Preaching on:
Mark 5:21–43

I think most of you have heard by now that a little more than a week ago I announced that I’ll be stepping down from my position as your senior minister here at the church. And in the interval here the church council and I have set my last day, which will be Sunday, September 8—which gives us 10 good weeks to say goodbye. And we need that time, I think, to say goodbye well—there’s a lot to celebrate that we’ve accomplished together, there’s a lot of gratitude to express for the way we’ve been there for one another, there are lots of fond memories to share, and there’s going to be some real sadness for some of us—certainly for me and for Bonnie. If you haven’t received my letter yet, please let me know and I’ll make sure you get a copy.

Since my announcement I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls and emails and letters from folks and had in-person conversations with some of you, and you’ve all been so gracious and kind and complementary and encouraging even, which actually makes it a lot harder to leave, to be honest. It would be a lot easier if you all just said, “Good riddance! Scram! Don’t let the door hit you!” But instead, your kindness and graciousness highlight for me all the more just how difficult this departure will be for me. It means so, so much to me that I’ve been able to be a positive part of your lives, and your support and your well wishes deepen the bond that we’ve built together over the last five years. And I think that’s the process of a healthy goodbye. It’s not trying to loosen the bond; it’s deepening the bond to the point of completion, so that we can let go with sadness and with joy. Your love and encouragement as I take this next step in my life and career mean more to me than I can adequately express right now. Thank goodness, I’ve got 10 more weeks to hopefully work it out.

As I’ve spoken to colleagues and friends and family about my decision, the first question they have for me when I tell them I’m leaving (after they find out that I’m not taking the expected path of leaving for another position at another church is, “Why are you leaving then? What went wrong?” Lots of ministers drop out because they’re emotionally or financially abused, their congregations are hotbeds of conflict and immaturity, or because they’re simply overworked, and one way or another they just burn out. But nothing like that is the case for me here. We have our moments, of course, everybody does! But that’s just a little spice in the curry here. We wouldn’t want things to get boring! But this is a healthy, stable congregation in a desirable area with amazing people and lots of resources where I’m appreciated and supported. Everything is great. So, what the heck could possibly cause you to want to risk losing all that? Good question!

I’m going to be completely honest with you all and vulnerable to boot and let you know that I don’t know exactly how to answer the question, “What’s next?” yet. All I know is that like Jesus in our scripture reading this morning, I have been interrupted. And for reasons that I can’t fully articulate yet, I know that I need to stop and give that holy interruption an opportunity to reveal and name itself in my life.

Just imagine the scene here for a minute: Jesus is on an important mission. Jairus’ daughter is dying. They’ve got to rush to get there in time to heal her. They’re fighting their way through this thick crowd, their minds must have been totally fixated on their goal֫—get to the house in time to save the little girl. And then Jesus does something totally bizarre. He just stops everything. “Somebody touched me! Who touched me?” And the disciples must have been like, “Look around you, scatterbrain, like everybody is touching you. Remember the dying little girl? Let’s keep moving! Come on!” And Jairus! Can you imagine how he must have felt? He must have been in an absolute panic for his daughter’s life. What could be more important than just continuing to get there? And really—really—did Jesus even need to stop at all? The woman with the hemorrhage was right, she was already healed just by touching Jesus’ cloak. You’d think he'd be grateful she didn’t throw herself at his feet and demand his attention the way that Jairus and so many others did. He could just get on with it. Hemorrhage healed, keep going. But not Jesus. In the middle of this critical, life-or-death mission for this big shot from the synagogue, Jairus, Jesus allows himself to be interrupted by an unnamed unknown. He stops everything simply because of a feeling inside of him that doesn’t really make any sense to anybody else, especially under the circumstances. And Jesus invites that unknown—that holy interruption—to speak and to reveal itself.

30 years ago this summer, at age 16, I heard the call to ministry. It was the same kind of thing—a literal interruption in my life, an abrupt moment where something shifted within me, and I suddenly knew beyond any doubt that I was going to be a minister. I heard a voice and everything. The whole shebang.

The next 10 years were spent simultaneously exploring and running away from that voice, that calling, that interruption in what I had previously thought my life might be. And then for the last 20 years, I fully committed to this inevitable and strange and wondrous calling. I went to seminary and worked my way up through ministry to arrive in this amazing place. And I assumed that the next 20 or 30 years would be much the same. I didn’t think I’d be in Glen Ridge forever, but when I left, I assumed I would be leaving for the next logical step—a bigger church, a bigger platform, a bigger budget, a bigger staff, a bigger salary, etc. etc. Not that those things were necessarily motivating me, just that that was the next logical and acceptable career move laid out for someone in my position. But instead, I’ve been interrupted.

This has been a very slow process. It started for me in earnest last summer. God began to speak to me. Not all in one moment, not with one voice, but in dreams, and synchronicities, and relationships, and books, and longings within me that could not be ignored. And over the last year of struggle and exploration and prayer, God’s intentions for my life have become clear to a degree. God is saying, I’ve got something for you to do that is off the beaten path. For the last 30 years, you have faithfully walked the clear path laid out for you by the church—college, the academic study of religion, resistance to the call, seminary, interfaith dialogue, internships, field education, a thesis, discernment, career counseling, psychological evaluation, search and call, ordination, chaplaincy, community minister, associate minister, interim minister, and senior minister. But now I’m asking you to risk it all, to take a leap of faith, and to step off the path of everybody’s expectations (including your own) and do something different. As Robert Frost famously wrote, “Two paths diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

The thing about the road less traveled is that you don’t know exactly where it’s going to take you. What I know for sure is that I’m not leaving ministry, I’m not abandoning my call, I certainly haven’t lost my faith. God is calling to me now to focus my energies and gifts on a new kind of ministry beyond the walls of the established church. I have some ideas about what this might look like and what it might become, but they’re not fully formed. They’re nascent, fetal. They’re still in the process of revealing themselves, and out of respect for them and this process, and in order to protect their integrity, I really can’t lay it out for you—but most of all I can’t do it because I don’t know yet. Vaguely, I can say that I’m going to begin to work as a spiritual director and I’m going to be working on some creative projects like a book, and at least one podcast that’s in the works, and some classes and retreats. And maybe—just maybe—I’m going to build something new and needed—maybe a new kind of church for a changing world. But in order for that to happen, I have to be faithful to this process and I have to allow myself to be interrupted and I need to make room in my life for something new to grow—as hard as that is to accept.

I wonder if you are open to interruptions. I’m not suggesting that everybody leave their jobs and try to make it on their own. This, for me, is a calling. You all have your own callings in life that are different than mine, look different from mine. But it’s worth taking some space to consider if you’ve made enough room in your busy schedules, in your impressive accomplishments, in your noble and worthy goals, on your bucket lists, for a little something new that wants to be known to interrupt you. Interruptions are not often immediately appreciated. If they don’t demand our attention, it’s easy to let them slip away. But paying attention to them might (might!) make all the difference.

Preaching on:
Mark 4:26–34

I’d like to invite you all to come by my yard sometime—take a good look—because right now everything is looking pretty good. I’ve been mowing it regularly (even the hard part, that steep rock-filled drainage ditch between the sidewalk and the road), I got the spring pruning and trimming all done, I cleared out the brush piles behind the garage that had been building up since last spring, I filled in all the old groundhog and chipmunk and rabbit holes, I pulled all the weeds growing out of the cracks in the driveway, we’ve cleaned up the garden beds, and I bagged up all the clippings. It’s pretty impressive! …If you’re going to walk by though to check it out, please do it soon, because in just about a week everything’s probably going to look terrible again.

It makes me anxious when the yard looks bad, especially in a neighborhood like this where most people’s lawns are professionally maintained and look perfect all the time. When I get too busy to mow or weed whack or prune or whatever, I feel like I’m letting everybody down, I feel like I’m letting the “Garden State” down. If someone stops to let their dog relieve itself in my yard, I worry even that the dog is judging me for my long grass. So, I prefer for things to look neat and tidy. I prefer for things to be under control. I prefer my lawn to look like everybody else’s lawn. I really do. But the yard has this mind of its own! It thwarts me! The grass and the shrubs and the weeds and the seeds, they have their own agenda.

