Tag christianity

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

Playing the Same Tune

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Sometimes even saints need a come to Jesus meeting.

Mark 9:2-9; Matthew 17:1-9; Luke 9:28-36

Have you ever sung in a choir or played in an orchestra?  If you have, you’ve probably had a moment when you realized that you were, for all intents and purposes, part of one large instrument.  Your voice in the choir was like one pipe in an organ.  You were part of a single, large organic instrument comprised of many voices, all being played by the director or conductor.  It’s a wonderful experience to be part of something like that, to know that you’re part of something large and beautiful and organic which, if it’s done right, can, in its magical way, completely transport people.  It’s a humbling feeling to know that you are helping to bring this powerful yet transitory thing into the world, a thing composed only of sound, a thing that was not in the world before the conductor raised their baton and will vanish when they cut off the last note and its echoes die in the hall.  

It’s an amazing experience.  And it all works beautifully as long as everyone learns their part.  And they all follow the conductor.  And they all play or sing the same piece.  All it takes for things to start to unravel, though, is for someone to decide they’re not happy with the conductor.  Or the piece.  Or their part.  Little rebellions lead to great ones.  It can start with something as minor as the woodwinds rushing the conductor’s beat.  It could end with the disgruntled first trumpet player playing Trumpet Voluntary in the middle of Mozart’s Requiem. 

That seems to be Peter’s problem when Jesus tells him what lies ahead for them in Jerusalem.  He’s not happy with the conductor.  He had been traveling with Jesus for a while now.  He had watched him feed multitudes of people.  He had seen him walk on the sea.  He had watched Jesus cast out demons and heal people.  So when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter naturally replied, “You are the Messiah!”  It seemed like the obvious answer.  After all, who else could do all those things?  But Jesus was cautious with Peter’s answer.  In all three synoptic gospels he sternly ordered his disciples not to tell people that he is the Messiah.  “No Messiah talk.  Are we clear?”

That didn’t sit well with Peter.  And then Jesus started to tell his disciples and everybody else that he was going to go to Jerusalem to speak truth to power at the corner of Religion and Politics.  He told them that the Powers That Be were going to reject him and abuse him.  He told them that he would be crucified.  And that on the third day he would rise again.  

No one wanted to hear that.  That’s crazy talk. Peter could not bring himself to sing along with that chorus.  He would not.  He took Jesus aside and rebuked him.  

Think about that a minute.  Peter rebuked Jesus.  And apparently the other disciples were kind of half-way behind Peter on this one.  Both Mark and Matthew write that Jesus turned and rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You’re not setting your mind on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus had a few more things to say to his disciples and the crowd about what it takes to be a disciple—namely, a willingness to put your life on the line and take up the cross.  But Peter and the disciples were silent.

Peter rebuked Jesus.  Jesus rebuked Peter.

And then silence.  Six days of silence.

It’s easy to miss that.  Things move fast in the gospels.  Jesus moves quickly from one thing to the next.  The phrase “and immediately” occurs frequently in both Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels.  But not here. 

Six days later.  So what was that like?  Six days of tension between Jesus and Peter?  Six days of anxiety for the disciples?  The gospels don’t say.  The gospels are silent.  And maybe Jesus and the disciples were, too.

Finally, Jesus decided that Peter needed a “come to Jesus” meeting.  Or a come withJesus moment.  So he asked Peter, James and John to come with him up the mountain.

And there on the mountain they saw him transfigured—shining bright and radiant, light within and light without.   They saw who their teacher really is inside his humanity.  They saw Moses and Elijah, the law-bringer and the great prophet, the two most important figures in the history of their people, appear with Jesus and converse with him.  

Peter, whose default mode seems to be talk-first-think-later, babbled out, “Lord, it’s a good thing that we’re here!  Let’s make three shrines, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah…”  The gospels tell us he didn’t know what he was saying because he was terrified.  Well you would be, wouldn’t you?  

And then all of a sudden there was a cloud throwing a shadow over them, wrapping them in a fog.  All the brightness was dimmed.  And a voice came out of the cloud and said, “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him.”

And as suddenly as it all started, it was over.  There was no one there but Jesus.  And as they headed back down the mountain he told them not to tell anyone about what they had seen until “after the Son of Man has risen from the dead.” 

It took a lot to get through to Peter.  It took six days of silence and a hike up the mountain.  It took seeing Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah as he was shining like the sun.  It took hearing the voice of God speaking to him from a cloud saying, “This is my Son.  The Beloved.  Listen to him!” 

That’s what it took to get Peter to play the same tune and follow the conductor.

What does it take for us?

There have always been people who try to bend Jesus to their agenda instead of bending themselves to the Way of Jesus.  There have always been people who call themselves Christian who don’t seem to actually listen much to Jesus.

For a long time now we have seen a strain of pseudo-Christianity in this country and around the world that has little to do with the teaching of Jesus as we encounter him in the gospels.  It is based on triumphalism, issue-based moralism, and a theology of glory.  It worships and celebrates power and ignores the call to enter the into world’s trials and suffering as Christ entered into our trials and suffering.  It walks hand-in-hand with extreme nationalism and, often, racism.  It sees baptism as a get-out-o-hell-free card and not as a way of life in the beloved community.  It has co-opted the name Christian and Christian language and symbols, but it has not learned to do justice, to love kindness or to walk humbly with God.  It has not learned to love the neighbor as oneself. 

So many, like Peter, wanted a militant messiah.  But that’s not the way God does things.  That’s not the Way of Jesus.

Six days before their trip up the mountain, after Peter rebuked Jesus and Jesus rebuked him back, Jesus had this to say to the crowd that had been gathered around them:  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit you to gain the whole world but forfeit your life?  Indeed, what can they give in return for your life?”

Jesus was not giving a recruitment speech designed to conjure the rewards and glories of conquest and victory.  He was issuing a realist’s invitation to a subversive movement where participation could have deadly consequences.  He was calling them, and is calling us still, to confront the powers and systems that diminish and oppress and marginalize and antagonize and lie to people wherever we find those powers and systems.  

Following Jesus can be dangerous.  Listening to him can put you at odds with family and friends.  It can complicate your life.  But it will also give your life meaning and purpose. 

