Easter homily
by Carrie Eikler
John 10:1-18
Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. You don’t have to be a classical music buff to know it [pianist plays first eight notes "buh buh buh BUH. buh buh buh BUH!].
Even if you couldn’t put the name of the piece with those first notes, most of us recognize it. While Alistair and I were puttering around the house on Monday,
wishing it wasn’t raining outside so we could be doing things in the garden,
the radio program we were listening to was about to play Beethoven’s 5th..
The announcer gave this prelude:
“Those opening four notes. They're so familiar that they're almost a cliché.
How many times have we heard them and thought, oh, that again?
We've heard it so many times before.” (Peformance Today, NPR)
But he promised that we were about ready to hear a performance like none other by the Dresden Staatskapelle conducted by Paarvo Jarvi.
[pause]
And I had to wonder, would I really notice the difference?
I mean, I’m familiar with your basic classical music,
I could name Beethoven’s 5th if I heard those first four notes,
but unless they played it on the kazoo… I doubt I would be able to really tell the difference.
Not that I would say it would be a cliché.
But it probably wouldn’t move me terribly.
I might think “Oh, that again, that’s nice” and go on puttering with my rainy day.
[pause]
Mary went to the tomb on that first day of the week.
If it was raining, it didn't keep her away.
Nor did the dark
We don’t know exactly why she went
but in the Easter story told in both Luke and in Mark said the women were going to take spices to the grave.
They were going to do funeral rites.
Perhaps they were eager to finally be close to the body,
to help Jesus, even in death.
To tend to him, to simply do what needed to be done,
maybe it was routine but at least they could do something
…which was more than they could do for Jesus in his hour of need the day before.
Maybe Mary was going to do these things. Maybe she was simply going to weep.
This…this is what you did for the dead.
She probably did it other times before with others who have died,
at least witnessed other women doing it since she was a girl.
It was probably a familiar routine.
Perhaps, a bit… cliché… just the motions one went through.
But she could have also gone for another reason.
... Because his death was anything but cliché.
It’s not that it was uncommon. People were crucified. Capital punishment happened in the public eye.
But she really believed him to be the Messiah, and that sort of death for the Messiah…?
This was someone who had seen her.
Who affirmed her.
Who let her love him and experience love from him that was not just about the body,
but about the spirit.
So I wonder if she went with just a little bit of curiosity.
After all, didn’t he say that he would rise again?
He brought other people to life: the centurion’s daughter, Lazarus.
They were dead, and they lived.
Even if she suspected something might not be routine with Jesus’ death, she still was amazed he wasn’t there. She seems a bit flabbergasted, doesn’t she?
(quickly speaking)
She looked where he should have been
and then looked all around her
and [sigh] wasn’t it just like the men to run and hide leaving her to deal with
the crisis
and what are those angels doing there?
and who is this guy who is asking such ridiculous questions? and why does she have such a strange feeling about him,
(gasp) it’s probably because he stole Jesus!!! and…
…this is no routine sequence of events.
Because then the dead… calls her name. [pause] Mary.
And she has met the Risen Lord.
And 2,000 years later, the church, on this day like no other, asks that question.
Have you met the Risen Lord?
And I have to say, that question, like many other questions Christians often ask each other, starts to sound...
... a bit like Beethoven’s 5th.
A bit, cliché. Something overused. Even to me.
Because I don’t know what we mean by it.
I’ve heard it so many times that I can’t see through the popular worn out answers.
Obviously, we know we’re not talking about the physical, flesh and bone Jesus.
This is where most Christians are happy to throw around metaphors,
even for Christians who don’t think they like metaphors…
What do we mean we’ve seen the Risen Lord?
Our mind quickly tries to answer the question with more obvious questions…
Where have we seen something powerful that we believe God is behind it?
When have we had an experience that made us feel good, and loved, and saved?
But, as much as I love metaphors, I can’t quite then sift my way through the metaphor into the stuff of real life.
So I’m not going to ask you this morning the typical Easter question:
have you seen the risen Lord?
Because I think I would get a lot of blank stares, even from myself.
Something that was so radical, and political, and spiritual sadly, doesn’t reach us anymore.
And I wonder if it is because we are looking for our answers about Jesus in all the familiar places.
It’s easy to say we see God in people who have helped us along the way. And that’s true. I’m sure the Risen Lord is there.
We search for the places in our lives where that positive experience points us to the fact that Jesus rose—
when things go our way,
when circumstances work out for the best,
when the heart of Jesus message of compassion and peace and mercy are lived out.
It’s easy to see the Risen Lord then.
But what about the harder places.
Those places, where Jesus was also very present. in his life. In his life after death.
What about when we see a father weep for his son killed by artillery fire?
A woman suffering from sexual abuse.
What about when the powers that be, begin to consume us, crucifying us with
job loss, increase of food prices, and endless warfare.
I’d have to say the Risen Lord is there but not like we’d expect.
Not making things easy for us or giving us easy answers.
And, yet, in these hard moments, we meet him.
...unsuspecting
...a bit flaggergasted.
...proably still wondering "where is Jesus?!"
even though he is right in front of us.
The French composer Hector Berlioz took a friend to hear Beethoven’s 5th symphony in Paris.
At first a bit skeptical about this crazy new music by Beethoven, Berlioz’s friend had to leave the music hall during the performance.
Berlioz found him pacing madly outside muttering to himself , saying
“Let me get out, I must have some air. It’s amazing. I was so upset, so moved, so disturbed I came out to put on my hat and I couldn’t find my head.”
When we meet the risen Lord, I think it has been, is, will be like this.
We won’t see the empty tomb,
or the dirt under the nails of the man we think is the gardener,
or even hear our names clearly spoken.
I think when we meet the Risen Lord we’ll be so upset,
so moved,
so disturbed
that we won’t be able to find our heads.
When you meet the risen Lord, choose the living over the dead.
the next encounter over the familiar cliche,
Choose the freeing rather than the clinging....
each and every time he calls your name.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Questions, Questions, Questions
Three meditations by Torin Eikler
Matthew 21:1-11 Matthew 26:69-75 John 18:33-38
Matthew 21:1-11 “Who is this Man?”
The story we are celebrating today – what we have come to call Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem – was a strange episode by any standards. Today we would find such a scene laughable, but even in ancient Israel I don’t think it would have been the norm. Here was a man riding into town astride both a donkey and a colt with no banner flapping and no guard of honor, and he received a hero’s welcome – the fore-runner perhaps of more recent ticker-tape parades. It was the sort of treatment reserved for war heroes or reluctantly given to the very important people of the occupying empire. And that, of course, is why it upset the Jewish authorities and why we call it the triumphal entry.
But what a scene to witness…. Imagine coming down the street to find a crowd of half-dressed people lining a dusty road on covered with the rest of their clothes with some branches from nearby trees thrown in for good measure. They’re shouting, chanting “Hosanna, [Praise] to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” And when you look to see what all the fuss is about, to see who it is that deserves such praise as to verge on worship, you discover not a prince or a general but a ragtag bunch of men and women in dirty clothes led by a person who seems no different from anyone else. You wonder out loud, “who is this man?” Someone nearby tells you, “This is the prophet Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee.”
That is an answer to the question. I think it’s likely that some of them would recognize the name and would have heard the stories about him. Maybe they joined in once they realized who that was riding the colt. But most of the people who were up on the gossip of the day and were cheering for Jesus would have gotten the word ahead of time, I think. They were the ones who made up the crowds on the street. It was the rest of the city, the people who were thrown into turmoil by the spectacle of his entrance that were asking the question, and I think they meant it along the lines of, “What is so special about this man? Why is he receiving such adoration?” And the answer they got was not the answer they were looking for. “Yeah, … so he’s Jesus of Nazareth … So what?”
Now there’s a question that transcends time and culture, a question that theologians and apologists have been struggling to answer for century in defense of Christianity, a question that faces each of us if and when someone asks us what we believe. We believe in Jesus the Christ …. So what? Who is this Jesus Christ you worship? Who is this man whose life … and death you celebrate, whose example you ponder, whose teachings you seek to follow?
Maybe you’ve never been in that position. Maybe no one has ever challenged your faith or asked you to defend what you believe. I suppose that’s both a good and a sad thing – good if it’s because so many people have discovered their own truth about Christ … sad because facing those questions is a very effective way to explore our faith and what it means to us.
What would you say if you were in the crowd? What would your answer be if someone you knew asked you the same question? Who is this man to whom we shout hosanna … this rabbi and prophet from Nazareth … this Jesus Christ?
Matthew 26:69-75 “Do you know him?”
I’ve often thought that Peter gets a bit of a bad rap in the gospels. More than once, he is the one who speaks for the disciples, voicing the opinion or viewpoint they all share and sharing the answers that none of the others is willing to put out there, and so he becomes the butt of many of the lessons Jesus teaches them. Sometimes, like when he names Jesus the Messiah, the son of most high God, he gets things spectacularly right. Other times, he is way off base. On this night, we see him living up to our lowest expectations.
Standing there beside the fire he denies Jesus not once but three times. He stands there in the warm darkness … stands by and watches as his rabbi and friend is taken away by his enemies. He leaves Jesus to face brutality and trial cold and alone.
What made him do it? Why didn’t he acknowledge the one he had chosen to follow? He was afraid – afraid of discovery … afraid of what would happen if he too were arrested. Who wouldn’t be … standing in the bastion of power of those who had so easily arrested a man with powers he couldn’t aspire to. If they arrested Jesus what would they do to him, to the man who had cut off one of their ears?
Of course he was afraid, … but I wonder if there wasn’t something else that moved him to that vigil because Peter was a brave and faithful man too. Who else had named the messiah, the son of the most high God? Who else followed the soldiers to the courtyard that night? Who else had picked up a sword to defend Jesus against a whole squad of professional soldiers?
And so I wonder if Peter denied Jesus as much out of hope and faith as out of fear. How many other times had Jesus been in a tight spot only to find some way to confound his would-be accusers and win his freedom? Who, if not the man who had stilled a storm … who had broken even the hold of death … who else had the power to break the hold of any chains that bound him and walk away untouched?
I think, maybe, Peter was waiting so that someone would be there to greet Jesus once he had won his freedom. I think, maybe, he believed that worked his customary “magic” and his ministry would continue – more shining and triumphant than ever. And so he waited in that fearful place in the hope of a dawn that was not to be, buying time by denying Jesus and leaving only when he realized that he had fulfilled a prophesy that he had also denied – that he had done the one thing he thought he never would.
Why is it, then, that we judge him so harshly and with so much pity? I think it’s because we see ourselves in him. We, too, would be the ones to see the divinity in Christ. We, too, would drop everything to follow his lead. We would be the ones with the courage to run along behind the soldiers not knowing what would happen, but hoping that something or someone – maybe us – would change the plot. And, we, too, would stand there watching, waiting, denying, and running.
None of us are martyrs after all, though we may sometimes feel like it. None of us have ever been in Peter’s position. What would we do if it came to that? What would you do if you were faced with the decision to stand with Christ and die or turn away and live?
I don’t think I have it in me to make the stand as much as I wish I could claim that kind of courage and devotion. I think I would choose to live … here and now, and I don’t pretend that I could even do as well as Peter. One time would be enough for me, I think. One question and one denial – “I do not know this man,” and I would be off and running, my sense of guilt and failure growing with each step.
Even though my faith assures me that death is not the end of life, I would turn away.
John 18:33-38 “What is truth?”
