How About a Little Reverie? (1 Advent B, Mark 13:33-27)

How About a Little Reverie? 

1st Sunday of Advent
Mark 13:33-37
November 29, 2020 

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, New Jersey 

Ten months ago tomorrow the Centers for Disease Control announced the first person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. The CDC Director Robert Redfield assured us that “based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.” Seldom has such tragic ignorance been offered in the service of such fleeting bliss.  

Our lives and our shared life have taken a terrible hit. We are grieving our many losses. We are approaching 1.5 million known dead across the globe, with the daily death toll now above 10,000 per day, a fifth of those in what we used to think was the most advanced nation on earth.  

We are grieving. Too many have lost those whom we love. All of us are grieving the life we used to call normal. Our daughter Beth teaches eight-graders in a district using a hybrid model of remote and in-person instruction. To protect her daughter (our granddaughter) Diana, Beth is living alone for now. I hope you will forgive me if I express my admiration for her: this is a heroism I can barely fathom. It is a measure of how much things have changed that we are grateful that we could Zoom in her simulacrum to join us for Thanksgiving Dinner.  

Some of us are coping, doing what needs to be done, our supports holding for now. Others are struggling to maintain any sense of control or well-being. Some have been pressed into a panic mode. And many of us sort of slide along the scale as circumstances and energy vary. I don’t know anyone who is thriving. We are drinking more¹, eating more², and exercising less³. I have yet to hear anyone say, “Well, at least we’re getting enough high-quality sleep!” In fact two-thirds of us report that our sleep quality has worsened in the last ten months.⁴  

So, imagine how thrilled I was to discover that the gospel reading for the First Sunday of Advent is a parable that tells us—four times, no less—to “Stay awake!” And, lest we think that translation issues might have made this harsher than it should be, the word that is used doesn’t simply mean to avoid sleeping. No, it means vigilant wakefulness, the kind that lets us stay on guard, attentive to the risks and unknown dangers around us. A less helpful or welcome lesson I cannot imagine.  

This idea of wakefulness, of vigilance, as a virtue isn’t original with Jesus. It’s a common theme in the literature of Jesus’ time in which God’s faithful people must go through great hardship. There may seem to be no end in sight for them, but they must not lose hope. Their rescue is on the way; something new is coming; creation is about to be remade. God’s people must stay alert to the signs of its coming, just as sentries in a besieged city watch eagerly for the arrival of a rescuing army.  

Vigils—periods of the night spent in prayer—were a feature of the devotional life of early Christians and from there passed into the practice of monastics. Even a casual reader of early monastic writings can see that sleep deprivation was an integral part of the lives of the holy women and men who lived in the deserted spaces of Egypt and Syria.  

 Nowadays going without sleep has become a late capitalist virtue. Sleeping people neither produce nor consume anything. Sleeping people are economically meaningless. Accordingly, as capitalism has developed, we spend less and less time asleep. In the last century the average night’s sleep has fallen from ten hours to six and a half.⁵ In place of the praying monastic the sleepless entrepreneur is offered as an ideal. 

For the Pentagon, 24/7 hyper-vigilance is a desired trait in its fighters. Some veterans have become such perfect embodiments of that injunction to keep watch that they cannot sit down in a room unless they are facing the door. This is just one feature of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many PTSD sufferers drink too much, eat too much, and don’t get enough exercise. They also have trouble sleeping.  

I wonder if we aren’t all suffering from some attenuated form of PTSD. The trauma that we are going through is certainly not as intense as combat, but merely knowing that a quarter of a million of our friends, family members, colleagues, and neighbors have died—so far—while our President refuses even to acknowledge that we have been harmed is injury enough.  

Is Jesus suggesting that we give up one of our last restorative strategies in order to spend our nights stoking our anxieties (and weakening our immune systems while we are at it)? If so, then I suggest we ignore this parable. I cannot see how voluntary sleeplessness can be anything other than a way of underscoring just how apocalyptically God-awful it is to live during a pandemic.  

It was hard enough for me getting to this point. I’m a little tempted to leave it there and walk away. “Listen for the what the Spirit is saying.” “Thanks be to God!” indeed. 

But it’s the First Sunday of Advent. Jody reminds me that Advent is her favorite liturgical season. She expects something Advent-y (her word). 

Hoping to avoid the ugliness that may ensue I therefore turn back to the text. My attention focused by fear, I notice a couple of things. The first is that one little word is caring a lot of freight. “It is like” is how my version translated it. “It is like a man going on a journey...” It is like. But “like” is not the same as “is.” The parable is offered to us as like, as a simile of, as a figure of speech about a man going on a journey. “It is like a man” in some ways; but that means it is unlike a man in others. The trick is in untangling like from unlike. So, in what ways could a doorkeeper who never stops keeping watch be like us? Are there other possibilities than hyper-vigilant insomnia? If so, what are they? 

The figure of the watching doorkeeper waiting for the absent master is a part of that apocalyptic literature in which history gets worse and worse until, with a bang, it ends and is replaced by God’s dream. God’s dream erupts into our world bringing a new creation. 

God’s dream is like this, but also unlike this. More often God’s dream hovers at the edge of our awareness, doing its work but mostly unnoticed. It lingers at the limits of sight. It percolates below our consciousness. It teases at us, just out of reach. 

This parable, then, could be read as an urgent plea for us to pay attention to what is happening mostly beyond our awareness and completely beyond our control. It comes to me in the moments between wakefulness and sleep when suddenly and unbidden there is what I can only describe as an almost-revelation of rightness, of sanity, of restoration. And then it is gone and I cannot remember why or how it was sane or even what it was that was restored and there remains only a longing for what almost is but isn’t…not yet, anyway. 

This state is akin to reverie, when our guard is down, when our minds wander off and the task at hand (if there is one) is happily forgotten. It is the very opposite of productivity. It is useless to the system and there are whole shelves in bookstores dedicated to advice about how to stop “procrastinating” in favor of engaged thinking.  

