In Unity We Lift Our Song

by Jenny Willams
John 10:22-30; Revelation 7:9-17

One of the many blessings in my life has been the gift of church music.  I grew up in a family who valued music and in a church that valued music. Because I was reared in a high steeple church, I was privileged to be exposed at a young age to string ensembles, handbell choirs, professional singers, and an organist who is a professor of organ music in a prestigious university music program.

When life took me away from home, I got to experience other kinds of church music.  I served a church in North Carolina which had a teenage show choir and a men’s quartet who sang southern gospel music.  I served a church in a small town in West Virginia whose pianist played every hymn in a gleeful, upbeat bluegrass style. I visited a Melkite church in Zababdeh in the West Bank, who sang their entire liturgy a capella.

These experiences contribute, I’m sure, to why the future depicted in John’s vision sounds so glorious to me:  countless numbers of disciples from all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages will join together in perpetual worship, singing glorious praises to the triune God. 

That they are singing is, I think, significant.  There is no Heavenly Muzak playing in the throne room, no recordings of babbling brooks or birdsong to calm the masses.  The people are not listening to song—they are making music, putting their bodies into their life of praise. 

I owe my love of church music to the people who taught me to sing.  I’m grateful for my parents and grandparents, with whom I saw in the pew during my childhood, and who heeded John Wesley’s direction to “sing lustily and with a good courage.”  I’m grateful for Rae, a church member who was my piano teacher and also directed our church’s children’s choir.  I can still remember her hand movements that, as she taught us Natalie Sleeth anthems, indicated we should try to adjust our pitch lower or higher. I’m grateful for Miss Nute, a church member who was the director of the choral programs at my public high school.  She urged us on in excellence in a capella pieces and somehow got away with teaching sacred music to the choir. I’m grateful for Diane, the director of the African-American gospel choir at my college.  She patiently taught us white kids who were in the choir to learn how to express our faith more freely in song than we were used to. 

I learned to sing because of the people whose voices I could listen to and try to follow. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.”  (John 10:27)  We only can sing the song of life because we are learning it from the one who was there when the music began.  To learn how to sing it ourselves, we have to follow him.

We who learned to sing in the context of church choirs know that while singing is a craft that requires personal attention, the goal of our individual efforts is to join well with others in a corporate endeavor.  We take our different gifts, our different voices, and make music together. We have to follow not only the director but listen to each other to make beautiful music.  The singing of the heavenly throng is unified by their focus on the triune God.  What makes the music of both the earthly and heavenly multitudes possible is the voice of the Lord.  We can only sing together because he leads us.   

On earth, the sheep hear His voice.
In heaven, the Lamb hears ours.  

To God and to the Lamb, we will sing!
 

Read more...

Struck Blind on the Damascus Road

by Jake Wilson
Acts 9.1-20

The conversion of Saul provides us with the New Testament example of a conversion experience.  Saul’s transformation from a persecutor of the Lord to an Apostle continues to serve as a word of hope to the sin soaked conscience of those who feel that truly their failings are too great to be forgiven.  The story of Saul’s conversion gives narrative power to the concept of being “born again” from John 3 or becoming a “new creation” from 2 Corinthians 5.

The power of this experience transformed the murderous Saul and immeasurably impacted the Christian faith.  Indeed powerful personal experiences of God have dramatically altered the direction of ‘the Way’ more than once. Remember that Luther shuddered under the righteousness of God until he came to understand the true meaning of the phrase, at which time he said “I felt that I was altogether born again, and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”  We can also call to mind the conversion experience of John Wesley who claimed his heart was strangely warmed and recorded in his journal “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” (Italics original)

That we live in a cultural age in which rampant individualism is one of the primary forces working against the witness of the Church should not cause us to completely abandon the langue of a conversion experience.  Powerful personal encounters with the risen Christ do occur as Luther and Wesley help us remember.  Still, if we are to proclaim the Gospel responsibly in our current cultural climate the preacher must temper the language of individual experience with a much thicker understanding of conversion. Fortunately, the text takes us in just such a direction.

For example, Saul’s conversion marks a change of communities.  The text indicates this in a number of ways.  Fruitful contrast may be drawn between ‘The Way’ of vs.2 and ‘his way’ of vs.3 (ESV; The TNIV reads ‘his journey’).  Saul is on his way, with orders from the leaders of one community, before his direction is changed and he joins The Way where he receives a new brother and is initiated into a new community through the laying on of hands, receiving the Holy Spirit and baptism.

