Thesis 2: The Bible is primarily a narrative about God with God’s people, which itself contains a diversity of testimonies about the experiences of individuals and communities with God.
In accord with the regula fidei (rule of faith) of the Christian Church and creeds, the primary literary form of the Bible is narrative, in which “plot holds together and integrates into a single whole what would otherwise be multiple and scattered.”(6) As a community that affirms both Old and New Testaments, the Church must read individual sections of the Bible in light of the larger story of God with God’s people, beginning with God’s liberating and sustaining covenantal relationship with Israel by which God sought to restore the original blessings of creation to a fallen world, culminating in the ministry, death and resurrection of the Jew Jesus Christ, and finding its ongoing continuance though the work of the Holy Spirit in the mission of the Church. Because God saves creation through a community of individuals, the testimonies and experiences that find their form in the various genres of the Bible are necessarily as diverse as the communities and individuals who experienced them.
In many cases, such testimonies diverge from, contradict, and even engage in argument with, one another. By canonizing such diversity under the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church has affirmed that such diversity, divergence, conflict and ongoing negotiation are not only central “characters” of the story of God with God’s people, but in fact constitute an essential part of the plot of that story. While, for example, various New Testament authors agree that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central event of history, how that resurrection shapes language, life and mission vary distinctly. The lack of closure and the canonization of inter-canonical argument constitutes as part of the Bible’s narrative form a witness to relational engagement with God and God’s people as a normative and foundational aspect of the revelation of the story of God with God’s people. Or, more pointedly, the life of God with God’s people is conversational.
Notes
(6) see Green 28 (repeated references indicate past postings)
Friday, April 8, 2011
Eight Theses for Reading Scripture in the Church
Next week, I'm going before my STM committee at LTSS (Brian Peterson, Michael Root, and David Yeago) to discuss the research I've been pursuing all year regarding the inter-relatedness of scripture and sanctification, particularly in regard but not limited to the Lutheran tradition. A major goal of my project is to formulate an accessible paradigm, applicable and easily appropriated in congregational life, to articulate and guide creative and artful engagement with the biblical words themselves. In preparation for the colloquy, I wanted to post eight "theses" that I arrived at by the end of the Fall semester. They were originally formulated for an assignment asking how the church ought to read "difficult texts," such as those dealing with womens' ordination or violence. They are loosely modeled after, but by no means exhausted by or dependent upon, the nine theses offered by "The Scripture Project" in their revolutionary volume The Art of Reading Scripture. In nuce, my own working theses are:
A. Theses 1-4: Scripture as Story of God with God’s People
1: The Bible’s Authority is grounded in faith in the Bible’s God
2: The Bible is a narrative in which diversity and disagreement are embedded
3: The identity of the Bible’s God is revealed in resurrection of Jesus Christ
4: Canon does not exhaust salvation history, but establishes its trajectory
B. Theses 5-8: On the Church’s Use of Scripture within the Story
5: Central trajectory of the Bible’s narrative is missional
6: Church exists in a divided state, requiring diversity in interpretation
7: Scripture has multiple senses and can be used in diverse ways
8: Facing difficult texts requires Church to ask “how can we pray this text?”
These are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather, to serve as loci and impetuses for further conversation and study. Over the next few days, I will post my theses serially. These are works-in-progress, and I invite any comments, suggestions and insights. I pray they will open up conversation and discussion, and by the Spirit's grace, may prove useful for use in the life of the church.
~
Thesis 1: The Bible’s authority for readers/hearers is derived from the authority that the God of the Bible has for them.(1)
Long before postmodernism, St. Augustine asked in his The Usefulness of Belief: “what is more rashly proud than to be unwilling to learn to understand the books of the divine oracles from their own interpreters and to be ready to condemn them without understanding them?”(2) Augustine here urges his friend to risk submission to the tutelage of the Church for the sake of truth, such that understanding might be built on foundations of faith and charity, rather than suspicion and doubt. Right understanding, along with charitable readings, flow from faith, and one’s faith is shaped by the community to which one belongs. Regarding the Christian Bible of Old and New Testament, Joel Green reminds us that as the Church, “we are the people of God to whom these texts are addressed” and “that reading the Scriptures has less to do with the tools we bring to the task, however important these may be, and more to do with our dispositions as we come to our engagement with Scripture.”(3) Faith in the God to whom the Bible witnesses, or, at the very least, desire to believe in this God,(4) is thus a prerequisite if the Bible is to function authoritatively both for individuals and for the community to which they belong. Rudolf Bultmann’s observations about interpreting history thus apply even more stringently for biblical hermeneutics: “to understand history is possible only for one who does not stand over against it as a neural, non-participating spectator, but also stands within it, and shares responsibility for it.”(5) As readers of Scripture within and as Church, our interpretation is never neutral, but must always take place within an invested and intimate relationship with the God revealed by Israel and Jesus Christ, and in communion with Christ’s Body, the Church.
NOTES
1 The formulation of this thesis is taken from Terrence Freitheim’s chapter “The Authority of the Bible and the Imaging of God” in Engaging Biblical Authority (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007, 47).
2 See Augustine’s The Usefulness of Belief in Augustine: Early Writings (ed. J.H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1979, 322).
3 Joel Green, “The (Re-)Turn to Narrative” in Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching (ed. Joel Green. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 23.
4 As Brian Peterson has reminded us (at LTSS), even dead German guys whose historical-critical projects seem menacing to those of us who adhere to a more theological-exegetical bent often carried out their work in the assumption of faithfulness (lecture 12.10.10)! My concern here is that while faith is requisite for understanding, we not make faith into a kind of works-righteousness in which its integrity is measured by one’s adherence or confidence to contested and difficult doctrines. Rather, the Church is a mixed body, and we are all mixed persons in various stages of growth in faith, and so, I have written this thesis in the understanding that it is as broadly inclusive as possible.
5 Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (trans. Schubert Ogden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 150.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
"Throw Open the Doors of the Church!" A Personal Remembrance of Peter J. Gomes
“And we remember those who have died...”
Sitting in the stillness of the sanctuary during matins at Mepkin Abbey, I felt my heart stirred by these words of the hours. Somewhere in the world, far from this arbor of tranquility, someone died. And we are praying for them. The world is sustained and sanctified by intercessions such as these. It is good to be here.
Little did I know that this morning, numbered among those for whom the brothers and I prayed was the incomparable soul of a teacher, pastor, and friend. It was only later that afternoon, returning to the chatter and noise of the world of car stereos and computers, that I received the news from a friend: Peter Gomes was dead.
I never had the honor of hearing Dr. Gomes preach at his home church in Harvard Square. I was the recipient of the irreplaceable blessing of being taught the art of expository preaching by him when he was a visiting professor at Duke Divinity School during my first year of seminary. When during our first class meeting he announced, “most of you come to me thinking you can preach when you cannot; but for some of you, there may be hope; if you listen to me, some of you may yet become ministers of the Word,” I thought him inestimably arrogant. By the end of our semester, as he roguishly smiled and glanced mischievously through his horn-rimmed spectacles whenever we called him “PJ,” I knew and loved him as inestimably tender and utterly devoted to us as his students. I’m glad I didn’t drop the class.
Staying in the class, of course, cost me a year’s tuition. Refreshed after three years away from the academy, I had managed to make perfect marks in all of my classes, positioning myself to make a run at a merit-based scholarship that would have lessened my loans significantly. Then PJ gave me a B+ in preaching. Heartbroken and just a little hell-bent, I requested a meeting with Professor Gomes to plead my case. I will never forget sitting with him in the advent of the summer sun on the patio outside the Refectory, he in his straw hat and bright bow-tie, me with my entitlements and expectations, and hearing his verdict: “an A would have meant you have arrived as a preacher. You are a B+ preacher - this means you are already a good preacher. It also means you have room to grow to become even better. If I have you an A, I would have given you nowhere to grow.” Suddenly, I was grateful for my B+, even honored by it. That was the last time I saw or spoke with him.
PJ did not leave us orphans, however. Throughout his time at Duke, he often spoke in wistful tones of how “no one but Rick Lischer has been down to see me” in his dingy basement office, and despite the greatness of his demeanor and the nobility of his character, it was not lost on us how this famous man, who often shared his Cambridge kitchen with the likes of Julia Child, was undeniably lonely. It is one of the great injustices of my tenure at Duke that PJ was not extended the promise of community which so characterized the mantras of the school’s theological self-understanding.
