F*** Your Breath, F*** Your Mockery, F*** Your Reserve Deputies Having Guns

Those who were walking by insulted Jesus, shaking their heads and saying, “So you were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, were you? Save yourself! If you are God’s Son, come down from the cross.” In the same way, the chief priests, along with the legal experts and the elders, were making fun of him, saying,“He saved others, but he can’t save himself. He’s the king of Israel, so let him come down from the cross now. Then we’ll believe in him. He trusts in God, so let God deliver him now if he wants to. He said, ‘I’m God’s Son.’” The outlaws who were crucified with him insulted him in the same way.

Matthew 27:39-44 (Common English Bible)

On the heels of Walter Scott, whose death came on the heels of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, whose deaths came on the heels of Michael Brown, whose death came on the heels of Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, and so many others...

Comes Eric Harris.

Harris was approached for arrest after selling guns and ammunition under the table to an undercover cop.  And then a 73-year-old insurance executive shot him to death.

You read that right.

The news came out yesterday afternoon that Robert Charles Bates will be charged with second-degree manslaughter (basically, unlawful death by gross negligence), and honestly, I feel bad for the guy.  He clearly wanted to play cop after having been a cop for a solitary year fifty years ago, but the city of Tulsa really should have known better and not ever put a service weapon in his (or another civilian's) hands.  And so he got put into a truly awful situation by a Tulsa police force that really should have known better than to issue a Taser and a lethal-force service weapon to, basically, a part-time volunteer.

You read that right as well.  Bates, though an insurance executive by day, was a major and longtime donor to the police department, and like many other large donors, he became a "reserve deputy," and after 800 hours of instruction through two different programs, achieved "advanced" status, which allowed him to basically function with the authority of a regular, full-time, professional deputy whenever he was on duty.

800 hours may sound like a lot, but really, it isn't.  My master's degree for the job I currently hold required 1,200 classroom hours, to say nothing of all the homework, papers, and field education time I put into the degree.  So even in terms of just classroom teaching, that's a 50% increase in instruction right there.

And my gig doesn't come with a gun.

Why does this matter?  Why am I harping on this?  Because in the video of Eric Harris's death, Bates very clearly thinks he is going to use his Taser on Harris, and instead ends up shooting him--essentially, the same defense Johannnes Mehserle made in his trial for shooting and killing Oscar Grant on the Fruitvale BART platform in the East Bay.

If a fully trained, full time professional police officer makes the same mistake with similarly fatal results, what on earth is a police department of quite a large city (a population of nearly 400,000 people according to Wikipedia...which, I know, is Wikipedia, but still, for basic stuff like this, it's pretty reliable) handing out guns to armchair cops who only have to put in 40 hours over six months to keep their reserve deputy status?

That'd be like giving some guy who really, really enjoys Microsoft Flight Simulator the proverbial keys to a Boeing 737 on the condition that he take it out for a spin at least a couple times a year.

As a red-blooded, patriotic, tax-paying American (TEAM MURICA), I'd much rather see my police departments funded at the levels they need to be so that they don't have to use these sorts of reserve deputy programs to fully fund their departments (and, similarly, so that they don't have to use awful mechanisms like civil forfeiture either).

I haven't talked about race yet (gulp), but I would be remiss if I did not also say that Eric Harris was both unarmed and African-American, and Bates is Caucasian.  And just like Eric Garner, Eric Harris complained as he died that he couldn't breathe.

A (as yet unnamed) law enforcement officer's response?  Fuck your breath.

That's right.  Fuck your ability to continue living.  Fuck the literal act of God to put life into man's nostrils (Genesis 2:7).

That parallel between the homicides of two black men, Eric Garner and Eric Harris, should be chilling.

But unlike Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Eric Garner's homicide, Bates still ended up charged.  And even though I may feel bad for him, it is so very, very important that he was charged.

Because unlike Officer Slager after he shot Walter Scott to death, Bates's law enforcement colleagues rushed to defend him, with one officer even saying that Bates was the victim in all of this kerkuffle, because he was stressed, and he made a mistake under stress and did one thing whilst intending to do another, and excusing the mocking behavior of the officers (since they claimed to not know Harris had been shot, even though Bates can clearly be heard on the tape saying, "I'm sorry, I shot him").

All of which kind of just proves my point.  That kind of stress isn't what you put a weekend warrior copper into with a gun in one hand and a taser in another, only for him to mix them up at the moment of truth, and to end up with a man bleeding out to death as those who should have been administering first aid mocked his pain, suffering, and dying instead.

The Gospels are unanimous that Christ, as He died on the cross, was mocked by those who put him there--the passersby and the centurions, the temple authorities and even at least one of the terrorists crucified alongside Him.

