The Third Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 7B] - June 21, 2009 (Mark 4:35-41)

My parents always told me to respect a storm. Lightning does strike people, they’d tell me. Every year it does. Trees can be taken down by the wind. When we were little I distinctly remember we were never allowed to take showers or baths when there was a thunderstorm doing its thing outside. It was a useful bit of wisdom, I suppose.

Perhaps, then, they’d be mortified to learn that just a couple of years ago I went on a jog on an afternoon when the news reported that a storm might be brewing. Thinking I could outrun it, I started off when there were only a couple of small clouds in the sky. About a mile or so into my run, I noticed that it started to get really dark. I thought to myself, “No big deal. I’ve run in the rain before.” Before I knew it, a lightning bolt struck nearby that stopped me in my tracks. I was at the top of a high hill and figured I was like a human lightning rod, even though I knew the statistical chances of getting hit were very low. Within a few seconds, the bottom fell out of the clouds and lightning was flashing all around me. Not wanting to stand underneath the tall trees that were lining the street, and knowing I was too far from home to turn back, I made a mad dash for a covered porch on a house across the street. I did not know these people, so I rang the doorbell when I got there just to ask their permission to bide the storm’s passing. I didn’t want to be asked inside, but I wanted them to know I was there. To my dismay, no one answered. For fifteen whole minutes I waited on that stranger’s covered patio for the storm to pass. I felt safe and I kept dry, but I just kept hoping that some other neighbor wouldn’t see this strange sweaty man on a porch he didn’t belong and report him for trespassing. Well, you know what they say…any porch in a storm!

The disciples in this morning’s story have no such safety or place to watch the rain and lightning, but they do ring the doorbell and get no response. Jesus, their teacher and leader, the one who would know what to do in this frightening situation, sleeps soundly through the chaos. They begin to try to rouse him, but with what hope? What is it exactly that they think he’ll do for them? Chart the quickest path to some stranger’s front porch to wait it out? Devise some system for reducing the boat’s watery ballast mid-storm? Lead them in a psalm for safety? He had healed so many already…do they hope he can bring that power to bear on them now in some way? After all, they are perishing! Can’t he save their lives?

It’s difficult to say for sure, but it occurs to me—based on their final reactions—that the last thing they would ever expect him to do is make the storm stop. They look to him in this moment where everything is out of their control because they have come by this point to respect his leadership. He is their Rabbi, their Teacher. It is likely they want him to solve the issue of their boat, but Jesus will end up solving the issue of the storm.

Mark paints a very vivid picture of what happens next. Jesus does not consult anyone about emergency procedures or take stock of people’s feelings. Jesus gets up from his cushion and stops the storm. The word in the Greek for what Jesus does when he wakes up—diegeiro—suggests that he goes to the uppermost point in the boat, the bow. I imagine Jesus doesn’t look all that different from that scene in Titanic when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character stands out on the point of the bow, wind blowing through his hair, and shouts out onto the open sea, “I am the king of the world!!”

Interestingly, the same Greek word for Jesus’ act of rising up is used to describe seas when they get rough and choppy. So here we have Jesus, the sleepy-headed rabbi, “growing rough and turbulent” in an answer to the seas that have grown rough and turbulent. He rebukes the wind—angrily scolding it for the tempest that it is—and the word of God commands the waters to be still. Standing up there in the bow, no doubt looking like some silly King of the World, Jesus tells the chaos to come under control.

And it happens! There is dead calm. The storm vanishes, and the boat of disciples continues to the other side of the lake.

What always catches me a little off-guard about this story is the disciples’ reaction at the end. Their prevailing sense of mind is not one of relief that their life has been spared or thankfulness for the calm seas, but rather awe, amazement, fear for who Jesus is, who he might be. Mark describes them as “fearing a great fear,” saying to one another, “who is this man, that even the wind and seas obey him?” Jesus has just essentially ridiculed them for a lack of faith, and they are still getting over the fact that their rabbi—the one who was just sleeping there on the cushion—has just demonstrated a power known to be possessed only by God the Almighty. They fear him. In fact, he is the only thing they really ever fear in this text.

So often this story of Jesus and the storm is used to draw a comparison to the various storms of our lives in order to bring relief, to assure us of God’s presence with us and power for us in the midst of calamity. And certainly we are reassured, on some level—through the cancer treatments, the loss of the job, the marriage that seems to founder—that Jesus can take our rocky boats and glide them safely through the storm. Yet in the stilling of the storm on Lake Galilee, Jesus is not simply a steady hand at the tiller. He is very God. By commanding the seas to be quiet and then invoking fear, rather than relief, in his disciples, Jesus is cast undeniably in the role of God—the God who commanded creation into existed with his word, the God who controlled the crashing waters at the first creation. Jesus is this same God who answers Job out of the whirlwind, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? [When I] shut the sea with its doors?” Jesus, our Teacher, speaks on behalf of and, in fact, embodies, this God who alone set the stars in their courses and set the measurements of the universe.

We have the temptation in the midst of crisis—whatever it is—to develop a myopia of misery, a nearsightedness that causes us to fixate purely on the storm and our place in it, to ask the question, “Why me?” or “Don’t you see that I’m perishing?” The challenge for faith is to remember God has the long view, the entire picture in mind. Just God was there at the beginning, God will be there at the end and into eternity. God knows how we got into the storm and how it fits into whatever comes after. God deserves our thankfulness and our devotion for our steps along that path, but God also deserves our fear.

Martin Luther begins every one of his explanations to the Ten Commandments with the words, “We should so fear and love God, that we should…” The First Commandment, for example, for Luther, means “We should so fear, love, and trust God above all things.” As we encounter our Lord in the Words of Scripture, in the sacraments, the point is not that our overwhelming reaction to God is to be afraid of him, but that we, through whatever happens, develop a profound respect for God’s ability to mould the universe and all the little events in it.. In this Galilee boat, like so many other times in the gospel story, Jesus is prodding his disciples to a deeper faith, a more profound respect, a deeper realization of how God engages and then declares authority over the winds and waves of life. Choppy and turbulent, chaotic and destructive, the waters rise up and threaten to do us in, but he rises up, too, and puts them in their place.

