Earth Day

Monday, April 13, 2015

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Easter, April 12, 2015

B Easter 2 BFC 2015
John 20:19-31
April 12, 2015

American novelist and writer, Anne Lamott, is a prolific Facebook poster who turned 61 years old this past week.  In reflecting back on how she got from 47 to 61, she wrote down every single things she knows as of today.  In keeping with Lamott’s style, much of her wisdom seems hard won, spoken with a sense of humor, and laced with the language of faith.  Here are some of the things Anne Lamott knows of today: 
o   Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
o   There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for an organ.  You can’t buy, achieve, or date it.  This is the most horrible truth.
o   Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together.  They are much more like you than you would believe.  So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.  Also, you can’t save, fix, or rescue any of them, or get any of them sober.  But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.  It is a huge gift to the world.  When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make each of you a nice cup of tea.
o   Faith: Paul Tillich said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. If I could say one thing to our little Tea Party friends, it would be this. Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is 90% of the reason the world is so terrifying. 3% is the existence of snakes.
o   Jesus; Jesus would have even loved horrible, mealy-mouth self-obsessed you, as if you were the only person on earth. But He would hope that you would perhaps pull yourself together just the tiniest, tiniest bit--maybe have a little something to eat, and a nap.

In these words of Anne Lamott, we hear beautifully poetic ways of knowing that are not about certainties and moralisms but a quality of life that is rich and full and grace-filled.  The character and content of Jesus is non-judgmental and an offer for Sabbath rest in the midst of a world that would have us working 24/7.   
o   Have a little something to eat, and a nap. 
o   We all find ourselves able to work again after we have been unplugged for a few minutes. 
          In the same way, the resurrection appearance we have from the Gospel of John this morning is more about affirming a way of life than it is about asserting God’s power of life over death or Christ’s authority over the grave.  In verses 30 and 31, there is a direct address to you, the reader, “But these things (“these things” referencing the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the Gospel of John) are written so that you may believe . . . .  Now translating this as “believe” is what we have heard forever and a day as the most important thing with Jesus.   For too long we have translated the Greek into the word “believe” as a way of saying that what is important is our opinion about Jesus. 
          But two things.  First, the Greek word for “believe” is better translated as “to be loyal to.”  In a world where John’s community, in the second and third century, is being heavily persecuted by the Roman Emperor, this is not some otherworldly, ethereal ask for intellectual belief.  This is the author of John relating resurrection appearances so that his community might have loyalty to a way of life demonstrated by Jesus over and against loyalty to a way of life sanctioned by Caesar.[1]  The stakes are high.  In the midst of tremendous persecution, the author of the Gospel of John is trying to communicate courage to communities so that they might keep on, keeping on with an alternative lifestyle that runs counter to the principalities and powers.  The reader is being asked to make their everyday, ordinary life mean something. 
          Secondly, in this context, the resurrection appearance is being given to you, the reader, so that we might continue to have loyalty to, might continue to have life.  Using the traditional translation as “belief”, the passage before us says, “through believing, you might have life in his name.”  Whatever the translation, it is important that we know “belief” as not the be all, end all of the passage.  Even if we would translate loyalty as belief, the author tells us that we are to know that through believing we might have life in Christ’s name.[2]  Life in Christ’s name is what matters.
          Such stories pointedly ask then what is the content and character of life as defined by Jesus.  Within these stories is a certain statement that life in Jesus’ name is something different, set apart from the wider cultural narrative about life.  As Christians, I think that is the 64 million dollar question we have to ask ourselves about our everyday, ordinary lives.  How is a life lived under the aegis of Jesus’ name all that different from a life sponsored by Caesar? 
