Oh No! He's Back!

 

This is a sermon I gave a number of years ago. I was going to write something on the same theme, then I remembered this sermon. I decided to post it instead.

Oh No! He’s Back! - An Easter Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 8, 2012

 

Scripture: Mark 16:1-8

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

We Christians so love to celebrate Easter. It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian year. It’s the biggest celebration of the Christian life. It really is something to celebrate. Jesus the Christ, the one whom we confess to be our Lord and Savior, was dead; and then somehow he wasn’t. It wasn’t possible, of course. It was just true, that’s all. Jesus Christ rose up from the grave. The grave couldn’t hold him. Death couldn’t stop him. What could be better than that? Nothing! Nothing at all could be better than that. So we celebrate, and rightly so.

But did you notice something about our reading of Mark’s version of the Easter story just now? Did you notice how it ends? Mary Magdalene and two other women come to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body with spices according to the burial customs of their time and place. To their amazement the large stone that had sealed the entrance to the tomb had been rolled away, and a young man dressed in white tells them that Jesus isn’t there, that he is risen. Then he tells them to go tell the disciples that Jesus, the risen Christ, would see them back in Galilee. The women see that Jesus’ tomb indeed is empty. Then Mark says: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark 16:8

Here’s something you need to know about the Gospel of Mark, if you don’t already. That’s how the Gospel really ends, with the women who witnessed the empty tomb saying nothing to anyone about Jesus being raised from the dead because they were terrified and amazed. If you look at the end of Mark in any Bible you will see that there are more verses there after Mark 16:8, but it’s real clear that someone else added those verses later. The way the author of Mark originally told the story it ended with an empty tomb and the women who saw the empty tomb saying nothing to anyone for, as Mark says, “terror and amazement had seized them.”

And here’s another thing about Mark’s Gospel to put alongside that odd story of the women being told to tell of Christ’s resurrection but not doing it. In Mark’s telling of it, during Jesus’ lifetime Jesus tells several people who have experienced him as the Messiah not to tell anyone, but they do. Very early in the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus cures a man with a skin disease. After he does he says to the man “see that you say nothing to anyone….” But Mark then tells us that the man whom Jesus had cured “went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word….” Mark 3:43-45 In another story Jesus restores hearing to a man who was deaf. Mark says that Jesus ordered the man who had had his hearing restored and those who had witnessed the event “to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.” Mark 7:31-37 In Mark, during Jesus’ life he told people not to say anything about him, but they did. After he had risen from the grave a heavenly messenger told the women to say that he had risen, but they didn’t.

It’s odd, isn’t it. We ask why? Why did people Jesus had healed tell about him though he told them not to but the women at the empty tomb didn’t tell about him though they had been told to do so? I don’t claim to be certain about why Mark told the story that way, but here’s an explanation that makes sense to me. Perhaps it will make sense to you too.

People proclaimed Jesus during his lifetime, though they had been told not to, because then, during his life when he was healing people, he was the kind of Messiah they expected, and the Messiah they expected wasn’t scary. He did good things for people without making any real demands on the people he healed, only that they not tell anyone about it. He was safe. He wasn’t scary. He did wonderful things for people; and his request that they keep quiet about him didn’t make any sense to them, just as it doesn’t make much sense to most of us. So they talked. So they proclaimed him to all who would listen.

The women at the empty tomb didn’t proclaim his resurrection although they had been told to proclaim it because, I think, they knew that while the Messiah they expected wasn’t scary, the Messiah they got was. Mark tells us as much. He says the women said nothing because “terror and amazement had seized them.” The amazement part is easy enough to understand. It isn’t every day someone who is truly dead gets up and walks out of the grave. The amazement part is easy to get, but terror? Really? Terror? Why terror? The Greek word that is translated here (in the NRSV) as terror means something like “trembling with fear.” (In some translations the word is translated as “trembling.”) The women said nothing because they were too afraid, too shook up, to talk. That can only have been, it seems to me, because they knew that this Jesus rising from the grave wasn’t just something to celebrate. It really was something to fear.

Why was it something to fear? Because it was precisely Jesus who rose from the grave. Jesus, the one who healed people, yes; but also the one who taught the people a new vision. A new vision of God as One who demands justice for the poor. Who demands that we beat our swords into ploughshares and learn war no more. Who got himself executed as a threat to the Roman Empire—a threat to all empire—with his vision of God’s alternative realm of compassion, justice, and peace. The women were afraid because they had known Jesus all too well during his life.