Not one to remain a victim of fate, PJ took matters into his own hands. As the semester drew to a close, he announced to us that he had “visited Mr. Dean Gregory Jones, and informed him that I had received less than satisfactory hospitality from the school, so he ought to provide me a blank check for me to take my beloved students to dinner at the Washington Duke.” We could only imagine the conversation, the slack-jawed visage of the Dean at the audacity of this tiny man from Harvard with the tremendous ego, his wounded pride, and his appreciation for his students. We feasted on prime rib, several bottles of fine wine, and a little taste of ivy-league elitism to the tune of over $1000 - PJ’s only regret was that smoking was not allowed, so he could not purchase a box of cigars. Such was his love for his friends.
If PJ valued feasting on the fineries of the material world, he was even more committed to teaching us how to administer the bread of life, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in our preaching. Much like our last supper at the Wa-Duke, Prof. Gomes viewed the sermon as a table prepared for the parish that must be set with care and boldness, a sensual ravishment that not only nourished spirits, but also transformed lives. He never ceased reminding us that “people come to church to hear something from you that they cannot hear or find anywhere else. If what you are saying is what they can hear from Oprah or NPR, you might as well not say it.” The preached Word is not just homiletic pyrotechnics or fast-food moralisms; under PJ’s tutelage, we came to see it, truly, as a foretaste of the feast to come.
Nor did he let us forget the great responsibility placed on our shoulders as we climbed into the pulpit. “You must have faith,” he intoned, “that God has given you this Word, for this place, in this time, for these people, at this moment. Do not give us this nonsense of ‘I’d like to suggest to you...‘ or ‘its my opinion that...‘ or ‘I invite you to consider...‘ You are the preacher. This is the church. Proclaim with boldness the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you don’t, how can you expect it of them?” PJ self-assurance and his confidence in the Word of Life enabled him to empower others to go and do likewise.
Such confidence, however, carried the additional responsibility of boldness. “On Easter Sunday,” he asked, “what do you think is on most people’s minds? Spring time and bunnies? New life? NO! They are thinking, ‘that blasted Jesus, just when you think he is gone, here he comes to bother us again! They are thinking, why must he continue to intrude on my life! And in such a fashion! No, what most people are thinking, and won’t express, is this: they don’t know if they believe in a real resurrection then, and are not sure they can believe in the same for themselves today. They are looking to you. Will you avoid this, or will you go there with them?” PJ taught us to be unafraid of speaking of proverbial elephants in the room, to take seriously people’s questions, not as excuses, but as genuine struggles, and ardent desire to believe, to hear someone believe enough to proclaim it, rather than postulate it. Preaching demands truthfulness and true faith - such a teaching has never failed me in my own ministry.
Putting our finger on such questions, and wrestling with them until we could find the confidence to believe God’s promises regarding them, occupied most of our time with PJ. I have never read the Bible so much in community - or so fruitfully, or enjoyably - as we did in our weekly seminar sessions. Those who were preaching would bring their texts and research to the table - always on difficult texts like Romans 13, Matthew 19, Joshua 23, and so forth - and for three hours, we would argue, challenge and imagine together not just how to preach these texts, but also how to hear God’s own answers to our own difficult questions. In four years of seminary, this has not happened in any other class. Yet here, the Word of God was truly living and active. PJ taught us to love the Bible, and the Gospel it contained.
As we all became comfortable and familiar with one another, humor became our general mode of discourse, and as anyone who knew him will attest, PJ was the master of sass. He often mocked his own baptist heritage, lamenting his hymnody’s obsession with “blood...its always about ‘the blood,‘ there is a ‘fountain of blood...‘ I wonder what all the women must be thinking each month.” He never tired of calling Karl Barth “old man river, who could have stood to write about fourteen less volumes of those blasted dogmatics of his.” And he never missed an opportunity to slip in self-promotion: after making some generally profound point, he’d wryly add, “if you don’t believe me, read my book.” He was a man who took himself entirely too seriously, but in a way that overflowed in endless chuckling and uplifting spirits.
It became the motto of our class to repeat PJ’s favorite baptist self-criticism. Remarking on the frequency of altar calls in services, he would suddenly sweep his arms into the air, instantaneously revert to preacher mode, and proclaim, “throw open the doors of the church!” Laughter ensued. Yet, this was precisely Peter Gomes‘ mission and purpose in all he did. Whether it was in performing the perfection of homiletic artistry, guiding hapless students through the strange world of scripture to make “preachers of them yet,” or in robbing the riches of the seminary to give to the poor who were his, PJ longed that the doors of the church would be flung wide open to all, and with them, the heights, depths, width and breadth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the riches of Holy Scripture.
Young preachers are often told that whenever you step into the pulpit, you bring with you every single pastor, teacher, and preacher who has ever influenced you, and that if you’re not careful, the claustrophobia will get to you. I am ashamed that I had not heard of PJ’s aneurism towards the end of last year, equally sad that it was not until the night of his death that I unwittingly offered prayers for his soul. And yet, I am thankful for the life he lived, the wisdom he shared, and the gift of the voice he gave to me. It is with great joy that I can now say, truly, that PJ will be with me in spirit in the pulpit, shouting with the whole communion of saints, “throw open the doors of the church!” If I can continue to heed his voice, my words may yet do justice to him, and to the Lord he now serves in the eternity that he made so vividly present by the words he gave us in his life.
(click here for a beautiful eulogy, chock full of PJ's humor, by William Willimon)
Sitting in the stillness of the sanctuary during matins at Mepkin Abbey, I felt my heart stirred by these words of the hours. Somewhere in the world, far from this arbor of tranquility, someone died. And we are praying for them. The world is sustained and sanctified by intercessions such as these. It is good to be here.
Little did I know that this morning, numbered among those for whom the brothers and I prayed was the incomparable soul of a teacher, pastor, and friend. It was only later that afternoon, returning to the chatter and noise of the world of car stereos and computers, that I received the news from a friend: Peter Gomes was dead.
I never had the honor of hearing Dr. Gomes preach at his home church in Harvard Square. I was the recipient of the irreplaceable blessing of being taught the art of expository preaching by him when he was a visiting professor at Duke Divinity School during my first year of seminary. When during our first class meeting he announced, “most of you come to me thinking you can preach when you cannot; but for some of you, there may be hope; if you listen to me, some of you may yet become ministers of the Word,” I thought him inestimably arrogant. By the end of our semester, as he roguishly smiled and glanced mischievously through his horn-rimmed spectacles whenever we called him “PJ,” I knew and loved him as inestimably tender and utterly devoted to us as his students. I’m glad I didn’t drop the class.Staying in the class, of course, cost me a year’s tuition. Refreshed after three years away from the academy, I had managed to make perfect marks in all of my classes, positioning myself to make a run at a merit-based scholarship that would have lessened my loans significantly. Then PJ gave me a B+ in preaching. Heartbroken and just a little hell-bent, I requested a meeting with Professor Gomes to plead my case. I will never forget sitting with him in the advent of the summer sun on the patio outside the Refectory, he in his straw hat and bright bow-tie, me with my entitlements and expectations, and hearing his verdict: “an A would have meant you have arrived as a preacher. You are a B+ preacher - this means you are already a good preacher. It also means you have room to grow to become even better. If I have you an A, I would have given you nowhere to grow.” Suddenly, I was grateful for my B+, even honored by it. That was the last time I saw or spoke with him.
PJ did not leave us orphans, however. Throughout his time at Duke, he often spoke in wistful tones of how “no one but Rick Lischer has been down to see me” in his dingy basement office, and despite the greatness of his demeanor and the nobility of his character, it was not lost on us how this famous man, who often shared his Cambridge kitchen with the likes of Julia Child, was undeniably lonely. It is one of the great injustices of my tenure at Duke that PJ was not extended the promise of community which so characterized the mantras of the school’s theological self-understanding.
Not one to remain a victim of fate, PJ took matters into his own hands. As the semester drew to a close, he announced to us that he had “visited Mr. Dean Gregory Jones, and informed him that I had received less than satisfactory hospitality from the school, so he ought to provide me a blank check for me to take my beloved students to dinner at the Washington Duke.” We could only imagine the conversation, the slack-jawed visage of the Dean at the audacity of this tiny man from Harvard with the tremendous ego, his wounded pride, and his appreciation for his students. We feasted on prime rib, several bottles of fine wine, and a little taste of ivy-league elitism to the tune of over $1000 - PJ’s only regret was that smoking was not allowed, so he could not purchase a box of cigars. Such was his love for his friends.
