When the World Blurs Your Vision

Mark 6:14-29

Lent 4

March 18, 2012

William G. Carter

But when Herod heard of (the work of Jesus), he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

            My third grade Bible had a picture of this scene. I don’t think the Christian Education committee in my church looked at it very closely before they gave it to me. In those days, we had to memorize three psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes because they would give us a Bible. Imagine my surprise, at nine years of age, to take it home and discover an old painted picture of John the Baptist’s head on a platter.

            Those were the days before cable TV and instantaneous violence, but we were never shielded from the gross and the grotesque. The evening news regularly reported deaths in Viet Nam, murders in the Bronx, and the occasional random atrocity. It was very clear as a nine year old that I lived in a dangerous world. Bad things happened. People hurt one another. My parents were very careful to guard me from hearing a lot of the specifics, but danger always lurked out in the shadows. And my Bible had a picture of John the Baptist’s head.

            All the characters in the scene were there. Herod Antipas, the regional king, looked shaken. The lady with the scary eyebrows was Herodias, his scheming wife. She sneered triumphantly. Her daughter, dressed in some kind of gauzy negligee, had a strange look on her face as if to ask, “Oh no, what did I do?” All around them were party guests, some of them men grabbing women, others looking shocked, with a few looking like they were ill from all the merry-making. It’s a really awful story – and there it was, in a collection of full-color Bible scenes, right between the sending of the disciples and the feeding of the five thousand.

            You have to wonder why Mark includes the story. He tells it as a bit of flashback. Back in chapter one, he says Jesus started preaching after John got arrested by Herod Antipas (1:14). Now, some five chapters later, he talks about the reason behind that arrest and its eventual outcome. He didn’t need to include this gruesome tale. Or maybe he did. We will have to decide.

            What’s curious is that Jesus doesn’t appear in the story at all. Mark’s Gospel is all about Jesus, the things he did, the words he spoke, the evil he confronted. Suddenly there is this lurid tale from the fortress high above the east shore of the Dead Sea. Like a lot of the outrageous tales that came out of castles, everybody heard it. The famed historian Josephus wrote his own account. Mark wants his own church to hear it, some thirty five years after the fact.

            By all accounts, Herod Antipas was a nasty man. The family name was Herod. His father was Herod the Great, the same monarch who got unhinged when the wise men came looking for the new king Jesus. Clearly the family had its issues. Let me see if I can quickly explain some of the family history.

·         Herod the Great was a practicing Jew. He married a woman named Doris. They had a son named Antipater. When the boy was three years old, Herod sent away Doris and the boy, and married another woman. Later on, Herod murdered that son. .

·         Herod the Great and his second wife had a son named Aristobulus. Before Herod the Great killed him, he had a daughter named Herodias. She’s the villainess of our story.

·         Then Herod the Great got rid of his second wife and married a third. She gave them a son called Philip, Herod Philip. Herod Philip married Herodias, the daughter of his half-brother, which would make her his niece. Together Philip and Herodias had a daughter named Salome, who was the dancer in our story.

·         After this, Herod the Great took a fourth wife, and she produced two sons: Archelaus and Antipas. Antipas is the Herod in our story.

·         Meanwhile Philip had moved to Rome, where he lived in luxury. Antipas went to visit him. He seduced his half-brother’s wife Herodias, and persuaded her to leave her husband and come back with him, where they could be happy forever ruling over part of Galilee from his desert fortresses.

            Are you following all of that? Herod Antipas married Herodias. She was the daughter of his half-brother Aristobulus, and therefore his niece. She was the wife of his half-brother Philip, and therefore his sister-in-law. I think it’s safe to say the family had some issues.

            While all of this was going on, there was this preacher in the desert, John the Baptist. He was a fierce Jew. We know him, of course, because of his big sermon that based on the 40th chapter of Isaiah. that sermon said, "The Messiah is coming. Get ready. Straighten the path of God!"

But apparently John had another sermon too. That sermon was based on Leviticus 18, verse 6. How do I know that? Because of what it says: “None of you shall approach anyone near of kin to uncover nakedness: thus says the Lord.”

John the Baptist started aiming that sermon at the castle of Herod Antipas. And he was so loud and so direct, that Herod’s wife Herodias heard it too.

Now, I don’t know a lot about ancient politics, especially with despotic kings and queens, but I wonder why they would care about some crazy, wild-eyed preacher out among the sand dunes and the scorpions. Why bother with John the Baptist and his critique of your moral behavior? Who cares what the preachers say? These days you can run for president after you’ve dumped a couple of wives and nobody is going to say much about it. The kings and queens of the world usually live by their own rules, often improvising as they go along.

You know, that is the way of the world . . .

            But here’s the thing: even though he arrested John the Baptist, Herod Antipas found himself strangely drawn to John’s preaching. There was something about it, something that signaled John got his message from somewhere outside of the whirlwind of Herod’s family. For this, of course, Herodias hated John. She wanted him done. But Mark says Herod protected him. Herod was afraid of him. Herod had sent men to arrest John, to put him down in the lowest dungeon, but then, in the most curious of details, the king liked to listen to John’s blistering preaching.

