The Last Day Lament

I led this prayer on the last day of our worship course (the day that we sang all the hymns that the students had written, hence the thematic transition at the end).

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A Seminary Psalm: The Last Day Lament

O God of Time, infinitely and intimately ours,
We are students and faculty facing the end of another semester;
Some of us the end of our journey at Drew.

We are buried beneath literal and digital stacks of paperwork,
Crunching out reports, and recuperating from computer crashes.
We are following guidelines and looking toward deadlines
And yet, despite so many straightforward lines,
We lose ourselves in a whirlwind of expectations.

O God of Grace, whose Book of Life has no column for grades,
We are students and faculty facing constant measurement:
Our mistakes and retakes, our credits and diplomas.
Our publish-or-perish publications, our tenure and evaluations.
We see A's and B's and C's and I's, NR's, and Z's,
And we wonder what they say about us;
About our learning and about our teaching.
We absorb letters on transcripts
As though they spell who we are and what we do.
But our identity is in You, O God:
You call us Beloved.
And our purpose is in You, O God:
You call us to Live, to Learn, and to Love.

Deliver us, O God!
Deliver us from the finality of our finals,
The pressure of our presentations,
The stress of our tests,
And the insidious voice inside us
Insisting that we've come to Drew
For any other reward or reason
Than the one for which You've led us here.

And thank You, God of Song,
That in the midst of our reading and writing,
We can claim this sacred time and space
To give You glory and praise.
Let all that we are and do be a song to You!

Amen.

Your Mistake Is Not the Last Word on You

Before I preached this narrative sermon to my classmates, I read aloud from John 21:1-19 (NRSV), projected the image below, and lit one candle to bring into the chapel the faint but unmistakable scent of fire.

Your name is Peter.  You remember that night—the night that Jesus was arrested.  It was the night that you did that thing you said you would never do, became what you said you would never be.  How could you forget that?  You never will.

Over and over again the people asked, “Are you not Jesus’ disciple?” and over and over again you said, “I am not.”  Three times.  Three times, just like he said it would be.  And you didn’t just deny Jesus or that you knew who he was.  You denied who he said you were and what he called you to do.

Are you not Jesus’ disciple?

No. No, I am not.

When it happened, you were warming yourself by a charcoal fire.  The air is still thick with the smell of it, even when you aren’t by a fire, because you will never forget that scent.  It’s always been unmistakable, but now it’s the smell of the most humiliating moment of your life.  Every time you warm your hands you relive that shame a little bit more.

And where do you find yourself now but right here at another charcoal fire?  It’s the first time Jesus is sitting with you by a fire since the night you wrapped yourself in the protection of lies.

But that’s not what Jesus talks about.  “Come and have breakfast,” he says, and as he cooks the fish you breathe in the smell of sustenance and wonder if things between you will ever be what they once were, what they should have been.

Here you are sitting down to a feast like nothing has even changed between you.  You became what you swore you would never be and you two have never even talked about it and this silence is actually starting to weigh on you as much as the shame ever has and God—Are you ever going to talk about it?

Jesus breaks bread and gives it to you, and as you reach out to take it, you can still see the wounds in his wrists where they nailed him to the wood.  But the fish are hot and the bread is fresh and you are hungry.  So you let the whole meal go by in friendly conversation, and you don’t ask Jesus about the awful thing burned into your memory to this day.

But he knows, doesn’t he?

And after you’ve eaten together, he speaks.

Your name is Peter.  At least, it is to Jesus.  Isn’t it?

“Simon, Son of John,” he says.  It’s a little like when your mother used to scold you for teasing Andrew when you were kids.  Except there’s a look on Jesus’ face now, and even though all you can think about is the burning coals and the heat of shame, there’s this look on his face and you can’t describe it, but whatever it is means you’re not in trouble.

“Simon, Son of John,” he says, “do you love me more than these?”

You do.  You cherish him.  He tells you to feed his lambs.

Maybe some time passes. You can’t be sure how much, because all that matters is that Jesus turns to you again.

“Do you love me?” he says.

You do.  You cherish him.  He tells you to tend his sheep.

The next time he says it like he knows what hearing a question three times will mean to you.  He says, “Do you love me?”

Someday the story of this conversation is going to be written down in Greek, and many well-meaning preachers are going to focus on the use of different words for love—agape love, phileo love—and what they think those words mean.  Some will preach how this goes to show that, even now, you can’t get where Jesus is or where he wants you to be.

