The Third Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 9A] - July 3, 2011 (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another…”

Jesus’ words as he addresses a crowd made up both of willing followers and skeptical accusers ring of frustration and puzzlement. Is he lashing out in anger? Is he throwing up his hands in disgust? We’re not really accustomed to hearing Jesus sound like this; that is, wandering into the risky waters of cross-generational criticism. In fact, he sounds here more like us.

“But to what will I compare this generation? They spend too much time in front of the computer or plugged into their iPod!” Or, “Those fuddy-duddies are so out-of-touch and old-fashioned! The world is changing! You better catch up, old man!”

“But to what will I compare this generation? That new music they’re always listening to sounds like pots and pans clanging together with a cat fight in the background!” Or, “That old music they listen to has no beat and no soul.”

“But to what will I compare this generation?” They want to pray a newer version of the Lord’s Prayer! How can you do that!?” Or, “They want to pray an older version of the Lord’s Prayer in language so formal and stilted!”

Choose your topic these days—sacred or secular—and it seems like so many opinions of what’s right and what’s good fall right along generational lines. Heads are shaken in exasperation and—if you’re like me, standing in line recently for a cell-phone upgrade that will drag me kicking and screaming into a new generation—beads of anxious sweat form along the ridge of the brow. New is not always improved, we know…and traditional may not always mean wiser. But the debates rage on, and from this morning’s gospel lesson we see that Jesus is no stranger, either, to the friction that occurs when generations of human beings set their habits and expectations up against one another.

In his case, Jesus is frustrated and almost irritated that the people of his day and age are so unreceptive to the message he is preaching, which is at odds with the message they’ve heard for so long from the Pharisees’ sermons and the scribes’ teachings. And it’s not just his message they’ve questioned and rejected. It’s also his cousin John’s. The crowds can’t seem to get their heads around the God who is presented in their respective messages. They can’t fathom the kingdom of heaven as it is proclaimed from the lips of these two newcomers.

And who can blame them? Both of these yokels hail from off-the-beaten-track Galilean towns, far from the traditional academy of Jerusalem. Neither has a formal synagogue training that we know of. One sequesters himself in the desert half the time, eating wild honey and locusts, coming close to civilization from time to time just long enough to dunk people in the Jordan River and publicly criticize the rulers’ morals. The other one hangs out with a bunch of tax collectors and other low-lifes, frequenting banquets and parties. Both seem to go against the status quo somewhat, setting themselves a number of times as the preferred option to the way things are. But John is too much of an extremist, like pots and pans clanging in the midst of a cat-fight, and Jesus seems too lax. John is a little too fanatical, Jesus not fanatical enough. Who would take these guys seriously, especially about matters that the Pharisees do such a good job of explaining in their sermons, convoluted though they may seem?

This is the situation which both John and Jesus confront: a populace of their own people who can’t seem to get their head around a new way of seeing God act and move in the world. To John, the people are hard-headed and ignorant. They need baptism for repentance and need it now, for the winnowing fork of God’s justice is in his hand and the chaff will be burned. (We must assume that would be John’s reaction to this, of course, for at the time he is currently in prison awaiting what will be his execution for the crime of criticizing Herod’s decision to marry his brother’s wife).

Jesus, on the other hand, compares the generation to children in a marketplace who try to do everything gentle and pleading they can to coax the people to dance or mourn. With inspiring words and uplifting promises of forgiveness he has played the flute, so to speak, to get them to “dance” along with his vision of the kingdom of heaven, and they still stand on the sidelines in their stubbornness. Likewise, he has cried the haunting mourner’s wail, reminding them of their need for mercy, and yet they remain unmoved.

Have you ever tried to explain your faith to someone who perhaps doesn’t believe? Have you ever tried to convince someone of the love of God or your involvement in the life of a congregation to a person who, for whatever reason, is reluctant to follow? To a large degree, Jesus’ experience with people’s doubt of and rejection of his message is common to people of each and every age. Whether we encounter difficulty in preaching the gospel of Jesus on a personal level or whether we get frustrated when our congregations don’t grow and gather new members, it seems as if the church will always have to live with some level of discomfort or frustration with how we’re received by the generation at hand.

Jesus’ immediate response to his own discouragement is to offer thanksgiving that the gospel message is not something to be grasped by knowledge or wisdom or sophisticated reasoning. Faith, as Martin Luther would put it, is ultimately a gift of the Holy Spirit and cannot be conjured by our own strength or power. Indeed, Jesus’ teachings are hidden from the intelligent and revealed to the young and inexperienced, the simple and pure-hearted. How many of us find ourselves more captivated by the children’s sermon than by the words preached from the pulpit? And, by the same token, I know many pastors who, like I, are as intimidated by delivering a children’s sermon as they are preaching a big people’s sermon. A religious system that rightly asks its leaders to attend a seminary and receive a post-secondary degree, can send the unintended message that brains are what’s required for a deeper faith, or to have faith at all. Pretty soon we forget how the infants see things.

St. Augustine (Antonella da Messina)

And here is when Jesus reminds us once again that it’s not brains that will lead to deeper faith, and it’s not a sophisticated understanding about how the universe works that will ultimately cause one to come to Christ. It is not brains we need, but a burden. Our attraction to the kingdom of heaven comes from the desire for an easier burden than the ones we’re carrying, a longing for rest for our souls. St. Augustine, a man of supreme intelligence who did not convert to Christian faith until fairly late in life, once said, “I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful, but I have never read in either of them, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’”

No, it is not wisdom or beauty—although they are there—that ultimately draws us to the way of Christ, but rather the promise of an easier way, the hope that when we cast our sorrows on this whippersnapper from Galilee we receive something far better than we’d ever imagine. It is, rather the confidence that this whippersnapper who goes to the cross for us and exchanges our a path of death and sin and guilt and shame for a new life filled with undying love and forgiveness. It is, rather, the understanding that somehow, with Jesus and his community, our way is indeed made easier, even though following him may be dreadfully difficult at specific times.

Thankfully, this was once again revealed to me this week during the Virginia Synod’s Kairos youth event at Roanoke College. One hundred seventy-five members of a younger generation than mine, including twenty-nine from this congregation, spent a six days praying and worshipping and studying Scripture. Although spending long days away from my family, sleeping on a hard mattress in a barely-air-conditioned residence hall is not how I’d ideally like to spend a week of the summer, I always return from these events somewhat renewed, not because I’ve had the opportunity to teach and lead but because the youth always manage to teach me something about trusting in Jesus.

Some speak it quietly in the comfort of a small group, while others take the opportunity to address the whole large group with a reflection on their faith. Some of them speak of heart-wrenching personal hardship and experiences with grief or abuse while others confess a relatively strong faith bred in their home congregations. No matter the method, no matter the venue, one theme is evident in every testimony: these youth desire an easier yoke than the one they carry now. They long for a Lord who is gentle and humble of heart. They seek a rest and comfort in a world that simultaneously idolizes youth and also expects them to grow up too fast. And in their prayers and concerns I detect a realization that coming to Christ is not purely an unloading and releasing of guilt and shame and heaviness of heart. I also hear an understanding that Jesus gives something in return. That is, he has a yoke, too. He longs for us to change and grow and bear his Word to the world.

