This Week's Sermon: "The Wings Wherewith to Fly High"

John 20:11-18

Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. 12 She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. 13 The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” 14 As soon as she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what he said to her.  (Common English Bible)

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

I want to try something different to kick off today’s sermon…I want you to try something, actually.

I want you to remember something, anything.  It can be happy or sad, relatively recent or a long time ago, but I want you to fix on a particular memory, of an event or a person or a place, something tangible that your mind carries with you...a wedding or a birthday or a baptism or a vacation destination, or even when the Mariners last won the World Series (oh wait, they haven't done that yet?  Carry on, then).

Got a memory?

Okay, now, what if I told you that you’re not remembering the thing you’ve got in mind, but that you’re remembering the last time you brought that memory up?  That’s what the latest science suggests, per the website that might have the best URL name on the web, FactualFacts:

A Northwestern Medicine study involving 70 people has shown that every time we remember an event that has happened from our past, our brain networks change in ways that actually alter the recall of the event.  This means the next time you remember it, you might not remember the original event but what you remembered the previous time.

As postdoctoral fellow Donna Bridge explains, “A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event—it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it…”

(T)he reason behind the distortion is that human memories are always adapting and that memories do actually change over time, e.g. if you think back to an event that happened to you a long time ago, like your first day of school, you actually may be remembering the information you retrieved about that event at some later time, not the original event itself.

So basically, when you strive to recall something, you’re recalling not that thing, but your latest recollection of it.  Imagine, then, the importance of our tangible memories: the photographs, the letters, the heartfelt notes (don’t tell my parents this, or they’ll arrange for another family photo session after this) to our spiritual well-being as creatures designed by God to love and be loved.

Imagine, as well, then, the sheer need of Jesus’s followers to adhere to that commandment given by Christ around the Passover table, to “remember Him.”  And how did they end up remembering Him?  And was it the same way that we remember Jesus?  Because honestly, it probably isn’t.

This is the end of a sermon series that has lasted us now almost fifty days!  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 other Christian mystics, comes through in his poetry about Jesus.  Jesus: Son of Man tells the stories of the gospels, but in Gibran’s soaring words, through the eyes of various supporting characters: the 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, two weeks ago 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.  After skipping a week, we read from Gibran’s version of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which Gibran assigned to the voice of the apostle Andrew, and then we arrived at Jerusalem itself, as Jesus preached and Gibran, through the voice of Joseph of Arimathea, transcribed.  Last week, we talked about the crucifixion, as Gibran, through the voice of Barabbas, the terrorist chosen for freedom by the crowd, narrated the Via Dolorosa, the way to Calvary, and now, at long last, to end this series, we reflect on the Resurrection, as written by Gibran through the voice of Mary Magdalene, an older Mary thirty years after the ministry of Jesus Christ:

Once again I say that with death Jesus conquered death, and rose from the grave a spirit and a power.  And He walked in our solitude and visited the gardens of our passions.

He lies not there in that cleft rock behind the stone.

We who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.

I know you who believe not in Him.  I was one of you, and you are many; but your number shall be diminished…there is a gulf that yawns between those who love Him and those who hate Him, between those who believe and those who do not believe.

But when the years have bridged that gulf you shall know that He who lived in us was deathless, that He was the Son of God even as we are the children of God; that He was born of a virgin even as we are born of the husbandless earth.

How do we remember Jesus Christ?  Well, first of all, how do we remember Mary Magdalene?  While Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code thriller was an abominably bad piece of Biblical research, he did at least get one thing right: it is a fiction that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.  There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that she is one.  Instead, it is far more likely that she was, in addition to one of Jesus’s many female disciples (such as Susanna and Mary, the mother of James the Just), a financial backer of Jesus’s ministry, something that a marginalized sex worker could likely not afford.

But we remember her as a prostitute because it suits our narrative and predispositions about her.  And, in all truth, we do the same to Jesus.  We recall Him not for who He was, but for who we want Him to be, who we wanted Him to be the last time we remembered Him, and then the time before that, and the time before that.

Yet it is the nature of our memory to skew towards particular instances and circumstances; it is why we can remember some singular events remarkably well even as entire weeks or months are largely a blur to the hard drive that houses our mental data storage.

And for far too long, our memories of Jesus served our narratives and agendas, not His.

We have continually made Him into things He isn’t, and never was—a supporter of money, a shamer of women, a preacher who cared far more about “saving souls” than about bringing the kingdom of God to God’s own earthen creation.  We remember Him as those things because it is more convenient for us to do so, because it takes some of Jesus’s rougher edges off and makes Him easier for us to follow in the time and place we live in now, not the time and place He arrived in.

In other words, we remember Him as such because it is far easier for us to worship a version of ourselves, 21^st century Americans, than to worship a 1^st century Israelite Jew.

