This Week's Sermon: "Easter Hill"

John 11:1-7

A certain man, Lazarus, was ill. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (2 This was the Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped his feet with her hair. Her brother Lazarus was ill.) 3 So the sisters sent word to Jesus, saying, “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.”

4 When he heard this, Jesus said, “This illness isn’t fatal. It’s for the glory of God so that God’s Son can be glorified through it.” 5 Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. 6 When he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed where he was. After two days, 7 he said to his disciples, “Let’s return to Judea again.” (CEB)



“The Lazarus Mission: In Search of the Meaning of a Miracle,” Week One

The clouds of dust built up and billowed around our parched and tired bodies. Donning latex gloves, the dozen or so of us on the site began reaching our hands into giant buckets of stucco and plastering that stucco against the walls of the tiny, two-room house being built. It was the suburbs of Tijuana, Mexico, in the middle of June, and in the heat of the early summer, American missionaries from all over had migrated across the border to build houses for Amor Ministries all around Tijuana. After mixing enough cement to form the foundation of the house, wooden frames were erected, along with a roof and proper windows and doors that lock. And the walls? As my senior pastor said afterwards, it used to be we would even paint the walls, if we had time. The family, who usually had previously been living in a shack, would choose the color, and one year, the entire neighborhood, everyone who was receiving a new house, picked varying colors of pastels, yellows and lavenders and baby blues to paint the outside of their houses. After applying the final coats of paint and leaving the mission site, one person remarked that from a distance, the newly-painted homes looked like Easter eggs. And so, that neighborhood was christened “Easter Hill.” And though named that for the beautiful colors, the implications of death and rebirth, of loss and renewal, were not lost on anyone, either.

This Sunday marks the start of a new sermon series for us that we are beginning as a celebration of the church season of Easter, as well as of the earthly season of spring—which means that for both Christians and non-Christians alike, this is a time of growth and renewal and, most importantly, of new life! Having just heard the most famous resurrection story the Bible has to offer on Easter Sunday, we will be spending four weeks going verse-by-verse through the second-most famous resurrection story—the story of the raising of Jesus’s friend Lazarus, a story that is only found in the Gospel of John. It is not the only resurrection miracle that Jesus performs—there is also, in the other three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the girl who is dead, and Jesus says that no, she is simply sleeping, before commanding her to awaken. But the raising of Lazarus is told in such rich and lavish detail that it has come to occupy a unique place in our collective memory as an exceptionally well-known and well-loved story. This week, to kick off the story, we begin with Jesus first hearing that Lazarus has fallen ill—not that Lazarus has died—but that he is sick.

And that distinction matters, because at this point in John’s Gospel, Jesus has preached of Himself as a giver of eternal life by being a direct conduit between us and God—He tells the Samaritan woman at the well that He can provide her with living water, rather than simply the water she came to draw, and He has referred to Himself in the feeding of the masses as the bread of life itself. But as far as the miracles that Jesus has performed so far in John’s Gospel, from the turning of water into wine and giving sight to a man born blind, Jesus has performed healings—not resurrections. And while the story of Jairus’s daughter being raised by Jesus comes fairly early in each of the other three Gospels, the raising of Lazarus is the very last miracle that Jesus performs in John’s Gospel before the beginning of the Passion narrative—the raising of Lazarus is Jesus’s grand finale, it is the massive display of fireworks in which He is going to bow out.

Which in turn creates a paradox—it is common for Jesus to use His miracles as tools for teaching, for demonstrating God’s power and grace, and raising someone from the dead would certainly do that. But Jesus’s opening line in this story is, “This illness is not fatal!” It is as though He has downgraded Lazarus’s illness from, say, terminal heart disease to a case of the sniffles. One I would need the help of many dedicated doctors to recover from, but for the other I simply need chicken soup and vitamin C!

So there are two potential ways of resolving this paradox—one is that Jesus is simply in denial. After all, He has just received disastrous news about a very close friend of His, and so naturally, Jesus is taking a page out of the Gospel according to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and is in the first stage of grief. But as we will learn next week, this is not the case, for Jesus is in fact the one to break the news that Lazarus has died, even before He has arrived on the scene.