Jesus wanted to make it clear that he was not a white-horse-sword-in-hand messiah. He wanted his disciples and everyone else to understand that his way of confronting injustice and oppression was to free people from its weight, heal their wounds, and then simply between them and the things that assailed them and speak the truth.  That was the music he was bringing.  That was the song he wanted the world to sing with him.  Peter didn’t like that song at all.  He wanted the Concerto for White Horse and Sword.  

So six days later, Jesus took Peter up the mountain to show him who he was really arguing with. So Peter could see him shine like the sun.  And so Peter could hear the voice of heaven telling him to shut up and listen.

Sometimes we all need to be reminded that Jesus leads and we follow, that he’s the conductor and we’re the players in the orchestra and singers in the choir.  Sometimes we all need to go up the mountain to be reminded of who Jesus is inside his humanity.  Sometimes we all need to be reminded of those words from the cloud: “This is my Son.  The Beloved.  Listen to him.”  

Especially those last words…  

Listen to him.

Salt and Light for the Healing of the World

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Stay Salty and Be Lit, all y’all

Matthew 5:13-20

“You”—and that’s you plural, all y’all—”You are salt of the earth,” said Jesus.  He was giving his followers, and that includes us, a new identity.  He was calling his disciples to live their lives as a visible counter-narrative to the status quo of the culture surrounding them, calling them to live by an ethic that was in stark contrast to the dynamics of empire which pitted neighbor against neighbor in an endless competition for the basic necessities of life.

You all are the salt of the earth.  Salt, sometimes referred to as “white gold” was and is one of the most useful and valuable things in the world.  “By Hercules, then, life cannot be lived humanely without salt,” said Pliny the Elder. “It is such an essential substance that its name is transferred to powerful mental pleasures too. All the charm and the greatest humor of life along with rest from work are called salts (sales)—it rests on this more than any other.”

Because salt was so valuable, the empire exercised significant direct control over salt production and distribution.  The Roman state operated or regulated many saltworks and heavily taxed the production of mines and saltworks that it did not directly control or operate. 

Salt has always been used to bring out the flavors in food.  You all enhance the flavor of the world around you.  You all bring out the distinctive nuances of uniqueness in every group you are a part of so that the savory essence of our individuality doesn’t melt away in a puddle of insipid sameness.

People have known since prehistoric times that salt is a biological necessity.  Our bodies and the bodies of almost all animals use salt, the electrolytes of sodium and chloride, to absorb and transport nutrients, to maintain blood pressure, to maintain proper fluid balances, to transmit nerve signals and to contract and relax muscles.  So you all maintain the flow and balance of life’s necessities for the health of the world.  The world cannot survive without you all.

Salt has been used since ancient times to cleanse and disinfect wounds.  So you all are the disinfectant of the earth.  You cleanse the wounds of abuse and oppression. You sanitize hearts and minds infected with lies and old hatreds.  You neutralize unhealthy appetites and desires that could lead to serious disease. 

Salt has been used since ancient times to preserve meat and fish and other perishables.  You all are the preservative of the earth.  You preserve the things that feed, nourish, sustain and energize the world.

Salt, for the ancient Jews, was a symbol of the permanence of God’s covenant. Grains of salt were placed on the lips of 8-day old babies during the rites of purification.  So you all are the living reminder of God’s permanent promise to and presence with the earth.  

Salt was believed to offer protection against evil spirits.  So you all are the guardians of the goodness of the earth who stand against evil.

Salt was sometimes as valuable ounce for ounce as gold so it was frequently used as money.  Roman soldiers received part of their wages in salt.  That part of their compensation was called salarium argentum or “salt silver,” and it’s where we get our word salary.  So you all are money, baby.  You all are the currency of the earth.

You all are the salt of the earth, but salt that simply stays in the shaker doesn’t season anything, so sprinkle yourselves out there to bring out all the good flavors of the world.

You are the salt of the earth, but salt that never leaves the box doesn’t heal any wounds or preserve anything.

You are the salt of the earth, but salt that simply sits in the sack won’t clear ice off of the roads and sidewalks to make the way safer for everyone, so shovel yourselves out there.

You all are the salt of the earth.  That’s how essential and valuable Jesus wants us to be in the world.  And just to make sure we get the point, he shifts metaphors.

“You”—and again, you is plural, all y’all—“You are the light of the world.”   

Cicero, the great Roman statesman who tried to preserve the Roman Republic during the rise of Julius Caesar described Rome as “a light to the world.”  At the time the Gospel of Matthew was being written, the Roman poet, Statius, described the emperor Domitian as “the light of the sun in the palace, a divine shining radiance that casts abundant light everywhere.”  

“Not so fast,” said Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “Rome is not the light of the world and neither is the tyrannical, violent emperor.  Au contraire.  You all are the light of the world.”

You all bring the light of truth to a world that all too often likes to obscure its real motives in the shadows of untruth, half-truth, treachery and duplicity.

You all are the light of goodness and generosity that can keep the world from stumbling off a cliff in the moonless night of narcissism, greed, selfishness, self-indulgence and self-absorption.

You all are the light of faith and hope that keeps the world from crashing onto the rocks of despair. You all are the light of love that guides the world toward a brighter day.

Let your light shine, said Jesus—not with spiritual arrogance or ostentatious piety, but with the simple brightness of caring for each other.  Let your light shine by speaking up for each other, especially for those who have no voice.  Let your light shine by standing up for each other, especially when you are standing up for what’s right  and fair and decent.  You, together, are the light of the world.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish,” said Jesus, “but to fulfill.” Jesus was mobilizing us to live a visible life of righteousness in this world—to be a visible sign of God’s righteousness alive and at work in this world.  

Righteousness is a central theme in the Gospel of Matthew, but righteousness is also understood in a particular way in this gospel.  

“I tell you,” said Jesus, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  That sounds pretty daunting.  After all, the scribes and the Pharisees were famous for being fastidious in keeping the law;  they were the public face of legalistic righteousness.  But Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, had a different definition of righteousness.