So really, we are all as Mary Magdalene in Gibran’s poem, unbelievers in Jesus Christ, because we do not yet believe, not really, in who He really was: a spirit and a power who conquered death to enable us to reach forth and heal, reach forth and make whole, and reach forth and resurrect.

And we are all as Mary Magdalene in John’s passage today, unable to recognize Jesus for who He really is, at least, not at first.  Not until He calls out to us, and we respond affirmatively.

In this way, far from casting Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, we should in fact all see ourselves as her: blinded by our own humanness, for better and for worse, to the point that we cannot see Jesus for who He is, and can only see Him starkly when we accept the reality that we did not recognize Him properly the first time around, or even the second, or the third.

It may sound like I am asking an awful lot of you, to humble yourselves to the point of admitting that you may have not completely understood the fullness and greatness of Jesus.  But I do not ask it lightly.  Because I have come to know in my own walk of faith that with that depth of humbleness comes incredible liberation, to be able to accept that I cannot and will not ever have all of the answers, and that I am free to be freed, to be made free and freer, by Jesus’s love for all.

Because of that love for all, He lies not there in the cleft rock behind the stone.

The stone has been rolled away.  It will forever remain rolled away.

With it, one more obstacle to our own embrace of God’s greatness and goodness in all its grace and splendor has been set aside, for now and eternity.  With it, the stones of our hearts and our souls, the stones that we prop up to block ourselves away from God, can one day be rolled away as well, so that we too may lie not entombed forever behind them, that we too may one day live.

And it is with these words of Gibran’s that I end this sermon, and this series:

It is passing strange that the earth gives not to the unbelievers…the wings wherewith the fly high and drink, and be filled with the dews of her space.

But I know what I know, and it is enough.

Amen.  A thousand times, Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington
May 17, 2015

My Dogs Write Back

(This is a sequel to my April blog post, "An Open Letter to My Dogs." ~E.A.)

Dear furless bipedal being who feeds us,

Despite being completely illiterate, our tails wagged with joy because you wrote to us, not the least of which was we got to imagine how much barking we would get to do if you had sent us your letter by UPS or FedEx rather than here.

See, we are used to being communicated with in short, often monosyllabic words, followed by the proffering of treats.  When someone tries to talk to us on a higher level than that, well, it's almost as exciting as actually catching a squirrel for once.

But the joy lessened when we realized that not only did your letter not come with aforementioned treats, but you called us "kinda dumb" in your letter.

Now that's just plain uncalled for.  Yes, one of us tries to hump the stuffing out of his blankie if given half a chance, and the other tries to eat her own poops if given half a chance, but what about you?  You not only feel the bizarre compulsion to pick up our poops, but to then throw them away.  Talk about a waste of a good treat.  There are dogs without poop to eat out there.  Think of them next time.

But really, though, our main grievance is with which how hardened your species' hearts have become.  We, simple creatures that we are, love anybody who feeds us and gives us tummy rubs.  You lot, on the other hand, will only love somebody if apparently they don't do anything to upset you ever and have the exact same religious and political beliefs as you.  If they feed you, that should be enough.  But apparently, it isn't, because just look at how much you dread being fed at Thanksgiving by relatives who don't agree with you.

Frankly, we think that makes you dumber than us.  Think of how many more tug-of-war partners you could have and how many more wrestling buddies you could call on if you stopped being so arbitrary over whose butt you sniffed and who sniffs your butts.  Instead, you turn away those potential wrestlers and tug-of-warriors because they bark differently than you.

Cutting others out of your life like that isn't very smart.  In case you're keeping score, eating your own poops: smart.  Farewelling people out of your life because they committed some minor heresy, according to you, a squirrel-abstaining idiot: stupid.

Now, none of that keeps us from loving you.  After all, you do feed us and cuddle us and lavish us with lots--though still never enough--attention.  But it's not a love of equals.  We tolerate your stupidity because of the deep emotional bond we have, not because we think even for a second that you are capable of appreciating the consumption of delicacies like flower petals and lawn clippings (you thought we were going to make another poop joke, didn't you?).

Rest assured that we do indeed love you as much as you love us, and that we want the best for you just as you want the best for us.  But just like you are convinced that we don't always know what is best for us, we are pretty certain that your species doesn't always know what is best for themselves either.

We wish you did, though.  We really do.  Because you being joyful in turn makes us joyful.  And that's all we really want in the end--that, and more treats, which you remain inexcusably stingy with.  And we think you want that too (joy, not treats...although you seem to have your own treat, called 'scotch').

That's what matters, furless bipedal being who feeds us.  Joy.

Now if you'll excuse us, we have some sunning to do over on your couch.  It is close to swimsuit season after all, and we still don't trust you to not dress us in something ridiculous and parade us around in front of your fellow idiots.

Love,
Sir Henry and Dame Frida

Why the Pew Report on Religious Affiliation Matters

In seminary, I went from being used to being the oldest in a family to being the very youngest.  I'm the oldest in my generation in my entire extended biological family by a couple of years, but upon entering the Master of Divinity degree program at my seminary, I spent my entire three years there as the youngest student in my entire extended seminary family: my M.Div. class of 2011.  While I had a number of classmates who were close to my age, I was the baby of my class.

