Emmaus

The lectionary text for this coming Sunday is the story of the disciples walking with Jesus on the Emmaus Road. My friend Bryan has helped me to see how this story encapsulates the myriad ways we seek and are found by Jesus within our Christian Communities, the ways that Jesus becomes visible to us ... Discussing together, struggling with Scripture, struggling with recent events, hearing the story, breaking of bread. My friend Dave preached a sermon at NPTS that asked the listener to be curious about what was manifest when Jesus broke the bread, perhaps his wounded hands. 

It is also of course a story about the hiddenness of Christ:

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. 

As soon as the disciples recognize Jesus, Jesus disappears.

The elusiveness of the resurrected Christ makes it hard for me at times to figure out what it means when we Christians confess that we are an Easter people. There is something conceptually simple in “following Jesus” even if it is existentially difficult. Yet, this vision of having Jesus with us, but often hidden, seems more ambiguous and complex. More searingly, Jesus didn’t make an appearance to everyone discussing the strange things that happened in Jerusalem, to every downcast or confused pilgrim on the road.

The story of Jesus appearing to them holds with my own experience: revelation as a kind of peek-a-boo. Look! Jesus is here! Clearly, fully. Look again and poof he is gone.

Today is the third anniversary of my Dad’s death. At times in the weeks and months after his passing his presence with me seemed palpable. I am not meaning to import this into these stories of the post-resurrection appearances as Marilyn Robinson does at the end of her book Housekeeping. There is no Christianity without the reality of the resurrection, or, at least it isn’t a Christianity that I am interested in—there isn’t enough joy to account for the suffering. I don’t believe in any calculations that tell us there is. The people that do these calculations count their own blessing more fully in the ledger than other people’s unmitigated sorrows.

And yet, Robinson is trying to account for the very existence of longings, longing so universal in our grief, so universal in our reception of the Easter promise .... Might not there be hidden in these longings a promise ? A promise of fulfillment and restitution and restoration. Jesus ever so present in absence....

But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

Staying Power

The first sermon that I ever preached was based on today’s Gospel passage from John. I don’t remember much of what I said about this well-worn passage about the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to Thomas. Other and better exegetes have pointed out that Thomas actually demonstrated a great deal of boldness and perseverance. Sacred history has been particularly unkind in giving him the moniker “Doubting Thomas.” 

Recently, I realized—with some relief—that I wasn’t undergoing a crises of faith. I thought that I might be. Today, I realize the burden that places on me. A burden to speak like someone with their hopes firmly in place. . . To speak like a person who knows that the powers are formidable and perhaps even unsurmountable, but they are not almighty. . . To speak like someone who knows the powers are bold and brazen, but they are not incapable of being shamed. 

Thomas had witnessed something unbelievably traumatizing. At that point he needed more than to hear a story of the glory of risen Jesus; Thomas needed to see glory apparent in wounds and scars. He needed to see glory apparent in this world that crucifies and devastates. Thomas needed to see that the resurrection was incarnational. That the resurrection has implications for his life on that day. 

The story of Thomas reminds me that even, and maybe especially, when we are trying to be faithful we need to interrogate our doubts: need to be bold in asking for signs, markers, theophanies, thin places where we can see God or hear God’s voice or feel God’s hand upon us. It was the boldness of faith which led Moses to ask to see the backend of God as God passed over and it is the boldness of faith that compelled Thomas to ask to touch those restored wounds. 

Thomas had staying power. 

Staying Power

JEANNE MURRAY WALKER

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts

outside to the yard and question the sky,

longing to have the fight settled, thinking

I can't go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there

is no God. And then as if I'm focusing

a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.

It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there

that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire

until I have to spend the afternoon dragging

the hose to put the smoldering thing out.

Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they've found melanoma,

complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.

God, I say as my heart turns inside out.

Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,

and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire

again, which—though they say it doesn't

exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.

Oh, we have only so many words to think with.

Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's

a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,

but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.

You don't want to talk, so you pull out

the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer

till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery

metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.

Psalm 13

Long enough, God--
you've ignored me long enough.
I've looked at the back of your head
long enough. Long enough
I've carried this ton of trouble,
lived with a stomach full of pain.
Long enough my arrogant enemies
have looked down their noses at me.

