April Fool?

April Fool?

© 2013 Robert J. Elder     
   

Luke 23:1-24

Herod questioned him at some length, 
but Jesus gave him no answer.

The chief priests and the scribes stood by, 
vehemently accusing him.

Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt 
and mocked him;

then he put an elegant robe on him, 
and sent him back to Pilate.

That same day Herod and Pilate 
became friends with each other.

The story of Jesus’ trial and execution is, in some ways, a sort of Whodunit. In the end, when all was said and done, who was really responsible for the death of Jesus? If we were the Jerusalem District Attorney, whom would we charge? The candidates for blame in our passage today appear to be Pilate, Herod, the elders, chief priests and scribes of the Temple. But beyond our passage, shouldn’t we include Judas, who betrayed him, the disciples, who abandoned him, and Peter, who denied him? Is this just about the whole list of potential suspects? Should anyone else be on our list?

In his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke reported that the earliest Christian preachers in Jerusalem reminded the people that “you handed over and rejected Jesus in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life...”

This certainly expands the list of suspects dramatically. Was it Pilate, the priests, or Peter? Was it Herod or the disciples? Was it the butler in the study with the candlestick? Was it every living soul in Jerusalem who failed to cry out for justice for an innocent person that day? I can't think of anyone who comes through this narrative looking very good. How do you charge a whole city with murder?

And what about the fact that whenever we fail to claim Jesus in our day, to acknowledge his lordship in our lives, we deny him anew, placing ourselves in the same unsavory company as those who denied him first? Are we, too, guilty of his death?

Lent is such an counter-cultural season. Traditionally, it is a penitential season in which we are meant to ponder our shortcomings with honest hearts -- at least as honest as we can muster. It is a time to meditate upon the supreme sacrifice of Jesus, which would never have been necessary if we had been as good and flawless as we spend most of our lives trying to convince ourselves and others that we are. For its part, our culture turns its back on Lenten themes, on “guilt trips” in general, on anything that might serve as an assault on our blithe search for a boosted self-esteem.

It isn’t easy for any modern preacher to stand before sophisticated people who have, or have had, successful careers, long lists of friends, newer model cars in the parking lot, that you are, in spite of your college degrees and many successes, fallen, sin-filled, and in need of repentance and salvation. (“My goodness,” you may be mumbling to yourself, “I got out of bed and made it to church, surely that counts for something on the good side of the ledger, why must I be subjected to yet another guilt trip from the pulpit? Don’t these preachers ever get tired of this subject?”). Sorry, it’s Lent for me too. The Lenten season of the cross, of betrayal and repentance, always seems out of place among successful people. If the point of the sermon today is to discover “whodunit,” surely everyone here can be marked off the list of suspects at least.

Christine and I were in Oklahoma City last summer for my a high school reunion, which was held a few block away from the site of the old Federal Building. You may recall it was a building which Timothy McVeigh decided would be a good symbol to destroy, killing a host of innocent people in the process, including little children ion the building’s preschool. I recall making our way through Lent back then, as we were treated to interviews with attorneys, legal experts, and authors of books about the trial of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing. Why? Well, his execution was scheduled around that time, and it was to be the first federal execution in many years. In those weeks leading up to the execution, yet again we saw the video footage showing the ruined carcass of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where one of my high school friends was killed along with 160-some others on that horrible day. By human standards of justice, if ever anyone deserved to die for a remorseless and brutal crime, it was Timothy McVeigh.

“Drama teachers will tell you that, for us to be engaged by a play, there must be a certain amount of distancing. We often think that the reason we love theater is that a play has characters with whom we can identify. But if we too closely identify with the characters, if from the moment they walk on stage we say, ‘Hey, that’s me,’ we are so busy defending ourselves, we can't get into the drama.”

The sins of other people are always much more interesting to us than our own, and it is precisely because they are not our own that we are free to be fascinated by them. I doubt many of us have stayed up nights making plans to blow up public buildings. The right sort of people, those who gather in this sanctuary this morning, or sit at the computer monitor to read yet another joke about the well-documented failings of famous public figures, seem so often to think of ourselves as somehow innocent of the moral foibles by which we are ready to judge others.

I remember sitting in the family room of a well-to-do couple during my graduate school years, listening to them go on and on about the fact that nobody in America understood a work ethic any more, that people on welfare did nothing but give birth to babies to burden the future of everyone around them, and that the world in general was just going to hell. This from people who already had spent at least 20 years, and proceeded to spend the next 20, benefiting from a social security system from which they received far more than they ever put in. I am also thinking of the rounds of school shootings, where the media seems in such a hurry to portray the shooters as loners and losers, thereby helping us distance ourselves from any feeling of kinship with such people.

"Moral condemnation,” one preacher wrote, “appears to work like binoculars. Look through one end, at somebody else's trespasses, at a safe distance, things are magnified. Look back at yourself, through the other lens, everything is tiny, insignificant, mere peccadilloes.”

We may give ourselves permission for our fascination with heinous crimes and their just desserts because we believe as deep down as we care to go that there is nothing vaguely similar between us and the Timothy McVeighs or the members of Al Qaeda. He was a loner, borderline nut case, apparently absent of conscience for what he had done. We like our evil pure, distilled down to its essence, not discolored with bothersome exceptions and details. It helps us keep our distance.

