In 1492, in Salamanca, Spain, Antonio de Nebrija presented to Queen Isabella his latest book. Nebrija wrote the first textbook on the grammar of the Spanish language — a grammar of the vernacular, the ordinary language of the people, the everyday language spoken in markets and in fields, at home and on the streets. No other European country had a textbook for their common language. No textbook of German grammar. None for French or Dutch or English. There were plenty of textbooks on the important languages, like Latin and Greek. But, in those days, no one wrote textbooks on how to learn common languages. That would be absurd, a waste of time.

So, when Antonio de Nebrija presented his textbook on Spanish to Queen Isabella, the Queen was confused, puzzled. The bishop had to speak up and explain the significance of the book. The bishop said to the queen, “After your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues, with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes, among them will be our language.”

The bishop’s explanation made sense to the Queen. She had her mind set on conquest. Of course the Spaniards would need to impose their language on the barbarians in her conquered lands.

In Nebrija’s grammar book, in the preface, he emphasized the connection between language and colonialism. He wrote, “I have found one conclusion to be very true, that language always accompanies empire.” Language and empire. Colonialism involved imperial control through language, through a common vocabulary, a single tongue.[i]

At Pentecost we see a world of many tongues, the opposite of what Nebrija and the Queen imagined. At Pentecost we see how God affirms the native languages of all the peoples. “The crowd…was bewildered,” it says, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:6). For God, there is no imperial tongue. Instead, at Pentecost we see God affirm a diversity of tongues. The Holy Spirit speaks through all languages. Every language is holy. There is none that is more holy than another. God speaks in a variety of tongues.

Pentecost invites us into a new way of engaging with difference, not just with different languages, but all ways we are marked as different from one another. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks through the differences, without converting them into sameness. People aren’t invited to give up their languages, their cultures, and convert to the same way of speaking, the same way of thinking.

The miracle of Pentecost is that God speaks through all the native languages, not that God speaks in a single language, a universal language, that is translated into other dialects. At Pentecost, difference is made holy, through the Sprit. “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,” it says (2:17). All flesh. Not some, but all. Not in order to make everyone the same, but to affirm all flesh, to affirm where they came from, to bless who they are, to announce that what makes them different is good, is holy. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (10:15). That’s what a voice from heaven tells Paul later in the book of Acts. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”

The book of Acts is the story of Pentecost. Acts tell how Pentecost unfolds, how the event of Pentecost turns into a story — the story of how, for the followers of Jesus, the world changes at Pentecost, the story of how God invites the followers into a strange world, full of confusion and promise, an invitation into a world full of what they had learned to call unclean, deficient, profane, unfit for God’s holiness.

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit plunges them into a world of difference. The Spirit baptizes them into strange languages and peoples. Pentecost is a miracle of communication that will lead them, ultimately, into communion with gentiles, which they did not consider kosher at the time.

That’s where the storyline of Pentecost leads, to the gentiles — to what was considered an unlawful and offensive union between Jews and Gentiles, unnatural communion. Later in Acts, in chapter 10, Paul explains this strange movement of the Spirit to his Jewish friends. He says, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile, but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (10:28).

“I shall not call anyone profane or unclean,” he says. Why? Because of what happened at Pentecost, where God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh is made holy, clean, good, even Gentile flesh.

We are still trying to understand what happened at Pentecost. We are still trying to understand how to speak in other tongues, not just our own, not just in the familiar. And we are still trying to understand the God who speaks with other tongues, the God who speaks through the mouths of others, the God who speaks in ways that are unfamiliar to us, that are strange — the voice of God that sounds so different that we find ourselves sometimes unable to understand, unable to recognize another’s voice as good news. We may find ourselves with the people on the streets of Jerusalem at Pentecost who are perplexed, who sneer and say to themselves, “They are filled with new wine” (2:13) — they are drunk, what they are saying is nonsense, irrational, absurd.

The history of the church is filled with stories of people who refuse to listen to strange tongues, Christians who refuse to learn from different forms of life, different ways of being. The story of Nebrija and the Queen of Spain is one such story. For them, the people in distant lands were barbarians, irrational, in need of a true language and civilized culture, in need of God’s law.

But Pentecost offers us a different way, where the Spirit affirms our differences, speaking in ways that each of us can understand, yet drawing us together, around the same table, into communion — that’s how the day of Pentecost ends, with all these strangers eating together. This is what it says about how the day ended: “So those who welcomed [the] message were baptized, [and] they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer” (2:41-42), “they broke bread from home to home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts” (2:46).

The miracle of communication that happened on Pentecost birthed a miracle of communion. To commune is to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit and hope for a miracle, the miracle of knowing God — in the meal, in each other. Communion is an invitation to come together around the same table, and to let Jesus stretch us into relationships with one another, with people who are the same and different, as we struggle to understand God, as we struggle to understand each other.

The day of Pentecost ends with friends and strangers coming together as God’s people. That’s what we celebrate at the Lord’s Table — the God who calls us, all of us, to be baptized into the Spirit, to eat and drink together, for God has made us holy, members of one another.

“I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh,” God says. Therefore, as we learn what Pentecost means for our lives, we say with Paul: “I shall not call anyone profane or unclean.”

~

John chapter 17 is a long prayer — Jesus’s prayer for his friends, for his loved ones. John 17 is his long prayer on the night he is handed over to his executioners. Jesus knows what Judas is about to do. Jesus knows that this is the beginning of the end. So he prays for the people he will leave behind. He prays for God to take care of them. His prayer repeats words of assurance, words of love. His prayer betrays his anguish at the thought of being separated from the people he loves. Jesus says to God:

“And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you,” he prays. “Holy Father, protect them… While I was with them, I protected them… I guarded them… But now I am coming to you… I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (Jn 17:11-15).

We can hear how much Jesus fears for his friends. He worries about the wellbeing of his disciples. He won’t be able to protect them anymore. He won’t be able to guard them from the evil one, the one who scatters the flock, the one who leads people astray, who sets friend against friend, who sows seeds of resentment and betrayal.

As death draws near, Jesus draws closer to his friends — he washes their feet and tells them that he loves them, and he tells them to love one another, to be there for each other, to be bound together in God’s love, in solidarity as companions.

The thought of his separation from them stirs up his longing to be close to them again, forever close, so he prays for his union with them: Jesus says,

“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one” (Jn 17:21-23).

We can hear how Jesus is already starting to miss them, how he is already longing for a time of reunion, to be close again.

Back when Katie and I were dating, we were separated from one another by the Atlantic Ocean. She was in Paris; I was in Durham. This was back in the olden days before Skype, so we had to talk on the phone, without seeing each other’s face. During those long months away, once in a while we were able to spend a week or two together. As we spent time together, we would try not to think about how we would have to say goodbye in a few days. But as the day got closer, we couldn’t help but think about how hard it was going to be at the airport, to watch the other one walk away, knowing that it would be a while until we got to see each other again.

Obviously there’s a big difference between the crucifixion of Jesus and Katie and I having to spend a couple years apart, in a long distance relationship. What Jesus felt must have been much more severe. Katie and I were separated from one another by an ocean. Jesus and his friends would be separated by death.

On that last night with his disciples, as he prayed, his heart must have ached. When it comes to the night of Jesus’ arrest, John’s Gospel is not like the other Gospels. Mathew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, praying for himself, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” For the other Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — Jesus spends his last night in agony in the garden, tormented by the thought of his death.

But that’s not the way it is in John’s Gospel. There is no garden of Gethsemane in John’s story. Jesus doesn’t pray for himself. Instead, he prays for his disciples: “I am asking on their behalf,” he says, “I am asking on behalf of those whom you gave me” (Jn 17:9). Jesus isn’t afraid for himself.

In John’s account, Jesus lingers as long as he can with his beloved friends, washing their feet, eating with them, talking, praying, stretching out their last night together as long as he can. He doesn’t want to leave. Life without them seems unbearable, unimaginable.

This is where we can begin to talk about resurrection. This is where we can start to talk about the way God refuses to let Jesus be separated from the people he loves. The power that raises Jesus from the dead is the power of a longing, a desire that is at the heart of who God is — a yearning for fellowship, for friendship, for sitting around a table and eating and talking and praying.