Yes, he rises up too. On the third day he rises, standing there, glorious, like the King of all Creation. In the storm that is Good Friday, even Jesus submits to the waves of abandonment and suffering for the sake of the God who alone can take the long view that sees through to Easter morning…and beyond. A deeper faith and trust in this God of Jesus makes us confident that no matter what, no matter what, God has the final word with the resurrection.

As Luther suggests, a faith based in fear and awe of God moves us not to question God’s whereabouts as we ring the doorbell frustratedly, wondering, “Are you there?” “Are you asleep??” Neither does such a faith lead us to consider God’s obliviousness to our plight, frantically asking, “Don’t you care that I’m dying?” Instead, it leads us to trust in the midst of the whirlwind that God is victorious over it, that there is no way, now that Jesus is in our boat, that we can be completely overcome. No way. Never. He rises up.

And, so, today our boat gains a new crewman. His name is River Jacob. A great watery name to remind him, perhaps, of the crashing river that birthed him, the waters that birth all of us in that new creation free from sin that Jesus brings. It is the water that washes up at the feet of the saints among whose great company we all will stand some day. Until then, River, pick up some wisdom along the way, from us, your rivermates, and, of course, your loving parents.

Like: respect a storm. They can be kind of dangerous.

But mostly: respect One who can still it.


Amen!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Day of Pentecost, Year B - May 31, 2009 (John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15)

The hours until his departure are growing shorter, and Jesus is trying his hardest to convince his worried and perplexed disciples that when he finally leaves them things will be just fine. Despite any fears and misgivings about this strange plan they may have, he assures them that they will be able to carry on without him: “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth:” he says, “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you.”

As if there could be something better than having Jesus himself!

And yet, Jesus himself implies quite strongly that this Advocate, this Counselor—whom they have not even seen, the one who will come only if Jesus vacates the premises—is the more-exciting “Act II” of God’s gracious redemption story. That’s what Jesus seems to be saying, but I cannot help but think that they must sense they are about to be left in the lurch, with no one reliable to turn to show them how to carry on.

It kind of makes me think about the people in that reality series Clean House, which airs on the Style Network. I had never seen it until a few weeks ago, but as Melinda will testify, I can’t help but watch it when I stumble upon it channel-surfing. Like a moth to a flame, I’m drawn in. Perhaps I’m thinking, “They could come to my office! And my car!” In an episode of Clean House, a quartet of extremely animated and ambitious home-makeover and design experts descend upon an inexplicably messy and cluttered house and attempt to organize it, throw away most of its contents or sell them at a yard sale, and, finally, completely renovate and refurbish the place. Clean House is kind of like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but with a more realistic edge and no sappy stories to make you cry. They don’t get a new home or a new yard, or new thousand-dollar household accessories to make their lives easier. The people on Clean House are, to put it bluntly, just plain messy, and the show’s organizing and design experts have to work with what they’re given and leave them better off.

In any case, one of the reasons I find the show so compelling is that the four experts who descend upon the house to clean it up are able to transform it so completely. Sifting through years of needless clutter and junk—junk which often obscures any useful purpose for the house’s given space—these feisty four people have the skills to clean, sweep, prioritize and counsel the homeowners into a completely new existence. And then, at the end of the show, after the house is re-done, they leave.

Anyone who has ever seen the show cannot help but wonder at that point: how long will that house stay so neat and clean once the experts have left? How long until the lucky homeowners return to their old, unfathomable clutter-generating ways without the motivation and know-how of the cleaning folk? They’re still the same people, with their same idiosyncrasies for collecting and allowing useless items to pile up…won’t the house go back to its former state in no time at all? I, for one, would like a Clean House, Act II.

That’s what I wonder, at least, and I wonder that about Jesus’ disciples, a group of folks who are about to be involved in a much larger world-organizing and cleaning scheme than an episode of Clean House. How are they to carry on once the Expert Redeemer has left the premises, when he’s crucified, then resurrected, then ascended? How are they to manage things once the Incarnate Christ is no longer hanging around? They’re the same disciples—aren’t they?—with the same flaws and idiosyncrasies as before. What will keep them from running this movement into the ground?

That’s when, Jesus does explain to them a little about the power of this Advocate, whose very name suggests he will be able to speak for and through the disciples and God. The Advocate will come into their collective midst and guide them in the truth, enlightening them one way or the other about Jesus. Nothing less than a direct connection to the Father and the Son, this Advocate will speak to the disciples the very communication he hears between the Father and the Son, the ongoing outpouring of love for us that we see on the cross. Jesus himself says that he hasn’t been able to say everything to the disciples, but this Advocate will enable him to do that. He will not lead them astray, nor will he withhold anything about God’s life from the disciples. “All that the Father has is mine,” Jesus reminds them. “For that reason I said that the Advocate will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

And even when they wonder about this Advocate’s presence, there will be undeniable proof when they begin to point to Jesus and Christ’s righteousness in everything they say and do. If they’re wondering how they’ll keep this giant world-cleaning project going, if they’re wondering how they won’t return to the same lives they led before, then they’ll need to look no further than their own life together, for the Advocate will be stirring and speaking among them. Jesus promises it.

Jesus rises and ascends to heaven and in his absence arrives a fuller presence of God. Only by the Holy Spirit can we truly experience the fullness of God’s life, that overpowering selfless love that the Father has for the Son, and the Son has for the Father. Only by the power of the Holy Spirit can we deeply connect, one life to another’s, in the same way that the Father and the Son deeply connect to each other. And so in letting go of and saying “farewell” to an incarnate Christ we receive the mission to take that Christ elsewhere. It’s not that having the Spirit is better than having Jesus, but that by receiving the Spirit, we begin to embody the fullness of who Jesus is and will be for the whole world.