As Eric Harris began to die on the Tulsa sidewalk, he was mocked mercilessly by those in similar positions of authority as the centurions and the temple leaders.

In 2,000 years, our exercise of power over each other's lives has scarcely changed one bit.

Even though the God who gave us life came to us, in the flesh, to tell us to be different, live different, love different.

We can do better.  In the name of that life-giving God, we must do better.

And for fuck's sake, stop giving guns to donors for them to be cops for funsies.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Words Wrought as Iron"

Matthew 6:5-15

“When you pray, don’t be like hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners so that people will see them. I assure you, that’s the only reward they’ll get. 6 But when you pray, go to your room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is present in that secret place. Your Father who sees what you do in secret will reward you. 7 “When you pray, don’t pour out a flood of empty words, as the Gentiles do. They think that by saying many words they’ll be heard. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows what you need before you ask. 

9 Pray like this: Our Father who is in heaven, uphold the holiness of your name. 10 Bring in your kingdom so that your will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven. 11 Give us the bread we need for today. 12 Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you, just as we also forgive those who have wronged us. 13 And don’t lead us into temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. 14 “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins.  (Common English Bible)

“The Son of Man: When Poetry Testifies to Christ,” Week One

Back in December of last year, just a few days before Christmas, I told a most remarkable story, a story many of you may remember.  It was a story about a young woman of only 19 years of age who, though being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, had managed to still play basketball for at least a few games for the college she had committed to, Mount Saint Mary’s in Ohio.  Mount Saint Mary’s even received a special dispensation from the NCAA to move up their season opener in order to give her more opportunities to get into a game before the tumor became too debilitating (the opener, by the by, was against the Disciples affiliated school Hiram College, who enthusiastically agreed in order to give her a chance to play).  She even relearned how to shoot the basketball with her left hand because of the tumor’s effect on her control of her previously dominant right hand.

And in so doing, young Lauren Hill became a powerful inspiration for many, many people.  LeBron James raved about her on Twitter.  Athletes and journalists across the country wrote to her.  And she managed to raise literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for brain cancer research.

And then, just two days ago, early on the morning of Friday, the 10^th of April, five months and a week after that monumental season opener against Hiram College, Lauren Hill died.

But I, at least, cannot forget her.  Nor, I reckon, could or will a great many other people.  And that is a testament to the profound power that comes from the unadulterated force of personality and will, something that we have found so utterly compelling in others for, really, as long as we have existed.  And that sheer force of personality, even in one long gone, is so compelling to us that their words and deeds remain in the most potent data storage unit ever made: our memories.

And out of that memory comes, in one man from Lebanon’s life, a vast store of poetry testifying to the teaching, healing, dying, and rising Christ.

This is a new sermon series for us, to begin a not too terribly new season...it is a week old, at least: Easter.  Just like Christmas and its 12 days, Easter is much more than Easter Sunday itself, and it lasts for much longer: fifty days, in fact.  That’s fifty days of hearing, bearing, and proclaiming the good news of the resurrection, long after the Easter Bunny has come and gone and the egg dye has been put back into the pantry for another year.

As a part of my own work and ministry in proclaiming to the world a risen Savior, this sermon series will take a new tack for me: talking with all of you about Jesus as He is revealed in poetry, of all things.  If you’ll recall my sermon series from a couple of years ago that I centered around several of the writings of C.S. Lewis, well, this series will be structured fairly similarly, except instead of C.S. Lewis’s books, it will be around Khalil Gibran’s poetry about Jesus Christ, of which there is a great amount, in the volume Jesus: Son of Man, from which this series derives its name.  Gibran was a Lebanese poet during the early 20^th century who was raised Christian but was also influenced by Sufi mysticism, and that mysticism, much like that of many Christian mystics throughout history, comes through in his poetry about Jesus.  Jesus: Son of Man tells the stories of the gospels, but in Gibran’s often soaring word choice, through the eyes of various supporting characters: the individual disciples, the female followers of Jesus, even some of Jesus’s opponents (although Gibran reserves his best poetry entirely for Jesus’s adherents).

We begin this series, then, with Gibran’s retelling of the Sermon on the Mount made famous in Matthew’s Gospel, and of how Gibran tells the story of Jesus teaching His disciples how to pray:

Thus spake Jesus, and it was in my desire to kneel down and worship Him, yet in my shyness, I could not move nor speak a word.

But at last I spoke, and I said, “I would pray this moment, yet my tongue is heavy.  Teach me to pray.”

And Jesus said, “When you would pray, let your longing pronounce the words.  It is in my longing now to pray thus:

Our Father, in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy name.  Thy will be done with us, even as in space. Give us of Thy bread sufficient for the day.  In Thy compassion forgive us and enlarge us to forgive one another.  Guide us towards Thee and stretch down Thy hand to us in darkness.  For Thine is the kingdom, and in Thee is our power and our fulfillment.

