By Whose Authority?

by Brian Volck
Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Mark 1:21-28

A little word history from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Authority: First written appearance in English: 1230, autorite "book or quotation that settles an argument," from from L. nom. auctoritas ,"invention, advice, opinion, influence, command," from auctor "author." Used to mean "power to enforce obedience" is from 1393; meaning "people in authority" is from 1611. Authoritative first recorded 1609. Authoritarian is recorded from 1879.

Power: First written appearance in English: 1297, from L. potis "powerful" Used to mean "a state or nation with regard to international authority or influence" dates from 1726. Powerful is c.1400. The powers that be is from Rom. 13:1.

The relationship between authority and power is long, complex and subtle. Distinguishing them in common usage today is challenging. Was Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of Barack Obama’s senatorial replacement an act of power, authority, or both? When I tell my sons, both of whom are now taller than I, to do something they don’t want to, am I relying on the power of the purse, the authority of paternity, or some combination?

These days, the word, “power,” carries a whiff of brutality and illegitimacy. No one, for example, brags about “speaking truth to authority.” Then again, “authority” isn’t what it used to be, with countless bumper stickers demanding we question it.

Yet, even in the twenty-first century, humans haven’t escaped the conundrums arising at the necessary intersection of freedom, community, authority and power. The problem has been around a long, long time.

Jesus teaches in the synagogue “as one having authority and not as the scribes.” He also casts out “an unclean spirit” – who, like Legion, know(s) with whom it or they contend – and the amazed onlookers cry, “A new teaching with authority! He commands even unclean spirits and they obey him.” It’s not immediately clear how authoritative teaching and power to cast out spirits go together, but the residents of Capernaum apparently take it for granted.

Today – and particularly in the developed world – Christians have more trouble making that connection. Paul reminds us that we are not all called to the gift of prophecy – a helpful reminder, given what Deuteronomy promises to those who falsely speak in God’s name. But if not all called, who is? In our churches, where or to whom do we turn for authoritative guidance? If the Bible, then how is it read and interpreted? If in wise persons, then which ones? Pastors? Spiritual directors? The Saints of our Tradition? Bishops and Patriarchs? An “inner light?”

In the Ekklesia, the community into which Christ calls you, where is Jesus’ “new teaching with authority” found? How and with whom will you find the strength to follow it?

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Epiphany 3B

by Jesse Larkins
Mark 1:14-20
I have a brother who is a bit of an adrenaline junky. In many ways he is not unlike most 26 year old boys who have no house payment, car payment, girlfriend, wife or kids: footloose and fancy free. On the other hand, there is something quite unique about my brother. It is the fact that, on average, he risks his life 2-3 times per day. You see, my brother has made a life for himself out of pushing the envelope. If you were to ask him, he would tell you that airplanes were invented to be jumped out of, mountains were made to be crawled up and then skied down, and waterfalls were created in order to slide off in 6’ pieces of molded plastic. My brother’s primary raison d’être is white water kayaking. He has traveled all over the world finding and conquering the world’s wildest rivers and creeks. If we didn’t share the hallmark Shuman nose, you might wonder how we are related. When it comes to taking risks, we are as different as night and day.

One time, when we were in college, my brother tried to teach me how to kayak. I lasted exactly 10 minutes…in the swimming pool. The first skill that all kayakers must learn is how to roll—that is, how to right yourself when you are flipped upside down and the suction of the river’s current is trying to keep you that way. My brother put me in the pool, flipped me upside down, and said: “Roll up.” I couldn’t do it; mostly because I panicked and flailed around under the water like I was drowning. Sitting on the edge of the pool a bit later, I asked him what went wrong. His response was something like this: “You can’t fight the water. You’ve gotta let it lead you. You’ve gotta let go of control and just go with the flow.”

“Great,” I said. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just watch you from the banks along with the rest of the crowd.” I admire my brother’s courage, fearlessness, trust, and passion, but I’m not ready to follow him down a river.

