April 23, 2006 - Democratizing goodness

2nd Sunday of Easter
23 April 2006
John 20.19-31
Democratizing goodness
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Thomas is my favorite disciple, because of his doubts. So it’s hard not to concentrate on him, today, but I want to pay attention to what Jesus was trying to do before Thomas took our attention away. Jesus repeatedly calls his disciples to peace and talks to them about what to do with the sins they will bring into their life together.

[Read John 20:19-31]

We decided the best table to use in the chancel on Maundy Thursday was my desk. It was big enough but not too big. It’s plain and “rustic,” which is the nice way of saying the condition of the finish suggests the desk might have been used once as the breakfast table for the gorilla habitat at the zoo. On days when the bananas had gotten past ripe, displeasing the simian diners, the table suffered the consequences.

So I had to give up my desk a few hours before the service, but I needed to keep the drawer, because it had important necessities in it like pencils, paper clips, and a ten-pack of Peanut M&M’s. It was just bad timing. I had made the mistake of waiting until the liturgical moving crew—nice church ladies all, I hasten to add—appeared to obtain the desk before removing the drawer. They of course noticed the M&M’s.

“Ah, ha!” they chortled, “now we know what you really eat!”

Okay, I know I tend to talk about the organic whole foods we buy through our co-op buying club, but I never said I was some sort of gastronomic virgin. I think that kind of purity is for humorless obsessives who prove their perfection by turning eating into a means of penance. Not me. I like my chocolate. Still, here were these moralistic desk grabbers, whose only purpose in my office was to abscond with my modest work surface, taking great delight to have busted me with ten teeny-weeny bags of Peanut M&M’s. They were so pleased!

Catching someone else in their sin is great sport.

Actually, it was a fun moment, even for me. Our laughter together reminded us of this truth about us, that catching people in their sin satisfies us in some twisted way. It’s the hungry energy behind yellow journalism and gotcha politics. Unfortunately, it’s also the devilish delight some Christians take in pointing out other people’s sins.

Last week, someone wrote a letter to the editor to our local paper condemning Americans who resist any requirement for Christian prayer in schools, legislative chambers, and the like. “Shame on you bad Americans!” is the shorthand version of this guy’s screed. “You’ve taken God out of schools!” Of course, no one took God out of schools or the floor of the state assembly or anywhere else. I can’t get God out of my head, never mind a whole building. But the rhetoric of a super-Christian never has to be factual, just fiery and fastidious. If you get angry enough about the purity of the faith, you can wrap your resentment in righteousness and wear it like the Shroud of Turin.

So you read a paragraph like this in John, and it can make you nervous: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them”—which doesn’t sound so bad, at first. But there’s always the other possibility for judgment: “If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Somebody, here, is being given authority to sew the “scarlet letter” on the chest of any Hester—or Chester—Prine who doesn’t fit his idea of good and upright. Or so it appears.

But things are not always how they appear.

For one, there’s not just one person that Jesus is talking to. He’s talking to all the disciples. Not even just an elite committee of disciples, but all of them.

In the second place, just remember that whenever the many decide about the sins of the one, each one of the many will have their turn to sweat under the light of spiritual examination for their sins, too. Anyone judging will get a chance to be judged, which encourages one to be very, very fair. You tend to be careful when you know your turn’s next, and the only real risk is leniency, which for many reasons doesn’t bother Jesus at all.

But it’s the third point about what Jesus teaches about forgiveness and retention of sins that makes you begin to think that judgmental Christians have missed the point of sin and redemption—and especially resurrection. The third point comes up in the first word Jesus utters. “Peace,” he says. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says. It’s so important, he says it again: “Peace be with you.”

Before Jesus brings up anything about sins—forgiving them or retaining them—he asserts peace as the primary and essential state of the heart. A heart that has not put itself at peace cannot see to understand the sins of anyone—himself or any other. It is not wrong to have a troubled heart, but the heart in a troubled state may not judge another’s sin. To be is angry is not necessarily to do wrong, but while anger resides in the heart, there may be no judgment. Nor is fear wrong, but it is wrong to judge another while afraid.

When you hear people condemning Americans’ faith and patriotism in a fit of rage, they’re not speaking for Jesus, not until they find peace. When you hear people condemning others’ sexuality because they’re afraid of losing the “family,” they’re not speaking for Jesus, either, because they have replace peace with fear as their motivating family value.

Peace is the central value for Jesus, peace among sisters and brothers, and peace in the heart. Without peace, you cannot see sins, not clearly and with justice, and it’s a curious thing, you may have noticed, that people at peace with themselves and others seldom give much thought to other people’s sins. But walk around town, or even around the church, and you notice that the people who spend their energy telling you what’s wrong with other people barely register a one on a scale of ten on the peace meter. Makes you think.

There’s a fourth point to make about what Jesus says regarding forgiving and retaining sins. Before you start, he says, “receive the Holy Spirit.” Now, that’s a tricky rule to follow. How to you know when you’ve “received” the Holy Spirit? And it’s true, it’s hard to know.

