Living word by word

Meditation on Luke's Passion

Because so many people will have a Holy Week broken up by spring break travels and moments out of their usual context, I post this meditation on Luke's Passion as a sort of Prologue. If you can do nothing else before Easter, sit down and read Luke 22 and 23. Perhaps this framing will be helpful:

Passion Sunday Year C

We live in a world that loves a story of winners and losers, where history is too often the story that is told by those who came out on top. Truth gives way to truthi-ness, and the people with the loudest microphones set the tone of our narrative.

The story of Jesus’ passion, especially in Luke,  can be read that way, as a story of mob mentality, a story of how fickle we are as human beings, how easily we turn against those who do not meet our expectations, how much we want to tie ourselves to a star.

But make no mistake. This is not a story about whether Jesus will win or lose, whether he will be a king as he is hailed to be on that Palm Sunday. It’s only about what kind of king he is, and who will recognize it.

We think we know what kings do: they rule, they wield the power of the sword; they set themselves on top and expect everyone else to take their place below. They meet with other kings and rulers and travel the world making royal appearances.The king’s language tells the story and the king’s judgment makes the law.

And here comes this king who does everything backwards. . . who does not defend his power, who eats with the lowly, who has no palace, no royal guard. Who relies on the hospitality of others.

And finally, this king pardons, not the deserving, but those who clearly deserve punishment. And dies between two thieves.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. . .

Finally, before his final breath,  someone declares him a king in an unironic way – and it is this thief, who is going to die anyway, who understands that Jesus’ kingdom, when he comes into it, will not look like a walk off the cross.

When you come into YOUR kingdom, Jesus, remember me.

Remember me in YOUR kingdom:

The one where enemies are reconciled ( 23:12)

The one where strangers take up a cross and follow you (23:26)

The one where sinners are welcomed (23:42)

The one where power is not measured by might but by righteousness and mercy

Jesus says today you will be with me in paradise

For what is paradise if not a place where the righteous are declared innocent

Where the sinner is pardoned

Where even the barren are blessed (23:29)

Where enemies become friends

Paradise –is that place of rest where the righteous wait for the resurrection

And today we are welcomed too – for this week, for our lives –into that place of blessed rest where we know that Christ is king, and where we wait for the resurrection, for the new life only this king can bring. That paradise is here today, because Jesus stands among us.

Related articles

May the burden be light

Holy time

Sunday's sermon: Lazarus and the nameless rich man

September 29, 2013

Lectionary 26;  Luke 16: 19-31

 

Pope Francis decides to invite former Pope Benedict and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams out for a ride in his 1984 Renault. How  else could three such prominent theologians actually have a private conversation about weighty matters? Unfortunately, the paparazzi get  wind of this plan and chase the three across the Italian countryside until the whole things ends in a tragic fiery crash, and all three end up at the Pearly Gates together.

St. Peter welcomes them and informs them that due to their dedicated service to the Lord’s Church on earth, they will each be granted a private audience with the Holy One. They draw straws to see who will go first and Rowan Williams is the first.

It takes a while. . .longer than anyone expected, really. And when Williams emerges he hangs his head and shakes his bushy eyebrows muttering to himself, “How could have been so wrong?”

Well, the popes are a little encouraged by this, so Pope Francis volunteers to go next. He is in the inner sanctum for even longer than the Archbishop, and finally emerges looking puzzled and humbled himself. “How could I have been so wrong?” he exclaims.

Pope Benedict, not at all cowed by this, strides in last. And this time the meeting seems never to end. Hours and hours go by, and finally the door is flung open, and God Herself bursts out, hanging Her divine head in despair, crying “How could I have been so wrong?”

---

          There are many things that have not changed in two thousand years. One is that we all love a good pearly gates joke. We know from ancient sources that stories about heaven and hell were told in ancient Egypt and  among Jewish rabbis in Jesus’ time as well. Jesus’ own story this morning is a mash-up of Jewish and Greek concepts of the afterlife, not one that’s consistent with any one understanding.