Take a good look at me, God, my God:
I want to look life in the eye
so no enemy can get the best of me
or laugh when I fall on my face.
(from Psalm 13, The Message)

One summer I worked in the Grand Canyon National Park as a Server and volunteered with Christian Ministries in the National Parks. There was suppose to be a Seminary student assigned to lead our team, but he never showed. The team was very disorganized. One day I was assigned to give “the message” at one of the campgrounds and neither the liturgist or the musician showed up. In a moment of panic, I opened the Bible and because I am terrible at improvisation I found a totally random Psalm and began reading. It was Psalm 13. I was embarrassed. It was a little intense for a campground kumbaya service. 

When I was in Seminary, I was in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas and someone made the statement: “Christian are not suppose to have enemies.” I readily agreed. It made sense to me as a budding Mennonite, but Hauerwas disagreed adamantly--you need to have enemies in order to love them. A few weeks ago, I wrote on how disarming it felt for the book of Lamentations to feel so relevant. It is even more unsettling when we are able to pray imprecatory Psalms without too much squirming. 

From the cross Jesus prayed “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Last year, I noted in a sermon on the last words of Christ that I found it interesting that Jesus didn’t say: “I forgive you because you do not know what you do.” I pondered whether this isn’t a recognition that forgiveness is a complicated process and not something that we can coerce into existence by our own force of will. It is a grace that God gives and requires the creation of new reality/world between people. Jesus prayed for his enemies. He didn’t pretend he didn’t have them. Jesus asked for mercy for his enemies. He didn’t pretend that what they were doing was excused simply by virtue of the fact that they “didn’t know what they were doing.” 

Intentional sinning is a drop in the ocean of the sinning that we do, and yet we are all responsible for the suppleness of our own hearts and our own receptivity to hearing the truth. So, I will end with what I find most disturbing about these Psalms. As denizens of the richest nations on the Earth, 90% of the world’s population could rightly pray these words about and against us. 

Sabbath: Unessential work?

It turns out that much of our work has been unessential. Who knew? 

For many, many years Doug and I kept Sabbath together. He wanted to keep Sabbath on Saturday and it was a bone of endless contention. When I was a kid Saturday was for trips to the Woolworth’s. In the 80s in Traverse City, Michigan you could still have lunch at a Woolworth lunch counter on a Saturday. My parents were always a bit overprotective, but we knew all the Woolworth’s staff by their first names and the store was tiny. I could browse with my allowance unattended.

It is where I got my first tube of lipstick (red, if you are curious). 

I don't want to keep Sabbath on Saturday,  I like to buy junk and get a hamburger. However, Doug and I both agreed on the importance of the idea of Sabbath. Indeed, I kept Sabbath rigorously on Sunday during my first two years of college and organized my studying schedule accordingly. 

I was incredibly driven during college. In hindsight, the study schedule that I kept was ridiculous. I hadn’t been a very great student in high school and I think if I am honest that I likely have a couple learning disabilities. I just went into overdrive trying to compensate for this while I was in college. I was also attending Calvin College, and that whole Calvinist work ethic thing is no joke. This work schedule was manageable when I was keeping Sabbath, but it almost destroyed me when I stopped. I got a horrible, recurrent case of Mono that lasted for almost 9 months. 

I believe in Sabbath.

Yet, it certainly is beginning to feel like the proverbial month of Sundays around here. My typical Sabbath activities: walks, soup-making, novel reading, napping, watching television, knitting, are wearing thin. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing! 

I think part of the reason that I am enjoying this blog so much is that it feels a little like work. In the book of Genesis we learn that labor was cursed in the Fall, like childbirth. In a perfect world both kinds of “labor” would be easier, but labouring itself would still be part of a good creation. We need to be able to find good work during this time of Quarantine, even as we reflect on the fact that our labor is not as essential as we once thought that it was... 

Maybe this is a good time to reflect on the real meaning that we attach to both our work and our rest. 

Spiritual, but not religious: A random reflection on John Prine, Candy Land, the Incarnation.

I have sometimes joked that I am religious, but not spiritual. The joke is not original with me. I am sure that I overheard it from one of the theological rockstars in my broader Facebook social circle.

I really love church and church has always loved me back (for a more poetic rendering of this basic point read this sermon draft).

I also wrote awhile back that I feel like I am at some sort of crossroads.. I will just say that one small comfort is that I don’t feel my faith in Jesus wavering one bit. I do wonder if I might have found myself falling rather headlong into a spiritual, but not religious stage. If it wasn’t for this quarantine, I think I might be finally enjoying Sunday Morning brunch and novel reading. Unfortunately, this quarantine means that even that small rebellion isn’t possible. I confess that I haven’t attended a single Zoom church meeting (so there….I guess). 