“What is truth?” It seems a strange question to be part of a criminal trial. All the rest of the questions Pilote asked were right to the point. “What have you done [to be handed over to me for judgement]?” – the question of a judge trying to understand what’s going on, to figure out if there is really merit for the case being brought. “Are you the king of the Jews?” – anyone claiming that title would be usurping the role of Herod and challenging the authority of the empire. They would be a rabble rouser and could be punished by death. “So you are a king?” – let’s just be sure that we understand the situation before we pass sentence. But “what is truth?” …. That’s a question more fit for philosophical discussion or a church than a court room.
I suppose that Jesus answers were a little less than helpful. He was as evasive and mysterious as ever, which probably got Pilote out of his comfort zone. This was not what he was used to. The man before him was not trying to refute the charges against him. Neither was he some surly criminal or rebel. He was an enigma, a mystery that seemed to make even his accusers uneasy since they had handed him over for sentencing, demanding the death penalty without any evidence but their own dubious claims. Perhaps Pilote’s final question actually got right to the heart of the matter – went straight to the core of what was important … both for the decision he had to make and for the decisions we make every day of our lives.
What is the truth? Plato would have said that truth is an ideal … something we can never know or understand in its fullness, limited as we are by the bodies we inhabit and the world we see around us. That’s an idea that Pilote would have been quite familiar with. But the writer of the gospel of John had a different idea. The good news in this gospel is that Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life” or the way to the true life depending on how you read the text.
For the people who cheered at his entrance to Jerusalem, that meant that he was a great prophet, a teacher who had the power to do signs and wonders in the name of God. For Peter and the other followers close to Jesus, that meant that he was the Messiah, the one who had come to bring freedom to the people of Israel. Many people since then have believed that Jesus was God come to earth to reconcile humanity with the Divine. And there are many more ways to understand who Jesus was and is, but none of them holds all the answers because Plato was right. We only see the truth dimly while we are here.
But it is important to ponder the truth that we do see. The truth, or rather, what we believe is the truth about the man Jesus who we call Christ and Lord?” is the central question we face in the life of faith, and the answer shapes how we live as we seek to join our faith and our daily living as seamlessly as possible.
Do you believe that Jesus was a great teacher or that he was the Messiah? Do you believe that he is the Christ, the Son of God who came to bring salvation to all humanity?
What do you believe?
What is truth … for you?
Matthew 21:1-11 Matthew 26:69-75 John 18:33-38
Matthew 21:1-11 “Who is this Man?”
The story we are celebrating today – what we have come to call Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem – was a strange episode by any standards. Today we would find such a scene laughable, but even in ancient Israel I don’t think it would have been the norm. Here was a man riding into town astride both a donkey and a colt with no banner flapping and no guard of honor, and he received a hero’s welcome – the fore-runner perhaps of more recent ticker-tape parades. It was the sort of treatment reserved for war heroes or reluctantly given to the very important people of the occupying empire. And that, of course, is why it upset the Jewish authorities and why we call it the triumphal entry.
But what a scene to witness…. Imagine coming down the street to find a crowd of half-dressed people lining a dusty road on covered with the rest of their clothes with some branches from nearby trees thrown in for good measure. They’re shouting, chanting “Hosanna, [Praise] to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” And when you look to see what all the fuss is about, to see who it is that deserves such praise as to verge on worship, you discover not a prince or a general but a ragtag bunch of men and women in dirty clothes led by a person who seems no different from anyone else. You wonder out loud, “who is this man?” Someone nearby tells you, “This is the prophet Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee.”
That is an answer to the question. I think it’s likely that some of them would recognize the name and would have heard the stories about him. Maybe they joined in once they realized who that was riding the colt. But most of the people who were up on the gossip of the day and were cheering for Jesus would have gotten the word ahead of time, I think. They were the ones who made up the crowds on the street. It was the rest of the city, the people who were thrown into turmoil by the spectacle of his entrance that were asking the question, and I think they meant it along the lines of, “What is so special about this man? Why is he receiving such adoration?” And the answer they got was not the answer they were looking for. “Yeah, … so he’s Jesus of Nazareth … So what?”
Now there’s a question that transcends time and culture, a question that theologians and apologists have been struggling to answer for century in defense of Christianity, a question that faces each of us if and when someone asks us what we believe. We believe in Jesus the Christ …. So what? Who is this Jesus Christ you worship? Who is this man whose life … and death you celebrate, whose example you ponder, whose teachings you seek to follow?
Maybe you’ve never been in that position. Maybe no one has ever challenged your faith or asked you to defend what you believe. I suppose that’s both a good and a sad thing – good if it’s because so many people have discovered their own truth about Christ … sad because facing those questions is a very effective way to explore our faith and what it means to us.
What would you say if you were in the crowd? What would your answer be if someone you knew asked you the same question? Who is this man to whom we shout hosanna … this rabbi and prophet from Nazareth … this Jesus Christ?
Matthew 26:69-75 “Do you know him?”
I’ve often thought that Peter gets a bit of a bad rap in the gospels. More than once, he is the one who speaks for the disciples, voicing the opinion or viewpoint they all share and sharing the answers that none of the others is willing to put out there, and so he becomes the butt of many of the lessons Jesus teaches them. Sometimes, like when he names Jesus the Messiah, the son of most high God, he gets things spectacularly right. Other times, he is way off base. On this night, we see him living up to our lowest expectations.
Standing there beside the fire he denies Jesus not once but three times. He stands there in the warm darkness … stands by and watches as his rabbi and friend is taken away by his enemies. He leaves Jesus to face brutality and trial cold and alone.
What made him do it? Why didn’t he acknowledge the one he had chosen to follow? He was afraid – afraid of discovery … afraid of what would happen if he too were arrested. Who wouldn’t be … standing in the bastion of power of those who had so easily arrested a man with powers he couldn’t aspire to. If they arrested Jesus what would they do to him, to the man who had cut off one of their ears?
Of course he was afraid, … but I wonder if there wasn’t something else that moved him to that vigil because Peter was a brave and faithful man too. Who else had named the messiah, the son of the most high God? Who else followed the soldiers to the courtyard that night? Who else had picked up a sword to defend Jesus against a whole squad of professional soldiers?
And so I wonder if Peter denied Jesus as much out of hope and faith as out of fear. How many other times had Jesus been in a tight spot only to find some way to confound his would-be accusers and win his freedom? Who, if not the man who had stilled a storm … who had broken even the hold of death … who else had the power to break the hold of any chains that bound him and walk away untouched?
I think, maybe, Peter was waiting so that someone would be there to greet Jesus once he had won his freedom. I think, maybe, he believed that worked his customary “magic” and his ministry would continue – more shining and triumphant than ever. And so he waited in that fearful place in the hope of a dawn that was not to be, buying time by denying Jesus and leaving only when he realized that he had fulfilled a prophesy that he had also denied – that he had done the one thing he thought he never would.
Why is it, then, that we judge him so harshly and with so much pity? I think it’s because we see ourselves in him. We, too, would be the ones to see the divinity in Christ. We, too, would drop everything to follow his lead. We would be the ones with the courage to run along behind the soldiers not knowing what would happen, but hoping that something or someone – maybe us – would change the plot. And, we, too, would stand there watching, waiting, denying, and running.
None of us are martyrs after all, though we may sometimes feel like it. None of us have ever been in Peter’s position. What would we do if it came to that? What would you do if you were faced with the decision to stand with Christ and die or turn away and live?
I don’t think I have it in me to make the stand as much as I wish I could claim that kind of courage and devotion. I think I would choose to live … here and now, and I don’t pretend that I could even do as well as Peter. One time would be enough for me, I think. One question and one denial – “I do not know this man,” and I would be off and running, my sense of guilt and failure growing with each step.
Even though my faith assures me that death is not the end of life, I would turn away.
John 18:33-38 “What is truth?”
“What is truth?” It seems a strange question to be part of a criminal trial. All the rest of the questions Pilote asked were right to the point. “What have you done [to be handed over to me for judgement]?” – the question of a judge trying to understand what’s going on, to figure out if there is really merit for the case being brought. “Are you the king of the Jews?” – anyone claiming that title would be usurping the role of Herod and challenging the authority of the empire. They would be a rabble rouser and could be punished by death. “So you are a king?” – let’s just be sure that we understand the situation before we pass sentence. But “what is truth?” …. That’s a question more fit for philosophical discussion or a church than a court room.
I suppose that Jesus answers were a little less than helpful. He was as evasive and mysterious as ever, which probably got Pilote out of his comfort zone. This was not what he was used to. The man before him was not trying to refute the charges against him. Neither was he some surly criminal or rebel. He was an enigma, a mystery that seemed to make even his accusers uneasy since they had handed him over for sentencing, demanding the death penalty without any evidence but their own dubious claims. Perhaps Pilote’s final question actually got right to the heart of the matter – went straight to the core of what was important … both for the decision he had to make and for the decisions we make every day of our lives.
What is the truth? Plato would have said that truth is an ideal … something we can never know or understand in its fullness, limited as we are by the bodies we inhabit and the world we see around us. That’s an idea that Pilote would have been quite familiar with. But the writer of the gospel of John had a different idea. The good news in this gospel is that Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life” or the way to the true life depending on how you read the text.
For the people who cheered at his entrance to Jerusalem, that meant that he was a great prophet, a teacher who had the power to do signs and wonders in the name of God. For Peter and the other followers close to Jesus, that meant that he was the Messiah, the one who had come to bring freedom to the people of Israel. Many people since then have believed that Jesus was God come to earth to reconcile humanity with the Divine. And there are many more ways to understand who Jesus was and is, but none of them holds all the answers because Plato was right. We only see the truth dimly while we are here.
But it is important to ponder the truth that we do see. The truth, or rather, what we believe is the truth about the man Jesus who we call Christ and Lord?” is the central question we face in the life of faith, and the answer shapes how we live as we seek to join our faith and our daily living as seamlessly as possible.
Do you believe that Jesus was a great teacher or that he was the Messiah? Do you believe that he is the Christ, the Son of God who came to bring salvation to all humanity?
What do you believe?
What is truth … for you?
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Fashioning New Life
Sermon by Carrie Eikler
John 11:1-45, Ezekiel 37:1-14
Lent 5
[on the worship center, 29 stones are lined up, marking the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion]
Gary Quarles kneels on his living room carpet and unrolls the 4-foot-long map that he's studied so many times,
trying to understand why his son died in the Upper Big Branch mine…
On the map he sees where his 33-year-old son Gary Wayne Quarles was working with crewmates Grover Skeens and Joel Price, and their supervisor, Rick Lane.
They are identified on paper as Victims 9-12.
And they're not where they were supposed to be.
They were, Gary Quarles believes, running for their lives, trying to escape after something went wrong near the end of their 10 1/2-hour shift.
Gary Wayne was [Gary, Sr’s] best friend and his only child, conceived when Gary's wife, Patty, was just 15.
"He made us grow up really fast, and he turned us into who we are," she says.
Patty, a homemaker, still keeps an immaculate house. But she's just going through the motions.
She rocks slightly in a recliner, dark hair still wet from a shower she didn't bother getting until midafternoon,
and describes her life now: "You go to bed and you get up and you go back to bed."
Gary nods. He recalls the day a relative told him to pull himself together, to get out and have a little fun.
"There's no fun to be done now," he says, eyes filling with tears.
"It's like the life been sucked right out of me." [i]
This week the valley of dried bones are laid aside the mountains of Montcoal, WV where 29 miners lost their lives in an explosion one year ago.