Being “in charge” of a couple yards these last five years has taught me that I’m not actually in charge at all. The yards are in charge. I’m just like nature’s janitor, I’m the cleanup crew. I am not the boss, I’m just here to respond. And I take my orders from a higher power. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.” The Kingdom of God is like a lawn: you think you’re in charge of it, you think you control it, you think you own it, you think you’re responsible for it, but the fact is that your influence is very limited. You can plant and you can cut. But the real magic—the life, the growth and transformation, the flowers and the fruit—they belong to God.

This all comes down to our spiritual attitudes, which are very important. In some ways, spirituality or Christianity is just an attitude. It’s an orientation to life. I plant tomatoes in my garden in the spring. I pick tomatoes off my vines all summer. I must be the King of Tomatoes! Tomatoes are here to serve me! But to those of us willing to listen to Jesus’ spiritual wisdom, we must cultivate a different attitude. I have received a gift too wonderful for me. And in response to that gift, I will become a servant to these tomatoes.

In Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve to work and care for the earth. God calls all of us to become stewards. But stewards, over time, often forget themselves and begin to behave like entitled kings and queens. When we elevate ourselves over the magic we are supposed to serve, we lose sight of it. God’s magic is a ground-level, grassroots kind of magic, and we need to stay close to the ground to really appreciate it.

We’re also called to be stewards of the church. We work and take care of it. And it’s critically important that we maintain the attitude that if God is at the heart of the church, just like God is at the heart of nature, then one of our most important jobs is to know when to get the heck out of the way of the magic. Get out of the way of the growth and the change and the transformation that can only ever truly belong to God.

And I’ll go one step further still. How often have you heard someone say, “Take control of your life!” “Become the master of your own destiny!” “Make your own future!” I’m not saying those things don’t work. There is a reason we live in a culture of power and dominance and control—because it produces results! I can’t argue with that. It also produces a lot of problems—war and conflict and pollution and the like at a global scale, but also, at the individual level, anxiety, and depression, and disconnection, and disease. So, being in control “works,” but I’m not sure we’ve really reckoned with everything we get in that bargain.

In my life, my greatest achievements, the biggest growth, the deepest and most meaningful callings have not been my doing. I’m only standing here with you today because God has made some magic in my life, magic that is far beyond my control. I am a steward of that magic, a responder to it. I’m along for the ride. I’m not the boss here. An instrument doesn’t play itself. I cannot understate the difference it makes in our lives to plant tomatoes and pick tomatoes as if you were a child at God’s magic show, as if you were instrument being played by God’s hand, as if (at any moment) a new and unexpected seed might be planted in your life. Because when we take control, all the yards look the same. When we take control, we stick to the well-worn path. When we take control, we think we already know everything we have to look forward to and we miss what God is doing.

The mustard seed is the smallest seed of all. But when it hits good soil, it grows like a weed. It takes over the whole lawn. Soon it’s a bush so big that the birds move in and make it their home. That’s what the Kingdom of God is like, Jesus tells us. It’s the seed you barely notice, that produces the weed you most want to mow down, that if you would only let it grow would transform your whole life. When you’re in control all the time, it’s very hard to go in an unexpected direction. It’s very hard for something new to sprout up in your life.

We so desperately want to believe that the Kingdom of God is the greatest power in the universe! No other kingdom can stand up to its greatness! God is almighty! All powerful! Whatever is happening in the world must be God’s plan! But Jesus’ teachings on the matter couldn’t be more opposite. The Kingdom of God is tiny, low to the ground, quiet, and easily overlooked. It must be searched for like a lost coin, like a lost sheep, like a perfect pearl. That means the Kingdom of God only has power when we pay attention to it in our lives. It only has power when we search for it in our lives, when we allow it to grow, when we humble ourselves to the point of placing ourselves within its power. The Kingdom of God only has power if we let it have power. It only has power if we respond to it.

When was the last time you were genuinely surprised by your relationship with God? When was the last time you let your spiritual yard get messy? When was the last time you allowed a pesky weed a little room to grow in your life? When was the last time you gave up control without giving up attention? When was the last time you got out of the way without turning your back completely on what was taking place?

Beloved, living a spiritual life requires a foundation of faith. Faith is not a series of beliefs that we assent to intellectually and then go about our business being the boss of everything. Faith is an attitude, a humbling orientation to life that enables us to believe in, and by believing respond to, God’s unexpected possibility.

May there be meaning in your messiness; may there be joy in your unexpected twists; and may there be magic whenever we get close enough to the ground to touch the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

Preaching on:
James 1:19–20
Romans 14:1–3

Most of us here, as Americans, have this deep inner sense that the freedom of speech is both a sacred right and a necessary evil. And whichever way you happen to be thinking of it at any given time has a lot to do with whether or not you’re in agreement with the last opinion you just heard. I’m feeling compelled to talk about freedom of speech this morning for just this reason. Because we all know we would never want to live in one of the many places where people aren’t free to speak up, speak out, speak the truth. And none of us—no person—is a true free-speech absolutist. We all feel like the line must be drawn somewhere, and we struggle with where, when, and how to draw that line.

This is all especially relevant to us right now because we just experienced a historic, controversial, and divisive antiwar, pro-Palestinian campus protest movement that’s left many of us with big questions about freedom of speech and expression, about the tactics and rhetoric of protesters and counter protesters, and about the response of the educational institutions and the police. And many of us are wondering: Where do we go from here?

So, I think I need to try to cover, briefly, three things this morning. I’m going to talk about the actual content of what the protesters have been saying. I’m going to talk about why I think freedom of speech is so important. And I’m going to talk about what our response should be to expression or opinion like the recent protests.

One of the biggest reasons that the campus protests have been so controversial and divisive is because they’ve been accused of being antisemitic. And there are a lot of competing opinions about whether or not that’s true. For example, there are pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters who say that they haven’t experienced any antisemitism at all in the encampments and protests. And there are Jewish students, students who believe that Israel’s war in Gaza is unjust and should be stopped, who have reported being targeted on campus because of their Jewish identity. We’ve seen reports of things like Nazi flags being flown at the protests. And we’ve heard from protest organizers that these things are isolated incidents from fringe individuals. We’ve heard chants like “Globalize the Intifada” which many Jews hear as a call for globalized violence against Jews, but which protesters claim is a non-violent call to action. We’ve heard “From the River to the Sea” which many Jews hear as a call for the total genocide and displacement of Jews in Israel, but which protesters claim is just a call for Palestinian freedom in the place they live. We’ve heard from protesters that Zionists are people who believe that Palestinians should never have a state of their own. We’ve heard from many Jews that Zionists are people who believe the Jews should always have a state of their own. Zionists have been particularly targeted by the protesters in terms of speech and action (“Zionists” have been harassed on campus and blocked from moving through campus, for example). Many Jews claim this is just a way to target Jews. Some protesters claim that they’re not targeting Jews, that they’re targeting Israel, its rightwing government, and its policies. Some Jews have claimed that any criticism of Israel, especially in this moment, is antisemitic.

I admire the protester’s calls to action for the Palestinian cause. I abhor war and violence. I hate the devastating toll this war has had on innocent people. There should be a ceasefire in Gaza now. And there needs to be a better, self-determining future for the Palestinians, ideally with their own state. That won’t be easy, especially with a group as absolutely detestable and dangerous as Hamas in charge of Gaza. But we need to figure this out or it’s only going to get worse for everybody. Israel cannot wipe out Hamas. I wish they could, but it’s just impossible without wiping out all of Gaza, and we can’t let that happen. I think the people in charge in Israel are smart enough to know they can’t wipe out Hamas, and they’re probably actually being motivated by other factors—from politics to revenge and even hatred. And it has to stop. So, to that point, I’m in accord with the protesters.

