Sunday, October 29, 2017

This Week's Sermon: "Reclaiming Our Hope," Revelation 20:1-10

Revelation 20:1-10 

 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the abyss and a huge chain. 2 He seized the dragon, the old snake, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. 3 He threw him into the abyss, then locked and sealed it over him. This was to keep him from continuing to deceive the nations until the thousand years were over. After this he must be released for a little while.

4 Then I saw thrones, and people took their seats on them, and judgment was given in their favor. They were the ones who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and God’s word, and those who hadn’t worshipped the beast or its image, who hadn’t received the mark on their forehead or hand. They came to life and ruled with Christ for one thousand years. 5 The rest of the dead didn’t come to life until the thousand years were over. This is the first resurrection. 6 Favored and holy are those who have a share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will rule with him for one thousand years.

7 When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison. 8 He will go out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog. He will gather them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the sea. 9 They came up across the whole earth and surrounded the saints’ camp, the city that God loves. But fire came down from heaven and consumed them. 10 Then the devil, who had deceived them, was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet also were. There painful suffering will be inflicted upon them day and night, forever and always. (Common English Bible)



“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Seven

I love both my grandfathers, but they could not possibly be more different. My paternal grandfather, who lives out on the coast with my step-grandmother, is an outdoorsman and college professor-turned-professional chef, a thoughtful and taciturn agnostic who is far more comfortable in the seclusion of fishing or crabbing than in the collective effervescence of an apocalyptic revival.

My maternal grandfather is a nomad who nominally has a home address in Michigan, but for years happily lived out of his series of Ford F-150s and a string of Red Roof Inns and Super 8 motels. He has no use for luggage, hauling everything in banana boxes, and is highly versed in apocalyptic theology thanks to the fire-breathing televangelists he follows assiduously. Despite my own deep faith, he began to worry, I think, that college was going to corrupt me, and he began sending me brochures and pamphlets from one such televangelist, mostly hawking useless goods for either preparing for the Rapture or for rubbing it in the faces of your left behind friends and relatives after the fact. Most of those pamphlets and brochures ended up in the bathroom of the apartment I shared with two of my college friends because, well, we enjoyed shocking our houseguests.

It’s sometimes disconcerting to have two relatives so close to me, who I both love so dearly, think me wrong in so wildly different ways—especially my maternal grampy. Even as we would good-naturedly argue theology with each other over sushi and beer, I could never quite shake the worry that there was some part of him that believed I was destined for hell despite my faith and good works. And that can create all sorts of difficulties in claiming Christianity as a religion of hope.

This is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

We began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” “Recovering Our Emotions,” and “Redeeming Our Broken Selves.” Last week, we came to the sixth chapter of the book, “Reclaiming Our Bodies,” and today, to the seventh chapter, “Reclaiming Our Hope,” in which Carol writes about the fear instilled in her and a Christian she pastored named Shawna that threatened, rather than strengthened, their relationships with God:

(A)s I served as a pastor and Shawna stood in my office, I heard how the idea of the Rapture frightened her as well. She had been told so many times that humanity was going to hell and that the truly faithful would be raptured that when she was a child and she would find herself suddenly alone, the first thing she would imagine was that she had been “left behind.”


(D)ecades later, that sense of abandonment stuck with Shawna. As Shawna raised her own daughters, she wanted a more life-giving idea of God and the future than the one she had been taught.

“What’s the point of religion if it doesn’t give us hope?” I wondered. “We don’t need all of that destruction to be satisfied, do we? If we don’t need it, I’m sure God doesn’t need it.” We began to focus on the prayer that Jesus taught us. What did it say about the future? “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Surely, it was not just a prayer but also a commission. It was a daring to dream and work for a world that might be like heaven.

Given Carol’s story here, it would be easy—and it certainly was tempting—to base this sermon off of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a critical link between it and our future hope that Carol draws in this passage.

