1 Peter
May 29, 2011
I missed being here last week, though I did have a nice vacation. One thing I did on vacation that I don’t do in my “normal” life these days is I went to an honest to goodness movie in the honest to goodness movie theater. Now, I don’t get to do this often – I’m not completely blaming Lydia, but it’s all her fault – I don’t get to do this often, so given the chance, I decided I had to pick the perfect film. I spent days reading up on all the movies showing in all the movie theaters in Dubuque. In the end, I had it down to two movies. One was Bridesmaids, a popular, funny, movie that had pretty good reviews in general. It was probably the safe choice.
The other movie was a French film – subtitled. Definitely not as safe. But, it too had good reviews, and I was drawn in by the story line. The movie is called “Of Gods and Men,” and it is about French monks who live in a monastery in Algeria, right smack dab in the middle of a Muslim community in a Muslim country. The movie is based on a true story of this group of nine brothers.
It was in this movie I found my Easter person for today: Brother Christian. He was the prior of the monastery, the elected leader of the community. Actually, my Easter “person” this week is really all of the monks in the tiny Cistercian monastery called “Our Lady of Atlas.”
These Trappist monks lived in the Atlas mountains near Tibhirine in Algeria. They supported themselves by gardening and harvesting honey and selling it in the market. They lived in close relationship with the Muslim villagers to whom they offered medical care and assisted in a number of other ways. These villagers and the monks lived together in love and had deep respect for one another. They shared their lives, celebrations, hurts, and fears.
In 1992, a civil war broke out in Algeria between the Algerian government and extremist rebels, who called themselves Muslims, though their lives bore little resemblance to that of most Muslims faithful to the Koran. The villagers and the monks became caught between the government militia and the rebels.
On December 14, 1993, twelve Croatian Catholics known to the monks had their throats cut at a few kilometers from the monastery. A week later, on Christmas Eve, the monastery of Atlas was visited by six armed men from the mountain around 7:15 p.m. There was no bloodshed, but the visit was a turning point in the consciousness of the monks.
The leader of the armed group, Emir Sayah Attiya, was known as a terrorist and was responsible for the death of the twelve Croatian Catholics and, according to the security forces, had cut the throats of 145 people. His exchange with Brother Christian was extraordinary. Brother Christian, appealing to the Koran, told him that the monastery was a place of prayer where no arms had ever entered; he requested that their conversation take place outside the monastery. Attiya agreed to this. He presented to the monks three demands of cooperation. To each one Christian replied that it was not possible. Each time Attiya said, "You have no choice," but each time Christian replied, "Yes, we have a choice." Attiya left and as he was leaving Christian said: "You have come here armed, just as we are preparing to celebrate Christmas, the feast of the Prince of Peace." Attiya replied, "I am sorry, I did not know."
Though the men left that evening without violence, the monks knew they would return. They also knew that their friends who lived in the village were equally in danger. This sets up the basis of the movie: The monks have to decide whether to leave the area – a privilege they have because they are foreigners – or to stay and continue to be a part of the community they knew and loved – even if it put their lives at risk.
Brother Christian had arrived at Tibhirine in 1971, and most of the other brothers had been there for a while. Their lives as monks were pretty much as you would imagine: They worshipped many times a day, they chanted, sang, read scripture, ate meals together, worked, read, studied, prayed. They are a religious order, and they follow what is called the “Rule of St. Benedict.” This is a book of precepts for monks living communally. This Rule is known for cultivating tightly bonded communities and contemplative lives. It stresses moderation of speech, humility, worship, prayer, study, just distribution of things, care of sick, manual labor, hospitality, and obedience.
Much of the movie is dedicated to showing us the discernment process of the monks as they struggle with this life and death decision. Two days after the armed men stormed the monastery on Christmas Eve, a majority of the brothers favored immediate departure. Two days later, they agreed to a more gradual departure, so as not to abandon the villagers without warning.
The movie shows, in a most beautiful way, the next couple of months as the monks did what they had always done: they chanted the Psalms, they prayed, they ate meals together, gathered for sacred community discussion, worked, studied. But now, we can see how each of these things, so ordinary seeming in ordinary times, helps them decide to stay with the villagers who need them. In the end, they unanimously decided they should stay at the monastery.
These were ordinary men. They were afraid. They did not want to die. They certainly did not set out to be martyrs. They disagreed with one another. Many were frustrated at first with Brother Christian, who never thought they should leave. One of the monks struggled to find God – feeling abandoned and without guidance. But through all of this, they never ceased their practices. These practices formed them, shaped their faith and their thinking, encouraged them, and sustained them. Without them, I truly believe they would not have made the same decision.
The author of First Peter was writing to churches suffering religious persecution. Our passage begins with what seems like a rhetorical question: “Who will harm you if you are eager to do good?” Bad theology over the years has assumed the implied answer to this question is “no one.” But given the context of the people he was writing to, we know the answer is found in what the author writes next: “Even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.” Of course doing right is no guarantee against suffering. In fact, sometimes doing right can ensure your suffering. Most of us want to believe the bad theology – that if we do the right thing, we will be just fine. But one glance at Jesus’ life reminds us that path of a Christian can be difficult and certainly does not guarantee us an easy life free of suffering.
What the author is doing in this passage is telling people how to live when their faith brings on suffering. And it is no easy trick. “Do not fear…do not be intimidated” ?? Seriously? Terrorists are staring at you down the barrel of a gun – do not fear? Of course, fear is natural – but as the monks show us, what matters is that you don’t let the fear win.
In March of 1996, three years after the brothers first contemplated leaving, armed rebels forced their way into the monastery and, at gunpoint, kidnapped and killed seven monks, including Brother Christian – only two monks survived. Most of us probably have difficulty understanding the decision of the monks to stay, knowing this was not just a possible outcome, but a probable one. They didn’t have a death wish, nor did they see themselves as somehow Messiahs who were doing something extraordinary. They were a part of the community in Tibhirine. They loved their neighbors, they knew leaving would affect those who depended on them for care. They saw something more important than their own safety or even lives. It’s hard to understand, but it’s important for us to try and understand.
After the author of 1 Peter explains that suffering might be a part of faith, he asks them to “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it in gentleness and reverence.” When we see someone like Brother Christian and the other monks of Lady of our Atlas, it’s hard to understand why they did what they did. The author of First Peter knows this will often be true when we look at the lives of Christians, because the life to which we are called is counter-cultural, and will look odd, even crazy, to those who don’t understand what gives us hope.
Because of this we need to be able to articulate our faith – not to justify ourselves, or prove we are “right”, but to offer to others a compelling vision of a world that is hard for most people to imagine. One where we love those who persecute us, love our enemies, chose nonviolence in the face of violence, live for something greater than ourselves, embrace and respect differences, and serve others before we serve ourselves. Articulating why you choose what you do, especially when it is counter-cultural, can be a witness to other people. It can draw other people into deeper faith and deeper commitment to live what they believe.
Brother Christian wrote a letter not long before his death, knowing that is was entirely possible he would be killed by one of these terrorists. It is a defense of the hope in him, and it is certainly full of gentleness and reverence.
“If it should happen one day - and it could be today -
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church and my family
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I would ask them to pray for me:
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones
which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems to prevail so terribly in the world,
even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.
I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems to me important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.
It would be too high a price to pay
for what will perhaps be called, the "grace of martyrdom"
to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be,
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters.
It is too easy to soothe one's conscience
by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it.
I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel
which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church,
precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm
those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic:
"Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!"
But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.
This is what I shall be able to do, God willing:
immerse my gaze in that of the Father
to contemplate with him His children of Islam
just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a "GOD-BLESS" for you, too,
because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.
AMEN ! INCHALLAH !”
