Sermon: "Our Whole Story"

This is a sermon that I preached at Crossroads yesterday. It's about telling our stories. I hope you like it, and that you get a chance to tell your story.

The scripture was Mark 6: 6b-13, 30-32.

It started with minutes 2:00-3:00 of this video:

http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/become-weaker

In it, Jean Vanier says:

“We need an experience of vulnerability....The danger in our strong civilizations is the last thing we want people to learn is to touch their weakness, their vulnerabilities. You can’t ask people to do a curriculum vitae putting all their weaknesses down. You have to show that I’m better than others...So it’s what will help people become conscious that I need help. That I am fragile. But at the same time I am beautiful.”

                                                         -----------

I did my undergraduate studies at a little place called Washington College. It’s located in Chestertown, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. About 10 minutes away from my alma mater is a place called Betterton Beach. Betterton is on the Chesapeake Bay, and it’s not the most impressive beach ever, but to this day if I visit there it feels like home.

Betterton was the place we would go to get away from school for just a little bit. To escape the stress and the drama of life at a small college. It was a place to recharge. For me, it became a truly spiritual place. Looking out over the sun-sparkled bay, ebbing and flowing, I got a hint of a God who is at once vast and unchanging and at the same time dynamic, ever in motion. I remember laying back in the sand and watching a seemingly endless migration of birds over the bay and marveling at God’s creation. I could forget for a second about papers and strained relationships and emotional struggles and just be. It was sometimes a place of solitude, and at other times a place to build community and strengthen relationships.

Betterton was a place of mini-pilgrimage for me. I would say that it has become a part of my spiritual history, of my story of faith.

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            If I were to ask you to tell your faith story, what stories would you tell?

            I’m not going to ask you to answer out loud right now, especially not on a moment’s notice, but take a second to think about this:

            What stories would you tell?

            What people would you name?

            What places would you include?

            Take a second to think.

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            Now I have to say that it’s fun to ask these questions at Crossroads, because I know people here have such different faith experiences. Some of you might have grown up in the church, and many of your faith stories will be church stories. That’s great! Others of you might have grown up Christian by association, or maybe at some point you drifted away from the church, and many of your formative faith stories might not be connected to church at all. That’s great too--those stories need to be shared! And some of you might not be that comfortable with language like “faith” and “church” at all. If that’s the case, I’m so glad you’re here, and I want you to know that your story is valuable. The church--and the world--need your story, too.

            If you think I’m alone in expressing this sentiment, I want to go all seminary student on you and quote one of the most prominent theologians of the 20th century, a German fellow named Jurgen Moltmann. He says that, rightly understood, “[The church] has no need to look sideways in suspicion or jealousy at the saving efficacies of the Spirit outside the church; instead it can recognize them thankfully as signs that the Spirit is greater than the church and that God’s purpose of salvation reaches beyond the church.” Now that’s a lot, and Moltmann isn’t known for writing in the clearest language ever, but I think what he’s saying is important: that the movement of the Spirit is not confined to the church or to church people. This is what we’re getting at when we take the time for God Sightings--looking for God in places other than our one hour of worship together inside this church building.

             John Wesley, who founded the Methodist movement that our community here at Crossroads has inherited, talked about a similar concept. He talked a lot about grace--grace upon grace upon grace--and about “prevenient” or “preventing” grace--the love of God active in our lives before we are even aware of its presence. Christ is at work in the world before we are even able to name God or grace. God is not only at work inside the church.

            This evening I want to talk about telling our stories. Our whole stories. This past several weeks we’ve been talking about finding ourselves in biblical stories, seeing how these stories intersect with our own stories. So this evening I wanted us to look at a biblical story about stories. It’s a bit meta but stick with me:

            Jesus had been traveling and teaching and healing with his disciples for a little while now. Just before the story that we heard Barbara read he’d gone to his hometown, Nazareth, and it hadn’t gone well. He basically got kicked out. Nobody would listen to him. All they could see is the carpenter boy that they grew up with, now pretending to be somebody important. So they ignored him.

            So it’s in this atmosphere of frustration that Jesus calls his disciples together and sends them out to do ministry in the surrounding villages and towns of the Galilee. It’s an odd sort of mission that they’re on. They’re supposed to go out empty handed, relying entirely on the hospitality of strangers--couchsurfing or perhaps networking via distant Facebook friends--telling all that they had seen and heard of Jesus and the coming of God’s kingdom. So the disciples, despite the bad experience in Nazareth, head out into the Galilee and, from what the story tells us, things go well. “They cast out many demons , and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” And then the disciples come back, and the writer of the gospel of Mark tells us that they “told Jesus all that they had done and taught.”

Now if I ever paid any attention to this verse, I think I always assumed that it was describing a sort of bragging session. “Hey Jesus? Guess what? I was in this one village and I cast out 30 demons and cured 10 sick people! I even cured this one guy twice!”
            “Oh yeah Thomas? You think you’re a big deal? I cured 15 people, cast out 40 demons, and put one in a headlock and gave it a noogie for good measure!”

And the whole time Jesus is sort of sitting there passively, nodding and smiling, proud of the superhuman accomplishments of his crusading disciples.

But I was in a Bible study once when I was living in Jerusalem, and somebody pointed out to me that the text says that they told Jesus all that they had done and taught.

All that they had done.

Now, here’s the deal. In the gospel accounts, and particularly in Mark, the disciples are not portrayed as stellar, perfect followers of Christ. The exact opposite, in fact. They are almost Keystone Cops-esque in their failures; constantly misunderstanding or mistrusting what Jesus is telling them. In fact it’s possible that the writer of Mark’s gospel is intentionally portraying the disciples as screwups to invite us, the listeners and readers of the story, into further discipleship--if these goofballs can be disciples, then surely we can follow, too.

So if the disciples in Mark are so perfectly imperfect, then when they gathered to share with Jesus and with each other all that they had done, we have to imagine that there was a significant amount of failure, frustration, and doubt mixed in with the stories of demon-destroying and sickness-healing.