I think the point about receiving the Holy Spirit is not very much about validating your license to judge other people. It’s more about understanding that knowing sin when you see it is a matter of discernment than legalism. To see a sin, you have to pick up on what’s going on in the moment, because the Holy Spirit is the part of God that lives in the moment. To see sin, you have to think through all the influences that led to the situation, because the Holy Spirit is the part of God that lives through the influences of every situation. To see sin, you have to silence all words of judgment in endless prayer, because the Holy Spirit is the endless part of God that, as Paul reminds us, “intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”

So if you can get all that together—if you can work as a whole gathering, if you can remember that it is never only one whose sins are judged but those of all, if you can each be at peace with each other and yourself, and if you can receive the Holy Spirit—you can work on forgiving sins, and if you have to, retaining them.

And to take Jesus completely seriously, you have to accept one more point, a fifth one, that Jesus makes, more in what he doesn’t say than in what he does. Jesus says that we can’t shirk our responsibility for looking around at ourselves and each other and figuring out what’s really going wrong with the whole of us, not just the individuals.

When in this country of such vast wealth and burgeoning budgets for medical care, it is a sin that so many poor—and even average—people live with serious, untreated medical conditions. Several people came through Good Shepherd Clinic here yesterday at First Presbyterian Church. I’ve no idea what any one of them was here for, but I did learn what some of the general conditions were that got treated. They were basic conditions, like high blood pressure, that we can diagnose with inexpensive equipment and treat with reasonably priced drugs. It is a sin that, only when a church, here and there, figures out how to provide for a doctor with a stethoscope and a bottle of pills, can we find a way as a society to provide basic, decent care for basic, decent people. Maybe someday, this sin will be forgiven, but for the moment, it is surely retained—here on earth, and in heaven.

When in this country of such vast wealth and burgeoning budgets as provide for vehicles that pollute the air, industries that pollute rivers and streams, and commercial media that pollute hearts and minds with deep greed and shallow sexuality, it is a sin that we fail to fund meaningful policies to protect the atmosphere, restore the waters, and enrich hearts and minds, especially of our youth. Our only effective “no child left behind” policies are those that assure every child access to junk food and mindless television. Maybe someday, these sins will be forgiven, but we can only retain them at least until we see the devastating effects our children and their children will suffer for our sins.

But wait a minute… Wait a minute… I’m about to lose my peace, here.

Okay, that’s better.

I don’t have to be angry at the policy makers for the sins of failed policies, and no one has to be angry at me for pointing out the sins. We can have that much peace. And now, seeing the sins for what they are, we may as well do what forgiving we can. Let’s forgive at least each other. Let’s forgive each other for sins, and while we’re at it, let’s forgive each other for noticing the sins and for not noticing the sins.

I’ve been reading Julian of Norwich some, lately. Seven hundred years ago, she had visions in which God appeared to her or spoke to her or put thoughts into her. I’ve never met anyone this has happened to, so I’ve usually assumed there’ve never been any such people, but I’m trying to be more open minded. Anyway, Julian of Norwich wound up seeing a lot of visions that happened to show her answers about questions that bothered her.

It bothered Julian that the world was so full of injury, sorrow, and sin. Her visions, coincidentally, showed her images of God beset with injury, sorrow, and the sin of the world. She saw much of the suffering as the work of what she often called the “Fiend,” whose main purpose was to ruin everything God made good. But God, as Julian kept inconveniently remembering, even made the Fiend.

What bothered Julian was the main truth the underlay the truth of all her visions. It was the one assurance that sustained her through everything. In her most essential vision, God told her, “Everything will be all right.” But how can senseless tragedies, for instance, be made all right? How can youth and their gifts of soul and beauty and grace be taken in a moment—dashed against the stone cold ground of this cold and unfeeling island that circles its raging hot star—and any of us be expected to believe everything will be all right? And yet there has been enough light and love in even the shortest life as to engender hope among us who yet remain.

In Robert Samels short life, for instance, light and love have come from heaven to earth. He stood right here in this very chancel last Christmas morning and sang to us. Our children were gathered right here, on the floor, and he looked right at them and sang:

Have you heard about our Jesus?
Have you heard about his fate?
How his mother went to the stable
On that Christmas Eve so late?
Winds were blowing, cows were lowing,
Stars were glowing, glowing, glowing.
Jesus, Jesus, rest your head;
You have got a manger bed.

So even from just a few minutes of Roberts too short life, we received light and love, and we have hope. [Robert Samels was one of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music students killed in Thursday’s plane crash.]

But something was still bothering Julian. If humankind keeps destroying parts of creation that it cannot restore—and if humankind cares not enough even to worry about its own goodness in destroying what our Creator called good—how can we believe everything will be all right? And yet we have once and again come to the better angels of our nature, finding in ourselves the strength and resolve to repent of evil, undo ruin, and rise to noble purpose in the service of the right.

But something was still bothering Julian. If sin multiplies and sinners unrepentantly destroy and the unrelenting Fiend prevails again and again, if only with the few, how can everything, including the Fiend, eventually be all right? And yet Julian saw that the grace of God would not allow even the Fiend to stand in the way of the assurance of how everything finally shall be. God is saving even the Fiend, which may not seem all right, but it is more all right than if God were not saving the Fiend.

“Sin is necessary,” Julian of Norwich was forced to see. “But all will be well,” she wrote, “and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

It is perhaps Thomas’ doubt about the same questions as Julian had that made him want to touch Jesus. The hope of forgiveness and grace, and the promise Jesus has offered that all will be well, is more than most of us would dare to hope, but we would love to hope it. We would perhaps rather die, if we were honest, than not hope it, but such hope is so hard to claim, if only because losing such hope would be so unbearable. And so Jesus calls Thomas forward, and Thomas, his fear-palsied hand defying his doubt, shows us that we can hope. He shows us, the much maligned doubter does, that it is all right to hope and, finally, to believe.