Of course, I know that this isn’t sufficient for the long haul. If anything this time of Quarantine is reminding everyone of the importance of the embodied parts of our faith: the feel of others' songs reverberating in our ears, the smooth feeling of the pews, the din that arises when the service is over, the taste of bad church coffee, the touch of paper thin hands of the old and the sticky hands of kids. We need all that. We need all that especially because of who we believe Jesus is and how he did his work and lived his life: water for washing, wine and donkeys, the spray of the sea, rolling seeds between his fingers, scratching his toes. 

This embodied life isn’t all beauty. There was also the kiss on the cheek for Jesus and all the pain that unravelled his physical life. 

Yet, Jesus, claimed embodied life again, taking time after he rose from the dead to cook fish for his friends on a beach.

I think I have set up a false equivalence here, though. I have equated “the physical” with the religious and the religious with what happens in church. 

I have been really deep diving into the music of John Prine the last week. I really like it. Bob Dylan was said to call his songs Midwest, Proustian, mindtrips. I don’t know-- I have just been struck with his decency, hidden, sometimes in the bawdiness. The embrace of the materials of our lives and their surprising goodness.  The way that we can make things a little less impossible for each other if notice each other.  His songs remind me of my favorite passage in American literature. 

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

For the time being, I can’t live out my faith in church or at some Cannery Row (although I can send Doug there). I need to iron it out with the strange materials of computer screens and dried beans and endless games of Candy Land.  I need to figure this out in the midst of dog vomit and never ending piles of dishes. I need to try and figure out how to hold on to Jesus and equanimity and love in the midst of cabin fever and the slow drip of an absolutely soul-crushing bureacratic process.

And what can I do? Cook breakfast, embrace the material world around and trust that Jesus is here too. 

(No fish for breakfast, though) 

The Resurrecting Duck

One Spring morning my parents brought home a cardboard box filled with baby ducks, turkeys, and chickens. I was about Sam’s age (8) and I was mesmerized by them. I kept hiding the ducklings in my bathrobe pockets and sneaking them into my bedroom. There were two ducks —a big white duck who we named Daffy and a mallard we called Cute Quack.

Daffy, possibly because of all those trips to my bedroom, imprinted on me and followed me everywhere I went. Cute Quack followed Daffy. That summer I had two duck companions. This started to become a bit of a problem when school began again in the Fall. The ducks kept trying to get on the school bus with me. I developed a method for handling the problem. I would walk out my front door and begin to walk slowly around the front of the house. When I reached the second corner, I would break out in a dead run. The ducks were usually left in the backyard lost and a bit confused.

One day the big white duck was struck by a car. My dad buried him in our garden. I was disconsolate and prayed and prayed that my duck would come back to life. The little mallard was clearly as sad as I was and spent the rest of the day fruitlessly searching for Daffy.

That Saturday we went to the neighboring town for shopping. When we got home a familiar sight met our eyes—a big white duck waddling around the yard with a little mallard in tow.

I was ecstatic. God had answered my prayers! I was so certain that I even started to convince my Mom a little bit.

She questioned: “John, are you sure the duck was really dead?”

“There is no chance that the duck that I buried was anything but dead,” my father answered with great certainty.

I checked the grave. The dirt had not been disturbed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, it turned out that a neighbor, upon seeing the dead duck by the side of the road, had brought over a new duck.

When I was a kid the world of the Bible felt very proximate. It was easy to inhabit a miraculous world where Lazarus rises out of his tomb, prayer could move mountains, and where God might just give me back my dead duck if I prayed hard enough.

The finality of road kill had not yet fully sunk in for me ... as it had for my Dad.

This morning I inhabit a world where the only type of resurrection in which I can habitually believe is metaphorical.

Daffy the duck doesn’t rise from the dead, but a kind neighbor might come on Saturday morning and bring a kid a new duck.

In the place of a God who undoes death and destruction, I have often relied on a belief in a good community of people who do justice and kindness.

And we are a resurrection people …

Through small acts of fidelity we work to make better futures possible for each other.

This isn’t adequate though.

Cute Quack could have told you that. After following the white Duck around for a couple hours he got disenchanted. He wasn’t ultimately fooled by the replacement duck. The next Fall, cute quack found her wings and caught flight.

This past week there was an article in Christianity Today entitled “If Easter is only a symbol, Then to hell with it.”