To intensify this, there’s something very particular to the gospel of Mark going on in this passage. I don’t know if you noticed, but the scripture that we heard read was in two parts even though it was one story. We read Mark 6:6-13, and then we skipped to Mark 6:30-32. What happened in between these two passage is the story of the execution of John the Baptist at the hands of King Herod, the most powerful man in the Galilee. Now John the Baptist is the very first character we encounter in the gospel of Mark. He baptizes Jesus, and his arrest marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The disciples would have known John. He was an ally; he was a bit like that guy you call “uncle” even though he isn’t really related to you. And now he’s dead.

This story is inserted in the middle of the story of the disciples’ missionary endeavors. This is something that Mark does quite often--putting one story smack in the middle of another story. There’s even a fancy seminary term for it: we call it “a Markan sandwich.” Sophisticated, right? And the idea of this narrative device is that the story that is inserted helps us interpret and understand the story that brackets it. In this case, we learn that the atmosphere of the disciples’ ministry and their subsequent reporting on it is drenched in fear and uncertainty. Their ministry is being done in the shadow of potential death and defeat. So we can imagine that there was some less-than-triumphal feelings during this report-back-to-Jesus session.

So I have to wonder what the disciples said to Jesus and each other. Sure, they talked about casting out demons and healing and preaching. But do you think some of them also said things like: “Jesus, I have to admit that there were times when I doubted you, and when I doubted myself and my own abilities.” Or things like, “Jesus, in one town I tried to cure people and nothing happened.” Or things like, “Jesus, in one town nobody would welcome me or listen to me and I felt discouraged and afraid.” Do you think they told their whole stories--not just the stories of their successes and their ironclad faith but their whole stories?

Now I asked you what sort of stories you would share if I asked you to share your faith story. And I want us to consider what it would mean for us to tell our whole story. We might have times in our lives when we are riding high on the Spirit. When we feel faithful and successful and good. When we can so easily sing to God the song that we’ve been singing in worship these past two weeks: “You’re always faithful.”

And then there are other times. Times when we doubt. When we hurt. When we struggle. When we ask where God is. Maybe our whole stories would say things like, “God, I’m trying to follow you but I’m afraid. I don’t see you. Where are you, God?” Things like, “I’m struggling with depression or with mental illness and things seem dark and scary.” Things like, “I know I’m called by you but I’m gay and the church discriminates against me.”

Or “I try to take a stand for justice but the odds seem stacked against me.”

Or “I want to learn more about Jesus but Christians seem intolerant and even mean.”

Or “I don’t have a house and I’m hungry, and even when I can find shelter and food there’s nobody who wants to really listen to me.”

Now if you have been thinking some of these things or similar things, I hope you can see that they, too, are part of your story of faith--part of the story that you share with other struggling disciples in the presence of Jesus, who does not judge but who redeems, who gathers all of our hurt and brokenness together and says, “Yes, I am part of this with you. I am present with you, here, in this mess.” 

Remember Jean Vanier? Saying that we never sit down to write our CVs by putting all of our weaknesses down? Many of us have a story that we tell about our lives. I notice it particularly here in DC. We meet someone in this city and what are we trying to find out? Where are you from originally? And what do you do? What sort of position do you have? Of what importance are you? What's your resume? Our faith stories are not a CV or a resume. They are not our DC story. They are stories about deeper meaning. About calling. About doubt. About struggle. About vulnerability. About grace.

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            I started off telling you a little bit about Betterton Beach, which is part of my own journey of faith and doubt, hope and anxiety. I told you about connecting with God and marveling at the wonder of creation. But friends, Betterton is where I went when I was stressed. When I had lost faith. When I didn't know what I was doing in my life or felt like maybe I should just drop out of school. Betterton was a place of highs, yes, but it was also a place of lows.

            Yesterday I took a little trip to Betterton and I brought back a bunch of smoothed out stones from the bay. They symbolize, to me, little pieces of my own whole story. I want to share them with you. In a few minutes we’re going to gather together, as we do every week, for a simple meal in the graceful presence of Christ. And after you take bread and dip it in grape juice and eat it, I’m going to hand you a rock. I hope that you will take it, and think a little bit about your own faith journey. There’s even a prayer station in back with some notecards if you want to pray about it or meditate on it a bit and scribble some thoughts down. And what I am asking you to do is to take this rock that I’m going to give you, and sometime this week give it to someone else. Hand it to them and say, “Hey. This is just a little symbol of how we share stories with each other.” And share with them a little bit of your story. And then ask them to share a little bit of their story, and to pass the rock on. If that sounds uncomfortable, practice telling your story to each other. Because we need to tell our stories, and we need to listen to the stories that surround us, if we’re ever going to really understand what  it is to be in the presence of Jesus.

            So we gather around a table with our messy stories. And we proclaim a Christ who is broken. And a Christ who is whole.

            The world needs you whole story. Tell it.

Two Recommendations for Life in DC

I have two recommendations for you if you are planning to live in DC. These suggestions are perhaps exportable to other major cities.

The first is to take advantage of every opportunity to hang out with friends when they are in town. So yesterday, I hung out with my good friend Christy and her husband Abel. They were in town visiting folks and checking out DC while en route to Christy's sister's wedding. Christy and I were Mission Interns in the same class--she did awesome work in Nicaragua while I made Excel spreadsheets in Jerusalem. Christy and Abel met in Nicaragua, where he is from, and now they live in Managua. We met up for lunch and chatted about life and work and where other Mission Intern folks are living now. It was great to get see them and get caught up. So that's recommendation number one.

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Here is recommendation number two:

Read the Bible in public.

I've said this many times and will say it again. One of the things I love about the blog medium is that I really don't know who reads this thing. So I have no idea what your faith experience is, whether you'd even use that language, whether you've ever read the Bible, whether you would ever want to, etc. But even if you have no desire to read the Bible, you should get one and pretend to read it in public. You get into the most fascinating conversations.

Before I met up with Christy and Abel, I was in Starbucks reading my little Bible, which one of my profs gave me after I gave my old one away. I was specifically looking for psalms for a few friends who are really kind of pissed off at God right now. Not, "take comfort, everything will be OK" psalms. I'm talking about "What the hell is wrong with you, God?" psalms.

