Under New Management

Galatians 5:22-26

May 21, 2014

William G. Carter 

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

If you are driving down the street, you might notice the sign that says, “Under New Management.” I suppose it is meant to announce a brand new start, a fresh new approach. “Come and visit it us,” the sign outside a restaurant may declare. “We are under new management.”

I don’t know about you, but when I see such a sign, I flinch a little bit: “Under New Management”? I suspect the old management wasn’t working so well. I wonder: will the waiters be better trained this time” Will the chef has stopped dropping cigarette ashes in my omelet? Has somebody told the teenager at the cash register to look up from her iPhone when it’s time to take my credit card?

New management usually takes over for a number of very good reasons. Whoever used to run the place has stepped aside. Someone has determined it is still a viable opportunity. And the new person in charge has made the necessary changes to start over again.

Now, I’m not talking only about a restaurant or a business or any of that. I’m also about our lives. In our scripture passage, Paul is discussing the “new management” that takes over our lives as Christians. There is a shift from being self-directed to Spirit-filled. It is a move from belonging only to ourselves, or belonging to the devil, to belonging to God and all that God loves.

Paul says this is the power of the Gospel. It frees us. Faith comes with liberation. We don’t have to be the person we were, captive to our natural whims, a slave to our own compulsions. Faith in Jesus sets us free. Paul says our old self is “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20). In its place there is a New Creation. The Risen Christ lives in us.

Every once in a while, we meet a person who has changed dramatically, for the good. Something has happened in them, perhaps quickly, perhaps over a long period of time. We knew what they were like, but now they are different.

I think of a woman from my high school class. Around the time of graduation, she didn’t have any plans. Penny seemed to coast along, doing whatever her friends suggested that she do. She was nice enough, but not particularly focused. When we met again some thirty years later, she was transformed. There was a sparkle in her eye. She bubbled confidence. She was clear about her life and her values. “What are you doing?” I asked. She is a hospice counselor. She gives her life every day to people who need her, and it never wears her down.

I wondered out loud, how is that possible? And she began to speak of how she prays, how she reads the scripture slowly every day, how her walk with God opens her to fresh insight and deeper hope. I told her she wasn’t the same person that I remembered from years ago in school. She said, “I certainly hope not.”

This is a glimpse of what faith in Jesus Christ can do to us. It replaces the old management with something new. In this letter to the Galatians, Paul’s word for the old management is “sarx.” It’s a word that means “the flesh.” What he’s talking about are the natural inclinations of every wild animal, the tendency to do whatever we want, to take what others have, to stir up fights, to live without any boundaries. Paul has already given a grim recital of what this looks like: jealousy, quarreling, breaking into factions, giving into our impulses, and so forth and so on. That’s what he calls “the flesh” (5:19-21). It was the old management that was running the place into the ground. And there is another way. Thanks be to God, there is another way.

When Paul writes to these Gentile Christians in Turkey, he gives them a few lists. Here is how to treat people in your household, he says. Then he gives them a list of what destructive behavior looks like. And then, in the text for today, he presents a list of how you know someone is under the New Management of God’s Spirit.

So Paul gives us a list. When he writes to these Gentile people in Turkey, he loves to make his lists. Here is how the Christian people in your household ought to treat one another, he will say. Or here are the destructive behaviors that get us in trouble, and then he presents his list. In our text, he gives another kind of list, a list of how you know someone is under the New Management of God’s Spirit.

One day this week, a volunteer by the name of Jack stood in the door frame of my study. We were chatting about the Joyful Noise program that he is co-leading with our children right now. Jack said, “You know, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is difficult to teach to little kids.” I smiled and thought of a couple texts that I hope they don’t have time to cover.[1]

But it occurred to me that every child can perceive when a person has God at the center of their lives. How do you know God got “into” somebody? By what they are full of . . . and so Paul gives his list:

            Love, joy, peace;

            Patience, kindness, generosity;

            Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Do you notice? We know what each word means. There is no need to look them up – love, patience, gentleness, we know what they are. And we know they are not specifically Christian words. When the Buddhist knocks on my door and speaks of peace, I resonate with her. When the Jew speaks of kindness, I nod in agreement. Anybody can be filled with peace or act with kindness, for God creates all of us with that potential.

What makes this a specifically Christian package is that these attributes are all embodied in Jesus. Everything we know about him suggests love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is how he is, and what he models for us. The true Christians are Christ-like. It is a supernatural transformation. I am talking about the people who are so full of the same Spirit that fills the Christ that they begin to resemble the Lord that they serve.