Back in March, after I had only been here a matter of weeks, I attended a meeting of the team formerly known as the social ministry team (now named the Community Service Team so as to give a clearer description of the ministries they undertake). The meeting began and the team leader rattled off an impressive list of projects the team was organizing for the congregation in the spring and early summer. The list was long, and I barely could keep up. When I thought we were finished the team leader asked the question, “That’s what we’re doing now. Is there anything else we could do? Any ideas?”

At that point one woman across the table reached into her purse, pulled out a newspaper clipping, and proceeded to read an notice that the General Assembly of Virginia was preparing to earmark appropriations to purchase luggage for foster children. Holding the clipping in her hand, this woman expressed her near anger that state money was going to be used for something that the churches clearly should be doing. “This is a job for the communities of faith,” she remarked, “not for taxpayers of Virginia.”

I was astounded! Here was a person who was reading the newspaper looking for ways to serve as Christ’s people. Here was a person in our midst who, I may say, was so in tune to embodying Christ in her day-t-day that the daily news had become “daily opportunity.” I did not remember the woman’s name at the time, but she could have been called “Advocate,” for she was clearly animated by him, tongue of fire practically leaping off her head.

As could be expected, the Community Service Team pounced all over her suggestion. I’m not sure at what point the foster system luggage project stands right now, but you will hear more about it soon. For me, however, that moment in that meeting was another one of those knock-me-over-with-a-feather moments because I knew God had sent me to a place that was receiving the Advocate with joy and courage. Here was a group of people, here is a congregation who is unmistakably stirring with the Spirit, prodding each other receive that Life-giver, to continue the mission that Jesus has begun.

It reminded me of what turns out to be the wonderful surprise of Pentecost. As Bishop Kalistos Ware, a bishop in the Orthodox rite, puts it: “If the aim of the Incarnation, is the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost, the aim of Pentecost is the continuation of Christ’s Incarnation within the life of the Church" (The Orthodox Way, revised edition. Kalistos Ware. St. Vladimir's, 1979 (1998) p.93).

To put it differently, there is, as it turns out, an Act II of God’s glorious redemption story, and we are it! You are it! I may be it, too, as the person holding the newspaper clipping attests. Together, the church is, so to speak, God’s bold next Act in the plan to remake and re-fashion creation. We are the fuller presence of God that comes about when Jesus ascends to the Father. And the Spirit is who makes this possible, because when we receive the Spirit we receive the whole toolkit, the whole assembly package, for being Christ to each other and to the world, be that through luggage for foster kids, or speaking a word of resurrection as we, this afternoon, inurn our faithful departed and supporting the bereaved in their grief. We are Act II, my friends, and the Spirit will spur us to countless ways of incarnating Jesus.

Or, to say it another way, “We’re not the same old disciples we were before! His grace changes us! Let’s…keep the house clean!”


Thanks be to God!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B - May 10, 2009 (John 15:1-8)

By the window in our kitchen in Pittsburgh grew an ivy plant in a hanging basket. I had bought the ivy plant a few years earlier just before my wedding when it was a few small branches. It had been part of a concerted effort to bring beauty, to bring life to my dull bachelor apartment since Melinda would soon be moving in once we got married. The ivy had struggled for a few years, never seeming to have the right light—first in a spot on top of the bookcase and then on the back of the toilet—but when we moved to our house we hung it by an east-facing window and it started to thrive. By the time we moved to Richmond, it was a large, sprawling mess of leaves and branches, too large, in fact, for the mantle in our new living room. So on the weekend we were moving in, one of my family members lopped off several of the longer branches and stuck them in a vase of water. Within a few weeks, they had sprouted roots.

When I went to transplant the clippings into a pot of soil a few weeks ago, I discovered that some of the branches had actually been placed upside down into the vase, the clipped part sticking up in the air and the new growth submerged beneath the surface of the water. Roots had sprouted there instead of leaves, nonetheless, or instead of killing the branch altogether, and when I stuck those new roots into the soil, the plant grew just fine! Much to my fair bride’s delight, we now have two ivies, both of them with branches and leaves sticking out randomly in all directions, shoots of new and old growth intertwined together.

Branches, it turns out, naturally seek nourishment and life. It is what they do…English ivy, grapevines, Virginia Creeper, kudzu…take your pick of vine. Though they appear to have life unto themselves—extending outward, sprawling all over the place, shooting upwards, downwards, sideways sometimes deceiving us with their interconnectedness—somewhere, somehow they connect to a source of life. Somewhere each branch is joined to the main vine, and from there the nourishment comes.

In John’s gospel, Jesus explains that’s how it will be with his community of disciples. Reaching for yet another image from Mediterranean agriculture, Jesus describes how organic and yet how interconnected their growth together will be. The various branches of his communion may twist and sprawl all over the place, sometimes deceiving us with their meandering nature, but the source of their life will be none other than the main vine, Jesus. Clip them off, and they won’t be able to make it on their own. As it turns out, these branches wither when they are disconnected from the source.

It is a key point for Jesus to make on this evening before his crucifixion, for Jesus will not always be with them in the way he is now. The community that follows him won’t always be able to travel along with him from village to village, to reach out and tug on his tunic when they need to clarify a point or ask a question. Up until this point and for a little while longer, he has stood and worked and prayed among them in human form, a distinct man who bears a special relationship with God the Father. Both he and the gathering of people who have assembled around him have been easy to pin down and locate among the hills and towns of Judea and Galilee: it walks with him, eats with him, consults him in time of crisis and trouble: “Jesus,” a grieving Martha had once said to him, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Yes, Jesus had been there, in an undeniable sense, and even when his words were difficult to swallow, his words still came from a mouth that could be unmistakably seen and heard. Now, he was speaking of leaving, of going away, and was impressing upon the disciples the necessity to stay yet with him somehow—to remain in him—and not go out on their own, like dozens of individual seeds sprouting up all over the place. They would be a vine; that is, a single plant, and God their vinegrower, and God would tend the vine to make sure it was continuing to produce the fruits of Jesus, those unforgettable acts of sacrifice and love for which he was known. Here and there it would involve and cutting off and removing parts of ministry and growth that were no longer serving producing fruit. And, here and there, even the parts that were fruitful with works of love could expect to be cut back from time to time so that they could be made stronger. But whatever kind of clipping and cleansing the vine underwent, its fruitfulness could come naturally as long as they stayed connected to what Jesus was, as long as they maintained that association with the love Jesus made known on the cross.