So I'm reading Psalm 74, and this guy comes in who was chilling on the sidewalk outside of Starbucks juggling pool balls, and he sits down at a table next to me, puts some sort of solution into his water bottle, looks at me, and says:

"Is that the King James?"

Oh boy, I thought to myself. This is going to be good.

It was.

After I informed him that I was reading the New Revised Standard Version, he told me this:

"I have a lot of problems with that book. I mean, I never thought I could scream at a book. But I've screamed at that one."

Now, the rest of the conversation was fascinating in its own right. He moved over to my table and we talked about the Greeks, aboriginals, Alexander the Great, intertestamental literature and the apocrypha, layers of text, demons, and, at one point, I told him about the story of Jesus calming dragons in one of the apocryphal gospels. He--his name is Daniel--was pretty pumped about that one.

But what I'm going to carry away from that conversation is this guy telling me that he has screamed at the Bible.

"Yeah," I said to him. "It's a book worth screaming at."

--

We ought to scream at our texts.

Like I said, I don't know if you, faithful reader, read the Bible. But whatever you read, do yourself a favor and scream at it. Struggle with it. Argue with it.

The psalmists who I was reading when Daniel started talking to me certainly knew something about screaming at texts. Saying, "Where are you, God?" Saying, "Whatever happened to covenant?" The psalmists. Jacob wrestling with God. Jesus crying out on the cross. We have permission--more than that, we have a responsibility--not to take texts at face value. To talk to them. To get frustrated with them. To scream at them.

Screaming at texts. It's a cure, I think, to fundamentalisms of every kind.

So I thank Daniel for that. Even if he has some weird beliefs about Lucifer.

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So that's recommendation two. Read your Bible in public. You never know who's going to talk to you, and what you're going to learn.

Memorial Day and my father

Tomorrow is Memorial Day.

A few years ago, on Veterans' Day, I went and heard by dad speak at a panel sponsored by Veterans for Peace. He said some pretty powerful stuff. I'm paraphrasing a bit here. One thing he said is that he feels really uncomfortable when people thank him for his military service--he served for two tours in Vietnam--because what he did in Vietnam was to aid and enable an effort to kill a lot of people. Another thing he said is that Veterans' Day is a happy day for him, a day that he celebrates the successes of veterans who have survived against all odds, not only combat but PTSD, trauma, alcoholism, crime, drugs, domestic violence, depression, psychosis, homelessness--so many wolves prowling for the lives of veterans.

But he said something about Memorial Day, too. He said that Memorial Day is a sad say for him, because it's a day that he remembers all his friends and classmates (he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1963) who have died, many of them not in battle but after returning home, driving drunk or committing suicide.

So that is more or less what my dad, who is a veteran, said about Memorial Day. That for him, it is a sad day.

This is not a self-righteous post. Tomorrow, I will eat grill food with some friends, and go hiking with some of  the same friends. I will not spend the day in sackcloth and ashes.

But I will think about those mourning losses, those who are torn apart inside, and those who are still alive but have never recovered and perhaps will never recover from their traumatic experiences.

And I will also stop, if sinfully briefly, to remember those victims of war who have died. Those hundreds of thousands of civilians--and yes, even those who took up arms or who bombed or who destroyed--in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in other places around the world that most of us couldn't find on an unlabeled map.

And I will say a prayer for peace.

And I will ask myself what I have done to honor veterans of war and victims of war, and to work for a more peaceful world, a world in which we do not have to add to the list of people who my dad remembers on Memorial Day.

grateful

In August I wasn't sure I could do this.

And in January I moved up to full time and I wasn't sure I could do this all over again.

But I did it friends. I've finished my first year in seminary post-hospital.

I am feeling very grateful to God, and for friends and family and faith communities.

A lot of really, really good people who have lent me a lot of support and love are about to graduate. And I am going to miss all of them very, very much.

But I am so grateful. For them. For new friends. For supportive professors and for jokes and for rain and for  I don't know what else.

Sometimes feelings just come on you like waves. Sometimes, with depression, they don't come at all, as pointed out by the amazing Hyperbole and a Half.

So hell, I'm grateful for being grateful.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Thank you for being blessings. Thank you all. From the bottom of my heart.

A thought about food and paying attention

I was walking out of a restaurant in Chinatown with a friend when a man walking past us caught my eye.

Now, here is the deal, and this is a confession. When people stop me in the streets of DC, I usually assume one of two things. One, they are college students getting paid crap money to try to get my name on their clipboard for UNICEF/Planned Parenthood/HRC. Or two, they are asking for money.

This is not something I am happy with about myself. There are all sorts of other reasons for someone to stop me. To ask for directions, maybe. Or maybe they're a friend I don't recognize saying hi. One time a guy stopped me because I was carrying my guitar and he wanted to tell me about a gig I should try to get. Or maybe someone just wants me to pay attention to what a beautiful day it is.

But I always assume it's about money. So when this man started talking to me outside of the Eat First Chinese Restaurant, I gave my standard response: "I'm sorry, sir, I don't have any cash."

"No, no," he said, and then made a sort of universally recognized gesture to his mouth, "I'm wondering if you have anything to eat?"

He had spotted that I was carrying a bag with leftovers from the restaurant.

"Oh! Yeah. Sure," I said, and handed him the bag. "Uh...it's General Tso's chicken." I shrugged as if to say, 'Not sure you like that.'

"Great, thanks," he said. We parted ways.

So here's the thing. When he stopped me, I wasn't mindful of the fact that I was carrying food. It wasn't until he pointed it out that I thought, "Oh. Right. I have extra food and can easily give it away." Because I'm used to having extra food. It's a normal occurrence in my life. A background noise. To have not only enough, but more than enough.

And there are plenty of people--way, way too many people in this city that it is cliched for me to point out is the capital city of the richest most powerful country on this planet--who not only don't have more than enough, they don't have enough. Food insecurity is rampant in DC.

So I'm grateful for my friends who remind me to be mindful of this. Like Andy and Erica and David and Veronica, who cook food for folks who don't have it down at the St. Luke's Mission Center. Or Rachel, who refuses to let us throw away extra food. Or the AU students who take a Saturday a month to help out at a food bank in Maryland when they could be studying or partying or sleeping in. Or all of my friends who stop and pray before we eat--I'm so bad at that!--so that we can take a few seconds to be grateful and mindful and to remind ourselves that the hands that brought us this food might be numbered with those who don't have enough.