            Just picture him, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, as his captive preacher thundered on. John would crank it up, and quote the book of Leviticus. “The Lord says you shall not do as they do in the pagan lands. You shall not defile yourself as other nations defile themselves. You shall be holy, as the Lord your God is holy. You shall keep my laws and ordinances.”

According to the story, Herod heard all this. He was a little confused, but he heard all of this. It was a different message than what all the suck-ups in his court kept telling him. It was a very different script than that of his father or his brothers. He had a beautiful wife that he stole fair and square from one of those brothers . . . but now, he hears another voice, a Holy Voice. It entices him, it confronts him. He can’t quite get that Voice out of his head.

In fact, next Saturday night, he has some of the regional leaders coming in for a party. He will impress them with his authority, with his opulence, with his impressive castle high above the sea. They will have a fine meal, hurl back some intoxicating drink. And then maybe, when everybody is feeling pretty loose, he can introduce them to the preacher locked up in his basement.

First, of course, there will be a bit of entertainment. Salome will come and dance. She’s so very good, so supple, so sensuous. She looks like her mother, only years younger. With that, he catches himself daydreaming. “I wonder what she would be like. I wonder if she would be as willing as her mother once was…”

OK, snap out of it. Especially you lecherous old courtiers.

The question that I asked before is the question that we have to ask: why does the Gospel of Mark tell this story? It’s not just because it’s a flashback. It’s not because Mark wants to kill a little time. No, it’s because he wants to remind us of what the world is like.

Jesus never appears in this story. I think that is significant. This is a story of a world without Jesus. As a result, this is what the world is like when it insulates itself from God, when it acts as if the powerful and the conniving can do whatever they want. This is what happens when people lunge after their own appetites and will do anything to satisfy the ravenous beast within them. This is what happens when people live by revenge, when those who are guilty would eliminate the nagging voice of truth. This is what happens when people swear by their own authority, when they are incapable of self-criticism. This is what happens when people refuse to live by forgiveness, when they insist their way is the only way.

Adultery. Incest. Lust. Fear. Revenge. Peer pressure. Destruction. This is a story of a world without Jesus. This is a story of a world that would kill Jesus. This is the story of a world that doesn’t know what to do with a Voice greater than its own.

            Listen, I don’t want to be too moralistic about this, even in Lent, but I think we know what kind of world this is. It is a world that says, “You can go it alone. You can do whatever you want. You can reach for whatever you want to reach for. You can forget about God, Jesus, and John the Baptist, and make it up as you go along.” And if too much of that world gets into our souls, we can find ourselves as empty and ravenous as Herod and Herodias.

            Am I telling you anything you do not know? No. Over the years, in this congregation, I’ve seen it all.

·         One man lost his marriage because he started chatting to a pretty young thing online. Next thing you know, he had to meet her.

·         Somebody else got married to the man of her dreams, only to discover he was blowing thousands of dollars on the slot machines of a glittering casino. He refused to change and told her to leave.

·         A working mother cleaned the closet of her husband’s home office, and I won’t tell you what kind of videos she found.

·         There are people who will rearrange their entire lives to hide an addiction.

·         There are others who create a crisis because they are so conditioned by life that they cannot live without a crisis; it’s the only way they feel alive.

·         There are people who can be so unforgiving that they must demand somebody’s head on a platter.

·         There are others who simply refuse to let anything ever be settled in peace.

            What every one of these stories has in common is that somebody has allowed the world to blur all vision. People can become a world unto themselves, insulated, afraid of the honesty, fearful of any Voice beyond themselves. This is a world without the searing truth of Jesus Christ.

            Yet it is also the world where Christ is risen, when Christ is on the move. Sad King Herod hears about the power of Jesus, and the work he is doing. And do you remember what he says? He says, “John must be raised from the dead.” The same Voice that John spoke is still speaking in Jesus Christ. He is saying you don’t have to live unto yourself, you don’t have get yourself stuck as a world unto yourself. You can live for God.

Not long ago, one of you said something very kind to me. I will never forget it. “Sometimes when you preach,” you said, “you lose your politeness.” I said “What? Oh, I’m terribly sorry…” 

“No,” you said, “that’s a good thing. Church is not a social club. Church is the community of faith where we tell the truth about ourselves – and the greater truth about God.”

            I think that’s really the heart of it. Christian faith invites us to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help us God. And when we do ‘fess up to the truth, we can decide to move outside our insulated little fortresses and do something holy in the world. Just like Jesus. Just like God.

© William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Living Among the Tombs

Mark 5:1-20

Lent 3 

March 11, 2012

William G. Carter

And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

            I want to begin with a story, a true story from last November. As my older daughter will tell you, I like to visit her at college once a semester or so. It’s some time for the two of us to connect and catch up. Her university is about four and a half hours away, in Indiana, Pennsylvania. I will drive out there, meet her after classes will finished. We will make a Walmart run to fill up a cart with microwave popcorn, Ramen noodles, and shampoo. Then we go somewhere interesting for dinner. After that, I say, “Do you have your bathing suit?” She pulls it out her bag, and we go over to the Hampton Inn and jump in the hot tub. That’s what we did on my visit last fall.