How remarkable that we should consider such character traits on the day we ordain our elders and deacons! Those who lead the Lord’s people should resemble the Lord they serve. And how will we recognize them?

• Love is the ability to act for the benefit of others
• Joy is the engine that never runs out of fuel.
• Peace is the harmony that creates harmony, within and between.
• Patience takes the long view of God’s eternal kingdom.
• Kindness confronts the human tendency to be cruel.
• Generosity counters the natural inclination to be selfish.
• Faithfulness is the commitment to endure no matter what.
• Gentleness is the velvet glove on the iron hand.
• Self-control is the discipline to make room for God’s direction.

This is what comes if we welcome God to fill our hearts and guide our lives. The world doesn’t need any more heartless bureaucrats, hostile managers, or passive-aggressive waitresses. We don’t need any more church leaders that are full of themselves, much less full of their own opinions. What God’s people need are servants who are full of God, ordinary people who are so full of God’s Spirit that they begin to resemble Jesus. They open us to the possibility that there is another way to live. Their lives reveal that God’s dominion is at hand.

The weary old world can’t always understand this. To use the apostle Paul’s word, the world runs by “sarx” – that is, the natural inclinations of the flesh. It is evident in so many ways, but perhaps the most profound way is how we compete with one another. We interrupt others when they talk. We scoot around a slowpoke to beat him to the checkout line. I think of that lady in Texas who planned to bump off a middle school cheerleader so her daughter could make the squad. That’s as worldly as a tiger ripping apart a wounded zebra. That’s the way of the world. But there is another way, the way of God.

Years ago, the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen took a teaching job at Notre Dame. He was hired as a professor in a brand-new psychology department. He enjoyed the work, loved the students, but there was one thing that caused him to grumble: it was the university’s obsession with football. He didn’t have a problem with the sport, but he noticed that, in South Bend, at least, the obsession could be more important than everything else. What’s that all about? And how does it square with living a holy and compassionate life in the world?

If we live in Christ, he said, “It is not excelling but serving that makes us most human. It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation. Compassion - to be with others when and where they suffer - is God’s way to justice and peace among people. Is this possible? Yes, it is, but only when we dare to live with the radical faith that we do not have to compete for love, but that love is freely given to us by the One who calls us to compassion.”[2]

Do you remember the list?

            Love, joy, peace;

            Patience, kindness, generosity;

            Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

These are the signs that God is at work in our lives. These are the gifts that increase in our souls as the Spirit of God directs our lives. And needless to say, these are the blessings that you might offer to the world.

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

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[1] Galatians 1:6-9, 3:1, 5:12, to name a few.

[2] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas A. Morrison. Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Image Books – Doubleday, 1983).

He Bore Our Sins

1 Peter 2:19-25

Easter 4

May 11, 2014

William G. Carter

For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

Tuesday was a beautiful morning at Antietam National Battlefield. The sky was bright blue, the rolling farmland was a carpet of spring green. John Conklin suggested I should stop by, if ever in the area. Tuesday morning, I realized I was very close. With a little time on my hands, I stopped by.

Most of our Civil War battlefields are now quiet spaces. Well preserved, hauntingly quiet. Standing at the ridge by the visitor’s center, I looked toward the old German church, imagining McClellan’s army coming up on Robert E. Lee. I recalled Matthew Brady’s early photographs of dying soldiers on the fields of Antietam. 23,000 people died in the one-day Battle of Antietam. September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest single day in United States history.

If you have visited these battlefields as I have, you wonder about the blood and the massacre. On a beautiful spring day, you wonder what the violence accomplished. In 1862, Antietam did not end the war. The leaders of both sides did not recoil from the horror and say, “That’s it. All of us have had enough. No more violence ever again.” Oh no. The Civil War went on for two and a half more years. Violence does not end all violence.

I was thinking about this sermon as I wandered around the battlefield. Our text reminds us of Good Friday and the death of Jesus. That was another brutal day. Sometimes I think we have spruced up the crucifixion, much like we have tidied up a Civil War battlefield.

Holy Week was not that long ago. I recall the grim faces at our last men’s Bible study. We were studying the account in the Gospel of John, where the Jewish religious leaders asked the Roman soldiers to speed up the executions so they could get on with their Passover celebrations. The men in our group turned pale as we read of soldiers breaking the legs of the crucified men so they could suffocate sooner. The cross was a horrible way to die, brutal and violent.

