Hey! What Gives!? (Matthew 6:9-10; Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; August 2, 2015)

Hey! What Gives!?

Matthew 6:9-10

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 2, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

If there is a single prayer from our tradition that people know by heart, it is the Lord's Prayer. There are a few variations. Some folks forgive debts where others forgive trespasses. United Methodists forgive trespassers, some wag has said, because we never forgive debts. More on that in a couple of weeks. Most Protestants use some version of the prayer as found in the Authorized Version, the so-called King James Version, named for the guy who did the authorizing. Many, though, use a modern version put forward by the International Consulation on English in the Liturgy. Some folks change a word or two here or there, to remove the patriarchal language. There are some slight differences in the concluding doxology (that is not part of either biblical version).

But all that aside, I can step in front of nearly any Christian body in the English-speaking world, say, "Let us pray as our Lord taught us," and have the assurance that we'll all get through it pretty well. We have this prayer memorized, even if it's only "sing-along" memorized, you know, in the way that we can sing along with a song on the radio that we couldn't sing without help. We also know the prayer by heart, which isn't quite the same thing. It's been a kind of refuge for us. When we have to pray, but don't know what or how, these words give agonized souls a way to pray.

I don't want to take any of that away, but like any set of memorized words that we use often, the Lord's Prayer has been subject to two distortions. First, we may never have read the Lord's Prayer very closely, in a way that let us hear it with something like the force that Jesus gave it. Second, like any common ritual, whether it's saying the Pledge of Allegiance or telling each other goodnight, we have this tendency to do it without really paying much attention. The words just carry us along and the first thing you know it's over and we hardly even noticed. We tell our spouses that we love them and after a few years it becomes automatic.

The solution to that problem is not to stop saying, "I love you." Nor is it to stop praying the Lord's Prayer. The solution is to pay attention, even if it is for the first time.

So, for the next four weeks we'll be looking a little more closely at the Lord's Prayer, learning or reminding ourselves of what it actually says, so that our worship together and our prayers when we are apart will carry more meaning.

The first thing that I want to notice is the sheer audacity of the prayer. With hardly any courtesy and no bowing and scraping at all, the prayer addresses God, lays out seven demands with the seven uses of the imperative. Then it stops so abruptly that Christians of later ages felt compelled to add the familiar doxology, "for thine is the kingdom, and so on..." It's a cheeky prayer, a prayer with sass. It doesn't request little things, either. This is not a request for help in finding a parking space or a lost set of car keys.

The scope of the prayer is huge, as the first five lines of the prayer make clear:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

These requests aren't really three separate requests but three ways of asking for the same thing. Here's the situation: God, though addressed as a parent, is somewhat removed from us. God is in heaven. And we are not.

God looks around heaven and everything looks okay. God's name is regarded as holy. God reigns. God's will is done. But that's in heaven. That's not where we are. We are on earth. On earth things are not what they are where God is. And perhaps this has escaped God's notice.

God's name is not regarded as holy. God does not reign. I say this because God's will is not being done on earth. How do I know that? I'm glad you asked. I know that because I know what God wants. We all know what God wants. We spent four weeks laying that out in detail before I went on vacation.

To be sure, the Ten Commandments are not the only place in the Bible where God tells us what God wants, but it's a pretty good place. It isn't hard to understand, either. To begin, God is the God who set Israel free from slavery to the gods of Egypt. Israel labored endlessly to ease Pharaoh's anxiety by meeting his whims. They labored without rest. The conditions under which they lived did not allow for rest or neighborliness or community or human being. When Israel cried out, God heard them, God saw their misery, and God determined to set them free.

God does not want people in thrall to any economic system or government or social arrangement or even to any person. It is God's intention, God's will, to "bring out" everyone who lives in slavery.

That slavery can take a lot of forms. It could be the slavery of, say, student loan debt that is so massive it can never be repaid. Or it could be the slavery of endless austerity imposed on one nation by another (who, in the case that I'm thinking about, have had a nasty habit in the last century or so of trying to impose their will on other people, sometimes with tanks, this time with banks). Or it could be the slavery of consumerism that dangles shiny objects in front of people who when they "support the economy" by buying them are then accused of being greedy when the business cycle turns down. Or it could be the slavery of fear that is peddled by those who want our obedience, and use that fearful obedience to make the world less safe and themselves richer and more powerful. Or it could be the slavery of addiction to chemicals that poison the mind and body and leave behind wrecked lives and a tidy profit for the drug lords. Or it could be the slavery of the American Dream that holds out the promise of a prosperous life to any who work hard and obey the rules and shatters that promise at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. Slavery comes in many shapes and sizes. God hates them all. It is God's intention, God's will, to break the chains of bondage.

