You Are Invited to Dance!

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

You Are Invited to Dance

One night when I was about 14 years old, I saw something that was almost indescribably beautiful, something that left me completely spellbound.   My mom and dad had gone out for dinner, just the two of them.  I don’t know what the occasion was, but they had dressed up for it.  Mom was wearing a black cocktail dress and Dad was wearing his best suit and tie.  

A few hours after they left, I was in my bedroom doing homework when I heard the front door open and then close and a moment later I heard music.  Soft, captivating music.  When I didn’t hear anything else for a minute, I padded down the hall to poke my head into the living room and make sure everything was okay.  And that’s when I saw it.  

Mom and Dad were dancing.

Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade was playing softly on the stereo, and my parents were dancing.  They weren’t just dancing…they were dancing beautifully.  They moved together perfectly.  They didn’t just sway together in time to the music, they knew The Steps, and they did them together flawlessly, as if they had practiced this every day for their entire lives.   

My parents were dancing, and it transformed them.  My dad was no longer the stocky guy with a short temper who, frankly, scared me a little—he was suddenly Gene Kelly, elegant, athletic and graceful.  My mom was no longer the brainy little elf with her nose forever in a textbook—she was suddenly Cyd Charisse, fluid, weightless and willowy!  They were no longer two separate persons, they moved as one, united by the music, their synchronized steps, and their embrace.

So why am I telling you this very personal story about a very personal moment between my mother and father?  Well, this is Trinity Sunday, and for one brief moment when I was 14, I saw a nearly perfect analogy of the Holy Trinity: my Mother, my Father, and the Holy Music united together as one.

Nearly perfect.  And also, not even close to perfect because even the very best analogies break down at some point.  They break down because they are trying to describe something that is too vast and deep and intimate to fit into human words.  Martin Luther said that to deny the Trinity imperils our souls, but to try to explain the Trinity imperils our sanity.

And that makes sense when you think about it.  Can you explain you?  Could you give a concise yet comprehensive description of everything that makes you you?  You are not an intellectual construct to be defined and understood.  You are a person to be befriended and loved.  The only meaningful way for someone to “understand” the mystery that is you is to relate to you—to be in a relationship with you.

When I saw my parents dancing that night, all those years ago, it was an epiphany for me, but it was by no means the final epiphany.  I had a new understanding of who they were together and what they meant to each other, but it was by no means a complete and exhaustive understanding of the mystery of their relationship.  Much of their relationship would remain a mystery.  In the same way, no matter how many epiphanies we have about the relationship, the oneness of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, there will always be more that remains a mystery.

Frederick Buechner described the Trinity as the Mystery beyond us, the Mystery among us, and the Mystery within us.  The Holy Trinity, the union of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons united as one God, is not a puzzle to be solved;  it is a mystery in which to immerse ourselves.  

You don’t solve mysteries, you explore them.  You enter into them.  You participate in them.  Maybe instead of calling this day Trinity Sunday, we should call it Mystery Sunday.

Richard Rohr said that when something is a mystery, especially when it’s a God mystery, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be understood, it means that it can be understood endlessly.  There is always more to see.  There is always more to relate to.  There is always more to understand.  There are always new steps in the dance.  

And it is a dance—or at least that is, historically, one of the best descriptions we’ve ever had of the Trinity.  But how did we come to have the Doctrine of the Trinity in the first place?  There is no passage in the Bible that specifically describes or defines God as Trinity, though there are some passages that hint at it.  As my colleague Heather Anne Thiessen once said, the Trinity isn’t spelled out in scripture, but it’s there in kit form.

Early followers of Jesus had a problem.  Like the Jews—and remember, the first followers of Jesus were Jews—these early Jesus followers believed that there is only one God.  But they also believed—or at least most of them did—that Jesus was divine in nature and that he was somehow completely one with God whom he called Abba or Father.  On top of that, they had received the Holy Spirit—the very breath of God, who they also experienced as a divine person because the Spirit often seemed to exist and act independently of Jesus and Abba.  At the baptism of Jesus, all three seemed to have been present: Jesus coming up out of the water, the Spirit, descending in the form of a dove, and the Abba, speaking like thunder.  So how do you reconcile three divine persons but hang onto the idea that there is only one God?

Well, you don’t, said one group of Christ followers.  These people were called Arians because the main proponent of their theology was Arius of Alexandria.  The Father is God, said Arius.  Jesus, the Son is a slightly lesser god.  He was created by the Father in the first millisecond of creation and all his authority and power comes from the Father, but he is separate in substance and stature.  And the Spirit is a slightly lesser god than Jesus, the Son, and also of an ever-so-slightly lower stature and substance.  What the Arians were saying, more or less, is that there are really three gods and the Father is the first and most important God, the one with all the power and authority.   

Hang on a minute, said the Trinitarians.  Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.  You who have seen me have seen the Father.”  After the resurrection, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into the disciples.  The Spirit is in his breath.  It’s his Spirit that flows in us.  When the prophets would say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me”  they were talking about the Father’s Spirit.  So, the Three have to be One.  They are Three.  But they are also One.  Three persons, One being.

This disagreement had started to become violent and threatened to completely and irreparably divide the church which had only recently really begun to come together in a meaningful way.  So 1701 years ago this month, in May of 325, the Emperor Constantine, who had recently declared himself to be a follower of Christ, decided that this question had to be settled for the good of the Church and the good of the empire.  He called for a Council and ordered all the bishops to meet at Nicaea to debate the matter.  After much argument, Constantine declared that the Trinitarians had won the debate. 

Constantine ordered the Council of Nicaea to formulate a statement of Doctrine to describe the Trinity.  This was the very first official doctrine of the whole Church, by the way, and the bishops and presbyters argued heatedly over the words they would use.  They argued about whether the Father and the Son were made of the same substance and whether they had the same nature.  They felt that they were standing at the edge of an enormous Truth about God and they sensed it was vitally important to get all the details exactly right even though there was no possible way for them to know or even see all the details.  In some ways, despite their tremendous intellectual capabilities, they were like children who stand on the beach and think that they can fully describe the breadth and depth and power of the ocean and all the life contained in it.  

They created the first draft of the creed we now know as the Nicene Creed and decided that adherence to this statement of faith would determine if someone was a true Christian or not.  Ironically, their very useful insight about the all-loving, all-relating God who exists eternally in the expansive community and relationship of the Trinity led them to formulate a faith statement that would all too often be used to exclude people from the community and the embrace of the Church of Jesus.

For all its official status and authority, the Council of Nicaea wasn’t quite the final word that Constantine and others had hoped it would be. Even though the emperor and the majority of bishops had endorsed the Trinitarian formula, Arianism didn’t just quietly fade away.  It has popped up repeatedly throughout history in various forms and can still be found today in some denominations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.  

Part of the problem is that some people have trouble wrapping their brains around the One plus One plus One equals One math of the Trinity even though nature abounds in living examples.  Leaf plus trunk plus root equals tree, for example.  Life is chock full of trinities when you stop to really look.  Still, God as Trinity isn’t exactly intuitive and can be a hard idea to accept for some.

Fortunately, about 50 years after Nicaea, the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, his younger brother, Gregory, the bishop of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, the patriarch of Constantinople came up with a better description of how the three persons of the Trinity exist as one God.  The model they used was a circle dance, and the fancy theological name they gave their idea is perichoresis, a Greek word which pretty much literally means circle dance.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, they said, exist as one in an eternal circle dance of love.  The Trinity is an eternal, joyful, radiant manifestation of love, loving, and being loved, and that love which endlessly flows between, in and through the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit creates and sustains the universe.

One of the beautiful things about this idea is that there is no hierarchy in it.  The Father and the Son and Holy Spirit are equal in their eternal love for each other and for their creation, which includes us.  Another wonderful thing about this idea is that it describes God as always in motion.  God as a verb, and not as a static noun, exists as an endless flow of love.  But perhaps the most powerful thing about this idea, at least as far as we are concerned, is that we are invited into their dance.  We are invited to participate in the endless flow of love, loving, and being loved.  The Holy Spirit, who dwells within us, carries us into the loving embrace of the Father and the Son and invites us to learn the steps of the dance.

When I saw my mom and dad dancing on that long-ago night, they had lost themselves in each other and the music.  They were still themselves, but they had become something more, and that something filled up the whole room and spilled out into me and my sister and the dog.  It’s like that with the Trinity.  The eternal dance of love spills over to create the universe and fills that universe with love.  

You and I are invited into the dance.  Never mind if you don’t know the steps.  The Spirit will teach you, and as you learn, the dance itself will carry you into the heart of Christ.

Painting: Women’s Wisdom Dancing by Sister Mary Southard, Sisters of St. Joseph

Conspiring With God

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

When you think of all the things the disciples of Jesus saw and experienced in their three or so years with him—exorcisms, healings, subduing storms, raising people from the dead, and then his own crucifixion and resurrection—it’s a wonder they didn’t become unhinged.  Maybe they did a little.  I think it’s safe to say that conspiring with Jesus had fundamentally changed their understanding of reality.  They had seen things.

The Book of Acts tells us that Jesus stayed with his disciples for another 40 days after his resurrection, teaching them about the idealized society of justice, kindness, diversity, equity and inclusion that he called kingdom of God. He told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait for “the promise of the Father.”  “John baptized with water,” he said, “but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”  And while he was saying all this “he was lifted up and a cloud took him from their sight.”  Strange as that was, things were about to get even stranger.

On the sixth day of Sivan, seven weeks and one day after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the day of Shavuot, which the Greek speaking Jews call Pentekosta, the streets of Jerusalem were teeming with people from every tribe and nation, from the far reaches of the empire and beyond, some even from Cush, Iberia and Ethiopia, from Scythia and the Parthian Empire.  Jews and proselytes, curious gentiles and ambitious traders had come from everywhere to be in the Holy City for the festival of the first fruits of spring and to commemorate God giving the Torah to Moses.  