The word Jesus chooses to describe this being connected was “abiding,” a funny word that we don’t use very much anymore. To abide, especially its connotation in the Greek here, conveys a sense of remaining with someone, of sticking by them over the long haul, of having patience that growth will come with time. As such, abiding is a bit of a paradox. Although it involves remaining, knowing growth may not happen overnight, it also entails hard work. It takes energy and effort to stay put and abide, to express loyalty and deep attachment. I think of Jesus, hanging rather stationery on the cross, hanging with us in our stubborn, self-imposed isolation from God, hanging with us in our slow-moving moments of sorrow and grief, and yet I also think of the effort and patience he puts forward to abide in those places.

Perhaps one of the most enduring images I have of this abiding, the importance of this deep and yet conscious connectedness to Jesus, the source of life, is not my English Ivy, but a woman by the name of Leslie Yarger, one of the older members of my former congregation. Leslie was approaching 90 when I became her pastor, but she was—and is—anything but homebound. Still blessed with good health and good eyesight and quite the adventurous spirit, Leslie would drive every day to the nursing home to spend time with her daughter and her aged sister. Her sister, Mazie, was past 100 and bedridden, and her daughter, Leslie Ann, was confined to a hospital bed and a feeding tube, rendered immobile by the advanced stages of a debilitating disease.

When I’d walk in for a visit, there would be Leslie, sitting between their beds on a folding chair she had set up, holding Leslie Ann’s hand with her right hand and Mazie’s with her left, content smiles of life across their faces. All day long. She’d, of course, get up once or twice to reposition a pillow or change the television channel, but then Leslie would return to the chair and grab their handsand once again, make that living connection.

Leslie was healthy and active. She could have gone anywhere, but there she abided. There she remained, ‘tween daughter and sister like some sort of mini-vine, as if it were the most natural place in the world for her to be, showing them—showing me, showing us—what hard work it is to abide, what it’s like to be pruned into self-giving faithfulness.

When we get right down to it, it won’t completely matter whether Jesus’ community of disciples is planted on top of the bookcase or on the back of the toilet, whether we’re doing ministry in an affluent suburban neighborhood or in a re-gentrifying inner city, in an old stone gothic cathedral or an abandoned storefront. When we get right down to it, it won’t matter all that much whether we’ve got a 5-year plan or a 5-day plan, because when we get right down to it, because our life is not going to come from where our branches are pointing, but from where they’re rooted.

We do not find our source of life, for example, in some principled claim to make a difference in the world, or the merit of some social or political agenda, jazzy youth and children’s programs, or even the style of worship we prefer. Our life comes from him, and there is no other reason for our meeting and doing ministry together than to feed off him.

On the other hand, it will matter quite a bit to our growth if we, like Mazie and daughter Leslie Ann, are holding the hand of the one who abides with us. It will matter when we are grafting our new and old branches into the word and sacraments of the one vine who opens up his veins week after week, prayer after prayer, to sustain us. It will provide growth when we continually find ourselves held to this love that abides, our clippings shoved into the water—the baptismal water—of that vine. It will provide growth when we measure our ministry alongside the self-sacrificial example Jesus gives.

So that when people see our tangling, sprawling interconnectedness—(Mazie-Leslie-Leslie Ann-Phillip-Jesus)—fruits of love and mercy flowing from our own branches, they will know that Jesus is nevertheless with us, that somewhere, at the center, the vine is there. He is the only vine who keeps living, you see, the only vine who abides and keeps living, even after he himself has been whacked away by our sin and thrown into the grave.

Now, aren’t we a right pretty plant, bought to bring life and beauty to these dull surroundings? He, the vine. We, the branches.

Thanks be to God!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Second Sunday of Easter, Year B - April 19, 2009 (John 20:18-31)

On the cover of the edition of Newsweek magazine that came out last week—the week of Easter—was a large cross made up of the words that said “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” It’s no coincidence that most major newsmagazines choose the week of Easter or the week of Christmas to grab us with a religious-themed article. This one in particular seemed dramatically titled and designed to get our dander up in such a way that we’ll read what the article has to say:“The End of Christian America.”

In the article, the writer, Jon Meacham, prattles on for four or five pages, giving his assessment of the recent political elections and the results of several recent polls on religious tendencies that have indicated that the number of professing, church-going Christians is down. Most interestingly (for Meacham, at least), the percentage of those who claim to have no religious affiliation at all is up: from 5 percent of the population in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. In addition, one survey he discusses pointed to a four-fold increase in those claiming to be agnostic or atheist from 1990 to 2009.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the article was the photography. In amongst the text were various staged photos meant to highlight our supposed flight from religion: one was a photo of a pulpit microphone stand…but both the microphone and a preacher were conspicuously absent. Another shot was of a Bible lying open on an empty pew in a deserted church, as if there were no one there to read it anymore.

Whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation and purports to be one now is not the main theme of the article. Rather, the focus is on the prevailing sense of doubt that, at least numerically-speaking, seems to be growing in our culture and how the Church might deal with it. Fewer people seem to be believing our story, the one we claim to be The Story—the story that frees us and makes us people of God. And therefore Meachum points to a sense of hand-wringing, despair, fear, a feeling that (gasp) we’ve never been here before.