Since I was reflecting on Ezekiel’s story of dry bones this week,
I experienced a certain chill added to the sadness:
29 white crosses with miner’s helmets balanced a loft, their lights beaming through the darkness.
Straight white crosses. Bone-like.
I wanted to see them fashioning themselves, clacking together, somehow causing a resurrection.
And what’s clear is that, like any tragedy, any death,
it is not just the dead who have been affected.
It is a transformation for those who remain, who loved them, who bore them and raised them.
They have the hard duty of living in the midst of death.
People going through the motions, having the life sucked out of them by grief and absence.
Living in a Martha-like agony
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
These are the painful, raw, words of Martha.
Martha, who did something.
Who ran out to meet Jesus in the dark of night while her sister Mary stayed home. Martha, who earlier, Jesus seems to have chastised for doing too much,
while favoring Mary’s quiet stillness.
Now, she does just the right thing.
She leaves Mary at home, and in Martha’s grief, her anger—
perhaps a bit of the righteous anger we saw when Mary didn’t help her host Jesus, she runs to Jesus, puts him to the test, asks him where he was.
He doesn’t rebuke her this time.
This time, he says ‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die will live” and Lazarus lives.
Thank God for Martha. We don’t often hear that, do we?
In the field of dry bones, the LORD asks Ezekiel a question.
A simple one. Perhaps rhetorical.
“Mortal, can this bones live?”
And can’t you almost hear the exasperation in Ezekiel’s voice:
“O Lord God, you know.”
And then it comes. Dem bones scene.
Clickity-clack, it’s almost humorous as we think of the ankle bone connecting to the leg bones.
But it’s not humorous. It’s horrific.
And if we take it on its own, like we often do, without regarding the rest of Ezekiel’s story, we don’t quite get the significance of it all.
We may be tempted to see it as merely a metaphor, a lesson.
It can seem a-- nice prelude to the Easter story which is only two weeks away.
David Garber reflects on this tendency to cut the dry bones story out of the rest of Ezekiel’s story.
He says, “Because we so often do not read the rest of the book leading up to this grand scene, we have a myopic view of the prophet's own desperation and the plight of the community to which this story attempts to give hope. We forget that Ezekiel himself was taken into exile…. that he heard reports of his religious institution being corrupted and that his status had been reduced from a prominent position as a future priest in Jerusalem to that of a temple-less priest in exile.
We forget the death of his wife and God's command for him not to mourn her as an example for the exilic community not to mourn the loss of the Temple (24:16-24).”
“More importantly,” he continues, “we forget the historical trauma that accompanied this exile. We forget that the Babylonians tortured the inhabitants of Jerusalem with siege warfare that lasted almost two years, leading to famine, disease, and despair (2 Kings 25:3).
We forget how they destroyed the city of Jerusalem, razed the temple to the ground, killed many of its inhabitants, and forced the rest to migrate to Babylon. Over and over again, in the texts we refuse to read from the book of Ezekiel, the prophet offers imagery that testifies to the multiple traumas that the community faced under the realities of ancient Near Eastern warfare.”[ii]
The reality of death.
So often we focus on the death, don’t we, and not the realities that cause death.
Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman talks about Ezeikiel, and I would say, the Lazarus story too, as texts that do not accept the reality as the final outcome.
The death is what is real. But it is not all there is.
It’s a great message of hope for people of faith.
It’s a wonderful concept for people moving through loss.
But how helpful it is, I wonder, for people in the throes of grief.
If you have ever grieved the death of a loved one, have these sorts of stories been helpful to you? Stories of bodily resurrection?
And as I gazed on a photo of a woman bending down at a loved one’s graveside in Raleigh county,
with the ravaged hills behind her,
I struggle to think how can we tell her—that there ARE stories of hope.
but...
His bones won’t be gathered up.
Jesus won’t be coming to raise his body.
[pause]
But I don’t know if that is what Ezekiel is saying. I don’t even know if that is what the Lazarus story is conveying.
And here is where we have to understand the Bible as stories not just of historical truth, but emotional ones.
Maybe the hope in this story for today doesn’t rest in the gathering up of the that miner’s bones,
but the gathering up of the one who bends over him in grief.
Maybe the hope in this story is in giving the slow steady breath of the spirit to Patty and Gary Quarles, who mourn the death of their son.
And as Garber said about Ezekiel, we forget what led us to this.
We forget the history of coal companies in West Virginia.
We forget about the struggle miners have in demanding establishing safe working conditions.
We forget that the tragedies we deplore are sadly, are connected to the luxuries we believe we cannot live without.
On Tuesday, when the memorials were taking place for the miners,
when politicians were saying these men did not die in vain and that things must change,
I admit, I felt something other than sadness.
I felt exhaustion. I felt cynicism.
I felt a bit of what has been coined “compassion fatigue.”
It was as if, the tragedy of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster held my compassion captive for the day
and then Wednesday came and it was Japan that called for my compassion because there was another earthquake.
And then when I turn on the radio on Thursday it was federal employees like my friend Barbara who may lose their jobs because of the threat of government shutdown.
And on Friday was for the eleven school children in Brazil who were part of mass school shooting.
And Saturday, oh right. Libya. My goodness-Libya.
Some may say we should just stop feeling connected to the world.
Others may say, just turn off your radio.
And I don’t know what to say back. It just feels wrong to me to think that way and yet,
All these valleys and mountains and plains of dry bones
and we don’t even need a dream where the Lord takes us there.
Just go on the internet, turn on the tv, open the paper and have your choice.
And that’ doesn’t even include the places in my own immediate life that pull at my grief,
my loved ones I feel desperately for, fear for…
And then things stop shocking me.
The horror of death becomes a simple song, like Ezekiel and dem bones
Our compassion is dried up.
We see, but we can’t quite feel anymore because what does all that feeling really do, anyway?
How are we to be responsive and help God breathe in the spirit when we know of all the pain and death around us?
And it wasn’t just a solo act by God, was it?
God used Ezekiel. Martha was an integral part of the raising of her brother.
We are called to help give hope and life, breathing in the spirit.
And yet, when we can’t think of how to breathe,
or if we don’t have enough breath to breathe in all the places of pain and death in the world, which really, none of us does,
God works in spite of our fatigue and cynicism.
It’s not too big for life to find its way.
As Paul Bellan-Boyer says, “God’s work does not stop when human beings have done their worst.”[iii]
[pause]
When we are too dry to go on, God’s breath will come.
And I don’t know how.
I can’t dissect it, or lay out the logical and systematic way it will happen.
I can just feel it.
In my bones. In my dried up, clicky-clackity bones.
[following the sermon we enter into silence/Waiting Worship, while the old coal miner's song "Dark as a Dungeon, sung by Kathy Mattea, is played. These are the words...
Oh come all you young fellers so young and so fine
Seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine
It'll form as a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal
Where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine
Well it's many a man that I've seen in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine
Where it's dark as a dungeon ....
And pray when I'm dead and my ages shall roll
That my body would blacken and turn into coal
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home
and pity the miner digging my bones
Where it's dark as a dungeon...
--
“Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, A Year Later: Family Can’t Move On” Huffington Post
David Garber, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=4/10/2011
Paul Bellan-Boyer
John 11:1-45, Ezekiel 37:1-14
Lent 5
[on the worship center, 29 stones are lined up, marking the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion]
Gary Quarles kneels on his living room carpet and unrolls the 4-foot-long map that he's studied so many times,
trying to understand why his son died in the Upper Big Branch mine…
On the map he sees where his 33-year-old son Gary Wayne Quarles was working with crewmates Grover Skeens and Joel Price, and their supervisor, Rick Lane.
They are identified on paper as Victims 9-12.
And they're not where they were supposed to be.
They were, Gary Quarles believes, running for their lives, trying to escape after something went wrong near the end of their 10 1/2-hour shift.
Gary Wayne was [Gary, Sr’s] best friend and his only child, conceived when Gary's wife, Patty, was just 15.
"He made us grow up really fast, and he turned us into who we are," she says.
Patty, a homemaker, still keeps an immaculate house. But she's just going through the motions.
She rocks slightly in a recliner, dark hair still wet from a shower she didn't bother getting until midafternoon,
and describes her life now: "You go to bed and you get up and you go back to bed."
Gary nods. He recalls the day a relative told him to pull himself together, to get out and have a little fun.
"There's no fun to be done now," he says, eyes filling with tears.
"It's like the life been sucked right out of me." [i]
This week the valley of dried bones are laid aside the mountains of Montcoal, WV where 29 miners lost their lives in an explosion one year ago.
Since I was reflecting on Ezekiel’s story of dry bones this week,
I experienced a certain chill added to the sadness:
29 white crosses with miner’s helmets balanced a loft, their lights beaming through the darkness.
Straight white crosses. Bone-like.
I wanted to see them fashioning themselves, clacking together, somehow causing a resurrection.
And what’s clear is that, like any tragedy, any death,
it is not just the dead who have been affected.
It is a transformation for those who remain, who loved them, who bore them and raised them.
They have the hard duty of living in the midst of death.
People going through the motions, having the life sucked out of them by grief and absence.
Living in a Martha-like agony
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
These are the painful, raw, words of Martha.
Martha, who did something.
Who ran out to meet Jesus in the dark of night while her sister Mary stayed home. Martha, who earlier, Jesus seems to have chastised for doing too much,
while favoring Mary’s quiet stillness.
Now, she does just the right thing.
She leaves Mary at home, and in Martha’s grief, her anger—
perhaps a bit of the righteous anger we saw when Mary didn’t help her host Jesus, she runs to Jesus, puts him to the test, asks him where he was.
He doesn’t rebuke her this time.
This time, he says ‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die will live” and Lazarus lives.
Thank God for Martha. We don’t often hear that, do we?
In the field of dry bones, the LORD asks Ezekiel a question.
A simple one. Perhaps rhetorical.
“Mortal, can this bones live?”
And can’t you almost hear the exasperation in Ezekiel’s voice:
“O Lord God, you know.”
And then it comes. Dem bones scene.
Clickity-clack, it’s almost humorous as we think of the ankle bone connecting to the leg bones.
But it’s not humorous. It’s horrific.
And if we take it on its own, like we often do, without regarding the rest of Ezekiel’s story, we don’t quite get the significance of it all.
We may be tempted to see it as merely a metaphor, a lesson.
It can seem a-- nice prelude to the Easter story which is only two weeks away.
David Garber reflects on this tendency to cut the dry bones story out of the rest of Ezekiel’s story.
He says, “Because we so often do not read the rest of the book leading up to this grand scene, we have a myopic view of the prophet's own desperation and the plight of the community to which this story attempts to give hope. We forget that Ezekiel himself was taken into exile…. that he heard reports of his religious institution being corrupted and that his status had been reduced from a prominent position as a future priest in Jerusalem to that of a temple-less priest in exile.
We forget the death of his wife and God's command for him not to mourn her as an example for the exilic community not to mourn the loss of the Temple (24:16-24).”
“More importantly,” he continues, “we forget the historical trauma that accompanied this exile. We forget that the Babylonians tortured the inhabitants of Jerusalem with siege warfare that lasted almost two years, leading to famine, disease, and despair (2 Kings 25:3).
We forget how they destroyed the city of Jerusalem, razed the temple to the ground, killed many of its inhabitants, and forced the rest to migrate to Babylon. Over and over again, in the texts we refuse to read from the book of Ezekiel, the prophet offers imagery that testifies to the multiple traumas that the community faced under the realities of ancient Near Eastern warfare.”[ii]
The reality of death.