It starts with an awareness. With a prayer.

With paying attention.

Instead of a systematic theology, I have a-systematic theology

So I sat down to write my credo for my systematic theology class and I've ended up with a 15 page christology. My roommate informs me that this is because I have too much Christ in my theology. I informed him that he's a rotten dirty heretic and that he deserves a big slap in the face from St. Nicholas. He also informs me that I superimpose my Christian beliefs on Jewish texts. I threw a shoe at him and insulted his heritage and his physical appearance. It was a good talk.

Ok, only half of that really happened. And my roommate totally gets a point in his column when, toward the end of my christology, I shrug and say something like, "Well, we can't really understand this without understanding the Holy Spirit, and I don't have time for that 'cuz it's finals week and I've frittered away all my writing time playing guitar in a fountain with said roommate."

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I wanted to share with you how I'm ending my credo, because I think it's fun and I think it helps blow overly-systematized theologies up from the inside out, which is a worthy cause in my opinion. Like Donald Miller says, this isn't math. It's relationship.

Check it out:

"The band mewithoutYou has a song entitled “Four Word Letter, Pt. 2” which ends emphatically with the following lines: “We hunger; though all that we eat brings us no relief, we don’t know quite what else to do. We have all of our beliefs, but we don’t want our beliefs. O God of peace, we want you.” Ultimately, it is not Christology that we crave. It is Christ. It is not theology that we yearn for. It is an encounter with the living God. It is not eschatology that we hope for. It is eschaton.

I once composed a song in critique of rapture theology that contains the line “I don’t know what’s waiting for us when we close our eyes, but I’d bet my life that it’s something that sings.” We do not know what the inbreaking kingdom of Christ will ultimately look like, but we see glimpses, hints of the glory to come.

            

Whatever it looks like, I will take the risk to claim that there will be singing.

And there will be dancing.

And we will feast together at the heavenly banquet."

thorn-pulling

We spend a lot of time at seminary talking about something called theodicy. Theodicy means "the justice of God," and it basically asks the question: "If God is all-good and all-powerful than why does bad stuff happen to good people?"

I will be honest with you and admit that I'm not sure there's much of a good answer to this, other than messing with the idea of what exactly we mean by the phrase "God is all powerful." Which I could do here, at length. But I'm not going to. Because right now, at the end of my semester, with a lot of the people that I'm in close relationship with going through some tough times, and with the 24-hour news cycle throwing its (why is it so)usual storm of pain and suffering at us, I'm not sure that trying to answer the question of theodicy is the most helpful thing.

There is a book of mystical poetry that one of the brilliant students that I worked with at American University gave me. She marked a bunch of pages in it. One of the pages she marked was a poem by Catherine of Siena, a 14th century saint. Here is what St. Catherine wrote:

"A thorn has entered your foot. That is why you
weep at times at
night.

There are some in this world
who can pull it
out.

The skill that takes they have
learned from
Him."

There is a time for debate. A time for trying to figure out ,"why." A time for analysis.

But there is a time, I think, when what we need to do is sit with each other and help knead thorns out of each others feet. Sit with those "some in this world" and help hold each others' hurt.

Maybe it's the end of the semester. Maybe it's all the trauma that has been flooding our national--and international--conscious lately. But that's where I feel pulled right now.

To sitting-with.

To thorn-pulling.

dance

Dance
and make a declaration:
I have a body.

I am not only
   scattered, racing thoughts
     caught on permanent loop
   ghosts of news media sites
      imprinted on the backs of my eyelids
I am not only
   systematic theologies
     that can't contain what they seek to explain
   theodicies
     that fail and fail and fail
I am not only
  numbness
  paralyzed by tragedy
I am not only
   Rumi's perpetual whirlpools
   the lies I tell about myself
   the skeletons of winter.

Dance
  and make a declaration
  a protest in the darkness:
We are bodies
  loving in rhythm
  moving to music.

We are miracles.

Sermon: A Deep and Terrible Darkness

This is a sermon I preached at American University last night. Obviously a lot has changed in Boston since I wrote this but I think it still speaks to our response, somewhat. It's on Genesis 15, which is a problematic text for me in a lot of ways because of all the time I spent hanging out with people who get treated like Canaanites, people who live between the river of Egypt and the great river, who were doing awfully fine without a covenant being forced down their throats, thank you very much. But that is not what this sermon is on, at least not directly. 

It probably won’t surprise you if I tell you that I had to change the sermon that I was going to preach today.

I was going to start with a hip, relevant reference to a movie. Except that I’m not particularly hip and relevant so it was going to be a movie from the 90s originally made in France. But it was going to relay the message of my sermon in the language of pop culture, complete with a Dustin Hoffman quote. It was going to set up a clever contrast with the passage from Genesis that we just heard, shed light on the scriptures, which was going to be ironic because the passage that we’re grappling with is about darkness.

And then the bombs went off in Boston.

It didn’t take long for the gruesome images to fill our social media sites and newsfeeds. And we watched. Watched the videos of the explosions, of runners still trying to finish. We refreshed news sites to see if there was new information. We gathered around. Huddled together. We prayed. We started planning vigils. We told stories of heroism, of runners running all the way to the hospital to give blood, of people responding. We shared posts about goodness outnumbering evil. We quoted Mr. Rogers telling us to look for the helpers when we are scared. We did what little we know how to do.

When something like Boston or like Sandy Hook happens—and isn’t it awful that we have a category to put these tragedies in, that we can say “when something like Boston or Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech or Columbine or….”—my first reaction is silence.  If you know me you know that not having words is scary for me. I'm not someone who is naturally prone to silence. But what do you say in response to the terror, the shrapnel, the bleeding limbs? What do you say in response to the smoke and the wreckage? I just have to sit with it, for awhile. Just sit in the deep and terrible darkness of it.

So now here I am, speaking. And here we are, looking for answers, looking for God to show up, to do something, to give us some sort of explanation or way to react or something. I know I am. It’s a natural response, and an important one. To look for God to show up.