Or have we? From the looks of John’s gospel, it certainly seems that we have. In the episode we’ve read this morning, which always forms the gospel reading the first week after Easter Sunday, we encounter the disciples first on the evening of Jesus’ resurrection and then again the week after. The news is fresh. Jesus is alive and well, no longer in the grave, and yet doubt has already set in. Thomas goes down into history unfairly as the one who doubts, when a closer read of our text reveals that Jesus must show his wounds to all of the disciples before they recognize and believe in him. Yes, doubt has prevailed since the first evening after Jesus was raised, even among those who first heard that incredible story and sought to spread it. In fact, the disciples’ sense of hand-wringing and despair and fear is so great that they’ve locked themselves away. Not only are they bearing some skepticism as to what they’ve heard, but they know there are plenty of people in society who won’t believe their story.

This is crazy! On the very night after death has been conquered, on the very day the grave has been opened, on the very evening God has totally upended the powers of darkness once and for all, the disciples find themselves practically conquered by doubt, shut in a room, and cowering in the darkness of fear.

I always think of the second Sunday of Easter—that is, the first gathering of the Easter people after the news of Easter as somewhat of reality-check Sunday. It is one week after we’ve celebrated the resurrection of Jesus and we are forced to reflect: is anything different? Once our ears have stopped ringing from the trumpet fanfare, the amplified alleluias, once we rub our eyes from the dazzling white and settle down a bit, has the news of the resurrection done anything to us? Are we believing and living according to its promise? Or have we oh-so-easily slipped back into doubt, a lack of trust that God has indeed wrought something new for us with the raising of his Son?

The early Church grappled with this, question, too. For centuries the practice was that those who had been baptized on Easter wore their baptismal robes all week long and showed up to church on this Sunday still wearing them! This was part of a faith-inducing effort to underscore for the newly-baptized—and all those who came into contact with them—that they were now different. They were cleansed, forgiven and free, living the new life in the hope of the resurrection.

Lyndsay and Kyle, how would you like that? Imagine dressing Parker in nothing but that baptismal gown all week. No cute Baby Gap clothes or those onesies with clever little sayings on them like, “Party at my crib: 2am. Bring your own bottle.” Only her baptismal gown, every day. And she can remove it when she comes back to church next week.

That was the church’s practice, for a long time. Just as an article’s photograph of an open Bible on an empty pew in a deserted church could suggest that no one is listening to the story of Jesus anymore, a host of Christians wearing their new baptismal identity in an unmistakable fashion on the outside could proclaim that the life of faith is alive. It is real. The resurrection has, indeed, made a difference in the world’s destiny, and we are called to testify to that difference. Pretty clever practice, if you ask me, and yet, I’m sure doubt still crept in. As Bono (lead singer of the rock band U2) says in the New York Times this morning,

“of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith—the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end” (New York Times, April 19, 2009, "It is 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?).

The main issue with Thomas and the other disciples as they deal with this "far-reaching idea" is that Jesus does not abandon them in their doubt. He mysteriously makes his way through the locked doors—twice—and invites them to look at his wounds, even to touch them if they need to. Unlike some leaders which equate doubting with treason, the Risen Jesus lovingly confronts their doubts and fears and seeks to address them.

More significantly, he breathes new life into them. That is, before their doubt can erode all the exciting elements of this new story, before their community becomes one primarily of hand-wringing and fear, before they begin to believe that nothing really is different, Jesus himself enters their presence and bestows upon them his Spirit, giving the story they’ve heard shape and form.

Shape and form like this: “The Lord’s peace be among you.” “Just as my life was one of mission, so will yours be one of mission.” “Receive the very Spirit of God and live by it.” “Forgive others, and do be careful with the sins you retain.” …“And many other signs which are not written in this book,” John adds.

Oh, they might not be written down, but we know them. Their shape and form are familiar to us. We know these signs when we hear of them, and they combat our fears and they break us out of locked doors and they strengthen our faith in a world that is always drifting, always, to some degree, doubting.

It sounds like a people who embrace a life of forgiveness, over and against the world’s wisdom of holding grudges. It sounds like a community that understands the necessity of loving people rather than simply tolerating them. It sounds like a group of people who live as though they are free from sin, who freely give of their own resources to care for those in need. It sounds like a gathering that has the courage to reach its own hands into the wounds of the world over and over again with the hope of healing, whether it is giving up a beautiful Saturday to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, or finding ways to send underprivileged children to summer camp, or going out of their way to comfort those who have lost loved ones.

Through all these ways and more, we know it will be him—the risen Jesus—active by the Spirit in the life of his community empowering his people to be clad in the joy of new life, assembling them once again and lovingly and patiently addressing their doubt. It will be him—the risen Jesus—bidding them to unlock the doors and live this new story. And when it comes right down to it, it will be the life of this community, with its unmistakable shape and form, through which others will understand and come to believe the news of the resurrection. And it won’t matter if the headlines say we’re declining or falling, or that the Bible is open, but people just aren’t listening anymore, or that we should be wringing our hands and writing our epitaph, because the risen Jesus will be there, offering his wounded body and poured out blood once again. And we will be strengthened to carry on.

Therefore, my sisters and brothers, deck yourselves out in your baptismal best. We have a story to tell. We have a risen life to live. For you may not have realized it before, but you—you and me together—we may be the only empty tomb some people ever see.

Thanks be to God!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

April 5, 2009 - Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion

Palm Sunday several years ago found me waking up at 4:30 in the morning to wait outside the mud walls of a small village in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt for the bishop to appear. He would symbolize Jesus, and his arrival in the village would commence the yearly procession of the palms. I was on internship that year, and my supervisor had led a group from our congregation in Cairo on a pilgrimage-like tour to several ancient Coptic Christian sites during orthodox Holy Week.

On that particular Palm Sunday morning, we had arrived in this small Christian hamlet not simply to observe but to participate in this ritual they had performed on Palm Sunday literally for centuries. It was to be, I reckon, the most nearly realistic of all my previous Palm Sundays. We waited outside, waving real palm branches that had been torn down the night before from the date palms along the Nile banks. Some had woven their palm fronds into elaborate mats. Our village hosts were native middle-eastern farms-people, people who worked the fields for their livelihood, and whose drab cotton tunics were not costumes but their actual daily clothes.