          The Gospel of John offers an interesting paradox as to how we are to know Jesus.  One writer in the Gospel of John, in keeping with the Jewish story of the Exodus, says that we know, believe, have faith in, have reason to give loyalty to Jesus through the signs and wonders he does.   Just as Jews were to know, believe, have faith in, have reason to give loyalty to God in the many signs and wonders did in liberating them from Egypt, so Jesus, as the God-revealer, merited the same devotion for his many signs and wonders.  At the same time, there is another writer in the Gospel of John who basically says, “Do you really need all the signs and wonders to know, believe, have faith in, give your loyalty to life in the name of Jesus?  That is what we see in the story of doubting Thomas.  The disciples, with Thomas away, have an experience of the Resurrected Christ.  Thomas seems to need the signs and wonders.
          As I shared in last week’s Easter Sunday sermon, resurrection was a common occurrence in 1st Century Rome.  Particularly for the Jewish people, proclaiming that someone was resurrected was a way of saying that a just and righteous Jew had suffered and died in an unjust world.  So proclaiming resurrection was a way of proclaiming that a person’s life, teaching, and ministry were just and righteous in the ordinary, everyday world. 
          Hear in the story of “doubting Thomas” the paradox of two traditions, three ways of knowing, all included in Scripture to suggest that there is more than one way to know Jesus.  Some of us need the signs and wonders.  Others, like Thomas, need the empirical evidence for the signs and wonders.  But there are still others who, for whatever reason the Scripture suggests, are blessed to know Jesus without the signs and wonders or the empirical evidence.  “Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Do you have loyalty to me because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to have loyalty to me.’”
          Now in the Gospel of John, the program and message of Jesus is known by how he confronts the Domination System, reveals the saving power of God through signs and wonders, and, in the end, how he is culturally different from the Domination System by being on his knees washing the disciples’ feet.  But the Scripture passage before us today makes it clear that there is more than one way to know the content and character of Jesus. 
That seems to fly in the face of how Christianity is presented today.  Today it would seem that the only way you can know Jesus and honor his name is by believing in him and his signs and wonders.  Showing loyalty to the program and practice of Jesus in an everyday, ordinary way seems to run counter to the Christianity that demands we believe in the signs and wonders.  And I don’t want to totally dismiss the signs and wonders.  New Testament scholars, Richard Rohrbaugh and Bruce Malina make it clear that ecstatic experiences or alternate states of consciousness, like ones experienced by the disciples in Jesus’ resurrection appearances are commonly accepted in 90% of the world.  Rohrbaugh and Malina point out that people in the U.S. who reference these experiences as irrational are in a very small minority.  And as long as I have been a local church pastor, though I have not personally had such an experience, some of the most lucid, healthy parishioners have related an experience they have had with the presence of a deceased relative.
All of this is to say that Scripture acknowledges multiple ways of knowing, the paradox of knowing through signs and wonders, but also through empirical evidence or sensory experience, as Thomas does, or through just knowing, intuiting.  Faith knowing allows for all of these ways and probably several more.  Sometimes, we, as Christians, do not show ourselves to be all that faithful when we insist that others come to know as we have known. 
I began this message with talking about the things that novelist and prolific Facebook writer, Anne Lamott absolutely knew as she turned 61 this week.  I end with another one of those things she absolutely knows. 
o   All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful gift; and it is impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It has been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It is so hard and weird that we wonder if we are being punked. And it filled with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.
o   All truth is a paradox. Grief, friends, time and tears will heal you. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate you and the ground on which you walk. The first thing God says to Moses is, "Take off your shoes." We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know.

I agree with Lamott in the sense that for people of faith the project with Jesus is often not
knowing with absolute certainty, but with a sense of wonder, taking off our shoes to gaze at the world and know that we are standing on holy ground.  Whether we gaze at the night sky and see the signs and wonders of the Northern Lights, with our hands touch the deep pain and grief of another, do the hard work of curiosity and intellectual investigation through our brains, or simply intuiting or know down deep in our bones, they are all legitimate ways to give our loyalty to a life lived in the risen Christ. 
          It may be a paradox to know there are so many different paths.  But as Anne Lamott reminds us, truth is often found in the paradox.  In the end, it is about having the courage to give your heart to life in Christ.  Amen.




[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 279-286.
[2] Ibid.

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