Of Memorials and Forgetting

John 17:1-11

May 28, 2017

The reading from John this morning comes from what is known as the Priestly Prayer – the prayer that Jesus offers around the table in the upper room where he shared the Last Supper, when he knows his is about to be betrayed, when he knows what his disciples will soon know. He offers this prayer for them, for his disciples – of his time and for all time.

It’s an interesting fact of Christian life and practice that almost all followers of Jesus come to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and that almost none of us remember the words Jesus prayed at the Last Supper.

What we choose to remember says something about us; as does what we choose to forget.

Jesus prays, “protect them … that they may be as one.” Keep them together. Keep them whole, even though the world would tear them apart.

Perhaps we choose to remember, “give us this day our daily bread” because bread at least sounds easy. We know that unity, on the other hand, is difficult. It may sound as nice as bread, but we know how hard it is to achieve. We know this truth because we know ourselves.

We are fractious. We are disputatious. We are proud. And that’s the best of us … sometimes even at our best.

Unity rarely comes easily, and sometimes we humans are at our worst when we are unified. “Mob mentality” is only a well-known term because it is a well-known phenomenon, and a dangerous one. Cults are known for their unity, for “being as one,” but that’s about the only positive thing that can be said for them.

Listening to reporting on the terrorists responsible for last week’s bombing in Manchester, I was struck by the observation that young men are drawn into terror cells because they want a sense of belonging, of community, of unity. Obviously, there is a shadow side.

On the other hand, life is a long journey and, as the proverb puts it, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. Together, we can accomplish so much more than any one of us can manage alone. We can create more. We can nourish more. We can protect more.

The whole of the gospel narrative is about creating a new kind of community in the world. The richly metaphorical writing in John’s gospel is crucial on this point, especially in the Priestly Prayer. A few verses further along than this morning’s text, Jesus continues in the part of the prayer that I call the “goo goo g’joob” section (you know: “I am the egg man; they are the egg men; I am the walrus” … anyway):

20 ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, ²¹that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 

The community that Christ founds – the church – will be marked by this spiritual unity, this unity of spirit. Just as Jesus is one with the Divine, so shall we be one with him. If, as the apostle Paul put it, the church is the body of Christ in the world, then the only way that followers of Jesus can have “a personal relationship” with Jesus is through the church. The only way to “know Jesus” in the world is by knowing the community gathered in his name as it tries to follow his way in the world.

The whole thing gets tricky as we try to follow that way. Jesus prays for protection for his followers because they remain “in the world.” He understands that the world will no more welcome those who try to live as he lived than it welcomed him.

He understands the opposition that has arisen against him, and he knows the only options left to him that night are to run away or confront an overwhelming power that seeks to crush him. He knows that his followers will soon know this, as well.

Jesus prays, “Now they know … protect them.” Now they know the truth, and, while the truth will set them free, the promise of liberation in this world is always fraught.

This prayer is about living liberating community in a world where freedom is a dangerous thing and authentic community a rare one.

The whole long struggle over how to remember the American Civil War testifies to that danger, and underscores, as well, the timely importance of what we remember and what we choose to forget. In the remarkable speech given when monuments to leaders of “the Lost Cause” were removed from their pedestals in New Orleans, that city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, asked,

“why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.”

Those markers were removed in New Orleans because the city recognized, at long last, that what we choose to remember about the past shapes how we act in the present and informs how we create the future.

The weekend of Memorial Day seems like a good time to acknowledge that truth. There are memories that we hold onto that hold onto us. There are pasts we cannot get past until we put them in their proper place.

Individually, every one who grows into adulthood recognizes this truth, and the entire profession of psychological counseling rests on it. But we are not in group therapy today; we are the church of Jesus Christ gathered in worship. Thus, for the moment, I am less interested in personal stories than I am in community histories.

And I am wondering, what stories of the past do we need to reconsider? What monuments do we need to remove? What forgotten stories do we need to memorialize properly?

I’m thinking about this on several levels. We’ve been talking this year about the Reformation, and as we think about reforming the church again and anew, what monuments do we need to remove? What forgotten stories do we need to resurrect?

How about on the broader community level here in Arlington and the metro area?

What about at the state and the national level?

*****

Let us pray: God of our time and of all time, teach us how to use well the time we have been given. Give us the wisdom to honor the stories of our forebears and to learn well from them, and open our hearts to your spirit calling us to create the future you imagine. Guard and protect us as we walk you way in your world, and, as together, we try to build the Beloved Community. Amen.

