God Out of the Box

Sermon delivered on Easter Sunday
April 8th, 2007
at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California

Hiroko, Daniel, and I decided to go to Stinson Beach a few weeks ago to get away from it all. It was Hiroko suggested that we try flying our kites – something we hadn’t done literally in years, and certainly not since Daniel had been born. So I grumped around the apartment trying to find them. Hiroko, of course, knew where they were and pointed me in the right direction, and we headed to the beach on a partly cloudy day. There was no wind. But we had fun, anyway, impersonating Charlie Brown running with his kite, and Daniel dug in deep to the sand near the ocean’s edge while the sandpipers ran back and forth in the surf. It was a great scene, rollicking at the water’s edge with kites that would not fly, laughing out loud while our three-and-a-half year old began to cover himself in the wet sand.

Kites are the first image I’d like to use today for the Resurrection. Because we began with a problem and ended with a mystery. If you’ve ever had a kite, you’ve had to deal with tangled kite string. And unwrapping an old box kite I’ve had since before my high school days was a proof in point. Kites never quite pack properly, you see. They seem destined somehow to fly – to leave the box, even an inanimate as they are. A spar pokes out here. The kite string leaves the spool and turns into a knotted mess over there. After having searched so hard for the kites, I’d thought I’d be irritated untangling kite string. But on the beach with the smell of sea salt and the sand beneath our feet – well, many things become possible!

Here’s another image for Resurrection – yes it’s the butterfly on the cover of our Easter Worship bulletins today. Take a look. Frankly, up until now, I found the butterfly not so helpful as an image to describe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can biologically study the development of the butterfly from egg to caterpillar to pupa to its colorful stage with gossamer wings. We can explain the processes that govern a creature that really never dies but, of course, changes radically. But what captured Resurrection for me as I reflected on the butterfly this Easter was the newly-winged insect emerging from the pupa. If you’ve ever seen it happen on video, you know what I mean. The butterfly just doesn’t fit into the chrysalis anymore. It must break free. And as its wings first fill with the fluids of life, it is clear it can’t fit anymore into the old way of being. Somehow, that says something about Resurrection – the Risen Christ cannot fit anymore into the old way of being.

Back at home, Resurrection is about Daniel trying, in his three-year-old way trying to dress himself. With arms sticking out in all directions – elbows, fingers, fore-arms, knotted wrists – trying to poke his head through the right part of the shirt. Funny, the shirt should fit him, but he can find many ways not to fit into it. That’s life in the Resurrection.

What is God up to?

Each year, we gather on Easter Sunday to celebrate something that doesn’t quite fit, and yet it does. Something has happened that we can’t quite explain, and yet we celebrate it anyway. Something we can’t quite explain but we see signs of everywhere we look. It’s in the spring air, the flowers, the new leaves. It’s in the ocean side and on the beach and the mountaintop. It’s in the farthest flung heavens where stars are being born. It’s in our lives and the lives of those we love even when we thought we knew them and they surprised us. Even when we thought we knew our own limitations and something happens and we discover something new about ourselves.

It’s in this community. This strange community called the Church. A community that fits, but not quite, into the surrounding culture. Every Church that has fully become a product of its culture has always disappeared. But the Church across the ages that knows Resurrection is like the kite that won’t quite fold, the three-year-old who won’t fit into the fashionable shirt, or the butterfly that no longer fits in its chrysalis.

We are an Easter people. Would it not have been more real to come on Good Friday than today? Crucifixion, after all, makes more sense if you think about it, than Resurrection. Executions have happened throughout history. We know death, suffering and their powerful hold on humanity. We don’t need to gather as a community and break bread and share the common cup to “get” death.

No, we gather, because we are an Easter people. Which means we are a people reborn of hope. Which means we recognize what the world calls normal and then add something too strange and wonderful for words to adequately describe. We are the people who shout “life” when the world declares, “death.” We are the people who say “arise” when the world says, “lay down.” We are the people who recognize something now deeply woven into the fabric of life that is connected profoundly with a God. . . a God who does not quite fit into boxes, whether they are intellectual constructs, ancient human traditions, or tombs hewn out of stone.

Our God in Jesus Christ is a God of surprises, even when it comes to death. Today we remember that death has been re-forged and snatched out of the hands of evil. It is no longer an end for humanity, but a new beginning. Today we celebrate all who have come before us – those who have died but yet are alive somehow, in ways we cannot explain, in all who count themselves in God’s children, beyond time, greater than our moment-to-moment existence can even imagine.

Today, we see the empty tomb, revealed to Jesus’ followers and at first perplexing them. They have fallen into an unexpected mystery that again fits their Teacher’s Way. Remember this Jesus? The one who was always turning the world order upside down? Who said the first are last and the last are first? Who had the power to heal and lead, and might have spawned a violent revolution, and yet instead heals and proclaims God’s love for the forgotten and dons a towel and washes his followers' feet?