And now there could be no more doubt. God had raised Jesus from the grave. They knew what that meant. It meant he really had been the one. Yes, he had been executed as a common political criminal; and that should have meant he’d been wrong, that they had been wrong, that he wasn’t the promised one they had thought he was. But now, now he had risen; and that had to mean something. It had to mean a lot. It had to mean he truly was the Messiah, God’s chosen and anointed one. The one who really did show us God in the flesh. Who really did show us God in a new way, a powerful way, a way that couldn’t be denied any longer. A way that changed everything. A way that absolutely demanded a response. That demanded nothing less than transformation. Transformation of their lives and transformation of their world. That meant they couldn’t go on living as before. They lived in the Roman kingdom to be sure, but now they knew that they had to live the kingdom life of the Kingdom of God, a life very different from life the way the world knows it. A life that denies the claims of the world and its kingdoms, that subverts the kingdoms of the world by showing life the way God intends it to be as opposed to the way it is in the kingdoms of the world. No wonder they were scared. We would have been scared too.

I recently read a suggestion that instead of saying “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” today we should be saying “Oh No! He’s Back!” (In Robin Meyers book The Underground Church.) Yes, Christ’s resurrection is great good news. Yes, Christ’s resurrection is God’s assurance to us that death is not the end. We’re right when we sing in the great hymn with which we began this service (Christ the Lord is Risen Today) “Where O death is now thy sting? Where thy victory O grave?” If that’s all there were to the empty tomb we’d have no reason to be afraid. We could just celebrate the great gift God has given us in Christ’s resurrection with no second thoughts.

Mary Magdalene and the other women who saw the empty tomb knew better. They knew that that’s not all there is to Christ’s resurrection. That’s why they were afraid. They knew that Christ’s resurrection had turned their world on its head. Everything was upside down now. Death had become life. The executed one had become God’s Messiah, God’s prophet of a new and radically different way of life. Death had lost its sting, and now they had no more excuses. Now all the reasons they could give for not following Jesus into the transformed life of the Kingdom of God rang hollow. Now they knew what they had to do.

They had to do what we know the earliest Christians in fact did do. They had to live a different life. They had to care for the poor. They had to refuse to worship the Roman Emperor. Their men had to refuse to serve in the Roman army, or in any army. They had to proclaim Jesus Christ is Lord! And they knew that when they did they were also proclaiming “And Caesar isn’t!” Caesar wasn’t going to like that, and Caesar killed people he didn’t like. Oh, there was plenty of reason for the women to be afraid.

There is plenty of reason for us to be afraid too, for us to say “Oh No! He’s Back!” along with our “He is risen! He is risen indeed!” There’s plenty of reason for us to be afraid too because all of those things that the women knew Jesus’ resurrection meant for them, Jesus’ resurrection means for us too. Jesus’ resurrection means life. It means life beyond this life, but it also means a radically transformed life here and now. It means that we too have no excuses for not living the life of the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdoms of the world. It means that we too have no excuses for not living lives of justice and peace. Lives of working with the Holy Spirit to make the Kingdom of God real on earth. To live into the prayer we say every Sunday: Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Like the people Jesus ministered to during his life we may want a safe Messiah who only heals and saves. The Messiah we got heals and saves to be sure, but he also expects. He also demands. He expects and demands a lot. And that’s scary. And so we shout Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! And if we really know what the means we also whisper Oh No! He’s Back! Amen.

 

No, Mr. President, It Wasn't

 

No, Mr. President, It Wasn’t

April 2, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I like former president Jimmy Carter a lot. He is easily our greatest former president. I fully support the equal rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ people and have for decades. Nonetheless there is something that keeps popping up on my Facebook feed about President Carter and homosexuality that simply isn’t correct. It is a statement attributed to former president Carter that reads;

 

Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born, and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things—he never said that gay people should be condemned.

 

There is much in this statement that is true. Jesus indeed never said a word about homosexuality. He never said that gay people should be condemned. Those things are true and important. One thing President Carter says, however, is not correct. He says that homosexuality was well known in the ancient world. No, Mr. President, it wasn’t. President Carter is just wrong about that.

To understand how that statement is wrong we need to make a crucial distinction. It is the distinction between same gender sexual acts and homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. The ancient world knew about homosexual acts. Leviticus would not have condemned them if it didn’t. See Leviticus 18:22. Sexual acts between men were relatively common among the ancient Greeks, something the author of Leviticus may or may not have known. The ancient world certainly knew that sometimes men perform sexual acts with other men.

It didn’t, however, know about homosexuality. By that I mean that it had no understanding that a person being homosexual is a natural type of human sexuality for some men and for some women. That understanding is a modern phenomenon. The word homosexuality wasn’t even coined until the nineteenth century.[1] Of course Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality. It never occurred to anyone in his world that sexual orientation toward a person of the same gender could be natural for some people.

We see that the world of the Bible considered only sexual acts between women and men to be natural in the only passage in the Bible that mentions sexual acts between two women. At Romans 1:18-23 Paul condemns the Gentiles for idolatry. He says that they could and should have known of the one true God because God is revealed in everything God has made. Yet instead of knowing and worshipping the one true God the Gentiles “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” Romans 1:23. They “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator….” Romans 1:25.

Paul then discusses what he considers to be the punishment God inflicted on the Gentiles for their idolatry. He writes:

 

 

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. Romans 1:26-27.