John 17:1-11

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

”I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.

And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

Free to Be ... What?

1 Peter 2:2-10; Micah 6:8; texts from John on truth

May 14, 2017

It’s Mothers Day, so a happy day to every child born of a woman. Mothers Day can be a mixed bag, for sure. Some of us have or had rich, joyous, loving relationships with our mothers; others of us have or had challenging or even painful, hurtful relationships. Some women love being mothers; others find it challenging in ways to bring more grief than joy. Many choose never to become mothers, and yet others wish desperately that they could be but circumstances prevent it. So, yeah, Mothers Day can be a mixed bag.

At its best, that first relationship is a treasured one remembered with deep love that provides a foundation for life. At its worst, that first relationship is a primal example of a past from which we need liberation. Heck, did you see the article in the Post last week about George Washington’s relationship with his mother? The Father of Our Country had some issues with his mother.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of pasts we need to let go of.

I found myself engaged briefly in a couple of social media threads last week that got me thinking about our complicated relationships to the past. One thread began with a friend’s post encouraging people to send letters to Speaker Ryan’s home voicing opinions on the health care bill – remember the simpler times when that was in the news … a week ago?

In any case, someone was moved to post this comment: “Right now we need to pray for our nation.” Sadly, I tend to roll my eyes when a comment begins that way. This one went on to say, “When men can go in women’s restrooms […] in the name of born the wrong gender we have a huge problem. Pretty sure you can look at your self in the mirror and figure out if you were born a man or a woman.”

Having just preached a sermon quoting the line in A Brief Statement of Faith about hearing the voices of peoples long silenced, I felt compelled to offer a different perspective, so I wrote:

Do you actually know any transgender persons? Have you ever sat down with someone who is transgender and listened to their story? Have you ever spoken with someone who was born intersex? The world is not black and white, and gender is not a simple binary.

As you might expect on social media the conversation didn’t go far, but it left me wondering just what the other person was afraid of and why. What had happened in his life that left him with such a constricted lens for seeing the world? From what did he need to be free? What scars did he bear from what ancient wounds?

Social media is the last place in the world one should look for social change or even the slightest change in the mind of any individual, and when I engage threads it is usually for the sake of clarifying my own thought. We may be free to express ourselves, but our expressions seldom lead to liberation. Even as I express myself, I am constantly reminded that most of need to be freed from some parts of own past and the stories we tell ourselves about what really happened.

So I wondered about the person seeking prayers for the nation: what god does he think we need to pray to, and what texts taught him about that god?

Those questions popped up again for me yesterday morning when I got a FB message saying: “So, send me some prayers. I’m giving dad his first progressive Christian book to read this weekend.”

The dad in question is a high school buddy of mine. I connected with the young man via FB a few years ago when he was struggling to come to grips with the United Methodist church’s treatment of gay seminarians such as himself. I saw something in an exchange with his dad at the time and chimed in with some progressive pastoral support that apparently meant a good deal to both father and son.

In offering a supportive word to a friend’s young-adult son, I suppose I was also trying to say, “the love of the gospel is more important than any other word; and if other readings of the text have oppressed you then those readings are not the truth and you should be liberated from them.”

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers, “if you follow my way in the world you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

At a moment in our country when so many misconstrue religious liberty for the freedom to discriminate, it’s important that we understand what freedom is for. At a moment in our country’s history when truth, itself, is under assault, and when our nation’s leaders regularly and obviously lie to us, it is important that we understand what truth is, as well, for we long for the liberation that comes when we know the truth.

Our particular moment feels more fraught than many, to be sure. I am not downplaying the seriousness of the current leadership crisis in America by noting that, in many ways, this is nothing new under the sun.

Every season of momentous change is marked by questions of truth and liberation. Jesus clearly understood this, and so did Herod. “What is truth?” is not only a lofty and abstract philosophical question, it is also an everyday existential one, as well.

Truth was at stake in the Reformation, when early democratic impulses led Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers to question the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on “truth.” The translation of scripture from the Latin insisted upon by the church to the common idiom of the people rested on a core conviction held by the Reformers that the people could be trusted to discern the truth.

Similarly, it’s no accident that when the Founders of the American experiment in self-government articulated their impulse for independence they did so by declaring certain truths to be self-evident. Those truths, they insisted, shall set us free.

Of course, whenever “truth” is given voice there’s a better than even-money chance that the “truth” spoken will be shaded in the direction of the speaker. In other words, if you have the power to articulate “truth” for the public, odds are you will articulate only that part of the truth that maintains your own privilege to speak it.

