March 31, 2013
Text:
I Corinthians 15:19-26, 28,
Luke 23:39-43
I want to talk with you this Easter Sunday about three people who are both very important to me and in my experience related agents of God: Gordon Cosby, David Hlfiker and Jesus. For visitors, Gordon was the founder of the Church of the Saviour from which 8th Day Church sprang and until his death 11 days ago a treasured mentor to me and many of you. David isa fellow member of 8thDay and dear friend who shared with us a few weeks ago that he has been diagnosed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. These two men have been special links to Jesus for me, and that is the context in which I want to talk about them and Jesus on this day when we celebrate and contemplate God’s act of vindicating the crucified Jesus and sending him on his next mission Word of God in and to the church by raising him from the dead,
I will start with Gordon Cosby. In the wake of his death many of you and I are reflecting on his importance in our lives, to this church and the church and world at large. I especially remember times when I was unclear what Jesus was saying to me and went to Gordon for counsel. He had an amazing gift for hearing our issue and need and framing a practical way to follow Jesus in our situation. He did not listen to us to think of a clever way to make us feel better in the moment but to help us discern a step to be more fully who we are as a whole human beings and servants of God.
In American culture we have a propensity to airbrush our heroes. A danger is that there will be a groundswell to transform Gordon the person into an icon in the same way the media and public at large have dealt with Martin Luther King Jr. since his death.Think about the way we have airbrushed Martin Luther King Jr. remembering him by his magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech which everyone these days loves and leaving out his letter from a Birmingham jail and his Riverside Church sermon calling into question the Vietnam War and the militarism in this country driving it.
My fear is that we will forget the edge in Gordon’s thinking thattook us out of our comfort zones. Gordon was amazingly insightful and generous in his listening and responding. What he did was affirm the reality of our struggle and then point us in a direction that made us more dependent on God than before, and if we couldn’t handle that increased dependence on God we would be disappointed that what he said made no sense. I dare say that for most people what Gordon had to say from the pulpit or one to one made no sense at all. On the other hand, for persons facing our own brokenness, his words were often liberating.
Let us shun the inevitable attempt to airbrush Gordon’s image until he becomes entirely comfortable for the mainstream. Instead let us remember and pass on to the next generation both his beauty and his oddness. One way for us to do this is to journal about our experience with Gordon personally or with what others have told us about Gordon if you didn’t know him personally. Then I suggest we share excerpts in our mission groups or in conversations with others who are doing the same thing. I propose we do this for at least a few weeks if not several months.
As we do this kind of journaling I suggest that in our journals we also write and think about gifts that we associate with Gordon showing up in this church on particular occasions – gifts of saying the right thing at the right time that help you or others or the community as a whole to see the way forward. This is the way the early church worshiping as scattered and proliferating house churches were reinforced in their belief that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the Christ, despite all the arguments to the contrary, and how he kept showing up in the spirit in such settings as with twos and threes meeting for prayer, in conversation, in worship and in carrying out the business of the church and in its mission to be a faithful witness and presence in the world. As Christ has spoken to, challenged and nurtured us through Gordon, our faith tells us to expect the speaking, challenging, and nurturing to continue in the community through each of us using the gifts Christ continues to give.
As I have done my own reflecting about Gordon several weeks ago when it was clear he was in the process of dying, I wrote three paragraphs which are printed in The Callings, our newsletter.
“My first impression of Gordon Cosby came as I listened to him speak to my first year class at Yale Divinity School in l955. Gordon spoke about the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit that was showing up at the then 8 year old Church of the Saviour. Without repeating his engaging stories, what stood out for me as he spoke was the ambiance he created that this was not about him but something that had gotten hold of this adventurous Christian community involved in a high risk, high reward way of being the church. His combination of conviction, humility and openness won my trust.
If his message was not about him or the strange and wonderful people attracted to this church, who/what was Gordon talking about? He made it plain as day that he was talking about the Jesus who died for us and by the grace of God is alive, still teaching, still healing, still confronting, still leading in the world today among those who take him seriously.