It is the God who hated Israel's chains in Egypt, who broke those chains, and who gave Israel a new life. We know God's dream for the shape of that new life. It would be a life of freedom from oppression by the gods of endless labor, endless anxiety, endless fear, and endless anxiety, the gods of death in all its forms. God would protect them from those gods. In their new life, there would be rest from labor. There would be freedom from fear that their houses and fields and orchards and vineyards would be taken from them. There would be freedom from violence. There would be relations that were based on truth-telling and where one neighbor would not regard the other as their rival or enemy. There would, perhaps best and least likely of all, be freedom from the envy and greed that gnaw at the roots of community and mutual care like the worm Nithhogg who in malice gnaws at the root of the world tree in Norse mythology.

God's will, in short, is no mystery. The mystery is, What has happened to it? Where is the making holy of God's name? Where is the reign of God? "These things are heaven," someone says. And I say to someone, "That's not good enough."

It wasn't good enough for Jesus. It wasn't good enough for the martyrs. It wasn't good enough for Benedict and those sought to fashion that humane life on earth, even if it was only within a small community, so that the rest of us should not lose hope. It wasn't good enough for Hildegard of Bingen who faced down bishops and demanded the unity of the Church. It wasn't good enough for William Wilberforce whose festival day was just this Thursday whose life-long labor was the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It wasn't good enough for Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw clearly the destruction caused by the interlocking mechanisms of racism, poverty and militarism.

It's not good enough for us, either. Obamacare not withstanding, there are still plenty of people who need Decorah's free clinic. The so-called recovery from the last recession not withstanding, there are hungry children in our own country, in our own county. A post-racial society not withstanding, a black woman can get arrested and thrown in jail where she dies under suspicious circumstances for changing lanes without signaling.

You see, Jesus told us to pray like this, demanding God's justice in an unjust world. We've been doing it for a long time. We've been praying for two thousands years for God's will to be done, for God's kingdom to come, for God's name to be made holy and it hasn't happened yet.

Are you discouraged? I am. Justice is a long time coming.

God broke Israel's chains and gave them a new life. But it isn't as if God simply snapped the divine fingers and snatched the Israelites from their beds in Egypt and plopped them down in the Land of Promise. At some point the Israelites had to get up on their own feet and walk out of Egypt.

The other half of the Lord's Prayer is that it isn't enough to nag at God for justice, although God's people have never been above nagging. At some point we have to decide that it's well worth giving up some of our privilege for the sake of justice for everyone. At some point we have to decide that it isn't going to be business as usual. At some point we have to decide that we have had enough. At some point we have to get up on our own feet and walk out of Egypt, too. At some point we have to decide that we aren't going to governed by fear or greed. And all of this is part of the answer to the Lord's Prayer that we keep waiting for and resisting at the same time.

This prayer isn't a set of words we say together that comfort us in their familiarity. Still less is it to be prayed on auto-pilot. It is a prayer that demands the full engagement of our minds and our hearts and our hands and our feet. It is a prayer that demands a response from God and from us. An answer might not be soon in coming; it might take another two thousand years. But we're going to keep praying like we expect the answer tomorrow.

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Rest for the Weary (Deuteronomy 5:12-15; 5th Sunday after Pentecost; June 28, 2015)

Rest for the Weary

Deuteronomy 5:12-15
5th Sunday after Pentecost
June 28, 2015

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

When Joseph died, “a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people [I think these were his “peeps,” his inner circle, rather than the whole of the Egyptians],”Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and fight against us and escape from the land." [¹]

The one percent always has a very basic problem. They are rich and powerful, but they are outnumbered. There are always more of the ninety-nine percent than there are of the one percent. It sounds silly to say so, but this is something that is often forgotten by the ninety-nine percent, but never by the one percent. Notice how mixed up the one percent is. They are afraid of the Israelites, afraid of their numbers and their power, afraid of their birthrates and their potential for rebellion. But most of all, they are afraid of their escape, afraid that they might have to do without them, afraid that they will no longer be able to steal their labor for their own comfort.