That’s why the Elizabeth Schuyler character in the musical Hamilton sings, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal … and when I meet Thomas Jefferson I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel.”

The first Christians, the Reformers, the Founding Fathers and Mothers were all trying to throw off the shackles of an oppressive past while articulating a renewed understanding of the truth. Being human, though, they were – just as we are – prisoners of our own time and circumstance.

So, what oppressive past do we need to cast off? What in your own history do you need to let go of? What does the church need to be freed from? What in the broader social, economic, and political life of the commonweal do we need to be liberated from?

Those are starting places, and questions for renewal and reformation. But if you don’t have some sense of where you want to wind up, any road will get you there. So, what is liberation for? Is it liberty for the sake of libertines? No rules? No broader purpose?

That way is always a theoretical option, but it is never the way of Jesus. In other words, when Jesus said, “if you follow my way you will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” he was pointing toward a way of living that is liberating.

Moreover, when he later insists “I am the way and the truth and the life,” he both underscores and gives contour to the way toward which he points, from which he beckons. His very life, into which he invites his followers, is the way into liberating truth.

It’s not a way marked by signposts of particular belief systems. The gate to the way is not some creedal or confessional statement. When Jesus speaks of this way in John it sounds like this: “they will know you are my followers by the way you love one another.”

Freedom is a beautiful idea. Freedom is coming. Freedom is coming. Freedom is coming, oh yes, I know. But freedom for what?

Earlier in worship we sang the best answer I know: “to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”

Personally speaking, I learned that lesson first and best from my mother. So that’s not a past from which I need particular liberation. There are, of course, other demons and fears and scars from which I need liberation in order to live more fully into the freedom that Micah articulated and into which Jesus invites.

I’m living into that step by step. Letting go of what needs to be let go of, and holding on to that which liberates. I hope you are, too.

More than that, I hope the we, as a people of hope, are always a place of liberation for one another, that, together, we are known by how we bind together love and justice. For that is what true religious liberty is all about. That is what we are freed for. Amen.

Incarnate Now

Luke 24:13-49

April 30, 2017

Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

Their eyes were kept from recognizing him. We read this richly symbolic story with the sly superiority of the knowing. How could these followers of Jesus not even recognize him when he’s walking right alongside them? How quickly they forget. But we, through the omniscience of the narrator, know what these characters do not – and we feel smug about it, too.

Hah! I’d know Jesus anywhere! No way I’d fall for the old hidden-Jesus trick! Not if we’re walking together talking about important stuff!

And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

Seriously! This guy hasn’t heard the latest news. He’s so out of it, he must be a loser. He’s certainly not an insider. He doesn’t even know about the things that just happened here over the weekend! He can’t be important. He’s got nothing to say that’s worth listening to.

But then, these two forlorn travellers do something completely unexpected.

Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.”

Did you catch that? These two men cite the testimony of women. Now, to be sure, they testify that the men went to the tomb after the women – perhaps to mansplain to the women about how tombs and stones work – but they did not see Jesus. Nevertheless, Cleopas and his friend cite the testimony of the women that the tomb was empty and that they had seen a vision of angels who said that Jesus was alive.

Then these two men do something else unexpected. They listen to this stranger who doesn’t even know the latest news:

Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. 

Walking along the road to Emmaus this stranger, this nobody, gives them a Bible study beyond what they’d expect from the most learned rabbi.

A friend of mine who serves a congregation in the projects in Chattanooga noted the other day that he would much rather listen to elderly African-American women from the projects talk about politics than to white, male Sanders supporters. Stereotypes of “Bernie bros” aside, what I hear in the comment is a preference for listening to the voices of the marginalized over the voices of the privileged.

I suspect my friend’s preference arises out of years of serving marginalized communities, but it also comes straight out of our Book of Confessions. Our Brief Statement of Faith includes this conviction:

In a broken and fearful world the Spirit gives us courage to pray without ceasing, to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior, to unmask idolatries in Church and culture, to hear the voices of peoples long silenced, and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.

“To hear the voices of peoples long silenced.” To hear such voices requires the willingness to follow the example of the disciples on the road to Emmaus: they listened to someone they did not know. They listened to someone who did not come to them with degrees and lofty titles. They listen to a fellow traveler along the road, a person with no visible signs of privilege.

Re-reading the Brief Statement of Faith last week I was struck, in the section I just read, by the faith claim upon which the section rests. We say, in this confession, that we trust in the Spirit, and, specifically, we trust that the Spirit of the living God will give us courage to hear the voices of peoples long silenced.

