Come and See

John 1:29-42

January 19, 2014

The gospel of John begins, famously, with the wordy, philosophical, decidedly Greek prologue: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” But before you can even begin to digest what this reference to the divine logos might possibly mean, John jumps straight into the story of the Baptist and his voice crying out in the wilderness, “prepare the way!”

No sooner does John cry out, than he starts pointing out: “look, there! It’s Jesus, the lamb of God.”

And that’s apparently all it took, the only testimony necessary, for immediately two disciples start to follow Jesus, even though it’s readily apparent from their questions that they don’t know where Jesus is heading.

All he says is: “come and see.”

Those words, and this passage, have a deep resonance for me, and a special place in my own story. This text from John was preached the morning, about 20 years ago, when Cheryl and I decided to attend a “perspective new members” gathering at a Presbyterian church in Lexington, Ky.

I grew up in the Presbyterian church – an oddity among Presbyterian clergy my age or younger. And I ran hard from it as a young adult – a very common path among young adults raised in Mainline Protestant denominations during the past 50 years. Despite the fact that beginning when I was in high school I felt drawn to ministry, and despite the fact that before I was 25 I had a masters degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, by the time I was 25 I had “come and seen” and “turned and fled.”

Yet there we were, a decade later, sitting in the pews, listening to this strange little story: “come and see, come and see.”

You see, there’s something about Jesus and his call that is just hard to ignore, and that changes the script you imagine for your life.

You know the script. We all know it. We are, all of us, socialized into it from the moment of our birth. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls the social script of our society “technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.”[1] Marcus Borg names the fundamental values – he calls them idols – of this script: achievement, appearance and affluence.[2] Walter Wink speaks of the powers that be within what he calls a system of domination.[3] Other theologians offer other, but fundamentally similar, descriptions of contemporary social norms and expectations, and the power of their allure – or, perhaps, the allure of their power.

I lived out the script working in the state government arena, with a modicum of achievement and a modicum of affluence, and, well, I looked good doing it! But something was missing – something of wholeness, mutual well-being, authentic community, something of communion.

Brueggemann, in describing the dominate script of our culture, argues that the script fails in its fundamental promises because it ultimately does not deliver either security or happiness. I tend to agree in terms of security – the vast majority of us live paycheck to paycheck often one serious illness or job loss from bankruptcy, and all of us live in a society so filled with guns that going to the movies or to a burger joint might turn out to be a fatal decision.

The one piece of Brueggemann's description that I would question is his notion that "we may be the unhappiest society in the world." By most measures of well being (including self-reported "life satisfaction" questions) North Americans are not particularly "unhappy." It’s not that we’re unhappy, but rather that we’re blissful – and blissfully unaware of how much the material sources of our happiness rest upon massive injustice, inequality, and violence.

In other words, if I want folks to question the dominant script, saying "you're not happy" is a nonstarter because most folks who walk through our doors (and most of the ones who don't walk through our doors, but walk in and out of the shops and businesses nearby) may feel stressed and stretched and often hungry for deeper meaning, but we don't usually describe ourselves as "unhappy."

The dominant script does "work" for some of us, but it does so on the backs of many more. Almost all of us Mainline Protestants in North America are part, globally speaking, of the one percent. We wrote the script. We benefit from it. It makes many of us happy. And it is massively unjust and unsustainable because it depends upon environmental destruction, abusive labor conditions, child labor, and a huge and growing gap between rich and poor. It depends, ultimately, on dividing the world into “us” and “them,” and building militarized walls to sustain the division.

When Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting the disciples into a community that insists upon the recognition of a fundamental relationship: we are all children of the same God; we are all the beloved; there is no “us” and “them.”

The cultural script in Jesus’ time insisted upon the primacy of tribe, of kinship ties, of blood relationship. When Jesus poured the cup and said, “this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” he inaugurated an entirely new script: you are not bound by the blood of kinship but by the love that courses through my veins for everyone.

Jesus invites us into a story marked by particular blessings: not mere happiness, but rather blessedness; not the kingdom of wealth but, instead, the commonwealth of the beloved; not the false security of weapons of war, but, in their place, the invitation to be called the children of God.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s monumental reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, he observes that “we could understand and interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it. … But again he does not mean that it is to be discussed as an ideal, he really means us to get on with it.”[4]

·         Be salt and light for the world.

·         Let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no.”

·         Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

·         Serve God rather than wealth because you cannot serve both.

Interpreting all that, and so much more, is so much easier than living it. The alternative script of the gospel is not easy, the way Jesus invites us to walk with him is narrow.

But knock and the door will be opened to you, seek and you shall find.