But evil is messier than that. Our culture demands electric power, and as soon as it looks as though we won't have as much as we want, making us more like the vast majority of the rest of the world, we think nothing of slamming salmon runs, further despoiling our air, and using farmers' irrigation water to get it. We refer to ourselves with the breathtakingly narrow description of “consumers,” as though all there is worth knowing about us is our appetite for ever-more goods and services, and we've built an entire advertising economy around creating, then meeting those consumer appetites, all at a cost to many things that are truly precious. We gladly sentence a thug who smacks a convenience store clerk to a long jail term, but if a multi-million dollar athlete is involved in violence, even murder, that can become their ticket to notoriety and further riches rather than punishment. We've created an entertainment culture that worships shamelessness and graphic violence, then wonder why children carry pistols and semi-automatic weapons to school.

To those who shouted for his execution on that April day in A.D. 33, the April fool appeared to be Jesus, the would-be king, all dressed up in mocking royal robes and crown of thorns, a buffoon who looked about as much like a king as a drunk sitting in a doorway downtown begging for change looks like the Duke of Windsor.

But the fools on that day as on this are the ones who think of evil as something that can be found only in others, never in ourselves. This may be one reason Paul was led to write, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 

To Be Lost, To Be Found, To Know the Difference

To Be Lost, To Be Found, To Know the Difference

Fourth in a Lenten series from Luke

March 10, 2013

           

© 2013 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Luke 22:31-34, 54-62

Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat,

but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail;

and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.

Just when Peter thought he was most in touch, most in sync, most able to stand next to Jesus, to defend him to the death, just then, at his point of greatest self-assumed strength, just at that very moment he was lost. This man, who was the first to raise his hand during the pop quiz when Jesus asked who they would say he was, who was first out of the gate with, “You are the Messiah!” This is the one who three times said he did not even know Jesus. There’s a lesson in there for us in there somewhere if we will attend to it. He was lost.

On the other hand, just when Peter went to weep in bitterness, just when he could see that his strength had not saved his master, had not even made a dent, just when he saw he was helpless to do anything of significance, even unable to speak up for his own acquaintance with Jesus, just then he was found. “I don’t even know the man,” Peter declared, voice shaking with the lie. This coming from the man Jesus once called, “The Rock.” Some rock...! Yet Jesus had prayed for him, interceded for him. And we all know Peter went on to become one of the bravest proclaimers of the faith. He was found again.

To be lost, to be found, to know the difference.

Sometimes we are lost and don’t even know it. Just when we think we are strongest, most capable, most in touch with the will of God, just then we may find reminders of our weakness, of our incapacity to stand by Jesus on the pedestals of our own strength and merit.

In a backward way, we love Peter for his failure, don’t we? More often than we’d like to admit, our own overconfident declarations of faith are also overstated. “I believe...” we say, unreservedly, in church, along with everyone else, as the Apostles’ Creed is recited. Easy enough to say in here, isn’t it, even though most of us really just more or less mutter it? But back at work, back in the neighborhood, back amid the hustle and bustle and jockeying for position, the elbowing for recognition, when there’s a price to pay, we turn into Peter: “No, I’ve heard of Jesus, of course, but can’t say that I really know him.”

Before we are too hard on Peter, we might recall that for all the tragedy and pain of his denial of Jesus, it is only Peter who made it to the courtyard. He followed Jesus at least that far, which is more than the others could say, apparently. He may be like us in this way too, when we feel, perhaps, that even if we are not perfect, at least we are ahead of others. Still, even that action turned into defeat. Faith, it turns out, is not a contest to see who gets there first or farthest. The culpability for the betrayal and denial of Jesus is cumulative, each little misstep, each failure to understand, each refusal to follow, all add weight to the outcome, until finally we are left with Paul saying, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”[1] All. No wiggle room there.

I think one of the amazing features of the Bible that we share is that it consistently looks at our heroes with unblinking truthfulness. In Peter’s own time, the literature of the Roman world was filled with stories of gods and heroes, while ordinary people were all but invisible, mere background figures or canon fodder for the stories of the great and glorious. Not so in the Bible, especially here in the New Testament. Here, Simon Peter, unarguably one of the heroes of the faith, is clearly nothing more than a lowly fisherman from Galilee, whose language or dress or body odor gave his humble origins away amid the Jerusalem folks sitting around the fire in the high priest’s courtyard that night. An ordinary man. In terms of the literature of his own day, his story would never have even been written down. If we had been writing one of the gospels, we would likely have been tempted to try to clean up the story of Peter, the faith ancestor of all of us here. But no, the Bible is honest. It tells the whole story of who we are. Yet it is the very ordinariness, the very thought that Peter was as we are, an ordinary person who found himself in an extraordinary circumstance, this is what makes the story so convicting.

Just like Peter, sometimes, for all our good intentions and resolutions, we fall away, we fall short, we deny and betray, and we are lost. “Alcoholics Anonymous teaches its members to introduce themselves, “I’m Jane,” or “I’m John, and I’m an alcoholic, but by the help of a higher power, a recovering one.” We love Peter for embodying [what we know we are]. For most of us are quite ordinary in our sin. “No redemption would do people like us any good that required us to be heroic. We need a higher power.”[2] Sometimes we are lost.

And sometimes we are found.

Sometimes we are found, though we have no sense within us that we are worth finding. In times when we weep bitter tears of resignation and failure, we wonder how we can go on, how we can face the world. It is when this picture of Peter’s weeping misery is before me that I am so captivated by Jesus’ prayer of intercession for him, even in anticipation of his failing, even as Jesus knew Peter was bound to fail, even so, he prays for him, intercedes for him.

