When Jesus is not all the world to me

John 18:33-37
Then Pilate entered again the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “You are the king of the Jews.”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or did others say this to you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people and the high priests handed you over to me. What did you do?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would be fighting in order that I am not handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
Then Pilate said to him, “So, then, you are a king.”
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. Everyone whose being is from truth hears my voice.”

There are times when I wish that Jesus was NOT all the world to me. You know that old song—“Jesus is All the World to Me”? There are times when I wish that wasn’t true. This is a test, folks. I’ve got to do a lot of preaching to redeem myself from that beginning, don’t I? I just thought I’d get your attention at the beginning of the sermon today.

Now what would make me say such a thing? Well, let me tell you about a dinner I once attended. In 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I went to my first Ramadan feast. Now that doesn’t mean I had a feast at the Ramada Inn. It was a Ramadan feast. I was director of the Wesley Foundation at UVA at the time and the Islamic Society of Central Virginia had rented the dining hall to hold a feast to recognize the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

To tell you the truth, if it hadn’t been for the noticeable absence of pork and beans and fried chicken, I would have been tempted to call it a potluck dinner, but no, this was a Ramadan feast and the Muslim community from all around Charlottesville, which is not very large, gathered in the dining hall. There was rice and fruit and garbanzo beans, and somebody brought burritos—it was quite a spread.

When we hear about Ramadan—IF we hear about Ramadan--we often hear it called a month of fasting, but dedicated Muslims only fast during the daylight hours as a way of rededicating themselves to God and strengthening their spiritual practices. Each day before sunrise they eat a meal and then, as soon after the sun sets as is possible, they eat a date to break their fast, offer prayers to God, and then eat a meal, which is often pretty big. During the month they are also supposed to give to the poor and read through the whole Qur’an. What if Christians read the whole Bible through every Lent? Actually that’s not a bad idea, is it?

Well, I was invited to attend the dinner. I accepted because it seemed to me to be an important thing to do. As a university community we had been trying to build some bridges with the Muslim community after September 11. Right after the attacks we held an interfaith vigil on the Lawn. Later we had an interfaith dinner of Methodist, Presbyterian and Muslim students and talked about what it means to be a person of faith and an American. We recognized that we lived together and didn’t know much about one another and so were trying to remedy that.

But here’s where I found myself wondering about Jesus that night. The head of the Islamic Society welcomed the two or three of us who had accepted their invitation for dinner and thanked us profusely for coming. He should have been on the Chamber of Commerce because he praised Charlottesville up and down for being a great place to live, and a safe place to live for Muslim people, and there were people from all over the Islamic world there. Then he said, “I’m not going to talk much, because I want you to talk with each other at the table. But please ask questions and we will try to answer them. We must learn about each other if we are going to live together.”

So I did. I asked about how the Muslim calendar worked and what Ramadan was about. They asked me about the United Methodist Church and what happened at the Wesley Foundation. Then I started talking with a man who used to be a Baptist but who had become a Muslim, and if you can imagine what a Baptist Muslim would be like, well, that was him. He was a tall man, born in the U.S., wearing a turban and using phrases like, “You can’t just talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk, too.” And he was ready to get down to brass tacks. He wasn’t going to gloss over the issues.

He said, “Now Muslims believe in Jesus. We believe that he was one of the messengers sent from God to show us the way. He was a prophet the same way Moses was a prophet. What we don’t believe is all that stuff about Jesus actually being God. But what I’m challenging my Christian friends to do is to show me how Muslims are not doing the things that Jesus taught, because I believe that the things Jesus told us to do are the same for Christians as they are for Muslims. We’re supposed to love, we’re supposed to worship one God, we’re supposed to dedicate ourselves wholly to God. You can be a Christian or a Muslim and believe that.”

Now here’s where the “Jesus is All the World To Me” stuff comes in, because I think there is a lot to be gained by Christians and Muslims studying their scriptures together. When we go the Bible and they go to the Qur’an, we both find stories about Abraham. We both find stories about David. We both find stories about Jesus. We both find a God who demands holiness from the chosen people, who is a jealous God who wants us to love the one true God and the one true God alone. There are many ways things that it seems that we share.

But Jesus is not all the world to Muslim believers. What they say about Jesus and what we say about Jesus are very different. And, here’s the scary thing: I sometimes suspect that Jesus is not all the world to Christians. Oh, we sing those words and many other words like them. “Take the whole world, but give me Jesus.” “Victory in Jesus, my savior forever.” “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Are these ringing any bells? But I sometimes suspect that for all of our lip service to King Jesus, our lives look like they are more at the service of Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Phil or Rachel Ray. Oh boy, it’s getting personal today. When the pursuit of lower interest rates or higher living standards turn our labor into meaningless work, when we anesthetize ourselves with video games or alcohol, when we look forward more to lunch at the Burger King than to worship with Christ the King—there is a problem! And maybe you think I’m just preaching to you here. This is me I’m talking about! ‘We’ is me and I know that the challenge is to claim the Christ that makes Christians Christians.

What do I mean by that? Well, take a look at our bible passages this morning. In 2 Samuel we read about David recalling God’s promises to him. God has promised to build a kingdom, a dynasty, from David’s descendents who will rule over the people. It’s a promise that has resonated with God’s people ever since. There has never been a time when we have not been looking for a Messiah to come and bring redemption to the people.

That was certainly true in Jesus’ time when he appeared before Pilate. The charge against him was blasphemy against the promise God had made to David, though it had a political edge for Pilate. Pilate represented the empire. Pilate represented the real power of the age. The only king the Jewish people should have been recognizing, in his eyes, was the Emperor.
But the local leaders bring this wandering religious teacher in before him claiming that Jesus was a threat to the empire. Pilate looks him over and seems to be amused. “You are the king of the Jews,” he says. “What could you have done to earn this title?”