Advent takes place in the not-here/not-there spaces of our lives as in the imperial advents of Roman days in the not-here/not-there space between the urban centers of politics, business, and administration and the open spaces of the countryside. The advent of God’s dream comes in the cracks, the fissures, and the half-dreaming reverie of our lives. In this sense, nothing has really changed. For it is not in Rome or Washington or other center of imperial power that God’s dream creeps in to dwell with us, but in the college student facing down imperial storm-troopers, in the listening voice at the other end of the telephone line, in midst of the poverty of a peasant family finding respite in a stable from the whims of a far-away ruler, If we must be attentive as Jesus instructs us, let us be attentive to those places for they are where we will glimpse God’s dream.  

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1Michael S. Pollard, Joan S. Tucker, and Harold D. Green, “Changes in Adult Alcohol Use and Consequences During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” JAMA Network Open 3, no. 9 (September 29, 2020): e2022942, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22942.

2AJ Owen et al., “Poor Appetite and Overeating Reported by Adults in Australia during the Coronavirus-19 Disease Pandemic: A Population-Based Study,” Public Health Nutrition, n.d., 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020003833.

3Jaime Ducharme, “COVID-19 Is Making Americans More Sedentary,” Time, May 12, 2020, https://time.com/5831678/covid-19-americans-exercise/.

4Matthew Gavidia, “How Have Sleep Habits Changed Amid COVID-19?,” AJMC, June 2, 2020, https://www.ajmc.com/view/how-have-sleep-habits-changed-amid-covid-19.

5Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London & New York: Verso, 2013), 11.

No One Left Out

 

Proper 27A

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

November 8, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

Church of the Redeemer

Morristown, NJ

No One Left Out

To read the New Testament, or any of the Bible for that matter, is to enter a world that is strange to our own. It’s not just that we have smartphones and regular garbage collection and they did not. It’s that we and they see the world in very different ways. They thought differently about how things work physically; they thought differently about the size and shape of the universe; they thought differently about history. They thought differently about everything.

And it’s hard for us to grasp. Learning to read the Greek in which they wrote is often easy compared to the work of learning to read what it was they were writing about. What seems easy to understand either because we’ve read it so many times it has become familiar or because we imagine that the writers lived in our imaginative world is, for both of those reasons, easy to misread and misunderstand. We have to read until the familiar becomes strange.

All the same, for all their strangeness, for all of the differences made by two thousand years of time and a continent and an ocean worth of distance, these human beings were not so unlike us. They preferred being alive to being dead. They lived together in communities. They married and raised children. They maintained households and community relations. They had a notion of what a good life would be and they struggled in that direction. They chafed under injustice and oppression and they resented unfairness.

Once we’ve read until a familiar text has become strange to us, then we turn around and read a strange text until the people become recognizably human.

This letter of Paul’s is his first surviving epistle, in fact, the oldest of any of the New Testament books, older by a generation than any of the gospels. Say whatever we will about Paul (and I’ve said plenty) he was the first known Jesus-follower to attempt any sort of written account of the Jesus movement. Like all of the New Testament books, 1 Thessalonians was written for a particular community of Christians to speak to the particular concerns that they had. We read over the shoulders of the first century readers for whom this book was written and to whom it was sent.

We surmise from reading even this short passage that there were worried and troubled followers of Jesus in Thessalonika. It was perhaps fifteen or twenty years since Jesus had died and been raised from the dead. It was a bedrock article of faith among the Christian assemblies that Jesus would return. He would return to “restore” Israel, as the Gospel of Luke puts it, to bring the definitive reign of God, to transform history so that humans, or at very least the humans who had followed the Way of Jesus, would be able to live the lives that God had always intended that they should lead. There are various images in the Bible of what this might look like, but the one from Micah that we would have heard last week had we read a little further will do nicely:

…they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid.¹

They believed that Jesus was the one through whom God would (finally) bring this to pass and that all this would happen soon. The folks at Thessalonika were not modern people. There were no anthropologists there, no sociologists, and no political scientists. They didn’t think scientifically in terms of systems that could be created, dismantled, or nudged in the direction of a just and peaceful society.

But they had nonetheless been at the work of living out an alternative vision of what human community could be. They were about the task of living into values that were at odds with the broader culture of Rome and its empire. They struggled to live non-violently, justly, lovingly, compassionately, and peacefully.

They weren’t environmentalists or ecologists, either. They certainly saw their lives as a struggle between culture and nature, a struggle that was often a matter of life and death, one that they had no assurance of winning. But they also understood that, just as human life as lived in the Empire of Rome was less than what God dreamed for them, so, too, was nature not as it should be. They believed that when Jesus returned to set things to rights, part of what would happen would be the restoration of creation to its intended splendor.

They understood themselves to be a part of God’s plan from which the natural world was not excluded and that their ultimate salvation and the creation’s salvation were wrapped up in each other. So their living out of and into God’s good news would be good news for the entire world.

Now they had been at this work for some time. But as the years drew on, members of their community died from one cause or another. This was not unusual, but it raised a problem. What would happen to those who died as Jesus’ return was delayed? Were they simply out of luck? Would they miss seeing in its completion the work that they had invested their lives in?

Paul crafted his answer to meet this pastoral need and to do that he drew from things that were a part of their lives. No, he said, those Christians who have died have not missed out, because when Jesus comes it will be like when the Emperor comes to pay an official visit, what was called a parousia. The Greek word means “presence” or “arrival.” (Its Latin translation is “adventus,” so that might help us.) The Emperor would draw near a city and heralds would be sent forward to announce the emperor’s approach. Horns would be sounded. The people of the city already knew that the emperor was coming so they would process out of the city to meet him on the road. They would wear white garments and, bowing down, they would present gifts.Now, a feature of ancient Greco-Roman cities is that there were no cemeteries inside the city walls. Instead, the roads into a city were lined on both sides with tombs. People wanted to be buried there so that travelers would see their tombs, perhaps read the epitaphs, and in this way they would be remembered, memorialized. Of course this meant that the emperor (or any other traveler) would meet the dead of the city before he met the living.