But I also think that a critical part of reclaiming our hope—and, by extension, Christianity as a fundamentally hopeful religion—is to demonstrate that it is not only possible, but right, for us to preach and teach Revelation in a way that is understandable and accessible rather than threatening.

We did that pretty extensively five years ago, when I spent my first summer here with you solely on preaching through some of the most famous images of Revelation, and why they often meant something different than what popular belief tells us they are about. But, like most vaccinations, we can always use a booster for understanding what this confounding and confusing book really says.

John of Patmos—not the same John as John the evangelist, who wrote the Gospel and three letters bearing his name—composes Revelation during a time of extreme danger for the early church. The Roman emperor Domitian has changed the practices of the imperial religious cult from deifying the emperor—making him a god—upon death to demanding worship of the living emperor, which is something that Christians refused to do on spec because of the belief that only Jesus Christ incarnates God. Domitian responded in turn with violent persecutions of the early Christians.

Revelation, then, is largely a diatribe against Domitian. From the famous Number of the Beast (the Bible verse, not the awesome Iron Maiden song) to the Whore of Babylon, Domitian and Rome feature prominently as the antagonists to God in Revelation. Yet, when you read a passage like this in Revelation 20, the assumption we make is that this is a predictive text—that is, a text that makes predictions of the future, such as the prediction of the thousand-year reign of Christ—instead of a descriptive text, which is to say, a text describing and interpreting events that have already happened or were taking place at the time of composition.

The notion that what Revelation depicts is descriptive of already taking place rather than proscriptive of events to take place in the future is called preterism, and it has been by far the easiest way I have found to keep the Bible a book of hope rather than of dread and despair.

Preterism is far from perfect—some schools of it maintain that the church supersedes ancient Israel at the point of Revelation, which is harmful and painful to the Jewish witness within Scripture—but the stories of Shawna and Carol of being terrified children because of Christianity is not an option.

Can we see Revelation in a way that describes the persecution of both the early church and ancient Israel in that time and place, then, without demanding that it describe our own futures, or that it describe the replacement of ancient Israel with the church?

And as a part of reclaiming the hope that is so fundamental to the coming of Jesus Christ that the first Sunday of the church season of Advent—which begins in a little over a month—is themed “Hope,” can we proclaim the value that we each have, not to be left behind or raptured, but simply to live?

Especially today, where hatred and nihilism seems to reign, a religion that is built upon, and communicates, hope is as important and as relevant as ever. A hopeful Christianity should still be a Christianity that has something to say to the world. And that something should not be, “We hope to leave you behind to fend for your unsaved selves as soon as possible.”

The rapture theology we have created for ourselves, then, is fundamentally anti-hopeful. Oh, it might be hopeful if you view yourself as one of the select chosen (and in truth, we probably all do), but I would submit based on my own understanding of Jesus and His teachings, that hope only for the bare handful is no hope at all.

An interpretation of Christianity that makes my grandfather concerned for my ultimate fate—as a Christian pastor who has dedicated his life to the teachings of Jesus Christ—that is not a hopeful interpretation. An interpretation of Christianity that makes young children terrified for the rapture because they cannot countenance growing up without their parents and siblings and friends—that is not a hopeful interpretation. The hope of a rapture is a hope too selective for Christianity.

In fact, any hope from the notion of the rapture is hope that comes from us, not from God. If you recall this passage in Revelation about the thousand years that many Christians claim accompanies the rapture, there is no actual rapture! The basis for that comes from one solitary verse in 1 Thessalonians 4, plucked out of its context and mashed up in here with Revelation—something I have to imagine neither Paul or John of Patmos would be thrilled about.