The Greek word for “righteousness” is dikaiosyne.  It’s a compound word formed from dike which means “just” or “fair,” and syne which means together.  In Matthew’s gospel, righteousness doesn’t describe intransigent moralizing, it describes instead a sense of justice and fairness rooted in compassion.  The word has a communal character—it describes an ethic rooted in community.  

In the first chapter of Matthew , Joseph is called righteous because in his compassion for Mary he did not want to expose her to public disgrace.  In chapter 3, when John the Baptist tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized, Jesus replies, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Jesus immersed himself in the waters of John’s baptism of repentance not because he needed to repent, but in order to show that he was united with and in solidarity with all those who do repent. It was a righteous act.  

In chapter 25, in Matthew’s description of the final judgment, the righteous are the ones who feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the homeless stranger, and care for the sick and visit those in prison.  These are the people who hear Jesus say, “‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (25:34)  

When Jesus tells us we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he is calling us to be living examples of God’s kind-hearted, compassionate, and frankly practical righteousness.  He is, in short, telling us to take care of each other.  He is telling us to treat each other like friends.  And he is telling us to do it in a way that is visible to the world around us.

Being salt and light is what helped Christianity grow from a small and often despised fringe movement into a major force of transformation for the empire and, eventually, for the world.

In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark put it this way: “Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”

A lot has changed in the world since the days when Domitian was the emperor and Matthew was writing his gospel, but in too many places the shadow side of human nature is still spilling pain and suffering and death on the vulnerable.  It seems sometimes that we will never see the end of the three great destroyers—greed, racism and misogyny.  

The world still needs salt to highlight its diversity, heal its wounds and preserve its life.  The world more than ever needs light to guide it in the way of truth and lead it out of the endless darkness of selfishness.

You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.

It’s our time to heal.  It’s our time to shine.  In the name of Jesus.

Withdrawing to Galilee

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Matthew 4:12-23

“Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.” 

In Matthew’s telling of the life and work of Jesus, the arrest of John is the trigger that launches Jesus into his ministry of proclamation, teaching, healing and non-violent resistance.   John’s arrest sets him on a path that will eventually lead him to his death in Jerusalem.

When Jesus launches his ministry, the timing is political.  The arrest of John the Baptist is the catalyst that sets him in motion.  Herod Antipas had John arrested because John had been speaking out forcefully against Herod’s abuses of power and other moral failings, including his adulterous marriage to his sister-in-law which was forbidden under Jewish law.  As he railed against Herod, John had been attracting hundreds of followers, which made him dangerous.  So Herod did what authoritarianism always does.  He silenced the inconvenient voice of truth and criticism.  He disappeared the leader of the potential resistance.

When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.   “Withdrew” is an interesting word choice here.  It’s an accurate translation, but one that’s apt to give us the wrong idea.  Jesus isn’t retreating.  He’s pivoting.  He is intentionally relocating to a more strategic position.

Why Galilee?  Matthew saw Jesus fulfilling a prophecy from the 9th chapter of Isaiah, but there were other very good reasons for Jesus to begin his work in Galilee. 

Historically, Galilee had been a hotbed of anti-Roman and anti-Herodian sentiment.  Long before Jesus arrived, Galilee had given rise to episodes of armed resistance and tax revolts.  In 37 BCE Hasmonean insurgents from Galilee waged a 2-year guerilla war against Herod and his Roman  overlords, hiding out in caves in Galilean hills between engagements.  In 6 BCE, Judas of Galilee led a revolt against the Quirinius census.   The city of Gamla, near the Sea of Galilee, had become a stronghold for Zealot extremists who had no qualms about using violence in their ongoing fight against the empire.  Galileans even practiced economic resistance when, beginning around 4 BCE, they initiated a 70-year boycott against mass produced clay lamps and red-slip pottery tableware which was used everywhere in the empire and taxed to help support the Roman military machine.

“Galilee of the Gentiles” had an ethnically diverse population.  Jews were the dominant group, but in an attempt to subvert Jewish resistance, the Romans had offered economic incentives for people from other parts of the empire to settle there.  Matthew tells us that Jesus made his home in Capernaum, a bustling, multi-ethnic hub from which other Galilean towns and villages could easily be reached either by boat or by road.  Because it was a garrison town and customs station, Capernaum had a highly visible Roman presence which meant that it would also give Jesus more opportunities to encounter travelers and settlers from other parts of Palestine, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Gaul and elsewhere.

“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” (4:17).   That’s the good news, the gospel, that Jesus proclaims from his strategic base in Capernaum. 

“Repent” really is not a good translation.  “Repent,” in English, has overtones of penance and sorrow and regret, but the Greek word Metanoia means a change of heart, a change of thinking, a change of direction, a change of behavior.  Metanoieteis the word Jesus speaks in the Greek text.  It’s a command.  An imperative.  From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Time for a change.  The commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness has come near.  It’s in reach.  Change your heart.  Change your thinking.  Change the way you do things.”  

When Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God is in reach, he is not speaking metaphorically.  He is calling for a spiritual transformation, yes, but that is just the beginning.  He’s also calling for social, political and economic transformation because the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy does not operate by the same rules as the empire.

As he walks by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus sees Peter, Andrew, James and John casting their nets into the sea.  He calls out to these Galilean fishermen and says, “Follow me, and I will make you become (literally) fishers of people.”  The translation here is a little tricky because the preposition is implied.  It could be “I will make you become fishers of people,” or “fishers for people,” or even “fishers on behalf ofpeople.”  But any way you translate it, Jesus is issuing a not-so-subtle invitation to Peter and Andrew and James and John to throw off the yoke of Rome.

In The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition, K.C. Hanson explained that Simon, Andrew, James and John were only semi-independent.  The Galilean fishing industry was very tightly controlled by the Roman Empire.  Caesar owned every body of water in the empire.  Fishing was state-regulated.  Fishermen had to pay a hefty fee to join a syndicate.  Most of what was caught in the Sea of Galilee was dried and exported at a regulated price and heavily taxed, and it was illegal to catch even one fish outside this system.

So how does it sound now… “Follow me and I will make you Fishers for people.”?  Especially when you remember that this is in the context of Jesus proclaiming that the Basilea, the commonwealth of God’s mercy and justice is happening now?  

