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3 Easter 2019: Ghost Busters

by

Pyle, Howard; Johnson, Merle De Vore (ed) (1921) “Blueskin, the Pirate”

I’m not sure we’re ready for this, but here goes.

What if I told you a story
about the time I saw my Great Aunt Elma,
five months deceased,
standing on the dresser in my bedroom
wearing a 1940’s mink fur tippet
with those poor little mink heads still on it?
Would you believe she was there
or would you listen politely
and assume my grievous imagination
had projected itself into the darkness?

Or this, what would you think
if I told you about an All Saints’ Day visitation
from a long dead childhood surrogate mother?
This was back in Columbus, Ohio
and one of the primary nurturers in my youngest years
was the centerpiece of the sermon I was preaching that day.

On my way into the church that morning,
very early when no one else was around,
I was greeted near the door by someone
I had never seen before.
All these years later, honestly,
I do no remember whether it was a man or a woman.
In those days, in that parish,
and with four very young children,
I got to church about 7 am on top of very little sleep.
Anyway, the person handed me “The Watchtower,”
the propaganda magazine of The Jehovah’s Witnesses.
After juggling my stuff and awkwardly unlocking
a series of doors, including my office,

I threw the magazine on my desk.
I never gave it another thought
until I stopped, dumbfounded,
in the middle of the sermon.

Suddenly I remembered that the woman
I was speaking about,
had been a Jehovah’s Witness.
What do you think?
Serendipity, coincidence, strange visitation, epiphany?

Just so you know, the first story is completely made up –
no Aunt Elma on my dresser.
The second story is the absolute truth,
with details as factual as I remember them.
But, being me,
I have never actually answered that question myself:
serendipity or epiphany?

John’s Gospel drives me crazy.
Katy can tell you how grumpy I get
when I have to preach his stories
more than once in a while.
Unfortunately, around Holy Week and Easter
it is John, John, John.

First of all, John doesn’t just tell a story
the way Mark does, he declares it
and then rubs it in your face.

It is the Gospel written
furthest in time from when Jesus lived,
and written by someone who never met Jesus.
And yet, John’s Gospel has the most and the longest speeches
delivered by Jesus as if verbatim,
with details and theological pronouncements
that did not even exist when Jesus was alive.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,
no one comes to the Father, except through me…” – only in John.

“I am the light of the world…” – only in John.

Foot washing – only in John.

Raising Lazarus from the dead – only in John.

“The Jews,” as a categorical condemnation – almost entirely in John. (Matthew, Mark, and Luke specifically name the Pharisees and temple clergy as Jesus’ primary opposition, while John castigates to “the Jews” sixty-seven times).

And the difference between John’s resurrection stories
and those of the other three Gospels,
are like the difference
between my Aunt Elma and All Saints’ Day stories.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke,
like my All Saints’ story,
invite the reader’s own conclusion
about how and why the tomb is empty.

But John,
like my Aunt Elma story,
tells us what happened so graphically,
and with specific conclusions about what it means,
that we are left saying “yes” or “no.”

And John even tells us,
more than once,
that he is telling us these stories
as “proof” of his other proclamations.
He essentially says to us,
Jesus is God in the way that I tell you he is God,
and here is my proof.”

So, you see, John leaves an accident
on the floor of the living room
with all kinds of company in the house,
and then I am supposed to preach about it.
That is what makes me grumpy.
By the way, nobody else
has this story about eating fish with Jesus
on the shore of lake Tiberius either.

So, I am not going to dignify John’s story
by going into its weeds
and deciphering what it all means.

Suffice it to say that John wants us to believe
that Jesus’ resurrection was physiological
and not a ghost story.
Ghosts don’t eat fish.
And John also wants to verify that Peter was forgiven
for denying Jesus three times
on the night Jesus was arrested.
I suspect that by the time the Jesus movement
had wiggled its way across sixty or seventy years
and hundreds if not thousands of miles
to where John entered it,
those were some issues that got argued about.