Hope enough to build a faith upon can only come from God, not from ourselves. So let our hope come from God rather than entirely from us. And in so doing, may we begin to reclaim it, and our faith, for a world that sorely needs both.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
 
October 29, 2017

Sunday, October 22, 2017

This Week's Sermon: "Reclaiming Our Bodies"

John 13:1-9

Before the Festival of Passover, Jesus knew that his time had come to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them fully. 2 Jesus and his disciples were sharing the evening meal. The devil had already provoked Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray Jesus. 3 Jesus knew the Father had given everything into his hands and that he had come from God and was returning to God. 4 So he got up from the table and took off his robes. Picking up a linen towel, he tied it around his waist. 5 Then he poured water into a washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he was wearing. 6 When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus replied, “You don’t understand what I’m doing now, but you will understand later.” 8 “No!” Peter said. “You will never wash my feet!” Jesus replied, “Unless I wash you, you won’t have a place with me.” 9 Simon Peter said, “Lord, not only my feet but also my hands and my head!” (Common English Bible)



“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Six

Christopher Reeve was one of my childhood idols. His quartet of Superman movies were before my time, but what that meant was that I came of age with him simply being known as Superman, not Dean Cain or Brandon Routh or Henry Cavill or any of the other actors to play that role. Christopher Reeve was, and will always be, Superman to me, and when he passed away thirteen years ago, I was genuinely crushed.

Reeve’s Superman status made—not just for me, but for so many people—his horse riding accident that severed his C1/C2 vertebra and left him a quadriplegic so traumatic to witness. It communicated to us that the Man of Steel was still, well, a man. Flesh and blood.

Reeve wrote extensively about his rehabilitation process from that accident in his autobiography Still Me, which is a profound reflection on the nature, limitations, and value of our bodies. He writes so poignantly of having to accept care that to us would be an outright invasion, a complete stripping of dignity, but which also kept him alive. He wrote:

The process of undressing me…I have finally come to accept; I used to have to control my anger with myself for having ended up in this situation. Often I listen to music or watch TV so I don’t have to think about being taken care of like a baby…

Unfortunately, this (stretching and flexing regimen) is immediately followed by one of the low points: the bowel program. I often joke that it’s one of my favorite shows, right after NYPD Blue and Law and Order.

I’m turned on my side, and the aide pushes on my stomach with his fist in order to force stool down through the intestines and out onto plastic sheets placed underneath me…Again, this is a time when I let my mind drift far away. The nurses and aides are always extremely professional, but all of us recognize what a personal invasion this is, and what an indignity. Sometimes it can take nearly an hour to complete the bowel program, and it seems like an eternity. When I’m unable to detach myself mentally, I still can’t help agonizing over the accident and the twist of fate that caused me to end up this way.

What an uncomfortable thing to think about, that amount of intimacy. Yet we must, to reclaim our bodies from the shame we hang upon them as easily as we do our clothes and fashion.

This is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

We began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” “Recovering Our Emotions,” and “Redeeming Our Broken Selves.” Today, we come to the sixth chapter of the book, “Reclaiming Our Bodies,” in which Carol conveys what might be the most moving story for me a book that is filled with them—a story of her mother driving her to the home of their pastor and his wife after it was discovered that the pastor had been having an affair:

When we pulled up to the driveway, the house was dark. My determined mom still gathered the basin and towels and rang the doorbell. I didn’t remember being let in. I just remembered entering and seeing Margaret, our pastor’s wife, sitting on a chair in her living room. She remained motionless in the dark room, in her beautiful home, staring at her spotless, plush white carpet, breathing deeply.

My mother took the basin, walked into her friend’s kitchen, and filled it with warm water. She carried it to Margaret’s feet. Taking off Margaret’s shoes, she cradled her soles as if they were the most precious thing in the world. Without a word, mom put them in the water and washed them.

Margaret began to cry, and it didn’t take long before the tears smeared all of our faces. Mom took Margaret’s feet out and dried them on the soft towels. Throughout the entire ritual, we didn’t talk much, but we know what was being said. As a teenager, I understood the depth of it. Margaret was about to face some of the worst public betrayal as people began to pick apart the indiscretions of her husband.

