April 5, 2015
Texts:
Psalm 118:1-24
Acts 10:34-43
John 20:8-18
Dixcy Bosley-Smith, our premier 8th Day Community publicity agent, recently ran into Anne Jarman, my former wife, and invited her to worship with us this Easter Sunday. When my son Chapman heard that his mother was coming, he said, “Mom, if you go, don’t do like I use to do, which was to fall asleep the moment Dad stood up to preach and to miraculously wake up the moment he finished.” Anne, I’m glad you are here. I know the Potter’s House in particular means a lot to you. Years ago Anne managed book sales here working alongside Mary Hitchcock, the manager.
I was intrigued on Friday with a column on the front page of the Post style section by Lonnae O’Neal entitled “I’m in church once a year. What have I missed?” She noted the steady downward trend in church attendance since the 1960s which Lonnae acknowledged to be the case in her own life. Recently she decided to go to church to see what she had been missing, if anything. What she noticed was not just a preacher and a choir but an alive community who had a lot of connection with each other. In her conclusion she wrote, “And as I stood there, I felt like I’ve missed church and I didn’t want to leave. It’s something I think I might like to feel more than once a year.”
I have two comments about this article. One is that she points to something very important – namely, the gift of community. She sees that there was far more in that church than a preacher and a choir. Secondly, her conclusion “I think I might like to feel (this) more than once a year” is not very compelling, rather a form of dismissing the issue with faint praise. It will take more than that to get the attention of those who look elsewhere for meaning and sustenance in their lives.
Easter finds us in a different place this year. Last year we worshipped around the corner in the basement of Sarah’s Circle while the Potter’s House was closed for renovation. Previously we worshipped here in the Potter’s House in the front and had the space all to ourselves on Sunday mornings. Now we share the building. We worship here in the back room at the same time the front room serves as a 21st century coffee house business, substantially filled with young people zeroed in on their computers, people of all ages perusing books, and other people sitting around tables having conversation over coffee. In the front it is relatively quiet. Back here it alternates between boisterous and quiet. In both places you can, if you must, go to sleep.
This morning I would like you to reflect with me on the relationship between this back room and the front room. Is there a connection? If so, what is it? Or must these two rooms be like ships passing in the night? I take the position that the Easter story speaks to both rooms. The question is how?
The Church of the Saviour created the Potter’s House as a mission of witness to the secular world. Over the decades it has been a powerful witness. A lot happened in that room and emanated into the world from that room. After the Church of the Saviour elected to break into many small faith communities, it became more than a single community could do to sustain the Potter’s House. The Potter’s House closed and the torch was passed to 8th Day Church and a group of people gathered by 8th Day. A vision that emerged from that group. The group concluded that we need the world that will be attracted to the front room. The question is how do we be who we are while respecting the freedom of people who come to be who they are?
Some people are still wrestling with the change in the Potter’s House as a problem. I propose that we consider it a possibility and think about how we in the back room prepare ourselves for that challenge. The last thing we need is to walk through that room with feelings of superiority, spiritual, ethical or any kind of superiority. The time has come to close ranks and to be who we are as an inclusive, ecumenical Christian community. And I say, to get there we have work to do. This morning I suggest we start by working with how we see things – how we see the world …ourselves, …God, … the scriptures and today, in particular, the Easter message. What I have to say follows Tim Kumfer’s challenge to us last Sunday to revisit the relationship of the Gospel to the world.
I begin this work at the point of how we read scripture. This week while I was preparing this sermon, something broke into my consciousness that both troubled me and offered me new possibility. It hit me that I am an addict and that I have been suffering from this addiction since my childhood. Like other addictions this is not some superficial thing that I can discard or free myself at will. It has burrowed into my being at the tissue level.
I am not addicted to alcohol or drugs or the like. What broke open to me is that I am addicted to religion – of a certain kind. This came to me as I was reflecting on a hymn we sang last Sunday. It was the old favorite “In the Garden” with those incredibly romantic words “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the meadow, and the voice I hear calling in my ear …” It moves on to those words that sounds like the epitome of spiritual experience “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own, and the joys we share ……”
Our hymnbook notes that the hymn was inspired by John 20, our text today. As I reread those words, I wondered how the writer of that hymn got to the language he or she used from the Easter story told in John 20. The hymn is clearly a misinterpretation, in fact a spiritually dangerous romanticizing of human yearning for closeness to God … like mine.