I think sometimes we protestants disparage things like rote recitation, singing Psalms, reading the bible daily, saying ancient creeds, believing it is just going through the motions and using words that are stuck in the past and mean nothing to us now. But when I look at Catholic people like the sisters and brothers in religious orders, who live day in and day out doing rote recitation, I wonder if we aren’t missing something. It was hard to watch the movie and not get that the decision to remain at the monastery came in no small part because these words, the bible, the life of Jesus, and the articulation of the Christian faith were imbedded so deeply in each of them because of these Christian practices.
Like any religious tradition, it’s easy to find faults with the Catholic Church. But, I would argue, among the Christian traditions, it’s hard to beat the Catholics in terms of commitment to social justice, nonviolence, and caring for the poor, sick and vulnerable. The monks who lost their lives in the hills of Algeria were ordinary men of deep faith, formed by their simple, yet profound, daily practices. May we hear their defense of the hope that was in them, and make it our own. Amen.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Easter people: Jim Corbett
John 14:1-10
Fourth Sunday of Easter: May 15, 2011
When most of us hear “shepherd,” the image that first pops into our head is that of a sweet 6 or 7 year old dressed up as a shepherd for the Christmas pageant. They are well-scrubbed and adorable figures with dish towels on their heads and clad in striped bathrobes and they often need a fair amount of shepherding themselves to get on and off stage at the right points. In other words, the picture that generally comes to mind doesn't have a whole lot to do with what Jesus is talking about here.
Shepherds had a hard life, since they faced all of the hardships of the hostile landscape through which they herded their sheep. Being with the flock, they faced all of the dangers and difficulties that the flock faced, and they were just as vulnerable -- to heat in the day, to cold at night, and to human and animal predators at all times.
Jesus as shepherd is a common, widely-used image in the Christian faith. But if our picture of a shepherd is sweet kids dressed up at Christmas time, we completely miss the point of the metaphor. Completely. Essential to the metaphor is that it’s not sweet. A shepherd lives outside of normal society, a nomadic life, divorced from traditional notions of wealth – yet possessing the skills to survive in a harsh world. The one who we are to follow, the shepherd, is not sweet and pastoral. This one leads us through the wild world, keeping us safe, yes, but taking us places we wouldn’t be able to go on our own, and that are often far more scary than picturesque.
The image of shepherd is not lost on this week’s Easter Person: Jim Corbett. Corbett is what he calls a “goatwalker.” He herds goats, and that forms the basis of his spiritual, religious, political, and social life. He was born in Casper, Wyoming, and spent much of his life as a rancher in Wyoming and Arizona. He also had a master in Philosophy from Harvard and taught college classes. This unique dual profession gave him both insight born of experience and the ability to powerfully articulate what he learned from tending goats until the day he died.
Goatwalking, according to Corbett, is an antidote to a life of listening to, and following, voices other than that of the Good Shepherd. Most of us, he claims, live trapped in a culture based on using and abusing our creation in order to “survive” – and for us, surviving means the progressive taming of wilderness and increased control over our destiny. Surviving is living in denial of our vulnerability by trying to control everything we think threatens us. And so to survive in this way, we have a need to remake and consume the world…to conquer it. We have become addicted, according to Corbett; addicted to control, denial, greed and consumption. We will use and abuse whatever we can in order to maintain what we have.
Wealth, we believe, in the talisman to all things evil. And so for us, thieves and bandits are those that would steal our wealth. But the thieves and bandits of which Jesus spoke are the ones who vie not for our wealth, but for our souls. When we give ourselves over to their leadership, when we believe what they say and follow what they do, they steal our very life, spiritually speaking, and keep us from the abundant life Jesus promises if we follow him.
One of the things I like about Corbett is that he helps us get beyond understanding that this abundant life Jesus talks about is merely life after death – life in heaven. He reminds us that the abundant life promised is found not after we die physically, but rather after we die to certain ways of living now. Jesus as shepherd isn’t leading us out of this world into the next; Jesus is leading us out of a certain way of living into a new kind of life in the here and now. And the route is as important as the destination. The route is through the wilderness…through the wild. We have to live unprotected by our creature comforts, and we have to let go of the illusion that we can control creation and use it to our own ends in order to see how creature comforts and the illusion of control are not keeping us alive, they are slowly sucking the true life right out of us.
Corbett believes goatwalking is a model for detachment from the addictions to greed and comfort and consumerism. Like shepherding, goatwalking is also not an easy life. You are out in the elements, leading a herd of animals who can survive in some of the harshest conditions. Corbett too needs to survive. But for him, survival is about meeting basic needs in the present. It’s not about maintaining a hold on things that don’t ultimately exist – security and wealth. Surviving is meeting each moment with only God’s gifts as resources.
“The life of goatwalking,” he writes, “concentrates on the present. Commercial economies on the other hand place their emphasis on the work needed to transform and develop raw materials into wealth [to secure an imagined future]. For the [goatwalker], wealth is created by sun, rain, and soil.” Because of this, Corbett is able to see the created world with complete gratitude for what it provides, which is – he has found – plenty in order to tend to our needs.
Corbett claims that most of us labor for future fulfillment in an “ever-dying present”. Life is supported only by work, investment, the accumulation of wealth – above all. “We labor in an empty present that is death;” he writes. “we grasp for a future that must die when we touch it.” Goatwalking provides the economic foundation for a practice that would otherwise be virtually impossible for members of industrial civilization: withdraw from society in order to cultivate detachment or selflessness.”
Short of becoming goatwalkers ourselves, he would claim that we need times when we quit grabbing at the world, time to rest, and to rejoice in the Creation’s goodness. He calls this, cleverly enough, Sabbath . But remember that this Sabbath is a wilderness experience. It is letting go of things that we have come to rely on for comfort in order to spend time in unfamiliar territory. When we leave life as we know it; it can feel like a harsh wilderness. But we learn that we are able to live without those things we think are so fundamental to our survival – to our way of life.
Corbett suggests we seek seclusion outside society, because a person addicted to social busyness cannot become adequately detached, and the most direct way to break the addiction is to withdraw from society. Having arrived at some measure of detachment, a person might return to society without suffering a relapse, but the person who has never experienced solitude can’t even understand their addiction or the nature of detachment.” This withdraw from society – this Sabbath – doesn’t have to be geographical. It means stopping, ceasing activities like buying, using, seeking wealth, running on the treadmill of life.
Corbett is careful to make an all important distinction between Sabbath as detachment and Sabbath as escapism. Escapism does not seek wilderness – it seeks tameness. In the wilderness we learn things about the world of which we are usually a part. We see things for what they are, and then – because in Sabbath we learn we can live in a completely different reality, we have the freedom to challenge and change those things on which we thought we depended. “To be detached,” Corbett writes, “does not mean the elimination of involvement. The people who detach seek total involvement, unlimited relationship, complete intimacy, inclusive empowerment. Detachment is freedom from the self-centering that destroys our ability to relate.”
When we detach for periods of time, we are more equipped to enter back into society with ears still tuned to the shepherd who leads us into and through the wilderness. In the wilderness, we are confronted with our denial, we find wealth impotent in the face of wilderness demands, and we begin to see what happens if we can’t break free from the death-dealing systems of the world. And that is the only way, Corbett would argue, that we can then challenge these systems and help bring life to others.
In 1981, while living in Arizona, Corbett became aware of refugees fleeing from civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. These people were crossing the border from Mexico into Arizona and seeking political asylum. At the time, very few of these refugees were receiving protection, as the U.S. government was funding the governments of the countries from which the refugees were fleeing, and immigration judges were instructed by the State Department to deny most asylum petitions.