But Jesus seems to be living on another plane. He’s not from around here. He talks about a kingdom not of this world. The real threat to Pilate and the empire is not from his followers, who would be fighting if the kingdom were of this world. No, the real threat to them is their failure to see the kingdom coming in their midst – something far more threatening to the way things were than they could even imagine.

“So you are a king then,” Pilate says.

Jesus answers, “You say that I am king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. If your being is from truth, you will hear my voice.” It’s tough when you bring truth into the equation because it makes everything else small talk. Just like my Baptist Muslim friend did. We suddenly had to talk to each other from our hearts.

Paul talks about this in his letter to the Colossians. He knew that the new Christians he was establishing across the empire were going to have to talk from their hearts and talk about truth and it was not going to be easy. When Paul gave a pep talk to the new Christians in Colossae and he did it, not by telling the Colossian Christians how much they had in common with the people all around them, but by reminding them of the thing that made them different. They had not found salvation by discovering that Jesus Christ was a nice model hero that we could tell stories about and seek to emulate. They had not found salvation because Jesus was a good storyteller and a good teacher who was a real hit at parties because of the pearls of wisdom that fell from his lips. They had found salvation, their lives had been turned upside down, their world had been rocked, their paradigm had been shifted, they were thinking outside of the box because Jesus was God. Check that—Jesus IS God!

Paul is not going to let them explain away who Jesus is. He just piles on the descriptions. Jesus is the “visible image of the invisible God.” Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation—through him everything in heaven and on earth was made.” Before all things, he is, and everything in the whole cosmos holds together because of him. He is the head of the body that is the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead. Through him God was pleased to reconcile all things in earth and heaven to Godself. You want the first light and the last word—it’s Jesus. You want the gospel truth and the final edition—it’s Jesus. You want the preview and the postlude—it’s Jesus. When Paul Harvey talks about the rest of the story, who do you think he’s talking about? It’s Jesus!

Now how do you take that Jesus to a Ramadan dinner? When Christians talk about Jesus this way, when we talk about Jesus this way, (because even when we’re not sure we’re being Christian, we do talk about Jesus this way), when we talk about Jesus this way we are staking a claim about the way the whole universe hangs together. We are saying that we have found one point in the whole great big cosmos, we have found one place in history, one moment in time, where God was revealed, where our salvation was assured, and where we began to understand who we are and what we were always meant to be. That one point of all the many others we could choose is in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

And because we look to this point and this person, we have something unique to offer the world. It’s uncomfortable at times. That’s why I said at the outset that there are times when I wish that Jesus was NOT all the world to me. I would like to reach out across that table to my Muslim brother with the Baptist language and say, “Yes, we are the same. Can’t we all just get along?” But if I go to the Ramadan table without my belief in Jesus, then I have nothing to offer to the conversation. Because if Christians have hope, it is a hope in Jesus Christ. If Christians work for peace, it is because they have seen God working for peace and reconciliation in Jesus. If Christians love others, even their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters, it is because they have seen sacrificial love in its most complete form as God poured out love for us on the cross.
The truth of the matter is that I cannot be reconciled to my Muslim brother unless I hold on to the Christ Paul talks about and expect the kingdom God promises David and believe that that kingdom entered the world in Christ.

But listen, that’s not even the best news. That’s not even the best thing that there is to say on this day, this Christ the King Sunday. Did you know that’s what this is? Christ the King Sunday. The last Sunday in the Christian year. The day when we look ahead to Christ’s final revelation as the ruler of all creation. Next week, we’ll be back to Advent and we’ll start to think about babies and shepherds and other smelly things that are the mundane stuff of Christmas. But today…oh, today I’m dreaming of a cosmic Christmas when we let it all hang out and we declare that Jesus Christ is not just a baby in a manger, but the ruler of the universe.

And why does it make a difference that we use this language for Christ? Why do we use all of these grandiose titles and high-falutin’ imagery? Isn’t it all a little…abstract?

Oh, friends, this is the best news of all. This is good news because the world is falling apart but the kingdom is just coming together. If we had any illusions that history had finally come to an end when the Berlin Wall fell, if we thought that there was nothing that could really threaten our sense of national security ever again, if we were deluded into thinking that a rising stock market and a comfortable future were birthrights we were all entitled to—if we thought any of those things, we learned again on September 11 that the world is still a dangerous place and that we are still vulnerable people. We learned in this awful war in Iraq and Afghanistan that struggles and trials and ideologies that threaten death and destruction continue. We have been shaken in ways we didn’t know we could be. We have grieved and worried about things we never worried about before. The world is not a place and we are not people who can say, “Every day and in every way we are getting better and better.”

But Christians have a different timeline. It’s a timeline that has a destination and we are all on a journey toward it. Sometimes we forget where we’re headed. Like when you go to the grocery store without a shopping list and find yourself wandering through the aisles saying, “Now what did I come for?” That’s us sometimes as we fall away from the promise, as we fall into sin, as we get confused and misdirected. But the journey set out for us in Christ has a destination. This train is bound for glory, this train.

So when we realize that this train is the one we’re meant to be on. When we recognize that our liberation, our salvation has already been won for us in Christ before we were even aware that we needed to be freed. When you see that the whole universe has its meaning tied up in Christ, well, things just look different. It’s not that we don’t grieve because we do--deeply. It’s not that we don’t hurt because we are often in deep pain. It’s not that we don’t believe in the reality of evil because it is at the heart of our story—there is no Exodus without slavery in Egypt and there is no resurrection without crucifixion on the cross—the powers of this world do have their day.