The author writes:

The truest fact of the universe this Eastertide is not death tolls, emptied sanctuaries, or overcrowded hospitals. The truest fact of the universe is an empty tomb. The Resurrection is the only evidence that love triumphs over death, weakness prevails over strength, and beauty outlives ashes. If Jesus is risen in actual history, with all the palpability of flesh, fingers, bone, and blood, there is hope that our mourning will be comforted and that death will not have the final word.

I am comparatively wealthy. I am anxious this Easter, but not about whether we will have dinner today.

I can settle (mostly) for a metaphorical Easter.

But what of those...

whose life is grinding poverty and unremitting pain.

Can they settle for a metaphor?

Whose whole lives are circumscribed, mining for metals for our phones?

Can they settle for a metaphor?

Who spend lives covered with pesticides so that we can have cheap strawberries and die young.

Can they settle for a metaphor?

Child soldier hopped up on drugs armed to kill?

Is a metaphorical resurrection enough?

Children who are trafficked for sex and die in lonely places with needles in their arms.

Will metaphor bring meaning to those lonely deaths?

Babies taken by bombs before they have plucked their first flower?

What hope is there in image of flowers in bulbs and apples in blossoms for them?

Generally speaking, we are people rich enough and connected enough that we can rely on ourselves and our family with a sprinkling of Easter metaphor to get by.

The only shallow graves we are apt to dig our for pet ducks.

Yet, not this Easter.

The shallow graves are being dug in Iran, Italy, and New York City.

Death stalks more boldly in the usual places—our long term care homes, prisons, homeless shelters — but death also stalks in grocery store lines and in our church sanctuaries.

There are some estimating that as many as 200,000 Americans could be dead by the beginning of May.

We do not need the Jesus of metaphorical Easter ducks this year!

We desperately need the risen Christ the harbinger of a new world.

For God’s sake: Let us not mock God with metaphor,/ Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,/Making of the event a parable, a/sign painted in the faded/Credulity of earlier ages:/ Let us walk through the door.

This year let us look hard and see that [t]he stone is rolled back,/ not papier-mache,/Not a stone in a story,/But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of/Time will eclipse for each of us/The wide light of day.

I hope this year that we learn that we cannot settle for any Easter hope that leaves behind those who suffer meaningless death at the whims of capricious leaders. I hope that this year we learn that we cannot settle for any Easter hope that leaves behind those who die alone.

This could become us. It always could have become us.

It is 5:57 on Easter Sunday, 2020.

The only hope in this world lies here:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.

Perfect love drives out fear

I used to listen to a call-in “helpline” advice show on Christian radio when I was a teenager. I haven’t thought about this show in a long time. It was called Dawson McAllister Live. Perhaps it is still on the air. Frequently teens would call in who had been sexually abused or raped. He always started with the same statement: When Jesus was nailed to the cross he was naked — sexual abuse and sexual shaming was part of the torture of Roman crucifixion. There is every evidence in historical documents that the sexual degradation of crucifixion extended far beyond just a naked death. 

I have forgotten much of the advice from that show, but this point has stuck with me through the years. When I taught on the problem of evil in theology class I had several students come to my office struggling to understand the absence of God when they had been sexually molested as children. They had not been sexually harmed by Pastors or Priests, but the effect was the same. They had been made to feel abandoned by God. 

There was nothing even close to adequate to say except that God, in Christ, has been there too. 

Jesus died naked. Torture and abuse had rendered his body a monstrosity. Part of the insidious power of abuse and degradation is that it makes people feel ashamed and abandoned. Most of Jesus friends abandoned him. Part of the insidious power of abuse and degradation is its capacity to make the victim feel like God is on the abuser’s side. Jesus cried out from the cross—God? Why have you abandoned me? 

The cross was spectacle. 

Its purpose to drive fear into the hearts of anyone who would dare call into question those in power. There was no shade in the shadow of the cross and to stand beside someone on the cross was to be rendered visible and vulnerable yourself.

In the Gospel of John we learn that standing beside him on the cross were his Mother, his Aunt, Mary Magadalene, and the disciple that Jesus loved (usually believed to be John). What allowed them not to turn their faces away from Jesus? 

Love.

Crazy, crazy love. The crazy love of old women. The crazy love of Mary who had been forgiven much. The crazy love of John who basically can’t write a sentence in any of his epistles without veering back into writing about love, love, love. 

It was love that kept Jesus on the cross and it was strange love that kept his mother, aunt, and his two dearly beloved disciples adamantly standing at the foot of his cross. 

Or as John would later write: 

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.