Who Will Rescue Isaac Now? Proper 8A, Gen 22:1-4, June 26, 2011

Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A)
Genesis 22:1-14
June 26, 2011

Who Will Rescue Isaac Now?

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

The Bible is not a pretty book. It is populated with glorious stories of deliverance and reconciliation, of promises made and kept. It has lyric poetry that soars as high as the human spirit can fly. It has depths we cannot plumb in a single lifetime.

But it also contains what the scholar Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” There are stories that horrify and repel. This story is one of them. This is one of the stories that gets the Bible an “R” rating. Reading this story closely is not for the faint of heart. That the Revised Common Lectionary committee has set it before us suggests that this story is also one that cannot be ignored. So we won’t ignore it.

But neither will we clean it up or sugar-coat it. If the Bible and the God whom we meet in its pages could not stand close questioning, then they would not be worth my time. If they could not withstand careful scrutiny, I would find a different line of work doing something more worthwhile and useful.

But as it is, I believe that even these texts, perhaps especially these “texts of terror,” are worth the strenuous conversation we must have with them. For it is in part in deeply engaging stories like this one that we grow up to mature faith.

So let’s begin by setting aside the notion that, since God was only testing Abraham, somehow that makes everything okay. The narrator tells us that God set out to test Abraham, but Abraham knew nothing of this. All Abraham knew was that he was summoned: “Abraham!” Abraham was summoned by a voice that he recognized. He answered in the way that people usually do in the Bible when God addresses them: “Here I am!” In this exchange, this two-line dialogue, God and Abraham are set in a relationship in which God addresses and Abraham answers. From that fact alone, we would know where the power lies. God has the initiative. If this were a chess game, we would say that God is playing white.

So that’s how this story begins. And Abraham knows it.

“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you,” God said. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” God names Isaac three times, as if there could be any question about which son God meant.

Abraham was new in the covenant people business and did not have a tradition to draw on for understanding the sorts of things God would ask. There were no seminaries filled with scholars writing books of systematic theology that would help Abraham sort things out. There was only the Voice who had promised an inheritance and a son to inherit it, the miracle son born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.

Abraham did not know and could not know whether this demand was in or out of character for God. There was only the Voice and its demand. We do not know, but we can imagine, what went through Abraham’s mind as he gathered what would be necessary for the sacrifice and for the journey. I suspect that Abraham brought nothing for the return trip; his life, too, would end at Moriah. We shudder to imagine what it would do to any of us to be put in Abraham’s position. What did he tell Sarah?

We can imagine, but we do not know what was in his heart as he walked, Isaac carrying the wood, and he the fire and the knife.

We do not know what was in his heart as Isaac innocently asked, “Where is the lamb?” and he replied with an answer with a double meaning, “God will provide.” He avoided saying the obvious—“You are the lamb for sacrifice that God has already provided.” In his use of the future tense—God will provide—was he calling God’s bluff, if a bluff it was? But there was no answer as Abraham walked with his son, his only son Isaac, the son whom he loved.

Abraham went about the preparation of the altar, piling the stones, laying the wood, binding his son and readying the knife. And there was still no answer from God.

What was in God’s heart as Abraham obeyed God’s summons? We do not know. Did God expect that Abraham would resist this insanity, this inhumane demand? After all, Abraham had resisted God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s argument then had been precisely that innocent blood should not be spilled—even by God—in the name of justice. But if God was surprised there is no hint of it in the story.

So there they went, a stubborn old man and his God, or perhaps a stubborn old God and his man, it’s really hard to say which, toward the edge of an abyss. There is such an abyss in every relationship. God and Abraham were racing toward the edge of theirs.

Abraham reached out his hand to kill his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loved, and God blinked. Someone had to. Someone had to call off this terrible game of chicken. This, after all, was not simply a test of Abraham. It was also a test of God. That’s the way it works in a covenant. If we have ever been so foolish as to put someone we have loved to the test, we know that it works both ways. And we learn that we cannot do this to someone we love and expect a relationship to come out of it without wounds. Abraham and God learned this the hard way.

Sometimes our journey takes us through a very hard place. It may feel like a test. Hard places, however, in life, in our relationships with each other, in our relationship with God, are not tests. They are reality. Reality is sometimes very hard, but it is not a game that God plays with us. Not again. Not after the fiasco at Moriah.

That’s something at least. Something we can take away from this tale of terror. But it is not all that we are asked to see.

There is one more character yet to be heard from. This story is told as if it were a contest of sorts between two protagonists. There is God; there is Abraham; and, there is the narrator who offers us a safe place from which to view the events as they play out. But there is a fourth position in the story and we have not looked at him yet.

That position is Isaac’s. He was a child at the mercy of an adult who was caught up in a contest with God. If Isaac was old enough to carry the wood, if he was old enough to ask where the sacrificial lamb was, he was certainly old enough to have an inkling of what was happening, to sense its menace. Perhaps Abraham and God learned their lesson about the futility of testing each other’s love. But what did Isaac take away from this? Could he ever trust his father again? Abraham may have protested that he wasn’t going to go through with it, that the angel intervened at precisely the point that Abraham was going to refuse to pass, but how could Isaac ever know that for certain? God may have protested that, after all, the angel did intervene and nothing really happened. But Isaac was really brought by his father’s obedience to God’s demand to a place of stark terror. Isaac would live his life in the shadow of that memory.

Perhaps God and Abraham came to the place where they could trust each other once again. I’m not so sure of Isaac. Or of his children and descendants, across whose lives this shadow also fell. Did this demand for a child sacrifice echo through the generations and centuries? Did it haunt God as well as God’s people? Was the death of Jesus—I’m speculating here. Remember I don’t necessarily believe everything I think—was the death of Jesus God’s way of atoning for the crime committed at Moriah?

I ask the question because I think it still haunts us. We seem unable to avoid reenacting it. Even though we know that a god who demands such a death is not worth our worship. Even though we know that a father who obeys such a command is not worthy the title. Even though the very hint that people would offer up their own children as a sacrifice is repugnant to us. In spite of all of that, in spite of all of that, why is it that we still do it?

Make no mistake, this story is a mirror held up to our own life. And looking into it we see into our souls. We are summoned by a voice that demands their lives. And we send them. When they come back to us, scarred by what they have seen and done and had done to them, wounded in soul and body, or perhaps even dead, we call their injury or their death a “sacrifice.” And I want to know, “Who is the god who dares to demand this blood?” And I want to ask, “Who will rescue Isaac now?”