The other option is to recognize Jesus’s boast for what it is—an assurance that not even death itself can hold a candle to the greatness and glory of God. Recall what I said just a moment ago—that this was supposed to be Jesus’s grand finale. Well, the previous ten chapters of story have been building us up to this, bit by bit, piece by piece—the first miracle doesn’t even involve a healing, it just involves some water at a wedding. Then, two chapters later, Jesus heals a centurion’s servant, but that is done from a distance, we don’t actually get to meet the servant. Then we finally get into the face-to-face healings. And now Jesus is playing His trump card. The challenges have grown in each passing miracle, and Jesus responds gamely each time. In fact, He even ups the degree of difficulty by waiting for two days before saying to His disciples, “Okay, let’s go see Lazarus now.” If you think of Jesus as a doctor—which is probably how a number of people did in fact view Him back then, as a sort of itinerant doctor—what sort of an on-the-job doctor, upon being presented with a terminally ill patient, would say, “Yeah…I think I’m gonna take a long weekend. See you on Monday?” Jesus is so completely courageous, so unafraid of this newest challenge, that He is fine making it more challenging!

We seldom have such a luxury in our own lives, to take challenges as they come at us with such grace, poise, and confidence. If we can find a way to make something less challenging, we often will. We take shortcuts. We use the Cliffs Notes. We download pre-written sermons off the internet. But when it comes to mission, to being a church in today’s world, there are no such shortcuts. There is no neat-and-easy how-to manual. We have to simply take the plunge together and hope and pray that the work we do in our communities and on behalf of others might actually result in a resurrection, in some sort of renewal, in their lives. And that kind of faith does not always come easy, even for a Christian.

But in this story, it does for Jesus. And there’s a reason for this—because He can foresee not only Lazarus’s resurrection, but His own. And a crucial detail about Christ’s resurrection, that we heard read last week on Easter Sunday, was that He had left the shroud, His burial cloth, behind. Quite literally, Jesus knows that the power of God’s love is so great that He is able to leave the trappings of death far behind Him in favor of clothing Himself in life, and in love. That is the sort of resurrection that is still possible. It is the sort of resurrection that the colors of Easter Hill represented—gone were the grays and browns of dirt and urban decay, replaced by the vibrant colors of new life. The burial clothes of abject poverty had begun to be shed by this community in Tijuana in favor of something new.

Here’s the catch, though—new life is precisely that—new. It is a foundation to build upon, not a story to end. And so while this may indeed be the last hurrah of Christ’s pre-Passion ministry, it is not simply the end of ten chapters of buildup and suspense. It is a beginning—for Lazarus, for Mary and for Martha, for the disciples, for all those in the crowd that will soon gather around a tomb that, like Christ’s own, goes from containing a body to being miraculously empty. And in Tijuana, the job wasn’t done, the mission wasn’t completed, simply because the houses were built. The ministry of mission, and of justice, and of love continues—just like the resurrected Christ.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
April 15, 2012

On Gnats and Camels

I probably shouldn't be blogging about something immediately after said thing has made me upset, but hey, here I am.

The American bishops of the Roman Catholic Church announced today, as CNN terms it, a major campaign to oppose what it views as threats to religious liberty from the federal government as well as various local governments.

Okay.

This entry is not about the individual policies being protested by the bishops--I agree with the bishops in some cases and I disagree with them in others. This entry is also not about religious freedom--I've already tackled that topic recently. This entry is about the moral authority claimed by someone like a bishop, or like me as a pastor, when protesting something.

Because...and I'll try to say this as delicately as I can...the bishops are simply not very good spokesmen to lead the charge for increased religious freedom and autonomy, especially in regards to sexuality.

Exactly 10 years ago, in 2002, the Boston Globe broke the stories of the criminal prosecutions of five Roman Catholic priests for child molestation. In the ensuing weeks, months, and years, it became readily apparent to the public that the scope and scale of the plague of child molestation within the Roman Catholic Church was enabled by cover-up actions committed by a number of Catholic bishops, ranging from reassigning accused priests rather than defrocking them to failing to report credible accusations to law enforcement.

In response to the scandal, that year the US Conference of Bishops created a "zero-tolerance" policy that required uniform adherence to rules such as use of background checks and the conducting of investigations, which was absolutely the right thing to do.

But with stories like these coming out from Philadelphia and these coming out from my hometown of Kansas City of abusive priests having still been sheltered by their dioceses after the zero-tolerance policy went into effect, it raises serious questions about whether the Roman Catholic hierarchy is even following its own rules and regulations regarding child abuse. When it is estimated that two-thirds of American bishops actively participated in such cover-ups before 2002, there really should have been a zero tolerance policy for bishops covering up abuse as well, because a certain portion of the distrust that many people now feel towards the clergy and the church can be laid directly at their feet. They showed that they could not be trusted with the autonomy they exercised.

