Love Made Rich (Philippians 1:1-18; May 6, 2018; 6th Sunday after Easter)

Love Made Rich

Philippians 1:1-18
May 6, 2018 6th Sunday after Easter

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

I've already explained to the younger folks that the word graduation comes from the Latin word for step: graduum. To graduate means to take a step. A graduate is one who has taken a step.

In one way that is a big deal. You who are graduating from high school in a couple of weeks have been at this for a long time: nearly thirteen years. Once you've completed this step, you'll be prepared for the next step. You'll go to college or university or a technical school. Or maybe you'll enter a trade program, an apprenticeship. You've learned (or you are supposed to have learned) the basic stuff to be a citizen who can have conversations with other citizens. You've learned how to find out how much carpet you'll need to cover your living room floor. You should know who Abraham Lincoln was and the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some of what you have learned will be immediately useful and some not so much. In fact, I will go so far as to say that few of you will ever solve another quadratic equation. I still remember Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10^23) but I have no idea how to use it.

However, education doesn't have to be immediately useful to be valuable. The point of education is to become a better thinker, one who is able to reason logically, engage in civic conversation, and have the beginnings of an idea of what a good life might be. This is in order that you might be someone who can make a contribution to our shared life in this nation and on this world, someone who cares about and can add to the commonwealth. This is why we are willing to pay taxes to pay for education.

If you have decided along the way that the most important goal of education is to secure a high-paying job for you, you are wrong. If someone has told you that this is the most important goal of education, they are wrong. I'll stand by that, even if that person was a parent, a teacher, or even a principal.

As you gain more experience, my hope as your fellow-citizen is that you will also gain in your ability to help perfect this nation and our shared life in it. There is a great deal to do.

But before you take that on, there is time for celebration. And we do celebrate your accomplishments so far. Enjoy the applause. There are very few times in life when you will get it. So savor the moment.

And then get back to work, because in another way this is no big deal. Graduation is just a step. It's a milestone along the road. And remember that the English word mile comes from the Latin word mille, the word for one thousand. Romans counted their steps each time the right foot landed, so a thousand Roman steps is very close to an English mile. The milestone is only as important as the nine hundred ninety-nine steps that come before it. So, by itself, graduation is no big deal. It's the steps that come before it and the steps that come after it that justify setting up a milestone.

You will learn soon enough if you haven't figured it out already, that you may finish an educational program but you will never finish learning what there is to know or even what you need to know. Of learning there is no end.

It's not just true of learning, but of life and of faith. Paul not only understood this but wanted his friends at Philippi to understand it as well. "I'm sure about this," he wrote to them, "the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus." We are God's works in progress. You may discover, if you go on to college and certainly if you ever find yourself in graduate school, that some papers are never finished; they are just handed in. "Done is better than perfect," says my sister Jody. And she is right.

Done is better than perfect. Deadlines are what make the wisdom of this obvious. Almost every week, I stand up here and I deliver a sermon that is full of holes, with weak transitions, and points that aren't quite what they ought to be. But done is better than perfect. Done is better than standing up and instead of a sermon announcing that the sermon I was working on isn't perfect yet and I’m not going to deliver it until it is. Deadlines force us to put forward even our imperfect works, as if they were finished.

But God doesn't seem to have the same problem as we do, at least not according to Paul: "[t]he one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus." God is at work in us and will continue to be at work in us so that the job will get done by the time it has to be done.

This is one of those verses that John Wesley seized upon as he developed a peculiar idea that Methodists have been stuck with ever since. Many Christians in his day believed that, human nature being what it is, no real progress in the Christian life is possible. Others were pretty casual about their Christianity and seemed to feel that no progress in the Christian life was necessary. John Wesley disagreed with both. He saw no reason why Christians should not be able and expect to become perfect in this lifetime. This sounded pretty ridiculous when I first heard it.

But before we scoff, we ought to let him tell us what he means. Well, he did not mean that we would never make mistakes. No, our minds are limited; our understanding is limited. Of course, we will make mistakes. We are all subject to the usual weaknesses. We might set out to do something and fail through weakness. That's not what he meant. What he meant was just as we learned to love through the grace of God, we might learn to love God with the same love with which Jesus loves God and this also through the grace of God. In other words, he preached that we who are followers of Jesus could learn to follow Jesus even in this. When he spoke of perfection, he meant perfection in love. This was not something that he claimed to have reached, although others claimed it. He hadn't reached it but he wasn't going to let it go either. If perfect love was God's dream for John, it would be John's dream for John as well.

Now, like Wesley, I've known a few people who claimed to have become perfect in love. In fact they claimed that this perfection not only made it possible for them not to sin, but even meant that they were no longer able to sin. Like all people who believe that they are perfect, these people were insufferable.

I'm not sure about Christian perfection as Wesley preached it. He thought that being perfected in love would mean that we could be free from conscious sin. And maybe so. But after Freud, I'm not sure that means a great deal. The worst and most dangerous of our sins are unconscious, at least for most of us, and they are things like racism, sexism, trans- and homo-phobia, ableism, ageism, and classism, and all the biases and filters we use to discount the value and experiences of others so that whatever privileges we enjoy are made to seem natural.

When I was ordained, I declared before the Annual Conference that I was "going on to perfection" and that I "expect[ed] to be made perfect in this life." Now, I'm not so sure about that, at least not in the sense in which I intended it then.

