September 3, 2006 - Worthwhile religion

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
3 September 2006
James 1.17-27
Worthwhile religion
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Something happened last week that reminded me of the days when I rode a motorcycle. I’m on the Healthier Morgan County “executive” [ooh!] committee, and the husband of one of the committee members died of injuries after hitting a deer on his motorcycle Tuesday evening. The calling hours were Friday evening, and was trying to figure out if I could go to Bedford for them. Thinking about my own motorcycle days decided the matter.

Back then, it was an hour’s drive over winding coastal roads to my church in Bolinas from our home in Petaluma. I drove the round trip twice a week, the return drive on Thursday being in the dark, when the deer were out. I drove carefully, watching for them. One day I had the car, which was lucky, because that day a deer did run in front of me, and I hit it. After that, when I was on the motorcycle, I drove more carefully and more slowly. I also drove my car slowly, after that, but all the same, another time I was in a car, I hit another deer. After that I got deer whistles for the bike, and at night I drove slower still.

I also waited by the roadside, if I had the motorcycle and it was dark, until I could get behind a car to follow. Then one night a deer ran onto the road behind the car I was following but in front of me. Somehow that deer sprinted out of my way untouched. Then one evening commute I was driving home from my day job on busy highway 101, and a car changed lanes into me on my motorcycle, knocked me flat on my side and set me spinning for a hundred feet or so. The driver hadn’t seen me. I had no broken bones or internal injuries.

On the way home from the accident, I was thinking about whether or not I had enough life insurance to take care of Marcia and the kids. Then I thought, “Hey, they don’t need insurance money. They need their husband and father.” That’s when I gave up motorcycle riding, considering the circumstances.

Every spring, I get the urge to grab a bike and go riding again. I just love the feeling of freedom and the way you lean into curves, rather than steering. It’s a sort of “one with everything” feeling—Zen-like, I guess—and I miss it. But I have these commitments.

Funny how we suddenly know this sort of thing—the right thing to do, considering the circumstances. James, in his letter to the churches, says that we should expect ourselves to know what to do, and our religion gives us a way to know. What’s interesting is that he does not say you can look it up. People have for centuries thought of the letter of James as the New Testament book that’s all about “works righteousness”—getting into heaven by following the rules—to the point where Martin Luther, who thought faith was all about grace, not works, suggested dropping James from the Bible. I used to think of James that way, but now that I read it with an open mind, I think we’ve not been listening to him very carefully. James does not offer a rule for every situation that requires compliance, but he does explain the importance of figuring out the right thing to do, depending on the situation.

So how shall we know what to do, according to James? Not necessarily by looking it up in an external authority. “Welcome with meekness,” James says, “the implanted word that has the power to save.” There’s something in us that knows.

A new book out by Harvard professor Marc Hauser explains how we all have some idea of right and wrong built in. In Moral Minds, Hauser offers the evidence of a biological predisposition for basic morality. We know there’s something basically wrong with killing each other, and though every culture arrives at its own conditions under which killing is accepted, even expected, the main expectation is that we don’t kill one another. Even in non-human mammals, researchers recognize patterns of compassion both within species and, sometimes, between species. In certain situations, an animal that doesn’t obey the golden rule—do to others as you want them to do to you—an animal that breaks that rule gets shunned by the other animals. Something we’re born with knows the right thing to do.

James goes a little further. To fulfill a divine purpose, James says, “[God] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of [God’s] creatures.” I’m not sure whether James is referring to the birth we have from our mother’s womb or the birth we have when we enter upon the Christian life. Either way, James clearly sees a Christian vision for making choices and enacting the goodness God intends.

James calls this Christian vision “the perfect law,” which sounds a little intimidating. Personally, when someone says, “Here, follow this law perfectly,” I want to get out of the room as fast as possible. I’ve never done anything perfectly. But that’s misunderstanding James . . . and misunderstanding righteousness. It’s not you and me that James wants to call perfect. It’s the law that is perfect. And he names the law “liberty.”

You have to mine James’s thinking—dig in it and sift it—to work out what Christian liberty means. It clearly doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. In fact, in the very next sentence he’s talking about Christians having to “bridle their tongues.” I’ve never worn a bridle, but I don’t think it would feel like liberty. One thing James must be talking about, then, is the liberty to live free from the captivity we create for ourselves when our tongues wreak their havoc in our lives. Our tongues need to be bridled so that we can be morally and spiritually free.

You know what I mean. Have you ever said something in anger that, after you said it, meant that you thereafter lived under the resentment of someone you injured?

Have you ever made a righteous pronouncement about someone else, only to make it obvious to people who know you that even you don’t live up to the righteous standard you’re pronouncing? Now you’ve bound yourself in the chains of hypocrisy, and the law of liberty punishes you with both self-judgment and the judgment of others.

Have you ever gossiped about someone and then had it dawn on you that the friend who listens to you gossip about others will listen to others gossip about you? Now you live in a prison of increasing mistrust among your very own friends.

The law of liberty, the perfect law, teaches us that the more surely we hone to practices of fairness and grace, the more free we’ll be in our life. There is an implanted word that our Christian faith teaches us—even as other faiths similarly teach their adherents—and it takes practice. Calling it an implanted word suggests that it’s like learning a language. If you’ve ever learned a new language, you know how much practice it takes before it starts to feel implanted. James admits, even if the word is in some sense implanted, that it takes perseverance. We have to be very attentive, and he have to keep working at it to be fluent in it. We seldom get it right the first time.

So it took me two run-ins with deer, one near miss, and one very lucky accident to realize that I had made commitments to people that required me to better protect my life. The day may come where taking more risk would become acceptable again, but to this day it is still right for me to stay off the motorcycle.

But doing right things is more than not doing wrong things, which is all I’ve talked about so far. Sometimes there is a right thing we must not omit to do. So, on Friday, there was a widow in Bedford preparing to receive a long line of friends and family. Friday’s the one weekend night I give myself to kick back or cut loose. Was I going to spend the better part of that evening going to visit her with moral and spiritual support?

I have to confess, I was not thinking about what James could teach me about my decision, and yet I was doing something James would have approved of. I looked in the mirror. I saw myself as someone who had enjoyed the pleasures of my motorcycle. I saw my living face and undamaged head, spared, as I was, from injury and death for doing the same thing that got the widow’s husband killed. Even without considering her need, it in that moment felt in a way ungrateful not to go pay my respect to a fellow traveler whose luck just didn’t hold on his last ride. I owed something to him, I owed something to myself, I owed something to God.

And the widow? She did not expect that someone with whom she’d merely served on a committee would feel obligated. That, though, made it somehow more precious. Who I am, to her, was insignificant, but that someone she knew only a little would take the time in the evening at the end of what for everyone, these days, is a long week, lifted her spirit. She was surprised and moved, and a little light came into her eyes. When James talked about the needs of orphans and widows, circumstances were much more dire for them than for a woman, today. This woman has her own career; there is insurance; the culture grants status to a woman on her own. But it is still true that in deep grief we will, under the best of circumstances, wither into the parched earth of loneliness without a community that surrounds and upholds us in our crisis.

When I looked into the mirror at myself, then, a little longer, I knew that I would not want to look there again if I failed this test of compassion. Thus do I observe what James calls “religion that is pure and undefiled before God.”

Isn’t it odd, then, what we hear people haranguing us about in the papers and public airwaves about purity and defilement? It’s always about some purported abomination, some prurient act or attitude, some presumed transgression of a holiness code, and decidedly, and in particular, it is always about someone else. These people enjoy the anger of their righteousness, but James admonishes them: “Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” James would have them look long and hard into their mirror, but then they lose their voice. They wield with machismo their inflated wisdom, when they might “welcome with meekness the implanted word.” They may look at themselves in the mirror, James says, but “on going away, they forget what they are like.” That’s the only way they can survive the mirror—by forgetting what they’ve seen.

How do you know what is the right thing to do? God, in mercy, will be your friend, no matter what, and you will receive mercy and grace whether you do the right thing or not, but what will the mirror, which knows not mercy and has no grace to bestow, show you?

What James really teaches us, here, is integrity—not the integrity of one who follows all the rules, but the integrity of one who cultivates the implanted word of truth, so that one becomes “a kind of first fruit” from among all the creatures God has made. We are in integrity when we know what truth we hold most dearly and when we say our truth to one another. Then we are in integrity when what we say aligns us in what we do. Then we are further in integrity when we experience the moral and spiritual liberty of one whose connection to the deepest inward truth informs every outward act. Then we are further in integrity when we lean into the lives of the deeply distressed, like the orphan and the widow—or like the dislocated worker and the homeless, the emotionally disintegrated and the mentally disturbed, the disowned and disdained and disenfranchised—when we lean into their lives with compassion and support.

