(The following lectionary reflection was published in bLOGOS three years ago, commenting on the same gospel text. Except for a few minor alterations, it appears as it did then. The photo is of Rutilo Grande.)

On March 12, 1977, Fr. Rutilio Grande, SJ, and two companions were assassinated as they drove toward evening mass through the fields near El Paisnal, El Salvador. Fr. Grande knew where he was going. During his five years as parish priest in the nearby town of Aguilares, he formed Christian base communities, trained lay delegates, and vocally opposed government attempts to silence Salvadoran priests who worked with and organized peasant laborers.

It was not a safe time. As Fr. Grande said, “It is practically illegal to be an authentic Christian in our situation because the world around us is rooted in an established disorder. Confronting that, the mere proclamation of the gospel is subversive.” Yet he had a larger vision: that of the Eucharistic table, the Lord’s Supper, which he described in a homily not long before his murder as, “the greatest commitment, the symbol of a shared table, with a seat for each person and tablecloths long enough for all creation.” “For this,” he added, presumably aware of the costs and demands of discipleship, “redemption is needed.”

When Fr. Grande’s friend, Archbishop Oscar Romero, drove to see the bloodied body of his fellow priest, he, too, understood at last what road he was on. Romero later wrote, “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead, I thought if they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.” And walk it he did. Three years later, on March 24, 1980, that path ended in assassination, while he celebrated the Eucharist.

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Dying for one’s friends, like Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he loves us, seems an impossible demand. Absent grace, it is.

Near the end of the movie, Romero, the Archbishop, played by Raul Julia, is deeply troubled, confused by impossible demands placed upon him as shepherd of a vulnerable flock in dangerous times. Alone on the road by Fr. Grande’s grave, he falls to his knees and prays four, short sentences:

I can’t.
You must.
I’m yours.
Show me the way.

This is the way of love described in John’s gospel, nothing at all like love in songs and stories. We can’t love others as Jesus loves us. It’s also extremely unlikely, even in this season of electoral silliness with its overheated rhetoric about war on religion or other groups, that Christians will be killed in the United States for proclaiming the gospel, as indeed they are in other parts of the world. Even so, we are chosen rather than choosing, named friends rather than slaves, and told to ask everything of the Father in Jesus’ name rather than labor in futility and ignorance. For this, redemption is needed.

We can’t.
He must.
We’re his.
Lord Jesus, show us the way.

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

Monday evening as I was sitting down to read the lectionary for this Fifth Sunday in Easter, NPR carried a story that has haunted me since.  It was the testimony of a Methodist pastor, Teresa MacBain who found that she could no longer believe in God.  Her reasons were classic—the problem of evil, etc.  For a time she continued in her role as a minister—albeit a faithless one.  The cognitive dissonance eventually led her to “come out” as an atheist at convention of non-believers.  The video of her coming out went viral on the internet and soon enough her congregation found out, in the way of many an internet age breakup, through social media.  Many shunned her, job interviews were cancelled, and she found herself an outsider in the circles she’d once been a part.

After listening to the story, it struck me as a bit over dramatic— the language of “coming out” as an atheist seems a bit too much.  But the story stayed with me, and as of this writing it is still the most recommended story on NPR’s website—it must have stayed with others as well.

As I turned to the lectionary, I started to wonder about belief, what it is to have it and what it is to lose it.  In our reading from Acts we are told of a conversion—a coming to belief.  The Ethiopian eunuch, came to belief through searching the scriptures, he was confused by what he found there but he kept searching.  He was ready when Philip ran alongside his chariot and offered to teach him.  It’s almost like the way a good math teacher works–allowing  student to try a problem herself, just beyond her level, and then suddenly revealing the answer after the thirst has been developed. When the eunuch understood the answers Philip offered to his questions, he realized immediately that he had found the truth.  There was no hesitation in his embrace of belief in Christ as witnessed in baptism.  We are told that he “went on his way rejoicing.”

In our epistle reading we find more insight into belief.  John tells us, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”  Belief and knowledge are different things, I think, but here I think we could easily interchange the words without radically changing the meaning.  “Whoever does not love does not believe in God, for God is love.”  Pragmatism would question a belief that does not offer a “live option”–something that makes a difference whether its true or not.  If I said I do not believe in gravity then I would have to behave in a way that expresses that belief–otherwise my belief is not “live.”  John is challenging the idea that people who say they believe, or know God, really do–if you do not love, it’s clear, John is saying, that you do not in fact believe.  Teresa MacBain’s asserted atheism was no doubt formed in a context of a good deal of practical atheism, where people who say they knew God, did not behave as though that were in fact true.