While Saul’s conversion does represent a powerful personal experience, this personal encounter is not for Saul’s sake but for the healing of the nations.  As Jesus makes clear in vs.15, Saul is to become God’s Apostle to the Gentiles.  The power of this encounter is not Saul’s inner experience but God’s determination to see that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” (Phil. 2.9-11)

It is also important to note that Saul’s conversion is not a heroic individual decision.  The language of asking Jesus to become one’s “personal Lord and Savior” is completely foreign to this encounter.  This was not Saul’s choice.  Rather he was struck down by Jesus, calling to mind the words of Hebrews 10.31 “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

In Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age, Brad Kallenberg offers a definition of conversion as “the change of one’s social identity, the acquisition of a new conceptual language, and the shifting of one’s paradigm.” (32)   All three of these aspects are present in the text.  Saul’s social identity changes as he moves from one community to another.  He begins to learn a new language as he confesses Jesus as Lord even before he understands what such a confession might mean.  And his paradigm is radically altered as he comes to see that the Jesus who was once a failed messiah is truly the Son of God (vs. 20).  All of this stems from the power of this road to Damascus experience.  Nevertheless the significance of the event, as would eventually be the case with Luther, Wesley and countless others, transcends Saul’s individual experience. 
      

Read more...

Speaking Out

by Mark Ryan
Our readings for this week show both the irrepressible quality of the good news about what God has done for Israel in Jesus Christ (Acts 5) and why that is so—that is the divine origin of the irrepressibility (John 20:19-31).

To begin with the scene in Acts 5:27, the text asks us to imagine a dramatic conflict where the revelation of God comes crashing up against the conventions—ideologies, really—that hold societies in place. “Did you not hear our orders?” asks the High Priest, with the implied further query, “don’t you know it is we who are responsible for common sense and good order around Jerusalem?”  That those representing ideology and good sense are the leaders of the Israel ought to trouble all of us who claim that our Christianity is central to our identity. Religious ideology here is more pointedly opposing itself to God’s plan than any mere secular kind. Perhaps we can imagine another form of conversation more common today with equally satanic results: “C’mon, you guys are good Christians who love the Church. Do you really think it’s appropriate to cause such a stir?” If Peter was somehow the vehicle of Satan in earlier text (Mark 8), here his reply is as frank as piercing in its truth: “We must obey God rather than men.” Perhaps unlike his rebuke of Jesus in Mark for failing to conform to his expectations for a messiah king, when he talks here it is clear that his speech has the character of witness. In fact, he seems to recognize that it is not his talk merely but that very spirit God breathed onto them.

This act of speaking out of witness, and the revolutionary political implications it carries reminds me of how the politics of liberalism has made a more restrained, even coerced speech, its end.  However noble intentions, philosophers like Jurgen Habermas have sought to find the “transcendental conditions” of our practices of arguing in order to show us the rules that govern our talk. On the one hand, this is better than some accounts of the grounds of human ethics and politics for it avoids the solipsistic self of some earlier accounts. However, one notes in these traditions a great desire to place limits on speech, and especially what can be said “reasonably.” In the end, they fall in love with, well, conventionalisms. It should have been no surprise that such an account of speaking should have led a leading philosopher like John Rawls, at least in his early work, to suggest that religious persons had to domesticate their speech by translating it according to strict standards before entering the political conversation.

How different is the Logos of God in the New Testament and the speech of those chosen to continue its work by speaking! One recalls earlier attempts to silence God’s Word, such as the occasion of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. If you put a cork in one outlet it pops up in another, perhaps the political version of wac-a-mole.

Now, as our Trinitarian theology hopes to make clear, the death and resurrection of Jesus is God’s speech foremost and not our own. But the crazy thing is that we are called somehow to take part in speaking God’s Word. “We are witnesses of these things, as is the holy Spirit that God has given to those who obey him.” What could it mean to be called, as members of the Church, to take part in God’s speaking of the Gospel of Christ? To answer this, it is a great resource that Peter’s refusal to stop speaking out comes in the same chapter of Acts that gives us an extraordinarily vivid depiction of what Gerhard Lohfink calls the vita apostolica, the living-and-being together of the disciples. As Lohfink notes, the newness of this community represented in the way they newly become completely dependent on and responsible for one another is an integral part of Easter’s reality. The complete dependence of this community on the Holy Spirit for its identity, its life, is what the text seeks to highlight for us when it tells us of what happened to Ananias and Sapphira. “Why,” Peter asks Sapphira, “did you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord?” (Acts 5:9)

If it is only in the light of God’s own Spirit in us that we can explain the honesty and courage that accompany the speech of the disciples, we must also acknowledge that their revolutionary speech had a home in a revolutionary polity, the community whose source is Jesus’ breathing out of his Spirit. Perhaps when our own speech as Christians becomes halting and hesitant, we should remind ourselves that we need a speech therapist. Our texts suggest that only the life of the ekklesia can play speech therapist when we want to re-learn how to utter God’s logos after him. 
 