We are living in a time when organized networks compete in unprecedented ways to restrain and give shape to the moral lives of others. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda want to attack the moral life of the west. The Christian right wants to control the moral life of everyone. Some political theorists are convinced that the free market will produce the most morally acceptable world economy, and others believe that one purpose of government is to hold society to a moral common denominator with regard to the sick, the aged, the poor and other vulnerable classes.

People in power clash with each other on what they think is the moral battleground of human culture. You and I are not their warriors—we are not even their pawns. We are just collateral damage, which is why the deeply sad news in our papers and on TV is not so much tragic as pathetic.

James doesn’t have much to say about all that. He just wants you to know that you have to live with yourself and, ultimately, live with God. If you know where your life and goodness come from, you can become conscious of how goodness works inside you, and if you master the workings of goodness inside you, you can do good in the world. When you and I start taking seriously the word of truth that gave us birth, however distinctly we may see the truth, one from another, we will finally come together and pull the rug out from under the fanatics and ideologs. When you and I—in the clear spiritual vision that at once accounts for and remains unstained by the absurdities of our postmodern world—when we finally begin to live with an inward alignment to our life-giving truth, all the apparently powerful of the world will recede in their impotence against the many of us who know the truth of our life and have decided to live by it.

I know that in some places our bible presents the image of us standing before a throne of judgment at the end of days, and this image is meant to help us decide what to do in our life, today. If we are afraid of what will happen to us in the judgment for making the wrong decision, it clarifies our thinking. That’s one way of looking at things. James offers us another way. He does not offer the frightening vision of the last judgment. He even sets aside the disconcerting reflection in a merciless mirror. James invites us to look into the perfect law, the law of liberty.

What would that be like?

What if you believed in the law of liberty? What if you were to realize you could make your choices in complete freedom? What if you did not worry about what people would do if you did and said exactly what you believed in? What if you freed yourself from fearing what might happen if you trusted the truth of the implanted word that gave birth to you once and gives you life still? Is there any power that can deny you this liberty? Do you want it?

Freedom. Amen.

August 27, 2006 - Faith as a last resort

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
27 August 2006
John 6.56-69
Faith as a last resort
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

We were all gathered—this would be about four decades ago—in our great gothic sanctuary, which even on Sunday mornings was grey and dim, for communion the night of Maundy Thursday, when dark recesses seemed to rise endlessly beyond the high arches. Our congregation took communion only four times a year, lest we overconsume Christ’s body and blood and take him for granted. This being the first time I would take the bread and cup, I was seated with other members of my confirmation class, rather than at the usual place with my family.

I was joining the church as a full member, though joining things had never much inspired me. I did join the Cub Scouts and, briefly, the Boy Scouts, but it was just something to do. The idea of joining in order to feel that I belonged did not occur to me. On that Maundy Thursday, however—I was in the eighth grade—I was joining the church, and this time I was feeling something. What I was feeling, though, was still not the excitement of joining, not the safety and happiness of belonging to the church community. I think, looking back, that while it probably mattered to me to belong, I already did feel that I belonged. I felt generally accepted, cared for and protected, which are signs of love, and I was sure the church community loved me, as my own family did. So I belonged already, and was loved.

Still, I was excited. The excitement, I can say now, came from being admitted to the mysteries of the faith. I had sat some dozens of times in pews alongside my parents, passing the trays of bread cubes and cups of juice to or from them, and as long as I had conscious memory I wondered what happened and what it felt like and what it meant to take the body and blood of Christ into my mouth. When I chewed that morsel, how would it feel? When I swallowed that juice, would it taste a little sweet and a little sour, the way it the grape juice usually does, or would it taste a little salty, which I somewhat hoped and somewhat feared it would?

Here came the first tray, the bread. I took, and ate, in remembrance of Him. Then, just before the usher approached with the tray of tiny glasses, Bruce Chapman, probably the brightest intellectual light of our confirmation class, spoke to me out of the side of his mouth. I didn’t, at first, catch what he said. Or I did, but I thought I must have misunderstood.

“What?” I whispered, the first time he said it.

“Something to wash it down,” he repeated.

“Oh.”

And thus, after the years of anticipation, the mysterious glory of the moment drained away—down the hatch, so to speak.

We had spent several weeks of communicants class learning from our teachers about what the church believes and how the church works. We learned why, on Sunday mornings, we do the things we do, and we were encouraged to begin thinking about how to live our lives after the pattern of Jesus, who did and said everything in love. I attended to these matters as a young adolescent would, I suppose. I more or less trusted my elders to be teaching me important things, and I agreed to assent to whatever formulas and instructions they thought should matter to me.

What really got to me, though, was the idea that I was being admitted to the mysteries, and my friend and classmate Bruce Chapman popped that bubbled without even, I’m certain, thinking about it. It was all suddenly reduced to a cube of white bread and grape juice. The mystery drained away; the spirit of life, seeped out and up into the great gothic ceiling of that old stone church.

But still, there was my dad. From conversations I had with him many, many years later, I came to understand his sense of the proximity of Jesus alongside him in the pew, during communion, as palpable to him as that of us, his family. Sitting in church with him, when I was a child, I did not know what his thoughts were, but I did see him, as I can vividly remember him still, with his eyes closed, his head bowed slightly, his hands clasped together, and his whole face engaged in a great, concerted effort to hold himself in the presence of a vast spiritual force, as if that force were a hurricane that might, if he were less determined, might blow him away. He held himself in the presence of that spiritual force from which he sought help and succor.

I don’t think Dad would ever have called it a mystical state, but I know that nothing else happening around him registered in his consciousness. We children could fidget in the pew, which at any other time annoyed the daylights out of him, or a friend would walk past in the aisle, which always drew his animated greeting, but Dad was not even aware. Somewhere behind that scrunched up face there was a meeting of a soul with the maker and sustainer of its life. It’s funny, about my father, that he could be oblivious to of some very serious realities about life going on around him, but he at the same time presented himself to God with a moral honesty that would terrify most of us into avoidance and denial. At the time, as a child in church with my family, I could not have explained all this to myself, but I could see the face, which is apparently all I needed.

So while I lost the sense of mystery and spirit on the night I was formally introduced to the mysteries, long memory would not over the years let my yearning to engage the mystery of life die. What’s difficult still, though, is living in the world—including living in the church—where mystical things are treated as matters best left to certain special and separate holy people or are treated as odd and ridiculous altogether. It is not a sign of our times, any more than fear, rage, lust or greed are a particular sign of our times more than that of any other time. We see Jesus’ disciples, in fact, telling him that they would rather reverence the old, ordinary spiritual experiences of their forebears than to have any new spiritual engagement with life of their own, just as, today, we see followers of Jesus insist on the old, ordinary spiritual experiences of nineteenth century revivalism. The details have changed, but the attitude is identical. We can have a fresh, energized relationship with God that connects with us in our reality, but, so often, we would rather not.

Jesus offered a present and vital spiritual engagement with life, which he symbolized in the offering of his body and blood, but it was too hard for his disciples. It is, of course, very hard for anyone. It was too hard for Bruce Chapman, and he could only comment on the surface realities of the symbols of our faith before him. It was too hard for me, and it took only the innocent comment of my friend to distract me from the mystery of the most powerful force in human life. And it was probably too hard for my dad, during most of his days. Yet upon arriving in Sunday worship early enough to afford him a few minutes quietly in the pew before everything started, he turned to the Place, to the Mystery, and to the Holy One for which he had found no substitute. Like the rest of us, he would spend his days going away from the source of life, trying to find life in the many satisfactions falsely promised us by the culture, and then he would in this moment find himself saying to the Holy One meeting with him behind his taught and straining face, “Lord, to whom can I go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Jesus was teaching his disciples that they did not need to have the same faith as their forebears. In fact, not only did the disciples not need to have their forebear’s faith, they could not have it. In case the disciples hadn’t noticed, he pointed out, those forebears were dead. Through their relationship with Jesus, they would have to work out with God their own modes of spiritual blessing. To listen to him, it should be easy, but it was difficult, they said.

I have been listening to Bill Moyers’ recent programs on “Faith & Reason.” He interviews all sorts of people, including agnostics, who find believing in God too hard to accept. It is really worthwhile to learn from them, and I don’t mean that as a way of sharpening our critique of the agnostics’ godlessness. It actually improves my faith to learn from agnostics. Their critique our Christian faith is often well founded and deeply affecting. It is like learning from Karl Marx the critique of religion as an opiate of the masses. When we honestly accept the fact that Christians in power have used our religion to subdue, and even subjugate, the less powerful, we can clarify our spirituality in those aspects with which it is misused. Agnosticism, and even atheism, are useful for our self understanding as Christians.