Part of what John does by placing the locus of knowledge and belief outside of a person’s own judgement–we can’t actually make a claim to knowledge on our own and as pragmatism tells us, we can’t make a claim to belief on our own either.  A belief or knowledge must be judged within a community.  It is only in a community that love can make sense, it is only in a community then that knowing God can make sense.

Perhaps the saddest part of Teresa MacBain’s story was the loneliness of her journey.  She wrestled with unbelief on her own, in secrecy, away from her church.  She found refuge and community online, the place where so many secrets thrive away from the grounded, complex communities where we can truly struggle and love together. What if she had told her congregation, I’m having trouble believing in God?  How they responded would be a reflection of their own belief, their own knowledge.

Belief isn’t the most important thing.  What we need, we are told in John 15:1-8, is not to believe but to abide.  It is in abiding that we discover truth, it is in abiding that we come to know.  Knowledge and belief work on so many levels beyond our conscious and rational minds, it is through practice, through context, through community and imitation that we come to truth.  We find all of this in abiding, staying close, not letting go.  A part of this, Jesus tells us, is also submitting to the pruner’s shears, allowing ourselves to be humiliated and reworked so that new growth can come.

Teresa MacBain says that she doesn’t miss God, but she does miss the music.  To her I would say, come sing with us.  I don’t put much stock in your belief or lack thereof.  If you start singing with us you may start praying with us, you may start reading the word with us, and end up doing the work of the liturgy.  This is an opening to practice love in a community and it is in love that we come to know God.  Maybe belief was just a dead branch that had to be cut so that a new shoot of life could come.  The trick is to stay with Jesus and his body made manifest on earth, believe it or not.

As the introduction to CFI states, the curriculum is intended to be a scaffolding on which conversations can hang.  CFI studies provide a congregation with language to have discussions about the purpose of being a called-out people.  I was amazed to watch how discussions about formation and Christian practice aided this congregation in their faithfulness, both as individual Christians and as a church engaged with their local community.

We undertook study and conversation by semester, meeting for seven to nine weeks each “term.”  The first fall, we studied “The Shape of Our Lives,” which helped folks understand the many forces that form us throughout our lives.  That study prepared us with a new grammar and growing trust in one another, both necessary to undertake The Shape of God’s Realm” in our second semester.  Things began to click as we walked together through a study of Christian practices such as truth-telling, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

After a summer break, we went on a retreat, facilitated by our pastor-scholar team.  Throughout the first two studies, I had been in conversation with the pastor and scholar who partnered with us, so that they knew how our conversations were going.  The retreat was then planned by the three of us to address places that our group was “stuck” in our conversations.   Six years later, I remember two things about the retreat.  One is hearing a young adult in our church talking about the need for married Christians to “place our marriages in the hands of others.”  That was new language for this congregation and reflected the depth at which they were replacing notions of individuality and privacy with an understanding of how their lives are dependent on the brothers and sisters in their church community.

The other thing I remember is that upon our return, many of the group members said of the retreat, “We got to know each other so well.”  This was a group of people who had lived in the same small town all their lives.  They had watched and were watching each other go through various life transitions.  They went to school together.  Some babysat others in the group.  Their lives were already linked so intimately and regularly, and yet the process of two semesters’ worth of conversation and one retreat drew them closer together than they’d ever been before.

In the second year, the CFI process affords some flexibility in choosing material to study.   Because worship is one of the most formative influences in the life of a church, we engaged Bonhoeffer’s Life Together in the autumn of our second year.  Reading that book together helped one 65-year old Appalachian woman read even more Bonhoeffer and another long-time church member fall in love with the Psalms.