But we work for a new day and a new kingdom because we know that death can never have the last word. We work for justice because we know that violence cannot break the power of love. We work for peace because we know the Prince of Peace will throw down every sword. We proclaim hope because our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We search for truth because the truth will set us free from every bond that keeps us from God. We worship because we know that all creation praises God and that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And we go to Ramadan feasts and talk about truth because we know that even though it makes us uncomfortable, Christ’s final prayer was that we should all be one—from every tribe and race and nation. And as we are reconciled to each other, we are reconciled to God. And as we are reconciled to God, we are reconciled to each other.

There is a welcome sign outside a dilapidated town in the grasslands of southern Oklahoma. I saw it one time on a trip Suzanne and I took in seminary. The sign is pockmarked from where some folks shot it up with a shotgun some boring night on the prairie when they didn’t have anything better to do. You can barely read the name of the town and you can barely read the words right under it. But the words say, “Welcome to Henrietta, Oklahoma. The best is yet to come.”

When the world seems darkest. When the world is falling apart. When you are tempted to say, “Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?” In those times Christians say, “The best is yet to come.” And we say it with straight faces. And we believe it. And we stake our lives on it because Jesus is all the world to us. Jesus is all the world to me. My life, my help, my all. Jesus is all the world to us. Thanks be to God.

Birth Pangs

Mark 13:1-8
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Teacher, look how wonderful are these stones and how wonderful these buildings!"
Jesus said to him, "You see these great buildings? No stone will be left upon another stone; all will be destroyed."
As he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, "Tell us, when will this be and what sign will there be when these things are about to be accomplished?"
Jesus began to say to them, "Watch that you are not deceived. Many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the one,’ and many will be deceived. But when you hear of wars and rumors of war, don't be alarmed; it is necessary that this happens, but it is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famine. This is only the beginning of the birth pangs.

The little Methodist Church in Ahuatapec, Mexico is just a humble little concrete and brick building on the outskirts of town nestled into a cornfield. Ahuatapec itself is not much of a town, maybe 5,000 or so when the men come back for the weekend after working in Veracruz or Chiapas harvesting sugar or fruit or whatever is in season. The town sits on the high desert plains of the state of Puebla. In the distance in every direction you can see massive purple volcanoes topped with snow. To the east there is the Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in all of Mexico at 18,000 feet above sea level. To the north is La Malinche, named after the Indian woman who became a guide and mistress for Cortez when the Spanish came to conquer Mexico in 1519. And to the west there is Popo, usually belching out plumes of smoke that can be seen for hundreds of miles.

But they are all in the distance. Ahuatapec itself is just a spot among the maguey plants and cactus that line the desert floor. It's a small place, dominated by a large Catholic Church in the very center of town. To be involved in the life of the community in Ahuatapec is to be Catholic. You can't be mayor without being Catholic. It's difficult to run a business without being Catholic. And to be Methodist is to be in the minority, to be on the outskirts of town, to be an outsider in your own community.

Despite that fact, for ninety years there has been a Methodist congregation meeting in Ahuatapec. I got to go there – twice - on mission trips to help build the new church, which is the first church building the Methodists have ever had. It doesn't have gold filigree and fine art like the Catholic Church in town, but it is better than the cramped quarters of the Sanchez family’s one-room house, which is where they met for ninety years.

It was during my first trip there in 1994 that I had my first encounter with the tensions between Catholics and evangelicos--the generic name for all Christians who are not Catholics in Mexico. We were holding church services in the new church, which was just a shell of a building with open windows at that time. As I was trying to preach in my strange mixture of bad Spanish and English, a man in a van selling ice cream came to the front of the building. He parked right in front of the church and began playing music over the loudspeaker on top of his van at an incredibly high volume.

Now it was good music. I like Mexican music and I’ve been known to play it from time to time. Earlier in the week as we were digging trenches for the surrounding wall of the church we had loved hearing the music from this man's van because it meant ice cream and a chance to take a break from the work. But this morning it meant something else.

There was no question of him being able to sell ice cream at this spot. The church was in a cornfield, a long way from any other house. The ice cream man had come to play music in order to disturb our service, in order to let us know that the town had taken notice of what had happened and was not entirely pleased with what we had done. He stayed for perhaps five minutes, during which I just had to stop preaching. Then he drove off slowly and I had my first experience of what my Methodist brothers and sisters felt each day in that community.

A few years later I took a trip to another city in central Mexico with a group of college students. Again we worked with the local Methodists who were a distinct minority in the town. Petra, one of our hosts, told me about growing up in the town and how when she walked down the streets, Catholics passing by in cars would put their hands to their foreheads in the shape of a ‘C’ to signify that they thought she was cursed.

I don’t tell these stories to talk about how bad Catholics are. Far from it. In this sanctuary this morning we are people who are from Methodist, Catholic and many other Christian backgrounds. Somehow, here, we have managed to find a unity in Christ that churches in Mexico still haven’t found. But these experiences for me were the first to tell me what it was like to be singled out because of my faith. In Ahuatapec and Cortazar, and more so in other parts of the world, to have and claim the Christian faith can be a dangerous thing. The persecuted Church is not just something we read about in the Bible; it still exists and there is much we can learn from those who still suffer for their faith.