What is interesting is that a couple of the agnostics I’ve been listening to had once been atheists but changed their minds. We don’t have the evidence, they say, to claim that there is no God. Personally, that’s all I need. Give me just enough evidence to wonder if there is a God, and I will work as hard as I have to in order to believe.

Or to put it in Peter’s words, “Lord, to whom can we go?” After Jesus had heard the objections about how hard it is to have faith in him, he said, “Okay, it sounds as if even you, my close friends and followers, are ready to leave the movement.” But Peter had thought it through. Jesus’ agnosticism about his own spiritually worn out religion was too convincing to let Peter go back to it. There were options, Gnosticism among them, but while a tired form of Judaism had become too attached to lifeless practice and belief, the thrill of a new religion wasn’t enough of an anchor to trust during the storms of life. The old, the new and the various all proved to be inadequate, and so difficult as Jesus’ offer of faith was, it was the only one left that gave Peter hope. It came off as a rather backwards compliment, but it was honest of Peter finally to affirm, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words…” As a last resort, faith in Christ looked as if it might work, and Peter told Jesus so.

I’m with Peter on this one. I am so very interested in the other spiritual solutions to the vagaries of life, not to mention solutions to the inexplicable horrors and the unacceptable injustices. And to tell the truth, I’m glad people of other traditions are working on them. I am glad that we have brilliant and sensitive Muslim teachers of goodness and peace. I am glad we have the Dalai Lama, with his disciplined approach to the alignment of the human mind, and that we have the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, with his unwavering attention to working out how to live in our world of such anger and violence. I am glad we have Rabbi Lawrence Kushner asking the questions of why we have evil and of how good we have to be. I am glad we have New Age crystal gazers, and I am glad we still have old fashioned nineteenth century Christians, even if some of them do keep hounding the rest of us into accepting their monolithic truth.

I love to visit each of these along their particular journey, and yet, like Peter, nothing compels me to go on their path to faith to the exclusion of my path with Christ. Technically, I suppose, that could change. When I exhaust the imagination of Christ for the making of joy and goodness, when I encounter the evil against which Christ has no power to hold forth, when I sink into such tangled skeins of moral confusion that Christ cannot realign the threads of integrity, when I see warfare raging with such heat that Christ may speak no word of peace, when I peer into darkness so deep that Christ cannot enter with light, then I may see if there is a path elsewhere to which Christ himself, because he loves me, would lead me. Until such a time, Christ has for me the words of eternal life.

The words of eternal life are apparently often difficult words. Perhaps you find them difficult, too. They are always words that demand your full spiritual intention, and you realize you are inclined to foreswear them, but you can only, perhaps like Peter, believe the words, because they give you hope of life. Amen.

July 23, 2006 - Christianity: A Life, Not an Identity

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
23 July 2006
Ephesians 2.11-22
Christian life is not an identity
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


When I was in high school, I was a Knight. The Knights was a service club that performed various tasks in the life of the school. The club got points every time it did something. The other service clubs never got nearly as many points, because the Knights had all the main point-getting jobs sewn up. Being a Knight was very cool, and I enjoyed feeling cool.

Well, until the Cavaliers came along. I think the Cavaliers got started by a guy who tried to get into the Knights the same time I did, but he didn’t make the cut for some reason. So he started up the Cavaliers, which required finding a teacher to sponsor them, filling out a form, recruiting some other members and ordering sweaters.

It turns out, the point-getting jobs were not as sewn up as we all thought. Just about anything that did some good for the school could earn points, and the Cavaliers started doing those things, lots and lots of them. By about their second year, they were earning more points than the Knights, and they won whatever it was you win at the end of the school year for getting the most points for performing service.

Suddenly, it was also very cool to be a Cavalier, even though it was still somewhat cool to be a Knight, if not as cool as it was before. Funny, how your feelings about yourself change, depending on what club you belong to and on how your club is looking to the eyes of the world.

Paul was the apostle that didn’t get to join the apostolic club that had everything Christian all sewn up. He hadn’t actually followed Jesus around for three years, like everyone else, for one thing, but for another—this was the main point—Paul had the idea that there were more point-getting activities in Christian life than the original apostles thought there were.

Worse, some of the point-getting things the original apostles believed in, Paul thought, really didn’t get you points at all. Circumcision was one of those. The original apostles thought the least a Greek could do to be a Christian was to get circumcised, because that would make him a genuine Jew, thereby making him eligible to be a genuine Christian. Paul knew and accepted and even insisted that Christian life is a difficult life to choose and live, but he began to see that difficult acts were not valuable for the spiritual life just because they were difficult.

More important, Paul began to see that marking yourself in some way as part of the chosen religious club not only missed the point, it led to spiritual mistakes. Christian life, Paul came to see, is not an identity. Rather, Christian life is a direction, a way of seeing things and a constantly evolving set of choices. It is meaningless to say, “I am a Christian,” which is an identity statement, because the only thing Christian about you is the next thought you have, the next choice you make and the next thing you enact according to your vision of Christ. Circumcision was about identity—about being a religious type—which is pointless, and it was a grave spiritual mistake. That’s what Paul thought, and for that he was not particularly welcome in the old line apostolic club, not at first.

Now, once Paul saw the pointlessness of the religious law about circumcision, he started to see the pointlessness of legalism in any form. Not that there shouldn’t be ways we ought to act and ways we ought not to act, but there’s no permanent set of books and no one-size-fits-all pattern of conduct that could ever be called Christian. Paul came to see that it would never again be so easy to be obedient as to look up the right thing to do and collect your points for doing it.

But now there’s a problem. How do you know what kind of religious person you are, if you don’t have a mark or a kind of conduct to show it? You can tell that a man with a yarmulke on his head is a Jew. You can tell a woman with a khimar scarf on her head is a Muslim, and someone curled up on a prayer rug facing east at certain times of the day is a Muslim, too. Things people wear or do mark who they are, religiously speaking, but what do Christians get to have that shows their religious identity?

That’s the tricky thing, isn’t it? All my childhood and until about my college years, there wasn’t much going on in the way of markers for Christian identity. Then someone woke up one day and thought it would be a great thing if there were markers. There ought to be a way, they believed, to say if you’re a Christian by what you did or what you said or what you wore. That’s when I started seeing Christians with big crosses hanging from their necks, and that simple fish drawing began appearing on notebooks and car bumpers. (If you want to show what you are in modern America, don’t mark your body. Mark your car!)

And there were also suddenly special rules to follow. You had to explain your faith in a certain way, and your prayers started to sound like everyone else’s prayers—“Lord, I just wanna thank you . . .”—so that you really and clearly distinguished yourself not only as a Christian and not some other religious adherent, but also as the right kind of Christian and not the inadequate kind of Christian. This wasn’t snobbery—don’t get me wrong; everybody was “welcome”—but it was a distinct movement toward identity. (I’m sure people were relieved that at least it didn’t involve a medical procedure.)

But to say everyone is welcome is not the same as what Paul says. Paul says that the outcome of Christ’s life and ministry is that there is no longer a religious “dividing wall” between people. It is not, for Paul, a matter of welcoming someone from the other side of the dividing wall coming over to your side of the dividing wall. No, Christ has “broken down the dividing wall.” Of course everyone is welcome. How could they not be welcome? They’re part of the household. They are no longer apart. They are no longer strangers and no longer aliens “with no hope and without God in the world.”

So if I say that I am a Christian, as I sometimes do, it is not to say that I am something that outsiders are not. I am saying that in solidarity with those “who were far off and those who were near”—Jews, Muslims, Baha’i, you name it—I am listening for the proclamation of peace. In my case, I hear peace proclaimed in the voice of Christ, but that does not exclude the peace other ears hear proclaimed by another voice.

I could reject the peace other ears hear proclaimed by other voices. If I believed there were a Christian dividing wall between me and them, I would have to reject other voices of peace. If I saw myself terms of a Christian identity, I would have to declare others outside the household of true peace. We’ve seen where that leads. Timothy McVeigh became part of the growing Christian identity movement, and he simply took the belief in Christianity as an identity to its logical conclusion when he blew the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City to smithereens. There was one right kind of Christian, and the rest were apostates. There was one kind of religion, and the rest were godless and evil. Death for them is not only justified but imperative.

Of course, we don’t think of this sort of thing as Christian at all. The idea of Christian identity is so foreign and objectionable that at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, no one even considered thinking, “Hey, this sounds like something a Christian would do.” In fact, you may remember, the thing people actually did think and did say—years before 9/11—was, “Hey, this sounds like something an Islamic extremist would do.” Do you remember that? I do, and I remind myself of it every time I hear the phrase “Islamic extremist.”