This has been hard, I know. I did warn you that the Bible isn’t a pretty book. I said that the Bible contains stories of deliverance but also texts of terror. In this case they are one and the same. Here, in this terrible text, precisely because of the terror, we have the possibility of being delivered from the cycle of death that our world has turned into a religion. In this story we, too, hear a Voice that summons us, not to offering our children as sacrifices, but a Voice that says, “Do not lay your hand on the child.”

It is a long journey from where we are to the peace that God promises, fully as long as the journey to which God called Abraham and Sarah when they left their homes for the land of promise. But if we hear the Voice that calls to us and take one little step in that direction, we will be well begun on that journey. Whatever else we might need for that journey, God will provide.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?, Trinity A, Gen 1:1--2:4a, Mt 28:16-20, June 19, 2001

Trinity - A
Genesis 1:1--2:4a
Matthew 28:16-20
June 19, 2011

What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?

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

The title of the sermon that I set out to preach was “Room for Every People.” It was going to be based on the Matthew text and it was going to be about the broad inclusiveness of the movement that Jesus founded. I set out to preach that sermon and I think it might have been a good one. I got sidetracked.

I got sidetracked by three things. The first two are the scripture lessons that we have heard. They don’t seem to have a great deal to do with each other. The first is one of two creation stories featured in Genesis. The second is the so-called Great Commission. The first tells the story of God speaking the universe, our world, the plants and animals that occupy it, and finally us into being. In the second, Jesus tells his disciples (and we are meant to overhear) to make disciples of Jesus Christ. What do the two have in common?

What an odd pair of texts for Trinity Sunday! And that’s the third thing that distracted me: the fact that today is the first Sunday after Pentecost, which in our liturgical calendar makes it Trinity Sunday. So my new sermon title (with apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein) is, “What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?”

The texts seem to have been chosen because they both refer to the Trinity. Matthew does it openly and clearly: Jesus tells us that as we make disciples we are to baptized them “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The Genesis text is less clear, but the Christian tradition has read this passage in a way that makes a connection. In the very first verse there is God. In the second verse there is the Holy Spirit: the wind from God that “swept over the face of the waters.” In both Hebrew and Greek, there is only one word for breath, wind and spirit. So the wind is spirit and the spirit is from God and therefore it is the Holy Spirit. Okay, but where is the Son? The Christian tradition has found the Son in the third verse, where God speaks. God’s speech is God’s word. Christ is referred to in John’s gospel and in other places as well as God’s “word.” So there you have it: the Trinity at creation.

With all due respect to our tradition this sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Then, while I was mowing my yard yesterday and ruminating on these things, something fell into place. It turns out that the two passages have more in common than direct and indirect mentions of the Trinity. They are both stories that were told while God’s people were dealing with an empire. In the first, God’s people were living in exile in the city of Babylon, the home city of the Babylonian empire. In the second, God’s people were dealing with the Roman empire. A good guess for where Matthew’s gospel was written puts it in Antioch of Syria, a very important city of the eastern empire, one that often served as a garrison for Roman legions.

What is even more important about our two stories is that they were both stories that were told against their respective empires. They are both resistance stories, stories of resistance to the empire in which they live.

Now that’s not immediately obvious, so it’s only fair that I tell you why I say that.

In the Genesis passage we have a creation story in which God makes all that is in a series of creative acts that are described as “good.” The Babylonians have a creation story, too. In that story, Marduk, the chief of the gods of Babylon, created the world by defeating the dragon Tiamat and using the halves of her carcass to fashion the heavens and the earth. Marduk then created humankind to work so that the gods wouldn’t have to.

Tiamat is hinted at in Genesis. The word for “the deep,” the formless waters that existed before God spoke, is tehôm, a word that is both related and close enough in sound to Tiamat that the hearers would have gotten the connection. But God subdues the tehôm with a simple word of command; there is no need for combat. Compared to our God, this Jewish text says, Marduk is not much of a god. This a bold assertion when we remember that the Jews were a people who had been conquered and taken into exile by the armies of Babylon. “We may be a subject people,” the text seems to say, “but we have the dignity of belonging to a God who makes yours look a swaggering blowhard.”

Perhaps even more subversive is the way in which the days of creation are arranged. The Babylonians also had a seven-day week and their creation story distributes creative acts to each day of the week like this story. But the Genesis story squeezes the work of creation into only six days, leaving the seventh day as a day of rest. The Jewish tradition has looked back on this story and said that the very crown of creation is not humanity, though that was pretty cool, “very good,” according to the story. The crown of creation is Shabbat, sabbath, rest.

But look a little closer: Marduk made human beings so that the gods wouldn’t have to do any work. People would do all the work. This then becomes the pattern for human life. Just as people exist to do the work so that the gods don’t have to, the lower classes exist to do the work so that royalty and nobility don’t have to. And other cities and peoples exist so that Babylon can live in luxury without having to work for it. As is true of all creation stories, this one serves as an explanation of the world.

The Jewish exiles by making Shabbat the crowning glory of its creation story, told a story that struck at the very heart of Babylon’s ideology. Human beings weren’t created so that God would have minions. When God made human beings, God put them in charge of creation! When God is done with creation, God rests. But the rest isn’t just for God; it’s for everybody and everything. On Shabbat, people rest, all people. Rich or poor, they rest. Slave or free, they rest. Young and old, they rest. Men and women rest. The animals rest. Even the land gets its rest one year out of seven.

The Babylonian story justifies the rule of the gods over people, the rule of kings over common folk, the rule of Babylon over its subject peoples. The world is arranged like a pyramid and everyone serves the one above them. The Babylonians imagined into being a world in which there is perpetual need. Even the gods can starve to death. They will unless someone serves them. Marduk solved the god’s problem by conquering Tiamat. The Babylonians look to solve theirs by conquering their neighbors. The strong are rich; the weak are poor.

The story of the Jewish exiles subverts all of that. Their story imagines into being a world in which the earth is good. The good earth supports our life so that we don’t have to labor all the time. In fact, we can do nothing at all one day each week and there will still be enough. We can give the land one year in seven to produce whatever it chooses to produce and there will still be enough. The story of Shabbat is a story of resistance to empire.

Matthew’s story is a story of resistance, too. Matthew’s empire is Rome, not Babylon, but the resemblances are still there. Remember how Matthew starts? He starts with a genealogy, like the stories that kinds and emperors tell about themselves. Then he has a story in which imperial counselors come from the east and ask to see the new-born king. Do you remember the reaction of the actual king? The empire strikes back at any threat, real or perceived. Anything is justified when it comes to defending its power, even the slaughter of innocents. I think we call them “collateral damage” nowadays. At the other end of the story, Jesus is killed because he threatened the political and religious arrangements in occupied Roman Palestine.