If PJ valued feasting on the fineries of the material world, he was even more committed to teaching us how to administer the bread of life, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in our preaching. Much like our last supper at the Wa-Duke, Prof. Gomes viewed the sermon as a table prepared for the parish that must be set with care and boldness, a sensual ravishment that not only nourished spirits, but also transformed lives. He never ceased reminding us that “people come to church to hear something from you that they cannot hear or find anywhere else. If what you are saying is what they can hear from Oprah or NPR, you might as well not say it.” The preached Word is not just homiletic pyrotechnics or fast-food moralisms; under PJ’s tutelage, we came to see it, truly, as a foretaste of the feast to come.
Nor did he let us forget the great responsibility placed on our shoulders as we climbed into the pulpit. “You must have faith,” he intoned, “that God has given you this Word, for this place, in this time, for these people, at this moment. Do not give us this nonsense of ‘I’d like to suggest to you...‘ or ‘its my opinion that...‘ or ‘I invite you to consider...‘ You are the preacher. This is the church. Proclaim with boldness the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you don’t, how can you expect it of them?” PJ self-assurance and his confidence in the Word of Life enabled him to empower others to go and do likewise.Such confidence, however, carried the additional responsibility of boldness. “On Easter Sunday,” he asked, “what do you think is on most people’s minds? Spring time and bunnies? New life? NO! They are thinking, ‘that blasted Jesus, just when you think he is gone, here he comes to bother us again! They are thinking, why must he continue to intrude on my life! And in such a fashion! No, what most people are thinking, and won’t express, is this: they don’t know if they believe in a real resurrection then, and are not sure they can believe in the same for themselves today. They are looking to you. Will you avoid this, or will you go there with them?” PJ taught us to be unafraid of speaking of proverbial elephants in the room, to take seriously people’s questions, not as excuses, but as genuine struggles, and ardent desire to believe, to hear someone believe enough to proclaim it, rather than postulate it. Preaching demands truthfulness and true faith - such a teaching has never failed me in my own ministry.
Putting our finger on such questions, and wrestling with them until we could find the confidence to believe God’s promises regarding them, occupied most of our time with PJ. I have never read the Bible so much in community - or so fruitfully, or enjoyably - as we did in our weekly seminar sessions. Those who were preaching would bring their texts and research to the table - always on difficult texts like Romans 13, Matthew 19, Joshua 23, and so forth - and for three hours, we would argue, challenge and imagine together not just how to preach these texts, but also how to hear God’s own answers to our own difficult questions. In four years of seminary, this has not happened in any other class. Yet here, the Word of God was truly living and active. PJ taught us to love the Bible, and the Gospel it contained.
As we all became comfortable and familiar with one another, humor became our general mode of discourse, and as anyone who knew him will attest, PJ was the master of sass. He often mocked his own baptist heritage, lamenting his hymnody’s obsession with “blood...its always about ‘the blood,‘ there is a ‘fountain of blood...‘ I wonder what all the women must be thinking each month.” He never tired of calling Karl Barth “old man river, who could have stood to write about fourteen less volumes of those blasted dogmatics of his.” And he never missed an opportunity to slip in self-promotion: after making some generally profound point, he’d wryly add, “if you don’t believe me, read my book.” He was a man who took himself entirely too seriously, but in a way that overflowed in endless chuckling and uplifting spirits.It became the motto of our class to repeat PJ’s favorite baptist self-criticism. Remarking on the frequency of altar calls in services, he would suddenly sweep his arms into the air, instantaneously revert to preacher mode, and proclaim, “throw open the doors of the church!” Laughter ensued. Yet, this was precisely Peter Gomes‘ mission and purpose in all he did. Whether it was in performing the perfection of homiletic artistry, guiding hapless students through the strange world of scripture to make “preachers of them yet,” or in robbing the riches of the seminary to give to the poor who were his, PJ longed that the doors of the church would be flung wide open to all, and with them, the heights, depths, width and breadth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the riches of Holy Scripture.
Young preachers are often told that whenever you step into the pulpit, you bring with you every single pastor, teacher, and preacher who has ever influenced you, and that if you’re not careful, the claustrophobia will get to you. I am ashamed that I had not heard of PJ’s aneurism towards the end of last year, equally sad that it was not until the night of his death that I unwittingly offered prayers for his soul. And yet, I am thankful for the life he lived, the wisdom he shared, and the gift of the voice he gave to me. It is with great joy that I can now say, truly, that PJ will be with me in spirit in the pulpit, shouting with the whole communion of saints, “throw open the doors of the church!” If I can continue to heed his voice, my words may yet do justice to him, and to the Lord he now serves in the eternity that he made so vividly present by the words he gave us in his life.
(click here for a beautiful eulogy, chock full of PJ's humor, by William Willimon)
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
A Keg in the Desert Shall Spring Forth
We all know that when Satan tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread, the Son of God resolutely declined. But what if the Sneaky One had rejoindered, saying "fine - take these stones and from them make BEER?" The fact that he did not is proof that the devil is not a Lutheran, if Jesus was, he would have had a hell of a time finding a snappy Bible verse counter here.
Thankfully for salvation history, no suds were spilled that day in the desert. However, a non-denominational Iowa home-brewer is putting the party back in penance by undertaking the Lenten discipline of abstaining from all solid food except water and beer (see the story here). Aside from raging jealousy (alcohol is verboten for this blogger this season), I'm also quite intrigued. Eric Marrapodi of CNN, describes J. Wilson, the home-brewer and suds enthusiast whose blog's motto is "an ideal condition of harmony, beer and joy" as " not a suds-soaked frat boy, but a careful home brewer with an eye for history and a hope for a spiritual breakthrough." Nor is he the first to undertake such an endeavor:
And apparently, the monks were on to something. In addition to imitating their imbibing habits, Wilson has also taken on other contours of their devotional discipline:
Definitely a discipline to ponder for future journeys with Jesus into the heart of the Lenten season. Apparently, Wilson is keeping a blog, Diary of a Part-Time monk, where you can follow his exploits.
In the meantime, if the devil offers you mug of frothing beer in the midst of your desert sojourn, perhaps the correct response would be to take it, chug it down, and then chuck the empty glass at the horny little bastard so you can contemplate in peace. Martin Luther would be proud, and, I like to think, so would the Lord.
Thankfully for salvation history, no suds were spilled that day in the desert. However, a non-denominational Iowa home-brewer is putting the party back in penance by undertaking the Lenten discipline of abstaining from all solid food except water and beer (see the story here). Aside from raging jealousy (alcohol is verboten for this blogger this season), I'm also quite intrigued. Eric Marrapodi of CNN, describes J. Wilson, the home-brewer and suds enthusiast whose blog's motto is "an ideal condition of harmony, beer and joy" as " not a suds-soaked frat boy, but a careful home brewer with an eye for history and a hope for a spiritual breakthrough." Nor is he the first to undertake such an endeavor:"Three hundred or four hundred years ago, a group of Paulaner monks in a Bavarian region had made a stronger beer in a town called Einbeck and they called it bock. The monks started making a stronger beer, a double beer, called doppelbock," Sorensen said. "The story goes the monks would give up eating and literally would drink this 'liquid bread' to sustain them through their Lenten fast."
And apparently, the monks were on to something. In addition to imitating their imbibing habits, Wilson has also taken on other contours of their devotional discipline:
He said has been reading through the Old Testament book of Psalms, meeting with a pastor and tried to increase his prayer life as part of the spiritual elements of the fast. He also spent last weekend visiting an group of monks at Conception Abbey in Missouri.
He said there have been many little spiritual breakthroughs living like a fasting monk in the modern world.
"I think in the first few days there were lots of little tidbits of enlightenment. I felt like I was in a tunnel and really focused. You could live among the craziness in the world and be a focused Christian."
Definitely a discipline to ponder for future journeys with Jesus into the heart of the Lenten season. Apparently, Wilson is keeping a blog, Diary of a Part-Time monk, where you can follow his exploits.