It is the Lord’s Prayer, as rewritten and remembered by a poet.  One of the greatest contributions by one of the most powerful and compelling personalities ever to grace this globe, put into words that are not merely the ones we can recite, rote, from memory, about guiding us from temptation, as though we were filling out the prayer on a triplicate form for God’s heavenly bureaucracy; no, there is an added dimension to this.

And that is maybe a bit weird for me to say…after all, this isn’t the first time I have preached on the Lord’s Prayer with you, so it makes it feel like I have maybe left something out the first time around.

But the truth is, that is really just a part of preaching and teaching.  I can’t cram everything I feel and believe and know about God into one 20-minute sermon, I have to, as Russ, my senior pastor in California always strove to emphasize to me, break this Bible thing up into bite-sized pieces.

Which is what the Lord’s Prayer does.  It breaks all our many needs up into bite-sized pieces that we can understand, so that we can pray for them properly.  We recognize God’s wonder and power, we recognize our own need for even the most fundamental of necessities, and we recognize our own inherent limitations and weaknesses in the twin faces of temptation and evil.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer, but it also interprets the practice of prayer itself.  Jesus says not to be showy about our prayer, to come up with all manner of empty, fluffer-nutter sayings the way He says the hypocrites do.

And of course He is right to admonish us to not do that.  But it similarly is as easy and tempting for us to bolt for the other end of the spectrum, where our prayers contain no passion or profoundness at all, but instead carry a rote style akin to reading out of the telephone books that none of us even use anymore.  Kevin Roose, a writer who, during his time in college at Brown University spent a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and wrote a book about it, recalls in it his memory of his grandfather saying grace around the dinner table, which “he rattled off so quickly that it sounded like one long word:  BlessolordthisfoodtoouruseandustothyserviceinJesusnameamen.”

God doesn’t ask for long and flowery phrases, but God does ask for meaning in our prayers.

Because a prayer that is short and said without emotion is as empty as a long and flowery prayer.

Emptiness isn’t what our faith is supposed to be about, and I know you all know this.  But if our faith is meant to endure, and our practices of prayer are meant to be remembered, well, our memories are pretty self-selecting in that way.  We don’t waste our limited hard drive space between our ears on any ordinary thing.

So let’s approach our praying to God with similar care and selection—which isn’t to say we should be selective about praying in general, but selective in ourselves about how we pray.  We should hold our praying to higher standards than we used to, because in truth we know better.  We—and that includes me—have all uttered up the silly sort of prayers on occasion for Russell Wilson to not throw a goal-line interception, or for whichever mediocre Mariner to get a base hit and score a run, because, God, if they win that game, we won’t ask you for anything ever again!  We’ve all done that.

The kicker in all of this is that this is really for our benefit—yours and mine—and not for God’s or for Jesus’s.  Jesus says as much in this passage: God knows what you need before you even ask for it.  But I also quote Soren Kierkegaard on this: “Prayer does not change God, it changes the person praying.”  I mean, if we could change God via prayer…well, God would be quite schizophrenic, especially during every Super Bowl, World Series, and NCAA tournament!

No, prayer is meant to change us, and change us it shall.  Not because we want it to, but because we desperately need it to.  And this, ultimately, is how it can change us: it changes us in the way that Gibran writes as he closes out this poem from Matthew’s vantage point, as the famed Sermon on the Mount is now over, and he is stuck trying to put Jesus’s command to pray into practice.  And Gibran’s Matthew does so, and in the process realizes this:

…and all of us followed Him.  And as I followed I was repeating His prayer, and remembering all that He had said; for I knew that the words that had fallen like flakes that day must set and grow firm like crystals, and that the wings that had fluttered above our heads were to beat the earth like iron hoofs.

Jesus’s words can flutter over our heads and beat the earth like iron, because like wings they make us soar, and like iron, they can endure forever so long as we allow them to.

Which, in the end, is likely precisely as it should be.  We end up remembering those words, and how they changed everything.

Do we remember a young woman and how she died of brain cancer?  Sure.  But do we also remember how she set the world on fire for her cause?  Absolutely.

And do we remember how the homeless carpenter from Galilee was crucified and died?  Yes.

But do we also remember how His words and deeds changed the world forever?  Without a doubt.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

April 12, 2015

An Open Letter to My Dogs

Dear Sir Henry and Dame Frida,

I know C and I gave you names of nobility and knighthood, even if you do plop down onto our laps and proceed to vigorously clean your genitals as we're trying to share a drink.  You are nothing if not noble-looking, though, as you stand perched on our furniture or at the door, muscles tensed and barking instincts ready should an unwelcome intruder (like, say, the UPS deliveryperson or the garbagepeople) dare to grace our stoop with their clearly unwanted presence.