Like Gordon I was raised a Southern Baptist. Recently, a New Testament scholar friend, also raised Southern Baptist, said to me, “Ours is a rich tradition. It was neither fundamentalist nor non fundamentalist. It was pre-critical.” Then he added, “And we can’t go back.” At Yale Divinity School I was exposed to critical scholarship. In Gordon I found a preacher willing to engage with the tension between his Christian beginnings and discoveries flowing from disciplined scholarship and serious exposure to individual and societal pain and cry for hope. I found a pastor who refused both the reduction of the gospel to ethical urgency and the answering of abstraction with abstraction. I found a tough minded thinker who shunned portable lists for successful spirituality and their dumbing down effect on the hard work of clear thinking and faithful action. The issue now for our scattered C of S churches is not how we replicate Gordon, because we can’t, but how do we tune into the voice that Gordon listened for and in so many ways was gifted to hear?”
After writing that, I went over to Christ House to read it to Gordon in person. Gordon was lying on his side on the couch physically weak but mentally alert. When I finished reading, Gordon said to me, “You will never know how much that means to me.” We had prayer together. Then when I got up to put on my coat to leave, Gordon said, “Hearing that makes me feel ready to die.”
As others of you have experienced in recent weeks, Gordon was open with us about the approach of death, and in doing so was saying goodbye and helping us say goodbye and at the same time learn more about facing death ourselves as Christians.
Now let me talk for a few moments about David Hilfiker and how he has been another channel of Jesus’ leading for me. I had known David casually for many years around the Church of the Saviour. He at one time was my physician when he worked at the Community of Hope health clinic and FLOC where I worked was four blocks down the street. Our relationship took a decisive turn after a mission group experience in leading a Bible study that fell flat, David said, “I would like to talk with you.” I was feeling pretty discouraged at the moment and I appreciated his reaching out to me. When we got together David asked me, “What I would like to know is how can you believe all that stuff?”
This kicked off a running weekly conversation that is still going on. From the outset it was clear that David and I come from very different theological traditions, his eastern liberal and mine southern evangelical. David wanted to know what I meant by the language I used and the way I referred to Jesus as the Son of God and his resurrection from the dead as fact rather than metaphor. Having been exposed to the liberal tradition in seminary and David’s having been exposed to the evangelical tradition while a doctor in rural Minnesota, we both were familiar with each other’s language and belief systems. It was also clear that neither of us felt it our responsibility to convert the other. David was requesting dialogue, and I was equally interested. As our conversation evolved I noticed and was excited by the fact that the more thoughtfully I expressed myself in response to David’s questions and listening, the more in touch I got with what has been for me the marvelous energy of theological conversation, although David was not at clear what was theology and what was something else.
At one point I asked David, “Why do you want to talk with me?” He answered, “I sense that you are in touch with something I want to know more about.” I then asked myself the same question, and the answer was that I sensed in David something really important and essential about the Christian life and path that I wanted to know more about.
Under the leadership of Gordon, the Church of the Saviour has been a meeting ground for these two American religious traditions. Without requiring conversion from one to the other, we have learned to give and receive with each other and to understand that theology is all about relationship – God’s movement toward us as witnessed by scripture and subsequent experience and our human movement toward God as also illustrated by scripture and human experience, including our own. Just as David and I are distinct I centers of thought and feeling, each reaching out to and responding to the other, so is the God – humanity relationship the central subject of theology. One dimension of that experience without the other – either God’s movement toward us or our movement toward God, is like weak tea or stale bread – no taste, no bite, no passion – essentially monologue. What David and I have avoided is dueling monologues. What we have been experiencing, if I may say so, is what Reuel Howe called the miracle of dialogue.
As I reflect on our different ways of thinking and use of language, it occurs to me that in my Southern Baptist evangelical tradition I learned the content of the Christian story – i.e., message and beliefs before I had much insight into myself as a person. For David it was just the opposite. The content to which he was exposed was pretty general and from my standpoint thin. He was encouraged to think through and experience most his own humanness. What we have been experiencing in our dialogue seems to us a movement toward some kind of new common ground and new solidarity for both of us.
As events have unfolded in the last few weeks it seems that not only David and I but we as a community are en route to a new place that is already stretching and deepening us. Both Gordon and David provide examples.
For most of the 50 years I have been associated with the Church of the Saviour, observers have posed the question, “What will happen to this community or now these several small communities when Gordon Cosby dies?” Some have predicted that there will be as decline and perhaps extinction. I say that that prediction rests on the assumption that the Church of the Saviour is an extension of
Gordon and his charisma. I don’t see it that way. What Gordon did was ground us in Christ, not himself, and this is what we will be discovering in a new context. It is Christ himself present in his body the church, which includes this church that holds our promise.