And I continued to keep that status as I went into parish ministry here in rainy southwestern Washington.  I'm the youngest pastor who is active in my town's ministerial association, I'm the youngest pastor who is active in my region's district clergy group, and in a variety of clergy meetings, I am often the youngest minister in the room by at least a decade.

I share all this because as clergy, we often mirror the communities we serve.  Churches seek pastors whose doctrine or denominational affiliation aligns with their own, and oftentimes, demographic factors like gender/sex, sexual orientation, and, yes, even age, can play a factor.

And age, as it so happens, is devastating the church.  Yesterday, the Pew Research Forum released a demographic study which they do every several years that puts the precipitous decline of religious affilation into pretty stark terms.  In short: the major categories of evangelical Christian, mainline Christian, and Roman Catholic all showed statistically significant decline since 2007, and the latter two groups especially so, at rates over three times higher than evangelical Christianity.  Orthodox and Mormon Christians also declined, though, interestingly enough, the Jehovah's Witnesses increased in numbers.

The slight decline in Mormon membership is a bellweather, I think, and I've heard almost nobody else talk about it.  Mormon families tend to have well above average birth rates (indeed, in his 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven on the history of Mormonism and Mormon fundamentalism, Jon Krakauer notes that Provo, the de facto epicenter of Mormonism, has the highest birth rate in America), and if that movement is declining, it means we can't get away with saying it is simply because our parents and grandparents aren't being replaced biologically.

No, it is that they aren't being replaced theologically.  In mainline Christianity, we also have to contend with a much lower birth rate in addition to the reality that we've done an epic fail of a job of passing the baton onto my generation: the loss in Christian identity almost entirely corresponds to an increase in "unaffiliated" identity, and that is the result of us millennials now being adults and, thus, polling subjects for studies like these.

A lot of what I have been reading has been of the Chicken Little "the sky is falling" variety, but I prefer to instead ask why we got here in the first place, since that is probably more instructive than simply howling "We're all going to die!" like an extra in a third rate zombie movie.  And as to why and how we got to where we're at, well, I have a few theories:

The church deserves the lack of trust put in it

The church (universal church, not any one denomination) hasn't recovered from, really, a series of scandals and blemishes that go all the way back to the 1980s: you had the transformation of churches into battlegrounds for overzealous culture warriors under the late Jerry Falwell and his (im)Moral Majority plus the fraud scandals of televangelists like Peter Popoff and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.  Fast forward to the 21st century and you have the sheer scope and depth of the Roman Catholic pedoophile priest scandal plus continued financial improprieties like in Mark Driscoll's former Mars Hill Church and First Family in my hometown Kansas City area.

We have, like the Pharisees of old, proven ourselves to be hypocrites, and people have justifiably decided not to trust us or our hollow teachings about morality.

The church, in turn, doesn't exhibit trust either

The abject lack of willingness to consider young Christians for leadership positions or, even more radically, to completely rethink the leadership structures of congregations, organizations, and denominations to be more in line with how this generation lives their lives, continues to astound me.  My generation isn't trusted with their hands on the levers of power yet, and so older generations continue, completely understandably, with the institutions and structures they know, not understanding just how out of sync said institutions are with the wider world.  Which leads me to...

The church is in a time warp of its own making

As long as worship services included hymns all written prior to the 1970s, a call and response litany, and a sermon that included three major points that all started with the same letter, the church could go on living in the world it loved and longed for, even as the world in fact was changing all around it.  Then, when this time capsule method of being church was no longer sustainable, congregations discovered that they didn't just have a few years of catching up to do, they had decades upon decades to make up for.  And just like it would be jarring if you took someone used to living in the tropics and dropped them in Antarctica, so too has it been jarring for thousands of congregations who were used to living in the mid 20th century to suddenly find themselves rudely dropped fifteen years into the 21st.

The church is cramming, which is never a good study strategy

So, once a congregation finds itself in the present day, they realize that maybe they have to change after all, but they try (or demand to) cram three or four decades worth of change into three or four years, which is a mighty tall order even for a perfectly healthy community.  Often, as in my case, this cramming comes with the calling of a new pastor, but it doesn't have to.  What it does always come with, though, is great and staggering expectations for the people themselves who are doing the cramming.  Imagine that the church is a student who has neglected all homework for a class on contemporary culture and then finds itself a week before the final exam without any clue as to how to ace it...that is the circumstance we have found ourselves in, and much like all of these other factors I am talking about, it is of our own doing.  We didn't have to procrastinate on studying how the world was changing, we chose to because we didn't actually think our teacher would flunk us.

All of these are why the Pew report matters so much, and why we should pay attention to what it is trying to say to us as communities of believers in Christ.  We have spent far too long ignoring what the world is trying to say to us and about us, and it would be sinful of us to continue on that path, because now, finally, at long last, we do indeed know differently.  We know better.