Poor Simon Peter, they’ll say, because they too will never forget the night you denied Jesus and everything you were supposed to be for him.  It will be easy for them to interpret the words to reflect what they already know about you: That you fall short and Jesus needs to meet you in your weakness.  They will shame you even in your redemption.

Maybe they wouldn’t preach it like that if they could hear what you hear.

You and Jesus don’t speak Greek.  You speak Aramaic, and what you hear is the very same question spoken three times.  What you hear is three opportunities to affirm your love and three instructions to cherish Jesus’ people the way you cherish him.  What you hear is Jesus calling you to be the disciple you were always meant to be.  What you hear is the emotion in his voice when his third question both breaks you open and restores you.  What you hear is the voice drowning out the crackle of fire.  What you hear is love.

Jesus calls you Simon, but you both know that you are and forever will be Peter.  You are the rock on which your beloved Jesus will build his church.  You are the one who will shepherd his flock.  You are the one who will speak to the Jews and the Gentiles.  You are the one who will die for them all—for Jesus, for his people.  You are the one who cherishes your friend no matter how ashamed you feel of your failure.

Peter, someday a Christian named C.S. Lewis will write about this kind of love between people who know each other the way you and Jesus do—that between friends, the question Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth?  Do you care about the same truth?  Lewis won’t mention you or this conversation with your Lord, but if you could know what he would write, you might say, “Yes!  That’s what Jesus is asking of me.  Do we see the same truth?  Am I ready to care for his people as much as I care for him?  Am I ready to lay down my life?  Am I able to bear the name Disciple, to be the person Jesus made me and do what he called me to do?”

And Jesus thinks you are.  At Passover, you told him you wanted to follow him wherever he was going, but back then you weren’t ready.  Now, Jesus says, “Follow me.”  And you will.  The last word on you in this story is not your mistake.

And you don’t know this yet, Peter, but someday millions of Jesus’ people will put the ashes of burnt palms on their foreheads. Those sooty dark smudges will remind them that they are mortal and that they have fallen short of what Jesus has called them to be.  But there but for the grace of God, those ashes will mean so much more.  Through the ashes, anointed on each forehead in the form of a cross, Jesus will speak to their hearts: “My friend, do you love me?”

And if they can hear those words above the crackle of fire, and each and every reminder of fall and failure, then like you, Peter, the people you nourish and lead and all of their spiritual descendants—they too will know who they are and what they are meant to do . . .

If only they will hear love over the persistent whisper of shame.

Getting What We Deserve

A sermon I delivered in class this month, based upon Job 2:1-8 (NRSV). I preached off of notes and pictures rather than written text, so this is just an adaptation of that presentation.

I invite you to read Job 2:1-8 first, noting that the Hebrew for "(the) Satan" also translates to mean "the accuser."

By the time we catch up with Job in the beginning of Chapter 2, he's already lost his numerous sons and daughters and all of his livestock and property. Job was a well-respected man in his community, and having all of these things had helped to shape his high social status. They're the kinds of things that made other people in the community look at him and say, "That Job must have done something right to be so blessed."

And then, just when it looks like it can't get any worse, he even loses his very health.

For the people of Job's time and place, all of this loss indicates one thing: Job must have done something wrong and now he's getting what he deserves. People believed that God would dish out rewards and punishments, an idea well established in Deuteronomy, which the storytellers and early audiences would be thinking with here.

But for the life of him, Job can't figure out what he could have done to be suffering this series of unfortunate events. His friends use common sense and religious tradition to make their point, but in the face of all of this logic and theology, Job only knows that this doesn't line up with his own experience. He has to rethink what he and his community have believed about God.

This is what Job's integrity is really about - being authentic. Not just doing good things or praising God (and by Chapter 3 Job won't seem as patient as we might think); but also standing by what he knows to be true.

Even if we don't experience the same losses that Job does, we 21st century Christians have plenty of voices competing to explain suffering to us.

Some voices ask, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Some say, "You're too bad to be forgiven."

Some voices pray, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," and then urge people to be stoic and to bear pain and hardship - even the kinds that humans cause one another - because somehow God derives glory from this.

Being apathetic or desensitized to pain is not the mark of strong faith. Seeking the power of God, even in the midst of human weakness and crisis, can be the mark of strong faith. Having the strength and compassion not to condemn someone for their own suffering can be the mark of strong faith.

Unfortunately, we - the church, the world - may have come up with even more ways to justify suffering than to alleviate it.