In theological parlance, there is a word for a revelation of God’s self. It’s called a theophany. Theophanies, in scripture, are often accompanied by signs of God’s power over creation. Fire, lightning, thunder. Earthquake. Blinding light, knocking Saul to the ground. God shows up and those who experience the theophany know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God is there. God makes God’s self known in a dramatic way.

I think that when I want to hear from God, I want this kind of encounter. I mean, I could do without the earthquakes. But I want the certainty. The convincing evidence that God is here, that God has something to say directly to me.

Genesis 15, which we just heard read, is the story of a theophany, but it challenges our expectations about what it means to encounter God. Now this Genesis 15 text is a pretty key story in the Hebrew Bible. This is the first covenant with Abram. Here God, having called Abram from his home into a strange country, promises him descendants and land. This is quite a promise for an old man, with no children, wandering landless. This story foreshadows all that is to come after—the birth of the Israelite nation, the captivity in Egypt, the Exodus, the violent entry into the “Promised Land.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that without this story, the rest of the Hebrew Bible doesn’t make much sense.

And so it’s fascinating to me just how ambiguous this passage is, in fact just how fractured it is. How caught up this passage is in fear and in darkness. It’s a story about a promise but it’s an ambiguous promise, an uncomfortable promise.

There are a few things that I want to point out about this text. First, there’s a ceremony being referred to here, a covenant ceremony, which the first hearers and readers of this text would have known but which we, in the 21^st century, are not familiar with. The description of this ceremony is remarkably detailed considering the usually sparse nature of biblical narratives. We are given a detailed list of the animals involved and a description of the process of preparing them and protecting them from scavengers. The prepared sacrifices are then accepted by God in a haunting scene involving “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch.” What is going on here?

            The way we translate from the Hebrew sheds some light. The Common English Bible translates: “That day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram.” The Inclusive Bible expands on the reason behind this translation: “In Hebrew, the word ‘covenant’ is derived from the verb ‘to cut.’ Usually both parties cut the sacrifice jointly, as if to say, ‘May this happen to me if I violate our agreement.’” So when Abram asks “how am I to know that I shall possess [the land],” God responds with a radical commitment, saying, in effect, “If I don’t hold up my end of this deal, I am going to get cut. I am going to be hurt.” This is a vulnerable God.

            What brings about this radical commitment from God? Abram’s doubt. Throughout this passage Abram challenges God, asks God pointed questions, asks how he can possibly know that God is serious about this promise. Now Abram is often lifted up as the paragon of faith, the one who does just what God tells him to do. And here he is, doubting, and forcing a response—a radical response, a vulnerable response—from God.

            So this promise is wrapped up in doubt. And the doubt doesn’t just manifest itself in the form of Abram’s questions. This whole passage is fractured and caught up in darkness. We are told that when God first addresses Abram, God tells him to go out and count the stars. So if we’re seeing the stars, then it’s nighttime, right? Ok. Then God talks to Abram some more and we are told that the sun is going down. So did a whole night and day go by here? Or is the story out of order? And then it’s nighttime again and we get this spooky scene with the smoking pot and the flaming torch. Time is fluid in this passage. It is fragmented. Fragmented like experiences of trauma. Because trauma disrupts our sense of time, makes seconds last hours and days disappear like smoke.

            So we go from nighttime to the sun going down and then “a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.” I can’t get rid of this line. It sticks in my heart. A deep and terrifying darkness. That’s what I feel when I see the news about Boston, the news about Texas, the news about the Virginia Tech massacre that occurred 6 years ago this week. The news of U.S. bombs falling on a wedding party in Afghanistan, killing 30 people. A deep and terrifying darkness. That’s what I feel when mental illness swirls around me and I have what we clinically call a “depressive episode” and my brain is trying to kill me. A deep and terrifying darkness.

            What I want to say here is that the fact that Abram encounters God in a fragmented way, and in a deep and terrifying darkness, tells us something about how we encounter God. Remember I told you about theophanies? This passage from Genesis is almost a reverse theophany. It does not happen with a thundering voice or with beams of light. It takes place under deep and terrifying darkness. It is in darkness and confusion that God—a radically committed God, a vulnerable God—shows up.

            So tonight I want you to stay with me, at least for a little while, in the deep and terrifying darkness. It is an uncomfortable place to be. A scary place to be. A place where there are no easy answers, where, in fact, there might not be any answers at all. This is not the place where we expect to find God. This is a place where we might describe our experience as an absence of God. And what I’m telling you, and what I’m telling myself, is: don’t be so quick to leave this place.

            See, I do not like the deep and terrifying darkness. I like sunshine. I like clarity. I like answers and certainty. But what I encounter in this passage is a faith, Abram’s exemplary faith, that is expressed through doubt. I encounter a sense of time that does not march by mechanically but that ebbs and flows chaotically. I encounter promises made in darkness, covenants cut in haunting scenes, God’s presence as absence.

            And I want to say that what seems like bad news—doubt, fragmentation, darkness—is actually good news. Because often these things match our experiences, and we can only meet God in and through our experiences. We can only encounter God, the God who heals, if we are willing to stay with the hurt, to experience it. As the Sufi poet Rumi writes, “the cure for pain is in the pain.”

            And I want to say, further, that if we are not willing to stay, for awhile, in the deep and terrifying darkness, then we are going to have a hard time following this Jesus, this Christ, about whom we sing and to whom we pray. Because the Christ who dies on the cross is dying, again, in Boston. Is dying, again, in Newtown. Is dying, again, in Afghanistan. Is dying, again, in Gaza. And even when the disciples encounter Jesus after the resurrection, they find that he still bears the scars of his torture and death in his body. The trauma does not simply disappear. It remains. The deep and terrifying darkness is not simply gone. But there is a word in that darkness, a further word, a word of radical commitment and vulnerability.

            I am going to ask us to spend just a few moments, now, before we sing, in silence. To stay in this darkness, for at least a little while. To experience an absence. And thus, to encounter the presence that, perhaps, we were looking for to begin with. 

Finally writing about Boston

I've posted three times in three days, which is quite an accomplishment for me. And I've written about myself every time. And I haven't written about Boston.