Together with other human rights activists, Corbett started a small movement in Arizona to assist these people coming across the border, by providing assistance, transportation, and shelter. To justify their actions, these activists, under the auspices of churches and Quaker meetings, cited religious precedent of protecting people feeling persecution, as well as the Geneva conventions barring countries from deporting refugees back to countries in the middle of civil wars.
This movement, which became known as the Sanctuary movement, eventually involved over 500 congregations, and helped hundreds if not thousands of refugees find freedom in the U.S.
Corbett and ten others around Tucson, Arizona were arrested for their work, as it violated U.S. immigration laws, although he was eventually acquitted.
For Corbett, the work he did on providing Sanctuary to those fleeing persecution grew out of his spirituality that was formed by ranching. He is not a rule breaker by nature. In fact, he takes very seriously the laws which govern our common life together as a country. He knows he is protected by the state from intruders just because he lives here. To break laws is to violate the covenant we have together as a nation.
At the same time, he has spent enough time “off grid,” so to speak, that he sees the limits of governments. He sees how some government laws are also violations of the covenants we have with each other. When confronted with a human being fleeing persecution, the laws that Corbett follows are those that govern humane relationships. Even though that means, in very rare instances, violating the government’s laws, Corbett has the courage to do so because he is not as dependent on the false security the government claims to offer most of us day to day.
Corbett violated the government produced law. But he was obeying, in his way of thinking, the true law – the one accountable to something higher than the government. He calls it a community created law. These are the covenants we create over time by living in a community where we are neighbors and friends, even with our enemies.
Corbett writes, “Sometimes one must choose between obeying the law and obeying the government, as in the case of the human rights violations. Sometimes our neighbors count on us to obey the law rather than the government (saving Jews from Nazis). Often, though, disobeying the government is like failing to keep a promise. When I fail to keep a promise I owe an explanation. I am not to be the sole or final judge determining whether I am justified by the injury I think has been avoided.”
You have to step out, step away, to see this distinction. Jesus called people in a different direction. It’s hard to hear this Good Shepherd passage for those of us who abhor any notion that the Christian faith is about exclusion. Jesus says you have to follow him in order to be saved. But, instead of thinking about it in terms of who “gets in” to heaven and who doesn’t, let’s think about it in terms of what makes for true and abundant life and what doesn’t – and it seems to have to do with choosing a life in which you rhythmically detach – enter a kind of wilderness and learn a new way of living.
Jesus knows what he's saying when he calls people to leave their homes and villages, and even their families, since he had done the same himself. He knows what it's like to have people think that you're crazy or irresponsible because of what you leave behind and let go of, because people said the same things about him. And he knows something else, too: this crazy life he lived, and calls us to live, is abundant life. It's THE abundant life, to be precise. It may be costly to follow the shepherd. We might have to enter a wilderness we would rather avoid. We have to give up things we don’t want to. But ultimately, we are giving up death and gaining life.
There are a lot of other voices out there asking us to follow: bosses, politicians, parents; acquisitions, ambitions, causes; always just one more favor to do, one more promotion to get, one more enemy to defeat, before you can rest secure. As one theologian put it, “Those other would-be shepherds are bad news, keeping us penned with anxiety and work toward things which never turn out to be quite what was promised -- international, personal, or job "security" which really mean a lifetime of vigilance while trying to deny or hide vulnerabilities that are still very real.”
Jesus leads us to what we need: food, water, air; true security, deep rest, and real love. Trusting him frees us to enjoy all of those good gifts as fully as God gives them, and the richness of God's blessings are far beyond what I know how to describe. When he's our shepherd, we experience abundant life that no thief can take away. And when we know that abundant life – when we have stopped following other would-be shepherds, we have the wisdom and courage to stand in opposition to systems that destroy. We don’t need the security and wealth those systems offer, so we no longer have a vested interest in maintaining them.
Think about ways you might become a goatwalker metaphorically. How can you regularly step outside society to sense the wilderness. God is there, and when we reach the wilderness – that place free from the trappings of this world – we will survive…truly survive. Truly live. Amen.
Fourth Sunday of Easter: May 15, 2011
When most of us hear “shepherd,” the image that first pops into our head is that of a sweet 6 or 7 year old dressed up as a shepherd for the Christmas pageant. They are well-scrubbed and adorable figures with dish towels on their heads and clad in striped bathrobes and they often need a fair amount of shepherding themselves to get on and off stage at the right points. In other words, the picture that generally comes to mind doesn't have a whole lot to do with what Jesus is talking about here.
Shepherds had a hard life, since they faced all of the hardships of the hostile landscape through which they herded their sheep. Being with the flock, they faced all of the dangers and difficulties that the flock faced, and they were just as vulnerable -- to heat in the day, to cold at night, and to human and animal predators at all times.
Jesus as shepherd is a common, widely-used image in the Christian faith. But if our picture of a shepherd is sweet kids dressed up at Christmas time, we completely miss the point of the metaphor. Completely. Essential to the metaphor is that it’s not sweet. A shepherd lives outside of normal society, a nomadic life, divorced from traditional notions of wealth – yet possessing the skills to survive in a harsh world. The one who we are to follow, the shepherd, is not sweet and pastoral. This one leads us through the wild world, keeping us safe, yes, but taking us places we wouldn’t be able to go on our own, and that are often far more scary than picturesque.
The image of shepherd is not lost on this week’s Easter Person: Jim Corbett. Corbett is what he calls a “goatwalker.” He herds goats, and that forms the basis of his spiritual, religious, political, and social life. He was born in Casper, Wyoming, and spent much of his life as a rancher in Wyoming and Arizona. He also had a master in Philosophy from Harvard and taught college classes. This unique dual profession gave him both insight born of experience and the ability to powerfully articulate what he learned from tending goats until the day he died.
Goatwalking, according to Corbett, is an antidote to a life of listening to, and following, voices other than that of the Good Shepherd. Most of us, he claims, live trapped in a culture based on using and abusing our creation in order to “survive” – and for us, surviving means the progressive taming of wilderness and increased control over our destiny. Surviving is living in denial of our vulnerability by trying to control everything we think threatens us. And so to survive in this way, we have a need to remake and consume the world…to conquer it. We have become addicted, according to Corbett; addicted to control, denial, greed and consumption. We will use and abuse whatever we can in order to maintain what we have.
Wealth, we believe, in the talisman to all things evil. And so for us, thieves and bandits are those that would steal our wealth. But the thieves and bandits of which Jesus spoke are the ones who vie not for our wealth, but for our souls. When we give ourselves over to their leadership, when we believe what they say and follow what they do, they steal our very life, spiritually speaking, and keep us from the abundant life Jesus promises if we follow him.
One of the things I like about Corbett is that he helps us get beyond understanding that this abundant life Jesus talks about is merely life after death – life in heaven. He reminds us that the abundant life promised is found not after we die physically, but rather after we die to certain ways of living now. Jesus as shepherd isn’t leading us out of this world into the next; Jesus is leading us out of a certain way of living into a new kind of life in the here and now. And the route is as important as the destination. The route is through the wilderness…through the wild. We have to live unprotected by our creature comforts, and we have to let go of the illusion that we can control creation and use it to our own ends in order to see how creature comforts and the illusion of control are not keeping us alive, they are slowly sucking the true life right out of us.
Corbett believes goatwalking is a model for detachment from the addictions to greed and comfort and consumerism. Like shepherding, goatwalking is also not an easy life. You are out in the elements, leading a herd of animals who can survive in some of the harshest conditions. Corbett too needs to survive. But for him, survival is about meeting basic needs in the present. It’s not about maintaining a hold on things that don’t ultimately exist – security and wealth. Surviving is meeting each moment with only God’s gifts as resources.