So two thousand years later
we get stuck with the echo of those arguments
when we should be focused on our own.

I guess we are also kind of stuck
where we were last week, with the Thomas story.
By which I mean, it is kind of like teaching school these days
and knowing that different people
have different learning styles,
and that one is not better than another,
but that general education
has traditionally focused its pedagogy
toward one learning style.
The Church, likewise,
has pretty much been focused on proclamation –
“here is the truth, believe it.”
That works for some people
but it sure does work for me, and
I am supposed to be one of the proclaimers!
So let’s get down and dirty with the resurrection.

In spite of what John writes, is not a yes or no story.
Clearly, by reading all four Gospels,
we see that some people had a post-crucifixion experience
that shocked and amazed them,
while others stood in disbelief
and still others must have been agnostic.

It has been the assumption
of Christian scholars, historians, and theologians alike,
that Christianity traveled up the Mediterranean
and proliferated across the world like a virus
because of the resurrection.
It is often said that “something powerful”
must have happened
to propel a small, new strain of Judaism
into a great new world religion.

Maybe.
But that something powerful
may not have been the resurrection stories –
or not only the resurrection stories.

There is another theory at work these days,
that suggests another reason
that Christianity went from approximately
forty small communities in the year 100 –
about the time John was writing –
to a million or so followers by the year 325
when Emperor Constantine forever changed things
by dragging it into the mainstream of history.

Early Christian communities were focused
on bringing about the Kingdom of God
“on earth as it is in heaven.”
They saw themselves as a parallel kingdom
within the Roman empire.

They did some interesting things that,
whether intentional or not, made them proliferate.

Instead of focusing on converting men,
which many of the religions did,
Christians focused on recruiting women and slaves.
They also became primarily an urban movement,
and that movement placed a passionate emphasis
on healing and bread.
In our parlance, they created a rudimentary social safety net.
Well, urbanization took off across the empire,
and of course, there were many more poor people than rich.
Likewise, women didn’t go to war and get killed.
For those reasons and more, the little Kingdom of God
grew like a mustard seed in the weeds.

But to be perfectly honest,
we have very little good historical data
on Christianity from the time of Jesus
through the first two hundred years.
It is a black hole with some echoes emanating out of it.

All we have is local lore,
the proclamations of geographically located people
whose voices got heard over everyone else’s.
A big church would have been fifty or sixty,
and a bishop would have been someone
who could claim the loyalty of a network
of a half dozen or more small congregations.
There were often violent disagreements
between groups of Christians, even
within the same town or city.
Athanasius, for example, had thugs
who cudgeled the opposition.
What constituted a church was more like a house-church,
with somewhere like Trinity Place
being a big, established one.
There were arguments about the resurrection.

Had Jesus been saved by God,
brought back to life in a statement of victory over death?
Or did Jesus do it on his own power?
Was Jesus raised from the dead
or did he rise from the dead?
Both sides called themselves orthodox,
and the many versions of this argument
were hotly contested.
Meanwhile, all of them had some version
of the Kingdom of God
they were trying to create on earth
as it is in heaven.
They did stuff that included healing and bread.

During the same time period, in the Roman empire,
at least twenty-six different people
claimed emperorship
and fought civil wars or battles of usurpation.

As the little kingdom within the empire grew
the grand empire around them became weaker.
Serendipity or an act of God?

I would not hazard a guess,
but I do believe that what propelled a small movement
gathered around a sagely holy man and prophet,
was what he taught
and the wisdom of his followers
to keep teaching and practicing it:
healing and bread,
imploring the kingdom of God
to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

I do believe that just like us,
all these years later in Trinity Place,
some were motivated by stories of resurrection
and promises of life after death;
while others were motivated by sublime wisdom
and insights that proved transformative;
while still others sought healing, some sought bread,
and while some served bread, others offered healing.

