May 28, 2017: In Memoriam John A. Hartog

σκυβαλα

(skubala)

Philippians 3:8: “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ.”

For Hank and me, Johnny was the cool cousin. Older enough to be always cool, but closer in age to us than the Vermeulens. One time my parents had to go to General Synod and they farmed us out, so I stayed with Auntie Jo, which meant good food. But I was jealous of Hank going to Uncle Bert’s, and getting to sleep in Johnny’s room on that trundle bed.

Our admiration for him was absolute. I have an early memory of him with an old truck in the back yard on Prescott Avenue. Was he driving it? Was “A. Hartog” written on it? I remember not knowing who A. Hartog was. All I knew of my uncle’s name was Bert, so Johnny had to explain it to me.

Johnny was funny and smart, and he had cool stuff, especially tools and cars. Wasn’t it true for him that all stuff was cool, all stuff had value? All stuff had stories, and the stories fascinated him. How remarkable that this Jersey boy should have been the one to learn and tell the stories of the rocks in this landscape, these streams and ponds and mountains.

Down this road at the first little creek he showed me a depression in the ground where once a house had been and a family lived. Further down is the stream where he showed me a mill pond and he could read in the rocks the change from cross-cut saws to radial saws. This very building, once derelict-–he heard its story of a sacred space. Some broken rusty piece of metal that you thought was junk he could tell the story of. For Johnny there was no such thing as junk, but everything had “surpassing value.” How many examples could I multiply?

Which is why our text from Philippians 3 is contradictory. “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse.” Refuse. Garbage. Trash. It’s “dung” in the KJV. These are all attempts politely to translate the Greek word σκυβαλα. Let’s go with “junk”. Could Johnny count nothing as junk?

Or, precisely to count all things as junk in order to gain Christ is why he built his barn and filled it up. St. Paul meant it for negative, but how about if we treat it as positive: I count all things as junk in order that I may gain Christ. How about if the junk is how you get to Christ?

I know that Johnny saw things differently than I did, than most of us, and he saw things we did not see. I think this was often for him a frustration and distraction, because if the world fit together differently for him, then how did he fit in? Was it distraction or abstraction? What is there after all to gain? And to gain, what must I count as loss? To count as loss brings things to conclusion.

How do you conclude things when everything has more to say, and its own thing to say? Including God? How do you draw conclusions about God, the way that other people seem to do, the way that we, his family, are always doing? To draw conclusions means you end the story, but everything has more to say and more to see.

I came lately to understand how he much an observer he was. Let me read from a letter that he wrote to Melody and me eight years ago. It’s dated 12/13/09. “Needless to say, but I have to speak about how wonderful our gathering at Maria’s was. I was watching all the participants, and both youse guys came up golden. Each particular characteriza-tion of the involved folks seems to change a bit a every year. I believe myself to be a sensitive observer, watching the coolest “cats” in my life. I’ll admit the outcome is always spectacular. It’s tough to get down, & tough to go back — Friday rain ruled, puddle to puddle. But, I’m back, & the cat still loves me.”

If you’re always observing you’re likely abstracted and a little removed, but maybe not at rest. He was a restless guy. But not from fear, and I don’t think from an internal itch. He wasn’t ever trying to prove something or even solve something, just keep open to everything as long as he could. Not at rest does not necessarily mean not at home. He was at home on this pocket of a mountain, in this landscape whose story he made his own.

And he prepared a place for himself. A home for his soul. A suitable church. I wonder if it put his soul at rest when he was alone by himself that he had this church to belong to. Especially in those last weeks of his life as he was contemplating the loss of all things, and suffering the loss of all things. This was the Johnny Hartog way of gaining Christ, to have a church for him and for himself to end in. Surpassing value. Johnny Hartog, rest in peace and rise in Glory, and God be with you.

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 21, Easter 6, Volunteer Sunday: Eager to Do Good

1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21


If you love me, you will keep my commandments. A well-known statement of Jesus to his disciples the night before he died. Less well known is that opening statement from the First Epistle of Peter: Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? The two statements in combination are my topic today.

But first let me thank The Stone House Singers for helping us celebrate our volunteering. Now you singers are not paid, correct? You are all volunteers, right? Not me. I get paid for this. How do you like it that I who am preaching the sermon on volunteering am also the one person in the room who isn’t doing it?

Do you consider the Lord Jesus a volunteer? Did he get paid for being Messiah? We know that St. Paul was a volunteer—he earned his keep by making tents. St. Peter seems to have gotten a stipend when he got promoted from disciple to apostle, but I’m guessing the readers of his epistle were volunteers. Like you all. So let me thank you, today especially Phil, Michael, Jenn, Dave, Jessica, Pete, Karen, and all of you, all of you because you are here today voluntarily.

The Christian faith, at its heart, is voluntary. Because it appeals to belief it requires freedom, not compulsion. It’s based on choice, not coercion. On attraction, not fear. The church has no police. Our only form of penalty is to keep you from communion, which most people do without anyway, so what use is that? The church assumes free will, volition, from the Latin voluntas, voluntatis, voluntate, voluntarily. Every Sunday is a volunteer Sunday. To keep you all volunteering is what I get paid for.

Which does take some doing, even though you all know that what you get back from your volunteering more than compensates for what you put into it.  And even though you understand the fulfillment and the satisfaction of having done something that costs you, it does cost you. Maybe time away from your family. Time away from your own pursuits that no one else looks after but yourself. Time away from your own self-care.

In our modern democratic culture the cost of your religion is rarely other than an opportunity cost. Your choosing for one thing reduces your opportunity to do something else as well. But you know there have been many times when your religion might cost you life and limb and many places where to support a church results in discrimination and even persecution. Your voluntary choice for church is also a choice for suffering, not suffering as a desirable but suffering as inevitable.

For us, supporting the church has cultural advantages and is regarded as respectable. It offers good programs and I don’t have to list them. But in the time of St. Peter’s epistle, the church had no programs besides its weekly gathering, and in the surrounding culture it was not respectable and it brought you disadvantages and social penalties.

So it’s a real question that the epistle opens with, it’s not rhetorical. Let me translate it extremely literally: “Now who is the one who will be harming you if you are zealous for the good?” Because you will be harmed! Maybe not in a religiously neutral situation like our own, but in a situation when your religion is not respectable, or even illegal, you will be harmed for doing good, especially when the good you do is to counter the prevailing power that maintains its power by doing harm. All governments are violent, all of them. Some less than others, but all of them. All governments lie, some less than others. Yet even when they lie, you be eager to tell the truth. Even when they are violent, you be eager to wage peace. And when they do harm, you be eager to do good.