So even though I am not Catholic, it is hard not to take those stories personally--as a human being, or as a person who does have a lot of affection for the Roman Catholic Church, but especially as a young male pastor who works with children every week.

I was immensely blessed in college and seminary to receive intellectual guidance and spiritual support from a number of Catholic clergy, but I have to admit that the trust I have in all of them does not really spill over in the direction of the hierarchy. I want it to, but it doesn't.

And it doesn't because it didn't have to be this way. I read these stories of the powerful protests from the bishops, and I think to myself, "What if they had applied this zeal and enthusiasm to keeping their churches' children safe?" Just imagine how much that zeal would have strengthened the church in that world, and made that world a better place!

Instead, exactly one week after a Kansas City judge rules that Bishop Robert Finn should stand trial for failure to report suspected child abuse, the American bishops devote their collective energy to initiating a public campaign not to better enforce their own policies regarding sexual misconduct, but to expand their own religious liberties, including in matters pertaining directly to issues of sexuality.

As Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:24, "You strain out a gnat but you swallow a camel!"

Yours in Christ,
Eric

The Leviticus 19 Question

I alluded to this phenomenon in my recent post on Paul and slavery, but I absolutely, without a doubt, believe that 99.9% of us Christians (myself included) pick and choose from within Scripture to create what is called a "canon within a canon." Essentially, we not only pick certain verses, chapters, passages, and stories to cling to, but in doing so, we sometimes supersize them relative to the verses that surround them.

In my Tuesday morning Bible Study yesterday, we tackled this issue head-on, and I realized, while teaching, that Leviticus 19 perhaps encapsulates the dangers of proof texting more so than any other chapter in the Bible. We were originally discussing James 4, which includes a strong admonition not to sit in judgment of others, and the curriculum we were using prompted us to ask ourselves what things we were most likely to judge other people on. I used my own notes to frame that as a discussion on why do we consider some sins so much greater than others.

Now, on some level, that's a no-brainer--stealing someone else's car is different on many orders of magnitude from, say, jaywalking. But Levitical law, with its hundreds of negative commands ("Don't do this") and hundreds of positive commands ("Do this") is used in such a way that some of its precepts do get far more attention than others.

Part of this is by design--the Ten Commandments are prominent for a reason, for instance. They are fundamental laws governing decency and right relationship with both God and one another. But what about the 600-some Hebrew Bible laws not a part of the Ten?

One of the most common arguments I hear goes something like this: "The Bible also says to not wear clothing made of multiple fabrics or to eat fruit of a plant that is less the five years old. We don't bother with those, so why follow its other laws?"

What I recognized during that Bible study, though, was that many of the laws that get cited in those exact arguments come from one chapter in particular--Leviticus 19:
-No sowing fields with two kinds of seeds (19:19)
-No wearing garments of two different fabrics (19:19)
-No fruit from young plants (19:23)
-No cutting facial hair (19:27)
-No tattoos (19:28)

BUT...Leviticus 19 also gives us this immortal command: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the LORD." (19:18)

So...what on earth are we to do with a chapter that contains many rules that few, if any, of us believers follow in any literal sense today, but that also is the source for one of the greatest laws ever handed down?

I conceded at the beginning of this entry that I am, in fact, guilty of picking and choosing within Scripture (it helps that I am not A.J. Jacobs and have no interest in trying to follow each and every law literally and then write a book about it!). For instance, I do not allow my belief in Scripture to equate into a personal belief in the sanctioning of slavery, or the silence of women, or the committing of what today would be considered war crimes. This does not mean that I consider the Bible to be anything less than the inspired Word of God. And my criteria for my "canon within a canon" comes from Jesus's own words in Matthew 22:

"And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" "He said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."" (Matthew 22:35-40, NRSV)

With surgical precision, Jesus lifted from a chapter of often esoteric regulations the heart and soul of what it means live as a Christian--loving others as you love yourself, presumably without condition or abandon.

The interesting thing is, the verse Jesus cites for loving God--Deuteronomy 6:5--receives a preamble of "Hear, O Israel" in the immediately previous verse of Deut. 6:4. So, its importance is already underscored before Jesus's ministry. But out of the depths of Levitical law, another verse is offered up by God's Son to complement it. And in doing so, Jesus gives me a lens with which to view the entirety of Scripture--does it hang upon the commandments to love God and love everyone else the same way that I want to be loved?