            The hot tub was warm, we were chatty. As we got in, a young man with a beard got out. He turned away and walked over to the shallow end of the pool and jumped in. Katie and I were talking. When the hot tub got a little too warm, we got out and jumped in the swimming pool. The young man with the beard got out, walked back to the hot tub, jumped in, and turned his back to us. We looked at one another, shrugged, kept talking.

            The pool was refreshing, but we wanted to get back in the hot tub. As we did, the man with the beard immediately got out, went back to the far end of the swimming pool, jumped in and turned his back to us. It was getting a little strange, and both of us noticed it. I didn’t say anything. Katie was confessing to a fraternity party that she had survived, and I wasn’t going to interrupt.

            But the routine happened a few more times. We got out of the hot tub and jumped into the pool again, the bearded man got out of the pool and returned the hot tub, always turning away from us. It was odd. Soon we left to change into street clothes, and I took her back to her dorm room. That was that.

            Two weeks later, she called me. “Did you see the news today?” Well, sure. The big story was that the FBI had captured a crazy man who had fired an AK-47 at the White House. Katie said, “Did you see where they arrested him?” No, I had not.

            She said, “They arrested him at the Hampton Inn in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He had stayed there two weeks ago.” I quickly looked online. Sure enough, same guy. Same young, shaggy bearded guy who kept turning his back on us and avoiding the same pool water.

The officials said he had a history of mental illness and had arrest records for drugs, domestic violence, and attacking a police officer. Just 21, he had left his family in Idaho and told a girlfriend he was on a secret mission from God. He bought an automatic rifle, drove to Washington D.C. by way of western Pennsylvania, took his shots, and then abandoned the car and rifle which were both registered in his name. Then he returned to the same Hampton Inn to hide out.

            Say what you want about him. I say he was out of his right mind. Somehow he had crossed the dotted line from sanity to madness.

            He sounds a lot like the man that Jesus encountered in a graveyard in the fifth chapter of Mark.  In one of the most gruesome descriptions in the New Testament, Mark tells of a man who was crazy as hell.  Mark means that in the fullest possible sense – the man was crazy, and hell had gotten into him.

            They tried to put him in a straight-jacket, but he ripped out of that. If anybody got close enough to put him in shackles and chains, he broke out of them. In daylight, he screamed at anyone who approached him. After dark, frightened children heard him howling at the moon. They tried to keep him out of sight and earshot, but nobody ever knew when he would suddenly appear. And when nobody was around, he spent his time picking up stones and pounding his body. He was crazy as hell.

Mark says he lived among the tombs. His address was 666 Death and Destruction Boulevard.

            There’s no telling how he got that way. Some of the scholars draw attention to his name. To gain a handle on the man, Jesus asked, “What is your name?” He said, “My name is Roman Army. There are a lot of voices yelling in my head.” A legion of soldiers was 5,120 soldiers. Here is a man living on the east shore of the sea of Galilee. It was quite possible the stress of living in an occupied territory, with soldiers rampaging your home and pillaging your family, that might have been enough stress to drive him out of the house and to the tombs.

            It’s a reminder that we live in a world where terrible things happen. We can call God the King, but God’s kingdom is a disputed sovereignty.

I remember a movie that I saw as a young adult. It was called “The Fisher King,” and gave me nightmares for a week. Jeff Bridges plays a cynical talk radio host named Jack, kind of like Rush Limbaugh without a conscience. Robin Williams plays a literature professor named Parry. One night Jack is mouthing off on radio, and it sets off a deranged murdered who goes into a Manhattan restaurant with a gun and starts firing. In the aftermath, Jack gets fired from his job, declaring all the time that he was not responsible for inciting anybody to murder.

            A couple years later, he’s down and out. Some teenage thugs mistake him for a bum, douse him with gasoline, and try to set him on fire. Jack is saved by a mysterious man who chases away the attackers. It’s Parry, the literature professor, now homeless. He is also a widower. His wife was one of the victims shot and killed in the restaurant while Jack was on the radio, mouthing off that night. Now their stories intersect. Both of them are trapped by the tragedies that nobody deserves. It’s a movie about the bad things that happen and multiply.

            This is the kind of world we inhabit. It hasn’t changed since the Gospel of Mark. Irrational evil breaks out for no apparent reason. It can scare the life out of us. There are people like this demoniac, living among the tombs, bruising themselves when nobody is around. Either they are too fragile to fight off the physical attackers, or they are too vulnerable to defend themselves from the voices inside of their own heads.

            Am I telling you anything you do not know? Of course not. We know what kind of world this is. That’s why we put deadbolts on the doors. That’s why we pay tax money for national defense and local security. That’s why so many people are so damaged, and there is never enough help to go around.

            I was talking to my stepson Josh. He’s finishing up a master’s degree in social work. His interest is drug and alcohol counseling for returning vets. In his last semester, he spends a day at Marworth, three  days at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Wilkes Barre, and Fridays at Tobyhanna army depot. I said, “Tell me about drug and alcohol counseling.” He shakes his head and says, “It’s a growth industry.” We know what kind of world this is.

            And let me say this is the kind of world that Jesus comes into. That’s what Mark wants to tell us. Jesus comes into a world so tangled, so twisted, so tormented. It’s a world where people hide in graveyards and hurt themselves with stones. The people of the nearby village want that man to stay up there. Stay up out of sight. It’s still that way. Keep people like that where we can’t see them. Keep them in the asylum. Keep them in the prisons. Keep them on the streets. We don’t know what to do with them. Keep them away from us.

