Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Alpha & Omega

John 13:31-31; Acts 11:1-10; Revelation 21:1-6
April 24, 2016
When I was in junior high school, so far back that they still called it junior high school, I was in a production of the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Last week, for no particular reason, one of the well-known lyrics from that play was running through my mind, “What’s the matter with kids these days? Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids these days?”
Yes, kids, be like your parents were – perfect in every way. That is, I suppose, the common instruction from every generation of parents to each succeeding generation of kids. The good old days were better, our movies were better, our music was better, and we were pretty much perfect.
Can I get an “amen” … from anyone under 30?
“Can I get an ‘amen’” is, of course, a trope of the African-American church tradition. Another, similar, phrase from that tradition – “can I get a witness” – is the title of Brian Blount’s commentary on the book of Revelation. Blount’s subtitle: Reading Revelation Through African American Culture.
Blount is president of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, and from that post he has offered a prophet’s perspective on preparing leaders for the church of Jesus Christ. His work on apocalyptic literature stresses, in his words, “how God’s end-time revelation has meaning for our present-time living.”[1]
I don’t preach often from the book of Revelation because, frankly, it just takes too long to set it up. It’s a part of scripture that I’ve always felt was better for a classroom conversation than as text for preaching, so I’m stepping into it this morning with more than a little trepidation, but I’m stepping into it because I believe there is still a word for the church in this strange apocalyptic text. Perhaps the easiest interpretation is simply to say Revelation has a lot to say about what’s the matter with kids these days – so long as we understand that, in terms of a 2,000 year-old text we are all kids.
We would do well, when we turn to Revelation, to listen for a word of instruction from a perspective different from our own. Not only is the text 2,000 years old, but, more to the point it was written way back then as an attack on Rome, on the Empire, and, in particular, on the emperor. Thus it’s difficult to hear a word from God in this text when we listen from Washington, DC. We are the empire now.
Blount quotes South African anti-apartheid leader and Reformed Church pastor Allan Boesak, who, in his own commentary on Revelation, wrote, “People who do not know what oppression and suffering [are] react strangely to the language of the Bible. The truth is that God is the God of the poor and the oppressed. … Because they are powerless, God will take up their cause and redeem them from oppression and violence. The oppressed do not see any dichotomy between God’s love and God’s justice.”[2]
Our fundamental call, as followers of Jesus and as those who would stand in the same line in which he stood, is to stand on the side of the vulnerable. Last week I attended a talk by Union Seminary Bible professor Rodney Sadler. Rev. Sadler is also one of the leaders of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that has seen faith leaders bring an urgent and prophetic voice to the midst of North Carolina’s wrenching political upheaval during the past several years.
Sadler opened his talk saying he wanted to speak about sodomy, and, in particular, “the sin of Sodom.” He put it that way, I’m confident, to make a room full of progressive pastors squirm.
Like the good Bible professor that he is, Rev. Sadler went on to quote scripture on scripture, that is to say, he quoted the prophet Ezekiel, who warned Jerusalem that it faced the same fate that Sodom endured way back in Genesis. Ezekiel said, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”
In other words, they did not care for the most vulnerable citizens in their midst, and God judged them for that sin. Indeed, throughout all of scripture, the most virulent condemnation is reserved always for those who do not care for the widows and orphans, the sick and the poor – that is to say, the most vulnerable ones in any society.
How we respond to the needs of the socially and economically vulnerable, how we care for them, how we show compassion to the least of these, is, in the final analysis, how we shall be known, and how we shall be judged. That is the story of all of scripture, and it is the story of Revelation. The emperor does not know this story, and he has no clue about the powerless.
These days, I fear, we who occupy the places of power and privilege in this society are coming up woefully short in grasping this story, as well. And we cannot claim ignorance as an excuse.
We know who the most vulnerable members of our society are, because they are the same ones who have always been the most vulnerable members of our society. That simple fact should raise all kinds of questions for those who want to “make America great again.”
Who are our most vulnerable sisters and brothers? Surely that list includes the poor, gay kids, gender queer kids, trans sister and brothers, women, people of color. In other words, those who have been labeled, at one time or another in American history, as other, as different, as “unclean.” All of them are victims of a patriarchal system that has been shaped by America’s original sin of white supremacy.
We stand at a critical moment in American history, and this week – like most weeks – suggests that our politics are not up to the challenge. You know we are still far from a grace-filled reckoning with that original sin when one of our two major political parties’ leading candidate for president can decry as “pure political correctness” the announcement that abolitionist and feminist Harriet Tubman will replace on the front of the $20 bill the visage of Andrew Jackson, slaveholder and author of more than his fair share of the genocide of Native Americans.
Now there are plenty of good and legitimate reasons for criticizing all of the current presidential candidates, but they are also reflections of a far deeper crisis than would be the election of any one of them. Thus the Trump candidacy on the Right and the Sanders candidacy on the Left are products of a deep rift running through the middle of the country.