Islam had nothing to do with Tim McVeigh’s terrorism, just as Christian faith had nothing to do with it, either, and I think we confuse and obscure matters when we call such things what they are not. If I can’t believe that my Christian faith did not cause Tim McVeigh to commit his atrocity, then I must also not believe that Islam caused nineteen angry men to commit the atrocity of 9/11 or that it causes Hamas and Hezbollah to commit atrocities against the Jewish, and Muslim, citizens of Haifa or that Judaism causes Israeli political leaders to commit the even more vast and deadly atrocities against the Lebanese people. Religious identity—that alluring, dangerous and so very human need to declare myself inside and others outside the household of God—religious identity, carried to its logical end, is what casts the vision of peace as a reward only for the winners of war, and it is what causes the endless atrocities we have been watching on television.

So when you call yourself Christian, be careful to know what you mean and to convey your meaning with the kind of openness and grace that breaks down dividing walls. The word itself—“Christian”—is constructed to help you do this. When in the book of Acts, the followers of Christ at Antioch were first given their name, the name they were given was “Christ” but with the diminutive ending: Little Christ. Christ-ian would come out in something like Christito or Christita in Spanish—Little Christ. You are a manifestation of Christ in this hour. You are a living moment of Christ in world history. You are a flickering light of Christ in this darkness. You are a gracious voice of Christ in these anxious days. You are a fragrant breeze of Christ through a toxic atmosphere.

To say you are Christian, the way Paul means it, is never to say you are a category. Rather, to be Christian is to enact the life that is Christ, the life that breaks down dividing walls, the life that abolishes legalism “with its commandments and ordinances,” that you might become with the whole world, as Paul says, “one new humanity instead of two, thus making peace.” [v. 15]

Let me speak to you personally. It is hard to know when I am teaching a wider truth of faith for us all to understand and when I am only telling you about the faith I myself must live by. I will be honest with you. I feel the hostility of the world so personally and so deeply that I hurt every day, even when the hostility toward me is misdirected and even when the hostility of the world has nothing to do with me at all. I simply feel it, and it hurts, I imagine, in a very slight way the way it hurts Jesus. The cross of Christ could not mean that Christians stand beside a dividing wall that creates perpetual warfare—frequently metaphorical, but too often tragically literal. So it is impossible for me to feel that I stand behind a dividing wall against most of the rest of the world, the part of the world that does not confess Christ. This dividing wall can, for a time, make the rest of the world an opportunity to bring all peoples over to my side of the wall, but this will not happen. Anyone can see that the whole world is not going to convert to Christianity.

So, eventually, a Christian dividing wall makes the rest of the world my enemy, and I believe I would die, literally, if I had to believe in it. I simply would not survive to a natural end in a world where my vision of God required enmity between myself and most of the world. I don’t want to live in a world—I cannot live in one—that is an extension of the competition of my high school’s clubs. The world cannot be a division between Christians and heathens, the way high school service was a division between Knights and Cavaliers. Curiously enough, in fact, I looked up cavalier in the dictionary, and do you know what it says? The definition of a cavalier is—get this—a knight. They are the same thing, just different names. A combatant is a combatant, by whatever name you give it. I would die if, ultimately, we were all combatants on the basis of our beliefs and convictions.

But Christ “came and proclaimed peace to [those] who were far off and to those who were near,” and that is a vision I can live by. I cannot live by a vision that says there are two kinds of people in the world—my kind and everyone else—but I can live by a vision that says there are two ways I can live my life. I can live my life in a religious identity that separates and alienates me from the rest of the world God loves, or I can live my life by a vision of grace in which I enact the peace of Christ in the worldwide embrace of God’s love. Because of Jesus, this latter life of peace is what I have chosen.

So we are just about to sing Lift high the cross, which in one way seems incongruous—raising the banner of our side of the dividing wall to distinguish ourselves—but the very words make things come out otherwise: “Each newborn servant of the Crucified / bears on the brow the seal of Christ who died.” The Lord’s symbol of holy defeat becomes the seal on our forehead that undoes any separation between the follower of Christ and the world God loves. There are no strangers or aliens, only “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.” Amen.

July 5, 2006 - This generous undertaking

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 July 2006
Psalm 9.9-20; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15
This generous undertaking
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Democracy excelled as a form of governance upon the founding of our nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. For once, a regional populace believed in its ability to govern itself without a monarchy, and independent of any outside government. The populace decided that individual human beings have an inalienable claim to certain rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the populace actually became independent, it wrote a constitution, agreeing that individual human beings could make the decisions needed to govern themselves. They decided to do it by voting for their own leaders who would make and enforce the laws they’d live by, and that’s what we’re still doing, today.

Now, maybe some of the people who created a nation from that constitution thought they had the perfect plan for our nation, but I don’t know who they’d have been. To judge from all the arguing at the constitutional conventions, you’d have to conclude that everyone ended up with at least something in the plan for the nation that looked imperfect to them. The Bill of Rights, our Constitution’s first ten improvements, are glaring evidence that the founders considered its inadequacies serious enough to require at least ten amendments in order for it to work. We’ve been improving on it ever since.

One kind of ongoing improvement has had to do with who counts as a real person—who, in other words, counts as enough of a person to be allowed to vote. At first, it only seemed fair that all white males who owned land should be able to vote. But then in 1841, a Rhode Island legislator named Thomas Dorr asked, “Hey, what does owning land have to do with it?” And after a while, almost all the white males over 21 could vote.

Then in 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got some women together in Seneca Falls, NY, and asked, “Hey, what does being male have to do with it?” And after a long, long while—not until the 19th amendment in 1920—almost all white people over 21 could vote.

Then, after Abraham Lincoln declared African-Americans free, someone said, “Hey, what does being white have to do with it?” African-Americans didn’t have to wait as long as women, and in 1868 and 1870, we got the 14th and 15th amendments, which gave them the vote.

Personally, while I agree that the founders of our nation excelled in their founding of it, what I really believe is great about our nation is that, over the generations, we have found ways to excel beyond the imaginations of those founders. Imagine if we’d never grown in these and many other ways. Our nation would stand out as among the most backwards, intolerant countries of the world. All but two Arab democracies would see us and say, “Look at America, they don’t even let women vote.” [Kuwaiti women voted for the first time just last Thursday.]

Imagine that. But women can vote in America, along with African-Americans and people who don’t own any land. All citizens who haven’t committed felonies get to vote. We’ve grown as a nation and changed. Growth and change have given all those people the right to vote, along with many other rights and privileges that belong to all of us, because the growth and change of our government and society have made expanded rights possible.

So does the church, the apostle Paul reminds us, grow and change. “Now as you excel in everything,” he says to the Corinthian church, “so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.” The particular undertaking was apparently to provide material assistance to some churches living in straitened circumstances. It seems to me that everything the church does for the sake of others on behalf of God is a generous undertaking. If it isn’t, I can’t imagine it could be on God’s behalf. Everything we have from God is for our abundant life of grace. That is God’s generosity, and it’s why faith is generous, too.

So Paul exhorts the Corinthians: “I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.” That’s pressure, comparing the genuineness of your love to other people’s earnestness. Who is Paul to make such judgments?

But Paul thinks it’s his job to pressure people, whether they like it or not. The Corinthians, it would seem, already didn’t like it. In the beginning of this second letter from Paul, he spends a lot of column space ruminating on his strained relationship with the church in Corinth. Oh, he starts off with all the usual “grace and peace to you” niceties that make us warm all over to read, but by the end of the chapter he’s acknowledging his rather overbearing style by trying to convince the Corinthians he’s not really trying to “lord it over” them. He explains in the second chapter that he decided not to pay them an announced visit because of the pain his presence would cause. There’s a lot of tension in the church already, just a generation after the cross, and yet all Paul can think of to do is push through the tension, awkwardness, pain and discouragement of divisions in which he seems so often to be embroiled.

So the body of the faithful has always been startled by sparks of contention, just as America’s political life has always been ignited by sparks of controversy. Maybe that’s why fireworks are the one reliable feature of every July 4th celebration. We just like it better when the fireworks don’t go off in our hands.

That’s the thing, though, about church life, when it’s vital, on the move, growing and changing: Sometimes the fireworks do go off in your hands. For in the church, fireworks come in the form of ideas—ideas about who God is, what justice means, what love requires and how faithful action looks to people. High-powered and quality ideas are the skyrockets that will blaze in the night for all to see, which means that they are by nature dangerous to handle. Paul wrote letters. He lit the fuses of spiritual ideas with his stationery, and those ideas are still singeing the tips of our fingers whenever we hold one of his letters long enough to understand the power of what they really mean.