But what I—especially as a Christian, who recognizes the shameful part the Christian Church has had to play in the framing and perpetuation of antisemitism, and the key role the Church has had in establishing genocidal violence and persecution against Jews—what I cannot stand by or give a pass to under any circumstances is antisemitism.

Have the campus protests been antisemitic? Well, anecdotally there’s a lot of evidence that they have been. It’s really hard, in my opinion, to fly a swastika and then claim you don’t have a problem. But were these just isolated incidents? Or were the protests themselves systemically founded upon principles or narratives that are inherently antisemitic? That’s a harder question to answer. Where I’m at right now is that I am absolutely sure that the protests and the protesters, by and large, were not trying to be careful about antisemitism. It is not a priority for them.

For me to be truly comfortable with any movement in criticism of Israel or Jews, I would need to make sure that a commitment to anti-antisemitism is a foundational principle. The left has told us that passively not being racist is not enough. We need to be actively antiracist. For me, an outspoken commitment to anti-antisemitism has been sorely lacking in the protests and, I believe, it’s what is morally and strategically required by the campus protest movement as it moves forward.

Now should protests which are not anti-antisemitic and which sometimes cross the line in indisputable antisemitism be allowed to continue? Should these protesters be allowed to speak and express themselves freely. I believe, absolutely, yes. There are a lot of reasons to support the general principle of freedom of speech even when you will almost certainly disagree with some of that speech and even when some of it will be problematic and some of it will be vile. I don’t have time to get into them all. So, I’ll talk about one that I think is especially relevant to the recent campus protests.

In the West, especially in the United States, the freedom of speech has become a critical cultural rite of passage for young people (especially) in the process of discovery of who we are, of what we believe, and of what we’re capable of. Every person deserves to be a part of the conversation and deserves to express their deepest ideals to the rest of us. Absolutely no one should be silenced by the government or punished by the government for speech. As for the rest of us, we should do our best, as much as possible, to cultivate a tolerance for diverse opinions.

Many of the campus protesters have been described as naïve or as unaware of the history in Israel and Palestine. I’m sure that’s true of some of them, perhaps it’s even descriptive of the movement as a whole. But that’s a terrible justification for silencing someone. In fact, it’s all the more reason to engage them as productively as possible. It’s not always possible to engage people productively when they’ve barricaded themselves in your administration building, but it should be one of our guiding principles, certainly a long-term guiding principle. Like, we have no choice but to arrest you today, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk to you tomorrow. We should honor the voices of these young people, even when they’re wrong. We should listen to them, even when it’s hard for us to do so. We should call them out, when they need to be called out. But we should engage them, rather than simply trying to make them go away.

Now, I’m talking now about speech—about the expression of ideas and opinions. But these have been protests—protests which (by design) have been extremely disruptive, sometimes destructive, sometimes a threat to safety and perhaps to necessary moral stands against antisemitism. Allowing someone the freedom to speak and to express themselves is not the same as allowing them to burn down the library, right? We all have a line. And every institution had to calculate that line for themselves. Some did better than others. It was extraordinarily difficult and stressful, and some of you were a part of those decisions. As a longtime leftie agitator, I can tell you absolutely that these protests are designed to get you to call the police on them. That’s part of the process here. It’s part of the dance. But when and how the police are called, and what they do when they arrive, is critically important. We cannot let ourselves get to a place where every time we see a bunch of young people getting rowdy and expressing themselves, we just automatically call the police and have them cleared out. That would be a huge mistake.

I saw very peaceful, relatively contained encampments cleared out violently by police under the watchful eyes of sniper rifles. I’m totally against calling the police out to attack peaceful, contained protests. If the response to your speech is a boot and a gun, you’re not likely to change your mind or to grow because you’re not likely to be able to give the opposing viewpoint, which is hidden behind force, any serious consideration. It is a huge tactical mistake, and it doesn't honor the process that these young people are engaged in. We should have some tolerance for disruption in order to allow people the ability to fully express themselves and the ability to fully hear opposing opinions. And that peaceful, contained disruption should be intellectually and morally engaged with and negotiated with. That is, I believe, a process, a ritual, a rite-of-passage in our culture that should be held sacred.

As Christians, especially as Protestant Christians, this right to freedom of speech and expression is central to our identity. The word protest is right there in the name—Pro-test-ant. We should extend this grace to others as much as possible. We should be, as James advised us in our reading this morning, quick to listen and slow to anger. And when speech is so vile as to be irredeemable, we should do everything we can to meet hate speech with loving speech, to meet bad ideas with good ideas. As Paul suggests in his letter to the Romans this morning, freedom of speech is not primarily a way of having arguments with the people you disagree with. It’s not about division. It’s about, as much as possible, offering people who are different from you, and perhaps even wrong, the grace and the space to still have a place at the table. And, I believe, a place at the table, and the right to express oneself, is the process by which we will grow toward greater love and greater justice.

Preaching on:
2 Corinthians 3:17–18 
John 14:16–17 

I’ve done a lot of work in interfaith dialogue, speaking candidly and openly with believers from other faith traditions. And one of the questions about Christianity that comes up most often from other monotheists (people who believe there’s just one God), especially Muslims and Jews, is “Could you explain the Trinity to me? It sounds so crazy, I must be missing something. Please, make it make sense.”

And imagine it from their perspective. Here’s this religion that firmly insists that it is a monotheistic religion—ONE GOD, not many—and yet they pray to and worship what looks to the rest of us to be THREE DIFFERENT GODS. The Creator God of Abraham we’re all most familiar with, and then Jesus, who was a flesh-and-blood human being, and then this third “person,” the Holy Spirit, who’s a little harder to define, but who shows up in various places as whispers in the night, or blowing winds, or descending doves, or tongues of fire, or the still, small voice within. That is a little confusing to people outside of the Church and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s also a little confusing to some of us inside the Church.

But I actually think trying to square the circle here is a bit of distraction. The mistake I think that we make over and over again as Christians is trying to intellectually define and understand the unchanging, eternal nature of what God is, who God is, what God has always been. There have been so many books and creeds written trying to diagram how it is that God is both one and three at the same time, and where the three persons come from, and how they relate, etc. etc.

In some ways, all these attempts remind me of medieval bestiaries. In the old bestiary, you’d have an entry for a rhinoceros, but reading the entry it was clear that the author had never seen a rhinoceros, nor even met anyone who’d ever seen one firsthand. It was all hearsay, and legend, and imagination that bore very little resemblance to the actual animal—like a weird game of zoological telephone. The important thing about the Trinity is not to categorize God or exhaust God through explanation. It’s not important that it’s logical, or consistent, or inoffensive, or exactly as we have traditionally described it, the important thing about the Trinity is what it tells us that God is doing in our lives and in our world.

This is a fascinating aspect of this to me. It is really hard to overestimate the shift in religious and spiritual consciousness that occurred when Jesus’ disciples (who were traditional “one equals one” monotheists) began to realize for the first time in human history that their understanding of God’s nature was holding back their ability to live into what God was showing them and doing among them. Jesus’ resurrection shifted the consciousness of the disciples from “God can only be this one thing” to “God can be more than one thing?! God can be God and Jesus at the same time?!” And eventually this seismic shift in consciousness was rounded out at Pentecost with a trinitarian understanding of God.

This was a revolution in the making. God is doing something new with us and for all intents and purposes it looks to us from our perspective that God is changing. This idea that God could at once be unified and diverse and that our understanding of God should not be based on what has defined God intellectually in the past but should be based on what defines God in our experience right here and right now, this idea began to spread over the decades and centuries to the wider Greek and Roman culture. And the world freaked out and spent a lot of time and energy trying to put the genie back in the bottle, trying to convince everyone that, in fact, God hadn’t changed and that God had always been a Trinity and always would be a Trinity. And this carefully described and contained Trinitarian doctrine became the new intellectual knowledge and belief that everyone would be indoctrinated into, which undermines, at the very least, the experience of the total, ecstatic, wild and mysterious revelation that the disciples were offering to all of Western culture and beyond—as our experience of God grows, God seems to grow with us. As we evolve, God seems to evolve with us. The heretical implication, what all the creeds and diagrams and dogmas are trying to arrest here, is that as we continue to experience our faith, as we continue to grow, as we continue to evolve, God will also continue to grow, to respond, to evolve, and to change for and with us. Our understandings of God, by definition, will always be incomplete.