I thought of my failed kayaking experience this week as I was reading this gospel lesson about Jesus calling his first disciples. Jesus’ ministry, especially his healings and confrontation with demons, were probably, like my brother on the river, something quite amazing to behold. It didn’t take long until the crowds following Jesus grew and his popularity spread. Yet, throughout the gospel, when push came to shove, and Jesus said “Follow me,” there were only a few who dared to leave behind their nets and their families to truly follow him. The rich young ruler went away sad. The religious elites shouted “crucify him.” And the rest were content to remain on the banks admiring the show.

When Jesus called Simon, Andrew, James and John to follow him, it was during his first major preaching tour. Heading through the backwoods of ancient Israel, Jesus’ proclamation was a familiar one to those who heard him. They had heard these words before when John the Baptist came through: “Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near.” Many had turned and repented at these words of John. Yet, when Jesus comes with the same message, this time the one calling was the one in whose life the Kingdom of Heaven was embodied.

Finishing his sermon, he walked down to the lake shore where four men were working, and issued the ultimate altar call. “Follow Me,” he said, “and I will give you the gifts you need to embody this good news of the Kingdom in yourselves. I’m not offering you much that the world will understand—no signing bonuses, no great benefits package.

But the Kingdom of Heaven is not exactly something that will be recognized by the world on the world’s terms.

‘Follow me,’ and the Kingdom of Heaven can become YOUR proclamation.

‘Follow me’ and I will change your relationship to God.

‘Follow me,’ and I will make you fishers of people, bringing you into new relationship with everyone you meet, including your enemies.

If you trust me; if you can loosen your grip on those things you hold so dear—your house, your job, your reputation, your political opinions, your other loyalties and allegiances; if you can just stop trying to determine your future happiness on your terms and let me guide you, I can offer you a part in this Kingdom come. Are you in, or are you content to remain on the banks?” And there, in the lives of Simon, Andrew, James and John, we see what it means to truly follow Christ into the rapids, no longer content to stand on the banks as a spectator.

The rest, as they say, is history. Simon, Andrew, James, and John dropped their nets, said goodbye to Dad, and followed. Even with their questions and fears, they trusted God enough to step to the edge of the falls and give themselves fully to serving and embodying God’s Kingdom in their own lives. Though they would spend the rest of Jesus’ life seeming to stumble and misunderstand what “following” was really all about, they dared to step to the edge and “let go of control.” The moment they accepted Christ’s invitation to an entirely new way of being in the world, God empowered them to reach beyond themselves and to risk everything they had to follow. They followed Christ off the edge of the rapid, not because Christ promised that they would always land up-right at the bottom, but because the One they followed would already be at the bottom with strength enough to pull them up when they struggled.

We can be both encouraged and provoked by Simon, Andrew, James, and John. These disciples challenge us to ask what things in our lives we still struggle to control at all cost when Christ is calling us to “stop fighting the water and let go.” Yet they also encourage us to go ahead and slide off the edge of this wild adventure of discipleship though we may not know all that Christ has in store for the ride. Sure, we will have moments of choking and flailing as each of the disciples did, but the One who called us is faithful; certain to right us when we’re upside down, and ever ready to welcome us back to the journey once we’ve caught our breath.

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Planning Our 2009 Gathering

by Kelly Johnson
Over the years, many EP endorsers have asked us to hold a Gathering dedicated to talking about economic issues, and at the end of last summer's gathering, the board agreed that we would move that direction for next year. Little did we know at that moment just how big an issue the economy was about to become in the U.S.

But as the planning committee began working, first we had trouble sorting out exactly which kind of economic issues we would talk about. Then, although usually a gathering is organized around a scriptural passage or theme, we could not settle on just one. Ultimately what struck us was less the importance of any one passage and more the importance of the scriptural story as the story of God’s economy. Or to put it another way, what struck us was the idea that the true economy is the work of God.

Our word ‘economics’ is related to the Greek word oikonomia, which refers to household management. (The Greeks had a separate word, chrematistike, to name efforts to make a profit in money.) So as we organize this gathering, we are thinking about questions like these: What is God’s household management (or home economics) style? How does God care for creation? And how do we who are invited to share God’s life participate in that economy—and get in its way? In particular, to continue our conversation on racism from last summer, in what ways now does our use of wealth build up the body and in what ways does it divide us?