I've changed in my understanding of Christian perfection in at least two ways. One of our bishops, Wayne Clymer, was helpful in my journey. He said, "If you are not going on to perfection, tell me, what are you going on toward?" Perfection is not a destination so much as it is a direction. And I would rather fail in the direction of loving perfectly than succeed in any other.

The other way that my understanding has changed is about what I think the obstacles to perfect love are. I used to be pretty focused on the rules. The Great Commandment (and the one that is like it), the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount all provided an unflattering mirror in which to find myself unacceptable on a daily basis. An endless cycle of failure, repentance, prayers for forgiveness led me exactly nowhere. I here found that battling "sins" is not a way to progress toward perfection of love.

What I have found in recent years are two things. Another bishop, Bishop Palmer this time, helped me shift my focus from my failure to God's character: "God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it" is the good news. Being forgiven or accepted has nothing to do with anything that we do or are. It doesn't hang on our keeping the commandments. It doesn't hang on saying a particular prayer. It doesn't even hang on believing anything. God loves us and there is nothing we can do about it. We are always already forgiven. We are always already accepted. We are always already God's children. And nothing can change that.

But. We can, if we want to, be a part of God's work in the world. We can, if we want, allow ourselves to be open to God's action in us and through us. We can, if we want, become part of God's good news. We can, if we want, begin to experience in our own lives the same transformation that God dreams of and has decided to bring to the whole of creation on what Paul calls the day of "Christ Jesus."

Every bit of brokenness in the world has some counterpart within me. Racism, sexism, are not just problems out there. They are also and at the same time, problems in my all-too-human heart and mind. Going on to perfection means more than keeping my divine rapsheet clean. Going on to perfection is the sometimes painful but deeply worth it process of having trans- and homo-phobia recognized, identified, and uprooted. This is why a program like Reconciling Ministries of which our Inclusive Ministries group is a part is so important. That's why I went through the leader's training so I could lead a "White Privilege: Let's Talk" group. That's why our connection to Potrerillos is so vital.

They all allow us to see our own implication in the oppressive systems that keep our world from being a blessing to all and keep us from perfection in love. In these ways, Paul's prayer is fulfilled: "that [our] love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight."

I'm not done. But God is at work in me. And I can work alongside of God. None of you who are graduating are done. But God is at work in you. You can work alongside of God. None of us on this earth are done. But God is working still. And we, if we want to, can work alongside of God.

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 Chutzpah (5th Sunday of Easter; Acts 17:16-31; April 29, 2018)

Holy Chutzpah

5th Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:16-31
April 29, 2018

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

In the summer of 1744 John Wesley preached his last sermon at Oxford University. The story says something about John and, by extension, something about the movement that he helped to found and even something about us who are his heirs. It happened in this way.

John had attended Christ Church College, Oxford, and studied the classics and logic. When he graduated he "took holy orders"--as they put it then--in the Church of England. After a year or so a "fellowship" became available at Lincoln College—also at Oxford—which provided a small stipend and allowed him to continue his studies and to supplement his stipend by tutoring students in Greek.

It was during his time at Lincoln College that John was part of the "Holy Club" which was eventually nick-named the "Methodists" because of the methodical way that its members went about their daily lives. While at Lincoln, John and his brother Charles became involved in caring for those who were in debtors prison. Their father had himself spent time in debtors prison. They knew the shame and helplessness that this involved.

This ministry led them to meet James Oglethorpe, a retired British general and philanthropist, who was hoping to reform Britain's prison system. He hoped to resettle debt prisoners in Georgia, a colony in the New World, for which he had obtained a royal charter. Oglethorpe took on John as his chaplain and secretary and that's how John got to Georgia. His time there is another story--ask me to tell you the story about Sophie Hopkie. It's enough to say that he was unhappy when he was there and even unhappier when he returned. Spiritual soul-searching ensued. This led, eventually, to a remarkable religious conversion and to John's engagement in a widespread preaching ministry.

Now, all this went on while he was still a fellow at Lincoln College. One of the obligations of all the fellows was to preach once in a while to the Oxford community. In August of 1744 he was scheduled to take his next turn. This was only five years after his Aldersgate experiences. He was convinced that he had found the secret to real Christian life, a secret that no one at Lincoln College seemed to share. He determined to preach on the subject, "Scriptural Christianity." And one of his chosen texts was Ezekiel 33:4:

"If anyone hears the trumpet but does not heed the warning and the sword comes and takes their life, their blood will be on their own head."

John appointed himself the lead trumpeter. You can imagine how this sermon went over.

If John had intended to persuade his fellows and the Oxford community at large that his understanding a practice of Christianity was a good thing, I would have to count his sermon as a failure. Lincoln College's Board of Trustees met shortly after his sermon and, after a short conversation, decided to tell John that it wouldn't be necessary for him to return to preach when his turn came up next. They would pay for a preacher in his place. They were sure he was very busy, probably best for all, good luck in all future endeavors, etc.

John had the zeal of the convert, one for whom life had a been an unsolvable puzzle, who then had an experience that ordered and fitted enough pieces together that he could see that his life now made sense. He not only knew that his new understanding of what it meant to be a Jesus-follower worked for him. As he read his Bible again he saw his experiences affirmed and supported on every page. His message, his version of the Gospel, was--he was certain of it--Scriptural Christianity. Therefore, his Gospel was good news for everyone. Whether they knew it or not.

From my lofty perch near the end of my career and two and three-quarters centuries later, I can see him and his Oxford sermon from more than one point of view.

