doubting thomas.

so i just moved and don't have internet regularly except when i'm at school.  and i preached the second sunday after easter again this year.  as with me, this sermon goes all over the place, but people said afterwards they really appreciated it.  so here it is.

every year for the past few years, i have either taught or co-taught a class for "skeptics," people who are honestly interested in christianity, but have questions. very often, one of those questions is, "is it ok if i have questions?" this class always works my own faith pretty hard, but i really value the experience and would not give any of the past few years up. this sermon came out of some of that reflection.

Doubting Thomas

Have you ever had anyone ask you if you have “accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”? If you haven’t, let me say that you are lucky. It seems to happen to me with uncomfortable regularity. I guess I just don’t look like someone who has. Once, I just had someone mutter, “There’s hope in Jesus” as they walked past me.

Every time this happens, I think to myself, is that what Christianity is? Accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior? Getting some kind of nebulous hope? Going to heaven when we die? This sounds so different from our gospel reading today, doesn’t it? “But these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name.”

Man! Someone call the Bible translation committees! John got it so wrong! We’re not supposed to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. We’re supposed to believe that he is our personal Savior, right? And “life in his name”? Where’s heaven? Where’s what happens after I die? That’s what Christianity is all about. Heaven or hell. Right? ...Right?

My point here is not to belittle street evangelists. They are obviously sincere enough about their faith in Jesus to go up to complete strangers and try to share that faith. They believe what they’re doing is the right thing, and I won’t say that street evangelism has never had any effect. God uses us all in different ways, and God can use anything to build the kingdom of heaven.

But what I am saying is that the “don’t you want to go to heaven when you die” gospel that the street evangelists share with people is only part of the gospel. It’s a compressed, simplified, and to some extent, a reduced gospel.

What does John’s gospel say today? Notice that there is no mention of heaven in the statement where the writer says why he’s written this book. John says only, “that through believing, you may have life in his name.” Heaven isn’t mentioned anywhere. And this statement comes right after the story of “doubting Thomas.” And before that story is the story of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance in John to the disciples where he says to them, “receive the Holy Spirit.” And then he gives them some instructions that seem strangely this-worldly, doesn’t he? Again, nothing about heaven or what’s going to happen after you die.

We are now in this period between Easter and Ascension Day, between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven. In studying this text, I kind of noticed something for the first time: Jesus didn’t go to heaven after he died! He came back to the world for a while. He taught his disciples more, he ate with them, he had a body they could touch. And after he did go to heaven, he left them with a promise that he would come back to this world. So there’s something more to this than going to heaven when you die.

On the other hand, it’s easy to go the other way from the street evangelist and make the gospel all about this world. Jesus’ teaching certainly concentrates on how we should live for God in this world, in the here and now. But again, the gospel of John does not quite fit that either. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says. There is a spiritual reality that also cannot be lost from believing in Jesus. And that spiritual reality contains a word we don’t like very much: sin. Now the church has disagreed over Jesus’ saying here for centuries, and to be honest it baffles me as well, because Jesus also says that only God can judge sin. But at least it must mean that there is a spiritual reality that we engage as Christians as well as a physical one rooted in this world. To lose either side is to shrink Jesus. It may be easier to get people to sign on to a shrunken Jesus, but then, who are they believing in?

And what does it mean to believe? I recently read an article that talked about Protestant problems with doubt. As you might know, one of the key pushes during the Protestant Reformation was to ground salvation in “faith alone.” “Sola fide” as it’s often quoted in Latin. There are a few of these grounding elements of the Reformation; some people call them the “solas.” But since the reformers put such an emphasis on faith, on belief, doubt became an enemy. We all know what a “doubting Thomas” is, right? And we all know that it’s not a compliment.

After the Reformation, the Enlightenment made certainty its holy grail. If you could just be certain about something, you had a place to stand. If you could just be certain about your faith, you are saved. It’s simple. It’s easy.

And it’s totally unrealistic.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That sure makes it seem like doubt can’t be part of your life if you follow Jesus, doesn’t it? And yet what often gets missed in this story is Thomas’ shocking answer: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas may have doubted, but he came to such an amazing declaration of faith.