“The life of goatwalking,” he writes, “concentrates on the present. Commercial economies on the other hand place their emphasis on the work needed to transform and develop raw materials into wealth [to secure an imagined future]. For the [goatwalker], wealth is created by sun, rain, and soil.” Because of this, Corbett is able to see the created world with complete gratitude for what it provides, which is – he has found – plenty in order to tend to our needs.
Corbett claims that most of us labor for future fulfillment in an “ever-dying present”. Life is supported only by work, investment, the accumulation of wealth – above all. “We labor in an empty present that is death;” he writes. “we grasp for a future that must die when we touch it.” Goatwalking provides the economic foundation for a practice that would otherwise be virtually impossible for members of industrial civilization: withdraw from society in order to cultivate detachment or selflessness.”
Short of becoming goatwalkers ourselves, he would claim that we need times when we quit grabbing at the world, time to rest, and to rejoice in the Creation’s goodness. He calls this, cleverly enough, Sabbath . But remember that this Sabbath is a wilderness experience. It is letting go of things that we have come to rely on for comfort in order to spend time in unfamiliar territory. When we leave life as we know it; it can feel like a harsh wilderness. But we learn that we are able to live without those things we think are so fundamental to our survival – to our way of life.
Corbett suggests we seek seclusion outside society, because a person addicted to social busyness cannot become adequately detached, and the most direct way to break the addiction is to withdraw from society. Having arrived at some measure of detachment, a person might return to society without suffering a relapse, but the person who has never experienced solitude can’t even understand their addiction or the nature of detachment.” This withdraw from society – this Sabbath – doesn’t have to be geographical. It means stopping, ceasing activities like buying, using, seeking wealth, running on the treadmill of life.
Corbett is careful to make an all important distinction between Sabbath as detachment and Sabbath as escapism. Escapism does not seek wilderness – it seeks tameness. In the wilderness we learn things about the world of which we are usually a part. We see things for what they are, and then – because in Sabbath we learn we can live in a completely different reality, we have the freedom to challenge and change those things on which we thought we depended. “To be detached,” Corbett writes, “does not mean the elimination of involvement. The people who detach seek total involvement, unlimited relationship, complete intimacy, inclusive empowerment. Detachment is freedom from the self-centering that destroys our ability to relate.”
When we detach for periods of time, we are more equipped to enter back into society with ears still tuned to the shepherd who leads us into and through the wilderness. In the wilderness, we are confronted with our denial, we find wealth impotent in the face of wilderness demands, and we begin to see what happens if we can’t break free from the death-dealing systems of the world. And that is the only way, Corbett would argue, that we can then challenge these systems and help bring life to others.
In 1981, while living in Arizona, Corbett became aware of refugees fleeing from civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. These people were crossing the border from Mexico into Arizona and seeking political asylum. At the time, very few of these refugees were receiving protection, as the U.S. government was funding the governments of the countries from which the refugees were fleeing, and immigration judges were instructed by the State Department to deny most asylum petitions.
Together with other human rights activists, Corbett started a small movement in Arizona to assist these people coming across the border, by providing assistance, transportation, and shelter. To justify their actions, these activists, under the auspices of churches and Quaker meetings, cited religious precedent of protecting people feeling persecution, as well as the Geneva conventions barring countries from deporting refugees back to countries in the middle of civil wars.
This movement, which became known as the Sanctuary movement, eventually involved over 500 congregations, and helped hundreds if not thousands of refugees find freedom in the U.S.
Corbett and ten others around Tucson, Arizona were arrested for their work, as it violated U.S. immigration laws, although he was eventually acquitted.
For Corbett, the work he did on providing Sanctuary to those fleeing persecution grew out of his spirituality that was formed by ranching. He is not a rule breaker by nature. In fact, he takes very seriously the laws which govern our common life together as a country. He knows he is protected by the state from intruders just because he lives here. To break laws is to violate the covenant we have together as a nation.
At the same time, he has spent enough time “off grid,” so to speak, that he sees the limits of governments. He sees how some government laws are also violations of the covenants we have with each other. When confronted with a human being fleeing persecution, the laws that Corbett follows are those that govern humane relationships. Even though that means, in very rare instances, violating the government’s laws, Corbett has the courage to do so because he is not as dependent on the false security the government claims to offer most of us day to day.
Corbett violated the government produced law. But he was obeying, in his way of thinking, the true law – the one accountable to something higher than the government. He calls it a community created law. These are the covenants we create over time by living in a community where we are neighbors and friends, even with our enemies.
Corbett writes, “Sometimes one must choose between obeying the law and obeying the government, as in the case of the human rights violations. Sometimes our neighbors count on us to obey the law rather than the government (saving Jews from Nazis). Often, though, disobeying the government is like failing to keep a promise. When I fail to keep a promise I owe an explanation. I am not to be the sole or final judge determining whether I am justified by the injury I think has been avoided.”
You have to step out, step away, to see this distinction. Jesus called people in a different direction. It’s hard to hear this Good Shepherd passage for those of us who abhor any notion that the Christian faith is about exclusion. Jesus says you have to follow him in order to be saved. But, instead of thinking about it in terms of who “gets in” to heaven and who doesn’t, let’s think about it in terms of what makes for true and abundant life and what doesn’t – and it seems to have to do with choosing a life in which you rhythmically detach – enter a kind of wilderness and learn a new way of living.
Jesus knows what he's saying when he calls people to leave their homes and villages, and even their families, since he had done the same himself. He knows what it's like to have people think that you're crazy or irresponsible because of what you leave behind and let go of, because people said the same things about him. And he knows something else, too: this crazy life he lived, and calls us to live, is abundant life. It's THE abundant life, to be precise. It may be costly to follow the shepherd. We might have to enter a wilderness we would rather avoid. We have to give up things we don’t want to. But ultimately, we are giving up death and gaining life.
There are a lot of other voices out there asking us to follow: bosses, politicians, parents; acquisitions, ambitions, causes; always just one more favor to do, one more promotion to get, one more enemy to defeat, before you can rest secure. As one theologian put it, “Those other would-be shepherds are bad news, keeping us penned with anxiety and work toward things which never turn out to be quite what was promised -- international, personal, or job "security" which really mean a lifetime of vigilance while trying to deny or hide vulnerabilities that are still very real.”
Jesus leads us to what we need: food, water, air; true security, deep rest, and real love. Trusting him frees us to enjoy all of those good gifts as fully as God gives them, and the richness of God's blessings are far beyond what I know how to describe. When he's our shepherd, we experience abundant life that no thief can take away. And when we know that abundant life – when we have stopped following other would-be shepherds, we have the wisdom and courage to stand in opposition to systems that destroy. We don’t need the security and wealth those systems offer, so we no longer have a vested interest in maintaining them.
Think about ways you might become a goatwalker metaphorically. How can you regularly step outside society to sense the wilderness. God is there, and when we reach the wilderness – that place free from the trappings of this world – we will survive…truly survive. Truly live. Amen.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Easter People: Anne Lamott
Luke 24:13-35
May 9, 2011
In my experience, when pastors are asked to share their favorite bible passage, there are a couple that get a lot of play: The wedding at Cana, and the Prodigal Son, for example. But, even more than those two, this one – the Road to Emmaus – often comes out at the top of the charts of favorite hits. And that makes sense to me. It’s such a great passage for those of us working on this faith thing. It speaks to what most of us yearn for – some assurance that we are on the right road, and that God is walking with us.
Because, of course, it doesn’t always feel that way. We can do our level best, make the best decisions we can, seek God’s guidance each step of the way, but it seems like rarely is it crystal clear that God is walkin’ along with us, saying “yes, this is right.” We pray and pray for at least a feeling of confirmation, but still there are times we think we’re on the right road, but really can’t be sure. And that’s when life is good. There are also times we know we’re on the wrong road, but truly, honestly, can’t find the alternative route.