And I haven't even gotten to how you'll eat anything, even if it makes you violently ill, and then happily try to go back for seconds as though you have completely forgotten the experience of emptying your stomach contents onto our kitchen floor.

You're kind of dumb, pooches.  I love you dearly, and you have stolen my heart completely, but you're a few kibbles short of a full dinner bowl, if you catch my drift.

Yet you manage to be pretty smart, too.  You've gotten me to give you treats for only partly doing when I'm trying to train you to do, be it to sit or to come when called.  You've outsmarted one another in the quest for bones, chews, and tummy rubs.  And you clearly have the mental and emotional strength to return to happiness and joy in life after what was clearly a traumatizing sojourn for the both of you as strays before being rescued by your shelter.

And that is what I admire the most about you--not how affectionate you are (although I love that about you), or how devoted you are to keeping your butts clean (although I am amused by that too).  It's that you clearly have an appetite for life and for loving people even after being left out in the world to die by people who should have done better by you.

Here's a confession to you, though, on behalf of humanity: we didn't just do it to you, or to other dogs...lots of other dogs, in fact.  In truth, we do it to one another as well.  We do it to ourselves.  We hang each other out to dry, we leave them to live off the crumbs of our table, we leave them homeless and exposed to the elements without any of the sort of empathy that both of you doofus-y dogs are clearly capable of showing.

The image of the two of you being forced into living as strays makes my insides churn out of grief, but the knowledge that we force other people to live and die that way too makes my insides churn out of anger.

Maybe it is because you're literally colorblind, but you don't see color in other people.  You don't care that I'm Armenian, or that C is a ginger (ew), or that we have neighbors who are African-American, Asian-American, Latino/a, or gay or lesbian.  All you care about is if they will give you treats and head scratches.

And, admittedly, that is something we have to work on with you furballs, that idea that everyone in your world exists to give you gifts.  But it's still probably better mentality than the one we have constructed for ourselves in which we judge others and deny them services and treat them with higher degrees of suspicion because of their race or sexual orientation.

When you guys display aggression, there's a reason for it.  But when we display it towards others--sometimes in ways that kill them in cold blood--honestly, it is so effing senseless.  There's just no reason why so many of our black men have to die at the hands of our cops or our gay and lesbian brethren have to be discriminated against at the hands of our Christians.  But we do it anyways.

I don't know when all of that will change for us.  We've been changing it over time, but in terms of dog years, we're talking about an awful lot of calendars you'd have to flip through.  You may not be around to see a changed humanity.

Really, I may well not, either.  I want to be, really, really badly.  But it might be too long coming.

I hope it isn't, though.  Because us humans could stand to be a little bit more like you.  Not the chewing through the wires of my massage-cushion-that-was-a-gift-part, but the other part, the part where what you deem to be a threat to you is based on your own physical safety and not on what the person looks like or who the person loves.

I mean, aside from people who try to bathe you.  We all know they represent the greatest threat to you and all that you hold dear.

Love,
Your human, Eric

(Sir Henry Wiggly is a Jack Russell terrier/chihuahua mix who enjoys begging for table scraps, eviscerating the stuffing out of his toys, and hiding bones.  Dame Frida Koala is a poodle/Shih Tzu mix who enjoys stealing Henry's bones, receiving long and extravagant tummy rubs, and chewing on her humans' socks.  They are the best dogs in the world.  Except for Rowlf from the Muppets, because of his kickass piano playing.)

Abel's Blood

The LORD said, "What did you do?  The voice of your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground."

Genesis 4:10 (CEB)

Cain has just murdered his brother Abel, and when confronted for it by God, gives the world's first ever Nuremburg defense: "I don't know.  What am I, my brother's keeper?"

Yes, yes, Cain is.  And a police officer is his/her citizen's keeper.  Because without keeping your citizenry in your heart, there really is not much point to serving and protecting.

Yesterday, the graphic and terrible footage of an African American man, Walter Scott, being gunned down over the course of eight shots by Michael Slager, a white police officer, hit the news, along with the headline that the officer who shot him (and then, to compound his sin of murder, planted a Taser next to Scott's lifeless body in an attempt to demonstrate that Scott represented a threat to his immediate safety) would be charged with murder.

I feel like I wrote these words already, for Michael Brown and for Eric Garner and for Tamir Rice.

But here I am, writing them again for Walter Scott.

Because his blood, and the blood of his brothers...of OUR brothers...cries out from the ground for justice.