Jesus did many other signs after that, John says, but apparently, after that, they weren’t any of them worth writing down. Amen.

April 16, 2006 - Easter: a comedy in two acts

Easter – Resurrection of the Lord
16 April 2006
John 20.1-18
Easter : a comedy in two acts
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


I feel for Peter. You have to be fully self possessed to stand the company of your betters. Better people are all around all the time. It’s what Peter must always have had to reckon with. There was always this matter of John, for instance, the disciple “whom Jesus loved.” What was that like to live with, to be not the one Jesus loved, or at least loved not as much.

And now, on Easter morning, there is this footrace to the tomb, and, as if belovedlessness were not enough, John is more fleet of foot, as well. I can relate. I often see Dale Coffey here, for example, whose daughter Maggie we will baptize in just a bit, sprinting up the street on his run after work. Now, I work out every single day, but no loving creator gave me the legs of a thoroughbred to run with. I couldn’t keep up with Dale. If I got a 10-second head start to a tomb a mere block away, he would beat me there—I know that. What must it feel like to be the Presbyterian Jesus loves?

Ask Dale.

But I want to talk about the gospel, a story always in need of telling. Now, people who know me are familiar with my complaints about Hollywood’s low target for quality storytelling, but I have to say that a sitcom might offer the best rendering of the gospel on Easter morning at the tomb, according to John. A little clever dialogue, some sight gags, and a laugh track could go a long way toward giving the feel of this little pack of friends we call disciples. We have, I believe, a comedy in two acts.

In Act One, the beloved gazelle disciple screeches to a halt at the mouth of the tomb, and while he’s reaching for his water bottle, up comes the tortoise Peter, who crawls right in. It had looked to the gazelle a little dark in there with what might be, Mary Magdalene’s report notwithstanding, a body. A little peek in, and the he saw death bands thrown in a pile, but you can never be too sure. In any event, something dead had been in there, which is the sort of situation a skittish gazelle prefers strength in numbers for. A dead body, which may in fact be gone, isn’t going to love him any less for being careful. When Peter doesn’t fly shrieking from the tomb, the beloved disciple takes his chances, and both are inside.

Sure enough, there’s no stink. There’s no lumpy pall. There’s no eerie groaning that bodies sometimes make after a while. No body, sure enough, just a pile of rags. The beloved disciple “saw and believed,” but all he believes, so far is that the body’s gone. A risen life would be something else again.

You imagine The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton—Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. One smarter in his mind than in fact, and the other only smart enough to know he doesn’t get it. The obvious is the most they grasp, and what they try to make of things is usually not the truth of them. If Ralph and Norton were at the tomb, it wouldn’t be much different. They’d look at things, shake their heads, and go back home to Alice and Trixie.

What else can they do? A tomb is not a glass of water. You can’t have a half empty tomb, or a half full one. You can’t change it with an optimistic attitude. A tomb with a body is dead; a tomb without a body is dead and gone. What’s the difference? Our two characters don’t see one.

We know what that’s like, an empty tomb whose chief virtue is that there’s no body spoiling in it. People live with that outlook all the time.

Christians follow the good shepherd beside still waters and lie down in his green pastures, but the empty tomb discourages them from staying with him through the dark valleys of self-examination. We don’t like the unknown of change we have to undergo if we’re going to risk becoming more fully human. Christians thank Jesus for dying to cancel their sins, but the empty tomb leaves them wondering if just being blind to some sins, like greed and envy, wouldn’t make life a little more tolerable and self esteem a little more attainable. Christians worship the risen prince of peace and send money through their churches to feed the hungry, but Jesus’ body missing from the empty tomb reminds them to hedge their bets by voting more for war and less for the poor. Christians claim Jesus as their friend, but the empty tomb reminds them that certain friendships can eventually cost them more than they bargained for.

Act One of the comedy ends, as the first part a sitcom does, without seeing how the problem will work itself out. With Peter and John sitting at home, hoping a long night of television will yield sufficient amnesia to resume normal living, we wonder if there’s anyone out there to give the story another life. The tomb sits there empty, and we wonder if God has given up on the story altogether and taken a cruise to the thithermost island paradise, where human civilization hasn’t ruined everything, so far.

Act Two begins with an unexpected character. It’s Mary Magdalene, again. But she’s already seen the burgled tomb. She’s reported the theft but has come back to the crime scene. What is she hoping for? That her eyes have betrayed her? That the body only stepped out briefly for coffee and a Danish? That she’d missed a telltale clue to what actually is going on in this crazy whodunit into which the Pink Panther should be bounding any minute?

There’s nothing comic about it all to Mary. Momentarily, she’s a little off-script, comedically speaking. She’s weeping. She sees two angels, which doesn’t simplify things. They’re one at either end of the slab. “Why all the tears, baby?” ask Mr. Angels Number One and Two, very tenderly. “Why all the tears, baby?”—in close harmony, like the Everly Brothers.

What’s the answer to that? You’ve had a life. You have a history, some of which people know, and some that is your secret, alone—a lot of water over the dam, in either case. At some point, you reconciled yourself to the notion that you’d made a mess of things, and all you hoped for was to distract yourself enough for the rest of your days to die without having to think about it all more than you could stand. Then along came someone who took a shine to you, though not in exactly the way you were used to someone taking a shine to you. He told you about what you had and were that was beautiful and good and wise and hopeful and worthy.