This is called love, the love that is God, as 1 John puts it: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… Everyone who loves is born of God” (1 John 4:16, 7).

From the start to the finish, the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus as a love story, a cosmic love story, where God becomes human in order to get closer to us, to talk and eat with us, to teach and heal us, to fall in love with humanity all over again.

As it says at the beginning of John’s Gospel, For God so loved the world that God came to us in Jesus, the incarnation of God, to share life with us, abundant life, life without end, an eternity of fellowship, of communion.

And, at the end of John’s Gospel, after the resurrection, Jesus keeps on coming back, appearing to Mary near the tomb, to the disciples in a locked room, to Thomas, to his friends who are fishing, and he makes breakfast for them and he eats with them, lounging around the fire, on the beach. And then it says, at the very end of the book, that Jesus did “many other things,” as he spent time with the people he loved. Here’s the very last verse of John’s Gospel, the last word in his story about Jesus: “There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:25). The end.

It’s a kind of end that doesn’t want to end, an ending to a story that doesn’t have an ending, because resurrection means that Jesus keeps on coming back, to be with his friends, to be with us.

Today is the last Sunday of Easter in the church calendar. On the day of Easter we celebrate the resurrection, and then we stretch it out for seven weeks, seven Sundays, because we don’t want our time with the resurrected Jesus to end, because, like Jesus, we don’t want our lives to be ruled by the gulf of death, by the division of violence, by all the little deaths, the sins, that separate us from one another and from God’s love — all of our small acts of violence, our secret resentments, our rejections of one another, our hatreds, all the ways we refuse to care for one another, to mourn with those who mourn, to suffer with those who suffer, to rejoice with those who rejoice.

Resurrection is good news because it shows us that there is a power at work in this world that will heal what has been wounded, that will stitch together what has been torn apart.

Resurrection is also an invitation, God’s invitation for us to be people who love like Jesus loves, to be people who long for the end of death, who pray against violence, who hope for restoration, to be a people who work for peace, for life, as ministers of God’s love, as incarnations of God’s love.

There’s a passage from 1 John that says all of this better than I can. 1 John continues the story of Jesus in the Gospel of John, as the writer tells us what it means to live as if we believe, as if we believe that the story of Jesus is true.

I’ll end with words from 1 John, which I hope will be an end that invites us to a new beginning, the new beginning of Easter, of new life, of resurrection:

“We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).

“We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another.”

I take the title of my sermon from a phrase that anthropologist Glenn Bowman uses to describe what goes on at sacred sites in Macedonia.  It is his Macedonian research that I draw on here.

In John 14: 27, Jesus says to his disciples:

“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you.  Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”

Good news, indeed.  These words have settled over me in the past couple of weeks like a dusting ofhope.  Beyond the day-to-day troubles and fears I wrestle with, I have been deeply disturbed by the Boston bombings and what they signify:  an age of global terrorism facilitated by technological connectedness and social disaffection.

I keep seeing the faces of those two brothers accused of the crimes and wondering (as many of you may be):  Who were they before all this?  What did they believe?  And what did they need?

Of all the fragments of information and speculation out there about the Tsarneav brothers, the one that stands out to me the most is this comment the older one is alleged to have made:  “I don’t have a single American friend; I don’t understand them.” A chilling confession, to be certain.  But not one I find all that surprising, or frankly, unfamiliar. Loneliness and isolation seem to be common themes in the experience of domestic terrorists in recent years.

I think I get what he meant, and I’m not a new immigrant or a member of a religious minority.  I frequently feel isolated and alienated.  In a society that prides itself on busy-ness, individual achievement, and mobility, it is difficult—if not impossible—to find stable sites of connection, actual places people return to and meet face-to-face.  And—once there—encounter one another in a way that cuts through barriers of religion, politics, economics, culture, and taste.

Today, I want to talk about how shrines serve this purpose of communal mixing in multi-ethnic societies. I was inspired to talk about this when I read our passage from the Book of Acts, particularly verses 9 –10:

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night:  a certain man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’  And when he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Paul’s excursion into Macedonia in the first century laid the groundwork for Christianity, the majority religion there.  But it is not the only religious presence.  Macedonia was ruled by the Ottomans for more than 400 years, and today about 34% of the population is Muslim.  Additionally, Jewish communities have come and gone throughout the centuries in Macedonia.  Jews comprise a very small minority in the Republic today.

The Republic of Macedonia has a religiously and ethnically diverse population with deep historic roots. Not unlike the Caucasus region, where the Tsarneav brothers originated.  Here, and throughout the Mediterranean, in particular, people of different faiths (I’m thinking primarily of Christians, Muslims and Jews—but there are others) share sacred spaces.  These are often the tombs of local saints or the sites of miracles.  People from multiple religious persuasions cross paths at such shrines, where they petition for blessings or for healing, or where they give thanks. They touch stones, tie bits of cloth to tree limbs, light candles and burn incense sticks, kiss effigies, drink and bathe in healing waters, murmur prayers, slaughter animals.

Take, for example, “The Tree of the Virgin” in Matarieh, Egypt, a large sycamore revered by Coptic and Muslim women (Mayeur-Jaoen 2012:159).  Or the tomb of Rabbi Saadia in Morocco, a pilgrimage destination for Moroccan Jews and Muslim Berbers alike (Driessen 2012:142-43).  These are sites of “mixing and sharing,” sometimes of ecstasy, often of joy, frequently of mourning.  Pilgrims together on their way to and at sacred sites often experience a sense of community (see Turner 1969).  And there is a gratifying sense of connectedness, too, that comes from loosening the spirit-self into a physical space where others have done exactly the same thing, over and over and over again.

When this happens among people whose theological and cultural frames diverge, it provides an opportunity to see common spiritual impulses.  And the seeing and the being together build tolerance, if not understanding.

The church of St. Nicholas in Macedonia serves as a good example of the way Muslims and Christians share sacred space.  Oral histories point to two people associated with this site—Nicholas—a local Christian saint credited with a miracle and the establishment of a Christian monastery in the area—and Hadir Baba—a Sufi saint, who also established a monastery nearby.  Both men are believed to be buried in or around the church.  Inside the church are paintings of Christian saints and, along one wall, a long, raised platform:  ostensibly the tomb of either Nicholas or Hadir Baba.  “In the vicinity of this platform,” writes anthropologist Glenn Bowman, “the carpets and the pictures on and leaning against the wall are Muslim and represent Mecca, Ali and Hussein, and the moments of what is in effect Shia history” (2012:20).

On May 5th, the Orthodox Christian caretaker of the church readies it for the pilgrims who will arrive the following day to honor the Feast of St. George.  She removes the prayer rugs from the floor around the tomb and “the green ‘Muslim’ ox-tallow candles and the Muslim prayer beads that visitors step through for blessings…are removed from the ‘tomb’ of St. Nicholas and replaced with white ‘Christian’ candles and a smaller rosary” (Bowman 2012:22).  In effect the church is ‘Christianized’ for the hundreds [of mostly Orthodox visitors]” (Bowman 2012:22).

The day after the feast, the caretaker and her son return the site to its everyday ‘mixed’ state.  “Carpets are carefully relaid, and intense discussion takes place around where exactly the image of Ali with his sword…should be placed and how to arrange the cloth that partially covers it” (Bowman 2012:22).  They are careful to replace the rugs around the tomb, drape the Muslim prayer beads across it and relight the tallow candles.

Here, at this small, modest church, Christians and Muslims very practically share a space sacred to them both.  But they do not just take turns in the space, as the above example would suggest.  They also intermingle there.  At times the Orthodox Christian caretaker of the church ritually passes the Muslim prayer beads across the bodies of Muslim visitors.  “…[A]nd when a respected Sufi dervish comes to the shrine [the caretaker] asks the man to pass the Muslim beads over [her son] as to read his fortune”
(Bowman 2012:22). Even though it requires constant negotiation at the local level and can never be taken for granted, such sharing and mixing transcends the xenophobia and ritual purity espoused by religious and state authorities at times.