In the same way, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, each, in its own way, reflects concern with and offers criticism of contemporary American political, social, and economic institutions that have failed far too many of us.
Of the contemporary movements, Black Lives Matters speaks most honestly to me precisely because it rejects any romantic notion of an imagined past when America was great.
As Brian Bantum, who teaches theology at Seattle Pacific University, wrote recently in Christian Century:
“As I read and listen to BLM activists, I hear a more profound demand – the assertion of their full and unequivocal humanity. It is not a call to be more deeply embedded in or participants with the American economic or political system. It is a call for economic and political systems that will honor their inherent humanity.”[3]
The church is another system called to change in the present moment. Writing in the same issue, Brittney Cooper, who teaches at Rutgers, notes,
“Meanwhile, the movement has issued a clarion call to the church […] to affirm a theology of resistance rather than a theology of respectability. This movement demands reckoning with who Jesus is. Is Jesus only a savior come to deliver us from punishment for personal sin? Or is Jesus a savior who joins with us in the work to end racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia?”[4]
Who is Jesus? He is the great physician, the one who offers healing. We need some healing these days. In his most recent book, America’s Original Sin, Sojourners’ editor Jim Wallis returns to the issue that drove him from his conservative evangelical roots almost a half century ago: racism and white supremacy.
White supremacy is often looked at as a problem primarily for black folks, because they have been, obviously and historically, the people most victimized by its effects. But white supremacy is not a problem of black folks, it is a sickness of white folks, and one that infects all of us white folk. Until we recognized it as such, I am afraid, we will continue to pass it along. Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t even know that we carry it.
I was reminded of this last Thursday, when my Facebook timeline blew up with memories of Prince. A 30-something friend posted a comment that underscored this poignantly for me. He wrote:
This time five years ago, I was preparing the dance mix for our wedding. On a whim, I decided to download a best-of album for Prince. I wasn't really familiar with his work. But each track blew me away. And then I realized something:
Growing up, I looked up to [David] Bowie for his weird, artistic, non-conformist, androgynous, sexy bad-ass self. Bowie was a hero to me.
But for all the reasons I loved Bowie, I had resented Prince. He was always sort of a joke to me. The weird costumes. Going by a symbol. His...blackness.
This is what the insidious logic of white supremacy does. It creates double standards and then justifies them by saying they are preferences. White privilege means that your preferences are "objective" and "logical" and not at all based on race.
There is no reason to love Bowie and resent Prince, unless you remain ignorant of the racist messages handed down since birth. For nearly 30 years of my life, I did not think I liked Prince. In reality, I would have loved him if I had given myself the chance. The past five years has been a time where I have been listening to as much Prince [as possible], appreciating his many personas in the public, and wishing I had not wasted so much time. And now that he is gone, I am even more upset that White Supremacy had not allowed me to love him.
Who is Jesus? The one who heals, from the beginning to the end.
Who is Jesus? “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” Revelation answers. When the Son of Man is glorified, in the words of John’s gospel, we will be known for how we have loved one another, every other, and, in particular, those who are and have been oppressed, marginalized, the socially and economically vulnerable, those that ideologies of race, gender, sex, economy, would teach us to hate.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” is not a campaign slogan, and this election will not “make America great again” no matter who wins. For, you see, we never were that great to begin with – at least not if by great you mean somehow fundamentally different from any other collection of human beings, somehow exceptional with respect to our own human nature.
Leaders who try to sell you on this idea of fundamental difference and a need to return to some imagined past when that equally imaginary difference made us great might as well be singing, “why can’t they be like we were – perfect in every way.”
Against that false proclamation, we proclaim a new heaven and a new earth, and we join our lives to the cause of making all things new, of co-creating with God the Beloved Community in which love and justice come together, in which freedom, love, joy, and peace become the song we sing. Amen.





[2] Allan Boesak, Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse from a South African Perspective, quoted in Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness: Reading Revelation Through African American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005) 32.
[3] Brian Bantum, “Black Lives Matter,” Christian Century, March 16, 2016, 26.
[4] Brittney Cooper, ibid. 27.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Deniers, Doubters, Betrayers

Acts 9:1-9; John 21:1-19
April 10, 2016
I love Peter. He has always been my favorite disciple: the one who never quite gets it right; the one who asks impertinent questions; the one who steps out of the boat and onto the water; and, in the end, the one who says, “damn-it, I don’t know him,” only to discover that it is not, in fact, the end.
For, in the end it will simply be alright, and, if it is not alright, then it is not yet the end. That’s what Peter must learn. It’s what Paul must learn. It’s what we must learn.
I love Peter, but, honestly, I’m probably a lot more like Paul. Paul was a pointy-headed intellectual who possessed a way with words. A Pharisee who knew the texts of his people in detail, and who upheld its law with zeal, Paul had as keen a mind as anyone of his day. He was a clear-eyed assessor of the way things are. And, before his heart could be opened to the way things could be, he needed those clear eyes to be blinded for a little while.