One of the ways of doing good is the contribution of your voluntary time to the alternative community of the church. Now there are many free-will communities in the culture for you to contribute your voluntary time to. They have their value. Choirs. The Park Slope Civic Council. Alumni associations. Sports clubs. I’m on the board of my housing co-op. But there is only one kind of voluntary association that I know of the only purpose of which is goodness itself, the source of goodness, the extension of goodness, and the maintenance of goodness against evil.

There is only one voluntary association I know of that trains you to head towards suffering, be that your own or someone else’s. There is only one voluntary association I know of for training in transforming love, transcendent love. This training in transcendent love makes use of many different exercises and fitness routines, and these are the volunteer jobs in a church, all the various kinds of service, all different aspects and expressions that woven together make up the complexity of love. That is what you are volunteering for, from coffee to counting money to serving communion, to train yourself in practical love and to contribute to a community witnessing to transcendent love.

If you love me you will keep my commandments. As typical in John’s gospel it can be taken different  ways. The verb forms allow all of indicative, subjunctive, and imperative, yielding an if-then condition either present-imperative or future-probable or maybe intentionally both. If ye love me, keep my commandments. If you are loving me you will be keeping my commandments.

I confess that loving Jesus has always felt awkward to me. I have no difficulty in loving God simply as God, but loving Jesus means also loving God as a human being, and loving a human being implies affection, but how can I feel affection for a human being at such a great remove in time and space? God as God I feel so close to, and my love of God is not about affection. So how do I love Jesus? If not by affection, then by action? By keeping his commandments? Okay, and what are his commandments? That we love. It’s circular, which is also typical of John. We love by keeping his commandments and we keep his commandments by loving.

My granddaughter is old enough now to be done with singing that Barney song, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.” It isn’t just any love that you practice here. I call it transcendent love because it is the love between God the Father and God the Son, and I call it transforming love that God took on our suffering in Jesus-being-eager to do good to those who harmed him, and I call it voluntary love because you do it in freedom. You choose for that love voluntarily behind its various manifestations in the down-to-earth realities of the congregation. You are eager for this love. You are eager to do good precisely against all the harm being done in the world. You are eager for love.

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 14, Easter 5, Believing Is Living on the Boundary

Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14

“If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” That’s quite a promise. Do you believe him? It’s from that promise that Christians typically end our prayers with such phrases as “in Jesus’ name” and “for Jesus’ sake.” It’s a promise we keep acting on, even when we do not see the proof of it or even an outcome. It’s a challenge as much as it’s a promise, isn’t it, to ask beyond our comprehension.

We Christians are expected to believe what we cannot comprehend. We are expected to talk about what we do not understand. We are challenged to know what we cannot explain. We are invited to go where we do not know the way, and even to want to go to we-don’t-know-where. All of this is included in believing. This is what agnostics feel they cannot do, at least for themselves, and what atheists feel no one should do, and we are fools for doing so.

Being a believer keeps you living right up against a boundary, a boundary on your knowledge and your certainty, a boundary of which there is another side. On this side of the boundary is our general common knowledge, with the predictability of nature and the availability of contentment and the reward of ease, provided you are privileged and lucky. Ease of knowledge, ease of proof, ease of self-examination, ease of contentment, ease is the ideal and possession is the proof, as long as your luck holds out. A non-believer is someone who believes the boundary is absolute, that there is nothing on the other side.

A believer lives on both sides of the boundary. We are firmly on this side in body and in soul, but we also traffic on the other side, the uneasy side, the side you can’t possess, the side of promises and visions and ethical challenges. Here are the things we don’t understand but talk about, here is what we can’t explain but yet we know, here is what we can’t comprehend but still believe, here is where we go though we do not know the way, and where we are welcome without possessing it.

The other side of the boundary is not an escape. It’s not an other-world, it’s not just heaven, the heaven that Stephen could suddenly see into as he approached the boundary of his death. Unless it’s the heaven not of mythology but of the Bible—heaven as the unseen reality pressing down upon us, heaven starting just above the ground and then heaven all the way up and all the way down again. The boundary is not across space or time but through the will, and the open welcome of the heart.

The other side of the boundary is not some other world but the spirituality of this world, it’s the transcendence of the very ground we live on. The promises and visions and ethical challenges on the other side are for this side to open up. Those promises and visions both confirm and challenge our possession and contentment on this side, whether for healing or revolution or both. What on this side you think of as firm and solid as rock is seen from the other side as living stones, appointed for praise beyond themselves. If you’re a believer you live on both sides of the boundary. And what on the other side you cannot possess is what gives you hope beyond hope for the ground on this side.

The boundary is through your heart, and your heart may be troubled, like the disciples in the gospel story. They felt that the Lord Jesus had drawn them up to the boundary, and now he’s going to cross it and leave them behind. “Where you going? We don’t know the way!” Can’t you just once right here show us The Father, and we shall be satisfied! The gospel writer had us in mind when he wrote this, for the absence of Jesus that they feared is the absence of Jesus in our ordinary experience.

There is a purpose to his absence though. The purpose is that we look back at ourselves, that we engage ourselves on this side of the boundary, that our belief about the other side affects how we perceive ourselves right here. We are invited to believe that we stand for Jesus as God’s presence in the world. Not that we are now the savior, not that we are God incarnate now, certainly not that we are the Lord, but that we are the living presence of God in the world. Where God was present in a person God is now present in a people. And now we are God’s people!

The Lord Jesus tells us, through the disciples, that he’s crossed the boundary to empower our lives on this side of it, and we need to come to terms with ourselves, and our status and powers and prerogatives and responsibilities. “Ask anything in my name. Greater works will you do.” 

Extravagant entitlements, and rightfully doubtful to critique from on this side, and doubtful to ourselves, unless we judge ourselves by what he tells us about ourselves from the other side. We have to believe about ourselves what he tells us about ourselves, and then let him make it of us.

Most religions provide some certainties and monuments on this side of the boundary. Temples are built for the gods to be accessible to visitors, with their images and sacrifices and oracles, priests and priestesses inhabiting monuments of polished stone. But what a strange new faith was this one, whose converts had no such things, and why the Romans considered them atheists.

The church had no priests and they possessed no buildings of their own. Their only sacrifices were ethical, their only oracles were their intercessions, and their only images were love. To the Romans it looked like just an exalted view of ordinary life, plus all the improbables these people believed.