So the one percent come up with a clever plan to keep the Israelite slaves in line. They force them to labor and toil for the benefit of Pharaoh and his crowd. Pharaoh forced the Israelites to build warehouse cities to store all the surplus that the one percent have stolen from the people: all the extra grain that they have grown.

Pharaoh was ruthless and the Israelite slaves led bitter lives of back-breaking toil. When Moses, the outside agitator, came and demanded that the Israelites be allowed to go into the desert to observe a festival to Yahweh, Pharaoh would have none of it. No time off for them! In fact, Pharaoh made the work of the Israelites harder by demanding that they find their own straw for making bricks. Pharaoh knew how to crush a union!

This system is riddled with anxiety from top to bottom. Egypt has enough grain to meet its needs; in fact, it lacks adequate storage space. But Pharaoh doesn’t consider cutting back production. What if there is a drought? What if there are locusts who eat up the grain? What if? So, food production continues as before and, because Pharaoh is anxious, the Israelites have to toil at building Pithom and Rameses, the warehouse cities. But Pharaoh is also anxious about the Israelites, so he plans a campaign of infanticide against them: he will make sure that the boy babies are all killed. He wants to exterminate the Israelites, but he is anxious that he might lose their labor, that they might escape.

Pharaoh’s anxiety infects the whole system. The Israelites hate being oppressed, but they are anxious, afraid to rebel, afraid to rock the boat. They blame Moses when their supply of straw is cut off. They are anxious about any changes in the way things are, even if things are awful.

The result of all this anxiety is that the Israelites have no rest. They work without humanity, without deliverance, without hope. Moses brings Yahweh’s message to them: “I am Yahweh, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God…. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This should have been good news, but the Israelites had been so demoralized that they could not hear the news. “Moses told this to the Israelites; but they would not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel slavery.”[²]

The whole Egyptian system was anxious. The gods were anxious, so Pharaoh was anxious. Pharaoh was anxious, so his people were anxious. His people were anxious and the spirits of the Israelites were broken. This was the regime under which the Israelites suffered.

This was the regime from which Yahweh freed the Israelites. The Israelites escaped from Egypt. They wandered about in the desert for a while not really knowing what to do or what was supposed to come next. They murmured. They complained: “Are we there yet? Are we there? When are we going to get there? I’m tired! I’m hungry! I’m bored!”

And then Moses went up the mountain and when he came back he showed the pattern of their new life to the Israelites, the ten “utterances”. The first three statements deal with Yahweh’s place in the new community. And then comes the answer, the remedy for anxiety. And it’s not Cymbalta, not Effexor, not even Xanax. The remedy for anxiety is rest, the thing they never had in Egypt. Their life in the land of promise will be different from their life in Egypt.

In Egypt they had no rest. In the land of promise they will rest one day in seven. In Egypt there was never enough for the Israelites. In the land of promise the land will produce enough that six days’ work will support them for seven days.

Sabbath is the antidote for anxiety, but it doesn’t work instantly. Habits of the heart die slowly. When the Israelites are told that they will gather enough manna on the sixth day to last through the seventh, there are some who don’t believe it. They go out to gather on the sabbath, even though they have been told not to. They just can’t wrap their heads around the notion that there is enough, that they don’t have to work seven days a week.

No, this sabbath is for real. And it’s for everyone.

My Grandfather Caldwell once got the idea into his head that the family should go on vacation. He knew of a cabin on a lake a day’s drive away that would be just the spot. My grandmother, though, knew that his idea of a restful vacation would be that he would rest and she would work. She would have to cook three meals a day and she would have to do it in a strange kitchen with who-knows-what sort of utensils and supplies. No, rest for the rest was going to mean more work, not less, for her.

But this sabbath was not going to be like that. On the sabbath everyone will rest. Men and women will rest. Children will rest. Servants will rest. Even the livestock will rest. You want your slippers? Don’t tell the dog to fetch them: it’s the sabbath and the dog gets a day of rest.

It is interesting to me that in the two lists of the Ten Commandments, the reasons for the sabbath differ. Here in Deuteronomy the reason for sabbath is the Israelites’ experience of and deliverance from slavery. On one day of the week, the usual arrangements of rank and privilege are set aside. For free and slave, for the rich and poor alike, sabbath is rest, sabbath is time for the things that renew and restore human life: meals eaten together with time for lots of stories and laughter and leisurely walks through the neighborhood or countryside with time to chat on doorstoops or to stop and listen to goldfinches singing. Of course, there is time to read the Torah and remember who we are: by long-standing rabbinical tradition studying the Torah is joy and delight, not work. Cooking is not done on the sabbath. You can feed a fire, but not start one on the sabbath. A leisurely stroll can be part of the sabbath, but not a long walk with the purpose of getting somewhere. Nothing could be less like slavery in Egypt than sabbath.