          But as we all know from our own jokes, these stories aren’t really about what we think of heaven or hell. You don’t have to literally believe in Pearly Gates with St. Peter at the front desk to enjoy a good story about popes or presidents or Lutherans  or Catholics. Some of them, like this one, are great jokes because you can easily put in the people of your day; who among us doesn’t have a family member that could stand in for Pope Benedict in this joke? The point of these stories is never so much about what we think things will look like after we draw our final breath, but about how we live our lives here and now. They are about seeing what is on earth from the eyes of heaven.

          Sartre said that the meaning of life is that it ends, and maybe that’s why we enjoy these stories so much. They are about the meaning of our lives from that final perspective: if the period were put on the end of a President’s life today how would we tell the story? If the period were put on the last paragraph of my life today, how would that story get told? There’s nothing like heavenly hindsight to put things in perspective. And perspective is exactly what the rich man and Lazarus get.

          So don’t be distracted by things like flames and the lap of Father Abraham. They are like the  bar when the rabbi and the priest walk into a bar. It’s not about the bar.  Jesus is using his cultural means to make give us a little fantasy that helps us pay attention to reality.  The image of this huge chasm between Lazarus’ condition in heaven and the rich man’s in Hades is a reversal of their life time conditions.

          And there’s another thing that has not changed at all in 2000 years, and this is the part that is not at all funny. There is still a tremendous chasm between the condition of some in this life and the comfort with which the rest live. We all can still see Lazarus at the gate, though there are forces in our lives that also work to keep him invisible from us.

There is a great chasm, and we get a witness to it every day in the newspaper. Often it can be measured in dollars and cents but there are other gaps as well.

          Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

          Between Congresspeople arguing about health care and those who actually don’t have any

Between we who have the means to recover from the affect of climate change to our communities, and those millions who will simply lose their livelihoods and homes.

This story calls us to pay attention to those terrible gaps that have existed in every generation and seem never to go away. It is only good news if you are the one who has not been on the winning side in this life. I do hope and pray that the Trayvons of this world are comforted closely by Abraham or someone equally wise in heaven, but I do not believe that should be the only consolation of all the people who find themselves begging at the gate, nameless and unknown to the haves of this world.  

One of the first clues things are reversed in this story  is that the rich man is the nameless one. You might sometimes hear him called Dives, but that’s only because that’s the Latin word for rich.  Imagine the afterlife  as a place populated by people who are finally known by their names, instead of “homeless” or “young black man” or “shanty dweller in a 3^rd world city”. Imagine the afterlife as one in which everyone who has put their names on buildings and projects and fortunes simply known as “rich man.”

In heaven it is not as it is on earth.

          When Lazarus dies, the scripture says, he is now “comforted” but the word is more like “encouraged” or even “called out”  John Swanson translates it this way “

          “Remember you received  your good things in your life.

          Lazarus likewise the evil.

          Now, here he is called as a witness, but you suffer.” (Provoking the Gospel of Luke)

Lazarus is called as a witness. A witness to the chasm, one who after years of being silent and invisible and nameless is called to witness, to speak.

 

We need those witnesses to the chasm:

One way activists have sought to bear witness is through art, through simply making the homeless at the gate more visible. In Boston graphic design students are turning simple cardboard signs in to art-quality colorful media pieces. An exhibit in Minneapolis a few years ago featured the work of homeless folks who were using humor to break down the barrier. One man named David Drew had a sign that read:

"Just a simple checklist of things you can do to ignore me: Check your seat belt, check your stereo, wash your windshield, call someone on your cell phone."

It would be funny if it weren’t so painfully true.

Jesus’ story doesn’t give us much hope that our human pattern of ignoring this chasm will change much. Indeed, it can seem as though our tools for turning away from poverty and inequality have only gotten more sophisticated over the years, to the point where we can now have politicians arguing that it will be good for the poor to drastically cut the amount of food assistance available to them. Mayors are rewarded for keeping the homeless off the street – not necessarily housed, but out of sight and often out of mind. We keep our own eyes fixed on moving up the ladder and thinking as little as possible about those who have no access to the ladder at all.