But I must tell you it is not primarily at these types of gatherings that I am reminded of Jesus’ promise of an easier yoke and lighter burden. That happens each and every Sunday—indeed, each and every day—when you and I speak on the phone or share a word in the Commons, when you share your own stories of experiencing God’s glory or your own prayer concerns for those you love, when you show up for worship in the middle of a hectic and busied lifestyle to anchor your week in the community of Christ’s disciples.

I am reminded of your deep faith when you arrive at this rail, hands open, head maybe bowed or eyes lifted up in hopeful expectation taking this guy from Nazareth seriously—not too unlike the children who come up here earlier in the service for a time with the pastor—wanting what Christ will give, presenting your shoulders once again for the gracious yoke, handing over your heavied hearts in exchange for that easier burden.

And then I see you, once again—refreshed, empowered, head lifted higher, shouldering that lighter burden of the Spirit’s transformation making your way back to your seat in the pew, making your way back out the door ready to bear this faith once again this week to any generation you happen to meet in the marketplace.


Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Day of Pentecost, Year A - June 12, 2011 (1 Corinthians 12:3b-13)

The apostle Paul was the master of metaphor. To illustrate a point he was trying to make, he could employ with great skill any number of images and analogies which had a wonderful way of sticking in the imagination and standing the test of time. When you read Paul’s letters in the New Testament, you will hear him talk at times, for example, about faith with agricultural symbolism. The church, in this case, is a field where church leaders are like farmers that toil to grow faithfulness and witness. The Spirit produces fruit in the life of believers, fruits like joy and patience and kindness. This was a clever way of speaking about the activity of faith for even those in an urban setting—and some of his were—could understand how the community created by the gospel might be, in some ways, like a place where growth was supposed to occur.

In other places Paul is fond of athletic metaphors. Faith, in this instance, is a “race to be run,” bearing some resemblance to a challenge that requires practice and discipline. In much the way athletes train their bodies to perform a contest, the faithful Christian trains his or her intellect and will to accomplish great feats in witnessing in spite of hardships and suffering. Nowadays, of course, such metaphor might resonate a little differently for those who are, say, fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers and fans of the Washington Redskins. But, no matter where your team loyalty lies, the life of faith being related to athletic competition somehow makes sense. These metaphors—both agricultural and athletic—have stuck with us.

But of all the metaphors and descriptions Paul used to describe the life of faith, perhaps none is as well-known and easy to grasp as the church as the body of Christ. In at least four of his letters, Paul spills a lot of ink trying to explain how the community of believers is like a human body with structural features like ligaments and feet and organs like eyes. Anyone who has a body can relate to this image. You don’t need to be involved in a specific field like agriculture or athletics to understand what Paul is trying to say about the church when he uses this metaphor. That is, the community of people who believe in Christ as Risen Lord is a functioning whole; no one part is complete by itself. Likewise, the character and vitality of the Christian faith cannot be summed up in one specific believer. It is a community enterprise.

Perhaps that is why when he is speaking to his conflict-ridden and controversy-prone congregation in Corinth, Paul finds the body analogy to be especially helpful. One of the many things over which the congregation there had been fighting was the presence of the Holy Spirit’s gifts. There is no way of knowing exactly what the specific hullabaloo was about, but it seemed as if some of the congregation members in Corinth had forgotten the body-like aspect of the Christian faith. They thought that certain gifts of faith, whether uttering wisdom, or working miracles or healing, or speaking in tongues were naturally better than others, signs that some people had received more important talents and skills and therefore did not really need the rest of the community. It was a big problem, one that may have eventually torn the congregation apart.

To counter their indivualistic and hierarchical way of thinking, Paul reaches for the body metaphor: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, or one body, so it is with Christ.” Notice he does not say, “so it is with Christians,” or “so it is with those who follow Jesus.” He explicitly names them Christ. They—that is, the Corinthians—are, in some way, Jesus. They are one organism, as it were, and he drives the point home even further by telling them “for in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews, Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink one Spirit.” Just as breath animate a human body, God’s Spirit gives them life. From here he goes on to explain that no one person, no matter how glorious or glamorous their gifts may be, can ever really survive without the gifts of all the other people present. The flourishing of the whole is absolutely dependent on the participation and the presence of each and every one. It is a follow up on the main lesson in the section we have this morning as our middle lesson, “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit” Paul says, “for the common good.”

For the common good. And that’s the key for this metaphor. That is, there are many different types of gifts, many different ways of serving—many different ways of skinning the cat, so to speak, when it comes to being a follower of Christ—but the gifts are never given solely for individual betterment. The gifts of the Spirit are never given for people to pursue their own happiness or their own personal path of spirituality. They are given to individuals, yes, but with the express purpose that they will be worked out and practiced within the body, whatever that body is doing.

This lesson has needed to be driven home to this slow learner countless times, but the occasion I remember most, for some reason, was by a woman named Shirley when I was working as a summer camp counselor at Lutheridge in Arden, North Carolina, where two of our college members happen to be working now. This particular week I had been assigned to work with a group of campers with mild to moderate developmental delays. They were wonderful individuals of all ages—mostly adults—who all had been diagnosed as having some significant special needs but who were not deficient in any way, (as our area director had taken great pains to remind us during our training), in regards to gifts of the Spirit. A week of working with that population always involved a talent show at some point. They could sit for hours as they, one by one, got up in front of the whole group and performed either a vocal solo or told jokes, danced or shared some other skill they were proud of.

Now, it just so happened that a group counselors and I had been racking our brains that week trying to remember all the verses of that annoying song about Noah’s Ark. (Youth group members know which one I’m talking about). It goes on and on forever:

“The Lord said to Noah, ‘There’s gonna be a floody-floody!
The Lord said to Noah, ‘There’s gonna be a floody-floody!
Get those animals out of the muddy-muddy!’
Children of the Lord.”

So, rise and shine…and give God the glory glory!
Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory!
Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory…children of the Lord!

In all seriousness, the song has something like twenty verses, and, for the life of us, we could not remember the last verse. These were the days before Google and smartphones, so we couldn’t just look it up on a computer. There were no songbooks, even. We had to rely on what people could remember and store in their brains, and in that regard we were coming up empty, which was exceedingly frustrating because the song couldn’t end (and it really needed to!) No one on camp staff could remember it!

But, as we learned that week. it just so happened to be Shirley’s favorite song. Shirley wasn’t able to do much for herself. She couldn’t eat on her own. She wasn’t able to see much because her eyesight was so poor. She needed help walking and getting dressed in the morning. But—you guessed it—she knew every single line to that song. Sometimes she’d get stuck in a loop and repeat a line or two a few times, but when she got up on that stage in front of all of us, it was one of her gifts to be shared for the common good. You can’t imagine our relief when she stood to receive her applause. She had taught us all the verses…and thankfully the Spirit had made us still enough to listen.

That example may seem somewhat simplistic in the grand scheme of things, but what I learned in that moment at that talent show goes right along with what Paul was trying to get across to the church at Corinth. And, as different as our situation may be from what the Corinthians may have been facing, it is a message that God’s Spirit is still trying to teach to the church in North America in the twenty-first century.