Currently we have three keynote speakers confirmed, each of whom will address part of the story of God’s economy and our share in it. Bill Cavanaugh will be speaking on creation; Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove on Jubilee and Jesus’ teaching; and Kathy Grieb on Paul’s collection for the Jerusalem community. Workshops are being organized around four types of congregational practice: congregations that run businesses together, congregations that do community organizing to deal with economic problems in their neighborhoods, congregations that share a common purse, and congregations that take up collections.

But these plans are just a framework for the real work of the gathering: taking time to get to know each other, to share ideas and questions, and to talk together about what our good God is doing. We hope to see you all there.

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King and the Kingdom

by Debra Dean Murphy
Today as we commemorate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it's easy to forget how despised King was in his own time by many on the right and the left, by many within the church and outside it. As the frequency of his public speeches increased toward the end of his life so did his visible rage; as his preaching evolved in the last years, he moved from what Richard Lischer has called a “homiletics of identification” to a “homiletics of confrontation.” The radical politics of the Kingdom that King envisioned—for the church and the nation—did not endear him to either; it got him killed.

As author Tim Tyson has bluntly put it: "In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates . . .The radicalism of Dr. King's thought, the militancy of his methods, and the rebuke that he offered to American capitalism have given way to depictions of a man who never existed, caricatures invented after his death."

Today all over America, preachers and politicians will wax rhapsodic over the "I Have a Dream" speech (the palatable, overly familiar parts of it). There will be marches and parades, with blacks and whites peacefully, optimistically walking hand in hand. These will be earnest gestures of mutual respect and goodwill which I don't mean to belittle. But after the festivities, too many of us will retreat back into lives of segregated comfort and indifference, unable or unwilling to recognize, as King himself did in 1957, that "we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power."

More than 50 years later we still can't quite absorb those words. We prefer the "other" MLK--the one who affirms our own outrage at racial inequality. But when Martin insists that such injustice is inextricably linked to an economic system that makes our comfortable lives possible, even as it exploits, debases, and erases the downtrodden and dispossessed, we get nervous. We don't want the justice that King dreamed of to cost us anything.

But of course it will. Another great martyr of the church, Archbishop Oscar Romero, saw it this way, ten years after the murder of King and two years before his own death by an assassin's bullet:

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which has turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering.

Blessing the poor and suffering and those who thirst for justice: this is the upside-down work of the Kingdom that the powers will not bless--that the powers, in fact, will seek to crush at every turn. (Can we remember on this day that our own government tried to blackmail King into committing suicide?).

In all their humanness--their moral frailty and their exquisite courage--Romero, King, and a long line of saints and martyrs have borne witness to the madness of peaceableness in the midst of violence; of subversive love in the face of all-consuming hatred. And in death, in bodies brutalized by systems propped up by fear, they summon us to our own mad, subversive witness against the powers.

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Heaven and Earth

by Debra Dean Murphy
1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51 (Second Sunday After the Epiphany)

Each year on the second Sunday after the Epiphany, the lectionary steers us away from the Synoptics, where we have been immersed in birth narratives, visiting magi, and the baptism of Jesus, and into the first part of John’s gospel, which contains none of these historical particulars. But the Johannine detour is significant for Epiphany, for these texts deal with the revelation of Jesus to Israel and to the world, making the claim that this One from Nazareth (“can anything good come from there?”) is the eternal Logos, Word made flesh, whose glory we have beheld.

It is the calling of the disciples that preoccupies the fourth evangelist here. (The Lectionary for Mass focuses on Peter and Andrew; the RCL treats the call of Philip and Nathanael). In Jesus’ conversation with Nathanael it becomes clear where the gospel writer’s interests lie. In summoning his followers, Jesus reveals his knowledge of them and of Israel’s promised future. Nathanael, a “true Israelite,” receives a promise that recalls another Israel(ite)—Jacob—who dreamed of God’s angels ascending and descending a ladder. What Jacob’s dream pointed to has now, says Jesus, come to pass (v. 51). What the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth makes possible is the meeting of heaven and earth for the salvation of the whole created order.