Where are the shrines, the sacred sites of mixing and sharing, in our own diverse, multi-ethnic society? Are they in churches, mosques, temples?  Are they in the marketplace?  Are they on the athletic fields? Where, exactly do we go together—heterogeneously—to ask for help, to pile our petitions on top of those who have come before us, and to experience community? Shrines in the sense of the Church of St. Nicholas in Macedonia do exist here.  The ones I know about are in Catholic communities and are frequented almost exclusively by Christians, if not Catholics. I know of only one other kind of site in the US where people of all faiths come together to leave a material trace of their vulnerability and longing:  the spontaneous shrine. You’ve seen them.  There is one now at the site of the Boston bombings.

These shrines have a particular morphology:  located on the site of a tragic event, they are usually at ground level and feature a proliferation of flowers, stuffed animals, notes, and candles.  They stay for an indeterminate amount of time—until a respectful period of observance is deemed over, perhaps, or until the flowers and teddy bears begin to rot and fall apart.  Until things stop being added.  They demonstrate the deep human need to interact with objects and spaces made sacred, in this case through the loss of life.

When I experienced multiple pregnancy losses several years ago, I knew what I needed.  I needed the cleansing waters of an Atlantic tidal pool along the coast of Morocco where I had once bathed with a flock of Muslim women seeking fertility, love, and healing.  There had been music, there had been laughter, under clothes flung into the ocean in offering, and there had been the ebb and flow of cold, gray salt water made sacred through pilgrimage. Instead, I was here, where I mourned alone mostly at a makeshift shrine in the corner of our bedroom for months and months.

We need places—real places—outdoor places and indoor places—where we lay the burden of artifice down and make ourselves vulnerable with one another.  Places not of consumption, nationalism, doctrine, or special interest.

What would it look like if we had shared sacred spaces of a more permanent kind here?  The kind that drew people from the diverse populations we find in this place?  The sort that beckoned us before (and beyond) a tragedy?  What would they look like?  What would we do there?   How would they draw us with their wonder?

~

References:

Bowman, Glenn.  2012.  “Identification and Identity Formations around Shared Shrines in West Bank Palestine and Western Macedonia.” In Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli, eds.  Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean:  Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Bloomington, Indiana:  IU Press:  10 – 28.

Driessen, Henk.  2012.  “A Jewish-Muslim Shrine in North Morocco:  Echoes of an Ambiguous Past.”  In Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli, eds.  Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries.  Bloomington, Indiana:  IU Press:  141– 147.

Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine.  2012. “What do Egypt’s Copts and Muslims Share?  The Issue of Shrines.”  In Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli, eds.  Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries.  Bloomington, Indiana:  IU Press:  148– 173.

Turner, Victor W.  1969.  The Ritual Process:  Structure and Anti-Structure.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press.

In 2008 I preached three sermons on the bluebirds who were living, and dying, in my front yard, in the bird house that my neighbor gave me. I guess we can call that my only sermon series.

For five years I haven’t said another word about them, partly because I was done thinking about birds as a sermon topic, partly because I thought you were tired of hearing about them, and partly because in the last one, part 3 in the series, I said I wouldn’t bother you with another bluebird sermon.

Despite all that, I’m thinking it’s time to revisit them, because I can’t help myself. When I think of Psalm 23, I can’t help but think of the bluebirds in my yard, sustaining life, even if its precarious life, bearing witness to hope in the midst of a world full of enemies. So, today: Bluebirds, part 4.

Let’s pray

From the book of Revelation, from the Gospel of John, and from Psalm 23 we hear a longing for rest, a longing for home, for a safe place to live. In Revelation, chapter 7, a multitude gathers around the throne of the lamb, of Jesus, resting in God’s house.

“These are the one who have come out of the great ordeal,” an elder says, and “the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them” (Rev 7:14-15). Or, as it says in another translation: “the one who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them.”[i] God draws the people close. God shelters the persecuted.

The image of God’s shelter here in this passage is the tabernacle, the tent of God’s presence that traveled with Israel as they wandered in the wilderness, during their migration out of Egypt. As a people on the move, Israel is drawn into God’s presence, drawn into the tabernacle — a movable shelter, a traveling refuge. And God extends the tent to cover all the people. Or, to turn to another image, as it says in Psalm 91: “God will cover you with his feathers. God will shelter you with his wings” (Ps 91:4). God’s tabernacle, God’s house, becomes a nest, with God as a bird, sheltering us under her wings. And no one will snatch us from the nest. Or, in the words of Jesus from John’s Gospel, “No one will snatch them out of my hand,” he says (Jn 10:28).

In John’s Gospel, the image is Jesus as the shepherd who watches over the sheep. But it’s the same idea: God’s presence makes a home for us, even when we are surrounded by enemies, by evil, as we move here and there in the world — God as a nest in the wilderness.

My neighbor gave me a birdhouse some years ago, the perfect size and structure for bluebirds to build their nests inside. I put it on a wood post in the front yard, near the road, which turned out to be a bad idea for a couple reasons. First, because the birds would panic every time a car would pass by, or a neighbor with a dog; and, second, neighborhood cats would dig their claws into the wood post and climb up to the house and kill the newborns. The nest became a grave.

I went to Home Depot and bought a metal pole to hang the birdhouse onto, to replace the wood post. The bluebird couple came back, rebuilt their nest, made some babies, and took turns sheltering the chicks while the other scavenged for food.

This is what hope looks like, stubborn hope — the way bluebirds come back and make room for life in the midst of a world of death. That’s what the gospel is all about: that God makes room for life to grow, so that God’s eternal life, God’s love can grow, can multiply, even in the worst conditions, even in the valley of the shadow of death. The hope of Easter, of resurrection, is that not even crucifixion can put an end to God’s work of making room for life in the world. The story of Good Friday and Easter Sunday is that God turns a grave into a place for new birth, the empty tomb into the birthplace of resurrection. God is stubbornly for hope, for life, like my bluebirds as they nest and shelter.

This winter I moved the birdhouse behind our house, because I decided that it was in my way in the front yard. A couple of bluebirds moved in a month ago and they’ve been hard at work collecting twigs and leaves, weaving all sorts of things into their nest.

Our church is a nest, where God weaves our lives together, creating a home in the world for the gospel to be born, for good news to grow in us, a shelter for hope and joy and all things good. The Christian life is about nesting, about being people who are able to build nests wherever we go, wherever we happen to settle for a season, knowing that God has always been mobile, living in a tent, a tabernacle, providing the people of God shelter in the wilderness.

The world seems like a wilderness of violence, full of hostility and wild destruction.

We are overshadowed by death. Yet, with the Psalmist we pray: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me” (Ps 23:4).

For you are with me. I say those words to God because I can say them to you. I can pray those words to God because you teach me what they mean. You are with me, as we live with shadows of death. You are with me, and with you comes God’s presence, with you comes the body of Christ. All of you, as church, are a nest, making a place for life, for joy, for the goodness of fellowship. I go on with hope, for you are with me.

In John’s Gospel, at the very beginning of his story about Jesus, the Spirit of God flies down from heaven in the form of a bird, a migration from heaven to earth, to rest on Jesus, and to draw us into Jesus’s body. The Spirit is a bird who gathers our scattered lives and weaves us into a home for new life, a nest for hope — not just for ourselves, but for a world in need of hope.

As the Psalmists says: “God will cover you with his feathers. God will shelter you with his wings” (Ps 91:4).

In the Acts of the Apostles we enter a world ruled by the crucified Jesus. The resurrected one returns to the scene exalted in the preached word. Peter and John carry this witness into the city of Jerusalem, directed toward rulers, elders, and scribes (Acts 4:5). The disciples proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, the site of their salvation.

The crucified man of Golgotha[1], the victim of public torture and death, executed by these rulers, elders, and scribes—by these judges—has now returned, not as victim, but as the wounded judge who saves.

And he must keep returning, for the murderous city is not through condemning Christ; the rulers are now turned toward his followers; “people who belong to the Way” (Acts 9:2). The imagery in the early pages of Acts works to establish continuity between Jesus’ suffering and the persecuted Church. Like Jesus’ trial, Peter and John appear in Jerusalem before the courts the day after their arrest and imprisonment (Acts 4:5). The jailed victims embody Jesus’ ongoing life in the world. To speak of one is to speak of the other.

By preaching Jesus Risen, by re-presenting Christ crucified, these judges are presented with their own particular past—the blood on their hands is no longer hidden. The sermon comes to them as a terrifying hope: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, in the name of this man alone, you will find your salvation (Acts 4:11-12).