Meeting someone where they are at, in need of tremendously intimate care just in order to survive, and being able to provide that care and friendship even when it would otherwise make you—or anyone else who happened to be there—uncomfortable? That’s called ministry. And it is what reclaiming these broken-but-beautiful vessels that God has placed us into looks like.

Jesus is about to die, but before He does, He takes on a menial task ordinarily reserved for the lowest of household slaves: washing His disciples’ feet. It was reserved for the lowest of the slaves because streets and roads didn’t have our modern-day drainage and sewage infrastructure, and so were typically absolutely filthy.

To perform that task is to demonstrate how low your status really is in the world, which is what Jesus’s ultimate message is—as I have served you (as a slave) so too should we serve one another. That is how radical Christian servitude and humility is meant to be. It also explains the vehement nature of Peter’s initial reaction to the news that his Savior would be washing his feet—he categorically refuses on spec.

Jesus scolds Peter for his resistance, and Peter not only acquiesces to having his feet washed, but he insists that Jesus wash his hands and head as well. There is a reason why I end the story on this particular exclamation from Peter—he is implying that the rest of him is as dirty as his feet, and that all of him is in just as much a need to be washed by Christ as the filthiest part of him.

It is a profoundly humiliating view that Peter takes of his own flesh, which remains in character for him; after all, when he first encounters Jesus, he pleads with the Lord, “Away from me, for I am a sinful man.” Peter, as was common in that time, thought his sinfulness could be passed on or be contagious, as it was seen (and still is, even if at times unconsciously) as the reason for misfortune.

That is a dramatic shift for Peter, then, to go from pleading with Jesus to move away from him to pleading with Jesus to wash every extremity of his body, in a way that Peter is likely fully accustomed to doing himself. After all, as a fisherman, he almost certainly would have been unable to afford a household slave to do that job for him.

But now, Jesus approaches him with the sort of humility that shocks Peter—and, if we are completely honest with ourselves, shocks us as well. I know it surprised me to read this particular story from Carol about her mother washing the feet of their pastor’s wife, just as it surprised me to hear that for his first ever Maundy Thursday service as pope, Francis chose to wash the feet not of priests, but of juvenile prison inmates, including women—which had never been done before.

Yet there is an additional dimension to Carol’s story, that comes from Christopher Reeve’s story. Him requiring other people to help him produce normal bodily functions is terribly undignified, but so too is having to see people produce the same excrement, but spiritually, about your marriage.

That is why Carol’s story matters so much. As a cheated-upon woman braces herself for the emotional *crap* that is about to overwhelm her marriage, a marriage that plenty of judgmental people would unhelpfully describe as polluted, dirty, or filthy, Carol’s mother takes the time and care to send the exact opposite message: you are still beautiful. You are still valued. You still matter.

Imagine all of the victims of Harvey Weinstein, or Bill Cosby before him, or Woody Allen, or Mel Gibson, or, frankly, our own president—any number of men who were and are insulated from the repercussions of their violent actions towards women because of who they are. Their victims were denigrated, disbelieved, and cast aside. The physical violence was compounded by spiritual violence.

When I came out two years ago about my own episode of being sexual abused as a child, I was fortunate enough to be believed, loved, and supported. How many people are not? How many people are violated spiritually as well as physically in the wake of their abuse? What was done to this pastor’s wife’s marriage was an act of spiritual violence. Yet here, she is told that she was still loved.

Do we dare send the same message to victims of such violence today? Do we dare to wash their feet in response to their stories of abuse and assault and harassment of their bodies?

If we are to reclaim our own bodies—and, in so doing, reclaim the body of Christ, the same Christ who washed Peter’s body and would just as surely wash our own—that has to be our starting point.

And with each pour of water, each wipe of the washcloth, and the warmth of each dry towel, may we communicate to ourselves that we do indeed still matter—to one another and to God.

Before that singular, monumental truth, all other truths pale in comparison.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
 
October 22, 2017