John was not new to Oxford. He knew the concerns of the community. He could speak their language. His own thinking had been formed there. Surely he could have found common ground. Perhaps if he had not gone into the pulpit with a chip on his shoulder, the outcome might have been different.

On the other hand, if he had not already had his fill of the condescending smiles, the ironic arched eyebrows, and the bemused tolerance of the Oxford community, maybe he would have wanted to find common ground.

On the other other hand, many people in England, Wales, and Cornwall, resonated with John's preaching. They had no high opinion of themselves and the free grace that Methodism offered them came to them as water to those dying of desert thirst. Why shouldn't he offer the same thing to the well-heeled and highly educated elite of Oxford?

On the other, other, other hand (Why do assume that there are only two sides to a question? Just because we have two eyes doesn't mean there are only two ways of looking at things). It isn't always about the effect that speaking will have on an audience. Sometimes it's about saying what needs to be said.

Maybe this was true for Saul of Tarsus, former rabbinical student under Gamaliel the Great, now become an apostle of a new understanding of what it means to be, not only a faithful Jew, but also a human being fully realizing God's dream.

In the course of his missionary wanderings, conducted not by any carefully formulated plan approved by the General Board of Global Ministries, but by a moment-to-moment spontaneity in response to the Spirit, Saul went from place to place. He went first to various cities in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and then into Europe. He spent time in Thessalonika, part of Macedonia that considered itself Greek, and then into Greece itself. Not just Greece, but Athens.

Athens was more than the Oxford of its day. If you could roll today's Oxford and Cambridge, today's New York and Paris, and today's Naples and Tokyo into one place, a place of rich and vibrant culture, a place of intellectual ferment, you would have a place half as exciting and sophisticated as ancient Athens. Athens was the beating heart and the thinking brain of the ancient world. At its heart was its marketplace, its agora. The agora was a feature of every ancient city, an open-air marketplace where everything from fresh bread to exquisite jewelry to young children were bought and sold.

In Athens so-called philosophers, the lovers of wisdom as they called themselves, went to the Agora to sell their services as tutors. They gave demonstrations of their knowledge and wit by engaging each other in debates, the better to show-case their value. The most popular schools of thought--Stoics and Epicureans--were there, but I'm sure that there were smaller groups there as well. Pythagoreans and Platonists of the paleo- and neo- variety were certainly present. And, since religion and philosophy were not so neatly divided, numerologists, astrologers, and various mystical traditions were added to the mix. It was a savory stew of thought and devotion.

But for Paul, little of this mattered. It's not that rabbinical circles were not places for debate. The Talmud, that great collection of Jewish debate, bears witness that rabbis loved arguing with each other. But for Saul in Athens there was only one issue that mattered and it was not up for debate: the matter of the representation of God in an object, the matter of idols. The city was filled with them. That was scandal enough for Paul, but doubtless he knew at least some of the stories: these were gods who behaved more grossly than the most unethical mortals, gods who cared nothing for how humans behaved as long as they made the right sacrifices, knew their place, and stayed in it. No moral code could be grounded in reverence for the Greek gods. And yet Greeks, like everyone else, were seemingly searching for the key to a good, beautiful, and moral life.

Saul, of course, knew exactly what that key was. And he had the--the Yiddish word for it is chutzpah which can be translated as audacity, sass, or even daring. It has both a negative and a positive aspect. Chutzpah challenges authority. It is rebellious. But it is also courageous or, at very least, foolhardy. To have chutzpah is to risk direct and honest speech or action. Saul, who never studied in Athens or even in Alexandria or Rome, dared to stand up in the midst of the intellectual elite of Athens and speak his mind. Imagine someone with a GED holding forth in the center of campus at Harvard University and you have something of the picture.

And what did Saul have to say? He began well. He began with a clever turn on an observation. Idols meant reverence of a kind. Idols everywhere meant a high level of reverence. And then there was the little shrine that he found--quite likely on a road leading into the city where such shrines were often built--a shrine to "an unknown god." Of course, Saul and everyone else knew how this shrine had come to be. Someone had found themselves in a very tight spot, physical danger on a ship caught in a storm, an attack of bandits on a lonely road, or a pinch that threatened financial ruin. In their fear and panic they cried out to the supernatural world in general, too frightened to limit their prayer to one particular god. And they had been spared.

The rules of piety called for a public gesture of gratitude. Building a road-side shrine would do nicely. But to whom? They had no idea. So they did the best they could: they built the shrine and dedicated it to what was really "an unidentified god." They trusted the gods to make sure the gratitude was properly routed.

But Saul turned an inscription to an unidentified god into an inscription to "an unknown God." Saul had a toehold from which to launch his argument. He went from there to cite a couple of Greek poets whose words seemed to support him. Finally, he turned his speech to God's dream made known in Jesus, though he never got to him by name.

Our text ends before end of the episode, which is disappointing, but then episode itself is a little disappointing. As soon as Saul mentioned Jesus being raised from the dead, he lost his audience. They went from being intrigued to scoffing in an instant. Like John Wesley at Oxford, Saul seems to have made no converts, nor does he seem to have ever returned.

Sometimes what we say isn't about the effect that we have on an audience. Sometimes it's about saying what needs to be said. In fact, I find that this theme runs through the Scriptures, especially when it comes to the prophets. Sometimes a prophet is called and speaks on God's behalf to people and they actually listen. At least once, in Jonah's case, that was an embarrassment to the prophet. When it happens, it's always a surprise. Prophets don't expect to change people's minds and hearts. That isn't usually why they speak.