In the meantime, if the devil offers you mug of frothing beer in the midst of your desert sojourn, perhaps the correct response would be to take it, chug it down, and then chuck the empty glass at the horny little bastard so you can contemplate in peace. Martin Luther would be proud, and, I like to think, so would the Lord.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Collecting Manna: Jeremie Begbie on Bach
What Bach's music provokes us to imagine...is a subtle relationship between natural and artistic beauty, where the two are not seen as fundamentally incompatible, but where natural beauty is the inhabited environment, trusted and respected, in which artistic beauty is born, even if born through sweat and struggle. The vision of making beauty is not one that sees the artist as striving for creation out of nothing, fashioning and foisting order where none is given, or pursuing a fetish for originalty...still less is it one of defiantly challenging God...The vision is rather of the artist, as physical and embodied, set in the midst of a God-given world vibrant with a dynamic beauty of its own, not simply "there" like a brute fact to be escaped or violently abused, but there as a gift from God of overflowing beauty, a gift for us to interact with vigorously, form, and (in the face of distortion) transform and in this way fashion something as consistent and dazzlingly novel as the Goldberg Variations, art that can anticipate the beauty previewed and promised in Jesus Christ. (from "Created Beauty: The Witness of JS Bach" in Resounding Witness, ed Begbie et al (Eerdman's, 2011), 108)
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Justification Songs, or, On Lutheran Rastafarianism
For our Lutheran Confessions class here at LTSS, we were asked to create an artistic representation of what the doctrine of justification means to us. That's right. Art project theology - which is actually quite fun considering some alternatives. Anyway, before the green-eyed monster threatens to floor you with jealousy, I thought it would be fun to share my contribution.
Believing that the doctrine of justification is not so much a deposit of propositional truth as it is the name we give to the entire story of God with God's people, from the creation to the calling of Israel to the salvation of the world through the God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, to the sending of the Spirit into the church's life in the new creation which continues to this day and until the End, a story which is different than others in that it is true, and that it includes us, I sought to re-tell this story in a mode that is congruent with what this story seeks to evoke: worship. As Robert Jenson beautifully remarks at the conclusion of his Systematic Theology, "in the conversation God is, meaning and melody are one. The end is music." By Christ's death for sinners, we are reconciled into the fugue that is God's life with God's people. This is not a punctiliar occurrence, but our very life with God and with one another in Christ's body, the Church, completed by the Spirit in our midst.
We receive our identity, then, not from ourselves, but from another. Which is why, for my project, I sought both to depend on another for my form, while also emptying that form of its content and re-imagining it from within the story which encompasses our world. Also, I simply couldn't find the inspirado to be original, so I pirated a melody. Bob Marley's Redemption Song is, in fact, a good vehicle for this, in that Marley's Rastafarianism sought to perform such a re-imagining of the existence of African-descent peoples under the cultural and economic captivity of a colonial regime, thus identifying with the Exodus, and, proleptically, with the Resurrection. I have simply baptized Rastafarianism's narrative from within Conessional Lutheranism - not because I don't like it, but because its not "my story." Anyway, the whole point being, the Gospel is never spoken to us in a vacuum, but is always contextual, always in-breaking and transforming the culture into which it comes, while also renewing that culture even as its expression is shaped by the hearers to whom it is uttered. This is the logic of justification extended into missiology, as well as unfolding into the new life, which is the gift given in justification, hence leading to sanctification and action.
Or, its just a blatant but highly intentional ripping off Marley's classic "Redemption Songs." Its super cheesy, and yet, somehow, it fits. Maybe a youth group will find it hip one day - maybe Bob is up there singing it right now, or maybe one day, I'll get to teach it to him...I hope I get dreadlocks in heaven...
Believing that the doctrine of justification is not so much a deposit of propositional truth as it is the name we give to the entire story of God with God's people, from the creation to the calling of Israel to the salvation of the world through the God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, to the sending of the Spirit into the church's life in the new creation which continues to this day and until the End, a story which is different than others in that it is true, and that it includes us, I sought to re-tell this story in a mode that is congruent with what this story seeks to evoke: worship. As Robert Jenson beautifully remarks at the conclusion of his Systematic Theology, "in the conversation God is, meaning and melody are one. The end is music." By Christ's death for sinners, we are reconciled into the fugue that is God's life with God's people. This is not a punctiliar occurrence, but our very life with God and with one another in Christ's body, the Church, completed by the Spirit in our midst.
We receive our identity, then, not from ourselves, but from another. Which is why, for my project, I sought both to depend on another for my form, while also emptying that form of its content and re-imagining it from within the story which encompasses our world. Also, I simply couldn't find the inspirado to be original, so I pirated a melody. Bob Marley's Redemption Song is, in fact, a good vehicle for this, in that Marley's Rastafarianism sought to perform such a re-imagining of the existence of African-descent peoples under the cultural and economic captivity of a colonial regime, thus identifying with the Exodus, and, proleptically, with the Resurrection. I have simply baptized Rastafarianism's narrative from within Conessional Lutheranism - not because I don't like it, but because its not "my story." Anyway, the whole point being, the Gospel is never spoken to us in a vacuum, but is always contextual, always in-breaking and transforming the culture into which it comes, while also renewing that culture even as its expression is shaped by the hearers to whom it is uttered. This is the logic of justification extended into missiology, as well as unfolding into the new life, which is the gift given in justification, hence leading to sanctification and action. Or, its just a blatant but highly intentional ripping off Marley's classic "Redemption Songs." Its super cheesy, and yet, somehow, it fits. Maybe a youth group will find it hip one day - maybe Bob is up there singing it right now, or maybe one day, I'll get to teach it to him...I hope I get dreadlocks in heaven...
Justification Songs
(adapted from Bob Marley’s “Redemption Songs”)
O Jesus was a rabbi
A Jew from Palestine
As Mary’s Son was One of us
As God’s Own Son divine
And my hand was made strong
By the grace of the Almighty
For while I was still a sinner
Christ died for me
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom
They’re all we’ll ever have
Justification Songs
Justification Songs
Emancipated from Satan’s slavery
Let the Spirit renew our minds
Have no fear of demonic enemies
None of them can stop the Kingdom’s time
How long will the wicked profit
While we stand aside and look
There is a new creation
It’s time to live out the Book
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom
They’re all we’ll ever have
Justification Songs
Justification Songs
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Rocky Mountain High: House for all Sinners and Saints
The final stage of my long and winding journey towards ordination has set us on the road back to our beloved Denver, CO. It was recently made official that to fulfill my internship requirement, I have been invited to serve as the vicar for the House for All Sinners and Saints under the supervision of the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber. Needless to say, we are overjoyed at the opportunity not only to serve in and be served by such an exciting and trail-blazing community, but also to return to the glorious lightness of being and life that can only come from living a mile above sea-level. Fellow Lutheran and songwriter John Denver said it best: "life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, blowing like the breeze, country road, take me home, to the place, I belong..." My whole family is giddy with a pre-mature Rocky Mountain High! 
Nadia began HFASS (which my classmate at Southern pointed out could be construed as "half-ass" - is this intentional I wonder?) as a church plant while still in seminary, and one of the primary goals of my apprenticeship to her will be to study the arts of missional development (ELCA super-secret code for church planting) so that I can "go and do likewise." Judging by the torrents of friend requests we have already received on facebook, however, I get the feeling that even more exciting will be the chance to experience the wonderful and surprising things the Spirit is doing in this quirky little portion of the Body of Christ, from beer and hymn sings at local bars, to celebrating matins on Wednesday mornings, to whatever other surprises the capacious creativity of the Living God devises for us and for the Kingdom while we are graced to pilgrimage alongside them. The Spirit's future awaits! I begin my service as a Vicar of Denver on Pentecost Sunday, June 12th, 2011. We appreciate your prayers (we are still awaiting word on housing, and will be cutting it pretty tight health-care wise, given that #2 is due Sept. 1st!), celebrations, and support as the journey continues! Onward and upward, as they say...
(PS: YES, John Denver really was a Lutheran at some point in his life...though he later turned to the self-help gurus of EST...so like I said, a true Lutheran...)