In Exodus on the other hand the commandment to rest is grounded in God’s rest after the six days of creation. God worked for six days and made all that is. On the seventh day, God rested for the whole day while creation looked after itself. God saw no need to stop by the office to see how things were going. God was not anxious about the world. God trusted the work of creation enough to let it go about its business for a day.

Sabbath is both justice and freedom from anxiety.

Sabbath is not just a day, either. Under the heading of sabbath came several rules, several mandated practices. Once every seven years, the land was not to be planted, grape vines were not to be harvested, orchards were not to be picked. In six years the land would produce enough to support the community for seven years. There was enough. Whatever grew of its own accord on the seventh year would belong to the poor, since they did not have the ability to set aside a sixth of their food against the seventh year. Even the land gets its rest.

Every forty-nine years, that is seven times seven years, there was to be Jubilee. All debts were forgiven. All slaves were set free. All land returned to the families of the original owners. Whatever inequalities had accumulated over the years were erased and everyone was equal again.

Fundamental to the idea of sabbath is the underlying notion of enough-ness. The earth and our own labor can produce all that we need. Not all that we might fancy, not all that we might desire, not all that we might covet, but all that we need. When Jesus points his disciples to the wild flowers and the sparrows who have all that they need, he is appealing to a sabbath-blessed world. When Jesus invites his listeners who are “struggling hard and carrying heavy loads” to come to him for rest, he is offering sabbath. The enough-ness of the earth and our work make sabbath possible and anxiety obsolete. Sabbath in its turn is both celebration and demonstration of the enough-ness of the earth and our work.

For lack of sabbath we become anxious. Out of our anxiety we toil without rest or relief. Out of our fear that we will not have enough, we permit the banks to colonize our future, putting ourselves in debt. When the debts of our people pile too high to be borne and the economy collapses, we rescue the banks and put families out on the streets.

Because we are anxious we push our young people to take on massive debt that they will never repay, so that they can get jobs that pay well enough that they will have more than enough. The companies that hire them– if they can find jobs– will not, however, pay them what their skills have cost and our young people will work in debt slavery for most of their lives.

Because it is not enough that our land produce what we need, because our system demands more than enough-ness of us and of the earth, we never let our land rest. We work without ceasing and so does our land. Our land and we will pay a cost for this.

There is an odd reference in 2 Chronicles 36, not a part of the Bible we get to very often, but it’s worth noting. Judah’s obligation to let the land rest was not carefully observed. The temptation to grow a little more, a little more than enough, was apparently too strong. For centuries the land’s sabbath years were not honored. The result was a debt to the land. Call it accrued vacation time. The Chronicler says that the exile in Babylon lasted for seventy years, because that was the number of sabbath years ignored by Judah. The land lay fallow for seventy years until it had enjoyed every one of those years of rest that it had missed.

Now, I don’t believe, and I don’t think you believe, that God’s judgments work themselves out in our history in such a wooden and mechanical way. But there is something to this. Sabbath unobserved, rest not enjoyed, sleep not taken, joy not celebrated, gratitude not lived out: all of these take their toll on us, on the poor among us most of all, and on the earth, and there is a reckoning to be paid. The nitrogen-rich run-off from our fields– but even more from our lawns– takes its toll on our seas and the life there that we depend on. The carbon in the oil and coal and gas that we burn, carbon that had been safely sequestered for millions of years and we have released in just a few decades, is changing the earth in ways that we have never experienced and the earth will have its due. The mineral resources– heavy metals like nickel and gold and cadmium, and other metals like phosphorous– that we have stripped from the earth are finite resources. The easily obtained minerals we have already taken, leaving the more difficult, the resources that can only be gotten at a high cost to land, air and water, and ultimately, to ourselves.

From anxiety we engage in violence against the earth, violence against ourselves, and violence against each other. Does anyone imagine for a moment that we would be interested in the affairs of the Middle East, for example, if we were not anxious about its oil reserves? Does anyone imagine for a moment that folks in the Middle East would care about us if our anxious presence there had not so disrupted their lives as to plunge them into anxiety as well?