Now, we have to go and live that new knowledge.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "But I Shall Be Crucified"

Mark 15:6-15

During the festival, Pilate released one prisoner to them, whomever they requested. 7 A man named Barabbas was locked up with the rebels who had committed murder during an uprising. 8 The crowd pushed forward and asked Pilate to release someone, as he regularly did. 9 Pilate answered them, “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” 10 He knew that the chief priests had handed him over because of jealousy.

11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas to them instead. 12 Pilate replied, “Then what do you want me to do with the one you call king of the Jews?” 13 They shouted back, “Crucify him!” 14 Pilate said to them, “Why? What wrong has he done?” They shouted even louder, “Crucify him!” 15 Pilate wanted to satisfy the crowd, so he released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus whipped, then handed him over to be crucified.  (Common English Bible)

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

“Teach them how to avoid our destructive footsteps.  Teach them to strive for higher education.  Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others, and I helped to destroy.”

These were Stanley Tookie Williams’s final words before his execution at midnight on December 13, 2005, and I still remember that night when he was executed.  I was sitting in my college chapel, thinking and praying about this man who founded one of the most notorious and violent street gangs in the country—the Crips—and who after his conviction and incarceration for murder became an anti-gang activist and author, penning memoirs and children’s books to encourage them to avoid joining gangs, all the way up until, quite literally, the last words he would ever speak.

Because on the one hand, do you execute someone who has been reformed while in prison?  Or have their previous choices made them completely irredeemable?

And as I recalled that night of praying in the chapel now, I began to think more and more of a character in the Gospels: Barabbas, and how our choice to forever follow his way, rather than the way and truth and life of Jesus Christ, has likewise condemned us, even as we, to this day, seek our own redemption.

This is now not as much a new sermon series for us, to go with the reality that Easter really isn’t a new season: we’re now four weeks removed from 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 other Christian mystics, comes through in his poetry about Jesus.  Jesus: Son of Man tells the stories of the gospels, but in Gibran’s soaring words, through the eyes of various supporting characters: the 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, two weeks ago 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.  After skipping a week, we read from Gibran’s version of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which Gibran assigned to the voice of the apostle Andrew, and last week, we arrived at Jerusalem itself, as Jesus preached and Gibran, through the voice of Joseph of Arimathea, transcribed.  This week, we are at the crucifixion itself, as Gibran, through the voice of Barabbas, the terrorist chosen for freedom by the crowd, narrates:

They released me and chose Him.  Then He rose and I fell down.

And they held Him a victim and a sacrifice for the Passover.

I was freed from my chains, and walking with the throng behind Him, but I was a living man going to my own grave.

I should have fled to the desert where shame is burned out by the sun.

Yet I walked with those who had chosen Him to bear my crime.

When they nailed Him on His cross I stood there.

I saw and heard but I seemed outside my body…I know that those who slew Him in my stead achieved my endless torment.

His crucifixion endured but for an hour.

But I shall be crucified unto the end of my years.

I think we tend to overlook Barabbas, just as we tend to overlook many of our most notorious criminals once they have been processed into our justice system.  Once Dzhokar Tsarnaev is sentenced, he will almost certainly fade into the background for years at a time, as have terrorists like Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, and Zacharias Moussaoui.  And ordinarily, that is the way it should be.  We can dwell on the evil and destruction that define their lives, or we can plunge forward in the continued quest to create and fashion a new world out of and in spite of their destructiveness.

But Barabbas the murderer is different.  Mark tells us of his crime, at least in part: murder that took place during an uprising.  But that doesn’t likely tell the whole story.  Why would Barabbas be killing someone during an uprising?  Because he was a part of the uprising himself.  And who would he be uprising against?  The empire that had placed itself as the (unholy, in Israel’s mind) ruler of the Holy Land: Rome.  And who is trying Barabbas and Jesus Christ?  Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor.

Barabbas isn’t likely even this murderer’s real name, once we break it down.  “Bar” is the part of an ancient Israelite’s surname, it means “son of.”  For instance, Jesus, speaking strictly in earthly terms, would be known as Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth.  And “abbas” is akin to the Aramaic “abba,” which we know from earlier in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus uses the term in His prayer at Gethsemane, means “dad.”  Not the more formal “father,” but the more intimate “dad” or “pop.”

So what Barabbas’s name means, literally, is either “Son of a Father” or “Son of THE Father.”  Barabbas could have given himself this alias for one of two reasons: in the former case, it would be to achieve anonymity…after all, every man is biologically the son of a father, some father, somewhere.  Or, he could be claiming the exact same mantle of Messiah-dom as Jesus is, claiming to be the Son of God.

And what if Barabbas was claiming to be the Son of God?  He certainly would be neither the first nor the last violent claimant to that throne.  But he is the claimant who is held up—unintentionally in terms of its larger meaning, I am sure—by Pilate as the choice the crowd—and we—must make.