So often we focus on the death, don’t we, and not the realities that cause death.
Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman talks about Ezeikiel, and I would say, the Lazarus story too, as texts that do not accept the reality as the final outcome.
The death is what is real. But it is not all there is.
It’s a great message of hope for people of faith.
It’s a wonderful concept for people moving through loss.
But how helpful it is, I wonder, for people in the throes of grief.
If you have ever grieved the death of a loved one, have these sorts of stories been helpful to you? Stories of bodily resurrection?
And as I gazed on a photo of a woman bending down at a loved one’s graveside in Raleigh county,
with the ravaged hills behind her,
I struggle to think how can we tell her—that there ARE stories of hope.
but...
His bones won’t be gathered up.
Jesus won’t be coming to raise his body.
[pause]
But I don’t know if that is what Ezekiel is saying. I don’t even know if that is what the Lazarus story is conveying.
And here is where we have to understand the Bible as stories not just of historical truth, but emotional ones.
Maybe the hope in this story for today doesn’t rest in the gathering up of the that miner’s bones,
but the gathering up of the one who bends over him in grief.
Maybe the hope in this story is in giving the slow steady breath of the spirit to Patty and Gary Quarles, who mourn the death of their son.
And as Garber said about Ezekiel, we forget what led us to this.
We forget the history of coal companies in West Virginia.
We forget about the struggle miners have in demanding establishing safe working conditions.
We forget that the tragedies we deplore are sadly, are connected to the luxuries we believe we cannot live without.
On Tuesday, when the memorials were taking place for the miners,
when politicians were saying these men did not die in vain and that things must change,
I admit, I felt something other than sadness.
I felt exhaustion. I felt cynicism.
I felt a bit of what has been coined “compassion fatigue.”
It was as if, the tragedy of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster held my compassion captive for the day
and then Wednesday came and it was Japan that called for my compassion because there was another earthquake.
And then when I turn on the radio on Thursday it was federal employees like my friend Barbara who may lose their jobs because of the threat of government shutdown.
And on Friday was for the eleven school children in Brazil who were part of mass school shooting.
And Saturday, oh right. Libya. My goodness-Libya.
Some may say we should just stop feeling connected to the world.
Others may say, just turn off your radio.
And I don’t know what to say back. It just feels wrong to me to think that way and yet,
All these valleys and mountains and plains of dry bones
and we don’t even need a dream where the Lord takes us there.
Just go on the internet, turn on the tv, open the paper and have your choice.
And that’ doesn’t even include the places in my own immediate life that pull at my grief,
my loved ones I feel desperately for, fear for…
And then things stop shocking me.
The horror of death becomes a simple song, like Ezekiel and dem bones
Our compassion is dried up.
We see, but we can’t quite feel anymore because what does all that feeling really do, anyway?
How are we to be responsive and help God breathe in the spirit when we know of all the pain and death around us?
And it wasn’t just a solo act by God, was it?
God used Ezekiel. Martha was an integral part of the raising of her brother.
We are called to help give hope and life, breathing in the spirit.
And yet, when we can’t think of how to breathe,
or if we don’t have enough breath to breathe in all the places of pain and death in the world, which really, none of us does,
God works in spite of our fatigue and cynicism.
It’s not too big for life to find its way.
As Paul Bellan-Boyer says, “God’s work does not stop when human beings have done their worst.”[iii]
[pause]
When we are too dry to go on, God’s breath will come.
And I don’t know how.
I can’t dissect it, or lay out the logical and systematic way it will happen.
I can just feel it.
In my bones. In my dried up, clicky-clackity bones.
[following the sermon we enter into silence/Waiting Worship, while the old coal miner's song "Dark as a Dungeon, sung by Kathy Mattea, is played. These are the words...
Oh come all you young fellers so young and so fine
Seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine
It'll form as a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal
Where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine
Well it's many a man that I've seen in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine
Where it's dark as a dungeon ....
And pray when I'm dead and my ages shall roll
That my body would blacken and turn into coal
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home
and pity the miner digging my bones
Where it's dark as a dungeon...
--
“Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, A Year Later: Family Can’t Move On” Huffington Post
David Garber, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=4/10/2011
Paul Bellan-Boyer
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Blinded by the Light
sermon by Torin Eikler
John 9:1-41 Psalm 23
The image of Christ as a shepherd is one that we are all familiar with. Psalm 23 was probably the first scripture some of us memorized – not surprising since it has imagery that is so easy for children to grasp hold of. And the image of a flock of sheep following behind a trusty caretaker continues to provide us reassurance as we our ability to understand the complex metaphors grows along with us. That’s one of the reasons that the Psalm is often read at sick beds and funerals. There is an undeniable sense of peace and comfort that comes with hearing that the Good Shepherd walks with us even through the darkest times of our lives.
Can you imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have that reassurance? If you lived in a time and place where the common understanding was based on a scripture that claimed that the sins of the parents would be visited upon their children for seven generations? If your child was born blind and the blame for that fell on you? If you had lived in darkness for your whole life?
What would it mean for you to meet the Good Shepherd … the Light of the World? How would you respond to his touch on your life?
That’s the question faced by the characters in the story we just heard read. Jesus has performed an unquestionable miracle. Giving sight to someone blind from birth was much more profound than healing an illness in the worldview of the time – a much more challenging proclamation of otherworldly power. It was unheard of even among the greatest healers of Jewish tradition. In some ways, it was more threatening … or more inspiring than bringing the recently dead back to life.
As you might expect, the Pharisees were troubled by it, and I suppose that might be understandable. Not only did it threaten their authority to have a prophet of such power wondering around teaching and healing with neither their oversight nor their control, it challenged generations of teaching and theology about the nature of sin and punishment. It flew in the face of the doctrine that the priests had worked out from passages in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and the Mosaic traditions.
They believed that the righteous were blessed and the unrighteous cursed. “There was no death without sin and no suffering without iniquity” (a word that refers to lesser disobedience to the law as opposed to inadvertent “transgressions” or willful “sins”). In their understanding, every person’s suffering was an indication of the measure of their guilt in the eyes of God. In addition to the assumption that punishment could carry on down the generations, it was also thought that a child could sin while in the womb or possibly even in the pre-existent state while the soul waited for a body to fill. So, even those whose suffering began at the moment of birth were suspect.
Jesus healing of the blind man along with the words that accompanied it threw all those teachings into question and put them in a bind. (Delicious isn’t it, how Jesus seems to be able to tie our assumptions in knots at will). If Jesus was right and the man’s blindness was not the result of sins, then his healing miracle was not all that threatening but the doctrine they had believed and taught for hundreds of years was wrong, implying that their entire theological system was flawed. If, on the other hand, the doctrine was correct, then Jesus was a prophet of unparalleled power with authority, even, to forgive sin which would make them somewhat … redundant to say the least.
To give them credit where credit is due, the Pharisees do at least research the situation before coming to their decision. When they hear about the confusion that has been caused by Jesus, they call in the healed man and ask him what happened. He confirms the troubling gossip they have heard, and they call in the parents to be certain that this isn’t all just some chicanery cooked up by a passing snake oil salesman. Once their questions have been answered, they can no longer avoid their quandary. A decision must be made: embrace the new possibilities illuminated by the Light of the World or turn a blind eye to the power and promise.
The blind man, of course, faces a similar choice … at least once he has been given his sight. We might think that it was an easy decision for him, but I wonder about that. None of us have been in his position, but there are stories about people who are given sight or hearing through new medical procedures after a lifetime of living with only four senses. They usually experience quite a difficult struggle. Sometimes the light or sound can cause pain, and they always have a sense of disorientation as they work at assimilating the new input. Essentially they have to relearn just about everything as they come to terms with a new dimension of the world around them.
In addition to the physical changes, the blind man also had to deal with a shift in position and a change in relationships. He was no longer a “sinner,” no longer restricted to the margins of society. He was a fully functioning human being and, in theory, he was allowed and expected to take part in the daily life of all the other “normal” people in his city. In reality, though, he would have had quite a struggle to overcome the habits of a lifetime. His neighbors would not have forgotten the past in the instant it took for his life to change. They questioned if he was really who they thought he was, and I suspect that their ongoing wondering and suspicion would have been hard for him to make friends and build a new social support system. The same thing is true for recovering addicts and reformed outcasts today after all.
On top of all that, he would have had to find a new way to support himself. I can’t help remembering one scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” when I think about that struggle. So bear with me …
In that movie, the life of the title character, Brian, seems to be following along in the wake of Jesus for better or worse (usually worse), and upon entering the city gates one day he is approached by a jaunty man who calls out, “Alms … alms for an old ex-leper?” Brian responds, “Did you say ‘ex-leper’?”, and the conversation goes back and forth ….
Ex-Leper: That's right, sir, 16 years behind a veil and proud of it, sir.
Brian: Well, what happened?
Ex-leper: Oh, cured, sir…. bloody miracle, sir. Bless you!
Brian: Who cured you?
Ex-leper: Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business,
all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I'm a leper with
a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone…. Bloody do-gooder.
Brian: Well, why don't you go and tell him you want to be a leper
again?
Ex-leper: Uh, I could do that sir, yeah. Yeah, I could do that I suppose.
What I was thinking was I was going to ask him if he could make me a
bit lame in one leg during the middle of the week. You know,
something beggable, but not leprosy, which is a pain in the ass to
be blunt and excuse my French, sir.
The ex-blind man in our story was in a similar situation. He was no longer blind. He could no longer rely on the alms from passersby or support from the synagogue that had been his to expect under the law, and he probably had no marketable skills. That left him – and his parents – with one less source of income to cover their expenses.
With all of the painful struggles coming his way and the added weight of the disapproval and ill-will of the authorities, I would not be surprised if the healed man was less than completely happy – perhaps more than a little frustrated by the new life opening up before him. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case. He embraces fully the promise offered to him, and responds in faith with worship.
And so everything is wrapped up nice and neat with the paradox that the man who was blind sees the truth more clearly than those who have who have always had sight. Right?
But what about the other people in the story? What about the nameless witnesses – the neighbors and friends of the healed man? What about his parents?
We aren’t told anything about the general public other than their amazement at what they have seen. His parents are a different story. We would expect that they were happy for their son … and maybe relieved to have the burden of a blind dependent taken from their shoulders, though they may have understood the struggles lying ahead of their family better than the man himself. Yet their response seems to be more than a little ambivalent. They don’t throw a party to celebrate the miracle. They don’t go dancing in the streets. They don’t follow their son to find Jesus. They are not even willing to say more than a few words of confirmation about their son’s identity when they are asked by the Pharisees.
I wonder why? I wonder what held them back? Was it just concern about what the future would hold? Were they worried about angering the authorities or offending the community? Or was there something deeper at work? Was there some part of them that didn’t really want things to change, that was afraid of what it might mean to accept the truth illuminated by Jesus teachings and the power of his actions? Would they have been happier to live in the shadow of their son’s blindness and the family’s shame than to step into the light healing – of new life brought by some traveling prophet – new life threatening joy in the place of accustomed pain and offering new struggles to replace the old standbys?
A shepherd is not all powerful. He can lead the sheep to still waters and show them the way to green pastures. He can heal their hurts and protect them from danger. But only if they follow him … only if they stay near him … only if they listen and come when they hear him calling.
The Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, God’s Love Made flesh, can restore our souls. He can offer us the bread of life to feed and sustain us. He can lead us to the still waters of peace and lead us through the darkness to infinite joy in the light of God’s love.
Are we willing to follow him though doing so may take us beyond everything we know? Are we strong enough to open ourselves to his healing touch, molding and shaping us to his design even if it bring painful changes? Is our faith strong enough to answer his call and let him fill our spirits or will we turn away, blinded by the Light?
I wonder.
John 9:1-41 Psalm 23
The image of Christ as a shepherd is one that we are all familiar with. Psalm 23 was probably the first scripture some of us memorized – not surprising since it has imagery that is so easy for children to grasp hold of. And the image of a flock of sheep following behind a trusty caretaker continues to provide us reassurance as we our ability to understand the complex metaphors grows along with us. That’s one of the reasons that the Psalm is often read at sick beds and funerals. There is an undeniable sense of peace and comfort that comes with hearing that the Good Shepherd walks with us even through the darkest times of our lives.
Can you imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have that reassurance? If you lived in a time and place where the common understanding was based on a scripture that claimed that the sins of the parents would be visited upon their children for seven generations? If your child was born blind and the blame for that fell on you? If you had lived in darkness for your whole life?
What would it mean for you to meet the Good Shepherd … the Light of the World? How would you respond to his touch on your life?
That’s the question faced by the characters in the story we just heard read. Jesus has performed an unquestionable miracle. Giving sight to someone blind from birth was much more profound than healing an illness in the worldview of the time – a much more challenging proclamation of otherworldly power. It was unheard of even among the greatest healers of Jewish tradition. In some ways, it was more threatening … or more inspiring than bringing the recently dead back to life.
As you might expect, the Pharisees were troubled by it, and I suppose that might be understandable. Not only did it threaten their authority to have a prophet of such power wondering around teaching and healing with neither their oversight nor their control, it challenged generations of teaching and theology about the nature of sin and punishment. It flew in the face of the doctrine that the priests had worked out from passages in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and the Mosaic traditions.
They believed that the righteous were blessed and the unrighteous cursed. “There was no death without sin and no suffering without iniquity” (a word that refers to lesser disobedience to the law as opposed to inadvertent “transgressions” or willful “sins”). In their understanding, every person’s suffering was an indication of the measure of their guilt in the eyes of God. In addition to the assumption that punishment could carry on down the generations, it was also thought that a child could sin while in the womb or possibly even in the pre-existent state while the soul waited for a body to fill. So, even those whose suffering began at the moment of birth were suspect.
Jesus healing of the blind man along with the words that accompanied it threw all those teachings into question and put them in a bind. (Delicious isn’t it, how Jesus seems to be able to tie our assumptions in knots at will). If Jesus was right and the man’s blindness was not the result of sins, then his healing miracle was not all that threatening but the doctrine they had believed and taught for hundreds of years was wrong, implying that their entire theological system was flawed. If, on the other hand, the doctrine was correct, then Jesus was a prophet of unparalleled power with authority, even, to forgive sin which would make them somewhat … redundant to say the least.
To give them credit where credit is due, the Pharisees do at least research the situation before coming to their decision. When they hear about the confusion that has been caused by Jesus, they call in the healed man and ask him what happened. He confirms the troubling gossip they have heard, and they call in the parents to be certain that this isn’t all just some chicanery cooked up by a passing snake oil salesman. Once their questions have been answered, they can no longer avoid their quandary. A decision must be made: embrace the new possibilities illuminated by the Light of the World or turn a blind eye to the power and promise.
The blind man, of course, faces a similar choice … at least once he has been given his sight. We might think that it was an easy decision for him, but I wonder about that. None of us have been in his position, but there are stories about people who are given sight or hearing through new medical procedures after a lifetime of living with only four senses. They usually experience quite a difficult struggle. Sometimes the light or sound can cause pain, and they always have a sense of disorientation as they work at assimilating the new input. Essentially they have to relearn just about everything as they come to terms with a new dimension of the world around them.
In addition to the physical changes, the blind man also had to deal with a shift in position and a change in relationships. He was no longer a “sinner,” no longer restricted to the margins of society. He was a fully functioning human being and, in theory, he was allowed and expected to take part in the daily life of all the other “normal” people in his city. In reality, though, he would have had quite a struggle to overcome the habits of a lifetime. His neighbors would not have forgotten the past in the instant it took for his life to change. They questioned if he was really who they thought he was, and I suspect that their ongoing wondering and suspicion would have been hard for him to make friends and build a new social support system. The same thing is true for recovering addicts and reformed outcasts today after all.
On top of all that, he would have had to find a new way to support himself. I can’t help remembering one scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” when I think about that struggle. So bear with me …
In that movie, the life of the title character, Brian, seems to be following along in the wake of Jesus for better or worse (usually worse), and upon entering the city gates one day he is approached by a jaunty man who calls out, “Alms … alms for an old ex-leper?” Brian responds, “Did you say ‘ex-leper’?”, and the conversation goes back and forth ….
Ex-Leper: That's right, sir, 16 years behind a veil and proud of it, sir.
Brian: Well, what happened?
Ex-leper: Oh, cured, sir…. bloody miracle, sir. Bless you!
Brian: Who cured you?
Ex-leper: Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business,
all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I'm a leper with
a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone…. Bloody do-gooder.
Brian: Well, why don't you go and tell him you want to be a leper
again?
Ex-leper: Uh, I could do that sir, yeah. Yeah, I could do that I suppose.
What I was thinking was I was going to ask him if he could make me a
bit lame in one leg during the middle of the week. You know,
something beggable, but not leprosy, which is a pain in the ass to
be blunt and excuse my French, sir.
The ex-blind man in our story was in a similar situation. He was no longer blind. He could no longer rely on the alms from passersby or support from the synagogue that had been his to expect under the law, and he probably had no marketable skills. That left him – and his parents – with one less source of income to cover their expenses.
With all of the painful struggles coming his way and the added weight of the disapproval and ill-will of the authorities, I would not be surprised if the healed man was less than completely happy – perhaps more than a little frustrated by the new life opening up before him. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case. He embraces fully the promise offered to him, and responds in faith with worship.
And so everything is wrapped up nice and neat with the paradox that the man who was blind sees the truth more clearly than those who have who have always had sight. Right?
But what about the other people in the story? What about the nameless witnesses – the neighbors and friends of the healed man? What about his parents?
We aren’t told anything about the general public other than their amazement at what they have seen. His parents are a different story. We would expect that they were happy for their son … and maybe relieved to have the burden of a blind dependent taken from their shoulders, though they may have understood the struggles lying ahead of their family better than the man himself. Yet their response seems to be more than a little ambivalent. They don’t throw a party to celebrate the miracle. They don’t go dancing in the streets. They don’t follow their son to find Jesus. They are not even willing to say more than a few words of confirmation about their son’s identity when they are asked by the Pharisees.
I wonder why? I wonder what held them back? Was it just concern about what the future would hold? Were they worried about angering the authorities or offending the community? Or was there something deeper at work? Was there some part of them that didn’t really want things to change, that was afraid of what it might mean to accept the truth illuminated by Jesus teachings and the power of his actions? Would they have been happier to live in the shadow of their son’s blindness and the family’s shame than to step into the light healing – of new life brought by some traveling prophet – new life threatening joy in the place of accustomed pain and offering new struggles to replace the old standbys?
A shepherd is not all powerful. He can lead the sheep to still waters and show them the way to green pastures. He can heal their hurts and protect them from danger. But only if they follow him … only if they stay near him … only if they listen and come when they hear him calling.
The Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, God’s Love Made flesh, can restore our souls. He can offer us the bread of life to feed and sustain us. He can lead us to the still waters of peace and lead us through the darkness to infinite joy in the light of God’s love.
Are we willing to follow him though doing so may take us beyond everything we know? Are we strong enough to open ourselves to his healing touch, molding and shaping us to his design even if it bring painful changes? Is our faith strong enough to answer his call and let him fill our spirits or will we turn away, blinded by the Light?
I wonder.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Borne by the Spirit
sermon by Torin Eikler
John 3:1-17 Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
I have been thinking about Nicodemus a lot this week. He appears in the gospels three times. First, he comes as a Pharisee under cover of night to ask a question of Jesus. Later he speaks as an advocate for Jesus before the ruling council of the Sanhedrin who wants to condemn him without a trial. And finally, he stands with Joseph of Arimathea preparing Jesus body for burial. That’s quite a journey for anyone to make – moving from a member of the council whose authority Jesus was challenging to an intimately involved follower of Christ.
But, we are at the beginning of the journey, and I have been wondering what possessed Nicodemus to go to Jesus in the first place. I imagine him sitting with other members of the Sanhedrin in the council chambers and talking about Jesus and the new movement he seems to be starting. Back and forth they go, discussing what they’ve heard of his teaching, tossing around traditional teachings and bits of scripture about prophets, and wondering about the sign and miracles that are taking place. It seems that a lot of those present came down on the side of treating him as a false prophet since Nicodemus went to see him secretly. He, at least, was left with some nagging questions, and unfortunately … or maybe fortunately, he never got to ask them. Instead, he was given new teachings and a new question to dwell on: “What does it mean to be born anew?”
Last October found me having a similar discussion in Waynesburg. Four of us got together there for a Theology Talk on the topic of Pneumatology – theology involving the Holy Spirit, and I posed the question of how what it means to have “a personal relationship with Jesus.” The question stems from what just might be a pedantic observation on my part that I won’t bore you with this morning, but it did lead us onto very interesting ground. I learned a lot about more charismatic branches of the Christian family tree in that hour and a half and about the short-hand catch phrases that are used in those circles.
Some of those phrases – like having “a personal relationship with Jesus” - were familiar to me. Others I had heard of but really didn’t understand, and even this soon after our discussion, I can’t remember them let alone tell you what they meant. But, as we four great and learn-éd theologians sat around the table, tossing around scripture, experience, and French fries, one question came up again and again in my mind … the same question Nicodemus had: “What does it mean to be born again?”
I have my own answer to that question, but every time I bring up the phrase with someone else, I find that their answer is different from mine. I fully expect that if I sat down with each of you and we got deeper into the catch phrases that inevitably come first, we would find what … ___ different takes on what it means to be born again.
That’s more than a little strange to me. Even though we have similar cultural background and we all read the same scriptures, we don’t have a common understanding about this idea that has come to be central to Christianity in the United States. There are a couple of common assumptions, I think. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior – there’s another one of those catch phrases - is one. Another one, at least in the world of believer’s baptism traditions, is getting baptized. But there must be more to it than just that.
One of the friends I made during my time in South Carolina was a Southern Baptist Pastor. Some time ago, I was talking with him about the altar call that was such a part of his tradition and not at all a part of my experience, and he told me that it was actually a frustrating thing for him.
“It is definitely important,” he said. “It’s important to offer a time for people who have felt moved to express their desire to come to Jesus publically and with a supportive group of people. But there are so many times when people start coming to church in Southern Baptist church, and they attend for a couple of months. Then, they come up to the altar call and get baptized a couple of months later, and we don’t ever see them again. They may say that they are born again, but I just don’t see it.”
That frustration struck a chord with me. One of my biggest problems with the whole “born again” culture is that it so often seems to be superficial. It seems to focus on what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace – “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.” Much of that frustration undoubtedly comes from being raised in Anabaptist circles where the truth of your confession of faith is traditionally judged by the manner of your living. But even when I talk with people who do not partake of Anabaptist heritage, there is the sense that being born again goes deeper than baptism or a statement of faith … or at least it should. Even the image of birth implies deeper change … transformative change … change on a level with coming suddenly into a whole new world and a wholly different way of being.