This is the alternative story, the counter narrative, the other path of the gospel entrusted to the church. When Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting us to travel this path and to share this story with a world that needs it even more desperately today than it did 2,000 years ago.

The alternative story that the church offers to the world does not promise that following Jesus will make you happier or healthier or safer or richer. Instead, in this story we we are invited into a relationship that binds us all – all of us – to one another. In this story we are bound together, and in that binding we find wholeness, mutual well-being, authentic community, deep communion. In other words, when Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting us to experience salvation.

Come and see. Amen.

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[1] http://jasongoroncy.com/2010/02/03/a-script-to-live-and-to-die-by-19-theses-by-walter-brueggemann/

[2] Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (my copy of which has been loaned out, so no details!)

[3] See Wink’s massive trilogy on The Powers.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995 edition) 196-7.

Called Out

Called Out

Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17

January 12, 2014

The church is the community of those called by God to be the body of Christ for the world.

I reckon that’s a fairly classic definition of church. It’s both descriptive and, at the same time, provocative.

On a Sunday when we ordain elders to serve as spiritual leaders of the community of the church at Clarendon, it’s good to pause for a moment and ask what it means to be called out.

On a Sunday when we mark the baptism of Jesus and, in doing so, remember our own baptismal welcome into the community of the church, it’s good to pause for a moment and ask what it means to be the body of Christ.

On a Sunday still at the beginning of a new year, as we consider both changes and opportunities before us, it is good to pause for a moment and ask what “for the world” means for us.

So let’s begin with these questions and our reflections from our own experience.

What does it mean, to you, to be called out?

What does it mean to be the body of Christ?

What does “for the world” mean for you?

*****

In the New Testament, the Greek word that we translate as church is ekklesia. You can hear in that the root of our word ecclesiastic. In general usage, ekklesia referred to a gathering of citizens or an assembly. It was originally a political term not a religious one, but it brought together two root words that sparked the religious imagination as well: ek, which means out; and kaleo, which means call.

Thus, the church is the gathering of those called out, as our ordination liturgy reminds us, by the One who calls us to follow.

Who is this One? Well, upon that the whole thing turns, doesn’t it. If Jesus is not the center of the life of the church, then it has no real life worth living. Oh, sure, we can be a nice organization of good people doing fine things in the community – another voluntary association of like-minded individuals. But that is not the church of Jesus Christ, that is not the body of Christ, taken, blessed and broken for the world.

We are the ones called to follow the One of whom God said, “you are the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.”

In the waters of our baptism, God whispers the same blessing, “you are my beloved, in you I am well pleased.” In these waters the church hears also the words of Isaiah, “you are my servant, in whom my soul delights; you will bring forth justice to the nations … I have given you as a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon.”

This is our common calling, because our life is centered on Jesus, the one called to bring sight to the blind, to bring release to the captives, to bring good news to the poor.

For that calling to resonate in our world we must be the body of the Risen Christ of our faith, for there is no other body. We are the ones called to be the body of Christ for the world. As Shane Claiborne observed, “we can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours.”[1]

We can do that, sure, but we can’t do that and call ourselves the body of Christ for the world. We can’t do that and still call ourselves the church. For to be the body of Christ for the world we have to be standing with those who suffer – the passion of the Christ demands of his followers compassion, the willingness to suffer with those who suffer.

We do this with what we have, where we are, here and now in mostly simple, human gestures on a human scale. We’re not called to save the world – salvation is God’s work, not ours. We’re called, instead, to be faithful.

I cannot solve the “problem” of hunger in the world, but I can share a meal with a hungry neighbor. I cannot solve the “problem” of bullying but I can extend compassion to a child. I cannot solve the “problem” of systemic exclusion but I can welcome people to my home. Now, lest I be misunderstood, the fact that I cannot, on my own, solve such problems does not get me off the hook from working with others, in community, for systemic change. After all, Jesus fed the hungry, broke bread with outcasts, touched the lepers – but he also tossed the money changers out of the temple, preached the forgiveness of debt, and wound up executed for sedition.

All of that, as the life of the church, is what it means to be blessed and broken for the world.

We center our small part of that work on hospitality and feeding our neighbors in body, mind and spirit. As we consider transitions, new initiatives, and changes to our sacred space, we hold that fundamental commitment as the measure of our decisions and our actions.

It’s a pretty good yardstick for our individual lives, as well. How does your life, lived day-to-day, one choice to the next, reflect God’s call and claim on your life to be part of the body of Christ for the world?

Let us pray:

God who calls us out, who claims us in the waters of baptism, who nurtures us in the community of followers of Jesus, bless our every step as we sojourn faithfully as Christ’s body for your broken world. May we sow seeds of healing, of wholeness, of justice and of peace as we journey together. Amen.