Violence from anxiety; anxiety from the conviction that there is not enough; the conviction that there is not enough from lack of sabbath. Sabbath is not trivial.

Nor is the sabbath simply a matter of personal morality. Sabbath is fundamentally social in its nature. Sabbath is observed by communities, not isolated individuals. Recovering sabbath is not a matter of individual decision-making. How for example do parents model sabbath when the non-working hours and days of the week are given to anxiously shuttling kids from one activity to another? How do we counter the modern orthodoxy that children must be performing athletes and that there is no help for practices and games that are scheduled on Sunday morning? How do we arrange our lives so that everyone can observe sabbath and our rest does not depend on the labor of minimum wage workers in stores and restaurants? How do we make sure that farmers with livestock, the crews that staff the ambulances, and the folks who make sure that those in hospitals and nursing homes are cared for all are afforded their sabbath as well? How do I train myself so that when Saturday comes– allegedly my day off– I’m not still working on a sermon? (Well, okay, that one is probably my responsibility.)

All of these are good questions. But they are second-order considerations and should not deflect us from God’s insistence on the importance of sabbath. As a sign of the enough-ness of the earth, as a sign of justice and freedom, as a sign to Pharaoh with his limitless demand for bricks that he owns a great deal but he does not own us, and as the rest that we and our planet so desperately need, the sabbath is God’s gift. Rightly do Jews welcome the Friday evening arrival of Queen Shabbat, the fairest of God’s creations. Rightly does Jesus welcome the weary and burdened. Rightly do we recognize the sabbath that lies at the heart of the good news, that is good news, good news for us, good news for all of us, and good news for the land and the sea and the air, good news for all of God’s creation.

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How Long, O Lord? (Pentecost 4; June 21, 2015; Charleston, SC)

How Long, O Lord?

Pentecost 4

June 21, 2015

I had planned to continue my series on the Ten Commandments this week. Today I was going to speak some good news, since at the heart of the Ten Commandments, at its hinge point, is the call to rest, to lay down our burdens, to set aside our work, to be freed from the tyranny of the undone. The home visit that didn’t get made, the laundry still waiting in baskets, the lawn un-mowed, and the car unwashed–all of this will wait. It’s time for rest. We could certainly use it. Some of us, anyway. Some of us are tired, but some of us are weary from the burdens we carry: burdens of grief, burdens of guilt, burdens of care. The summons to rest can be very good news, indeed.

And then last week happened. We looked into an abyss as nine Methodists were killed in Charleston, South Carolina.

I have struggled to know what to say. Friday I went from staring at a blank piece of paper, to staring at a blank computer screen and back again. I had nothing.
Or rather, I came up with too much. There are too many voices, each hoping to control the conversation, for me to sort it all out so that I can be my usual rational restrained self.

Like Jacob, I’ve been wrestling with Yahweh’s night angel at the Ford of the Jabbok. The angel seems to have the upper hand, but I will not let go, because it is not only for my sake that I seek a blessing, but for yours. I am not allowed to let this go. I’m not allowed to let this go because I am your pastor, but I’m also not allowed to let this go because I’m white.

To be white in America is to occupy a place of privilege. I know it doesn’t seem that way. I know white people can have a rough road. I know white people can suffer. I know that white people can face what seem to be—and sometimes are—insurmountable obstacles. But every aspect of my life, every aspect of our lives, would be harder if I, if we, were black. White privilege does not mean that we don’t have a race to run; it only means that we run our race without the ankle weights that black folk were fitted with at birth.

So, I don’t have the privilege of deciding to ignore what happened in Charleston this week. I don’ t have the privilege of deciding when we can stop talking about race. I don’t have that privilege, if for no other reason than because I can step into this pulpit without a second thought about my safety or yours and I tell you the truth: there is isn't a single AME pastor nor a single black congregation in America who that can say that this morning.

My place of privilege as a white man is something I was born with. I didn't earn it and I can't give it away. I can only use it. So, the issue I face this morning is how to use my privilege. My undemocratic decision is to begin, once again, the hard work of looking into the abyss and facing without flinching what looks back at us.