In Kayla’s and Tim’s daily Inward Outward blog, they recently quoted Richard Rohr “Whenever any church stops believing in its own gospel, God has to come in through the air ducts. God has to find a shrouded identity, code words to say the same thing, new ways to open the human heart and catch people with the truth when their guard is down.” I love that quote because it puts the emphasis in the right place – on the mystery of God’s loving us and working with us, as Martin Luther once said, “warts and all.”
The whole Biblical story is one of God coming through the air ducts, and that is also the Church of the Saviour story. God in Christ or through individuals or the community comes to us, and, often without our knowing what is happening, re-grounds us in our story. This is also showing up in David’s response to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s as it did years ago when he wrote his book of his own experience as a physician who acknowledged making mistakes. That book brought David to widespread attention as it enabled professionals to talk about their finitude and their human vulnerability.
As David has shared his feelings about his new situation we have been drawn in with him into the darkness of our human vulnerability. The novelist Alice Walker counsels young writers to “go to the places that scare you.” As David shared in his sermon a few weeks ago what scared him most about the future he is facing is the fear of abandonment. In sharing that and his love and need for this community his courage has begun to free the rest of us both to face our own vulnerabilities and our need for community. David told us that both from this community and the people on his blog he has never received such an outpouring of love. Moreover, in a way he cannot explain he says that he has never felt happier from anew and fresh opening in his being.
‘The third person I want to talk about is Jesus and John and Paul’s witness to his resurrection. John 20:1 tells us that the women go to the tomb while it was still dark and to find the tomb is empty. Jesus arose from the dead in the darkness. I have never noticed that before. Usually we think of Easter as the day that reverses the darkness of Good Friday. Here we see the theme of light in the darkness which is actually what we have been discussing in our relationship to Gordon and David.
A parallel theme that Paul underlines is that Jesus’ resurrection is not the end of the story but the middle of the story. When David asked me, “How can you believe all this stuff?” I could have said, “If you think Jesus’ resurrection is some kind of mysterious and bodily form is a stretch wait until you read I Corinthians 15:19 – 28, today’s text.” Here Paul talks about the end of history as we know it. That end does not come until Christ brings into line all the forces that oppose Creator God, the last of which is death. The text says at that time, Christ turns over this world as a new creation to God and all creation has been transformed into a giving receiving balance of harmony under the eternal reign of God.
This is the Christian vision according to scripture. From our human side it is beyond our imagination how the world we know could be transformed into the condition and function as God intended. This is a particular stretch as we contemplate the playing out of climate change which the world is substantially ignoring.
What does that mean – God reigning over this world transformed into a new creaton? Sounds like Gordon, doesn’t it – holding up a vision that from every practical angle seems utterly impossible and then saying “That’s God’s agenda.” A week ago Wednesday night when we gathered in the Potter’s House to be together after Gordon’s death that morning, Becca Steele recalled a favorite Gordon story. Gordon as an army chaplain in World War II was on the battlefield one night during an intense bombardment with an advance on the Germans scheduled at daybreak. Gordon jumped into a foxhole with a soldier he had never met. The soldier saw his chaplain insignia and cut to the chase. “Chaplain, when we charge in the morning I am convinced I am going to be killed. I know nothing about God or what to expect after I die. What have you got to say to me?” Gordon answered very simply, “You are going to encounter a love beyond anything you can imagine.”
That for me is a transformative image. As scripture tells it this is why Creator God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead and gave him back to his movement as a real living person in a mysterious form which we cannot pin down, only receive as the signature of God’s unconditional love. This is the loving Creator Gordon told the terrified soldier who was waiting that very day.
Fundamentalist Christians have a hard time with God’s love as unconditional and with this world transforming somehow at some time into a new creation. Gordon got this and reimaged the church from an institution into intentional communities that, as Emil Brunner once said, live by mission in the world as a fire lives by burning. Think about the scores of missions which have sprung from the Church of the Saviour and our shared tradition. As I have done an inventory in my mind, every single one of these missions came into being and existed for a time, some into the present, as the embodiment of a new creation which makes the love of God visible and accessible in a particular way.
I have been talking about the movement of God toward us. Our faithful response is simply to take in this witness, embrace and work with it, and let it reveal at the right time details for answering. The stand and understanding of this church based on decades of experience is that following such leading will take us deeper into the love beyond imaging Gordon expressed to the terrified soldier.