 

I’m not sure what he means by “the due penalty for their error,” but notice Paul’s use of the words natural and unnatural. He clearly believed that only what we call heterosexual relations were natural for everyone. We know that isn’t true. The ancient world didn’t.

So former president Carter is correct that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. More importantly he never said anything about sexual acts between people of the same gender. We can assume, I think that, he knew that such acts occurred. Even though the ancient world didn’t have the concept, there surely were homosexual people in Jesus’ time and place. Yet Jesus said not one word about such sexual acts. We can safely assume that either he didn’t think them immoral or at least that he didn’t consider them worth talking about. President Carter is wrong about the ancient world knowing homosexuality. He is absolutely correct that Jesus never condemned same gender sexual acts or the people who engaged in them. We who confess him to be our Lord and Savior must never condemn them either.

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[1] http//plato. Stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality.

And the Curtain of the Temple Was Torn in Two

 

And the Curtain of the Temple Was Torn in Two

April 2, 2021

 

Today is Good Friday. Good Friday is the seemingly odd name we give to the day on which we especially commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the one we confess to be Lord and Savior. It is the most solemn day of the Christian year. There are several unique things about Christianity that make it different from all other faith traditions, the Incarnation and the Trinity among them. Yet perhaps the one thing that most distinguishes Christianity from other faith traditions is the truth that we follow a man who did not die a natural death. The founding figures of Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism all lived more or less lengthy lives and died of natural causes. Jesus didn’t. The ruling authorities of his time and place, the Romans not the Jews, executed him as a political criminal. Or maybe to them he was only a nuisance and a potential threat to their rule rather than an actual one. Either way, our Lord and Savior was executed, killed by the legal and military authorities of his day, and killed in the most brutal, miserable way those authorities used to kill people, crucifixion. The founding figures of other faiths died natural deaths. Jesus was murdered.

That Jesus was executed as a criminal creates a particular problem for Christianity. If we can’t find saving significance in Jesus’ crucifixion our whole religion is a sham. It’s a fraud. Jesus’ crucifixion having no meaning would mean that we follow a man who was a total loser, a false messiah, a man who claimed to be and who we confess to be something that he was not. Yet Christians have always found salvific meaning in Jesus’ death. For nearly the last one thousand years, though not so much before that, western Christianity has found the meaning in Christ’s crucifixion that Christ was paying the price that had to be paid to God before God could or would forgive human sin. I reject that interpretation of Jesus’ death completely. I won’t go into the reasons I reject it here. For a rather lengthy discussion of my reasons see chapter 8 of my book Liberating Christianity.[1] I want to focus here not on critiquing  a widely held but I belief indefensible understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion but on the explanation of that meaning that the Gospel of Mark gives in just a few words as part of its story of Jesus’ Passion. It is a powerful explanation that discloses the true meaning of Jesus’ death to us.

Mark of course tells a story of Jesus’ crucifixion. He had to. Every Christian knew that Jesus had been crucified. Mark knew that, and he apparently also knew that Jesus’ crucifixion has profound saving significance. He expressed that significance in these few words: “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”[2] In my experience few Christians understand the significance of Mark’s words here, but in those words Mark discloses the true cosmic significance of Jesus’ death. To understand how they do that, however, we need some background information that most American Christians don’t have.

“The curtain of the temple was torn in two.” Most of us know, I think, at least generally what the temple was. The temple in Jerusalem was the central institution of Judaism in Jesus’ day. It had originally been built in the late sixth century BCE after the Jews returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity. The king and Roman puppet Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) had greatly expanded and enhanced it. It was staffed by the top authorities of the faith, the chief priests, priests, scribes, and Levites. It was the only place where Jews could offer the animal sacrifices that the Torah law so often demands. It consisted of several different of courts or areas. The first one a person entered was the largest of them. It was called the Outer Court, or the Women’s Court, or sometimes the Court of the Gentiles. Anyone could enter it. It was where people were selling doves and changing money when Jesus came in and disrupted those activities.[3] As you moved through the temple, which only men could do, you passed various areas and installations including the altar where those animal sacrifices were performed. At the far end of the temple from where you entered was a small space called the Holy of Holies. It was the most sacred place in Judaism. It was where God lived. When the Jews called the temple the House of God they meant it literally, and God dwelt in the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was so sacred that only the high priest could enter it, and he did so only once a year. It was separated from the rest of the temple by a curtain. The curtain blocked all view into the Holy of Holies. It separated the Holy of Holies from the people. It made the Holy of Holies a secretive, mystical, inaccessible place. In both a factual and a mythic sense the curtain of the temple separated the people from God.

Mark says that at the moment of Jesus’ death the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. He means the curtain that closed off the Holy of Holies. Mark surely did not intend for us to take that assertion literally. In any event there is no historical evidence outside the Gospel of Mark that the curtain was actually torn in two when Jesus died. (Luke has the curtain torn in two but at a different time.[4]) Mark clearly intends a mythic meaning here not a literal one. We too must focus not on mere historical fact but on what Mark’s statement about the curtain of the temple being torn in two means. It means an immense amount. It is the line in which Mark tells us what Jesus’ death meant for him and means for us.