These two people walking along – going to Emmaus – certainly must have questioned whether they had been on the right road all this time. These were part of the group of people who gave over their lives to following Jesus for a few years. They believed Jesus was sent from God…a divine presence in their midst who would bring about great change in their lives. But, they were sorely mistaken. The road became a dead end. All that excitement, all that hope, ended when Jesus was nailed to the cross. They had given up everything because they were sure God wanted them to walk this new path, take this new journey, and they were sure that in Jesus God walked the road with them, but in the end they were left feeling foolish, abandoned, and undoubtedly unsure what it meant to follow God.
Now, they could see no way forward. All they could think to do was to head home. They were on their way back to Emmaus – back to where they started. They were left at a dead end on the road they had travelled, so they retraced their steps, going back to the beginning, probably in hopes that they would find another road to travel – a road where they would really, truly, find God.
But in this beautiful parable of life called the Road to Emmaus, the author of Luke tells us that the goal of life is not to find the “right” road. There is not a path where, if we just find it we’ll find God and all God wants for us. In this passage we see that God meets us on whatever road we happen to be on at the moment…right, wrong, good, bad, or indifferent. Faith is not really about figuring out the right road. Faith is about letting God transform us on whatever road we happen to find ourselves.
Anne Lamott knows the road to Emmaus. She knows what it’s like to be journeying through life without hope, sure there is no meaning or purpose, only to realize that all along Jesus has been walking with her – she just couldn’t recognize him at first.
Anne Lamott was raised by her parents to believe you had a moral obligation to try to save the world. But no one in the family believed in God. Her father had had a terrible, painful, cold Christian childhood, and out of loyalty to him, no one ever talked about God. The family line was that believing meant you were stupid. Only ignorant people believed. Yet somehow, from a very early age, Anne felt someone – something – alongside her. “I bowed my head in bed and prayed,” she says. “I prayed because I believed – not in Jesus – but in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed and that I did not tell a soul.”
Throughout her life Lamott has struggled with thinking she has to be perfect to be loved – and she has been anything but perfect. She began drinking and using drugs at a very young age. While her “outward” life looked okay to friends and colleagues, her private life of drugs, alcohol and sleeping around was breaking her from the inside out. She writes, “I was cracking up. It was like a cartoon where something gets hit, and one crack appears, which spider webs outward until the whole pane or vase is cracked and hangs suspended for a moment before falling into a pile of powder on the floor. [At one point,] I called a suicide hotline, but hung up when someone answered. Heaven forbid someone should think I needed help. I was a Lamott – Lamotts give help. I believed that I would die soon, from a fall or an overdose. I knew there was an afterlife but felt that the odds of my living long enough to get into heaven were almost nil. They couldn’t possibly take you in the shape I was in. I could no longer imagine how God could love me.”
At one of her low points, she was out walking, and she passed by St. Stephen’s Episcopal church. She had been there as a child with a friend. She’d heard there was a new priest, and later she decided to call him. When she went to see him, she told him everything – all the darkness, all the pain, all the shame. She told him that she didn’t think God could possibly love her. He responded quite simply: “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.” It was a start. Something changed that day – even though it would be four years before she got sober. As she put it, “I was not willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.”
One of Anne’s favorite places was a flea market in Marin City, and she would often go on Sundays. At 11 o’clock on Sundays, she would hear gospel music coming from a church across the street – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church. It was homely and impoverished. A ramshackle building with a cross on stop, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But, she loved the music. She began stopping in from time to time, standing at the doorway to listen to the songs. The church was so run-down, with terrible linoleum that was brown and over-shined, and plastic stained-glass windows. But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man, and a congregation of 30 people or so, radiating, as she puts it, “kindness and warmth.”
“I went back to St. Andrew about once a month,” she writes. “No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace.”
Then, Anne Lamott had her Emmaus moment. It wasn’t exactly like the one in the bible, but it was her moment of recognizing God in the midst of her journey. She had been seeing a married man, and got pregnant. She had an abortion. “I didn’t go to the flea market the week of my abortion,” she writes. “I stayed home, and smoked dope and got drunk. On the seventh night, though, very drunk and just about to take a sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily. Several hours later, the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. I had a cigarette and turned off the light. After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there. After a while, in the dark, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.
“I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’
“After that, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.
“One week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “Fine. I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” This was my beautiful moment of conversion.”
Just like with the two people on the way to Emmaus, God met Anne on the road she was already travelling. But also like those two people, something had to happen before she could recognize God walking with them. It took a community – a community gathered, breaking bread, singing songs, reading scripture, loving one another. It took church.
Anne’s life did not become perfect after she found church. It was still some time before she got sober. She got pregnant again – only this time she had the baby. Parenting is not, of course, the world’s easiest jobs, and she made plenty of mistakes. She did not find the perfect path – the right road – because there isn’t one. She stayed on the rocky, imperfect, sometimes ugly journey, but now she knew God walked with her – no matter what her life looked like, no matter what she did. And St. Andrew was the bedrock of that journey. It was through the people of her church that she stayed grounded and connected to Jesus. It was her life line.
She writes, “No matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”
Jesus meets these two people on the way to Emmaus. He doesn’t come to them in Jerusalem. He doesn’t wait for them at home. He doesn’t bid them make some holy pilgrimage or undertake some pious feat. Rather, he meets them where they are – on the road, amid their journey, right smack in the middle of all the pain, frustration, and despondency that threatens to overwhelm them. Jesus listens to them, to their pain, he interprets scripture to them, he walks all the way home with them. But they don’t recognize him until they are together around a table, in a sacred moment of church, breaking bread together.
It’s not a bad pattern to emulate, is it? Meet people where they are. Open up the scriptures so they can make sense of their lives in light of God’s mercy. Gather them to the meal that they might behold and be nourished by Christ’s own presence. There is no doubt this story directs us to the church, where we may encounter Jesus in the word and the sacraments. But not the “the church” that’s equated with the institution. We are directed instead to the church that meets a very ordinary world, a world marked by human loss and brokenness. Maybe church is not just a place where you come to find out how to be a good Christian. Church is where you come to find out that Christ loves you, God walks with you, even when you are nowhere in the ball park of being good.
Anne Lamott is not an Easter person because she is so amazing. One of the reasons Anne Lamott’s faith story is so compelling is because she is so honest – so authentic. She tells the truth about herself – even when it is painful. In honor of Mother’s Day, I would recommend reading her book, “Operating Instructions,” which is about her life right after she had her son, Sam. By the time she has Sam, Lamott has found church, God, even Jesus. But the book is about an imperfect mom, who makes mistakes. And for those of us who are mothers, we know how unforgivable it is to make mistakes with our children. How could we do that? It’s the most important job we have, yet we make mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes. There is no better road to travel if you want to learn about God’s love and forgiveness that the road of parenting.
Anne Lamott is an Easter person because she was dying and then she met Jesus, found a church that helped open her eyes to God’s presence in her life, and found new life. She was Easter-ed. We’re a small church of kind, warm-hearted people. We can Easter people. We can be a community that opens people’s eyes to the presence of God in their lives no matter what those lives look like. We can meet people on their road to Emmaus. And it’s not a matter of convincing someone of something, converting someone, telling them right from wrong. It’s a matter of doing what we do: gathering, singing, breaking bread, loving, welcoming, not judging. We do this well. We can help Easter people who are dying into a new life. Amen.