We had only been given a two-hour window for his possible arrival, and so everyone had all arrived early so as not to miss it. The procession of the palms would wind its way through the narrow city streets, and end in the village church. Once inside, the Palm Sunday parade would flow seamlessly into the beginning of their first Holy Week liturgy. The bishop eventually showed up, although not on a donkey. He was in a mid-90’s-era red Fiat sedan, already fully robed and ready, but as soon as he jumped out of the car, the whole town erupted in shouts of “Hosanna” and we waved our palm branches as he led us through the mud streets of the town, into the courtyard, where children shouted from rooftops. Holy Week had now begun in that village, the way it had for roughly sixteen or seventeen centuries straight with a level of realism that cannot be duplicated by many places.

We like do this with Holy Week. It arrives each and every year with the Christian faithful assembling in churches, public places, on cathedral steps to re-create to some degree the events of Jesus’ own last week before his death. We strive for some level of drama or realism, for we know that these events make some sort of difference to us. You and I may not actually be from the Middle East, and we probably don’t have palm trees in our yards, yet we each clutch in our own hands today a palm for waving, a token of realism to connect us to things that happened on a week centuries ago. Jesus goes to Jerusalem at the time of Passover and is hailed as King of the Jews on the streets of the city. Yet basically by the time the week is over he has eaten his last supper in the Upper Room, been betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, crucified on Golgotha, and left dead in an empty tomb.

They are a shocking and stirring string of events, and each year, whether in isolated villages in the Middle East with processions and palms or in suburban Protestant churches in America with their dramatic readings and mournful hymns, we gather to remember them and travel the path of Jesus. We come to Holy Week, palms in hand, bread and cup in hand, to walk lock-step with our Lord.

Yet I wonder if Holy Week is not better thought of as the time our Lord walks lock-step with us—not that we’re the center of the universe, and that God is trying to catch up with our pace, but that in these events we see the desire of a God so driven to love and save that he will not withhold his Son from living the human condition, every step of the way. Jesus, God’s Son, walks lock-step with humankind, and suffers everything that goes along with that, which means God ends up knowing betrayal, the fickleness of fame, the desertion and denial of friends, the violence of hatred, the bitter coldness of the grave. Jesus, the much-anticipated Messiah, does not cling to his royal, divine status and choose a way of life and death that befits a God, but empties himself, as Paul recites in Philippians, “taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness and being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

When we enter into the events of Holy Week, we are not simply trying to re-create the somber and, at long last, uplifting events of that whirlwind last week. We are claiming something dramatic, something incredibly profound about the God we worship. French Dominican theologian Jean Lacordaire once exclaimed in a sermon, “God on a cross! That is all my theology!” That is, of all that we might say about God and what God is like, that he empties himself to walk this way of sorrow and be handed over to his death somehow captures all that we would need to say.

The events of Palm Sunday and Holy Week show us that God is inextricably bound to his creation and the sore length of its experience, and he is bound to it with love. God will not back out of or back down from this love. God will not find another route into the city, or weasel his way out of its nastier parts. God will not receive our fair-weather shouts of “Hosanna!” without also bearing the angry demand to “Crucify!” Jesus, once and forever in the form of God, once and forever free from sin, will thoroughly show his solidarity with his creation by succumbing to the worst that sin has to offer.

Jesus, once and forever in the form of God, once and forever triumphant over sin, will thoroughly grant salvation to his creation by rising from the tomb.
And so, when we grip our palms today, when we find ourselves moved by the readers’ rendition of Jesus’ last week, when villagers half a world away await once more for their robed bishop to leap out of a small car and start the somber procession let us remember that all these things chiefly proclaim God’s love for us, not our love for God. We don’t just give thanks for the opportunity to reflect with Jesus in his final moments but we praise a God who dies to be with us in all our moments, a God who knows the sting of a friend’s betrayal, and we could add…the depth of a widow’s loneliness, the fear of a refugee’s lifestyle, the despair of a cancer patient’s days, and the loss of a parent’s only child. In each and every situation where it seems we walk painfully alone, God is, in fact, there. Nothing is off-limits for this God, and the farther we stray, the more earnestly seek the ways of death, the more determined he is to walk right there with us.

And, as we learn this week, he walks much farther still…on the cross, going the length of where our sin would eventually take us.

So, here’s to a dose of reality, here’s to music and drumbeats and palms to give the drama a little more impact. And here’s to a God who decides to be real with us, taking the form of a slave.

Here he comes! Get those palms ready! Shout “Hosanna! God save us!” Watch his steps. Here he comes. To walk with you. To walk for you. To walk…with love.


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

"A Land of Holy Questions" - at Gethsemane: "Are You Asleep? Could You not Watch One Hour?" Mark 14:32-42

And there they sleep. Can we blame them? At some point the human body has to give in. It has already been an intense week for them, as Passover usually tended to be, anyway, with all of its running here and there making preparations, visiting relations. But this particular Passover had taken it up a notch or two. They had followed Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem, finding the donkey for his strange parade. They had stood by at the temple as the conflict surrounding him grew. They had no doubt dealt with the rumors that must have been circulating about the anger Jesus was stirring up among the religious leaders. The conversation in the Upper Room the night before had been particularly heavy, requiring constant thought and attention, and there was the constant worry that someone in their intimate circle would break ranks and deny him or, worse, turn him in. All in all, there was probably not much sleep to be had that week. Lots to be considered, contemplated, but eventually the body and the mind give in.

I know that my body eventually gives in. I tell people that with a house containing an infant and a two-year-old, I have a completely different relationship with sleep than I did just a few years ago. I can get up and respond to a whimper or a cry, mix a bottle with one eye still shut, but eventually some voice inside me says, “Put your pillow over your head and drown it out.” And I’m strangely proud to say that I’ve learned to sleep with one pillow under my head and one pillow over it. It sounds unfair, but I guess I’m just resigned sometimes to letting Melinda can deal with the middle-of-the-night issue alone.