Paul re-imagines the parousia of Jesus as taking place from above. As he approached, the trumpet would sound, the heralds would announce his arrival, and the faithful would go up in this case to meet him. The dead would meet him first. The anxious Thessalonians didn’t need to worry about the dead of their community. When the time came, the dead would have a front row view.

I don’t doubt that the community at Thessalonika was able to find some comfort in the poetic image that Paul sketched in his letter to them.

The question I have is this: does it work for us who do not anticipate visits from the Emperor and who, for that matter, may or may not believe that history is laid out in the way that the Thessalonians believed it to be? I mean, do we really expect that our history will go along, fulfill certain disconnected prophecies, and then suddenly come to an end to be replaced by this supernatural interruption? We can and do imagine several scenarios for the end of human history, but none of mine at least look anything like this.

 

I see God’s dream for us differently, not as something outside or above history, and not as something really in history, either, but as something that bubbles up through it, erupting sometimes into a glimpse of what God wants for us.

It happened that way about four years ago in Baton Rouge during a Black Lives Matter protest. Protesters blocked a roadway without a permit and a line of heavily armored Louisiana State troopers prepared to shove the protesters off the street. A young black woman named Ieshia Evans stepped onto the street and stood facing them. Looking at the picture of her in a summer dress, I suspect that she hadn’t planned this. Still, she was there, this slender young woman, facing down a phalanx of police who looked like they were ready for combat. She described it this way:

When the police pushed everyone off the street, I felt like they were pushing us to the side to silence our voices and diminish our presence. They were once again leveraging their strength to leave us powerless. As Africans in America we’re tired of protesting that our lives matter, it’s time we stop begging for justice and take a stance for our people. It’s time for us to be fearless and take our power back.²

God’s dream lives just below the surfaces that we walk on unthinking. Sometimes it erupts. Sometimes it springs up and thrills our hearts, making us believe that the impossible dream of a peaceful justice is not only possible but inevitable.

The Thessalonians were worried about whether the dead of their community would be allowed to be a part of Jesus’ coming. And this after just a few years of delay in their expectations. What nearly two thousand years of delay have taught us is that Jesus’ coming is always already happening right now. Through Ieshia Evans, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and through everyday acts of millions of others who never make the news,Jesus approaches, blows a trumpet, and announces the transformation of the world, not as a future event, but right now and here among us. No one alive, or dead, or yet to be born will miss out.

Therefore, as Paul said, let us encourage one another.

 

--------------------------------------------------

 

1^ Micah 4.3b-4b.

2^ Yoni Appelbaum, “A Single Photo from Baton Rouge That’s Hard to Forget,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/a-single-photo-that-captures-race-and-policing-in-america/490664/

The Roaring Twenties

 

Proper 26A
Micah 3:5-12
November 1, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopalian
Morristown, NJ

The Roaring Twenties

Our Scripture reading is set in the little kingdom of Judah during in the Roaring Twenties, not the 1920s but the 720s BCE. The Assyrian Empire had been the regional superpower for about three hundred years (with about another one hundred to go). They had just recently overrun the Kingdom of Israel to Judah’s north, capturing its capital Samaria in 722. A flood of refugees washed up on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The people of Judah were anxious both because of the refugees themselves who came in large numbers and because of the Assyrian armies who could easily menace Judah next, as in fact they did just a few years later.

Ordinary people were anxious, but the rich and powerful saw an opportunity: They stole ancestral land from the people to sell to the newcomers. They made sure that the court system was sufficiently corrupt not to have to answer for their crimes. They bought the silence of the Jerusalem prophets.

With the financial and real estate sectors, the judiciary, and the official religion under their control, they could act without fear.

The one percent and their enablers had a lock on the system and there was nothing that could be done about it. They committed one outrage after another. They broke laws with impunity. They had purchased God’s silence, convinced God to look the other way, and persuaded themselves that God’s silence meant God’s approval. With Samaria and Israel destroyed, but with Judah safe and Jerusalem bigger, richer, and more glorious than ever, they concluded, “Surely God is on our side!”

Self-congratulations led to contempt for anyone else. As far as they were concerned the peasants who kept the city in wine, mutton, and barley, and even the men who drafted to keep watch on the walls of Jerusalem were “losers and suckers.” The elite had created an all-encompassing narrative in which they themselves were the only legitimate holders of power. There was no way to break into that narrative.

Those who had been dispossessed, contrary to Judah’s covenant with the land and with their God, needed to be restored to what belonged to them. Those whose labor had been stolen to defend the city where the stolen wealth of the land had been moved needed God’s justice to be done. They needed God’s judgment. Their very lives depended on it.

But there was nothing in the narrative offered by their rulers, their judges, their priests, or their royal prophets to suggest that God was anything other than indifferent, that God cared about the outrages they were experiencing,or that God would or even could bring justice and judgment for them.

Enter Micah. Micah was a wild card. He was a prophet who was not on the Temple payroll. He took no money from the king. He was a prophet in private practice. He could say anything, do anything, and what he did was to speak on God’s behalf. Not on behalf of the domesticated God who lived boxed-in in the Temple. Not on behalf of the God whose reputation was tied to Judah’s geo-political success.

No, Micah spoke on behalf of Yahweh who was still free and wild, a God of barren open spaces and windblown mountaintops. Yahweh was loving-kindness itself toward the people who longed to live in the community of peace that was possible within Yahweh’s covenant with the people and with their land. But Yahweh when roused in defense of her cubs was a mama bear toward those who threatened to undo Judah’s covenantal justice.

Micah spoke: Yahweh had had more than enough of prophets who sold their gift to the highest bidder. Yahweh was tired of the rich buying and selling the poor. Yahweh was done with priests who used the commandments to keep the poor in line. Justice was coming. Judgment was coming.