The curtain of the temple separated the people from God. It prevented the people from having direct, unmediated contact with God. When Mark says that at the moment of Jesus’ death the curtain of the temple was torn in two he means that with Jesus’ death everything that separates us from God, or that we think separates us from God, is removed. Destroyed. Rendered inoperable. With Jesus’ death we see that we in fact stand in direct, unmediated relationship with God. All barriers real or imagined between us and God are torn down. They never existed in the first place, but now we see that they don’t. We see that in truth nothing in all creation separates us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, as St. Paul says.[5]

OK, but why is it precisely at the moment of Jesus’ death that the curtain of the temple is torn in two? It is because as Jesus dies on the cross we see that God enters into and is present with us in everything that happens in our lives up to and including death. In Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, suffering and dying on the cross we see that God does not stand aloof from us and our lives. Rather God is always there with us no matter what. Yes, Jesus cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But that cry simply points to the paradox that in Jesus on the cross God is paradoxically both absent and present at the same time. In Christ on the cross God enters into the full human condition, including suffering and death. There is no separation between God and us. None. If there ever was any it is gone. Any such thing is rendered ineffective, torn in two from top to bottom.

That’s why we can call this most solemn day of the Christian year when we remember the horrific suffering and death of our Lord and Savior “Good Friday.” On one level of course there’s nothing good about it. Unjust suffering and death, indeed any suffering and death, are never good. They’re just inevitable for us humans, being as we are mere mortals not gods. Yet like all profound spiritual truth Jesus’ suffering and death are a paradox. What on one level is horrific (and we must never minimize its horror the way the Gospel of John does) is at the same time the best news there ever was or ever could be. In them we know that God never leaves us, never rejects us, never dismisses us, but is present in saving solidarity with us in everything that comes our way. Full stop. That’s the bottom line of the Christian faith. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The curtain is torn in two. Thanks be to God!

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[1] Thomas C. Sorenson, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2008) 91-108.

[2] Mark 15:37-38 NRSV.

[3] For a discussion of the meaning of what Jesus did there see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians,  Revised Edition, Volume Three, The New Testament (Coffee Press, Briarwood, New York, 2019) 48-50.

[4] Luke has the curtain being torn in two, but he gets the timing wrong. He says it happened at noon, three hours before Jesus died. See Luke 23:44-45. That timing removes all the meaning of the curtain being torn in two. The author of the Gospel of Luke wasn’t Jewish like the author of Mark was. He apparently didn’t understand what the curtain was, what it did, and what its being torn in two might mean.

[5] Romans 8:38-39.

Let's Get Him Right for a Change

 

Let’s Get Him Right for a Change

March 29, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. It marks the beginning of the most sacred week in the Christian year, the week in which we walk with Jesus through his prophetic entry into Jerusalem, his last meal with his disciples, and his crucifixion. After we have gone through all that we celebrate his resurrection on Easter Sunday. It’s quite a journey, and one of the striking things about it is the way the people of Jerusalem turned on Jesus. I once gave a sermon with the title “Hosanna! Crucify him!” in which I delved into that reversal of the crowd’s attitude toward Jesus from Sunday to the next Friday. The stories of that change in the mood of the public go like this.

At the beginning of the week Jesus enters Jerusalem, and he intentionally does it in a prophetic way. In the oldest account we have of his entry Jerusalem, the one in Mark, we read:

 

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

 

                ‘Hosanna!

                   Blessed is the one who comes in

                                the name of the Lord!

                   Blessed is the coming kingdom

                                of our ancestor David!

                Hosanna in the highest heaven!’

 

                Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple….Mark 11:7-11a.

 

It’s a celebratory scene. It’s also a prophetic one. Jesus here enacts a scene from Hebrew scripture. At Zechariah 9:9 we read:

 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

       Shout aloud, O daughter

              Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you

       triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

       on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

 

By riding a donkey into Jerusalem Jesus portrayed himself as that humble but victorious king. He rides a donkey not a magnificent war horse. The donkey is not an animal of war. It is an animal of peaceful agricultural pursuits. Riding one creates quite a different impression that riding a war horse does. Clearly Jesus was intentional about creating that different impression.

Fast forward from Sunday to Friday. Mark describes the scene on that tragic day this way:

 

Pilate spoke to them again, ‘Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call King of the Jews?’ They shouted back ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him! So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd…handed him over to be crucified. Mark 15:12-14.

 

The crowds that had welcomed him in celebration on Sunday now want the oppressive, occupying Gentile Romans to execute Jesus in the brutal, horrible way they executed political criminals, by nailing him to a cross.[1]

In my experience Christians tend to react to the change in the crowd’s behavior that these verses give us in one of two ways. Mostly they ignore it. They hear the stories, but those stories are so familiar to them that they hear them but don’t think about them much. Or they do think about them and are puzzled. What happened? Why did the crowd turn so viciously on the one whose coming they had so celebrated? It’s not an easy question to answer, but here’s what I’m quite sure is the reason.