An article in a recent edition of The Christian Century ponders the church’s current challenges of people to join congregations in the ways that they used to in earlier decades. The challenge is especially acute in those of my own age group. Many folks these days are content with attending a congregation or various congregations, sometimes even quite regularly, without ever actually committing to membership in one particular congregation. They remain loosely connected to one or several communities of faith, never really venturing very far into the life of any one community. Some say it’s a result of our consumerist culture, where options for everything overwhelm and tantalize. Whatever the reason, people are not belonging to churches in the way they once did. Congregations are handling the challenge in different ways, some getting rid of any type of formal membership at all, others ramping up guidelines for affiliating, demanding more. Leaning more to the side of inviting modern church people to commit to definite, formal membership, one Lutheran pastor is quoted in the article as saying, “that is the secret gift that unfolds as you become integrated into something that is larger than yourself. You find yourself saying yes to possibilities that you would never otherwise imagine.”

Meredith Sizemore Photography

Possibilities that we never could imagine. Verses to songs that we never could remember on our own. Lives transformed by God’s grace that we never could fathom. Gifts of the Holy Spirit that we never could experience unless we were up close and integrated into the body of Jesus. It sounds like Christ himself is at work! For, you see, I think we get the part about each of us having unique constellation of gifts, and I think we even get the part about recognizing the gifts in others. It’s always good to hear that again and again. Where we might could use some reminding is the part about how they’re used for the common good. In Christ’s church, we find ourselves involved in possibilities we never could imagine when we begin sharing our gifts not simply for our own objectives, no matter how noble we may think they are, but for the sake of everyone, for the sake of Jesus who is now apparently loose in the world through our life together.

So for this Pentecost, as we welcome aboard two new members to this ark of salvation through the waters of baptism, let’s claim all of Paul’s metaphors for this hapless yet marvelously gifted community we call the church. We're probably going to need them: the field and the athletic field, as well as the body. The Spirit is doing something here, as it is in every church in every age in every language God has created. The Spirit is animating something here, and we are excited about it.

Yes, let’s claim all of Paul’s metaphors on this birthday of the church and then, if we may, add one from Shirley. The Spirit has given each of us our own unique verse in God’s grand song of love and redemption through Jesus Christ. It is a song that is sung with tongues of fire through the life of his community, imperfect and out-of-tune choir that we may be. You’ve been given your own verse in the song, and ain’t nobody gonna be able to sing it but you!

So, let's hear it, then! Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory, children of the Lord!

Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A - May 15, 2011 (Acts 2:42-47, John 10:1-10)

A few years ago when I first moved to Pittsburgh, before I was a husband and a father and knew how to do things like change a diaper in a grocery store bathroom, I was a member of a choir that met for supper and practice every other Friday night. Though they were informal occasions, they were fairly well-organized. Like many group endeavors, they operated on the principle that everyone should contribute in some way, either by bringing a dish or by cleaning up afterwards. I liked to volunteer for the clean-up part, but occasionally I volunteered to bring something low-maintenance, like the bread or the drinks.

One day I opened my email to discover—to my horror—that the responsibility for bringing the main dish had finally fallen to me. I thought to myself, “Don’t they realize I’m a bachelor? Are they really going to want to eat anything I make?” I know there are plenty of single people who are great cooks, but at the time I was more accustomed to eating my meals on the run in one-person servings—things like sandwiches and cans of Campbell’s Soup. Something that would pass as an entrée for a whole group of people was far beyond my ability to create.

But before my panic could get the best of me, I decided to contact the one person to whom I was closest who is adept at cooking for large groups of people—my grandmother in Walkertown, NC. She had a chicken casserole I figured I could replicate. It called for a cup of soup. I remember eating it many times on Sundays when my whole family would gather at her place after church. I probably drove her crazy asking about it, calling her three times in two days to make sure I had the ingredients and cooking instructions down pat. I finally gave it a whirl and took it to choir practice. It turned out OK, I suppose. They liked it, but it didn’t seem to taste as good as I remembered hers tasting. In any case, as she was reciting to me for the third time the order of ingredients over the phone, intermingled with words of encouragement she made mention of a principle of cooking that so many chefs and cooks and grandmothers already know, but that I was just learning: “The more you cook for,” she said, “the better it is.”

And it’s absolutely true. When you take a recipe and cut the portions down to serve on person the dish never ends up tasting as good as if you were to take that recipe and multiply it to feed a larger number.

In the infancy stages of the Christian faith, recorded in the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles, we find the recipe for the church—and we discover the same principle of my grandmother’s chicken casserole applies: the more it’s made for, the better it is. The faith of those who follow Jesus is not meant to be—is never meant to be—served up as an individual dish. No matter how you slice and dice it, it is a group activity, more “casserole” than it is “personal pan pizza.”

Day of Pentecost, icon

That is unmistakable as we read the accounts as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. What the grand story of Acts shows us, more than anything else, is that the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit bring into existence a community that is steadily pulled closer and closer together and at the same time spread outward, into the world. More and more people are added comprising an ever-growing diversity of languages and cultures, but the essence of the faith is always about togetherness. Those who hear the Shepherd’s voice and follow do it together and together they are offered for the life of the world.

The recipe, if I may call it that, is included, bare-bones, in our first reading this morning. Luke writes, “the baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Five basic ingredients, and that’s it:

(1) receiving and hearing the apostles’ teachings; that is, gathering to listen to the stories that the apostles’ told about Jesus and his words;

(2) taking part in fellowship, which entails spending time together and getting to know one another.

(3) the breaking of bread,

church potluck

(4) prayers, which means celebrating Holy Communion and praying for each other. And, lastly,

(5) sharing things in common, including possessions and food, so that people may not go without.

Surely, you may say, the church is so much more than that nowadays, and is up to so much more! There are things like CARITAS and Vacation Bible School, the visiting of the sick and incarcerated. There are the car wash fundraisers and the youth retreats. Sunday School and choir practices. Christmas musicals and the stewardship campaigns…and what about keeping up the building, making sure the property is maintained? Can our common life really be boiled down to those basic five?

Is all the other stuff then superfluous? Or might these things be variations elaborations on these essentials—that is, the apostles’ teachings, fellowship, sacramental life, prayer, and communal redistribution of goods and property? My guess is for the latter, but it might be a good practice for the life of the church to continually set our ministries against this original recipe. For it is these five ingredients, given shape by our Lord’s resurrection and given power by the Holy Spirit, that form the basis of all the activity and vitality of Christ’s body on earth.

Dr. Martha Roy was woman in my internship congregation in Cairo, Egypt. When I was there she was about 89 years old and still played the pipe organ at worship every Sunday. She was an American, born in Egypt in the early 1900’s to a missionary family from the old United Presbyterian Church. Dr. Roy, as I called her, was an “old-school” Presbyterian who has spent the entirety of her life in service to the church in Egypt. The only time she lived stateside was when she was getting her college and graduate degrees. She served as a teacher and musician on several faculties in Egypt, and was a recipient of the highest honor ever awarded by the President of Egypt to a foreigner. Her unique life provided her the opportunity to worship in the churches of the Middle East and in the missionary congregations that were formed along the Nile. One of her brothers, in fact, became a missionary in Sudan, and as refugees from the Horn of Africa began pouring into Cairo in the last decade or two, Dr. Roy found herself in the position to participate in their religious communities, too. Her life’s masterpiece, perhaps, was the first-ever codified liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church. This two-thousand-year-old branch of Christianity never had a written-down form of its worship—neither words nor music—until Dr. Roy and her colleague Dr. Toth set themselves to it.