Matthew tells his story of Jesus in part as a story of Jesus’ and his followers’ resistance to the Empire. His favorite strategy is irony. Herod in his palace imagines himself safe from political threat. In the meantime the real king has been born and lives in a house so ordinary that it can’t be found without neon signs—or wandering stars, I can’t remember which. Jesus preaches a new reality that he calls “heaven’s empire.” The greatest irony is that one who died a despised death at the hands of the empire should be the one who carries imperial titles like the Son of God.

In our story today, Matthew uses imperial language ironically yet again. The Romans claimed to have brought all the world’s peoples into its empire. Shedding their blood and at the point of a sword, all the world’s people were brought into submission to Roman laws. In Matthew’s story, Jesus tells his disciples, just eleven of them in this account, to do what the Roman legions had done, only for them it will be different. They won’t make subjects; they will make disciples. They won’t spill blood; they will baptize with water. They won’t impose Roman law; they will teach people what Jesus told them: love your enemies, be peacemakers, seek justice above everything else so that you will have what you need.

Read in this way, these stories become powerful stories of resistance told against whatever the current empire happens to be.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be told differently. They have been. The story of a world that is so good that we may live in it without scarcity, has been told as a story that gives us permission to do anything to creation that we want in our zeal to exercise dominion. Read in this way, the story becomes an excuse to act just like the Babylonians. The story of Jesus’ sending the disciples read in another way gives them permission to behave just like the Romans have: compelling everyone to submit to their way of life and faith and threatening them with (eternal) death if they don’t.

Both of these stories have been used as imperial narratives, but I’m asking us to let them resistance stories instead. I’m asking us to do this, because have our own empire to deal with, an empire every bit as ruthless as either of these. In the face of our empire, we are summoned to live faithfully and these subversive stories are one of our very few resources for doing that.

These stories also tell us something about the character of the triune God to whom we belong. (You thought I had forgotten!) The world is good and we are good because the God who made us is good. The God who made us delights in our delight, not our slavish devotion.

The God who made us lived among us. In the person of Jesus God lived life from our perspective. He woke up hungry at night. He needed his diapers changed. He learned to talk and walk. He puzzled over the injustices he saw around him. He longed for peace. And he taught us how we might life lives in the face of the empire that are fully human, just and peaceful.

The God who made us and who walked alongside us continues to live within each of us and within our communities. So we have all we need to resist the dehumanizing forces around us, the strength we need to live as Jesus taught us. We have all that we need to hear these stories come alive for us and through us. We have all we need to tell our own stories in our own day out of our own struggle.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

"Wild Card," Pentecost A, Acts 2:1-21, June 12, 2011

Pentecost - A
Acts 2:1-21
June 12, 2011

Wild Card

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

Every year the members of the Annual Conference gather for four days of worshiping, celebrating our mission and ministry, and engaging in holy conferencing. That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that every year we gather for four days of spinning our message, promoting our own institutions, and bickering with one another about money and sex. Both ways of describing what the Annual Conference does are more or less accurate. The difference between them has to do with how tired and frustrated the story teller is. Let me say that I bless Alan Lerstrom and Kathi Mitchell for being willing to take on the role of lay member of Annual Conference.

As difficult as it can be sometimes, the Annual Conference is important. Our Book of Discipline describes the Annual Conference as the “basic organizational unit of the United Methodist Church.” Its major business this year was the election of delegates to the next General Conference. Our General Conference meets every four years and is the voice of the global United Methodist Church. It sets the agenda for our denomination for the next four years, or what we call a “quadrennium.” It is composed of clergy and laity delegated by Annual Conferences from around the world. Kathi Mitchell decided to stand as a candidate for the lay delegation from our Annual Conference this year. She did pretty well, all things considered, though she didn’t gain a spot on either the General Conference or Jurisdictional Conference delegations.

If you’re not bewildered by just this mention of three different kind of Conferences it’s because you’ve been around United Methodists for a long time. The universal first impression of our denomination is that it is organized to a fare-thee-well. We can’t really help it. It’s in our denomination’s DNA. The founder of our movement, John Wesley, came at life in an extremely organized fashion. That’s the nice way to put it. The Freudian and perhaps not so nice way to put it would be to say that he was “anal retentive.” Basically, he was a control freak.

Control freaks seek structure and order, especially when there isn’t enough structure and order. If they are high-functioning control freaks, they are able to bring their organizational vision to bear on disordered circumstances in a helpful way. If they are not high-functioning they try to control everything by stamping out all creativity and spontaneity. Those who are not control freaks find this annoying.

Every movement, every organization, and I think, every person needs some degree of order. And every movement, every organization, and every person needs some degree of creative freedom. Even a machine needs a certain amount of what is called “play.” A wheel bearing needs a few thousandths of an inch of wiggle room. Otherwise it will overheat, the surfaces will weld together and it will freeze up. Too much wiggle room and a bearing will wear out, and then it will overheat, weld together and freeze up.

In the religious context, too little play leads to what we call legalism. Without enough play, all we see are the rules. Rules are good. They are intended to help us live by showing us the shape of the world that we live in. They show us a life that will work with rather than against the grain of the universe.

But when all we see are the rules, our lives become like wheel bearings with too little play. We overheat. Parts of our lives that are supposed to slip over each other, stick instead. We grind to a halt. Too many rules that are too tight result in the end of all movement. For living beings, that is the same thing as death.

At the other end of the spectrum from organization, order and control are creativity, freedom and spontaneity. We who are part of the biblical tradition have always called that end of the spectrum “spirit.” In fact, since it expresses part of God’s nature we have called it “The Spirit of Yahweh” or “The Spirit of God.”

It’s only fair to warn you that, coming as it does from the opposite end of spectrum from order and control, the Spirit (with a capital “S”) can be more than a little disturbing, upsetting, anxiety-provoking and even scary.

Consider the images of the Spirit that are used in the Bible. Yes, a dove is used as one of those images. At the scene of Jesus’ baptism in Mark’s gospel, for example, the heavens are torn open and a dove descends on Jesus. A heaven-splitting dove is disturbing enough, but then the dove “drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness,” using the same word that describes Jesus driving the money-changers out of the temple. So much for harmless, gentle doves.

We might make “windy” noises, but we know about mighty winds. We’ve seen “mighty winds” wreak havoc all across the southern part of our country and even in our own state. “Mighty winds” are nothing to mess around with.

We might wave red, orange and yellow crêpe paper over each other’s heads. But real fire, another of the favorite images for the Spirit, has a disturbing double aspect. On the one hand, fire gives light, transforms flesh into meat, dough into bread, clay into pottery and ore into metal. It heats our homes. It adds atmosphere, too. A candle-lit dinner loses something if the candles aren’t lit. But as the folks of Arizona know too well, fire can be enormously destructive and dangerous. As of yesterday, the wildfire there had burned over 629 square miles. That’s a square that’s twenty-five miles on a side.