It has to do with what the crowd says as they cheer Jesus’ arrival in the city. As we just saw they say,

 

Blessed is the one who comes in

                the name of the Lord!

Blessed is the coming kingdom

                of our ancestor David. Mark 9b-10.

 

Notice particularly what these people are expecting from Jesus. They think Jesus is going to reestablish the kingdom of David. David was a Hebrew king who lived and ruled around one thousand years before Jesus. He expanded the Hebrew kingdom to its greatest extent ever. He has a military leader. He made his name fighting the Philistines. By Jesus’ time people had developed an expectation of the coming of a messiah, that is, one divinely anointed to raise an army, drive the Romans into the sea, and reestablish a kingdom that hadn’t existed since 586 BCE when the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah.[2] The crowd that welcomed Jesus that Sunday thought he was that messiah. They thought he would call the people to arms to attack and defeat the Romans, probably with divine help. They wanted him to create an independent Jewish state like David’s had been so many centuries earlier.

But what happened? Jesus didn’t do any of those things. What did he do? Mostly he taught his revolutionary vision of God’s will in the temple. He had no weapons. He called no one to arms. He didn’t even try to attack the Romans. He attacked the temple authorities, albeit mostly only verbally, but that wasn’t what the people wanted or expected the messiah to do. So they turned on him. Our text says the temple authorities stirred them up against him, and maybe they did. Whether they did or not Jesus had so disappointed them that they were ready to turn on him. They’d get the Romans to inflict a punishment on him that they could not. They shouted “Crucify him.” That’ll show him they surely thought.[3]

This is the only way I can explain how in this story the crowd’s shout of “Hosannah!” on Sunday turned into “Crucify him!” on Friday. They had built up their hopes for liberation from the Romans and placed those hopes on Jesus. They thought he would bring them that liberation, but he didn’t. He didn’t even try to. So to hell with him, they thought. We’ll get the Romans to get rid of him for us, not that the Romans needed their demands or support to crucify a troublemaker like Jesus. They did that all the time. Still, in this story the crowd urged to Pilate to crucify the one who they considered to be a false messiah in whom they had put so much hope and who had disappointed them so horribly. Their “Hosannah” became “Crucify him!”

But of course Jesus really was the messiah. It’s just that he wasn’t the kind of messiah people expected or wanted. He taught creative nonviolence not military conquest. He taught transformation of the world through peaceful inner transformation of people one person at a time not transformation of the world through violence.[4] He said God blesses the poor and powerless over the rich and powerful. No one expected that kind of messiah. I don’t blame the people of Jerusalem for rejecting Jesus and even calling for his crucifixion the way my Christian tradition tragically has for nearly two millennia. The people of Jerusalem that week that Jesus was there really did get him wrong. Their disappointment and anger are understandable if certainly not commendable, and they explain their change from Hosannah to Crucify him!

Many people get Jesus wrong today too. They expect him to return in power and glory to set the world right, or at least set the world what these people think is right. Sorry folks. Not going to happen. Jesus wasn’t about worldly power and glory. Rather he taught us to respect and care about and for those the world scorns and oppresses. He preached justice brought about by nonviolent opposition to the world’s  unjust ways and systems. He modeled self-giving love as the way God wants us to live. He displayed righteous anger toward evil but never let his anger turn him violent. He showed us a life of spiritual health lived in an intimate relationship with God. Best of all he demonstrated to us, most powerfully on the cross, God’s presence and unshakable solidarity with all people in everything that happens in life, especially suffering and death. So let’s stop making Jesus something he wasn’t and stop expecting him to do things he never would do the way those people in Jerusalem did so long, long ago. Let’s finally get who he really is. May it be so.

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[1] I deal here with this story as it is told in Mark. There is a consensus among scholars about the probable historical inaccuracy of the story. It is almost certain that Pilate had Jesus crucified on his own initiative. He didn’t need a Jewish crowd to urge him to do it, and he wasn’t one to be concerned about satisfying such a crowd.

[2] The words messiah (from the Hebrew) and Christ (from the Greek) both mean an anointed one.

[3] Let me say again that this part of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is almost certainly not historically accurate. Tragically the notion that the Jewish people turned on Jesus and demanded his crucifixion has been a pretext for Christianity’s horrendous history of anti-Judaism up to and including the Holocaust. Almost certainly the Jewish people in Jerusalem at the time had nothing to do with Jesus’ crucifixion. Again, I’m dealing with story here not history.

[4] See Mark 5:1-13 and the discussion of that story in Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Three, The New Testament (Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, 2019) 39-40.