I recalled that I had been alerted to romanticizing when I was a student in seminary. My preaching professor assigned my preaching class to write what we would say in a street corner sermon on a downtown street in New Haven, Connecticut. As I tried to do the assignment, I came up empty until I recalled a time when my father, a building contractor, asked me to give a brief devotional talk to his work crew at the beginning of a summer day. On that occasion the words seemed to flow for me as I gave what I presumed to be my Christian testimony. My words went like this: “God is with us. God is all around us. How do I know this? Because I can feel him in my soul,” which is the same language in the hymn. When I laid down my pen on that assignment I thought I had nailed it, only to read these words from my favorite professor, “You write here of your longing, not your reality.”
This week I saw how captive I have been to substituting my yearning for my reality. I saw in a new way that my parents were also addicts and their parents before them. In fact my spiritual formation took place in a denomination of addicts, so addicted to imaginary walking and talking with Jesus that we didn’t notice the realism in scripture such as the story in Genesis 4 of God coming to Cain after he has killed his brother, Abel. God asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” already knowing the answer but giving Cain the opening to confess. Instead Cain tries to brush God off by asking “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God says, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” Clearly, according to the text, God is with us and engaged with us as we are in the world. At the same time he does not tolerate evasion or romanticizing his presence.
Thus romanticized, religion becomes a kind of self-medication, like other addictions, against reality with deep and life-long consequences. In case I am not alone in this company with this addiction, what can free us?
One answer to that question is to read the Bible as it was intended to be read. Years ago, James Sanders, a widely respected New Testament scholar spent a weekend with us at the Church of the Saviour working with one theme – namely, that the Bible is not primarily about giving us models for morality but rather mirrors of identity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was working with the same understanding in his commentary on the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Bonhoeffer said that the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, and the tower of Babel are not about what was but what is.
How does this relate to the connection between the back and front rooms here in the Potter’s House? We might start with the issue that Sanders and Bonhoeffer were getting at – human identity. We have this in common between the so-called religious world back here and the so-called secular world out there. We are all human beings.
Three weeks ago at the quarterly meeting of community and covenant members about 30 of us were sitting in this room in a circle with David Hilfiker leading the discussion. The discussion centered on this question: if a core piece of our identity as 8th Day Church is to be an inclusive community, how do we live that out? And at this point in time how does each of us see ourselves in the picture - on the margins or in the circle?
While holding on to that question my mind went was also asking, what causes people to circle up in the first place? What holds the circle intact and gives it life? Does every circle have a center? What is ours? For me the answer is that the center of the circle is the resurrected Christ, alive and active among us in spiritual form.
Keep your eyes on the prize -a Civil Rights slogan. It is also the quintessential mark of Christian existence. If you want to distinguish Christian existence from other religious or non-religious modes of being, it is this: converted Christians persist in exerting themselves to keep their eyes on the prize. This is who we are. This is what we do. Yes, we fall away, over and over, but we come back because the prize has laid its claim on us. This is our identity to the extent that we claim that identity.
Now let’s turn to today’s gospel text: John 20:1-18. The story breaks into two parts. The two parts are connected by a heretofore obscure woman in John’s gospel who shows up at the crucifixion along with two other women, Mary the mother of Jesus and her sister. This woman, Mary Magdalene comes from what was a thriving village along the Sea of Galilee. She may have been a woman of means who was part of the Jesus movement for some time. She is the character John chooses to tell his version of the Easter story.
While it is still dark, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb to check on the body of Jesus, to ensure that he has had a proper burial and to grieve her loss. When she gets there she immediately notices that the stone covering the entrance to the tomb has been removed. She looks inside and sees it to be empty. Alarmed, she hurries to tell Simon Peter and the other disciple that the stone has been moved, the body is gone, and the tomb is empty. What’s going on here? Mary exclaims, “They (we are not told whom she suspects “they” to be) have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Mary has one thing on her mind – that their beloved leader has a proper burial.