(pause)
That’s a hard thing to come to grips with. We do feel a little different – at least I hope we do, but in many ways, we don’t. It doesn’t feel like we’ve passed into a whole new world, that we’ve found a whole new way of being. Is it realistic or even possible to be so completely reborn?
Nicodemus struggled with some of the same questions; though to be fair, he had a little more confusion to deal with. The phrase that Jesus gave him was “no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born anōthen” which has more than one possible meaning. It can mean born again or born anew, but it can also mean born from above. I imagine him hearing that and thinking what on earth….
And, of course, Jesus responded with … you’re not getting it. It’s not about earth at all. It’s all about the Spirit. Those who believe … those who get it … are no longer entirely of this world. Their faith has transformed – made them more human through the touch of God’s immense love. They are borne on the winds of the Spirit, moving here and there as God directs them. And to everyone else, they seem aimless and rootless.
There is an image from the film “American Beauty” that has wafted its way into my brain. It’s actually from a movie made by one of the characters in the film who makes a habit of watching the world through the lens of his camcorder.
One day his imagination was caught by a plastic bag. The bag had been blown into a corner and was caught up in the eddies made there by the wind. For minutes, it floated up and down, spun around by the currents of air – a common piece of trash transformed into poetry in motion by the breath of the breeze that gave it life.
Are we like that? Are we in the world but not entirely of it? We are all born from the waters of humanity. Have we yet felt the transforming touch of God’s love? Has our faith made us poetry moving at the touch of the Spirit?
Most of us, I think, have experienced that some time in the course of our lives. I invite you now to turn to a brother or sister near you and share one of those experiences, ... one of the times you have become more than yourself, … one of the time when you have been borne by the Spirit. I will gather us back after a time for our sending hymn.
John 3:1-17 Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
I have been thinking about Nicodemus a lot this week. He appears in the gospels three times. First, he comes as a Pharisee under cover of night to ask a question of Jesus. Later he speaks as an advocate for Jesus before the ruling council of the Sanhedrin who wants to condemn him without a trial. And finally, he stands with Joseph of Arimathea preparing Jesus body for burial. That’s quite a journey for anyone to make – moving from a member of the council whose authority Jesus was challenging to an intimately involved follower of Christ.
But, we are at the beginning of the journey, and I have been wondering what possessed Nicodemus to go to Jesus in the first place. I imagine him sitting with other members of the Sanhedrin in the council chambers and talking about Jesus and the new movement he seems to be starting. Back and forth they go, discussing what they’ve heard of his teaching, tossing around traditional teachings and bits of scripture about prophets, and wondering about the sign and miracles that are taking place. It seems that a lot of those present came down on the side of treating him as a false prophet since Nicodemus went to see him secretly. He, at least, was left with some nagging questions, and unfortunately … or maybe fortunately, he never got to ask them. Instead, he was given new teachings and a new question to dwell on: “What does it mean to be born anew?”
Last October found me having a similar discussion in Waynesburg. Four of us got together there for a Theology Talk on the topic of Pneumatology – theology involving the Holy Spirit, and I posed the question of how what it means to have “a personal relationship with Jesus.” The question stems from what just might be a pedantic observation on my part that I won’t bore you with this morning, but it did lead us onto very interesting ground. I learned a lot about more charismatic branches of the Christian family tree in that hour and a half and about the short-hand catch phrases that are used in those circles.
Some of those phrases – like having “a personal relationship with Jesus” - were familiar to me. Others I had heard of but really didn’t understand, and even this soon after our discussion, I can’t remember them let alone tell you what they meant. But, as we four great and learn-éd theologians sat around the table, tossing around scripture, experience, and French fries, one question came up again and again in my mind … the same question Nicodemus had: “What does it mean to be born again?”
I have my own answer to that question, but every time I bring up the phrase with someone else, I find that their answer is different from mine. I fully expect that if I sat down with each of you and we got deeper into the catch phrases that inevitably come first, we would find what … ___ different takes on what it means to be born again.
That’s more than a little strange to me. Even though we have similar cultural background and we all read the same scriptures, we don’t have a common understanding about this idea that has come to be central to Christianity in the United States. There are a couple of common assumptions, I think. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior – there’s another one of those catch phrases - is one. Another one, at least in the world of believer’s baptism traditions, is getting baptized. But there must be more to it than just that.
One of the friends I made during my time in South Carolina was a Southern Baptist Pastor. Some time ago, I was talking with him about the altar call that was such a part of his tradition and not at all a part of my experience, and he told me that it was actually a frustrating thing for him.
“It is definitely important,” he said. “It’s important to offer a time for people who have felt moved to express their desire to come to Jesus publically and with a supportive group of people. But there are so many times when people start coming to church in Southern Baptist church, and they attend for a couple of months. Then, they come up to the altar call and get baptized a couple of months later, and we don’t ever see them again. They may say that they are born again, but I just don’t see it.”
That frustration struck a chord with me. One of my biggest problems with the whole “born again” culture is that it so often seems to be superficial. It seems to focus on what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace – “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.” Much of that frustration undoubtedly comes from being raised in Anabaptist circles where the truth of your confession of faith is traditionally judged by the manner of your living. But even when I talk with people who do not partake of Anabaptist heritage, there is the sense that being born again goes deeper than baptism or a statement of faith … or at least it should. Even the image of birth implies deeper change … transformative change … change on a level with coming suddenly into a whole new world and a wholly different way of being.
(pause)
That’s a hard thing to come to grips with. We do feel a little different – at least I hope we do, but in many ways, we don’t. It doesn’t feel like we’ve passed into a whole new world, that we’ve found a whole new way of being. Is it realistic or even possible to be so completely reborn?
Nicodemus struggled with some of the same questions; though to be fair, he had a little more confusion to deal with. The phrase that Jesus gave him was “no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born anōthen” which has more than one possible meaning. It can mean born again or born anew, but it can also mean born from above. I imagine him hearing that and thinking what on earth….
And, of course, Jesus responded with … you’re not getting it. It’s not about earth at all. It’s all about the Spirit. Those who believe … those who get it … are no longer entirely of this world. Their faith has transformed – made them more human through the touch of God’s immense love. They are borne on the winds of the Spirit, moving here and there as God directs them. And to everyone else, they seem aimless and rootless.
There is an image from the film “American Beauty” that has wafted its way into my brain. It’s actually from a movie made by one of the characters in the film who makes a habit of watching the world through the lens of his camcorder.
One day his imagination was caught by a plastic bag. The bag had been blown into a corner and was caught up in the eddies made there by the wind. For minutes, it floated up and down, spun around by the currents of air – a common piece of trash transformed into poetry in motion by the breath of the breeze that gave it life.
Are we like that? Are we in the world but not entirely of it? We are all born from the waters of humanity. Have we yet felt the transforming touch of God’s love? Has our faith made us poetry moving at the touch of the Spirit?
Most of us, I think, have experienced that some time in the course of our lives. I invite you now to turn to a brother or sister near you and share one of those experiences, ... one of the times you have become more than yourself, … one of the time when you have been borne by the Spirit. I will gather us back after a time for our sending hymn.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Shaped by Pain
sermon by Carrie Eikler
Genesis 2:15-17, Psalm 32
March 13, 2011 (Lent 1)
One thing I like about this story, about this first fling in the garden, is the fact that it doesn’t hide anything from us. We get it.
We don’t quite understand God making a whole world, and calling it good. We can understand making a delicious apple pie and calling it good…but a world? That’s a little beyond our grasp.
So when Adam and Eve take a bite of that fruit…yeah. We get it. That yearning. That seductive temptation. And like the ice cream to top off that apple pie, one of the first human emotions in the bible is scooped out for us. Shame. Shame which comes from guilt which leads to embarrassment-- melting into the crevices of our lives. The author of Genesis doesn’t even have to label it as such, just paint us a picture of two nearly naked humans hiding from God because of what they did, and…we know. In fact, just mention the word naked, and it’s enough to make us flush a bit with embarrassment.
So of course, it’s a logical story to start Lent. Lent is the season of penance, of self-reflection, of shining a light in our dark corners and seeing what needs to be swept clean. For all the negative associations around Lent, it can actually be fairly joyful, welcomed. That is, if you just see it as a season.
When the darkness and the confrontation with our demons are confined to Lent. After all, it’s only 40 days.
I wish that was the case for everyone.
But it’s not. For some-- for many-- the struggle with demons is not confined to a season. It is an ongoing reality. A constant struggle with shame. Pain, anxiety, self-loathing, confusion.
For some, the garden is not just a story about shame. It embodies the nakedness, and vulnerability that comes when we feel we’ve been placed beyond God’s reach: by events in our lives, by illness, by pain. So I’m tempted to tread into Lent lightly because for some, it is not a mere 40 days from the shame of the Garden to the Alleluias of Easter. For some it is a daily companion of spiritual and emotional nakedness.
Clinical depression will affect one in ten Americans in their lifetime. And more dramatically, one in four women will suffer from it. That means someone in this sanctuary has probably battled with it. That means one of us, likely more than one, currently lives with depression everyday. And if it’s not you, then you likely have loved, and been loved by, someone with depression. It might be the one sitting next to you, a few rows back from you, the one holding your hand right now.
Depression is not something we talk about openly in church. And I’m not surprised because the Christian church hasn’t been helpful when it comes to the topic. The great church father Augustine, labeled the characteristics of depression as a disease of the soul, and as a mark of God’s disfavor. And while such a theology hasn’t persisted in our contemporary world, the stigma we have against depression is alive and well. So many suffer…in silence.
Which is bizarre, if you look at scripture. Can we gloss over the pain of Job? Can we discount the deep laments of the psalmist? And today’s scripture is a perfect example: while I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Now I am hesitant to transfer present-day medical or psychological labels on people of other times and cultures, but what comes to me as I read this is a deep sense of despair. The psalmist even talks about being in a pit of despair. It’s not “shame,” – it’s a desire for fullness,while not knowing why the body wastes away. A physical feeling of heaviness, an oppression of the spirit. The reality of suffering…in silence. While I kept silence, my body wasted away.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess that I don’t believe I have walked that lonesome road of depression, of clinical depression. I have walked with others who experienced it. I have felt ill-equipped and confused, not knowing what to do. So I won’t pretend I can speak about the experience of depression from within.
Recently I heard an interview of three well-known authors who live with depression.
Andrew Solomon is the author of the book Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet, And Parker Palmer, is a Quaker author and educator.
And while I haven’t lived with depression I found their thoughts illuminating to the ways depression affects the soul. And if you think you don’t need to hear what it’s like because it’s not something you struggle with, then perhaps that is exactly why you need to hear it. Remember” One in ten people. One in four women. In some way it does affect you because it will affect someone who needs your love and support.
Andrew Solomon describes his experience with depression. He says “It’s an experience…of finding the most ordinary parts of life incredibly difficult: finding it difficult to eat, finding it difficult to get out of bed, finding it difficult and painful to go outside, being afraid all the time and being overwhelmed all the time. These are the essential qualities of [depression]. It isn’t, I think, primarily an experience of sadness, but experiencing [the opposite of human vitality].
Anita Barrows echoes this: “Suddenly, in depression you are ripped from what felt like your life, from what felt right and familiar and ordinary and ordered, and you’re just thrown into this place where you’re ravaged, where the wind rips the leaves from the tress, …your soul in depression.”