So what is to be done? From his heavenly hindsight the rich man at least moves from seeing Lazarus as the guy who will cool to tongue to thinking of someone besides himself – he asks for a witness, someone to go and warn his brothers, and Abraham responds that he already has witnesses   

He has the witness of the law and the prophets. Words like Moses’ law of jubilee that debt not be allowed to create a permanent chasm in society; words like Amos’ lament for a people who lie on

No one can cross it –  Indeed, it’s true that a man named Lazarus, risen from the dead, was not enough to convince even teachers of the law like the Pharisees to repent. But Lazarus was not the only one. Jesus was raised from the dead as well, and the fact that a man named Luke wrote this gospel, for a group of Gentile and Jewish Christians who included some rich people among them, who included male and female, slave and free in their midst – that Jesus did indeed cross the chasm. We have to get to the end of Jesus’ life to make sense of his story as well, and that story is one that ends with these words:

“ the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:46-48)

We are witnesses. But we are witnesses only as we let go of our identities as yet another rich person. We are witnesses when we are named at that baptismal font, stripped of everything but our identity in Christ, dead to the world’s evaluation of us, made alive only by our life in  Jesus, next to the one who chose the place of the poor, we who bear witness to the chasm of this life but also to the power of Jesus’ ability to cross it, to make even the dead alive. When we are Lazarus, we are witnesses of these things.

The surprising end on the Gospel story is that someone does come back from the dead, and at least a few of us through history have decided to listen. People like St. Francis of Assisi, who threw off his identity as a rich man and chose to live among the poor and the animals.

People like Dorothy Day, who from her baptism sought to be close to the wretched and the nameless homeless of New York City, bearing witness through writing and hospitality.

People like Gordon Cosby, who started Church of the Saviour in Washington DC, really a cluster of churches, each of which identified with Lazarus in different ways.

The Washington Post wrote about him:

“Cosby, who has been preaching since he was a 15-year-old in Lynchburg (Va.), was raised Southern Baptist in southern Virginia. He went into the seminary and then became an Army chaplain in Europe in World War II, an experience that reshaped his faith perspective. He said he came back feeling that denomination and race were artificial constructs and that people should live in regular life as they would in war–willing to lay down their lives for their neighbors, viewing their faith as an urgent tool to change the world.”

Cosby died at the age of 95 recently, cared for at a ministry he had founded, Christ House, spending his final days next to homeless men who needed medical care and shelter.

 

In whose company would we like to be known? Just another boring rich person who like every other has thrown a few coins to Lazarus but never breached the gap, or the one who was among us like Lazarus, poor, homeless, not esteemed by the world but finally raised up by God to new life.  It will not be in heaven as it is on earth, this story reminds us. But in Christ we see it could be on earth as it is in heaven.

 

Lazarus at the gate

This coming Sunday's text has reminded me again of the astonishing fact that very little has changed in two thousand years. We can still see Lazarus at the gate, only now he's the homeless guy (or woman) with the cardbaord sign at the freeway exit.

I'm fascinated by this Boston project started by some art students to spruce up those cardboard signs. The first step in solving homelessness, they argue, is recognizing the humanity of those who use signs to get our attention, and nothing humanizes better than art (and, I would argue, the stories they tell on this website).

Lectionary Blog: The Parable of the Guy in the Ditch

Credits: Karoline Lewis for the alternate parable title: Garret Keizer's wonderful book Help: the Original Human Dilemma; Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. Bible translation from Eugene Peterson's The Message.

Luke 10:25-37

Here Jesus goes again, answering a simple question with a story. At least this one seems to have a clear enough point to it. It’s no accident that we have Good Samaritan laws and not Unjust Steward laws. Good Samaritan Hospitals, and not Rich Fool Hospitals.

But although it’s so familiar and so evidently simple, that’s just the problem with it.

Like so many parables, Jesus gives us just enough details  to make it seem real – the dangerous road, the officials in a hurry, the robbers lurking nearby, the wine poured into open wounds and a donkey hauling a broken man to shelter.  It’s so vivid, it’s no wonder the story has become synonymous in our culture with what it means to help a stranger in distress.

But there are so many details left out; so many complications of helping real people in the real world, that make it seem easier than it really is.

Because we all know that helping others is actually a pretty complicated affair:

Garrett Keizer describes this with bracing clarity in his book Help

          “I want to tell it again in different versions. . . I wnt the Samaritan. . . to take the phone from the saddlbad and hear the voice of his wife, his sister-in-law, the police telling him that someone he dearly loves is “at it again.” I want the man by the side of the road to be his father, his little brother, or his only begotten son, and I want him to be drunk as a skunk and stripped, beaten, and left for dead. I want this to be the third time in as many months that this has happened. . .