St. Peter in his epistle appeals to this temple language to teach the scattered little congregations in Asia Minor to see themselves as more than just gatherings of exiles and outsiders, but actually as the location of God’s saving presence in the world. That just as the Spirit of God came down upon the Temple of Solomon, and just as the Holy Spirit rested upon the Lord Jesus, so the Holy Spirit of God, not just a third of God but the soul of God, the full and inner self of God, the vitality of God, the Holy Spirit of God rests upon this congregation to be fully present in the world.

We might rather have God present in the world in a fashion less ambiguous, less tainted by our human weakness and less compromised by the sins of the church. More miraculous, more distinct from human experience, more impressive to the world, and sufficiently discernible from this side of the boundary without belief.

That would be the way of prestige and possession, but not be the way of sacrifice and love. That would not be the way of the God whose greatest work in all the world was to yield to us upon the cross, to yield to us at our very worst. It’s a remarkable extension of that same radical love that God should submit to us to be present in the world.

This has meaning for our congregation of Old First. Our mission is to be a community of Jesus, to worship God, to love God and our neighbors. But also our mission is to exhibit the presence of God within the world, to display it and declare it, by our doing and our saying and our singing, and even by just our believing.

You know people who are content to stay within the boundary and have no interest of the other side. But you know people who feel the pressure of the boundary and its restriction, and they long for openness and something more, for comfort and for challenge, for revolution, for healing, for hope beyond hope within this life.

Tell them, tell them what you believe. You don’t have to prove it, you can’t prove it, don’t bother. Just report to them what you hope for and what you sing about, because just within your simple believing God is present in the world, and just in your telling, the love of God is flowing through you out to them. You are how God has chosen to love the world.

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Guest Post: Why I Volunteer, by Phil Alexander

I was asked to serve on the 2nd Mission Committee by Pastor Meeter. That committee, as you may know, is dedicated to creating adult education programs for the congregation and the community.

Well, I don't know if it was kismet or fate or the Holy Spirit, but I told Pastor Meeter, “You don't know how perfect I am for this job.” He didn't know at the time I had a lot of professional experience creating professional development programs for adults.

On the committee, I got the chance to work with a few members of the congregation, and develop friendships, pray together, and to find a new way to put faith in action.

But I'm not here to speak about the benefits that I experienced while volunteering. I want to look at the topic of talent. Last time, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo spoke about us giving of our treasure, time, and talents to the church. I found that because my volunteering aligned so easily with my talents, it was easy to give of my time.

So, I'd like you to think about what talents you have that you can contribute to the congregation. What are the things that you can do that might help this church move forward? Do you have specific skills in writing, or numbers, or organization that might be of use? Or, are there any under-developed talents that you're looking to grow?

I'm sure there are enough jobs to do that a place could be found for you. And if you focus on what your talents are, you might just have as a rewarding experience as I've had. Thank you.

Guest Post: Why I Volunteer, by Michael Bagnulo

I have been asked to speak about why I volunteer at Old First, keeping in mind the theme of Volunteer Sunday: “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?” (! Peter 3:13)

Let me start by describing what I do as a volunteer. I am one of the many volunteers that support our summer shelter program. For several years now, Old First has served as a summer respite shelter for homeless men. 

During the summer months, when the city is certain that leaving folks unsheltered will not lead to freezing deaths and bad press, a significant portion of the city shelter system shuts down. Civilian organizations, like Old First and the non-profit organization CAMBA, step up to fill this gap in service.

For a few months, we provide dinners and beds for homeless men currently working their way through CAMBA’s housing program. We do this every weeknight, throughout the season. We get somewhere between seven and fourteen men each night. Volunteers greet them, feed them, keep them safe through the night, and see them off again in the morning.

We do this with the generous support of other congregations and non-religiously affiliated volunteers. The volunteer crew has included artists and bankers, cooks and scholars, religious leaders and atheists, grandparents and school children. The shelter clients range from their early 20s to nearly 80. They include construction workers and shop clerks, custodians and the unemployed, parents and runaways, and at least one painter.

My short path to working for the respite shelter began with an experiment in charity. I won’t go into the Biblical and personal inspirations for the particular experiment, but a few years back I decided that I would always carry change in my pocket and I would, without hesitation or consideration, give money to anybody who asked for it. I would not judge the stories I was given. I would not turn away people who, given the circumstances, were certainly lying to me. I would not attempt to evaluate the legitimacy of the need of the person asking. I would just say yes. I would just give them some of what I had.

Obviously, this small experiment has not ended poverty and want in the city. I have no idea – no way of even guessing – what impact this has had on the people who have asked me for money. I will say, however, that it has had an impact on me. Essayist Erik Reece writes that the critical impulse is a byproduct of the Fall. He states that, before the Fall, Adam and Eve engaged the world around them through creative giving. Mirroring the Creator who gave life to everything, Adam and Eve gave names to everything. It was only after eating the forbidden fruit that they began to understand aspects of the world around them as good or evil. That’s much too philosophical for me to unpack, but I do take this away: We were fully human and giving before we ever got into the business of judging. I decided that, to the best of my ability, I’d try to commit to a relationship of giving and charity as my default position. I’d commit to giving and could work out the details later.

I was well into this experiment, when I was approached by Cynthia and Daniel to help with the shelter. I was hesitant at first. There was a valid political criticism of the summer shelter program: it could be argued that, by covering the gap in shelter coverage, we were enabling the government to shirk what should be their year-round responsibility to shelter these men. I was also sympathetic to those who envisioned that we would be turning our sanctuary into some Dickensian holding tank for the hopeless.

I discovered that the reality of the program in no way matches this Jacob Riisian nightmare – but how would you know at first, if you’d never seen the shelter program in action? Finally, there’s the obvious jealousy I think we all feel about whatever sliver of time is left to us when every other demand takes its cut. I’ve never met a person who actually suffers from having too much time on their hands.

But, in keeping with the personal experiment that I was already running, I decided that I would commit to volunteering first and worry about the details later. A year later, as we look at another season, I’ve re-committed to volunteering again.

Why? First, if there’s something liberating about embracing the logic of the gift in your approach to others. There’s a freedom in not having to play the judge. This feeling is strengthened in me when the focus of the relationship is food and shelter. Every Sunday, we are asked to give money as a symbol of our bodies, our labor. And it is good and right to do so. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something pure about taking the symbolism out of the equation. Give food to a hungry person. Give a tired wanderer a safe place to rest. And do it solely because they showed up at your door hungry and tired. So little of my work-a-day week makes that much sense. The simplicity of it is truly a blessing.