Jesus was a unique person—a person who embodied in his life, in his ministry, in his teachings and healing, in his relationships, the potential for this shift in God consciousness within all of us. Jesus taught us that God in our loving Father, shifting us away from royal, kingly metaphors for God. A king sits on a throne, somewhere in a palace far away, far removed from ordinary people by orders of magnitude. But a parent lives with you in your own house. A parent is not just a distant symbol of order, a parent is close to you. You can know your parent personally. And as we discover, as we grow up, as we lose our parents to distance and age and death, your parent lives on intimately inside of you.

And this is exactly where Jesus tells us to look for God and the “Kingdom” of Heaven—within us. And if God’s Realm is within us, then we, as Paul said in our reading this morning, “are being transformed into God’s image” from within, from the Spirit. And if God is within us, then as we change, then so too does God. This is not to say that we define God. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s God who is defining us, but in the process of defining us, God is also responding to us, growing with us. It's the Holy Spirit now who represents this inner reality, this dynamic and intimate connection with the divine. The Spirit is not some abstract concept or distant third wheel in the Trinity. The Spirit is the living presence of God moving within us, changing us, evolving with us.

So, what would I say today to our interfaith friends asking me to make sense of the Trinity for them? I'd tell them the Trinity isn't some theological puzzle in need of solving, but a living, evolving relationship that must be experienced to be believed. The Trinity is proof that we can't put God into a box of our own definition and understanding. God will always be breaking open our boxes. And the Trinity, as we have traditionally defined it, is proof that we’re always going to do our best to stick God back in the box, once God has gotten out. But thank God, that is truly a hopeless endeavor. It may give us stability and security for a time as we adjust to the new thing that God is doing among us, but eventually, there will always be another new thing, there will always be another level, there will always be a greater consciousness.

The Trinity as I understand it, is a narrative of change. God the creator was up in Heaven. But God decided to come down to earth and enter human existence in the person of Jesus. Jesus departed this earthly life for heaven, but showed us that heaven is no longer above us, it is within us. And from that inner relationship, we Christians experience the Holy Spirit transforming us from within and responding to our own growth and change and love and compassion. And as we change, and as we change the world around us, God too grows, evolves, stretches out with us to meet a new horizon, a new hope, a new way.

So, to my interfaith friends, and to my Christian friends, too, I would say: The Trinity is a profound reminder that God is with us every step of the way, not a distant or static being, but a fluid, evolving presence that breathes change into the very essence of our lives and in turn, is changed along with us. 

Preaching on:
Acts 1:1–11

Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong would often tell a story about the Ascension and the world-famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan. According to Spong, while he was at a conference once, Sagan approached him and asked him, “Do you know what the Ascension would have looked like to an astrophysicist?” Spong replied, “You know, I’ve never really considered it. What would the Ascension have looked like to an astrophysicist?” And Sagan tells him, “If 2000 years ago, Jesus had left the earth traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), he still wouldn’t even have escaped our galaxy yet—and there are billions and billions of galaxies!”

For Bishop Spong, famously a very liberal reformer, this story was an illustration of the problem of taking our scriptures too literally. Did Jesus really literally physically fly off to heaven? If so, then according to Carl Sagan and Jack Spong, he’s still got a really long way to go. If Jesus didn’t go to outer space, where did he go? Where actually is heaven, anyway?

Now we don’t have to go as far as the Enlightenment and science to find reason not to take the story of the Ascension too literally. Because even the Biblical text itself seems to advise us to hold onto this story with open hands and to try to let it breathe a little bit. There are actually two versions of this story. The first version is the final story in the Gospel of Luke. And the second version (which we read this morning) is the first story in the Book of Acts. And while both versions see Jesus floating off to heaven, other than that they’re very different tales. You wouldn’t know—believe it or not!—that they were written by the very same person (let’s just follow tradition and call him Luke).

In a court of law, if you want to establish credibility and convince people of the truth of your story, you need to be consistent, right? If the details of your story change, that’s an indication that there’s something wrong with your memory or your honesty. But that doesn’t concern Luke. The last page of Volume One and the first page of Volume Two contain two different versions of the same story.

The first version is a conclusion of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the removal of the human God, Jesus, from center stage; the second version is the beginning of our earthly ministry, the introduction of the Spirit God, the Holy Spirit, to the stage. Luke, without trying to hide what he was doing, without any worry that people would think it was funny, fully confident that he was playing by the rules of the game, changes the story to suit his purposes in each book.

Luke is telling us: Jesus’ Ascension is not about a trip to outer space. Jesus’ Ascension is an encounter in our inner space. Like most miracles, the objective outer experience is less important than the subjective, inner effect it has upon those who are witnesses to it. So, naturally, the details of the story and the interpretation of the story change as our inner perspective changes.

This is a double rejection of materialism. It rejects the materialist view that religion can’t be true because the physical details are impossible. And it rejects the fundamentalist view that the spiritual truth of religion can only be true if the physical details are facts. Both perspectives were utterly alien to Luke when he was writing. Something amazing happened! Let’s not get stuck on the pesky little details. Let’s talk about what this means!

As if on cue, in the Acts version of the Ascension we read this morning, two new characters show up. Luke calls them men in white robes; you might call them angels. And they have a somewhat weird message. While Jesus is being carried away by a cloud, they ask the disciples, “Why are you just standing there looking up into heaven? Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Even the angels are speaking strangely. It almost seems like they’re chastising the disciples a little bit for standing around and gawking. But it’s strange to do that while Jesus is flying away on a cloud. And it’s all the more strange to chastise them for looking up while admitting that Jesus will return the same way he left.

I can only conclude that Jesus’ exit from this earth was a mysterious one and that his return to the earth will not be on a cloud from some physical heaven somewhere up above us but will be made manifest instead in this world through a spiritual process that cannot be accomplished merely by looking to heaven for answers or waiting for the inevitable apocalypse to come. I agree with Carl Sagan: Jesus’ Ascension was not a trip to outer space. It couldn’t have been a trip to outer space because heaven is not up in the sky.

Now in the original Greek of Luke and Acts, there weren’t two different words for sky and for heaven. It was just the same word. The story of the Ascension acknowledges that linguistic limitation—that the world had not yet separated the idea of heaven from the idea of sky. In the cosmology of everybody everywhere at that time, heaven was UP. But the two angels enter this second version of the Ascension story to begin to challenge that connection. Why are you looking UP to heaven when heaven is not really UP? Jesus is not a trip to outer space, he’s on a journey to inner space, to source of everything, because as he literally told you, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

And so if Jesus is to return to us, he won’t return from the sky you experienced him departing to, he will return from the Kingdom of Heaven that you make manifest within you and that you together express into the world around you. That is how Jesus will return—he will return from within you. As Jesus says in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Astrophysicists look up in the sky and they seek out the origins of the universe. And they’ve traced it back so far to “the Big Bang”: a singularity that exploded and stretched into the entire expanding cosmos. And that’s great. I love that stuff. I have no problem with looking up at that story. When astronomers say, “We’ve looked 46.6 billion light years away and still no heaven!” I can only agree with them, and it doesn’t cause me any concern whatsoever. Because I know there’s another direction we can go. We can look up for the origins of the cosmos, but to discover the source from which the cosmos arises and returns, to find the Alpha and the Omega of all life and all creation, to truly encounter and experience God in this body, we must travel within.

