Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Passion of the Christ

Easter Sunday, 2016
Isaiah 65:17-25
The first five Easters of my life as a minister of word and sacrament I served as an associate pastor in congregations of more than 500 members. Like most women and men serving in such roles, I longed to preach the high holy day sermons – Easter, Christmas Eve – the feast days that form the foundation of the story around which we center the church.
Now, however, like most women and men who have preached the story each year for a decade or more, I find myself wondering what else can I possibly say that hasn’t been said, oh, about 2,000 times before.
In that state, I’ll confess, I entered Holy Week feeling considerably less than passionate about the whole thing.
In a post written about a year before his death, entitled “Easter Again,” the late theologian Marcus Borg reflected this challenge. He said,
“I sympathize with clergy who preach about Easter to the same congregation for several years. Of course, you say what you think is most important the first time.
So what do you say the second time and the third time and more?”[1]
That got me to wondering what I thought was most important way back when I first preached an Easter sermon. What was I so passionate about that I saved it up for that first Easter Sunday here? I certainly don’t remember, and I would be shocked if anyone who was here in April of 2004 remembers what I thought was so important on that Easter Sunday.
Anybody remember? Anybody? Bueller?
I didn’t think so. On this 13th Easter Sunday I’ve been privileged to preach here, the fact that no one recalls what I was passionate about in 2004 strikes me as perfectly, wonderfully appropriate.
What matters on Easter is not what I am passionate about, nor what you are passionate about. What matters on Easter is what Jesus was passionate about. Because what Jesus was passionate about is what God was and is and ever will be passionate about: life – in all of its power and possibility, all of its daring and diversity, all of its longing and its love.
Jesus was passionate about life, and about ensuring that all of God’s children, sprung from the tree of life, might find a place at the table of grace.
It is, thus, beyond ironic, that the symbol of the movement that grew out of Jesus’ life should be a reminder of state-sanctioned death. It’s important to remember that, and thus to remember the passion of the Christ – that is to say, his suffering and his death. We do not lift high the cross to celebrate or sanction suffering. We lift high the cross to proclaim that the power of God is precisely the power of life in the face of suffering and of death.
Easter is God’s great “yes,” in the face of the powers and principalities that would have us believe all of the world’s loud “nos.”
“No,” terrorists and fundamentalists tell us, “It is not possible to have peace.”
“No,” those who believe that power flows from weapons tell us, “It is not possible to live without militarized borders and wars without end.”
”No,” bigots and reactionaries tell us, “It is not possible to have just and diverse communities.”
“No,” those who profit from a fundamentally unfair global economy tell us, “It is not possible to have economic justice.”
“No,” white privilege tells us, “It is not possible to proclaim that Black Lives Matter, and it is all the more impossible do something to transform the systems that reinforce that tragic truth that, for far too long, they simply haven’t.”
“No,” the talking heads tell us, “It is not possible to have women in positions of power and authority and to judge them on what they accomplish there, instead of on whether or not they smile enough to please the men.”
“No,” the governor of North Carolina tells us, “It is not possible even to figure out restrooms such that transgender sisters and brother can pee in peace.”
I bet that if I’d uttered that phrase on that first Easter Sunday here some of you would still remember it!
What I hope we remember, though, is that this “yes” vs. “no” is not an opposition of us vs. them. It’s an opposition, instead, of us vs. God. You see, some of these voices of negation belong to each of us; all of them belong to some of us. After all, affluence, appearance, power and profit – these are the idols we worship.
Nevertheless, all of these things that the world teaches us are impossible – that we teach ourselves are impossible – are precisely the things about which Jesus was passionate: peace, love, justice.
One might cite Elvis here, and ask, “what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding.” Costello has always been my personal favorite Elvis.  
For the higher churchers among us, we could cite Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. The Rev. Curry, in his Easter address, noted that much of the time we look at the passions of Jesus and conclude that they amount to “a great hope, a wonderful ideal, but not realistic in a world like this. Maybe,” he went on, “parts of us … wonder, maybe the strong do survive, maybe might does make right, maybe you better look out for number one. [… But] how’s that workin’ out for the world? The truth is, the way the world very often operates is not working out. It’s not sustainable. It’s not the way to life.”[2]
The way to life. The way to life is what the Easter story is ultimately all about. The way to life, as Jesus’ life demonstrated, is not a way of denial and avoidance of the broken places of the world, but, rather, a way of engaging that which is broken and transforming it, a way of finding new life out of the dust of that which has been destroyed, a way of getting to “yes” when all around us – and even, sometimes, within us – the world shouts “no!”
From beginning to end, Jesus’ life was about taking the world’s expectations, and turning them upside down; of hearing “no,” but speaking an insistent, challenging, loving “yes!”
In his first public sermon, according to Luke’s gospel, Jesus took down the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read, “the spirit of the Lord is upon me, for God has ordained me to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, restored sight to the blind, and the year of jubilee to those who live in debt.” God has called me, in other words, to speak “life” where the world says “death.”
Isaiah concluded his prophetic writing with a clear vision that informed and motivated Jesus from start to finish:
“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating. … Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox …! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”
This is the passion of the Christ. May it be our passion as well. On Easter, and on every other day until all have life, and have it abundantly.
Christ is risen! Let us rise up as well! Amen.