Read more...

Grounded Hope

by Debra Dean Murphy 
Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; John 20:1-18

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.”  (John 20:15)

Let us not mock God with metaphor, / analogy, sidestepping transcendence; / making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the / faded credulity of earlier ages: / let us walk through the door. (Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike)

John the Evangelist sets the resurrection story in a garden, grounding Easter’s hope in, well, the ground. “The tree of life,” Vigen Guroian observes, “still stands in the midst of the garden.” No pie in the sky here; Easter is earth tended, mended and renewed, and a body alive again.

John Updike the poet reminds us that our hope lies not in nature’s rhythms of birth, death, and new life (comforting as they may be), nor in traditions handed down from learned teacher to disciples, but in the scandal and embarrassment of a resurrected body:

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

“Ours,” Updike says, not “mine.” The hope of resurrection is not that of Plato’s singular immortal soul; it is not the promise of a post-mortem spiritual existence in a far-off heavenly realm. The hope of resurrection is that the material creation in all its fullness participates—now partially, then perfectly—in newness of life, in communion with the Source of all that is. Heaven and earth are joined, through the mystery of Jesus’ rising from the dead, in the shalom of God.

The disobedience that occurred in the first garden was the burden Jesus bore in Gethsemane’s garden. In Easter’s garden, the burden has been rolled away. His broken body, now restored, makes of us a body, his body: “it was as His Flesh: ours.”  And through the gifts of the good earth, grain and grape, harvested by human hands, we take, bless, break, and share his body, becoming what we already are.

We are grounded in this hope, nurtured by these gifts, sustained for the work and witness we are called to: go and tell; be and do; live mindfully, patiently, peaceably in the joy of the resurrection. “This,” we profess this day with the Psalmist, “is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

Read more...

Insurrection Sunday

by Ragan Sutterfield
Luke 19:28-40; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Luke 22:14-23:56

“For I hear the whispering of many—
terror all around!—
as they scheme together against me,
as they plot to take my life.”

These verses from Psalm 31 are a proper preface to Palm Sunday. This is the Sunday not so much of children waving palms with hosannas as it is the beginning of a drama that will end in execution, murder, and suicide. This is the beginning of the end of the key conflict between the kingdom of God and the empire of the world.

The crowd has it right when they proclaim, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.” But we should not take from this that Christ is coming in peace, at least not of the kind maintained by the empire until its legitimacy is threatened—the peace of stasis, peace without conflict. Christ is entering Jerusalem for peace, and violence, unrest and insurrection are the sure signs that the kingdom of peace is threatening a world bent on coercion and injustice. Christ’s response to this violence is to take the downward path toward death—the path of humiliation for the sake of righteousness.

Humiliation is a common theme in the lectionary readings for this Palm Sunday. In Philippians Paul calls us to have the “same mind” as a savior who “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” In Isaiah the one who sustains “the weary with a word” does not hide his “face from insult and spitting.” Then we have Jesus entering Jerusalem in triumph with the first gospel reading and hanging on the cross by the second.

Paul calls us to follow this path of humiliation and so we must ask, how do we enter on this downward path?

From Psalm 31 to Isaiah to the Gospel, humiliation is the result of righteousness and obedience. We should take away from this that if we are to be righteous, if we are to follow the ways of Christ rather than the competing ideologies of our age, there are going to be times when the world will humiliate us (Sojourners recent attack from Glen Beck?).

But in all of the readings for this week we also see that in our humiliation, as in our humility, we must be radically dependent upon God. In this radical dependence we die and let our life carry on in God—let God become our body and breath. We follow the Psalmist saying, “I trust in you, O Lord; / I say, ‘Your are my God.’/ My times are in your hand.”