In our fourth semester, we jumped ahead of the proscribed process a bit.  Rather than reading a second book, we used the Assessing our Strokes material.  This congregation already placed great value on leading Spirit-led lives.  They already engaged in discernment in congregational decision-making processes.  I felt they were ready to skip to this component, but other congregations may not be ready for this set of conversations after only three other studies.  As directed by the curriculum, we spent eight weeks walking slowly through Acts 10, examining the many ways the Spirit can work and what that means for the history, present, and future of our congregation.  As a result of that study, the whole congregation (not just those in CFI) entered into discernment about the direction of our church.  This congregational discernment, which grew out of CFI, led us to change direction in an existing ministry with youth and children in our local community.  That decision bore much fruit.  Because our congregation developed a newfound understanding of hospitality through CFI, those unchurched young people were welcomed into worship, and some eventually into membership of the church.  “Getting new church members” wasn’t the motivation for or the point of the community youth ministry.  Because of the way the Holy Spirit worked through our engagement with CFI, we had become church in a deeper and more fulsome way.  We welcomed all of those kids into the reign of God, even the ones who never set foot in worship.

So many faithful things that I haven’t named happened along the way in the two years of our conversations together.  While many congregations continue to use CFI materials after the initial two-year commitment, this congregation decided to leap fully into new and reinvigorated ministries to each other and beyond the congregation.  It was such a joy to be a part of.

I was moved to my current appointment one year after that small-membership church completed their engagement with the CFI materials.  About a year into my new pastorate, I pitched CFI to my new church.  There was not enough interest to launch it at that time, and I was disheartened.  Now, in my fourth year here, I have proposed it again.  I found myself describing CFI to this Church Council as “studies”, yes, but also as a patient process in which we develop friendships with each other and which will sustain the work of the church over time.  The time now is, and I am thrilled to embark on this process with yet another congregation.

Every community has its own language. Any time a group of like-minded people comes together to discuss what is important to them, it is critical that each person understands what another is saying. They develop a kind of shorthand among themselves, and cultivate ways of sharing information, interests, and convictions that are particular to that group. A gathering of accomplished cooks can exchange recipes and discuss culinary technique with one another without much effort. Experts in auto repair can discuss parts and technical procedures in ways that elude the layperson. To enter into the conversation requires a grasp of the language that is employed. The same is true for the church. It is not that we, as disciples of Jesus, consciously seek to utilize jargon that excludes or alienates those not already part of the in-group. But followers of Christ do sometimes traffic in terminologies and concepts that are essential to a proper understanding of who we are. Often, such terms are difficult to grasp for those unpracticed in the art of sustained ecclesiological conversation.

At this summer gathering, members of the Ekklesia Project will reflect together on the notion of “Slow Church” as a way of being faithful. As advocates of slow church remind us, something like “sustained ecclesiological conversation,” or–more simply–”talking with brothers and sisters in Christ about things that matter,” is an essential element of the slow church vision. But, as anyone who has tried to enter into this kind of conversation with a church community will likely tell you, this can be difficult when there is no common language shared by those who engage. Even more challenging, sometimes participants in the conversation come to the table with stubbornly trenchant ideas about the terms of the conversation and deeply ingrained definitions of the concepts up for discussion. Sometimes, instead of talking with each other, participants simply talk past each other and leave the conversation feeling more frustrated and alienated than when they came.

One of the strengths of the Congregational Formation Initiative is that it assists church communities in exploring key terms–basic building blocks of any conversation about corporate faithfulness–in ways that challenge all participants to rethink and perhaps revise any stubborn perspectives that hinder real discussion and growth. If two people come to the table with radically different notions of what the “Kingdom of God” might look like, or what “reconciliation” is all about, the initial stages of CFI provide opportunities to sort through these differences, to work towards a common understanding of their common vocation as members of the body of Christ. On an even more basic level, participants are encouraged to develop shared perspectives on things like “virtues,” “convictions,” and “stories”. Because each person comes to the conversation with different experiences and different influences, there will–thankfully–always be some measure of diversity in our understanding. The development of a common language helps to ensure that such diversity doesn’t result in a conversational impasse, as congregations learn how to articulate the story of their life together in Christ. These discussions, as simple as they might seem, achieve so much in the way of laying a foundation for future conversations.

As a pastor committed to engaging my congregation in long-term dialogue about our identity in Christ and our calling to embody the gospel where we are,  I look back on the CFI experience as one that provided an invaluable starting point for that process of engagement. CFI is not a quick-fix. In the early months of our three-year conversation, I jokingly referred to the curriculum as “1,095 Days of Purpose”. By the end of the three years, I was convinced that the conversation would be much longer than that. And that’s exactly how it should be. A mustard seed takes a long time to grow. God’s work is not instant, and the conversation among God’s people about that work should unfold in a context of stability and commitment, where we are patient with God, with one another, and with ourselves. The CFI conversation assists congregations in creating space for the Spirit to do its work on us, as God continues to grow and build us up in love, and to shape us for the purposes of the Kingdom.