Second, it serves as a strong bond to my faith. Participating in this shelter program was a lesson in God’s love, Jesus’s love. It isn’t an accident that feasts and food feature so prominently in the Bible, are an aspect of so many divine miracles. Brecht writes, “First bread, then morals.” Any of the shelter clients and the shelter volunteers can tell you that the playwright is making an unnecessary and erroneous distinction. Feeding the hungry is always a moral exercise. A slice of bread is a moral fact. A clean bed is a concrete statement of how you value your fellow man.

This is, I think, the explanation for why, strangely, Old First’s shelter has a curious reputation for being the gourmet client’s shelter of choice. Our food here is, I’m told, unusually good, as far as the shelters go. I submit that this is because it is reflection of us at our best.

Which leads us to my third and final reason for volunteering. Free food. And its usually pretty good. Last year, we had at least one professional chef on the team. So that’s some no-joke good food. Just saying.

I volunteer because it is where I put to test the proposition that a loving God made a good world and find, again and again, the proposition holds. I thank Cynthia and Daniel for the invitation to this experience. I thank the other volunteers who have kept the program going. I thank Jabe, who is leading the effort this coming summer. And I give thanks to everybody at Old First who supported this wonderful thing we do.

This is not necessarily my pitch for why you should join us on the shelter team - though you should, we’d love to have you. What I do recommend, from my own experience, is putting the adopting a attitude of giving towards the world. Commit to volunteer before you sweat the details. Volunteer, and see where it leads you.

May 7, Easter 4: Believing Is Suffering As Action

Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2:19-25, John 10:1-10

Last Sunday I said that when St. Peter gave his speech to the crowd in Jerusalem, about the injustice done to Jesus and their implication in its evil, they were “cut to the heart,” and they called out, “What shall we do?” 

So think about speeches to the crowds in history, by Mark Antony or Robespierre or Mussolini or a recent presidential candidate, when the crowd gets angry and even violent. “Lock her up,” throw them out, rise up against Pontius Pilate, overturn the Temple. But this time, instead of an angry mob, we get a new community of mutual welcome and radical hospitality.

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Fellowship. The Greek word is koinonia, which you can also translate as communion, community, commonality. This first community of Jesus was very communal: they “had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Radical hospitality, a way of life expressing the sort of believing that is welcoming, a believing that opens your heart as much as your mind. This practice of radical hospitality is what believing in Jesus should look like.

 Their primitive communism was a wonder and a sign. It was not meant as a law for all of us for all of time. It was a special sign and wonder to recapitulate the temporary communism of the Children of Israel when they were gathered at Mount Sinai, even while the promise of the Torah was that in the Promised Land everyone would enjoy their own private property.

So the apostles did not enjoin this temporary communism on their later congregations. How could they, when their converts were often women who had no right to property and slaves who had no right to themselves! The most they could share was their presence at worship, if they could risk getting away for a couple hours once a week at night. Their inability to contribute any more than that was part of their suffering.

Even for that first church in Jerusalem the suffering began soon enough. Chapter 5 reports that some people lied about their donations. Then the apostles were imprisoned and flogged. Chapter 6 reports dissension in the congregation over who got more food, and then with the stoning of Stephen the rest of the city rose up in rage against them, and the Christians had to flee Jerusalem, and the new sign and wonder was holding up in peace and love while under persecution.

So in his first epistle, when St. Peter wrote about enduring pain while suffering for doing good, he knew of what he wrote. Otherwise it’s unattractive what he wrote, and it’s been taken to suggest passivity and surrender in the face of trouble. Like sheep. And if Jesus is such a good shepherd, then why am I suffering? And frankly I do not want to endure pain while suffering unjustly. Neither do you. Either you want to ease the pain or stand up and fight back against the injustice.

But in fact the epistle is describing something active. It was addressed to women who had no legal rights against their unbelieving husbands and were forced to submit to things against their will. It was addressed to the converts who were slaves, of which there were some number. They were not field slaves, and not abused as badly as our American slaves, nor did they suffer the added cruelty of racism, but they still were slaves, with no right to their own lives. And their love of Jesus gave them no advantages, only disadvantages.

So just their living as Christians as best they could was not passivity but daring activity, even just going to church. The pain and suffering that St. Peter addresses is the by-product of doing the right thing in a tough spot, of voluntarily doing the right thing with no hope of reward or recognition but maybe punishment. This takes moral courage, especially to not fight back, to not retaliate in kind, unless you consider it fighting back when you just keep doing the right thing time and time again.

First Peter calls us to follow Christ as an example—the Christ who was willing to go all the way to his death on the cross. It’s not that our suffering is good or redemptive. Suffering is bad, yet we should not walk away from suffering, but enter into it with freedom and purpose and love.

Because if you walk in love you will get extra suffering. If you walk in love you will eventually meet the resistance and opposition of the powers of the world, because their power is built on possession, not on love. And if you walk in love, you will develop extra sensitivities, and the suffering of others will touch you more and more.

The call of First Peter is a call to action, not passivity. But you can’t free others from suffering without having to suffer some yourself. You can’t free others from abuse without it costing you. I believe you know this, and yet you want to live this way anyway. You want to live this way because this is what you believe.

Christ is the example but more than an example. He went through the doorway of this cross to his resurrection, and he lives. He is actively the shepherd and guardian of your souls. What First Peter means by “soul” is not a disembodied spirit, but your personality, your mind, your emotions, your vitality, your breath, your life itself. He is the living guardian of your life and your vitality.

As your shepherd and guardian he does not spare you from suffering, because death is real, and the shadow of death is scary, but his love is stronger than death, and he gets you through each next valley of the shadow of death, partly by his Holy Spirit in you and partly by means of your belief, by your just being aware of him, and that awareness can sustain you. 

He doesn’t spare you from enemies, but he sets a table before you in the presence of your enemies, and the power of your enemies does not extend to forcing you not to love. We prefer to share our table among other nice believers like ourselves, like in that first church in Jerusalem, in mutual hospitality, but we are called to extend a table to people who want to be your enemies, in radical hospitality and supernatural welcome.

This model of fellowship is a vision not just for the church but for how human beings should be behaving in the world. Of course it is opposed by the powerful, and it takes belief to do it, because there is so much history to suggest that the way to power and success is consumption, aggression, defensiveness, possession, and legitimated violence, and so much expert analysis to back it up. You have to endure all that to still believe, you have to suffer all that to still believe and still to love.

Last week I said that believing begins in your heart before it gets to your head. It begins in your heart and it rises into your head and then it shines out of your eyes when you look at other people and you believe in them. I said that because believing is from your heart it is a kind of welcoming, when you welcome the testimony of a witness or welcome the good news. And then I said that because believing is from your heart it desires action. 