So why not take on death, too, and turn it upside down? Death becomes not the end but a new beginning. It is a gateway into life that is so incredibly new, it is almost unrecognizable. The women who had followed Jesus find an empty tomb and are perplexed. Even when the angels describe to them what has happened, they can scarcely understand. There is no resuscitated corpse or reanimated body. There is no parlor or magician’s trick whereby Jesus somehow managed to survive crucifixion. This is the mystery of New Life. New Hope. And it will not fit into the tomb. It won’t even fit into our greatest and best hopes. It is God’s New Word for a people hungry for something they cannot describe. It is the transformation that the world searches for. It sets the captives free and brings Good News to the poor and the destitute. It turns hearts of stone into living hearts again. It breathes new life into what was utterly dead. And, in some way, it is the light behind the sunlight, the power that rests at the foundation of the cosmos, the renewal that marks rebirth. It makes common things like bread and wine holy. It silences the powerful and gives voice to the voiceless. It demands everything that we are and then makes it new again.

Look again this Eastertide – all fifty days of it – for the miracles, both great and small, that smell, taste, and feel like the fragrant new Body of Christ. You may not recognize them at first. They might appear in your garden, in your neighbor, in a loved one, or in your own heart. They will appear in this community in unexpected ways. They will surprise us, just as the Resurrection surprised Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the first apostles. They will startle us, just when we thought we understood how everything worked. And they will make us anew.

Our God does not live in boxes, whether made by humanity or death itself. Our God is out of the box. So watch out. Be ready for anything. And find your joy, life, and love renewed.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Why the Cross?

Sermon delivered on Good Friday
April 6th, 2007
at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California

Readings for Good Friday

There was a big flap in the Anglican blogosphere this week. Of course, lately, we’ve gotten good at those. The Sunday Telegraph in England had a good go at stirring the pot just in time for Holy Week with a headline that read Easter Message: Christ did not die for sin. In the article, Jeffrey John, Dean of St. Alban’s Cathedral, was referred to as a “controversial cleric,” as he was the center of a debate a few years ago when he was almost made bishop in the Church of England, but was turned aside by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the midst of a media frenzy and a dreadful row. . . because Jeffrey John is gay.

So now he’s a media favorite, and was paraphrased by the Telegraph as saying that “Clergy who preach this Easter that Christ was sent to earth to die in atonement for the sins of mankind are ‘making God sound like a psychopath. . .In other words, Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him. . .This is repulsive as well as nonsensical.’”

Not leaving any stone unturned, the Telegraph then interviewed N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, world-renowned evangelical and New Testament scholar, who was quoted as saying, "He is denying the way in which we understand Christ's sacrifice. It is right to stress that he is a God of love but he is ignoring that this means he must also be angry at everything that distorts human life.” And unnamed “Church figures” we’re quoted as saying that Jeffrey John’s words were a “deliberate perversion of the Bible.”

What a great way to sell a newspaper. Clerics shouting at each other. Accusations of perversion. Positing the counterpoint of a God of Love and a God of Anger. Stepping into the rifts of contemporary Christianity and tickling both sides to make a scene.

Turns out Jeffrey John was being quoted out of context in a very profound way. His full address didn’t appear publicly until after the Telegraph’s article. N. T. Wright might have been quoted out of context, too. But, hey, this is the stuff that gets the dander up of Christian theologians. And it’s the stuff that gets the reading public to take a second look. Because we all love a good controversy. We all love great spectacle. Even if it's an itinerate healer, preacher, teacher, and prophet strung up on a cross.

Even after 2,000 years, Christians are still duking it out over the cross, trying to make sense of the violent sequence of events that led to Jesus’ execution at the hands of Empire and religious authorities. . .and why this had to happen. Why Jesus had to suffer a gruesome and excruciating death when he was, tradition holds, otherwise innocent. The question goes much deeper than this, of course. There are questions of sacrifice and satisfaction, deeply tangled up in the cultures of ancient Judaism, first century Palestine, the late Roman Empire, the feudal society of Northern Europe, and the mystics of the Middle Ages. And more recently in our own society, nineteenth- and twentieth-century church phenomenon like the rise of contemporary evangelicals, fundamentalism, Anglo-Catholicism, and so forth.

Look, the cross and theories about atonement are favorite subjects for church historians and theologians. Worthy of spilling a great deal of ink over and vast resource expenditures researching and compiling and ruminating.