Would such an approach to Scripture appeal to you? How would you resolve the question of deciding how to best follow the Bible? How would you answer the question of Leviticus 19...of how to treat a chapter of religious laws that get dismissed for the sake of argument, except for the one law that may be the greatest exception of them all?

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Long Live the Lamb"

John 20:1-10, 21:15-17

1 Early in the morning of the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. 2 She ran to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.” 3 Peter and the other disciple left to go to the tomb. 4 They were running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and was the first to arrive at the tomb. 5 Bending down to take a look, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he didn’t go in. 6 Following him, Simon Peter entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. 7 He also saw the face cloth that had been on Jesus’ head. It wasn’t with the other clothes but was folded up in its own place. 8 Then the other disciple, the one who arrived at the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 They didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to the place where they were staying.

15 When they finished eating, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”
Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 Jesus asked a second time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Take care of my sheep.” 17 He asked a third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter was sad that Jesus asked him a third time, “Do you love me?” He replied, “Lord, you know everything; you know I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep." (CEB)

Easter Sunday 2012

The dying man’s voice crackled precariously over the background static noise of the cell phone, of the beeps and whirs of the machines that were helping keep him alive, of the other people standing by his bedside. He was saying goodbye to the world, but most particularly to his wife, who years ago had been stricken with Alzheimer’s. He had spent all this time since then trying to care for her as best as he knew how, but he had just turned 90 and had recently fallen, taking him again to the hospital. And so rather than being able to say goodbye in person, his family and friends tried to do the next best thing for him and his bedridden wife with the cell phone and a hearing aid. And even though I visited him then, in the hospital, I had no idea that phone call had taken place until the following Sunday, when my senior minister held up the cell phone before the church, and played that portion of the final phone call where the man was whispering to the love of his life, “Goodbye, my sweetheart. I love you.” But by Sunday, the time when we heard that call, he had already passed away. Out of the depths of death, his voice spoke to all of us who were there that morning, and no longer burdened by his body, all that remained of him were his words…words of love, of compassion, of such warmth of spirit that I knew no words to describe it—only comparisons: like the family member who dies but who had recorded your answering machine greeting, and you keep it because it keeps them alive. I had so much to say in trying to describe to others what I had heard that morning, and absolutely no language in which to say it, until I realized this week: what I had witnessed was a resurrection. Before this week, before reading the Resurrection story in the Gospel of John, where the Beloved Disciple saw the empty tomb and believed, even without seeing the living body of Christ, I had never dared to believe that I would have borne witness to a resurrection. Even though Easter is supposed to be one of those stories that we all know—Jesus is betrayed, tried, convicted, crucified, and three days later is risen. And yet, it is impossible to read it each and every year without taking something at least a little bit different away from the story. And so, on this Easter morning, roughly the 1,982nd anniversary of the Resurrection, here we are, gathered as the Disciples of Christ at the empty tomb.

Like the Beloved Disciple, like Simon Peter, like Mary Magdalene, we too do not yet know the whole story of Easter. At this point, nobody in the Gospel has actually seen the Risen Christ. And we are not so lucky as Thomas, to be able to later place our hands upon Jesus’ wounds, and believe because we have seen and felt the proof of Christ’s Resurrection. So we would well be forgiven for making the exact same mistake as I did, to assume that we simply have never seen the Resurrection in our ordinary lives. But we would be wrong for thinking that.

We do not have the luxury of denying—whether because of our own doubts or because of our own uncertainty that God really does love us so much that He would bring one of His own back to us from the dead. We do not have the luxury of denying because we see what has happened with Peter—the exact same Peter who, three days earlier, denied over and over and over that he ever knew Jesus. Now, our denials are not the same as Peter’s—we may not be actively denying that Jesus has a role in our lives, but we are denying ourselves many, many more opportunities to see Him and hear Him when we tell ourselves that the Resurrection can only happen just this once. I had denied myself a chance to see and understand the risen Christ in not recognizing that dying voice on the phone for what it was—a person’s love outliving the person itself. That, that, at its absolute core, is the Resurrection in a nutshell: God’s love has outlived Christ’s earthly body, and now, that love is so abundant and overflowing that it actually brings Christ back, not to God, but to us. God’s love has brought Christ back to each of us!