Have your ever suffered for your religious beliefs? Has there ever been a time when you felt that your very life was threatened because of your faith in Jesus Christ? Most of us have never known that sort of insecurity. We live in a land which may ignore Christians and which may downplay its Christian heritage, but it is, by and large, not a land where Christians are persecuted. Rightly we celebrate the work of Jefferson and Madison in guaranteeing freedom of religion. But it is not so in most of the world.

Believe it or not, Americans and Europeans are now a minority of the world's Christians. Most Christians are not white and they do not speak English. Most of them live in the Third World and most of them are poor. It has been estimated that in China, only about 2% of the population is Christian, but even if it is only 2% that would amount to over 26 million Christians.

What is also true about the majority of Christians is that they live in countries where freedom of religion is not constitutionally guaranteed and in many cases they live with the real threat of persecution. In China religious organizations that are not officially registered with the government are subject to regular harassment, particularly around the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. Amnesty International reports that those caught participating in services considered illegal are often detained or fined, the usual fine being the equivalent of several months’ income. Imagine the impact it would have on your family if you lost three months income just because you came to church this morning.

In Sudan we hear about the genocide and warfare in the Darfur region and in the southern parts of that country. What we often don’t hear is that there are religious dimensions to that conflict. As the majority Muslim population has instituted Shari’ a law, they have also begun to exterminate the Christian population. Christians are sometimes sold into slavery to Muslims. The government policy there mandates the forced conversion of anyone who is not Muslim. In Iran, Christians, Jews and Baha'is all face violent crackdowns and death because of a government policy forbidding conversion to a religion other than Islam.

In Palestine, there has traditionally been a large minority of Palestinian Christians who held high positions of leadership. As much as 15% of the population was Christian as recently as 50 years ago. Today that figure is 2%. In Bethlehem, where Jesus was born and which has had a large Christian population, Christians are leaving in droves. The new wall of separation that the Israeli government is building goes right through Christian neighborhoods, cutting off people from their businesses and families. Palestinian Muslim gangs produce faked documents claiming that they are the legitimate owners of Christian lands and push the owners out. Ibrahim Shomali, a Christian restaurant owner, is selling out and leaving. He says, “Here is where Jesus was born and over there, across the hill in Jerusalem, is where he was crucified. We Christians now feel like we are on the cross.”[i] If the projections hold, there will be almost no Christians in the land of Jesus’ birth in fifty years.

Even in nations that are allied with the United States, Christians are endangered. In Saudi Arabia, which receives so much money from our nation for its oil and so much military aid, there are severe restrictions on Christian worship. It is officially outlawed and only marginally tolerated. Christians are arrested and lashed in public if they practice their faith openly. Bibles are regularly rounded up and burnt. Christians are arrested and tortured and can be legally executed if they have converted from Islam.[ii] Much of the wealth that the nation has accumulated in the past few decades has been used to support schools and mosques that advocate the expansion of the kind of Islam that has produced these laws.

There have been cycles of persecution like this before. In 1915, across the Middle East, but particularly in Armenia, there were devastating genocides that wiped out Christian cultures that had survived since Roman times. It’s also true that we can find times when Christians used their positions of power to persecute and kill Jews and Muslims. But what we face today is grim and one-sided. Philip Jenkins, who wrote a book on the changing face of Christianity says, “In the world as a whole, there is no question that the threat of intolerance and persecution chiefly comes from the Islamic side of the equation.”[iii]

We saw this played out recently when Pope Benedict, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, quoted a remark from a medieval Turk that was interpreted as disparaging of Mohammed, the founder of the Muslim faith. In the violence that followed, the people who suffered were Palestinian Christians, whose churches were burned, a Somali Christian nun, who was murdered, and followers of the faith everywhere who suddenly wondered about their own safety in Western, religiously-tolerant societies. The Pope made his apologies, though I don’t think he should have, but he has said that he has a clear agenda for his upcoming trip to Turkey next week. He is seeking reciprocity. He wants to listen to Muslim demands for greater sensitivity to their faith, but is insisting on stronger protections and rights for Christian minorities.[iv]

Why is this important to us? Why should we spend time on this question? It cannot just be because we want to give thanks in this Thanksgiving time for this land and the freedoms we enjoy here. It’s a little crass to give thanks because we don’t suffer like our brother and sister Christians in Pakistan.

No, it’s important because we need to hear the challenge to us. Jesus says that we will hear about wars and rumors of wars, and indeed we do. There has not been a generation since Jesus’ death that hasn’t heard about these. But in the times we live in, the particular challenge we face is being faithful to the God we know in Jesus Christ, being open to those who do not know this God, and struggling (and that is the word) to create societies in which Christians and all peoples are free to practice their faith without fear of persecution.

It is also our challenge to create societies where we not only tolerate other religions but to engage them and confront them when they become violent and demonic. It would have been right for Muslims in the 12th century to question what Christianity had become if it could produce things like the bloodthirsty excesses of the Crusades. There are still areas where Christians should be challenged to examine their faith and practice. It is just as right for us to question what Islam has become when followers produce, in its name, horrors like terrorist cells, suicide bombers and beheading videos. We need some real, hard conversations about what it means that we live together and how it is that we shall do that peacefully and with full respect for each other’s existence. We need to love our neighbors enough that we will not ignore the distortions that lead to evil and death. And we need to recognize when we are putting others, and ultimately ourselves, at risk by not responding directly to threats. We need to respond as Christians, but we need to respond.

The words attributed to the German theologian Martin Niemuller following World War Two are just as appropriate to us today. Niemuller was credited with that saying, "When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic and therefore, I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church and there was nobody left to be concerned." When we stand with those who suffer and refuse to let them sink into oblivion, when we speak their names to those in power, we bear a witness that one day we may wish others would carry for us.