“I will make you Fishers for People.  For your fellow human beings.  Not just for the empire.  Not just for the elite, the wealthy, the powerful, the 1%, the people who reap all the profits but do none of the work.”

And of course Jesus uses a fishing metaphor to issue this commanding invitation because he’s talking to fishermen.  

Follow me, said Jesus.

Follow me and I will make you the you that you were meant to be

for the good of all God’s people.

Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that this is a miracle story.  These Galilean fishermen don’t drop everything and “immediately” follow Jesus because of their extraordinary courage.  They do it because of who it is that calls them.

Jesus makes it possible for them.  Jesus captivates them with his vision and his presence and his words…and the Holy Spirit.  In the same way Jesus can make it possible for us.

Last week we took time to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a man who clearly followed Jesus as he led and inspired others to keep reaching for that better reality called the kingdom of God—the commonwealth of God’s kindness and justice.  In a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one year before he was assassinated, he said this:

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain . . .Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.”

“When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.”  That sentence at the beginning of today’s gospel reading sits heavy in my heart.  It would be easy to write off John’s arrest as just one more authoritarian act of oppression in a land where authoritarian oppression was the norm.  It would be easy to skim past it and go straight to the calling of the fishermen, a story we can easily spiritualize if we don’t think too much about what it is that they gave up to follow Jesus and what it cost them and their families.  It would be easy, even, to just not see it.  But it is the thing that sets the work of Christ in motion.  

It would be easy to think, well that was then and this is now—that’s just how things were.  But this week, this month, while the streets of our cities are filled with armed and masked federal agents who are kidnapping and killing our neighbors, while resistance to authoritarian thuggery in Minneapolis and elsewhere is met with violence it is simply not possible to ignore that sentence.  Where do we withdraw to?  Where is our Galilee, our place of resistance? Where do we go to stand up with Jesus and say, “Time for change.  The Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy is at hand.”

When Jesus heard that Rene Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three had been shot and killed, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old preschooler in a blue bunny hat had been abducted outside his home, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse was shot and killed by government agents who are long on hostility but short on training, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that 100 clergy had been arrested at the Minneapolis airport while protesting the presence and tactics that government agents are using to oppress our neighbors, he withdrew to Galilee.  And stood with them.

Minneapolis is our Galilee.

Chicago is our Galilee.

Portland is our Galilee.

Wherever our neighbors are being assaulted and oppressed, that is our Galilee.  That is where we hear Jesus calling us to follow him, even if it means stepping away from life as we’ve always known it.  

Jesus is telling us it’s time for a change.  The kingdom of heaven, the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy is in reach.  “Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.”  

Taking the Plunge

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

One Sunday morning when a newborn baby was being baptized during the worship service, there was a little five-year-old girl who was watching everything very intently from the front pew.  She was utterly fascinated by the baptism ceremony, but didn’t really understand what it was all about, and as pastor began to scoop water from the font and pour it onto the baby’s head, she turned to her father and in a very loud voice asked, “Daddy, why is he brainwashing the baby??”

Baptism isn’t brainwashing, of course, but over a lifetime it is supposed to change the way you think, the way you see the world, and the way you interact with the world.  We baptize people, including babies, as a sign that they are included in God’s grace and in God’s mission to transform the world.  We baptize because Jesus told us to baptize.[1]  And we baptize because Jesus, himself, was baptized.

The baptism of Jesus is covered in all four gospels.  Sort of.  John’s gospel has a scene where Jesus is at the river while John is baptizing, and  John says he saw the Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove, but the Gospel of John never actually describes Jesus being baptized.  

My favorite version of the Baptism of Jesus is in the Gospel of Matthew because it starts out with John and Jesus arguing.  Can you imagine it?  There they are, hip deep in the water, and Jesus says to John, “Do you have to dunk me all the way under?  Can’t you just scoop up a handful of water and pour it over my head?” And John says, “Dude!  No!  Are you crazy?  I’m John the Baptist, not John the Episcopalian!” (rim shot)

Actually, what they were arguing about was that John didn’t want to baptize Jesus—at least according to Matthew’s account.  Jesus came to John to be baptized, and Matthew tells us that John would have prevented him.  It didn’t feel right to John.  It didn’t feel appropriate to him because he knew that Jesus was more important than he was.  For him to baptize Jesus seemed upside down and backwards.  “I need to be baptized by you!” he told Jesus.  

I need to be baptized by you.  That’s an interesting choice of words.  The wording in Greek implies that John felt he was lacking something that he thought Jesus could give him.  What could that be?

Jesus finally persuaded John to go ahead and baptize him when he said, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Today’s English Version translates that as “Let it be so for now. For in this way we shall do all that God requires.”  The Contemporary English Bible says, “For now this is how it should be, because we must do all God wants us to do.”

Basically, Jesus was saying to John, “let’s go ahead with this because it’s the right thing to do.”

So there’s another reason we baptize:  it’s the right thing to do.  It’s what God wants us to do.

The word “baptism” comes from the Greek verb baptizein which means “to dip,” or “to dip frequently or intensively, to plunge or to immerse.”[2]  It’s also the verb that’s used to describe putting dressing on a salad, though, so you could say it also means “to sprinkle.”  

Because early Christian baptisms were usually by immersion, some have insisted that you have to be fully immersed or it’s not a real baptism.  But The Didache, a manual for good church practice written in the late 1st or very early 2nd century said, “If you have not living water (running water, such as a stream or river), baptize into other water; and if you cannot in cold, in warm. But if you have not either, pour out water three times upon the head into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.”  

That practice of pouring out water on the head is called afflusion, by the way, and as The Didache attests, it has been one of the ways the church has baptized people since its earliest days.

Yes, our word baptism does come from the Greek verb which means to immerse.  But what is it that we are immersed into?   The water is an important sign.  It speaks to us physically, spiritually and psychologically in a powerful way.  But even if there is only a little water poured onto our heads, we are being immersed, plunged into the life and love of the Triune God, the vision and mission of Christ.

Martin Luther said that the amount of water is never an issue.  Water is the physical sign of what God is doing in baptism; it is the Word of God that makes baptism effective.  One drop of water is enough because it’s the  Word of God that has all the power.  The water and the Word together become a sign of what Christ has done and is doing for us.  