Over the course of history, religious peoples have:

...claimed that the pain of childbirth was inflicted on women because of Eve's part in the Fall,
...identified illness and disability with demon possession,
...blamed victims for bringing acts of violence upon themselves,
...speculated that AIDS arose to punish homosexuality,
...sanctioned genocide and slavery in the name of God,
...and - just like Job's friends - touted the adage that "you reap what you sow."

It's time to realize that suffering, like grace, is not so conditional. It's a realization we need to face for all of those people like Job whose hardships only become worse when accusations rain down on them.

Accusations.

And it's even more than that: it's important for everyone who has ever been told that they are "undeserving" in one way or another - too innocent to face pain, too guilty to find grace.

Because if we don't acknowledge that bad things can happen to people in spite of the good that they do, how can we ever accept the idea that grace can come to people in spite of their sins and mistakes? How can we accept forgiveness for what we ourselves have done?

Do you know that you are forgiven? For everything. No matter what.

We must believe that grace is just as real and unconditional as suffering is - and ultimately more triumphant.

The Gospel of Matthew says that God causes the sun "to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

So what's the point?

Maybe the point isn't our righteousness or whether or not we deserve what comes our way, but that God aches with human suffering, and rejoices when we find grace and hope in spite of it.

Letter to Grandpa

I offered the following letter as the eulogy at my grandfather's funeral this week. Grandpa just recently celebrated his 91st birthday and lived with my parents and grandmother for the past two years. His health and strength, both cognitive and physical, deteriorated gradually due to Parkinson's Disease, and he received home hospice care for the past 10 months. (I wrote about him here in October 2010 as well.)

This gradual process was painful for him and for all of us. Indeed, it raised many theological questions for me. And while I still do not have all of the answers (nor do I expect to), I do believe I have been given the most important one. The one about identity - who we really are; why we love and are loved.


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Dear Grandpa (my godfather and my "Grandsprout"),

The earliest memory I have of you is walking with you in your vegetable garden in Brooklyn. One time, I found a stick there and you let me bring it home for our dog like some kind of souvenir. (Because I was visiting one of the coolest places I'd ever been, and I had to go out and share a part of it with somebody.)

That's how I feel about the love that you and Nana have shared. That needs to be passed along to everyone. It isn't just your garden variety kind of love. It is tenderly planted, lovingly grown, and devotedly protected. It has deep roots and widespread branches. But the best part is that you were always inviting us to walk in your garden. You and Nana both loved so many friends and family members, too.

You loved us with every bowl of soup and plate of manicotti, every fresh-baked loaf of bread, and every homegrown veggie. You loved us in the way you cared for your parents and your neighbors. You loved us in wanting the best for us, and in reconciling when it was time for reconciliation.

And then there is what I learned through all the people who have been loving you and caring for you. Your wife, your children, our extended family, our church congregation, ministers and chaplains, and our own personal fleet of angels: the caregivers and aides and healthcare professionals who may have pulled up in the driveway as strangers, but came through the door as friends, and left the house as family.

Because love like this means that there are no strangers, only more people to feed. (And we like that.)

As the dementia progressed, it was so difficult to see everything we thought made you "you" slowly begin to slip away - your sharp mind, your memories, your strong sense of self. We loved those things about you. But they weren't why we loved you. And I finally realize that there is a difference.

I believe that we receive grace from God not because of what we do or who we think we are, but because of who God is and what God does. And I believe that we are to love each other like that as best as we can: not because of who we think we are or should be, but because of who God says we are - that we are all meant to love and be loved. Unconditionally. No matter the circumstances.

The last memory I have of you is from Christmas. Nana and Mother and Dad and I were playing Apples to Apples and laughing so hard. And you were laughing with us. The joy we felt in each other's company was palpable.

Grandpa, we miss you now that you have continued on, but you aren't far from our minds or hearts. And I hope the joy that I feel in knowing that you are at peace today is just as palpable as our joy together on Christmas Day.

Love,
Sprout

The Garden: A Revelation

When Hilary Rhodes of Woman at the Well sent me the post she wrote for this blog based on one of mine, her theological and historical exploration originally culminated in a beautiful personal testimony, which I loved even more than the insightful analysis of grace. I told Hilary that these parts' length and content (related, yet quite different) suggested to me that they should indeed be two separate pieces, so what you've seen this week is that first portion.

Because the second part is so personally meaningful, Hilary would like to make WATW its home, and I agree. It moved me, though, and so I'd like to make a point of recommending it to you and directing you over to WATW to read the full text. It's a descriptive piece about a spiritual vision she experienced; a story of depression and consolation, fear and grace.