Coming into Jerusalem with Jesus near the end of his ministry, followed by great multitudes of people who were proclaiming Jesus as king, the disciples were convinced that their journey would end in glory. Standing among the great buildings of the capital city, in the shadow of the Temple, one of Jesus' disciples got carried away and said to him, "Teacher, look how wonderful are these stones and how wonderful these buildings!"

But Jesus would have none of it. He knew how fragile the institutions of the world are. He told the overawed disciples that the time was soon coming when not one stone would be left upon another, and within forty years his prophecy had come about. The Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem laid waste. And Jesus went on to warn the disciples about what their future really looked like. It was to be a time of persecution for them when they would be dragged before councils and hated because of his name. There would be war and famine and all manner of troubles. But these, Jesus said, were only birth pangs--like the pains of labor signaling the birth of new life.

We are blessed to live in a place like this, but the persecuted witnesses of the past and of today have seen the birth pangs in a way that we haven’t. Christians in the Sudan share the same gospel we do. They eat the same communion meal we do. They are baptized just as we are. But when they talk about the hope of the future, they see it in a very different way.

Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was murdered for his witness to Christ in a time of civil war in his country in 1980, said, "A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth--beware!--is not the true church of Jesus Christ." That’s a challenging message for a privileged church.

In the book of Hebrews, the writer asks those in the church to "recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated" [Heb. 10:32-33]. So what's it going to be? Are we going to be partners? Or shall we be forgetful? Forgetful of them, of Christ, and ultimately of who we are?

Thanks be to the God of the poor and the God of the suffering. Thanks be to the God of the persecuted, the God of Jesus Christ.

[i] “Christian population falls in Holy Land,” Brian Murphy, Associated Press Religion Writer, 11/11/06. Referred to hereafter as AP.
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians, Wikipedia
[iii] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], p. 170.
[iv] AP

Mite-y Giving

Mark 12:38-44
As part of his teaching, he said, "Watch the scribes from a distance. They like to walk about in long flowing robes and to be greeted respectfully in the market. They like the best seat in the synagogues and the best spots in banquets. They eat up the homes of the bereaved and pray with great show. They will receive the greater judgment."

As he was sitting there in the sight of the collection box, he watched how the throng threw money into the box. Many rich people were throwing in great amounts. But a poor, bereaved woman came and threw in two small coins, which were worth about a cent. He called his disciples and said to them, "I tell you the truth: This poor, bereaved woman has given more than all those who are giving to the collection box. All of them gave out of their abundance, but she, from her poverty, gave all that she had, all she had to live on."

They were trying to put Jesus on the defensive. It was near the end and this itinerant Jewish teacher had finally shown up in Jerusalem, the place where all prophets go eventually to have their mettle tested. The tension was high. The crowds had gathered. Jesus had talked of a coming day of reckoning, though his disciples conveniently ignored his warnings about his imminent death. Everyone expected a showdown or a throwdown or some sort of satisfying resolution to this challenge Jesus presented.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we make our decisions based on comparisons? For us it might be Allen vs. Webb, or Drake vs. Kellam – and the whole of their political programs hinge on how we view them as people. Can we trust what they say? Do we know who they are? There was more than a little of that going on in the Temple the day Jesus came to town. It was Jesus vs. the scribes, Jesus vs. the Sadducees, Jesus vs. the Pharisees. Who was the more believable representative of God’s message? Whom could the people trust?

Jesus’ opponents were more than happy to provide the opportunity to compare. The chief priests, scribes and elders were the first to hit him up with a challenge, questioning his credentials. “Who gave you the authority to do these things you do?” they asked. Jesus artfully avoided their question by asking them to weigh in on John the Baptist, another prophet much beloved by the people and much reviled by the leaders. When they didn’t answer, Jesus refused to do so, too.

The Pharisees and Herodians were next with a question about taxes. Should good Jews pay taxes to a pagan Roman emperor or not? Again Jesus stumps them with a good line. “Give to the emperor the things that are his, and to God the things that are God’s.” How were they going to say that anything wasn’t God’s? They were stuck and they knew it.

The Sadducees followed with a ridiculous question designed to catch Jesus in the controversy over whether there was a resurrection of the dead. A scribe tried to enlist him in a conversation about which commandment was the greatest. And at the end of it all the critics were silenced. Jesus had handled himself so well that no one dared ask him another question.

But Jesus wasn’t done with the comparisons. There in the crush of the Temple he turned to those listening and put in a dig at the scribes, the most learned men of the faith. “Keep watch on what the scribes do,” he said. “They like to wear the latest fashions, they like to be noticed whenever they go out in public, they eat up the fortunes of widows, they like the best seats in the synagogue and the primo places at feasts. They will receive the greater judgment.” They will receive the greater judgment. Greater than who? Than the Pharisees? Than the Sadducees? Than the ordinary people? Than anyone? Jesus just leaves that hanging.

He’s standing there in the Temple and he’s in full view of the collection box. People are coming and putting in lots of money. Seems like there was no problem with giving, particularly among the rich. Was this an everyday occurrence? Was Jesus seeing the normal pattern? Or did folks know that Jesus was there to watch? Was there a wink and a nod to the crowd? Did they come to be seen giving? We really don’t know.

But Jesus had no problem making another comparison because in the midst of the crush, there came a poor, bereaved woman. She went to the box and put in two small coins – mites they are called in some translations, not worth much more than a penny. Was she destitute because of the scribes who, Jesus said, “eat up the fortunes of the widows”? We don’t know. But Jesus sees a lesson here. He calls the disciples, a much smaller group for a much more intimate story. “You see that woman, that widow,” he says. “She has given more than anybody else. They all gave out of their abundance, but she has given out of her poverty. In fact, she’s given all that she has to live on.”

