How Do You Know?

1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

April 26, 2015

I am a conceptual thinker, but an experiential learner. I don’t know if that’s an unusual combination; I just know that’s how I think and how I learn. How do I know? A lifetime of trial and error … and then pondering the trials and the errors seeking to understand them ever more deeply.

That’s how I know. I don’t know how you know.

But given that I learn experientially, the way that I know things conceptually is by learning them concretely. How do I know that my mother loves me? I learned it as she fed me and cared for me as an infant and young child, and later on as she drove me to practices and to school and to all kinds of other events … and, all the more so a bit later when she let me drive her.

How do I know that my child has a good teacher? When I watch my child come alive talking about class; when she points out things in the world that she’s learned about in the class; when she begins teaching me things she’s learned that I don’t know.

How do I know that we’re on the right track as a church? Well, I could turn to our Book of Confessions where I’d learn that the marks of the true church are these: the word of God is preached and heard; the sacraments are rightly administered; the order of the church nurtures and sustains a covenant community. That’s a decent list and I could check it off one by one. Or I could look at the budget and see that it’s healthy. Or I could look around and see that lots of folks are involved and engaged.

But the way I know that we’re on the right track is this: we see brothers and sisters in need and we help. The church is healthy when the love of God abides in its members. “This is how they will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”

How do we know that love? We know it when we see it in action.

We saw it – no, we embodied it yesterday when we spent the day rebuilding a neighbor’s home, restoring a house and yard, and making a place where love will abide for years to come.

We’ll see it in just a few minutes when a bunch of us go outside to plant a garden that we’ll nurture for months as it produces hundreds of pounds of fresh vegetables to feed our hungry neighbors.

We’ll see it later this afternoon when some of us will gather for an interfaith worship service to pray together for justice, and to hold the United State Supreme Court in prayer as they prepare to hear arguments on marriage equality this week. And we’ll see it Tuesday morning as many of us gather in front of the Court to stand on the side of love.

Sisters and brothers, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

That’s how we know.

Now the sign that has hung outside over our parking lot for the better part of 15 years proclaims, in words, that we welcome everyone with faith and doubt. I am living proof of the truth of those words because, I promise you, nobody has wrestled with the claims of our faith and the structures of our church more deeply and skeptically than I have.

I dare say that what we consider “doubt” usually circles around words of the faith, creedal convictions about the nature of God, the lordship of Jesus, the understanding of resurrection. In other words: statements about broad concepts that beg the question, “how do you know?”

While I can certainly engage and even enjoy a good conceptual discussion about theology or Christology or ecclesiology or eschatology, such discussion are not how I know anything about God or about Jesus or about the church or about the ultimate fulfillment of history. Partly, that is due to my own limited capacities, but partly it’s due to the limits of language itself and the framework for what we say we know in this day and age.

I mean here, that in a highly technical, scientific, post-enlightenment cultural context our language and framework for knowing are limited too often to technical, scientific, literal understandings of what is far better understood metaphorically and experientially.

Take the passage from the gospels this morning. “I am the good shepherd.”

If your only framework for understanding that phrase is literal, then most of us are at a complete loss because you can’t even have sheep in Arlington County. We don’t have a clue, really, what a shepherd is, what a shepherd does, how a shepherd lives.

The words only come alive when we begin to understand the metaphor. Only then can we even begin to read perhaps the most famous lines in all of scripture, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. God makes me to lie down in green pastures; God restores my soul.”

These are rich metaphors, but even in their richness they only begin to come alive when we experience them as lived realities. That is to say, when we experience inexpressible love abiding in the lives of the people of God as they care for us, for one another, and for neighbors in need. Then we begin to know. When that love abides in us, when we find ourselves expressing it and extending it to others – especially to others not like ourselves – we begin to understand. When the love of God abides in us, when we have the capacity to help, and we see a brother or sister in need and offer all we have for his or her sake? That is how we know. Amen.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Easter Sunday, 2015

Mark 16:1-8

So, I saw this headline the other day: Easter Doesn’t Have to Be a Diet Disaster. Well, whew, I thought, that’s one less thing to worry about. Now, I can scoff, but actually, if overeating is the main concern, then we’re doing pretty well. After all, what do we have to be afraid of, if that’s what we’re worried about?

On the other hand, when I look at the other headlines it seems that the world still stands in need of good news on more than the diet front. In fact, I’m pretty sure that our concerns and our fears are not all that distant from those of the women who went to the tomb.

Listen for a word from God, from the Gospel of Mark:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Mark’s account of Easter has always been my favorite. Originally, the gospel of Mark ends right where this reading does. “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

I get it. I appreciate it deeply. I am right there with these three women; confused, amazed, and terrified. In the grip of something I cannot fathom, and thus reduced to silent wonder. Terror. War. Climate crisis. Where is the good news? Rome. Herod. Crucifixion. Where is the good news?