Many scholars see an echo of the Shema in Thomas’ answer. The Shema is the basic prayer of Judaism. It is one of the first things an observant Jew will say in the morning after waking up, and one of the last things said at night before going to bed. It is called the “Shema” because that is the first word of the prayer in Hebrew. We know it in English as “Hear O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one.” In Hebrew, LORD stands in for the proper name of God, and the Greek Jewish writings carry that tradition over. When Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” he is making an extreme declaration of faith for any Jew.

And tradition tells us that Thomas went to India to spread belief in Jesus there. There are still churches in India today that trace their heritage back to Thomas. And of course, Thomas’ tradition was strong enough in the first two centuries of Christianity that we have a collection of Jesus’ sayings named after him: the gospel of Thomas. Regardless of its later reception by the church, you do not get a gospel named after you if you are considered the paramount example of someone who failed in your Christian journey.

If doubt is the enemy of faith, we would have to not only disqualify Thomas, but a huge number of the Psalms as well. Many, many Psalms express doubt about God and God’s purposes. They cry from the darkness of despair and depression. Just last week on Good Friday, we heard Jesus cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If that is not doubt, I don’t know what is. If even Jesus doubt, and not only Jesus, but the psalm-writer before him, how can we say doubt is the enemy of faith?

Notice Jesus’ response to Thomas: “Stop doubting and believe.” Doubt is normal. A faith that never doubts, that never wrestles with questions like the possibility or impossibility of resurrection is not much of a belief. But a faith that never stops doubting is not much of a belief either. Chronic, constant doubt kills our belief. On one side, we have to lose our affection for certainty and realize that we will never have it. Faith, belief, trust - these are not certainty. They are instead the voice that says, “My LORD and my God!” even in the dark times. But on the other hand, if we can never say that either because we are too concerned with getting something right, with missing something, with something being impossible, we do not have faith either.

Remember where Jesus appears: in the middle of the disciples. They are all in a group, relying on each other to get them through this dark time. And it is the group that bears witness to Thomas. One of the promises of Jesus is that he formed a community to carry on his work and his teaching. Everyone receives the Holy Spirit. In the dark, in the doubting times, we never have to go it alone. Thomas might doubt, but he sticks with his fellow disciples anyway. When our own faith is falling to pieces, the church picks us up and carries us until we can see Jesus again in our lives.

Jesus isn’t my personal savior. He is all our savior! And he is not just “my Lord” but all our Lord. And sometimes we might get something wrong, but there is always someone else to offer another viewpoint. Jesus is not just spiritual and not just of this world. We question and we doubt, but we gather with Christians every week or month or year to fall on our knees and say, “my LORD and my God!”

Amen.

radical hospitality.

i know i just preached, but since i didn't preach at all january and february, i guess i have some making up to do :) what actually happened was the rector was coordinating a diocesan retreat yesterday and they had a drama at the later, more popular service, so i volunteered to write a sermon for the small early service, which is where i've been preaching about once a month for the past year.

and the passage was John 12:1-8 which is one of my favourite gospel passages out of all of them.

Radical Hospitality

Did everyone see the media frenzy back in the fall about the whole “Jesus’ wife” thing? A scholar at Harvard discovered an ancient papyrus fragment from Egypt that had the words “Jesus said, ‘my wife...’” written on it. The whole thing was hard to miss... It was on CNN, ABC, NBC, all the news stations. People were speculating and commenting. Even the Vatican came out with a strong statement accusing it of being a modern forgery.

The whole thing got me thinking, you know, why is this such a frenzy? Why are the mass media, companies with budgets in the millions of dollars, spending so much time and energy on a little fragment of papyrus, a couple inches square, and an obscure researcher at Harvard working in the incredibly obscure field known as “papyrology”? You know, the down-to-brass-tacks practical question of what makes them think they’re going to get their money back from this story?

Let’s face it: Christianity is big news. And not only things that appear to question orthodox Christian belief like this papyrus. The media frenzy and circus around the election of the new Pope is pretty much identical. Pope Francis gave an audience just yesterday to 6900 reporters and media staff. Almost seven thousand men and women came to hear the Pope, not to receive spiritual guidance or wisdom, but because it’s their job, and they are getting paid to send news of this man all over the world.