The disciples of Jesus were there, too.  They had stayed all together in one place, in one room, waiting as Jesus had instructed—waiting for a signal, praying for whatever God might do next.  Suddenly the house was filled with a sound like a hurricane.  It filled the house and drove them to their feet while something that looked like tongues of fire danced between them until a flame seemed to alight on the head of each one of them.  They felt a presence swell up inside them as they were captivated by the Holy Spirit. 

They poured out into the street where they began to speak to the crowd in languages they had never learned, the Spirit speaking through them, proclaiming the love and grace of God as it had been made known to them in Jesus the Christ.  They spoke of God’s works of power through Jesus, his feeding of multitudes, his healings, his teaching.  They spoke of how he welcomed strangers and touched lepers.  They spoke of how he challenged the self-righteous and embraced the neglected.  They spoke about his vision of a whole, healthy and peaceful world, the dominion of God.

On the day of Shavuot, the Festival of Harvest which was also called Pentekosta, the day on which Moses had been given the Law, the Holy Spirit began to spread the good news of the Reign of God through Jesus, the Christ, to people from every corner of the empire of Caesar and places beyond.  

That day, that Pentecost, is often called the birthday of the church.  We sometimes think of it as the day that the Holy Spirit entered the story, but the Spirit had been part of the story from before the beginning.

When Jesus was baptized, the Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove.  That’s why the Spirit is usually depicted as a dove.  In Celtic Christianity, though, the Spirit is often portrayed as a wild goose.  

When you think about a dove, you think of something graceful and gentle and sweet.  It’s easy to ignore a dove.  Their cooing is soft and quiet.  It can lull you to sleep.  A wild goose, on the other hand, is a different bird altogether.  Geese are loud and intrusive.  They can be downright aggressive.   There is no complacency with a wild goose.  If a goose wants you to move, it will find a way to move you.  A wild goose isn’t safe or tame.  And neither is the Holy Spirit.  If the Spirit wants you to move, she will find a way to move you.  

The Holy Spirit is sometimes depicted as fire.  The Apostles experienced tongues of flame filling the room then resting on them.  The prophet Jeremiah said that when he tried to be silent the unspoken word of God, inspired by the Spirit, “is like a fire shut up in my bones.”  John the Baptist had told people, “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”  

The Spirit is sometimes understood as wind or breath.  The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, also means breath or wind.  It’s the same with the Greek word for Spirit, pneuma; it also means wind or breath.  In the Genesis story of creation, the Spirit is the ruach of God—the breath of God or wind of God that hovers over the waters, bringing order out of chaos.  When the prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a valley full of dead and dry bones, it was the ruach breath of God that filled those bones with life.  In the Gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus surprised the disciples in the locked room where they were hiding then breathed out his breath on them—pneuma­­­­—and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  

The Spirit inspires us to envision God’s utopia on earth as it is in heaven, and energizes us to work to make that vision a reality.  The Spirit inspires our imaginations, giving us visions and dreams of the better world that God is calling us to build, and she makes us impatient with the violence, selfishness and injustice of our world as it is.  

Our word “inspire” comes from the Latin word spirare, to breathe.  We breathe in the Holy Spirit, acknowledging that the life and power of God are in the very air we breathe.  We breathe in and call it inspiration.  When we die, we expire—ex (out of) spirare (breath)—we give up our breath, our spirit.  And in all of this, in all our life of faith, we are called to conspire with God. Conspire, con-spirare—to breathe with.  The Holy Spirit invites us to breathe as one with God, to change our understanding of reality, to learn to see the world through God’s eyes and love the world with God’s heart, to bless the world with God’s presence flowing through us.

It is by the Holy Spirit that we can say that Christ is in us and that we are in Christ.   It is the Holy Spirit who opens our hearts and opens our eyes to the presence of Christ in, with, and under all things.  It is the Holy Spirit who guides us to the future that God has envisioned for all of us.

When we conspire with God, the Spirit takes root in our lives to produce the fruit that builds and sustains community. Love inspires us to invite and welcome others, to create a place of safety and comfort where we can belong to each other.  Goodness makes us trustworthy and moves us to treat each other well.  Peace creates openness so that we can know each other more deeply.  Faithfulness ensures that we are deeply loyal to God and the Spirit’s calling. Gentleness shows that we care for God’s creation, that we will treat each other, and animals, and creation, itself, with care and respect.  Joy keeps us from sinking into cynicism or bitterness.  It keeps our hope alive and flourishing.  Joy is proof of the presence of God within us, a manifestation of our participation in the life of God.  Kindness   shows that we understand that we are all of the same kind—created in the likeness and image of God and that sometimes we all need a little help, a spoonful of understanding, grace and love. Patience isthe inspired virtue that demonstrates our awareness that every one of us is learning and growing at a different pace and that life is teaching us different lessons.  Self-Control means that, with the Spirit’s help, I can restrain both my appetites and my temper.  It means I keep a lid on the things that interfere with my ability to bring the fruit of the Spirit[1]—love, goodness, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, joy, kindness, and patience—into the world around me.

We sometimes say—I’ve said it myself—that the church needs a new Pentecost, another outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  I think what we really need, though, is to revisit and reaffirm the ways that the Spirit is even now alive and moving in our midst, and to open ourselves more fully to the wind that’s already blowing and the fire that is already glowing.  We’ve been happy with the quiet cooing of the dove;  it has sustained us and calmed our anxieties.  But maybe it’s time to wake up the wild goose and stir up the flames.

Symeon the New Theologian, writing in the late 10th or early 11th century said, “When you light a flame from a flame, it is the same flame that you receive.”  Through our baptism we have received the flame of the Spirit as it has been passed down through the centuries from generation to generation and person to person. That flame shines all the way back to the Apostles.  It’s the same flame that danced on their heads on that day of Shavuot so very long ago.  

This same Spirit has been waiting for an invitation to dance on our heads and in our hearts.  She[2] has been opening our eyes and minds and hearts to enlarge our vision.  She has been nudging us to conspire with God to subvert the domineering paradigms of greed and fear and coercion as she guides us to enlarge the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness and love and generosity on earth as it is in heaven.  

In his letter to the churches in Rome, Saint Paul said “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… When we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  In other words, you are God’s child.  I am God’s child.  And Paul went on to say that all creation has been waiting with eager longing for us, the children of God, to be revealed so that we can get on with the business of freeing, healing and restoring God’s beloved world.[1]  

The bottom line of Pentecost is this:  God has a whole new way of working in the world.  As children of God, we are employed in the God family business.  God is transforming the world in us, with us, and through us.  We cannot be afraid to change things—because God has called us and empowered us to be the change that all of creation has been longing for.  (Romans 8)  

God has empowered us with the Holy Spirit so we can walk the Way, speak the truth and live the Life of Christ as we confront the economic, social and political systems of empire with the vision and reality of God’s commonwealth of justice and kindness.


In his book, God’s Politics, Jim Wallis tells about the time he was attending worship in St. George’s cathedral in South Africa during the days of apartheid.  Bishop Desmond Tutu was preaching when suddenly the service was interrupted by South African security police who marched into the cathedral to intimidate Bishop Tutu so he would not speak out yet again against the apartheid government.  

When the Security Police filed into the building with weapons, tape recorders and cameras, Bishop Tutu stared them down then said to them, “You are powerful. Very powerful. But I serve a God who will not be mocked.” Then with a dazzling, warm smile he said to them, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to join the winning side.” 

Immediately the congregation was transformed.  The spell of fear that had gripped them was broken and the people began to dance.  They danced out into the streets where even more security forces were waiting to intimidate them, but the police ended up standing aside and letting the people dance in the joy of the Spirit.

When the forces of intimidation showed up at church, Bishop Tutu unleashed the wild goose of the Spirit and stared them down with a dazzling smile.  That’s our weapon.  That’s our most powerful tool in the God Family Business—the business of transforming the world:  a dazzling smile fully loaded with all the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,  gentleness, and self-control.  

Our job right now is to pray for the Holy Spirit to fall on us and light us up in a big way so that we are brave enough and whole enough to embrace our identity as children of God.  We are the ones we have been waiting for.

So take a breath.  Breathe in the Spirit that Christ is breathing out on you.  And then go, Child of God.  Chase the wild goose and breathe love out into the world.

[1] Galatians 5:22

[2] I know that some people object to using a feminine pronoun to identify the Holy Spirit, but there is a long tradition of using feminine language and imagery for the Spirit which is rooted in both the original languages of the Bible and in theology.  In Genesis 1:27 we read that humanity was created in the image and likeness of God, “male and female he created them.”  The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, is a feminine word.  Another name for the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is Wisdom—Sophia—another feminine name and word.  Then there is the Shekinah of God, another term for the Presence or Spirit of God which falls upon or rests upon the prophets and others.  Shekinah is not only a feminine word, but has always been understood to be a feminine aspect of God.  Pneuma the Greek word for Spirit, is gender neutral. 

[1] Romans 8:14ff

Rise and Shine

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

When Jesus Started Working from Home

Rise and Shine

The Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, also called Ascension Day, was on Thursday.  It’s always on a Thursday because it always comes 40 days after Easter.  And since it’s always on a Thursday, it often gets overlooked because most of us aren’t in the habit of going to church on Thursday, and Lutherans and other protestants don’t always pay attention to Feast days anyway.  So, we have the option of observing it on Sunday.  Ergo, welcome to  Ascension Sunday.  And as a bonus, it’s also the 7th Sunday in Easter.  

The Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ.  Ascension Day.  It’s almost as if we really don’t want anybody to notice it.  Even Google says that “Ascension Day is widely considered one of the most overlooked or ignored major feasts in the Christian calendar,” despite the fact that it is a distinct article in the Creeds.  “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father…  and he will come again with special coupons for up to 20% off on everything you need for your Memorial Day barbeque.”  Well, that last part’s not in the creeds.