But Christianity is not a religion of individual inner experience alone. It’s a religion of community, togetherness, fellowship, love, mission, forgiveness, transforming the world for the better. So, this is the story so far: God the creator is up in Heaven. But God decides to come down to earth and become the human Jesus. Jesus departs the earth for the heaven no longer above us but within us. And from that inner experience, we Christians express the Kingdom of Heaven into the world through the power of God, now within and among us as the Holy Spirit. And for those of you who want to hear more, I’ll pick up from here on Trinity Sunday in two weeks.

For now, Beloved, just know that it’s true. Jesus is not moving at the speed of light through space. He’s moving at the speed of our faith and at the speed of our expression through all of us. Don’t look up. Look within, look to another, and then act together. And as miraculously as he departed, Jesus will come again. 

Preaching on:
Ephesians 5:1–18

Right around the time we were setting the date for Church Music Sunday, Pam was digging around in the church archives and she pulled out an interesting piece of church history. It’s the first edition of The Church Window, the magazine of the Glen Ridge Congregational Church, published in May 1930. And one of the articles is entitled Is Singing Wicked?

Now, don’t worry, even in 1930 the answer to this question in our church was already a foregone conclusion, so the author, John Tasker Howard, who was a prominent music historian, was asking the question somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But he was right, in a sense, about needing to ask the question because he understood that the Christian Church’s relationship to music throughout history and right up to the present day has been full of disputes and controversy.

So, this morning I’m going to follow his lead. On this Church Music Sunday, I want to know IS singing wicked? Is it? What are the arguments that support the contention that singing is wicked? (Other than a quick glance over my shoulder at the choir—you don’t look that angelic if you don’t have something to hide!) But if we decide that singing isn’t wicked, what does our tradition’s occasional mistrust of music tell us about the power of music? And what does the power of music tell us (we who love church music) about what we believe about God?

We don’t know much about music in the early Church. We know that for Gentile Christians, they were trying to separate themselves from the world, and music was a part of the world—their old lives. It was associated with pagan ceremonies, theater, drama, and all kinds of sinful passions. Despite this we know that early Christians were singing together and offering spontaneous solos, but they did it without any kind of instrumentation. Singing was tolerated as long as it wasn’t accompanied. Even the chanting of the Psalms was controversial because the Psalms refer to musical instruments. There are all kinds of things in the Bible that might make you squirm, but some of the first Christians just couldn’t handle the mention of musical instruments, which shows just how strongly they felt about the potential for worldly music to be a bad influence.

In the Middle Ages the Catholic and Orthodox churches developed chants as the central form of liturgical music. Again, no instruments. But the singing being done in church was now standardized into a specific form and carefully controlled. No more spontaneous solos. The chanting we’re most familiar with in the West is Gregorian Chant. Chants are austere without being easy to sing. They could only be sung by someone with training. They weren’t sung by the congregation. So, they were a cautious embrace of singing. In traditions that were very concerned with hierarchy and with controlling the access of the people to all things holy, the control of music tells us that they understood that music was a direct connection to the Divine that needed to therefore be tightly controlled.

So, so far we have music as dangerous because it’s too worldly and music as dangerous because it can connect us directly to God. The danger of music can go both ways. Now with the Protestant Reformation came another split in opinion about music. The Lutherans loved music. They believed that music was a gift of God and an incredibly powerful tool for spreading the Gospel message. Lutheranism developed all kinds of congregational hymns and choral singing. Our church music program today would not exist if it weren’t for the Lutherans.

On the other side of the equation were the Calvinists. The Pilgrims and Puritans (who eventually became the Congregationalists) were Calvinists. The Pilgrims had congregational singing but they only sang the Psalms and other pieces of scripture. No instruments. No musical notation. And they didn’t even try to make the Psalms singable. You just sang them straight out of the Bible without any kind of rhyme or meter to make it a more pleasant experience. Since tunes were passed down orally, they were slightly different in every congregation, and when different churches came together to worship as a larger group the sound was particularly terrible.

That’s very fortunate for us, because it turns out that even the Puritans came to believe that bad singing is more wicked than good singing. They decided they needed a Psalm Book with translations that were singable and tunes that were standardized. And that led down the slippery slope to the pianos and organs and choirs and anthems and hymns and artistic expression and even (gulp) the clapping that have become a part of our church’s music program.

So, is singing wicked? No, singing in church is a form of devotion and music connects us directly to God. Earlier generations worried that if the music and the singing were too good, they would distract us from worship. This led on the one hand to very beautiful, but very controlled (almost professional) chants. And on the other hand, to very accessible but very bad congregational singing. If you want music that is really accessible and really good, you need what our church music program provides: You need instruments, you need art, you need to teach everyone to sing and read music and play instruments, and (while you’re allowed to have musical tastes) you shouldn’t be overly concerned with the appropriateness of particular style of “worldly” music making its way into sacred music. Rev. James Cleveland, one of the greatest gospel musicians of all time, explained this to the crowd during the recording of Aretha Franklin’s live gospel album Amazing Grace. He said that it was OK to perform secular music in church because what you sing is only half the equation. The more important part, in fact, is “who you sing it to.” What we’ve come to believe in our church music program is that good music is not a hindrance to worshiping God. The better the music, the deeper the devotion, the higher the praise. That’s what we believe about the power of music.

This also tells us something about the God we believe in. Our music connects us to God because it reflects God in a profound way: Our music program is full of talent, creativity, diversity, and harmony. Talent is wonderful thing because the gifts of talent come to us directly from our creator and are inspired and sustained by God’s Holy Spirit. When we express our talents in singing and music, we become an expression of the Holy Spirit among us. We become an expression of God. Our God is a creator God, who is always making something new. Our creativity in music and performance is a testament to who God is and to what God is doing in the world. Our music program teaches and performs music from a variety of cultures and backgrounds and styles, both sacred and secular, because our God is the God who is everywhere, who made and celebrated the great diversity of the heavens and the earth and human beings too. And when we make music, when we sing, when we pray, we make it sound good, because our God is a God of harmony and beauty, so our greatest devotion in art to God is to make our art really good art, not as a distraction from God, but as an expression of and a testament to who God truly is.

Beloved, singing is far from wicked; it’s divine. As we continue to embrace and grow our church music program, let’s remember that music offers us a unique and profound way to experience and express our faith. Let us sing, then, not just with our voices, but (as we read from Ephesians this morning) with our hearts, with our souls, celebrating the God who has given us the gift of music. Because when we sing good, when we play good, we affirm that our God is good—a God of beauty, creativity, and endless love, whose presence is magnified in every note we sing, in every melody we play. So, let the Church sing—knowing that in every note, God is with us.

There’s an unwritten rule that every minister is required to preach one sermon on The Velveteen Rabbit, the 1921 children’s story by Margery Williams, about a little stuffed bunny’s journey to become Real through the love of the little boy who owns him. I love the way the best children’s books explore these really deep theological themes. I still remember the first time my mom read this book to me when I was little and how it made me feel. And there’s a message here in The Velveteen Rabbit for Emilia and Griffin and Reeve and their parents and godparents and all of us as we promise to raise and teach and form and love them well. And there’s a message here about what it means to be in a relationship with God. Probably you’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit or had it read to you at least once, but if not, here’s what you need to know:

A little boy gets a stuffed bunny for Christmas, but it’s not as cool and exciting as some of the other windup toys he gets, so the bunny gets ignored in the nursey where he has plenty of time to talk to the other toys. He learns from an old toy horse all about what it means to Real. If a child truly loves a toy, then that toy becomes Real. Does it hurt? the bunny wants to know. Sometimes, but when you’re Real you don’t mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once or bit by bit? It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. You’ll be a very worn out, shabby toy by the time you become Real, but you won’t mind because Real things can never be ugly except to people who don’t understand.