            Yet when the man sees Jesus, he moves toward him. “Don’t torment me,” says the tormented man. “I know who you are, Jesus, Son of the Most High God.”

“What’s your name?” says the healer. The man says, “My name is Roman Legion, because there are so many of us.” He is possessed yet he senses the power of the healer in front of him. Jesus looked at him and did not say the village crazy man. He saw beneath all the wreckage, and saw a child of God. Torment had seized the man’s soul, but Jesus came with the shalom of God. He ranted and yelled, but Jesus was full of peace. Looking intently, the healer said, “Come out of God’s child, you filthy mess.

The noises inside the maniac began begging to get their own way, “Don’t send us out of the country, we like it here. Send us over to that herd of dirty pigs.” Jesus nods in agreement, raises his hands, and says the words. There was a mighty scream, the beating of bat wings, the squeal of two thousand pigs, the mad rush to the sea, and then a dead calm. Peace. Shalom.

That is our Bible story. And there are four things that we need to say about it.

First, Jesus is all about this kind of work. He is a healer who delivers us from evil. Both before his death and after his resurrection, the God who comes in Jesus Christ is an exorcist. He takes on evil wherever he finds it, particularly the evil that damages the children of God. He sees it honestly for what it is. He confronts it. He chases it away. This is his work. Slow but steady, one person at a time.

Second, this work is costly work. A herd of two thousand swine may not have mattered much to a Jew, but it mattered greatly to their Gentile herders. Real health care is never cheap. It takes a lot to make us well. And it always costs something. Just ask the family with the alcoholic teenager; it’s not the kid who is sick, it’s often the whole family, the whole system, the whole addictive neighborhood that hooks us. It’s going to take a lot of effort to pull out the weeds and not let them grow back.

Third, healing is threatening to many, many people. They hope they never get ill like that man up in the tombs. But the thing that really unhinges them is when the ill person is made well. That’s threatening. Did you notice the response in our story? The villagers don’t want Jesus to stick around after the exorcism. They want him to go. They don’t want to deal with any more healings or any more exorcisms. They want the world to stay as scary as it is, because at least that’s predictable. The power of Jesus is too disruptive. His love is too fierce. He is going to change their world, and they do not want that.

Fourth, those who are healed will not stay silent. They have a story to tell and they will tell it. Jesus says something kind of funny to the man up among the tombs. After he is healed, the man wants to travel with Jesus, but the Lord says, “No, I don’t want you traveling with me.” Then he says to the man, “Go home and tell your friends what God has done for you.” Wait a second – go home and tell your friends? Tell your friends? Does this man have any friends? He’s been living up among the tombs. “Go home and tell your friends”?

Well, he must have had some friends. Or he must have made them pretty quickly. But he did not keep anything quiet. “I found somebody who could make me well. I found somebody who is not afraid of the noises in my head. I found somebody who helped me work through my issues. I found somebody who came into my dark night and stayed until the brand new day.”

            And when people come out to see what is going on, it is just like Mark’s description of Easter morning. They go among the graveyard. They see a man clothed with a new garment. He is seated and speaking is his right mind. This is the very picture of Resurrection Power. It restores and it alarms. The power that we see in Jesus Christ signals that nothing is going to stay the same ever again.

            There is a moment in that movie I mentioned, “The Fisher King.” I don’t know if you ever saw that movie, which is now many years old. A lot of painful things happen in Jack and Parry’s lives. But one day it dawns on Jack that, for all the guilt he carries, he will never be free until he helps Parry lift the pain that holds him down. But what to do?  Parry is hospitalized, nearly catatonic after being beaten by the same two thugs who had attacked Jack. All these stories intersect.

            But Jack is becoming a changed man. He’s cleaned up his life, gotten a job, told his girlfriend that it’s time for the two of them to settle down together. And in an insane moment of risk, he decides to do something for Parry. His friend has convinced himself that the Holy Grail, the cup of Jesus Christ from the Last Supper, is hidden in a small castle turret on the Upper East Side. So Jack climbs up the turret, breaks into an apartment, and get a small trophy on a bookshelf. It’s not the real thing, of course, but it’s enough to bring Parry out of his frozen state. And for the first time he says, “I miss my wife.” “I miss my wife.” He names the demon. Finally he has authority over it.

            Next day, a friend stops by the mental hospital to visit him. Parry is not in his bed. No, he’s out in the gathering room with Jack. They are leading all the patients in a song: “I like New York in June, how about you? I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?” And for the first time, it’s clear: they are free. Free from all their haunted dreams. Free from all the damage of the world.

Leading a song in the lounge of a mental ward, they were completely in their right minds. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Did you have something happen to you, something so healthy and good that you couldn’t keep quiet?

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

At Risk of One's Life

Mark 8:31-38

Lent 2

March 4, 2012

William G. Carter

Jesus called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

  

The theme for this season of Lent is “Deliver us from evil.” As you will remember, it is a line from the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus teaches us to pray for God to protect us, to move us out of reach from all the forces in the world that threaten to do us in. There is evil in the world. People hurt one another. People hurt themselves.