The Spirit is creative, powerful and life-giving. It is also playful, wild and unpredictable. The Spirit has little respect for rules or structures or orderly processes. It avoids committee meetings and conferences. It doesn’t keep appointments reliably.

The Spirit is God at God’s freest. It cannot be tamed or domesticated or produced on demand by any technique or technology. The Spirit of God is a church bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. Its unmanageability gives headaches to church managers at every level—from bishops to pastors. Like new wine it ferments and foments and ruins any attempt to squeeze it into old containers.

And here we are today, celebrating the gift of the Spirit and asking for more! What are we thinking?

As chaotic as the Spirit is, it is also the source of our life as a movement. The times of greatest challenge for the Christian movement have also been the times when the Spirit’s work has become the most evident. In our own challenging times we need the presence of the Spirit among us.

The trick, I suppose, is discovering how to live with the Spirit when all attempts to get it to work through our committees fails. It’s not a matter of striking a balance. Whenever the Spirit gets involved, balance is no longer an option. It’s more a matter of keeping our feet and trying to go with the flow. I remember a story about a Taoist master and his disciple who were walking along a rain-swollen river when the master stumbled on a rock and fell in. The horror-stricken disciple ran along the river as fast as he could, trying in vain to keep up with his master and to find some way to rescue him. The master was swept out of sight around a bend in river, but the disciple did not give up. Finally, he came upon the old man, sitting on a rock beside the river, soaking wet and laughing. He asked, “Master, are you all right? What happened?” The master answered, “Well, as you know, I fell into the river. It carried me along for a while and then I fell out again. And here I am.”

We need to figure out how to become more supple, able to change direction quickly in response to the Spirit’s movement. We need less of five year plans and more of taking the very next step, the one set in front of us and trusting that the Spirit will bear us up. We need fewer committees and more ministry. We need less structure and more life. We need less work and more play. We need fewer rules and more room to move.

How much more? I don’t know. How much is too much? I don’t know. When do we get to the point that creative play becomes destructive chaos? I don’t know. How much of the Spirit should we ask for? I don’t know how much. I only know we need more. So we’ll ask for more. And let God decide how much.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

6th Sunday of Easter - A, John 14:15-21, "Not Alone"

6th Sunday of Easter
John 14:15-21
May 29, 2011

Not Alone

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

Alone. Is there a more frightening word in the English language? I don’t mean the kind of alone that is a welcome relief to me, an introvert, after Annual Conference—four days of being confined in a closed space with twelve hundred of my closest friends!

I mean the kind of alone that we don’t choose. The kind of alone that tears a chunk out of our lives and out of our hearts and leaves us bleeding. The kind of alone that looms over us and we know that it isn’t going to end. That kind of alone.

We are hard-wired to dread this kind of aloneness. Thanks to our over-sized brains we are born long before we can do anything at all for ourselves. We can suck and we can cry and that’s about it. We are absolutely dependent on other people to meet every need for survival. Without other people we would die. Period. We are hard-wired to find being alone very anxious-making.

It’s not that there aren’t people who have faced down that anxiety. Chuck Noland, Tom Hanks character in Cast Away, found himself marooned on an island in the South Pacific. He had to figure out how to survive using only what was already on the island, the flotsam that had washed up on the island, and his own wits. He was entirely alone. Well, he was technically alone, but in reality not quite. You may remember that he had a volleyball named Wilson who became his one companion.

Sigmund Freud told a story about his grandson Ernst who was then about a year and a half old. When his mother was gone from the house, Ernst would play a game which Freud called “Fort/da.” Ernst had a length of string tied to an empty spool. He would throw it out of sight over the edge of his bed and say, “ooooo,” which Freud understood to be “fort,” German for “gone.” Then he would pull on the string until the spool was back in sight and announce, “da!” German for “there it is!” Freud theorized that Ernst was using this game to rehearse his mother’s going away and return, that he had “transferred” (a favorite word of Freud’s) his anxiety over his mother’s absence to the spool. Maybe so. And maybe the “peek-a-boo” game that we play with toddlers is like that. Young children who would not survive actual abandonment can turn it into a game with a happy ending. Maybe so.

In the ancient world abandonment was no game. In the ruthlessly competitive world of ancient society, a person’s survival depended primarily on their family connections. To lose those connections was a disaster. The word “orphaned” in our reading, refers to someone who has lost these connections. Incidentally, the Greek word orphanos is where we got our word “orphan.” Oddly, for us who are accustomed of thinking of orphans as children, in Greek it can mean either a child whose parents have died, or an adult whose children have died. Either way, an orphan is alone in the world, at the mercy of everyone around them and without protection.

This is why Jesus in the same passage promises an “Advocate,” that is, someone who will stand up with his disciples in court, like an attorney. It also explains why translators can never seem to decide whether to translate the word as “advocate” or “counselor” on the one hand or as “comforter” or “consoler” on the other. The reality is that an orphan needs both a good lawyer and emotional support. There just isn’t any single word in English that will do the trick.

In our passage Jesus promises that, even though he will be absent—since he is returning “to the Father”—his disciples will not become orphans. Through the Spirit of truth who will be a counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter to the disciples, Jesus will be present and so will “the Father.” They will not be alone.

As always when we are reading the Bible we need to remember that the writer of this gospel is not telling the reader anything new. John’s readers already knew these stories, so that’s not why they were written. The gospel was written so that the readers could hear the stories being told in such a way as to help them face their present situation.

And the situation John’s readers faced was very hard. The majority of scholars date this book to around 90 ad, some sixty years after Jesus was crucified. This event was as far away to his readers as the bombing of Pearl Harbor is to us. If Jesus’ earliest followers expected him to return in triumph to defeat evil and transform the world soon after he rose from the dead, they would be beginning to wonder what was keeping him. They may even have begun to believe that the world as they knew it was the reality they would have to keep living with.

The Jesus movements had grown and gained in numbers to the point where it was coming to the notice of the Romans that there was a new sect of Judaism that was following Jesus whom they had executed as a rebel and criminal but whose followers believed was alive. The larger Jewish community for its part was reeling from the revolt of 69-70 and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jewish attempts to define who they were as a people ran headlong into Jewish Christian attempts to redefine Judaism. There was a bitter conflict between Jewish followers of Jesus and Jewish non-followers of Jesus that resulted in Jewish communities being torn in two and Jesus-followers being expelled from the synagogues.