But then this: the stone is rolled away. The tomb is empty. What the what?

This is the point in many sermons when I would ask you to share a time in your own life when you’ve experienced whatever it is I’ve just described, but I’m fairly confident that y’all would remain as silent as the empty tomb in this case. This sort of thing doesn’t happen just every day.

Or, to be sure, if we broaden the question a bit and consider times in our own lives when we’ve been reduced to silence by the shock or wondrousness of an event, we can probably name a few. Sometimes overwhelmingly bad news brings shock that silences us, and we are afraid to speak for fear that the moment we give words to the new reality that so shocks and frightens us we will forever have to live in the world. If I do not say that I am coming apart at the seams then perhaps I will not have to live in a world torn asunder by some unspeakable tragedy.

Awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of creation can also leave us speechless. Happier, for sure, than tragedy, but often no more able to give words to our experience.

Spring has come to these parts, and in the past few days I’ve marveled at the daffodils blooming in our yard. There are so many more of them sprouting now than the number of bulbs I planted a few years back. I know that there is a precise botanical explanation for this, though I don’t pretend to know what that is. I also know the truth that William Blake articulated, perhaps upon observing his own garden:

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

There is rational, scientific truth, and it matters, of course. But there is also metaphorical truth. It is no less true for being metaphor, and it is no less important. Indeed, I want to suggest on this Easter morning, such figurative language is more important because it allows us to grasp truths that escape the literal.

Incredible beauty – in the petal of a flower, in the light of a distant star, in the smile of a newborn child – incredible beauty is rendered flat and banal when reduced by literal descriptions, but can be raised to rich meaningfulness in metaphor.

When the world shifts, we try to find words to stand on – or, better, to stand under so we may understand. When the shock is great, it takes a while to find words. When the ground of reality shifts suddenly under our feet we reach for words that let us stand again.

When the shock is the violent death of the one you believe will save your people, when the shock is an empty tomb … well, that doesn’t happen just every day and it demands a vocabulary that transcends the every day, as well.

If we understand the Easter story with our 21^st-century minds as being about the literal, bodily coming back from the dead of a human being who was hung on a cross to die, then, no. This doesn’t happen every day.

In the same way, if we read the whole of gospels as if we’re reading the front page of the New York Times then we’re going to be confused at best by what we find in scripture.

The words matter, and the words we choose to describe what we experience arise within a cultural context. Moreover, the words also frame that cultural context. All of which is to say, the past is a foreign country where people speak a foreign tongue. When we dip all the way back in time to 1^st –century Palestine the past is more like another planet.

As James Carroll puts it in his most recent book, Christ Actually, “It is impossible for us, bound by a very different cosmology, to know what kinds of events lay behind reports of such activity, and it misleads us to obsess about ‘miracles’ as essential to the meaning of Jesus.”[1]

We can, though – and maybe we even should – obsess about the words.

Take, for example, the words the women heard at the mouth of the tomb:

He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

Remember, this is Mark’s gospel. It begins almost as abruptly as it ends. There’s no birth narrative in Mark. We find, instead, the proclamation of John the Baptist, and then, in the 9^th verse of the opening chapter, the simple declaration: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee …”

At the tomb, the followers of Jesus are instructed to go back to the beginning, back to Galilee. In other words, back into the world, for whatever the resurrection experience is going to mean, its meaning will be written through the lives of the disciples.

That is to say, for us, followers of Jesus in the 21^st century, the meaning of the resurrection will be determined by the manner of life we live in response to it. Our lives will be our testimony to the reality of resurrection, the reality of rising up in the face of even death itself.

For what is ultimately revealed in the story of Easter is the love of God, which stands triumphantly over everything that stands against love. As Maya Angelou wrote, “love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

I would add to her litany that love finds new life even where hope itself seemed to have died on a cross.

So fear not. Don’t be afraid. Go forth and be just like the women at the tomb. Yes, Mark’s story ends with their fear and silence. But we know that was not the end of their story. If it were, after all, there would be no gospel – no good news. It’s not news if never gets spoken.

They found their voices, and their love of Jesus – and Jesus’ love for them – both of those combine to give voice in the world to the love of God. Their lives stood as their testimony to the continued reality of the risen Christ inspiring them, filling them with the Holy Spirit, such that all those around them said of them, simply, “see how they love one another.”

They were terrified into silence, until they remembered the one who said so often, “be not afraid.” Then they found their voices.

Because they did, we can sing, with the apostle Paul, the great proclamation of our faith. In the book of Romans, Paul spends a great many pages trying to explain the meaning of the resurrection, but it is as if he finally gives up expository writing and turns to poetry, concluding with what I take as the ultimate meaning of Easter and the words I stand on when the ground shifts under my feet:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed. Amen.

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[1] James Carroll, Christ Actually (New York: Viking, 2014) 132.