I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t really point a finger at the disciples. The going has gotten tough, but the disciples just aren’t going. Even Jesus’ closest three, Peter, James and John—the same three he had chosen to climb the mountain for the Transfiguration, the three who had been there when he had raised Jairus’ daughter, the three who had been given the special briefing about his upcoming suffering—even they have either had enough or do not realize just how serious things are and have chosen to pull the pillow over their heads. Furthermore, Mark tells us they press the snooze button not once, but three times, as if to underline their utter inability to stay awake. “Are you asleep?!” Jesus asks, in frantic disbelief, “Could you not stay awake—could you not watch—one hour?”

And for what are they watching? In the parable Jesus had told the day before about the necessity for watchfulness, the doorkeeper had been told to watch vigilantly, for he would never know when the master would return. It was a reminder that the end of things was to come soon and that falling asleep, letting the mind drift to other subjects and the hands to idleness was not a wise use of time. The Lord could arrive at any minute and usher his kingdom in fully. Had they so soon forgotten that lesson? Had the whirlwind events from the week been so bewildering that it was still better just to pull the pillow back over the head?

Or might Jesus have told them to watch for the betrayer, who would certainly be followed by the guards come to arrest him? The words of Jesus’ anguished prayer, echoing the psalms of question and lament, certainly seem to suggest that Judas’ deed was on his mind. Maybe Peter and James and John had been brought like a lookout for danger, highlighting how this is a conflict of wills within Jesus’ own soul: might Jesus, at the last minute, be tipped off to Judas’ approach by watchful disciples so that he may flee?

Perhaps he just needed their ministry of presence. So deeply agitated and worried about what was to come, he needed them as friends, as people who could help him bear his torment a little easier just by being there? Disappointed, let down, he asks, “Are you asleep? as if to say, “How could you do this? Was staying awake too difficult a task?

Although I’d always envisioned this dialogue taking place in a serene garden, a place designed for quiet contemplation, in reality we learn it is a place of work, monotonous toiling and turning. Yet, to a large degree, the proximity of a large oil press seems actually to make sense, helps paint and even better picture: the heavy weight of God’s will imposed upon him, the grinding of this cold, hard reality squeezing in on him. One nineteenth-century theologian actually compared the kingdom of God to a giant wheel that Jesus set in rolling motion by his preaching and healing, but that eventually got out of control and crushed Jesus, unable to get out of its way fast enough.

Jesus prays at an oil press for the stone to stop turning, for the cup to pass, for the kingdom to continue rolling without any suffering—and asks you and I to have the common decency to stay awake with him. Jesus requests that we keep him company, that we keep each other company, that we keep the community of the baptized as our primary company.

He bids us to be on the lookout for temptation, to keep our eyes peeled for those things that do harm to God’s people, to be vigilant but vulnerable in the midst of turmoil.

He asks us stay alert for the ways God is calling us to serve, to keep the team or committee meeting on task, to respond to his call at a moment’s notice.

And yet there we sleep. In prayer, our minds drift so easily into daydreaming—at least mine does. In the grind of ministry, we let the pointless details derail and destroy us. We get burned out, stressed out, we tune ourselves out, tired and frustrated to the tasks of faith at hand. We prize the feeling of community, but we stop attending worship, we stop serving. We want our relationships to be whole and sound, but devote little energy at real acts of forgiveness and reconciliation. And the church, as a whole, sleeps through its share of opportunities of being Christ’s willing disciples in mission and outreach. In ways large and small, when it comes to being Christ’s willing disciples in each and every tough situation we look for the opportunity to pull that pillow over our heads time and time again. But can we blame ourselves? Absolutely.

At the oil press we have named Gethsemane, we see the essential tension that embattles the life of every believer: that conflict between the spirit and the flesh, the will that is in bondage to sin and the desire to be better. And, at the oil press we have named Gethsemane, we also see the grace from an incredibly patient God claim once again even our sleepy heads for his kingdom. Even after three instances of falling asleep on the watch, after three times wondering, “Are you asleep?” Jesus still asks us to accompany him. “Get up,” he says, “let us be going.” Once more being beckoned—being called from our slumber, our slackness, our sin we are invited to continue with him—invited to be with the man who has striven hard in the night with his Father, and now takes up the cup of suffering to be crushed hard for us against the cross and usher the kingdom in fully.

“Get up,” he says, “And let us be going.”


Thanks be to God!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

Third Sunday in Lent, Year B - March 15, 2009 (1 Corinthians 1:18-24)

The hymn we just sang as the hymn of the day, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” was written by a young Englishman by the name of John Bowring who eventually, toward the end of his life, became Governor of Hong Kong. As the story goes, Bowring was moved to write the words to the hymn upon seeing the bronze cross that sits atop the ruins of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Macau, China, when he was just 33. The Cathedral of St. Paul in the Portuguese territory of Macau, once the largest church in all of Asia, was damaged by a typhoon in 1835 and all but the façade and its large bronze cross burned to the ground. The intricate carvings on the stone façade were fashioned by Japanese Christians in exile in Macau, and bones of other Japanese martyrs have been discovered in the crypt. One of the remaining uppermost carvings depicts Christ’s conquest of death. Never to be reconstructed, thanks to a decline in the Christian population due to the demise of colonialism, this façade now looms over the town of Macau, a mere shell of the glory and grandeur it once possessed. With that back story in mind, one can perhaps better appreciate Bowring’s opening lines:

“In the cross of Christ I glory, tow’ring o’er the wrecks of time.
All the light of sacred story gathers round its head sublime.”