The disciples were good at holding their tongues here. They had learned. Jesus had a habit of saying these impossible things. When he told them once that it was easier for a camel to be saved than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, they had balked. “Well, who can be saved then?” they had asked. And Jesus had pointed them to God. “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible,” he had said. Now that Jesus was saying that the model for giving was this woman who had given everything she had to live on, they just let it go. Or perhaps they had learned, after traveling so long on the road with no visible means of support, that what had once seemed impossible wasn’t really.

I believe that Jesus was trying to get their attention. It would have been easy for them to forget, in the midst of the crowds and the controversy and the expectations of the scene, who they were and who Jesus was. Having arrived in the center of it all, it would have been easy to be captivated by the rich, the learned, the powerful, the movers and the shakers. But the comparison Jesus wants them to make is not between him and them, but between this destitute, bereaved woman and them. It is her deep poverty, her essence, her very life and livelihood that Jesus points to. That is what she had to offer.

The Iona Community, which I quote so often, has a prayer that goes, “Help us not to offer you offerings that cost us nothing.” That’s what all the others were putting into that box. Offerings that cost them nothing. Offerings that may even have been to their advantage if the right person saw them. Offerings that did not begin to touch the deep joy and deep need to give that was implanted in their souls, that is implanted in each of us and which we sense every time we are touched at our core –when a baby is born or a sunset draws us in with its glory. Only the widow was giving from that place that knows no half measure can suffice to give thanks for this life we have received from God.

It’s that kind of gratitude that lies behind the biblical model of tithing. It was the scribes Jesus talked about who demanded the first things – the first seat at the table, the first seat at the synagogue. But the first things are really those that belong to God. The first tenth of our income, the first priority on our time, the first claim on our lives. I have never yet met a person who regretted practicing the discipline of tithing or who found it a burden. People who give a tenth of their income to the work of God are generally those folks who seek out more ways to give. What they have discovered is that giving the first things, and not just from the excess, from their abundance, unlocks a generous spirit that is the spirit we are all meant to have.

We’ve got youth away on a middle school retreat in Lynchburg this weekend and I’m glad for that. Many of my formative Christian experiences happened at youth retreats and in camping experiences. One of the most important for me was an event called Youth Active in Christian Service, or YACS, which took place in the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1980. The spiritual leader for the week was a guy by the name of Tim Whitaker, whom some of you will remember. He was serving this church at the time he led the event.

The idea of the week was to bring together youth and send them out each day to work at mission projects around the Shenandoah Valley. We didn’t get to choose where we were going; we were just sent. I was sent to Waynesboro to work in a program with mentally challenged adults. It was way outside the realm of my experience and I was nervous about being there. But over the course of that week I discovered that what the people I worked with had to offer me was far more than I had to give. What they gave me was contact with a deep joy. It was a joy I didn’t know at school, where I was doing what all adolescents do – I was struggling to find an identity and trying on a lot of masks to hide my insecurity. What I found in the adult socialization program was a rare gift – the opportunity to be myself and to share God’s love and to feel God’s love without judgment.

When I came back home at the end of that week, I found a similar program in Orange and for the next two years I spent just about every Thursday night helping out. It didn’t hurt that the director of the program had a really beautiful daughter who was about my age, but you know that didn’t work out. What did work out was that I got to know Charles and Margaret and Helen and so many more people who blessed my life just by letting me spend time with them. Each week we would shop for food together, cook together, eat together and spend time developing skills that would help them live with some dignity and independence. And along the way I found a calling that took me outside of myself. I found a part of me that needed to give. I was so into it that I had a T-shirt made that said “Thursday Night Fever”. And when I trace the story that led me into the ordained ministry, that story goes right through a little cinderblock building on the outskirts of town where I learned what God is doing. And let me tell you, I’m discovering it all over again whenever I join our Archangels class.

My colleague in ministry, Deborah Lewis, wrote a really beautiful sermon on giving recently and she captured so well what God is doing. “We are given into this world,” she said, “and into each other’s lives for this purpose: to love with all that we have. To boldly bear the image of the God who created us and calls us to be the family who gathers at [the communion] table. To move through our lives with open hands, not clenching what we already have, but hoping to extend our hands in service and invitation to others.”[i]

To love with all that we have. That’s the comparison Jesus asks us to make. To ask ourselves continually if the generosity we are displaying in our lives and in our giving is adequate to the love we have received from God and from others. Of course, we will discover that it isn’t. And the people I admire the most are those who find a way to continue to open up as they mature through life. It is so easy to clutch what we have as we look at the very real threats we face. But there are those whose lives seem to grow ever larger as they discover the ability to give, even from the very substance of their lives.

We’re going to celebrate the life of one of those folks here tomorrow. Barbara Tankard is someone who had that largeness of spirit that never stops giving. That’s why her death has come so suddenly to so many of us. She was giving right to the end. But as we gathered on Thursday and in these past few days to prepare for tomorrow, what I heard over and over was the joy people felt at the opportunity to be with Barbara and to give to her. She had some great friends who learned to share with her in the joy of giving.

I need to end this sermon with a challenge, because it feels like a challenge to me, as it must have felt like a challenge to those disciples who heard Jesus’ words in the Temple that day. Where are you being called to give from the substance of your life? How does your financial giving reflect the life you have been given? How does your openness to the people around you reflect the welcome you have received from the God who redeems us all? What more are you being asked to give? Because the great tragedy of our age is not that people are overstretched and feeling that their resources are insufficient to the needs they face. The great tragedy of the age is that we do not see the resources that are right in front of us and we have not been giving from the right place. In the end giving is not a matter of the wallet or the pocketbook – it is a matter of the heart.