Throughout the gospels, Peter fills the role of the “Everyman” disciple. He says things, does things, asks things, makes mistakes about things that represent the ways all disciples are in relationship with Jesus: faltering, stumbling, sometimes falling. It is no different for any of us than it is here in the gospel.

It is interesting that in the same breath, as Jesus made a prayer for unfailing faith for Peter, in that breath he prayed also for Peter’s return when he failed, and commissioned him with his prayer to strengthen others who follow. While Peter was on the road to being lost, was destined to deny his Lord that very night, even then Jesus was praying him back into relationship, was finding him again.

Probably no hymn in the world is more well known than “Amazing Grace.” Probably even those who claim to be totally unmusical, those who may think they have never memorized a piece of music, would surprise themselves when it comes to this song. See if you know it...

 [Sing it a capella....] Amazing grace, how sweet the sound...(now you...) I once was lost, but now am found...(now you...). See? We just know this hymn, it is a sort of hymn Peter could have written. In some ways, it is amazing that it is so well-loved, considering the confession that is called for in the very first line from anyone singing it: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me...”

A wretch? Is that what I am? I remember back in the 1970s hearing this hymn sung with a less offensive word used there, something like “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a soul like me.” Aw, isn’t that sweet? Jesus saved my unwretched little soul. We don’t live at a time when we go around calling people wretches, much less ask them to think of themselves that way, it might do harm to their self-esteem or something. No one likes to think of themselves in this way. I remember singing this hymn across the chancel from my colleague in my church in Texas, and mouthing “...that saved a wretch like you!” to him. He got tickled and started laughing so hard he couldn’t sing for the rest of the hymn.

Do we have problems referring to ourselves with a word like “wretch?” Of course we do, who wants to be a wretch?! It offends my self-image! I’m a pretty good person, certainly not a wretch. Thinking this way, we sound for all the world like Peter, puffing himself up to size in order to tell Jesus he would defend him to the death. Yet just when we think we are most found, least wretched, that is when we are lost. It is one of the paradoxical truths of the gospel. The dictionary says a “wretch” is “a miserable person, one who is profoundly unhappy or in great misfortune.” Just as Peter declared his willingness “to go with [Jesus] to prison and to death,” at that very moment when he thought he was the strongest, he was at that moment on the cusp of being the most lost. He was wretched, even if he didn’t know it, and we are no different.

Many of you probably know the story of “Amazing Grace.” The author, John Newton, was a new believer around the year 1750, yet after coming to faith he had continued to command an English slave ship. Eventually he saw that any role in the slavery trade was antithetical to the Christian faith, and he left the sea for good. He studied for the ministry, and for the last 43 years of his life preached the gospel in Olney and London. At 82, Newton said, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner (he was lost), and that Christ is a great Saviour (he was found).”

I once was lost, but now am found. He knew the difference after a lifetime lived between being lost and found. These are words that could well have been written by Peter. Indeed, I suspect that, given the right circumstances, they could be written by us all.

To be lost, to be found, to know the difference. The difference is in the one who does the finding. There is nowhere we can go that is beyond the finding power of Christ, who prays for us: “I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail...” Jesus prays for us. We were lost, but we are found. Thanks be to God.

---

[1] Romans 3:23, NRSV.

[2] “Ordinary Sin,” by William Willimon, a Duke University Chapel sermon, March 28, 1999.

The Power of Darkness

The Power of Darkness

Third in a Lenten series from Luke

                 

Luke 22:45-53                        

Psalm 55: 12-14, 20-21 

March 3, 2013           

© 2013 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

When I was with you day after day in the temple,

you did not lay hands on me.

But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!

Take a moment to think about the verses from Psalm 55[1] that we said together a few moments ago. Just to remind us of the bitterness the psalmist must have felt as this psalm was composed, I’ll read the words again:

It is not enemies who taunt me –

I could bear that;

it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me –

I could hide from them.

But it is you, my equal,

my companion, my familiar friend,

with whom I kept pleasant company;

we walked in the house of God with the throng.

My companion laid hands on a friend

and violated a covenant with me

with speech smoother than butter,

but with a heart set on war;

with words that were softer than oil,

but in fact were drawn swords.

I wonder if these words, or words like them, were on Jesus’ mind that night when he looked up and saw a crowd headed his way, with Judas leading the mob, pursing his lips for a kiss of betrayal?

I once heard about a struggling little non-profit agency on the East Coast, a local effort that helped to house people who were in need, people who, without someone to stand up for them, would be on the street. The agency struggled along doing its good deeds for the needy until one day, when a few fresh faces came onto the board of the organization, people with all the enthusiasm and promise that seemed to suggest they could help in significant ways. The first task they chose, however, was to begin exposing the weaknesses of the executive director to other members of the board. Finally, enough of the board’s energy was taken up with this discussion that their mission began to suffer, the director finally resigned, and the organization went out of business. An organization that for thirty years – with all its shortcomings and warts intact had still managed to help hundreds of families with housing needs – ceased to exist.

One observer of the human scene once said that some people, like Judas, cast out devils for a while … and then become one.