Eventually, the bunny becomes the boy’s favorite toy, and they have wonderful times playing together. One night, the nanny refers to the bunny as “just a toy” and the boy is very upset. You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s REAL! And when he hears that, the bunny knows that it’s true, the nursey magic has worked on him, and he’s become Real. That night “so much love stirred in the rabbit’s little sawdust heart that it almost burst.” One day, playing outside, the little stuffed bunny meets some wild rabbits who are disturbed by his appearance. They ask him to play with them, but the bunny doesn’t have any hind legs for jumping and so the wild rabbits tell him that he isn’t Real like them which is very upsetting for him.

When the boy gets Scarlet Fever, the bunny stays with him in bed. When he finally recovers, the doctor orders everything that was in bed with the boy while he was sick to be burned—especially that old, ratty bunny. Sitting on the burn pile at the end of the garden the bunny becomes very sad and sheds a real tear which lands on the ground. A fairy flower grows from the tear and the nursey magic Fairy comes out of its blossom. She tells the bunny that she’s going to turn him Real now. Wasn’t I Real before? he asks. You were to the boy, but now you will be to everyone. She turns the bunny into a wild rabbit in the garden living with the other wild rabbits he met before. And he has real hind legs now that he can jump and twirl with. And in the spring when the boy comes out into the garden to play, he sees the rabbit and thinks it looks a lot like the old bunny he lost when he had Scarlet Fever, never realizing it was “his own Bunny, come back to look at the child who had first helped him to be Real.” The End.

When I became a parent, I was pretty shocked to be handed the pink, wriggly ball that was my first son. Of course, there was joy. And for me, also, an immediate and heady experience of falling in love with this kid. At the same time, I also felt stirring in me this primal, animal, balled-fists instinct to protect my child. And my brain, addled by that night’s emotions and hormones and lack of sleep began to worry away at the problem of every threat and danger that I would need to save my son from through the long course of his life. I could feel the momentous responsibility of keeping him safe and protecting him from all the pain and grief and injury that can happen in life.

At the same time, deep in my heart I was realizing—as my brain’s list of potential threats and heartbreaks got longer and longer and longer—that although I’m going to do everything I can do to keep my son safe, I’m not going to be able to rewire the universe. He’s going to get sick. He’s going to feel sad. I’m going to disappoint him and maybe even occasionally fail him. Simply put, I couldn’t protect him from his life. And I realized falling in love with him that night that the best protection I could offer him wasn’t a shield from life’s slings and arrows. The best protection I could offer him was to love him so thoroughly and so completely that when pain, and disappointment, and injury, and frustration, and heartache, and disease, and old age inevitably got to him that he would have the strength and the perspective to deal with their consequences.

One of the jobs we have as parents and godparents and grandparents and teachers is to help our children recognize that the price of life is totally worth paying. We can’t teach them that by protecting them from life. We teach them that by loving them through life. The Velveteen Rabbit’s perspective is that you only become Real after you’re worn out and broken. But hopefully you’ve had the experience and the perspective to realize that your fur is rubbed off, and your seams are busted, and your paint is chipped not because life is some heartless meatgrinder, but because you were so thoroughly loved by and loving to the people around you. My prayer this morning for Emilia, Griffin, and Reeve, and all our kids is that we offer them as much of this kind of unselfconscious, joyful, playful love as we can—that we believe in them. And if we love them and believe in them, they’re going to grow up, and one day leave the nursery, and discover that they can walk on their own two feet. And may they be filled with the power to love their lives and every joy and challenge that life brings their way.

And, of course, we want our children to have a relationship with God too, right? And so let’s teach them that the gift of God is waiting for them. It’s waiting to be noticed among all the other busy, shiny, exciting toys in the nursery. The gift of God is already in every life waiting to be picked up, to be noticed, to be loved. And once we pick God up, every snuggle, every game, every secret whispered in God’s ear brings God closer into our lives and closer to the world through us. Just like the boy's love breathed life into the bunny, our love and attention breathe reality into the Divine. God, like the bunny, doesn't usually become Real in an instant but evolves with each act of love, each night under the covers, every afternoon playing in the garden—God grows with us.

God loved humanity into existence in the book of Genesis. And now we here today love God into existence through our lives. And when we love God into existence in our lives, God becomes an undeniable presence, guiding us, giving us strength and perspective. The Bible tells us “God is love.” So, when we fill our kids with the love to appreciate and thrive in the face of life’s challenges, we are filling them with God. God is that love-filled perspective—the widest and deepest dimension of human existence. And when we bring that Divine dimension to life inside of us, because it is far bigger than us, it eventually escapes us, escapes the nursey, overflows and breaks free into the wide and wild world.

The moral of the story, The Velveteen Rabbit, is that things are Real not because they move or are busy, but because somebody has loved them into reality. A sign that something is Real is that it’s been worn down by that love. I have no doubt that Emilia, and Griffin, and Reeve will know that kind of love. And I pray that as that love grows up in them that it also overflows into the friends, and family, and work, and community, and world all around them. Amen.

Preaching on:
1 John 3:1–7
John 15:12–15

Happy Friendship Sunday everybody! It’s good to have friends here with us. We’re doing exciting stuff here at GRCC, and we want to share it with you. And friendship is an important part of the solution to the problems that afflict our world today. Love and friendship are virtues that hold the power to transform us from within and radiate out into our communities and the whole rest of world.

John’s first letter says that we’re all children of God. BUT what we are becoming hasn’t been revealed yet. We’re children of God who don’t know yet what we’re going to be when we grow up. You could say, I guess, that we’re all a work in progress. And we know this viscerally, I think. We look around in our lives, in our communities, in our world, and we know we could probably do at least a little bit better. We could probably do a little bit better than 11 different versions of The Real Housewives. We could probably do a little better than trying to bomb our way to peace. We could probably do a little better figuring out ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We could probably do a little bit better than eating the entire tub of ice cream while binging on those 11 different versions of The Real Housewives while trying not to think about climate change and war.

I mean I know you get it and you see it too. From the personal to the political, from the local to the global, there’s little doubt that we are a work in progress. But if it’s true, if you agree with me (as I think you probably do) that we’re all works in progress, what’s the process? What’s the process of formation that’s at work on us? From where does our salvation come? What’s making things better?

One answer we hear a lot is that science and technology are going to make the world a better place. Now, please, I’m not a luddite, I’m not a science denier, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Science is real. It works. Technology has vastly improved our lives in many ways. But technology can go both ways. Atomic power used in power plants could be a good thing, as long as you don’t have a leak or a meltdown and you can figure out a good place to dump your nuclear waste. But atomic power used in bombs and missiles could end the world.

And science, which is very good at producing facts, is not as good at producing action. So, there’s decades of scientific consensus on climate change, but science has yet to produce a shift in our actions commensurate with the consequences that will be faced by future generations. Science and technology can improve a lot, but they can’t improve us. They don’t make us suddenly mature and wise. If we’re foolish and selfish, we’ll use our science and technology in foolish and selfish ways. If we’re wise, we’ll use them wisely. But where’s the button to push to make us all wise? That tech doesn’t exist. And it never will.

An alternative vision of what’s going to make the world better comes from traditional religion—that our salvation or the return to paradise or the kingdom of heaven (or whatever you want it label it) will be entirely transcendent. It’ll come from outside of us, from beyond us. God will definitively, miraculously, and apocalyptically intervene. The world will end, the badies will suffer terrible things, the good guys will be rewarded. And this new, perfect world order will last forever and ever and ever.

According to this model there’s really nothing much for you and me to do at all, except to stay out of trouble and to make sure we have all the proper religious affiliations: we’ve participated in the proper rites and rituals, we’ve affirmed the proper beliefs. And then we just wait for the trumpets to sound.

The problem with this is that it completely misses God’s living, real presence in our world and in our lives. God is imminent in everything all around us. God is here. We Christians believe that God came into our world, through Jesus, as a human being, as a fully human participant in humanity’s process. We don’t have to wait for the end of the world for God to show up. Our faith tells us that God is here now, God is calling us and moving us to do new and great things, and God cares deeply about the fate of the present world. Waiting for God to fix things denies the fact that God is already at work within and among us. And Jesus didn’t teach anyone to sit around and wait. Jesus taught us to believe a few things, but mostly Jesus was giving us the proper worldview for living more justly and more wisely.