But what struck me as almost funny about the coverage of that little papyrus was the superficiality of it. As I said, papyrology is a pretty obscure field, and you really can’t expect journalists to dig into the nuances and details of this field that they report on maybe once or twice in five years. But it wasn’t only papyrology that got a superficial coverage, it was Christianity itself. No one, at least that I saw, bothered to talk about early Coptic Christianity in Egypt, the community that probably created the papyrus. Is it because this is also an obscure branch of Christianity, or is it because this community is currently being threatened by the new Islamist government in Egypt, and contemporary politics are too much of a hot potato to be in a story about Jesus and his wife?

And no one, again, at least that I saw, ever commented about one of the names for the church in the Bible itself. Do you know what the church is called in the New Testament? Yeah, it’s called Christ’s bride. The author of Ephesians compares the relationship of a husband and wife with Jesus and the church. In fact, he gets so enraptured with his metaphor that he actually has to stop halfway through this exalted rhetoric to comment “oh wait, but I am talking about Christ and the church.” At the end of the visions in the book of Revelation, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’” They invite everyone to “take the water of life as a gift.” This image seems to parallel the visions in Isaiah of Israel welcoming the nations to Jerusalem to worship the one God of Israel, with the church as the inviting bride.

Is it so surprising, then, that we might find an ancient writing from a tradition that scholars know was heavily mystical, where Jesus refers to his wife? A professor last semester, who has his Ph.D. in papyrology suggested just that: that this fragment might not be written about a human wife for Jesus, but it might have been written to encourage the church as the bride of Christ. Especially considering that the rest of the sentence has been torn off the papyrus fragment, we really have no idea. Even the Harvard researcher who made the discovery was cautious, commenting that this proves nothing one way or the other about the historical, human Jesus. Her voice did tend to be downed out, however, by the excitement!

But the other thing that struck me in the coverage is that whenever anyone goes searching the gospels fro a wife for Jesus, the inevitably latch on to Mary Magdalene. And it makes me wonder, why not this Mary in our gospel passage today? She is not Mary Magdalene, but Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Imagine the scene. There is a banquet. People are reclining on couches. They are probably all getting ready for the Passover which will start in a few days. Maybe they are talking about the trip to Jerusalem, tensions with the Roman military occupiers, gossiping about the priests in Jerusalem. Maybe Martha is encouraging them to eat up all the bread, because you cannot have anything with yeast in the house during Passover. Lazarus and his family may have been giving the banquet to thank Jesus for raising him from the dead. And in the middle of the dinner, Mary, the sister of the host, in fact probably one of the hosts herself, comes in, breaks a stone jar of perfume over Jesus’ feet, and then unveils her hair and wipes his feet with it.

Do you know how intimate an act that is? She is touching, caressing him. She has unveiled her hair in the presence of all the guests, especially all the unrelated men in her house, and she is wiping the feet of her rabbi with it. A woman’s hair in the Middle East is a symbol of her sexuality. It is no coincidence that, even at its most minimal, the Islamic hijab covers a woman’s hair, or that observant orthodox Jewish women cover their hair so that after they are married, no man sees their hair but their husband.

And what is the objection to her act? It is not, as it is in a slightly different version in Luke, that the woman is sexually impure. There is no comment on her sexuality at all. And it is not the objection about status which Peter gives in the very next chapter when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. Much has been made in commentaries about Jesus washing feet that it was a slave’s job. But that is not the objection here. Instead what Judas objects to is the financial impropriety of her act. Not even Mary’s brother comments at the way she is opening herself and her family up for accusations of dishonor. No, all anyone seems to care about is the waste of money.

The financial equivalent is actually quite hard to work out in this case. A denarius was a silver coin of the Roman Empire, and it was what a daily laborer would get paid. These are like the people who are hired to work in the vineyards, in Jesus’ parables. There was no middle class as we think of it in the Roman Empire, so to call something like this “minimum wage” would be misleading. It would be enough to keep a family on. So something more like a construction contractor’s yearly income, maybe. According to the U.S. government, that would be something around $35,000. Mary pours $35,000 worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet.

So when I think about the intimacy and the extravagance of this event, not just the financial extravagance but also the personal risk involved, do I think this Mary was Jesus’ wife?

No, not really. For one, this is the only hint of any kind of relationship between these two. For another, we don’t know if her brother and sister berated her in private afterwards. For a third reason, I think this extravagance can be explained by the fact that just in the previous chapter, Jesus raised her brother from the dead. This does not seem an unrealistic response of gratitude to me. Her family is already giving a dinner for Jesus and all his disciples. We can surmise both from the apparent size of the party to the fact that the family owned a jar of perfume worth that much money that they were very wealthy. It is even possible that the nard had been meant for Lazarus, and when Jesus raised him from the dead, the siblings decided to anoint Jesus with it out of gratitude. I think, though, that we can rule out that they expected Mary to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. That was her own offering, her own sacrifice of her dignity and honor for Jesus’ sake.

