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Good Friday 2014

nancy — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:18:24 +0000

Readings:
Isaiah 52:13–53:12; Psalm 40:1-14; Hebrews 10:1-25; John 18:31-19:37
It’s been a hell of a Lent.
It began for my family with the diagnosis of our middle son with epilepsy after two terrifying seizures. It continued when a group of friends from seminary began, through an extended email chain, sharing with one another the trials we were facing: one friend wrote that she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, after which another friend shared that her father had inoperable cancer, after which a third friend wrote and said “Our Good Friday came today with news that my father, too, has metastasized cancer.” In the midst of this my brother-in-law was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder. There’s more to be said, but that will suffice. I’m sure you could add to this list your own sufferings and the troubles of those you love. Several of us in this community over the last forty days have spent time in hospitals, seen loved ones sick or injured, have lost old friends or family members.
It’s been a hell of a Lent.
And sometimes I can’t help but wish God would just fix things. Just do the God-magic and make everything better. But as soon as I think these things I realize that what I am asking from God is precisely magic; I’m asking for a god who looks more like the pagan pantheon of divinities who exert power and control over defined areas of our lives; divinities who can be coaxed and bribed into interfering in human affairs. This interference, of course, in the Greco-Roman mythologies is sometimes beneficial to us and sometimes harmful, depending on the whims of the gods. You see, the very power I wish God would exert to magically make this world better is a power that is but human power writ large and projected upon a transcendent screen.
Karl Barth has urged us to remember that God’s power is not an “empty, naked sovereignty.” He adds, “God, . . . if conceived of as unconditioned power, would be a demon and as such his own prisoner.” My desire for a God who would reach in and act in a punctiliar and unpredictable intervention of sheer naked power to make things better sounds more like Zeus than Jesus on Good Friday.
Jesus on Good Friday has an encounter with Pontius Pilate in John’s gospel that forces us to rethink divine power. “Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’” Jesus refuses to answer, but instead questions Pilate about his question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” To which Pilate replies, “I am not a Jew, am I?” Jesus answers him, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Jesus’ answer is yes and no. “Yes, I have a kingdom,” which presumable makes him a king, but his kingdom is not “from this world” and so it is unclear what his kingship means. Pilate’s worry, of course, is that Jesus’ kingship will be a threat to his, but could a kingship not from this world threaten a kingship of this world? Pilate seeks further clarification, “So you are a king?” Jesus answers him, again obliquely, “You say that I am a king.”
Rowan Williams interprets this exchange to mean, “The kingship [Jesus] exercises is the kind of power that cannot (not should not, but cannot) be defended by violence.” Pilate’s question of kingship is a question, then, that “cannot be answered in the language in which it is asked.”
In the City of God Augustine argues somewhat paradoxically that violence and coercion can only be used to defend relative or penultimate things. This seems odd, because one might imagine that violence, as a last resort, would only be used to defend the most important things, things that are absolute and ultimate, things like the kingdom of God. But Augustine refrains, saying that if we were to try to defend the ultimate good with violence we would only have shown that what we were defending was not the ultimate good. To inaugurate the peaceable kingdom by a show of force is, of necessity, to inaugurate something other than the peaceable kingdom.
“Are you a king?” Pilate asks. “What kind of power do you wield?,” he wants to know. Jesus refuses to respond on his terms and finally becomes silent—a silence that opens a space, an empty space, a pause, in which questions of violence, power, defence, and rivalry fade before his determination to end this competition for verbal territory. At this point of the conversation, his answer to questions of power and authority cannot be spoken but only enacted. His answer will be the cross.
And given what Jesus has said and done in the face of Pilate, I’m not sure we interpret the cross rightly if we think of it as kenotic, self-emptying—at least not from the perspective of John’s gospel. We must be careful not to conflate John’s story too quickly with the Christ hymn of Philippians 2 in which incarnation and cross are described precisely in kenotic language. In John’s gospel, Jesus is not emptying himself of power in order to undergo the cross and then reclaim power through resurrection.
If the cross is what Jesus looks like when he has laid his power aside, then we don’t really have a challenge to power as we commonly construe it—that is, as naked sovereignty. But if the cross is Jesus’ enactment of power, then all abstract, unconditioned power is shown to be fundamentally demonic. To borrow a phrase from a wonderful recent essay by our own Tony Baker, the crucifixion challenges all “unhinged power”— power unhinged from justice, unhinged from order, unhinged from love.
The cross is not Jesus’ Clark Kent disguise that will be set aside when he is resurrected and restored to his true identity as Superman. Jesus just is Clark Kent.
Cross and resurrection are the same power, the power of God to be always entirely true to who God is and the power of Christ to make that divine activity radically and perfectly transparent. This power, always present as divine energy, always present as an unfailing and unstoppable pressure toward love, is a shared power that invites, partners, and cooperates with the creation in its redemption. “He who made us without ourselves,” Augustine writes, “will not justify us without ourselves.”
What are we to make then of Jesus’ words on the cross, “It is finished”? For those of you who have taken my ethics courses, and who have perhaps occasionally fended off boredom by counting how many times I said the word “telos” in a given class period, you might be interested to know that the word “finished” in this verse is tetélestai, from the root telos—“it is complete, it is fulfilled, it has been brought to its proper end.”
Done. Finished. Or is it?
If we are not careful we can fall into the trap of reading the “It is finished” as indicating the fulfillment of a divine decision to engage in a self-imposed and self-enclosed heavenly transaction by which the human condition is changed for us but not with us.
Yet the story does go on. The blood and water that pour from Jesus’ side suggest the founding of a church through baptism and eucharist that will continue Christ’s work. As Richard Neuhaus once commented, “‘It is finished.’ But it is not over.”
The divine power exhibited in the cross is a power that invites us into the continuing work of redemption and atonement. We become, again to cite Tony Baker’s words, “atoned atoners.”
On the cross the end comes, but the end turns out to be a beginning. The unhinged power of the demonic seeks quick and forceful solutions, but the power of God that is hinged to justice and formed by love, requires patience, for it seeks not to destroy what stands in the way of progress but to transform what stands in the way of the restoration of all things.
In his poem, “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot describes, as well as anyone, the way in which “it is finished” invites us into the ongoing work of atoned atoners.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . . .
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. . . .
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
Amen.