Others had said such things to you, and they were liars. They told you things for their own interests, not yours. But this one seemed to know something that you maybe hoped at times was true about you, and what if he was right? So you followed him. You listened to him. You believed him. You thought things, felt things, said things, and did things that you hadn’t the courage before to think, feel, say, or do. Life got better. You felt joy. You found strength. You grew confidence. You learned hope. The world, to you—the future, to you—might be full of wonder and delight, after all.

And now this man is dead. Worse, they’ve taken his body, and so you’re crying about it. What about that, Mr. Angels Number One and Two, surprises you?

Then. Jesus steps into the tomb. On the laugh track, there are a few oo’s, ah’s, oh’s. This is a surprise. Mary thinks it’s the gardener, which thought, in sitcoms, we learn about in mutterings. “Oh, for crying out loud,” Mary would mutter, “these gardener’s have no couth! What’s he doing here in a tomb, feeding the geraniums?!” (Titters on the laugh track.)

This moment rivets. The supposed gardener could easily have been in the crowd that demanded the cross for him. He could have been the grave robber that took him. All she asks for is that, whatever the ostensible gardener did with him, he show her where he is.

The ostensible gardener says, “Mary.” He says her name—his voice, saying her name.

That’s a funny thing—isn’t it?—the voice of someone who knows us as truly as we can be known saying our name. You know a voice like that. There is no other voice like that.

What if you were to, just for the moment, believe that the very thing about you that you can’t stand for anyone in the world to know is actually known by one true heart in the world, to which this voice belongs. Maybe there are several things, things you have not ever told and pray to heaven no one will ever find out, and you decide that this one true heart in the world does now know it and has known it. And somehow, everything is okay with this true heart knowing you like this—knowing you exactly as you are, so personally but without you fearing it.

Now, if this one true heart were to die—if the world got angry at it and killed it for being true in exactly the way you needed it to be true—you would be left with, well, nothing. Nothing to lean on, nothing to hope for, nothing to live by. You would weep, of course. If someone asked you, “Why all the tears, baby?” you would maybe slap him, even it was an angel. But Mary doesn’t slap him.

“Rabbouni!” she exclaims. “Teacher,” John translates. Well, more than teacher, I assure you. Mary was born with her soul intact and has since assaulted her soul with all the things we all of us assault our soul with—according to our own wounds, fears, and desperate waking dreams. Jesus has seen it all and heard it all and told it all. That’s why they killed him. Mary was relieved and eventually joyous about it, but they thought maybe they could maintain the charade a little longer. Mary doesn’t care about them any more. She has been fallen and she has been broken, and all she wants his to stand and be whole. She just wants her integrity back and her self back.

When Jesus says “Mary” to her, she knows it’s all been true. It’s been true that she is who she is, that she’s done what she’s done. It’s true that even through the worst of her falling she has been finding herself. It’s true that brokenness is, to God, simply the project of fitting all the pieces together in the time you have left. It’s true that while not all the pieces ever fit anywhere in this world again, there is a realm beyond sight where every piece lives in peace. It’s true that, if you do your own spiritual work and lie to yourself as seldom as possible and never yield to hate and always fight to love, you will often construct the kingdom of God for a little while around you. It’s true that even when you fail in everything, you can all the same sit in the empty tomb and wait with angels in the looming presence of death until someone comes in to remind you that life is the last word. If you think it’s the gardener who’s the one who shows up, well, how hilarious! Who else? Life is the only excuse there is for a gardener.

End of Act Two. Fade to green. Amen.



Hymn following the sermon:

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain,
Thinking that never he would wake again.
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green,

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain.
Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

April 9, 2006 - In remembrance of her

Palm/Passion Sunday
9 April 2006
Mark 14.1-9
In remembrance of her
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

My favorite movie from last year is Me and you and everyone we know. Miranda July wrote it, directed it and played the female lead. (One way to save money on your first release must be to do most of the work yourself.)

In many ways, the story is populated by very ordinary people, in some ways less than ordinary. July plays Christine Jesperson, a quirky artist whose day job is transporting elderly people from the nursing home to shopping centers, appointments and wherever. She meets John Hawkes, played by Richard Swersey, in the shoe department of a low end department store, where she’s taken an old man to buy walking shoes.

Christine seems to like John, and John seems to like Christine, which seems to freeze them in each other’s headlights. They sort of talk about the prospect of seeing each other, and then John takes Christine’s phone number. She waits for a phone call. John mostly doesn’t get around to calling. He has other matters to attend to, like taking care of his two young sons when it’s his turn to keep them. John’s wife has left him, apparently due to boredom. Christine has no other love interest, apparently due to a general lack of curiosity among all nearby males.

The chief attribute of these two might be their awkwardness. Every situation seems to have too many ways to go wrong, and both of them have a knack for the most agonizing way to move things. When John’s wife is packing up boxes of his stuff, so he can move the heck out, he looks on with something between bewilderment and disbelief. We all watch with our own disbelief a couple of minutes later, as John walks around the outside the house by the bedroom where his sons are playing on the computer. He dowses his hand with lighter fluid, lights it, and then pounds the lawn with it to make the flames go out.