They speak because they have to. They speak because they cannot remain silent. They speak because God has boxed them in and left them with no way out but to speak. They speak because someone must tell the truth of God's dream in that time and place and no one else seems to want to do it.

But often it comes out crosswise. I suspect that this is often because the inner suffering and turmoil that come with being a prophet get mixed up in the message itself. Natural charisma is not a characteristic of prophets or apostles in our tradition. We can hope that Saul came to a more winsome way of preaching his gospel. We know for certain that Wesley did. In his seventies and eighties he was one of the most beloved figures in England. People crowded the streets to see him go by in his buggy. But in Oxford in 1744 all of that was far in his future.

In 1744 in Oxford he had to speak God's truth as he knew and lived it. It came out pretty rough. It was hard to listen to. He didn't make any new friends and maybe lost some that he had. But he couldn't not do it.

Sometimes it comes to us, too, to speak hard realities, harsh truths. Try as we may they come out of us with sharp edges and covered with prickles. We speak in love as best we can, but our best is never quite good enough and there are those who are offended, or even worse, hurt. There are times when it is all that we can do to be kind and, sad to say, being nice is a lost cause. But we have to speak anyway.

And it has nothing to do with whether our speaking will persuade anyone or nudge the course of history toward a more just or peaceful path. It has to do with telling the truth. That is true when it comes to writing letters to an elected representative or to the editor. It's true when it comes to marching in the streets. It's true when speaking to a coffee group or a church committee. It's even true when it comes to a Thanksgiving dinner with our extended family gathered around when someone says something outrageous and hateful. Sometimes we have to tell the truth. And when we have to tell the truth at least we can do it in the knowledge that we are following our ancestors and trying the best we can to pass on what we have received. Sometimes it's about saying what needs to be said. Sometimes it’s about holy chutzpah.

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.

Sincerely Wrong (4th Sunday of Easter; Acts 9:1-19; April 22, 2018)

Sincerely Wrong

4th Sunday of Easter
Acts 9:1-19
April 22, 2018

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

There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.

That is an odd thing for me to say and especially odd for me to say it here. I am professionally obligated to be in favor of religion and faith, or so it would seem. Nonetheless, I think it's important, especially in our era, to acknowledge that religion has a dark side. I can point to a number of episodes in our history that show that Christianity is certainly not guiltless in its involvement in the dark side of religion.

• As early as the fifth century, the Christian church used imperial power to suppress dissent and disagreement in the church.
• In the late eleventh century and running for the next two centuries, the Western Church launched a series of crusades, one of them directed at dissenting Christians in the southern part of France.
• Beginning shortly after the Protestant Reformation and ending only in 1792 with the execution of Anna Göldi,¹ some 40,000 so-called witches were put to death.²
• From 1492 to 1900, the native population of what became the United States was reduced from 5 to 10 million to 238,000³ by a combination of disease, slaughter, and starvation carried out by Christians under the cover of Christian theology in order to take the land that had belonged to the Indigenous people, land that includes the land this church building rests on.
• Some 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and transported to the Americas. About 450,000 were eventually shipped to the United States.⁴ The labor of these and the millions of their descendants was stolen by a system that received the blessings of the Christian churches, our tradition among them.
• A number of prominent Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham are framing our military involvement in the Middle East as a religious war pitting Christian America against the Muslim Near East.⁵[5] And it is quite possible that their opinion is shared in high places.

As a Christian I would like nothing more than to be able to put a great deal of distance between my understanding of Christianity and these manifestations of it. You might be able to offer me suggestions about how to do that. One suggestion I will refuse is any argument that begins with the words, "But what about..." If that is what you were going to offer, I ask that you try another approach.

All the major religious traditions that I know anything about have a problem with violent extremism. The Christian tradition is neither more nor less guilty than any other, as far as I know. And we here today are Christians talking about a problem that our tradition has. Deflecting blame or responsibility for our tradition will not be helpful.

"True believers" are dangerous. Or are certain people dangerous for other reasons and I'm just blaming the danger on their religion? Could we turn to Saul of Tarsus (as he is known in our reading) for some insight?

Saul was certainly committed to his cause. He was not content to argue against followers of the Way nor to limit himself to making the case for some other particular way of being a Jew. Saul had guarded the overcoats of those who participated in the mob act of violence against the Christian deacon Stephen. Even that wasn't enough. So Saul, a Pharisee, went to the high priest, a member of a Jewish party bitter opposed to the Pharisees, to get warrants for the arrest of anyone connected with this "Way" or showing too much interest in Jesus.

Saul's behavior isn't uncommon in the history of religion. Far from it. It's actually pretty predictable, because it happens more often at some times than at others. It happens whenever a group senses that its identity is threatened. Often those threats come from outside. Certainly the Romans represented a threat to the identity of the people called Jews.

The Roman presence in Palestine was overwhelming. It was a military threat that could and did explode into violence at the least provocation. It was an economic threat that overwhelmed the local markets, forced peasants off their land, indebted families, and deprived the people of any way to earn a living. It was a religious threat that honored gods who deserved no honor and gave them credit for Roman power. It was a cultural threat that surrounded them with a sophistication they could not possibly match. There was little that Jews could do to resist these threats.