And, like Peter, Christ comes back to us despite, or perhaps because of, our ability to deny to ourselves how much God loves us. Remember—earlier, Peter had denied Jesus three times. In this post-Resurrection conversation between Peter and Jesus in John 21, how many times does Peter now affirm his love for Jesus? Three times. The three times Peter says he loves Jesus poetically counteracts the three times he has denied Jesus, and that entire back-and-forth between him and Jesus is living, breathing proof that no matter our own denials, our own ways of shutting ourselves off from the living God, that none of those denials can prevent us from participating in Jesus’ plan for the world, for His plan to feed and tend and care for His lambs. This is a God who loves us so much that He cannot and will not exclude us from His vision.

Originally, in Scripture, Jesus is meant to be God’s lamb—that is why John narrates the Passion story on the day BEFORE the Passover, rather than the first day of the Passover—because the day before was when the Passover lambs were to be sacrificed for the holiday. But in what he says to Peter, Jesus has completely turned this notion on its head though—it is no longer Him who is God’s lamb—it is us. You, me, all of us, we have become His lambs as well.

Which means that Christ is indeed able to live on through each of us, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our own ability to deny or doubt or wonder if Christ lives. And He lives in us, in spite of the things we do wrong, the things we wish we could do better, the things that remind us again and again and again that we are nowhere near as perfect as the original lamb who died and rose again. But if you do feel, as Peter surely did during the trial and crucifixion, if you feel cut off from the lamb, cut off from Jesus, because of your own limitations, because of your own hurts and pains and mistakes, know that Easter is the opportunity for you to cast those doubts aside, to say, “Enough with the things in life that are keeping me from becoming closer to God. Enough with the things in life that are keeping me from loving as Jesus loved. Enough with the things in life that are keeping me from trying to create a better world—the kingdom of Heaven itself—in this beaten and broken world. Enough with all of that pain! Long live the lamb!”

Dedicating yourself to loving the Risen Christ, as Peter did in proclaiming his love, as John did in believing that Christ had overcome death, as Mary Magdalene did in exclaiming “Rabbi!” upon recognizing Jesus, it means loving not only Christ simply because He lives, it means loving one another because He lives in each of you. To say, “long live the lamb” is to say “long live the lamb in each of the children of God across the world.”

And that is the wonderful, powerful, awe-inspiring paradox of Easter: to say yes to the Risen Christ is to say yes to the world that crucified Him to begin with. And I know what the Bible says, about how we are not made for this world, but for the next. But so too was Christ Himself, made not just for Heaven, but made from Heaven, yet He returned to us—for us. In spite of everything that had happened, in spite of the agony of the betrayal, and of the hatred in His trial, and of the humiliation in his public, painful death, Christ did not simply return to God—He returned to us. The victory of Easter Sunday is not simply one of life over death, or of love over hate—it is a victory of reconciliation and right relationship over sin and blood revenge. By returning to the world that killed Him, Christ restored the right relationship between us and Him, between earth and heaven, and between you and God.

And if that were not enough, God invites each of us to bear witness to that reconciliation of our relationship with Him in the events of each of our lives: in the forgiveness offered to a person who has hurt another, in the release of a once-ill family member from the hospital, or, in my case, in the hearing the voice of a now-dead man pouring out his love for all to hear, the Resurrection lives and breathes all around us. Christ’s Resurrection is there, and it is up to us to believe in it out of the same faith that called this anonymous Beloved Disciple to believe that life and love had won in an empty tomb outside Jerusalem.

Long live the Lamb! Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
April 8, 2012

Wan Ong Kuei

Today marks the holy day of Maundy Thursday—the dramatic evening of so much regret for Jesus’ disciples during the Passion. There is Peter’s denial, and the fleeing of the eleven at Gethsemane, but the big regret is of course Judas’s betrayal of Jesus into the hands of the Romans and temple authorities. The common belief—taken from Matthew’s Gospel—is that Judas then committed suicide, but according to Luke (as conveyed in Acts of the Apostles), Judas is killed by divine providence, and Mark and John do not explicitly address Judas’s fate. Still, if Matthew’s version is indeed correct—that Judas hanged himself—it is especially tragic, because it indicates that Judas had given up any and all hope of restoring right relationship with Jesus and, by extension, with God and with the world entire.