This Palm Sunday as many of us march around our churches waving palms, remember that these will be the ashes representing our death when they are burned for Ash Wednesday—that if we follow Christ into Jerusalem humiliation and death will follow. This Sunday is the beginning of the radically new insurrection of the Gospel—an insurrection that begins with humiliation, moves to “death—even death on a cross,” and ends with God’s faithful deliverance and resurrection.

Read more...

Celebrate!

by Janice Love
Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

To see as God sees.

I have had the delight this Lent to have always before me the picture of Charles McCollough’s sculpture, “The Return of the Prodigal.” (pictured*)

It has led me to contemplate not only the joy of heaven over one sinner who repents but also the suffering of God over the lost, the dead, the unrepentant. Perhaps it is parents who best glimpse this pain as we ache, grieve and pray for our children, at times tempted to shout out, as in Psalm 32, “Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you.” As loving parent to the whole world and all its messy brokenness, oh, how God must suffer. Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking reflects that “…Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole…The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.”

To see as God sees is the calling of the church that we might too join heaven in celebrating what God celebrates.

In Lent we focus on the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem to reconcile heaven and earth. Reconcile comes from the Latin ‘reconcilare’ meaning “to bring together again” or, literally, “again make friendly”. During the transfiguration, back in chapter 9 in the gospel of Luke, we hear the voice of God reconfirming Jesus’ anointed status and commanding that we “listen to him!” After coming down from the mountain, Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem. By chapter 15, we find him determinedly on his way, teaching and healing. Large crowds are traveling with him. His teachings include calls to humility and compassion. And chapter 15 opens with the statement, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.” All of them! To listen to him. See God’s arms beginning to open wide in welcome, the throngs of angels readying their cheers. And then the keepers of correctness pop the balloon.

The Pharisees and scribes, the trained theologians, are grumbling again about the company Jesus keeps. In response, Jesus rattles off three parables in quick succession, the longest one about the man and his two sons being the last told, before turning again to address his disciples. If the first two parables have been surprising, the last no doubt elicits open shock. The behavior of the youngest son violates so much correctness that the knickers of the Pharisees and scribes “listening” must be in knots. Asking for his inheritance before his father has died, selling the property given to him, traveling to a foreign country, wasting his ill gotten gain on women and wine. Perhaps they even laugh upon hearing that when the youngest son’s fortunes take a turn for the worse, he ends up alone with the pigs, unclean animals that further deservedly cement the young son’s very own uncleanness. Ahhh, justice.

And then the turn. Having gone as low as a young Jew might, he “comes to himself”. In humility and repentance and in order to save his life, he decides to return home, confess and appeal to his father’s compassion for a job as a hired hand.

And then the welcome. Even before the repentance of the son is known, while he is still far off, there is the undeserved, over the top, arms wide welcome of the father. For it is not only the youngest son who has suffered.

And it is this that the eldest son does not see. The eldest son sees what he has always done for his father and he sees what he does not have. He sees the sin of his brother and he sees the rightness of his position on the matter. He sees from where his vested interests are. He does not see the suffering of his father and therefore does not understand his joy, even though the reason for it is repeated to him three times: ‘because he has got him back safe and sound’, ‘because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ One wonders if the Pharisees and scribes, so like the elder brother, are able to see now that Jesus has told them three parables.

To see as God sees requires our willingness to enter into God’s suffering for the world so loved. It is not that hard to find. As Gordon Harland in Christian Faith and Society insightfully states, “there is enough pain and sorrow in any city block to crack the heart of the world.” Harder perhaps is the willingness to be present enough with one another that we are able to enter into one another’s suffering. To be present to God is how we are able to enter into God’s suffering. It is in part what the Sabbath is for, time to be present to God and to one another, to let go of the vested interests that blind us to what God sees.

But it is potentially overwhelming, exhausting, painful work. This is why, I think, God in God’s wisdom, calls us into community with one another. The church as the Body of Christ is better able to bear the weight of this cross than what we might be capable of as individuals, for the ministry of reconciliation has been given to the church (2 Cor. 5:18). But we have also been given the message of reconciliation (5:19) – of Jesus’ reconciliation of heaven and earth. The hardest and most impossible reconciliation has already been accomplished and we are a new creation in Christ. Hear the angels’ cheers? Now that’s worth celebrating! 

(*Pictured: "The Return of the Prodigal", terra cotta by Charles McCollough, 2006; “The Salt of the Earth: A Christian Seasons Calendar 2009/2010, www.sculpturebymccollough.com)

Read more...