These followers of Jesus who were thoroughly Jewish found themselves on the outside looking in, sometimes separated from their own families as the boundary lines were being drawn. They were threatened by confusion within and by persecution from the outside. They were stripped of the modest legal protection of being a sect within the Jewish people and exposed to Roman suspicion and accusations. And just where was Jesus, anyway, and when was he coming back?

They felt bereft, abandoned, and left behind. They were exiles in their own communities. They didn’t know what to do next. They weren’t sure they had the energy or the courage to do it even if they knew what it was. They were demoralized.

I get that way, sometimes. Not most of the time, just sometimes. Most of the time I soldier on, doing the little good I can where I am. But sometimes I see things too clearly. And then I feel overwhelmed.

I’ve been carrying around a moment like that from our time in Portrerillos. It’s been haunting me.

While we were in Portrerillos Brandon Schmidt and I stayed in the home of a woman named Edís. One morning in addition to the usual tortillas, beans, fried plantains and fresh fruit, Edís offered us a box of corn flakes. It looked both familiar and strange. Carol says that I will read anything, and cereal boxes are no exception. It was an ordinary box of ordinary cereal. In the list of ingredients the very first item was maíz (corn). No surprise there. But it was not simply maíz. It was listed as maíz desgerminado, “degerminated” corn, corn with the germ removed, corn stripped of its most nutritious part, the part with most of the protein and other nutrients.

Now, the people of Portrerillos know something about corn. They are, in fact, direct descendants of the folks who domesticated corn. They have been planting and eating corn for centuries. Since they don’t have any fields, they plant corn and beans on the hillsides. And they plant them together. The people of Central America didn’t just domesticate corn; they also figured out that corn and beans are a good combination. They are good for the soil. Beans put back what corn takes away. They are also good because corn and beans between them supply all of the amino acids that people need.

For centuries, since long before the Spanish came to plunder whatever wealth they could find, before they came to enslave the people, before they came to force the people to turn to growing crops that the Spanish could sell, centuries before the people of Portrerillos started speaking Spanish, the people of Portrerillos grew corn and beans. It was a way of living that worked and it still works.

But now, you see, they can have corn flakes, corn flakes made of the least nutritious part of the corn, corn flakes that will contribute empty calories and obesity to a people who do not have money or health to spare. Now they can have corn flakes made in a far away place and trucked to them over roads that shouldn’t be carrying the traffic. And to pay for the corn flakes and other consumer goods the young men of Portrerillos are mostly somewhere else, working at jobs no one else wants and sending money back home.

I looked at the box of corn flakes and suddenly felt that I was looking at a good deal of what has gone wrong in our world. A box of corn flakes is undermining a delicate balance that the people of Portrerillos have with their fragile land. A box of corn flakes is turning the community of Portrerillos into an accidental association of individuals who happen to live near each other. I looked at the box of corn flakes and felt that I was staring into the eyes of the Beast. And I felt terribly, terribly alone.

How can I fight the Beast? How can I even fight the Beast on my own behalf, let alone on behalf of our friends in Portrerillos? How can I even explain what I mean? How can I say it clearly, so that it makes sense, even to me? So, you see, sometimes I feel overwhelmed.

But to those of John’s community who felt overwhelmed, John’s Jesus says this: “You are not alone. I have not left you orphaned.” John reminded his community of what they needed to remember. He reminded them about the Holy Spirit. We know about the Holy Spirit. It’s that mysterious third part of the Trinity, something we don’t understand, not even a little. We were baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And at our confirmation, hands were placed on our heads and the work of the Spirit within us asked for.

John wants his community to know that these were not just words. The truth is that the Spirit is with them as counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter. They are not alone. They have not been abandoned. They are not bereft of the presence and power they need to be who they are called to be and to do what needs to be done.

And neither are we. We are God’s children. The Spirit has been given to us. We know who we are. We know that we can do what needs to be done next. We know that we are God’s beloved. We are not bereft. We are not orphans. We are not alone.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

5th Sunday of Easter A (May 22, 2011) - John 14:1-14 - The One Truth Among Many Truths

5th Sunday of Easter - A
John 14:1-14
May 22, 2011

The One Truth Among Many Truths

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

There it is right on the bulletin cover, straight from the horse’s mouth as it were: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Wow!

Jesus is the way. There isn’t any other. There is only one mountain and there is only one road that goes up the mountain. If someone isn’t on that road, they’re on the wrong road. Pretty simple, huh?

Jesus is the truth. There isn’t any other truth. Anything that looks like truth that isn’t that truth isn’t the truth at all. This could save a lot of money for anyone who had thought to go to college—what would be the point, really? We already know the whole truth.

Jesus is the life. Any life that isn’t Jesus is really death in disguise. If you want the life that God has to offer, it’s right there in Jesus and nowhere else.

Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. Apart from Jesus there are only false roads, falsehoods, and death.

If we follow this logic, then the practical upshot is this: the only way to get to heaven is to profess Jesus and believe in him in our hearts. Otherwise we are going to hell. There are hard truths in life and this is one of them. Good people whom we may admire, people like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, even our grandparents and our children are all either in hell or headed there unless they—the ones who are still alive at any rate—become professing Christians. After all, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.

Now there are, I think, at least three problems with the reading that I have laid out. The first is a pastoral problem. The problem is this: how do I go about explaining to a family’s Aunt Sarah that her husband Fred, though he was a good man who worked hard, loved her and their children, and strove to leave the world a better place than he found it, is in fact not in heaven because he wasn’t a Christian. It seems that he experienced the church as falling pretty far short of its ideals and this scandalized him, so much so that he refused to have any thing to do with Jesus or with Jesus’ God who, after all, ought to stand behind the brand name of the family business. I can’t paper over this difficulty, either, not if there is a chance that someone will misinterpret my kindness as suggesting that they don’t need to be a Christian to avoid his fate.

So, at a time when this family needs the love and care and support of God that is present, however imperfectly, in the church, they get from the church instead a proclamation of God’s merciless wrath against those who don’t believe or say the right things.

The second difficulty with this “Jesus’ way or the highway” reading of John is theological. It asks us to believe that the God who loves us so much that Jesus came to die for us is also the same God who sentences people to hell forever with no possibility of parole for failing to confess the right creed or have the right experiences. It asks us to believe that God is not as merciful as the governor of Iowa or the President of the United States because they pardon people, but God does not. It asks us to believe that because I am willing to forgive Gandhi for not being a Christian I am more loving than God.

I know I can’t point to a specific biblical text that says this, but from what I have learned from the Bible of what God is like and how God is with us, I have come to believe that God never stops loving us. God will woo us through this lifetime and into the next if need be until we respond in kind. Because we are free to refuse God’s love, I believe that hell exists, but I also believe that it’s mostly empty and that the only residents are the temporary ones who still think they don’t want to be in heaven. If God’s ultimate nature is love and if love is the deepest meaning of the universe, then hell as proclaimed by the Christian right makes no sense.