There is a third way, a middle path, I believe, between science and religion that hasn’t been fully and properly defined or realized yet in our world. As religious people, as Christians, that should be thrilling to us. We’re not here to lead this sort of bifurcated life, where on the one hand we’re religious and on the other hand we’re worldly, and religion is private and personal and totally irrational and incapable of being discussed without offense and bloodshed, and therefore irrelevant to world and its problems.

The job of religion isn’t to wait out history in the cloister of faith. The job of religion and Christianity in particular I believe in the 21st century is to heal this division between our brains and hearts, between spirit and matter. This is the Christianity that has a purpose in our world—a Christianity that longs deeply for individual and cultural integrity—wholeness. For us, that’s the process that’s going to make to make the world a better place, that’s where I believe God is calling us.

This work will only be accomplished if we follow Jesus’ greatest commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love our enemies even, to love another as he loved us. Incredibly, in John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that we’re his friends, not his servants. And in friendship there’s equality. Now, we’re not saying Jesus isn’t great or special. What Jesus is saying to us is that whatever greatness or goodness or potential we see in him, he now sees in us. Whatever hope we put in him, he now also has in us. Jesus has recruited us. As Teressa of Avila wrote, “Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours.” And as John wrote in his letter, “What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when Jesus is revealed, we will be like him.” We don’t know yet exactly where we’re going, exactly what we’re becoming. We don’t know exactly what the process is by which we will grow and develop. But what we do know is that we have the potential, and if we are wise perhaps the destiny, to be like Jesus.

What’s going to make things better? God’s working to make things better through us right now—as God’s friends, as Jesus’ body. When we love one another, when we live with one another in friendship that stretches us beyond our human limitations, when we grow so that our technological progress and our maturity find alignment, when we show the world that God is right here with us and all of God’s potential is already being offered to us as freely and as openly as anything is offered to a friend, that is what is going to make things better.

Friends, I believe we are on the cusp of a transformation, a pivotal moment where we can harness the teachings of love, the principles of friendship, and the advancements of science and technology to create a world that reflects the very best of what it means to be human. This is our calling, this is our mission, and together, we can shape a world that mirrors the boundless love and potential God sees in us.

Preaching on:
Mark 16:1–8

A few weeks ago, my four-year-old son Romey asked me, “Dad, are bees dead?” Romey’s been very curious about death recently and learning a lot. Romey, who loves gardening and the outdoors, hadn’t seen any bees all winter long and he was beginning to get worried. I put his mind at ease. I explained to him that some bees do die in winter, especially if it’s very cold, but if all the bees were dead, there wouldn’t be any more bees in spring. I told him that bees were just hibernating the winter away in their hives or in piles of leaves and in old dead logs waiting for the warm weather to wake back up.

On April 8, 1966, Time magazine published one of its most iconic and maybe infamous cover photos of all time. It was a first of its kind cover—just text; three red words on a black background asking a question: Is God Dead? It set off a firestorm of overwhelmingly negative responses. Letters poured in. Pulpits across the country thundered. Even Bob Dylan would criticize the cover in an article in a magazine the illustrious name of which I can’t say with kids in the room, but let’s just say there was a bunny on the cover and she sure wasn’t the Easter Bunny. Time magazine and its editors were labeled from all sides as atheists, communists, anti-American.

The article itself was far tamer than its headline suggested. It was all about the changing state of religion, religious sensibilities, and theology at a turning point in American history—the post-World-War-II religious revival had peaked, the Cold War and nuclear annihilation had seized the world and our apocalyptic imaginations, the Civil Rights movement had presented a new idea of the power of religion to transform society for the better, the war in Vietnam was beginning to cause serious unrest, the flower-power, psychedelic, hippie movement was in full swing, and a month earlier John Lennon of the Beatles had told the world, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” In this moment, the article fairly evenhandedly laid out the questions that religion and faith were wrestling with. But people hated that cover, they hated the question it asked, and they hated anyone who would ask it.

Death of God theology, which is a real thing (it’s also called radical theology), was barely more than a footnote in the article, but one of the theologians referred to as a death of God proponent in the article, William Hamilton, was turned on by his community—he was driven with his family from his church and he was forced out of his job as a seminary professor. Something about this question, “Is God Dead?” made people feel vulnerable, anxious, and really angry.

Now one of the great ironies of this to me is that April 8, 1966, the day the cover was published, was Good Friday. I’m sure that was intentional. What day could be more appropriate to sit with this question than the day the of crucifixion, the day that Christians believe that God, in some sense, actually died. Even people who believe that God died were not ready to be asked the question, “Is God Dead?” which I find striking.

The reason I’m talking about Good Friday on Easter morning is because our understanding of the resurrection depends on our understanding of what happened on Good Friday. Just like we’re uncomfortable with questions like, “Did God die? Is God Dead?” We’re also uncomfortable with Good Friday—for good reason: It’s bloody, it’s violent, couldn’t God have found another way? Most Christians go straight from Palm Sunday to Easter skipping Holy Week and the crucifixion all together, skipping the possibility of being asked the uncomfortable questions.

For most of us, I think, we’re willing to admit that God is an occasionally hibernating God. Just like the bees, sometimes God seems to disappear, but God (for good reasons that we can’t fully understand) is just napping in a pile of leaves somewhere and will be back in due course. The nice thing about this kind of resurrection is that it’s just like spring: the blossoms on the cherry trees are same year after year, and when the bumblebees come back they act like bumblebees have always acted, and when the tulips come up from the ground, they come up exactly where you planted their bulbs. Spring is reassuring and predictable, and we can forgive an unchanging and predictable God for occasionally going dark on us.

And we prefer this hibernation faith to a resurrection faith that says that our God is a continually dying and rising God—our God has died, and our God has risen in a way that we barely recognize. Mary Magdalene, in John’s gospel, met the risen Jesus in the garden and didn’t even recognize him he was so alive and so transformed. Maybe Jesus was playing a joke, we think. Maybe he found the gardener’s hat and put it on to pull poor Mary’s leg. Maybe she just needs glasses. How different could he have been? He was just in there a couple days. Resurrection is a total transformation because death, first, is a total transformation.

Now I don’t agree with everything that radical theologians say. They say all kinds of different things. I disagree emphatically with some of it. But I deeply appreciate the kinds of questions that they ask. Essentially, what they’re asking us is: In a world even more radically changed than when that cover was published more than 50 Easters back, are some of our ideas about God, some of our images of God “stuck” in the ideas, images, and values of an earlier age, a by-gone culture. If we can’t let go of some of that stuff, if we can’t even be asked the questions without attacking those who ask them, how can we ever live fully into a resurrection faith?

Resurrection isn’t a destination. It’s not a one-time event. And its not just about Jesus. The Bible tells us that resurrection is the destiny of all who believe and it’s the destiny of all of creation. The resurrection is a new spiritual dimension and a continual process. It’s not everything that God was, continuing on. It’s everything that God is, now becoming. It’s everything we are, now becoming.

In the article, Is God Dead?, various people were asked about their images of God. One man from Philadelphia said that he sees God “a lot like he was explained to us as children:” an older man up in heaven who is just, but who gets angry at us. “I know this isn’t the true picture,” he said, “but it’s the only one I’ve got.” This man feels it. He feels that he’s stuck, but he’s afraid of betraying the image that was given to him as a child. He wants to grow his image of God, but he doesn’t know how to grow an image which he knows isn’t the true picture, and he doesn’t know how to let it go. He’s stuck. And God is stuck with him. Many people in his situation will stay stuck. Many people realizing the limits of the culture’s ideas about God will throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of religion and faith all together. What will you do?