Some of us sat around last week after church and talked about ideas we have and ideas we hear and ideas we keep a lid on, for fear of their explosive power. We started having these meetings last year. People in these meetings set their ideas out for others to inspect, and sometimes you can see that if one idea was going to be launched into the sky it means that another idea would have to be put back in the box. You can’t send up both ideas in the same hour of worship, or even the same kind of church. So that’s different—people talking about ideas they have about the church, ideas that don’t necessarily go together, and figuring that saying their ideas out loud was better than not saying them, no matter what happens next, even if what happens next goes boom.

It’s easy by now to see what advice Paul would give at this point: “In this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something—now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it.” Finish the conversation. Complete the circle.

Take the conversation from the starting point of mutually exclusive ideas and work those ideas around to their logical conclusion. One idea that came up last week is that the fate of our planet is a responsibility for Christians and should be addressed to them. Another idea is that Christian responsibility should not be addressed to Christians by their leaders, and so the fate of the planet should be left either to the change that Christians will either spontaneously assume responsibility or simply leave others to be responsible. A third idea is for Christian leaders to lead by describing the problem and the options but not lead by teaching what they believe is right. These three options cannot be done at the same time, and our Christian community has begun a conversation about the relative value of each option. The congregation has begun this conversation. All Paul would say is, “Now finish doing it.”

Now, I realize that to many people of the sort that come to our Presbyterian churches this sounds like not very much fun. It sounds downright unpleasant. It sounds like an invitation to endless bickering and the kind of irresoluble set of differences that have beset the denomination for decades—like the issues of sexuality that keep festering, the more we try to settle them. But I promise you, this working on the difficult questions of the life of the church truly is the sort of thing Paul describes as a “generous undertaking.”

Really, we already know this. We’ve long been dealing faithfully with controversial issues, and to great effect. You already know this. Housing for the poor and disadvantaged is a controversial issue in our society. Just look at the raging debate surrounding the restoration of public housing in New Orleans. But the membership of First Presbyterian Church has taken a clear an unequivocal a stand that inadequate housing for low-income households is morally wrong. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of Habitat for Humanity, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves a decent house to live in—and not just Americans, and not just Christians, but every person on this planet.

What else? Health care. The current health care system in America provides for treatment of those wealthy enough to have insurance or to pay their own medical bills. Under the leadership of Margie Porter, First Presbyterian Church has spoken. This situation is morally wrong, and we have taken an unequivocal stand. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of the Good Shepherd Health Clinic for those excluded by the American health care system, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves adequate health care.

These are generous undertakings. They are not only generous because they depend on our wealth and sweat and time; they are generous because they depend on our moral courage, our credibility as Christians, our sincerity and our earnestness. If Paul were testing “the genuineness of [our] love against the earnestness of others,” we’d pass with flying colors.

This generous undertaking that First Presbyterian Church is about—the undertaking to support and sustain the unnoticed and underserved, the vulnerable and sometimes even the vilified—this generous undertaking our church is about both draws more energy and gives more energy to us than just about any other spiritual motivation the Bible talks about, though between the prophets and the teaching of Jesus, it’s hard to think of anything the Bible talks about more.

Now, that’s a congregation that has been willing to grow and change, and its growth and change overflow in generous undertakings that extend works of love and grace to people who long for the abundance God longs to give them. The wide mission of this congregation envisions the generous undertaking of work for the sake of those God sees but the world ignores, those God knows but the world forgets, those God loves but the world despises. You start ministries of that character in a church, and you sometimes get fireworks. If you don’t, you should, because the worldly side of us wants to fight when the godly side of us acts with revolutionary faith.

This is who we are. This who we’re going to be, if we’re going to be faithful to what God made us to be—faithful to the heart that has been beating within this congregation for generations, now. Our community regularly looks toward us for the kind of moral courage that we keep showing, and can keep showing, if only we can continue to believe in being the people God has already made us to be.

Every now and then we sort of go to sleep and get comfortable with all the revolutionary things we’ve been doing, having domesticated them, but every now and then, out of the depths of some soul among us, someone wakes up and says, “Oh, no. No, our soul is not free; there is an injustice in the world. There is a beloved of God somewhere going unloved by us.” And it is our duty to say out loud that something’s wrong and needs to be changed. Then, just as the founders of our nation did, every now and then one of us and then a few of us and then the rest of us will rise up and say, “This is what has to happen now, and this is what we’re going to do about it.

And the revolution continues. Amen.

May 28, 2006 - In God's care

7th Sunday of Easter
28 May 2006
John 17.6-19
In God’s care
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

No, to answer your question, I have not seen The Da Vinci Code. I haven’t read the book either. I have nothing against either the book or the movie—or for that matter, Dan Brown. I think it’s interesting, actually, that he made up a story about Jesus in which Mary Magdalene turns out to be his wife and they had a child. People all over the place are offended, which I suppose is predictable. Some of the Catholics are mad about the besmirching of Catholic history, and a few conservative Protestants are mad about the idea of Jesus being a dad.

I think we need a little perspective. For one, the so called Catholic history of the early centuries of the church is really common to us Protestants. We hadn’t split from the mother church yet, and Protestants never rejected the particular church decisions Dan Brown tells a story about. For another, the power struggles and intrigue that come off as so corrupt in Dan Brown’s story are not Catholic problems, or even Christian problems. They’re human problems. People in power like to control what story will be told about history, how the story will be interpreted and what values to draw from it. Everybody knows this happens. Popes—along with presidents, prime ministers and kings—decide what history will record as they effect it. They get mad as people start finding out some of the inconvenient details, and that’s when they complain about people “rewriting history.”

And as for the idea of Jesus having a child, golly, would that be a sin? The gospels never say Jesus was married, but they never say he wasn’t, either. They’re just not interested in that. If Dan Brown wants to make up that Jesus was a husband and was going to be a father, the gospels don’t seem to care.

Dan Brown has obviously written a fascinating story that I would find very intriguing if I were to read it, and I would read it if I didn’t already have a stack of books I want to get to first. Even more obvious is that Americans are absolutely captivated by the question of what might be true about Jesus, the church and the story the church has to tell about Jesus. No matter what you think about the version of the facts offered by The Da Vinci Code, the fact of The Da Vinci Code has really made people otherwise uninterested in the story of Jesus suddenly captivated by his story. They’d just like to know what the real story is, and especially they seem to hope it’s an interesting one.

I don’t know what to say about this. A few years ago, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ swallowed a particular orthodox Catholic story about Jesus hook, line and sinker, and the public went crazy for it. This year, it’s Dan Brown’s anti­-orthodox bent that’s wowing everybody. What I haven’t noticed yet is any particular conviction from either perspective about what people want to change in their life, depending on which version of the story grabs them. The people who liked the Gibson version are still behaving the same ways they did before his movie, and the people who like the Brown version aren’t declaring any new courageous commitments that I’ve heard of so far. Nobody really worries about what will become of them, according to what they decide to believe.

Which makes me wonder if Jesus worries too much. He’s about to die, leaving behind him a group of followers who know exactly what the story is, and he’s so worried that he insists that God take over complete responsibility for what he expects to be a grave situation. “The world has hated them,” Jesus says, and he to his father he pleads, “protect them from the evil one.”

What if the story of Christ in our life meant something that serious to us? What if losing Christ in our life was that serious? I don’t think what some clever book or movie told us were the facts would make very much difference. I think the story of how we live with the ideas of Christ—and what Christ loves and fears and fights for and battles against—the story of how we live with the goodness and power of Christ is what will make a difference in this world. Jesus is very concerned about our safety and well-being in this world, if we go about making the difference he expects us to make.

What would it be like to take very seriously the story we must all of us in some way know, however vaguely? What would it be like to take it so seriously that we defied the world’s hatred openly? What if we knew evil when we saw it, and what if we called it evil? What if we faced without reserve the greatest danger? What if we trusted God’s protection, whatever happened?

Memorial Day weekend reminds us what it’s like to face the greatest danger. A Russian soldier in World War II—and it’s worth remembering all soldiers who have died, no matter what country they’re from—a Russian soldier was killed in battle, and afterward this note was found in his pocket:

Do you hear me God? Never before in my life have I spoken to you, but today I want to greet you. You know that since I was a child, they said that you didn’t exist... And I was foolish enough to believe them.

Never before have I realized the beauty of your creation. Today only I discovered this beauty, when suddenly an abyss opened above me, a sky filled with stars. Amazed, I saw how they twinkled. How could I have been so cruelly deceived!