In today’s text, an early church leader turns to the cross for a moral lesson. “Look to the cross,” he says. “Jesus did not return abuse for the abuse he suffered. When the Lord suffered, he could have retaliated but he did not. Instead he trusted himself to the God who judges every person.” All the time, in the words of the African American spiritual, “He never said a mumbalin’ word.”

Peter was speaking to a congregation of Christians who are suffering. They knew first-hand that those who follow Jesus have a tough time in the world. They can be mistreated for doing the right thing, maligned for setting God’s ways as their highest pursuit. This was especially true for the primary audience addressed by Peter. They were house servants, many of them domestic slaves. They were bound to serve earthly masters, but as Christians they had a higher Master. And it is God in Christ who determines the Christian’s behavior; it is not our situation in life.

It is difficult to stay clear about that. With my hands shading my eyes, I looked toward Antietam Creek. The water ran thick red on that day in 1862. Sharpshooters stood on the ridges above, picking off scores of enemies trying to forge the stream. 23,000 men died in a single day. We remember three men dying on crosses outside of Jerusalem. One was more than enough.

The writer of our Bible text is reflecting on that single death. What does it mean? For a group of downtrodden Christians, the violent death of Jesus means that we must refrain from perpetuating the violence. Jesus taught as much: “You are not,” he said, “to love the neighbor and hate the enemy, speak to the friendly but not the unfriendly, be generous to the generous but withhold from the selfish. No, God acts out of God’s own nature, never reacting, but sending sun and rain to both the just and unjust.”[1] God loves all, even if they do not deserve it.

Here is one of the many things that the New Testament says about on the death of Jesus. What does this mean? “Christ suffered for you,” he declares. There is something freeing about this, something profoundly liberating. Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.” Then he reaches back into the Jewish scriptures to find an affirmation from the prophet Isaiah, “By his wounds you have been healed.”

It is intriguing that after President Lincoln heard about the violence at Antietam, he regarded the Civil War differently. It was about more than states rights, and whether or not the southern states could do whatever they wanted. It was also about freeing those who were enslaved. Four days after the gunfire stopped in Antietam, Lincoln announced he would issue his Emancipation Proclamation as of January 1863. All slaves in rebellious states would be forever free.

So I’ve been thinking about how all of this holds together. What amount of self-sacrifice is necessary to provide freedom for others? Not merely to exert control over the rebellious tribes but to create freedom – and finally reconciliation? These are more than Civil War questions from 152 years ago. They are matters of the greater gospel, begun on a cross in 30 A.D.

We say a lot of things about the cross – “Jesus died for our sins,” for instance, even though our sins continue. Or another New Testament writer declares, “Christ has broken down the wall of hostility between us . . . through the cross.”[2] But there is still great hostility in the air among a lot of people; I observe, in some corners, we could make the case that the Civil War may not be over yet, and it’s still Blue against Gray.

So in these days after Easter, when we reflect on the cross, we see how far God will go to bring violent people into peace. God cannot compel warring people to stop their war, not without obliterating all of them. But here is what God will do: with all vulnerability, God will step onto the middle of the battlefield and take all the bullets – all the anger, all the hostility – into his own body. God takes all of it on the cross, in order to take it all away . . . provided we let it all go.

That’s the human struggle, isn’t it? I saw war in the eyes of the lady who cut me off on the highway yesterday, then she glared at me as if it was my fault. Sorry, not that time. But I have to let it go.

I saw it on the sign outside the visitor’s center at Antietam. In official lettering, it declared that guns and firearms are not welcome at a battlefield memorial. Just let the irony of that sink in. Then ask: why would anybody take guns and firearms to a battle that is already over?

But my favorite glimpse came when I pulled off to a little spot to write a few notes about Antietam, and I discovered where I was. There it was - a monument to Clara Barton. I didn’t know for what she did on that battlefield. A forty-year old clerk in Washington’s patent office, she collected medical supplies and food to deliver to the soldiers. Her father had taught her that Christians care for those in need. She persisted with army officials until she received permission in August 1862 to take humanitarian supplies to the front lines.

One month later on the field of Antietam, she got busy, bandaging the wounded, feeding the hungry, showing compassion regardless of what side of the line anybody fought. They called her “the Angel of the Battlefield.” A few years after that, she organized the American Red Cross.