And what is Jesus’ response? Does he protect her sexual honor? No again. He simply accepts her sacrifice and protects her from criticism of her financial decision. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’”

Many scholars see an echo of Deuteronomy 15:11 in Jesus’ reply here, so like a good seminary student, like a good preacher, I went and looked it up. And indeed, the two comments are remarkably similar. But what was even more interesting was the context of Deuteronomy 15. Deuteronomy 15:11 comments that there will always be poor in the land, but the chapter is not about the poor, but it is about the Sabbath year. Every seventh year, ancient Israel was supposed to cancel everyone’s debts. Deuteronomy chapter 15 is mostly concerned with laying down the procedure for loans to be cancelled from repayment. 15:11 comes at the end of an instruction not to take the proximity of the Sabbath year into account when making a loan. “Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, 'The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,' and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing.”

God turns our economic practices on their heads. The Israelites are instructed to give loans, not only without consideration of interest income, but even without consideration of ever being paid back! Mary’s personal risk in this story takes it even further. Not only does she give extravagantly financially, but she also gives extravagantly of her own dignity, personal status, and sexual reputation.

Every week, when the gospel passage is read here, we affirm that it is the gospel of the Lord. And we praise Christ for giving us his gospel. This is a gospel that calls us to an uncomfortable, a radically uncomfortable re-ordering of the way things work. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to extravagant hospitality and extravagant personal and financial risk without any consideration of what we might “get back,” or even, in some cases, what consequences we might suffer. Mary could not know that Jesus would defend her, although she surely knew that someone would object to her actions. And she did it anyway.

May our own risks and gifts be made, not with the risk-reward, “how am I going to make my money back” calculations, but with obedience to the gospel and such love of our rabbi and our Lord.

Amen.

what's the point?

while in japan last month for their wedding, we went to church with my brother and new sister-in-law. i am still processing that experience, but the trip also gave me some fodder for my sermon this morning.

What's the point of following Jesus?

Last month, my husband Chris and I were lucky enough to be able to go to Japan for my little brother’s wedding. One of the problems was that with the exception of my brother, no one in my family spoke much Japanese, and with the exception of his bride, no one in her family spoke much English. However, Chris and her brother became friends at the reception by mostly avoiding language and simply pouring each other sake. On the other hand, a few days later, it took Chris and me twenty minutes just to figure out how to buy train tickets. Twenty minutes just for train tickets. If I ever go back to Japan, I’m going to ask my brother for a crash course first.

The sheer power of words for humans is uncontested. It was the development of sophisticated language, scientists believe, that was one of the key skills that allowed homo sapiens to become the dominant species on this planet. Language allows for communication and cooperation far beyond what is achievable by any other method.

In one of the few moments of levity in Hamlet, there’s an exchange between Hamlet and Polonius while Hamlet is pretending to be insane. Polonius comes across the prince in the castle and asks him, “what do you read, my lord?” And Hamlet answers, “words, words, words.” Polonius then attempts to disentangle himself from this apparent misunderstanding, which allows Hamlet to mock him and wander off continuing in his apparent insanity.

Shakespeare’s plays, of course, are treasuries of words, containing some of the most carefully crafted English ever written, and, at least at one time, coming in only second to the bible itself in the sources of common quotations for English-speakers.

And yet, language isn’t all good. If I asked, probably everyone sitting here today could, within a few seconds, come up with an insult, a cutting word, a verbal takedown that someone said to us in our lives somewhere that still stick with us. Especially if said by a parent or a close friend, such words can be deeply wounding. And language can simply be a barrier as well, because there are thousands of languages spoken in the world.

Today we reach the end of this long, confusing dialogue between Jesus and the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. Just look at the confusion that can be caused even when people do speak the same language! Like many of Jesus’ conversations that the gospel of John gives us, this one has not only confused its hearers at the time, but continues to stump not only the church, but also people who don’t follow Jesus. John’s gospel seems to include this passage instead of recording Jesus’ words at the last supper, but Christian scholars have debated for centuries whether or how much of John 6 refers to the Eucharist.