posted by David Ensign at 6:59 AM

A Movement of Thieves and Beggars

Luke 19:28-40
March 20, 2016. Palm Sunday
You realize, of course, that Holy Week begins with horse thieves? It’s pretty much the first liturgical act of the entire drama. “Go into the village ahead of us, and you’ll find a colt. Take it.”
Not, “go and ask the horse’s owner if we can borrow it for a bit”; not, “go the Joshua’s Rent-a-Colt and pick one up”; not “see if we can use the rabbi’s mule.” Just find a colt, take it, and if anybody asks, tell ‘em the master needs it.
The amazing thing is, it works. Someone – as it happens, the owner of the horse – does stop them.
“Hey! What are you doing with my horse?”
“The master needs it.”
“Sure, no problem. Tell him I said, ‘hey.’”
So, I suppose, technically the story begins with horse borrowing … with every intention of returning. Though, it must be said, the story omits that detail.
Still, this is not the way a traditional leader organizes a movement, nor is it the way that a legitimate leader administers an organization.
There’s a great deal of improvisation going on here. It’s not so much that Jesus is making this up as he goes along, although there’s certainly some of that. After all, nobody has done this whole messiah thing before so there’s not exactly a script to follow.
Improvisation, of course, is more than just “making stuff up.” Improvisation begins where one is, working with what one has been given, and moving always toward opening up new possibilities.
Jesus is in Jerusalem, in the seat of power – both secular and religious – at a moment fraught with uncertainty as an oppressed people yearn for liberation, for jubilee, for justice. While religious leaders seek to maintain an uneasy status quo that is, at least, more peaceful than all-out war, the secular leaders seek to maintain a repressive order that is profitable to Rome.
Jesus steps into this moment aiming to open up new possibilities of a better future. He works with what he has been given – a people, their stories, and their traditions.
The parade into Jerusalem, for example, is this marvelous piece of street theater with none-too-subtle implications for the powers that be. It works because it takes a familiar tradition – the triumphal entry into the city along the route used by military and political leaders – and turns it on its head: a colt, instead of a war horse; a rag-tag group of women and children and the poor leading the way where one would expect Roman legionnaires; Jesus, a humble outsider riding in the place where you would expect to see the governor or, perhaps, even the emperor.  
I always scoff at folks who say they want their church to remain out of politics, and I scoff, first and foremost, because of the gospel of St. Luke. Luke gives us many of the most beloved stories of Jesus, beginning with the birth narrative, and, from the very beginning – “in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus …” – from the very beginning of the story Luke pays great and pointed attention to the political context of Jesus’ life.
In other words, there is something that we can accurately call “a politics of Jesus.”
But, as this parade into the seat of power subtly suggests, this is not politics as usual, and this is not your grandmother’s movement – unless, maybe your grandmother was Mother Jones or maybe Dorothy Day. Mother Jones, who said, “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” Dorothy Day who said, “don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Those two women come far closer to Jesus’ way of engaging the powers that be than do most folks who pass themselves off as political leaders these days.
It’s easy to see why leaders these days don’t want to follow the way of Jesus. Look at the story this morning. As we’ve seen, it starts with thieves or, at best, with beggars. Jesus’ followers in Luke are not well-scrubbed and carefully vetted middle class suburbanites with made-for-TV lives.
Recall how the story begins: with a birth announcement delivered to shepherds – folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. When Jesus grows up – in a backwater town distant from the cultural centers of the day, flyover country, if you will – and begins his movement, he seeks out fishermen, who have going for them only that they aren’t shepherds.
You want to go lower on the power chart in 1st-century Palestine than shepherds and fishermen? Well, the only way to go lower would be to seek out and include women in your inner circle. Mary, Martha, Lydia. Check.
So you have a movement, if not literally of thieves and beggars, then, at best of the marginally employed and of women. Oh, and don’t forget the tax collectors.
So, what happens? Well, let’s look again at this parade into Jerusalem.
The people – “multitudes,” Luke tells us – come to town making an unholy racket, praising God loudly, and crying out, “blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
My running friend and colleague, MaryAnn McKibben Dana, writing this month in Christian Century, notes “Jesus doesn’t lead the throng into Jerusalem, riding out front with everyone trailing behind him. […] But here, as his ministry approaches its culmination, it’s the disciples and the crowd who are out ahead, and he’s the one following. The Pharisees see it, too; for months they’ve been tut-tutting Jesus – what he does, how he does it, when he does, and with whom. Now it’s the crowd they want to stop at all costs.”[1]
Why? Why do the religious authorities want to stop a crowd that is praising God? Why are the civil authorities afraid?
I think the key lies in the crowd – in their identities. These people are not powerful, they are not privileged, they are the furthest thing from insiders. They are not inside-the-Beltway. The powerful would probably like to dismiss them as thieves and beggars, or, at best, the powerful might choose to provide some basic level of sustenance to them, enough to keep them quiet and out of the way where they pose no threat to the privilege enjoyed by those in positions of power.
To raise too many questions, especially in a rowdy and public manner, threatens the status quo. Those in power will happily brand those who question that power. “Tell those thieves and beggars to shut up!”
If dismissing the crowd doesn’t work, they’ll turn on the leaders. As Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara famously observed, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
That is why the Pharisees tell Jesus to keep it down. “Tell your people to be quiet!”
But Jesus understands, as Dr. King so often observed, “that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” There is something in creation itself that cries out for justice. The rocks themselves will start to shout.
It is all well and good that we should begin worship this morning taking up a collection of coats. It would be gospel to end worship questioning the economic and political systems and structures that leave so many people out in the cold. Palm Sunday is about more than a festive parade.
As MaryAnn put it, “Here are two disciples, sent into a town where they aren’t known, hoping they don’t get tarred as donkey thieves. Here are crowds, making themselves vulnerable, out ahead of Jesus where there’s nowhere to hide. Here is loud boisterous testimony of God’s deeds of power, so powerful that it makes the Pharisees desperate to silence it.”[2]
Palm Sunday is about more than a festive parade. It is about the long march toward the beloved community – that place where all God’s children are welcome, where we all hear the voices of those long silenced, where we know one another not in terms of power or wealth or status, but in terms of our common, shared, and equal status as beloved. Let us walk on, with shouts of praise, “hosanna,” in the highest! Blessed is the one who comes this way, and keeps on walking the path, in the name of the Lord. Amen.