She did this willingly: she went to the battlefield to bind up wounds. She offered compassion to all soldiers regardless of whether they wore blue or gray. She is still remembered for her mercy at a level far beyond the soldiers or their generals. Through her deeds, she pointed us beyond the war to another way of living. And just to score the point: we would never have known about her if she hadn't entered the war.

These are clues to the work accomplished by Jesus on the cross. He entered the battle between heaven and earth, putting himself squarely on the battlefield of rebellious Confederates and warlike Yankees. And he gave himself that all people ultimately might be healed.

  

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

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[1] Fred B. Craddock, 1 Peter, Westminster Bible Commentary, p. 50

[2] Ephesians 2:14-16

What a Mess!

Psalm 14

May 4, 2014
William G. Carter

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.

The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, 
who seek after God.

They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread,

and do not call upon the Lord?

There they shall be in great terror, for God is with the company of the righteous.

You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge.

O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

One night last week, I was feeling pretty restless. So I picked up the television remote and began flipping through the channels. To my delight, there was the end of a movie that I had seen in a theater. It’s a movie that some of you saw, and it’s called “The Help.” It’s the story of African-American house maids in Jackson, Mississippi, sometime in early 1960’s. Through a variety of circumstances, they tell the stories of their lives to an Ole Miss graduate who publishes them anonymously in a book.

Aibileen is one of these truth-telling maids. She has friends who get fired for using the wrong toilet. Her own son is killed in a factory accident and she’s not given time off to grieve. One of her jobs is to raise white children in Jackson, Mississippi -- children who love her, children who are an inconvenience to their socialite mothers, children who will grow up to become as racist as their parents. For this, she is paid a pitiful salary and treated as if she is invisible.

But Aibileen tells her story. The story goes in a book that sells extremely well. The wealthy people of Jackson are shaken at a time when the Civil Rights movement is rolling into town. And one of the angriest is Hilly Holbrook, a privileged socialite who represents all the white people who put down and demean their hired help.

Hilly knows that Aibileen is in on this project. But she can’t say so publicly because it expose and embarrass her in way that if you haven’t seen the movie, you can’t quite imagine. So what does Hilly do? She falsely accuses Aibileen of stealing some family silver. She threatens to call the police, and demands that Aibileen’s pliable boss should fire her immediately.

But Aibileen has had it. She has become accustomed to telling the truth. She says, “Miss Hilly, all you do is scare and lie to try to get what you want.” Hilly bursts into a shrieking rage. And then Aibileen says it: “You are a godless woman. Ain’t you tired, Miss Hilly? Ain’t you tired?”

You know, it is a daring move to call a white Baptist socialite in Jackson, Mississippi, a “godless woman.” But it sure does explain an awful lot.

Psalm 14 declares that people do terrible things when they act as if there is no God, when they behave as if they are not accountable to the One who has given them their lives. They go astray, says the Psalmist. They do corrupt and abominable deeds. They might declare with their lips that they believe in God, but in their hearts, in the center of their souls, they act as if they are an end in themselves. “Miss Hilly, all you do is scare and lie to try to get what you want…you are a godless woman. Ain’t you tired?”

In just a few verses, the psalm diagnoses what is wrong with the whole human family. The people who are made in the image of God behave as if God is of no consequence. Psalm 14 declares that chaos rules when people are godless. They mistreat one another, they enslave one another, they falsely accuse one another, they are predators of the weakest and most vulnerable . . . and human life becomes a big sloppy mess.

If we took the time, we could pull out the daily newspaper and circle every article where somebody acts selfishly, or violently, or uniquely in their own self-interest. Perhaps there would be a couple items on the cartoon page that would remain unmarked, the crossword puzzle perhaps. If we took the time . . . but I’m certain you have stories of your own, stories where family members stop speaking to one another, or people carry grudges long past the expiration date, or employers gobble up and discard the people who work so hard to make them rich, or lazy workers take advantage of the employers who treat them with grace.

Anybody here think the human race is in good shape? Or that it has ever been in good shape? We don’t have to read the Bible to see this; the Bible has already read us. You don’t have to read the old story of Adam and Eve as a scientific document to know that it is spiritually true. God says, “You can eat all the fruit that you want, except from that tree over there.” Gee, Lord, it hadn’t occurred to us until you said that.