What’s more, there are irrational powers that are poised against us. In the first century, the people of Jesus’ time were quick to call them demons. If you had a migraine, the neighbors said a demon attacked you. A crippled spine or a paralyzed limb was evidence of an oppressive spirit. If a person struggled with mental illness, the common diagnosis was that an evil presence invaded them. If a cloud of sadness descended and would not leave, or if manic energy overwhelmed you, everybody believed something had gotten into you.

This was the New Testament way of saying there is evil in the world. If God is ruling in power and might from heaven, it often seemed as if there was an opposition force invading from hell. The Jews were very careful to declare that there is one God, all loving and all powerful. They were very clear that God alone is God, and that God is just and good. At the same time, they had to make sense out of the daily reality that life gets twisted into destruction. How else can you make sense of the headlines, except to say there is some systemi

As we have heard from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus began a ministry of confronting evil. He delivered people from evil. On the very first day of his work, he went into a synagogue to teach the scriptures – and evil was waiting to take him on. It was seductive – a member of the congregation stood to question him, to disturb him, to attack him. And whatever it was that had gotten into the man said, “I know who you are! You are the Holy One of God.” Evil Personified could see Jesus very clearly. With that, the question is posed: “Jesus, have you come out to destroy us?” Jesus muzzles the nasty spirit and restores the man.

The confrontation began in a synagogue. It continues in a community. Right after Jesus leaves the synagogue, the whole town of Capernaum start bringing him all of their wounded, all of their afflicted, all of their damaged. And one at a time, he takes them by the hand, or he looks them in the eye, or he lifts them out of the dust. This is his work – to restore people from the ravages of evil. To release them from the oppressions that lay heavy upon their lives.  

His work begins in the synagogue. It continues in the community. It spreads through the surrounding region. And now, as we heard, even one of his own disciples now attacks him. It is the moment when Simon Peter can see Jesus for who he is. He is the Christ, the Messiah, the Strong Son of God. The whole book has been moving to this moment. Who do people say that I am? “You are the Christ, the Messiah of God.”

But no sooner does he say it, no sooner does he begin to explain it, when Simon Peter pulls him aside and starts yelling at him. He rebukes them – that is, he reprimands him and says, “You are talking nonsense. You are not going to die. The Messiah does not die. Jesus, stop talking this crazy talk!”

And Jesus glares at him and says, “Shut up, you Satan!”

That has always sounded harsh to me. He looks at the very first disciple that he selected in the Gospel of Mark and calls him a devil. He points the muzzling finger at the first person in his inner circle to get it right. Up to this point, the twelve disciples have been bumbling along. They are like third-rate actors who miss all the cues and mess up all their lines. Peter finally gets something right; and not just something, he gets the big thing right. He sees that Jesus, his powerful friend Jesus, is really the Messiah.

And Jesus thunders at him, “Stop, you Devil. Be quiet. Get in step behind me.” That’s harsh.

Last Saturday, when Buz Myers was here, he helped us understand some of this. He pointed out that, for hundreds of years, the Jewish hope was for a Messiah, for a Chosen One who would save the people. And the defining characteristic of a Messiah is that he would not die. He would never die.

This is what the Jews of that day believed, ever since they heard God’s promise to David, the greatest of their kings. The Messiah will come from the house of David. The house of David will be an everlasting house. It will not die. Even when the Babylonians invaded in 587 BC, and killed all of David’s royal descendants, they held firm that one day, sometime in the future, God would send a Messiah to make everything right. When the Messiah comes, the Messiah would not die!

Simon Peter says, “You are the Messiah, Jesus. You are the Chosen One.” And Jesus says, “I am going to die.” That’s when they begin their little shouting match. And that’s when Jesus looks at Simon Peter, and says, “Get behind me, Satan.”

It seems so harsh. Yet what is this, that stirs Jesus to say this? What is it, that makes him look right at a trusted friend and denounce his word as evil? It seems to be rooted in the very next word Jesus speaks, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” There is God’s way, and there is the human way. Simon Peter is merely being himself, while Jesus is pursuing the mind of God.

Now what do I mean by this? Simply this: there is no greater human need that self-preservation. I got into the car on Friday morning to drive a hundred miles, and somebody said to me, “Take care of yourself.” No problem. I am an expert at taking care of myself. I am a human being. I excel at taking care of me.

That does not mean I am very good at it. I eat too many potato chips. The doctor said, “Stay away from peanuts,” and I sneak a handful of peanuts when my wife is not looking. And if she catches me, I blame her for bringing peanuts into our house. I know how to take care of myself, even if I am not in tip-top shape.

I am really good at taking care of myself. When there are chores to do, and I don’t want to do them, suddenly my ears stop working when somebody calls me to the chores. When there are obligations to meet, and I would rather do something else, I skip the obligations and do whatever I want. When there is something challenging before me, something that I really need to do, I will take the shortcut, or I will look for the detour, or I will rehearse the apology so I can justify to anybody who will listen why I did what I did, or why I did not do what I did not want to do.