Luther described baptism as one of the means of grace through which God creates and strengthens “saving faith.”  He borrowed language from Titus 3:5 to depict baptism as a “washing of regeneration” in which infants and adults are reborn.  In that rebirth, said Luther, we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ. 

“Baptism, then,” he went on to say, “signifies two things—death and resurrection, that is, full and complete justification. When the minister immerses the child in the water it signifies death, and when he draws it forth again it signifies life. Thus Paul expounds it in Romans 6: ‘We were buried therefore with Christ by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.’ This death and resurrection we call the new creation, regeneration, and spiritual birth. This should not be understood only allegorically as the death of sin and the life of grace, as many understand it, but as actual death and resurrection. For baptism is not a false sign.”

In other words, as Luther describes it, we actually die and are resurrected in our baptism.  Life—baptized life—is a brand new life.

Baptism is not a sign of my decision for Christ, it is a sign of Christ’s decision for me.  It is a sign of God’s grace—the grace that gives us life, the grace that sustains our life.  By the presence of Christ, the living Word, and by the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us and works through us, that one drop of water can make all the difference in the world.

Baptism isn’t an event, it’s a way of life.  But if our baptism makes one drop of difference in our lives, then we nurture that new life so it can grow and mature. That’s what church is for. That’s what education is for. That’s what prayer and contemplation are for.  But church, prayer, education—these things are not our mission—they are things that prepare us for and empower us for our mission.  

The late Thomas Troeger who taught preaching at Yale Divinity School once said,  “When we follow Jesus into the waters of baptism, we are making a statement, a witness to our desire not only for a new life for our individual selves, but a new life for the whole world. We are renouncing Herod’s action of shutting up John, of shutting up hope, of shutting up the transformation of this world. We are affirming the opening of heaven, the opening of hope, the releasing of God’s renewing power into the world. 

“Every time we have a baptism in our churches, we are making a statement of the same good news that John preached. It is not good news to the Herods of the earth. It is not good news to those who want to shut up the transforming power of God, including those who do it in the name of narrowly doctrinaire religion. But it is good news for everyone who yearns and hungers for a new world, a new creation. When we follow Jesus into the baptismal waters or when we reaffirm our baptismal vows, we are giving testimony that the opening of heaven is greater than any human effort to shut up the power of God.”

What happened for Jesus in his baptism also happens for us in our baptism.  The heavens are opened to us so there is no barrier between us and the presence of God, no barrier between us and each other.  We are told that we are loved.  We are named as children of God in a world that wants to call us all kinds of other names, a world that encourages us to label ourselves in ways that alienate us from each other and to name others in a way that alienates them from us.  But baptism reminds us that we are all God’s children.  We are all in this together.

In a world full of bad news, baptism makes us the Good News people.  In our baptism we are called beloved.  In our baptism we are named children of God.  The Spirit of God descends on us and into us to empower us and to open our minds and hearts.  And our ears. In baptism we are given a new identity; we hear God proclaim You are my child.  I am pleased with you.  I like you!  Now…let’s go out and heal the world!

[1] Matthew 28:19

[2] Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary

Fleshing Out the Story

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Could it be the most important idea in history?

John 1:1-18

I deeply and truly love Christmas, but the sheer enormity of it is almost overwhelming   I’m not talking about all the shopping or all the hustle and bustle and preparation at home and at church.  I’m not even grumbling about the over-the-top commercialism or all the different greeting card interpretations of the “true meaning of Christmas” which can put you in a psychological sugar coma if you try to swallow them all at once.   

The thing that is almost overwhelming for me is the daunting task of trying to convey the real true meaning of Christmas, the task of sharing a genuine and meaningful understanding of The Incarnation, the theological claim that Saint Francis thought was the most important doctrine of the church—the mind-stretching assertion that the mystery we call God, the Maker of Everything, came to us as one of us—the idea that God “became flesh and lived among us” from gestation to birth to death as a particular person in a particular place and in a particular time so that we could begin to more fully understand that God is with us in all persons, in all creatures, in all creation, and at all times.

That thought, that idea, that reality that we call The Incarnation is so enormous and mind-boggling that it’s really tempting to retreat into the less cosmic halo of ideas that hover around that manger in Bethlehem, ideas like innocence and love personified and new beginnings.  Those are all good, true and valuable things.  They are meaningful parts of the package.  But the goodness, truth, new beginnings and love we see in that holy child become even more potent when we begin to truly understand what God is doing in that manger in Bethlehem.

When the early followers of Jesus began to write down their understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about, when they began to explain what meant to them and what they meant when they called him Christ—Christos—the anointed one, it’s clear that they saw him as something more than just a great spiritual teacher or religious leader.   You don’t have to read very far in these early writings to discover that these followers of Jesus thought there was something of cosmic importance about him.  Early on they called him the Son of God but that description didn’t seem to be enough for many of them.  It didn’t seem to fully capture the all-encompassing  fullness of what they had experienced in Jesus the Christ.  

“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word,” said the writer of Hebrews.[1]  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation,” said the author of Colossians, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things have been created through him and for him…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven…”[2]

Late in the first century, a writer we’ve come to know as John sat down to write his account of Jesus.  He wasn’t interested in creating just another chronicle of the life of Jesus as others had done; he wanted to explore the meaning of Jesus.  He wanted to make it clear that Jesus the Christ was not someone who could be defined, contained or constrained by geography or time or even philosophy, because the God of all geography and time and philosophy was and is somehow present in him.  

John began his gospel like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity.  The light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it…. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we gazed on his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The language of this prologue is pure poetry.  But it’s also philosophy.  And in a strange, farsighted way, John was brushing up against physics. 

The Greek word we translate as “Word” is logos.  Logos was a word that ancient philosophers loved to play with and because of that we have numerous ways to translate it.  One of the oldest meanings of logos was story or narrative.  Where does your mind go if you hear In the beginning was the story, and the story became flesh and lived among us?  

Logos could also mean content or reason or statement.  Other philosophical meanings included, order, idea, blueprint, primordial template, primal thought, or intention.  

Logos became flesh and lived among us.  The metaphysical became physical.  If that sounds too esoteric, consider quantum physics. 