Like saying to the kids, “Shelby and Jake, don’t play in the mud.” Mud? Is there mud? Thanks, Mom, I didn’t realize there was mud.”

Adam and Eve ignored God and took matters into their own hands. And as somebody said so delightfully, “they “spent the rest of their days convincing themselves that it all worked out for the best.”[1]

The word is godless. Not that there is no God; there is. But acting as if there is not. Ever get tired of that?

The psalm suggests this impulse infects all of us. “All have gone astray,” says the poet. All alike are perverse. No one does good, not one of us. The Lord looks down from heaven to see if anybody is actually searching for God. Anybody, anybody at all?

Do you think this a harsh indictment? Look around. Look carefully and widely. See if anybody is looking for God. Or if they are merely imprisoned in themselves. Some time ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called Who Needs God? In the concluding pages, he writes:

Atlas was condemned to carry the weight of the entire world on his shoulders.  That was as harsh a punishment as the ancient Greek mind could conjure up.  Today, it seems, we have volunteered to play the role of Atlas . . . We have not offended God, we have dismissed him, told him we were grown up enough not to need his help any more, and offered to carry the weight of the entire world on our shoulders.  The question is, when it gets too heavy for us, when there are questions too hard for human knowledge to answer and problems that take more time to solve than any of us have, will we be too proud to admit that we have made a mistake in wanting to carry this world alone?[2]

Maybe you don’t like the word “godless.” I don’t particularly like it. But something in my soul is drawn to Aibilene’s invitation: “Ain’t you tired? Miss Hilly, ain’t you tired?”

Of course I’m tired. I will bet you’re tired. Tired of carrying it all by myself and not handing it over to God. Tired of keeping up appearances when we are weary and still pretending we are something we are not. Tired of trying to finish the race on our own steam when it is God who carries us every day. Tired of acting like we are in charge of everything when the plain truth is that it has all come to us as a gift. Tired of trying to influence other people of our point of view, rather than study how God teaches us to walk in peace, justice, and self-giving love. Aren’t you tired of flipping through the channels in late-night restlessness, looking for something to ground your soul, or at least bide your time? Aren’t you tired of a life without God?

Then you are in the right place. We celebrate two sacraments today; one’s not enough. We baptize a child and say, “You don’t have to make it on your own, because you are God’s child just like the rest of us.” Then we seal the deal at God’s Table when we taste again that we are welcomed, wanted, and fed with a mercy and wisdom far beyond our own. Here is where life begins again, in the presence of Jesus Christ, our redeemer.

Writing about the Heidelberg Catechism, Craig Barnes writes of the misery, the godless misery that comes to the human race when we try to carry everything and complete it all on our own limited power. He says something provocative about this: “People usually prefer the misery they know to the mystery they do not.”

And then he adds: “I have been a pastor long enough to know that just because people are miserable, that does not mean that they want to change. They may change jobs, move to a new town, buy another car, or find another relationship, but essentially they’re just rearranging the furniture of their lives when what they really need is a new life.”[3]

New life is the currency of God’s kingdom. We don’t have to be tired anymore. God is right here, inviting us to put our weary, sin-sick souls into the mysterious hands of New Creation, lifting us out of the "miseries to which we have grown accustomed." Our lives are defined by Christ crucified and risen. And if you trust him with that, no difficulty, no disease, no loss, no tragedy, no misery will ever win over you. You belong to him, body and soul. Jesus Christ is our true home.

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

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[1] Frederick Buechner, http://frederickbuechner.com/content/eve

[2] Harold Kushner, Who Needs God? (New York: Touchstone, 2002) p. 210.

[3] M. Craig Barnes, Body & Soul: Reclaiming the Heidelberg Catechism (Louisville, KY, Congregational Ministries Publishing, 2012) p. 47.  Thanks for his wisdom which infuses this sermon.

Comfort and Comedy

John 20:19-31

Easter 2 / Holy Humor

April 27, 2014

William G. Carter 

. . . Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

It is a cruel irony that Doubting Thomas visits us on Holy Humor Sunday. Thomas is the kind of guy who can’t take a joke. The few times we meet him in scripture, he is earnest and precise. He believes words should mean what they mean.

He speaks first in chapter eleven, after Lazarus dies. Lazarus, the beloved friend of Jesus, had been sick, and Jesus wait for a couple of days. Then Jesus says, “Let’s go to Judea.” The disciples say, “Lord, they were just trying to kill you in Judea,” but Jesus says, “We have to go wake Lazarus.” They say, “But if he’s only sleeping, he will be OK.”