Oh, believe me, I really know how to take care of myself. Left to my own ways, to my most natural inclinations, I will do whatever I can to take care of myself. Because I live with the presumption that my life is all about me. These are “the human things” that Simon Peter sets his mind upon. This is what he expects of Jesus - - that Jesus will take care of himself. This is what every human being will do, when left to one’s most natural inclinations.

You hear it, I think, when people makes some money, find themselves with some spare time. What are you going to do? The answer is usually, “Whatever I want.” Going to get myself an easy life, do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. That’s called “taking care of yourself.”

You hear it when the student graduates from school. Sleep to noon, nobody is going to tell me what to do or when to get up. It’s about me, and my needs, and my comforts, and taking care of me. Simon Peter says, “Jesus, you are the Messiah. Watch out for yourself. Be good to yourself. Take care of yourself. Live forever. Take a cruise to the islands.”

Jesus says, “Shut up, Satan. You are thinking about human inclinations, and not the will of God.” And this is the will of God: to confront every form of evil. The will of God is to make people well. To offer love to those who have no love. To share a meal with the person who has no food. To embrace the teenager that the world excludes. To untangle the woman who is twisted by fear. To lift up the man that the world puts down.

The will of God is to push us beyond every natural inclination for self-preservation, so that we can make a constructive difference in a tormented world. God has a mission to the world in sending Jesus the Messiah. He is coming to heal people who don’t realize how sick they are. He is coming to raise up from the dead those who have lost any joy in living. He is coming with surgical skill to remove the cancer of despair from people who are worried sick. He will do whatever it takes, and he is not the least bit inclined to “take care of himself” and play it safe. And if the world hands him a cross, well, that comes with the territory.

For Lent, I chew on this as I offer the prayer, “Deliver us from evil.” Jesus comes to deliver us. The first thing that he delivers us from is our own preoccupation with ourselves. He will not play it safe. He will not chase after his own comfort. He refuses to paddle around in a hot tub of cozy feelings. No, he is on a mission. His life has a purpose. God sends him as Messiah to take in the whole world for repairs.

And lest we think that the task is his alone, he turns to his own church and says, “Follow me. Get behind me and follow me. If you wish to save your neck, you will lose it. But if you would lose yourself for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, you will find yourself saved and delivered.”

This is the mystery of Lent. What do we give up for Lent? We give up ourselves. We stand contrary to our own natural desires, and we join with Christ to make this world a beautiful place, a healed habitation for God and all God’s creatures. We tell the truth in a culture of lies. We announce sin’s forgiveness. We celebrate God’s claim on us with bread and wine. We repair what we can. At all costs, we continue the work of Jesus.

And if somebody hands us a cross and says, “Carry this,” it comes with the territory. 

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Telling the Truth

Psalm 51

Ash Wednesday

February 22, 2012
William G. Carter

Today is the 280^th birthday of George Washington, first president of our country. I don’t remember very much about him, but I do remember a legend about his childhood. His father asked, “George, did you cut down that cherry tree?” Young George replied, “I cannot tell a lie…”

            It was a remarkable thing for a future president to say, even if the story was probably a fabrication. On the last two nights, I watched the PBS biography of President William Jefferson Clinton. I don’t know if he ever declared, “I cannot tell a lie,” but it seems he may have told a few. And as I watch the current electoral scramble of others who are trying to claw their way to the White House, I listen to men who are so self-assured, so self-confident, so much in need to be “right” about everything, and I wonder if anybody in the public eye is capable of telling the truth.

            The ancient scribes attributed Psalm 51 to the greatest President of Israel. Actually he was the king, King David. It does not matter if David wrote the words. It matters that he prayed them. It matters that anybody prays this psalm. It is a confession of sin, an affirmation of brokenness, a one-on-one prayer before the God who knows our secrets.

            King David certainly had his secrets. One day he spotted a pretty lady and he had to have her. It didn’t matter to him that she was married. It didn’t matter to him that he was married. In passion he reached for her, she conceded, she conceived, and David tried to cover up what they had done. Yet God was watching, and God reported the whole sordid business to one of the prophets. The prophet made an appointment with the king and reported how God knew all about the king’s secrets. Caught with blood on his hands and guilt in his heart, David stopped maneuvering his own spin on his deeds.   

            So the words of Psalm 51:

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

            It is hard work to tell the truth. Sometimes people will not tell the truth until they are caught. Other times they will not reveal it even if somebody is hauling them to the penitentiary. Sometimes people allow themselves to become so confused that they don’t know the truth. The human heart is a devious muscle, creating a maze to circle around the things we have done and left undone. It is difficult to counter the fear and the creativity that creates every lie. It may take years for a good therapist to help people untangle all the stories they have created to cover the things they have done or endured. Or it might require a number of confessions, as one layer of deception after another is pulled away.  

Truth telling requires a certain kind of surgery. The surgeon must slice through the protective skin, breach the immune system, and perform an amputation of every pretense. It is costly surgery. It always results in the transplant of the heart. If successful, there is the cleansing of the lips. In the end, truth telling changes us. It makes us different people, with the deepening ability to trust in God.

I spent some time this morning reading the first few paragraphs of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He begins his extraordinary description of Christian faith by talking about knowledge. “We cannot know God unless we know ourselves,” he says. “We cannot fully know ourselves until we know God.”