 Energy moves through quantum fields as abstract mathematical wave functions.  When wave functions are observed, they tend to collapse into particles.  Particles continually move through patterns in a kind of quantum dance, always moving toward closeness, joining, partnering, combining.  Fermions dance with bosons.  Neutrinos, muons, gluons, leptons and quarks assemble themselves into protons, neutrons and electrons which assemble themselves into atoms which assemble themselves into molecules we call elements.  Hydrogen and carbon molecules dance together to form the four essential organic compounds: nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.  And out of all of this comes life.  The Word, the Story, the Pattern, the Intention, the Thought becomes flesh and dwells among us.  

The great British astrophysicist James Jeans wrote: “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the field of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter… We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own minds.”[3]

This is The Incarnation.  The great Thought of God expressed in the whole universe condensed itself into a singular human life and lived among us.  And why would God do that?  

Love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw love as the driving force of the universe. “For Teilhard, love is a passionate force at the heart of the Big Bang universe, the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center; love is deeply embedded in the cosmos, a ‘cosmological force.’”[4]

God is Love, we read in 1 John.  “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Love became flesh and lived among us.  And still lives among us.  And within us.  And around us.  And beyond us.  

Love…God… was not content to be an abstract idea or a mere sentiment.  God, the Author of Life, the One in whom we live and move and have our being is Love with a capital L.  Love Personified…and Love is all about relationship.  Christmas is when God, the Love that founded the universe, showed up as one of us in order to show us in person just how much we are loved and in order to teach us to love each other more freely and completely. 

Love became flesh and lived among us so that we might learn to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Love didn’t come to us as a king or potentate to lord it over us.  Love came as a poor baby among a poor and oppressed people far from the centers of privilege and power in order to show us that “the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center,” is alive in and breathing life into all of us and wants to unify us with each other center to center and heart to heart.  

It’s an enormous idea, this thing called Christmas, this Incarnation.  This idea that the Word became flesh encompasses everything we see and everything we don’t see.  It speaks in poetry then carries us into the depths of philosophy and physics and biology.  It warms the heart and boggles the mind.  It is, quite literally everything.  And the beating heart of it is love.

To even begin to understand the Incarnation, we have to open our minds and our hearts.  As another early follower of Jesus wrote: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”[5]

Merry Christmas

[1] Hebrews 1:3

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, as quoted by Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, p. 40

[4] Ilia Delio, ibid., p.43

[5] Ephesians 3:18-19

The Light of Hope

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 24:36-44

“When the end of the world comes,” said Mark Twain, “I want to be in Kentucky.  They’re twenty years behind on everything.”

Our Gospel text for this first Sunday in Advent, the first Sunday of a new church year, comes from a section near the end of the Gospel of Matthew that centers on the coming of the Son of Man. The fragment we read this morning comes hard on the heels of Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple with the implication that this will be the beginning of the “end times.”  The disciples, of course, want to know more.  “Tell us, when will this be,” they ask, “and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

The answer Jesus gives to “when will this be?” is “God only knows.” 

This section of Matthew and its parallels in Mark and Luke are sometimes called “the little apocalypse.”  The word apocalypse comes directly from Greek and only drops one small syllable on its way into English.  Apokalypsis  in Greek becomes Apocalypse in English.  The literal meaning is “an uncovering” or “unveiling.”  It originally meant a disclosure, a revelation.  

The word can also describe a particular kind of literature.  That’s the first meanings in Merriam Webster’s dictionary:

one of the Jewish and Christian writings of 200 b.c. to a.d. 150 marked by pseudonymity, symbolic imagery, and the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom.

Webster also gives what it calls the “Essential Meaning”:

a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction.

In more common usage, apocalypse is often used as shorthand for “the end of the world.”

From disclosure to disaster.  That’s quite a shift in meaning—although it makes sense.  When things that are covered up are suddenly revealed it often creates a lot of anger and instability.  

I’ve often wondered why we are so fascinated with the idea of The Apocalypse, the End of the World.  What is it about the human psyche that wants to immerse itself in “end of the world” thinking and stories?  And why has our interest in this topic been growing? 

If you take a look at Wikipedia’s list of Apocalyptic films, it paints an interesting picture.  Before 1950, there were only 4 apocalypse movies.  The first one was a Danish film made in 1916 called, prosaically enough, The End of the World.  And then we went fifteen years before anyone made another apocalyptic movie.  That one was a French film made in 1931, also titled The End of the World.  American filmmakers got into the Apocalypse business in 1933 with Deluge from RKO Pictures, and then the Brits took a turn in 1936 with a United Artists picture called Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells.  So in the whole first half of the 20th century, only 4 apocalyptic movies are listed.  Four.  

And then they stopped.  That’s probably because the whole world was at war in the 1940s.  People were living through an apocalypse, and they wanted their movies to give them hope, to tell them there was a brighter day coming, that there would be a time of rebuilding.  

Apocalyptic films reappeared in the 1950s, but they were still sporadic enough that it would be stretching things at that point to call them a genre.  From 1950 to 1959 there are eleven apocalypse movies on Wikipedia’s list, but things would pick up significantly in the 1960s.  

From 1960 to now there have been 378 apocalyptic movies. That’s 378 films about the end of the world in a period of 65 years.

So back to the original question: why are people so fascinated by apocalypse?  Why is there such a big market for dystopia and humanity’s grand finale? 

I don’t know what the social psychologists would say about that, but I do know what Biblical scholars and theologians say.  They tell us that apocalyptic literature appears—and movies are a form that—when a people is oppressed, under great stress, and experiencing persecution, or when the world in general becomes so dystopian that problems seem unsolvable.  

The Book of Ezekiel, with its strange visions and imagery, appears during the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah to give hope and courage to captive and enslaved people who had seen their nation not just defeated but destroyed.  The Book of Daniel was written to give hope and courage to the Jewish rebels fighting against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the cruel Greek Seleucid ruler who desecrated Yahweh’s temple by setting up an altar to Zeus and sacrificing a pig on it.  John’s Apocalypse, which we call the Book of Revelation, was written to give hope and courage to followers of Jesus in Asia Minor who were being oppressed and persecuted by Rome.