I also was raised with this image of God: a nice man in heaven who made everything and controls everything and doesn’t change. In High School I had a couple of experiences that began to challenge this view. One of them was learning about evolution in my biology classes. I was totally fascinated by this process which was nothing like the creation story that had been told to me. In my fairly Evangelical youth group, we had a debate on Creationism vs. Evolution, and I was on the much smaller Team Evolution. I studied for this debate for weeks. I was so into it. I read like five books on evolution and made notes and I was ready to rumble. But I was, I must admit, uncomfortable. If evolution was true, what would that mean for God?

When I got home the night of the debate, feeling victorious despite the fact that my wise Evangelical youth pastor didn’t declare a winner, I realized that in the course of this experience, for me, the unchanging God who created an unchanging universe and mostly unchanging life exactly as it is 4,000 years ago in the book of Genesis was dead. But, thank God, my faith (probably because of that youth group and the opportunity to talk about evolution in it) was not dead!

I opened those books on evolution again that night in my room and marveled at the God who was now suddenly able to come to life in those pages—a God who was at the heart of a continual process of change that is growing the world—the universe. I experienced a resurrection that night. God was transformed before my eyes, and I was lucky I could still recognize her there growing, changing, randomly and yet with what appeared to me then as some sort of greater purpose that has not yet been completed. And it is still ongoing on the biggest and smallest scales.

You see, beloved, if we truly live into our resurrection faith, then we may at times feel like the women running from the tomb at the end of Mark’s Gospel, full of fear and awe for what is coming, afraid to say anything. But when we realize that God’s death and resurrection is the new way, the new image of what God is doing in our world and in our lives, we may discover God’s true, vibrant limitlessness. Is God Dead? I say, yes, God died on the cross. And now God is resurrecting, rising beyond our expectations, showing us the infinite potential in our lives and in our world. This Easter let’s celebrate the resurrection by committing ourselves to harnessing and guiding the power of radical change in our lives and in our world. We can’t stop change. But we don’t need to fear it, as long as we are willing to let God come back to life within it. That is a resurrection faith.

Preaching on:
Matthew 11:1–11

The rise of Christianity is just about the most improbable origin story imaginable. The biggest religion in the world today and the biggest in all of human history was founded by a poor, peasant rabbi who was a part of a tiny backwater religion, which had been conquered and subjugated by one of history’s greatest empires—Rome. And that poor, peasant, Jewish teacher was crucified by the Roman Empire—a contemptible, shameful public execution intended to utterly wipe out his legacy. And within 300 years of his death on that Roman cross, Jesus the Christ would become the God of that empire. And the image of him, staked out and dying on their cross, would become ubiquitous and holy to them. How was such a reversal possible?

It must have been God’s will. Well, sure. But that doesn’t tell us anything about God’s technique, God’s style. The thing about being omnipotent is, you always have plenty of options. To be honest with you, I’m not so sure about thinking of God as omnipotent—ALL POWERFUL. If I were all powerful, I think I might behave a little differently than God does. If God is all powerful, I think it’s safe to say that God isn’t a showoff about it. And, in fact, we can see God, the almighty God, beginning to show contempt for what we humans think of us as power.

How would a God who is all powerful, but who is coming to loathe the expression of that “power”—violence, war, subjugation, oppression, exploitation—how would that God behave? Perhaps if you were all powerful, but you had come to regret what power is and how it works, you might decide to redefine what power is—to redefine yourself. Maybe you would come down from “on high,” enter the world a lowly peasant, and conquer an empire not through a decisive military victory but with nothing more than the persistent power of your symbolism and the gradual spread of your love.

In a world dominated by the fist and the whip and the legion, perhaps you too would wield healing, compassion, and forgiveness as the truest forms of strength. And where power raised an army, rode a war horse, and took itself very seriously indeed, perhaps you too would call disciples, ride a baby donkey, and mock the very power the world has come to believe that you are.

And so we come to our parade this morning, Palm Sunday, the entry into Jerusalem. First, you have to understand that it’s very possible that on that very day and perhaps that very hour that Jesus rode into Jerusalem down the Mount of Olives that Pontius Pilate, on the other side of town, was also entering Jerusalem in force, on an armored horse, surrounded by legions of soldiers in a stark display of intimidation and (as always) with the inherent threat of violence—you people had better not get out of hand at this year’s Passover. Jesus’ parade was not just different than Pilate’s, it was a mockery of Roman power and all “power” that lives and dies by the sword.

On May 26, 2007, members of a white supremacist hate group held a march and rally in a public park in Knoxville, Tennessee. The counter protesters were sick and tired of the Antifa tactics sometimes used to shout down (and sometimes beat down) white supremacists. It felt like they were getting sucked into the very display of violent power that they were wanting to oppose. How do we still stand up against them while offering an alternative to them?

Instead of meeting anger and hate with more anger and hate, they decided to meet them with humor. And so the Coup Clutz Clowns were born. When the neo-Nazis marched, the clowns marched with them, only they made sure to goose step in their floppy red shoes. And when the neo-Nazis shouted, “White Power!” the clowns pretended like they couldn’t hear them very well. The neo-Nazis shouted louder, and then the clowns understood. They started throwing handfuls of flour into the air and shouted “White Flour!” Some women arrived in their wedding dresses and corrected them, “No, No, No, not ‘White Flour,’ ‘Wife Power!’” A clown on stilts with a tiny little handpump camp shower started spraying water onto the clowns below. They all tried to squeeze under the tiny stream of water, but there wasn’t nearly enough room. “Tight Shower!” screamed the clown on stilts. “Tight Shower!” And the neo-Nazis decided to go home.

Now Jesus wasn’t just clowning around on Palm Sunday. He was, I think, deadly serious. His “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem was a mockery of Roman pomp and power, but it was also a true and serious display of God’s new definition of power: humility, sacrifice, the commitment to peace, and the certain knowledge that “power’s” greatest threat—humiliating torture and death—could be converted into the greatest expression of commitment, love, and transformation that the world had ever known.

As Jesus enters Jerusalem on a baby donkey, he is locking on to his fate. There can be very little doubt that he knew that mounting that tiny donkey and riding down that hill would lead him irrevocably to the cross. There is no turning back now. He knew where his actions would take him—to the cross and to a holy transformation of the very idea of power. He was utterly rejecting the traditional hope (an almost hopeless hope) of a violent, revolutionary messiah who would raise an army, ride a war horse, call down the legions from heaven, and defeat Rome in battle.

If God is all powerful, couldn’t God have done it easily? Of course! When I read my Bible don’t I read many stories about God using power in just this way? Doesn’t God use death and suffering to humble the proud and punish the wicked? Yes! Doesn’t God use war and violence and subjugation to win territory for God’s chosen people? Yes! But in Jesus Christ, beginning with Christmas and concluding with Palm Sunday and Good Friday, God is choosing to no longer conquer the world from on high. Instead, God will transform the world and all those on it from within.

As Christians, do we understand what Jesus has taught us? Do we understand that the Kingdom of Heaven that we were expecting from on high has actually arrived as the Kingdom of God within us? Do we understand that the power we are still most enamored by (the power of coercion through force and domination), is no longer the greatest power in this world? Because we still cling to it, looking to it for assurance and security, forgetting that every empire in history has fallen, that every wall ever built has been breached, that every army ever raised has ultimately been scattered.

Do we understand? And are we willing, as we wave our palm branches and shout our Hosannas, are we willing to explore in our lives, in our world, the kind of power Jesus demonstrates? The power of the Mahatma Ghandis and the Mother Teresas and the Martin Luther King Jr’s and the Dorothy Days and the Nelson Mandelas of this world? The kind of power that is far too weak to conquer the world but is the only kind of power strong enough to transform the world.

What would it look like to expand upon that true and great power in your life? What would it feel like to loosen your grip on this world, on your life, and give yourself to this world and to the people around you instead? What if your greatest fear wasn’t dying, but was not taking the necessary risks in this life to become everything God intends you to be—no longer frightened and clinging and cruel, but confident and expansive and full of love? By this power, Jesus and a few disciples conquered the greatest empire in history! What could we achieve if we were willing to follow him?