I don’t know, Lord, whether you will stretch out your hand to reach me, but for me, I will recognize you, and you will understand.

It's a miracle that in the depth of this terrifying hell, light illuminates me... and that I have been able to see you. I won’t tell you anything else, except what a joy it is to know you.

At midnight, we have received the order to attack: but I am not afraid. You are
watching us.

Listen, there is the signal. I have to go. Yet, it was so good to be with you.

If Jesus’ prayer extended to everyone on earth through all of history, it worked for the Russian soldier. He got the protection Jesus asked for. “Listen,” he says, “there is the signal,” which meant it was time to go and die. “Yet, it was so good to be with you.” That’s the protection, to know that one day, some mortal threat will take every one of us, and yet it has been so good to be with God.

We don’t know whether it was the Russian’s Jewish God or his Christian God he was taught not to believe in—or for that matter some traditional deity worshiped in a remote mountain valley—but whichever it was, he finally believed. That was his protection.

We don’t know how the Russian died. Maybe he was firing away but missed the enemy soldier who had better aim and, God’s protection notwithstanding, fell into the dust. Maybe he looked into the face of the enemy soldier but saw in some way the miraculous deep abyss, again, its beauty like stars twinkling, and why would he kill that? And in the joy of his reverie, God’s protection notwithstanding, he fell to the dust.

It wasn’t any different, except in the details, for the disciples. They all met their enemies, and sometimes they died in the battle. God’s protection of them meant they need not fear. Protection meant they could claim some certainties about beauty, goodness, grace and hope. Protection meant the shining light of joy would sustain them amidst darkness deep as midnight and propel them to engage the next threat. Protection meant facing the day without evil, foreswearing hate and its blinding lust. The soldier and the disciples had protection from God like this in common.

We tend to think of Memorial Day as a day on which we might spend an hour or so being thankful that men and women have died under terrifying circumstances, that we might live so casually and in such comfort with our many tastes and options and alternative belief systems, unfettered by those who would deprive us of our choices. But there is something bracing, invigorating, emboldening, enlightening and even joyful about taking on such enormous risks ourselves.

What if we took the risk of life and limb on for ourselves, instead of letting our young and mostly low-income men and women risk their lives for us? What if we refrained from intimidating other nations with our collective might and presented instead our formidable individual souls to the world as warriors of unconquerable love, who do not wither under the insults of the AM radio bullies or succumb to the wiles of our false financial tempters? Jesus might in his prayer to God say of us, “They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.”

What will it mean to keep God’s word? Something different for each of us, I suppose. Something exciting and liberating, something enlivening and fulfilling, something centering and gracious, something sometimes ambiguous and subject to confusion by the evil one, something sometimes dangerous enough to require God’s protection.

I believe that keeping God’s word after Jesus is gone will mean claiming his belief that the world does not have to keep being the way it is. I believe we can create a world where security is mostly a matter of justice, generosity and mutual acceptance and not what’s left over after war and death. I believe we can create a world where Christian religion is not neither a gory movie about our dying Lord nor a suspense novel about a corrupt church, where Jewish religion is not endless bloodletting to claim land and where Islamic religion is not lethal martyrdom for the sake of destroying a culture it resents. I believe a good and true and democratic nation can base its economy on something more noble than rewarding those who concentrate more wealth faster than their neighbors. I believe the society can thrive whose poor and marginalized people are provided for with dignity, and tenderness—and everyone shares the cost and is glad to do it.

I believe doing all these would be keeping God’s word. I believe that would make all the lives that have died in battle for the sake of all the things we being in. I believe they would all say, “We are glad to have died for this.”

And I believe this is nearly the society we have, today, . . . if you subtract the bitterness, greed and fear. Take the society we have today—with all its goodness, with all its wealth, with all its imagination, and with certainly its technology and its ability to figure out how to get things into people’s hands and lives that will feed them and comfort them and give them delight. I believe if you take all of that and subtract the bitterness, greed and fear, that we are very nearly what God is after from us. It’s that hard, but it’s that simple. I think we’re that close.

I think we’re that close. I think all the people that have died in the cause of liberty over the centuries—and not just Americans—are watching in eager anticipation right now, thinking, “Do they see it, yet? They’re so close!”

So I am glad about Jesus’ optimism about God and about us. I know he frets a bit about the one who is destined to be lost, and what I’m pretty sure about is that we’re not supposed to look around and see where this person is sitting in the pew—which one it is who will turn out to be the lost one, the betrayer. I’m pretty sure that what Jesus means by that is that in each one of us, there is the seed of a betrayer who will be lost, if we don’t trust the protection that we have and we fear too much what might happen to us, were we simply to live faithful lives. And I’m sure we can all do it and that it will mean for each of us that we will have to stop doing something we do every day—and start doing some other things, every day.

Then the world will be changed and we will be strong. It may not be perfect, but the world will be changed and we will be strong. We will remember those that have died, not in the shame that we have still not created what they died for, but in the joy that we have, each of us and all together, done a good thing and have loved God’s word. Amen.

May 21, 2006 - Abide in love

6th Sunday of Easter
21 May 2006
John 15.9-17
Abide in love
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


Maybe you heard about the Congolese computer specialist, Guy Goma, who was sitting in a lobby a couple of weeks ago at the BBC waiting to be interviewed for a computer technician’s job. The producer of a BBC news program entered the lobby and called for “Guy,” but the Guy that was the internet commerce expert intended for a live, on-air interview was Guy Kewney, who was sitting in a different lobby. Guy Kewney was supposed to offer some wisdom about the day’s legal decision between Apple Computer and Apple Records, something about which Guy Goma had no particular knowledge.

Nevertheless, there was Guy Goma, on camera and answering questions about what it would mean that Apple Records can no longer use the Apple logo to sell their product. Guy Goma thought such questions a little strange for the job interview he came for, but he did the best he could. The interviewer, for her part, was a little nonplussed by the answers she was getting but pressed on in the hope that she’d soon ask something that might bring a more enlightened response. Curiously, to the typical, unwary viewer watching the news that evening, the at first puzzled looking computer tech gradually settled into his new roll as recording industry guru and ultimately managed to look fairly confident in his wisdom.

Then the interview was over. News producers around the world have been having fun with the whole fiasco ever since, although I think, truth be told, they’re all really glad that what happened to the BBC producer didn’t happen to them. Personally, I’m glad that what happened to Guy Goma hasn’t happened to me.

Actually, as frequently is the case, here I am in the pulpit with the sense that it is happening to me. When the lectionary calls for preaching on Jesus’ highest principles of faith, after all, who am I to appear, live and uncensored, as the expert on his deepest truths? I am supposed to comment, expertly, on the commandment to you that you love each other, which is so hard to do that the church, over the last 2,000 years, has still not very thoroughly understood it. I seem to have been sitting in the wrong place, and someone has asked the wrong “guy” to speak about love.

But who of us would be the right guy, or gal? Who of us knows how to love others as Christ has loved us? Who of us, if we did know, could do it—could live a life like that, could serenely lay down that life for friends who don’t necessarily deserve it? No one is qualified to teach love like that. But someone has to. Or maybe, if no one can actually teach such love, someone might still convince the audience that they have enough wisdom, grace and understanding to start the project. Maybe we can all, like Guy Goma, gain enough confidence in our awkward attempt to fake it that something like love will happen. Now, we’re not imposters, not exactly. We’ve just been called on, as a kind of comical mistake, to be experts on loving one another, and somehow we expect ourselves to muddle our way through.

I wonder if Jesus knew in the beginning, when he called his disciples one by one and two by two, that he would be charging them with lives of such extreme love, when all was said and done. Perhaps answering the call was the first test, or the first act, of love. Certainly, in order to love, we have to recognize love when we see it, and the first act of the disciples was to recognize in Jesus the spirit of abiding love, love that seeks to reach the heart of others and draw their heart out to a life of grace and peace. Some people, in deciding to follow Jesus, might have looked instead to him for miraculous abilities or great favor with God or a great drive for power over the world, which, come to think of it, were exactly the things Satan thought he saw in Jesus. But what the disciples must have seen in Jesus was great and miraculous love. Little did they know that by the time it all was over, Jesus would expect such great and miraculous love also from them. Seeing great and miraculous love in Jesus is the first step in following the commandment to love, and in our seeing, we choose to follow him as an act of love.

What else did Jesus do in his life of love?