[1] MaryAnn McKibben Dana, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” in Christian Century, March 2, 2016.
[2] Ibid.

posted by David Ensign at 6:58 AM

Sunday, March 06, 2016

This Ministry for this Moment

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15, selected verses
March 6, 2016
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a presidential election campaign going on these days. I haven’t made much, if any, mention of that. It’s not because I don’t care about it, but we have chosen this Lenten season to focus on joy.
Seriously, I’m having a hard time recalling any political season that has been more generally soul-sucking and joyless than this one.
It’s also scary. All of the great fault lines that run beneath American public life are being exposed, and many of the deepest ones have been given sharp and dangerous shakes. I’ve had a couple of conversations with colleagues recently that circled around the question of how one decides when a particular political campaign reaches “status confessionis” – or “confessional status.” In other words – less Latin words – when must the church, if it is to remain true to its confession as the church of Jesus Christ, speak a guiding and, necessarily partisan word to the body politic, or, to put it in still other words, when does silence betray the church’s confession?
That’s essentially the question that Martin Luther King posed in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail in 1963 when he wrote:
… the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I am meeting young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.[1]
“When does the church cease to be the church?” King asked. When it fails to recognize that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and, then, when recognition dawns, it still fails to act.
The church betrays its confession and ceases to be the church when, in the interest of an orderly status quo, it fails to stand in active solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the victims of what is always already an unjust status quo.
Now, if you are expecting that my next move will be to endorse one candidate or to condemn another one, I hope you’re not disappointed when I say I don’t think we’re at that point. Yet.
That is to say, with respect to the current political moment, I do not think we are quite at a status confessionis. People of good faith, people who are trying to follow the way of Jesus in the world, can cast their votes for the whole range of candidates, without the specific endorsement or condemnation of the church or her ordained leadership. The confession of the church does not depend upon the partisan politics of this moment, though that may change in the days just ahead.
Nevertheless, we do have a particular calling for such a time as this. We have a ministry for this moment when the politics of our nation are profoundly broken. We have a ministry for this moment when a conservative evangelic author writes that the “leading Republican candidate to be the next leader of the free world would not pass my decency interview.”[2]
We have a ministry for this moment when a prominent progressive church leader, writing about that same candidate, says, “I grew up assuming that Republicans and Democrats, like my parents, were partners in managing the nation, that Congress was the place where ideology evolved into governance, and that the whole deal depended on civility, respect, and compromise. I am astonished at what has happened in 2016.”[3]
We have a ministry for this moment when a widely respected nonpartisan researcher for the Pew Research Center can warn, “The political partisanship now evident in the United States is not politics as usual. It is something different. And we should all be watching it very closely.”[4]
The Apostle Paul named the ministry for this moment quite clearly almost 2,000 years ago in his letter to the disputatious church at Corinth, telling that divided people that God “has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to God’s self, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ.”
We have been given the ministry of reconciliation. Is that not precisely what the present moment demands?
The gospel text this morning includes three “lost-and-found” parables. The set-up is this:
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 
The outsiders and the marginalized – the tax collectors and the sinners – are drawing near to Jesus. Why? Surely they must hear in his teaching some good news for their lives. Surely they must hear an invitation: you who have been consigned to the margins will be welcome to the table.
The powerful insiders object: “this fellow welcomes sinners and he even eats with them. Yuck!”