What we find out later is that he was trying to repeat a favorite trick of his uncle’s, who would dowse his hand with alcohol and then light it. I guess it doesn’t burn your hand to do it that way, though I haven’t yet been curious enough to find out. In any event, what we do find out is that John just wants there to be something interesting to show for the few cubit feet of space he takes up on this planet. He wants his sons to see him as a meaningful entity in the universe. He’s willing to do anything to show he’s alive. It’s just that whenever he takes a determined action, it’s so awkward we want to look away. We shake our heads. We just want it to stop.

So that’s the problem with that woman barging in while Jesus’ friends are trying to have a quiet dinner him. It’s terribly awkward, and they want it to stop. To begin with, the woman has no sense of propriety. She has no sense of proportion, either. She has bought—who knows how?—the Chanel of fragrant oils. She rips off the seal, pulls the stopper, and drains the flask over Jesus’ head. Every last drop. What is she thinking?

“Jiminy Christmas!” someone with a little good sense says. “You could feed Easter dinner to a thousand homeless people for what that bottle must have cost! Somebody cut up that woman’s VISA card till she learns how to be responsible with it.”

People are angry at the woman, and you get the feeling it isn’t really about the money. You also get the feeling the poor are not exactly uppermost in their mind. The problem is that some irrational drive has overcome this woman, and she’s upsetting the fragile peace they’re trying to maintain at the house of Simon the leper. They’re afraid the peace is unraveling, given the tensions building out among the rabbis and the rabble. Nobody’s up for emotional demonstrations. It’s all so awkward, already, without the ridiculous excess of this silly woman.

But Jesus is okay with it all. “You guys leave the woman alone,” he scolds. “I promise, the soup kitchen customer base isn’t drying up any time soon. You’ve got plenty of time for that. Besides, I like what she did, and I won’t be around to enjoy these things forever. You might want to enjoy life yourselves a little more, while I’m here to enjoy it with.”

Jesus likes passion in people. He likes it when you hear an idea for a more beautiful truth and feel such passion that you drop your fishing nets and follow the teller of the truth wherever he goes. He likes it when you want so passionately to live such an authentic, honest to God life that you’ll sell everything you have and give away every dollar you’ve got and go live it.

Jesus likes it when you realize how much living you’ve put off for the sake of stocking your life with comforts and then embrace the discomfort of living boldly every moment with just the little you really need. He likes it when you follow exactly and only the thought you came to that possessed and energized you, even though it offends the sensible, wastes the valuable, and values the whimsical.

Jesus likes it when you for the moment forget your 401(k) investments, tuck away your plans for worldly gain, and invest your credit limit in something and someone you love. He likes it when, now and then, your passion eclipses correctness and collapses good sense. He likes it when you quit taking even your church duties so doggone seriously and waste a little time just hanging out with God—preferably at great expense.

You don’t have all the time you think you have, and Jesus seems to think you’re forgetting that fact.

The reason your passion matters so much is that there are just a few days of Jesus-as-we-know-him left. Whatever the church affirms about the resurrection and the real body of Christ in the sacrament and in his real body as the church, Jesus affirms something about what his friends experience of him now which they will never get to experience again. “You will not,” he warns everybody, “always have me.” There is something about this moment that cannot be replaced, restored, resumed or made up for at any other time in any other way.

One woman in the whole world seems to get it. If she didn’t have her awkward passion, we would never have known. Jesus’ belief in the value of the moment would have been a secret forever, as far as we can tell. No wonder he tells everyone that wherever the gospel is proclaimed, what she’s done will be told in remembrance of her. Life and faith wouldn’t be the same without her.

What I loved about John and Christine in Me and you and everyone we know was their refusal to accept doing life the right and comfortable way, if it meant costing them their passion. If art was a waste of time, then it was a waste of time, but Christine was going to spend her energies, her wealth and her soul on the art she believed in. If, for John, doing what felt alive was awkward—and igniting his hand was just the start of it—doing and saying the life-giving thing was the choice he’d live with. Lighting his hand on fire was a stupid thing to do, but he found out over the course of the story a little more about why he did it. When John unwraps the bandage at the end, his suffering has taught him that the world of risk, disappointment, confusion, and sorrow becomes through frail hope and stubborn passion a place of healing, truth, love and life.

If John and Christine had been around during dinner with Jesus at Simon the leper’s, there’s no doubt in my mind they’d have had a flask of pure nard with them. (I’d just hope nobody left any matches lying around.)

None of this is to say that passion is easy to come by. Peter was always trying to have it, but often it turned out badly. It sounds passionate when he gets furious with Jesus for saying he was going to be arrested and killed, but that was really panic, not passion. It sounds passionate when he lops off the ear of a soldier in the garden where Jesus is being arrested, but that is really rage, not passion. It sounds passionate when Peter insists that he will die with Jesus before he would abandon him, but that is really either pride or grief or wishful thinking, not passion.

No, passion is hard to come by. It comes out of love, and the love it comes from is not the famous agape love that Christian writers are so fond of. It comes from eros love—love that stirs the soul, love the raises the pulse, love that lights a fire. Now, our society has become so transfixed by sex that sex is all we think about when we talk about eros love, but eros love is simply that love by which the heart leaps out with passion for the goodness and enjoyment of the beloved. Monks and nuns and mystics have loved God with such love. An artist loves a seascape with such love. A singer loves an aria with such love.