The third problem with this line of thinking has to do with the fate of the world and the splendid and bewildering array of life that it hosts. If there is only one truth and we are in possession of that one truth and everyone else is either wrong or agrees with us, then any other opinion firmly held must be a threat to us. This line of thinking carves the world up into “us” and “them.” “We” must oppose “them” with every fiber of our being, because we are right and they are wrong. “We” can never make peace with “them” because that would mean betraying the truth. “We” can’t even engage “them” in serious conversation, at least not the kind where we really listen to each other because we dare not risk being converted away from the truth.

By definition there is only room for one absolute truth in the universe. It must exclude every idea that is not already implied by it. Of course, each of us will understand this truth differently and so only one of us is right and the rest of us are wrong and the one who is right has an obligation to persuade the ones who are wrong. By force, if necessary. A universe with an absolute truth can never have a population greater than one. An absolute truth asks us to believe that we are capable of having infinite minds.

This is Harold Camping’s tragedy. He has been holding out for his version of absolute truth for years, but the rest of us have, for the most part, been pretty unreceptive. Recently he invited us into his revenge fantasy in which he and his followers are rescued and the rest of us fall under the judgment of God. Today he has discovered that he is still in the world with us. We are still in the world with him. Will he get it that our task is not to figure out when the world will end, but to do what we can to preserve it? I don’t know. What I suspect is that none of us stand much of a chance of doing that unless we become more modest about our truth claims.

So what, then, do we toss out John’s gospel, since I seem to be saying that everything is relative? I mean, what’s the point if we’re all going to heaven anyway?

Well, I don’t have any problem opposing a text of the Bible. Remember I’ve said that the Bible is not a book so much as it’s a conversation. We are not so much being asked to submit to the Bible as we are to enter its conversation. And sometimes in conversations we agree and sometimes we disagree—at least if it’s a conversation worth having—and the important thing is to stay with it. So if we need to disagree with John, I’m okay with that.

But let’s make sure that we understand him first. At first reading John’s Jesus is serene and lofty, far removed from the ordinary world. He may give his life, but no one can take it from him. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke may struggle to understand and do what God wants, but not John’s Jesus. John’s Jesus knows what is going to happen before it happens (a little like Harold Camping!) and is untroubled by it. The disciples may not get it, but Jesus lays it out for them over and over again.

The reality of John’s community was far from the serenity we see in John’s Jesus. John’s community was in trouble. They had come to a final divorce from the Jewish synagogue. The painful and hostile feelings left over from that are very much in evidence. They were having real struggles trying to decide who they were as a community and what their task in the world was to be. They were wounded, abandoned and confused. They took it out on each other and their Jewish neighbors. They set a pattern that has played out in European history and led finally to the Holocaust of the last century. It was a terrible thing they did, but perhaps it is, if not excusable, at least understandable coming as it did out of their desperation.

John was writing to a demoralized community, divided against itself and threatened from the outside. Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” was meant as a comfort for their grief and as a support that would strengthen them in their difficult struggle for existence.

It was not meant to become a program for oppressing people who did not follow Jesus. It was not given as a creed to an institution with a membership of a billion so that they could use it as a club against its non-member neighbors. No, it was something more modest than that. It was reassurance and a reminder to a struggling community of Jesus-followers.

John’s community had other options available, other ways of being in the world. There were other ways of thinking, speaking and seeing the world, other truth systems that they could choose. There were other possible lives than the hard one they were living. John wanted to remind them of who they were. John wanted to remind them of the commitments they had made and how that shaped the world they lived in. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the path. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the truth. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is life.

When the going got rough these Jesus-followers needed to be reminded of this.

We find ourselves in difficult times, too. Our difficulties are not the same as those faced by John’s community, but sometimes we need the same reminders. We’re not always sure how to live in the world as Jesus-followers. In fact most of the time we’re pretty unsure. There are other ways of being in the world, there are other messages, there are other lives. Being a Jesus-follower is not the only available option.

Any of us can see this simply by turning on the television or cranking up a web browser. You who are graduating and headed for college or the world of work will experience this, too. There are other choices than being a Jesus-follower.

I’m here to remind you of the commitments you have made, commitments we have all made. Four or five or eight years ago you stood in front of this congregation and you committed yourself to being a Jesus-follower. If you’ve tried to do that on your own, you may have discovered just how easy it is to place that commitment in the background while you’ve gotten on with seemingly more important things: getting good grades, cultivating a social life, scraping together the money to buy the latest gadget.

I’m here to remind us all—on behalf of the Church—that we are Jesus-followers. And for those of us who are Jesus-followers, Jesus is our way, our truth and our life.

That’s not a invitation to intolerance or arrogance. Our neighbors may have their way, their truth, their life and they may be different from ours. We don’t have to impose our way, our truth or our life on our non-Christian neighbors. We just have to follow the Jesus who is our way, our truth and our life. That’s all. Because we are Jesus-followers. And that’s what we do.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Unrealistic Aspirations - May 15 (4th Sunday of Easter - A) Acts 2:42-47

4th Sunday of Easter - A
Acts 2:42-47
May 15, 2011

Unrealistic Aspirations

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

“Back when I was your age.” Everyone knows the scene. And everyone knows what’s coming next. It will be a story of the way things never used to be, a story of the good old days. The story will be about tough times and hardships. And yet it will be told with a wistful look in the eyes and maybe even a catch in the throat. Grandchildren will roll their eyes. Grandpa is telling his stories. Again. For the hundredth time.

The music we grew up hearing plucks a particular heart string. I listened to the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin’” over and over the first time I got my heart broken. This was in the days before there were mp3 players and earplugs. I inflicted my musical ennui on the whole family. And mostly they let me. If I hear that song again, I still feel a pull, an aching longing. Time has left a patina on my memories.

When Carol and I move, packing our belongings brings us up against our past as we pack away old photographs and yearbooks. We recall memories of an earlier time, when our dreams were new and uncompromised, when we asked a great deal of the world and had not yet been disappointed by the answers, when we could be anything we wanted to be.

It was a different era for each person, each generation. For my generation it was the sixties. Love was all you needed (especially if your parents were paying the bills). The Monkees sang, “We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say.” Never mind that they never got around to actually saying it. The same Establishment that we despised marketed the revolution to us and it never occurred to us to see the irony or the trap. Cynicism would come later. Then, we could change the world. We were full of dreams and the energy needed to make them come true. The world looked to us for answers and let me tell you we had them.