This is a terrifying moment. It is also a slippery moment for us, one that can tempt us toward a dangerous abstraction. Jesus as the only way to salvation tempts us to imagine our Christianity secured, our lives placed firmly on the right side of history.

We are tempted to distort the resurrection of Jesus as a means toward our own exaltation.

In a move toward God-likeness, even when we talk of justice, we are tempted to create abstract categories like “the poor,” and “the oppressed,” constructing a world outside of which we stand confidently as neutral persons, or in a space between the powerful and powerless. And if this world has been framed for us, one may reach the greatest temptation of all:

Tempted to imagine ourselves outside the powerful/powerless relationship, able to swoop in to save both; we are tempted toward false-messiahs, seduced by false-promises of righteous heroes.

From this imagined security, preaching Jesus as the site of salvation becomes attached to our vision of what is true, good, and beautiful.

And the problem with this fantasy is not that our lives are something other than God’s gift, or that our lives cannot be witnesses to God’s salvation. The problem with this fantasy is precisely that it builds our future hopes upon an invented foundation; it keeps us from being able to remember the truth of our lives:

The truth is, we find ourselves placed within a particular history, in a world not of our own choosing.

Jesus’ salvation in the abstract teaches us to live under the illusion that we can disavow the past, that we can cancel history, reject the memories we no longer want. We can receive Jesus’ forgiveness without realizing in Jesus’ salvific presence the voice of a particular history, particular people. We are tempted to think, in the abstract, that we can turn toward salvation without turning toward real victims, real histories of violence, receiving the Holy Spirit from real people.

If we climb up into the place of the judge, we are tempted to build our future on the forgotten-dead. But God keeps opening our graves, keeps bringing our past back to us[2], disrupting our future visions with the greatest offense of all: that the site of those who have been wounded, who have been made victim, is the site of our salvation, for God returns to us from the dead, still as the man of Golgotha, still wounded, still bearing the marks of the victim.

In this way, the resurrection of Jesus preached to his crucifiers in the New Testament steals from us the ability to abstract the story from its own particular movements. In order for the specific rulers, elders, and scribes in Jerusalem to turn toward their salvation, they must turn toward their particular history of violence, oppression, and exclusion. They must face Jesus, whom they sentenced, whom they crucified, exposing themselves to the judgment of God; and unwittingly, to salvation.

We see here the basic gospel reversal. The victim has become the judge.

But the gospel reversal goes further. The one crucified does not proclaim this good news as a threat, but as a promise and a hope. The old world must end, and yet, its end is not the final word.

The embodied site of this radical break happens most dramatically with Saul of Tarsus, the villainous persecutor of Christians. Until now, Jesus’ resurrection has been preached in Jerusalem, directly to rulers and priests responsible for his crucifixion. It was geographically contained. The crucifixion was their problem, not ours.

Then Jesus stopped Saul on his violent journey, outside the city walls. In blinding him, Jesus brings Saul to his end, sending him to Damascus to be healed by the very people he insulted, injured, and killed. God’s resurrection sermon now stretched beyond Jerusalem: it became a gospel for all people, for us.

Yet, this universalizing move maintains its particular nature. Outside the city walls, those whose lives are marked by violence, oppression, or exclusion, become another “Jerusalem,” another city of rejection. They become another embodiment of Christ crucified, the wounded judge who saves. For when Jesus appears to the man of Tarsus, he locates his identity inside the muted cries of his particular victims:

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4)

Jesus is now calling out from Saul’s past, spoken in radical identification with those broken bodies stoned to death with Saul’s approval (Acts 7:54-59). This is the hidden past that must be given back to Saul in a particular way; this is his story that will also be his salvation. He must turn toward his victim’s voice, those calling out from the dead, revealing God’s identity found on the side of those made victim. The decisive moment for Saul—the blinding light and accusing voice—is the moment Saul found himself removed from his place as judge.

Before that moment, Saul could only see Jesus as failed messiah, useless to the moral order set up to secure a social order Saul could control. But Jesus’ voice still comes to Saul as his antagonist, arriving to defeat his murderous plan, to blind Saul and bring him to his end. Jesus is a living, acting agent. He is the one whom has spoken, still speaks, and will speak again.

Christ’s disruptive appearance flips Saul’s world upside-down, returning to him his true memory, making him truly present to himself for the first time; an excruciating experience. Saul set out to bind his victims, to bring them helplessly back to Jerusalem in chains, and instead he found himself on the ground, lying helplessly without vision, dependent on others to lead him to Damascus.

Saul’s dreams, nurtured by the seductive illusion of righteous heroes, were stolen from him.

He now traveled toward an unknown future, following only after God’s promises.  He could no longer breathe threats and murder, he could not even eat or drink; he could only be led toward his victims in hopes that God’s word would come to him again.

And though Jesus remains the living word who commands, the community must now come into view. We must come into view. Jesus asks us to do something we do not want to do. In the second act, immediately following our lectionary text, Jesus asks Ananias—a follower of Christ, Saul’s enemy—to give Saul his sight, and with it, his salvation (Acts 9:10-19). Jesus asks the community to offer salvation to someone we would rather see left on the road, blinded, swept away and forgotten.

We are asked to look upon this most despised of victims, and let him speak to us of Christ’s presence. We are asked to respond solely to the command of Jesus, to not build our loyalty upon any principle or social order.

This is a precarious moment of apocalyptic proportions. The old world is at its end. The foundation on which Saul once stood has crumbled underneath him. Now he can only point toward Jesus, can only follow after him. HIs future has been disrupted, turned toward Jesus’ hopes, his witness against violence, oppression, and exclusion.

The difficulty with rooting Jesus’ salvation in the presence of particular victims is that our relationships are often fluid and our vision is always limited. It is not a question of whether or not God is on the side of the oppressed; the marks of Jesus’ body are a witness to God’s relentless choice for the victim.

The question for us is this: where are we willing to see the victim, and where are we not? Are we willing to see the hunger strike at Guantanamo as the witness of victims, whether or not we find any one detainee guilty of violence? Detainees being made victim, excluded from human touch, human reconciliation: are we willing to let those moments speak to us of Christ, our wounded savior?

And what of our personal relationships? The complexity of our lives and the world we inhabit make it possible for us to find ourselves both oppressed and oppressor: both judge and victim. And we never reach anything that could be called a purity of either position. One theologian says it this way: Violence, oppression, exclusion toward the so-called ‘other’ is not wrong because the ‘other’ is purely good; it is wrong because the ‘other’ is truly human.[3] She or he is God’s creature, immersed like we all are into the cycle of wounds received and given, where our options for individual violence are already faded into the background of violent histories. Before we can choose a non-violent alternative, we are already caught in the oppressor/oppressed bond, already part of its brutal force. And this is the difficult truth of our lives: we cannot escape this deadly entanglement.

Yet the good news echoed in Jesus’ resurrected wound is this: Jesus has been to the depths of these entanglements. He has entered these destructive cycles of violence; he has been crucified by these histories of oppression and exclusion. Jesus has been to the places where we have been hurt the most, where the world is at its worst, places where these wounds turn into weapons. Jesus has entered the space we cannot escape. And Jesus will bring us out, for God does not merely escape violence and death; God brings it to its end; Jesus’ intervention is a wrench in the spokes that keep histories of violence turning.

Indeed, God will open our graves, and give us back our past; not as a threat, but as a hope and a promise.

This is the story God gives us as the wounded judge who saves. He knows we cannot escape it alone. His resurrection sermon comes to us as people in need each other, in need of God to make space for us to go on, space to make us truthful witnesses.

Which brings our community back into view. We have come to worship, to preach the resurrection. And in so doing, we open our lives to the hope that God’s living word will give us back our past; not as a threat, but as a promise, and a hope.

Like Ananias, we wait for God’s command, and hope God will help us be faithful as we try to point toward Jesus with our lives. If you find yourself made victim, wounded by the stones of judges, your voice can be bold against oppression, for God is with you. You can be bold, because Jesus has already pronounced the most crushing judgment of all to the old world of oppression: it has no place in God’s future. Jesus’ witness is already with you and ahead of you, inviting your raised voice against violence and exclusion, and turning it toward God’s future promises.