When we were in seminary, Parker Palmer came to campus to speak . Palmer is considered a Quaker “guru,” and being at a Quaker seminary, you could just imagine the energy humming in anticipation of his visit. Being the spiritual giant that many see him to be, I was surprised to discover he, too, has struggled with depression. And because he was so revered-- he was someone who “shouldn’t be depressed”-- he felt ashamed.
He said “On one level you think ‘this is the least spiritual thing I’ve ever done.’ And the soul is absent, God is absent, faith is absent. All of the faculties that I depended on before I went into depression were now utterly useless….people would say, “Gosh Parker why are you sitting in here being depressed …you’re so successful and you’ve written so well, you’ve helped so many people’ and that would leave me feeling more depressed because I would think, ‘I’ve just defrauded another person. [ If] they really knew what a schmuck I was, [they] would cast me into the darkness where I already am.”
The opposite of human vitality. Ripped from what felt like your life. Cast into the darkness. Maybe more than shame, this is the fear that’s taking place in the garden.
Now take a moment. Still yourself. What is your experience with depression? Have you ever glimpsed into that pit of despair? How have you felt it in your body…your soul? How have you witnessed it affecting those around you? Those you love? (hold silence)
When I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then…then I acknowledge my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave [me].
Then… thank God for that “then.” That turning point, The place where it all shifts . Whether it is
then I confess my sin, or
then…I allowed someone to enter my pain or
then…I let go of pride and made my demons known to God.
Then… somehow, I stepped out of hiding to meet God in my nakedness—or maybe I didn’t even step out, but then God stepped into my silence.
It’s not just about sin and forgiveness, but about despair and redemption.
Then…“In a sense” says Andrew Solomon, “after you’ve been through a depression, it gives you a different relationship with the world.”
Then… ““I think depression sort of works on it the way you could work a piece of clay, so that it softens and it becomes more malleable” reflects Anita Barrows. It becomes wider. It becomes able to take in more. But that’s only afterward. In the fire, what you get is the fire.”
Then… Parker Palmer’s therapist offers him a thought, saying “Parker, you seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?”
That is why we should talk about depression. Here. In the church. Where I pray we have cultivated a ground on which it is safe to stand. Because it is one of the things that makes us more human.
In our pain, unwelcomed or not, understood or not, we become more human.
And that is the humanity that God has, and continues to, step into.
---
Benediction – Rainer Maria Rilke
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
You have seen it growing
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power when you plucked the fruit,
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again are a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
and onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under the sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Genesis 2:15-17, Psalm 32
March 13, 2011 (Lent 1)
One thing I like about this story, about this first fling in the garden, is the fact that it doesn’t hide anything from us. We get it.
We don’t quite understand God making a whole world, and calling it good. We can understand making a delicious apple pie and calling it good…but a world? That’s a little beyond our grasp.
So when Adam and Eve take a bite of that fruit…yeah. We get it. That yearning. That seductive temptation. And like the ice cream to top off that apple pie, one of the first human emotions in the bible is scooped out for us. Shame. Shame which comes from guilt which leads to embarrassment-- melting into the crevices of our lives. The author of Genesis doesn’t even have to label it as such, just paint us a picture of two nearly naked humans hiding from God because of what they did, and…we know. In fact, just mention the word naked, and it’s enough to make us flush a bit with embarrassment.
So of course, it’s a logical story to start Lent. Lent is the season of penance, of self-reflection, of shining a light in our dark corners and seeing what needs to be swept clean. For all the negative associations around Lent, it can actually be fairly joyful, welcomed. That is, if you just see it as a season.
When the darkness and the confrontation with our demons are confined to Lent. After all, it’s only 40 days.
I wish that was the case for everyone.
But it’s not. For some-- for many-- the struggle with demons is not confined to a season. It is an ongoing reality. A constant struggle with shame. Pain, anxiety, self-loathing, confusion.
For some, the garden is not just a story about shame. It embodies the nakedness, and vulnerability that comes when we feel we’ve been placed beyond God’s reach: by events in our lives, by illness, by pain. So I’m tempted to tread into Lent lightly because for some, it is not a mere 40 days from the shame of the Garden to the Alleluias of Easter. For some it is a daily companion of spiritual and emotional nakedness.
Clinical depression will affect one in ten Americans in their lifetime. And more dramatically, one in four women will suffer from it. That means someone in this sanctuary has probably battled with it. That means one of us, likely more than one, currently lives with depression everyday. And if it’s not you, then you likely have loved, and been loved by, someone with depression. It might be the one sitting next to you, a few rows back from you, the one holding your hand right now.
Depression is not something we talk about openly in church. And I’m not surprised because the Christian church hasn’t been helpful when it comes to the topic. The great church father Augustine, labeled the characteristics of depression as a disease of the soul, and as a mark of God’s disfavor. And while such a theology hasn’t persisted in our contemporary world, the stigma we have against depression is alive and well. So many suffer…in silence.
Which is bizarre, if you look at scripture. Can we gloss over the pain of Job? Can we discount the deep laments of the psalmist? And today’s scripture is a perfect example: while I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Now I am hesitant to transfer present-day medical or psychological labels on people of other times and cultures, but what comes to me as I read this is a deep sense of despair. The psalmist even talks about being in a pit of despair. It’s not “shame,” – it’s a desire for fullness,while not knowing why the body wastes away. A physical feeling of heaviness, an oppression of the spirit. The reality of suffering…in silence. While I kept silence, my body wasted away.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess that I don’t believe I have walked that lonesome road of depression, of clinical depression. I have walked with others who experienced it. I have felt ill-equipped and confused, not knowing what to do. So I won’t pretend I can speak about the experience of depression from within.
Recently I heard an interview of three well-known authors who live with depression.
Andrew Solomon is the author of the book Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet, And Parker Palmer, is a Quaker author and educator.
And while I haven’t lived with depression I found their thoughts illuminating to the ways depression affects the soul. And if you think you don’t need to hear what it’s like because it’s not something you struggle with, then perhaps that is exactly why you need to hear it. Remember” One in ten people. One in four women. In some way it does affect you because it will affect someone who needs your love and support.
Andrew Solomon describes his experience with depression. He says “It’s an experience…of finding the most ordinary parts of life incredibly difficult: finding it difficult to eat, finding it difficult to get out of bed, finding it difficult and painful to go outside, being afraid all the time and being overwhelmed all the time. These are the essential qualities of [depression]. It isn’t, I think, primarily an experience of sadness, but experiencing [the opposite of human vitality].
Anita Barrows echoes this: “Suddenly, in depression you are ripped from what felt like your life, from what felt right and familiar and ordinary and ordered, and you’re just thrown into this place where you’re ravaged, where the wind rips the leaves from the tress, …your soul in depression.”
When we were in seminary, Parker Palmer came to campus to speak . Palmer is considered a Quaker “guru,” and being at a Quaker seminary, you could just imagine the energy humming in anticipation of his visit. Being the spiritual giant that many see him to be, I was surprised to discover he, too, has struggled with depression. And because he was so revered-- he was someone who “shouldn’t be depressed”-- he felt ashamed.
He said “On one level you think ‘this is the least spiritual thing I’ve ever done.’ And the soul is absent, God is absent, faith is absent. All of the faculties that I depended on before I went into depression were now utterly useless….people would say, “Gosh Parker why are you sitting in here being depressed …you’re so successful and you’ve written so well, you’ve helped so many people’ and that would leave me feeling more depressed because I would think, ‘I’ve just defrauded another person. [ If] they really knew what a schmuck I was, [they] would cast me into the darkness where I already am.”
The opposite of human vitality. Ripped from what felt like your life. Cast into the darkness. Maybe more than shame, this is the fear that’s taking place in the garden.
Now take a moment. Still yourself. What is your experience with depression? Have you ever glimpsed into that pit of despair? How have you felt it in your body…your soul? How have you witnessed it affecting those around you? Those you love? (hold silence)
When I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then…then I acknowledge my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave [me].
Then… thank God for that “then.” That turning point, The place where it all shifts . Whether it is
then I confess my sin, or
then…I allowed someone to enter my pain or
then…I let go of pride and made my demons known to God.
Then… somehow, I stepped out of hiding to meet God in my nakedness—or maybe I didn’t even step out, but then God stepped into my silence.
It’s not just about sin and forgiveness, but about despair and redemption.
Then…“In a sense” says Andrew Solomon, “after you’ve been through a depression, it gives you a different relationship with the world.”
Then… ““I think depression sort of works on it the way you could work a piece of clay, so that it softens and it becomes more malleable” reflects Anita Barrows. It becomes wider. It becomes able to take in more. But that’s only afterward. In the fire, what you get is the fire.”
Then… Parker Palmer’s therapist offers him a thought, saying “Parker, you seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?”
That is why we should talk about depression. Here. In the church. Where I pray we have cultivated a ground on which it is safe to stand. Because it is one of the things that makes us more human.
In our pain, unwelcomed or not, understood or not, we become more human.
And that is the humanity that God has, and continues to, step into.
---
Benediction – Rainer Maria Rilke
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
You have seen it growing
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power when you plucked the fruit,
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again are a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
and onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under the sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Meeting God
sermon by Torin Eikler
Matthew 17:1-9 2 Peter 1:16-21
In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking a lot about our church. Who are we? What is our vision? What do we do well? What should we be doing differently? How can we bring more people in?
We are a wonderful community of faith by any measure. We have meaningful worship experiences together. We are open and welcoming of a large variety of different people. We have an extraordinary music program for a church our size. We have a good program for Sunday School, and an energetic and endearing group of children who are involved in church life in meaningful ways. So … why aren’t we bigger?
And then Cindy read an excerpt from “Meant to be Missional,” an article in Bethany Seminary’s periodical at the start of our Leadership Team meeting, and it caught me up short. It reminded me of something that I used to know, that I thought I knew so deeply that I wouldn’t forget it: the life of faith is not about us. At least it’s not just about us. It’s really about God … and our relationship with God.
That’s easy to lose sight of. Our families, our friends, our jobs, our good works take just about all the time and energy we can manage to throw at them and beg for more – sometimes literally. They fill our minds with thoughts of schedules and worries about the future and questions about what’s next and how we will get there and what we need to do. We don’t look for God in the midst of all that. We don’t expect God to be there. And so we don’t notice God even though she’s right there in front of us… every day. Perhaps there are better questions to ask, questions that would help us find God. Who does God want us to be? What is God already doing around us? What will it take for us to see it and join in?
There are many answers to those questions: simple ones, complex ones, vague ones, so many different ones that they can be overwhelming. What we need in the end, what we want when we are at our strongest is a transfiguration of our own. To be there on the mountain top and see Jesus talking with Moses and Isaiah, glowing brighter and brighter until we bow our heads for the pain of looking. To feel the power of the experience change us in ways that we can only begin to understand.
For some people, those kinds of experiences seem to be common, but I have only ever had one … and it wasn’t on a mountain top. It was in a wet front yard on the side of National Road 40. I was walking out under the cloud wracked sky, doing a little head-clearing leg work as a break from working on a sermon for class. And, as I watched the clouds moving across the sky, I saw the sun send a beam of light shining on the grass a little ways away. I stopped and stared as the spotlight moved quickly across the ground and then disappeared, and I was caught up in the wonder of creation for a moment or a minute or five.