I find Jesus’ words about the power of darkness to be particularly chilling. Still, we need to recall that this is not the only “hour” about which Jesus spoke in his ministry. It is a word that comes straight across from Greek and Latin into our language: hora, meaning the time, the right sort of time, the opportune time, the blacksmith’s proverbial “strike while the iron is hot” sort of time. There had been other opportune “hours” in Jesus’ ministry, you can spot them running all through Luke’s gospel: The time when Jesus healed many, when he rejoiced, the hour of the disciples’ trials, the hour when the Son of Man comes like a thief in the night, the hour when the Pharisees warned Jesus about Herod’s evil intentions toward him, the time when the authorities expressed their desire to arrest him, the time when the Passover meal was eaten with his disciples.

Jesus had been among all these people who came to arrest him, day after day, yet they were afraid of the friendly crowds that followed him. How appropriate that they decided to come under the cover of night, when his loyal crowd, most of them, were home in their beds. In Luke 4, Jesus was tested in the wilderness and resisted, and Luke says that the devil left him until an “opportune time.” Alas, that time has come. Jesus is arrested. It is the devil’s hour, and the power of darkness provides the cover for their action which the light of day might have foiled.

All of us have known times when we intend something good, but we find no means at hand to accomplish it. The human tendency, then, is to take up any means at hand, the “ends justify the means,” as the old saying goes. But we all have seen, time after time throughout human history, that the means become, and even displace, the sought-after ends. The 17^th century philosopher, Frances Bacon, once observed his own culture struggling with questions of means and ends, and reflected that when improved means are found to pursue unimproved ends, we discover that, as Bacon declared, “it is singularly amazing how long the rotten can hold together.” In the end, to abandon legitimate means to seek legitimate ends ultimately means the loss of those legitimate ends. Means become ends, methods become outcomes.

Sometimes we have the good in mind but have no power to accomplish it. Jesus knew this, but trusted enough in God’s future to realize that though this hour was not his, other hours would be. There would be other hours, triumphant hours to come. In this situation, surrender and self-sacrifice were his only choices[2] as he held on to the confidence that the end of the story had not yet come, that there was more to be accomplished through God’s own time.

Here is a little something that I find interesting in this passage. Though they have come to arrest him, and Jesus knows this, he continues with the same sort of ministry that has characterized his life since his baptism in the Jordan: teaching and healing as signs of his kingdom. Even here, even as he is about to be handed over to those who are only too willing to do him ultimate harm, he teaches and heals. He teaches his disciples about the special impotence of violence to accomplish ultimate things, “No more of this!” he declares, and then he works to heal the effects of violence as he touches the servant’s ear and restores it. When it has been at its best, his church has been at this work ever since, teaching and healing, proclaiming and restoring.

Jesus knew that if his disciples took up the means of those who came to arrest him – the sword, the club, retaliation and bloodshed – it would ultimately taint and spoil their aim, which was to live out the love of God for all the world to see.

So the power of darkness has found its hour. What then? What is to become of the betrayer as well as the betrayed? Betrayal moves in two directions, it moves against the welfare of Jesus, but it also moves against the potential hopes and future Jesus saw in Judas when he called him to be one of his chosen disciples. Jesus had once chosen Judas, had seen something in him, some potential, had invested his time and energy into his relationship with him. Here we find that Jesus’ hopes and dreams for Judas are also betrayed. Maybe betrayal between intimates is always be like that, as tragic for the betrayer as for the one betrayed, perhaps more so.

There is a Fra Angelico painting in the Academy in Florence, Italy, where Judas is pictured with a black halo. In the island nation of Haiti, in the ragged city of Port au Prince, there is an Episcopalian Cathedral, in which you can find another depiction of the last supper. In the scene, Peter and Judas are depicted as white people, because, after all, they both denied Jesus, and white was the skin color of those devils who once enslaved the people of Haiti. The rest of the disciples are black. Yet Jesus appears as mixed race, a mulatto, neither black nor white, because of a local tradition in that culture that when the Messiah returns, he will save both white and black, the betrayer as well as the betrayed.

The power of darkness is not ultimate. The hour that Jesus mentioned passes, and another hour comes. A seed planted in dark soil, a baby after nine months in the darkness of the womb, they know the time when darkness has its hour, but they prepare there for other, brighter hours to come.

The power of darkness is proximate, but it too has lessons to teach, if we will attend to them. I’ll close this sermon with two bits of poetry, the first by contemporary Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas, the second from a hymn verse written for a hymn competition back in 1999, in anticipation of the new millennium.

Via Negativa, R.S. Thomas

Why no! I never thought other than

That God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to

Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars. His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm. We look at people

and places as though he had looked

At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Through the Darkness of the Ages[3], Hilary Jolly

Through the darkness of the ages, Through the sorrows of the days,

Strengths of weary generations, Lifting hearts in hope and praise,

Light in darkness joy in sorrows Presence to allay all fears,

Jesus, you have kept your promise, Faithful through two thousand years.

If we find ourselves deep in the hour of darkness, where there is betrayal all around us, remember there is another hour coming. Watch and be faithful.

---

[1] Psalm 55:12-14, 20-21, NRSV.

[2] Alan Culpepper, New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, Abingdon Press, p. 437.

[3] Via Negativa, and Through the Darkness of the Ages, copyright Jubilate Hymns, LTD., Hope Publishing Co., Carol Stream, IL 60188.

Who's On Trial?

Who’s On Trial?

Second in a Lenten series from Luke

                 

Luke 22:39-46                                         

February 24, 2013           

© 2013 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Why are you sleeping?

Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.

Twice he tells them to pray. And both times he gives them the content of their prayer, that they “not come into the time of trial.” What did Jesus mean by that? In just a very few verses, Jesus would be appearing at a trial. Is that what he meant? They should pray so they would be spared from his trial? Or was it more than that? The verses prior to our own lesson were filled with Jesus’ words about his own trials, and specifically, Peter’s coming trial and betrayal. So what is he saying? That we can escape our trials? Or that we can live through them and on out to the other side?

What is the effect of prayer? The circumstances of Jesus’ own prayer reveal that though he prayed God might remove this cup – the coming agony of his passion – from him, that is not what happened. Additionally, though he urged the disciples to pray to escape trial, they fell asleep instead – sleeping “because of grief.” We all know about that kind of sleep, depressed, despondent, the divorce becomes fonal tomorrow, my-world-is-about-to-end sleep. Some might then conclude that this provides evidence that intercessory prayer – prayer which intercedes on behalf of ourselves or others – is not effective. Then Jesus followed his requests to God with. “yet not my will but yours be done.”

How long, do you suppose, was the silent pause he made between the two phrases, between asking God to remove his cup of suffering, and relinquishing control to God’s will in the matter? I don’t know for sure, and neither does anyone else, but I’d guess it was a very long time.

Have you ever had your heart’s desire on your lips and in your mind, wearing your hopes like clothing, finding reason to return to them again and again, making them the subject of your prayers as well as your daily conversation? And have you ever discovered that in response there is sometimes only silence? I remember when it became clear my mother’s cancer was going to take her life. I prayed that this cup would be taken from her, from me. Silence. I waited. I slept because of grief. My mother died.

How long is the space between the time you discover your unmet hopes and the time when you find you have said in your life “yet not my will but yours be done”? I’d guess if it was something really important to you, it might have been a long, long time. It was for me. In fact, at this very moment, you may still be waiting for a response to some precious prayer, long on your heart. It’s not easy, is it, this waiting for an answer that does not come?

It isn’t the receiving or not receiving a positive response to our prayers that matters, not so much as the need finally to hand the outcomes of all our unmet desires to God, to seek his will in all things. Easy to say. Not so easy to do. I know this and so do you. Want to know how difficult? Just consider this scene where Jesus awaited God’s response. Jesus. Son of man. The Messiah. The anointed one of God, waiting for an answer that does not come. This is the Jesus whom we worship, left on hold.

Have you ever known someone who had a spirituality that was marked by a sense of handing over, a sense that the will of God was uppermost in their meditations and in their lives? I have heard of such people, saints, an occasional spiritually advanced person, but I’ve never been one of them.

When Jesus told his disciples that they were in the kind of night, the kind of dangerous circumstances where one would be inclined to sell his own clothes to buy a sword, he meant that they were in a desperate situation and they should make no mistake about it. He had told them at his last supper with them that he was going to be arrested and killed, and now they were moving out into the dangerous night. He was right. It is the sort of terrifying circumstance in life where one would sell anything, set aside any of life’s other priorities in order to have this one thing.

I remember the scene from the film Titanic, when the rich antagonist offered one of the ship’s officers a fistful of money to let him have a seat on the lifeboat. The officer looked at him incredulously. What good would money be to him, who would, in the space of a few hours, be dead? What could he buy with it that would be of value to him? The wealthy man thought he was offering what was precious, but its value was only proximate. First one must have an assurance of a continuation of life. Money only has value when it represents something that can be added to life. But that was a night when one would have sold his own clothes to have the one thing that might save him. What good are clothes when in a short time you will be at the bottom of the ocean or stretched out, naked, on a cross? “[The disciples were] prepared to meet the incoming danger by becoming dangerous. This, of course, is not the way of Jesus. In the battles facing the twelve, swords will be useless: a sword would not help Judas, a sword would not help Simon, a sword would not help frightened, fleeing disciples. But they thought so. So do we, truth be told.” If we think our own resources will see us through our greatest catastrophe, Jesus knows we are mistaken.[1] That is the sort of circumstance in which the disciples and Jesus found themselves, up against the wall, with only the protection of prayer to clothe them. And God appeared to be away from his desk, their calls were going unanswered.

Which is, of course, an answer of sorts. Sometimes the answer that silence provides is hard, but it is still an answer. It may not be the answer we want, but it will become the answer to the ultimate prayer, the one that relinquishes control, relinquishes the idea that we can have things the way we wanted them, that we can sell our clothes and buy our salvation.

A line in the Holy Week hymn titled “Go to Dark Gethsemane,” suggests that we not turn away from Jesus’ own griefs, but that we “learn from Jesus Christ to pray.” What do you think we we are supposed to learn about prayer?

One thing we learn is that Luke presents us with a picture of Jesus as one who prayed throughout his life. He did not just pray at this, his hour of critical need, but throughout his life and ministry. Prayer was his pattern. Luke records Jesus’ determination to pray at his baptism, at the beginning of his ministry, before he chose his disciples, before Peter made his confession of Jesus’ Messiahship, at the Transfiguration on the mountain with Moses and Elijah, before he taught the disciples about prayer, here, before facing his arrest and execution, as he was dying, and, finally, in Luke 24, when he was risen from death, he prayed with two of his disciples who had walked with him to Emmaus, and they recognized him as he prayed.[2]

Other things we learn about prayer from Jesus: He was not bashful about saying what he wanted and waiting for an answer. He knew he might not receive what he had asked for. And he determined above all to align himself with what God is doing in the world, even when the entire picture and reason for this was out of his own view.