But there is one thing we are apt to forget as we argue over the why’s and wherefore’s of Jesus’ crucifixion. As much as we Episcopalians and Anglicans pride ourselves in pursuing faith without sacrificing our minds, we mustn’t forget that when God in Christ dies on the cross, all intellect dies, too. On the cross, all of humanity – heart, soul, body, and mind – are lost to Jesus. Just as they are lost to all of us in death.

At the end of the day, the apostles were so frightened that most were scattered. The crowds were stirred to shout, almost blindly, “Crucify him!” rather than to sit and carefully weigh – in good Anglican fashion – the merits of Jesus’ teaching. Pilate was only interested in preserving the peace of Jerusalem as best he could, a consummate politician and brutal Roman Governor who would take lives if he had to in order to keep the tributes to Rome flowing. The Sanhedrin, made up of wealthy family interests and classes beholden to the Roman authorities, had their own affairs to look after. Jesus had pushed the plight of the ordinary people in their faces and was fomenting what looked alarmingly like a revolution with his entry into Jerusalem and his pushing the money-changers and merchants out of the Temple a few days before. One man’s life was weighed in the scales of social order. Guess which side won.

No one on the day of the crucifixion sat down to wonder long if God would be satisfied by Jesus’ death, or if Satan would be, for that matter. Or if the sins of the whole world for all time could be supported by iron nails and wooden beams. Nor did anyone sit down that day to write a book about why indeed bad things happen to good people. Our intellects ask these questions, of course, but our intellects are ephemeral – gone like the wind as Jesus’ mind was when he breathed his last and darkness covered the land.

The cross simply is. Like our suffering much of the time. Like the suffering of the world. It is in the moment. Hard as the cross, sharp as nails. Propped up in a sky with a harshness that wrecks all our best thought and deepest hopes.

I am reminded of a few years ago when two wonderful parents in the church I was serving lost their four-year-old son to an unknown illness. Little Issey (ee-say) was struck down in a matter of days by fever, and then coma. All the best 21st-century medicine and technology could not save him. He had been a joyous child, innocent in so many ways, effused with the energy of new life. He did not deserve death. Nor did his family.

Children in the West in this day and age aren’t supposed to die so suddenly and tragically. Many of us would argue that children anywhere aren't supposed to die so suddenly and tragically in this day and age. Nor are first-century healers and teachers who bring hope to the poor and love to the loveless.

I can only reflect this Good Friday on the plaintive word of Issey’s mother as she sobbed next to his body.

“Dooshite?” she asked through the tears. . . Japanese for “Why?”

There was, of course, no good answer, except to grieve with her and her family, and the community that rallied around them.

The cross remains a hideous thing. Hideous even though we’ve tried turning it golden, by wearing it as jewelry and painting it onto Bibles and Prayer Books and raising it up as statue and sculpture. We have painted it, drawn it, reflected on it, named holy orders after it, raised it up as a sign of hope. Some have gone to war using it as a talisman. Others have waged peace holding the cross up high. We have made it a symbol of mercy, of redemption, of liberation. It has been the tool, weapon, and wonder for us and our spiritual ancestors across a hundred generations. Strange we are as a Christian people.

But the cross remains a hideous thing. And holy. Because it reminds us of the death in our own lives and stands on Golgotha like a beacon of terror. It is the doorway we must all pass sooner or later. It is the weight we must all carry with our own sufferings, each unique, but each common with the sufferings of all humanity. We hunger and thirst for answers to our own special crosses – those unique weights we haul around even if we pretend not to. We want to know why. Of course we do. What could be more human? And there are some who claim to have answers.

But answers to senseless things are never fully satisfactory, even if we give them titles like “Penal Substitutionary Atonement,” “Christus Victor,” or even the aptly named “Satisfaction Theory.”

The reason the crucifixion speaks to us has little to do with theory, but everything to do with reality. It is C. S. Lewis who remarked in one of his books that pain and suffering are probably among the most real elements of our lives. All of us who at one time or another have experienced pain, death, and suffering know this to be true. Even when our minds are in denial, our hearts, our guts, and even our very bones and flesh know the truths of pain, death, and suffering.

It was real that Jesus died for the simple reason that good people who challenge the evils of their day often die. It was real that love is often crucified by our anxieties, lust for power, and hunger to be in control. It remains real that God in Christ Jesus speaks to us most often when we are out of intellectual answers, facing death of one kind or another, and bereft of the Spirit.

That is the Good News of Good Friday, no matter what we theorize about Jesus and the sins of the world. And who’s right, be it the Bishop of Durham, the Dean of St. Alban’s, or a young upstart like me? Perhaps those of us who wear the fancy clothes and write with fancy prose should listen more to the mothers of lost children. Perhaps we should dispense with the sometimes arrogant desire to explain everything and embrace the crosses of our lives and the lives of others as Jesus did: with humility, grace, and love. Perhaps it is time to stop pursuing our desire to be God, and let God pursue us, even into our darkest hours, where hope seems dead and love is crucified.