Honestly, I am able to still marvel
over that All Saints’ Day experience,
and laugh at how thick-headed I can be –
taking so long to recognize the serendipity
or epiphany, whichever it was.
That is not the only mystery and strangeness
I have been subjected to over the years,
but none of them proves anything to me.
I take that back,
they confirm for me the need for humility
and openness.
But John’s stories and my own
ineffable experiences
do not prove anything about Jesus to me.
If I needed any confirmation about the wisdom of Jesus
it is what I have witnessed in the community of faith
that engages in the practices of healing and bread.

But please do not hear my cantankerous relationship
with the Gospel of John
as calling your baby ugly.
Rather, it is simply feeling backed into the corner
by a part of our religious tradition
that insists that I take John’s words as proof of his claims,
instead of being able to witness
the presence of God in our midst,
where I do,
and how I do.

We have a diversity of lenses
and we need to recognize the glory
of all those visions we behold.

 

3 Easter 2018 B: Empty Tomb?

by

“Peace be with you…”

Have you ever sat by yourself on the beach
at the ocean, or walked along
its foaming boundary, or stood sentry
on a cliff overlooking its broiling brine?
When you were there
at the ocean,
up close or distant,
did you ever embrace the sound of eternity?
You know,
waves of sound rushing over
the curvatures of your ear,
your head now a conch shell
holding the echo of those waves through recall
all these miles and years later?

Have you ever been embraced like that by the ocean?

Have you ever walked
through a dawn meadow
slipping into a robe of dew, wet
with its freshness all over you,
gleaming in the new sun?
Or maybe it was at daybreak
in the forest, with the trees and ferns
dripping the moisture of a new day,
a freshly hung spider’s web glistening
in the light of a single ray
piercing the canopy above?

Have you ever been robed like that in a new day?

Have you ever laid flat on your back
in the grass
under an awning of lights in the night sky,
gawking at the endlessness of time?
Gawking, your mouth gaping
at all the years and miles so far behind you
in the universe?
Have you ever laid there like that, suspended between an endless past and an endless future?
Have you ever fallen into such timelessness?
Have you ever witnessed your own
infinitesimal self
as a dust mite of nothingness
within the dome of time?

Have you ever been small like that beneath the stars?

Have you ever sat in the arms of a big easy chair
with your eyes closed
holding the soft downy crown
of an infant beneath your nose,
that scent of fresh skin
filling your own mind with awe and gratitude?
Have you ever dozed off like that, cradled
in the power of an infant,
breathing the aroma of sweetness and
engulfed in joy?
Have you ever been held like that while holding a small, little other?

“Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the dust, or from the field, the soul-body
of the field – rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing – as if I could see the wind itself…”

That Marie Howe poem
(“Once or Twice or Three Times I Saw Something”)
is a stuttering over the kind of moment
we receive as a gift
and want so much to tell someone else about,
but when we do, it disappears
like the rainbow sheen of a bubble popping.

I talk about the “whispers of God” a lot,
my phrase for such fragile moments.
Sometimes it is a very faint whisper
and sometimes a swarm.
It can be a horde of whispers carried
by an air force of lightening bugs
filling the stillness around us
with secret voices
that seem to know us by name.
But as soon as we go to tell about it,
to share it with someone with words
we can’t quite find,
it disappears.

Like the Howe poem,
it hovers and stutters over a moment
that cannot be captured or told.

The window on eternity is obviously
not limited to the four panes through which
I have just invited us to peek –
you have your own portals.
If we put all of our experiences together –
all the moments and all the whispers –
we might have hundreds of them,
thousands even;
times and places and sensations
that wrapped us ever so briefly
in a place beyond our own body,
and beyond our own time,
and beyond our own mind.

What I’m trying to evoke right here
is the opening of a portal
that looks into a dimension
that is actually present all the time,
and in every moment.

I am absolutely certain
you know the kind of moment I mean –
and know what it is like to fall into such an opening –
then re-emerge just as quickly
only to wonder how long we were there.