At least for now, justice is being pursued on behalf of Scott, which is a damn sight more than I can say for Brown, Garner, or Rice, since the two officers who killed Brown and Garner emerged without any indictment filed against them, and the investigation against the officer who shot and killed Rice is still ongoing, despite similar video being made available of his murder.

Which begs a question: how many more black men need to die at police hands before we can say that there is a pattern here, not just cases of isolated police brutality?

Because literally the same day as this footage was made available, another white South Carolina police officer was arrested on an entirely separate felony charge for shooting and killing another African American man, Ernest Satterwhite.

And if this is indeed a pattern, then we cannot simply wash our hands of it as easily as Pilate did of Jesus Christ.  Isolated instances are easy for us to write off, at least in our minds.  Surely Pilate thought the same of Jesus Christ...after all, most Israelites claiming to be the messiah advocated the violent overthrow of Rome (which is why at certain parts of the Gospels, the crowds expect the same of Jesus, and He demurs; He really is the Prince of Peace is the end).  A nonviolent messiah?  That's a one off.

But Pilate, and us, would be ignoring the larger pattern here: that we are the ones putting our citizenry to summary deaths at our hands, sparkling clean though they may be from the washbasin's water.

And so it is not merely the ground from which the blood of Walter Scott cries out for justice...it is from our hands.  My hands and yours, because with enough outcry, our leaders might actually have to change the way they do police work.

And if nothing changes, then our hands shall remain stained with Abel's blood, no matter how much soap we shall ever try to use.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Year's Easter Sermon: "Dawn of the First Day"

Matthew 28:1-10

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the tomb. 2 Look, there was a great earthquake, for an angel from the Lord came down from heaven. Coming to the stone, he rolled it away and sat on it. 3 Now his face was like lightning and his clothes as white as snow. 4 The guards were so terrified of him that they shook with fear and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Don’t be afraid. I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6 He isn’t here, because he’s been raised from the dead, just as he said. Come, see the place where they laid him. 7 Now hurry, go and tell his disciples, ‘He’s been raised from the dead. He’s going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.’ I’ve given the message to you.” 8 With great fear and excitement, they hurried away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples. 9 But Jesus met them and greeted them. They came and grabbed his feet and worshipped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Go and tell my brothers that I am going into Galilee. They will see me there.” (Common English Bible)

Easter 2015

Nickajack Cave in Tennessee exists now as part cave, part pond, a result of our construction of the Nickajack Dam in the sixties.  The lower half of the cave is completely submerged in water, leaving only the upper half open for the colony of literally hundreds of thousands of bats that has made the cave an official wildlife refuge in the state of Tennessee.

But it is, as it so happens, amazingly enough a refuge for human life as well.  In 19, a year after the cave had been flooded, the legendary musician Johnny Cash traveled there intending to end his life within the cave.  Instead, he had a profound spiritual experience that ultimately led to his sobriety from drugs and another thirty five years of life before he would die of natural causes in 2003.

I grew up with Johnny Cash’s music; rare was the morning when I wouldn’t hear Folsom Prison Blues or Burning Ring of Fire being piped into the kitchen as I rolled my sleepy self out of bed for another day of school.  And those songs could have come from another music icon from earlier days who had died well before their time, like Marley or Hendrix, Moon or Lennon.  But instead, I was listening to the lyrics of someone who, at the time, was still very much among the living.

Johnny Cash emerged from Nickajack Cave with a new life.  Something had happened in the darkness of the rock, and I would call it a resurrection.  After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a resurrection had occurred behind the opacity of stone and hillside.

You might think me comparing Johnny Cash to Jesus a trifle blasphemous, no matter how much you may have liked Johnny and June.  But I’m not comparing Johnny Cash to Jesus so much as simply saying this:

How Jesus was resurrected is likely how you too can expect to one day be resurrected: in the darkness, in the cold, with nobody around to see it.  And then you will emerge from that dark and that cold and that isolation into a new dawn, into a new day, and into a new light that will forever shape your eternal life going forward.  In other words, all of us, great musician or not, are as Jesus.

The moment of resurrection is the first day of eternal life.  In Matthew’s Gospel, he says that Christ’s resurrection happens on the first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath.  But it is also the first day of new life for Christ’s human form, a life that would last beyond that week; it would see another Sabbath, and then another, until after 40 days, enough eyewitnesses had seen (and, in the case of Thomas the apostle, touched) the risen Christ that there could be no doubt: He had indeed emerged victorious over the grave.

And so too, then, can we.  It is terribly ironic, Matthew’s wording about the guards of Jesus’s tomb in verse 4: an angel appears, and they “were so terrified of him that they shook with fear and became like dead men.”  Of course they did, because that is what fear can do to you.  Fear can maybe not kill you outright, but it can make you as though you were dead.  Fear can deaden you to the vividness and vitality that is inherent in living, and in living for God.  Fear can make life not livable.