But, before we get too carried away, we must remember that people have not always gloried in the cross of Christ, nor have folks recognized that all sacred story gathers round its head, sublime, or otherwise. In fact, Paul tells his congregation in Corinth that the message of the cross is foolishness for those who don’t believe or understand it, like local pagan Gentiles and Jews. The Greek word for “foolishness” is where we get the word “moron.” In the eyes of non-believers, Paul says, only a moron would allow himself to be identified with Jesus’ crucifixion, and who would want to be associated with a moron God? For a world that has learned almost from its birth to measure strength in terms of the ability to inflict violence and injury, to assess intelligence in terms of the ability to outsmart the opponent, to award success to the brilliant and the beautiful, Jesus’ death on the cross makes absolutely no sense at all. And if God’s ways have their culmination around this event, much like a bronze cross adorns the pinnacle of a grand cathedral, then God himself runs the risk of making no sense at all. “Will the wise debater please stand up and take the mike?” Paul jokingly picks a fight. How about the one with all the fancy credentials behind your name…B.A. B.S., M.Div., why don’t you give this a whirl? Can any of you smartypants make heads or tails of this?” “I don’t think so,” Paul answers his own rhetorical question, because using human wisdom as the standard, God’s going to just look moronic.

Yet, even in that, God is wiser. And God, even at his weakest, at God’s sorriest, at the point of God’s most stinging defeat is still somehow capable of victory.

Paul is very direct with his style and language here, right off the bat, because, surprisingly, the Corinthians had begun to forget this plain fact. They shouldn’t have, given that, as Paul points out, none of them had gotten into the family of God with their smarts or their looks or their powerful connections. Yet they were apparently beginning to be enamored with things other than the gospel—things like social status and economic privilege and intellectual pedigree—and it was even creeping into the way they related to each other. Paul points out that if they weren’t careful, the Corinthians would run the risk of contradicting their own message of the cross. That is, allowing these external measurements of wisdom and wealth and status to creep in and infect their community and how they related to one another would necessarily infect their message, their proclamation about the Jesus. It’s not just that division and conflict would set in, but that they would begin to proclaim human wisdom and human power as the gospel, and that would be far inferior to God’s wisdom and power made known in the cross. What made that wisdom and power so life-saving, so world transforming was that it was built on weakness.

I always hesitate to make a reference to a movie for a sermon illustration because these days there are fewer and fewer movies that everyone has seen, but there is a clip from the 2006 film “We Are Marshall” which has stuck so clearly in my head that I can’t help but share it. The movie “We Are Marshall” tells the true story of the athletic department of and the community around Marshall University following the horrific plane crash in November of 1970 that all but wiped out the football team, the coaching staff and key alumni.

The plot centers on the university’s reluctant decision to rebuild the team from nothing and the obstacles they face in a struggling town whose main pride is linked to the fortunes of the football team. When they win, times are great. When they lose, people grow restless and depressed. From the start, the new coach brought in for the task, Jack Lengyel, played in the movie by Matthew McConaughey, faces an uphill climb in his attempt to form a team with no scholarship players. His most formidable criticism, however, comes from his own assistant coach, Red Dawson, played by Matthew Fox, who is embarrassed and mortified at the weekly trouncings the new Marshall team is taking. Red, who was not on the plane that went down, is convinced that continuing to play, even though they are by far the weakest team in the conference and therefore completely unable to win—much less score on a regular basis—is a desecration of the dead players’ memories and of the former head coach’s philosophy, which was “winning is everything.”

At the turning point in the movie, Coach Red has abandoned the team, humiliated by the team’s loss and convinced that Coach Lengyel is doing the wrong thing by continuing to field the team. One night, Coach Lengyel tracks down Red on campus to talk him back into returning. In a moving scene, Coach Lengyel concurs that for sports teams, winning is important, if not primary. But in the circumstances of Marshall’s situation, he explains, he has realized that winning looks altogether different. Rather than defining winning by the tally on the scoreboard at the end of the game, Coach Lengyel suggests that their team wins just by stepping onto the field, in a way, by acknowledging their weakness. For their situation, embracing the team’s obvious weakness will be victory, in and of itself.

The setting for this conversation between the coaches is what makes the scene totally effective: they are sitting together in what appears to be the university chapel. And, as their talk draws to a close and Coach Lengyel has said all he can about redefining the concept of winning and he gets up to leave Coach Red in prayer, the camera pans out over their shoulder to focus on the wall behind the altar where there hangs, plain as can be, a cross.

I’ve been meaning to look up to see if that cinematographer was Lutheran, because the message of grace is so blatantly clear. Winning does look different now. Not necessarily in football…but in a life lived by the message of the cross. When we take to heart the message that victory is won when Jesus fully embraces his weakness—our human weakness—and dies on the cross, then all our attempts to appear powerful or clever or connected really fall flat. “Where is the debater of this age? Where is the one who is wise? Could someone take the microphone and give it a go?” Paul’s old questions ring out, but we know the answer.

My sense is that the world still hasn’t quite made sense of the cross, present preacher included. It’s not like two thousand years later we’ve suddenly realized what the Corinthians hadn’t. We try to talk down the importance of the message of the cross, thinking there surely might be other reasons we should hang out together: it’s a great place to network, it’s a social club; it’s entertainment. We clutter the route behind Jesus’ footsteps with all kinds of gimmicks and programs that we think will help the community of Jesus win in the surrounding culture but in the end which do little but hide the fact that we all stand in need of this grace. We set up all kinds of ways to impress each other, and, we hope, in the process, God. We forget that because God won victory in handing over his Son to weakness and brokenness, the way of that victory involves simply stepping on the field of life, in all our human weakness, and letting the power of the resurrection have its way there, too. Most of all, we neglect to consider our own calls, that no matter who we think we are, we all started—perhaps even kicking and screaming like I’ve heard I did—in the same wet marble basin, with the same words, “you’ve been marked with this cross of Christ…forever.”

In the end, that will be the cross that towers over the wrecks of time, gathering the light of sacred story. Not a bronze cross that adorns a fallen cathedral, no matter how shiny…not even a bigger wooden cross that towers over the end of Monument Avenue, but the cross that marks the lives of the people who have been chosen purely for their losing status. The people who broadcast, primarily through their own weakness and lack of wisdom, that God has won. It is an odd way of winning, perhaps. It has been called foolish before. But God is victorious, indeed.


Thanks be to God!


The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.