Acts 4:1-20

Healing the lame (last week’s text from Acts 3) may lie far beyond our abilities. But is Peter and John’s courageous speech to the authorities any less miraculous for us?

The church’s speech in our pluralistic setting is increasingly muted and indistinct.

Sure, the constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but that “freedom” works out to be only operable in acceptable times and places: Sundays mornings within a self-identified arena of worship, but not Monday mornings in the workplace or classroom. Our kids’ elementary school banned biblical characters in this year’s hero essay project after a second-grader from our congregation wrote about Jesus last year. To punch through such invisible yet resilient barriers in American public life, Christian speech turns strident, either trumpeting messages that merely parrot a particular brand of politics or commending personal belief that leaves public idolatries intact. Even worse, to sidestep such barriers, the church resorts to appealing to American appetites for self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction.

In our little congregation in San Francisco, we have historically avoided even using the word “evangelism” because it conjures up too many old practices that make us cringe (some practiced by us in other settings and some practiced by others) and a truncated message that leaves too many assumptions in place and raises too few questions. Since talk is cheap, we have tried to emphasize the role of embodiment before speaking—in essence, following the pattern of Acts 3 and 4 (deed followed by interpretation).

But in trying to retrain our speech, have we become fearful of speaking the name of Jesus? In attempting to speak distinctively, have we lost the capacity to speak at all because we have become so respectful of public orthodoxy, so intent on maintaining our respectability? The voices of our cultured despisers ring loudly, “On what authority do you say these things?” We shrink back and speak only within the privacy of our homes and houses of worship. If we speak publicly, we had better be backed up by the credentials of the academy; by the support of experts or the successful; or by our good works, our track record of making an impact on our community. Anything short of appealing to these authorities for political cover leaves us exposed to the threat of castigation. Although it is our vocation to announce good news, we are silenced into deference to the authorities of our day and cowed by their weapons of fear, death, and exclusion.

Peter serves as the patron saint of the tongue-tied. His lame denials on the night of Jesus’ arrest befit a church of mumblers and mutes.

But a few short weeks after he could not answer simple questions from a poor serving girl, this unlettered, ordinary Galilean makes a stunning address before the Jewish equivalent of the Supreme Court. In the wake of the Resurrection, Peter’s tongue is loosed for speech.

What makes Peter’s speaking distinctive is not its heat, eloquence, or volume. (He is rather respectful of the authorities, though not deferential.) What is positively unnerving to the authorities is that Peter speaks at all. The authorities had put Jesus on trial and demanded, “On what authority do you do these things?” Then they killed Jesus in order to silence him. But here are Peter and John, companions of Jesus, facing the same question and the same threat but not remaining mute despite what the authorities did to Jesus.

According to the settled order of the day, the dead stay dead, the powerful get their way by punishing the lowly, and the wealthy consume at the expense of the poor. But the act of Peter’s speaking and the content of his words testify to the same irrepressible reality: the once-muted church speaks because the dead don’t stay dead. The authorities may have pronounced death on Jesus, but God has overruled their words by raising him from the dead. Far more than a one-off anomaly, Jesus is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead—the beginning of the Easter Revolution that ends the settled order based on death. The dead don’t stay dead, so the rule of power and wealth has come to an end. New creation is at hand.

The temple authorities put Jesus in the lowest place they could—an outcast’s death outside the city walls, the ultimate in exclusion from the community, the ultimate in silence. But God has raised Jesus to the place of highest honor and authority, at the very center of God’s new community. Armed with the words of Psalm 118, Peter puts the temple authorities on notice that, in raising Jesus from the dead, God has made him the cornerstone of a new temple with the only power under heaven to heal. On what authority does the once-silent Peter speak? On the authority of the resurrection and God’s gift of speech to the church, Peter and John say, “We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (v. 20).

At the end of the story, it is the authorities’ turn to be speechless. The accusers of Jesus and his people are now silent. The reversal is sudden. Maybe this story seems fantastic, too miraculous, a daydream. But since God raises the dead, perhaps like Peter, we too will wake up to the reality that Easter has ended death’s reign and that we no longer need to defer to the authorities that seek to regulate or silence the church’s speaking.