Monday, March 28, 2011
Collecting Manna: David Bentley Hart on the Cappadocians
I've noticed I've taken to quoting far too many white male theologians in these posts, with a definite paucity in the departments of women and persons of non-European origin. Remediation will come soon, I promise. In the meantime, I just came across this wonderful quote from Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in a piece he wrote on Robert Jenson. I think it helps unfold what I was after in my sermon yesterday, and Hart summarizes the Cappadocians with all his characteristic pomposity and flair.
The Cappadocians, by the way, were neither white nor European, but hailed from the regions around modern Istanbul and Turkey in the late fourth-century, and are considered the most imaginative and most powerful champions of Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy. Their ranks included St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil the Great, and also their sister, St. Makrina. There you go - a woman and some non-Europeans! Even so, the debt is far from paid...
The Cappadocians, by the way, were neither white nor European, but hailed from the regions around modern Istanbul and Turkey in the late fourth-century, and are considered the most imaginative and most powerful champions of Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy. Their ranks included St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil the Great, and also their sister, St. Makrina. There you go - a woman and some non-Europeans! Even so, the debt is far from paid... It must be appreciated, I hasten to add, that "salvation" was not understood by the Cappadocian fathers in the rather feeble and formal way many Christians have habitually thought of it at various periods in the Church's history: as some sort of forensic exoneration accompanied by a ticket of entry into an Elysian aftermath of sun-soaked meadows and old friends and consummate natural beatitude.Rather, salvation meant nothing less than being joined to the Living God by the mediation of the God-Man Himself, brought into living contact with the transfiguring glory of the divine nature, made indeed partakers of the divine nature itself (2 Peter 1.4) and co-heirs of the Kingdom of God. In short, being saved was - is to be "divinized" in Christ by the Spirit . In the great formula of St. Irenaeus (and others), "God became man that man might become god." (from "The Lively God of Robert Jenson" in First Things, October 2005, 30)
An Awkward Intimacy - A Sermon for Lent 3
Third Sunday of Lent
St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church (Durham, NC)
Exodus 17.1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5.1-11
John 4.1-42
(Note: It is always hard to reproduce, after the fact, the event-quality of extemporaneous preaching. Each "performance" is live and therefore unique. I have done my best to re-capture from the tape of memory the gist of things. The sermon itself went about 18 minutes, but people seemed to think it was alright!)
Well, this is awkward. The disciples return from grabbing a sandwich from the Sychar Subway to find their teacher, the Messiah, the most holy, pure and almighty Son of God sitting by the well with...a woman. And, of course, not just any woman. But a Samaritan...woman. In the publicity of broad daylight! They do not yet know what Jesus has drawn forth about her disreputable sexual history. But what they do know, and what they see, is Jesus, leaning so close to a strange female at a well, almost whispering into her ear, gently and ever so intimately, "I am he."
So of course, the disciples do what most of us do when we stumble upon something so intimate, so real, and so awkward to us. We get embarrassed. We get tongue-tied. We avoid what is before us, awkwardly stare at our shoes, or try to make small talk. Yet John records their thoughts, and he might as well have added one of them saying, "why don't you two get a room?" As it is, once the woman, who is undoubtedly no stranger to the scorn and stares of scoffers and saints, pays them no heed. She leaps up to rush home and proclaim to others boldly, "look! someone who has told me everything I have ever done! Come and see!" The woman's boldness, her freedom, stands in bold contrast to the schmucks back at the well who can only really muster up small talk: "so, um, Jesus, um...want a bite of my sub?"
Incidentally, I think the disciples must have been Lutherans. Let's be honest, we are TERRIFIED of intimacy. Just look at the first ten rows of pews - EMPTY!!! And as we all know, its most likely that way in 99% of Lutheran churches across the country right now! I'd like to think its because you're afraid I'm going to launch a sermonic spit-bomb on you. At Southern, its the exact same way. First five pews? Empty. I grew up sitting in the front row (pastors' grandkid!), and so I like to risk a sally forth into no man's land on occasion and occupy the first pew beneath the pulpit. Often, the presider or preacher will look at me kind of nervously and back their chair up a few feet - I swear they must be thinking: "does he have a bomb strapped around his chest?" "What is he DOING so close?" Awkwardness.
For a tradition of faith which values the idea of God made flesh, of God descending from the lofty heights of distance deity to come near in feeble flesh, we sure struggle with the idea of intimacy with God. Words and slogans like "God is love," "Jesus loves and died for me," and "we need to love and serve our neighbor" are well-intentioned and well-wrought, and yet, if we are all honest with ourselves, we like to keep such divine love, such "Jesus is my boyfriend" talk at arms' length. Its good for evangelicals and Christian radio. But I'll stay as far away from that altar until I HAVE to go up for communion.
We are not unlike the disciples, stumbling upon an awkwardly intimate encounter between Jesus and a woman at a well. In some ways, we are not unlike the ancient Israelites, asking the testing, honest, difficult question in our hearts: "is the LORD really among us or not?" This seems to be John's concern in writing too. Grand theological claims like the Prologue, the clearing of the temple, the debates with the Pharisees, the puzzling locutions of "the Father and I are One" are juxtaposed throughout the narrative with moments of stirring intimacy: Jesus whispering with his mother at wedding; Jesus conversing with a sage at night; Jesus at a well with a woman; Jesus touching the eyes of a blind man with his spit. Is this one, so fleshly, so earthly, so intimate, the same as the Creator of the Universe? Can divinity be so awkwardly embodied? Is this the LORD among us, or not?
Our own struggle with the intimacy of Jesus has very little to do with God most of the time. What we understand and what we have experienced as "intimacy" in this world is so often marked by disappointment, shame, hurt and betrayal that when we encounter the reality of the burning furnace of divine love, we recoil - we do not know how to accept it or what to say. We fear the exposure that comes when someone comes close to us, sees through the layers of fig leaves that we like Adam and Eve adorn our nakedness with, and offers to tell us everything we have ever done. Some of us have been hurt when we have become so vulnerable to another. Marriages fail. Lovers leave. Leaders betray. Those to whom we give our hearts reject them, or, seeing the ugliness we've taken so long to work up the courage to reveal, exploit us. And we have undoubtedly done the same to others.
So often, such exposure is not a source of living water welling up in us, as true love was meant to me. It is more like the exposure of radiation in the waters of Japan, which even an ocean away, we fear will contaminate us, and kill us.
To stand naked and exposed before the God of the universe is a terrifying thing. To stand thus before our fellow human beings equally so. And so we clothe ourselves in apathy, in defensiveness, we avoid intimacy, or we commodify, commercialize and objectify it, making it the stuff of steamy Hollywood love scenes and cheap tabloid cover pages, distancing ourselves from the awkwardness and painfulness of flesh meeting flesh, of brokenness encountering brokenness, of the awkward exposures and painful shames of our own lives. And so we come to believe that God will look at us the same way. We define the intimacy of God by our experience of the world, rather than letting the lie that is the world's version of intimacy be smashed by the truth that is the love of the Father for us.
The intimacy Jesus shares with our woman today is far from pain-free. In some instances, depending on how you sound the words as you read, Jesus can sound down-right cruel. Layer by layer, Jesus undresses her very identity as Samaritan, exposing her as an outsider, pointing to her people's separation from the Chosen People, flirtatiously offering her "living water" while at the same time dancing playfully away from her when her longing seems genuinely aroused. And then, the killer blow: "what you have said is true: not only have you been divorced five times, but now you're also living with someone."
And yet, we must look to the woman's reaction to these difficult words. For, unlike Nicodemus, meeting under the covering of night to cloak the awkwardness of his intimacy with Jesus, in broad daylight, this woman is captivated by the promises and possibilities before her. Unlike the pharisee who made his living by being holy, this woman knows desire; she knows longing; she knows a creep when she meets him, and she knows genuineness too. "I perceive that you are a prophet" she responds. Tell me more. This woman is truthful - we might say, justified - and anticipates Jesus' words: true worshippers worship in Spirit and in TRUTH. This woman knows a real man when she meets him. She knows there is intimacy here to be had. She does not back down from her exposure, or her nakedness before the penetrating gaze of this Jew; she goes deeper.
And in doing so, in allowing herself to be intimate with Jesus, Jesus in turn, becomes intimate with her. Jesus does not shame her, as so many would, with the knowledge of her sin. Even his jabs at her community's religious life are not meant as exclusionary, but point to the wonderful mystery of something radically new. For in the time that Jesus says is NOW HERE, the worship which has been dressed and covered up by the trappings of the exclusivity of the temple will be unveiled and exposed for all nations and peoples who worship in spirit and truth. The nakedness of God, and the possibility of intimacy through the Spirit, will be extended not just to the Jews, but through THIS Jew, to all. God's intimacy will overflow into the world, without bounds.