Martin Luther mocked one of his Catholic interlocutors for appealing to this passage in their debate about the Eucharist, but the command to eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood seems unmissable. Also, it was this passage combined with the traditional “institution” passages in the other gospels that led people to charge the early church with cannibalism and to accuse them of murdering and eating babies in their worship rites. Even today, some anti-Christian writers have accused the church of trying to gloss over its own cannibalistic history by insisting this passage is Eucharistic, against its apparent plain meaning, and even the way the crowd in the text is recorded as having reacting.

Has Jesus purposely set out to confuse people?

I don’t think so. His answer here is different than, say, to Nicodemus in chapter 3. When Nicodemus can’t understand being “born again” or “born from above,” Jesus does not explain himself, but simply asks Nicodemus, “how come you’re not getting this?” Nicodemus is an educated man, a Pharisee, Jesus even calls him “Israel’s teacher.” But here, Jesus is talking to a crowd of people who have been following him, and probably also to those who have just come to the synagogue for services that evening. Jesus leaves the realm of the metaphorical and says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

Jesus seems to have been using a rabbinic style of teaching here, with extended metaphor taken from the Exodus passage on manna. Since the people are thinking about manna and bread, Jesus uses that to launch his teaching. But people are obviously confused. If Jesus were a pastor, people would probably be complaining that his sermons are too unfocused. And, indeed, some of his disciples leave here. Even when he says, Ok, it’s not about flesh, it’s about my words, what I’m teaching you, people still can’t get over it and they bail.

Can we blame them? You think you’re following a miracle-worker, a healer, a teacher who has something new to say, and then he comes out with this crazy-sounding sermon in front of everyone at the synagogue. Who can accept this teaching?

It’s passages like that that make scholars think that the community to whom this gospel was written were asking the same question. Who can accept this teaching? Why are we bothering to follow this weird guy? People are kicking us out, accusing us of cannibalism!

What’s the point of following Jesus?

You can almost hear the sadness in Jesus’ voice when he says, “But among you are some who do not believe.” Even though maybe he knew people would not believe, he also says, again going back to chapter 3, that he has not come to condemn the world, but to save it. And then again, he turns to those closest to him, and he asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” The writer of the gospel is asking the same question of his readers. Some have already left us. Do you also wish to go away?

Is the journey getting too hard? Is the mocking getting too much? Do you just hate getting up early in the morning for some superstitious nonsense?

As in the other gospels, Peter gives a clear answer that rests on the identity of Jesus. “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” They get Jesus’ turn away from the confusing bread and flesh. Remember, Jesus said, “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” But Peter says “eternal life.” Is that something special?

After the first and second Great Awakenings in this country and the revivalist Christianity that resulted, most of us would answer yes, it is! It’s about life after death, or something, right? It’s about “going to heaven when you die.” Jesus is a fire insurance salesman, right? That’s the whole point of following Jesus. You get to “go to heaven.”

Not really. In Jewish thought of this period, and especially in John’s writings in the New Testament, eternal life is about living now. It’s not some vision of playing harps and sitting on clouds after death. It’s about living now, following Jesus’ teachings, his words, living in this crazy new radically expanded community of God. Jesus brought God’s teaching about how things were supposed to be - life empowered by God’s Spirit as promised in John 3, all people united in worshipping God as promised in John 4, celebrating God’s creation and taking care of each other promised by Jesus’ miracles of wine and bread in John 2 and 6. When Jesus sets out to feed people, he doesn’t hold back! The best wine at a wedding, where people had already been drinking for days, and enough food for 5000 people. This is what eternal life looks like.

This is what Jesus promises. This, John says, is the point. This is the power of these words. Follow Jesus and live like this. Live life worshipping God with those who were your enemies, celebrating together with them and feeding and caring for each other.

The cost for those earliest Christians was high. The cost for some Christians today is still very high. Jesus never promised a life of material wealth or success, or a perfect family, and he definitely never promised that things would all make sense. The power of Jesus’ words is that when meditated on, eaten, absorbed into us, they give us a new way to live.

The second century church father Tertullian encouraged his home church, “We ought to devour him with the ear, and to ruminate on him with the mind and to digest him by faith.” Or as we say at the Eucharist, “feed on him in your heart with thanksgiving.” Words are powerful. May we take Jesus’ words into us as food to live the life he promises.