The Easter church is a speaking church, a community entrusted with words that no one else can speak and that have the power to heal the world: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. O Church, speak!

Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 3:12-19

Psalm 4

1 John 3:1-7

Luke 24:36b-48

The cover story for the April 16, 2012 issue of Time Magazine was entitled “Rethinking Heaven.”  In the article, the author contrasted the popular conceptions of heaven (as most recently found in the popular book “Heaven is for Real”) with more full bodied accounts of the afterlife as recently put forward by N.T. Wright and others.  Most people within the average congregation think of the afterlife and heaven as a realm filled with disembodied souls all hugging and congratulating each other on their arrival.  This is the place where we walk down streets of gold with our long deceased Aunt Sally and where God sits in a “reaaally big” chair (this according to Colton Burpo, the child author of “Heaven is for Real”). 

This week’s lectionary text from Luke challenges our common conceptions of life after death. Our reading comes at the close of the first day of the new creation inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection, and should be considered within the context of the whole of chapter 24.  The chapter begins with the empty tomb and the confused disciples.  From there the resurrected Jesus takes a walk to Emmaus with two of his followers where he shares and meal and is revealed in the breaking of the bread.  These two startled followers rush back to Jerusalem where “they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” (35)

It is during this conversation that Jesus appears for the second and final time in Luke’s gospel.  The disciples were “startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” (37)  The imagery of a ghost, that is a disembodied spirit, whizzing through the air, here one moment and gone the next, is in keeping with some of our most popular ideas about the afterlife. 

However, Jesus is not a ghost.  To prove this, he invites the disciples to engage their senses, to look and touch, he points out the flesh and bone of his body, he explicitly shows them his marked hands and feet.  And then, as if to close the door on any doubt, he asks for food and for the second time, the resurrected Jesus eats with his followers.  There are few things more human than hunger pangs and God’s provision of food is established in the very beginning of the Genesis story.  Jesus is referred to as the “bread of life” in John showing us that physical and spiritual nourishment always go hand in hand. 

We see this in Jesus’ ministry and his encounters with the disciples after his resurrection.  Sharing meals was the means through which his disciples recognized him (35).  They knew it was him because he broke bread with them – until he ate with them, he was not even recognizable.  Eating with his followers was an essential part of Jesus’ identity before and after his death and resurrection.  We hear the stories of him eating with Mary and Martha, eating in the home of Simon the Pharisee, eating with Zacheaus, and making a dinner party into the setting for theological engagement.  Jesus’ ministry happened around a table, which means that the very creaturely act of eating is a part of our life with God and God’s life with us.  Food is a holy mystery because it is an engagement with life and death in its most intimate processes.  It is God’s love made delectable.  Popular conceptions of life after death lose the theological richness of food and eating and in doing so beg the question: why would God make table fellowship central to the ministry of Jesus, central to the continued life of the church and then banish such corporeal concerns for all of eternity (after death)? 

Scripture is clear, that it is not just our souls, but all of creation that moans in travail waiting for redemption.  In the same way, we await the redemption of our bodies as Paul reminds us in Romans 8.  The scriptural accounts of the resurrected Jesus in Luke 24 directly contradict any version of the afterlife where our bodies and the earth are cast aside rather than redeemed.    

We know our bodies are important to God because their creation occurs at the very beginning of God’s and our story.  Indeed, the Bible is a book about bodies – live bodies, dead bodies, longing bodies, hungry bodies.  Jesus lived an embodied life, died a bodily death and was raised to a newly transformed bodily life, a life which continues to be embodied in the Church. 

When someone dies, pastors always hear the consoling words of friends and neighbors “she is in a better place now that she has cast off this mortal coil.” This mortal coil, though, was created by God and to deny our bodies is to deny the beauty of the work of our Creator. We do need to help our congregations rethink heaven.  However, it is too late to do so at the grave side.  But what of this week?  What of the third week of Easter, as we continue to be startled by the resurrection?  May this be a week for us to look upon the resurrected Christ and proclaim the goodness of creation. 

*Many thanks to Sarah Jo Adams for her help with this post.

Acts 4: 32-35
I John 1:1 – 2:2
John 20: 19-31

Wow! The texts for this second Sunday in our most important, celebratory season are powerful and their theme is easy to detect: testimony, declaration, proclaim, witness.