In circumstances like this one thing that people often resort to is turning their focus on their own group. They will search out those who don't fit, who disturb the unity of the group, or who seem to have sold out. Saul, like so many others before and since, has come to the--perhaps unconscious--conclusion that the way to defend the identity of his group is to purify it of all that contaminates it. He decided that the followers of the Way were one such contaminate that must be cleansed from the Jewish community at any cost.

In his experience there was no arguing with Jesus-followers. They would hold their vile opinions even in the face of death. Stephen died joyfully.

There was no redemption for people like that. So, in Saul's logic, they would have to be arrested, tried, and killed. Or maybe just killed. He had certainly been satisfied with that result when the victim was Stephen.

Motivated in this way it was impossible for him to imagine that Jesus and the followers of the Way might have something to contribute to the identity of Judaism, that they might make it stronger, rather than weaker. Jesus, after all, had focused on a few key values and commitments that embodied what to him was the heart of the covenant life with God. He sought to reform Jewish life, to reinvigorate it, to offer to the Jewish people an alternative way of being human, a way that conformed to the heart of God's dream.

In this way Saul's persecution of Jesus-followers was the result of a failure of imagination. He just could not see the life that Jesus had offered. He just could not see that there was, even in that strenuous time, a path that was truly human. Jesus had marked it out, but Saul couldn't see it.

In our story the blindness doesn't come until later, until after the light, and the voice, and the demand, "Saul, Saul, why are you harassing me?" It wasn't until Saul had his instructions and the light and the voice had faded that Saul opened his eyes and discovered that he could not see.

But Saul was blinded long before that. When he could no longer see variety as a gift. When he refused to see the blessed messiness that was ancient Judaism. When he would not see what he could have seen, he was as blind as it is possible to be. And this was precisely because, in his imagination, he saw with blinding clarity.

We've seen that happen in our own country as we have faced a world less under our control, a world that seems more dangerous, even if it is not. This comes at a time when many are struggling to make their way in the world that globalization and rule by the rich have produced. It is a real temptation in this time to turn our eyes inward and find an element that we can plausibly take to be an alien one. Some of us feel compelled in that direction. Our attention focuses on anything that seems to threaten the white, straight, Christian image that we have of our country's history and imaginable future, and we react with fear and loathing. Some of us are maddened to the point of violence or, if not to actual violence, then to turning a blind eye to the violence of others. Two black men cannot wait for a friend in a Starbucks without being arrested and detained for fifteen hours. Another black man is killed because the implicit bias of the officers blinds them to everything except the terror they feel because the man they are mistakenly pursuing is black. And many of us simply shrug our shoulders. If these are injustices, well, they are necessary injustices to protect our safety, and especially the safety of our image of who we are.

Or we imagine that immigrants from Latin America are "rapists, murderers, and drug dealers" and that the presence of undocumented immigrants makes us less safe. Our fears justify any sort of action. They spur us to build a wall to keep an imagined impurity at bay. (Take it from this historian, that no empire has ever built a wall that succeeded in keeping people out of a place they wanted to be in.) They spur us to contemplate expelling some millions of undocumented people. They allow us to turn our eyes away from the inhumanity of the way we treat desperate people, splitting families apart, misinforming them of their rights, and exiling people whose only home is among us to places they have never lived, whose languages they do not speak, and whose culture they do not understand. Our fears become a kind of scale that covers our eyes and keeps us from being able to see.

Our own United Methodist Church, like all mainline denominations, has struggled numerically since the heyday of civil religion in the 1960's. The Church as we have known it has become increasingly irrelevant to life in the early twenty-first century. Even the Southern Baptists who just twenty years ago were gloating over us, are shrinking in numbers. A few mega-churches have attracted attention, but I cannot forget that giantism is sometimes the last evolutionary gambit before extinction.

Some in our church are convinced that the problem is that our denomination lacks the theological purity it needs to survive and thrive. They are determined to purify United Methodism of those pesky progressives. The "issue" of LGBT folks' life and ministry in our midst is only the presenting issue. The real subject of their concern lies with some peoples' failure to understand the authority of Scripture in the way that they do. They distrust the movement of the Spirit that leads pastors and congregations toward a more radical love toward the world. They see these things with blinding clarity. They have blinded themselves into believing that the secret of growing the church is to tear it in two.

Saul, having seen with blinding clarity, can no longer even direct his feet onto his own path, let alone his fellow Jews toward the Path, the Torah. He has to be led into Damascus by the ICE agents assigned to his mission. His sight and his future fall into the hands of the unsung hero of the story, Ananias, a follower of the Way who is terrified at being asked to present himself to the persecutor of the Way as a follower of the Way. Saul "has done horrible things" to the community in Jerusalem. We would not blame him for refusing the assignment.

But he does not let his fear blind him to the possibilities. He went to Saul. He laid his hands on him. The flakes that had blinded Saul fell away, and Saul could see. It says that he could see again. But maybe Saul sees in a way that he has never seen before. I think so. May the same be said of us all.

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 Ben Panko, “Last Person Executed as a Witch in Europe Gets a Museum,” Smithsonian, accessed April 21, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/last-witch-executed-europe-gets-museum-180964633/.

2 Jamie Doward, “Why Europe’s Wars of Religion Put 40,000 ‘witches’ to a Terrible Death,” the Guardian, January 7, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/witchcraft-economics-reformation-catholic-protestant-market-share.

3 Donald L. Fixico, “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization,’” HISTORY.com, accessed April 21, 2018, http://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-united-states.