Thanks be to God.

[i] “Generous Living,” sermon delivered 12/5/06 at Wesley Memorial UMC, Charlottesville.

Denying Death Its Due

John 11:32-44
When Mary came to the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell before him at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews gathered there together weeping, he was convicted in spirit and disturbed within himself. He said, "Where have you put him?"

They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus wept. So the Jews said, "Look how he loved him." But some of them said, "Couldn't this man, the one who opens the eyes of the blind, have kept this one from dying?"

Jesus, once more convicted in spirit, came to the tomb, which was in a cave, and a stone was placed over it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone!"

Mary, the sister of the one who had died, said, "Lord, by this time it will stink, for it's now the fourth day."

Jesus said to her, "Didn't I tell you that, if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
So they took away the stone. Jesus raised his eyes and said, "Father, I thank you that you heard me. I knew that you hear me always, but I spoke on behalf of the crowd so that they might believe that you sent me." Having said this, he called out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"

The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped with a facecloth. Jesus said to them, "Set him free and let him go."

Once a rooster got me in trouble. Actually it was a chicken, a 6-foot-tall singing chicken. But I remember it as a rooster and this is why: One of my best friends in seminary was a guy by the name of Wayne Harberson. It wasn’t clear why we became friends, but we definitely did so. Wayne was significantly older than I was, almost my father’s age. He came to seminary after serving for many years in human resources and the department of psychology at the University of Houston. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but now I realize how much he had to downsize his life to come to seminary.

A few weeks ago I mentioned what our apartments looked like at Perkins School of Theology. One room efficiencies built right after World War II with Murphy beds that pulled down out of the wall. We downsized from a small apartment to go to one of those rooms. Just down the hall from us Wayne was trying to downsize from a house into one of those rooms.

We were fast friends even though we came from very different worlds. Many nights, Wayne would go out to dinner with Suzanne and me and Laurence and Helen, our other good friends whom we just visited in Scotland. Later in the night we’d take a study break for worship in the chapel and then head up the street to a frozen yogurt shop. And in those mundane moments as our friendship developed we learned a lot about each other. We learned how differently we thought about theology and how similarly we felt about the church. I even learned that Wayne’s real first name was Joyce, though he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that.

But I was going to tell you about the rooster. Wayne’s birthday was April 15 and by that time in the year we loved Wayne enough that we wanted to do something big for his birthday. So we concocted a plan to have a singing telegram visit him during our introduction to Bible seminar class. This was the big required class that met three times a week. 75 students in Selecman Auditorium.

The teacher that day was Dr. Bill Power, a great storyteller and scholar who was also a very imposing figure. He had a good sense of humor but he would rarely crack a smile. I talked with Dr. Power before class to let him know that we had arranged for this singing telegram to come at the end of class and hoped that he wouldn’t mind if he came in as he wound up his lecture. And, oh, by the way, the telegram was going to be delivered by a singing chicken. Dr. Power never actually told me it was going to be O.K., but he didn’t say ‘no’ either, so we went ahead and arranged for the telegram. Wayne didn’t suspect a thing.

The lecture that day was on Job and Dr. Power was talking about the passage where Job says, “I know that my redeemer lives” [Job 19:25]. It’s a lovely passage and one that inspired a great hymn by Charles Wesley all about the consolations of God’s salvation in Christ. But Dr. Power was making the point that Job was not asking for consolation when he utters that phrase. The word that is translated ‘redeemer’ is a Hebrew word ‘goel’, which means something like a blood avenger. What Job wants, in the face of all his calamities, is someone who will take up his cause and avenge his losses. He doesn’t want a consoler, he wants a goel.

So that’s what Dr. Power was talking about when he suddenly looked up and stared at the back of the auditorium. I could tell he was trying to ignore whatever was back there and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew what it was and there were still 30 minutes left in the class period. Finally he could ignore it no more so he turned to me and said, in his sternest voice, “Mr. Joyner, I think your rooster is here.”

Well, it wasn’t a rooster, it was a chicken, but I wasn’t going to correct Dr. Power. And the chicken took the cue and came on in. He was a born performer and he wasn’t going to be content to sing “Happy Birthday” and go on his merry way. Oh, no. He had to tell a few jokes – a few risqué jokes. And sing a few extra songs – a few risqué songs. All in the middle of Bible class! Even though the class loved it, I was dying, trying to melt into my seat which was right next to Wayne and the chicken. When the bird finally left, Wayne stood up in place and said, “I know that my goel lives!” He took it so much better than I did.

Wayne must have been a great teacher and administrator at the University of Houston, but he was an even better pastor. He was born to do it. And I learned so much from watching him and from arguing with him and from sharing so many meals with him. We were with him as he met Diane, who became his wife and joined him in that tiny room in Martin Hall. And we kept in touch every so often as he went to serve churches in Palestine and then in Houston, Texas. He was loved everywhere he went and he helped so many people see Christ.

If this sounds like a memorial tribute, it’s because it is. A month ago I got the word that Wayne was ill and two weeks ago I caught up with him by phone in a hospital in Houston. He was in good spirits and was very glad to hear from me, but he told me he had liver cancer and it didn’t look good. It was an awkward phone conversation. I couldn’t get the words out. And I didn’t know what words to say.