Or perhaps Like Saul, you live in a world in which God’s unexpected interruption might surprise you, redirect you, stealing from you visions beholden to illusions of righteous heroes. Following after Jesus’ command, you may be blinded so that you might see. And at the moment you are dependent on others to lead you, hear the good news: the end of our dreams comes with the gift of God’s future, God’s dreams. And it also comes, we pray, with a real community to offer you God’s salvation through human touch and reconciliation, sharing with you in the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

Like the disciples, we may all still lose sight of Christ’s call on our lives, yet we preach the good news of the resurrection: a “world characterized by betrayal is now interwoven with God’s reality incapable of betrayal.”[4] In the risen Christ, we still have space to go on.

Whoever you are, whoever we are, we pray God will show us our identity. We pray will God still speak to us, will help us see victims and judges, oppressed and oppressor. And God must keep whispering to us of a relationship more hopeful, a reconciled life together beyond our imaginations, stretching us into new ways of being church.

For as one theologian says, “if God’s forgiveness does not confront an abstract past, then God’s grace does not make possible an abstract future.” Our life in the freedom of the Holy Spirit remains relentlessly particular. We exchange stories and memories: we pray, we hope, we lament. And in the presence of our resurrected Lord, we find out that our self, our story, our particular history, is the very gift given to us to give to each other.[5]

In the resurrection, our story is given back to us as the end of all exclusion, creating a space for each of us in Christ’s body.  Simply being handed back our hurt, our wounds, and our wrong is not itself an act of grace.[6] Many of us would rightly regard such a possibility with terror and despair, an occasion for some to be more deeply hurt by a world that keeps making victims. What happens in the resurrection, however, is something much more profound: our story, whether as judge, or victim, or both, is given back to us in a particularly special context—in the presence of Jesus.[7] It is the gift given in the wounds of the resurrected word made flesh, the one who keeps coming to us as the bread of heaven, and the cup of our salvation.

In a documentary called The Undocumented, Marcos Hernandez tries to track down his father, or at least the body of his father, who was last seen in the Arizonan desert, with other migrants, a group of them, walking for days in the 120-degree summer heat. His father left their home in Mexico with a Coyote, a man who he paid $2,500 to lead him across the border so Marcos’s dad could get a job and make enough money to send home to pay for his son’s expensive dialysis treatments, to keep him alive. But the father never called. The Coyote reported that he left him in the desert, because he was sick and couldn’t keep up with the others.

Marcos fears the worst — that his father died of dehydration, of heat exhaustion. But to confirm the death, he has to find the body. The documentary is about Marcos and many others, their hopes and fears, as they try to find out what has happened to loved-ones, family members who tried to make the trek across the border into Arizona, into the United States.

The filmmaker focuses on the morgue in Tucson, where the medical examiner, with a team of pathologists and forensic anthropologists investigate human remains, looking for clues that would help them identify the person, so they can return whatever is left to communities, to provide some kind of closure for family members and friends, so the dead can be honored with a burial.

In the film, Marcos won’t believe that his dad is dead until he can see his dead body, or whatever is left of his body — a skull, teeth, his rib cage. He will not believe, unless he can see.

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” That’s what Thomas says to the other disciples about the resurrected Jesus, and what he says, what Thomas says about needing to see the body, reminds me of the story of Marcos, about the need to see in order to believe. For Marcos, his father’s dead body will confirm his worst fears. But for Thomas, the living body of Jesus will confirm what seems impossible, this outrageous news, an unthinkable hope: that Jesus, who everyone saw on the cross — crucified, died, and buried — that he has come back from the world of the dead, back to the land of the living, back to his friends and family.

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Thomas wants to play the role of the medical examiner, investigating the marks of death, the puncture wounds in Jesus’ hands and torso. When Jesus enters the room, he gives Thomas what he wants: “Put your finger here and see my hands,” he says. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Jesus invites Thomas into his body, to poke and prod, to reach into his crucifixion, into his wounds, and in them to discover the resurrection, to believe in the power of God, to have faith in the God of life — as the writer of the Gospel says at the end of our passage, “these things are written so that through believing you may have life.”

What I find so odd in this scene is that the resurrected Jesus still bears the marks of his death, that Jesus still has open wounds, cuts and gashes, holes in his body, as if he is still being healed of his death, as if he is still being restored to health, as if a full resurrection takes time, as if Jesus needs time to be healed completely from his death.

What does this mean as we think about Jesus now, today, as a resurrected body? Does Jesus continue to suffer reoccurring pain, an ache in his legs, throbbing in his side, stinging in his ribs. Do his muscles, his tissue, his flesh, does his body remember the torture of the cross? Does the trauma of crucifixion linger with Jesus, just like my car accident over a year ago lingers with me, as my knee aches when I run, as my neck and back muscles tense up with stress?

There’s a mysterious passage in Colossians, a mystical verse, where the apostle Paul seems to think that Jesus is still suffering from his crucifixion, that the resurrected Jesus bears the agony of the cross, and that human suffering, human pain, our afflictions, are bound together with Christ’s. “In my flesh,” Paul says, “in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”— Christ’s tribulations and oppressions, Christ’s distress and anguish, the wounds of Jesus, Paul says, are opened up in his flesh.

“Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”

The wounds are a kind of absence, a hollow, a puncture, marking Jesus with the unfinished business of resurrection. The wounds in Jesus’ resurrected body are signs to us that more healing is to come, that all has not yet been restored, but that God is at work, healing us from our evil, curing creation from sin. Jesus is alive as a protest against our violence, as a challenge to the power of death.

The problem, for me, is that the powers of death seem to be alive and well. Just listen to our prayers here at church, the way we name the realities of violence, of death, of sin, all around us and even inside of us. It’s not hard to see the absence of resurrection. It’s not hard to pray our way into a world in need of new life, of new creation.

What I want is what Thomas gets: Jesus, alive, physical, touchable, undeniably here, present beyond doubt. I want the reassurance that all shall be well, that our state won’t start executing people on death row again, that Marcos Hernandez will be reunited with his father, alive, that our homeless and imprisoned friends will be restored to life, to a full life, that you and I will get all that we need for a good life, a life full of joy and fulfillment, of grace and affirmation, full of God’s abundant life.

I want the resurrected Jesus, in the flesh, to tell me what he told those disciples when he came to them: “Peace be with you.” “Peace be with you.” “Peace be with you.” Jesus says it three times in our passage, I guess because the disciples needed convincing, but I need convincing too, and it’s hard for it to be enough for me to read the words and to believe them. It would be much easier to have Jesus here, in the flesh, to say those words, to me, to Marcos, to all of us.

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand… I will not believe.”

But Jesus says to Thomas, to the disciples, and to us, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Blessed are those of us who believe, after Jesus ascended into heaven. Blessed are the believers who have faith in what we cannot see, in the absent, resurrected Jesus. As the ancient creed of the apostles says, “I believe in Jesus Christ, who ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead” — a Jesus who is, for now, absent.

What does it mean that we have to go on without the resurrected body of Jesus? — to be people who believe without seeing? That’s the question I’m left with after Easter. And two things come to mind, two thoughts about this gnawing absence.

First, the absence of Jesus in the flesh turns us to one another, as we experience the body of Christ at church, in the gathering of believers who become Christ’s presence, in the world, through the Holy Spirit. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says to the disciples as he breathed on them, as he breathes on us, and through us. In the church we experience the Spirit of Jesus made flesh in us, as we forgive, as we extend God’s grace, as we speak the truth.

That’s the first thing I want to say about what the absence of Jesus does to us — the absence draws us into the identity of Jesus, as we become the body of Christ. The second thing needs to be held in tension with the first, because if all that we say is that Jesus is here, at church, then we are tempted to detach ourselves from the rest of the world, we are tempted to think that we are self-sufficient. But the absence of Jesus should set us in motion, because we should be looking for him, waiting for a return, open to surprise even while expecting him to show up.

The absence of Jesus invites us on a pilgrimage, a search for Christ’s presence, outside of us, beyond our congregation, in the world. And when we look for him, we have to remember how he appeared to Thomas, with holes in his hands and his side, bearing the marks of our violent world, holding in his hands the wounds of creation.

After Easter, we are like Marcos Hernandez, who never stops searching for his father, even after all these years, years of looking among the anonymous dead — los desconocidos, as they are called, the unknown, the strangers — the corpses and bones in the Tucson morgue.