I have to confess that I’ve always had a little trouble taking the Ascension of Jesus seriously.  The way Luke and Acts describe Jesus ascending always felt a little cartoonish to me.  In my imagination I keep seeing it like a Terry Gilliam animation from Monty Python with Jesus suddenly rising up from the ground then catching a ride on a nearby cloud.   

I realize that’s not the best way for a pastor to be thinking about a significant event in the life and ministry of Jesus, an event so significant that it is included in the Creeds, so I’ve made an effort to think about it more seriously.  After all, the Ascension of Jesus has real significance for those of us who are followers of Jesus.  The early church saw the ascension as the necessary conclusion to the resurrection, an exaltation that raised Jesus to his heavenly throne.

So, it deserves some thoughtful attention. 

The Ascension marks a turning point in the way God interacts with humanity—with us.  For a very long time, God seemed to engage with us relatively infrequently through prophets like Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Micah.  Moses gave us Torah—the teachings—with some very good basic information we needed to build good relationships and a just society.  The prophets chimed in from time to time with occasional corrective advice and direction.  And encouragement.  Or sometimes to scold us.  Worship in the temple and reading the scriptures in the synagogue were formative community experiences that reminded the people that they lived together under God’s leadership and in the covenant of God’s teachings, that God was with them, and that healthy relationships with each other and with God were important. 

But, good as the law and the prophets were, people kept finding loopholes or subverting their intent, or just ignoring them.  There was a lot of ignoring. So, to get us back to “love your neighbor as yourself” (which is from Leviticus, by the way), God came to us in person and entered human history as one of us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.  

Jesus interpreted and expanded the teachings of the law and spoke in the tradition of the prophets to confront human systems based on greed and oppressive power dynamics, to renew our relationship with God, and to expand our understanding of God.  

And to teach us not to be afraid of God.  

Richard Rohr says, “Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us, Jesus came to change our mind about God.”  Most importantly, Jesus came to proclaim that the reign of God had begun—that a human society structured on God’s values of love, kindness, diversity, inclusion, equity, justice and generosity was being inaugurated and was within reach.  That was the Good News that Jesus preached and taught everywhere he went: the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness is within reach.  God has a better way of life in mind for all of us and it’s doable.

So after going to all the trouble of incarnation and living a fully human life from start to finish, after challenging our religious and political and economic systems and suffering the most extreme backlash for doing that, after training disciples, after being crucified and then resurrected—after all that, why would Jesus just up and leave?  

I can think of two reasons, and they’re connected.  First, I think Jesus ascended, returned to his trans-dimensional life, because it was time for the kids to grow up and go out on their own.  The kids being us.  Humankind.  

God decided it was time to engage with humanity in a new way.  Instead of working and speaking primarily through only a few select prophets, God was now going to engage the world through a multitude of persons by endowing every open and loving person with the Holy Spirit.  And for that to happen, Jesus had to step back so we could step forward.  His disciples and followers would never fully take the responsibility of renewing and transforming their world—our world—if Jesus was still available for Facetime to arbitrate disputes, point the way through dilemmas, and make all the tough decisions.  

Jesus had prepared them for this.  Luke says he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.  He reaffirmed the key points of what he had been teaching them, telling them that repentance, metanoia—a conversion of heart and mind that changes how you see and approach the world—metanoia and forgiveness of sins was to be proclaimed to all peoples.  Then he told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait for his signal.  “Stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high,” he says in Luke.  In Acts he says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”  Which is the same thing just worded a little differently.

During that time of waiting in Jerusalem, the disciples prayed together, sang together, worshiped together, and ate together.  Acts says that they shared all things in common.  They created a model for the followers of Jesus that we still follow in some ways.  This life together was part of their preparation for the work that lay ahead.  Through all this they continued to remind each other of their discipleship experiences with Jesus, sharing what they had learned and imagining how they might apply that knowledge.  Though they probably didn’t realize it, they were building a foundation of community to fortify their relationships with each other and to build the mutual support that they would rely on to carry them through the challenging days ahead.

The long and the short of it is this: Jesus ascended so we could take up the baton of transforming the world.  We are empowered to do this work and guided by the Holy Spirit who enriches us through our life together.  

I think the second reason Jesus ascended is that he had taught us everything we need to know to live a whole, healthy and helpful life.  These were the same lessons that we are called to share with the rest of the world:  

  • If someone lashes out at you, let it go.  Turn the other cheek. 
  • Don’t curse your enemies, pray for them instead. In fact, don’t stop there—love your enemies. 
  • Forgive and you will be forgiven.  
  • Do not judge and you will not be judged.  
  • Treat others the way you would like to be treated.  
  • Share—if you have an extra coat, give it to someone who doesn’t have one.  If you have 5 loaves and two fish pass it around to the multitude in front of you.
  • Give something to everyone who asks.  Yes he really did say that.  (Luke 6:30)
  • Don’t make yourself crazy worrying about how you’re going to get by.  God knows what you need.  Trust that you and God together will find a way to muddle through.  
  • Don’t embrace violence or the tools of violence.  Those who live by the sword—or the gun—will die by the sword.  Or gun.
  • And most important of all, love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  That’s what the law and the prophets were all about.  Love each other.  Full stop.

Much of what Jesus taught was a restatement of what God had been trying to teach us from the very beginning.  Jesus, himself, said he had come to fulfill what the law and the prophets had been saying all along.  He embodied what the prophet Micah had said 700 years before him, “God has told you what is good, people.  And what does God require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”  

What else was there to teach?  All the bases had been covered.  So it was time for Jesus to return to the place he called “My Father’s House.” As one of my friends said, “The Feast of the Ascension celebrates the day that Jesus started working from home.”  

Jesus started working from home.  But he promised that we wouldn’t be left like orphans.  Yes, the work of enlarging God’s domain was now in our hands, but we wouldn’t have to do it alone.  He promised that the Holy Spirit would be with us and in us to guide us and prompt us and remind us of what Jesus had taught us.  “I have said these things to you while I am still with you,” he says in the Gospel of John.  “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. … Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” 

The book of Acts tells us that while the disciples were gazing up toward heaven and watching Jesus ascend, two men in white robes suddenly stood by them and said, “You Galileans, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”  

Why do y’all keep looking up toward heaven?  Your work is down here.  Jesus will be back when the time is right.

Our work is down here.  And God knows we could be doing better.  War is still erupting all over the world because people are greedy or sometimes because people are so convinced that their way of seeing the world is the only way and that people who see it another way must be eliminated. Or conquered.  Or controlled. People are still turning to self-medication in huge numbers because life for many is meaningless and painful or frightening…or just plain boring.   Whole groups of people are oppressed by other whole groups of people because we have made gods of power and competition and money instead of following the God of love and cooperation.  The planet itself is crying out in pain and becoming less habitable because we have trashed it instead of loving it and taking care of it and learning our proper place in the intricate, interconnected and beautiful web of creation. 

In a year like this past year—a year when we have seen basic tenets of our constitution challenged or flagrantly ignored, when rights like habeas corpus and the right of due process have been simply disregarded, a year when we saw life-sustaining food and health programs being torn away from the poorest among us so that the wealthiest could pay less in taxes while saddling the country with an additional $3.5 trillion in debt[1], when once again  political powers that refuse to compromise managed to ignore the overwhelming voice of the people and impose legislation that will make life in this country more tenuous for all of us—in a year like this it’s really tempting to gaze up to the heavens and hope that the next cloud that floats overhead will be carrying Jesus back to us to fix everything once and for all.

But that doesn’t seem to be happening.  That is not, apparently, the plan.  At least not for now.  Jesus is still working from home, or walking among us in a Matthew 25 disguise like the Undercover Boss,  which means that the work of transforming the world through love and truth and grace is still very much in our hands.  

“A Christian,” said St. Augustine, “is a mind through which Christ thinks, a heart through which Christ loves, a voice through which Christ speaks, and a hand through which Christ helps.” 

It’s time for us to rise up.  It’s time for us to ascend, not to a cloud that will take us away from it all, but to our feet taking us into it all—into the world with the ministry of love, healing, kindness and transformation that Jesus has left in our hands.  

God has told us how to live and what to do.  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God and with each other.  Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Love yourself.  Love the world that God has given us.  Love it into peace and wholeness one person at a time.  And listen to the Holy Spirit reminding us of everything Jesus said.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid. Peace be with you.

[1] Congressional Budget Office, reported by Robert Reich.

Loving Jesus

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Loving Jesus

John 14:15-21

A new student asked her yoga instructor, “Can you teach me to do the splits?”  “Hmmm,” said her instructor.  “How flexible are you?”  “Well,” said the student, “I can’t come on Tuesdays.”

A man called the obstetrician in a panic and yelled into the phone, “My wife is pregnant, and her contractions are only two minutes apart!”  “Is this her first child,” asked the doctor.  “No, you idiot!” yelled the man.  “This is her husband!”

The way we hear things is important.  The way we hear things can make a huge difference in what we understand and how we respond. 

In his wonderful book The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner wrote:

“WHEN A MINISTER reads out of the Bible, I am sure that 

at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

“We don’t see things as they are,” said Anias Nin, “we see things as we are.”  

The same goes for hearing.  We don’t always hear what someone is actually saying.  Sometimes that’s because we don’t really want to hear it.  Sometimes it’s because we think we’ve heard it before.  And sometimes it’s because we’re already thinking about our own reinterpreted version of what we think they’re saying.

“If you love me,” said Jesus, “you will keep my commandments.

How do you hear that?  What does it mean to love Jesus?  What does it look like for you—to love Jesus?  

Mark Allen Powell wrote a profound little book called Loving Jesus which takes seriously the idea of what it means to love Jesus.  The title is kind of a giveaway.  In the forward to Loving Jesus, he wrote this: 

“Becoming people who love God is the only reliable path to being more spiritual.  Loving God transforms people from within and connects them to something eternal and ultimate.