It takes no courage to listen to the talking heads of TV networks, or to the pundits of the opinion pages, or to elected public officials. Now, I’ll grant you, that it takes a strong stomach to listen to some of them these days, but that is not the same thing as courage.

Likewise, it takes little courage to listen to scholars or experts or corporate leaders, and it surely takes no courage to listen to me or other church leaders.

At least, that is, if we stick to the dictionary definition of courage as the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.” I just don’t think it takes a lot of that to show up at church on Sunday mornings most weeks!

But, in our Brief Statement of Faith, we confess that it takes courage to listen to people who do not usually get listened to. Why? Why do we feel the need to pray for the courage to hear voices long silenced?

It does not, it seems to me, take heroism or bravery to listen and to hear. On the other hand, as Brene Brown reminds, “Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.’ … Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as ‘ordinary courage.’”[1]

The road to Emmaus is a path toward ordinary courage. When we follow that path we never know whom we’ll meet along the way.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

How many of you have seen the ad that Heineken beer recently put out? It’s being touted in some corners as the “antidote” to the mess that Pepsi and Kendall Jenner put out earlier this year. Pepsi had a privileged white woman bringing peace, love, and understanding to social strife with a nice cold can of soda.

Heineken, on the other hand, constructed a social-science experiment that brought together pairs of individuals who clearly did not see the world through the same lenses: a trans woman and a man who said “that’s not right: you’re a man, be a man or you’re a female, be a female”; a white man who said, “feminism today is man-hating,” and a woman of color who said, “I would describe myself as a feminist: 100-percent”; and so on.

The individuals knew nothing about one another when they walked into a warehouse space together and were given a series of instructions that led them through a small but unclear construction task. Eventually each pair built a set of stools and an unfinished table. The instructions guide them to sit and answer a few questions that lead them to sharing some of their personal histories with each other. The construction task puzzle continues until it becomes clear that they’ve built a bar. The instructions lead them to a pair of beers which they are to place on designated spots on the bar.

Then the disembodied voice that has led them to this point instructs them to stand and watch a short film. The video shows them clips of each other from interviews conducted prior to the experiment revealing the attitudes that should separate them. Then they are given the choice to leave or to sit down together over a beer.

Now it’s a beer commercial, so the pairs that made it into the final commercial all choose to stay. I don’t know if there were folks who chose to walk out. And, it’s a beer commercial, so mostly it’s trying to sell us beer.

Nevertheless, it reveals some important truths: if ordinary courage is about speaking one’s mind by telling one’s heart, then courage requires spending time together, committing to a common task together, being willing to speak and listen from the heart, and being willing to sit down together at table.

Cleopas and his friend spend time with a stranger. They take on the shared task of hiking together for hours. Then they offer hospitality from their hearts, and finally they break bread together. Along the way they get to know one another, and their deepest identities – their true hearts – are made know in the breaking of bread. Just as Jesus was known to his followers in the breaking of bread, so we are best known to one another at table.

The road to Emmaus is, ultimately, a story of incarnation, and, if we have the courage we are invited to walk the same road.

The heart of this story of broken hearts breaking open again beats in incarnation. Something becomes flesh, becomes real. Do we have the courage to listen if in that listening we may encounter deep and abiding truth, if, in that listening, Christ may be made flesh in our midst, if, in that listening, our own hearts may become transformed?

Toward the end of Matthew’s gospel, just before the Holy Week narrative, we read the parable of the judgment of the nations. The parable turns on this incarnational truth: when I was hungry, you fed me … Lord, when did we do this … truly I tell you, whenever you did this to the least of these my family you did it to me. On the road to Emmaus that parable might have included, “when I was walking the road alone, you welcomed me to join you and you listened to my story; when I had no home at the end of the road, you invited me into your home and you offered me a meal.”

There’s an Episcopal church in an affluent neighborhood in the town of Davidson, NC, that installed a sculpture in its yard. It’s a simple bench with a homeless man sleeping on it. It’s called Jesus the Homeless. The first week after it was installed a neighbor called the police to report a vagrant sleeping on the church grounds.

Come, Holy Spirit. Grant us the courage to walk the road to Emmaus with eyes wide open to Christ in our midst, grant us the courage to open our minds to the stories of our hearts, and grant us the courage to hear the voices of peoples long silenced. Amen.

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[1] Brene Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (New York: Gotham, 2007).