4 Henry Louis Gates Jr, “How Many Slaves Landed in the US?,” The Root, accessed April 21, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-1790873989.

5 Muqtedar Khan, “Preachers of Bigotry,” Brookings (blog), November 30, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/preachers-of-bigotry/.

These Are Written (Second Sunday in Easter; John 20:19-31; April 8, 2018)

These Are Written

Second Sunday in Easter
John 20:19-31
April 8, 2018

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

I realized something this week, something that gives me a little relief and a little sadness, too: This is probably my last sermon here on John's gospel. My hope in beginning this series was, if you remember, that by reading John with new eyes and hearing him with new ears I might come to the place where I have a better understanding and appreciation of what it was he was trying to do. I hoped to better respect him even if I couldn't say that he and I were besties.

You might say that I set the bar a little low, but there is a place for baby steps and I think this was one of those places. John, if I understand him rightly, set for himself a difficult mission. To a great extent, he was successful. There were even a few places where I said quietly, "Well, done!"

You might also remember--in fact I hope you never forget--that I set out on this experiment with a theory to test. My theory is that John's gospel was written for a community of Jesus-followers who had been part of a Jewish community in a Greco-Roman city. There were Jewish communities in many ancient cities. While they varied in their practices and beliefs, these communities felt a kinship with each other. They had a lot in common. They shared the experience of following a religious way of life that presumed life in Judea and a special relationship with Jerusalem while at the same time they were actually living outside of Judea and far from Jerusalem and its Temple.

The Jews had won a very important privilege in the Roman Empire: they were recognized as a licit, that is, lawful, religion without having to worship the Roman gods or even having to offer a sacrifice of incense to the spirit of the Emperor. In exchange for that, a daily sacrifice and prayers were offered in the Temple on the emperor's behalf. In this way, Jews were able to live in Greco-Roman cities in relative peace most of the time and could at very least appeal for imperial protection if local magistrates decided to use them as scapegoats.

From the point of view of the leaders of the Jewish communities, these new Jesus-followers were dangerous. They were Jews, at least at first, but their insistence on recognizing Jesus as the Anointed One (Messiah in Hebrew, Christ in Greek) threw the synagogues into turmoil. We don't know who started the quarrels and we don't know whether the Jesus-followers decided to leave the synagogues first or whether the synagogue leaders decided to show the Jesus-followers the door first. We only know that what began as a larger group, became two, mutually hostile groups.

The split left the Jewish communities weaker and more vulnerable, but they may have seen no other choice. The one thing that the Romans would not tolerate under any circumstances was civil unrest. This they would put down with brutal efficiency.

The Jesus-followers--however much they might have provoked it--found themselves outside of the Jewish community. Suddenly they were no longer a part of a licit religion and could legally be persecuted. But the pain and danger of the Jesus community went well beyond that. They had been Jews a long way from Judea and Jerusalem, but connected to the broader Jewish community through the synagogue. Now they were isolated from their roots and their connection to Jerusalem.

This Jesus community was suddenly from nowhere at all. "Once you were no people, but now you are my people," God once said to them. Now they heard their fellow Jews tell them, "Once you were God's people, but now you are nobody at all." They were nobodies from nowhere.

I can't say for certain just how the lines were drawn between Jewish synagogue and Christian church, but I imagine that--if modern church splits offer any clues--sometimes the line cut through families. Children may well have been cut off from parents, siblings from each other. Certainly many friendships were destroyed by this schism. So now the Jesus-followers were nobodies from nowhere and they were alone.

We may think that we modern folks are all about individuals, but we still know in our bones that human beings are not built for being alone. Crying babies make us anxious to care of them even when they are not ours. Solitary confinement is a devastating sanity-threatening form of punishment. We will hold stubbornly to ideas that we would instantly recognize as foolish and false if it were not for the risk that, if we disagree with our community, we will lose our place in it.

All of this is to say that John's little band of Jesus-followers was in a state of painful disorientation. They were suffering a kind of vertigo of the soul. They were survivors of deep trauma and sometimes it seemed that the surviving part was still in doubt.

No wonder, then, that John's story eventually turns to the little band of Jesus-followers hiding out in their safe-house. The disciples' story becomes a way for the members of John's community, living some sixty or seventy years later, to work out some of their own stuff.

The original band of Jesus' followers was hiding out because they were afraid of the leaders of the Jewish community. What can they possibly do, if the Jewish authorities have it in for them? How can they dare to show their faces? Even if it is the first day of the week, or what later followers would come to call the Lord's Day?

They were behind closed doors on the Lord's Day and who should appear but Jesus himself. He showed himself to them, as a wounded Messiah. He breathed on them and gave them the authority of the Spirit to forgive sins. (They are not nobodies now, are they?) Thomas Didymus wasn't with them, so Jesus did an encore a week later just for him. You may notice that, while Thomas had claimed that he needed to put his fingers in the wounds in Jesus' hands and his hand in Jesus' side, and Jesus told him to do that, the text doesn't say that Thomas actually did that. Instead, Thomas declares his own confidence in Jesus based on seeing him only.

"Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe," says Jesus. John, of course, is addressing Jesus' words to his own community, none of whom (more than likely) had even seen Jesus either during his lifetime or in a resurrection appearance.