          “I want the Samaritan – very much I want this – to get into a big argument over putting the victim on his animal. . . I want to hear him scream “Just get on the [stupid] donkey.. . .

          “I want the Samaritan, on his return visit to the inn, to learn that the wounded man has recovered enough to trash his room, harass several guests..  .

          “In short, I want to see it get complicated. And along with that, I want to see it take time, all kinds of time.”

 

If any part of you is laughing ruefully after this litany it’s because you know how very very vulnerable we make ourselves when we help others, and how easy it is to delude ourselves that we are in fact helping, when maybe we might just be interfering and making things worse – worse for those we  love if not also for ourselves and our supposed beneficiaries.

Like Keizer, I want it to get complicated.

And here’s another complication, a metaphor for just how difficult it can be to even encounter our neighbors: You can no longer take this road. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is now blocked by an enormous wall, separating  Israel from Palestinian territory; you cannot simply walk from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Jew and the Samaritan  simply wouldn’t end up on that road together anymore.

If this parable is  designed to tell us HOW to be help our neighbors, this story is way too simple, way to quick, lacking in all the messy details that make the job hard.  You can’t get there from here.

The truth is, most of us would never find ourselves on such a road in the first place. We’ve built our entire security society out of the assumption that people should help themselves, and if the world is not safe enough they should pay for a better security system, a better handgun, an armed guard to accompany us in the dangerous places. We pay for the health club and the statins best healthcare we can possibly afford and wonder what that person who had the heart attack did wrong. We invest everything we can in helping our kids be responsible and studious and successful so they’ll go to the right schools and get a good job and never ever have to ask for a handout.

Which is why when the bad stuff does happen, as it so often does, even now, the person in the ditch is so often incredibly alone.

The suffering of the one in the ditch is not just about theft and violence and wounds. The suffering of the person in the ditch is that of being passed by.

So often that is the pain that I hear, over and over again, of those who find themselves thrown off the fast track of life.  What’s surprising is not that bad stuff happened. If you live long enough you expect that. What’s surprising and so saddening, again and again, is how utterly isolating it can be, when you are the one who lost the job, you are the one with cancer, you are the one whose spouse is slowly drifting away on the ship of Alzheimers. What so many people tell me hurts the most is that the rest of the world keeps on racing by, and hardly anyone stops to say, “are you all right?”

 

If this story is supposed to tell us how to help our neighbor, it’s finally not that helpful, in a world designed to keep us away from unfamiliar neighbors. But that’s not actually the  question the religious man asked, not what Jesus was trying to answer.

The question is WHO is my neighbor

“The Samaritan,” the man answers Jesus, grudgingly,  because in his religious mind the Samaritans are the ones that have it all wrong. They worship in the wrong place in a weird way. Their religion took a strange left turn several centuries ago and ever since then it’s been much easier to live separate lives, keep to ourselves and not expect anything from one another.

And the answer, finally, for the lawyer and for us,  is that the neighbor is finally that unlikely character that offers YOU help – the one you would be least likely to talk to on the road, the one you might even cross the road to avoid. The Samaritan, that most unlikely neighbor, is not necessarily the person you would point at and say, now there goes a good man. THERE goes someone who observes the law and walks upright.

And in that sense, you could say that when we are the ones lying in the ditch by the side of the road, and we cry out for help, we might end up relying on someone like Jesus – someone none of the religious authorities in his day thought was right. Someone who had no place to lay his head, who was called a glutton and a drunkard. Someone who ate with all the wrong people.

Jesus may be revered in some circles still but for many of us it’s still maybe a little bit embarrassing to call on him for help, or even admit that we need that  kind of help.

Anne Lamott , in her memoir Traveling Mercies, describes her own conversion as exactly such a reaction. She was sick, strung out, broke, and utterly alone. She reached rock bottom, was lying alone in her room and sensed the presence of someone there. She sensed that it was Jesus, and writes that her first thought was “Anyone but him.”

But that is how grace works.

We find ourselves beaten down, tired, stripped of all our pretensions of being really good people. We find ourselves in the ditch, the one place we swore we would never be, looking so pathetic  we  can’t blame anyone else for passing us by.