Our search for the resurrected one, the one who has come to give us life, has everything to do with the dead, with the wounded. To be people of the resurrection means that we believe that the wounds will be healed — and not just to believe in this healing, but to give our lives to the healing power of God, to believe with our lives.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Jesus Christ is risen!

(Everyone hopefully responds, “He is risen indeed!”)

Nice.  And I have just proved that you already know this story, the one I have been asked to stand up here and tell you.  You already know this story.

But as one of my teachers used to reassure, with his wide, kind eyes and broad, soothing Australian voice, “It’s OK—we learn by repetition.”

We are here today for lots of different reasons.  Most of you came for the food.  I mean, Janna made a triple rum black pepper cake.  Some of you came to hold Gwendolyn and Susannah.  I think the kids came to play outside on a day when they anticipate joy and energy in the air, the kind they feed off of—maybe you do too.  Some of you came to sing.  Some of you came simply out of habit.  All of these are very good reasons to come.

But we are a storied people and today of all days we are bound up in words that we gather to repeat to each other year after year.  You already know this story, but we’re here to hear it again.

I have my own vision of Easter morning.  It is shaped by bunnies and pastel colors, crosses adorned with flowers, people making food for each other, sunrise and plastic eggs, people gathered around tables, little people in pretty dresses and blue blazers.  (I grew up in the South and trust me, for better and worse, in my childhood the blue blazers were a thing.)  My vision of Easter is full of particular joys small and large, false and true, but it is always full, and, on the whole, rather shiny.

So I find it disorienting to read the resurrection stories in the Bible.  They are all odd.  They are not spit-shined Sunday best.  They certainly aren’t pastel.  They are dark, full of deeply troubled people running around in a graveyard at dawn.  Angels appear and, in case you hadn’t noticed, when angels show up they almost always bring some kind of trouble and disturbance.  Usually they scare people.

Mary, Peter, and the other disciple are confused and afraid.  They don’t know what is happening.  They are fearful of grave-robbing, of someone desecrating the body of their teacher, their friend, someone they loved.  Mary, panicked, keeps asking, “Where is Jesus’ body?”  A few years ago my friend lost her husband in a boating accident in Lake Gaston.  I remember our pastor praying, “please, please Lord, just let them find his body.”  I didn’t understand then, but I do more now, how incredibly difficult it is to lose someone to death, and then, to lose their body too, to have it snatched away.

John’s story has a disoriented pace, a troubled confusion, a disjointed sense of time and reality: it looks like Grief—dramatized, writ large.  For grief warps time and reality for those locked in its grip.  And here, grief itself is upended, disturbed, interrupted.

John’s story is wrapped in a morbid fascination.  He keeps talking about the tomb.  Nine times in eleven verses, “to the tomb,” “from the tomb,” “outside the tomb,”  “into the tomb.”  “The tomb…the tomb…the tomb.”  It is unbridled narrative direction, focus.  John is not subtle.  He wants us to think about the tomb, to reflect on its emptiness.

And the grave-clothes, John won’t let me take my mind off of Jesus’ grave-clothes.  He describes them in such detail, the strips of linen that had been wrapped around Jesus’ body lying there, the cloth that had covered his dead face folded, carefully, it seems, and set to one side.  Was the linen stiff with blood?  Or did Joseph of Arimathea have time to wash Jesus before he wrapped his body, leaving the strips clean and fluid, neat and white, like folded laundry waiting patiently on my bed to be put away?  Why are they there?  Are the linen strips, as Calvin suggested, the “tokens of death,” laid aside to “testify that [Jesus] had clothed himself with a blessed and immortal life.”[1]  Or are they a sign of the upside down nature of God’s kingdom?  Linen was a fine cloth, worn by kings and priests.  Does Christ in his reign have so little need of our finery and status that he would just leave the trappings of human kingdoms, discarded in a heap?  Whatever the case, there they lay, their image seared into the minds of those who come to see.

John paints a haunting picture for us, as do the other gospels.  It is different from my shiny Easter vision.  The church interprets the fact of the resurrection as the mark of God’s final victory over death.  Which it is.  And after the terribleness of Jesus’ death on the cross, it is no wonder that we want to sing “Victory in Jesus” on Easter morning.  But there’s a temptation buried in our theology, a temptation to triumphalism and demanding the immediacy of God’s kingdom; it isn’t far removed from the shouts of the crowd on Palm Sunday.  Peter Hausmann told us last week in his sermon, “People want Power.  King.  Sword.  Change.  Certainty.”  Sometimes, if we aren’t careful, we can twist the meaning of resurrection into that same thing: “Finally,” we say, “on Easter we have Power.  King.  Sword.  Change.  Certainty.”  But that isn’t the same thing as resurrection, as God’s victory over death.  God’s victory always looks different than ours.

I think that is one reason we have these strange, morbid stories of scared, grieving people confronting grave-clothes and an empty tomb.  They subvert our temptations.  The power of resurrection in every way, even from the moment it is first discovered, is founded in emptiness.  John, like any good writer, doesn’t tell us that, he shows us.  Shows us grave-clothes and an empty tomb, paints a particular viewpoint.

And he takes us somewhere too.

John’s story is incredibly physical.  It is a narrative full of direction.  There is a lot of movement, bodies in motion.  There is a great deal of concern for where bodies are in space.  “I do not know where they have put him!” Mary cries (20: 13).  John directs our sight, he tells us where things are, where people are.  The story is layered and folded, like the cloth that covered Jesus’ face, with words of “coming” and “seeing.”  “Mary comes,” “Mary sees,” “Mary runs.”  “Peter and the other disciple went out,” “they came,” “they ran.”  “The disciple went,” “He sees,” “He went in.”  “Peter comes,” “Peter went in,” “Peter sees.”  “Mary stoops,” “She sees,” “She turns,” “She sees,” “She turns.”  Over and over, words of stooping and going in, going out and turning, coming and seeing.

Mary, especially, she keeps coming and seeing.  She comes to the tomb, she returns to the tomb, she looks into the tomb again.  She keeps approaching, keeps coming back.  She turns at the sound of Jesus’ voice, even when she doesn’t realize that it is him.  She is deep in grief, her hope might be fading, her hope might be almost nonexistent.  But she comes and returns and turns again and again to Jesus, even when she is sad and afraid and doesn’t understand and, it is “she, the one having turned”—that is what John calls her—she is the one who sees Jesus—risen—calling her name.[2]

Is that the point?  The repeated coming and seeing?  Is that our invitation too at Easter, to come and see, to be like Mary, turning again and again with our vestige bits of hope?  It might be confusing, unnerving.  It might turn our worlds on end.  It might interrupt our expectations.  It might interrupt our grief.  We might not know what to make of what we find—spent grave-clothes, an empty tomb.  We might not even recognize Jesus when he shows up in flesh and blood, right in front of us.

But if we grasp, even in a whisper, even in a moment, what it means—spent grave-clothes, an empty tomb?—Jesus is risen!—Then we are changed.  There is hope.  Maybe not stalwart, self-assured, shiny hope, but some kind of revelation that when we thought—when we were sure—that all was lost:

It is not.

Mary ran in the beginning, ran to find the disciples out of fear and desperation, “they have taken the Lord” (20: 2).  It doesn’t say so, but I like to imagine her running at the end too, running with awe and confused wonder and abandon to tell the disciples this time, “I have seen the Lord!”

Today, may we receive this good news, this astounding, earth shattering news.  May we allow ourselves be spellbound.  May our griefs be interrupted, and begun, in small, slow ways, to be healed.  May our gazes and our bodies be directed, lifted up to see the risen Christ.  May we be sent out running, full of freedom and confused, baffled joy.

We may not yet have any, earthly idea what it all means.  But Easter invites us.  Come and see:
Angels attending.
Spent grave-clothes.
Empty tomb.

And Jesus.
Himself.
Risen.

Hallelujah.

Ash Wednesday and Holy Thursday go together. Both turn our eyes, they turn our lives, to the basics, the fundamentals of earthly life: dirt and water. On Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, we are marked by ashes, by dirt, and we remember that God has made us from the earth, we remember that our lives of dust are held together with God’s love.