And it was about the land. It’s always about the land. Since Judah’s corruption was centered in Jerusalem, judgment would take this form: Jerusalem would be ruined. The trees would take over the land where the Temple once stood. The land would still be there, but Jerusalem would not.

Now, the word of the prophet is one thing. Audience response is another. Seldom are the judgments of a prophet unavoidable. More often than not there is a way out, if–and it’s a big if–their words are heeded. Micah spoke hyperbolic words against Jerusalem on God’s behalf. He wasn’t the only one. Isaiah of Jerusalem was also active. A group of priests were re-imagining life in God’s covenant. It came together under one of the kings, Hezekiah, who reformed Judah’s life. Assyria did not overrun Jerusalem. Judah enjoyed a period of peace that lasted more than a century.

Things being what they are, the crisis of the Roaring Twenties tends to be repeated. We are in the midst of one of those repetitions now. The rich and powerful control the regulatory process and the tax codes so that they become even richer and even more powerful, while the rest of us watch with anger and dismay as every norm is shattered. High offices are occupied by the self-serving. Self-serving religious leaders declare that all of this is the will of God and that anyone who disagrees will be judged by God. And it seems that there is no one to stop them, no one to offer a different narrative, no one to announce the coming justice of a God who is not bought, who is not captive, but who remains wild and free and every bit as passionately committed to justice as ever.

Micah doesn’t live among us, but his spirit does. And we are perfectly capable of being Micah in his place. We are perfectly able to say to the rich and the powerful:

This is what God says
to those who lead my people astray:
the pundits shall be disgraced,
and the press secretaries put to shame;
they shall all cover their lips,
for they have no insight into God’s reality.

This is what God says
to the Senators and Representatives
who say whatever the lobbyists demand
in exchange for money in their campaign war-chests,
This is what God says to the preachers who lie,
who say that God does not care about justice,
that God is not committed to peace,
but only to the freedom of the strong to be strong
at the expense of the weak:
Therefore because of you
the District of Columbia will be plowed as a field;
Washington shall become a heap of ruins,
and Capital Hill a wooded height.

Micah is not here, but we can say that to the rich and powerful. Many of us have already said it. More of us will say it on Tuesday. And if need be we will say it in the streets. Micah does not live among us, but his spirit does.

An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

 

An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

Men's Journeys
Jeremiah 20:7-13
June 21, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, NJ

Just why I can't really say, but unlike many of my progressive peers, I lean toward the Hebrew Bible. Maybe because it was Jesus' Bible and, as the old Sunday School song says, "If it's good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me."

Maybe because, when I took Hebrew, I was assigned a study of the uses of the Hebrew word gô'êl, a word that is usually translated as "redeemer" or "avenger," but which is best understood as "the one who does what a next-of-kin should do." Often it refers to a human next-of-kin who should make sure that their relative lives in peaceful sufficiency. Sometimes it refers to the requirement to exact vengeance in the case of a wrongful death. This was ancient Israel's rough and ready criminal justice system and, before we comment on its barbarity, may I just remind us all that our own criminal justice system can hardly claim any moral high ground.

When I realized that one of God's consistent claims in the Hebrew Bible is that God acts as gô’êl, as next-of-kin, to anyone who does not have a next-of-kin to act for them. In particular this is true for the widows, the orphans, and the undocumented workers. Mess with these classes of people and you will find yourself facing, not an angry parent, spouse, or sibling, but Yahweh, the covenant God of the Israelites. Something in me thrilled to discover this. Social justice is not some add-on to the biblical message. It is part and parcel of who God has decided to be toward this world and its people. This is comes as both comfort and warning.

So I am a Hebrew Bible fan. More than that, I am a fan of the prophets. To them falls the task of speaking for the God-who-is-next-of-kin. When a society fails to protect those who have no other protector, when a nation fails to safeguard those with no safety net, when a people decide that the rich and the powerful are the God-blessed, then prophets announce the bad news: by setting themselves against the moral arc of the universe they will bring, not prosperity and security, but anxiety and scarcity on themselves.

If this is the well from which Jesus drinks, then one of those who dug must deeply would have to be the prophet Jeremiah. I'm a Jeremiah fan. Jeremiah's people claim to be the people of God and were convinced that it gave them unqualified immunity and unlimited protection. Jeremiah is clearest among the prophets about the fate of a people who forget who God is and what it is that God seeks for this world.

Jeremiah is my favorite, too, because he never hides how he feels about his job. Unlike Isaiah who was all "Ooh, ooh, pick me!" Jeremiah's response was in essence, "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number." When God would not be dissuaded, Jeremiah discovered quickly that the job of prophet has absolutely no perks. He is God's "essential worker:" abused, endangered, and woefully underpaid.

In our text today he does not hold back. “You fooled me, YHWH, and I let myself be fooled. You were too strong for me, and you triumphed.” The Hebrew root, repeated in the words, "fooled" and "let myself be fooled," has the basic meaning of being open, but not in a good way. It means being open to deception or enticement, being simple, foolish, or silly, in other words. So as Jeremiah is using the word, it accuses God of having deceived, or enticed, or even seduced Jeremiah into becoming a prophet. Add to that notion the mention of God's being too strong or having overpowered Jeremiah in that act and Jeremiah is close to invoking a dark metaphor. "Enticement by force" could be a way of avoiding a very ugly accusation, but it amounts to the same thing. Jeremiah is saying, in typical prophetic overstatement, that he is experiencing his calling as at very least some sort of bait-and-switch scam or even an assault with sexual overtones. The fact that either could be meant lets Jeremiah leave the accusation hanging in the air.