Already, of course, the story-telling has begun, the myth-making that allows us to discount this terrorist attack in the service of racism. The NRA weighed in before the bodies were cold to tell the victims that it was their fault for coming to church without packing heat. Some pundits and politicians cite this as a case of the religious persecution of Christians as if Dylann Roof went to the Emanuel AME Church Wednesday evening to keep Christians from worshiping freely and not with the purpose of killing black people, as if this atrocity belongs on the same spectrum as a company forced to pay for birth control for its employees or a baker forced to serve all the public, even the gay and lesbian public. These clumsy and crude attempts to hijack the story are easy to dismiss.

Other strategies for leaving behind yet another of God’s summons to repentance without having to actually change anything are not so easily dismissed. Imagine if this story were about a young man from an Arab country who walked into a white suburban Christian congregation, say, St. Mark's UMC in Iowa City, and shot nine of its members. For one thing it is hard for me to imagine him being arrested alive. We would assume without any investigation at all that the attack (and we would call it a terrorist attack) was motivated by Islamic extremism. No one would bother to talk to his family. His state of mind would be irrelevant. We would tighten up security and increase surveillance.

In this case, though, we strip his act of political and racial context and try to fit him into the “crazy loner” narrative. We like crazy loners as killers because they let us off the hook. Craziness in this context means that it is irrational, so we can’t understand it. Since we cannot know and cannot understand, we don’t have to. We use unexplainability itself as an explanation. This allows us to express sympathy for the victims without ever having to question whether there is a wider context that makes sense of this act, a wider context that includes us, and our thought, speech, and action. So we observe the obligatory moments of silence and get back to our lives. Until the next time. And there is always a next time. And a time after that.

But this violence is not senseless. Roof’s actions are not meaningless. The President was wrong to call these “senseless murders”.¹ He should know better. These murders make all too much sense. This terrorist attack is of a piece with the long line of terrorist acts committed against black Americans throughout our history. It fits all too well into a story that lies at the heart of our story as a people.

On the one hand we have this idea that we are a community of equals. Some have a little more, some a little less. But those inequalities among us should not overshadow our basic equality or threaten that community.

On the other hand is an idea that was given its American expression by the Virginia House of Burgesses in the late sixteen hundreds. They invented racial privilege so that blacks would never be able to make common cause with poor whites against wealthy whites. The House of Burgesses (made up of wealthy whites) figured that if poor whites could see themselves as superior to all blacks, even the poorest of whites would never turn against the wealthy. They were right.

Our story is in large part the story of the struggle between these two ideas. The deepest struggle of our national psyche is the struggle to hold both of these ideas at the same time. We benefit from the hundreds of ways that racism is a part of our institutions and culture, but this is not how we want to think of ourselves so we do what humans do so well: we ignore the unpleasant. We repress the racist part of our national psyche, shove it down, cover it over, so that it’s out of view.
Wednesday night was what Freud might have called a “return of the repressed.” Our national neurosis has erupted again. We are trying with all our might to put it behind us, to get it back under control.

But God has not brought us to this moment so that we can evade our past and our responsibility yet again. Wednesday night’s terrorist attack was not God’s plan, but I won’t give up the hope that God has plans for us in the midst of this grief. I almost said shock and grief, but only amnesiac victims can claim to be shocked.

So what do we do to take advantage of the opening God has given us? Like David confronted with his wrong-doing by Nathan, we can say with him, “I have sinned against the Lord.” We, unlike David, might actually admit that we have sinned against people, too. We can stop claiming to be innocent.

The attack on Emanuel AME was not the first. We can learn their story, so intertwined with the story of the United Methodist Church. We can learn the story of the African American community in the United States. There are books and even movies that can help us.

We can listen to African Americans as they tell their experience of life and–this is vital–we can believe them when they tell us how it is for them. I know that there is no large black presence in Decorah, but that’s why God invented the “interwebs”.

We can stand ready to change. The Ten Commandments are about a people who had been delivered by God’s mighty acts who had to imagine and live into a new future. God is ready to lead us, too. God is ready to set us on the path to a new future, a future of a life and a world shared by all of God’s people.

I hasn’t been in the bulletin for years, but we still sing, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in God’s sight” when the kids come forward. One day, God willing, they will all be precious in all of ours, too.

---

This work is licensed under
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1Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.”

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

With Breathless Anticipation

Romans 8:18-39
Pentecost
May 24, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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

Since We’re Already Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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

2 1 Kings 19:12

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

What We've Got Here Is Failure to Communicate

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

Mothers' Day

Teacher Appreciation

Senior Recognition

May 10, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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