On Holy Thursday, at the end of Lent, we focus on water, the water in these pitchers, the water that you will pour on someone’s feet, the water that will wash over your feet.

In these last days of Lent, we are ready for renewal, for new life; we are ready for water, life-giving water. With this water, God’s love washes over us. With the hands of our sisters and brothers, Christ’s love holds us.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says to his disciples after he washes their feet. “A new commandment I give to, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus gives his new commandment of love as he washes feet. For Jesus, footwashing is what love looks like; footwashing is what God’s love feels like. Christian love has everything to do with the gentle way we hold each other’s feet, with all the ways we care for one another, with generosity, with kindness, with tenderness. God’s love has everything to do with ashes and water, with the dirty feet we will take in our hands, and the hands we will trust to hold our feet, to uphold our lives.

When Jesus tells us to love one another, he gives us something to do, footwashing, because love is more than a feeling; it’s a commitment to sustain one another, to walk side by side, to work together, to serve with humility, to trust someone with your lives.

Footwashing is how we practice this love, how we learn how to love as God does. Footwashing makes our love visible, tangible, palpable — as physical as ashes and water, as flesh and blood, as washing and drying.

When we wash feet, we find ourselves resting into Jesus’ love for us — a love that flows with the water, a love that reaches out to us with hands. When we wash feet, we learn again how to practice love — we make a profession of our love, a public confession that we believe, that we trust, that we have faith in the God who is love, the God who is here, at our fingertips, between our hands and feet.

You make this confession with your feet and hands as you surrender yourself to the body of Christ, as you let someone take your feet and wash them. You make this confession with your body as you bow into the form of Jesus, as you become a servant, kneeling before your sister, your brother. With these movements, we come to know God’s life among us, God’s restoration, as God renews us with life-giving water.

It’s one thing to know that God loves you. It’s another to feel it. I know that God loves me; the bible tells me so. But I’m here tonight because I need to feel it.

Benediction:

We have worshiped God through footwashing. We have invited God into our hands and feet, into our lives. Go now, washed and renewed with the love of Christ.

And as you go, may the life of Jesus flow through you life, may God’s love flow through your love. Amen.

I

Our Psalm for today reads:

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.”

What might it mean for us to be like those who dream?

In a short story published in 1911, W. E. B. Du Bois dreamt Jesus Christ turned up in Waco, Texas. What if, he asks, what if Jesus came and wandered amidst lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws, chatting with white wives of important men, and black convicts on the run? What if no one quite gets who he is or what he’s up to? Called simply ‘the stranger’ by everyone, including the narrator, Jesus provokes a different response from each character he meets. Some have eyes to see him. Some don’t.

The power of the world Du Bois creates here lies in a single, tremendously powerful paradox: On one hand, there is the fact that Jesus is the one everyone, I mean, everyone knows—especially in Texas of all places!—and on the other, the fact that Jesus is a stranger. Everyone in the story knows who ‘Jesus’ is, but few recognize this weird, quiet out-of-towner, this drifter whose ambiguous racial identity drives much of the dramatic tension. The white folks keep thinking he’s white at first glance, then freak out when they realize he isn’t. His eyes are too dark, his skin is olive, even yellow, and his hair hangs in close curls on the side of his face. They think they know him, but it turns out, they don’t. The town priest says, “Surely, I know you. I have met you somewhere…You—you remember me, do you not?” But the stranger quietly sweeps his cloak aside and passes through the door, saying in low tones, “I never knew you.”

This ambiguity—between knowing and unknowing, the familiar and the strange—this is precisely what gives the whole thing its dreamlike quality. Indeed, isn’t this what it feels like when we dream? Familiar things feel suddenly strange, and strange things familiar. Normal things appear bizarre to you, but it somehow feels natural when you find yourself baking a casserole at the White House with your old gym teacher from middle school. It’s an unsettling thing, to dream. We often wake up alarmed or sad or filled with longing.

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” writes the psalmist,
“we were like those who dream.”

What might it mean for us to be like those who dream?

II

I think keeping this sense of ambiguity and paradox in mind helps us when we come to the Old Testament reading for today, Isaiah 43. Having been languishing in exile for years, the Israelites receive a new word from Yahweh. Judah fell to the Babylonians because of their unfaithfulness, yes, but now—now, they are coming home. Their Persians captors, being used of God, have freed them, released them to journey back to the land they call home. It would seem, from the Israelite point of view, that perhaps everything will now go back to normal, back to the way things were. The word Yahweh speaks to them now is not judgment, but consolation. Comfort. The only problem is, the instructions don’t entirely make sense. How so?

Notice that in verses 16 and 17, the prophet repeatedly interprets this new journey by alluding to an earlier event, the great Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. He reminds hearers that Yahweh is the one “who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters.” Do not forget, he says, who brought you out of bondage. But then, abruptly, the next verse tells them: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” Well, that’s going to be a little hard for us since you literally just told us about them.

And furthermore, it’s not hard to imagine their confused response: how could we forget about ‘the former things, the things of old’ when it is you, the God of our beginnings, our past, our story—who is instructing us to forget them? Are we to forsake the familiar things, the trusted things—our tradition, our narrative, our history—for the sake of this new strange thing you will do? It is a disturbing question. It is the perennial question for people of faith, the question God’s people face again and again, in every generation, as an ancient truth encounters a new world, new circumstances, new problems. It is the question we face today, isn’t it?—in our own lives, in the social issues we face, in the life of the churches broadly speaking, and in the life of Chapel Hill Mennonite in particular. It brings us back to the tension between what we know and what we don’t, the paradox between the familiar and the strange.

Let’s read the next verse with this question in mind, and with the dreamlike vision of Jesus Christ in Texas still echoing in our ears. I think something very interesting begins to come into view: “I am about to do a new thing,” Yahweh says, “now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” You might miss it, God says to them, and to us. And because we might miss it, we are reminded that the one doing it, this strange thing, is the one we know, the one who has drawn near to us already. The God of the Exodus.

I’m doing something that is new for you, Yahweh says, something strange. But it is I who will do it—no one else—I, the Lord, the one who brought you out of Egypt. The point is: Something strange will happen. But someone familiar will do it. It is a simple point: Something unknown is coming to you. But someone who knows you, whom you know, will be with you in the unknown. Change comes. But the unchanging one remains with you in the midst of it. And in this way, the wilderness wraps itself around our wandering, holding us in a new world, a mixture of the strange and the familiar, of things we recognize and things we don’t. This will feel kind of like the Exodus, Yahweh says, but it isn’t the Exodus. It might feel familiar, but it isn’t business as usual.

In the context around this passage, there are indeed descriptions of how, exactly the journey will be different. In the original Exodus, for instance, they left “in great haste,” but this time they won’t. Water was scarce the first time; this time rivers are promised in the desert, pools of water in the wilderness. But for our purposes here, I think it is more pressing for us to consider what this text might suggest to us about the way God interacts with God’s people. That is, what does it mean for us to live inside of this tension between the strange and the familiar? What does faithfulness look like in the weird, dreamlike wilderness of the God of Israel, the one who calls us to ‘a new thing’? What would it mean for us to live in this paradox, to be like those who dream?

III

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams once began a sermon by acknowledging the fact that people often suspect, not without good reason, that paradox is a cheap, evasive maneuver. We call something a ‘paradox’ or a ‘mystery’ in order to escape our own contradictions, or to conceal our muddled thinking. This is quite possible. You may wish to inform me I have done so, and we have a time in our service for that.

But Williams also points out that a paradox—like the one we’ve talked about today, of the God of old saying forget the things of old—this paradox can be doing something different too. It can acknowledge that life in the real world is fluid, filled with subtle and rapid interactions, and that our language, therefore, sometimes has trouble ‘keeping up’ with that puzzling and elusive thing—truth. We know and we don’t know. Familiar and strange. “In such a setting,” Williams says, “we utter paradoxes not to mystify or avoid problems, but precisely to stop ourselves [from] making things easy by pretending that some awkward or odd feature of our perception isn’t really there. We speak in paradoxes because we have to speak in a way that keeps a question alive” (Ray of Darkness, 100).