On the road to Damascus, his eyes were closed in order for his heart to be opened. The blinding of Paul sets the stage, ultimately, for his encounter with Peter.
I love Peter because he so richly and fully embodies the life of faith as I understand it. It’s a crazy, non-linear, tortuous path we follow, and it includes cul-de-sacs of denial, dead-ends of doubt, and off-ramps of betrayal. All of that is true.
But all of that is not all of the story, for, as our readings this morning also suggest, the way of faith includes so much more – not the least of which are the weird little rest stops along the way.
The gospel of John draws to its close by way of one such stop, on the shore of the sea of Tiberias, where, following the trauma of Holy Week, some of the disciples have begun to seek normalcy again. They began as fisherman, and they’re going back to the sea to fish again.
They don’t have much luck, and their nets are empty after a night of fishing. I am not a fisher. I have only one fish story and it’s just like what the disciples experienced: losing a good night’s sleep and catching absolutely nothing. Mine involved getting up in the pre-dawn hours to join my dad and a friend of his for fishing trip. We spent hours on a river in east Tennessee, and never even got a nibble. Any taste for fishing that I might have developed was cut short that day.
But Peter and his friends were fishers, so they no doubt appreciated the on-again, off-again nature of the enterprise. Like much of life, one never knows whether the nets will come in empty or full, but you keep casting them.
At that point in their lives, though, the disciples must have felt like their nets would never be full again. After the long, fruitless night’s work, the empty nets probably just felt like confirmation of their now empty lives.
Yet, even in that most desperate and desolate hour, grace abounds. Even when they must have felt alone and abandoned, Jesus shows up. What’s more, he feeds them. Grace abounds, even when it seems as if all has been lost.
Peter, in this moment, is confronted by grace, and it must have overwhelmed him all over again – perhaps just like his first encounter with Jesus. Put yourself in Peter’s place, if you can. He has denied Jesus three times.
This is such a crucial part of the gospel narrative that it is included almost identically in all four gospels. The early Christian community, built in significant part through Peter’s work, felt it crucially important to include his denial of the Christ in all of its foundational texts, its holy scriptures.
Why? I mean to say, that strikes me as strange. When I think of the foundational mythologies of other communities I tend to think of hero narratives. Why, in the foundation story of the early Christian communities is this story of denial and betrayal central? As usual, I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question. I am curious: what do you think?

Yes. The figures of Peter and Paul are foundational precisely because they are such very human figures. They are broken, scared, filled with doubts, weak, and foolish. Yet they are also seekers, searching for something whole beyond their own broken places. They are, in so many ways, just like the rest of us, and, like us, they stand in need of a grace that they cannot achieve on their own.
That is, after all, the human condition. From the moment of our birth, we inescapably need grace. We need the grace of our mother’s breast. We need the grace of someone to clothe us, house us, feed us, and keep us safe. We need the grace of air to breathe and water to drink. All of this is grace. All of it is gift. None of it is earned, and we cannot provide any of it for ourselves. This is the human condition into which each and every one of us is born.
We are not gods, much less God. We didn’t, in fact, build this.
We have cast our nets into the see and drawn them back empty. We face the endless sea as small and powerless. We come back to the shore tired and hungry.
And there stands Jesus, ready to feed us.
But the story doesn’t end when the bread is broken and the meal shared. (A meal, by the way, made possible when the disciples followed Jesus’ instruction to think through their problem differently, to get a new mind for a new time, to cast their nets on the other side of the boat.)
No, having been richly fed, Jesus reminds Peter what grace is for. Grace is for living through our own brokenness, and grace is for living deeply into relationship with other broken people.
Peter has denied Christ three times. What are our deepest denials? We deny our own need for grace, and, in so doing, we have no grace for others. Look around these days, and you can see that such denial runs deep.
The laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi in recent days? A fundamental denial of the grace of safety for transgender kids, first and foremost.
Peter has denied Christ three times. What are our deepest doubts at the heart of such denial? We doubt that grace is abundant. The Panama Papers story that broke last week? It seems that the very richest among us harbor such deep doubts about abundance that they will go to most any length to bind themselves tightly to their earthly treasures, meanwhile the poorest of the poor are denied essential, life-saving services because the public treasuries are drained dry by tax dodgers in pin-striped suits.   
Peter has denied Christ three times. What betrayals result from this denial? We betray ourselves because we, like Paul, are blinded to our deep and essential connections. We do not see that we are in this together, and thus we betray our relational responsibilities.
Deniers. Doubters. Betrayers. That is who we are, yet Jesus stands before us loving us still. And thus, like Peter, we are confronted once again by the simple question that Jesus poses: do you love me?
Yes, Lord, you know that we do.
Feed my lambs.
Do you love me?
Yes, Lord, you know that we love you.
Tend my sheep.
Do you love me?
You know everything. Lord, you know that we love you.
Feed my sheep.