Agape love is different. It’s that detached, indifferent love which does not discriminate and does not change with the moment or the person or the place or the reason, and it is, therefore, a good and wonderful love. For agape gives us the care to put coins in boxes and checks in envelopes for One Great Hour of Sharing, which supports water projects and other good things among people we don’t know and in places we’ll never see. But eros love grabs us, holds us, delights us and drives us to acts of unaccountable extravagance. Eros love is a great ship steaming for a tropical island of beauty, grace and joy.

Personally, I think I see deeply spiritual eros love like that of this unnamed woman in every kind of person. Even the most stayed and proper, even the most controlled and deliberate, now and then surrender their will to a passion for something that matters more, they realize, than all their propriety and all their willpower. The place in life where that surrender occurs is what we call vocation, which Frederick Buechner has famously said is “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [Wishful thinking, p. 95]

Whenever Ruth Rusie tells about some adult she’s been teaching to read in the literacy program, her face shines. She is glad, and the world’s hunger is met with just a little more nourishment. That is passion. When Chris Young plays that charming little Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude [Rhosymedre] we heard this morning, the gladness of the composer comes alive again in the gladness of the player, and some deep hunger in me is satisfied in the luminous, ruminant flow of tones and chords. That is passion.

You know it is not passion when you’re roiling with energy because the hunger is in you. That is avarice. When someone on TV gushes over the passion of some tycoon, rock star, or sports celebrity, as often as not, it’s avarice they’re really talking about. Passion, rather, is the fulfillment of your joy at the point where the life of the world is strengthened, illumined, unbound, and renewed.

This singular week out of the year we call Holy Week is unique for two reasons. One, grief deepens with each day while God dies and the world goes to pieces. Two, passionate love for the life of Christ swells wider in the heart than ever any of us thought we had the heart to hold.

I suspect we most of us come here to worship God, as we are supposed to do, but I also think we come hear for another reason we won’t say, even to ourselves, which is that we hope something will happen just now, such that in the coming days there will reach out before us a new life. We have already done everything we can think of to make the former life new, and the former life of longing, trying, approaching and occasionally just missing joy and faith seems determined to hold out against our best efforts. We come here because maybe God will this time make the thing happen that will set us free, make us happy, and renew our strength, that we may mount up with wings like eagles.

If you are coming not only to worship God, as you are supposed to do, but also because you want to feel the wind under your wings, then let your waiting end. What you need from God is already done: You are alive, though you had fallen ill with fear and soul-sickness; healed, though your strength only comes back with agonizing slowness; restored, though your spirit is yet beset with the decay of your former demons; and loved, though self-doubt remains an ache that reminds you of the lonely wanderings you made before you gave in to Christ’s relentless passion for you. All that is done, because of God.

What is left to do is for you to undertake. It is a small thing, hardly anything at all. Some certain passion awaits your grace to release it. This passion has been growing in you, and there is something out in the world, possibly the person next to you—next to you here, or somewhere in your daily life—for which or for whom your passion is meant to ignite. When it does, then you will be fully alive, even if only as long as it takes to drain a flask of oil over someone’s head.

Releasing this passion does not make the grief of the world go away, if we Christians with our Holy Week rightly understand about the way things are, but the grief of the world does not deter you. The grief of the world does not destroy what you love but only reminds you of how dear to you the genuine treasures of this life truly are. The grief of the world withers before your passionate love for Christ which you manifest in the extravagant passion of your living.

Spend some fleeting moment this week, therefore, in lavish love for Jesus’ sake, so that when you in some far off moment realize you will never have it back, you will rejoice with Jesus that, because of your passion, the love remains. Amen.

April 2, 2006 - Soul voices and spiritual friendship

5th Sunday in Lent
2 April 2006
John 12.20-33
Soul voices and spiritual friendship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Interpretation of gospel text and Bach Cantata No. 159

Cantata Part 1


1. Arioso and Recitative: Bass (Voice of Christ); Alto (Voice of the Soul)
Behold!

Come, look yet, o my mind,
Where is your Jesus going?

Let us go up

O hard way! Go up?
O monstrous mountain, like the mountain of my sins!
How bitter that You must climb it!

To Jerusalem,

Ah, don't go!
Your Cross is already prepared for You,
where You will bleed to death;
here scourges are sought, there reeds are bound,
Your bonds await You;
Ah, don't go there Yourself!

Yet, were You to remain behind,
then I myself could not go to Jerusalem,
alas, sorrowfully instead would go to Hell.


2. Alto Aria and Soprano Chorale
I follow after You
I will stay here with You,
through spitting and shame,
do not scorn me!

I will still embrace You on the Cross,
I will not leave You,
even as Your heart breaks.

I will not release You from my breast,
When Your head grows pale
at the last stroke of death,

And if You must depart at last,
Then I will hold You fast
You shall find Your grave in me.
In my arm and bosom.

(Chorale: “O sacred head now wounded,” verse 6)


Commentary on cantata part 1

“When your head grows pale at the last stroke of death,” sings the devoted soprano, “then I will hold you fast in my arm and bosom.”

The imagination of our Jan Harrington is so vivid, whenever we talked about this cantata, he could see like it was in front of him the gory head of Jesus grow pale, which seemed to make Jan go a little pale, himself. And every single time we talked about this, Jan would say, “Those Lutherans!” I think he considers their imagination too vivid.