“The Christian faith is not just a religion (a system of rituals and beliefs), but arelationship—a relationship of love with Jesus Christ who is risen from the dead.  When this basic point is missed, the Christian religion becomes hollow and staid.

“When Christianity is not, first and foremost, a relationship of love, it becomes a matter of works and toil and patient endurance—all worthwhile, perhaps, but a far cry from the spiritual experience of joy and peace that it is supposed to be.”

So, what does it mean to love Jesus?  What does that look like?

How much is your love for Jesus affected by your mental picture of Jesus, the picture of Jesus you carry in your head and in your heart?  And how does that picture affect the way you hear Jesus?

Recently, Tripp Fuller’s Homebrewed Christianity podcast featured an educational unit called The Many Faces of Jesus which focused on different cultural perceptions of Jesus. The promo for the unit showed twelve different depictions of how people from different eras, cultures and ethnic groups have imagined Jesus.  https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/2025/03/29/themanyfacesofchrist/

Do any of these look like the Jesus you’re talking to when you pray?

Can you hear the words “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” from any of these faces?  Is it easier to hear it from some than from others?

Here’s what Jesus looked like to me as a kid—the classic Warner Sallman painting of Jesus standing at the door and knocking. https://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/christ-at-hearts-door/

That’s what Jesus looked like in my childhood mind.  That’s who I talked to when I prayed.  And in my mind he sounded like Victor Mature.  A serious baritone voice with ponderous cinematic music in the background.  And, of course, he spoke in King James Bible English because that’s what we heard in Sunday School, even though we didn’t understand half of it…  “Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.”  Come again?

Later we switched to the RSV in Sunday School and I saw other pictures of Jesus, so I began to hear him differently, too.

As time went on, more new translations were published—The New English Bible, The Good News Bible, The NIV, the NLT, the NRSV, the CEV, The Message—and with each translation the words changed, usually just a little, but sometimes a little change in wording meant more than a little difference in meaning and understanding.

When I was a teenager, new pictures of Jesus began to emerge.  Sometimes we saw him depicted as younger and hipper looking.  Sometimes he looked a little more rugged, like someone who really might be walking everywhere he went and living out in the elements.  

Sometimes he was even laughing.

It didn’t occur to me until years later, though, that in all of these pictures he was pretty much Anglo.  White.  Like me.  And my dad and my mom and almost everybody I knew and went to church with.  He might have a good tan from being outdoors so much.  But give him a haircut and dress him for church and he’d fit in just about any pew in any predominantly white church in America.  In fact, starting in the late ‘70s you wouldn’t even have to give him a haircut.

How does “Blessed are the poor” sound coming from Jesus in an Armani suit?  

There has been an increasing trend over the past few decades for different cultures and ethnic groups to portray Jesus as one of their own.  Black Jesus, Asian Jesus, Latino Jesus… 

On the one hand, this can be a useful way for people to hear Jesus speaking to them more clearly and directly within the context of their own life and culture, especially since so many of the images of Jesus we’ve had for so long have been white Northern European looking.  It’s easier for people to relate to and embrace a Jesus who looks like them.  That’s why, historically, the northern European church made so many images of a northern European-looking Jesus to begin with.  And it’s important to remember that the wide dispersion and normalization of those images had everything to do with colonialism and nothing at all to do with how Jesus actually looked.

So yes, culturally diverse images are a good and necessary thing.

On the other hand, it’s easy for any culture to commit the same kind of small idolatry that White America has committed and White Europe before us.  It’s easy to fashion Jesus in our own image.  When we do that, when we appropriate him to our race and our culture, some of the things he says, especially the things that critique us most directly, may lose some of their power.  Many of the things he said resonate all the more powerfully because he spoke as a member of a marginalized class in an occupied nation of oppressed people.

And that brings me to this image.  https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/12/15/jesus-face-recreated-scientists-skulls_n_8809466.html

In 2001 a team of Israeli and British forensic anthropologists and computer programmers used skeletal remains from first century Galilean peasant men to construct a composite portrait of Jesus. Let’s be clear NOBODY is saying that this is what Jesus looked like.  What they are saying, though, is that he probably looked a lot more like this than like any of the other paintings or depictions we’ve ever seen.

Look at that face.  Dark olive skin.  Curly, somewhat kinky hair.  Dark brown eyes.  If he was typical for the region, he probably stood somewhere between 5’1” tall to maybe as tall as 5”7”, and weighed about 110 pounds.  He would have been short, wiry, spare and strong—and most likely nothing special to look at.  

Now… can you hear him saying, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments?”

Are you willing to let him give you a commandment—even a gentle, grace-filled commandment?  

Can you hear him saying, “I will not leave you orphaned” and promising us the companionship of the Holy Spirit?

Can you see him as Emmanuel—God with us?

Can you love him?  

I ask you this because this portrait has been haunting me ever since the first time I saw it.  When I first saw it, I confess that I recoiled from it a little bit.  More than a little bit.  This face is so different from the Jesus I had always imagined.

On the other hand, this face fits perfectly with what the Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 53: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by others…and we held him of no account.”[1]

This face haunts me.  This is the face that I see more and more in my mind’s eye when I read the words of Jesus in the gospels.  This face challenges me.  This face makes me confront my own latent racism.  This face makes me confess my own petty idolatries.

Can I love him?  Can I love a Jesus who looks nothing like me?  Can I see him as Emmanuel? 

When I see this face speaking the familiar words of the gospel, the words themselves are no longer familiar.  They are new.  They have sharper edges.  They penetrate my expectations in extraordinary ways and surprising places.  To my surprise, I have also found that this Jesus comforts me more than any of the Jesus pictures I knew as a child.  There’s an earnest, honest sincerity in that face, the kind of sincerity that we tend to experience a little more readily from those who have “nothing in their appearance” to otherwise distract us.  He feels more present, less abstract.  His words feel more personal.

If you love me you will keep my commandments.

And what are those commandments?

Well there’s just one, really, but he repeats it twice:

John 13.34 – I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 

John 15.12 – “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 

The way we show that we love Jesus is to love one another.  He gives us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, to give us the courage and will to love each other.  He gives us the Holy Spirit to help us get over ourselves so we can see Christ in each other.

It’s a true thing in life that some faces are harder to love than others. 

Some of the faces we face stir up unpleasant memories for us.  Some of them express unpleasant attitudes.  Some just seem unapproachable.

But in every face we face, Jesus wants us to find their true face, the face he knows and loves—and even beneath that, he wants us, in some way, to see in them the image of God.  Which is why Jesus gives us the Spirit of truth—to help us love him and find the face we love in each other.

Sometimes you have to look hard and deep into a face to find the face you can love, the face that remembers it was created in the image and likeness of God.  And sometimes you have to adjust the way you’re seeing.

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie Hook (1991) where Peter Pan, played by Robin Williams, returns to Neverland after having lived for years as a grownup in the grownup world.  At first the Lost Boys don’t recognize him and are downright suspicious of him.  But then Pockets, one of the smallest boys, gets up close to him, looks at him through Peter’s own upside down glasses, squinches up Peter’s face in his hands, and suddenly recognizes the face of his old friend.  He sees the face of the boy who left Neverland hidden in the grownup face of the man who has returned.  And in that moment all the love comes flooding back.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-O1ReOPOQ

Within every face we face, Jesus wants us to find that person’s true face, the face he knows and loves—and beneath that, even in some way, to see in them the image of God.  In every face we face, Jesus wants us to search for his face.

“Those who love me show it by loving others,” says Jesus. “And God loves those who love me. And I love them.  And I will reveal myself to them.”

Who could ask for more than that?

[1] Isaiah 53:2-3

Goodbyes Are Never Easy

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

John 14:1-14

Goodbyes are never easy, especially when you are on the receiving end.  When you suddenly realize that someone you have counted on, someone you have relied on for years, someone you have loved, someone you assumed would always be there—when you suddenly realize that this centrally important relationship will soon be irretrievably changed, maybe never to return to what it was…ever…it can be devastating.  It can feel like the world as you know it is collapsing around you, like the ground is shifting beneath your feet and you can’t find a solid place to stand.  

I think most of us have felt that at one time or another—the anxious, disheartening, disorienting dismay of suddenly learning that the future is not going to be anything like the future you envisioned or expected.  It can knock the wind out of you.  It can leave your heart troubled…to say the least.

I think it’s safe to say that this is what the disciples must have felt when they heard Jesus say, “I am only going to be with you a little while longer. . . Where I’m going you cannot come.”  

That evening as they sat down to dinner, he had washed their feet and told them they must learn how to serve each other.  Hard on the heels of that teaching, he had told them that he was about to be betrayed by one of them.  But before they could really take in that troubling news, he gave them a new directive:  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  

And that’s when he told them he was leaving. “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.”

So they were upset.  They were confused.  They were anxious.  Their hearts were in turmoil.  Their world was falling apart right before their eyes.

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” said Jesus.  “Believe in God; believe also in me.”  

That’s how it reads in most of our translations.  What it actually says in the Greek, though, is slightly different:  

Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.  

It’s possible that this is just a quirk of the language, but it’s more likely that Jesus is reminding his disciples to be unified in their love for one another and for him, to be so united in love and purpose that it would be as if they had one heart.  And he wants that singular communal heart to be at peace.

You, plural, do not let your singular heart be troubled.

“Believe in God; believe also in me.”   Again, that’s how many of our translations render it, but it really would be better translated and more to the point to hear him say, “You trust God.  Trust me.”  The Greek word at work here, pisteuete, can be translated either way—believe or trust.  

Believe or trust.  They have similar meanings but they’re not exactly synonyms.  Believe is a head word, an intellect word.  Trust is a word with guts.  A word with heart.  A word with legs.  Belief is isolated and cerebral.  Trust is a relationship.  I may believe you’re strong enough to hold the rope that keeps me from plunging into the abyss, but it takes trust for me to actually put that rope in your hands. 