That sort of despair is profoundly depressing, not merely for the person feeling it, but for any person witnessing it. The belief that an action of yours is so egregious, so beyond the pale that it cannot be undone or mitigated or apologized or begged pardon for is something we have probably all felt—it is what creates regret, guilt, and shame within each of us.

How we reply to those feelings does, I think, speak volumes as to who we are as people. And so in acknowledgement of that reality, I offer to you, on this sacred day of profound and ultimate regret, a short nonfiction story from my early ministry here last year. To preserve the privacy of the persons involved, no names are used, and some identifying details have been changed.

The catharsis for me to write this story comes from the words of Dr. Pauline Chen, in her poignant and heartfelt book Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, where she appropriated her Taiwanese heritage to explain her own regret over a patient’s death, writing:

“The old-time Taiwanese believed that certain souls haunt the world, searching for mollification for their untimely or dishonorable deaths. These wan ong kuei, “wronged spirits,” are destined to wander among humans for eternity. Without any justification for his manner of death, (my patient) became a wan ong kuei of my mind.”

The woman sitting across from my desk looked older than she probably was—a product of a hard life, undoubtedly—and in her state of grief, was slightly disheveled and, I think, still adjusting to her new reality of loneliness and loss. Her common-law husband had just passed away, and he was for all intents and purposes a John Doe—he had nobody left except for her and their caretaker. She, in turn, was casting about for a place for herself and, by extension, her memory of him. Her grief was framed by the crisp autumn colors I could see outside my office window, and I noticed how poetically saddening it was that she was facing this transition as the seasons were on the verge of changing from growth and sunlight to decline and darkness.

She said they had not been to church in ages—she literally just walked into my parish off the street—but she wanted to say farewell to him in a church before he was cremated and his ashes transported upstate. Upon hearing that the funeral would likely be attended only by her, their caretaker, and myself—maybe one or two other people if the stars and planets aligned—I agreed to plan and officiate the service for free. I took her contact information and promised to be in touch. Put at ease that her husband would be accorded a proper farewell, she gingerly rose from her chair and slowly walked out of my office, her walk betraying a slight limp in the process.

The day before I hoped to perform the funeral, I tried to call the number I taken down from her to let her know that the service was on, and to stop by to go through it together. Receiving an automated error message, I tried again. And again. And again. Realizing I had taken her information incorrectly, I got onto the website of the local paper to begin flipping through the obituaries, looking for her surname, before remembering that he was her common-law husband, and as such they had had different names. I couldn’t find her address on Google maps. I tried that incorrect phone number again, even though I knew in my head that I would receive the same emotionless, robotic reply. Putting down the receiver into the phone’s cradle for the last time, I mentally kicked myself over and over for such a simple, but emotionally devastating, mistake.

I never heard from the woman again. To this day, I have no idea if her husband was ever laid to rest as she had planned, if at all. My memory of her, and of her husband’s need for a lovingly arranged departure, became a wronged spirit, a wan ong kuei, in my own ministry so very soon after I had just begun it. I kept a copy of the order of service I had composed in the bottom drawer of my desk, just in case she walked into my office again, and I tried to banish the failure I felt to the darker recesses of my cerebral cortex.

Some months later, deep in the wintery bluster of the holiday season, I was working from home on an upcoming sermon series while the season one Christmas episode of the television series The West Wing played in the background on my computer. That episode, entitled “In Excelsis Deo,” revolved around a plot concerning the passing of a homeless, faceless military veteran who had died on Christmas from exposure while wearing the donated coat of a White House staffer. The staffer, played by Richard Schiff, found the veteran’s likewise homeless brother and arranged for a funeral with military honors for the deceased veteran at Arlington National Cemetery. The similarities between this fictitious man and my flesh-and-blood John Doe—the sheer poverty, the relative anonymity, the absence of any deep network of friends—were not lost on me.

The episode’s concluding scene of the funeral at Arlington, superimposed with the voices of a boys’ choir singing "Little Drummer Boy," played out across my computer screen as I glanced up from my work to watch. From the small group of only four mourners to the honor guard’s mistaking the White House staffer for the veteran’s brother, I saw depicted on the screen the funeral service that I was supposed to have performed for my John Doe: a small, intensely private and intensely profound farewell to a man whose remaining family I might not have known from Adam, but who still cried out to me for help regardless.