Amen.

not a mother's day sermon.

this sermon was for two weeks ago, which i only realized was mother's day after i wrote it.

so one line got shoved in there real fast to acknowledge that fact.

one of the lectionary texts for the day was 1 John 5:1-6. i already happened to have a sermon written on 1 John 5:4-12, so that formed the jumping off point, and the "application" bit was taken pretty much straight from that one. but this was a different sermon. it was the one i would have liked to have written the first time (march 2011). but i wasn't a good enough preacher/sermon writer back then to have been able to pull it off, and i had only just fallen in love with Desiderius Erasmus then. the combination of trying to write (and giving up on) a paper on Erasmus and just getting better at more tightly organizing sermons, and having a very different audience let me pull it off this time around. this version of it actually should be longer, and could definitely have been a lot longer, but at an 8am service, they like the sermons short and sweet *grin*

Love and Faith Conquer All

Today’s reading from 1 John happened to intersect with two of my favorite topics, so I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to preach on it.

Despite possibly being the most bizarre book in the Bible after Revelation, 1 John is one of my favorites. I really love 1 John for its emphasis on how to live in Christian community. Even in the passage today, which is about the power of faith in Jesus Christ, 1 John can’t resist throwing in the comment that “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” If you love God, you will love the children of God, each other!

It manages to pack in a ton of theology, encouragement about how to follow Jesus, and confusing language all in such a short space. It’s also regularly given to New Testament Greek students, partly because the Greek is so strange, so you’re never sure if what you’re translating is correct or not because sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.

And speaking of the Greek, one of my favorite people in church history was Desiderius Erasmus. He was a monk who hated being a monk and ran away from his monastery to become a scholar and writer in the fifteenth century. One of my favorite quotes of his is also one of his most famous: “when I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food and clothing.” He was dedicated to his work as a scholar and dreamed that everyone would have a Bible of their own to read. Erasmus shocked the church by publishing a new translation of the Bible in Greek that disagreed with the Latin Vulgate, the official, approved Bible of the medieval church. His boldness in publishing and his vision of a Bible for the masses was a huge influence on Martin Luther and many of the other people who became the reformers.

Erasmus never joined the reformers, though. He knew the church needed reforming, but he was horrified when it became clear that Luther’s reforms would lead to a schism in the church. Although Luther wrote Erasmus asking for support, Erasmus refused and told Luther to back down in the face of Rome and work for less radical reform. In the words of my church history professor, “Erasmus died a Catholic, but a depressed Catholic.”

And this particular passage in 1 John became something of a real problem for him. The writers of the Vulgate saw three things: The water and the blood and the Spirit, and they couldn’t resist putting in an extra verse that supported Trinitarian theology. Erasmus looked at the Greek manuscripts available to him and realized it had been added. So he took it out.

The uproar was fierce. How dared he change the words of the sacred scripture? When Erasmus pointed out that they had been changed to add the verse in the first place, no one was appeased. How dared he question the wisdom of the church? Erasmus’ reply to that was that he wasn’t questioning the wisdom of the church, he was simply being faithful to the manuscripts. If, he said, someone could prove to him that the verse was original, he would add it back in. And the leadership of the church was so desperate to put it back in the Bible that they had someone forge a manuscript and present it to Erasmus so that he was forced to add it back in. If you look up 1 John 5 in a King James Version of the Bible, you will find it there.

But today, Erasmus has won. And in one way, his story is a wonderful example of exactly what is being spoken about in this passage. Erasmus not only loved the parent, but he loved the children. Out of love for the church, he wanted the church to have the most accurate Bible it could have because that is where our faith comes from. When we read the Bible, we hear God’s Spirit speaking to us, telling us about God, and giving us the strength to have faith.

But out of love for his fellow Christians, Erasmus also wanted as many people as possible to have a Bible that they could read so that the Spirit could speak to everyone, not just the rich and powerful and educated. Before the reformation, the church leadership controlled who was allowed to read the Bible and who was not. Erasmus intended his Greek Bible to be the basis for translations into every language, and indeed, the King James Version is based in a large part on Erasmus’ Greek text.

And Erasmus had faith. He believed that God was guiding the church, especially in this newly discovered wave of manuscripts and the recovery of knowledge of Greek in Western Europe. He truly believed that our faith would conquer the world.