Well, then, is it any wonder that the very first action of the Christian community was welcome, hospitality, fellowship, sharing bread, distributing your wealth as all have need? Yes it is a wonder, it is a wonder and a sign of what God is like and how God behaves in the world. When you share in this community of Jesus you are sharing in the acted-out testimony of God’s love for the world and God’s great and unfailing love for you.

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 30, Easter 3, Believing is Welcoming

 Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

Jesus called the two disciples “slow of heart to believe.” Believing is our topic in this fifth sermon in my series on belief. The other lessons do not use the word “believe,” but they offer synonyms.

In the first lesson, from Acts, in the sermon of St. Peter, he says: “Let the house of Israel know with certainty.” Is “knowing with certainty” a kind of believing or does such firm knowledge surpass belief? Rationalism would say that there is knowledge more certain than belief. Rationalists impressed by Richard Dawkins, for example, might say that they have knowledge so objective that believing is irrelevant.

But the rationalist balloon has been punctured by many other scientists. All knowledge, even scientific knowledge, starts from some foundational beliefs that are simply presupposed. All knowledge, even scientific knowledge, has some quantity of believing in it. Knowing something with certainty is still believing. Everyone believes lots of things, even atheists.

Everyone believes lots of things at the same time, some things almost contradictory while being simultaneous, and with varying measures of certainty. And where does certainty come from? Analysis? Rational comprehension? Your mind, your brain? Often from your intuition, when you just know something.

Certainty often comes from your whole life of experience saying, Yup! But then, how trustworthy, really, is your experience? How often doesn’t your experience mislead you? So sometimes you believe things against your experience, and then your certainty has to depend on the trustworthiness of the messenger. I think that’s what St. Peter was appealing to when he preached the resurrection, which was opposed by  all of human experience. He was offering himself as a trustworthy messenger, so that their certainty required a decision, and thus a risk.

Another synonym for believing comes later in the lesson, when it says that three thousand people who heard the sermon of St. Peter “welcomed his message and were baptized.” Welcoming the message is a kind of believing. At least when the message is positive. I can imagine believing a bad news message and not welcoming it. But still the image holds, of believing as a kind of welcoming.

Consider your body language. You welcome with your arms more than your eyes. Welcoming is more from your heart than from your head. Welcoming is more than rational—it has emotion in it, and commitment, and self-extension. Welcoming a message is different than just accepting a message or agreeing with it or even understanding it. So believing is like first you open your arms out to a message, first saying, “Welcome, hello, glad to see you, come in,” and only then do you begin to analyze it and understand it and then know it with certainty—heart first, then head.

If welcoming is from the heart, then it includes desire, and the desire to respond, the desire for action. When those who heard St. Peter’s sermon felt “cut to the heart” they wanted to do something. They said, “Brethren, what shall we do?” Demonstrate? March on Pontius Pilate? Overturn the temple? Throw the bums out? Call a general strike? Next week we will see the actions they were led to, which were all about welcoming instead of opposition.

When we move to the second lesson, the context is very different. It was written by this same St. Peter but decades later. Instead of preaching to a crowd he was writing to the little congregations scattered in Asia Minor, where they were suffering the subtle persecution of exclusion from both Roman and Jewish society. They were exiles in their own neighborhoods, exiles from that previous way of life that had been handed down for generations.

St. Peter tells them that they were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from their forefathers. He’s calling their former way of life “futility,” though it’s still dominant around them, and regarded by the Empire as natural and even virtuous. He calls them to believe something about themselves, something opposite to what their neighbors believed about them, and otherwise than they themselves had formerly believed about themselves, when their inherited experience had been misleading them.

So then, believing includes welcoming a message as much about ourselves as about God—a message both negative and positive about ourselves: negative in that we were living in futility despite how wonderful our culture was supposed to be, and positive in that we are capable of living in the truth, and living with genuine mutual love, of sharing something imperishable, living and enduring. You have to believe this about yourselves, and that takes your decision, and a risk!

The other synonym for belief in our second lesson is trust in God, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Trust is the energy of belief, and hope is the spin-off of belief. Both trust and hope are also seated in your heart. When your heart tells you that you can trust a person, then your mind can decide to have faith in that person. Once again, believing starts here, in the middle of your chest, and it moves up from your chest to your head, and then out of your eyes, as you project your faith and hope on those whom you trust.

And now finally the Gospel. Easter Sunday afternoon, and the two disciples are on the road to Emmaus. Jesus meets them incognito, listens to their news, and then he calls them foolish and slow of heart to believe. You know the story, how he explains it all to them, that they had misunderstood the scripture, and how rightly to understand it in terms of his death and resurrection; and then they invite him in for dinner, and he takes the bread, blesses, breaks, and gives the bread, and of course they recognize him as he removes himself from them.

“Were not our hearts burning within us?” Here again, belief is in the heart, and I think it’s because your heart is the meeting place of the emotions of your gut with the thinking of your head. In your heart they come together into your will and your desire and commitment. When you blend together will and desire and commitment, you get love, the outflow of your heart. If you believe in someone with all your heart, that is an action of love.

You know, it’s because of Gospel stories like this one that here at Old First we celebrate Holy Communion every week. It’s to feed your believing. I think believing is harder than it used to be, when Protestant churches maybe did not need Communion as much. But today our believing gets starved in ways it didn’t use to. The Lord Jesus prescribed for your belief the breaking of the bread, and we accept his prescription from an attitude of humble trust more than analysis. We welcome weekly Communion more than we approve of it. We open ourselves to it, and we let the Lord Jesus make himself known to us as he wants to.

He prescribes to us his body in the broken bread. This means that he prescribes communion not like a doctor dispensing pills, but like a mother offering her body to her nursing infant. And that is the baby’s first experience of love. Every week the Lord Jesus offers you his body as the expression and pledge of his love. Welcome his love. The most important belief you can have is in God’s great love for you.

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 23, Easter 2, Believing is Not Seeing

Acts 2:14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:91-31

St. John is very helpful when he tells us exactly why he wrote his gospel: “These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in his name.”  In other words, the Apostle John wants you to have the new life that comes with the name of Jesus, and you get that new life by believing in Jesus as the Messiah—so here he is for your belief.

Believing in Jesus is what makes you a Christian. And then the combination of what things you believe about Jesus is what makes you one kind of a Christian or another. What we believe about Jesus is what we repeat every week, as part of our worship, when we recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed. Every week you say it—either “I believe” or “We believe.” It is worth noticing what we take for granted, that believing is central and even pivotal to the Christian faith.