Dr. Martha Roy, center

When I’d sit with her to visit, it was like speaking with a living history book. She could talk for hours explaining how marvelously diverse she’d found the expressions of Christianity to be. But at some point she’d inevitably open her Bible to this very Acts passage and say, very ceremoniously, “Here is what it’s all based on, Phillip. No matter the diversity, these practices are everywhere, and Christians of every kind and color and history cherish them.”

I had maybe touched briefly on this during a lecture in a seminary class. She, on the other hand, had experienced it first-hand, over and over again. I was sad to learn that Dr. Roy died about two months ago 2 weeks shy of her 98th birthday.

Each of these ingredients, you see, is intended to bring us together and form us as a flock, to keep our hearts and hands and voices focused on what we share as a community. That was what Dr. Roy had glimpsed in so many different expressions of the church. In prayer, we share our wounds, our insecurities, our fears, as well as our dreams about the future. In worship we share our voices and our Lord’s peace. In service we share our talents and our skills, as well as our words of reconciliation and forgiveness with each other. In our offerings, we share our treasures with those around us. It’s a risky move, allowing ourselves to be formed by the breaking of bread and prayers and pooling of resources and hopes on such a regular basis. It can be risky…but it’s sacred.

The greatest danger is we can forget how counter-cultural these practices actually are, how unnatural it usually is to put ourselves in close relationship with so many others. We can lose sight of how transforming the Holy Spirit intends these practices to be, especially in a culture like ours that constantly exalts the value of individualism, relishing in voting people off the island and whittling panels of art contestants down to one.

We always run the danger—and, I, more than anyone else—of turning Christian faith into a head-trip, a grand chance for internal reflection. We transform the news of Jesus’ resurrection into something entirely personal, as if Jesus rose from the dead so that everyone may explore their own paths of spirituality and new life! Or we can fall into the trap of thinking that participation in a faith community is to get values that help us “get by in life.”

In Acts of the Apostles, nothing could be farther from the truth, and Jesus did not rise from the dead in order to help everyone achieve some form of individual enlightenment. Christian faith is ultimately about sharing over and against a world and a self-tendency that is about taking and gaining. And, thankfully, Luke does not fashion a completely rosy view of the early Church as they gather together in harmony with their glad and generous hearts. They don’t really “get by.” They struggle. Even as they celebrate amazing achievements, they get it wrong from time to time, and we know from our own experiences that the church can be a hurtful place where greed and selfishness play part.

I think that might be why this segment of Acts in one of my commentaries is entitled “the Community of the Uncommon Life.” It is really uncommon to live this way, to hold everything in common and to think of ourselves as bound together, irresolvably, because of a common bond in baptism. It really is uncommon to think that these five ingredients are all we need subsist on. And not just subsist…but live the abundant life.

No, the church is not about helping individuals get by in the world. It is not even about giving us values to succeed in life. The Christian faith is about transforming the world with the power of Christ’s resurrection. If it is about values at all, then it is about values that turn the world on its head, that bring the world in and love it up good, slop it with a generous helping of God’s grace, and send us all back out, hopeful and transfigured.

The church is chicken casserole, brothers and sisters, and the more we “cook” for, the more we break bread with, the more God gathers us out of our individual menus to graze with the flock—you guessed it—the better the news of the resurrection will be.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion - "The Cry of the Whole Congregation" - April 17, 2011

Four voices. Four distinct and unique voices from four people who, as far as we can tell, never knew each other or even came into contact with one another. Yes, the voices are distinct and unique, but each is uttered with an urgency and clarity untarnished for roughly two-thousand years. And, despite their differences, their individual perspectives, all four speak with remarkable similarity, especially given their independence of each other. As it happens, we know their names—at least, the names that got attached to each voice fairly early on—but we know blessed little else about them or their original audiences. The stories they told with their voices took precedence over anything they would tell us about themselves.

Mark, who probably spoke first (or at least got written down first) was most likely Greek, and most likely speaking in or around Rome in the first century to a group of believers who were unfamiliar with Jesus’ Jewish roots. The stories he had heard and assembled about Jesus paint the picture of a servant Savior who is at once swift and forceful in overturning the powers of evil. For Mark, the impact of this Savior’s words is almost overshadowed by the number of miracles and healings he performs.

Then there is Matthew’s voice, which for a long time was thought to belong to one of this Jesus’ original Twelve followers. We figure Matthew was most likely a Jewish Christian who wrote in a locale much closer to where his subject actually lived. Matthew saw Jesus primarily as a teacher—a teacher, moreover, who was skilled in interpreting Jewish law and forming a community of followers. And so Matthew’s voice presents a Jesus who tells more parables, gives clear instruction about forgiveness and church discipline, and likes to stress the moral implications of Jesus’ kingdom.

Luke is the softy of the bunch, choosing to stress Jesus’ concern for the least, the lost, and the little. He’s the one who collects and records Jesus’ parables of the lost coin, the Good Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son…and what would Christianity be without those? Luke is the most educated of the voices, most likely a doctor who travelled with the apostle Paul around the Mediterranean for a while, and his sophisticated grammar and style show it.

And then there is John, the outlier. He is the most poetic of all the voices, accomplished in the use of metaphor and irony. Unlike the others, John chooses to tell a few stories in depth rather than hashing out everything he ever heard about the man. For John, Jesus’ signs were of utmost importance. We typically call them miracles, but for John they were signs because they signaled something about God’s glory that was being revealed in Jesus. John wrote for a congregation or a group of congregations who were likely Jewish but who had been ostracized from the religious community because of their claims about Jesus. John often gets a bad rap because people find him the most difficult to understand, but somehow his voice would really be missing if it were lost.

All four had their special emphases to make, their theological points to drive home, their particular perspective. And all of them are telling the truth. Yet something profound happens to these four distinct voices when they get to the part of their story where Jesus enters Jerusalem just before the Passover. Differences in their perspectives begin to fade away and their voices start to unite. All at once, they start telling the same story with some of the same key details. Yes, there are some discrepancies in a few words now and then—signs of their distinct perspectives creep in here and there—and some of them record Jesus’ encounters with the temple authorities more fully than others, but, by and large, the four voices start to tell the same story.

Something happened—something momentous—surrounding this man Jesus from Nazareth as he came from the backwater villages of Galilee into the fevered Passover celebrations of Jerusalem during the time of the Roman army’s oppression. Something was happening—something worth remembering correctly—as he borrowed a room for one last meal with his disciples. Something significant was happening as he faced betrayal and denial from these same disciples and was handed over to his enemies. Something miraculous was happening as he was stripped and hung on the cross and treated like a nobody.