He’s pointing to something all of us avoid. Without God, we tend to inflate our own importance. As Calvin says, “All of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself.” (Book 1, Chapter 1) We contaminate ourselves by arrogance, and convince ourselves we are better than we really are.

But honesty demands otherwise. If we really know ourselves, if we know our weaknesses as well as our strengths, if we know our fears as well as our affirmations, this truthful knowledge frees us to lean completely on God. If the bones are creaky and energy is wavering, we lean ever more on the God who is stronger than us. If we see with honesty that our lives are too short and that our efforts will never be completed, we look toward the God who will finish what we cannot.  

So the ashes offered this night represent many things. Certainly they are symbols of mortality. As such, they are tokens of loss, recalling the shortness of life and the limits that come from being Somebody else’s creature.

But I am thinking of the ashes as something else: they are the incineration of all unhealthy pride. Try as hard as we want, we cannot flourish without God. We spin a web of illusions. We try to convince ourselves how we are the center of all things. We begin thinking that our opinions are supreme, that our decisions are always justified, that we are able to manufacture our own future and write our own press releases. And God reaches down with fiery fingers and every presumption goes up in smoke. All that’s left are the ashes. If we choose to wear them, they are a sign of how much we really depend on God, and how carefully we should examine ourselves.   

             

            It is healthy to be honest. Eugene Peterson translates the Psalmist’s prayer this way: “Lord, what you’re after is truth from the inside out. Enter me, then; conceive a new, true life. Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean, scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.” (Psalm 51:6-7, The Message)

            You know, that’s something for us to reflect upon. The dirty ashes smeared on us tonight are a holy sign that God is making us clean. I am ready for that. How about you?

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Jesus on Fire

Mark 9:2-9

Day of Transfiguration

February 19, 2012

William G. Carter

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Maybe you weren’t keeping track, but today is exactly between Christmas and Easter. It is halfway, and this is the story that the church tells at the midpoint of that journey. Jesus took his closest friends up a mountain, and suddenly he was transfigured.

Maybe there is some significance in the timing. There are a lot of people who worship here on Christmas, and a lot of people who worship on Easter. Maybe those people are going to miss the importance of this story. The angels sing on Christmas, Jesus the Christ is born.  The child of God has made his home among our homes. The angels return on Easter, and announce that Jesus is risen. He is raised from the dead and returning to the Father. In between, there is this story.

It’s not only a story told between Christmas and Easter, it is told between Epiphany and Good Friday. On Epiphany, we remember the arrival of Gentile wise men to worship the Jewish king; we sing of these “three kings” and learn about their generous gifts. On Good Friday, hardly anybody is around to worship Jesus as he is enthroned upon a cross. He is abandoned by his friends and dismissed Pontius Pilate. In between worship and desolation, there is this story.

We call it the story of transfiguration. We don't know what that is. Transfiguration is an invented word with no predecessor. Certainly all of our words were invented at some point in time, and we don't know where this particular word comes from. The only time it ever appears in the Bible is when Mark, Matthew, or Luke tells this story.

What is a transfiguration? Mark does not say, but he shows it. Jesus shines as bright as a candle in full flame. Christ is full of fire. It’s this visionary moment that has no ready-made meaning. It can't be reduced to a simple, flat message. If that's what you want, you won't get it from this story. There is no practical life lesson on the mountain. And Mark says those who see it are terrified.

Up until now, it is clear that Jesus has great power and authority. We have spent four weeks together on the Gospel of Mark, with more to come. We have heard how Jesus drives out the nasty spirits, heals the headaches, cures the cripples, and cares for the needy. And every time a demon wants to identify him, and say, "We know who you are," Jesus tells it to be quiet. But here, on a wayside stop between his birth and his death, between his ministry and his departure, some of us get to see that there's more to Jesus than we thought.

You and I are included I seeing this vision - - did you notice that? It is a privileged group: Peter, James, and John, along with anybody who hears this story. We are given some inside information. Someone must have told Mark about it, and now he's going to tell us. And this is why he tells us about this fiery moment: because the truth about Jesus is not obvious.

Some folks don't seem to understand this. They want the Christian faith to be completely obvious to everybody, and act as if it's a simple plan of A-B-C to make everything better. Just follow the words on the bumper sticker and they will change your life. Just repeat after the preacher and you, too, can be happy and successful. Some of those people have TV shows on Sunday night television, and they preach success and power and blessing and good, old-fashioned affluence. They point to the good things in life and say, "These are the signs that God loves us."

Yet Jesus himself never talks this way. He has just told the inner circle of his followers, "Pick up your cross and follow me." His words are still in the air as he takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain.

Others would like to believe the Gospel is pure mystery. They worship a cloud of incense without any clarity. Someone once said, "Faith is a leap in the dark," that it's like a holy question mark dangling from the sky and you jump in order to grab it. Maybe you will land and maybe you won't. Well, that is not quite the same thing as faith. It might be speculation, but it's not faith.

So here's what we see on the mountain: that the Jesus who we thought was a human just like us, is still a human being, but he really isn't like us. The countryside medic is also a holy man. The first-century Jewish male is not bound by time, race, or gender. The Galilean servant whose ministry leads him through the dust is really the Holy One through whom the world was created. We thought we comprehended Jesus. We believed him to be a wise teacher, nothing more, and then discovered his secret identity is a bright star burning like the sun. We thought we apprehended him, but he is beyond all of this. That's what we discover on the mountain.