God should know better and Jeremiah is not shy about telling his own story. If being a prophet means speaking truth to power, telling God his own truth is as prophetic as you can get. Jeremiah demands God's promised justice, even when it is God of whom he demands it.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about men's journeys, but you've probably already guessed. I see features of my own story in Jeremiah's. Of course no disciple is greater than their master, so I'm claiming no equivalence. I'm not even claiming to be a particularly apt disciple. If Marx was right that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, in the place of Jeremiah's gutsy bleat, mine is more like the men's prayer from The Red Green Show.

This Canadian comic series features the misadventures of a group of men who are trying without a great deal of success to figure how to be happy. They have gotten no further than to figure out that their happiness must somehow involve the happiness of the women in their lives but they can never seem to shake loose the allure of guyness. At least once per episode they gather for a meeting of the Possum Lodge and open the meeting with the Men's Prayer that goes like this: "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

My upraising yielded a version of manhood that was deeply conflicted. I was supposed to be a "man," someone who was not only in charge,but deserved to be. And, as a man who was also straight, white, middle class, and college-educated, I was at or near the top of every hierarchy I could see.

In part I felt uneasy with that privileged height. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I saw just a little of what it cost my mother to live in a world that valued men more than women. Maybe it's because I experienced some of what it cost me and my sisters to be born into a world that valued adults more than children. Maybe it's because manhood defined that way remained a precarious achievement.

Mostly I was okay with privilege, okay with the power I had. My wishes, my hopes, my wants were important just because of who I was.

But there were times when that unease would ooze out. Carol had aspirations to become a nurse and then, a psychiatric nurse. I could hardly claim that that was less important than my goals. And, in the event, she has had, I suspect, a greater impact on the world than I have, for all my plans. Even she does not know how many lives she has saved and how many more are better because of her work. How could I have stood in the way of that? I didn't find it easy, and I was much less easily successful at it than I could have wished, but I was glad to be able to aid this remarkable woman in ways that my father would never have done. He once told me that I would make someone a wonderful wife some day. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

In seminary during the theological development of second-wave feminism, even at a backwater institution like the University of Dubuque, my notions of the role of men in the Christian movement were challenged on a weekly basis. One good friend especially, Karen Dearsch, took me on as a special project. I'm not sure why. Maybe I showed promise. More likely she just couldn't refuse a challenge. And I certainly was that. We would come out of a class in which I had made some foolish statement or other and she would turn to me and say, "Now, John..." She made the implications of my positions clear and with that clarity I came recognize how benighted they were. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Jody kept working on me, too, as you might imagine. She has reminded me of how little air there is in the rarified heights I often inhabit. She will meet a long abstract rant of mine with the giant-slayer question: "What about the sheep?" This is a shorthand reference to the work of Fernand Braudel who persuasively demonstrated that you cannot understand the history of the Mediterranean world until you are very clear about the fact that sheep change their grazing grounds with the seasons. "What about the sheep?" demands that I be grounded, and not to some abstract ground, either, but to the ground that yields the grasses that sheep eat in their summer and winter grazing lands.

Someone responded to my first sermon here by saying, "I can see where [Jody] gets it." That is at least half backwards. But for Jody's apparently indefatigable patience (which I know to be more apparent than real) much of my thought would stagnate and start to smell, however much I would be willing stay settled where I am. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say more. I would love to talk at great length about a community of folks in Potrerillos, a village in the mountainous northeast of El Salvador, and how they stood my notions of wealth and poverty on their heads. They tolerated my stupid questions. They didn't answer me with words; instead, they showed me. For them I have learned Spanish, or relearned it. For them I have learned more about political economy than I ever wanted to know. I'm still not sure how that story is going to go from here. None of it has been particularly easy, for in the process I discovered that hard and painful truth that my country had betrayed me. Maybe a different version of the Men's Prayer goes: "I'm an American. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say something about how my most deeply held beliefs have been constantly challenged: beliefs about race and racism, about sexuality and gender, about capitalism and colonialism. Every axis against which I am measured and found privileged is also an axis about which my world is spinning. I have no idea how it will all come out except for this:

I know my journey isn't just about me, nor is it undertaken just for my benefit. One thing has emerged with greater and greater clarity (although that is no guarantee of its truth). There is something at work--fashioning or perhaps birthing but in any event--bringing into being a world that we have hardly begun to glimpse. Jesus called it the basileia tou theou, that I like to translate as "God's dream." King called it the Beloved Community. It is the possibility of human community within a broader global community of all living beings and the world that sustains them. The whole world is on a journey toward it.

My own pilgrimage, however reluctantly I undertake it, is intended--and not always by me--to inch the world toward God's dream. Perhaps I am being dragged toward God's dream. I'll accept that if the alternative is being left in self-satisfied stasis.

Yes, "I am a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Amen.

Response to the Statement of the Appointive Cabinet of the Iowa Annual Conference

March 28, 2019

Dear Bishop Haller and the Appointive Cabinet of the Iowa Annual Conference,

Since my conscious decision to count myself a follower of Jesus some forty-five years ago, the United Methodist Church had nurtured me and challenged me to grow in the love I bear toward God and in the love that God bears toward all of creation through me. Always the prodding of the church had been for me to love more, to expand the circle of those whom I love, to love recklessly.

But now the United Methodist Church warns me insistently, stridently, and threateningly that some of those whom the Spirit has taught me to love are not acceptable in God’s eyes and must not be acceptable in my eyes either. To say that I judge myself to have been betrayed by my church is a painful understatement.

In the midst of this great disappointment I appreciate the opportunities that you have given the clergy and laity of the Annual Conference to gather to ask questions and speak what is on their mind and heart. “Holy conferencing” is always in short supply. Thank you for making it more available in this way.

Unfortunately, my retirement to New Jersey prevented me from attending these sessions and from gathering with my clergy and lay colleagues and friends. So I have chosen to participate in the on-going conversation by writing a response to your statement of March 14.