When the bombs go off--in Gaza or in Syria or in Boston--my first reaction is silence. I don't have any words. If you know me you know that not having words is scary for me. I'm not someone who is naturally prone to silence. But what do you say in response to the terror, the shrapnel, the bleeding limbs? What do you say in response to the smoke and the wreckage?

So much of what gets said after these sorts of things--how awful that there are "these sorts of things," that bombing and shooting and death and maiming are a category that we can talk about--strikes an ugly chord in me. The jump to assumptions about the religion and the nationality--let me be brutally honest, about the skin color--of the perpetrator. The endless speculation. The 24-hour news cycle.

We do what we do. We huddle together. We hold vigils. We identify heroes. Unless of course the bombs are falling far away, falling on--let me be brutally honest again--falling on Arabs. Then we don't need heroes. We only need the heroes when it's "us."

I am not trying to take away from anyone's pain, anyone's mourning. Boston is a horrible human tragedy and we need to do what we do, need to huddle together and hold vigils and tell stories about stories. What I am trying to say is that we are a part of this. This culture of violence. This culture that leaves the Senate paralyzed to do anything about guns. This culture that thinks that dropping bombs on wedding parties in Afghanistan is ok but a bomb going off at a marathon isn't. This culture--this government, this good "liberal" president--that is going to pump $40 billion more dollars into weaponry for Israel, so that we can watch from afar as the bombs drop on Gaza and the tear gas and rubber bullets get fired directly into the faces of unarmed protesters and the kids get shot from the rooftops in Hebron and the Wall gets built and built.

I abhor what happened in Boston. It is sick and it is cowardly and it is unacceptable.

But Suheir Hammad gives me my response: I will not dance to your war drum.

stamps

Someday I will stop writing about the hospital, but not today.

In the meantime, I listened to a speaker yesterday, Mike Stavlund, who said we don't really get over grief, we just learn to integrate it in our lives. Make the fragments part of a--still fractured--whole. His grief is incredibly different then mine. I'd say worse but he told us not to do the whole comparison thing. So I'll keep writing, I suppose.

Here is what is making me write today:

When my parents loaded me in the car to limp our way up the East Coast to Silver Hill--to Connecticut, where everything was going to be alright so why did it feel like I was dying of choking on half-formed words--I asked if we could stop by the post office and pick up a roll of stamps. I used those stamps to send letters from the hospital, letters on yellow legal pad paper, letters to everyone I could think of to write letters to. To folks at MVS and to the AU community and to Dumbarton and to friends from high school and college. I scribbled in my journal--gold, gold, gold, the trees are all gold, and the birds that are in them also--and wrote furiously cramped letters and quoted Rilke and Thurman and Nouwen and Kathleen Norris and I don't know when the words stopped pouring out of me but somehow when I got home from Silver Hill things weren't all better but the words had dried up.

And I say all this to say that I am down to just three stamps on that roll, having just used one to send off a massive check to pay for the psychological assessment I have to have done for the ordination process. Maybe I'll use the rest of my hospital stamps for some similarly ironic purpose.

And I say all this, also, to say that I am staking out a claim made of words for myself, again. Lent started that process, hopefully. I'm not saying I'll write everyday, or even every week. I'm not setting a timeline. But I am tackling this fractured process of writing again. Because in my journal from that painful journey I wrote, again and again:

Thank God I still have words. Thank God I can still write.

...and remembered

I woke up before the construction--
(that awful jackhammer sound of the bulldozers
evoking concrete dust and demolished houses)
--woke up to the refrains of songbirds.

...and remembered trees bathed in gold
and a wire cage open to the sky.

And
touching stories on my arm
tried again.

eschatology

They tell me that these ancient apocalypses don't speak about the end of the world
    but an affirmation of the world
    a world where death has lost its sting.
But the chaos that hovers on the edge of my vision
    has a voice and he whispers:
"You can't beat me. You need me."
And I wonder if he's right.
And I think about conversations
    about chaos
    about creativity
    about art.
And I wonder who's got it right.

We are on your couch
    not talking
    and thinking about death
    and how it does, really,
 
sting.

Sermon: To tell a different story

This is a sermon that I preached last night at Kay Chapel at American University. It's about violence in the name of the Christian story, and why I think--given all that violence--we still need to tell the story of our faith. As it turned out, it was also the day when the campus remembers those who died in the Holocaust by reading names from the steps of Kay, so there was a resonance between what I was saying and what was going on outside. The texts were John 20:19-31 and Acts 5:27-32. Let me know what you think.

I. Love. Stories.

When I was a kid, I used to tell stories. I had a really active imagination, so my stories usually involved Martians or dragons or robotic superheroes. I just loved make-believe. Loved creating whole worlds that I could play in, could lose myself in.

I never kept my stories to myself. I would tell them to just about anyone who was around. My mom would sit at our computer and type up the stories that I told her. Then we’d print them out and make a book out of them, and my dad would help me illustrate them.

I’m pretty sure I still have some of those books sitting around, but anyway. That’s a different story.

Stories. What’s your favorite story?

Think about this question for a second. What’s your favorite story?

Why is it your favorite?

Who is the story about?

Last week, we walked together through a story. It’s a story that has all the elements that make for a good story. It has foreshadowing. Tension. Conflict. Betrayal. Redemption. And when we tell it, there’s a lot of singing.

Now, we find out, the story continues. There’s a “what’s next?” And it sounds like it’s going to be another good story. The story of a people transformed in order to transform the world. The story of a church.

 Earlier, we heard the first outlines of this new story. We heard about the disciples, huddled together in the upper room. We heard about their transformative experience with the Risen Christ, with this man who still bears the scars of his terrible death but now, somehow, graciously breathes out the Spirit of peace. We heard about Peter—fearful Peter, Christ-denying Peter—suddenly filled with courage, leading the apostles in front of the council, saying “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” Renewal. Drama. Confrontation. Oh, yeah. This is going to be a good story.

But there is a problem with this story, or at least a problem with the way that this story has been told throughout the history of the church. A problem that makes me cringe even though I want to be thrilling to the themes of redemption and liberation hinted at in these texts. The story that we are hearing the beginning of tonight is good news, but it has not always been good news for those that the Christian community has interacted with. As it turns out stories, even good stories, can be used as weapons.