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[1] From The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.

Following Stars

Matthew 2:1-12; Isaiah 60:1-9

January 5, 2014

I want to spend a moment, this morning, rescuing the magi from the disrepute they’ve lately fallen into in some quarters. You know the joke that’s made the rounds for a few years now: if it had been three wise women they would have asked directions and brought practical gifts.

Well, to begin with, the story doesn’t actually specify three wise men. That tradition likely arose because the story names three gifts. The text, itself, is silent on the numbers. As to the gifts: while they may appear to us strange and utterly impractical, in fact, they would have been quite valuable. A family that was going to be on the run and in exile could certainly use a bit of financial support. Moreover, as in all of Matthew, the events of Jesus’ life regularly refer back to Hebrew scriptures – in this case to the passage from Isaiah that we just heard.

The great poem that closes Isaiah provides the plot for Matthew’s narrative. Upon such reference, in fact, the whole of this story rests. Oh, and it’s also in looking at that referential nature of the story that I’ll defend the wise men on one last note: as the first verse of this story tells us, the wise men did ask for directions.

“Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’”

They came asking directions. In fact, they went straight to the top – to a gathering that included the king, the chief priests and the scribes. Now, you might well say, “typical men, on a power trip,” and I won’t argue that point. In fact, this story of the magi is filled with warnings about the dangers of power and the structures that ensure that power remains in the hands of the powerful.

Those warnings begin when the wise men travel to Jerusalem – the capital city, and a city with a long and storied history of pretension to power. We can hear all of this in the passage from Isaiah:

“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” This proclamation comes in Isaiah’s closing vision of the new Jerusalem, and it would have come as comfort and affirmation to Herod – “my city is going to rise up and become an important power in the world!”

But the priests Herod consults are wise enough, and honest enough, to point Herod toward a different prophetic vision. They tell Herod that he – and the wise men from the East – are consulting the wrong text when it comes to this rising star. Instead of Isaiah, they suggest, you should be reading Micah, who proclaims, “you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”

As Walter Brueggemann puts it:

This is the voice of a peasant hope for the future, a voice that is not impressed with high towers and great arenas, banks and urban achievements. It anticipates a different future, as yet unaccomplished, that will organize the peasant land in resistance to imperial threat. Micah anticipates a leader who will bring well-being to his people, not by great political ambition, but by attentiveness to the folks on the ground.

Herod tells the Eastern intellectuals the truth, and the rest is history. They head for Bethlehem, a rural place, dusty, unnoticed and unpretentious. It is, however, the proper milieu for the birth of the One who will offer an alternative to the arrogant learning of intellectuals and the arrogant power of urban rulers.[1]

Micah, moreover, speaks in a clear voice utterly lacking in sentimentality.

It’s been said that sentimentality is among the greatest enemies of the gospel. It’s easy to sentimentalize all of the stories we read and repeat around Christmastide, and the story of the magi is no different. We like to include dress-up kings in our pageants, and we must – as we did this morning – include “We Three Kings” in the proceedings.

But this is no sentimental tale, and we should attend, however difficult it is, to the horror imbedded in it. The story of the magi ends when they avoid going back to Herod, and that avoidance foreshadows the flight of Mary and Joseph from the terrors that Herod will inflict upon the children of Israel.

If we confront the story honestly – and allow ourselves to be confronted by it – then we must ask ourselves about slaughters of the innocent here and now. How is it that in the richest country in the world, almost 1-in-4 children live in poverty?[2] How is it that the U.S. rate of child deaths by gunshot has increased by 60 percent over the past decade, even as overall murder rates have plummeted in cities across the country?[3] How is it that 16 million kids in America don’t get enough to eat?

Ol’ Herod had little on us when it comes to a slaughter of the innocents. This is not a sentimental story. This is the story of the beginning of a great turning – a turning that has been ongoing and that continues and to which we are called to commit our hearts and minds and talents and treasures, just like the magi who came following a star to offer homage to the one whose birth heralds change.

We are called to follow that one to whom that star pointed – just as faithful folk at Clarendon Presbyterian Church have for 90 years now. We are called to follow the one to whom that star pointed to create a community in our own time that bears witness to the God revealed through the life of that child born in dusty Bethlehem. We are called here and now to follow; and in following, to build a community centered around this table to which all are welcome, at which sanctuary is offered to the innocents among us and to the rest of us, at which all are fed.

The story doesn’t end there, because we don’t just sit around this table telling old stories until we pass away into history. No. The story doesn’t end here, because we are sent from this table into the world to participate in God’s work in the world: the in-breaking of the Spirit; the cosmos-shaking of Christ; and the history-making of Christ’s church. Let us break bread together. Let us be the church of Jesus the Christ. Amen.