May 9, 2011
In my experience, when pastors are asked to share their favorite bible passage, there are a couple that get a lot of play: The wedding at Cana, and the Prodigal Son, for example. But, even more than those two, this one – the Road to Emmaus – often comes out at the top of the charts of favorite hits. And that makes sense to me. It’s such a great passage for those of us working on this faith thing. It speaks to what most of us yearn for – some assurance that we are on the right road, and that God is walking with us.
Because, of course, it doesn’t always feel that way. We can do our level best, make the best decisions we can, seek God’s guidance each step of the way, but it seems like rarely is it crystal clear that God is walkin’ along with us, saying “yes, this is right.” We pray and pray for at least a feeling of confirmation, but still there are times we think we’re on the right road, but really can’t be sure. And that’s when life is good. There are also times we know we’re on the wrong road, but truly, honestly, can’t find the alternative route.
These two people walking along – going to Emmaus – certainly must have questioned whether they had been on the right road all this time. These were part of the group of people who gave over their lives to following Jesus for a few years. They believed Jesus was sent from God…a divine presence in their midst who would bring about great change in their lives. But, they were sorely mistaken. The road became a dead end. All that excitement, all that hope, ended when Jesus was nailed to the cross. They had given up everything because they were sure God wanted them to walk this new path, take this new journey, and they were sure that in Jesus God walked the road with them, but in the end they were left feeling foolish, abandoned, and undoubtedly unsure what it meant to follow God.
Now, they could see no way forward. All they could think to do was to head home. They were on their way back to Emmaus – back to where they started. They were left at a dead end on the road they had travelled, so they retraced their steps, going back to the beginning, probably in hopes that they would find another road to travel – a road where they would really, truly, find God.
But in this beautiful parable of life called the Road to Emmaus, the author of Luke tells us that the goal of life is not to find the “right” road. There is not a path where, if we just find it we’ll find God and all God wants for us. In this passage we see that God meets us on whatever road we happen to be on at the moment…right, wrong, good, bad, or indifferent. Faith is not really about figuring out the right road. Faith is about letting God transform us on whatever road we happen to find ourselves.
Anne Lamott knows the road to Emmaus. She knows what it’s like to be journeying through life without hope, sure there is no meaning or purpose, only to realize that all along Jesus has been walking with her – she just couldn’t recognize him at first.
Anne Lamott was raised by her parents to believe you had a moral obligation to try to save the world. But no one in the family believed in God. Her father had had a terrible, painful, cold Christian childhood, and out of loyalty to him, no one ever talked about God. The family line was that believing meant you were stupid. Only ignorant people believed. Yet somehow, from a very early age, Anne felt someone – something – alongside her. “I bowed my head in bed and prayed,” she says. “I prayed because I believed – not in Jesus – but in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed and that I did not tell a soul.”
Throughout her life Lamott has struggled with thinking she has to be perfect to be loved – and she has been anything but perfect. She began drinking and using drugs at a very young age. While her “outward” life looked okay to friends and colleagues, her private life of drugs, alcohol and sleeping around was breaking her from the inside out. She writes, “I was cracking up. It was like a cartoon where something gets hit, and one crack appears, which spider webs outward until the whole pane or vase is cracked and hangs suspended for a moment before falling into a pile of powder on the floor. [At one point,] I called a suicide hotline, but hung up when someone answered. Heaven forbid someone should think I needed help. I was a Lamott – Lamotts give help. I believed that I would die soon, from a fall or an overdose. I knew there was an afterlife but felt that the odds of my living long enough to get into heaven were almost nil. They couldn’t possibly take you in the shape I was in. I could no longer imagine how God could love me.”
At one of her low points, she was out walking, and she passed by St. Stephen’s Episcopal church. She had been there as a child with a friend. She’d heard there was a new priest, and later she decided to call him. When she went to see him, she told him everything – all the darkness, all the pain, all the shame. She told him that she didn’t think God could possibly love her. He responded quite simply: “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.” It was a start. Something changed that day – even though it would be four years before she got sober. As she put it, “I was not willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.”
One of Anne’s favorite places was a flea market in Marin City, and she would often go on Sundays. At 11 o’clock on Sundays, she would hear gospel music coming from a church across the street – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church. It was homely and impoverished. A ramshackle building with a cross on stop, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But, she loved the music. She began stopping in from time to time, standing at the doorway to listen to the songs. The church was so run-down, with terrible linoleum that was brown and over-shined, and plastic stained-glass windows. But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man, and a congregation of 30 people or so, radiating, as she puts it, “kindness and warmth.”
“I went back to St. Andrew about once a month,” she writes. “No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace.”
Then, Anne Lamott had her Emmaus moment. It wasn’t exactly like the one in the bible, but it was her moment of recognizing God in the midst of her journey. She had been seeing a married man, and got pregnant. She had an abortion. “I didn’t go to the flea market the week of my abortion,” she writes. “I stayed home, and smoked dope and got drunk. On the seventh night, though, very drunk and just about to take a sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily. Several hours later, the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. I had a cigarette and turned off the light. After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there. After a while, in the dark, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.
“I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’
“After that, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.
“One week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “Fine. I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” This was my beautiful moment of conversion.”
Just like with the two people on the way to Emmaus, God met Anne on the road she was already travelling. But also like those two people, something had to happen before she could recognize God walking with them. It took a community – a community gathered, breaking bread, singing songs, reading scripture, loving one another. It took church.
Anne’s life did not become perfect after she found church. It was still some time before she got sober. She got pregnant again – only this time she had the baby. Parenting is not, of course, the world’s easiest jobs, and she made plenty of mistakes. She did not find the perfect path – the right road – because there isn’t one. She stayed on the rocky, imperfect, sometimes ugly journey, but now she knew God walked with her – no matter what her life looked like, no matter what she did. And St. Andrew was the bedrock of that journey. It was through the people of her church that she stayed grounded and connected to Jesus. It was her life line.
She writes, “No matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”
Jesus meets these two people on the way to Emmaus. He doesn’t come to them in Jerusalem. He doesn’t wait for them at home. He doesn’t bid them make some holy pilgrimage or undertake some pious feat. Rather, he meets them where they are – on the road, amid their journey, right smack in the middle of all the pain, frustration, and despondency that threatens to overwhelm them. Jesus listens to them, to their pain, he interprets scripture to them, he walks all the way home with them. But they don’t recognize him until they are together around a table, in a sacred moment of church, breaking bread together.
It’s not a bad pattern to emulate, is it? Meet people where they are. Open up the scriptures so they can make sense of their lives in light of God’s mercy. Gather them to the meal that they might behold and be nourished by Christ’s own presence. There is no doubt this story directs us to the church, where we may encounter Jesus in the word and the sacraments. But not the “the church” that’s equated with the institution. We are directed instead to the church that meets a very ordinary world, a world marked by human loss and brokenness. Maybe church is not just a place where you come to find out how to be a good Christian. Church is where you come to find out that Christ loves you, God walks with you, even when you are nowhere in the ball park of being good.
Anne Lamott is not an Easter person because she is so amazing. One of the reasons Anne Lamott’s faith story is so compelling is because she is so honest – so authentic. She tells the truth about herself – even when it is painful. In honor of Mother’s Day, I would recommend reading her book, “Operating Instructions,” which is about her life right after she had her son, Sam. By the time she has Sam, Lamott has found church, God, even Jesus. But the book is about an imperfect mom, who makes mistakes. And for those of us who are mothers, we know how unforgivable it is to make mistakes with our children. How could we do that? It’s the most important job we have, yet we make mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes. There is no better road to travel if you want to learn about God’s love and forgiveness that the road of parenting.