It is less so for other religions. The ancient pagan religions were not about belief. The ancients believed in their gods and goddesses no more than you believe in the Internal Revenue Service or the Port Authority. Their gods were simply powers in the world to be both feared and satisfied.

Neither is Judaism based on belief, but on birth and observing the procedures, apart from whether you believe in God or not. All the disputes and divisions in Judaism are over the procedures, not God.

Nor is Islam based on belief, but on submission. Islam was spread in the world by military power and not by missionary appeal. If you were conquered, you submitted, whether you believed or not.

Islam is not congenial to a premium on belief, because belief implies freedom to believe or not. For Islam it is an insult to the majesty of God that God should be subject to our belief or not, that God should be judged by us in terms of credibility. The God of the Holy Koran would never offer himself to human subjectivity in the way that the Lord Jesus offers himself to Thomas. The gospel, with its premium on belief, elevates human beings relative to God to a level that Islam finds arrogant and offensive. Who do we think we are?

The premium on belief that distinguishes Christianity you can chalk up largely to the Apostle John. I did a word count on the verb “believe”. In the Gospel of Matthew, the verb “believe” occurs ten times. In the Gospel of Mark, it appears ten times. In the Gospel of Luke, nine times. In the Gospel of John, ninety-eight times, ten times as much. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it is one theme among others, but in John, it’s the main theme. The author tells us as much. These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in his name.

So the Apostle John is inviting us to believe. What’s more, he’s inviting us to believe without seeing, even though all of our human experience reinforces the cliche that seeing is believing.

In a courtroom trial, the jury wants to know what the witness saw, not what the witness believes. If the witness says what he believes the judge rules it out of order. It’s up to the jury to decide what they believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, and they base their belief not on what they saw for themselves, because they were not there, but on the testimony of the witnesses. Just so with the Christian faith. You may consider the Christian church to be one huge jury, sitting through the centuries, hearing and depending on the testimony of witnesses under cross-examination by advocates and adversaries in order to determine its belief or not. That it works this way is the legacy of the apostles to the church, and “Blessed are you who have not seen, but yet believe.”

The apostles are the witnesses. They were the original witnesses right after the fact, and ever after they remain the witnesses, by means of their testimonies written down for us. The apostles were first-hand believers because they actually saw it, and we are second-hand believers who believe what they testify they saw.

Thomas did not want to be a second-hand believer. In the week between the first and second appearances of Our Lord, the disciples told Thomas that they had seen him alive again. It was only because they had seen him that they believed, and Thomas wants nothing different for himself. What he’s asking for is nothing untoward, though I am not sure why he’s so adamant about it.

Then Thomas ends up making a great leap of faith, jumping out in front of the other disciples, and out of his mouth, not Peter’s, comes the claim which is the pointed climax of John’s Gospel, “My Lord and my God.” Nine years ago I preached about this intuitive leap by Thomas and its significance.

Today I want to stay with that response of Our Lord to him: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” He’s talking about us, you, the second-hand believers, who depend on the witnesses. Apparently we are blessed in a way that first-hand believers are not. To believe in what you have not seen requires more of you, it raises you to something, to a level of risk and initiative, to become a greater soul, and live at the level of hope instead of mere possession. Blessed are you who have not seen but yet believe.

Believing the witnesses is parallel to believing the promises, which also you cannot see, not yet. We Christians believe two kinds of things: witnesses and promises. We stand between the witnesses of the past and the promises of the future. From the witnesses you can believe something to be true about the past. And from the promises you can believe something to be true about the future. You believe the witnesses of his resurrection and you believe the promises of your own resurrection, and the one guarantees the other.

Our resurrected Lord is keeping our future inheritance safe with him in heaven until he comes again to rule the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the wonders of his love, into which we will be resurrected, soul and body, as he was. He holds the promise and he is the living witness. Both witness and promise are held together in him.

We have just now moved from the language of the Gospel of John to the language of the First Epistle of Peter, from the resurrected Jesus in the experience of the first-hand believers, there, in that room, to the resurrected Jesus in our experience as second-hand believers, removed from us in heaven but still present to us by his Word and Holy Spirit. Our relationship with him requires more of belief than was required of his disciples, because we do not see him, and we have to depend more on the promises, and even him we experience as a promise.

He is both the living witness and the living promise. And because he personally is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, so is your inheritance, the inheritance that you are promised. Not only is your inheritance imperishable, but St. Peter goes further to claim that the genuineness of your faith is imperishable, even when it’s tested and tried by suffering and opposition or your internal doubts and hesitations.

It’s imperishable because it’s grounded not in your own ability to believe, but in the objectivity of what happened to Jesus in history, as attested by witnesses. It’s imperishable because no matter how weak you might feel within your faith, the written testimony of the apostles does not change and the living testimony of the resurrected Jesus is undefiled and unfading.

The benefit of this, in the words of St. Peter, is the salvation of your souls. This terminology is easily misunderstood if you think of your soul as that ghost inside your physical body. The Greek word for soul can also be translated as “life,” your full life, your human life, and your fully real and human is what is being saved.

This is not a final escape, but the rescuing of your life right now, the rescuing of your life from frustration, from nothingness, from the shadow of death. It saves your actions in the world from emptiness, it rescues your witness in the world from nihilism, it saves your good deeds, your social witness, your service to the poor, your speaking up, your resisting violence, your marching in Washington, your reading books, your raising kids, your sacrifices of time and energy and money for the congregation you belong to, all that gets saved, it is not wasted, it does not get lost. That’s the promise, and of that you yourselves are witnesses.

And this is how you may feel the truth of that ecstasy of St. Peter’s epistle: “Although you have not seen him, you love him, and although you do not see him now, you believe in him, and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 16, Easter, "Woman, Why Are You Weeping?"

Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18

When we were planning the music for this service, Aleeza told me that one possibility for Jeffrey Mandelbaum to sing was the Ebarme dich from the St. Matthew Passion. You just heard how simply beautiful it is—the interplay of violin and voice, the grief sustained in understatement. But how can this aria for Good Friday be appropriate on Easter?

Then I realized that Jeffrey could sing it for Mary Magdalene. Her weeping is central to the Easter story. Twice she gets asked it, “Woman, why are you weeping?” It was through her tears that she was the first person to see Jesus alive again.

I’m imagining the scene like from a movie by Tarkovsky (visually like Nostalgia but with the soundtrack from Sacrifice). You see an open garden in the dim light of early morning, and in the middle distance you notice a tomb. You watch different characters come into view and do different things and then leave again, and then one woman comes back, and she crumples down outside the tomb, and the camera patiently watches her. From the music you can tell that she is weeping, it’s the Erbarme dich by Bach. Woman, why are you weeping?