Then we have a kind of conclusion. And then another chapter. And then another conclusion. The suspicious me is suspecting that chapter twenty-one is actually a sort of afterward to the gospel. If we didn't have it, we would never have missed it and the gospel would conclude with the observation that Jesus did a lot of wonderful things that the first generation of Jesus-followers saw that were never written down. But the ones that were written down were written for the sake of John's community, that they might "believe" that Jesus is the Anointed One and, through that "belief" have "life."

John's hope is that his community will stop being victims of their trauma--as shown by their cowering fear of the synagogue officials who tossed them out--and move beyond being mere survivors of trauma to being a community of people who thrive, a community that has real life.

At first glance it would seem that this recovery and rebirth take place through the the community's beliefs, but I think we need a second glance and maybe a third. Some funny things have happened to the notion of belief in the last few decades. The meaning of belief seems to have shifted. I hear people talking about belief now and I have this urge to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: "This word you keep using. I do not think it means what you think it means."

A belief seems to be an opinion that doesn't have to be backed up with fact and sound reasoning. Beliefs are a private matter, it is assumed, and therefore no one has the right to question them. So a belief doesn't have to be defended. Belief has come to refer to our non-disputable, privately-held opinion. That's not what John means by it, however.

It's another case of the problems we have when we try to translate a text. In most cases words that can be used to translate each other are not really equivalent. Take for example the Spanish word, pila. In El Salvador a pila is the two hundred gallon concrete tank and washing surface that is a center of many households. In Argentina a pila is a battery. I see a connection between the two meanings: both uses have something to do with a reservoir. But there is no English word that covers the same territory.

The same problem confronts us in the Greek word family that we usually translated as "faith" or "belief" or "believe." The word in Greek, though, also covers the area covered by the English words "trust" and "trustworthy." "Faithful" and "faithfulness" come closer to being equivalents. Faithfulness isn't a matter of belief. Faithfulness is a moral commitment to fulfill one's promises. Faith is the confidence we have that someone who has made a promise will keep it. Sometimes in the New Testament it's even hard to tell who is the one who is being faithful. The phrase that is usually translated as "faith in Christ" can--and more directly--be translated as "the faithfulness of Christ" or simply as "Christ's faithfulness."

To understand John rightly I think we need to push the translation more toward something like this:

Then Jesus did many other signs in his disciples' presence, signs that aren't recorded in this book. But these things are written so that you may confidence that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through that confidence and in his name you may really live.

John's hope for his community is that--out of all the things that could have been written about Jesus--they will read these things and gain the confidence not simply to survive their trauma but to thrive in spite of it. This is John's version of God's dream: Real life as it truly should be lived even in the midst of a world that sometimes delivers pain, sorrow, and real damage.

And perhaps John's hopes extended beyond his own wounded, struggling, and cowering community. Perhaps he imagined that others would find that their experiences were not so far from the things that his community had been through. Perhaps he hoped that other communities and even individuals would take these words to their own comfort and healing, move through their pain, and emerge into the light of life in the presence of the God who was made known in Jesus, who had loved them all along, and who would never cease to love them to the end of history and beyond. Amen.

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.

The Best Joke of All (Easter; John 20:1-18; April 1, 2018)

The Best Joke of All

Easter
John 20:1-18
April 1, 2018

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

Our daughter Beth was visiting us over what seems an Easter in the distant past. We lived far away from each other and didn't get many chances to visit, so time was precious. And I was frittering it away writing a sermon on the Saturday before Easter. I was--as I always am--concerned that it be my best work. To Beth this seemed unnecessary.

"Dad," she said. "I've heard a lot of your Easter sermons. They are all basically the same. 'Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham.' You should just say that. That's always what you say anyway. People won't mind. They'll be grateful."

I don't know. Some of you might mind. Others might be grateful. But she's certainly right about one thing. She has heard the heart of what we proclaim this morning: "Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham."

“Jesus was dead. Now he's alive." The good news is not actually in the words themselves. The good news is what happens in the space between "Jesus was dead." and the next sentence, "Now he's alive." What we call the resurrection happens in that gap, in the silence between two sentences. We use the fancy word, resurrection, as if we know what it means, as if the word expresses what it means. But the resurrection happens in the wordless space between two sentences. Resurrection is a word that means "we don't know what happened, but something sure did."

Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. From then to now, from dead to alive, we know the beginning and the end, but of the event that connects them, we know nothing. That used to bother me, the knowing nothing. It bothers me less these days. There are a lot of things we know nothing about.

We know nothing about falling in love, except that it happens (if we are lucky). In one moment there are two people who know each other in one kind of way. In the next they are connected in a new way that changes their lives and (again, if they are lucky) sends reverberations down through generations.

We know nothing about dying. Of course we know about getting very sick or about being badly injured. What we don't know is how it happens that the one we love is there one moment and in another moment they are not.

So I'm a lot more okay with not knowing what happened in the moment between "Jesus was dead" and "Now he’s alive" than I used to be.

It's not just that we don't know. It's that there is a positive mystery here. There is a ground as holy as the ground Moses stood on when he saw a bush burning without being burned up, a ground as holy as the ground that we stand on when we see or speak with or touch another human being.

Sometimes people have tried to describe what happened. They've tried to fill in the silence with words. Mel Gibson, for example, after an hour pornographic violence in "The Passion of the Christ," attempts to portray Jesus' rising from the dead. In my view that goes beyond silly and risks sacrilege. None of the gospel writers dared to do what Mel did. There are times for words and there are times for silence, and Mel severely misunderstood which was which.