For an earlier generation the era was the Depression and WWII. It didn’t matter if it was hard. They remember with fondness a simpler world when issues were stark. They were part of a shared enterprise on behalf of the whole world. It was up to them to stop world fascism. No challenge since has ever really measured up to that one. There are still annual reunions of WWII military units, though the number of attendees is falling at an alarming rate.

For ancient Israel of Isaiah and Jeremiah’s day it was the period of the Exodus, the time of desert wandering, when the people were utterly dependent on God and God fed them each day with manna and was there for the taking, food that took on whatever flavor you wanted it to.

For the church of the New Testament it was the time just after Pentecost and before the uprisings that brought the destruction of the Temple and the Jerusalem church, before the rift with Judaism. This is how they remembered it:

⁴² The members of the Church devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. ⁴³ Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵ they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶ Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

We have a need to connect with the past. This is not the same thing as the need to know the past in any objective, realistic way. When historians come along they tell us things we don’t really want to know. What we really want is nostalgia. What we really want is for our fantasies of the past to remain undisturbed by inconvenient facts from historians.

So the early church is indulging in nostalgia in our text. It cherished the fantasy that it had “the goodwill of all the people” in this episode sandwiched in between the execution of Jesus and a series of endless conflicts with religious and political authorities. The church with a history of internal conflicts and arguments, cherished a fantasy that there was a time when they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” with one accord. They cherished a fantasy that there was a time when they “had all things in common.” But do we have any particular reason to believe that this communalism was ever the rule?

The commentators are pretty sure that this is not an historical recollection but a bit of nostalgic idealization. Combine that with the fact that this text smacks of socialism or worse. We have good reasons for dismissing this tale completely.

And yet. There is something here that shouldn’t be ignored. Memory is creative. It makes sense of the present by reconstructing the past. When nostalgia “remembers” it holds up something as an ideal, as something to be imitated, as a value to be cherished. The WWII generation remembers a time that required the courage to face implacable enemies, a time that called for the surrender of individual goals for the sake of the common good. These are good things; they are worthy ideals.

The children of the sixties remember a vision of freedom for all people, a vision of a planet at peace. These are good things; they are worthy ideals. If the way we remember is false history, it is nevertheless true memory. We remember the way it could have been, might have been and might be still if we chose it, worked for it, lived toward it.

What are the childhood memories of the Church? There was a time when “all who believed were together and had all things in common.” There was a time when want was unknown.

These are echoes of still earlier memories. There were memories of manna in the wilderness. They would gather the manna according to the size of their family. Those who gathered little had no lack. Those who gathered much manna had no more than they needed.

There were memories of a great crowd that had followed Jesus into the wilderness. They were hungry, but the only food they could come up with was contributed by one boy with five small barley loaves and two fish. But Jesus took that meager offering, blessed the bread, broke it and gave it and the fish to the crowd of thousands and everyone had enough to eat.

The story has a challenge for us. Should there ever be real need among us? How far would we be willing to extend the limits of this common concern? Should any Christian suffer want while others have leftovers in the fridge? Should we ever be so anxious to hang on to our stuff that we close our ears to the cry of the hungry?

Imagine what our life would be if this “memory” were our vision for the life of our congregation, our community, our world. Surely it would be something like this:

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

It really doesn’t get any better than that.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Mothers' Day: An Idea Whose Time Has Come - Luke 24:13-35 (3rd Sunday of Easter A) May 8, 2011

3rd Sunday of Easter - A Mothers' Day
Luke 24:13-35
May 8, 2011

Mothers' Day: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

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

I share several meditations with you this morning. I believe that they are connected. I start this Mother’s Day with a nursery rhyme you may have heard from your mother:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.

In the picture books I grew up with, Mr. Dumpty was always portrayed as a very large egg. I don’t know where this notion came from—it isn’t in the rhyme. In our shared memory and imagination, though, Mr. Dumpty was an egg. His fall was catastrophic. Even massive military intervention couldn’t restore Mr. Dumpty to his pre-fall condition.

Of course, we note, as an egg Mr. Dumpty should have known better than to perch on walls. The world is a dangerous place for an egg, full of hard objects, like the ground, for example. He should have been careful. I’m sure his mother warned him about this. But he refused to listen to his mother and you see what happened. Let that be a lesson to us all!

This is certainly one way to read the nursery rhyme. But it’s not the only way to read it. There is a little niggling detail that doesn’t really fit that reading. Why did the king imagine that the best way to restore Humpty to health was to send his infantry and cavalry? Wouldn’t his engineers have been a better choice? Or better yet, his physicians?

If we follow this line of thinking—and I have to admit that I find it fascinating—we fairly shortly come to two conclusions: First, Humpty did not simply fall; he was pushed. Second, the king was almost certainly behind this “accident” and sent his army to make sure of it. So, behind a text that blames Humpty for his own injuries and praises the king for attempting to give aid, lies a quite different reality. The king had Humpty wacked and had his press secretary “spin” the story to cover up the truth and make him look like the hero of the piece.

This is a method of reading texts. It’s called “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” “Hermeneutics” is a technical term. It has to do with interpreting texts. A hermeneutic is a method or way of reading or interpreting a text. Mostly we do that interpreting unconsciously. We seldom say, “Now what sort of a hermeneutic am I going to apply in this instance?” But there are times when it would be useful. For example when our mothers say, “Where are you going? Who are you going to be with? What do you plan to do? When will you be home?” we may be tempted to respond to their apparent attack on our freedom and autonomy. But a conscious hermeneutics may help us to understand that when she asks all those nosy and demeaning questions, what she really means is, “I love you.” And the proper response is to say, “I love you, too, Mom.” Unless, of course, we are less than eighteen or still living at home, in which case the proper response is to say, “I love you, too, Mom” and then to answer her questions. She has a right to ask them; that’s her job.

My second meditation. Mostly we are not aware of our hermeneutical choices. When we realize that many messages have something to hide, we may find it useful to engage in a hermeneutic of suspicion. A hermeneutic of suspicion recognizes that we often often use written or spoken forms of communication to avoid communicating, to obscure rather than to bring to light, to hide the truth rather than to reveal it, to miscommunicate rather than to communicate. It also recognizes that the attempt to obscure, to hide, to misdirect almost allows leaves traces in the text. Like a poker player, a text has “tells” that broadcast, if not the whole story, then at least the fact that the whole story is being withheld. The presence of infantry and cavalry as supposed rescuers of the shattered Humpty is the nursery rhyme’s “tell.”