For the way of Barabbas is the way of more and continued violence, death, and destruction.  The way of Jesus, in contrast, is the way of new life, renewed love, and eternal salvation.  But the crowd, handpicked by the temple leaders and almost certainly not representative of the crowd that welcomed Jesus with obvious admiration and reverence on Palm Sunday, chooses Barabbas, and his way, over Jesus and His way.

We are that crowd, even today, whenever we too call for the way of Barabbas, the way of violence and destruction, instead of the peacemaking way of Jesus.  As I was putting this sermon to bed this weekend, I read in the news about the two police officers shot and killed during an otherwise routine traffic stop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which, on top of Officer Brian Moore of the NYPD, makes three more officers killed in the line of duty this month.

And this is to say nothing of the ones who have come before them, officer and (often African-American) civilian alike.  The names of the dead are almost endless, and they are dead precisely because we choose, time and time and time again, the way of Barabbas rather than the way of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, if the execution a decade ago of Stanley Tookie Williams teaches us anything, it is that even choices to follow the way of Barabbas made many, many decades ago can still lead down the way to death today, because we too choose the way of Barabbas in the face of someone who has been reformed and rehabilitated and redeemed.

Such destructiveness, such unadulterated death, doesn’t come from Barabbas himself: he is but a symbol of this way.  He is, in the end, nothing more than a token, a human face to a plague that comes from the devil working through us--after all, just look at Pilate.  Right after releasing Barabbas, Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified.  He frees a man, and then follows that man's way by handing another over to suffer and die, even as he (in Matthew's Gospel) washes his hands of the blood that comes from his having followed the way of Barabbas.

But rather than examine ourselves, we crucify Barabbas.  Maybe not on that day during the Passover in New Testament Jerusalem, but for the rest of his life, and the rest of ours, we crucify Barabbas even as we ignore the reality that we are treading upon his already well-trod path ourselves.

Which makes our choice to cross over towards the path of Jesus Christ all the more crucial: in all honesty, His is by far the less-worn path, and believe me, it isn’t for a lack of people making a profession of faith in Him; after all, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world.

It is because even after making that profession of faith in Christ, we still walk on Barabbas’s way, not Christ’s.

Maybe, just maybe, we can stop walking that way today.

It is a hope I have.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

May 10, 2015

Why Pastors Dislike Preaching On Secular Holidays

Yesterday's post "Why I Don't Preach a Special Sermon for Mother's Day") got lots of amazing feedback, both on Facebook and Twitter, which, to be completely honest, I wasn't really expecting.  I knew I had to tread a fine line between making my point and coming across as an anti-mother crank who hates everything flowery and beautiful on a day that is ostensibly all about celebrating motherhood.  So, whenever I stick my neck out there, it is always reassuring to be affirmed.

But as I alluded to in that post, it isn't just Mother's Day.  It's Father's Day.  It's July Fourth.  It's the entire bloody calendar of secular holidays that are supposed to be a Biden-esque BFD in church but that shouldn't be.

And a lot of us pastors dislike it.  We loathe it.  I have colleagues who genuinely dread (behind closed doors, of course, lest they hurt a special snowflake's feelies) having to preach on those days.

Why do we run from that?  After all, preaching and teaching is a responsibility many of us cherish, honor, and take extremely seriously.

Here are, I think, five reasons why:

1. It's idolatrous

Yes, idolatrous.  I didn't stutter.  Church is meant to be for the worship and glorification of God and the furthering of God's mission, as revealed by Jesus Christ, on earth.  When we deviate from that to take a detour into celebrating Americana on Independence Day, or celebrating a greedy, racist explorer on Columbus Day, we are elevating something that isn't from God into an idol because we are glorifying it in the same space and before the same altar as God.

A few years ago, a minister whom I had regularly invited as a guest preacher to cover for me during my Sundays off, gave a seriously team-'murica-bordering-on-jingoistic sermon that was ostensibly about 9/11.  Except it wasn't on the Sunday of the week of 9/11, 9/11 was still weeks away, and I had already made plans to mark it during the appropriate Sunday in my pastoral prayer.  I had several of my congregants come to me afterwards, visibly disturbed by his sermon, and I completely understood why.  They were hearing an idolatrous message.  We aren't supposed to hear a message to worship America, we're supposed to hear a message to worship God.  And that didn't happen that Sunday.

2. It distracts from God

Springboarding from #1, if I'm preaching about mothers or fathers rather than God as a parent, I'm elevating us, God's children, to that same sort of idol-status.  It's tempting maybe to do that, because it really is super easy to go from your own mom or dad to God as a mom or dad, but, to repeat my main point from yesterday: your parent is not like God.  Your parent is human, God is not.  Our parents will stumble and mess up, sometimes horrifically, but God does not.