Of all the prayers we may find in the Bible, this prayer from Jesus reminds us that prayer in crisis means the most when it is preceded by a lifetime of prayer discipline. Jesus could handle the silence that confronted him because he had been in prayer so often before. One friend of mine wrote once, “Prayer is an exercise of faith, in the fullest sense of the phrase. Prayer requires a good bit of conditioning, and there are no shortcuts to fitness. This is hard news, of a hard work, especially for lumpy people like me. Some of us are simply too lazy to work that hard. And when the crisis comes, we’re too flabby to respond. We wear out quickly.”[3] This is what led to the disciples grief-filled slumber.

Jesus could pray to his Father in his hour of greatest anguish because his life had been characterized by prayer. Some fail to pray through resignation. “When my time comes it comes,” we say, or “Whatever God has in mind is what I’m going to get, why bother praying?” But apparently the struggle we undergo in prayer has great value, no matter the outcome. Jesus told his heavenly Father what he wanted, in hopes that his request would intersect with the Father’s intentions. Some cynics say that prayer is like throwing an anchor onto a rock, and then imagining that by pulling on our prayer like a rope we are pulling the rock to us, when we are really pulling ourselves to the rock. But that is only a caricature. Here, Jesus was deliberately trying to pull himself to the rock, he wasn’t fooling himself. It takes a lifetime of prayer to know that as one of the chief goals of prayer.

Several years ago, professor Carol Zaleski reflected on the peculiar practice of prayer in a short article.[4] I really appreciated what she wrote:

 “Recently we learned about a young girl in our area who has been diagnosed with a virulent cancer. Doctors say her odds of survival are at best 20 per cent. She has just begun chemotherapy and her immune system is so ravaged that the most innocuous virus could kill her. This little girl is being prayed for around the clock by friends and strangers – and now, I hope, by readers of this column. Her disease will be fought with every weapon in the medical arsenal devised by God-given human ingenuity. At the same time, her family will storm the gates of heaven with prayer, commend this girl to her Creator, her guardian angel and the saints, and call in all reinforcements, for resignation is not a Christian virtue.

 “It would be different if we were adherents of a Star Wars religion, latter-day Stoics who believe that the universe is ruled by an impersonal Force; then our task would be to adjust ourselves to its ordinances without complaint. We would follow the counsel of Marcus Aurelius – the philosopher-emperor [whose reputation experienced] a small revival with his appearance in the film Gladiator and the recycling of his Meditations into a neo-Buddhist self-help manual – to...reflect that ‘all things are little, changeable, perishable.’

 “If we think that suffering is a result of misinterpretation, that individuals are sparks cast off by the infinite spirit and destined to return to the mother flame, we do well to practice composure. It is, however, a characteristic peculiarity of Christianity (as of Judaism) to fancy that God wants us to complain and commands us to intercede. Moreover, the creed tells us that we belong, by calling, to the communion of saints both living and dead for whom intercessory prayer is the natural medium of communication.”

The best way to understand prayer is to start. To pull ourselves toward the Rock. And to keep on. And on and on and on.

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[1] Luke:Interpretation Commentary Series, Fred Craddock, John Knox Press, 1990, p.260.

[2] Luke 3:21; 5:16; 6:12; 9:18; 9:28-29; 11:1-2; 18:1; 22:39-46; 23:34, 46; 24:30-31.

[3] Bill Carter, in an unpublished paper presented to the Homiletical Feast in Tampa, Florida, January, 2001.

[4] in Christian Century, “Storming Heaven,” February 17-24, 2001, p. 24.

To Bathe in the Sheep Gate Pool

 To Bathe in the Sheep Gate Pool

Robert J. Elder, Pastor

                  First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington

                  Ash Wednesday: 2-13-2013

John 5:1-9 (NRSV)

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a Sabbath.

Everyone who reads the papers knows what an “unprovoked attack” is. Among the anxieties of modern life there is the fear that we may be walking alone one night, or resting quietly in our own home, and suddenly, out of the darkness, a stranger attacks us with malevolent intentions. Scoundrels have always been able to use the element of surprise to accomplish evil ends.

But what about an act of “unprovoked grace”? I recall a blossoming of bumper stickers years ago calling for a bit of unprovoked graciousness through “random acts of kindness.” Perhaps you have been on the receiving end of a randomly kind act, say when struggling to manage two large full grocery bags and a stranger stepped forward and opened the door for you.

When we are on the receiving end an act of unprovoked graciousness, we won’t have expected it, that’s the delight of it, isn’t it?

It was so for the man who lounged for 38 years by the pool called “Beth-zatha” or “Bethesda.” For 38 years, he had in mind one goal only: to get to the pool any time the waters were stirred and receive the healing that everyone said would be available only momentarily for the lucky few who could jump in time. That pool must have been something like those call-in contests on the radio: “We will offer this prize for the correct answer from caller number 10!” Caller number 9 and caller number 11 are no closer to winning than caller number 243. It isn’t fair necessarily, just a random chance in a dialing sequence. Today could be your lucky day, but very likely it won’t be. The air stirs, the aroma of fresh water invades the stagnant atmosphere around the cisterns of the Bethesda pool, and everyone realizes it all at the very same instant. There is a rush like nobody’s business until that all-too-brief moment has passed. A missed opportunity means more endless waiting until a magic moment occurs again.