Fear can do to you, in the end, what the cross did to Jesus and to countless other crucified victims.

It can kill you, slowly and painfully, collapsing you upon yourself until you cannot breathe, lest you cry out in protest at what is being done to you.

And it is important to remember that, because it isn’t as though Jesus is arising from a death brought about by bubonic plague, or cowpox, or the latest Justin Bieber single.

He is arising from a death at our hands.  He is stronger than our violence, stronger than our hatred, and stronger than our fear of Him.  He is stronger than all of these things that led us to crucify Him.

But even after He has arisen, that fear can remain; again, just look at the guards of His tomb.  Even the female disciples of Jesus who, though excited by the angel’s message of the resurrection, are also fearful of what has really taken place here overnight, and what that means for their faith.

The difference between the guards and the women is, the women absolutely would not let their fear control them.  Their excitement would.  They hurried back to tell the male disciples of this, and Jesus appears to them en route, and what are the first words out of His mouth to them?

 Be not afraid.

The same words the angels say to the shepherds on Christmas when told of Christ’s birth.  The beginning of both of Jesus’s lives are accompanied by these words, by an exhortation to drive out one’s fear and listen, really listen, to what God is saying to us, both at Christmas and at Easter.

And both times, that message is: I, Jesus, am coming.  They, and you, will see me there.

The famous Great Commission—the go forth and make disciples of all nations command that Matthew’s Gospel ends with—is already put in motion.  The women are asked to go forth and tell the disciples of Christ’s presence, just as we are asked to go forth and tell of Christ’s presence.

Even though—and this is important—they hadn’t yet seen the resurrected Jesus in bodily form yet.

That is the sort of faith Easter asks of us, and the sort of faith we ought to be able to respond with.

After all, the women had faith in spite of their fear, even if the guards did not.

Which means that whatever your fears in your own life are, and your own trepidations about your own future, you can still have faith as well.  They are not mutually exclusive of each other.

If you fear what a world without your teachers or tethers to hold you back from self-destructiveness, well, you can still have faith that God can push on towards wholeness.

If you fear what will happen to you if you slide back into addiction, well, you can still have faith that God can lead you away from it or out of it.

And if you fear what may come in a world where you have no idea what it means that Jesus is once again among the living—because, unlike us, the women haven’t had 1,970-some years to ruminate and argue over it—then have faith that it is right for God’s divine love to conquer earthly death.

For, as the Presbyterian preacher Thomas G. Long writes in his commentary on Matthew:

The wonderful news of Easter is that Jesus is alive, and the terrible news of Easter is also that Jesus is alive, because nothing is nailed down anymore…The way the world used to be, if something troubling got in the way, like a call for racial justice or a worker for peace or an advocate for mercy, the world could just kill it and it would be done with.  But Jesus is alive, and righteousness, mercy, and peace cannot be dismissed with a cross or a sword.  We have to decide where we stand and what we will do in this new and frightening resurrection world.

A new world.  A resurrection world.  And Easter represents our first day in that new world.  Like Jesus Christ, like Johnny Cash, like so many others who have died to themselves and gone on to live once more, we have emerged from the darkness and loneliness of the cave and out into the morning light.  The mustiness and dankness of the tomb has been replaced with the freshness of air that God Himself breathes into us, just as He did to breathe life into Adam all the way back in Genesis 2.

And like Adam, we might well have no idea at first what at all to do with this new world that we have been given and re-given again.  Like Adam, we might well end up using this new life we have been given to hear out the voices of temptation, even if that was never our initial intent, because that is often how temptation works.

But unlike Adam, we have the testimony of the two Mary’s who have come to the tomb, found it empty, found the guards like dead men, and hurried off, spurred on by the words of an angel, to find a risen Savior who tells them that He will appear where they are going to next.

Wherever you are going to next, Christ can yet appear.

That is what the resurrection promises.  Because sealed off in a tomb outside Jerusalem, Christ appears only to the stones.

But now, wherever you are and wherever you will go, the risen Christ might meet you there.

Such are the ways of the resurrection world.  Such are the ways of the first dawn of the first day in this resurrection world.

And such are the ways of a God who makes it all possible.

He is risen!  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

April 5, 2015

(Image courtesy of jungiananalysisliterary.com)

A Holy Saturday Plea

When I was a kid, I thought that today, Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, was the absolute worst day on the calendar.

It was the only day the disciples were completely and totally without Jesus.

Even on Good Friday, in the midst of His Passion, Jesus found the strength and energy to exhort the women of Jerusalem to not weep for Him (Luke 23:28).  Even though His words are scary in an entirely other sense because He tells us to weep for ourselves, He is still very much among the living, even if all He has left to do is die.  He is still teaching, even if all He has left to do is to be made silent.