Anne Lamott is an Easter person because she was dying and then she met Jesus, found a church that helped open her eyes to God’s presence in her life, and found new life. She was Easter-ed. We’re a small church of kind, warm-hearted people. We can Easter people. We can be a community that opens people’s eyes to the presence of God in their lives no matter what those lives look like. We can meet people on their road to Emmaus. And it’s not a matter of convincing someone of something, converting someone, telling them right from wrong. It’s a matter of doing what we do: gathering, singing, breaking bread, loving, welcoming, not judging. We do this well. We can help Easter people who are dying into a new life. Amen.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Peace Be With You
John 20:19-31
May 1, 2011: Second Sunday of Easter
The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked out of fear.
What do you do when you are afraid? Psychologists, sociologists and scientists of various sorts tell us that the two most common reactions are fight or flight. Depending upon the situation, your personality or your upbringing, you may be more inclined toward one of those than the other.
Today’s Gospel reading from John tells us about the response of the disciples to their own fear. On the third night following the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were so afraid that they had locked themselves up in the house where they had met. They had chosen flight over fight. Actually, at the time of Jesus arrest, some of them had wanted to fight. Simon Peter had drawn his sword cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus commanded Peter to put his sword away. Jesus had chosen another way. At various points, the disciples had also encouraged Jesus to choose flight as the best option.
But now, his followers had chosen flight. They were locked up at home, trying to play it safe. Even though Mary Magdalene had told them that she had seen the risen Jesus, they were apparently still afraid and probably disbelieving. The reading tells us that they were locked up for fear of the Jews. At this point, we need to remind ourselves of a couple of things: Biblical scholars tell us that it wasn’t only the disciples who feared persecution but the community to whom the gospel was written was persecuted by the ruling religious authorities in their community. These religious authorities were also Jewish. John’s community hadn’t entirely cut off from their own Jewish roots, but they perceived the Jews who did not follow Jesus to be pushing them out of the synagogue and persecuting them for the direction their faith had taken.
Most of us do not know what it is like to be persecuted for our faith in this way, although interestingly enough, there are many Jews these days who know what it is like to be persecuted by Christians which is certainly an abuse of our religious tradition. It actually seems a bit ironic that on this day when we are reminded of a Christian minority persecuted by other larger religious traditions, this is the day which commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day which honors the six million Jews who were systematically exterminated by the Nazis in 35 countries, and with them an additional three to four million people whom the Nazis deemed undesirable and inferior "enemies of the state.” gays, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, Slavic people, the physically and mentally disabled, and political dissidents of every sort. Today is called Yom Hashoah.
On a day like this, Yom Hasoah, we are reminded that persecuted minorities have always had reasons to be afraid, and on this day so many years ago, 3 days after the crucifixion, it was those first followers of Jesus who were locked up with fear when the risen Jesus came and stood among them. There are many marvelous things about this reading: First off is the fact that the risen Jesus comes bringing peace. They heard his voice saying, “Peace be with you.” They saw his hands and his side, the reminders of the pain he had endured through capital punishment for his unwillingness to stop his active witness to God’s love at work through his life. Seeing that he was alive, his followers began to rejoice as he spoke those words again, “Peace be with you.” Three times in this reading, the voice of the risen Jesus breaks forth saying, “Peace be with you.” Having been killed by one of the most violent methods, how is it possible that one of the first things that Jesus chose to do with his resurrected life was to come back to his friends bearing his wounds and witnessing to peace. He had certainly been persecuted, but chose neither fight nor flight. And for Jesus, this third way, was the essence of peace…peace in the midst of despair, peace in the midst of persecution, peace in the midst of fear.
Another amazing thing revealed to us through this reading is that the risen Jesus comes to the disciples in the context of community. If you go to the end of each of the Gospel stories from the Bible and look at the resurrection appearances, this rather frequent theme emerges which we in our individualistic culture often fail to notice. True, there is a very occasional reference to a story such as that of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus while she was seemingly alone in the garden, but in the vast majority of cases, the risen Jesus meets people in the context of community. Just as Jesus says in Matthew 18, “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am with them.”
The risen Jesus appears here to the 10 without Thomas present, and then a week later to the ten with Thomas present. In other gospels, Jesus appears to a group of the disciples by Lake Tiberius, to a group of women including Mary Magdalene, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus who only finally recognized him when he broke bread with them, and to the eleven apostles on a mountain in Galilee. Over and over, the risen Jesus appears to two or more gathered together and, for the most part, he is then not seen by them in the same way any more. It seems that wherever two or more gathered in the name of Christ, they are far more likely to encounter the one who brings the message: Peace be with you.
A woman named Wendy Wright gives an example of what it meant for her to learn to receive the peace of Christ when gathered in a surprising twosome. She was sitting on a bench reading a book while visiting Seattle when she was confronted by a man on the street with unkempt hair, missing teeth, disheveled clothing and a body clearly under the influence of some substance or another. She had made the mistake of leaving her purse sitting on the ground. She knew he had not approached to ask for the time of day. After realizing that she could not flee and that fighting was not a good idea, she said, “Somehow I summoned the presence to reach down into the depths of my heart and call up a reserve of love the likes of which I had never felt before. And when I finally looked into this man’s eyes, I truly felt him to be myself.”
Following her encounter with the man she met on the street, somebody whose life was so different than her own and yet who suddenly didn’t seem so different, Wendy Wright put it this way, “It was not until much later that I was able to articulate what had happened to me, and to the man I met, on that Seattle sidewalk on a weekday summer afternoon. We had been on holy ground. I had encountered the heart of another person in a way that was unimaginable to me before. We had been in the presence of a love that transformed us both and dissolved the glaring distance between our very different lives. I think I have never been as close to another person, at least for those few moments when this man unwittingly lifted the heavy trappings that obscured his heart and let me, and himself, see the bare and beautiful personhood that was still aching there…. If I could stand there again, I would know the peace of Christ that passes all understanding. I would be able to live God’s shalom….But just for an instant I was privileged to walk firmly in the middle of the path of peace that the tiny babe in Bethlehem came to bring to us so long ago.”
Jesus knew that his followers were so often caught up in the fear-filled voices screaming fight or flight. But he showed up in the midst of the community gathered in fear, he didn’t criticize them for their fear or their flight. Instead, Jesus simply extended his own wounded flesh for them to touch, bearing bodily witness that there is a third way that is possible for communities of two or more gathered in his name and it is a possibility beyond fight or flight. For his part, when he would have had every cultural justification to fight or flee, Jesus resisted evil and did not succumb to either of these voices, still so compelling today.
Perhaps we will have a better idea about how to make peace on an international basis when we learn to heed God’s voice of peace in every one to one relationship in which we find ourselves, whether at home or at church or at work. The risen Jesus shows up saying, “Peace be with you,” reminding us that we do not have to be tormented by the voices of fear, by our own anger lashing out, or by the voice of somebody else’s anger lashing out at us. Neither do we need to allow the voices of flight to convince us that we are weaker than we are when we feel afraid. The third way of peace isn’t only about the way Jesus was willing to enter into our pain and die out of love for us. It is also the way that he lived his life and the way in which the Spirit God has given to us empowers us to live our lives. It is possible because God has already entered into those fear-filled, locked up places of our lives to weep with us, the forgive us and to heal us that we might realize that we can live the peace of Christ with one another.
During the next 5 weeks of the Easter season, I will be talking about “Easter people.” These are people who I think manifest Christ-like qualities and live faithfully. But this morning, I wanted to start with those first Easter people – the ones who were there. It reminds us that Easter people often begin locked in a room, afraid and just waiting for everything to pass over. Easter people are only Easter people because they have met the one who offers a peace which surpasses all understanding. Easter people are not super-human…they are not necessarily stars. In fact, they are like most of us; they began huddled in fear, locked in a room, just hoping and praying Jesus doesn’t come through the door and send them out. But Jesus does…and Easter people are ones who go in spite of the fear. They are the ones who choose neither fight nor flight, but rather believe in Jesus’ words, in Jesus’ way: Peace be with you. The peace of Christ is with you all. Amen.