Jesus is telling them that, come what may, they can trust him.  Trust God, he says, and trust me.  Trust me to the end.  Trust me to beyond what looks like the end.  Things are about to get more horrible than you can imagine.  There will be betrayal and painful, ugly, humiliating death.  There will be astonishing, joyful, unexpected resurrection.  There will be mysterious and baffling ascension.  Those are just stops along the Way.  Keep following me.  Keep going.  Trust God.  Trust me.

“In my Father’s house,” says Jesus, “there are many dwelling places.”  

I feel a lot of sympathy for the translators here because the “dwelling places” are not really places at all.  And I have to say that the King James translation has done us no favors by telling us that in God’s house there are many mansions.  Jesus is not promising his followers an eternity of earthly wealth and prime real estate.  He is promising, instead, that in the ongoing journey of eternal life we will always find a place in the endless life and love of God. 

The Greek word translated as “dwelling places,” monai, comes from the same root as the word for “abide.”  Meno, to abide, is the Gospel of John’s favorite and most frequently used word to describe being in a relationship with Jesus.  It’s the word Jesus uses when he tells Philip, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me—abides in me—is doing his works.”

When Jesus tells us that there are many dwelling places in God’s house, he is not giving us a tableau of heaven;  he’s not painting us a picture of the great reward at the finish line.  He’s giving us a travelogue.  Jesus is telling us that faith in him is, in fact, a journey with him.  He’s telling us that as we follow him through God’s house in this world and into what comes next, there is no end of places to stop and catch our holy breath.  He’s telling us that there are a lot of places to pitch our tent along the Way, a lot of places to enjoy our companionship, to tell stories and sing songs and make s’mores on the pleasant evenings or to huddle together for warmth and comfort and moral support when things are cold and dismal.  

All along the Way there are places to abide.

“If it were not so,” said Jesus, “would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.  And you know the way to where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”  Good old Thomas.  He speaks for us, doesn’t he?  Well he speaks for me anyway.  Throughout the Gospel of John whenever Jesus sounds like an esoteric Zen Master, Thomas is the one who speaks up to say, “I don’t get it.  Explain it to me like I’m five.”  

“You know the way,” said Jesus.  “You know me.  I am the way. And the truth.  And the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Too many Christians have pulled this last statement out of its context and turned it into a proof text to claim that believing in Jesus is the one and only way to get to heaven.  Not only does this reduce faith in Christ to nothing more than a ticket to paradise, it is completely contrary to the spirit and intention of the other “I AM” statements Jesus makes in John.  

In the seven “I AM” statements in John, Jesus is telling us that he is the ultimate source of abundant life and grace.  When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life” or “I am the light of the world ” or “I am the gate” or “I am the Good Shepherd” or “I am the true vine,” these statements signify the very presence of God.  Jesus, himself, makes that clear when he says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also.  In fact, you already know him and have seen him.”  

This is an echo of what he has already said to them at the end of chapter 12 when he said: 

“Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who trusts in me should not remain in the darkness. I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.”

“I am the Way the Truth and the Life,” said Jesus.  “No one comes to the Father except—through  me/because of me/with me—those are all legitimate ways to translate that versatile little Greek preposition dia that indicates Jesus is the conduit into God’s presence.  Jesus isn’t saying that you have to make some formal statement of spiritual allegiance to him or accept certain doctrinal principles about him.  Whether you do these things or not, he is the one who brings you into the presence of God because he is the presence of God.

Frederick Buechner put it this way:

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” He didn’t say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn’t say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could “come to the Father.” He said that it was only by him—by living, participating in, being caught up by the way of life that he embodied, that was his way. 

“Thus it is possible to be on Christ’s way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don’t even believe in God.”

It is possible to be on Christ’s way without ever having heard of Christ.  It’s possible to be walking the way of Jesus if you are a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Taoist.  It’s possible to be living in the Way of Christ even if you are agnostic or an atheist. 

If your life is centered in love for God’s people and for God’s creation, if Truth is your highest value and it pains you to see truth devalued, if you believe that Life is a gift to be entered into deeply, a gift to be treasured and enjoyed and shared, then whether you know it or not, you are walking in the Way of Jesus, a Way that leads directly to God’s presence…even if you don’t recognize it.

“I’m going on ahead of you,” said Jesus, “and I know that right now it feels just devastating.  But trust God.  Trust me.  Keep walking in my Way.  Keep speaking Truth with uncompromised honesty.  Keep empowering and sustaining and being grateful for Life and immerse yourself in it.  Our pilgrimage into the infinite heart of God is endless and there will be no end of places for us to meet up along the Way.” 

Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.  We’ll travel this Way together…in Jesus’ name.

The Gate Versus The Gatekeepers

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

The words don’t change. The way we hear them does.

John 10:1-10

The Revised Common Lectionary, which most pastors and preachers follow in our tradition, repeats every three years.  The texts don’t change, but the way we hear them is different every time so I always assume that God wants to say something through these texts to this people in this place at this time and in these current circumstances.  The text doesn’t change, but the circumstances do.

When John 10:1-10 came up three years ago on the 4th Sunday of Easter I was only a few weeks away from retiring.  As I prepared my sermon, knowing that the time was very near when I would be leaving The Little Church with a Big Heart, a congregation I had served for twelve years—a congregation that I deeply loved, a congregation that had loved me back in more ways than I can begin to tell you—I kept coming back to the part where Jesus says, “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” 

The gatekeeper was opening the gate and I was being led out.  That meant that the time had come for the congregation to listen carefully to the Shepherd’s voice so they could discern who was being called to serve as their new sheepdog, which is what pastors really are if they’re listening to the Shepherd.

Six years ago, when this gospel text came up for the 4th Sunday of Easter, we were still in the very early days of the Covid 19 pandemic.  Hearing Jesus say, “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly” seemed like the apex of irony when we were locked down in our homes and hearing about thousands of deaths every day.  But in many of our faith communities, our abundant life together continued in spite of our enforced isolation.  We found ways to worship and hold classes online and even discovered that our after-worship fellowship time had an unexpected bonus because everyone was able see everyone and speak to everyone all at once on Zoom, taking turns in the conversation.  It really was remarkable.  Plus, there were no complaints about the coffee because everybody made their own.

The words of Jesus are the same every time we hear them, but we hear them differently each time because of what is going on in our lives and in our world.  

What’s influencing the way you hear the words of Jesus in this text this year?  Now?

One of the downsides of preaching the lectionary is that sometimes the selected text is isolated from its fuller context.  The fourth Sunday of Easter, for example, is traditionally known as Good Shepherd Sunday, so each year the lectionary gives us a different fragment of the shepherd and sheep imagery that Jesus is using as he verbally spars with the Pharisees and temple elders who are challenging him.  The thing we miss, though, is that all these fragments are parts of a larger unit, a larger story being told in John, a story that takes up all of chapter nine and more than half of chapter ten.  

Today’s gospel text is a continuation of the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. The events of that healing and the confrontation that follows all play out in chapter nine but they give meaning and weight to the shepherd imagery Jesus uses in chapter ten.   

When we read that story today, we don’t always look too far beyond the miraculous healing of the blind man—whose name by the way, according to both Eastern and Roman tradition, was Celidonius.  Maybe we pay some attention to the themes of light and darkness and true sight and spiritual blindness which are also part of the story, but what is not so readily apparent to us is that this is also a story about fear and boundaries and how people use and protect power.  Which raises the question: how were the people in this story hearing the words of Jesus?

Poor Celidonius had barely been given his sight when he was almost instantly confronted by the same group of self-appointed, conservative Judeans who had been repeatedly antagonizing and challenging Jesus.  Like detectives interrogating a criminal, they made the formerly blind man tell his story over and over again.  When some of them suggested that maybe he had never really been blind, his parents were brought in to affirm that yes, he was born blind, and no, they didn’t know who gave him his sight, and by the way he’s an adult and this has nothing to do with us.  When, after all this, they asked him to retell his story one more time, Celidonius was just plain exasperated. “I have told you already,” he said, “and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”   

That question really pushed their buttons.  They were supposed to be the authorities on all things sacred, and the suggestion, even if it was a bit facetious, that they might become disciples, students, of this Jesus who dared to do questionable things like healing on the Sabbath?  That really set them off.  They doubled-down on their commitment to Moses and Mosaic law, then circled back to their cultural assumption that Celidonius was born blind because of sin.  “You were born entirely in sin,” they said.   And then they expelled him from the synagogue.

Fear is a significant undercurrent in this story.  The blind man’s neighbors were anxious because acknowledging the miracle would mean that they would have to reevaluate who they thought Jesus was and also, no small thing, how the universe works and how God works.  The Pharisees were anxious for the same reason but with more at stake, so they not only tried to debunk the miracle but to discredit the miracle worker, Jesus.  The man’s parents were nervous for all the same reasons, but also because the Pharisees could bar them from the synagogue.  And that was a very frightening prospect to consider.  

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were 394 synagogues in Jerusalem in the early first century.  These synagogues were places for religious study and debate but they also functioned as community centers and economic centers.  Business deals were hammered out in the synagogue.  Workers were hired in the synagogue.  Marriages were contracted there.  The synagogue was the center of community life and being thrown out or banned could be both economically and socially disastrous. 

So fear and anxiety made everyone except Jesus and Celidonius reluctant to acknowledge the extraordinary thing that God had done in their midst.  Before we get judgmental, though, it’s important to remember that everything that happens in the gospels happens under the watchful eye and oppressive shadow of the Roman Empire.  Everything Jesus said or did had to break through the atmosphere of fear that the Romans relied on to enforce the peace and the paranoia of the Jewish leaders who tried to prevent open rebellion by keeping a lid on the messianic hopes of the people.

Jesus made these Jewish leaders nervous when he was merely preaching and teaching.  When he did works of power like giving sight to a man born blind, he just plain scared them.  When he started talking about the sheepfold and the gate and the shepherd and bandits and thieves, he infuriated them.