Like the boy Samuel in this week’s Old Testament lesson, Jesus stands poised to call Israel to newness of life, to a new way of imagining what God-with-us will mean. The invitation reads simply: “Come and see.” Philip persuades Nathanael with these words; a few chapters later the Samaritan woman will issue the same summons to another skeptical bunch. What Jesus invites us to cannot be grasped simply as head-knowledge; it is lived practice. “Watch me,” Jesus seems to be saying, “I will show you who God is and who you are to be. This will take some time.”

While explications of this week’s Epistle lesson often fixate on the sins of gluttony and illicit intercourse, another interpretive strand seems promising, especially in light of the call narratives of John and 1 Samuel: We live out the call of God in specifically embodied ways. “Glorifying God in our bodies” has to do with food and sex, to be sure, but it also encompasses an array of bodily practices (hospitality, for one) that bear witness to goodness of God in the world.

And, finally, Psalm 139 sums up the truth of God’s knowledge of us and of God’s call and claim on our lives. Here we are reminded that knowledge is not only episteme, but ontos; not mere cognition but radical participation. God’s knowledge of us and our knowledge of God are enacted as we exist as members of one another and of the Triune God.

As we glimpse such participation this side of the eschaton in, say, the Eucharist, we come to know something of the meeting of heaven and earth that makes possible the salvation of the whole created order.

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Remember Your Baptism and Be Thankful

by Erin Martin
Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11

I remember my baptism very well.

It was fifteen years ago, and I felt that as a recent college graduate I was at a crossroads in my life. I remember that I wanted to start new, to wash away some of the painful choices I had made in my life and recommit myself to God. My mother was attending a Baptist church at the time, and so I sat before her pastor and expressed my earnest desire to be baptized. When he lowered me into the water and then raised me up again, the first air I breathed felt like new life to me. I felt like I had died and been raised with Christ.

Years later as an ordained Methodist minister the majority of the baptisms I perform look nothing like my own. Mostly I hold infants in my arms and pour water on their heads. Their rebirth in Christ will be far less tangible to them, but by no means less real.

I have come to understand that remembering one’s baptism has less to do with remembering the “experience” of one’s baptism and far more to do with remembering the “significance” of one’s baptism. While the experience of baptism is varied, the significance of baptism is unchanging. In baptism, all persons put on Christ, and for that we can be very thankful.

When Jesus goes to the River Jordan to be baptized by John it is not because Jesus is in need of repentance. From the beginning, John understands that the roles here are reversed. Jesus should be the one doing the baptizing. John declares that he is not even worthy to stoop down and untie Jesus’ sandal strap, let alone be the one to lower Jesus into the water and raise him up. In Jesus’ baptism, the one who is greater submits to the one who is lesser, and it is the humility of this submission that reveals Jesus’ greatness to us.

In his Interpretation commentary, Lamar Williamson explains that Mark’s placement of the baptism narrative in the prologue to the gospel and not within the public ministry of Jesus serves to establish the identity and authority of Jesus. In Jesus’ baptism, the heavens are ripped apart in the same way that at Jesus’ death the Temple curtain is ripped from top to bottom. Williamson writes, “In both cases, what had long been sealed is suddenly flung open.”

With Jesus, the long-deferred prophetic hope is realized, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1). According to Williamson, the significance of Jesus’ baptism is that he is who God says he is, “beloved Son.” In the same way that Jesus’ baptism establishes his identity so too our baptism establishes our identity. The significance of our baptism is that we are who God says we are, beloved sons and daughters of God through Jesus Christ.

Remembering our baptism entails glorying in Jesus’ identity as Son of God and glorying in our identities as children of God in Christ.

Clayton Schmit explains our deep connection to Christ through baptism in this way. He writes, “In Jesus’ baptism, he was fully identified with us as human creatures. In our baptism, we become fully identified with him. His life in God is our new life. His capacity to bend to God’s will is our strength to live a godly life. His love of all is our charity toward others.”

Remembering our deep connection with Christ in baptism has nothing to do with form, how much water is used, whether or not one is sprinkled or immersed.

Remembering our deep connection with Christ in baptism has everything to do with receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit that comes to us regardless in baptism.

Through the Holy Spirit we are made new. Through the Holy Spirit we have been clothed with Christ. Through the Holy Spirit we have been given the incredible gift of being made children of God. There is no greater gift. May we receive it with gratitude.

Thanks be to God!

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