I found some things that you said to be valuable and useful. I appreciate your statement’s acknowledgment of the harm–past, present, and future–done to LGBTQIA persons. I appreciate your commitment to keep us informed as the shape of the General Conference’s actions becomes clearer and is evaluated by the Judicial Council for its constitutionality. I appreciate your statement’s recognition that we need each others prayers.

But your statement is a troubled text. Your intent to offer a powerfully unifying statement is undercut by its inner and unacknowledged contradictions.

Foremost among these are the evasions around the “great harm [that] has been done and continues to be done.” “We confess and grieve” is a strong beginning that promises the bold change of mind, heart, and life that our tradition calls repentance. But that change is not forthcoming. It disappears behind the passive voice: you grieve that harm that “has been done.” What is this harm? How has it been done? And, most importantly, who has done it? If we do not name the harm, if we do not identify how it happens, if we do not see clearly how we are implicated in the mechanisms that perpetuate it, how can we possibly address much less “eradicate” it? You could have led the clergy and laity of the Iowa Annual Conference in asking and addressing these questions. Instead, your statement retreated into the fog of the passive voice.

Having accepted no responsibility for past and present harm, it is not surprising that your statement moves on to open self-contradiction. You are “committed to observing the governance of the Book of Discipline” and at the same time you are “committed to eradicating any further harm.” Unless you deny that any provisions of the Book of Discipline are harmful to LGBTQIA folk, there is simply no way that these statements can both be true. How long can any of us “go limping with two different opinions”?

How long, for example, can you dangle charges over a colleague who has been under complaint for most of the last three years and who has suffered under an un-acted upon complaint for nearly a year? Here, if ever there were one, is a chance to “[eradicate] any further harm.” Bishop Haller, you might do that by dismissing the complaint and taking any consequences of that dismissal upon your own shoulders rather than allowing continuing harm to be borne exclusively by one who is both an elder of the conference and a beloved child of God.

I suspect that some at least of the faults and evasions of this statement reflect a specific process, a process that sought to craft a statement that all of the signatories could agree to. The cabinet, as you suggest, is diverse in some ways. In terms of gender it is, if I am not mistaken, the most balanced cabinet in our history. It evidences ethnic diversity. Doubtless it reflects a diversity of theological commitments.

Along the most critical axis, however, it is not at all diverse. It is monolithic. It is a group of powerful straight folks gathered to talk about LGBTQIA folk rather than with them. You could at least have acknowledged this limitation. As it is, your allusions to diversity only serve to distract from the harmful reality that some voices were silenced before you even began to speak.

I have been taught by the biblical tradition to expect that the voice of God speaks most clearly through those who have been silenced, those who have fallen into the gaps, those who are consigned to speak from the margins. Perhaps these voices were excluded or perhaps I am not as receptive as I should be. For whatever reason, I did not hear God’s voice in your statement. That saddens me. I had hoped for better and I hope for it still. In that hope I remain,

Yours in Christ, 

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD, Elder (retired)

Credo: Why Is the Church?

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Last Sunday at Decorah
Last Sunday Before Retirement
Ephesians 1:15-23
June 24, 2018

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

Well, here we are. This is my last Sunday under appointment as your pastor, my last Sunday as an active elder of the Iowa Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Fifteen hundred sermons preached over a thirty-eight year career and it all comes down to this.

You know what? That's far too much pressure to put on you or me. It took me a long time to learn that a sermon should say one thing and one thing only. It should be focused. My first preaching professor said, "Think rifle, not shotgun." He was right. I might update that and say, “Think laser, not floodlight.” Any attempt to cover it all means not covering any of it. That is a lesson I still sometimes forget. But today, more than most, it's important to remember: Say one thing. Say one thing.

Okay.

In the first sermon in this series I approached the question, "What is the Bible?" In the second, "Who is God?" Now it's time for, "Why is the Church?" Those with good memories will notice that I have changed this last title from when I announced the series. I'm fond of why questions. My mother said of her experience trying to raise me that she could the answer question, "Where are the stars?" The question, "What are the stars?" she could handle pretty well, too. But when I asked "Why are the stars?" she threw in the towel. I guess I was asking theological questions even at the age of four.

Why is the Church? Asking "Why?" is better, I think, than "How?" or "What?" or "Who?" about the Church. "Why?" focuses more sharply, I think. And we need the focus because there are quite a few answers, especially to the question of "What?" is the church, that are making being the church harder and harder for all of us.

I'd say that there are three theories about what the Church is:

1) It is a kind of social club that does charity work, sort of like the Lion's Club, only with singing and more prayer. Membership requires that dues be paid in both money and volunteer work. But it also confers privileges, like being able to borrow folding chairs for a graduation reception or having your children's children baptized, even though those grandchildren are unlikely to be in a church until they get married.

2) The Church is a kind of co-op that provides religious goods and services and its member/owners are its inner circle of customers. They seek the services that they need and they pay on a fee-for-service basis. Members are entitled to complain about poor service. We give volume discounts to member/owners.

3) A very old answer is that the Church is the custodian of salvation. The sacraments or the Gospel message, depending on whether we are thinking of Catholics or Protestants, belong to the Church. They are the paths that lead to heaven and the Church is the toll-keeper. The Church has a monopoly over salvation. Those who are in the Church can walk the path. Those who are outside are doomed.

It has been easy for me to reject the first two models. The Church with membership that confers privileges has never really squared in my mind with Jesus' call to discipleship.

And the Church as a non-profit co-op with customers to please just rubs me the wrong way. I hate the phrase, "church shopping," with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. It's not that I don't get the need to chose a church wisely. I get that the brand name of the franchise doesn't always tell us what we need to know. It's just that church shopping leads to choosing a church that pleases us, to choosing a church where we'll be comfortable. In my experience church belonging is more about finding a church that will challenge and support me (and expect the same of me) in the process of "being perfected in love," as we Methodists say.