And when we distract from the perfect that is God by trying out some Hallmark-esque revisionism in preaching about our parents as perfect, it can induce all manner of feelings of inadequacy...all of which pulls us away from and distracts us from the perfect love of God.  We end up doing the exact opposite thing that church is meant to do: bring us closer to God's glory and to fulfilling the mission God has for us.

3. Secular holidays have an agenda

And no, I'm not talking about the "Secularism is taking over our government and our schools and our manufacturers of cheesesteak sammiches!  Beware of the new world order!" school of Chicken Little-esque Christianity.  I'm talking about secular holidays advancing a particular narrative, like that Christopher Columbus was somehow a swell guy (again, he wasn't) or that Halloween is a standalone holiday (it isn't), which simply isn't true.  This isn't the case for all public holidays, but for a lot of them, this is the case.  We're taught sanitized versions of historical events behind holidays like July Fourth, Independence Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr. day that edit out some of our own sins (like our treatment of American Indians, or our trying to smear King as a communist).

Truth is beyond value in our worship and spiritual life in church--indeed, John writes in his first letter about how we are called to worship God "in spirit and in truth."  Jesus says that the truth shall set us free.  We can uphold these Biblical maxims by being honest with ourselves about what a holiday is trying to say to us, and what we are telling ourselves about it and its history.

4. It makes our work smaller

We like to pretend that our beloved flocks hang on our every word, even though we look out into the pews and know full well that when you've got your head bowed, you're checking the baseball score on your iPhone rather than praying.  And we realize that not every detail of the nitty-gritty exegesis, research, sweat, and tears that went into the writing of our sermons will be remembered--hell, I can sometimes barely remember what I preached on in any given worship service without looking it up.

But we do hope that our messages give you spiritual nourishment, and dense nourishment at that.  We hope they give you strength to get through the next six days before we get the honor of preaching to you again, and we hope that you retain some of the inspiration that made that particular message happen.  These are big, lofty hopes we have for our work, and when we feel the need or pressure from our communities to deviate from what we feel God is calling us to preach to what the community expects or wants to hear, it diminishes our teaching and its importance, which we already worry about enough (see previous paragraph).

Point blank: I can't think of a single person in my entire life as a Christian who has said to me anything along the lines of "I wasn't sure about this whole God-thing, but now that I've heard that Father's Day sermon, I feel restored to God now!"*

*An exception to this for me has always been Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, since King was himself a pastor, and I have received uplifting feedback about how discussing King's honoring of God and humanity helped inspire a listener or three.

5. The risk of offense is great

We live in a world where, if I don't preach about Memorial Day or Veteran's Day, some troll somewhere will think it is because I hate soldiers.  If I don't preach about Independence Day, I must hate America (TEAM 'MURICA).  It's ridiculous, reductive, and not even remotely constructive.  But that is how knee-jerk humanity has become, and sometimes, we bow to pressure not from what God is telling us to do, but from our instinct to follow the path of least resistance.  I myself often end up with a compromise arrangement, like not using my sermon to talk about a particular secular holiday, but using, say, my newsletter column to do so, just so that I can inoculate myself from any of that (plus, it provides a ready-made basis to springboard off of, and I otherwise often suck at writing my newsletter columns).

But doing what is convenient is seldom the same as doing what is right.  And so we feel guilty whenever we cave to that temptation.  But we know we shouldn't.

So there you have it.  I'm done cranking about secular holidays in the church, but I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about it.  Especially if you're not a pastor--how do you feel when your pastor gets up and says, "Today's sermon will be about [fill in non-church holiday here]?"

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Why I Don't Preach a Special Sermon For Mother's Day

...or for Memorial Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, or Columbus Day, even though I believe in the importance of observing all of these days (except for Columbus Day, since its namesake was a racist, greedy slaver who didn't actually "discover" North America).

I have a pretty durned spiffy mom.  She does extremely difficult and important work through the law firm she owns by exonerating innocent people from prison, saving others from the death penalty, and litigating for the civil rights of a wide swath of people.  She and my dad did at least a passable job raising me and my sister, at least on the basis of our lack of a criminal history and our general status as slightly mild contributors to the greater good of society.  She has flown out to Washington to visit my congregation several times, and they absolutely adore her, undoubtedly because of her (overly eager, frankly) willingness to embarrass me with all manner of amusing stories from my childhood.

But I won't be talking about my mom in my sermon on Mother's Day this Sunday.  Or on any Mother's Day.  And it's not because I don't care for her...I do.  An awful lot.

It's because I care for everyone, also an awful lot.  And what brings people together as a church community isn't our reverence for our mothers, but our reverence for God, who is Father and Mother (if you consider that Jesus refers to Himself as a mother hen in Matthew 23, which was the passage I preached on last Sunday) of us all.

And much as I would like to boast about my earthly mum (see above), I am supposed to boast about my heavenly mum first and foremost.