My colleague and friend, Ed Searcy, re-discovered in his doctoral studies that the root for the word “testify” is “testes” and comes from the practice of requiring men to cover their clothed genitals with their hand as they swore that what they were about to say was “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. The implication being that they were staking their own future generations on their testimony. This was in the times when only males were considered as witnesses. Ed suggests that witness may be, therefore, the better word to use.

Witness (“knowledge, wit”) in Christian use is a literal translation from the Greek ‘martys’ (martyr). Here again life is at stake for the witness, female and male, as we declare our willingness to die for the truth of what we witness to.

Declare is to “make clear”. A revelation has occurred that, for Christians, makes clear the past, present and future. This revelation we are called to make clear, to proclaim to and for others.

Proclamation/kerygma is one of the ancient five marks of the church (the others being worship/leitourgia, training/didache, fellowship/koinonia and service/diakonia). Of all the marks it is kerygma that offers the possibility of salvation, for what we proclaim is not of our own making but was revealed to us.

And to what is it that we witness, declare, proclaim? We find it at the heart of the reading from Acts:

“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”

The resurrection of Jesus was profoundly unexpected and profoundly surprising. Without it there is nothing for us, nothing to hold it altogether. It is what makes history. It is, for us Christians (and, in our belief, also for the world), the hinge of history. Traveling out from Jesus’ resurrection, like a shock wave in time, is the future, God’s future – relentless, unstoppable. And therein lies our hope. God’s steadfast love is on offer to all; forgiveness is on offer to all. God’s intended transformation of the whole world is inaugurated and will be completed in God’s good time.

This is pretty big news. One of the significant ways that the church witnesses to the world is, I believe, in what we celebrate, what we take the time and effort to mark. Truthfully, the volume of our celebrations of the resurrection in North America is decidedly mute, which in itself speaks volumes to our reticence about our own core proclamation. N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope, accurately sums up the situation:

“Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.” [p25].

We have fifty days to celebrate, contemplate, rejoice in the fact that Jesus did not stay dead. It is time to pump up the volume – because death would rather than we remain in our quiet, confused state. Wright continues,

“We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival…This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.” [p256/7].

Maybe then we and our children and youth and even the world will ask what all the hoopla is about and we will proclaim to one another and the world, “My Lord and my God!”

John 20:1-18

Death is the peak of all that is contrary to God in the world, the last enemy, thus not the natural lot of man, not an unalterable divine dispensation. … Peace cannot and must not be concluded just here in such a way as to establish a spiritual-religious–moral Kingdom of God on earth, while forgetting the enemy. There is peace only in prospect of the overcoming of the enemy.

-Karl Barth

I recently accepted an invitation to write an encyclopedia article on death and dying, and I wonder if I am up to the task. In particular, I wonder if I have it in me to tell the truth about death. The fact is death intrigues me even as it scares me. I think about it all the time. I read books and essays about it. I have my students read and talk about it.

And yet, I find that I rarely tell them or myself the truth about death. That truth, if Barth is to be believed (and I think he is), is that death is an enemy, one with which we are never to make peace. More importantly, death is a defeated enemy, defeated by God’s raising Jesus from death.

We in the Ekklesia Project talk a great deal about the Kingdom of God: about participating in the building of that Kingdom, about the establishment of justice and peace that are the hallmarks of the Kingdom. I believe we are right in doing so. We would also do well, I believe, to heed Barth’s admonition not to forget that the real enemy of that Kingdom is death. It is death – and especially the fear of death – that keeps us from resisting injustice and violence.

The late Pope John Paul II maintained that our world is dominated by a culture of death. He pointed to our frivolous attitude toward life, our cheapening of the gift of life, and our easy embrace of medicalized killing as evidence that we have forgotten that death is an enemy. In fact, our disposition toward death is paradoxical: even as we rush into death or push others headlong into it, we spend an inordinate amount of time and money struggling against it. Either way, we betray in our actions and attitude a failure to acknowledge that only God has the power to defeat death, and that God has indeed already done so by raising Jesus from the dead.

Paul calls the risen Jesus “the first fruits of those who have died,” maintaining that Jesus’ resurrection secures a general resurrection of all the dead at the conclusion of history. This is then the linchpin of the gospel: Christ is risen, and the enemy of us all has been overcome. We make peace, not with death, but with the deeper truth of the resurrection. This deeper truth allows us to face death – tentatively, fearfully, haltingly, but to face it nonetheless.