In response, Jesus tells these stories about a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep alone in the wilderness to seek out the lost one, a woman who loses one coin and spends an entire day scouring the house until she finds it, a father who kills the fatted calf to celebrate the return of his wasteful, wayward, lost son even as his other, faithful son watches resentfully.
These are parables of extravagant grace, and they work best when we recognize what has been lost. What has been lost? Well, in a word, us.
We are the lost ones, or, perhaps more specifically, something crucial to our common humanity has been lost.
During Lent this year we have focused on deep and authentic joy because deep and authentic joy is crucial to living life abundantly, to living faithfully, to living fully and richly into the kindom of God, to following Jesus in the world.
Deep joy, moreover, rests on two other attributes sadly lacking in so much of contemporary culture, politics, and, in truth, our lives in general: hope and sincerity.
We have turned hope into a punch line. The hip among us have embraced a stylish, detached, ironic cynicism. The less hip go for a more straightforward, mean-spirited version of the same thing: two sides of a lost coin.
If you offer sincere hope you are likely to be derided as naïve or worse. If you suggest that strength lies in community and harmony you will be called weak. If you have the unmitigated gall to suggest that true power comes from love it won’t be long before somebody mocks you for inviting people to share a “kumbaya moment.”
We all know – because, after all, inside the Beltway we’re all quite capable of being hip, detached, and ironic – we all know what kumbaya moments are, and we know to avoid them, or, at the very least, to avoid singing along when one happens, and, for sure, we’re too hip to, you know, actually sing Kumbaya itself, even though it is, for the record, in the hymnal -- #472.
Hey, I get that. I had my fill of that song around campfires as a kid, and I’ve avoided it most of my adult life.
But a couple of years ago – the summer of 2014, to be precise – I heard a story that gave the song new life for me, and that, more importantly, pushed me to think, anew, on what is lost in our joyless rush to cynicism.
The summer of 2014 was the 50th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer, the voter registration drive led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other Civil Rights groups in the summer of 1964. Thousands of college students from across the United States signed up to work to register black voters in Mississippi, where, under Jim Crow laws, fewer than one in ten eligible blacks were registered.
Before deploying to Mississippi, the students attended one-week training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, on the campus of what is now Miami University. Before the end of the first session word came that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, young Civil Rights workers in the Freedom Summer project, had disappeared in rural Mississippi. It would be months before their bodies were found, buried in an earthen damn outside Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The leaders in Ohio gathered the student volunteers, shared the news of their colleagues’ disappearance, and invited the students to spend the next hour in thought and prayer as they discerned a way forward. When they reconvened, the leaders told them that they were free to go home if they liked. They said, “no one will feel you are any less if you choose to leave now.”
One of the students said, before we make any final decisions, let’s sing. They joined hands and sang, “we want freedom, Lord, come by here; we want justice, Lord, come by here; churches are burning, Lord, come by here; kumbaya Lord, kumbaya.” The next day, every one of those students went to Mississippi.
That’s a kumbaya moment. That is what real hope looks like. That is what sincere conviction and faith in this country and her promises looks like. That is what deep and abiding joy feels like. That is what ministry for this moment sounds like. That is what we have lost.
A church true to its confession seeks after what has been lost.
It’s not about an old song that can surely be cloying. It’s about an ancient spirit that is anything but. It is an ancient spirit of boundless love that drives a politics of welcome, of justice, and, yes, of joy. May it be so, before it is too late. Amen.




[1] Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 300.
[2] https://maxlucado.com/decency-for-president/
[3] https://jmbpastor.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/building-walls-instead-of-bridges/
[4] http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/15/is-america-dangerously-divided/

posted by David Ensign at 10:24 AM