Jesus smacks his head and says, “I guess I can use metaphors and euphemisms with you people. Let me say it straight: Lazarus kicked the bucket, bought the farm, and bit the dust.” And they look at him blankly. So he says, “Lazarus is dead. Come on, we are going to him.” And Thomas gets his first speaking line in scripture, kind of spoken in the tone of Eeyore: “Alright, let’s go die with him.”

The big joke is that Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. I imagine him looking at the twelve and saying, “Do you get it?”

The next time Thomas speaks, he interrupts Jesus. It’s the Last Supper. Judas has just slipped out to betray. Jesus is giving an extended speech. It’s a farewell speech. He tells them how to make their way in the world after he’s gone. These have become some of the most beloved words in the Bible: Love one another, as I have loved you. I am the vine, you are the branches; stay with me.

At one point Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places… If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

And Thomas interrupts and says, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

He is one of the Beloved of God, and he interrupts some of the most comforting words that the Lord ever speaks.

It seems he can’t help himself. It is how he processes reality: with precision, with accuracy, with clarity. He wants to know, and to be clear about it.

Thomas reminds me of how Garrison Keillor describes an engineer. If a pessimist sees a glass and says it is half-empty, and an optimist sees a glass and says it is half-full, then an engineer sees a glass that is twice as big as it ought to be. I have engineers in my family. Thomas would make a good one. These are the people we count on to design our bridges and measure our brake pads. It’s OK that they are not comfortable with ambiguity.

But faith requires something else. Faith is a move from outer observation to inner comfort. We could say with Thomas that “seeing is believing” – but faith is about believing even if we do not see.

That’s why the Gospel of John tells the story of Thomas. John is writing sixty years or more after the Resurrection. For us, that’s kind of like the people who still remember fighting in World War 2. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be. If the stories are to be remembered, they must be written down. That is what John is doing for the people who didn’t actually see Jesus.

And he is offering this as a gift to people like us, who come years later. We hear about Jesus, we hear about his resurrection, but he does not come “on demand” as if he has to prove anything.

That reminds me of Doubting Thomas’ favorite joke. Ever hear that one?

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Jesus.

No, it’s not.

Yes, it is.

No, it’s not. Jesus never knocks. He appears if and when he chooses, and rarely when we expect him.

I wonder if anybody laughed when the Lord appeared a week after Easter. The disciples were in a room they knew how to lock from the inside, but suddenly he was there. Not only that; he had heard what Thomas and the others were saying when he wasn’t visibly present in the room.

Last week, we heard how Mary Magdalene did not even recognize him outside his tomb. This week, we hear of an eavesdropping Lord – he can hear what we say, and can appear anywhere – recognized or not – before he slips out of sight again. If these are clues from John as to how to live with a Risen Lord, then the blessing really comes when we believe what we cannot see.

Erik Erikson, the psychiatrist, wrote about children who cry the moment that a parent steps out of sight. To use his words, ''The infant's first social achievement, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability.''[1]

I like that phrase: “an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability.”

In these weeks after Easter, we are going to spend some time in worship with the Heidelberg Catechism. It’s a teaching document from 1563, designed to give us the words to ground our faith, to help us establish Christ as an “inner certainty.” I invite you to a weekly Wednesday evening class at 6:15 as we work through the words before I preach about them on the next six Sundays. A catechism is a Question and Answer document, and the first question is the one before us today: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer begins, “That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Faith takes root in this answer. We belong to Jesus Christ, the One who returns from the grave, who hears our doubts and misgivings without blasting us in punishment, who is free to come and go as he please, who is with us without recognition, who beckons us to join in the life eternal of the Father. We can’t see or prove any of this – but we can trust it as an inner certainty.

Jesus offers us a faith without any props, beginning with the prop of his physical body. Nobody can cling to his shoulder, like Mary Magdalene wanted to do. Nobody can stick their finger in the nail holes, like Thomas said he needed to do. Bodily contact is not necessary for Christian faith, because faith is a matter of the spirit, an inner certainty that benefits both body and soul.

We belong to Christ, to the Risen Christ. That is our comfort, and our only comfort. There are people who can give us comfort, people we can love and adore, but they are not perfect and sooner or later they will let us down. There are words by great spiritual leaders that offer wisdom and insight, but words slip into the air and evaporate eventually. Even a church, a good church like this one, has an array of opportunities for worship, education, and service - - but every human institution waxes and wanes, goes through cycles, evolves, changes, or falls apart – every single one.