38 years. Perhaps in that first year the man remained beside the pool with nerves on edge, waiting, waiting, waiting until, WHAM! the instant arrived when healing was only a fleeting few ticks of the clock away. But others were faster. Then, that opportunity having been missed, there remained only more waiting on edge. But for 38 years? By the time 38 years of waiting go by, we have spent so much time biding our time that waiting itself has become our whole life’s work. Day after dreary day, his focus had become waiting. Hour by hour he waited. Days stretched into weeks and months, until he could hardly remember a time of his life not characterized by endless waiting.

Then, one day, a voice startled him from his usual stupor into an unaccustomed state of alertness. He looked up. He was blinded by the sun silhouetting the stranger’s face. “Do you want to be healed?” the stranger asked. What a cruel, silly question! Hadn’t he devoted almost his entire life to waiting for an opportunity to be healed? So his answer sounded ambivalent, explaining that he had no one to help him. He had almost forgotten the whole reason behind lying beside the pool. It had been so long since he had really thought of the effect of the healing waters that he had come to think only of getting in them.

We have all known the secret pleasure that can characterize a temporary illness, which requires that we stay home, leaving the real tasks of life unfinished, unattended for a while, giving us the luxury of temporary unaccountability. For the man by the pool, means had become ends. Getting into the water had become the whole life’s goal. Getting a handout from passersby had changed places with the original target of actually becoming mobile enough to work. What healing meant, what work is, these had been forgotten, maybe somewhere around the 24th year of his endless waiting.

Do you want to be healed? What a question! But after 38 years … interim answers, lesser answers offer themselves when our lives involve waiting. “Perhaps he has never been well. Perhaps he doesn’t know what it is to be well.”[1] Abraham waited all his life for a son. Job waited endlessly for an interim answer to his questions about suffering.

It has occurred to me that a lot of us throw away a pretty good portion of our lives believing that waiting for real life is our task, when the fact is that real life is only what we have right now. Life today is not a practice for some future time of real living. Sometimes chronically ill patients have reported that one of the key adjustments to life with their disease was to discover who they were called to be now that disease is a given in their life. The person they had been is gone. A new goal and task to life need to be discovered, or else the remainder of life could seem only that: a remainder, a time of endless waiting.

Congregations can do this too. Members of churches may sit year after year waiting for the church to turn into the church they really wanted it to be, withholding themselves from real work on behalf of the church until that far-off time when their vision of what the church should have been will be realized.

Me? Healed? The man beside the Bethesda pool said, “No, I want to get into the water, but no one will help me.” We may respond, saying, “I haven’t had anyone provide a church for me the way I have really needed a church to be. I know what I’m looking for in a church, and I’ll just wait to be healed until that comes along, thanks.”

Jesus bent over, got close enough to the man’s face that he could smell what he had had for breakfast, looked right into his eyes and said “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.” Nothing further about pools of water and a thousand other excuses. Just, “Get up and walk.” Unprovoked grace! And the man did. And so may we.

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[1] “Hazards of Healing,” by Margaret Guenther in Christian Century, May 10, 1995, p. 507.

Veiled Attempts

Veiled Attempts

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Exodus 34:29-35           

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone

because he had been talking with God.

“Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone.” I like this line, I don’t fully know why. Someone walks into my office and says, “God has been speaking to me,” and sometimes, fearful, I think to myself, “What does that have to do with me?” and like the Israelites I am afraid to come near them ... They may have been in touch with something big, something dangerous.

But then, I think how often in the study at the church or at home, alone with the Bible and a few trusted commentaries that surround me on my desktop like old friends – and maybe a paper prepared by one of my preaching friends from our annual meetings in January on sermon texts – I make a study of these passages I preach on every Sunday.

Over my career in ministry, in my sermon preparation times, as I have considered the implications of a scripture reading, I frequently remark to myself how often I find some nugget, some insight, some arresting observation among all the words written in commentaries by men and women wiser than I, that makes me stop in my tracks — things, as they used to say, that make you go “hmmm.” It might be a single word, repeated in an unusual way, or an alternate translation that suddenly makes it seem as though someone turned the light on in the room.

A couple of days go by, and then I get to the day for writing the sermon, and often all the shine seems to have gone from my nifty insights, I can’t seem to find the same gear I had when I was meeting with my fellow scholars. The light switch is overhead, just out of reach. My face was maybe shining in scripture study days or weeks or months ago, but by some Thursdays, I’m behind the old veil again. The world has undone my proximity to the voice of God one more time, and I have to work at finding my way there once again, to the place where the veil can be removed and I can sense the nearness of God that makes my face begin to glow like moving just a little too close to the campfire.

Maybe you have been there too. I suspect some of you have. I hope many of you have. Maybe you have found times in your life when the puzzle pieces snapped together for an instant, when the sense of something very important to you suddenly became evident in a way it never had before. Still, the lifting of the veil, the shining of the face lasts but a short time, and all too soon, back behind the veil we go, back to the mundane, insightless lives we know all too well. Why must it always be so?

I recall that Phillips Brooks[1] once said, “Humility doesn’t come from counting up our sins, it comes from standing our tallest and measuring ourselves against that which God intends for us.” But we can so easily lose sight of our tallest selves, and especially the selves God has in mind for us to be.