In other words, Christ is still present on Good Friday.  And, as we all know, He returns to us anew on Easter Sunday.

But Holy Saturday?  That day sucks.  No Christ at all, but the disciples are expected to celebrate both the next day of Passover and the Sabbath as proscribed by their religious tradition.  If we worship God out of celebration (and many of us do, even if not every Sunday), imagine thinking why on earth you should be celebratory when the entire spiritual foundation of your life has just been ripped out from under you like the road underneath Wile E. Coyote.

So yeah, Holy Saturday can bite me.  But I'm supposed to endure it as a Christian.  I am supposed to endure it because I am supposed to walk alongside Christ, and this was something that was done to Him at our hands.

Much as we may think God wanted this to happen, God did not kill Jesus.  We did.

So I get today to stew in my own culpability, my own sinfulness in how I continue to crucify Christ by not caring enough for others or for God's creation, by not standing up and speaking out when I felt more comfortable remaining silent, and then resenting my own inability to make a bigger difference on behalf of the Christ who was crucified yesterday and who is risen tomorrow.

So, here's my first plea: please, please do not make these same mistakes, as much as you are able to.

And here's my second: don't let others make these same mistakes.

It is the lack of caring that so pains and harms God's children, of this I am certain.  Despite his protestations, Pilate could not have cared less about what ultimately happened to Jesus; if he did, he would have ordered Jesus freed and Barabbas crucified.

And then cruelly, Pilate washes his hands of that decision.

How many times do we reach for Pilate's washbasin to wash our hands of our treatment of others?

How often to we try to cleanse our hands of the stain of the blood of gay and lesbian neighbors, or persons of color, or people crushed under the satanic (yes, satanic) yokes of poverty, homelessness, or malnutrition?

And how often do we then lament the state of the world, and focus on putting blame on anyone but ourselves?

Guess what: that is what the temple authorities have just finished doing: lamenting the state of the world and focusing on putting the blame on Jesus rather than where it belonged...on their own shoulders.

Please, remember how great your responsibility is in a Holy Saturday world.  Remember that your call to holiness extends far beyond the mere coils of your personal beliefs and thoughts.  After all, Pilate thought Jesus innocent, but it did not stop him from handing Jesus over to be crucified.

This Holy Saturday, we need fewer Pilates, and more Mary Magdalenes, and Salomes, the women who hurried as soon as they were able with the Sabbath ended to return to Christ's side, even if they thought Him to be dead.

They had not washed their hands of what had happened.  They remembered.

So too, then, must we.  And then do it differently the second time around.

Yours in the crucified, now dead, but soon to rise, Christ,
Eric

If The Writing's On The Wall, It's Because You Have Been Found Wanting

I'm taking a short break out of my preparations for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday (collectively known in the clergy world as the "Triduum") to write about a couple of things regarding this whole RFRA kerkuffle that I have already been blogging about incessantly (see my last few entries here and here).

First, earlier this week, the General Board of my denomination, the Disciples of Christ, voted unanimously to authorize the removal of our 2017 General Assembly from its original host city of Indianapolis in protest of Indiana's new RFRA.  Several of my colleagues have even privately said that the would be willing to make individual financial donations to the denomination to mitigate any cancellation fees this move would incur, and I will be one of them who does donate if need be.  A certain saying about putting one's money where one's mouth is comes to mind, quite literally.

Second, though, is that I feel the need to refute this narrative that somehow the defense of the RFRA has religious tradition on its side, a narrative like in this piece from Rod Dreher for TIME Magazine (which, amazingly, somehow still exists).

There are several serious theological and exegetical errors in Dreher's analysis, and while I am normally not one to nitpick, when we are talking about the turning away of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ, I will nitpick until they are free to patronize any pizza shop in Indiana they please.

First, the title of Dreher's piece.  Rod, you know where the "writing on the wall" idiom comes from, right?  In Daniel 5, the Babylonian monarch, King Belshazzar, sees a hand writing a mysterious writing on the wall of a banquet in which the king is eating and drinking from dishes looted from the Jerusalem temple.  None of Belshazzar's magicians can decipher the handwriting, so the king sends for Daniel, who translates it thusly:

Mene: God has numbered the days of Belshazzar's reign
Tekel: God has weighed and measured Belshazzar and found him wanting
Parsin: Belshazzar's kingdom will be divided between the Medes and the Persians

So from my perspective, actually, the title fits.  God is weighing and measuring us, and if we are going to turn away our neighbors on the basis of their sexual orientation, we will be found wanting, and our kingdom (the influence we hold over the populace) could well fall and be divided.