Furthermore, Jesus reveals to the woman the deepest intimacy yet told in John's Gospel. The woman has been revealed intimately to Jesus; now Jesus reveals, intimately to her, that "I am he, the one standing before you." Here is God, the divinity, the Logos, the Word made Flesh, the One who is One with the Father - undressed, naked, and revealed, to a foreign woman of ill-repute, on the edge of a well, in broad daylight. The woman is rapt and enchanted. They lean close. There is electricity here. If this were a secular film, we would expect the scene to fade away as Jesus wraps her up in his arms and carrries her off to the Hotel Samaria. Something passes between these two that is unimaginable to John's readers - and shocking to the disciples when they return.
Of course, had they been reading their Hebrew Scriptures, the disciples and we should not be shocked. They would remember that in the love story of God with God's people, romances always happen by water! In the Great Vigil of Easter which we anticipate, we are told how God's love hovered over the waters and created the world; how God placed Adam and Eve by the rivers of Eden; how God led God's beloved people through the waters of the Red Sea into liberation and covenant; how God provided for them at the rock of Meribah; how in the Song of Songs, the lovers' eyes meet like doves beside the rushing waters; how in Christ's death, water flows with blood from His side; how in baptism, we are each incorporated into the love story of God. The story of God with God's people is one of both physical waters and of spiritual waters welling up within this life together, overflowing into the world.
Nor would the disciples themselves have overlooked the most obvious love story here in the background: the story of how, when Abraham desired a wife for his son Isaac, he sent his servant to a foreign land, where he waited by a well for the woman who would bring water for him and his camels. This would be a suitable bride for Isaac, and would become the mother of Jacob, of Israel. The disciples knew that love affairs begin at wells. It should not have surprised them, then, that Jesus, the lover of the world, should be intimate here, with a woman, inviting her into His life, and embracing her into His story. She is, in a sense, to be the bride of Christ, and the mother of a new kind of Israel, one arising from the Jew Jesus, to embrace the world in God's story of His romance with His creation.
Lent is about longing. It is about desiring, thirsting for God, anticipating the Vigil of Easter at which we not only recount again this unbelievable story of the intimate God who redefines our understandings of love, of acceptance, and of intimacy, and draws us near as God's family. As some of you know, Lent was not originally a time of mortification of the flesh, of shame at sin, of cloaking ourselves further in fig leaves and works; rather, in the early church, Lent was a time of great anticipation as candidates, catechumens, were prepared for baptism. Like the woman at the well, they were submitted to public scrutiny, asked to profess the faith to the entire community, to confess sins, even to be exorcised of demons and of evil spirits! Today's Gospel reading was selected by the church as representing the stages of intimacy through which a new believer had to pass on her way to the living waters of baptism, where in spirit and truth, she would go down into the waters, die to the world's illusions of intimacy and love, and rise up, fully immersed, fully washed, into the light and the warmth and truth of the love of God, the grace in which we stand, justified by faith in Christ who on the cross came to die, not for the righteous, but for sinners.
And at that vigil, she would be naked. Literally. The church could not truly read the words "Behold, if anyone is in Christ, she is a new creation - everything old has passed away, behold! everything has become new!" unless symbolicaly and physically, that person also passed through the exposure and the intimacy of being before God, as humans were meant to be in the beginning, without shame, without guilt, without fear of exploitation, to arise and be clothed in the white robe of Christ.
Awkward? Not to them. Only for us.
In Christ, God desires this kind of deep intimacy with us. In baptism, God has poured the love of the Holy Spirit into our hearts, and in baptism, Christ becomes unified with the believer. We have UNION with Christ! Martin Luther used to say that the union between believer and Jesus is so close that even the most intimate sexual union between a married couple (see Eph.5) is but a shadow, a figure, a foretaste, of how close Jesus is with us. Jesus is REALLY within you, really that close. It is not just a story we tell, not just nice words we read, not just a nice set of imagery. The one who lived and died and rose for you dwells intimately in your heart, such that you are now one flesh with the very Creator of the Universe! This is the reality of what it means to be baptized - you have been and are becoming transformed - dare I say, divinized? - by the gift of the intimate and personal presence of the Divine Lover in your hearts!
Sound crazy? In our Gospel, notice what happens to the woman. When the gawking disciples show up, she does not allow shame to dominate her. Rather, she leaves behind her old water jar (a symbol of the death she has undergone, perhaps?) and rushes to tell the people of her village, who undoubtedly are well aware of her extracurricular activities, and takes what was one a source of shame and makes it the very stuff of her proclamation and witness! "He told me everything I have ever done!" Shame has given way to freedom! The sinner has become the saint! The prostitute, the preacher.
And notice her words: "come and see!" The woman uses the very words that Jesus Himself had used to call his own disciples. There is a sense in which already, this woman has been so close, so intimate with Jesus, that she has already taken on Jesus' own life and words, and is doing that which Jesus tells his disciples is his true food: "to do the will of the one who sent me."
If this woman, who partakes of the first fruits of the inbreaking kingdom of God in Christ Jesus, is already so united, so faithful, so transformed, so intimate with Jesus, how much more are we, who are baptized and who live in the time of the ripe harvest and white fields, united with Christ and so called to take on his nature, his words, his life, his love? We are literally called to become one flesh, one spirit, with this new life, with these living waters that well up within us. Just as in baptism, we are ordained as ministers of the gospel in the priesthood of all believers, so, enraptued and ravished by the intimate love of our divine Bridegroom, we too are called to follow this woman's example, to go forth, and invite others to "Come and see" this kind of love, to witness it, not only in the Words we proclaim, but also, in becoming the kind of community which can truly call itself the Bride of Christ.
We are called to become the kind of family of God that can see our neighbor's nakedness, his shame, his sin and guilt, and who will welcome him into the story of God. To be people who, because we have been honest, and intimate, and courageous, and willing to be exposed to and with one another, who do not hide behind our sins and our shames, but rather confess them, forgive them, and experience together transformation, can go and do likewise, extending such a Gospel welcome to all. We are called to be a family who embodies this Gospel in the way that we do not shame one another, in the way we do not betray one another, in the way in which guilt has no place within our love of one another. We are called to be a people who can see each other's awkwardness, and meet it, not with words of condemnation, but with gentleness, kindness, peace, patience, and love.
We are invited to take up the gift of new life, of a new nature, of a new love, of an intimate union, and to use it, to invite others to become part of the story of God with God's people, a story made possible because Jesus Christ lives in our hearts, a story we live out in this community of faith, in our intimacy with one another.
Awkward? Its so much easier to just say, "well, God accepts me just where I am." Why do we need such a transformation? But if we are honest with ourselves, "God accepts me as I am" is pure hell. It is indeed true - God does not shame us, God does not look upon our sin with condemnation in Christ, and God will always be patient and forgiving and loving. But in Christ's love, God does not touch us once, tell us an empty "I love you," and then leave us. Rather, God is in it for life. God comes close to us in Christ, through the Spirit, and chooses to be united in intimate love with us in our hearts - we literally become a new reality, a new being, a new nature, a new creation. Each of us contains so much divine power, so much divine love, so much divine potential, and if we are willing not to hide from that gift, but to use it, to live out of it, to LOVE out of it, then we truly can become, like the Samaritan woman, a source of living water for others. God accepts us where we are at - and then also transforms us so that we do not have to stay there, but so that we can grow deeper roots in Christ, and so, delve more deeply into what true intimacy is.
What in your life defines the intimacy of God? What in your life keeps you from intimacy with God, from intimacy with others? Today, as you come forward to receive the most intimate sign of God's love, the very body and blood of Jesus Christ which will be taken into your body, uniting your flesh with his, I invite you: bring forward your shame. Bring forward your betrayals. Bring forward your fears. Bring forward your guilt. Bring forward your feelings of being judged, of being exploited, of being abused. Bring forward these things, take them off, lay them on the altar, and come naked before the one who sits beside you at this well of life and longs to whisper in your ear, "I am he - the one that loves you." It definitely sounds awkward to us. But give it a shot. And perhaps, I pray, you may discover that in coming undressed and exposed, as Adam and Eve, to this feast, you will also find God, naked and exposed, in the love of Jesus Christ.