This was their own symbolic language, but it had a very sharp edge when Jesus was using it.

The sheepfold was not private property.  It was a piece of communal economic infrastructure, a shared space that was crucial to the economic survival of a village.  In reality and as a metaphor it was a symbol of interdependence.  Several families would herd their flocks into the sheepfold to keep them safe through the night.  Shepherds took turns serving as the gatekeeper, often lying down or sitting stretched across the entrance of the sheepfold as a living gate, guarding the entrance with their bodies. The gatekeeper wasn’t just guarding his own sheep but all the sheep of the village.  A thief or bandit who might climb over the wall was threatening an entire community’s common life and security.

Shepherd imagery had political weight.  The Shepherd was a familiar political metaphor long before the time of Jesus.  Emperors, kings and religious leaders referred to themselves as shepherds to emphasize their claim that they guided and protected the people.  Prophets referred to these same powerful people as shepherds when they were critiquing or criticizing them.  On the other side of the same coin, the Shepherd was a messianic metaphor.  David had been a shepherd and it was commonly understood that Messiah would be a “Shepherd” from the line of David.  

When Jesus began to address his opponents with shepherding imagery, confronting them with the metaphors of the sheepfold and the gate and gatekeepers and thieves and bandits, his opponents, the gatekeepers of propriety who had just expelled Celidonius from the synagogue, undoubtedly heard his words as a sharp criticism. They would have remembered Jeremiah saying, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture.”[1]  They would have remembered Ezekiel saying, “Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves!  Should not the shepherds feed the sheep?  You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep.  You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.”[2]

The words of Jesus in the text don’t change, but the way we hear them changes every time.  We hear them through the filter of our circumstances.  Sometimes we hear comfort.  Sometimes we hear criticism.  How do you hear them?

“My sheep know my voice,” says Jesus.  Whose voice are you listening to?  What news sources do you read or watch or listen to?  What kind of message are they giving you about the world?  About yourself?  What kind of messages are you letting into your heart and mind and soul? 

Are they messages rooted in faith, hope and love?  Or are they messages rooted in fear?  Do they seek to enlarge your heart or shrink it?  Do they seek to open your embrace of others or do they tempt you to close yourself off from everyone who isn’t a whole lot like you?  

Who or what are the bandits in your life?  Who’s climbing over the wall to steal your peace?  Who or what is killing your joy?

Who is the gatekeeper for your heart and mind and soul?

“Very truly, I tell you,” said Jesus, “I am the gate for the sheep.  All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them.  I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.  The felon comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you may have life and have it in all its fullness.”

The words are the same but we hear them differently every time.

Nine years ago, for instance, today’s gospel text spoke to me powerfully and deeply in ways I could never have foreseen.  

Only two days before preaching on this text, I presided over a memorial service for a young woman named Meghan, the daughter of some our closest friends, a young woman I had watched grow up as an extended-family sister to our kids.  

I had officiated at Meghan’s wedding two years earlier, which gave her death an extra layer of pain for me and a feeling of something like guilt, because she was killed by her husband, the man I had united her to in marriage.  

Nine years ago, when I came to the part of today’s gospel where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy…” it just wrecked me.  I had to stop and take a long, deep breath before I could read the rest of what Jesus says here: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

As those words hung in the air, I thought about Meghan’s memorial service.  I thought about the church, our “home” church where I had met her parents when we were all teenagers, our church where she and her sister and our kids were all baptized, our church where our kids grew up together to become lifelong friends.  I thought about our church where so much life has happened—I thought about that church filled to capacity with people who had been touched by her, whose lives had interconnected with hers and with ours.  I thought about how they had all come “back to church” for her, back to the Christ-centered starting point where all our relationships and stories had begun.  

I thought about how in that service, despite the pain and anger and sadness that had brought us there, we experienced the joy and comfort of the abundant life we had all shared over the years.  And I realized that, despite our grief and pain, our abundant life continues.  I realized that Meghan’s abundant life continues, that she lives on in the hearts and memories of her friends and family and in the loving presence and heart of Christ.

On the 4th Sunday of Easter, nine years ago, I realized that, while it was Meghan’s tragic and untimely death that had brought us all together that day, it was Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who had originally brought us all together in the first place.  We had all met each other in the very beginning because we had come to church.  We had met in the company of Christ.  We had followed the voice of the Shepherd who called us all together into one great big flocking family—a family that is bigger than any one church building or any single congregation or any denomination, a family that is, truly, bigger than any one religion.  

Abundant life. Overflowing life.  This is the gift Christ gives us in our life together.

[1] Jeremiah 23

[2] Ezekiel 34

Hope–Alive and In Person

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

Sometimes you need more than a vision.

Luke 24:36b-48

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,  I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.[1]

 This is the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.  It is, in the writer’s own words, an orderly account.  He is reporting what has been told to him by those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.”  Luke wants you to know that he investigated everything carefully.  So if Luke tells you that shepherds watching their flocks at night heard angels singing and that an angel told them to go to Bethlehem to see a baby in a manger, Luke wants you to know that he is reporting the story exactly as it was told to him by at least one reliable person.

Luke likes details.  Luke locates the story of Jesus in history.  It began when Tiberius was emperor.  When Quirinius was governor of Syria.  When that first census was taken—you know, the one everyone hated so much because it stuck us with that annual tax of one denarius per person.  

Luke keeps things physical and human.  This gospel doesn’t spiritualize practical or justice issues.  For Luke, it’s “Blessed are the poor,” not “blessed are the poor in spirit.”  Yet Luke does emphasize the presence and work of the Holy Spirit—Jesus is conceived by the Spirit (1:35), and anointed with the Spirit (3:22; 4:1, 14, 18), people are filled with the Spirit (1:15, 41, 67) and inspired by the Spirit (2:25–27),  God gives the Holy Spirit to all who ask (11:13), and Jesus promises the disciples that they will be “clothed with power from on high”(24:49), which is clearly a reference to the Holy Spirit who will make a fiery appearance in the Book of Acts, which is really volume 2 of the Gospel of Luke—but for all that, the Spirit usually seems more practical than ethereal in Luke.

And then there’s the eating. 

Luke’s gospel seems to have an unusual interest in food.

In the Magnificat, Mary sings that the poor will be fed and in Luke’s telling of the Beatitudes, Jesus says those who hunger will be fed.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus talks about table etiquette three times. There are five banquet parables.  Jesus is present at nineteen meals.  Five times he is criticized for eating too much and with the wrong people.  But it is after the resurrection that food plays its most important role in this very earthy gospel.

On the afternoon of the resurrection, the risen Jesus joins a couple of heartbroken travelers who are returning from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus.  These two, let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas, are two people who know Jesus well.  In fact, if Cleopas is the same person as Clopas mentioned in John 19 (and most scholars think he is), then these two Emmaus travelers might be Jesus’ uncle and aunt.   Tradition identifies Clopas as the brother of Joseph.  So they know him,  but as he walks with them and talks with them they aren’t aware of who he is.  Luke tells us “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It’s not until he sits down with them and breaks bread that they realize who he is.   Breaking bread—food shared at the table—becomes the sign of recognition.

Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples huddled in the upper room about their encounter with Jesus.  But just as they started to tell their story, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”  

And here is where Luke, the realist, the reporter, is at his best.  He tells us, “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”  Well you would be, wouldn’t you.  Startled. And terrified.  If you had seen someone killed in a brutal and horrific way and then entombed but suddenly that person was standing right in front of you, you would probably think you were seeing a ghost, too.  Or maybe you would question your own sanity.  

Before their minds could be totally blown or wander too far into the fog of speculation, Jesus brought them sharply to the reality of the moment.  “He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.”  

Once again Luke puts emphasis on the physical.  Touch me and see.  Luke is making a point.  A ghost does not have flesh and bones.  

Naturally the friends of Jesus, when suddenly confronted with his unexpected, risen presence, feel a tangle of emotions.  And once again, Luke is the realistic reporter.  He tells us they were joyful and disbelieving and wondering all at the same time.  So Jesus asks for something to eat and they give him a piece of broiled fish.  This is the physical proof that seals the deal and silences all doubts. Ghosts do not eat.

The realism is important here.  This is not merely a “spiritual” resurrection.  This is not merely a vision.  And this is certainly is not an elaborate mythic metaphor for springtime.  Luke wants to make it absolutely clear that this is flesh and bones Jesus returned to life, Jesus physically, bodily raised from the dead. 

Why does Luke make such a point of this and why does it matter for us?

In the original ending of Mark’s gospel, there are no post-resurrection encounters.  There is an empty tomb and a strange young man clothed in white who gives the startled women the cryptic message that “he has gone ahead of you.”  It has been suggested that the empty tomb in Mark symbolizes that ultimate love in our lives, the love of God, cannot be crucified or killed.  

Well okay.  That’s not a bad message as far as it goes.  It’s an easy idea to carry in your head.  It sounds somewhat sophisticated and enlightened.  But does it move your heart?  Can that symbolic interpretation carry the full weight of your hopes and fears when you’re faced with a crisis?

We are called to share the Good News of Christ risen, Christ alive, Christ with us, Christ at work in the world.   We are called to bring hope—a real hope that speaks to the real needs of the real people who live in real crisis in our real world.  Does “the empty tomb is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering” do that?

And again, that’s not a bad message.  It is part of our message.  But is it enough?

Twelve years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer I found myself confronted by my own mortality.  I was more scared than I cared to admit because both my mom and my dad died of cancer.  Sometimes a diagnosis or a crisis can really sharpen your focus.  Things that had been theoretical either become the life raft you cling to or they get discarded.  I realized during that time that, while I’m willing to entertain and discuss all kinds of ideas and theories about resurrection, for me personally a psychological or philosophical or purely mystical  understanding isn’t enough to carry the weight of my hopes and fears.  I need something with some bones in it, some skin on it.  And I’m not alone in that.

