have to entice you to come.

Mattthew’s Jesus turns our notions upside down. The point of church is not to get people to come. The point of church is for us to go. We gather so we can be formed so we can be scattered into our community and world. Matthew’s Jesus turns our attention from the struggles involved in running any church in the early twentieth-first century toward the broken world around us.

Make no mistake. It’s not a matter of taking up these verses with the pride and arrogance of the imperial age. We may find that we listen more than preach. We may find that we are the ones who are converted to Christ. We may find that far from having all the answers and taking charge, that someone else may already know what needs to be done. And all they need is one more set of hands, hands that could be ours.

Jesus turns us outward, humbler and–it is devoutly to be hoped–a little wiser. He turns us outward and gives us a promise. If we follow our path of discipleship out the doors, into the missionary frontier that is American culture in our age, Jessu promises “I myself will be with you every day until the end of the present age.”

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A Change of Plans (Matthew 28:1-10; Easter; April 5, 2015)

A Change of Plans

Matthew 28:1-10
Easter
April 5, 2015

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

Our daughter, Beth, has written the shortest Easter sermon. She was visiting us at Easter time once when she was still in college and knew everything. I was working away on the Saturday before Easter and she advocating putting my sermon away and preaching what everyone had come to hear: a sermon in four sentences.

Here it is: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham.

Short, sweet, and, I have to admit, the essence of every Easter sermon I have either heard or preached.

“Believe me, Dad,” she said, “people will thank you for it.”

Maybe she’s right. At the same time, I can’t help but feeling that there is something more that needs to be said. After all, at its heart, the Easter proclamation is about vindication; it’s about recognizing the winner; it’s about derailed plans suddenly re-railed. As humans we all tend to read into this that it’s a vindication of us, recognizingourselves as winners, and re-railing our plans. Then it is not so much Jesus who is risen from the dead; it’s us. Easter then becomes an affirmation of us and of the arrangements we have made for our lives. We move on with a will to whatever is waiting for us after church: ham, or (in our case) lamb, or (if you are a vegan or vegetarian) yams.

I can’t help the feeling that there is something else at work here, something more than the good feelings brought on by a promising spring after a long and hard winter, when we get to put away our sun lamps and can go to work and come home in daylight. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it goes beyond our imagination. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it has to be true.

That’s what Mary Magdalene and the “other Mary” thought. If we settle for less than that we will render their testimony false. If we settle for less than the fear and joy that they experienced we might just as well save ourselves the bother and go straight for the ham, lamb or yams.

The women, of course, did not go to the cemetary expecting Easter. Though we are not told what they planned to do once they got there, they went to see the tomb. Jesus was dead; they expected his body to be in the tomb.

Jesus had forced a showdown with the powers of Roman Jerusalem and he had lost. The rich and powerful won. Violence won. Injustice won. Hatred won. Death won. That came at no surprise, really, although they had perhaps hoped for more. Jesus had come preaching and teaching God’s care for the poor, the sick, the outcast, the sinners, in short, the losers of his world. He had stood with them and for them. He had even claimed that God favored them with special love. He had claimed that God was at work in them and among them, bringing the Kingdom of God into this world through them.

The rich, the strong, the insiders, the righteous, the winners didn’t take Jesus’ preaching very well. They felt threatened. That is, of course, because they were in fact threatened by Jesus. They reacted to him as to any one else who proclaimed God’s judgment on their comfortable arrangements of things. They killed him. All the rules were followed. Jesus was properly accused, properly convicted, properly sentenced. This is how the powers-that-be murder those who threaten their power.

Winners win and losers lose. There was nothing new about that and the women knew it. The women knew that Jesus was dead. The guards at his tomb knew he was dead. Pontius Pilate and the High Priest knew that Jesus was dead. They could all get on with their lives, whether lives of poverty or lives of privilege.

But that’s where they were wrong, all of them. That’s when there was an angel of the Lord, dazzling white and brilliant. That’s when there was an earthquake and the guards–tough Roman guards, veterans of multiple deployments–the guards fainted from fear. The women, frightened but bravely holding on to consciousness, received the message from the angel and instructions to gather the disciples and head for Galilee. And then Jesus himself met them as they ran to carry out their instructions. They touched the dead man, now alive, and heard his words.

Everyone’s plans changed in just a few moments. The Mary Magdalen and the “other Mary”, who until very recently in Matthew’s gospel had not even been mentioned, became the key figures the story. The authorities suddenly found themselves doing damage control, trying in vain to contain and control the story.

Soon the disciples did go to Galilee; they did meet Jesus there; they did receive their instructions to make disciples. “Make disciples everywhere,” Jesus told them, “even in Decorah.” Soon they found their voices; they went everywhere, even Decorah, and proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord.”

This was the outcast Jesus, the ex-peasant from Galilee, the criminal who died a shameful death, the loser, the gadfly, the one who mocked the rulers and punctured bloated egos, the lover of tax-collectors, prostitutes and other notorious persons, this Jesus is Lord.

We know that this is imperial language. Of only one other person was it said that he “is Lord” and that was the emperor. When the disciples found their voices they announced that Caesar is not Lord. All the so-called authorities are overthrown. All of them. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

I’m not sure that a lot of Christians get this. A lot of Christians seem to think that being a Christian should get them some power and special considerations. Their version of Christian faith should have a privileged place in public life. They should get to treat people they don’t like badly as long as they claim that Jesus doesn’t like them either.

What we don’t understand is that Jesus has dethroned every authority, even ours. Caesar is not Lord. Barack Obama is not Lord; neither is Joe Biden. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner–they’re not Lord. Neither are Rachel Maddow, nor Rush Limbaugh, nor Jon Stewart, nor Bill O’Reilly. They are all dethroned. The United States is dismissed, and so it the United Nations. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Charge are not Lord; they are unseated. Monsanto and Exxon are not sovereign. We owe no final allegiance to anyone’s Commander-in-Chief. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are dethroned. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are put down.

Now we are free to imagine a new world. We are free to dream a world where black lives matter, where the hungry eat their fill, where the earth sighs in relief from its long suffering, where love between equals is celebrated no matter who is loving whom, where the poor have all that they need to live good lives and the rich will no longer be burdened with more than they need. We are free to dream God’s dream.

Feel free to add to that list if you didn’t find something there to fill you with fear and joy. As for me, I found plenty. The news this morning is enough to unmake us all. The news this morning is enough to remake us all. The news this morning goes beyond what we have thought or felt or imagined. The news this morning is too good not to be true. And here is the news: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive! Hallelujah!! Now all we have to do is to live into this new life that has come to us. We can chew on that while we’re eating our ham, or lamb, or yams.

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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.