A Call to Good Anger

 

A Call to Good Anger

March 29, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

So many Christians think the life of faith mostly means being nice. I think women especially are apt to have been taught that they’re supposed to be nothing but nice. And of course most of the time being nice toward other people is good and proper. I’ve known lots of very nice church folk. It’s pleasant to be with and to work with them. Many of them do good work in their communities, charity work mostly rather than justice work, but doing charity is a good and necessary thing. I mean nothing here to disparage good, nice church people and the work they do.

These days, however, I keep thinking of John Lewis’ admonition to all of us that sometimes it’s necessary to cause good trouble. Good trouble is refusing to be complacent and inactive in the face of injustice and other social ills. It is acting, nonviolently, to disrupt those injustices and those social ills. Lewis spent his whole life causing good trouble against the diabolical expressions of American racism that still plague our nation. In 1965, on a bridge in Selma, Alabama, causing good trouble against Jim Crow laws that deprived Black citizens of their right to vote nearly got him killed by the forces of injustice. Nothing ever caused him to stop making good trouble against American racism. Lewis was an extraordinary man. He somehow managed mostly to remain nice—and nonviolent—as he caused his good trouble. Yet surely his motivation for causing that good trouble wasn’t that he wanted to be nice. His work for racial justice surely arose from a deep-seated anger about the brutality, dehumanization, and discrimination that American racism produced and produces; and John Lewis was a devout Christian. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He experienced the worst American racism directed against him and his family. He had to be angry about it, and I’m sure that he was.

Lewis spoke of and caused good trouble. Well, if there is good trouble there must also be good anger that leads us to cause that trouble. The idea that Christians should just be nice is a serious misreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus got angry, and at least once he acted on that anger and caused some real good trouble. At Matthew 12:34, for example he calls the religious leaders of his day a brood of vipers. That was hardly being nice to them. Then there’s the famous story, so often misinterpreted, of Jesus performing a disruptive prophetic act in the Jerusalem temple.[1] There’s a version of that story in each of the four gospels. I’ll quote the oldest of them, the one in Mark.

In that story Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, recreating a scene from Zechariah 9:9. The first thing he does in Jerusalem is go into the temple. We read that he “began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not let anyone carry anything through the temple.” Mark 11:15b-16. Jesus must have seemed downright crazy to those who saw what he did. Surely he did what he did because he was angry. I mean, you don’t just walk into the central edifice of your faith and start physically disrupting what goes on there because you’re happy with the place and want to be nice. This story tells us that Jesus was angry with the authorities who ran the temple and objected strongly to how they did it.

So too does what he said about those authorities a bit later in his time in Jerusalem before his arrest and execution as a real troublemaker:

 

As he taught, he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’ Mark 12:38-40.[2]

 

Jesus was righteously angry with the temple authorities of his day because he believed that they put themselves above the people they were meant to serve and oppressed those people with the temple tax they tried to get all Jews to pay. He was also angry with them because he was convinced that they replaced true worship of God with ritual animal sacrifice (that’s why people were selling doves in the temple) which he knew wasn’t at all what God wants from God’s people. It should be clear that getting angry is a perfectly Christian thing to do as long as you’re angry at the right things for the right reasons and always act on that anger only nonviolently.[3]

Our world today is full of situations, conditions, and institutions to which the only proper Christian response is righteous anger. I can’t possibly list all of them here. They range from attempts by state legislatures and governors to take away from women their right to control their own bodies to environmental degradation so severe that if not reversed it could threaten all human life on earth. Two other outrages have gotten a lot of attention in the press lately. One of them is gun control. This country lacks the wisdom and the political will to do anything meaningful to reign in our out of control gun culture. We can’t even reinstate the ban on military style assault weapons that we once had but Congress let expire. Who the hell needs an AR-15 for any purpose other than mass killing? No one, but we can’t even make everyone who wants to buy one undergo a basic background check. Much of the world thinks America is insane about guns. They’re right, and we’re doing nothing about it. How can a Christian committed to Jesus’ way of nonviolence and respect for all human life as every Christian must be react to America’s gun culture with anything but furious anger? No Christian should respond nicely to the outrage of America’s love of guns.

Then there’s the attempt currently underway by Republican controlled state governments to suppress the vote. The targets of these anti-democratic measures are primarily Black, Brown, and poor American citizens. Republicans know that these voters are unlikely to vote for them. They know they can’t win when voter turnout is high, as the 2020 election proves. So rather than develop and advocate policies that actually help people, including people who aren’t rich, they work to make registering to vote and actually voting so difficult that a great many people will just give up and not vote. The state of Georgia, for example, with a Republican governor and a Republican controlled legislature, has among other anti-democratic things substantially reduced the number of polling places in future elections. The result will be even longer lines of people waiting to vote than we’re there before these new laws were passed. Then they made it illegal for anyone to give food or water to anyone waiting in line to vote. Measures like these disproportionally affect minority communities. The Republicans who enacted them know that they do and intend that they should. We Christians must be outraged and mad as hell about these efforts to impose a new Jim Crow on the Black people of Georgia and other states with regard to their right to vote.