I have seen a lot of death in my decades as a pastor.  I have accompanied people up to death’s door more than a few times and held their hand as they crossed the threshold.  I will tell you right now that, in my experience, those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus have been the ones who have departed most calmly, most readily, and most willingly.

I will also tell you that those I’ve known who can proclaim their faith with quiet conviction have also usually been those who have believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus.  Though I’ve read his words many times, Frederick Buechner’s statement of faith still moves me:

“I can tell you this,” he wrote, “that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very un-fancifully, even though I do not understand well my own language. I was not there to see it any more than I was awake to see the sun rise this morning, but I affirm it as surely as I do that by God’s grace the sun did rise this morning because that is why the world is flooded with light.”

The testimony of faithful people is a good and powerful reason to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  That’s why Luke, at the beginning of his gospel, makes it clear that he is reporting events  just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.  

But there is also another good reason to trust the accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus, a reason that’s both practical and theological:  something transformed the disciples of Jesus.  Something inspired this frightened band of misfits who had been timidly hiding behind locked doors to become apostles who carried an impossible message into an empire that was openly hostile to them.  Something gave them unbreakable courage.

Pinchas Lapide was a Jewish theologian and historian.  He was not a Christian, but he believed that God raised Jesus from the dead.  For him, the proof of the physical resurrection could be found in the changed lives of the disciples.  In his book The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective he wrote: 

“When this scared, frightened band of the apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.” [p. 125]

Jesus was a real physical person who was tortured to death in a first-century lynching.  The state and the religious authority colluded to crucify him, to physically destroy him and in so doing to destroy his opposition to their power.  His crucifixion was a political statement.  What they failed to see and understand, though, was that there was a power and authority in him that dwarfed any power and authority they imagined they had over him.  

For that reason,  nothing less than a bodily resurrection would do to nullify their violence and call their power into question.  It was his physical body they killed.  It would have to be his physical body that would proclaim their work undone.  

The power and authority of Jesus was rooted in his deeply loving relationship with the God he called Father, the God who raised him out of death into new life.  His resurrection was a victory of God’s dominion of love and life over the death-dealing oppression of empire.

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that violence will not have the last word.  Pain will not have the last word.  Fear will not have the last word.  Anger will not have the last word. Disease will not have the last word.  Suffering will not have the last word.  Death will not have the last word.

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that grace, forgiveness, faith, hope and love—these things will have the last word.  The resurrection was God affirming that Life will have the last word.  

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

[1] Luke 1:1-4 NRSV

This Year is Different

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 20:19-30

We know this story, right?  Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter we get the same Gospel text from the 20th chapter of John.  Year in and year out.  Every year, one week after Easter we hear “The Doubting Thomas” story.  That’s what we call it, which isn’t really fair to either Thomas or the text because there is a lot more going on in these twenty-one verses, and some of the most important things in the text, arguably, have nothing to do with Thomas.   But still, having said that, this story is so familiar that even non-church people know it.  Doubting Thomas is a cultural touchstone.  Right?  

We know this story, do we not?

I wonder.

This year the story sounds different to me. This year, when I read the first line of this story it hit me in a way it never has before.  

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews…”[1]

Stop there for a minute.  Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus faces opposition and antagonism from a particular group of conservative  Judean religious leaders.  These were the leaders who collaborated with Roman authorities to help keep a lid on things, particularly in Jerusalem.  John’s gospel simply refers to this group as “the Jews.”  This was never meant to be understood as “all” Jews.  Jesus was a Jew.  His disciples were Jews.  So, throughout the gospel of John, when the writer talks about “the Jews,” he is referring to this particular group of antagonists, and not Jews in general.

Except, maybe, in this one instance.  

After Jesus was arrested, the disciples fled back to the room where they had shared the last supper.  And that’s where they have mostly stayed for three days and nights, huddled together behind locked doors.  

Put yourself in the room with them.  It’s evening.  The sun has set.  Someone has lit a small lamp or two but those lamps seem to fill that large room with more shadows than light.  In those shadows your mind keeps replaying the events of the last few days—Jesus being arrested in the garden, Jesus being dragged away in chains, the crowd that had shouted Hosanna a few days ago now shouting for him to be crucified.  And yes, you see that picture in the shadows, too—Jesus  being tortured and crucified.  Jesus laid in the tomb.

Everyone in the room with you is grieving.  You all have very good reasons to be afraid.  The world outside those locked doors is not a safe place for you.  You know that there are people out there who would do to you what they did to Jesus, your teacher, your friend.  

You are grieving.  You are afraid.  And you are in turmoil because earlier in the day, Peter and another disciple erupted into the room all in a lather to say that the tomb was empty and the grave clothes were all neatly folded and set aside.  On top of that, Mary Magdalene is telling you that she has seen Jesus and spoken to him… and all you can think is that her grief has made her delusional.

And where is Thomas?  Where did he go?  What is he doing?  Why isn’t he in the room with the rest of you?  The last time one of your companions slipped away somewhere by himself it was Judas, and we all know how that turned out, don’t we.  

So there you are, huddled together in a room full of fear and grief and shadows.  And of course the doors are locked.  You don’t know who you can trust.  You don’t know who might make some deal to hand you over to the authorities.  You are afraid of your own people.

Six years ago we all heard this text behind locked doors.  We were all afraid of our own people then.  Well, not so much the people as the virus one of them might pass along.  Our doors were closed to protect all of us from all of us.  

This year, though, is different.  This year I think we understand a little more clearly that what we are seeing in this passage from John’s gospel is a scene of political terror.  We are seeing a small community traumatized by state violence, a community that has every reason to think that more violence may be coming their way.

This year the story resonates more profoundly and directly. This year we have seen heavily armed “agents” wearing masks conducting sweeps through our communities, disappearing our neighbors from their work, their cars and their homes, even from courthouse hallways and steps.  This year we have seen our neighbors spirited off to detention camps or deported to foreign countries without anything like due process.  This year we have seen people killed while protesting these actions.

This year we all know someone or know about someone who is living in grief and fear behind locked doors, not knowing who they can trust, afraid of their own people. 

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

Jesus showed up behind their locked doors, emerging from the shadows of their distress to free them from the fear and grief that were paralyzing them, to unlock and open for them a whole new understanding of life and death and God, and to empower them to continue with the work of proclaiming the counter-imperial commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness.  

Jesus does the same thing for us.  Jesus appears inside our locked up spaces.  Jesus passes through the shadows of our fear and unbelief to come and stand beside us and among us, to show us that he is alive—and to teach us how to live in a new reality.  If we will believe.  If we will trust.

When Jesus steps into the locked up places in our hearts and minds, when Jesus steps through our fears and unbelief to stand before us, to stand in the midst of us, he does it for a reason.  The living Jesus stands in our midst not just so that we can resume the same old relationships with God and with each other that we had before, but so that we can begin an entirely new relationship with God and with each other.  

Jesus does not just want us to learn about him.  Jesus wants us to learn from him so we can live in unity with him and continue his work of making the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  

We are not united to a dead, historical Christ who lives only in the pages of the gospels.  We are united to a living Jesus who stands here among us, who meets us at the table of companionship. We are united with a living Jesus who meets us in disguise on the streets, who comes to us hungry and thirsty, unwell and unhoused, who encounters us as a stranger, a refugee or an immigrant.  

But Jesus doesn’t just show up.  Jesus knows that there’s something more that we need so we can rise out of our pain and fears and unbelief to do the work he calls us to do.  Jesus knows we need a spirit of courage that will make us brave enough and bold enough to love each other and love the world, a spirit of joy and wonder that will keep us from slipping into cynicism or despair in a world that is all too often indifferent when it isn’t being downright nasty.  Jesus knows that if we’re going to help heal the world’s angst we need to be free of it ourselves.  So he gives us the antidote.

“Peace be upon you,” he says.  Shalom aleichem.  Put away your anxiety.  Let go of your fear.  Put away your disagreement.  Stop trying so hard to be right.  Try, instead to be loving.  Stop the finger-pointing.  Stop investing so much energy and emotion in nonsense and things that don’t really matter.  “Peace be upon you.” 

This is not the peace of empire, the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana, a peace enforced by force or coercion, a peace procured through the art of the deal.  This is the shalom of God, the peace of wholeness, the peace of mutuality.  This is a peace that embraces diversity and fosters equity and strives for inclusion.  This is the peace that works for justice, loves kindness and walks humbly with God.

“Peace be upon you,” said Jesus.  And then he showed them his hands and his side. “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”   They recognized him by his wounds.  His wounds proved that he was the real Jesus.  His wounds convinced honest and reasonable but skeptical Thomas that he was truly the risen Christ.

In Wounded Lord, Robert Smith’s commentary on the Gospel of John, which he completed shortly before he died, he wrote: “Those wounds will never go away.  The exalted Christ has not passed to a sublime existence immune to suffering.  Even after Good Friday and Easter, God continues to turn to the world through the wounded Christ.

 “To believe in this Jesus means to take him, wounds and all, into our own lives.  To believe means to participate in Christ’s own suffering on behalf of the true life of the world.”

Our Christ, our God, is not some transcendent deity who sits in heaven far removed from the pain of our existence.  Our Christ, our God is wounded from embracing the world, wounded from loving the world.  We can sing about victory all we want, but the reality is that we are still in the struggle, and the Good News, the really Good News is not that our Messiah, our Commander is immortal and impervious, but that he has a Purple Heart.  The Good News is that his wounds were fatal, but his fatality was not.  His wounds mean that our wounds may kill us, but that won’t stop us. 

“Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 

This is where we go from being disciples to being apostles.  Now we have the same mission Jesus had.  We are not supposed to just sit still and happy in our own little pool of peace.  We are being  sent.  We have to go out in peace.  And withpeace.  We have to be grounded in the Shalom of God—the blessing of well-being—but on the move, carrying the shalom of God with us, sharing it and spreading it.