"Jesus was dead. Now he’s alive." Here are two sentences, either of which makes perfect sense without the other and which, together, are completely at odds with the rest of our experience. Death is the end of life, not its beginning. And so, "Jesus was dead. Now he is alive." is a very odd thing to say.

But that oddness is what makes those six words a story. Only "Jesus was dead" can render "Now he’s alive" into the proclamation of a wonder. It is very much like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol that begins by telling us, "Marley was dead: to begin with" and goes on to tell us that, without understanding this, "nothing wonderful can come of the story." Dickens is right. Without "Jesus was dead," there is nothing wonderful about "Now he’s alive."

But wonderful or not, getting from one to the other doesn't seem to be possible without confusion and oddness. Mary Magdalene, to whom our tradition has been--without cause--very unkind, went to visit the tomb of Jesus early on the first day of the week. Remember that the first day of the week is Sunday, not Monday. That's why Christians disagree about all sorts of things, but the one thing that we agree on is that Sunday is the day of resurrection and the primary day on which the Church gathers. Mary found the stone removed from the entrance and the body of Jesus removed from the tomb. When she told Peter and the "other" disciple (John, presumably), what ensues next is an adolescent competition about which one is the winner. John wins the footrace to the tomb. (Yay! John is the winner!) But it is Peter who enters the tomb first (Yay! Peter is the winner!) Peter looks around inside, but it is John who "believes" first (Yay! John is the winner!). And then, like rival rugby teams, they go off together to have a pint.

Meanwhile Mary suffers a series of confusions. She thinks the body of Jesus has been stolen. She sees Jesus, but thinks that he is the gardener. Jesus speaks to her by name and she recognizes him (Remember Jesus said that the shepherd would call the sheep by name and the sheep would recognize his voice?). Mary tries to hug him (wouldn't we all?), but is told that she may not do this. Then, on Jesus' instructions, Mary announced "Now he’s alive" to the other disciples. What, I wonder, did John "believe" if it was Mary who announced aliveness?

The disciples knew that "Jesus was dead." They learn that "Now he’s alive." But they are no better off than we are when it comes to knowing how the truth of one sentence became the truth of the next. They are just as ignorant as we are when it comes to the darkness and silence between the two announcements.

How does past death become transformed into present life? How does despair turn into hope? How does apathy become faith? How does indifference become love? How do people convinced that they are unable to accomplish anything to improve their own lives, discover strength in the midst of weakness? How do people who are fearful for their own future and the future of their children become people who care about others? How does someone whose heart has been broken dare to love again? How does one generation of young people, discounted by their cynical elders, shake the halls of power and speak so clearly, so loudly, so resolutely that people who worship their guns are afraid? How does someone diagnosed with terminal cancer move from fear to confidence in the face of death?

I don't know. If you've come get an answer to that question, I am sorry to disappoint you. Truly. I do not know how this movement happens. I only know that it does happen. And I will tell you that I suspect that all of those reversals, every movement from captivity to freedom and from exile to homecoming is grounded in the movement from death to life contained in the Easter proclamation: "He was dead. Now he’s alive."

"Hooray!" I might have preferred "Hallelujah!" but that's a small criticism. Arguably, Hooray is just English for Hallelujah. This strange movement from death to life leads, in ancient Israel's experience, to praise. Trapped between the waters of the Sea of Reeds and the on-coming chariots of Pharaoh's army, Israel is as good as dead. They retreat into the water and something happens and they find themselves alive and the finest heavy cavalry in their world defeated, fled or dead. Just as in our story this morning, it is a woman, Miriam, who has the words: "Sing to Yahweh who has won this great victory, throwing horse and rider into the sea!"

The Easter is not simply a message that Jesus is risen from the dead. Easter is a movement to which we are all invited, a movement from death to life to praise, from despair to hope to praise, from oppression to liberty to praise, from exile to homecoming to praise, from self-protection to solidarity to praise, from brokenness to wholeness to praise, from failure to holiness to praise, from sin to forgiveness to praise.

Charles Wesley understood how things stand. He had moved from lost to found to praise. He knew that he would need a thousand tongues to praise God adequately.

From death to life to praise. From "Jesus was dead" to "Now he’s alive" to "Hooray!" and, finally, to "Now go eat ham." Well, okay, this movement does not require us to be meat-eaters. You may, if you prefer, "Now go eat yams," or just “Now go eat.” Death yields to life. Life yields to praise. Praise yields to acts as ordinary as a meal eaten with our families or friends. Praise yields to ordinary life now become extraordinary because we now live as those who have been snatched from death and ushered, we know not how, into life and praise. Ordinary life transformed is life lived by those who have passed through the empty and silent space between "Jesus was dead" and "Now he is alive." It is lived in the faith that is not superstition. It is lived in the hope that is not optimism. It is lived in praise and gratitude.

We have not yet fully lived into the Easter proclamation, but that's okay. It really is. That's why we have Easter every year. That's why we have Easter for seven weeks of the year. That's why we have Easter every week. That's why we have this baptismal font that is both the place where we are drowned and buried and the place from which we are born. That's why we have this table that reminds us of all the meals that Jesus has eaten with us and summons us to the meal that is God's dream for us, the meal to which everyone brings what they have and everyone receives what they need, the meal at which the wealth of the rich buys no more than they need, the meal at which the poverty of the poor does not mean that they will get less. That's why we have each other as companions on the journey to encourage and, if needed, to help us back to our feet when we stumble.

"Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. Hooray! Now go eat." Which is what we are about to do. But first, we sing!

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.