It is as if all four voices know that, regardless of what else they communicate about the man and his ministry, this part containing his last days is the most important. It is the crux of his mission, his identity. This part will define him, more than any of his teachings, miracles, signs, or parables…even the parable of the Prodigal Son. Likewise, all those parables and miracles and teachings must be interpreted in light of what transpires to Jesus in Jerusalem. Jesus of Nazareth, these voices mean to tell us, came in to the city highly regarded by his people as a new king but ended up getting crucified instead after a charade of a trial and laid in a borrowed tomb. And somehow the news articulated by these voices changed the world and the destiny of all creation.

At our high school Bible study this week we put on our theologian hats and took a look at what have come to be called “atonement theories.” Fancy word, I know. Atonement theories are essentially assessments of these events that seek to explain just why Jesus had to die and how his death makes us one with God. In short, who was this Jesus and why did his death matter?

Did Jesus need to die, for example, because someone needed to pay the price of human sin? That is one theory. Or did Jesus die because that is how God needed to conquer evil and darkness once and for all? That is another theory. Or perhaps Jesus died because God needed to give his people an example of how they are to love one another completely; that is, by laying down one’s life for another? The youth looked at Scriptures passages and hymn lyrics and even a Kanye West song that seemed to suggest and support any number of these theories for how Jesus’ death restored us to God.

What we discovered, however, is that there is no one right or wrong theory; they all contain some element of truth and honesty, and the all kind of overlap and blend together at some point. Maybe the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is simply too profound to be wrapped up neatly in a few words, or contained in one voice. What is interesting, though, is that the gospel voices themselves never seem to be too concerned with exactly how Jesus’ death reconciles us with God. They simply get down to the facts of what happened on that fateful week and let the power of the story speak for itself. They do their best in communicating the chain of events that allows us to understand that in the person of Jesus God himself is somehow intersecting with this world in a way no one can fully comprehend. They do their best in lending their voice to a story that is so crucial to creation’s existence and future that even had they been silent, the stones themselves would have found a way to proclaim it.

For even though words to explain it often fail us, we know it is this story of Jesus in Jerusalem that lets us know how completely God loves us. We know that it is this story of Jesus at his Last Supper which compels us to serve our neighbors whether they live here in Crestview or on the cost of Japan. We know it this story of Jesus in Gethsemane that reminds us it is not our will that will eventually have sway over our lives, but rather the will of the God who sends him. We know it is this story of Jesus before Pilate that frees us from the need to justify ourselves before God. We know it is this story of Jesus on the cross that allows us to look even into the tragedies like that of Blacksburg four years ago and speak a word of comfort and promise that God does not forsake his children even in the hour of death. We know it is this story of Jesus in his last days in Jerusalem that somehow wraps up all our shortcomings and presents them to God and offers us, in exchange, a new way of living that is filled with hope.

And so this morning we hear a rendition of those events, and you’ll be asked to lend your voice to the story. The particular version we recite does not belong to any one of those four voices; rather, it is a compilation of all of them together, like they are speaking in harmony. Specifically, note what your voice does as our worship plays out. Pay attention to the particular words that come out of your mouth, how they begin with praise but end with death threats.

And when today’s reading of that story is finished…when the last nail has been pounded through weakened flesh, when the last bystander has left the scene, when the taste of that wine and bread on your tongues has begun to fade, and when, on Sunday, the women hurry to the tomb with their embalming spices, the four ancient (yet modern) voices will want to know…what will we do with ours?

Will we join our voices and our lives with theirs in the urgency of proclaiming these events and how they change the world?

Or will we shut up and be silent and leave the stones to speak in our place?

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fourth Sunday in Lent [Year A] - April 3, 2011 (John 9:1-41)

The sermon portion of the closing worship each year at the Virginia Synod’s event for 5th and 6th-graders, which is called “7th Day,” involves a series of skits put on by each group of youth who are attending the event. Each group (and there can be 25 or more) is given a little snippet of Scripture from one of the gospels, and they come up with a way of presenting or portraying that snippet without speaking and without costumes. Each skit usually takes about ten seconds and is performed up on the stage in front of the entire assembly. They shuffle up on one side of the stage, perform the piece of Scripture in somewhat rapid fashion, and then exit the other side of the stage while the next group is coming on stage behind them. As can be expected, the skits are often very humorous, sometimes puzzling, and occasionally very moving.

One skit at this year’s event, held about a month ago, featured a young girl who was blind cast in the role of Jesus for a healing story. I had seen the girl several times during the course of the weekend being guided by a personal aide up and down the steep hills and staircases of the retreat center. She also carried a white cane and she appeared to me to have no vision at all. As her group got ready to perform, I found myself wondering how she might be experiencing the event (especially since the sermon was silent), how challenging it must be some people to be fully incorporated into relatively simple tasks. Suddenly, there she was, hand outstretched, her aide pointing her body in the direction of the people who were pantomiming imaginary ailments. They had to stand right up close, stretching their heads out and pressing them into the palm of her hand.

Maybe she had volunteered to act out the role of Jesus herself, maybe her group members had assigned it to her, maybe they had drawn straws for the part—but, to be honest, it kind of caught me off guard. I must confess that to me she may not have been the obvious selection to play Jesus, especially because navigating the stage could have been difficult, but, man, did it work! It was a beautiful portrayal of the story, and, like all experiences with the gospel of Jesus, it contained a poignant element of surprise. I was humbled to watch from my seat on the front row as the person who probably most often dwells at the margins became the agent of healing and grace.

It’s safe to say that people with illnesses or disabilities were viewed a little differently in Jesus’ day. Rarely were they seen as agents of healing or grace. Rarely were they even incorporated into daily life. Without the aides offered by modern technology and today’s educational systems, such people were often left at the margins of life. Furthermore, their malady was often seen as divine punishment for some sin either they or someone in their family had committed. That made interaction with them even more of a taboo on most occasions. Blindness, especially, was to be pitied and feared, for in ancient Greek culture, seeing was equated with understanding, sight with knowledge. In fact, the verb “to see” in ancient Greek is the same word for “to perceive,” or “to regard” or “to discover.” It was thought that someone who was unable to see could never really comprehend anything on a meaningful level.

So, as you can imagine, the blind man in this gospel story was most of all to be pitied, left at the margins to beg. As they approach him, the disciples wonder whose sin might be responsible for his condition, his or his parents’? Jesus’ grace, however, transforms the scene, complete with the gospel element of surprise. At once, the man born blind is brought into a relationship with God’s own Son and his condition is changed into a display of God’s glory.

And, all the while, the nearby Pharisees react in a similar fashion to my callous first impression of the young girl’s skit at the synod event: surely this man cannot be the Messiah.

There are many interesting elements to this encounter between Jesus, the man born blind, and the Pharisees. Perhaps the first one is that the actual act of healing takes up such minimal space in the story. Only two verses out of the forty-one deal with the man’s gaining of physical sight. Jesus spits on some dirt, rubs the mud in his eyes, and tells him to go wash it off in the water. The bulk of the story, rather, focuses on how people deal with and make sense of the event. What is communicated here has less to do with Jesus’ ability to transform a hopeless situation (which is important, by the way) and more to do with people’s reactions to and reception of Jesus. That is, the light that Jesus brings to the world, as explained by this story, has less to do with physical healing and transformation and more to do with spiritual understanding and a restored relationship with the Creator.