I don’t remember how long it was, but it was long enough to find myself on my knees when it was over. I got to my feet, brushing distractedly at the mud on my pants, and as I looked around to see if anyone had been watching (embarrassment is a powerful force); I noticed something on a nearby tree. It was a triangle made by three cicada shells which was surprising since it wasn’t really the season for them to be out in force. I picked up the shells and carried them carefully back our apartment, looked at them for a little while, and wondered (as seminarians will) if they were symbolic of something greater – a sign, maybe, or the “calling card” of a triune God.
It was not an epiphany. I didn’t hear voices. I didn’t feel any sense of guidance or clarity of thought. In fact, I ended up slapping that sermon together late at night because of all the time I spent looking for some esoteric meaning. When I talked about it with a couple of my closest friends, one of them shrugged and said, “I guess you just got to meet God.” I liked that phrase so much that I think of the whole thing as “The Day I Met God.” (hmm …. sounds like a good title for a movie or at least a book!)
I still don’t know what that moment was about, and I’m pretty sure I’m in good company there. I suspect there are others here who have had powerful experiences that left them wondering. Peter, James, and John didn’t seem to understand what was going on on their mountain top either. In Mark’s version of events, Peter doesn’t even know what to say when he sees Moses and Elijah standing with Jesus. Matthew is a little gentler, but it’s still pretty clear that Peter didn’t get it. He offered to build shelters for the glowing visitors who certainly wouldn’t need them. Even after the voice of God had spoken to them, they still didn’t understand. If anything they were more confused, and in the verses that follow the reading they peppered Jesus with questions.
In response to their confusion, Jesus tells them to hold onto the memory … to hold on and not to tell anyone (even the other disciples) about it until later. I’ve often wondered about that. It seems strange that he didn’t encourage them to talk it out amongst themselves or sit them down and explain like he did on so many other occasions.
We don’t know what his reasons were, but the opening to Peter’s second letter shows how he understood his words years later. Signs and wonders, he says, are not to be understood. They are indications of the mysterious presence of God. They can’t really be interpreted through the use of our own intellect and reasoning.
That kind of thing is difficult for me to come to terms with, usually. I’ll admit that I live much more in my head than in my heart or my spirit. Maybe that’s why I don’t often have ecstatic experiences that knock me to my knees. I’m sure that’s why I have wrestled so much with the one that I have had. But, you know, as time has gone by, I find that I am less worried about trying to figure out some particular message in it and more grateful for the way it has shown me that experiences with the divine really do happen, that we really can meet God.
In three days, the season of Lent will begin. It is a season for reflection in preparation for the coming of Easter. It is a time to clear out our lives a little so that we can spend some quality time examining the state of our relationship with God in the face of the suffering that Love will undergo on our behalves.
Usually, I have no problem doing that. I love the slow, considered pace of Lenten reflections. I love have the season uncluttered by frantic preparations. But I sense that it will be more difficult this time around. Lent is coming late and Spring is coming early. Gardens need to prepared, children need to be played with, meetings need to be planned. Busy-ness has already begun to take the place of quiet in the early dark of winter evenings. How am I going to be able to meditate? When will I find time for self-examination? Where is there space for quiet waiting with God? It makes my shoulders bunch up with tension and resentfulness just thinking about it!
Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions again – making it all about me and what I can do all by myself. If I learned anything from that day in Richmond, it was that it doesn’t take specially prepared spaces or quiet times to find God. God comes to us even in everyday moments and mundane places. Maybe I … maybe we just need to ask different questions. Questions that awaken us to the Shining Presence and the Misty Voice when they enter our lives. Questions that open us up to God’s touch. Where is God touching us? Where is God touching the world around us? What is God trying to say to us … to show us in those moments … through those signs? If we ask those questions and pay attention to the answers, we may find God crossing our path in the yard or on the street or over dinner with our families and friends.
For the next seven weeks, pay attention to the times when God crosses your path. You might find understanding or inspiration there before you. You might not. You might only find more questions, but when you open yourself to the presence of God, when you let it touch you, you will find yourself changed … transformed … transfigured in ways that you may never fully understand. And that’s okay. That’s how God works in us. That’s how God guides us toward what we are meant to be … as long as we are willing to open ourselves to that vision.
Are we? Are we prepared? Are we ready to meet God on the mountain or along the road or where ever God comes to us?
Are you?
[Waiting worship]
Confession/Reconciliation:
Would you please stand and join me in the words of confession and the sending hymn….
Our holy and present God, we recognize your power to transform our lives. We confess that we have not always listened to you as closely as we should. We have not always acknowledged your presence. We have not always followed your lead.
(Silence)
God, we know that your grace and mercy extends to us. May your grace cause us to listen more closely, and may your mercy guide us into your ways. AMEN.
Matthew 17:1-9 2 Peter 1:16-21
In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking a lot about our church. Who are we? What is our vision? What do we do well? What should we be doing differently? How can we bring more people in?
We are a wonderful community of faith by any measure. We have meaningful worship experiences together. We are open and welcoming of a large variety of different people. We have an extraordinary music program for a church our size. We have a good program for Sunday School, and an energetic and endearing group of children who are involved in church life in meaningful ways. So … why aren’t we bigger?
And then Cindy read an excerpt from “Meant to be Missional,” an article in Bethany Seminary’s periodical at the start of our Leadership Team meeting, and it caught me up short. It reminded me of something that I used to know, that I thought I knew so deeply that I wouldn’t forget it: the life of faith is not about us. At least it’s not just about us. It’s really about God … and our relationship with God.
That’s easy to lose sight of. Our families, our friends, our jobs, our good works take just about all the time and energy we can manage to throw at them and beg for more – sometimes literally. They fill our minds with thoughts of schedules and worries about the future and questions about what’s next and how we will get there and what we need to do. We don’t look for God in the midst of all that. We don’t expect God to be there. And so we don’t notice God even though she’s right there in front of us… every day. Perhaps there are better questions to ask, questions that would help us find God. Who does God want us to be? What is God already doing around us? What will it take for us to see it and join in?
There are many answers to those questions: simple ones, complex ones, vague ones, so many different ones that they can be overwhelming. What we need in the end, what we want when we are at our strongest is a transfiguration of our own. To be there on the mountain top and see Jesus talking with Moses and Isaiah, glowing brighter and brighter until we bow our heads for the pain of looking. To feel the power of the experience change us in ways that we can only begin to understand.
For some people, those kinds of experiences seem to be common, but I have only ever had one … and it wasn’t on a mountain top. It was in a wet front yard on the side of National Road 40. I was walking out under the cloud wracked sky, doing a little head-clearing leg work as a break from working on a sermon for class. And, as I watched the clouds moving across the sky, I saw the sun send a beam of light shining on the grass a little ways away. I stopped and stared as the spotlight moved quickly across the ground and then disappeared, and I was caught up in the wonder of creation for a moment or a minute or five.
I don’t remember how long it was, but it was long enough to find myself on my knees when it was over. I got to my feet, brushing distractedly at the mud on my pants, and as I looked around to see if anyone had been watching (embarrassment is a powerful force); I noticed something on a nearby tree. It was a triangle made by three cicada shells which was surprising since it wasn’t really the season for them to be out in force. I picked up the shells and carried them carefully back our apartment, looked at them for a little while, and wondered (as seminarians will) if they were symbolic of something greater – a sign, maybe, or the “calling card” of a triune God.
It was not an epiphany. I didn’t hear voices. I didn’t feel any sense of guidance or clarity of thought. In fact, I ended up slapping that sermon together late at night because of all the time I spent looking for some esoteric meaning. When I talked about it with a couple of my closest friends, one of them shrugged and said, “I guess you just got to meet God.” I liked that phrase so much that I think of the whole thing as “The Day I Met God.” (hmm …. sounds like a good title for a movie or at least a book!)
I still don’t know what that moment was about, and I’m pretty sure I’m in good company there. I suspect there are others here who have had powerful experiences that left them wondering. Peter, James, and John didn’t seem to understand what was going on on their mountain top either. In Mark’s version of events, Peter doesn’t even know what to say when he sees Moses and Elijah standing with Jesus. Matthew is a little gentler, but it’s still pretty clear that Peter didn’t get it. He offered to build shelters for the glowing visitors who certainly wouldn’t need them. Even after the voice of God had spoken to them, they still didn’t understand. If anything they were more confused, and in the verses that follow the reading they peppered Jesus with questions.
In response to their confusion, Jesus tells them to hold onto the memory … to hold on and not to tell anyone (even the other disciples) about it until later. I’ve often wondered about that. It seems strange that he didn’t encourage them to talk it out amongst themselves or sit them down and explain like he did on so many other occasions.
We don’t know what his reasons were, but the opening to Peter’s second letter shows how he understood his words years later. Signs and wonders, he says, are not to be understood. They are indications of the mysterious presence of God. They can’t really be interpreted through the use of our own intellect and reasoning.
That kind of thing is difficult for me to come to terms with, usually. I’ll admit that I live much more in my head than in my heart or my spirit. Maybe that’s why I don’t often have ecstatic experiences that knock me to my knees. I’m sure that’s why I have wrestled so much with the one that I have had. But, you know, as time has gone by, I find that I am less worried about trying to figure out some particular message in it and more grateful for the way it has shown me that experiences with the divine really do happen, that we really can meet God.
In three days, the season of Lent will begin. It is a season for reflection in preparation for the coming of Easter. It is a time to clear out our lives a little so that we can spend some quality time examining the state of our relationship with God in the face of the suffering that Love will undergo on our behalves.
Usually, I have no problem doing that. I love the slow, considered pace of Lenten reflections. I love have the season uncluttered by frantic preparations. But I sense that it will be more difficult this time around. Lent is coming late and Spring is coming early. Gardens need to prepared, children need to be played with, meetings need to be planned. Busy-ness has already begun to take the place of quiet in the early dark of winter evenings. How am I going to be able to meditate? When will I find time for self-examination? Where is there space for quiet waiting with God? It makes my shoulders bunch up with tension and resentfulness just thinking about it!
Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions again – making it all about me and what I can do all by myself. If I learned anything from that day in Richmond, it was that it doesn’t take specially prepared spaces or quiet times to find God. God comes to us even in everyday moments and mundane places. Maybe I … maybe we just need to ask different questions. Questions that awaken us to the Shining Presence and the Misty Voice when they enter our lives. Questions that open us up to God’s touch. Where is God touching us? Where is God touching the world around us? What is God trying to say to us … to show us in those moments … through those signs? If we ask those questions and pay attention to the answers, we may find God crossing our path in the yard or on the street or over dinner with our families and friends.
For the next seven weeks, pay attention to the times when God crosses your path. You might find understanding or inspiration there before you. You might not. You might only find more questions, but when you open yourself to the presence of God, when you let it touch you, you will find yourself changed … transformed … transfigured in ways that you may never fully understand. And that’s okay. That’s how God works in us. That’s how God guides us toward what we are meant to be … as long as we are willing to open ourselves to that vision.
Are we? Are we prepared? Are we ready to meet God on the mountain or along the road or where ever God comes to us?
Are you?
[Waiting worship]
Confession/Reconciliation:
Would you please stand and join me in the words of confession and the sending hymn….
Our holy and present God, we recognize your power to transform our lives. We confess that we have not always listened to you as closely as we should. We have not always acknowledged your presence. We have not always followed your lead.
(Silence)
God, we know that your grace and mercy extends to us. May your grace cause us to listen more closely, and may your mercy guide us into your ways. AMEN.
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