And only then, do we have a shot at true understanding. Understanding that will not require explanation. But understanding that will emerge from the very heart of life and death itself, from the foundations of being, from that which stands as alpha and omega, from the One who is our beginning and end and who holds our lives so lovingly, so tenderly, so absolutely, that our cross may not mark an end, but a new beginning.

Palm Sunday - A Reflection

Readings for The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

audio available

There is always a struggle in how best to describe Palm/Passion Sunday, both in writing and in conversation. Which is it? Palm or Passion? Or is it neither – something else, entirely perhaps?

To say that it is both -- more than the usual tongue-in-cheek tendency for Anglicans/ Episcopalians and our “both-and” heritage – to say that it is both is to fold our arms around the painful truths of life itself. Truths that we all know when we are most honest about who we are as people on pilgrimage in a broken world. Truths that steal the thunder out of any homily, sermon, or even this written reflection for Palm/Passion Sunday:

Our lives are a constant collision between joyous victory with all of its giddy hope and the crushing terror of the cross – the great disappointments, if not the death and destruction that often haunt us.

Christianity turns on this axis of the opposing worlds of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the brutality of shameful execution. As Christians, we are a peculiar lot because of this: prone to probe the very depths of despair and talk about hope at the same time. Daring to look directly into the face of suffering with an unflinching gaze as we behold our God nailed to a tree, the One most intimately a part of us and all Creation slain by all that hungers for power over our lives and the life of the greater world. And yet daring to hope for a purpose in that which seems senseless.

The cross has forever been, in the Christian life at least, a point of terrible intersection between what is human, broken, and fragile and what is divine, perfect, and stronger than the fabric of space and time itself. It is also a point of intersection between the awful powers of domination and the freedom of God’s promises. It is the point where our deepest hatreds and fears are met by the gaze of One who forgives even in the hour of deepest suffering. It is the point where all our hopes and dreams are shattered by rough splinters and hideous nails. Where the deepest pains of our lives, individual and corporate, intersect with a love that reaches beyond time.

We are almost a Palm/Passion Sunday people in the end. Almost, because, of course, this day – nor Good Friday – marks the end of our story. Or rather, they mark the end of a particular story: the story of darkness where the rulers of all that is evil and all that clutches meanly at us – all that is spiteful, petty, and without compassion have their way. Where we are broken with God in Christ by all that is hideous and inhuman. All those dark places in our own hearts enthrall us for a moment, just as they did the crowds in Jerusalem and the leaders, too, from Pilate’s complacent arrogance to religious authorities clinging ruthlessly to domination: that one idol that spans the millennia and has too many other awful names to mention here.

Your cross, my cross, and our shared cross, come to Golgotha with Jesus’ cross. And as we say in our baptism, we are somehow hoisted with him, too, left out to hang in cold and callous ways by evil.

My failings and selfishness, just like yours and all that we share together is in the crowds demanding the blood of the innocent, thirsty for a spectacle that might assuage us of that gnawing sense that something is wrong. . . or, heaven forbid, that we might be wrong.

My coldness, your coldness, and ours together is Pilate washing his hands of the matter, callously handing over an innocent to be brutally murdered in the name of order, our peace of mind, and our sense of control.

And I weep, and you weep, as did Mary and all Jesus’ beloved who remained to the end – hearts broken by a God who fails in the worst way. A God who suddenly appears no longer omnipotent, but frail – perhaps even fickle – while the powers of darkness rage, the sun is covered, the earth shakes, and death visits.

And we are in awe, like the centurion, looking into a story that is marked by tragedy and faith, terror and majesty, pathos and compassion.

We are today the people of Palm/Passion Sunday, and it is with this great collision that we begin Holy Week. We are meant to be broken open by this day. We are meant to gaze into the darkest places of our being and open the doors of our lives so all that is wicked is met. And, like Jesus, to throw ourselves entirely into the hands of a God who seems strangely absent and almost negligent – One who has forsaken us.

Stay there for as long as you can. Let this week re-make you. Let it remind you of all that you have suffered and all that you have borne with tears in this ephemeral thing we call life. And be naked – spiritually at least – as Jesus was before the world and before God.

There will be no conquering fear until we know it as intimately as we know our hopes. There will be no conquering evil until we understand its cold, cruel, and calculating madness. There will be no overcoming hatred until we have seen its power in our lives and communities with open eyes and rendered hearts.

And there will be no end to death until at last we have followed Jesus into it, with our own cross and all that struggles within us. To find rest in the void and let go of every last shred of ego, and let go completely of being itself until at last all that is left is God.

And what comes next is God’s, and God’s alone.