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[1] http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2103

[2] UNICEF study reported in: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-hidden-toll.html

Found in Translation

Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25

December 22, 2013

“All translation is treason,” said 19^th-century Japanese scholar, Okakura Kakuzo, in The Book of Tea.

On the other hand, all we have is translation, for all language translates something beyond itself toward which it points, and, thus, mistranslation or misunderstanding is always possible in every moment, in every utterance.

I hope you are now confused.

Indeed, you should be confused because the entire story of Jesus is confusing and confounding from the very beginning. Look at the characters in the stories of Jesus’ birth. And, yes, I said “stories” – plural – because let’s be honest, Matthew and Luke do not tell the same story. Oh, and Mark and John don’t tell it at all. As to the characters: they are all confused. The magi, or “wisemen”? Following a star, they have got to be confused. Shepherds? “Sore afraid,” so the familiar King James translation tells us, and we know that fear breeds confusion. Mary? Luke focuses his telling of the tale on her, and she is most decidedly confused. Joseph? Definitely confused.

Take a step back from the characters in the stories to the words that we have. Written in a long-dead street language – Koine Greek – these stories themselves rest, in key parts, on translations into Greek from ancient Hebrew texts. In the case of our passage from Matthew this morning, some things are lost in translation. But, at the same time, some things are found.

We’ll begin with what’s lost. The first noun, in the English translation of our passage, is “birth.” In the Greek the word is genesis, and a variation on it is found in the opening verse of Matthew’s gospel where it is translated, properly, as genealogy. There is another Greek word, genessis, not used in Matthew, but more simply meaning birth. In other words, in our passage today, what we hear as a simple “birth story” might be more deeply understood as a story about how one generation – Mary and Joseph’s – gave rise to the next – that of Jesus.

Hearing that, we might also discern an invitation that concerns passing the story, the gospel, the good news on from one generation to the next, and thus hear beyond the story of the birth of a child into the story of a birth of a movement of spirit and grace in the world.

Matthew focuses his genesis story on Joseph, but again, something is lost and, perhaps, something found in the matter of translation.

Matthew calls Joseph a “righteous man,” and we might miss that if we read with only contemporary eyes, through which it might be difficult to see righteousness in abandoning a young woman. However, in first century Palestinian culture, the appropriate and expected reaction to Mary’s situation would be to stone her. Seen in that light, Joseph is, indeed full of faith and grace.

Matthew goes on to inform us that all this happens to fulfill the word of the prophet Isaiah. Here again, however, something is lost in translation. The text of Isaiah available to the author of Matthew was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew. In the original, Isaiah’s words are more accurately translated as “young woman” than as “virgin,” as the Hebrew almah refers to a young woman of marriageable age.

What’s lost in translation, for us, is a simple Hallmark moment, a card or carol pointing to a moment out of time, but what’s found might just be a moment of deeper history: a story about the incredible faithfulness of two parents who defied their culture’s mores and expectations to raise a son who would come to be called Emmanuel – God with us.

What matters here is not the sex lives of Mary and Joseph, but, rather, the faith lives of Mary and Joseph. If “virgin birth” is important to you that’s fine, but if it’s a stumbling block let it go. More importantly, don’t let it be a point of division between people who are trying to follow the way of Jesus. It’s simply not fundamental to following Jesus in the world, to trusting that through the person of Jesus we are invited deep into the heart of God, and that through the good news revealed in Jesus we find that, indeed, God is with us.

After all, that is what the angel says to Joseph: through the birth of this child whom you shall call Immanuel, you will find that, truly, God is with you. This is the moment of the great story that elicits pure wonder from us: the wonder that God should choose to be with us – each of us, all of us. The good news revealed most decisively round the manger: God is with the whole of humanity – whether or not we perceive it or acknowledge. The world belongs to God: the earth and all its peoples.

Given that, the deeper question this text insists upon is this: what kind of God does Jesus reveal?

That’s what we find in translation, because that’s what Jesus does for us. Jesus translates the unspeakably other Yahweh into terms we can grasp: prince of peace, wonderful counselor, light of the world, bread of life.

Peace. Good counsel. Light. Bread. These we can understand. This is an everyday language we can speak. We know that a broken and violent world longs for peace. We understand that our own broken lives need good counsel. We can see clearly that in darkness we need light. We feel the common hunger for bread.

We often lose literal meanings in translation, but we can find the deeper trust, obedience, and faithfulness of Mary and Joseph. In finding that, we may discover also that the path they followed can lead us deeper into the heart of God.

That path opens to us again as we gather close by a manger to welcome again the one whose presence in our world will translate the hopes and fears of all the years into a common hymn of praise. Amen.