They are rare, these moments
or whisper of the holy, but we pass by them all the time.

We walk the beach in search of shells
and so pass by eternity while never knowing it.

We walk through the morning dew
trying to stay dry, and so miss the eternity infused in it.

We look up into the night sky trying to figure out
which stars form what constellations,
and neglect to fall into the timelessness
just waiting there for us.

“Peace be with you.”

You and I will never know,
at least not in the body we now inhabit,
if resurrection was the historical moment
that Luke attempts to describe.
Narrative can never do justice to experience,
any more than a movie can capture
the experience the mind creates
when reading a book.

But we do know, from the miraculous-ness
of our own lives,
that resurrection is a mysticalmoment.
You and I have fallen into such moments
and out of them again, in the blink of an eye.

Strain as we might,
we can never give the experience
to anyone else.
The mystical moments we experience
are ours and ours alone.
The best we can do
is tell each other what it was like,
and what we imagine we learned from it –
the meaning
of our Alice In Wonderland nanoseconds.

That is what Luke
and Matthew
and John
try to do.

They take a particular moment in history,
experienced by people they did not know,
in a place they may never have been,
and they try to describe what happened.
Luke, Matthew, and John
narrate what it was like,
and what it meant.
They’re not up to task though,
any more than any of us are up to it.
Even a stellar poet like Marie Howe
cannot quite do it.
Perhaps that is why the author
of Mark’s Gospel never tries.
Mark’s gospel leaves us at the empty tomb.

For him, that was enough.

The stranger at the empty tomb
telling Jesus’ closest friends
not to count him out,
and then those friends run away afraid.
They say nothing to anyone,
and that is where Mark’s Gospel ends.
That was enough.

Some moments cannot be shared.
Some of us will try
some of us will not.
Both are fine.
Neither one is proof or definitive.

Once, when I was in seminary
flying home for vacation,
I got stuck in the Detroit airport
for longer than expected.
Somehow, I struck up conversation
with a fellow traveler my age
who was an Evangelical Christian
in a seminary as conservative
as mine was progressive.

He kept pressing me to answer questions
I could not answer
or for which I had no answer.
The more I pleaded the poetic awe of mystery
the more he tried to pin me down.

“But what if someone had had a movie camera
right there as they rolled away the stone?
What would the camera capture?”

He had me now, he thought.
Nowhe would find out whether or not
I was a true believer;
meaning of course,
if I believed what he believed.

“It wouldn’t matter,” I answered.
“What do you mean, ‘it wouldn’t matter?’
Of course, it would matter!”
His voice was impassioned.
“No,” I continued, “it would not matter because
even if it was on film
we would both see different things in the film;
we would both experience
the images before us differently.
No two people see the same thing
any more than two people
have the same experience of the same thing.”

He looked crest-fallen.
We were two ships passing in the night
and the best we could do was wave at each other.
Just because that young man
clung to the precise denotation
of every word of the narrative,
rather than the mystical natureof resurrection as I do,
doesn’t make his understanding lesser,
or better, more faithful or less thoughtful.
Because I cling to the mystical nature of resurrection
rather than upholding the historicity of the story,
doesn’t make me better or lesser either.

The entire history of Christianity
will teach us nothing
if we are unable to see that from the beginning
we have all been like those fabled
blind men around the elephant,
each describing the creature
in grand but different detail.

None of us owns the truth. No one does.
There is not one, single truth to be owned;
no one truthavailable to any one human being
or group of human beings.
That is our limitation,
that is our smallness,
that is our reality,
even though we are always
trying to make it different somehow.
Coming to peace with that limitation IS
the beginning of wisdom.

So, whether you are devoted to the narrative –
to the exact and literal words of the biblical text,
or like me, you share a reasoned skepticism about the text
yet have an unshakable faith
in the mystical nature of resurrection…
I bid you peace,
in the name Jesus, who said it himself:
Peace be with you.

 

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