In recent years I've grown more and more suspicious of the third model, too. When I came to believe that God loves us in a way that does not privilege church membership or even Christian faith, I had to change my thinking. I have become what is sometimes called a universalist. That is, I believe no one is excluded from God's love in this world or the next, except by their own choice, and even their choice is not a once and forevermore sort of choice. I believe in the theoretical possibility of hell as our choice to exclude ourselves from God's love. But I think that practically speaking hell is mostly pretty sparsely populated. To put it perhaps a little too cutely, when people realize that they have pretty much been idiots when they were alive and that God has loved them and always will love them, they mostly change their minds and stop being idiots.

I don't mean to make light of the process of changing our minds either during this lifetime or the next. It's hard. We embrace ways of being in the world and ways of relating to ourselves and to each other because we think we get some benefit from them. To give up those ways is scary and painful. We depend very much on God's love to be able to do it at all. In the case of people who are seriously evil, say, Osama bin-Laden and Adolf Hitler, this work of repentance will be excruciating. But I believe that God's grace will enable even them to do that work. It is God's intention, in short, that everyone experience salvation, whether in this life or the next. "God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it" isn't just a cute slogan; it has real consequences. We can try, but I just don't think that any of us can hold out against God's love forever.

You do not have to join a church to be saved. You do not have believe a list of things to be saved. You do not have to have any particular experience to be saved. You are always already saved. We no longer live under an economy of salvation that depends on our persuading God to forgive us. God has always already forgiven us. Seeking God’s forgiveness is not what our life is about.

So, I have come to believe that the Church is not the dispenser of salvation, whether through its rituals or its message. Cyprian of Carthage was wrong when he wrote that “there is no salvation outside the Church.”

If that is the case, then "Why is the Church?" And here is my answer and it resonates with Paul whom we heard in today's reading from Ephesians. When I read this text, I see an image of something like a fountain. God's love overflows and fills Jesus; Jesus' love overflows and fills us; we overflow and fill the world. God's dream is made real in human history in the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus. God's dream becomes Jesus' dream. As Jesus' dream is made real in human history in us, his dream becomes our dream. As we labor to transform the spaces around us our dream is made real in the world. This out- and over-flowing of God's love and God's dream is what the Church is all about.

Why is the Church? In order to be the presence of Jesus in the world. We are the prototype, the pilot project, the beta release of God's dream. It's not that God's dream can't be found in other places, even in some unlikely places. But here is where it is labeled as God's dream. Here is where the dream comes with the stories. It is not that Christ has no other hands but ours, but ours are the hands that are labeled as Christ's hands.

The Christian tradition is unique in this way. If you ask a Muslim where God's will can be seen and known, I'm pretty sure that their answer will be “in the Qu'ran.”

I'm not sure what the Jewish answer to that question might be. In fact, I imagine that this question might provoke an argument. One might say "the Torah" and another might say "the Messiah." And maybe the real answer is in the dispute itself, in two Jews seeing and defending different answers knowing that the result is better than the sum of its parts. Maybe.

But if you ask a Christian this question, I think the answer should be, “Sometimes you can see God's dream in the life of the Church.” That doesn't mean we always get it right. The failures of the Church over the centuries have been spectacular and tragic. We are too slow to learn from our mistakes. But when God's dream appears among us, it is gorgeous.

The test of the Church and the test of a church is whether it makes God's dream real in its midst and in the world. Models of ministry come and go. But the core reason for the Church's existence does not: it is to make God's dream real. It's all right there in the prayer that Jesus taught us.

At First United Methodist Church we have certainly not always gotten it right. A beta release always has bugs. A prototype doesn't always live up to the hopes of its designer. A pilot project will uncover unforeseen problems. We have had ours. And I have made more than my fair share of contributions to our crashes.

But God's dream has appeared among us. In the determination to welcome the stranger, even when they come without the proper documents as they do to the Justice for Our Neighbors clinics we host, or come from another tradition as our Muslim students guests during Ramadan, I see God's dream made real. In the shared hilarity of the Puppets of Praise, I see God's dream made real. In the dogged stubbornness of the UMW who somehow carry on doing ministry, I see God's dream. In the solidarity fostered by Sister Parish, I see God's dream. In Silas's exuberant joy as he slides into home plate and the children's sermon, I see God's dream. In the consistently good music of the choir that is never the same choir for two rehearsals or worship services in a row, I see God's dream. In the white steeple that rises like a beacon beside the other buildings of our neighborhood, I see God's dream. God's dream has appeared among us. And those moments have been gorgeous. Those gorgeous moments are my answer to the question, Why is the Church?”

So, thank you. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for allowing me to share those gorgeous moments. Keep making those gorgeous moments with Pastor Mee. But in the meantime, thank you. Thank you. 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.

Credo: Who Is God? (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Exodus 3:1-15; June 17, 2018)

Credo: Who Is God?

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 3:1-15
June 17, 2018

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

Who is God? Now there's an ambitious question! Maybe I would have been better off to have asked the question next week with everything packed, my car running, ready to hotfoot it out of town before you had a chance to ask any questions.

How to begin...

I can say that my earlier attempts to find an answer to that question mostly involved what we in the "biz" call "doing theology." Part of the reason for requiring a seminary education for clergy is to train clergy as theologians, or at least to make a beginning. We were subjected to various courses in theology that broke it down into its parts: Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, eschatology, pneumatology, anthropology, and theology proper. Theology also got smuggled into courses on Church history, which was framed as a series of controversies, a series of heresies that were battled and defeated (sometimes in literal battles). We learned the general shape of what is acceptable and what is not in Christian thought. We learned about current schools of theological thinking. We found our favorite authors and stuck with them, defending them against all comers.

My mind and personality are suited to this sort of thing, so you can imagine that I did it pretty well. I still do.

But as comfortable and familiar as this path is to me, it has its limits. One of those limits is that doing theology is a matter of abstraction. We might start with the Bible, or, more accurately a small selection of texts from the Bible, and we make general statements about them. We move from the specific to the general. And this applies to the stuff of our lives as well as the stuff of the Bible. Take Karl Barth, one of the more famous theologians of the last century. You can read all thirty-one volumes of his Church Dogmatics and never discover what sort of a marriage he had or whether he liked children.