I notice, when I’m reading the gospel of John, that I cringe a lot. I cringe a lot because John uses a word repeatedly, a word that is used in tonight’s reading. Actually, in the Common English version that we heard read, the Greek word “Ioudaios” is translated as “Jewish authorities.” But traditionally, in the old King James Version and in the New Revised Standard Version that I’m used to reading, the word is translated as “Jews.” And I hear, “the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews.” And I think, instead, of all the times in the past 2000 years when it has been Jews locking doors for fear of the good Christian folks. And I think, instead, of centuries of pogrom and persecution and Holocaust. Of Christian bishops urging emperors to prohibit Jewish communities from rebuilding burned out synagogues. And then I turn to the Acts passage, and I read “the God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree,” and I wonder just how long in Christian history it took for that plural “you” to mean, not authorities or power structures but instead a whole race or ethnic group. I wonder just how long it took for this good, good story of resurrection and redemption and empowerment to turn into a story of violence, of ethnic cleansing of us-versus-them, of othering.

Of course the story didn’t start out this way. When the gospel of John uses the word “Ioudaios,” what’s being referenced is an intra-Jewish conflict. The Jewish community is being pulled apart over the issue of the messiahship of this Jesus of Nazareth character, and the fledgling pre-Christian community is not doing so well. It seems, from other texts in John’s gospels, that Christians—who, remember, are still predominantly Jewish at this time—have been kicked out of synagogues. So what we have in John’s gospel isn’t the story of Gentile Christians against traitorous Jews but rather a struggling Jewish Christian community against, as the CEB would have it, religious authorities. There are even some scholars who argue that the meaning of “Ioudaios” is better understood as “Judean,” that is, from Jerusalem and southern surrounds, in contrast to the predominantly northern, Galilean followers of Jesus.

This same dynamic of intra-communal conflict is at play throughout the book of Acts. The author of the single document that we know as Luke and Acts goes out of his way to absolve Pilate of the death of Jesus, emphasizing the insistence of the Jewish community on the crucifixion of Jesus. But as Barbara Reid writes, “When Jewish Christians spoke of Jews who put Jesus to death, the intra-Jewish nature of the conflict was clear. But when Christians who are no longer Jews speak of ‘the Jews’ as being responsible for the death of Jesus, there is a whole other nuance that fuels anti-Judaism. Luke’s narratives must be understood in both their historical and theological contexts, at the same time, they must not be used to foment anti-Semitism.”[i]

But oh, how our Christian narratives—our Christian stories—have been used to foment anti-Semitism. The story of the crucifixion, with the Jews as the enemy, the killers of Christ, fueled Christian violence against Jewish communities, from riots to pogroms to the ovens of the Holocaust. It was Christian theology—the Christian story about God—based, ostensibly, on the biblical texts, that made this violence possible. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners makes this point, that German anti-Semitism, based on Christian theology and a certain reading of the Bible, created the atmosphere in which genocide could occur.[ii] Our Christian story was wrapped up in the need for violent scapegoating. Our story, our text, was used as a weapon, as a tool for writing other people out of the story. 

Now much work has been done, after the Holocaust, to disassociate biblical interpretation from this pernicious anti-Semitism. But Jewish people are not the only victims of our Christian tendency—can we call it our human tendency—to write people out of stories. Other religions have been the target of our stories-as-weapons as well. I’m thinking particularly of the stereotypes and the fear directed toward Islam, from the blood-drenched saga of the Crusades until today. The story relies on the exclusion of others, of people of other religions, in order to secure the particularity of Christian salvation. And we look to some of our favorite Bible verses and we see the shadow of this looming exclusivity. We see John 3:16, that favorite verse for signs at football games, and we read “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” And somehow instead of the love of God, and instead of the statement against condemnation that appears in the very next verse, somehow this verse comes to mean “You must accept Jesus or you must perish.” And we hear John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” See? Look! It’s in the Bible! If you don’t believe in Jesus, then you are excluded. You are written out of the story.

(This is bad exegesis, by the way. But I think it’s representative of the way these texts have been interpreted over the centuries and throughout modern times.)

Now maybe it’s natural for religious stories to exclude other religions. But the way that the Christian story has been told over the centuries and right up until our current time has been perfectly willing to write people out of the story within the Christian fold. It will come as no surprise to you to hear me say that our texts have been used as weapons against women. I mean, there’s the obvious proof text passages. 1 Timothy 2:12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Or 1 Corinthians 11:3, “I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of the wife.” But those passages are the easy ones to critique, to say, “Well, those are just the product of a certain sociohistoric context.” But there are parts of our story that are much closer to home, I think, that have been used to commit violence against women. How many women experiencing domestic violence have been told that the abuse their husbands are pouring out on them is simply “the cross that they have to bear”? How much Christian theology has centered around God as an abusive Father, pouring His—and I say His here on purpose—wrath out on a victim Son? And if an abusive Father, why not an abusive husband? And I could go on and on about texts from the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah that picture Israel as an unfaithful wife and proceed to use language of violence and shame against the feminine depiction of the people of God. So often, too often, the texts that we draw on for our Christian faith have been used to silence women, to hurt women, to write women out of the story.

Of course, the latest fad in violence done in the name of the Christian story is that which is committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer folk, whether Christian or not. And again, we can go to the Bible for our prooftexts, for those seven clobber passages that are used to tell gay people that they are inherently wrong, unclean, less-than. During the recent rallies at the Supreme Court in response to the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 court cases, one journalist went and talked to young people who were rallying against marriage equality. He had them write the reason for their opposition to gay marriage on a pad of paper and then snapped a picture of them. Almost every single one of the young people he talked to used some sort of pseudo-Christian argument to make their case that marriage should be between one (cisgender) man and one (cisgender) woman. As Peter Gomes, the late Harvard chaplain and himself a gay man, writes: “Although most contemporary Christians who have moral reservations about homosexuality, and who find affirmation for those reservations in the Bible, do not resort to physical violence and intimidation, they nevertheless contribute to the maintenance of a cultural environment in which less scrupulous opponents of homosexuality are given the sanction of the Bible to feed their prejudice and, in certain cases, cultural “permission” to act with violence upon those prejudices.”[iii] To Gomes I would add that even when overt violence is not acted out against gay people, the violence of closets and of silencing—with all the depression, self-loathing, and all too often suicide that results—is not to be underestimated. For so long LGBTQ people have been the scapegoats, pushed to the margins and written out of the Christian story.