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Revelation 1:9-18

wpengine — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:59:30 +0000

Alleluia Christ is Risen!
This is the season of resurrection. Here in Christ Chapel we have listened to the stories from scripture that tell of the appearances of the risen Christ to his friends. We have heard preachers David and Jana and John speak of the risk of resurrection, experiencing the unexpected Jesus, and knowing Christ through table and story and through the body. For even after all these years have passed from the first Easter week, we still know the resurrection through our senses: the faculties of the body: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste.
Here in our second reading is another resurrection appearance in the key of Apocalypse. From John of Patmos, exiled because of the testimony of Jesus. The Book of Revelation is a treasure — although it was not popular with Luther – it is a treasure if you can read it like a poet or a mystic, but not like a poet of privilege but a desperate poet in times of trouble. Revelation is a Magical Mystery Tour of sight, but also of sound — of hearing, singing, chanting, praying. In our text this morning, I not only see, but I hear.
Lucy Winkett, Canon Precentor at St. Paul’s Cathedral, is a musician, a close reader of scripture and a preacher. In her book, Our Sound is our Wound, she writes about sound as a metaphor for our life with God. She observes the sounds of scripture and the sounds of our culture and invites us to notice what they say about us and about God.
What is the sound of resurrection? How do you know resurrection or convey it?
“I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying…”
John is in an ecstatic trance, in the zone on the Lord’s Day. He probably is not boxed into a pew, but he is in community and in prayer. He hears a loud voice like a trumpet.
Was it a voice like a trumpet, or was it a trumpet? What is a trumpet but a brass instrument with air forced through it? A magnified, metalicized voice, exulting like the trumpeters who play at Good Shepherd at Easter, or who played at my friend’s wedding? The sound of the resurrection is a voice like a trumpet or a trumpet like a voice — Isn’t Louis Armstrong’s singing voice and jazz trumpet the same voice? The sound of the resurrection is Louis Armstrong. And for me this last spring of high school for my son, Henry, the sound of resurrection is the Austin High School marching band. Henry plays the trombone…. Trombones rock. Trombones rule!
“Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”
Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands,
and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest.
His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters.
Water has color. Water has properties: taste, feeling, clarity, but also water has sound.
… and his voice was like the sound of many waters.”
What is the sound of resurrection? It is the voice of the storm who thunders. It is the waves crashing on the rocks at Singing Beach or Swallowtail Light or whatever beach or whatever rocks you hear the water crashing. It is the mountain stream swelled by snowmelt in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It is the fountain that runs and sings outside my bedroom and porch window at home every day. When the rains pour and drive as they do here in the Hill Country, filling Shoal Creek and flooding, rushing, drawing — that’s the sound. The voice is a big sound, a gentle sound, a resonant, endless sound — it’s a chorus, it’s a choir. It is the voice of creation.
In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last,
and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.
Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this.
“Do not be afraid.” That’s one thing the risen Christ says. It’s what the living Jesus said too… and that is the voice you recognize when it calls your name, just as the woman knew in the garden that the stranger was her friend: “Mary.”
And the one Christ who speaks after he tells you not to be afraid, then tells you to do something — to go, to tell, to meet him in Galilee, Do not hold on to me but go tell. Here, the command is to write. Write.
What happens when we hear the resurrection? The voice like a trumpet? Like the sound of mighty waters?
I have a friend who teaches preaching, Ruthanna Hooke, and she teaches about the preacher’s voice and the way it speaks truth…God’s Word. She teaches with a book called “Freeing the Natural Voice.” Working with her is about learning to hear and learning to speak from the inside out from the depths not from the shallows. It is a practice that is physical, psychological, and spiritual and all at once.
When we hear the resurrection… through water, trickling or thundering, or jazz trumpet or singing, the resurrection sets us free. It releases us from prison and fear, exile. The resurrection make us a new creation. The resurrection frees the natural voice.
We can go tell, we can go write, we can go tell it on the mountain, we can publish glad tidings…
Let me tell about one other friend, Barbara Rossing, who teaches at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. She writes about the book of Revelation — against all the violent, divisive, frightening Left Behind theology.
This is what she says: in Revelation, people are not raptured up to heaven, but God is raptured down to earth — to be with us, to dwell with us, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Heaven is raptured down to earth.
So let us hear the sound of the resurrection, and then may we speak, sing, preach and pray from the very depths of God.
Amen.

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