The thing is, Jesus’ death on the cross is easy to imagine but hard to take. For the most part, we put it out of our mind. It’s too troubling. You think about Jesus hanging up there dying like that, and your face goes white, your knees go weak, your pulse goes up, and your hands turn clammy. Jesus on the cross produces anxiety, and even at your best, you get pretty jumpy.

The voices around Jesus in these first two movements are at their best, you’d have to say, and even they are obviously on the edge. The soul of Jesus, our alto Mary Ann Hart, wants to save him, of course, and you can feel her anxiety in every word: “O monstrous mountain! . . . How bitter that you must climb it!”

Jesus just has to keep saying, “Let us go up . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem.” Over and over.

The alto gets really wound up: “Don’t go! . . . you will bleed to death!” She’s coming unglued. But she gets hold of herself and realizes she’d end up in hell, unless Jesus goes through with it.

Then the soprano gets into it, too. The two of them together screw up the courage to face the inevitable.

“I follow.”

“I stay here with you.”

“I will not release you from my breast.”

“In my arm and bosom.”

All the determination! But all this determination reminds you of Peter in the garden, reassuring Jesus how loyal he’d be, and of Jesus telling Peter about his three ineluctable denials. How much of it is anxious desire to be good enough, and how much is it fear of failing to hold the intention? There is so much distress and consternation, we just don’t know. “O Jesus, I have promised,” goes the old hymn, but quoting our own promises is not necessarily a guarantee of resolve.

We have heard, here, an earnest conversation among spiritual friends, but not quite the honest conversation we can rely on. There’s a deeper level of honesty to reach: less bluster, more reality; less swagger, more resignation. . .


Cantata Part 2

3. Tenor Recitative
Now, My Jesus,
I will grieve over You,
in my little corner;

Although the world may
take the poison of desire to itself,
I will feed myself on my tears
and will not long for
any other joy,
until my face
beholds You in glory,
until I am redeemed through You;

Then I will be refreshed with You.


4. Bass Aria
It is finished,
the pain is over,
We are again made whole in God out of our state of sin.

Now I will hasten
and give thanks to my Jesus,

Good night, world!
It is finished!


5. Chorale
Jesus, this thy passion
Is my purest pleasure,
All thy wounds, thy crown and scorn,
Are my heart's true pasture;
This my soul is all in bloom
Once I have considered
That a home in heaven
Is offered to me through Thy suffering.

(“Jesus suffering pain and death”, verse 33)

Jesus is about to say a couple of things. One is that you have to be willing to give up your life to save it, and if you only try to save your life, you’ll lose it. Then he’ll report on the state of his own willingness to give up his life. “My soul is troubled,” he’ll tell us, which is a dose of reality. And then, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour,” he’ll say, resigning himself to whatever’s coming.

John 12:20-33
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.


Sermon

After Dorothy Gale has been back in Kansas for a while, and half forgotten her friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion, she takes a vacation to California. Things happen, beginning with an earthquake. (What else, in California?) She winds up in an early version of what J.R.R. Tolkien might have included in “Middle Earth,” and there she bumps into the Wizard, again. They share unlikely travels and strange experiences.

At one point, they come into the Valley of the Voe, where more peculiar things happen. They notice a couple of oddities: (a) there are no creatures, only vegetation, and (b) there are homes and gardens and other signs of civilization. How could there be buildings and signs of civilization without a society of people?

Dorothy and her companions find the answer in a plant, which they discover when piglets the Wizard has brought with him eat a delicious fruit that looks like a large, luscious peach. When the piglets eat it, they disappear. They’re there, but no one can see them.

Presently, Dorothy, the Wizard and the others come upon a household of disembodied voices, who explain matters. What the piglets ate with such relish was the “dama fruit,” which makes whoever eats it invisible. Everybody eats it, in the Valley of the Voe, if they know what’s good for them.

Why would people want to be invisible? Dorothy wants to know.

Well, it cuts down on vanity, for one. People can’t see you, so you don’t fuss with appearances. That’s the up side, and there’s a down side. Though dwellers of the Valley of the Voe can enjoy the beauty of trees and flowers and fields, they cannot enjoy the beauty of each other.

There is a more pressing reason for eating dama fruit, however, which is neither esthetic nor a character issue. It’s survival. There are bears in the Valley of the Voe, and a bear will eat you, if it can see you. Safer to be invisible.

Those are the choices: (a) be seen or unknown; and therefore (b) be at risk or safely out of sight. In a way, these have always been choices for people, even beyond the Valley of the Voe.

Occasionally, Jesus chose to be invisible. He was known to disappear into the wilderness or across a lake to get away from the press of the crowd. When the crunch really came, though, he stood at the center of things. He went up to Jerusalem to stand on the hill, and that was unsettling, to say the least, for everybody. But to be meaningful to the world and to himself and to God, Jesus would have to be exposed.

Dorothy, the Wizard and all their companions, except the piglets, make the same choice as Jesus. They want to get back to real life on the surface of the world, where they belong, and there is no way to do it if they can’t see each other. Their decision could lead them face to face with an invisible bear. When the time comes, they’ll take their chances, but giving up on being who they were and apparent to the world is not an option. They choose safety in unity and interdependence rather than evasion and hoping.