Theology may tell us about what God is and what God is not, but surprisingly tells us little about who God is. Theology can satisfy us intellectually and still leave us wanting something else.

So I'm not sure I'm even qualified to ask the question. Moses asked the question. He wanted to know God's name, something more than "the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Moses wants a name to give to the Israelites. He knows they will ask. And I suspect he knows why they will ask. Names are like handles that can be used to gain power. In some places in the world, no one's true name is ever uttered out loud. Instead they goes by a nickname, sometimes obscene, always an insult. In that way they are protected from spirits who would use the knowledge of their name to do them harm. Even we, if we are in a conversation in which someone knows our name, but we do not know theirs, feel ourselves at a disadvantage, as if we have given someone else power over us.

So Moses asked, "What is your name?" And God replied, "אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה," which translates to "I am what I am" or "I am who I am."

Traditionally, philosophically-minded theologians have interpreted this as meaning something like, "the One who has no source of existence beyond itself," or "the One who is not dependent on anyone else," or "the self-existent One." I can't blame theologians for this. Like the rest of us they are just trying to understand. They are just trying to get a handle on God. And that may be the problem, the same problem that the Israelites had. They are trying to get a handle on God, too. But God does not wish to be handled.

And that's why I think God response is something along these lines: "When the Israelites demand to know my name, tell them, 'You think you'll have some sort of leverage over me if you know my name? Well, nevermind what my name is! It's none of your business what my name is!' Tell them Nevermind sent you!"

What if I tried--what if we tried--living into the question of who God is without being motivated by any attempt to get a handle on God, but simply to know even as we are known, as Paul put it.

In the last few years I have found myself more and more wandering along the winding and criss-crossing paths of the Bible itself. There are, I testify, wonders to be seen. And in the dazzling details I glimpse hints, if not of God's name, then at least of who God might be known to be.

There is, of course, the next verse, the one after the one in which God skates around the question of God's name, the one in which God tells Moses God's name: "The Lord [that is, Yahweh], the God of your ancestors, Abraham's God, Isaac's God, and Jacob's God." Yahweh might be related in some way to the Hebrew for "I am." So something odd has happened, which to say the very least, is not at all unusual in the Bible. In one breath God has said in effect, I'm not going to tell you my name. In the very next God says, Oh, by the way, my name is Yahweh. But that isn't where I went in pursuit of an answer to the question of who God is.

Where I went is this: We are used to thinking about God in the declarative sentences and philosophical propositions of the theologians. We don't necessary know the lingo, but we think that this is how it ought to be done. But the Bible doesn't present God very often as the object of theology. Instead the Bible presents God as a character in a story. In fact the Bible presents God as the leading character in the story that it contains.

In the story I've chosen for today's text we have, in a way, God's self-introduction to the Israelites after a considerable period of absence. The absence is not explained. It's just there. Abraham had a God. Isaac had a God. Jacob had a God. Joseph and his brothers had a God, the same God as their father, grandfather, and great grandfather. In that story Joseph and his brothers God arranged for them to settle in Egypt as guests of Pharaoh and so escaped a regional famine.

But then God seems to have disappeared. A different Pharaoh emerges, one who didn't know Joseph or his brothers, one for whom the Israelites were just a subject people the labor of whose bodies could be commodified and exploited. Pharaoh enslaved them. But God is absent. God even disappeared from the memory of the Israelites; they have forgotten. They have become just another band of miserable slaves. When they cry out, they don't even have an address toward which to direct their prayers.

But that doesn't seem to matter to God. Whatever God's absence meant, it had not meant that God had ceased to notice what happened to the Israelites. As God said to Moses, "I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain."

There is more. Not only has God noticed, God is now on the scene to deliver the Israelites. God has not forgotten the covenant that even Israel can no longer remember.

"I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them."

God has seen, God has heard, God knows, God has come down to deliver, God has come to bring them to a good land.

In the story, we know God as one who sees, who hears, who pities, and who comes down to save. It's a story to be sure. We could say that it's just a story, only a story. We could say that, except that, since we are Jesus-followers, we are part of that "just a story." We are on the inside of the story. We are characters in this story in which God is also a character. Inside this story we can never be sure that God will not see. We cannot rule out the possibility that God will hear. We cannot categorically state that God does not pity the oppressed. And so we cannot ignore the possibility that God will come down to save.

Does this answer the question of who God is? Will you accuse me of a sleight of hand if I say, Yes, it does? I haven't proven anything, even that God exists. But if this story is any part of our story, then that changes things.

We don't know that God will act this way in similar circumstances. But God has done it before. So neither can we know that God will not act in these ways again. We hope that God will, because there are people who are being oppressed now, people who have fallen into Pharaoh's hands, people who had fled life-threatening conditions in their home for the hope of refuge in another land and who have been denied that hope. But not simply denied it. They have been arrested and charged with crimes. And if that were not bad enough, their children have been taken from them, two thousand or more of them taken and held hostage. Pharaoh has never dared to be so callous and cruel and cold.

But this is acceptable because Pharaoh has decreed it. Pharaoh imagines that there is no higher authority who can disagree. Pharaoh even imagines that he may invoke God as the authority behind his decree. Pharaoh imagines that he can carry out a cruel and callous policy and claim that he ought to be obeyed because God says so. I don't know what story Pharaoh thinks he's in. But it's not our story.

In our story there is One who notices such things, and who has a record of responding savingly and sometimes savagely. for the sake of two thousand underage hostages. The God of Abraham cannot be counted on to be absent. When the God of Abraham is present, the oppressed go free and the oppressors answer for their crimes. And that's my answer to the question. This is Who God Is.

If Pharaoh is sleeping well these days, it's only because he doesn't understand the situation.

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.