Of course, when a late medieval ex-monk thought of faith conquering the world, he thought of something quite different than what we think of today, or what the original readers of 1 John would have thought of at the end of the first century. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have the promise for today. In fact, today, we probably read it much more closely to the original audience, partly because of what we have learned from Erasmus and other scholars of his era: go back to the text. “Ad fontes” was their slogan: Back to the sources! Not only the biblical text, but as many other ancient sources as we can find.

The community that 1 John was written to, and probably the gospel of John as well, had undergone some kind of trauma. Just as Erasmus feared would happen to the medieval church, this ancient community of Christians had split, and they felt betrayed. So the writer reminds them of Jesus’ commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” And when we obey this commandment, which is not burdensome, we love God, and our faith in Jesus Christ and our love for God and each other is what conquers the world.

This is not a victory through military might, or through rhetoric and manipulation, or even through a voting majority. This is a victory through love. It’s an amazing, upside-down, backwards idea. But this is the lesson of Jesus. And the Spirit of God who speaks to us and in us and through us testifies to this love and to Jesus because the Spirit is truth.

What does it look like to live like this, to live following the commandment to love each other as Jesus loved us?

How you act when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or at the coffeeshop?

Or when someone else’s kid throws a tempter tantrum in the middle of the mall?

Or when a call goes out to volunteer here at All Saints’ or in one of the many ministries here that serves the community?

Or when the global NGO Save the Children comes out with its annual list of the worst places in the world to be a mother?

It shows in how we act towards people, yes, but it’s not just about people. In his book “Surprised by Hope,” N. T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England and another of my favorite authors, says, “Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation…”

All of these things can be part of our faith which conquers the world. The activities themselves don’t conquer the world; it’s why we do it. We are inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation.

Living this way won’t automatically come naturally to us. It would be nice if they did, but we have to consciously listen for the Spirit in our lives. These are habits we have to build. For some of you, maybe writing things down is your way to go. Jotting notes during the day, or if you do daily devotions could help. I go through journaling phases in my own life; sometimes I write every day and then I stop for months. Something constant is what helps us build habits.

Put a sticky note on the dashboard of your car. “Love each other as I have loved you.” Make it your iPhone’s wallpaper :) Put a note on your cubicle wall at work. Make art or music or find an activity that speaks both to your heart and from your heart as it’s inspired by the love of God and the delight in the beauty of his creation. Maybe learn about a person in the history of the church who exemplifies this for you and then learn from them. There are some amazing people tucked away in our family over the course of two thousand years, and many of them are inspiring as well.

Maybe you’re already serving in a ministry and trying to love each other and listen for the Spirit. The problem is, if you’re still alive, God is still working on you. Keep listening, for the Spirit in your own heart and in the voices of those around you, and you can be sure eventually God will push you on to your next step.

But the promise is there for us. As we abide in the love of Jesus, we are children of God, and whatever is born of God conquers the world. Victory through love. Love God and love his children.

Amen.

lenten sermons, part 2.

here is the sermon i delivered this past sunday. it is not as good as the one below. if i had been thinking more clearly, i would have added the challenge to think about who doesn't seem to fit, who doesn't seem to have done things "right" and the possibility that they may be the new way God is working in and through his church. but i was stressed and a little depressed. and i'm not very good at "application."


Children of God

You know, sometimes Jesus doesn’t make any sense to me. On the other hand, he’s hardly alone in that. The passage today from the gospel of John actually happens after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but of course, we won’t celebrate that until next week. So the people who arranged the lectionary are at least as confusing (or maybe confused? :) as anyone else.

But I think Jesus is especially confusing. Here he is in Jerusalem. He is getting ready to celebrate the Passover with his disciples. And he seems to be getting ready for his death, having been predicting it for a while. He has just been welcomed rather flamboyantly into Jerusalem by people waving palm branches as one would cheer a king returning victorious from battle. And in all this excitement - about Jesus, about the festival coming up - some Greeks want to meet him.

It’s not entirely clear who these people were. They may have been Hellenistic diaspora Jews who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. That is to say, Jews who spoke Greek as their first language and read the Bible in Greek. Or they may have been gentile worshipers of the God of Israel, but one who had not officially and formally converted by the rite of circumcision. My guess is that they’re non-Jews who worship the Jewish God. Either way, it’s clear they lived neither in Jerusalem or Palestine at all and had traveled at some length and some expense to come to the festival.