I think this story about Moses running up and down the mountain of meeting represents something like that in the life of Israel. They were beginning to be made to see not only that God was willing to save them from the slavery of Egypt, but that God was willing to believe in them, was willing to stay beside them even when the great danger had passed, even when – and this always comes as a great shock to people who beat themselves up at avery available opportunity – even when they knew they had failed God, had let God down. Even then, God believed in them, which in some ways is harder to take than if God had simply thrown up his hands and walked away. God wanted more from them, found more potential in them than they knew they had, and caused them to begin to stand their tallest and measure themselves against that which God intended for them.

How can it be otherwise for us, who follow the Savior?

I remember the very first wedding we celebrated in the spanking new sanctuary of the church I once served in Port Arthur, Texas. One of the distinguishing features of that sanctuary was that up at the peak of the roof, clerestory windows ran the entire length of the room, made up of stained glass panes of various colors. Our first wedding was at 11:00 A.M. on a Saturday, a couple of weeks after the sanctuary had been dedicated, and I will never forget that as the bride made her way toward the chancel, the colors from those clerestory windows were displayed along the entire length of the center aisle. No one had anticipated the effect. Her white dress changed colors with every step, transfigured: one moment it was white, the next moment green, the next it was so red it appeared to be on fire, then yellow, purple, and so on. By the time she reached the front of the sanctuary, we were all absolutely transfixed. I could hardly bring myself to speak the words to begin the service. It was as if the architect and the sun had conspired to provide us with a truly heavenly light show.

One great claim of the Christian faith is that while we may be in the dark about many things, on the ultimate issues of human life there is light. Paul once said, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.”[2] Some things, many things, we don’t know. We really don’t know the complete answer to all questions that begin with “why.” The answers we do have shine in the face of Moses, in the face of Christ, on our own faces, and can change us more fully, more gracefully than that wedding dress ever changed that bride or any of us.

What happened on that holy mountain when Moses came back to deliver the tablets to the children of Israel? When they say that his face had a certain glow about it, what does it mean? Was it like the glow your hands feel when they have been warmed by a fire? How do we describe such things? One preacher says there is no describing them, that if you are going to talk about a bear, the best thing to do is bring in a bear. But how can we bring in the shining face of Moses?

It is as hard to describe what happened on that mountain top as it is to give an accurate description of what goes on in our dreams.

The question for us is not so much whether we have ever experienced a transfiguration the likes of the one that came over Moses, but whether we may ever have been an agent to help God bring one to pass. In southeast Texas, where I once served, there is a special school – the Hughen School – for very sick children, most of whom have few or no motor skills. One very sick boy lived at that school, dying by degrees. Tragic as that could be, that is not the reason for telling this story. Children get grievously ill every day. It is one of the unhappy yet constant facts of human life on earth. But this little boy had the good fortune to be living in the same community with some faithful believers who took the story of God’s own shining in the world to be their story. God’s glory lived in them to the degree that they carried it with them where they went. A group of these people joined together to go to that child every day and read to him. Knowing that he was slowly dying, unable to move or read for himself, it was the only activity that comforted him.

The social workers were amazed. Just being read to by three ladies, taking turns, one every day, transformed him from a depressed and despondent child into a responsive person whose spark of life, though soon to leave him, grew brighter, not dimmer. The boy died eventually, as we all must die. But his life had been forever transfigured by the ministry of caring Christian people. Their lives had been changed as well. I can assure you, with my own eyes I saw them glowing.

When do we find that the veil of the mundane lives we live has been lifted? Paul worried that people might miss the fact that Christ has lifted the veil from our eyes. He said, “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord ... are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”[3] All of us. Transformed.

William Willimon, a Methodist bishop and former chaplain at Duke University, once wrote,

“A few weeks ago I had a bad day, the culmination of a bad week. The congregation didn’t like my sermon, didn’t care for my pastoral care. The Institute on Religion and Democracy sent another batch of spiteful e-mails. The electrical relay to the organ gave out. I was depressed.

Then, preparing for a sermon, reading a text I had worked on many times before – Galatians 2 – I noticed something. A little Greek word, eis. Paul says ‘a person is righteous not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.’ But eis can be either translated ‘in’ or ‘of.’ Is it the faith ‘in’ Jesus Christ – Jesus is the object of our faith? Or can it also be the faith ‘of’ Jesus Christ – we are to have the same faith, that same suffering, obedient unto death, boldly trusting faith?”

Bishop Willimon went on, “Suddenly the latter possibility glowed before me, lit up my imagination, transfigured my previous understandings of faith. Our being right with God is not so much our belief in Christ as it is our believing like Christ. What matters is Jesus, moving toward the world as he moved, living and believing as Jesus, ‘Jesus only.’

I wanted to preserve that moment of exegetical insight forever. But I couldn’t. I had to go back down and be a pastor, answer the mail, visit the sick and construct a sermon. Still, my face shone because, like Moses, I had been talking with God. The rest of that day some people needed sunglasses just to look at me.”[4]

There are those days when I know just how he feels. I pray that you do too.

Copyright © 2013 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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[1] An American clergyman and author, briefly served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s. In the Episcopal liturgical calendar he is remembered on January 23. He is known for being the lyricist of "O Little Town of Bethlehem".

[2] I Corinthians 13:12

[3] II Corinthians 3:18

[4] “Come On Down” by William Willimon Christian Century,  February 10, 2004, p. 19.