Now we’re ready for this morning’s text, the story of the two disciples who were on their way to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. Jesus fell in with them on the road as was the custom in those days when numbers meant safety from bandits. The two disciples were sad. Jesus asked them why. They expressed their amazement that Jesus hadn’t heard of Jesus and his death. Jesus, in turn, gave them a quick run-through of the Hebrew Bible and laid out the necessity of the events that they were mourning. When evening approached and the two disciples neared their destination, they pressed Jesus to stay with them. He yielded to their request. Contrary to custom, he assumed the role of host at the table to which they invited him. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his companions and vanished from their sight. And, yes, the actions are supposed to remind the reader of the actions at the communion table. Well, the first four anyway, not the vanishing part. The two disciples recognized Jesus in his action of breaking bread and, overjoyed at this evidence of his resurrection, dashed back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night.

That’s the story. Now there is a little detail in Luke’s telling of this story that asks for the use of a hermeneutics of suspicion. The details about the two disciples are a little odd. The story names only one of them: Cleopas. About the other it is silent. We may assume that the tradition had simply forgotten the name of one of the disciples and remembered the other, but the facts may be quite different. We’ve all seen Robert Zünd’s Der Gang nach Emmaus (“The Road to Emmaus”) depicting this story. It has two male disciples walking through the Swiss countryside around Lucerne. Jesus walks between them, dressed in flowing white robes and the other two are walking on either side of him, half-facing in his direction.

But the text doesn’t tell us that both disciples were men. Later tradition has done that.

Feminist theologians noticed that the text is strangely silent about the unnamed disciple. In fact, the whole of the New Testament is strangely silent. Almost without exception the New Testament reduces, obscures, brackets or even erases the role of women in the early Christian community. A feminist hermeneutic of suspicion argues that the “other” disciple is unnamed because to name her would reveal her gender. For a number of reasons, Luke was not interested in doing that. This unnamed disciple is a woman, perhaps the wife of Cleopas, perhaps even more disturbingly one of those to whom Paul may be referring in 1 Corinthians: a unmarried female Christian, that is a “‘sister’ who went with Cleopas as a wife.”¹

In this reading, the Emmaus road story is not just a witness to the resurrection of Jesus (which it is). It is not just a witness to the experience of the risen Jesus in the “breaking of the bread” at the table in worship (which it is). It is also a witness to a disciples of equals in the early Christian church, to a form of shared life that radically challenged gender roles in ancient culture, to an equality of men and women in at least some parts of the early Jesus movement.

It’s amazing what we forget, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose. This brings me to my third meditation.

Today we are celebrating the role of our mothers in our lives. For most of us this is a good and appropriate thing to do. Most mothers have done, and do the best that they can. Most of us become mature enough to recognize this and to appreciate what our mothers actually did, especially in light of what they had to work with. Mothers are human beings and they don’t always get it right. But most of them get it right enough for us to have a good foundation for taking on life.

What you won’t hear in the advertisements for flowers, jewelry and greeting cards (and let’s face it, Mother’s Day is big business: According to the National Retail Foundation it’s worth over $14 billion each year²) What you won’t hear in the official media presentation of motherhood is that some mothers are so neglectful or abusive that their children are left scrambling for “mothering” wherever they can find it. What you won’t hear is that for some people today is painful reminder of what they did not have rather than a celebration. We forget them sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose.

We forget that behind our contemporary Mother’s Day is a history of politically active women who rowed against the cultural tide. Anna Jarvis is credited with launching the modern Mother’s Day, but she became so disgusted with its commercialization that she publically regretted ever having started it. She had actually gotten the idea from her mother, also named Anna Jarvis, who organized mothers in her community in West Virginia to stand in solidarity with each other across the fault line that had been cracked open by the Civil War.

We forget Julia Ward Howe’s attempt in the late 1800s to launch an international Mothers’ Day. We remember her for the hymn that she wrote after having visited the Union Army camps in and around Washington, DC, in early 1862. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was a favorite among Union soldiers and became a resource for fighting the Civil War. She had seen a vision of truth conquering falsehood and justice making war on injustice. There were real falsehoods and real injustices at stake. But what Howe saw later was the terrible, excruciating and finally unacceptable cost of war. She regretted her own role in providing war with a soundtrack.

She concluded that, left to their own devices, men would never bring about a permanent peace. Women, especially mothers, she reasoned, would have to step in where men had failed. If she could get mothers together, she thought, they would change the world. She gave it her best shot:

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: “...our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”³

Her best shot was pretty good, but it wasn’t good enough. Mothers’ Day as a day of empowerment for women so that they could transform the world sputtered and coughed along for ten years and then collapsed, only to be replaced a generation later by a different sort of Mother’s Day altogether. We forget.

Finally, my last meditation which began earlier this week when we heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Bin Laden was responsible for destruction and death on our shores and around the world. He was influential for a time because he was able to cast his grand pretensions as humble service to God. Our nation’s leaders of nearly all political persuasions ascribed far more power and influence to him and to his organization than he ever deserved. And I believe his death will prove to be far less important than nearly anyone makes it out to be.

The reality is that bin Laden had already been left behind by history. And the reality is also that this didn’t happen because of the courage and sacrifice of honorable servicemen and servicewomen who have been engaged in the longest war in our nation’s history. It is no fault of theirs that when violence answers violence the result is never simply justice.

No, it was the mothers of Cairo and Alexandria who showed how pathetic a man bin Laden actually was. It was the mothers, not bin Laden’s terrorist organization, who brought down the oppressive regime in Egypt. Their courage kept this revolution from becoming a blood bath. Their unfailing presence in the streets gave the lie to bin Laden’s dreams of glory and revenge.

We forget. Osama bin Laden had a mother. I know nothing about her. I know that she carried him under her heart for nine months, that she felt him kick within her, that she labored to bring him into the light of day. I know nothing else about her, really. But I cannot imagine that this was the life that she wanted for her son. This was not her dream.

Howe’s proclamation was unusual in part because of its dream of the power of mothers for peace, but also because its vision went beyond the boundaries of Christendom. She intended that there be room for mothers whether they were Christian (that is, those whose baptism was of water) or whether they were simply the grieved mothers of dead sons (that is, those whose baptism was of tears)? There is room in Howe’s vision for bin Laden’s mother.

Howe’s proclamation never got the traction it needed to overcome the interests of all those who stood to profit from the making of war. There are still great war-making interests. But there might be an audience for Howe’s proclamation now. Osama bin Laden’s mother, baptized as she is in tears, might be ready to hear Howe’s call. The mothers of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans might be ready. The mothers of our own dead might be ready. We might be ready. It’s an idea whose time has come.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

11 Corinthians 9:5. The NRSV has “a believing wife.”

2National Retail Federation, “Mom Second Only to Winter Holidays, According to NRF Survey” http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=918 (May 7, 2011)

3Julia Ward Howe, “Mothers’ Day Proclamation”, 1870, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejwriting/a/mothers_day.htm.