Stopping my work completely, I froze, and, in an uncharacteristic moment of pique, I overturned the colossal stack of books that were, just a moment earlier, sitting precariously upon my desk. Seeing them tumble to the floor, I fell back into my chair, shaking, and immediately, I began to weep.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Letters From the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

"He is Risen"

Dear Church,

One of my favorite television shows currently on the air is the sitcom “Community,” which depicts a group of lovable college misfits. One of those characters—Shirley—is an evangelical Christian whose faith is demonstrated in a variety of ways on the show, sometimes for comedic effect and sometimes for conveying love. My personal favorite expression of her faith, however, is in the apron she wears whenever she is baking something—on the apron is a pair of breadsticks in the shape of the Cross, with the caption “He is Risen.” (Because bread also rises!)

It’s clever in its own way, perhaps a bit cheesy, but it represents the creativity that folks now have in how they express their faith. For many people, if you didn’t catch them in church, you might never know they were practicing Christians. For us, I hope our faith is a bit more visible.

Because the Easter story, at its core, is one of visible faith. Without the Resurrection, the story of Christ would likely never have been told the way it has been. Jesus would have been remembered, but more as a moral teacher and rabbi than as who He also was—the Messiah, Son of the living God. It was the Resurrection that sealed the deal—it guaranteed that Jesus would be written about, talked about, and followed for years. And because of it, we are Christians today.

So, this Easter season, I invite you to ask yourself, how does the empty tomb inspire your own expressions of faith? How can you bring your own creativity and gifts to bear in proclaiming the love of the Risen Christ in your life today?

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Hosanna in Excelsis"

Mark 11:1-10

1 When Jesus and his followers approached Jerusalem, they came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives. Jesus gave two disciples a task, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village over there. As soon as you enter it, you will find tied up there a colt that no one has ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘Its master needs it, and he will send it back right away.’”
4 They went and found a colt tied to a gate outside on the street, and they untied it. 5 Some people standing around said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 They told them just what Jesus said, and they left them alone. 7 They brought the colt to Jesus and threw their clothes upon it, and he sat on it. 8 Many people spread out their clothes on the road while others spread branches cut from the fields. 9 Those in front of him and those following were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord![a] 10 Blessings on the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest!” (CEB)

Palm Sunday 2012

There was no way around it for me-aside from the amazing hole-in-the-wall falafel restaurant my Bible professor took me to, Jerusalem was bound to disappoint me somehow. It is nearly impossible to hold something worldly in such high esteem, and then finally get to see it, and not be disappointed. Just ask the kid who didn't get to go to Disney World until he was in high school. The Via Dolorosa, the route that tradition tells us Jesus took to Golgotha, has become a veritable bazaar of purveyors of mystical Holy Land junk, nearly all of which most people could easily do without. The Western Wall is now surrounded at all entryways by airport-style security, making entrance to one of the holiest sites in the world a stressful and invasive experience. The awe-inspiring Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the traditional site of the Crucifixion, is run jointly by a myriad of Eastern and Western denominations, which may or may not always get along with one another. And the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem overlook more than simply the path that Christ took into the city of David on Palm Sunday, they also overlook the once-armed border between Israel and Jordan, a stark reminder that the land the Prince of Peace once trod upon has yet to actually enjoy any semblance of real peace. It was, in a word, sacred and profound and holy, yes, but also disappointing.

So, I’ll just come out and say it—I used to dislike Palm Sunday with a passion. It isn’t the story itself, or the cast of characters, or even the fact that Scripture actually puts more emphasis on the cloaks as a path for Jesus’ colt than the palms themselves—as Mark, my college chaplain, was fond of saying, “They should rename Palm Sunday as ‘Cloak Sunday!’” No, it wasn’t any of those things. It was that I would be pressed into service every year, without fail, to run up and down the aisles of the sanctuary waving palms with all the children of the church, like I was an overgrown young adult still being forced to sit at the kids table, where your knees come up to the table itself. Next thing you knew, I’d have to re-enact Jesus’ baptism with water wings.