So must Christians always be nice? Hell no. Jesus wasn’t. Why should we be? The world is full of injustices that require our anger. We must get righteously angry about them, then we must let our righteous anger lead us to every nonviolent action we can think of to correct them. Yes, being nice is nice, but it isn’t always appropriately Christian. Let us allow our good anger to lead us, nonviolently, to cause the good trouble John Lewis caused his whole life long. May it be so.

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[1] For a discussion of what Jesus was really about in this act of his see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, The New Testament (Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, 2019) 48-50.

[2] For a longer discussion of these verses and those that come immediately after them see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, op. cit. 50-52.

[3] People sometimes say that Jesus’ action in the temple was violent. it wasn’t. It was disruptive, but he harmed no one. In the Gospel of John’s version of the story he uses a whip of cords, but he uses it only to control animals. He never uses it against people. See John 2:13-16.

What's Missing?

 

What’s Missing?

March 26, 2021

 

It’s a familiar little story to many of us. You’ll find it at Mark 10:17-22. A man comes to Jesus and kneels before him. He ask Jesus what he must do to inherit what he calls eternal life. Unfortunately the story doesn’t tell us what he, or it, means by eternal life, but never mind. Clearly eternal life is something this man is powerfully concerned about and something he thought Jesus could help him with. Jesus says to the man you know the commandments. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t bear false witness, and a few others. The man claims to have obeyed those commandments all his life, so Jesus tells the man that he lacks one thing. He tells the man to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, then come follow him. The man goes away grieving because, we’re told, he had a lot of possessions.

What’s going on here? I mean, this man is successful both by the standards of the Jewish faith tradition of his time and by the standards of the world. He has done what his religion has told him to do, and what Jesus at first told him to do, in order to be right with God. He has kept at least the most basic commandments of the Jewish law. He’s at least relatively rich in the way the world measures such things. Few people in his world owned much of anything beyond the bare essentials, if they owned even that much. This fellow is an exception. He apparently has had the resources to acquire a whole lot more than the bare necessities of life. It would seem he has it made. I mean, religion is about obeying the rules, right? And being rich and owning a lot of stuff makes you happy, right? By both the religious and the secular standards of his time, and of ours, this guy is living the good life.

Yet he comes to Jesus and asks how he can get something he hasn’t got, something he calls eternal life. Why? I don’t think he’s being greedy or selfish here. Rather, I think that the question he asks Jesus tells us that at some level he knows he’s missing something really important. Why else would he go see Jesus at all? I don’t think it was just out of curiosity. He did after all ask Jesus a pretty important question. Jesus wasn’t any kind of success by the standards of either his faith tradition (which at the time was all about obeying rules) or of his secular culture. Like all secular cultures, including ours, Jesus’ secular culture was about acquiring wealth as the criterion for success. Jesus had no time for the temple authorities and their rules from Leviticus. He owned essentially nothing and relied on others to provide the necessities of life for him. On the surface it makes no sense for this worldly, successful man to go to Jesus for much of anything.

Yet something was missing in this man’s life. He sensed a lack, though he may have sensed it only at a subconscious level. He may not even have understood fully why he went to ask Jesus this question, but he went. Jesus knew the man was lacking something important, and he knew what it was. That’s why he told the man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Giving to charities that help people in need is a very good and worthwhile thing, but that’s not why Jesus told this man to sell everything he owned and give the money to the poor. Jesus told him to do that extreme thing because he knew that it was the only way to move him beyond the place where he was stuck and get him moving toward finding what was missing in his life, in his soul.

So what was missing? Several things, or perhaps just one thing that we can express in several different ways. They’re the things that are so often missing from the lives of people with many possessions. A commitment to the values of the Reign of God rather than the reign of Caesar, whatever form Caesar may take at any given time and place. A commitment to follow God’s ways rather than the world’s ways. Commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves. A reason to live beyond himself and his selfish desires. A desire for more spiritual wealth rather than monetary wealth. A desire for a life of depth and real meaning. A commitment to what is good and true rather than to the false desires of the world. Jesus knew what this man was missing, and he prescribed shock therapy to bring the man’s unconscious sense of what he was missing into his consciousness so that he could deal with it constructively.

As the New Testament says, it isn’t money that is the root of all evil, it the love money that is. 1 Timothy 6:10. We can safely assume that the man in this little story loved money. In my experience the people with the most money are usually though not always people for whom money is the most important thing. This man’s love of money was keeping him from living into the better angels of his nature. It led him to substitute what is false for what is true. Jesus knew that about him. Perhaps at the end of the story the man was beginning to know it himself. We’re told that he went away grieving. Why was he grieving? He could have just brushed Jesus off telling himself that that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He didn’t have to take what Jesus said to heart, yet it seems that to some extent at least he did. He probably went away grieving because at some level he knew that Jesus was right. To use some old time religious language, he felt himself convicted. He wasn’t happy about it. He knew that to gain what was missing he’d have to turn his whole life around, to rethink his values and restructure his priorities. He’d have truly to admit to himself that he had been on the wrong track. None of that comes easily to any of us. Perhaps as he walked away from Jesus he hadn’t yet decided to do what Jesus told him to do. Perhaps he never would. Still, that he went away grieving tells us that somehow what Jesus had said to him to some extent at least struck home.