Woman of Syria, why are you weeping? Woman of South Sudan, why are you weeping? Mother of Trayvon, why are you weeping? Woman of Palestine, why are you weeping? Mother Eve, cast out of the garden, why are you weeping? Jesus, outside the tomb of Lazarus, why are you weeping? It’s usually a Good Friday question, but our gospel makes it an Easter question. Have any of you been weeping much of late?

I have, the last few months. Since October 8, when the Access Hollywood tape came out, and since then the sanctioning of violence all around as good and right and our prerogative, and the national enhancement of selfishness and fear. And not just here, around the world. Last Easter I was more optimistic than I am right now. I know the world is actually not that different than it was a year ago, but the future looks different than it did then, the future looks darker, drier, hotter, more aggressive, more fearful, defensive, divided, and devoid of hope.

So while Mary Magdalene was grieving the loss of her beloved teacher, she was also grieving the loss of the future she had seen in him, the future he said that he would bring. All the hopes and dreams of Israel he had personalized within himself—that he was the resurrection and he was the life and he was the light and with him the kingdom of God had come, and now that he was dead, there was nothing left over, all that was deadness too. Their whole relationship with God had died with him. God had forsaken him upon the cross, God forsook them all, and she was God-forsaken too.

You can weep with her that God is dead. You can weep with her a godless world. A world without God that has no need of God. Where the right is determined by those who take power, and order is the protection of their interests, and justice their enforcement. The world looked worse to Mary Magdalene than it had before he came. The best is resignation, or just go back to her old sins.

When she peers into the tomb, the angels ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Don’t they know why? Do they lack empathy, have angels no imaginations? Why don’t they tell her the good news why she does not have to weep? At least they don’t tell her not to. Maybe she has to, maybe her weeping is the proper welcome for the resurrection. Who needs a resurrection if everything is fine and dandy and you are satisfied and gratified with a lovely bourgeois life? Who needs hope? Do we need to let ourselves weep for ourselves and for the world rightly to welcome the resurrection?

Why does she obsess about the absence of his body? This certainly counters the philosophical interpretation of Easter that his rising again is only a metaphor for the spiritual uplift of the human soul that he inspired in them. But Jesus is not the Buddha, and the gospel was not written by Plato. The Bible is all about embodiment, the soul is for the body, not against it, the promises of God are all embodied promises, and if the body of Jesus is gone, then God does not remember them, God does not care. Then death and violence are more powerful than God, and so is absence, emptiness, deadness, nothingness. She wants his body to hold off the nothingness a little while.

Then she looks behind her at a man of course she wouldn’t recognize because she knows he’s dead. “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” She doesn’t answer him—she assumes he already knows whom she is seeking. “Just tell me where you put him.” Then he calls her by name. And when she hears her name she recognizes him. He was seeking her! He found her in her God-forsakeness. He offers no explanation how he’s alive again. His answer to her abandonment is just to say her name.

Is that not what you want from God, less an analytical demonstration of the doctrines than to have some sense of the presence of God? For most of you the opposite of belief is not unbelief in the sense of logical dispute, but rather despair, discouragement, and existential doubt. It’s less there is no God than God is the great disappointment, the great abandonment, and since we can manage our lives without God anyway, why bother with God at all. Unless God calls you by your name. And that’s why you are here today. You can’t keep yourself away from God.

Jesus never explained how he rose. He never offered reasoning to make it more believable. What actually happened to Jesus between his death and his post-resurrection appearances to his witnesses the New Testament does not profess to know. It is simply called “raising the dead,” and raising the dead has no historical analogy in human experience, it has no verifiability. The only analogy the Bible ever offers to the raising of Jesus is the future resurrection of us all, and that will be verifiable only after the argument is settled! So what you are left with is a choice, and that not without risk!

What he did offer his witnesses was just the evidence of his living body. His real prior physical body, though somehow modified. Because the promises of God are all embodied promises. Your body is that piece of the real world that you are, and for which you are responsible. The corporeality of your body is your solidarity with the whole creation, the biosphere, the soil, the climate. The creation is groaning from all the evil that human sin has let loose in it, and for this we all should weep.

His evidence was also the allowance of her weeping, that weeping instead of stoicism is the right response to loss and death and suffering. That weeping instead of cynicism is the right response to violence and injustice. That you start with weeping before you move to action. You can fight back if you have been weeping first. Weeping acknowledges that things are not what they should be, that the world is good and that it’s not so is a grief. The alternative is to accept the world as cruel and bad, to which we must respond in fear and self-aggrandizement, and take what we want, and force ourselves on other men and force ourselves on women, and force ourselves upon the world. This is your choice, and if you take Easter as the pledge of God, than you can live by hope instead of fear and resignation. Not so much from optimism in humanity, but choosing for hope because of God.

Easter is most certainly a joyful day, a peppermint day, a hopeful day, with its promise of new life, the promise of eternal life, the victory of life over death. Yet Mary is allowed to weep today because this eternal life is hidden beneath its opposite, the eternal life of Jesus is not some ethereal, disembodied bliss, it is rather embodied and therefore hidden under trial, suffering, death, and sorrow.

But this negativity is also its latency, its ground, as with Bach’s Erbarme dich, when the violins rise and rise to heights of beauty upon the sustained plaintiveness of the human voice. Because the Christian hope is not bliss but love within suffering—that love has power to enter into suffering, and right within that suffering to generate greater love. This is the love that is stronger than death. In love he calls her name, Mary, in love she answers Rabbouni. The Easter gospel is a love story.

The witnesses to Our Lord’s resurrection have left for us their testimonies, and their testimonies are an invitation. The invitation is for you once again take the resurrection of Jesus as the pledge of God to you, the pledge that the peace of God is stronger than the violence of men; that generosity has more clout than fear; that though evil is strong, God’s love for the world is stronger than the world, so that your faithful actions are not in vain; and that though death is strong, God’s love for you is stronger than your death. In the words of Jeremiah, I am the Lord, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Take your tambourines. Go forth in the dance of the merrymakers! Christ is risen, Alleluia.

Copyright © 2017, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 2, Lent 5, Belief is Disturbing

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

It’s a wonderful story, but if you read the subsequent verses, you learn that the Judeans who did not believe in Jesus reported this miracle to the authorities, who responded by setting in motion the plot to arrest him and kill him. So the resurrection of Lazarus was the death of Jesus.