“When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

In the original Greek it says that he breathed into them.  This is  such a profoundly intimate moment, a moment of physical closeness.  The word that’s used in the Greek, emphisao, is the same word that’s used in the Greek version of Genesis 2 when God breathes life into the human that God has made out of earth.  This is the breath that gives life.  Jesus breathes the Spirit of life into them…and into us.

Breathe.  Take a deep breath and inhale the Spirit of God that is being breathed into you. Right now, right where you are.  Breathe.  Breathe in the Holy Spirit, the breath of Christ. 

Now breathe out.  Let everything holy in you, the Christ in you, the love and goodness in you fill the room.  

And now, think about this.  This new life that you are inhaling and exhaling—it has a purpose.  You are being sent.  

“As the Father sent me, so I am sending you,” said Jesus.  You are being sent to teach forgiveness to a world that is addicted to the poisonous drug of retribution. You are being sent out to bring the shalom of cooperation to a world that is obsessed with competition.  You are being sent out to bring a breath of fresh air to a world that is gasping for the love of Christ and the breath of the Spirit.  

So take a deep breath.  And go.  The world needs the breath of Christ.  This year more than ever.

[1] John 20:19 (NRSVue)

Painting: Deep Breath by Melody Weidner

Easter in a Dying Church

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

They come because they have always come…

and on this day of days, 

not to pass through the beckoning door,

not to let their careful footsteps drum

old echoes from the wooden floor

would deny the pattern of their ways

and all the times that they have come before.

They sit where they have always sat…

each in the customary pew, 

with room enough for all, 

even for the visiting few  

who do not hear the sweet, unearthly voices

singing Alleluia in memories so loud;

room enough for those who do not recall 

the passings, the accidents, the choices 

which have thickened the witnessing cloud

and left this sparse, embodied remnant of the hosts

surrounded by their ghosts.

They come to meet where they have always met…

to taste the wine with a beloved friend

who has faded from sight 

but still shares the cup in the world without end,

to break bread with the cherished spouse

who, though swallowed by the light,

still prays beside each member of this house,

to meet children, uncles, sisters, mothers, 

cousins, aunts, fathers, brothers,

in soul or body distanced from their common place—

to allow for them a sanctioned space.

They come to be seen with the unseen…

to testify to the most revered of their presumptions:

that before and beyond here and now

the empty tomb 

leaves a hole in all assumptions.

Out of the Dark and Into the Light

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 11:1-45

If you look at a full moon when it’s rising, sometimes it looks much closer and larger than usual.  The curvature of the earth at the horizon seems to magnify it, and it may look yellowish or have a tinge of orange as its light is filtered through layers of moisture or dust or pollution in the atmosphere.  If you see it rise during the day, it may look illusory and distant, a faded disc projected against a fathomless blue sky.  If you see the full moon through a telescope, you suddenly see it as a world in its own right and not merely as Earth’s bright companion.  You see its long story spelled out in craters and mountain ridges.  Sharp outcroppings of rock hint at moments of violent upheaval and plains of dust speak of eons of silence and solitude.  But if you are holding the hand of someone you love as you watch the full moon rise, it looks like a different thing altogether.  It becomes a benevolent entity from heaven full or romance, mystery, and poetry riding across the field of stars just for you and your love.

Sometimes reading the scriptures is like looking at the moon.  So much of what you see depends on where you stand,  who your reading companions are, what clouds you’re looking through, what lenses are clarifying or distorting your understanding, and what you’re looking for to begin with.  

I read two very well written and well-reasoned articles by noted scholars not long ago that helped me see this familiar story of the raising of Lazarus in an entirely new way.  These articles made a strong case that Lazarus may have been the actual author of the Gospel we know as John—or at least the first draft of major parts of the Gospel.[1]  That idea has had me reading this week’s gospel in a different light, reading it as if it might be a memoir.  

One of the things you notice when reading John is that for much of the gospel Jesus seems to be slightly aloof or distant.  As one scholar puts it, he seems to be walking two feet above the ground.  But when you get to chapter 11, suddenly everything is very down to earth and the emotions come spilling out.  This chapter has all the feels, and it’s not hard to imagine that this is Lazarus telling his own story.  The story starts out with a certain distance, both geographically and emotionally, but it quickly becomes more immediate, more personal, more touching. 

When Jesus and his disciples learned that Lazarus was deathly ill, the disciples were fearful about returning to Judea because they knew that there was a certain contingency among the Jewish elders who wanted to find a way to eliminate Jesus.  When Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” it feels a bit like nervous bravado, but it’s also an acknowledgement that traveling to a town so close to Jerusalem is dangerous for all of them.  Their return to the area will, in fact, lead to circumstances that harden the resolve of Jesus’s antagonists to kill him.   

We’re told that when Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has already been in the tomb for four days.  The Jews of that time believed that the spirit stayed near the body for three days after death.  Saying that he has been in the tomb for four days is a way of telling us that Lazarus was well and truly dead.  This will be reinforced toward the end of the story when Jesus asks them to remove the stone that sealed the tomb.  Martha says, “Lord, there is already a stench because he’s been in there for four days!”  I love the way the King James version puts this:  “Lord, he stinketh!”

And now a quick aside before we see Jesus meeting up with Martha and Mary, the grieving sisters of Lazarus.  A few years ago Elizabeth Schrader Polczer was closely examining Papyrus 66, one of the oldest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of John, or any New Testament book for that matter.  She discovered compelling evidence that Martha may  not have been in the original text but was added by a later scribe.  This may have been done to harmonize John’s gospel with Luke by importing the Galilean Mary and Martha from Luke 10 into this Judean story in John 11.  More likely, though, this was done to undermine the apostolic authority of Mary Magdalene who many early Christ followers regarded as the most important of the apostles.  John has the confession that Jesus is the Christ/Messiah coming from Martha and not Mary.  Either way, it is important to note that it is a woman who makes this important confession and not one of the male disciples, and particularly not Peter who makes this statement in the Synoptic gospels.  

While the possible insertion of Martha in the text is an important consideration, for now let’s stick to the redacted version with both sisters as it has come to us in our English translations.

When Martha runs out to meet Jesus, the first thing she says to him sounds almost like an accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Mary will say the same thing to him just a few verses later.

How many times have we felt that way?  

Where were you, Jesus?  Why weren’t you here when life was falling apart, when worse came to worst and everything went to hell in a handbasket?  What was so important that you couldn’t be here when we needed you most?  What kind of friend are you?  

When we are grieving, the littlest thing can trigger us to spill our pain all over everyone around us, especially on those closest to us.

“Jesus,” said Martha, “if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  But then she catches herself.  She takes a breath and says, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Martha is hinting very broadly that she expects him to do something.  God will give you whatever you ask… so ask already!  That’s what’s hanging in the air.

But Jesus is reluctant.  “Your brother will rise again,” he says.  And it feels like he would maybe have preferred for things to stop right there.  It feels like he’s reluctant to say or promise anything more, as if he’s hesitant to promise any immediate relief for their grief.

Martha hears his reluctance but prods him further:  “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  I know he’ll rise again.  Eventually.  Everybody knows that.  But her unspoken question is still hanging in the air:  I know he will rise again on the last day, but what are you going to do right now?”  And haven’t we all felt like that, too, when we’ve lost someone we love?

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”  She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

It’s important to say a word here about what it means to believe.  In our world, in our time, we often use the word believe as a synonym for think.  It tends to be a cerebral word for us.  But in their world and their time, it was a much more visceral word.  You believed things in your guts, not in your head.  The essential meaning was trust.  Jesus is saying, “Those who trust me to the depths of their guts, even if they die, they will still live, and those who live with that kind of trust in me will never die.”  And then he asks Martha, “Do you have that kind of visceral faith and trust in me?”  

When Martha says, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” what she is saying is not, “Yes, I intellectually accept the idea that you have a unique relationship with God.”  What she is saying is, “Yes, I trust to the depth of my very being that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one we’ve waited for throughout all of history.  That understanding of who you are, Jesus, is part of who I am.  It flows in my veins.”

When Mary came out to meet Jesus, she fell at his feet.  The NRSV says she knelt at his feet, but the Greek text is more emotional and expressive than that.  It says she fell at his feet.  Her grief is so acute that she collapses at his feet.  And she echoes Martha’s words: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Jesus sees her weeping.  Jesus sees the people who came with her weeping.  And he gets caught up in their pain.  The Greek text says that he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly distressed.  He was agitated.  He was a wreck.  He asked them where they had laid his friend to rest.  And then he began to weep.

Jesus wept.  Jesus wept because he loved his friend and felt the pain of his death.  Jesus wept for Mary and Martha’s pain and the grief of everyone around him.  Jesus wept for all the pain and loss we experience in the world.  Jesus wept out of frustration.  Jesus wept because he knew that restoring Lazarus to life would be the thing that would set his own painful death in motion.

When Jesus came to the tomb he was greatly agitated and disturbed.  The Greek word that’s used here, embriómenos, indicates an emotional mix of deep frustration and anger.  It’s another one of those deeply visceral words that don’t translate well.

Jesus was angry at death.  Jesus was angry at loss and pain.

 He told them to take away the stone that sealed the tomb and then he prayed in a way that allowed those around him to listen in on his conversation with the Father.  “Father, I thank you for having heard me.  I know that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”  Lazarus came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

“I am the resurrection and the life,” said Jesus.  We tend to put the emphasis on resurrection, but the real promise is life.  Life in all its fullness.  Life eternal.

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity.” (1:4)  Jesus, the light of the world, called Lazarus out of the darkness of death and into the light of life.  In chapter 10, the chapter that leads into this story,  Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.”  Lazarus heard the voice of his friend, the Good Shepherd, and followed him out of death into life. 

When we weep, Jesus weeps with us.  But weeping is not the end of the story.  Ever.  The Good Shepherd calls us out of death and into life in all its fullness.

[1] http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/01/was-lazarus-beloved-disciple.html