Always Be Ready
1 Peter 3:13-22
April 24, 2008
I’ve been reading a pair of completely unrelated texts that came across my desk in recent days. One is a now-classic book by Quaker activist and writer Ched Myers entitled Who Will Roll Away the Stone? It’s one of those books I’ve seen and heard referred to for a number of years, but only just recently decided that, with a title like that, it would make excellent reading for Eastertide. Indeed, it does, but more on that in a bit.
The second text is a six-page, hand-written piece headed, “The Church is a Theocracy Not a Democracy,” that was sent to me and a handful of other clergy who were mentioned or quoted in a recent Baltimore Sun article on same-sex marriage. The writer, a clergyman from southern Maryland, wrote to explain to us that we are leading our flocks astray with our un-Biblical teachings and ecclesiastical waywardness.
With those two disparate texts on my desk, I opened the Bible to read the lectionary passages for this Sunday and read these words:
Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.
Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is in you, scripture charges those who would call themselves followers of Jesus, disciples of Christ, people of the way. Always be ready to give an account.
I want to give you just such an account this morning, but first let me share with you why I bothered to wrestle at all with a long-winded screed attacking me and, to be sure, by extension attacking this congregation for, among other things, “seeking to help same sex couples sink deeper into the pit of sexual perversion.” I receive such stuff somewhat regularly. I suppose it comes with the territory, and most of the time I just throw it away. But last week, when Peg mentioned the “Unbinding the Gospel” event, I asked myself, “what is the gospel, the good news, that needs to be unbound at Clarendon?”
Then I read this letter attacking us for leading people into sin. Then I read Ched Myers’ reflection on a line from Native American author Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony:
Stories, Silko’s elder says, are all we have to fight off illness and death. Christians finds such Stories in scripture – what I call the narrative of biblical radicalism. The problem is, the North American church has been fooled into thinking our Stories are just entertainment, or it has forgotten them altogether. At the same time we have been seduced by stories spun by the imperial Dream: the official narratives of the National Security Council and the six o’clock news, the fabulations of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. These tales promise prosperity, power, and prestige, but deliver only captivity. Worst of all, we Christians have confused our Stories with the narrative of empire, thus allowing scripture to be expropriated into the service of oppression.[1]
Be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in you. Unbind the gospel. Tell your stories. Share the good news. Let the chips fall where they may? Perhaps. But also, trust God with the outcome.
In the lectionary passage from Acts this morning, Paul is standing in the Areopagus proclaiming to the Athenians the good news about Jesus. He stands ready to give an account of the hope that is within him. The source of that hope comes to us clearly in the reading from John’s gospel: “I will not leave you orphaned, I am coming to you. … Those who have and keep my commandments are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father.”
That’s the good news, sisters and brothers, that we are loved by our Creator God, that we are graced by the continuing presence, the accompaniment of the risen Christ, and we are empowered by the Spirit to live out the commandments of Jesus: namely this – that we love one another just as he loved his disciples.
Unbind this gospel and share it with a world that so desperately needs to know itself as beloved. Give an account of the hope that is within us. Share our stories.
So, let me then give you an account of the hope that is within me by way of two stories from last weekend.
Last Sunday afternoon we went up to Rockville for the installation of our good friend, Leann Hodges, as associate pastor at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church. Some of you may have heard us tell tales of Bud’s babysitting adventures with Alex. Alex is Leann (and Ray’s) four-year-old son. Alex is adopted, and he is a biracial child. He is, in the way of every child, extraordinary and also perfectly ordinary, and he was energetically hosting us in his home Sunday evening as we sat around telling tales of family and church, and breaking bread and sharing wine.
Simple, sacramental gifts of shared time and purpose. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that Leann and Ray are white Southerners, from Kentucky, and I am another one, born in Alabama, and at the time when I was a four-year-old boy an interracial couple would have been grounds for violence in our home states and the marriage of any such couple would have been against the laws of those states, and this one, and any child born of such a union would have been spurned and shunned by many if not most good Southerners.
Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that such a child would not likely have found a home in very many southern churches not that many years ago. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that the infamous “way of life” defended for so many years in our part of the world saw itself as based on Christian scripture but that was, in fact, much more accurately understood as imperial court theology than as any faith in Jesus seeking new understanding for a new time
As I hopped on the Beltway to drive home last Sunday evening, I thought of Alex and wondered, “is that what people were so scared of?”
Second story from last weekend:
Last Saturday, Cheryl and I had dinner at Mike and Clark’s house. We had a wonderful time, sitting out on the back deck watching the birds splash in the birdbath, talking about our gardens, telling tales of growing up small town or Southern. We shared a delicious meal, breaking bread and sharing wine.
Simple, sacramental gifts of shared time and purpose. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that I am a minister of the word and sacrament in a denomination that still has so far to come toward welcome and embrace and empowerment of Mike and Clark and millions of other gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered sisters and brothers in the faith. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that we are living in Virginia, where the rights and privileges that Cheryl and I take utterly for granted as a straight, married couple are constitutionally denied to Mike and Clark. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that those civil restrictions – civil wrongs, as it were – are based in a theology that calls itself Christian but that is, in fact, much more accurately understood as imperial court theology than as any faith in Jesus seeking new understanding for a new time.
As Cheryl and I turned onto to Rt. 7 to head home, we asked one another yet again, for the thousandth time, “is that what people are so scared of? Mike and Clark?”
The hope that is within me this morning is simply this: that we might move the broader church and culture beyond such fear; that we might live into the day when there truly is nothing out of the ordinary about any of this; that such a day might be soon and very soon. That hope is based on nothing less than an utter conviction that God created us all and loves us all, and that we are called to love one another in that same unbounded way.
Why do I believe this, when the vast majority of Christians around the world see it differently? Because my faith is in a God made known to us through the lived experience of Jesus, who had love for all beyond all the bounds and borders his culture, his faith community, his ecclesiastical authorities erected in defense of the imperial status quo of his day. And because Christian theology ought to teach us that truth is not first and foremost propositional, but is rather relational and incarnational. We shall know the truth, as Christians, to the extent that we know Jesus and walk in his way, and to the extent that we know and love one another. To precisely that extent, we shall be set free from all that binds our hearts and minds in fear.
Finally, I believe this because human beings do not think our way into new patterns of living; we live our way into new patterns of thinking. And we share these patterns of living through the weave of stories that bind us together and make sense of the often chaotic, incoherent scraps of life. As Ched Myers puts it, “while logic can often persuade us to change what or how we think, only the circle of Story has the power to transform what we live by.” [2]
Those may seem contradictory claims at first, but I believe not, in the end. For it is the stories of our ways of living that move us to think differently about a new time. Without the experiences of breaking bread with folks not like me, I might live in fear. Without sharing the stories of those experiences, I might live in silence and fail to live into the calling to give an account of the hope that is within me.
Without the gospel witness of the transformative and revelatory power of breaking bread, I would have no context for explaining how the experience of breaking bread fills me with a faith, hope and love that casts out all fear.
We are all witnesses here. We are all called to share the good news that we experience together in this good place. We are called to unbind this gospel of love, precisely because the world is bound by fear. Sisters and brothers, always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.
posted by David Ensign at
9:03 AM
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