Which really is how it needs to be in church.  Not everyone has my mom, even if I wish that they did.  Not everyone has a good or great mother.  Plenty of us have sadly had downright lousy or even abusive mothers, just like plenty of us have sadly had absentee or abusive fathers.

But none of us have an absentee or abusive God.

None.  Of.  Us.

The God who is God of me is also God of you, and the God who loves me loves you just as much.

Our human parents, though they should and must strive to be like that, aren't always.

For the same reason, I don't give a sermon about my rather spiffy dad on Father's Day, or a star spangled sermon on July 4th weekend: because yes, ideally, our nation is supposed to be about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, because all of us were created equal by God, but in point of fact, our state still treats very few of us as true equals, and instead treats the rest of us as cogs in a machine built to serve that privileged few.

Put a different way: for some, Mother's Day or Father's Day is not about a great parent in their lives, because their mother or father was no such thing.  And for some, Independence Day is not always about a great country, because if you are, say, American Indian (again, Columbus Day...), how might you feel about a great country that has for centuries treated your family like obstacles rather than like people?

In other words, celebrating for one person is akin to having to recall and relive abuse for another.

Church needs to be about giving thanks for the perfect in our lives, not simply the good.  That's what sets us apart.  God doesn't abuse us.  God never will.  We aren't forced to relive abuse at God's hands because there is no abuse at God's hands.

And religious communities are the only things whose entire existence is devoted to the task of honoring that God.

I won't be straying from that existence this Sunday, at least not in my sermon.  I do have a special children's message planned for Mother's Day, and in past years, I have used things like my newsletter column to talk about Mother's Day.  Our church will also be providing flowers for our moms, for we really do have quite a few amazing moms in our ranks, moms who amaze me and make me proud to be their pastor.

Yet church also needs to remain a place for those whose experiences with mothering, either as a mother or having a mother, are considerably more gray than black or white.  Church needs to able to welcome those with mixed and terrible experiences from their parents as well as those who have had amazing parents.

So this isn't about me trying to be nitpicky (because God knows, us pastors love being contrarian to one another).  Indeed, this is soul sized stuff, for the church needs to welcome even those who have been mixed or terrible parents themselves.

Because that is the radically noxious nature of grace: we have welcome those who we might not want to celebrate, and celebrate those who we might not want to welcome.

It is what God, through Jesus's redemption of humanity, did for us.  God, like the mother hen Jesus spoke of in Matthew 23, gathered us under His, or Her, wings.

And so we are called to follow it thusly as well, and gather all under our wings, regardless of their experience with or as parents.

Happy Mother's Day,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "A Tempest in Their Sky"

Matthew 23:29-39

“How terrible it will be for you legal experts and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 You say, ‘If we had lived in our ancestors’ days, we wouldn’t have joined them in killing the prophets.’ 31 You testify against yourselves that you are children of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, complete what your ancestors did. 33 You snakes! You children of snakes! How will you be able to escape the judgment of hell?

 34 Therefore, look, I’m sending you prophets, wise people, and legal experts. Some of them you will kill and crucify. And some you will beat in your synagogues and chase from city to city. 35 Therefore, upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been poured out on the earth, from the blood of that righteous man Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. 36 I assure you that all these things will come upon this generation. 

 37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You who kill the prophets and stone those who were sent to you. How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that. 38 Look, your house is left to you deserted. 39 I tell you, you won’t see me until you say, Blessings on the one who comes in the Lord’s name. (Common English Bible)

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

The photographer’s images range in mood and palette, from black and white to vivid colors, but the common element of each image is that it is a photograph of a house of worship of some sort, a church or monastery or synagogue, and so on.

And the photographer who is taking these lovingly painstaking portraits is, of all things, an atheist.  Why?  Because our images of faith and worship of a God not his still moves him.  I’ll let him—a Canadian photographer named Mark Schacter, explain from a piece of his from CNN’s BeliefBlog:

With the wonderment of an outsider, I try to understand the seemingly incomprehensible (to me, at least) pull that faith exerts over so many people’s lives.

As a photographer approaching this mystery, I am confronted by what might seem like a contradiction.  Photographs capture what can be seen, and yet faith is often invisible.

But even if personal faith can’t be seen directly, there are some tangible traces of its existence, and that’s where I point my camera.

In particular, I photograph houses of worship whose bricks and clapboard, stained glass and steel are often the largest and most visible manifestations of religious faith…

But is it the building itself that gives the space a sacred quality, or is holiness derived from the devotions of worshipers, present and past, who have occupied the space?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question.  But I do know this: Even an ardent atheist can look at a house of worship and see the signs of an invisible human longing that is common to us all, believer and unbeliever alike.

Far be it for us to believe that any atheist is incapable of such longing—indeed, it is a longing that Jesus spoke of and with, for Jesus was not speaking just to the converted; He was not preaching only to the proverbial choir.  Jesus sought to change minds and hearts, which means He surely valued the attention of nonbelievers as much as, if not more, than believers.  But do we do the same today?  Or do we tend to paint skeptics and nonbelievers--of whom I am sure we all know many and actually probably count as friends, family, and neighbors--as some sort of bogeyman?