Hope and courage for people in dire straits.  That’s what all the ancient apocalypses are really all about when you wade through all the fascinating imagery.  They use imagery as a kind of code because the people writing them and reading them are living in dangerous circumstances.  If the empire is breathing down your neck, it’s not safe to say “The Emperor is a gluttonous, greedy, selfish pig who bullies the people and forces nations to hand over the best of everything while the rest of us are sucked dry.”  So instead you write about a harlot who sits on seven hills.  You can’t say that the emperor is a monster, so you write about a monster, a dragon with seven heads, and trust that people will read between the lines.

The writers of the apocalyptic works in the Bible, and the Holy Spirit who guided them, never intended to be giving a coded timeline of the end of all things.  That’s not why they were written.  They were written to give a simple clear message:  “Hang in there.  Yes, these are scary times.  But God is on your side. Nasty empires and oppressive regimes don’t last forever.  They either exhaust themselves, or somebody conquers them, like when Darius the Mede brought new management to Babylon; or enough people finally get tired of their rubbish and rise up to throw them out on their ear, like the Maccabees did with Antiochus Epiphanes; or they overindulge themselves to death and collapse from internal squabbling and rot.  That’s what happened to Rome.  Once more for emphasis: Hold on to hope.  Have courage. God is on your side.  And God wins in the end.

This “little apocalypse” from Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels is radically different from other apocalyptic writings in one major point.  Other apocalyptic writings—those included in the Bible like Daniel and Revelation, extra-biblical books like 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, and the apocalyptic pamphlets that circulated throughout Palestine during the Jewish war—all focused on the basic universal apocalyptic message: hang tough, God is with you, hope and courage, fight the good fight.  But this homily from Jesus has one important departure from the formula.  Ched Myers and other scholars suggest that Jesus is telling his followers to abandon the temple.  He is telling his followers to resist, but not to join in the rebellion.  He urges them not to be led astray from their path of nonviolent resistance by charismatic leaders with messianic claims, and patriotic swords and spears.

Jesus calls us to a different pathway of apocalypse.  This is not the pathway of Judas Maccabeus picking up his sword to fight the Greeks.  This is not the pathway of Simon bar Giora, claiming to be the new King David as he leads guerilla bands in surprise attacks.  This is not Mad Max with a sawed-off shotgun.  

Jesus is telling his followers that armed rebellion is not the pathway to the kingdom of God.

 The pathway of Jesus is the Way of nonviolence.  The way of critiquing the bad by doing the better.  The rebellion is not the kingdom. But the kingdom is a rebellion…done a different Way.

In the gospels, the kingdom of God, as it is embodied by Jesus, is revealed to us as a nonviolent rebellion against business as usual, economics as usual, politics as usual, government as usual, and religion as usual.  It is also very much a rebellion against rebellion as usual.  The entire mission of Jesus in the gospels is, in its way, an apocalypse.  A revealing.  It pulls back the veil to show us the serious flaws in our ways of doing things.  It critiques the bad by giving us a vision of the better.  

It reminds us that the day will come in God’s own good time when, as Isaiah promised…

Out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

                  and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations,

                  and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

         they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

                  and their spears into pruning hooks;

         nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

                  neither shall they learn war any more.

O house of Jacob,

                  come, let us walk

                  in the light of the LORD!

Yes, in a way Jesus does predict the end of the world.  The world as it is  ends when it is gradually, nonviolently reimagined and replaced heart by heart, mind by mind, one person at a time until the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness becomes our everyday reality on earth as it is in heaven.  How’s that for an apocalypse?

Advent is the time when we remember that Isaiah’s hope, that ancient hope, is our hope.  Advent is a time when we light the candle of hope to remind us that Jesus has called all of us to walk in the light of the Lord.  It is a time when we remember that just as Jesus came to teach us the Way of love and truth, the Way of cooperation and companionship, the Way of kindness and justice, he will come again when the time is right to remake and renew the world.  

When will that be—the Second Coming of Christ?  God only knows.  The only thing we can know for certain is that each day brings us one day closer.  As St. Paul says, “You know what time it is.  Now is the moment for you to wake up.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;  the night is far gone, the day is near.”  

Salvation—our remaking as a whole and healthy world—is  closer to us now that it was when we got up this morning.  So watch.  And hope.  And be ready.  In the meantime, O house of Jacob, O house of Jesus, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.  

What Kind of Kingdom?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 23:33-43

Today is the last Sunday of the church year, Christ the King Sunday or Reign of Christ Sunday.  This is a fairly new addition to the church calendar—it was added only 100 years ago—and frankly, not everyone is happy about it.  

In 1925, the world was trying desperately to put itself back together in the aftermath of World War I and it wasn’t going well.  Pope Pius XI was gravely concerned by the growing tide of secularism and ultra-nationalism in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, and, of course, the rise of Communism in Russia.  In response he issued an encyclical called Quas Primas—“That Which is First.” Interestingly, it can also be read as a question, “What is First?”.  In this encyclical, he established The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe or, as it came to be commonly known, the Feast of Christ the King.  

Pope Pius was trying to restate and reinforce the idea of the sovereignty of Christ over, well, everything.  He wanted to make it clear that our deepest and most profound allegiance should be to Jesus Christ above and beyond every other allegiance.  But in doing it in this way, was he, maybe, missing the point of what Jesus was actually saying when he talked about the kingdom of God?

The image of Christ as King is problematic for us in a number of ways.  First of all, it’s hard for us to relate to even the idea of a king.  There aren’t very many real monarchs left in the world, and most of the ones who are still here wield a power that is primarily symbolic or ceremonial.  As a case in point, King Charles III ascended to the throne of Great Britain three years ago after the long reign of his mother, Queen Elizabeth, but neither the world nor Great Britain have seen any significant changes in the governance of the United Kingdom as a result.  That’s because whatever power the throne still has is very strictly circumscribed by a democratic parliament. 

Another problem with the imagery of Christ the King is that, unfortunately, Christianity doesn’t have a very good track record with kings.  Too often in history Christianity has found itself either colluding with or coopted by the oppressive forces of empire instead of the liberating and restorative teaching of Jesus and the movement of the Holy Spirit.