We find ourselves utterly unable to walk the road alone anymore.

Then it is Jesus, the last one we want to turn to but the only one who is still around, who picks us up. Who gives us wine to drink and anoints us with oil. Who walks alongside us because we can no longer travel by ourselves, who gives everything he can and says, “I’ll come back for you.”

Who is my neighbor? Like it or not, in all kinds of guises we might not expect. it’s Jesus.

 

 

The messy work of love

I have a special affection for this month because my birthday falls in February. So does Valentine’s Day. And Presidents’ Day.  And Groundhog Day.  And usually in the midst of that, Ash Wednesday floats in and paints an ashy cross somewhere in the calendar.

There’s something about the mobility of Ash Wednesday around all these other strange little days that feels profound to me each year, and each year in a different way. There are times when we get to have hearts and chocolate as part of Mardi Gras, and that is lovely. But there are years, like this one, when our declarations of love happened the day after we’ve walked around with signs of our mortality on our foreheads – and I can’t think of anything that makes me feel more tender toward my loved ones than being reminded that they, like I, will die some day.

I don’t have a great affection for Hallmark holidays in general, but my kids are now at an age when Valentine’s Day has meant that our house has been littered with scraps of red and pink construction paper all week. Of course the kids are making Valentines for every child in their overcrowded classrooms, because that is what they must do – give one to everyone, or to no one. On the one hand, this means that most of these cards will be ignored, unless they have candy attached; on the other hand, it means that my children will have to write the names of every single child in their class, even the ones they would never hang out with if given a choice.

The making and giving  of these school-age Valentines themselves seems something like a trial – a test of my tolerance for glitter glue and paper scraps, for last minute bustle and the inevitable sugar crash that will come at the end of the day when the candy that comes with all these greetings has been consumed. I have to work constantly to reframe what is happening here – that we are not just going through the motions or being slaves to Hallmark, but in fact are celebrating the fact that we have the leisure to celebrate all kinds of love, even the generic love of one classmate for another and the fact that these kdis  daily have a chance to learn and grow together.  

Every year as I put ashes on foreheads I’m reminded that some of those foreheads might not be present next year. It wouldn’t hurt to understand the giving of Valentines in the same way: I cannot know what life will bring these 38 fifth graders in the next year. They could use all the love – even construction paper love – they can get. And if my children learn that the giving of love is not just sentiment but intentional work as well, all the better.

 

 

Lectionary (and Bonfire) blog 30C; Luke 18:9-14

            There once was a boy who went to church. Every Sunday. He went to church because his family said, “this is what we do.” They put money in the collection plate because his parents said, “this is what we do,” and the boy put in his pennies too. They volunteered at the church bake sales and rummage sales and clean-up Saturdays because his parents said “this is what we do.”

            And sometimes, spoken or unspoken, he knew his parents meant “This is what our family does because we are not like those other families, the ones down the street that sleep in on Sundays and spend all their money on themselves and stay home and watch TV instead of helping others.” And the boy grew up thanking God that he was not like those other people.

            But the boy did grow up, and came to see that there were other ways to live in the world. When he was in high school and college, he learned about the root causes of poverty, and he went on mission trips to places in the world where people did not even have TV’s, and he helped build houses in neighborhoods where his parents had never ever dared to drive. He learned about climate change and colonialism and feminism and different sexual orientations.

            And with his youth group or his college group he’d pray for people who were victims to racism and poverty, and he’d give thanks that he had the advantages he had in life. But most of all he’d give thanks that he was no longer like those people with whom he’d grown up, who were parochial and judgmental and believed that God was on their side. They were “nice” in a bourgeois sort of way, but it was clear to him now that they used God to reinforce their racism and their sexism and their suspicion of outsiders. He’d thank God that his eyes had been opened to social justice and that he now had a more genuine grasp of what Jesus was about. He’d thank God he was not like those other Christians.

            As time went on, the young man became not so young. He still cared deeply about justice and remembered with fondness the fervor he’d had in his younger years. But now he had a mortgage to pay and children to send to college. He put his vote where his faith was and tried to remember to give regularly to causes he cared about. He recycled and signed petitions and sometimes even wept about the headlines.