It’s similar today to how Christians travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Holy Week there. You may know that every year, thousands of Christians from around the world descend on Jerusalem around Easter to follow Jesus’ own path through the city and celebrate with parades, ceremonies and church services precisely the things we are reading in the gospels. Of course, today, we can fly there, whereas in the first century, the journey had to be made much more slowly and painfully by foot, horseback, and/or ship. And whether it was the first century or the twenty-first, it’s not a cheap trip either way.

So these Greeks seek out Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples who probably spoke Greek - he has a Greek name - and told him they wanted to meet Jesus. Philip goes and tells his friend Andrew, and together, they go to tell Jesus, possibly offering to act as translators between the Aramaic-speaking Jesus and the Greeks.

And what does Jesus do? Does he say, “Great! Bring them over!”? No. Does he say, “No, at this really important festival, I need to concentrate on my fellow Jews”? No. He goes off on this bizarre monologue about the Son of Man being glorified, grains of wheat, and his Father in heaven.

What the heck is going on here?

Well, part of what I think is going on here - and this is just me - but I think the author of the gospel narrative has gotten a little distracted. Ok, distracted isn’t quite the right word. I don’t mean to imply that the author here has ADD or something. But what I do mean is that he is trying to make a point, and he’s using the Greeks to make it. We’re the ones who get distracted by this narrative of the Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the festival and get a little off track from the gospel’s larger point. So the Greeks and Philip and Andrew are really just a setup to be able to give Jesus a chance to speak.

This is all standard in the ancient art of writing biography, which is another reason I feel like saying the author got distracted is a bad way to put it. In the ancient world, people expected the story of someone’s life to be given a point, that the narrative would be constructed to communicate a morally edifying lesson by the author. If the author didn’t do this, he would be held to have not done his duty. It was part of the convention of the genre. It would be like today, picking up a newspaper and reading an article about a court case, say, where the journalist had written up the article so that it was embellished and sounded like an excerpt from a novel. It would, in fact, still depict what happened in the courtroom, but it wouldn’t fit our expectations about how the journalist should write her story. She would have defied the conventions of her genre.

So when I say that the author of the gospel is using the request of the Greeks as a setup for Jesus, I don’t mean he invented it. It probably did happen, because we also know from other writers that inventing things was frowned on. But then in proper ancient style, he uses the episode to allow Jesus to deliver an important speech which reinforces the message being given to this account of his life.

But what is the point?

One way we can get to that question is to ask what is it about the fact that people described as Greeks wish to see Jesus. We’ve already seen that Jesus doesn’t seem to answer their request. But what if his strange monologue here is, in fact, an answer?

People have found that among others, some of the major themes in the gospel of John are Jesus’ identity with respect to the Father, and the identity of God’s people. And when you look through that lense, this episode starts to make a little more sense. First, Jesus’ monologue about the glorification of the Son of Man and of the Father’s name fit very nicely within the theme of the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus is put into a very close relationship with his Father. And in this little passage, Jesus’ own glorification is linked to the glorification of the Father’s name. So this very carefully reinforces again that close link between Jesus and his Father. As we’ll discover on Easter, Jesus’ death glorifies both him and the Father’s name.

The other theme that gets pushed here is this gospel’s new definition of the people of God. Jesus spends his time in this gospel talking to just about everyone: his friends and family, Pharisees, fellow Jews, and at least one Samaritan woman. In all of these exchanges, John’s gospel has Jesus pushing on the definition of God’s people, arguing and disagreeing with his fellow Jews about that definition. And here, Greeks come to see him and this prompts him to begin talking about the glory of the Father, which even prompts a response from heaven.

Jesus is pushing a new definition of the people of God. Here it’s being made clear: the new people of God are Jews and Gentiles together, united not by circumcision, but by Jesus’ death. There was always a way for Gentiles to join the people of God: circumcision for men, and eventually baptism for both. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories of Gentiles coming to believe in and worship the God of Israel.

Jesus' radically new way of including Gentiles in God’s family is one of the things that we celebrate on Easter, and indeed every time we take communion. We always pray and thank God that we are made one body when we eat the bread and drink the wine, the bread and wine that were first part of a Passover meal where Jesus made another radical announcement that they were to be the body and blood of Jesus himself. In his death and resurrection, all people are made the children of God.

Amen.