We see their point. Still, don’t you like the option to be invisible, when it comes something as personal as spirituality? Like those who dwell in the Valley of the Voe, we think spiritual invisibility avoids vanity. Showing off our spirituality is unbecoming, and to be preoccupied with the appearance of our spiritual life is a little narcissistic. We’ve all seen the type who boast about their spiritual superiority, and how self-absorbed indeed they are. And we’ve all seen the type who grovel in their spiritual depravity, and how self-absorbed they are, too, in their competition to be the worst of the worst, that their salvation seem all them more dramatic.

No, we’re better than that, we reckon. We don’t need testimonials to prove our faith and humility. We’d rather risk seeming smugly prideful than falsely humble. We’d rather not look like anything at all than let someone see what our spiritual life looks like.

These might be high and noble sentiments, in their way, but what if they mask another feeling that may be closer to the truth of it? What if they simply mask our fear? The relevant fact, of course, is the fact of the bear.

What is the bear?

The bear is what comes to devour you, if you become spiritually visible. If you become spiritually visible, someone in a Bible study might find out you don’t know a lot of the stories of the Bible. So you don’t go to Bible study. Or if you become spiritually visible, someone might realize you’re confused about matters on which others seem so certain. If you become spiritually visible—if you actually tell someone what you believe and don’t believe and wished you would believe, and if you have found, all the core teachings of your Sunday school upbringing notwithstanding, that you can’t believe certain things—if you become spiritually visible, people may shun you and make you feel very, very lonely in your beliefs and disbelief.

And so we eat our spiritual dama fruit. In fact, when people first come through the door of our typical mainline churches, we hand them a serving of dama fruit by letting them know, in various wordless ways, that it’s safe here not to show your spirituality. You don’t have to say what you believe and don’t believe. You don’t have to expose your spiritual weaknesses and struggles. You don’t have to talk about your faith. You’re safe, here, from all the risks of showing your soul for others to see.

What the courageous Lutheran who wrote the text for Bach’s cantata had going for him—his gruesomely fertile imagination notwithstanding—was the notion that Jesus’ soul could be visible, and being visible, Jesus’ soul was having a helluva time with the way things were turning out. Jesus’ soul was visibly distressed and at least highly dubious of the possibilities for grace in what fate had in store for him. If Jesus’ soul had her way, he would have eaten a bowl of dama fruit and lived to see another day.

But spiritual invisibility is not really an option. Our dama fruit only seems to hide us. We’re more like the Wizard in the first Oz story, trying to hide behind the curtain and hoping no one will notice what a sham we’ve been perpetrating, but people see behind the curtain well enough. Others see what we’re trying to hide. They see when our laughter covers up our fear. They see when our busyness covers up our sadness. They see when our judgment of others covers up our own insecurity. They see when our silence covers up the thousand voices that confuse our thoughts. They see when our thousand words cover up the emptiness we keep praying God to fill with meaning.

We are never really spiritually invisible, except to ourselves. God sees us perfectly, and those who know us well see us more clearly than we dare admit. This is a grace, even if it makes us very nervous.

The grace of God and others seeing us is that we may realize, any day now, that it’s time to wear our spiritual lives for others to see. It’s time to put on garments of prayer and testimony, expressing to each other the colors of our faith, the shape of our God and the song of our soul. It’s time to quit calling it friendship to hide our spirituality from each other and to make spiritual friendship the highest purpose of belonging with one another as a church. It’s time to open our heart in its tenderness and trust others to see us and know us and embrace us as friends of Christ and of one another.

Only through visible spiritual friendship with each other may we begin to see our faith honestly within the context of our life. Only when our soul sings out loud, as Jesus let his own soul sing (if the gruesome Lutheran guessed right), may we begin to hear the harmonies and dissonances in the music we make with the raucous world.

Becoming spiritually visible doesn’t happen by accident—at the church picnic, or dinners-of-eight or the book group. The truly spiritual life, especially the spiritual interpersonal life, happens on purpose. We claim an intention, and we follow where it leads.

If you want your spiritual life to grow in strength and depth, you will ask questions about it. So not to lose your soul in ambiguous, pleasing thoughts about being vaguely “spiritual,” you will write down your answers. When you have a dream, you will wonder what it is telling you about your life. When you hear a sermon or a prayer that makes you happy or sad or angry, you will ask your soul what it is about you that you get happy, sad and angry over mere words. When you feel ashamed about yourself, you will ask what that wound is about—and what you and God can do to heal it.

You will find that all of this is more than you want to do alone. Spiritual honesty is impossible without a spiritual friend who has another set of eyes and ears noticing things you won’t see or hear. When your fears and passions blind you, you can be led by a friend through the dense spiritual jungle. When a driving inner drumbeat deafens you with ancient messages of blame, you can be calmed by a friend while the noise dies down. Without spiritual friendship, you will circle the same waterless earth where you’ve been thirsting for years. So you want a friend along for the journey.

So begin, right now, to find someone to trust, and find it in yourself to trust her or him. Deciding to trust is also a decision to be afraid, because we only have to trust in the face of some kind of danger. There is always a bear out there, and what people do with our trust can be a bear. No one is completely deserving of all our trust, which is why we also have to trust in God—either God or our invisibility. So spiritual friendship, the decision to be visible, is a test of our faith, both in persons and in God.

This is how you will be happy. You will not be happy by staying alone in the safest spiritual hiding place you could find. You will be happy because you walked in the safety of friendship with a trusted other and with God. Amen.