I could go on, of course. I could talk about all the biblical arguments for chattel slavery in the United States. The violence done in the name of the Bible against indigenous people, including ongoing violence against Palestinians sanctioned by the land promises of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The violence of colonialism. I imagine you get the point.

So here’s the question: why not just throw it all out? Why, if the Christian story has been accompanied by, and has fueled, so much violence throughout the centuries, if our texts have been used to write so many people out of the story, then why should we keep the damn thing at all? Why should we read the texts, why should we listen to the stories?

Here’s why I think our Christian stories matter. Because they point the way to the risen Christ. And this Christ, this risen Christ, is the Jesus who knows what it is to be written out of a story. To be pushed to the margins. To be violated, abused, killed. And it is this Christ—this risen Christ who still carries the signs of trauma in hands and side, wounds that Thomas can touch—who, against all reason, breathes the Spirit of peace out onto the disciples who betrayed and abandoned him. This wounded, this traumatized Christ comes to us from the margins of the page, from the places of crushing pain, and gives us the ability to tell a new story. Gives us new lenses to read this old, old story.

This risen Christ, this resurrected Jesus, calls us to question any place in our story that excludes and scapegoats, because if we read with the eyes of Christ we read with the eyes of the excluded and the scapegoated. This risen Christ, this resurrected Jesus, transforms Peter and the rest of the disciples from marginalized voices huddled in a room to empowered voices that must obey the call of a God of justice and of peace rather than any human authority of violence and dehumanization.  When we read our texts, when we tell our stories, in the Spirit of this resurrected Jesus, we find that our texts can no longer be used as weapons. That we can no longer engage in the project of writing people out of the story.

Because, you see, we are an Easter people. We are an Easter people, and something fundamental has changed. Something that leads us to challenge, like Peter standing before the council, the violent side of our shared story.

What’s your favorite story?

Who is it about?

Who is included, and who is not?

Let me tell you my favorite story. It is one that I have probably told before. You might have heard it in this very chapel, but I think it is worth retelling. The story is about South Africa, in the depths of the struggle against apartheid. The white South African government had outlawed a march against apartheid, so the organizers of the march decided instead to hold a church service at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. Then-bishop Desmond Tutu was preparing to speak to the gathered marchers when the doors to the cathedral burst open. In poured members of the dreaded apartheid secret police, making no effort to conceal their identity. They carried tape recorders and pads of paper. The message was clear: speak up, and your name will be taken down. You will be recorded. And we will find you. And we will find your family. And you will regret that you did not hold your tongue.

Desmond Tutu surveyed the situation. The menacing agents. The terrified congregation, eyes moving fearfully from him to the intruders. What would he say? How would he respond?

He began thoughtfully. “You are powerful,” he said. “You are very powerful.”

“But we serve a God who will not be mocked!”

And then, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of welcoming and smiling widely, he proclaimed: “Since, in Christ, we have already won…we invite you today to join the winning side.”

The response was tremendous. The congregation began singing and dancing, and the pressure of their movement slowly moved the secret police out of the cathedral and onto the street. From fear to celebration. From huddled in a room to saying, with Peter, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”

Now the thing about this story is that when it happened, there was no way, just no way, that Desmond Tutu was right. The anti-apartheid movement was not the winning side. It was, very decidedly, the losing side. But a decade later those same protesters would be dancing in the streets of South Africa celebrating the fall of apartheid, and who knows but they might have been joined by some of those same secret police agents who had been tasked to intimidate and brutalize them. The anti-apartheid movement was carried forward by a hope in the resurrection, a hope that challenged not only state-sanctioned but also church-sanctioned dehumanization and violence. The scapegoated, traumatized Jesus, emerging from the margins of the story to breathe peace.

Friends, we are being invited, today, to meet this resurrected Jesus. This might mean positioning ourselves in some scary places. In the margins of our collective stories. In fearfully locked rooms. In the places within our narratives where prejudice and scapegoating rule the day. In places of trauma and pain. Because it is from exactly these places that the risen Christ emerges, breathing peace. This risen Christ is calling to us, today, from demolished homes in East Jerusalem, from bomb-shattered streets in Syria, from poverty-ravaged and abandoned urban and rural landscapes in the U.S., from psychiatric wards and homeless shelters, calling to us. Calling to us to, today, to tell a different story.

Calling to us, today, to join the winning side.

---

[i] Barbara Reid, “Notes on Acts,” in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible (Abingdon, 2003), 1959.

[ii] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997).

[iii] Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (Harper One, 1996), 146.

Easter Monday: On not giving up

Lent is over, Christ is risen, the "alleluias" are back on our lips....and I'm in a total daze, probably brought on by the 11 worship services I've been to in the past 4 days.

God sent me an email this morning that just said "enough already."

Anyway. Back in February, before Lent began, I wrote this:

"I was thinking about "giving something up" this year, and it struck me that giving up is exactly what I've been trying to avoid ever since I got out of Silver Hill more than a year ago now. So I think I'm going to blog for Lent about what I'm not giving up on, what I'm holding on to, what's keeping me going."

A liturgical season later, and  think I only missed three days. Not too shabby given how much of an undisciplined mess I generally am. I've had help. Once people caught wind of what I was doing, they'd ask me, "So, what aren't you giving up on today?" or "Have you blogged today?" It was a cool bit of community accountability that I really appreciated.

A liturgical season later, and what I have is a list of reasons--some seemingly trivial, some almost too big to hold on to--for putting my feet on the ground in the morning, for getting through the day, for taking whatever the next step is in this whole ministry thing that I've committed myself to. Should I say, this whole life thing that I've committed myself to?

Thank you for coming with me on this Lenten journey. There is so much not to give up on. So much to keep going for.

One day, when I am struggling, will you be part of my community of accountability? Will you remind me of this?