When someone looks at Jesus, when someone perceives Jesus, do they see an imposter, a blasphemer, just another ordinary sinner? Or do they see the Son of God? Do they make little note of him, abdicating any judgment about how important he might be? Do they understand him to be a significant prophet, a godly man? Or do they understand him to be Lord? The entire range of reactions is presented by this gospel story. Those skeptical front-row Pharisees never come to see him as anything more than a sinner or a blasphemer. Never can they even bring themselves to mention Jesus by name! The man’s parents, full well knowing their son has forever been changed and healed, back off from any assertion about Jesus. The townspeople display pure puzzlement, and perhaps some curiosity. And even the man born blind, himself, slowly grows in understanding of just who this Jesus is. It is not until the end of this encounter that he calls Jesus “Lord” and falls down to worship him.

Pool of Siloam

Another interesting thing about this story is that it involves a critical turning point in John’s gospel. Up to this point, Jesus has performed other signs and has gotten into debates with the Pharisees and religious authorities, but here is the first time anyone is driven out of the synagogue—out of the community—because they confess Jesus to be the Messiah. Here is where belief in who Jesus is and why he matters begins to divide people for the first time seriously. In ancient Judaism, the synagogue was central to community and culture. To be cut off from them was to be cut off from life. And so it is a more than a little ironic that the man born blind, who before his encounter is cut off from life because he cannot see or know anything, is now after the encounter cut off from life because of the person who gave him sight.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, retain their position within the religious community, retain their standing in regards to God’s law, but lose out on a deeper understanding of what God is really like and how much their own sin blinds them to it. They turn a “blind eye” to the poignant gospel surprise.

For whatever reason, we can lose sight of the fact that Jesus has this divisive effect on the world, and on us. We can forget that he often creates division between people, just as we can forget that the presence of light, by definition, creates pockets of shadow and darkness. It has the ability to expose and create contrast, just as Jesus has the ability to expose sin and selfishness and the unwillingness to believe in God’s glory. I find that in both private devotion and in public worship we tend to stress Jesus’ inclusion of others who are different or outcast. We emphasize the joy and excitement of responding to Jesus, but we overlook or gloss over the fact that Jesus does cause division and sometimes conflict.

On some level, I suppose that if we were to err in overemphasizing an aspect of Jesus, concentrating on his loving and gracious embrace isn’t a bad one to choose. But on another level, if we ignore the fact that Jesus comes to bring light and expose the darkness we may fail to notice this feature of Jesus’ character and ministry that exists in our own relationships with him. We can forget that even Jesus himself was aware of this power he wielded. “I came into this world for judgment,” he admits, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

This does not mean that his love is qualified in any way. As he himself says, he was not given to condemn the world, but to love it, and anyone’s life—anyone’s—may be an opportunity for God’s glory to be displayed. However, Jesus’ judgment does mean that it we must be honest about our sinfulness, too, our ongoing tendency to linger in the darkness about how completely God really loves us. As New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann once put it, “in order to be grace, it must uncover sin.” And in the presence of Jesus’ grace, we can range the whole gambit of reaction, just like the characters in this story…from hostility, to doubt, to disregard, to outright worship.

Realizing the multi-faceted nature of this encounter, I decided to emphasize the healing portion when I shared this story with the nursery school students in chapel this week. But before I could even put down the Bible once I had finished reading it, one of the students blurted out, “I wish I could just jump in that story and tell those people that…that…that God is a good guy!”

As I reflected on this comment with Christy Huffman, who alternates chapel duties with me, we realized that’s the essence of the story—of any story involving Jesus. He is the light of the world, and we are invited to jump right in to the story, his judgment and all, and let Jesus speak with us. We are to jump in and find that being so face-to-face with him will make us aware of our own sin, our blindness to the ways God loves us. Likewise, we jump in and learn he cleanses us anyway. We jump in…and see he makes a habit of turning the most pitiable, most forlorn, most marginalized of situations into arenas where God’s light may shine through. His healings, his holy meal, and of course his cross, all display a God who is at work, transforming the world into a place of new life.

In the end, we are to jump into his story—jump from the front row into the skit—and prepare our own muddied lives to be an opportunity to display God’s glory. Washed, and with our eyes blinking, we press our heads up into the palm of his wounded hands and begin, at long last, to see.


Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

"Stirred, Not Shaken" - Lenten Reflections on the Life of Faith (Guide Our Life)

Texts: Exodus 13:17-22, 2 Timothy 3:14-17

[enter to the "Raider March," complete with whip, fedora, and leather jacket]

Greetings, fellow adventurers!

I was in town to do some top-secret protection for the Picasso exhibit down at your museum of Fine Arts, and I heard about your Lenten Wednesday worship theme this year. Come to find out, it is based on a twist of one of my fellow adventurer’s martini orders. Indeed, my British counterpart, Agent 007, always orders his shaken, not stirred. I suppose I’d take mine the same way. I’ve never met Mr. Bond, but we lead a similar lifestyle: secret missions, international travel and intrigue, and the propensity to display calm, wit, and quick thinking in the face of danger (if I do say so myself). He always prefers things a little shaken up, not just stirred around.

But not you. Oh, no. You, on the other hand, have apparently ordered up a life that is stirred, not shaken. It’s a clever little reversal of wording. I suppose it calls attention to your desire to be stirred up by the Holy Spirit into service and courage rather than shaken into doubt and despair. Apparently you even pray for this type of life. That’s pretty admirable, especially to adrenaline junkies like me. In one of your worship services, the rite of confirmation, you even line up your young whipper-snappers up in front of the church to publicly affirm the promises of their baptism. And right there you pray for God’s Holy Spirit to keep them stirred, not shaken. As they are poised on the brink of adulthood—poised to grab hold of the grace that has been handed them by God—you look the challenges of life square in the eye and pray for the help that will keep them faithful.

Come to think of it, you sound like a fairly intrepid outfit that a guy like me might even fit in! And today/tonight you’re considering part of that prayer that I happen to know a little about: guide our life. Since I have a knack for tracking down my prize by following clues and sometimes raw instinct, I thought might be in order for me to swing by and give you a few pointers about good guidance. You see, I rely on guidance of all types: scholarly knowledge I’ve obtained in the academy, cryptic archaeological symbols, legendary oracles, and an internal sense of where danger might lurk. I know a thing or two about how to navigate adventure, believe you me. Maybe I can help you in your adventure to be stirred, not shaken.

Because, let’s be honest: life is an adventure. Whether you’re ranging all over the planet, attempting feats of daring and danger, or whether circumstances require that you live your whole life within a few square miles, life necessarily involves decisions, and those decisions carry with them the air of adventure. Life involves risk, choices, fear of regret, tiptoeing or diving headfirst into the unknown. What to do Friday night? Where to go to college next year? How to raise a family? What job to take? Which retirement facility to inhabit?—the adventurous aspects of life are inescapable. And for people of faith, there is the added dimension of how to live to the glory of God in each and everything you do. It is nice to know you may pray for some type of guidance in the midst of it all.