He learned his spiritual tradition. He absorbed what there was in the scriptures and teachings of his forebears to strengthen his mind and heart, and to empower him to enact love. Jesus also questioned his tradition as an act of love. Not everything people told him was true, and not everything that once was true would be true forever. “You have heard it said of old,” was how Jesus began his challenges to tradition, by which he meant that things had changed. Things changing, however, didn’t mean that traditions were always mistaken. Jesus just meant that ancient traditions are not permanent truths. Jesus changed the way his followers understood the nature of work, family, sexuality and community, because the nature of work, family, sexuality and community shifts over time—because cultural conditions change. Knowing how to love during an era of cultural change is something Jesus expects us to learn. It is better to know how to love than it is to know how to resist change, and sometimes we are called on to make the difficult choice between the two.

What else did Jesus do in his life of love that he now wants us to do, too?

He healed people. This is not easy to do, but it can be done, even by us. We pray for healing every week here, for instance, as a testimony to our trust in the spiritual influence we have to make whole and to cure.

Recently, we’ve also begun working at the more mundane mechanical and chemical forms of healing in the free clinic downstairs on Saturdays. You could practice loving like Jesus loved right now. You could volunteer at the clinic. I can tell you, physically standing in and witnessing the work of Good Shepherd Community Health Clinic—which we named after Jesus, come to think of it—is an experience entirely other than knowing about it or even contributing money to it. I go to clinic board meetings, make phone calls, wear the t-shirt, talk to reporters, and pester community leaders about the clinic, but walking in for even a brief visit on Saturday mornings fills me with a sense of grace that feels like the sort of love that transcends affection. Seeing the glow of Margie Porter, who has loved that clinic into life, feels like standing in the glow of a saint. People really are having their serious health problems improved and removed at the clinic. They’re being healed. You can be part of that. You can love others as Jesus loved, just by deciding to help.

What else?

Jesus told the truth in love. This is a tricky one. I’ve had many people in my life tell me the truth and tell me they loved me both at the same time, but it wasn’t always true. Loving one another by telling the truth is easy to foul up. It so often becomes just telling someone what it is about them that we don’t like, and we can prove they’re wrong to be the way they are.

How do you know if you’re telling the truth in love or just telling someone the truth of what you don’t like about them? Well, if you get something out of the change you ask for, it may be more self interest than truth. Self interest is not love. If you can tell someone an important truth, and the outcome of your telling them is a matter of indifference to you, it might be loving to tell them. When you’re telling someone the truth in love, the first beneficiary is always the person to whom you’re telling it. If you find that you need someone to believe the truth more than they do, you may not be telling the truth in love.

Still, Jesus told people truths in love that were hard to take. When Jesus told Peter the truth that Peter would deny him, Peter didn’t like it. Yet, even though Peter didn’t like it, he actually did want to understand himself. When he realized later how badly mistaken he was about the strength of his loyalty, he wept inconsolably. Perhaps it was Jesus’ telling Peter the truth about himself that so deepened his grief as to prepare him for transformation into the powerful teacher and leader he became. Something twisted in us often must be untangled before we can be realigned into nobility, so if you know something true that would serve someone in their realignment, telling that truth may be an act of love. All of us, at times, benefit from love like that.

What else did Jesus do to love those in his life?

It would take too long to list everything, but an outline might go like this. Jesus told stories—surprising ones, funny ones, infuriating ones, sad ones—and his stories were acts of love. He went off alone to take care of himself, because no one, not even Jesus, can exert loving action 24/7, and we must remember that self care is an act of love. He encouraged his followers and reminded them of all they were capable of. Jesus’ highest expectations along these lines come up in today’s gospel lesson. “I do not call you servants any longer, . . . but I have called you friends.” We are exactly to Jesus as he is to us, and we are exactly to each other as Jesus is to everyone.

“And I appoint you,” Jesus says, “to go out and bear fruit.” Love blossoms and forms fruit on our branches. Love grows from the rain and ripens in the sun. Love sweetens over long days and weeks, and it so weighs down our limbs that we sometimes feel we will break. Love waits for harvest but sometimes falls to the ground for whatever creature may find nourishment in us—maybe a kid out exploring the orchard, maybe a worm in the dirt. We don’t often get to choose.

Which brings us to the last thing that loving one another means. It’s—I’m a little embarrassed to say—the gospel according to Stephen Stills: “Love the one you’re with.” We Americans so believe that we create our own destinies that it’s hard to convince us that we don’t often get to choose whom to love. We think we create our connections with other people; we think we choose our friendships. But it isn’t true. You go to work somewhere, and the people you’re working with were chosen by someone else. Even if you choose the people who work for you, they’re people you choose for their utility in the job and not for their friendship to you. You join a church, and you find yourself in a pew with the people who turn up. You may pick one friend, but you wind up in that person’s circle of friends and have to find a way to enjoy yourself with them.

Even marriage, our most definitive institution of chosen love, is less a matter of our own choice than we try to convince ourselves it is. Anyone who has been married several years realizes how different the person you married is than the one you seemed at the time to have married, and several years still further along you realize, even more to your surprise, that you are not the person you thought you were when they married you. (We are every one of us full of surprises, even to ourselves. Just ask Judas.)

Insist on it all you want; your belief in the ability to choose whom you are given to love diminishes with every year of life, if you pay attention at all. So you either learn to love the one you’re with, or you put off loving someone while you keep leaving those you can’t love or don’t want to love or shouldn’t have to work so hard to love—or you put off loving the one you’re with until they show themselves ready for your love. The men and women and children that populate your life are the ones for you to love as Christ has loved you, assuming you understand how thoroughly, unreservedly, unaccountably and irresistibly you have been loved by him.

Jesus said, “Abide in my love.” It is hard to do—he never denied that—but it is also what to do, while we may fake it at first, if we mean to be faithful. Love is a choice to follow our gracious leader and teacher and Lord. Love is learning our faith tradition and learning it so well that we can see it changing and evolving into its next flowering and new growth. Love is healing one another—in our body, in our mind, in our heart, in our spirit. Love is telling the truth—especially about ourselves, and then about each other. Love is bearing fruit in acts of grace, mercy and self giving for one another. And we can only love those in our lives for whom our love is a presence and a force for wholeness and peace.

You may be thinking, I do feel the desire to love in a new and gracious way, but I have felt that before, here, and failed in my intention. Of course you have. That’s what we do. So remember right now the words you heard, today, when it hit you that you have to change. Remember the verse of the hymn or the line in the prayer that caught you up and held your heart under the light of grace. Remember, perhaps, just the words of Jesus: “Abide in my love.” And when that moment comes for you to love someone in the way you have not been able to bring yourself to do, stop. Don’t say the thing you have thought to say that is so much like the thing you always say. Stop. Don’t work out all the reasons you can hold something against the one you’re with. Stop. Don’t take advantage of the kindness or vulnerability of the one you’re with in a way that increases you and diminishes him or her. Stop.

Stop and replace all your thoughts and words with Jesus’ words: “Abide in my love.” Just that much pause, and that much truth, may be enough to give you time and latitude to consider how to love this one you’re with as Christ would love him or her, as Christ has loved you. You will bear fruit, fruit that will last. Amen.

May 14, 2006 - On a wilderness road

5th Sunday of Easter
14 May 2006
Acts 8.25-40
On a wilderness road
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

In the recently released film Akeelah and the bee, an 11-year-old girl has a gift for remembering how words are spelled. Her teacher notices her extraordinary ability and encourages her to enter the school’s spelling bee, the first step in a process that could lead her to the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The problem is, Akeelah is poor, the youngest child in a family held together by a working widowed mom, and living in the crime ridden Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles. Her subculture is against her. Schoolmates torment her for being a brainiac. Her gangward leaning brother gives her a hard time. Her mother considers her interest in spelling a frivolous self-indulgence. One potential ally is so tough on her that she rejects his support. Nearly everyone and everything around her conspires to convince Akeelah that she can’t succeed in spelling bees, and if she does, she’ll be scorned within her culture.

When Akeelah does work up the courage to enter the school’s spelling bee, she wins, of course, and advances to the district competition, where she confronts the world beyond her subculture. That strange world is no more supportive than the familiar one. When she is not altogether ignored, she is intimated by people who either scoff at or outright berate her. Akeelah has nowhere to turn but inward.

Well, that’s not quite true. There’s a young contestant from the nicer suburbs in the San Fernando Valley who sees something valuable and interesting in her. He’s Hispanic, and his father is a successful writer, so they’re different, but there’s a feeling of believing in Akeelah as someone with value as a contestant and a person. She can sort of believe she’s worth something.

I wonder if the Ethiopian eunuch believes he’s worth something. Someone—it could have been his parents—believed he wasn’t worth leaving sexually intact. Whether it was his parents or some other person with power over his destiny, someone considered him more valuable without his sexual organs than with them. Eunuchs aren’t worth much as social beings in his culture, but the rich and powerful think eunuchs can be trusted with their personal household property, namely their treasure and their women. For the trustworthy management of finances and females, the eunuch was well provided for.