Hilary and I differ in much of how and where we were raised and the theological and political landscapes around us. We have walked individual and intersecting paths. But I feel a sense of camaraderie in both her writing voice (particularly in her more personal writings) and in many of the issues she confronts. The blend of ideological differences and similarities between us, in fact, serves to remind me how simultaneously unique and intricately connected the parts of the Body of Christ truly are.

And so it is my pleasure to introduce to you Hilary's visionary tale:

I can’t tell you the moment I lost my faith. Sometime when I was about 14, when I was old enough to understand how shallow and fear-based and resistant to questions and dismissive of real need my experience of it had hereunto been. This was followed with six years of becoming an increasingly angry atheist. I can, however, tell you – almost to the hour – the moment I found it again:

The night of Thursday, September 6, 2008.

It was two months before one of the most heated presidential elections in history. I’d just come off a tearingly difficult, lonely, and isolated sophomore year of college, where I’d battled depression so severe that if I didn’t have anything to do, I’d stay in bed until 3 PM with the shades shut. I was saved by a deep friendship with an absolutely wonderful guy in my psychology class. (Matt, shout-out time.) But I’d been struggling over the summer again, and although I was about to take off to Oxford University and fulfill one of my longtime dreams, I was faced with a dialogue that was (especially on the right wing) about nothing but fear and despair. About the “destruction of America.” About this scary dark-skinned guy with the scary “Muslim” name. About how there might not be time for me, and my future family and children and grandchildren.

I was lying in bed in the darkness, crying. Just so scared. So scared. I was screaming in my soul. I was in agony. I couldn’t even breathe.

I couldn’t do it alone. I just couldn’t. It was too big for me. It was too much. It was beyond my ability to bear. And so I did the only thing I could:

I asked for help.

I listened to it echo in the walls. I watched headlights pass on the ceiling.

I eventually subsided into a troubled sleep.

And that night, the Word came back.

This is what I remember...

Read more.

The Cost of Grace

by Hilary Rhodes, contributor

Today, I’d like to expand on Kim’s last post about “deceptive Christian tippers,” and to do so through the lens of my current muse: Dietrich Bonhoeffer.


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Bonhoeffer, as you may know, was a German Lutheran pastor who died a martyr – he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, days before it was liberated by the Allies – for his single-minded, incredibly courageous, uncompromising efforts to resist Hitler and the Nazis. Thus, his writings (Cost of Discipleship, Christ the Center, Ethics, and more) are uniquely positioned to speak to us on the true role of a Christian in the savage twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our call to social activism, and how – in his case – to reconcile it with the bluntly pacifist message of Jesus, who famously instructs us to turn the other cheek and not resist an evil man.

CHEAP GRACE

As I read Kim’s post about Christian diners who leave come-to-Jesus tracts for their restaurant servers in place of cash tips, it occurred to me that this was a great way to explore Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of “cheap” and “costly” grace, almost literally. The diners may feel that by leaving an instruction manual on how to obtain “eternal life,” they are doing their waiter or waitress a much greater and lasting service than if they’d merely left them a temporal, worldly gift of money. But the questions raised are twofold:

1) How can this anonymous, tight-fisted, downright pharisaical method of drive-by evangelism possibly communicate the life-changing, radical, and completely counterculture nature of the Gospels?

2) In fact, can there be any benefit to it besides the fact that it makes the diner feel as if they’ve “done their part”? Or is it just a low-risk, cop-out, “don’t look at me” method of proselytizing that indeed sets the public perception of Christianity back still further?

Bonhoeffer would characterize it as the latter. In The Cost of Discipleship, which I am currently reading, he opens with an admonishment to the Christian community to take a hard-eyed look at their methods of preaching, and judge whether this leads people to the actual Word of God, or is intended instead to protect the “look but don’t touch” insular country-club nature of many churches. He then examines his own Protestant heritage, and how Martin Luther kicked off the sixteenth-century Reformation with the radical idea that not good works but rather grace alone is sufficient to redeem an individual.

There’s many a theological discussion to be had about Luther and his message, not least his rabid anti-Semitism. But Bonhoeffer’s focus for exploration – and mine – is how the concept of grace, and its function in Christian life, has become grossly misunderstood and devalued. Luther’s proposition that God alone confers salvation has led, as Bonhoeffer points out, to a sense among many contemporary Christians that they can live a life identical to their secular counterparts in nearly every respect. Save for going to church on Sundays, certain taboos in vocabulary, and, yes, leaving evangelical tracts in place of tips, they can live essentially as they did before, confident that grace has been put to work to wipe out the rest of their transgressions. It becomes “the justification of sin, rather than the justification of the sinner in the world.”

Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace,” and characterizes it as the greatest threat, bar none, to a real, vital Christian calling in this day and age. When Christianity is lax, lazy, and easy, when it demands nothing from us and is palatable to the suburban everyman leery of scary words like “sacrifice” and “suffering,” it completely loses the radical quality on which it was founded. It becomes Christianity without Christ.

So what’s the answer? How can we maintain a distinctively Christian identity? Or will this build the exclusionary walls even higher, if Christianity has an entrance exam harder than Harvard’s?

COSTLY GRACE

The commandments of Jesus are deceptively simple. “Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow Me.” When asked how to obtain eternal life, he doesn’t break out a phonebook-sized manual of rules and regulations. He merely affirms the Commandments first given to Charlton Heston Moses: Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Honor your father and mother. Love God with all your heart, soul, body, and mind. And love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I’ve written several entries at my own blog dealing with the nature of these commandments, and how we (present company no exception) so often fail at putting them into practice in daily life. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is always, uncompromisingly, and brutally honest about what the cost of discipleship entails. When He calls you, you can’t stop to bury your father or say goodbye to your loved ones. You can’t set your terms and then follow. You can’t follow when the stock market’s doing well. You drop everything, and follow. Period.

This is also the hardest thing we can ever do. Bonhoeffer puts it just as frighteningly: “When Christ calls a man, he calls him to come and die.”

Because in fact, we do die. Maybe not in actual martyrdom, as Bonhoeffer did, but in everything we were before, our old habits and neurotic fixations and judgments and beliefs and cop-outs. We burn away. We do sell everything, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise. And in stripping ourselves of these worldly accoutrements, we are thrown into a new life where we are forced to rely completely on the Divine Mercy.

And in so doing, we don’t give up everything and get nothing for our trouble. We receive the Pearl of Great Price. We receive, in this utterly necessary, transcendent sacrifice, the gift of costly grace. Our life is no longer our own, and has been bought on a heavenly account we can never pay back – and don’t have to. That story has already been told. The story of how love overcomes evil, the truth of all human reality. The power of death, and our own death, has been broken forever.

It’s done. It’s been done for a while. On a beautiful spring morning almost two thousand years ago, two women in Jerusalem met a man they thought was the gardener. And it ended.

It’s not about blood and guts. It never was.

Hollywood’s never figured that out.

THE CROSS

Like many Christians, I like to wear a cross necklace. It’s another easy and low-risk way of displaying religious conviction – that is, when it isn’t just a throwaway fashion statement. But for Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of nothing more or less than our own absolute commitment to follow Jesus’ path, even unto its uttermost end.

We each have our own crosses to bear. Starting out on a spiritual journey will, I promise, show yours to you pretty darn quick. And it’s a scary proposition. It explicitly includes suffering, and that death I mentioned above. So why would we, as creatures who are naturally averse to pain, choose to do that to ourselves?

What if our cross to carry was to humbly accept the unconditional love and mercy of God, for ourselves and for everyone we meet? To yield ourselves into the arms of a Divine who is so deeply in love with us that He did not consider the life of His Son too high a price to pay for our redemption?

Does that sound so terrible? So dangerous, so exclusionary? So self-righteous, so bloodstained, so many of the adjectives that are (sadly, and truly) used to characterize the exploits of many people who have called themselves Christian throughout the centuries?

For Bonhoeffer, this was the ultimate core of his call to resist the Nazis. He understood that Jesus was not preaching a message of passive acceptance, the life of cheap grace, to sit back and let the most evil dictator of the twentieth century – perhaps in all of history – seize control of his beloved home country.

To turn the other cheek didn’t mean to become collaborators, either active or complicit. What it was, was a call not to fight the Nazis on their terms. They wouldn’t be brought down by Bonhoeffer and his fellows becoming them.

Because the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the most gloriously counter-intuitive message in all of human history, is a call to action. To demonstrate, to create, to live the Kingdom of Heaven, and the perfect love of God. Here. Now. Forever.


Hilary Rhodes has recently launched her own blog at Woman at the Well, where she ruminates on issues of social justice, courageous faith, the creative life, and more. Although Sarah Lawrence College is regularly cited as one of the least religious schools in America, it was there that she rediscovered, and fell in love with, her lost childhood faith – except on a hundred orders of magnitude more, in depths of experience and mercy that she never, ever thought were possible. For more on that, keep tabs on WATW.