So I planned to take a brief trip out to Houston last Thursday. Just overnight. Just to see him. But I think Wayne must have thought that was a pretty extravagant and needless thing for me to do. Early Thursday morning, with his family all around and before I left my house, he died and his long struggle ended. Tomorrow, at his old church, they’re going to have a great celebration of his life.

So now I come to preach about our text for this All Saint’s Sunday. It’s a familiar gospel passage. Jesus received word that his friend Lazarus was dying while he was away in another part of the land. He decides to wait a few days before going to see him. In the meantime, his friend dies.

This is not the part of the passage that seems most important to me, despite the parallels I can pick out. It seems to me that Jesus had very different reasons for waiting. He seems to have known that what he was going to do with Lazarus was going to be momentous – it was going to change everything. What he was going to do with Lazarus was going to show the people once and for all who he was and what sorts of power he possessed over death.

But it didn’t change the response of Mary, Lazarus’ sister, when she saw him walking up the road to the tomb. She knew his power. She had placed all of her hopes in him. She fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had only been here, my brother would not have died.”

Jesus looks at Mary and sees her weeping. He looks at the others who were gathered together with her to share her grief. The Bible then says something very interesting about Jesus. Some translations say that Jesus was “deeply moved in spirit and troubled,” which implies that Jesus was moved by the emotion around him. Shortly after this we have the shortest verse in the Bible, which says simply, “Jesus wept,” and the combination of these verses is used to suggest that here we have the ultimate expression of Jesus’ human nature. In fact that’s what some of the mourners say. They look at Jesus’ tears and say, “Look how he loved this man.”

But I think that’s a wrong reading. The words that describe Jesus’ inner state are not about feeling compassion and being moved to mourning. What they’re about is disturbance and anger. They describe someone who is passionate and convicted. You could say that they describe someone who looks upon the crowd and is fed up with what he sees. Some want to see a human Jesus who cries with compassion. But others want to expose him for a charlatan. They’re there wagging their heads and saying, “This guy makes blind people see, doesn’t he? Why couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”

So Jesus marches on to the tomb and again we are told that he is “deeply moved in spirit” and again the Greek words are the same. They indicate conviction and even anger. Jesus doesn’t waste time with niceties; he tells those assembled to take away the stone that had been placed in front of the cave tomb. Mary protests, “Lord, think of the smell! It’s been four days.” Four days. Jews believed that the spirit of a person stayed near a person for three days. After four, there was nothing left but the stench.

Jesus turns to her and says, “Didn’t I tell you that you would see the glory of God?” They take away the stone. Jesus raises his eyes and speaks aloud to God, making it clear that this miracle is all about helping the crowd to believe who he was and what power he represented. And then he cries out, with conviction in his voice to do what he knew he was going to do all along, “Lazarus, come out!”

There is dead silence in the air. There must have been. The shock of those who couldn’t believe this man’s audacity to call forth a decaying corpse from the dead. The suspended belief of those who wondered if maybe, maybe… And then he walks out. Still bound by the cloths that they had placed on him four days before. And Jesus says, “Set him free and let him go.” Death was denied its due and the die was cast for all that was to come.

Now here’s the parallel I draw between this story and the story of my friend, Wayne: I believe that what moved Jesus to tears was not the grief that we feel when someone we love dies. Jesus loved Lazarus. Jesus called him friend. But he knew before he ever faced the tomb that he would see him once again.

I believe that what agitated Jesus and what moved him to tears was the range of his vision. Jesus was God. John, the gospel writer, tells us that right up front. Jesus, the Word, was with God in the beginning and all things were made through him. The Word was God and without him nothing was made. So Jesus knew the world in its intended state and sees the world as it shall be when all things are restored and made right. There is beauty throughout and God’s purposes cannot be defeated, even by death.

But what must have broken Jesus’ human heart was the fact that we couldn’t see what he saw. We live in broken time and our eyes are often blinded to the incredible beauty of the world by the pains we suffer and the griefs we know. Our experience of God is mediated through lives that know soaring joys but also deep losses. We can lose sight of what God is doing and we can feel empty even when we ought to know a creation full to overflowing with the glory of God.
So when Jesus looked at Mary weeping and the crowds who were so divided and deluded in their expectations of him, he was moved with the deep conviction that the world must know what it is. The people must know who they are. And all creation must know who he is – the God who never lets death be the last word. And knowing all this – knowing how beautiful the earth is and how tragically it has been deformed by the effects of sin and death – knowing completely what we know only in part – Jesus wept.

I want to weep like that for Wayne and for all the other saints we remember on this day. I want to weep, not out of self-pity or out of my own sense of loss, but out of the deep joy of knowing that we live in a creation with so many shades of complex beauty and so many colors of light and life. I want to weep in confidence that all these lives that have touched mine are not lost or ended or destined to remain a memory. I want to weep knowing that the ones who have shown me God’s love are caught up in that love and carried on by that love into a future I can only imagine and dream and hope and glimpse.

There have been times in these last few days when I have wept for other reasons. My vision is not like Jesus’ and I can be overcome by the darkness at times. But I have also found that I have had moments of deep, inexplicable joy. Well, it would be inexplicable if it weren’t for the witness we have in Jesus Christ, the Risen Savior who conquered death and invites us to life. It would be inexplicable if it weren’t for the bread and the wine on the communion table that speak of life broken and yet continuing into eternity. It would be inexplicable if it weren’t for saints that show us in their lives how we have this treasure in earthen vessels. The beauty and the joy and the love I feel would all make no sense at all if I had not lived with saints like my friend Wayne.

You’ve got that joy, too. I trust that and know it. Give thanks to God for the saints who helped you see that. Thanks be to God.