After the long drought of Lent we can once again say, “Hallelujah,” for Jesus is risen!

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reflects on the murder of Trayvon Martin and the practice of reading Scripture–and being read by it–in Christian community.

The constant stream of news this week about Trayvon Martin has re-ignited a national conversation about race–a conversation that has been, in my estimation, neither this public nor this intense since the controversy surrounding President Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, during the 2008 presidential campaign. The deep pain at the center of this conversation reveals a wound that we often try to hide, despite the fact that it will not go away. Our history of race-based slavery colors everything in America. President Obama was both honest and revealing, I think, when he said in a press conference last week, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

To read the rest click here.

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Mark 11:1-11

Hang on to the wheel
for the highway to hell
needs chauffeurs for the powers that be
– Mark Heard, “Rise from the Ruins”

Early in my years as a pastor, I was conscripted to be in a pageant as part of a gathering of area churches. Several of us chosen ones wore either a crown of rejoicing, a crown of righteousness, a crown of glory, or a crown of life. As the appropriate Scripture passage was read, each one of us, dressed as royalty, processed down a long auditorium aisle and placed our crowns on a stage altar. The producer/director/stage manager/costume designer (the sister had a lot invested) was as earnest as the day is long in wanting to portray visually a Revelation-like casting crowns before the throne. My wife hesitantly had to admit afterwards that the overall visual message was more like “Elvis impersonators are in the building.”

I think of that night as another processional draws near.

This Sunday, members of our congregation will process, waving palm branches and singing “All Glory, Laud and Honor.” We will read the extended Passion account from Mark’s Gospel and conclude the service outside with the planting of the cross. From time to time I’ve worried that, with the best of intentions, we might be turning this high drama into Christian kitsch, a mere token performance. But I’ve learned through the years never to underestimate the power of the public reading of Scripture, especially the Passion narrative. Too many things have happened, like the year the narrator’s role was read by a lady who served in a lightning-rod position with the Juvenile Justice System. She resolutely directed the juvenile facility from a restorative justice model, even when she was being skewered on the front pages by the local D.A. and a very ambitious young journalist. Throughout her time in the crucible, she remained in steadfast good cheer; but as she read her part in the Passion narrative that Sunday, her voice quivered and cracked, and when it did our sanctuary was filled with the Story’s surplus of meaning.

So anything can happen, even if the reading functions only as a “re-hear-sal.”

It’s the “performance” of the first part – the Liturgy of the Palms – that I wonder about. A simplistic reenactment of Psalm 118 denies that Mark 11:1-11 is high drama as well. Ched Myers says that Palm Sunday is carefully choreographed street theater, a showdown in the war of myths. Jesus staged his theater of messianic politics to expose what William Stringfellow names “the authority and reign of death over the world,” and what songwriter Mark Heard calls “the highway to hell.” That ought to have some bearing on how we process!

It goes without saying that the rhetoric and symbolism of restoration – of nation and/or Christendom, usually through decisive military or political triumph – are as powerfully seductive as ever, especially during this endless season of political campaigns. Part of our performance of the Palm Sunday processional, then, will be the confession of our “nostalgia for the parade,” for the ways we still try to make Palm Sunday, instead of Easter, the fulfillment of Christ’s ministry.

But we’ll also process in anticipation of hearing the Passion story yet again. We’ll walk the aisle in the faith that, because of God’s triumph over death in Christ, we’ve been freed from the dead-end of being chauffeurs for the powers that be.

Come to think of it, a “token performance” is just what the day calls for. While attending a Prairie Home Companion episode in Nashville, Lee Camp was struck by the idea to use a similar format with an “understated but explicit and coherent theological agenda.” The idea germinated and, since 2008, he coordinates four wonderful “Tokens” performances each year, a name he took from a William Stringfellow quote:

Discerning signs have to do with comprehending the remarkable in common happenings, with perceiving the sign of salvation within the era of the Fall. It has to do with the ability to interpret ordinary events in both apocalyptic and eschatological connotations, to see portents of death where others find progress or success but, simultaneously, to behold tokens of the reality of the Resurrection or hope where others are consigned to confusion or despair.

Mark Heard gives us our cues for Sunday’s performance::

Go and tell all your friends and relations
Go and say what’s not easy to say
Go and give them some hope
That we might rock this boat
And we’ll rise from the ruins one day.