I am hoping that the way I’ve tried to speak about Isaiah is like that: As a paradox, an apparent contradiction which keeps us in dialogue, keeps us open and trusting the possibility that something true may emerge in the process of our questioning, our seeking. That truth—about God, about one another, about ourselves—can and does emerge from these tensions, these messy and puzzling conflicts: this lesson is one of the greatest gifts CHMF has given me. This sermon, in key part, has been a way of reflecting biblically and theologically about what happens here, and in our homes, and in our Community Life Meetings. What is this concrete practice of dialogue, of living together inside the new and the old, of being receptive to a God who is at once strange to us and familiar? There are many good ways of naming it. I have tried to suggest a name from the language of the Psalms:

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.”

What does it mean for our community to dream together? In this sense, dreaming isn’t pie-in-the-sky idealism; it isn’t escape from reality. (It’s not like those John Lennon bumper stickers you always see in Carrboro, “you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”) Rather, for the Psalmist, ‘being like those who dream’ names a concrete way of recognizing that faithfulness to the God of Israel calls us—just as it always called them—to walk side by side with the strange and the familiar, the new and the old.

We have always been a people who find the strangeness of God in the familiar, the ordinary: bread and wine, singing hymns and talking, washing each other’s feet. And conversely, we have always been a people who find the familiarity of God in strangeness, in the strange lands through which we wander—deserts and wilderness and the University of North Carolina—and most of all, perhaps, we find the familiarity of God in strange people. That is, the ones the world calls strange: those who are naked, those who are hungry, those who are thirsty, those who are sick. Those who are excluded, those who are in prison, those whom the world has forgotten, and cast aside. We have always found God in the strangeness of those places, those people. “I was a stranger,” Jesus says, “and you welcomed me.”

If there is something timeless, something ‘we can count on’ not to change in our knowledge of God and of Christ, isn’t it this? Precisely that God is always disrupting our familiarity, always surprising us, always identifying Godself with the strangers and the strangeness we thought we had safely put aside? Hasn’t the God of Israel, the God of the Exodus always been this way? Wanting to be known, but known as a stranger, a burning fire. Giving us a name, but not a name we can use to possess him as another object of our knowledge. Hell, it’s barely a name we can even pronounce. YHWH. I am who I am. The known and unknown God. The God we know, meeting us in the stranger we don’t.

In closing then, it’s worth noting two things. First, this paradox of strange-and-familiar, like a dream, can be unsettling, frightening even. It means we risk missing something. We might even miss seeing God. In the story of Jesus Christ in Texas, there is only one person who recognizes Jesus immediately; the rest mostly miss the point. It is the butler of the white woman who owns the house where Jesus is staying. “He was an ancient black man,” Du Bois writes, “with tufted white hair, and he held before him a large, silver tray filled with a china tea service. The stranger rose slowly and stretched forth his hands as if to bless the [items on the tray]. The old man paused in bewilderment, tottered, and then with sudden gladness in his eyes dropped to his knees, and the tray crashed to the floor. ‘My Lord and my God!’ he whispered; but the woman screamed: ‘Mother’s china!’”

As we discern, in our communal life and personal life, what it means to live out an old faith in ever-changing circumstances, it can be hard to know what exactly is confessing Christ, and what is fretting over the good plates; to know when the Lord is saying, “I am about to do a new thing,” and when it’s just us getting it wrong. But it is just this uncertainty which calls us into community together, into radical patience, and radical dependency on the presence of the spirit in our midst.

And this brings me to the second point, the last thing I’ll say. And that is that we should remember from Isaiah that this paradox, this difficult word, is not judgment; it is comfort. It is not a punishment, but hope—an invitation, an opportunity to meet the living God in community together, and in the strangers we welcome, and in the strangers who become neighbors, and in the neighbors who become friends. In this way, the prophet tells us, the people of God are formed. According to verse 21: unsettling though it may be, it is through this journey, this ‘new thing,’ this strange process that God “gives water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert…drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, so that they might declare my praise.”

On Monday mornings, a few years ago, there was a worship service in a clearing in the brush and trees for the people who lived nearby, in the woods. We worshiped on an abandoned concrete slab, a stones throw from an onramp for Interstate 40. After Paul would lead us in a few hymns with his guitar, after someone would read from the Bible, after Carolyn would preach, it was time for Communion. The pastor would stand at the flimsy card table and read from 1 Corinthians, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread.” She would take the Hawaiian bread from the plastic bag on the Lord’s Table and hold it up and tear it in half. Then she would take the Welch’s grape juice and pour it into the cup, saying, “In the same way Jesus took the cup, the cup of the new covenant.”

Once, as the minister walked from one person to another in the circle, serving Communion, she came to a man who was new to our community, a homeless pilgrim who had wandered into town and would wander away when the time came. I could see his hands, held out in front of him, mud-stained palms, thick fingers, yellowed by cigarettes. I caught a noxious whiff of stale alcohol sweating through his pores. As the pastor tore a piece from the loaf and put it in his hands, I saw his eyes begin to water, his eyes swimming in tears, tears streaming into his beard.

In the story we heard from Luke’s Gospel, a son returns to his father’s house, smelling of pig slop and fornication, and he is welcomed to communion at his father’s banquet without question, without a lecture, without a call for repentance.

“But while he was still far off,” it says, “his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (v. 20). The sight of his son overwhelms the father with love. He cannot wait for his son to arrive, so the father runs to him and embraces him, welcoming him with a kiss.

The son begins the speech he had prepared on his long walk home, the one about being worthless, unworthy of love, the speech about being a slave not a son, a hired-hand not a member of the family. But the father interrupts his speech, he doesn’t let his son finish groveling in his shame. The father cuts him off and begins to prepare a feast instead: he says to his servants, “Quickly… get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

With his love, his unconditional love, this love that moves him to run out to his lost son, the father washes away his child’s guilt and shame. In his father’s house, “there is therefore now no condemnation.”

That’s almost true, because we do hear condemnation from the eldest son who cannot tolerate the stench of his brother’s sin. He, of course, focuses the father’s attention on sex, as we so often like to do: “when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”

The older son thinks of his life with his father as obedience and punishment, and since the younger son has disobeyed, he must be condemned and punished, not welcomed, not celebrated, not desired and loved. The older son thinks of his life as one of slavery—that’s what it means to live in his father’s house: obedience as slavery, piety as slavery. “I have been working like a slave for you,” he says, “and I have never disobeyed your command.” He’s worked so hard, he is so valuable to the household, so he should get payment, he should get more than his wayward brother. What he does not understand is that his father loves without a reason, his father loves without calculation, without evaluation, without comparisons.

This is where we find God in the story. Like the father, God is the one who loves, who desires reunion with his beloved, with his children, all of them, all of us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter where we’ve been. Shame and guilt do not come from God; those accusations come from us, as we play the role of the older son in the story, the accuser. God has no need for us to grovel in our worthlessness. God is the one who interrupts our confessions with grace, with forgiveness, with communion, with a party, a celebration. As Paul puts it in our passage from 2 Corinthians, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their transgressions against them.”

The good news is that we are loved, that we are fundamentally loved, that the most basic thing about us is that we are loved by God, desired by God, that we belong to God, as children not slaves.

To have faith is to come to know, to believe, that the truest thing about yourself is that you are loved. To have faith is to believe that you are worthy, worthy of love, that you are lovable.

Church, our congregation, our life together is an exploration of how we are made lovable, how we are worthy of love. Our life together is our confession that God’s love is possible, here and now, with us, God’s love made flesh, in our flesh. To believe in this love, to trust our lives to this God, we need all the help we can get — we need sisters and brothers who show us what it means to be loved by God, not accusers, not people who shame us, but children of God who hold us with the father’s arms, who wash away our guilt with the father’s kiss, people who show us, with their tears of joy, how it feels to be welcomed, to find a place at the Lord’s Table, God’s banquet.

After the Communion service in the woods, with his eyes still wet with tears, I heard the homeless man ask to borrow a cell phone so he could make a call. “Hey,” he said into the phone, “I’m at this place, I think it’s a church, and you’ll never guess what happened. They let me take Communion.” He was bewildered, shocked with joy.

I think the challenge of the story of the prodigal son comes at the beginning of the passage. The beginning of the story calls us to think about where we can find Jesus, as we follow him into new life, the new creation. This is how the story begins: “The sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ ”

Who do you eat with? Who are the sinners who are too dirty, too impure?