What remains is Jesus Christ. Death did not take him away; on the first day of New Creation, God raised him. He’s back and completely alive. Nothing can take away the love he has for us. It is a certainty.

From time to time, some of you have heard me quote Frederick Buechner. Fred is an award-winning writer, a Presbyterian minister in fact. A few of his books are on my top shelf, close to where I write my sermons. I reach for them when words fail me, because his words speak so well.

What is not so widely known is the moment when faith bubbled up within his spirit. Buechner was a published novelist, widely acclaimed, yet he sensed something was missing. Here’s how he tells the story:

. . .  for the first time in my life that year in New York, I started going to church regularly, and what was farcical about it was not that I went but my reason for going, which was simply that on the same block where I lived there happened to be a church with a preacher I had heard of and that I had nothing all that much better to do with my lonely Sundays. The preacher was a man named George Buttrick, and Sunday after Sunday I went, and sermon after sermon I heard. It was not just his eloquence that kept me coming back, though he was wonderfully eloquent, literate, imaginative, never letting you guess what he was going to come out with next but twitching with surprises up there in the pulpit, his spectacles aglitter in the lectern light. What drew me more was whatever it was that his sermons came from and whatever it was in me that they touched so deeply.

And then there came one particular sermon with one particular phrase in it that does not even appear in a transcript of his words that somebody sent me more than twenty-five years later so I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it —and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all. Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness, Buttrick said, but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, "among confession, and tears, and great laughter." It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then. It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.[2]

Crowned among confession, and tears, and great laughter. With that, the open door, the inner certainty, the comfort offered within God’s grand comedy of resurrection. Trusting in that makes all the difference.

 Did you hear the one about the preacher who spoke too long? He sat down and the people sang about joy.

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

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[1] Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, chapter 7 (1950).

[2] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, Harper and Row, Publishers.

O Mary, Don't You Weep!

John 20:1-18

Easter Sunday

April 20, 2014

William G. Carter

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

For all of today’s hosannas and hallelujahs, Easter begins with tears. A woman went to the tomb of a beloved friend and found it cracked open. His body was supposed to be there. She had every reason to expect him to stay in Joseph of Arimathea’s donated tomb. Mary Magdalene had stood near the cross with his mother. She heard him gasp in pain, she saw him breathe his last breath. She knew he was gone and wasn’t coming back.

So there is no logical reason for her to go to his tomb. John says all the necessary work had been done. The body of Jesus was wrapped in linen with the burial spices. Nicodemus had seen to that, returning secretly with an extraordinary amount of myrrh and aloes to prepare the body. The deed was done, the tomb was sealed, the Sabbath rest began.

I have been with people when they discover a grave has been desecrated. It is not a pretty sight. There were gasps and exclamations of shock, then blind rage. “Who did this? Where are those vandals? Why wasn’t somebody watching?” Then come the tears, tears that declare “I loved him.” It was hard enough to watch him die, to say goodbye – but now this: a broken grave.

Before we rush onto thin affirmations today, let’s first take the time to feel the shock of it all. Easter begins with tears. Easter begins with Mary weeping by the tomb.

She had run to tell two disciples that the grave had been robbed. Simon Peter and another race to the empty tomb. They can only confirm that the grave is open, and that it is empty. Somebody has been there before them. The linen wrappings lie without a body. Some of them were rolled up and placed off to the side. Who knows what they think? Simon Peter leaves, heartsick and scratching his head. John says the other disciple “believes,” but doesn’t actually say what he believes. So the two of them go home.

What exactly do you believe about Easter? Not what people have told you, but you yourself. What do you believe? I believe Easter begins with tears. Real tears. Death is real. Our loved ones die. Jesus died. Mary Magdalene was certain of that.

As she peers into the tomb after the other two depart, she sees two angels. They weren’t visible before. They ask about her crying. “Woman, why are you weeping?” They offer no consolation, only a question. Her grief should be self-evident, if angels have any emotion. She has lost her Jesus, not once but twice. He died and now he is missing. The tears are real. They are always real. Easter begins right there.