And it appears your God is not prepared leave you hanging in that department. Look at the ancient Israelites. As you know, I’ve studied their history very carefully. After God delivered them from their slavery in Egypt, God didn’t just slap them on the rear and turn them loose to their freedom. Against all odds, he found a way to guide them out of a hostile, oppressive environment into an even more hostile desert, right through the middle of a huge body of water, and, eventually, into a land God had set aside especially for them. They were dressed for battle action and carried with them the bones of their great ancestor Joseph as a reminder of who they were.

While they journeyed, of course, two pillars guided them: a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Eventually, when they would obtain the Ark of the Covenant (which, as you know, now sits forgotten in some unmarked box amidst many others somewhere in a government warehouse), the cloud and the fire would rise and fall in the air over the ark. When this cloud would fall over the Ark, the Israelites would set up camp. As soon as it lifted into the air, they knew it was time to move on.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of things on this planet, but I have to say I can’t imagine what that would have looked like. But the Israelites knew it could be trusted. They knew it represented God’s real presence, slogging with them wherever they went.

That’s pretty cool—it’s like some divine GPS device—but what I find most interesting (as a person who likes to get straight to the treasure) is that this long stint in the wilderness was a part of the deal. The wandering is built-in, right from the start. As they get started on this adventure, God is set on leading them a roundabout way. Rather than taking the direct route through the land of the Philistines, God makes them traipse into the wilderness, southward, toward the banks of the Red Sea. And the wandering does not cease once they come out dry on the other side. For a total of forty years they meander through the barren wasteland of the Sinai Peninsula and the northern Arabian Desert before they finally reach where they’re supposed to be. Nevertheless God was with them the whole time, his mysterious pillars of cloud and fire leading the way, but also involved in their own wandering.

I don’t know how you read it, but there are a few things I would take from this account if you’re thinking about guidance. For one, the people of God traveled as a group and were guided as a group. They had leaders that helped mediate the course who struck out on their own occasionally, but the journey of faith was not a “lone ranger” thing. God is clearly interested in guiding a community, not just individuals. To receive God’s guidance, you might not want to stray too far from the desert caravan of your brothers and sisters.

Secondly, wilderness is part of the adventure. In your baptismal journey, you can expect times of wandering and wondering. You can assume there will be days and years you feel lost, miles from where you want to be. You may even feel lost from God. But you should never forget that he has promised to be in the midst of that wandering with you. This is where the sacraments are so important. Tangibility is part of your faith. You’ll need something to hold onto.

Another thing you may want to take from this lesson is to get rid of the idea that every single step of your life has been mapped out by God, and that it’s your job ahead of time to figure out what those steps are. It appears God doesn’t really guide like that, and God isn’t that much of a control freak. People of faith can often get stuck in that trap, though, always waiting for some special secret oracle, some clear signpost that will let them know which path at the fork in the road to take. They worry and wonder about which decision would actually be in God’s will. I mean, sometimes there may be signs, mentors, who can point away. But the danger is getting frozen in your tracks, paralyzed by the thought that your powers of decision may somehow nullify God’s ability to bring good from any circumstance.

There’s one guy who gave some pretty sound advice in this department—I think you may know him. He said, “If you are a sinner, then sin boldly, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.” I believe his name was Martin Luther, and he always had a knack for pointing to the cross.

For that’s really the heart of the matter here. When you Christians are thinking about God’s guidance, about the way through the wilderness, all thinking must begin with that cross. That Jesus…man, was he an adventurer! He thrust himself—body and soul—into his trust in God, and his life and death proved God’s promise to guide his people through any situation. The cross is evidence of God’s ability to redeem any decision we make. It is that guidepost of all guideposts. May I be so bold as to suggest that that the cross is those two pillars—set together—which still lead God’s people, assuring you God is with you at all times, no matter the depth of the danger, no matter the width of your waywardness. Maybe that’s just some crazy archaeologist’s hunch, but I’d run with it. No matter what, it should give you an idea of the form of God’s guidance so that you and all your young whipper-snappers may face life stirred, not shaken.

I suppose our journeying is beginning to look a little different, yours and mine. The nature of my adventure is the recovery of ancient artifacts, the acquisition of rare treasures and secrets. As an archaeologist, my life is committed to the uncovering of truths from the past. The Lost Ark, the Temple of Doom…they all are tokens of by-gone eras. But you, you are called to things ahead. You journey on with the promise of a time yet to come, agents of a kingdom of grace that is being established as we speak.

As the writer to Timothy says, you need to know that you are equipped for every good work. Any adventurer can assure you that in order to be truly guided one must have a place to go. To receive direction, there must be a destination. And that you have! You may walk and wander with the confidence that God will always be guiding you to the place where your gifts participate in the restoration of this world to God through Jesus.

And, just like the ancient Israelites carried with them the bones of their great ancestor Joseph, reminding them of their identity, you travel with the Scriptures in your safekeeping. They are “inspired by God,” as again the writer to Timothy says, “useful for teaching, for reproof…and for training in righteousness.” Let me tell you: don’t forget your own set of ancient texts, and how important those living bones are for your adventure. You may feel sometimes that they burden you down, but don’t ever downplay their ability to guide you and remind you who you are.

Well, it has been with great honor to offer you any words of wisdom tonight. You’ve got your mission as the people of God, rooted in your baptism. I am beginning to recognize that it is far more daring—and, at times, frustrating—than mine ever have been. But also far more exciting, this life of faith. You go forth with a clear vision, drawn ever deeper with your community into God’s redemption of the world. Use whatever gifts you’ve received. And go forth. Boldly make your decisions. Lead the adventure of a lifetime.

Oh, and if you happen to run across any, uh, any snakes—which I hear lurk sometimes in your story—then don’t let them shake you either. Be stirred, stirred to action, ever confident that God has chosen to guide you.

Well, with that, I’m off.  If I don't get back to my post, I can see a fifth episode: "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Picasso."



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

(as the inimitable Indiana Jones)

The First Sunday in Lent [Year A] - March 13, 2011 (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 and Romans 5:12-19)

It was supposed to be an idyllic setting. The spot of earth they had come into was almost perfectly flat, ringed by just enough tall oak trees to provide comfortable shade but containing enough open space for them to till and work the earth in a small vegetable garden. And it was a sufficiently wild but never hostile environment. Animals like squirrels and raccoons and even deer often scampered across the lawn in a somewhat friendly manner, and the woods that abutted the back of the property were home to all kind of birds.

The wildlife teemed there, but the backyard was primarily idyllic because of what it offered the children. The instant they looked at it he and his wife could see their two young girls growing up in it. First, a small sandbox. Later would come a play house in the back corner. In the summer, a pool of water would offer refreshment from the heat and the lack of a slope made rolling snowballs for snowmen easy in the winter. But always: nature’s harmony. It was a place the two of them could envision the innocence and happiness of childhood taking shape.