But I have a hunch that isn't what Dreher was going for.  Even if our turning away of gay and lesbian couples would make us to be found wanting in God's eyes, which I have to imagine it would.

Second is this line:

"I understand that most liberals view homosexuality as entirely analogous to race. Abrahamic religion does not see it that way. Sexual expression has moral meaning that race does not."

Good gravy, where do I even begin with that?  Abrahamic religion places moral meaning on race all. the. effing. time throughout the Old Testament.

In the Hebrew Bible, God is the God of the Hebrews and not much else.  In Deuteronomy 20:17, God, through Moses, issues the Israelites a laundry list of differing peoples they are to exterminate in their entirety, lest they teach the Israelites detestable things (God also promises to send a pestilence upon these peoples in Exodus 23:23 & 28).  This command is also repeated in another form (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).

In Exodus 21:1-6, slaves must be set free on the seventh year of their enslavement, but this law only applies to Hebrew slaves.  Non-Hebrew slaves can be enslaved indefinitely (Deuteronomy 20;11).

And in Deuteronomy 23:3-6, Ammonites and Moabites are permanently banned from converting to Judaism and consigned to second-class citizen status.

In fact, all of these sorts of verses were in part why there was such debate over whether to evangelize to Gentiles to begin with as what would become Christianity began splintering away from its Jewish tradition.

And right after that comes this:

You don’t have to agree with Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and traditional Christians, but this goes down to the foundational beliefs of our religions.

Maybe it does, but Biblically speaking, it shouldn't.  When asked in Matthew 22 what the most important commandment is, Jesus proffers two: love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18).  On these, Jesus says, hangs the entirety of the law and the prophets (22:34-40).  Meaning that as Christians, these two laws are the foundational beliefs of our religion.  And dismissing a customer on the basis of a same-sex wedding doesn't count as love of neighbor.

Moving right along:

An America where the majority casts aside religious liberty, and treats orthodox Christians as outcasts as gays were once wrongly treated, is an America in which it is hard to have faith. (emphasis Dreher's)

The false equivalency here is so stark, it's painful.  Are Christians being killed for being Christian, like Matthew Shepard, Richie Phillips, Jason Gage, and so many other gay, lesbian and trans people?  Is there a lengthy and historically documented tradition of discrimination against Christians in America?  Did Christians have to face ballot measure after ballot measure banning their right to marry?  No, no, and no.

And by the by, since when did being against same-sex marriage become a part of Christian orthodoxy?  My theology is about as orthodox as it gets, but under Dreher's definition of the term, I would count as neither a traditional or an orthodox Christian.  And really, considering the serious errors in Biblical exegesis I detail above, it's pretty rich for Dreher to act as though he has religion on his side with this argument.

Which is sort of--and has been--my point all along.  Religion isn't, or shouldn't be, on the side of defending Indiana's RFRA.  The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment that protects your religious expression protects mine as well, and the American judicial system has a long history of protecting the religious expression of views that are certainly in the minority in the American populace, such as the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to not be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette) or the right of Amish students to not attend public high schools (Wisconsin v. Yoder).  In fact, the "compelling governmental interest" litmus test in regulating religious expression has been on the books since 1963 in Sherbert v. Warner, with the majority opinion being penned by one of the great liberals of the Supreme Court, Justice William Brennan.

As a self-professed "liberal" "orthodox" "traditional" Christian, I consider religious expression to be beyond value.  The only way I know that I can teach and preach what I feel called without government interference is if the pastor down the street from me can preach and teach what s/he feels called without government interference.

But turning away a gay couple on the basis of that preaching and teaching isn't free expression any more than turning away an African-American couple or a Jewish couple is.  It's discrimination.  And it is an affront to God.

That, for whatever it is worth, I learned from Jesus Christ: in Luke 9, a Samaritan village turns away Jesus and His disciples when they seek lodging on the road, "because His face was set toward Jerusalem" (Samaritans resented Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish tradition--essentially, they turned Jesus away because He was not a Samaritan).  His disciples wanted to call down fire from the heavens to consume the town, but Jesus rebuked them for wanting to.

It was only later on down the road, a few verses later, that Jesus lamented that the Son of Man had no place to rest His head.

What a terrible lament to have to admit.  At our hands.

The entire point of protesting the RFRA is to end the need for that lament.

I hope Rod Dreher can recognize that, and repent of his defense of it.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

As I write this, I saw the updated body count of the al-Qaeda attack in Kenya: 147.   147 souls.  Please pray for all those affected; I had the immense privilege of visiting Kenya on my mission trip to Africa in 2006 and came away humbled and genuinely moved by the beauty and culture of generosity that is firmly at root there.  This attack is an affront on that culture and beauty.  ~E.A.