Our Lord had two best friends. One was the disciple John, the author of the story, and the other was Lazarus, so when Jesus wept, it was personal, and more than general grief for the human condition. And I wonder if he also grieved what he felt he’d had to do, his disturbing strategy of letting his dear friend die.

Yes, he had a miracle he was planning, but letting him die first in order to do it was close to an abuse of their friendship. Lazarus died believing that Jesus had abandoned him. When Our Lord got the message that Lazarus was ill–so please come quick, he must have thought to himself, “Good, maybe he’ll die, and then I can use that as an opportunity to demonstrate my final masterpiece.” To do this did he not have to stifle his natural emotions?

How much of a favor was it for Lazarus, to raise him, after having let him die? I mean the guy had crossed the finish line and now he had to come back and run his race all over again!

If he meant it as a favor to Martha and Mary, it would have been much kinder to come and heal him before he died, as the sisters were expecting. That he hadn’t done so had disturbed their relationship. When he finally shows up the first thing they let him know is that he failed them. They believe in him as Messiah but he had strained their trust in his personal love for them. He has to suffer the pain of this.

So when Mary joins him and they approach the tomb, it all comes out of him, and the author stresses the great emotional disturbance of Our Lord. So when Jesus wept, did he also grieve the loss within his natural friendships? And when Jesus wept, did he weep for himself?

He knew what his disciple Thomas knew, that doing this miracle would end up getting him killed. So Jesus felt in the death of his friend his own impending death, when he would exchange places with Lazarus, and, despite his own resurrection, lose his friendship with Lazarus forever. There could be no gain without some loss. Life for Lazarus was death for Jesus. This was his last miracle. Jesus wept.

The author is clear that the reason that Lord Jesus did this disturbing thing of using his friend was to instill belief. Eight times in the story the verb “believe” is used.

He did this so that his disciples would believe in him.

He did this so that Martha would believe he was the resurrection and the life, that she would believe that those who believe in him will live and never die, and that she would believe he was the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. 

He did this so that if Martha believed, she would see the glory of God. 

He did this so that the crowd would believe that his Father in heaven had sent him. 

And he did this so that many Judeans who saw what he did would believe in him. 

A complexity of belief in the interrelated aspects of who he was and what he did.

He did this to demonstrate in one consummate action the several things he had been teaching all along, that the Father had sent him to act as God in human flesh, that his human word was the very word of God, that in his human life was God’s life, that from his death would come eternal life, that he was the good shepherd, that his sheep would hear his voice, and that when he called them by name they would come out. All this he demonstrated when he shouted, “Lazarus, come out.”

He demonstrated the power of his word, and not even deadness could resist the command of his voice. It’s one thing to heal a body that is still alive with its own vitality, but even modern medicine, having conquered many fatal diseases, is powerless after death. Once life goes out it’s irretrievable, and Lazarus was very dead. But Jesus calls the putrefying corpse by name, and the voice of Jesus is answered by the corpse presenting itself, as if to say, “You called me, Lord!” Implicitly saying, “Here am I, hineini.” As you too will say. He has demonstrated something in the future of us all.

He demonstrated that the prophecy of Ezekiel was now come true in him, that the predicted resurrection of the nation of Israel would be at his beck and call. Those who saw what he did believed in him for this. So now they could hope that the resurrection of the nation of Israel would be soon.

It would be a narrowly national resurrection of every dead Israelite, nobody else, finally to live the promised good life in the Promised Land. Martha believed in that, and that her dear friend Jesus was just the Messiah to get the whole thing started, and soon enough her brother would rise again along with all the other Jews. Martha doesn’t cry, she’s come to terms with everything. But Jesus will disturb this too, and the national hope as well, by letting himself die, as he let Lazarus die. He had a global resurrection for all of humanity to set in motion.

He demonstrated his divinity, we would say, looking back. But that they did not yet believe. The dots were all there, but no one connected them till Thomas did it a week after Easter. It required the absolute shock of Good Friday and Easter to intuit what still unimaginable. But here it is enough to believe in his person and his promises, and he will open up himself in his own time.

When you believe in Jesus, you believe in him for more than you successfully grasp of him. He always is ahead of you. And what you ask of him he may well not answer when you call. “Lord, if you had been here, this would not have happened.” 

Where were you, Lord? Why did you let us go through this?

Well, do you still believe I am the resurrection and the life?

I am not sure what that means.

I know you don’t, but do you believe in me? That you can trust me for whatever it might mean? Can you believe in those promises of God that I am delivering in my way and in my time?

You know, in wrestling with this story this week I was struck by the emotional disturbance that the Lord Jesus felt and the social disturbance in what he did, and how much belief in Christ is a disturbance, and is meant to be so. It means the disturbance of all your other beliefs, a shaking, a loosening, an unbinding from the cloths that bind you, and a letting go.

The Lord Jesus disturbs the laws of nature, he overturns the tables of biology, he interrupts the natural harmony of chemicals and the God-given cycle of life and death. He initiates a rupture in the world, a crack in the chain of being, a disturbance in the vibrations of the universe. Your belief in him disturbs your friendships and your family expectations.

Your belief in him disturbs your emotions and you find yourself weeping and you can’t tell whether it’s from grief or joy or both. Your belief in him disturbs your security, economic and political. Your belief in him is meant to disturb your loyalties, patriotic and theological and even ethical.

I’m thinking about the turmoil in our nation being generated from the White House and aggravated by the Congress. I’m thinking about the daily disruption of our domestic tranquility whether by intention or incompetence. I’m thinking about the detectable disturbance in our weather which gets met by denials of climate change and answered by frantic increases in fossil fuel extraction.

And we divert ourselves in entertainment and educated consumerism and soothe ourselves in dining and fine design. This is the American way of death. This Bible calls this “flesh,” the frantic chasing after life by any means. To set your mind on the flesh is death, but to set your mind on the Spirit is life.

This turmoil and this frantic disruption is what Our Lord disturbs when in grace and love he cries with a loud voice, “Come out.” Against the resistance of our fear and doubt, the resistance of dead matter and the hardness of rock, and into the darkness of the cave, he calls, “Come out.”

To believe him is life. You rise again. You are set free from the drag of the flesh to live in the breath of God’s Spirit, free from the turmoil to live in tranquility, free from the criticism of your family to say what you believe, free from the pressure of your friends to act on your belief, free from White House to live in open generosity, free from Congress to live creatively in peace, free from your own grief and fear to use your grief and fear for empathy and service and love.

It was for love that Jesus wept. His disturbance is the power of his love to break through the resistance of death and fear and your unbelief. I invite you to believe that God loves you and to answer when God calls you. Here I am.

Copyright © 2017, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.