I was eleven years old when my grandfather died. He had a heart attack on his way to seeing me walk a ceremonial bridge from Cup Scouts to Boy Scouts. Grandpa was only five years older than I am now. My parents raised me as a Christian, and I had heard plenty of sermons that declared Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead. But as I stood sobbing by my grandfather’s grave, I also knew my grandfather wasn’t coming back. The fresh dirt on his grave assured me of that.

Was Easter real? Was death defeated when Jesus was raised back to the life? I couldn’t say at age eleven. I knew death was real. And I knew if I ate enough chocolate eggs and marshmallow Peeps on Easter, I wouldn’t think about death for very long.

But here’s the thing. Mary turned away from the tomb. Through scalded eyes, she saw somebody she could only construe as the gardener. He asked her the same ridiculous question, “Why are you weeping?” as if he was on the same wavelength as the two angels in the tomb. She didn’t recognize his voice even as he spoke to her.

He asked another question, “Whom are you looking for?” That’s a question that the Gospel of John places on the lips of Jesus over and over again. He knows there is a search going on in every human life. We are looking for something, Someone, who can meet us, who can complete us, who can hold us forever in grace and truth.

People will do all kinds of things to satisfy this fundamental human hunger. They will take cruises and come back weary. They will dine on extravagant meals and come back weary. They will medicate themselves to get as high as they can, only to fall like Icarus with melted wings. A friend of mine tells me about a loved one who is going in June on a weeklong retreat in Hawaii with a new age guru; it’s going to cost $6800 for her to search for enlightenment, and she’s looking for the same thing the rest of us are looking for: meaning, purpose, holiness . . . God.

The gardener asked the question, “Whom are you looking for?” Truth be told, she was looking for a dead Jesus, so she could take him away and keep him safe once and for all. That was all she was looking for.

That’s when he said it: “Mary…” Easter happens when Christ calls our names.

Some people today are out trying to prove the resurrection. They haven’t realized it is impossible to do. If you go to Jerusalem, the Christians over there can’t even agree on the location of the empty tomb. They don’t know conclusively where it actually was. Three hundred years after the first Easter, some Christians said, “We know the place; let’s put a church on it.” In 1867, a Garden Tomb was found and others said, “This is the place.” A friend of mine tells me they are both wrong; the tomb of Jesus is actually in Japan.

The fact of the matter is, Christians have never worshiped a tomb. There is no comfort in a tomb, especially if it’s empty.  No, we worship Jesus Christ. He is the One who calls our names . . . Louise, John, Ann Kelly, Margaret, Richard . . . Easter becomes real when we know he is alive and he is the One we are looking for.

If Jesus is alive, he can speak to us. He can lift the old words of scripture off the page and lodge them in our hearts. And we know the Lord is our shepherd, we know that death has no final power over us. I spend a lot of time with the Bible, and sometimes it is as if he speaking to me – because he is. Have you ever had that experience? He is the One we seek behind all of the words written in Bibles and newspapers.  

If Jesus is alive, he can come to us even if we do not see him. “Though we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil - - for You are with us” We can stand a little taller, stand a good bit stronger, because it is He who helps us to stand. And we discover because of his presence with us, there is nothing for us to fear. Not since he is alive!

If Jesus is alive, he can invite us to do something important for God and God’s world. He does not want us to fall into selfishness and self-absorption, but invites us – calls us – to give ourselves to others as he gives himself to the world. One of our church members apologized to me the other; she has to skip worship today because they need her to serve food at the soup kitchen. I said, “Don’t ever apologize for responding to the voice of the Risen Christ. You have to do what he calls you to do.”

Easter becomes real when we hear the Risen Christ calling our names.

I didn’t know that at age eleven, standing by my grandfather’s grave. But I have stood beside countless graves of other people and declared with full authority, “Don’t be afraid. The God of life is stronger than death, and the people who have trusted Christ continue to be alive eternally.” I said it because it’s the truth, and I said it because I believe the Risen Lord called me by name and said, “Bill, this is what I call you to say.”

Mary’s tears are real. But she stops weeping when the Risen Christ calls her by name. Easter is for her.

And Easter is for you. Trust that, behind all the words we say today, behind all the hymns we sing and the prayers we speak, trust that, behind the bread we eat and the cup we drink, Christ is alive. He knows you better than you know yourself. He loves you more than you can possibly imagine being loved. He imagines you living a life free from fear, a life you can offer to him for the benefit of the broken world that he loves.

This is the grand adventure of faith, Easter faith. And if, at heart, you are looking for him, he will find you . . . and he will call you by name.

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