This story isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago in a place far away. It’s about us. This story points to the divine truth that true faith isn’t about obeying rules and true wealth doesn’t come from material possessions. And like all good Bible stories this one calls us to ask ourselves some hard questions. It moves me to ask, “Am I the man of this story?” Like him I yearn for a proper relationship with God, what the man in this story calls eternal life. Like him I have many possessions, or at least I do by the standards of much of the world if not by American ones. Like him I don’t cotton much to the idea of selling them all and giving the money to the poor. I think this story calls all of us to ask the same question the man asked Jesus and to be honest about answering it. I don’t mean that we necessarily need to sell everything we own and give the money to the poor. We too need the essentials of life after all; but I do think this story, like the whole Bible, calls us to reevaluate our priorities. To reassess our values. To be honest about whether the love of money or of anything else is keeping us from the fullness of the spiritual life that truly is a goal much to be desired, that is true wealth indeed. To be serious and prayerful in discerning what is missing from our lives. If we will do that, and if we are honest about our answers, this little story will have done its divine work in us. May it be so.

Help My Unbelief

 

Help My Unbelief

March 20, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There has been a sharp difference of opinion among people of faith over the admissibility of doubt in a life of faith. Two giants of twentieth century Protestant theology differed vociferously over the question. Paul Tillich insisted that doubt is inherent in faith and is a necessary part of it. Karl Barth once said would someone please tell Tillich that doubt is inconsistent with faith and is the negation of it. I come down on Tillich’s side of that divide, but then I come down on Tillich’s side of most every divide. Faith is not knowledge. Faith is not certainty. Faith is trust that certain things are real, things like the reality of God and the divinity of Christ. Trust means precisely that one lives as though we knew that these things are true when we actually don’t know that they are at all. Because we don’t know that they’re true, because we aren’t certain that they are true, there is always an element of doubt in our trust, in our faith. Doubt is unavoidable about anything about which we lack absolute certainty. That doubt doesn’t or at least doesn’t have to destroy out trust, destroy our faith. We just live with it, though most of the time we just ignore it.

There is one story in the Gospel of Mark that affirms out doubt. It’s the story of Jesus exorcizing a spirit out of a boy. You’ll find it at Mark 9:14-29. In that story a man from among a crowd of people tells Jesus that he has brought his son to Jesus because the son “has a spirit that makes him unable to speak, and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid….” Mark 9:17-18. The father had asked Jesus’ disciples to exorcize the spirit, but they had been unable to do it. Whereupon the spirit seizes the boy as the father had described. We’d probably say the boy had epilepsy or some other seizure disorder. The ancient world of this story said the boy had an evil spirit. The father says to Jesus, “if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Mark 9:22b. Jesus replies to the father, “If you are able!—all things can be done for the one who believes.” Mark 9:23. Then we read, “Immediately the father of the child cried out, ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’” Mark 9:24. Whereupon Jesus exorcizes the spirit out of the boy.

The NRSV says that the father spoke of his “unbelief.” We can I think take unbelief here to mean what we mean when we speak of doubt. The father believes in Jesus but apparently not to the point where he had no doubt. So it is, I think, with all of us people of faith if we’re honest with ourselves. We might work to convince ourselves that we never doubt the truth of our faith, but can any of us ever honestly say that we don’t? I don’t think so. I have been what I have called a professional Christian, referring to my status as an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for years now; and I can’t honestly say that. I know that faith is not certainty. There have been times in my life when God and Jesus Christ have been very real and present to me. I thank God for those times. They are wonderful even when they happen during very hard times in my life as indeed they have. But there have also been times in my life when God has seemed more absent than present, when God has not felt all that real to me. In other words, I am a man of both faith and doubt just like in the father in Mark’s story.

So what did Jesus do with this man who had just confessed both his belief and his unbelief? Did he say that since the man had both belief and unbelief there was nothing he could do for the man and his son? Not at all. Jesus says to the spirit possessing the boy, “You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!” Mark 9:25. Jesus had the power to make this boy well, and he didn’t let the father’s unbelief stop him from doing it.

We learn that God does not reject us because our belief is mixed with unbelief. God does not reject us because our faith is mixed with doubt. God doesn’t require or expect perfection from us, not in our actions, not in our faith. God knows that we are creatures, indeed God’s creatures, not gods. God surely knows the nature of human faith better than we do. God surely knows that faith without doubt is just not possible for most of us humans. God doesn’t reject us because we doubt. Rather, God enters our doubt with us and seeks to lead us out of it to the extent that we are able to move beyond it. So with the father in this story I say I believe, help my unbelief. I hope that perhaps you can say that too.