The not-so-young man didn’t go to church as often because there was so much else to do, but when he did go he made sure to go to the right kind of church, one that supported his values and which taught his own children good things like inclusion and recycling. He wasn’t so sure about a lot of the other beliefs his church taught. How could you be sure of anything in such a diverse world? He wasn’t even really sure how to pray anymore, but he knew it was important to be grateful. Grateful that he wasn’t filled with hate like the neighbors who went to that fundamentalist church. Grateful that he wasn’t one of those religious fanatics.  Grateful that even though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer he still had values of respect and responsibility. Thank God, he thought, that I’m not like those other people.

 "But the tax collector would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified.”

life or death

    I've written before about what I've learned from  my kids' swim school. This past Sunday's lessons -- "I set before you life and death" -- were an opportunity to think again about what it is we're up to as we go about setting up church programming for the year.

    As a pastor, I get irritated when I sense that families are just "squeezing in" church between multiple other enrichment activities for their kids. It's easy to be resentful when you knock yourself out creating a good Sunday School or confirmation program, only to have folks show up haphazardly, "consuming" church the same way they do everything else. Do we need to charge tuition to get people to value what we do?

  But maybe it's as much our fault as anyone else's. Even my kids' swim school has to remind parents occasionally that swimming is a skill that could save a life. How much time and attention do we -- especially we on the more liberal end of the spectrum -- give to the WHY of matters like faith formation? If X and Y activities for a 5 year old are equally fun, how is church qualitatively different? If X and Y high school programs are equally good boosters for a college application, why push the church youth group?

  You don't have to be threatening the fires of hell to communicate that faith is a matter of life and death -- that a conviction in things unseen might finally be a more life-giving foundation than all the other things we could do to fill our days. Maybe the church needs to get better at telling people why this is important.

"Where your treasure is" postscript

This quote popped up today from, of all places, my "Runner's World" email:

There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.

-- Willa Cather

Happy Pentecost

I'm not in the habit of posting sermons here, but since this one failed to get recorded on Sunday (my fault), and my husband claims it was one of my best. sermons.ever. -- I'll put it here. 

May your Easter be complete: Christ is risen!

Pentecost Sunday, 2010

Acts 2

Here we are again, the feast of Pentecost, the day that is supposed to be one of the three great feasts of the church year, but is usually crowded out in our attention by graduations, benefit athletic events, sometimes Mother’s Day or Memorial Day weekend, or at least some really nice weather.

 

You don’t hear of people buying new Pentecost frocks, or singing Pentecost carols in the streets. Children don’t look forward with great anticipation to Pentecost baskets of treats.

 

But at least the repetition gets this story into our heads, this odd, odd story about the disciples bursting upon the public square after days of hiding, so filled with the Spirit people believe they’ve been drinking next year’s Passover wine.

 

I admit that I find the reading of many languages a bit embarrassing many years. We Lutherans can come up with half a dozen European languages, but we fall pretty short with anything beyond that. The day ends up feeling like a judgment on our failure to truly be a Pentecost church, a reminder of how segregated we still are.

 

And then there’s the historical reminder about what some versions of mission work in the West meant. For the truth is too often the church did not take this story as its commission to go and learn the tongues of others, to assume that peoples of all nations ought to hear the good news in their native tongues. All too often the cultural effect was the opposite. What about all the languages people had to give up to be “one of us”? What about the languages the West has destroyed?  What about all the native tongues in this country that are now dead because the white man arrived with guns germs and steel?

 

And then there’s the dread I feel on behalf of the lector, who gets to read this long list of nationalities they’ve never heard of:  ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes,  ¹¹Cretans and Arabs — It’s the kind of reading lectors dread. Where is Pamphylia anyway?

 

There are plenty of scientific reasons to believe that this was not possible, that a bunch of illiterate Hebrews couldn’t have suddenly gained second languages.

 

This Spirit wasn’t just making them bold, getting them beyond their fear of the authorities, it was breaking down the barriers both of their abilities and of their own understanding of what Jesus had come to accomplish. It is the first of many cultural barriers to come down in the book of Acts, as the church spreads beyond the imagination of those disciples.

 

But the story is even stranger than that, because some of these groups, like Medes or Elamites, for example, could not have been there in the first place. Not because of highway construction, but because they did not belong in the first century either.