I loathed having to do the whole dancing-with-the-palms ritual. It’s not because I dislike seeing others do it, or that I think dancing is wrong—although I have it on good authority from that ‘80’s movie starring Kevin Bacon that dancing leads to hand-holding—it is that I was, (a) hideously self-conscious, almost to a fault, and (b) convinced that whatever it was we were doing, it probably had zero resemblance what actually happened when Jesus actually rode triumphantly into Jerusalem so many years ago. I felt the same way about those churches back in my hometown in Kansas whose members would, on Good Friday, walk up and down the streets carrying fabricated crosses to re-enact the Via Dolorosa. I would see them and think to myself, “Yep, totally looks like The Passion of the Christ out there. Jesus definitely wore an AC/DC tank top to his Crucifixion.” That’s harsh, I realize. But I really worried that, say, Jesus would come back at that exact moment, see what we were doing, and just say, “What the heck? I never did it like that! Is this some kind of spoof that’s going on Youtube as soon as this is over?” I tend to worry that when we try to re-enact the Bible today, we sometimes come so far from the mark that what we end up creating isn’t an homage, it’s a parody.

And, in some respects, it is a parody of a parody. The triumphal entry of a hero into a city would have been nothing new to Jerusalem in the time of Jesus—Alexander the Great held one when he conquered Babylon, for instance. But such spectacles were reserved for the emperors or their proxies—the people who represented imperial power to the masses, certainly not for a humble Jewish carpenter. But those emperors, governors, and soldiers, they would have entered the city on their finest horse, not on a donkey or a poor little colt—it would be as though the President of the United States pulled up in a motorcade made up entirely of clown cars! And so while scholars argue that Jesus riding in on the animal that He did was meant to fulfill Scripture, to fulfill prophesy, there is a certain amount of theatrics that Jesus is employing here, it is a spoof of the Roman powers-that-be whom Jesus, or the Jewish rank-and-file population of Judea, probably didn’t much care for. If Jon Stewart and The Daily Show were around back then, this would have been something they might have concocted!

The irony cuts both ways, however—we know, as the New Testament scholar Douglas Hare puts it, “that the man who is here hailed as Messiah by a throng of joyful pilgrims will soon be condemned by his nation’s leaders and suffer an excruciating and shameful execution. Explicit joy is thus overshadowed by implicit sorrow.” And in response to this, God pulls the only card He has left to play, the only ace left up His sleeve—He turns Christ’s imminent death into a resurrection and declares love’s victory over the sin that led Jesus to be condemned to death. Just as we begin Holy Week with a sense of joy at Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem, so too do we end Holy Week with a sense of joy at Christ’s arrival in the world as the risen Son.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves just a tad, aren’t we? The problem is, so are the crowds of pilgrims themselves—what they are shouting, “Hosanna,” literally means, “Save us now!” Hosanna in the highest heaven—hosanna in excelsis—in turn means, “save us now, God who lives in heaven!” It is that beautiful line from the Robert Browning poem—God is in His heaven, and all is right in the world. Except that deep down, we know that it isn’t. Christ has come, Christ has gone, Christ will return again, and our world still bleeds. Our world still bleeds because we are waiting for Christ to come again, but we are shouting, as the crowds did nearly 2,000 years ago, “save us now!” Not, “save us tomorrow,” but “save us now!”

It’s a pretty common refrain, isn’t it? There is usually something in our lives that we want to be saved from—a substance we use too much of, or a job we find unrewarding, or a home life that does not nourish us. And that’s much more what we need saving from than the things that we usually try. Last Friday, the Mega Millions lottery jackpot hit $650 million. It made the national news, even people who never, ever played the lottery were snapping up tickets. One of the three winning tickets was bought in my home state of Kansas, but since my phone has NOT as of yet been ringing off the hook, I can just as soon assume that my family and friends are no more materially wealthier now than they were on March 29. But think of what our expectations had become—we paid attention to this lottery, to the money it would promise, as though it would deliver us, like the materialistic Messiah that money is, from the dreary duldrums of our status quo life and into the Paradise of wealth and riches. In buying Mega Millions tickets, we were saying to that jackpot, “Save us now!”

But here’s the thing—this is Palm Sunday. The Resurrection is still a week away. The people who are calling out for Christ’s saving power must still wait another week before God’s victory over death is complete. And so, too, must we also await our ultimate salvation. It is tempting to put our faith into money, or power or prestige, or material possessions, because of what they can deliver to us in the here and now, but when we do so, we are creating yet another parody, this time of our own faith, and what—or who—we choose to put that faith in.

Palm Sunday is a day for rejoicing, yes, but mostly, it is a day for rejoicing of what is to come. When we lose sight of that patience that is required, we run the risk of disappointing God and disappointing ourselves. So when we shout our own praises to Heaven, simply remember that salvation arrives on God’s timetable, not ours.

Hosanna, hosanna in excelsis! Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
April 1, 2012