In her book A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom and Perseverance,  Diana Butler Bass said, “The word king is so problematic.  It is wedded to social privilege and pyramids of wealth and power and invested with centuries of inequities and fairy-tale fantasies.”[1]  Our experience of kings stands in stark contrast to the egalitarian vision Jesus was describing when he announced that the basilea of God was within reach.

Basilea.  That’s the Greek word in the gospels that we translate as kingdom.  It’s a word that the empire used to describe the domain of Caesar and also the territory governed by Herod and other client kings.  And even as Jesus was proclaiming the arrival of the basileaof God, it was a word that was both too small and too loaded to really capture the new reality that Jesus was describing.

The word Kingdom implies boundaries. Boundaries imply limitations and location.  You are either inside or outside.  Even the synonyms for kingdom make it sound territorial. 

The word Kingdom also implies power, usually and especially coercive power. Constantine and later Christian emperors and kings readily embraced the concept of the Kingdom of Christ because it was an image they could use in exercising their own power.  They could claim that they were appointed by Christ and were ruling under his authority, which meant that they could spin just about anything they did as justifiable because they were acting on Christ’s behalf.  Convert people at the point of the sword or by torture?  No problem.  We’re doing it for Jesus.  

Today, Christian Nationalism and other authoritarian movements appropriate the language of Christ the King to imagine Jesus as a muscular monarch, kicking tail and taking names.  Under the auspices of Christ the King, they want to establish a restrictive theocracy, but in embracing that idea they completely miss the new reality that Jesus was calling us to embrace.

Kingdom, realm, reign, sovereignty—none of these terms are really a good fit for what Jesus was describing when he announced that the basilea tou theou –which we translate as The Kingdom of God—is arriving, is at hand, is within reach. 

George Orwell was a guy who knew a thing or two about language and how we use, abuse, twist and misuse it.  Orwell said, “There is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”[2]

Christ the King is one of those worn-out metaphors.  We keep using it because we haven’t come up with a better phrase to describe the vision of God’s all-pervading influence that Jesus was proclaiming or a way to describe our belief that God in Christ is the ultimate power that moves the universe through love, compassion, creativity, grace and cooperation.  

On the plus side, Christ the King does make us ask ourselves some important questions. What do we mean when we say that Christ is sovereign?  How do we understand the kingdom of God, the reign of God?  How do we understand the power of God?  How do we understand power in general?  How do we use power?  Do our values reflect the values of empire or the values of Jesus?  What kind of kingdom do we belong to?  And what do we do when our allegiance to Christ and the values of Jesus are in conflict with the values and practices of the other powers that hold sway in our lives?

The kingdom of God, as Jesus described it, was and is a resistance movement.  To say that Christ is king is a resistance claim.  It is a challenge to the way power is coercively used most of the time in our world.  Jesus is a different kind of king.  The crucifixion is his coronation.  He surrenders to the coercive power of empire to show us its naked violence, but also to show us the greater power of love and nonviolence.

Pontius Pilate understood that Jesus was all about resisting the empire’s coercive power but also the empire’s imagery.  When Pilate asked Jesus straight out, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus simply replied, “You say so.  Those are your words.”[3]  The soldiers crucifying Jesus mocked him saying, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!” Pilate mocked both Jesus and the Jewish people by having a board nailed above his head with the inscription, “This is the King of the Jews.”  These were people who understood power in only one way.  Control.  Coercion.  Power over.

But the reign of God that Jesus was describing is a cooperative world.  The reign of God doesn’t force itself on anyone or try to control anyone.  Christ, as king, pervades, persuades, encourages, nudges and asks us to live up to a vision of our better selves. 

 The commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness is a world where generosity, grace, compassion and mercy prevail.  It is a world driven by and governed by love.  It is a world where everyone’s needs are met and no one goes hungry.  It is a kingdom that opens pathways through every kind of border, boundary and barrier.  It is a world where the only control is self-control.  Its central values are to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. Its only law is love: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.  

The kingdom that Jesus was describing is a world moving toward the vision of Isaiah when we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, when nation shall not lift up sword against nation nor shall they study war anymore.[4]  The kingdom that Jesus proclaimed is the world where God walks with us as Ezekiel envisioned, a world where God shepherds us, where Christ seeks out the lost and brings back the strays, where through us, Jesus binds up the injured and strengthens the weak and feeds us all with justice.[5]

The reign of God is a realm in which the poor are blessed and the hungry are filled and those who mourn are comforted.  It is the world Mary envisioned in the Magnificat when she sang, “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”[6]

Yes, God exercises power.  But not the way we usually think of power. God’s power is all about empowering you.  God is about giving power rather than holding onto it.  God gives power to us so that we can love and care for the world more fully and effectively. Together.  “The greatest manifestation of the power of God,” said Bishop Yvette Flunder, “comes when we work together to find ways to be together and do justice together and love together and stand together.”  

The kingdom of God is all of us together.

 “Jesus did not establish an institution,” wrote Bishop Michael Curry, “though institutions can serve his cause. He did not organize a political party, though his teachings have a profound impact on politics. Jesus did not even found a religion. No, Jesus began a movement, fueled by his Spirit, a movement whose purpose was and is to change the face of the earth from the nightmare it often is into the dream that God intends.”

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  It is a day when we use the “worn out metaphor” of kingly power to try to open the doors and windows of our hearts, minds and souls to the empowering love of God through Jesus Christ.  It is a day when we acknowledge both that God in Christ is the ultimate power and that we need to redefine how we understand and use power.  It is a day when we are asked to declare that our deepest and most profound allegiance is to Jesus Christ above and beyond every other allegiance.  It is a day that challenges us to walk in the Way of Jesus so that we can help to bring God’s vision of a whole, healthy, loving and cooperative world into reality on earth as it is in heaven.

Today is the day we volunteer to change the face of the earth from the nightmare it so often is into the dream that God intends.  In the name of Christ the King.

[1] Diana Butler Bass; “Christ the King”; A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance

[2] Politics and the English Language, 1946. 

[3] Luke 23:3

[4] Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3

[5] Ezekiel 34:15-16

[6] Luke 1:46-55