 

The Medes were a people of ancient Iran. They were conquered by the Persian king Cyrus around the same time that the Hebrew exiles were allowed to go home from Babylon, 500 years earlier. They were not allowed to keep their identity and history does not record them as a people for centuries before Pentecost.

 

The Elamites were also Iranian of a sort. We don’t have any record of their language for hundreds of years before that day of Pentecost. And Pamphylia—an ancient Greek dialect, unattested to for 300 years before that day.

 

People losing their language, losing their identity, happened often in the ancient world and still happens today. Scholars tell us that globalization means somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of the world’s languages will be lost in the next 40 years. The Elamites and the Medes are the brothers to the Chinook and the Iroquois – a people conquered, a people passed into history.

 

What is going on here? Did the author of Acts, who is usually very careful about exactly when and where things happen, just get careless?

 

The Spirit is not just reaching across the borders of nationality – it’s reaching across time. Reaching back to peoples who have been dead and gone for hundreds of years. All of them, even the dead, hear the good news of Jesus – and they hear it in their own tongue.

 

What God is up to here is, once again, greater than we can imagine

 

It’s one thing to imagine God’s Spirit transcending our all too real borders – the walls in Palestine, the fences in Texas, the security lines at JFK airport.

 

It’s another thing to imagine that God’s Spirit can get beyond language – not just our native tongues but the way we speak, the way our words betray our background and our education and our class, the way our words too often bind up our ideas so tightly that our imaginations are stifled.

 

It’s another thing to imagine God’s Spirit breaking through our borders of the heart – the way our minds automatically categorize people and send up warning signals to us even when we’re trying NOT to – brown skin, white skin; male, female; liberal, conservative; fit, fat; old, young; one of us, NOT one of us.

 

But here God’s Spirit is reaching back, back, not just beyond  those deadening borders of the here and now but even to the borders of time. Reaching back to the dead, to those whose hope seems utterly shut out.

 

This is what the church means when it says Jesus descended to the dead. This is what we mean when we talk about a communion of saints. That even those people who history has passed by, whose identity was destroyed, whose language is, quite literally, dead – these people too are offered the good news that Christ is risen from the dead. This is also, by the way, what ECLC means when we say we give witness to God’s yes for the world.

 

The fiftieth day of Easter, the last and final day of resurrection, we celebrate that God’s YES for all the world extends even this far.

 

It extends to Iraqis and Iranians in 2010, dead or alive.

It extends to people who do not understand each other, even when they speak the same language.

It extends to children and children’s children, to parents and grandparents and all our misunderstandings of one another.

 

And it extends to the dead among us too:

Even to us who fear that the fire has gone out of our faith, that the living waters have become a little still and stagnant.

 

The God who raised Jesus from the dead is still reaching out beyond the graves to us as well. Calling us to live, even though we are dead. Calling us to speak, even though history and doubt and all our questions make us feel mute. Calling us to trust that God’s Spirit can work in any place, among any people.

 

Thanks, Robert Frost by David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace  . . . .

 

 

This Holy Spirit offers hope for the future, even for our children’s children,

Hope for the past, even the long dead,

Hope even for us, who are given life eternal even now.

 

Because that Spirit has been given to us.

 

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

Lectionary Blog Easter 2C

Acts 5

It has always disturbed me that the sermons and testimonies early in Acts seem so full of accusation: "this Jesus, whom you crucified. . . " the disciples preach. 

Indeed, in this Sunday's first reading the authorities react, "you are determined to bring this man's blood on us!"

But then, any declaration of the resurrection had an element of judgment in it. Isn't that the way the story goes when the "good guy" -- whether Arnold Schwarzenegger or the ghostly victim of a wrongful death -- comes back? We expect the bad guys to get their comeuppance. It's kind of a wonder that Jesus appears primarily to his friends -- though they deserted him  -- and always with "peace" on his lips.

In these testimonies after stating the bald truth of Jesus' wrongful death, the disciples always follow it with a proclamation that God raised Jesus so that repentance and forgiveness of sins might come for all.

That seems to be the common theme for this Sunday: there's no skimming over the bloody mess.  We must witness to the real wounds before we can see the real forgiveness the resurrection offers.