The thirsty pilgrims of ancient Israel once quarreled, asking, "is the LORD really among us, or not?" Centuries later, a poet of the psalms who was himself a lover, wrote, "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the Holy place where the most high dwells; God is within her, she will not fall." In Christ we have found this river; God is within you, and God will not fail you, will never make you feel ashamed, will never betray you. Rather, by the Spirit, Christ dwells in our hearts. Lovingly. Intimately. Forever.
Go forth, like this woman. Live in this intimacy. Live in this gift. Live as an agent and a lover of this new creation. Worship in spirit and truth. And invite others to come, to see, and to experience this love for themselves. Amen.
In memoriam Peter J. Gomes, witness, teacher and friend. May his soul rest in peace. Soli dei Gloria.
St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church (Durham, NC)
Exodus 17.1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5.1-11
John 4.1-42
(Note: It is always hard to reproduce, after the fact, the event-quality of extemporaneous preaching. Each "performance" is live and therefore unique. I have done my best to re-capture from the tape of memory the gist of things. The sermon itself went about 18 minutes, but people seemed to think it was alright!)
Well, this is awkward. The disciples return from grabbing a sandwich from the Sychar Subway to find their teacher, the Messiah, the most holy, pure and almighty Son of God sitting by the well with...a woman. And, of course, not just any woman. But a Samaritan...woman. In the publicity of broad daylight! They do not yet know what Jesus has drawn forth about her disreputable sexual history. But what they do know, and what they see, is Jesus, leaning so close to a strange female at a well, almost whispering into her ear, gently and ever so intimately, "I am he."
So of course, the disciples do what most of us do when we stumble upon something so intimate, so real, and so awkward to us. We get embarrassed. We get tongue-tied. We avoid what is before us, awkwardly stare at our shoes, or try to make small talk. Yet John records their thoughts, and he might as well have added one of them saying, "why don't you two get a room?" As it is, once the woman, who is undoubtedly no stranger to the scorn and stares of scoffers and saints, pays them no heed. She leaps up to rush home and proclaim to others boldly, "look! someone who has told me everything I have ever done! Come and see!" The woman's boldness, her freedom, stands in bold contrast to the schmucks back at the well who can only really muster up small talk: "so, um, Jesus, um...want a bite of my sub?"Incidentally, I think the disciples must have been Lutherans. Let's be honest, we are TERRIFIED of intimacy. Just look at the first ten rows of pews - EMPTY!!! And as we all know, its most likely that way in 99% of Lutheran churches across the country right now! I'd like to think its because you're afraid I'm going to launch a sermonic spit-bomb on you. At Southern, its the exact same way. First five pews? Empty. I grew up sitting in the front row (pastors' grandkid!), and so I like to risk a sally forth into no man's land on occasion and occupy the first pew beneath the pulpit. Often, the presider or preacher will look at me kind of nervously and back their chair up a few feet - I swear they must be thinking: "does he have a bomb strapped around his chest?" "What is he DOING so close?" Awkwardness.
For a tradition of faith which values the idea of God made flesh, of God descending from the lofty heights of distance deity to come near in feeble flesh, we sure struggle with the idea of intimacy with God. Words and slogans like "God is love," "Jesus loves and died for me," and "we need to love and serve our neighbor" are well-intentioned and well-wrought, and yet, if we are all honest with ourselves, we like to keep such divine love, such "Jesus is my boyfriend" talk at arms' length. Its good for evangelicals and Christian radio. But I'll stay as far away from that altar until I HAVE to go up for communion.
We are not unlike the disciples, stumbling upon an awkwardly intimate encounter between Jesus and a woman at a well. In some ways, we are not unlike the ancient Israelites, asking the testing, honest, difficult question in our hearts: "is the LORD really among us or not?" This seems to be John's concern in writing too. Grand theological claims like the Prologue, the clearing of the temple, the debates with the Pharisees, the puzzling locutions of "the Father and I are One" are juxtaposed throughout the narrative with moments of stirring intimacy: Jesus whispering with his mother at wedding; Jesus conversing with a sage at night; Jesus at a well with a woman; Jesus touching the eyes of a blind man with his spit. Is this one, so fleshly, so earthly, so intimate, the same as the Creator of the Universe? Can divinity be so awkwardly embodied? Is this the LORD among us, or not?
Our own struggle with the intimacy of Jesus has very little to do with God most of the time. What we understand and what we have experienced as "intimacy" in this world is so often marked by disappointment, shame, hurt and betrayal that when we encounter the reality of the burning furnace of divine love, we recoil - we do not know how to accept it or what to say. We fear the exposure that comes when someone comes close to us, sees through the layers of fig leaves that we like Adam and Eve adorn our nakedness with, and offers to tell us everything we have ever done. Some of us have been hurt when we have become so vulnerable to another. Marriages fail. Lovers leave. Leaders betray. Those to whom we give our hearts reject them, or, seeing the ugliness we've taken so long to work up the courage to reveal, exploit us. And we have undoubtedly done the same to others.
So often, such exposure is not a source of living water welling up in us, as true love was meant to me. It is more like the exposure of radiation in the waters of Japan, which even an ocean away, we fear will contaminate us, and kill us.
To stand naked and exposed before the God of the universe is a terrifying thing. To stand thus before our fellow human beings equally so. And so we clothe ourselves in apathy, in defensiveness, we avoid intimacy, or we commodify, commercialize and objectify it, making it the stuff of steamy Hollywood love scenes and cheap tabloid cover pages, distancing ourselves from the awkwardness and painfulness of flesh meeting flesh, of brokenness encountering brokenness, of the awkward exposures and painful shames of our own lives. And so we come to believe that God will look at us the same way. We define the intimacy of God by our experience of the world, rather than letting the lie that is the world's version of intimacy be smashed by the truth that is the love of the Father for us.
The intimacy Jesus shares with our woman today is far from pain-free. In some instances, depending on how you sound the words as you read, Jesus can sound down-right cruel. Layer by layer, Jesus undresses her very identity as Samaritan, exposing her as an outsider, pointing to her people's separation from the Chosen People, flirtatiously offering her "living water" while at the same time dancing playfully away from her when her longing seems genuinely aroused. And then, the killer blow: "what you have said is true: not only have you been divorced five times, but now you're also living with someone."
And yet, we must look to the woman's reaction to these difficult words. For, unlike Nicodemus, meeting under the covering of night to cloak the awkwardness of his intimacy with Jesus, in broad daylight, this woman is captivated by the promises and possibilities before her. Unlike the pharisee who made his living by being holy, this woman knows desire; she knows longing; she knows a creep when she meets him, and she knows genuineness too. "I perceive that you are a prophet" she responds. Tell me more. This woman is truthful - we might say, justified - and anticipates Jesus' words: true worshippers worship in Spirit and in TRUTH. This woman knows a real man when she meets him. She knows there is intimacy here to be had. She does not back down from her exposure, or her nakedness before the penetrating gaze of this Jew; she goes deeper.
And in doing so, in allowing herself to be intimate with Jesus, Jesus in turn, becomes intimate with her. Jesus does not shame her, as so many would, with the knowledge of her sin. Even his jabs at her community's religious life are not meant as exclusionary, but point to the wonderful mystery of something radically new. For in the time that Jesus says is NOW HERE, the worship which has been dressed and covered up by the trappings of the exclusivity of the temple will be unveiled and exposed for all nations and peoples who worship in spirit and truth. The nakedness of God, and the possibility of intimacy through the Spirit, will be extended not just to the Jews, but through THIS Jew, to all. God's intimacy will overflow into the world, without bounds.
Furthermore, Jesus reveals to the woman the deepest intimacy yet told in John's Gospel. The woman has been revealed intimately to Jesus; now Jesus reveals, intimately to her, that "I am he, the one standing before you." Here is God, the divinity, the Logos, the Word made Flesh, the One who is One with the Father - undressed, naked, and revealed, to a foreign woman of ill-repute, on the edge of a well, in broad daylight. The woman is rapt and enchanted. They lean close. There is electricity here. If this were a secular film, we would expect the scene to fade away as Jesus wraps her up in his arms and carrries her off to the Hotel Samaria. Something passes between these two that is unimaginable to John's readers - and shocking to the disciples when they return.