Madeleine L'Engle has this to say about the transfiguration in one of her poems:

Suddenly they saw him the way he was,
The way he really was all the time,
Although they had never seen it before,
The glory which blinds the everyday eye
And so becomes invisible. This is how
He was, radiant, brilliant, carrying joy

Like a flaming sun in his hands.
This is the way he was — is — from the beginning,
And we cannot bear it. So he manned himself,
Came manifest to us; and there on the mountain
They saw him, really saw him, saw his light.
We all know that if we really see him we die.
But isn't that what is required of us?
Then, perhaps, we will see each other, too.[1]

What Madeline’s Transfiguration poem suggests we have a hard time looking at one another for the same reasons we have a hard time seeing Jesus. Looking closely, she says,   requires a kind of death: death to my superior attitudes, death to my agenda, death to all my judgments and prejudices. All of these require a kind of cross-bearing, which is good preparation for Lent.

One of our members says he visited a church full of people with a skin tone different from his. He was surprised to discover that they shopped in the same stores and had the same jobs as the rest of us. “Never realized I was a racist,” he said, “but now I see differently.”

All of us judge others on our own suppositions.  I remember a few years ago at a conference. I'm standing with a bunch of people in a buffet line. There's this one guy, looks like a pretty boy. Tall, thin, tanned, hundred dollar haircut. I took him to be a mountain biker or a professional athlete who turned out well. I was noble. I engaged in the first rule of friendly conversation and asked an open-ended question. "Where are you from?" Right outside of Denver. "What do you do?" I'm a Presbyterian minister.

By now, my eyes are turning green with envy. He's about my age, but he has only one chin. I said, "What's the name of your church?" Columbine United Church.

"Columbine?" And he said, "Two members of my youth group were killed. I was at the high school on the day of the shootings, holding the hands of the wounded, talking with some of the survivors." I was ready to discount him because of his haircut until I discovered that he knew all about carrying the cross.

It's always worth giving somebody a second look. There is more to everybody that we realize, and we learn that if only because there is more to Jesus than we realize. Jesus doesn't fit into our mould; if anything, we are the ones who are being reconstructed in his image. And we can't nail him down and keep him on a cross, anymore than you can keep him safe in a sealed tomb. There is more life at work in him than we realize, more love than we ever thought possible, more power than we can contain. Remember how Madeleine L'Engle puts it?

"This is how He was, radiant, brilliant, carrying joy like a flaming sun in his hands. 
This is the way he was — is — from the beginning . . ."

Last Sunday, we baptized one of God's children. We did it, not because it’s a social nicety, but because we believe there is more holiness going on in the world than anybody usually sees. On the surface, a pretty baby, a precious child. But below that, she is the latest of God’s many masterpieces in the making. We have an obligation to tell her that, to teach her that.

Last week, a friend spoke eloquently at his brother’s funeral. “You can see all the layers of my brother’s life,” he said. “He was a son, a husband, a father, a business man, a friend. That’s how we knew him. And when you scrape each layer away, you see him for what he truly was, at his deepest essence. He was a child of God.”  Somebody taught him how to see.

On the day of Pentecost, Peter preached the good news and got three thousand converts at the 9:00 service. He said, "Looks like we'd better baptize them." And it probably took most of the day. It's amazing what God can do; always more going on than we ever thought.

Not long after that Peter was praying on top of a roof, and the Spirit said, "There's an Italian soldier downstairs who needs the Gospel." He didn't want to do it; after all, the man was an Italian. But the Spirit said, "Get up and go!" So he got up, and preached about Jesus, the living Jesus, and the man believed, and Peter said, "Bring me some water; I'm going to baptize him and his whole household, because if God says yes, who am I to say no?"

Then God pushed Paul and some friends into Europe. They landed in Philippi, down by the river. And there was a woman named Lydia, a very wealthy woman. She already believed in God, even though Paul and his buddies weren't doing all the preaching. And they baptized her whole household, because God is so loving and holy and active, you never quite know what's going to happen.

That's the testimony of the scriptures. If Jesus is who the scriptures say he is, there is no way we can reduce him to a careful little formula. He is enfleshed like us and he is able to know what it means to be a living being. And he is greater than us, stronger, more loving, and therefore he is able to help us in our weakness.

            So here we are today, halfway between the cradle and the cross. We get a brief glimpse of the God with whom we must contend. The carpenter with calluses from working the wood is more than a carpenter. The peasant in the muddy tunic is suddenly so dazzling that we don’t really have the words to describe him. The village healer who opened blind eyes by rubbing mud on them is the very One who burns so brightly that we cannot completely see him.  

            If we thought we could avoid all this God stuff as unnecessary, look again. If we thought we could dismiss Jesus as somebody who only lived a long time ago, take another look. If we thought we had solved all the mysteries of the universe, Jesus appears, to push us beyond everything we knew. This is where faith begins, true faith. Not by tying everything down, but by discovering to our shock and astonishment, that when it comes to God, there is so much more.   

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977) 194.