May 1, 2011: Second Sunday of Easter
The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked out of fear.
What do you do when you are afraid? Psychologists, sociologists and scientists of various sorts tell us that the two most common reactions are fight or flight. Depending upon the situation, your personality or your upbringing, you may be more inclined toward one of those than the other.
Today’s Gospel reading from John tells us about the response of the disciples to their own fear. On the third night following the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were so afraid that they had locked themselves up in the house where they had met. They had chosen flight over fight. Actually, at the time of Jesus arrest, some of them had wanted to fight. Simon Peter had drawn his sword cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus commanded Peter to put his sword away. Jesus had chosen another way. At various points, the disciples had also encouraged Jesus to choose flight as the best option.
But now, his followers had chosen flight. They were locked up at home, trying to play it safe. Even though Mary Magdalene had told them that she had seen the risen Jesus, they were apparently still afraid and probably disbelieving. The reading tells us that they were locked up for fear of the Jews. At this point, we need to remind ourselves of a couple of things: Biblical scholars tell us that it wasn’t only the disciples who feared persecution but the community to whom the gospel was written was persecuted by the ruling religious authorities in their community. These religious authorities were also Jewish. John’s community hadn’t entirely cut off from their own Jewish roots, but they perceived the Jews who did not follow Jesus to be pushing them out of the synagogue and persecuting them for the direction their faith had taken.
Most of us do not know what it is like to be persecuted for our faith in this way, although interestingly enough, there are many Jews these days who know what it is like to be persecuted by Christians which is certainly an abuse of our religious tradition. It actually seems a bit ironic that on this day when we are reminded of a Christian minority persecuted by other larger religious traditions, this is the day which commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day which honors the six million Jews who were systematically exterminated by the Nazis in 35 countries, and with them an additional three to four million people whom the Nazis deemed undesirable and inferior "enemies of the state.” gays, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, Slavic people, the physically and mentally disabled, and political dissidents of every sort. Today is called Yom Hashoah.
On a day like this, Yom Hasoah, we are reminded that persecuted minorities have always had reasons to be afraid, and on this day so many years ago, 3 days after the crucifixion, it was those first followers of Jesus who were locked up with fear when the risen Jesus came and stood among them. There are many marvelous things about this reading: First off is the fact that the risen Jesus comes bringing peace. They heard his voice saying, “Peace be with you.” They saw his hands and his side, the reminders of the pain he had endured through capital punishment for his unwillingness to stop his active witness to God’s love at work through his life. Seeing that he was alive, his followers began to rejoice as he spoke those words again, “Peace be with you.” Three times in this reading, the voice of the risen Jesus breaks forth saying, “Peace be with you.” Having been killed by one of the most violent methods, how is it possible that one of the first things that Jesus chose to do with his resurrected life was to come back to his friends bearing his wounds and witnessing to peace. He had certainly been persecuted, but chose neither fight nor flight. And for Jesus, this third way, was the essence of peace…peace in the midst of despair, peace in the midst of persecution, peace in the midst of fear.
Another amazing thing revealed to us through this reading is that the risen Jesus comes to the disciples in the context of community. If you go to the end of each of the Gospel stories from the Bible and look at the resurrection appearances, this rather frequent theme emerges which we in our individualistic culture often fail to notice. True, there is a very occasional reference to a story such as that of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus while she was seemingly alone in the garden, but in the vast majority of cases, the risen Jesus meets people in the context of community. Just as Jesus says in Matthew 18, “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am with them.”
The risen Jesus appears here to the 10 without Thomas present, and then a week later to the ten with Thomas present. In other gospels, Jesus appears to a group of the disciples by Lake Tiberius, to a group of women including Mary Magdalene, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus who only finally recognized him when he broke bread with them, and to the eleven apostles on a mountain in Galilee. Over and over, the risen Jesus appears to two or more gathered together and, for the most part, he is then not seen by them in the same way any more. It seems that wherever two or more gathered in the name of Christ, they are far more likely to encounter the one who brings the message: Peace be with you.
A woman named Wendy Wright gives an example of what it meant for her to learn to receive the peace of Christ when gathered in a surprising twosome. She was sitting on a bench reading a book while visiting Seattle when she was confronted by a man on the street with unkempt hair, missing teeth, disheveled clothing and a body clearly under the influence of some substance or another. She had made the mistake of leaving her purse sitting on the ground. She knew he had not approached to ask for the time of day. After realizing that she could not flee and that fighting was not a good idea, she said, “Somehow I summoned the presence to reach down into the depths of my heart and call up a reserve of love the likes of which I had never felt before. And when I finally looked into this man’s eyes, I truly felt him to be myself.”
Following her encounter with the man she met on the street, somebody whose life was so different than her own and yet who suddenly didn’t seem so different, Wendy Wright put it this way, “It was not until much later that I was able to articulate what had happened to me, and to the man I met, on that Seattle sidewalk on a weekday summer afternoon. We had been on holy ground. I had encountered the heart of another person in a way that was unimaginable to me before. We had been in the presence of a love that transformed us both and dissolved the glaring distance between our very different lives. I think I have never been as close to another person, at least for those few moments when this man unwittingly lifted the heavy trappings that obscured his heart and let me, and himself, see the bare and beautiful personhood that was still aching there…. If I could stand there again, I would know the peace of Christ that passes all understanding. I would be able to live God’s shalom….But just for an instant I was privileged to walk firmly in the middle of the path of peace that the tiny babe in Bethlehem came to bring to us so long ago.”
Jesus knew that his followers were so often caught up in the fear-filled voices screaming fight or flight. But he showed up in the midst of the community gathered in fear, he didn’t criticize them for their fear or their flight. Instead, Jesus simply extended his own wounded flesh for them to touch, bearing bodily witness that there is a third way that is possible for communities of two or more gathered in his name and it is a possibility beyond fight or flight. For his part, when he would have had every cultural justification to fight or flee, Jesus resisted evil and did not succumb to either of these voices, still so compelling today.
Perhaps we will have a better idea about how to make peace on an international basis when we learn to heed God’s voice of peace in every one to one relationship in which we find ourselves, whether at home or at church or at work. The risen Jesus shows up saying, “Peace be with you,” reminding us that we do not have to be tormented by the voices of fear, by our own anger lashing out, or by the voice of somebody else’s anger lashing out at us. Neither do we need to allow the voices of flight to convince us that we are weaker than we are when we feel afraid. The third way of peace isn’t only about the way Jesus was willing to enter into our pain and die out of love for us. It is also the way that he lived his life and the way in which the Spirit God has given to us empowers us to live our lives. It is possible because God has already entered into those fear-filled, locked up places of our lives to weep with us, the forgive us and to heal us that we might realize that we can live the peace of Christ with one another.
During the next 5 weeks of the Easter season, I will be talking about “Easter people.” These are people who I think manifest Christ-like qualities and live faithfully. But this morning, I wanted to start with those first Easter people – the ones who were there. It reminds us that Easter people often begin locked in a room, afraid and just waiting for everything to pass over. Easter people are only Easter people because they have met the one who offers a peace which surpasses all understanding. Easter people are not super-human…they are not necessarily stars. In fact, they are like most of us; they began huddled in fear, locked in a room, just hoping and praying Jesus doesn’t come through the door and send them out. But Jesus does…and Easter people are ones who go in spite of the fear. They are the ones who choose neither fight nor flight, but rather believe in Jesus’ words, in Jesus’ way: Peace be with you. The peace of Christ is with you all. Amen.
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