Hence we find the Ethiopian eunuch traveling in relative comfort across the countryside. He is educated, of course, and a scroll of the prophet Isaiah has come into his hands—we don’t know how or why. At the moment we meet him, he is reading Isaiah 53, that long, sad account of the suffering servant who was “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

If he was reading the Hebrew scriptures in the hope that he’d find comfort for himself there—if he thought that outside his native culture that mutilated him and isolated him from the normal course of social life and welcome he’d find inclusion—he was mistaken. Deuteronomy 23.1 clearly establishes that a eunuch must not be “admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” This eunuch may be coming back from worshiping in Jerusalem, but not in the temple with the acceptable people. That group doesn’t want him either, not as a normal, integral member of the community.

Here’s where God comes in. Philip is on his way from Jerusalem to Gaza on what Luke, here in Acts, describes as “a wilderness road.” The Greek words are often used to describe the area around where a city had been laid waste. So it may be more than barren wasteland this wilderness road runs through; it may have been purposely and viciously wiped out by someone powerful with overweening and perverse self interest, kind of like the eunuch’s sexuality. The eunuch is motoring along in the slow lane with Philip ambling to his right.

The Spirit, like an angel, speaks to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” Whatever. So Philip steps it up till he’s able to overhear the eunuch, or maybe he reads his lips. In any case, the book is Isaiah, Philip can tell, and how far has the eunuch read so far? And does he have any idea, Philip wants to know, what Isaiah’s wild ideas mean to the unwashed and uninitiated mind? And the answer is, of course, yes and no.

Yes, the eunuch knows what it means for a lamb to led to the slaughtering bench. He knows more than Philip at the moment could realize what that lamb would feel like facing the butcher’s knife and having nothing to say about it. When Isaiah says, “In his humiliation justice was denied him,” he knows very well what that means, the eunuch does. On the one hand, the eunuch understands a great deal of Isaiah.

On the other hand, what could the eunuch understand about this man of sorrow of Isaiah, for whom “it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” [Isa 53.10] and yet to whom the Lord promises to “allot him a portion with the great”? [Isa 53.12] It would surpass wonderful if the eunuch could make something of a life crushed with pain and yet destined to an allotment with the great. This eunuch of great economic value knows the crushing pain of being a perpetual social reject and a hopeless spiritual outcaste. But who is Isaiah talking about, and what does he mean? The eunuch can’t understand. “How can I,” he wonders out loud to Philip, “unless someone guides me.”

So Philip guides him. He tells the eunuch, beginning with Isaiah’s words, about a redeeming life that has walked this earth. From birth he was the living, breathing idea of love. This life of love drew to his crib the least and lowly of the grazing lands and to his playground the wise and wealthy of the east and. He “grew and became strong in spirit,” Luke reports, such that one day his elders sat at his feet to learn, and another day his peers rose to their feet to stone him. He saw the truth as none had seen it, and when he told his truth the powerful shook with rage. When he told a perplexing story, it clarified the meaning of life. When he clarified the will of God, it perplexed the traditional mind.

All of this drove authorities to distraction, and they had to get rid of this man, who thus came to be rejected, mocked, abused, and “like a sheep . . . led to the slaughter.”

The rest of the story gets better, though. It is like the story Mahatma Gandhi told about what happens when you meet oppressors with nonviolence: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” The good news about Jesus that Philip tells the Ethiopian eunuch is that this grace filled, holy life of love was sustained by such pervasive and irresistible grace that it not only survived but it prevailed. The most cut off, unclean, humanly dispensable wretch of the world is, in fact, beloved of God and infinitely worthy of undying love and peace. You get into this life of love and peace by submitting to it, not by destroying everyone in the way of your seizing it. That submission Christians call baptism, and baptism is all it takes.

As Philip and the eunuch were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Nothing.

Nothing is to prevent the eunuch—this sexual, social, ritual, spiritual reject of the world—from being baptized. He practically baptizes himself. He leaps off his chariot and descends into the muddy waters some unknown lake or river, and Philip splashes in with him, baptizing him with whatever words it takes, or no words at all, but maybe just the laying on of such hands as know when to touch what God has made holy. Nothing prevents God’s love and grace, and Philip knows better than to stand in the way.

People I know don’t believe this. From the first days of my sense of call to the ministry, the people I’ve often known best and cared about most have not believed that the grace of God in Christ, as I understand Christ, was for them. They thought that real life was not the simple, tidy picture of piety that adorned the wall of their Sunday school, if they ever went to one. At least, their life wasn’t that. They couldn’t accept the peace that passes understanding, because they’d come to understand too much. They’d come to understand that nice guys finish last; that God helps only those who help themselves, which makes God a redundant God; that peace is won through force and not relationship; that hypocrisy is as much a fixture in churches as elsewhere, and is more obvious there; and that people will kill and destroy for the sake of their religion if you scare them bad enough.

So I got very sad about that, and I am still sad about it. I am a minister because of this sadness. I see all those inadequacies in the church, too, but I’ve come to believe they don’t have to be what the church is. Nothing about the story Philip told the eunuch, starting with Isaiah, led me to see the church that way, not anymore. All I’ve wanted to do is tell them—tell all the people who, like the eunuch, have become learned and curious and lonely and hungry for truth—tell them the story they’re already, in their way, fascinated with.

Everyone with a heart, it seems to me, is fascinated with a God whose world includes the obvious pain and suffering we keep seeing and yet a God who decides to allot the sufferer crushed with pain “a portion with the great.” I think my learned and curious friends are deeply disappointed that the world does not seem to be turning out this way, and they would like to trust, if only it didn’t make them look terribly foolish, that the world would not turn out this way. They would like to believe in a God of a world that would not turn out to be so disappointing.

I believe the God of Jesus is the God my friends would like to believe in. For they would sooner hope than despair; they would sooner love than fear; they would sooner show compassion than hate; they would sooner surrender to peace than dominate an enemy that only multiplies with every new assault. For too much of their lives, my friends content themselves with a world so much less than the one they would sooner believe in. So I keep thinking of how I might tell them a story of faith that would liberate their soul from their baleful skepticism that they might change the world, the fear that besets the smart and sophisticated, if they’re paying attention at all. Their skepticism may be grounded in this fear that they’re inadequate do anything about it all.

In Akeelah and the bee, a middle aged would-be mentor tells Akeelah such a story to liberate her from fear. He points to words framed on the wall of his study, something Nelson Mandela told the liberated blacks and coloreds of South Africa in his 1994 inauguration speech:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. The glory of God: It is in the lamb on the way to the slaughtering bench. It is in the eunuch, whose life until now has been defined by what happened at the slaughtering bench. It is in you. It is in me. We watch our televisions in their high definition, and, not unlike the eunuch, we are given to see that we are not the sexually and socially spectacular beauties that populate the airwaves. Anyone who does not wear that dress or fill that bra or drink that beer or attract that babe or drive that car is so undesirable as perhaps to be trusted with little else but a stash of treasure, but such a person does not matter. That’s the story of this sad world—the lie our television keeps telling us—and the other story is that the glory of God is within us all, every one.

You know the sound of someone who wants to believe that other story, the story you have and might tell. It’s the sound of the once-upon-a-time romantic whose disappointment about it all has left her with a bitter taste. Here is the irony. As long as that disappointment is there, you are still in the presence of someone longing to believe. I’m one of these; I’m one of these.

There are those of us who were born with a longing to believe so strong that we just did go ahead and believe in the glory of God in us all. But then life happened, and we grew disappointed. The glory of God was tarnished, tainted, and trashed so often in so many that we grew disappointed and even bitter. Still, that longing never left us, and we wished there would be a way to keep believing in the glory of God and the glory of life. That longing to believe in the glory of God in us all grew so dogged and fierce that we could not stop ourselves from finding a place, a gathering, and a pulpit where we would try again and again to tell about it.

So we just did keep telling about it, and now some of us believe that these disappointed romantics like us, among others, are ready to hope again. We believe that if the likes of us don’t hope again and speak again and work again toward a world full of the glory of God, the planet will suffer incalculable loss.

Many of you know all this, and I don’t really have to tell you. You know that you have always believed in the glory of God in you and in everyone. You know that the world has denied this, and the world has crushed you with the pain of in its denial. You know friends who are crushed with this pain, and you may know inside yourself that you love them and want tell them a story that would restore their hope.

You have that story in you. That is what you are here in these pews. You believe in that story, and so you are here. Now, all you have to do is figure out how that story goes. And then you have to tell it. Amen.