This is now not as much a new sermon series for us, to go with the reality that Easter really isn’t a new season: we’re now four weeks removed from 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, two weeks ago 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.  After skipping a week, we read from Gibran’s version of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which Gibran assigned to the voice of the apostle Andrew, and this week, we arrive at Jerusalem itself, as Jesus preaches and Gibran, through the voice of Joseph of Arimathea (a member of the Sanhedrin but a follower of Jesus), transcribes:

“Nay, I shall not command Syrian flesh against Roman.  But you with my words shall wake that city, and my spirit shall speak to her second dawn.

My words shall be an invisible army with horses and chariots, and without ax or spear I shall conquer the priests of Jerusalem and the Caesars.

I shall not sit upon a throne where slaves have sat and ruled other slaves.  Nor will I rebel against the sons of Italy.

But I shall be a tempest in their sky, and a song in their soul.

And I shall be remembered.

They shall call me Jesus the Anointed.”

And indeed we have, in calling Jesus since time immemorial the Christ.  “Christ” isn’t Jesus’s surname—it isn’t as though his Nazareth Pre-K teachers could find his name under “C” on the class roll sheet.  No, “Christ” comes from the word “charism,” which, in the ancient Greek, means “anointed.”  When we say “Jesus Christ,” we are literally saying, “Jesus the Anointed.”

As He is.  Which we well know, for the man was baptized after all, and baptism is itself an anointing, springing from the older Hebraic tradition of pouring oil upon priests and kings alike.

But Jesus is different.  His anointing is unlike any of ours, or any of anyone else’s, ever.  Nobody before or since as had their baptism marked with the voice of God Almighty proclaiming, “This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased.”  I mean, we hope that God is pleased with us, as we are indeed God’s children even as Christ is the one true Son, but…well, if the one true Son’s diatribe, both according to Matthew and according to Gibran, is any indication…maybe not so much.

Let’s unpack Matthew first: this is the tail end of a chapter-long rant against the scribes and Pharisees for a multitude of sins: tithing dill, mint, and cumin while neglecting the weightier matters of the law such as justice and mercy and faith; devouring the homes of widows; taking for themselves all the seats of honor at any and every occasion, and so on.  They act, in short, as though they themselves are God’s chosen and anointed, not Jesus, and it shows.  It shows to everyone who has ever had to interact with them, because they are treated so blatantly unfairly and heartlessly.

Which is why Jesus weeps for Jerusalem.  It isn’t enough to simply take that second half of today’s passage, that reflection on the Holy City, in a vacuum.  All of chapter 23 leads up to this lament, it is why Jesus is in such grief: Jerusalem time and again chooses to follow not the authentic prophets of God, but the false teachers who fatten themselves up on what they take from the common people.

The normal recourse against such unjust treatment would be to go to war…it is, for instance, how we got our independence from England after all.  But it is, of course, not what Jesus envisions, and that is where Gibran’s voice, and the voice of our atheist photographer, come in.

“You with my words shall wake that city, and my spirit shall speak to her second dawn,” says Gibran’s Christ, and that ends up being a prophecy fulfilled by the words of Peter that convert thousands in Jerusalem on Pentecost Day, which is coming up just three weeks from now.

With Christ’s words, we too are called to continue to wake our cities and our towns from their slumbers, and when they do awaken, to share with them the spirit, the essence of Christ: to love God and love each other, but also to be furious and demanding in response to moments when love is not shown and displayed to one another.

And, if we are honest, what Jesus shows to the scribes and Pharisees isn’t really love, at least in the sense we tend to think of it—He’s basically cussing them out by this point in Matthew 23.  But what He does do—is doing, really—is speaking not merely to the scribes and Pharisees but to all who are listening to his screed, us included.  And to the rest of us, it ought to be heartening that someone else, God’s Son, in fact, is going to the mat for us against those who would hate us and do evil to us.

That’s what churches are meant to represent, that is what houses of worship can be.  The word “sanctuary” literally means “safe place,” and we need to be a safe place for those who are hated, for those to whom evil is done, and to in turn rebuke the evildoers.  Great houses of worship that do this are revered, images of them are remembered, and stories of them are handed down.

Do you not think that our atheist photographer, despite his skepticism, feels safe at church, even if only to photograph it?

May we, then, speak to nonbelievers similarly, that they may feel safe in our own spiritual home, rather than in the spiritual homes of the scribes and Pharisees who would seek to condemn them first, and love them a distant second.

Here, though, that order is, and must be, always reversed.  Then may our love, and the love of God through us, seep through the condemnations and color anew their experience of the one true God.

And in so doing, may that continue in the spirit of how Khalil Gibran ends this particular poem:

These are the things He said outside the walls of Jerusalem before He entered the city.

And His words are graven as with chisels.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

May 3, 2015