Of course, had they been reading their Hebrew Scriptures, the disciples and we should not be shocked. They would remember that in the love story of God with God's people, romances always happen by water! In the Great Vigil of Easter which we anticipate, we are told how God's love hovered over the waters and created the world; how God placed Adam and Eve by the rivers of Eden; how God led God's beloved people through the waters of the Red Sea into liberation and covenant; how God provided for them at the rock of Meribah; how in the Song of Songs, the lovers' eyes meet like doves beside the rushing waters; how in Christ's death, water flows with blood from His side; how in baptism, we are each incorporated into the love story of God. The story of God with God's people is one of both physical waters and of spiritual waters welling up within this life together, overflowing into the world.
Nor would the disciples themselves have overlooked the most obvious love story here in the background: the story of how, when Abraham desired a wife for his son Isaac, he sent his servant to a foreign land, where he waited by a well for the woman who would bring water for him and his camels. This would be a suitable bride for Isaac, and would become the mother of Jacob, of Israel. The disciples knew that love affairs begin at wells. It should not have surprised them, then, that Jesus, the lover of the world, should be intimate here, with a woman, inviting her into His life, and embracing her into His story. She is, in a sense, to be the bride of Christ, and the mother of a new kind of Israel, one arising from the Jew Jesus, to embrace the world in God's story of His romance with His creation.
Lent is about longing. It is about desiring, thirsting for God, anticipating the Vigil of Easter at which we not only recount again this unbelievable story of the intimate God who redefines our understandings of love, of acceptance, and of intimacy, and draws us near as God's family. As some of you know, Lent was not originally a time of mortification of the flesh, of shame at sin, of cloaking ourselves further in fig leaves and works; rather, in the early church, Lent was a time of great anticipation as candidates, catechumens, were prepared for baptism. Like the woman at the well, they were submitted to public scrutiny, asked to profess the faith to the entire community, to confess sins, even to be exorcised of demons and of evil spirits! Today's Gospel reading was selected by the church as representing the stages of intimacy through which a new believer had to pass on her way to the living waters of baptism, where in spirit and truth, she would go down into the waters, die to the world's illusions of intimacy and love, and rise up, fully immersed, fully washed, into the light and the warmth and truth of the love of God, the grace in which we stand, justified by faith in Christ who on the cross came to die, not for the righteous, but for sinners.
And at that vigil, she would be naked. Literally. The church could not truly read the words "Behold, if anyone is in Christ, she is a new creation - everything old has passed away, behold! everything has become new!" unless symbolicaly and physically, that person also passed through the exposure and the intimacy of being before God, as humans were meant to be in the beginning, without shame, without guilt, without fear of exploitation, to arise and be clothed in the white robe of Christ.
Awkward? Not to them. Only for us.
In Christ, God desires this kind of deep intimacy with us. In baptism, God has poured the love of the Holy Spirit into our hearts, and in baptism, Christ becomes unified with the believer. We have UNION with Christ! Martin Luther used to say that the union between believer and Jesus is so close that even the most intimate sexual union between a married couple (see Eph.5) is but a shadow, a figure, a foretaste, of how close Jesus is with us. Jesus is REALLY within you, really that close. It is not just a story we tell, not just nice words we read, not just a nice set of imagery. The one who lived and died and rose for you dwells intimately in your heart, such that you are now one flesh with the very Creator of the Universe! This is the reality of what it means to be baptized - you have been and are becoming transformed - dare I say, divinized? - by the gift of the intimate and personal presence of the Divine Lover in your hearts!
Sound crazy? In our Gospel, notice what happens to the woman. When the gawking disciples show up, she does not allow shame to dominate her. Rather, she leaves behind her old water jar (a symbol of the death she has undergone, perhaps?) and rushes to tell the people of her village, who undoubtedly are well aware of her extracurricular activities, and takes what was one a source of shame and makes it the very stuff of her proclamation and witness! "He told me everything I have ever done!" Shame has given way to freedom! The sinner has become the saint! The prostitute, the preacher.
And notice her words: "come and see!" The woman uses the very words that Jesus Himself had used to call his own disciples. There is a sense in which already, this woman has been so close, so intimate with Jesus, that she has already taken on Jesus' own life and words, and is doing that which Jesus tells his disciples is his true food: "to do the will of the one who sent me."
If this woman, who partakes of the first fruits of the inbreaking kingdom of God in Christ Jesus, is already so united, so faithful, so transformed, so intimate with Jesus, how much more are we, who are baptized and who live in the time of the ripe harvest and white fields, united with Christ and so called to take on his nature, his words, his life, his love? We are literally called to become one flesh, one spirit, with this new life, with these living waters that well up within us. Just as in baptism, we are ordained as ministers of the gospel in the priesthood of all believers, so, enraptued and ravished by the intimate love of our divine Bridegroom, we too are called to follow this woman's example, to go forth, and invite others to "Come and see" this kind of love, to witness it, not only in the Words we proclaim, but also, in becoming the kind of community which can truly call itself the Bride of Christ.We are called to become the kind of family of God that can see our neighbor's nakedness, his shame, his sin and guilt, and who will welcome him into the story of God. To be people who, because we have been honest, and intimate, and courageous, and willing to be exposed to and with one another, who do not hide behind our sins and our shames, but rather confess them, forgive them, and experience together transformation, can go and do likewise, extending such a Gospel welcome to all. We are called to be a family who embodies this Gospel in the way that we do not shame one another, in the way we do not betray one another, in the way in which guilt has no place within our love of one another. We are called to be a people who can see each other's awkwardness, and meet it, not with words of condemnation, but with gentleness, kindness, peace, patience, and love.
We are invited to take up the gift of new life, of a new nature, of a new love, of an intimate union, and to use it, to invite others to become part of the story of God with God's people, a story made possible because Jesus Christ lives in our hearts, a story we live out in this community of faith, in our intimacy with one another.
Awkward? Its so much easier to just say, "well, God accepts me just where I am." Why do we need such a transformation? But if we are honest with ourselves, "God accepts me as I am" is pure hell. It is indeed true - God does not shame us, God does not look upon our sin with condemnation in Christ, and God will always be patient and forgiving and loving. But in Christ's love, God does not touch us once, tell us an empty "I love you," and then leave us. Rather, God is in it for life. God comes close to us in Christ, through the Spirit, and chooses to be united in intimate love with us in our hearts - we literally become a new reality, a new being, a new nature, a new creation. Each of us contains so much divine power, so much divine love, so much divine potential, and if we are willing not to hide from that gift, but to use it, to live out of it, to LOVE out of it, then we truly can become, like the Samaritan woman, a source of living water for others. God accepts us where we are at - and then also transforms us so that we do not have to stay there, but so that we can grow deeper roots in Christ, and so, delve more deeply into what true intimacy is.
What in your life defines the intimacy of God? What in your life keeps you from intimacy with God, from intimacy with others? Today, as you come forward to receive the most intimate sign of God's love, the very body and blood of Jesus Christ which will be taken into your body, uniting your flesh with his, I invite you: bring forward your shame. Bring forward your betrayals. Bring forward your fears. Bring forward your guilt. Bring forward your feelings of being judged, of being exploited, of being abused. Bring forward these things, take them off, lay them on the altar, and come naked before the one who sits beside you at this well of life and longs to whisper in your ear, "I am he - the one that loves you." It definitely sounds awkward to us. But give it a shot. And perhaps, I pray, you may discover that in coming undressed and exposed, as Adam and Eve, to this feast, you will also find God, naked and exposed, in the love of Jesus Christ.
The thirsty pilgrims of ancient Israel once quarreled, asking, "is the LORD really among us, or not?" Centuries later, a poet of the psalms who was himself a lover, wrote, "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the Holy place where the most high dwells; God is within her, she will not fall." In Christ we have found this river; God is within you, and God will not fail you, will never make you feel ashamed, will never betray you. Rather, by the Spirit, Christ dwells in our hearts. Lovingly. Intimately. Forever.
Go forth, like this woman. Live in this intimacy. Live in this gift. Live as an agent and a lover of this new creation. Worship in spirit and truth. And invite others to come, to see, and to experience this love for themselves. Amen.
In memoriam Peter J. Gomes, witness, teacher and friend. May his soul rest in peace. Soli dei Gloria.
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