Until the dead bird last week. It was a Hermit Thrush, white breast feathers belly-up for who knows what reason, right in the middle of the path to the shed. I, of course, had become somewhat hardened to such a sight, but how would I explain this to my daughter as she rounded the corner? Had she encountered something this disturbing, this out-of-the-ordinary before? Would it scar her? What kind of questions might she ask that I wouldn’t be able to answer? I found myself wanting to shield her from it, as if its very presence had marred the whole backyard experience, transforming it into something less-than. At first I tried to convince my wife that maybe I should have found a way to chuck it into the bushes before it was discovered by innocent eyes. But in the end, we confronted its reality head-on, but still not 100% satisfied with their explanation.  How does one really make sense of death? There is always a tendency to shield oneself from these awful realities.

The same can be said for other far more idyllic surroundings that have been marred with far worse: the pristine and picturesque Pacific coastline of northern Japan, the war-torn villages of Libya, the poverty- and AIDS-stricken villages of sub-Saharan Africa. We are speechless at the brokenness of creation, the brokenness of our lives, and we come up with any number of ways to rationalize it, or numb ourselves to it, or stitch together fig leaves to cover it up. One of the parishioners in the first congregation I served is the world’s oldest living hypnotherapist. One of his early assignments as an Air Force officer in the Pacific theater of World War II was to hypnotize soldiers who had served at Iwo Jima who were mentally and emotionally paralyzed by the gruesome carnage they had witnessed there. Wracked by those horrific scenes amidst what should also have been an idyllic setting, they came to him for a last-ditch fig-leaf shield. His hypnotherapy could never erase or undo the atrocities, he always acknowledged, but it offered some kind of relief, some kind of shield.

In a sense, this is what we all do to our gruesome human condition, a condition put into remarkably accurate and perceptive language by the ancient Hebrews thousands of years ago. The first man and first woman, set by God’s grace in the garden of Eden, transgress the law—the one law had been issued intended to keep appropriate and life-giving boundaries between the roles between Creator and the created. Tantalized, and also swindled by the tempter, that crafty spreader of lies, they seek God’s private knowledge, some false form of freedom, and they reach for power—they reach to occupy the role that the Creator fulfills.

And at that moment, as the apostle Paul explains, sin comes into the world. A force enters the idyllic backyard that immediately transforms their surroundings into something less-than. It is a force that has somehow both been unleashed by them and caught hold of them. With sin now free to spread its lies, things will never be the same. And the immediate effect is that their eyes are opened, but only to see their vulnerability. The immediate result of their temptation to sin is not wisdom or power, but shame and, eventually, fear…fear even of the one who created them.

For the apostle Paul, and for countless other people of faith, this story in Genesis explains with perfect truth the story of the human condition. “Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin…and death spread to all because all have sinned,” he says, tracing our condition back to the near-beginning, to the very first humans, but never taking us off the hook, either. It attempts to tell us something that we all know and feel from our own observation—by that inner sense implanted by the Creator—but that can never explained by even our best science; namely, that we look around and find ourselves in what should be an idyllic place, with life in full communion with God, with creation, with each other, and with ourselves—but which isn’t.

Theologians have long plumbed this story of man and woman’s fall to find the root cause or the main character of our sin. Is it, for example, a sense of rebellion, an urge of disobedience, as when woman and man willingly went against the law that had been established? Or is sin best described as disordered desire, a sense that we want the wrong things and turn away from the very things that are good for us? This would be suggested by the fact that woman sees the tree as good for food, a “delight to the eyes,” rather than as the deadly fare that God had maintained it was. So much of our brokenness is brought about by wanting and seeking the very things that do us in. Or is sin, at its root, pride, a craving to be like the Creator in all the Creator’s power? “When you eat of it,” the serpent promises, “you will be like God,” an offer that was—and still is—too good to turn down.  

Or, as Martin Luther and the other reformers proposed, is our sin rooted in our contempt for God’s Word?  When the serpent presses the woman about what God said, she incorrectly quotes what God originally said.  As Luther noted, man and woman were unable or unwilling to cling tightly enough to God’s Word, and there sin has its opening—with all of us (see typescript The Faith of the Christian Church, part II, David S. Yeago, pp 42-43).

"Adam and Eve" Albrecht Duerer, 1504

Perhaps, though, sin is something so insidious that it defies a tidy explanation. Try as we may, we can never really perfectly point at what has gone wrong. Nevertheless, the fact remains that when we open our eyes wide enough, we realize that things are not as they should be. Things like greed, vanity, and selfishness rule our hearts and our relationships far more than they should. Yes, this Genesis story is the story of our condition. From Adam and Eve to Moses, it is the story of you and me. From Moses and the prophets through the wayward years of Israel, God’s people, who tried to live by earthly definitions of power and who grasped after worldly riches and who lived by testing God’s faithfulness, this brief episode tells the story of our condition. From the blood-drenched shores of Iwo Jima to the awkward conversation about a bird’s death between a father and his daughter, this is the story of our condition, the story that something is not right. This is the story of us.

But—thanks be to God—it is not the end. For now there is the story of Jesus, the free gift. Now there is a new Man among us, one who comes to begin a rescue mission that will not just hypnotize us to sin’s effects, or erase the scars it leaves, but that will that will, in fact, miraculously undo its power. There is a new Man among us, born of God himself, yet clothed in flesh like one of us, who will triumphantly withstand the guile of the tempter and unravel his lies, one who will, on our account, cling to the Word of God so tightly that he will become inseparable from it. Now we have the story of Jesus, the free gift, and he will bring about a new birth that will give us new eyes that, when opened again, will see a world with limitless potential for service and love.

And, foremost, Jesus will prove God’s love for us. His rescue will focus on our hearts, to unspoil that which we have ruined, to put back together that which we have helped tear apart, to forgive that which we could never imagine being forgiven, to raise our blessed dead.

Now, my friends, there is the story of Jesus, the free gift, and it assures us that our story does not have the final word. I suppose this is what the American theologian Frederick Buechner meant when he said, “The gospel is bad news before it is good news,” that it is tragedy before it is comedy (Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Harper SanFrancisco, 1977, p7).  We first must encounter our state of vulnerability, our state of being lost—in short, the fullness of our sin—before we realize we have been saved. We must come to terms with our need for redemption before we hear the good news of our redeeming. We must first recognize the totality of our filthiness before we hear that God loves us anyway, loves us to the core. We understand that we are wounded, and then we realize that this Jesus is also wounded for us.   

          

It is not just the season of Lent that asks us to grapple with these two stories—the story of us and the story of Jesus. Our entire faith is based on it. Too often we are lulled by the crafty tempter into thinking that nothing is really wrong with us or the world, or, at best, that death and sin are just a permanent part of the picture. Too often we are lured into thinking that belonging to the church or participating in congregational life is simply a way to get some good values and morals, or an avenue for serving others. We must never forget that Jesus’ life and death is not, at its core, about values or morals or even serving others. Jesus goes out into the wilderness to rescue us. He endures the cross to save us, to put a different, beautiful ending on the story we keep writing.

And, in the surprising way God would have it, it is not really a new ending, but, rather, another beginning. It is a beginning that goes on and on with the power to transform creation and our lives, once more, into something good. The challenge of our faith, rooted in baptism, is to see ourselves written into Jesus’ wonderful new beginning, to take hold of this free gift, to cling to his Word that transports us to the idyllic setting of grace that God always intended. 

It is about the challenge of knowing that, yes, we are lost.

But that we also have been found.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.