Simon Peter and the other disciple take off running for the tomb. The text says that the other disciple outran Simon Peter, gets there first, looks in and sees the body wrappings lying there but did not go in. When Simon Peter catches up, the other disciple steps aside and Simon Peter goes into the tomb. He, too, see that the body is gone but that the face cloth placed over the face was at one end of the space and the body wrappings at the other end. The text then tells us that the other disciple saw and believed but it doesn’t tell us what he believed nor does it tell us Simon Peter’s reaction except by silence to suggest that he was with Mary Magdalene worried about where someone had taken the body and what had they done with it. The text concludes this scene noting that the disciples returned to their homes. What’s going on here? What was John saying to his own faith community for whom he was writing a half century after Jesus’ death?
Many Biblical scholars today say that Simon Peter and the other disciple represent the two branches of the early Christian church with somewhat different identities in the time John was writing. One branch traced their roots back to Simon Peter and the other branch to the other disciple, sometimes referred to as the “beloved disciple.” In some ways these branches resemble the Moslem split between the Sunni and the Shia except in contrast to the latter the branches chose to live with their differences as a single movement rather than split apart. Scholars tell us that the apostolic churches continued the patriarchal structures of the Jewish synagogue that they had adopted at their beginning. The Johannine communities turned to an egalitarian structure in which women shared leadership with men. It was a structure without hierarchy. Which was the best model for the church and its future? Obviously John thought the egalitarian model was best, but he does not exclude the other model.
What about the linens noted by each disciple? If the grave had been robbed, the robbers would have taken out the body still wrapped in linen cloth. What Simon Peter sees is the face cloth at one end and the body clothes rolled up where the body had lain. Could the state of the linens suggest an orderly departure, the opposite of a grave robbery? Do they suggest that with his death Jesus had finished his ministry in the flesh indicating that what went on there was the work of God – and Jesus upon his awakening? We are left with mystery, and the text intentionally leaves us there.
The two disciples leave Mary while it was still dark and she beset by grief. Very thoughtful of you two guys! As she weeps, she bends over to look into the tomb and instead of the linens Mary sees two angels or heavenly messengers clothed in white, sitting where Peter had seen the face cloth at one end and the rolled up body clothes at the other end. Now – the rest of the story – possibly Jesus had completed the work he was sent to do and was now moving on to stage two. Psalm 118 read earlier today, says, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”
The heavenly messengers ask Mary why she is weeping? She replies, “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this she turns around and is standing in the presence of Jesus whom she thinks is the gardener assigned to tend the cemetery. This figure asks her the same question as the angels, “Woman, why are you weeping?” and adds another “Whom are you looking for?” She repeats her concern to ensure a proper burial for her beloved leader.
Jesus calls her name “Mary.” Remember the earlier chapter in John where the sheep enter the sheepfold at night and he shepherd calls them by name, one by one. Mary experiences that acceptance, that inclusion and replies “Rabbouni” the name for Teacher. Mary must have reached out to hug Jesus like she would never let go. Jesus says, “Do not hold onto me because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
What does this strange story really mean? What is Easter all about and what difference does Easter make to the connection between us in the back room and all who come and go in the front room of the Potter’s House?
The bottom line is that we are left with a huge mystery. My problem with the hymn “In the Garden” is that it tries to shrink the mystery by imagining a scene of unbelievable one-on-one intimacy with the risen Christ. Jesus from the other side of death tells Mary to rejoin the others, tell them,“ I am ascending to the Father,” taking on a new role, not only for Israel but for the whole world. Mary does so and, in the mind of the Johannine church, she becomes the first apostle – a woman - one from the margins of society given a role that pulls together the circle. Lots to chew on there.
Lastly, recall our experience of sitting in a circle exploring our identity as an inclusive community and what that involves and what it requires. The circle is a symbol of wholeness, of energy flowing back and forth in every direction benefiting, enlivening everyone in the circle. What would happen if the folks who come and go from that front room began to experience the Potter’s House as a circle? More food for thought.
Amen