Be Careful What You Ask For

It’s not an easy thing to be a disciple – to be a follower of Jesus. You’ve got to do a lot of things that seem backwards. You’ve got to forget things that you’ve taken to be true all of your life. Things like – “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Things like – “Always look out for number one.” Somehow being a disciple changes all that and it’s not easy.

How do we know it’s not easy? Well, just look at the first disciples. When you read through the gospel of Mark, a clear question emerges which has vexed the best biblical scholars over the years: Where on earth did Jesus find such a hopeless bunch of disciples?

I’m not trying to be unkind to the first apostles here. They obviously ‘got it’ eventually, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But they have absolutely no clue what is going on throughout the entire book of Mark. And that’s true not only of the lesser-known disciples like Thaddeus, Bartholomew and Fred. [You didn’t know there was a disciple named Fred? See how little known he was?] It’s also true, and maybe particularly true, of the big 3 that they didn’t know what was going on. And who were the big 3? Peter, James and John.

Let’s just run down the list here, shall we. Chapter 6 – Jesus walking on the water. It’s just after the feeding of the five thousand and the disciples have gone on ahead in the boat while Jesus stayed on the mountain to pray. A rough storm comes up, Jesus walks out to the boat on the water, the disciples think he is a ghost, Jesus gets in the boat and the storm ceases.

Now after all that drama on the high seas, what do you think impresses the disciples most? Mark 6:51-52 says, “They were astounded because they did not understand about the loaves.” Walking on the water, calming the storm – they could handle that, but what they really want to know is, “What was that bread trick all about?” They still don’t get it two chapters later when Jesus wants to feed the four thousand. Having seen it all before they can’t understand how Jesus is going to feed the crowd with seven loaves and a few fish.

Chapter 9 – Jesus tells the disciples about his coming crucifixion and the first response of his group is to argue with one another about who is the greatest. Jesus is very calm about this conflict and he sits them down and he tells them two things: First from Mark 9:35 – “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Sound familiar? The second thing he tells them in verses 36 and 37 is that they had to welcome children if they were to welcome God and follow him.

Well, it’s only shortly thereafter that the disciples send the children away from Jesus and are rebuked for it and only shortly after that that the disciples become very concerned because Jesus says it will be hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. What does this tell us? The disciples had very short memories and they kept having the same conflicts over and over.

Which brings us to the passage for today. It’s getting late in the story now and Jesus has finally turned toward Jerusalem – the place where the final scene in this drama will play out. As he walks on he’s being followed by this group of disciples who are no more in the picture now than they have ever been. The disciples, the text says, are amazed – probably still trying to figure out how to get a camel through the eye of a needle. And the other followers are afraid, but then again people are afraid all through the gospel of Mark – the disciples in the boat, the woman healed of the flow of blood, the woman at the tomb when they find it empty. At any rate, it was not exactly an informed and courageous group that was setting off on this final journey.

So Jesus decides to stop and talk with the twelve disciples and, for the third time, he told them what was going to happen. This time he makes it more explicit than any other time. He says, (and here I’m reading from Mark 10:33-34), “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again." This is the first time he’s told them about the abuse he’s going to suffer before being killed. Before he’s simply said that he would be killed.

This time, when they hear it, the disciples don’t react with anger or disbelief as they have in the past. In fact, they don’t seem to respond at all. Maybe they’re getting it! Maybe they finally understand what this journey to Jerusalem is all about! You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

James and John now come to the front. Poor James and John – convinced to the last that Jesus was going to lead them to power and ambitious to be right beside Jesus at the head of the nation. They ignore Jesus’ dire warnings and all the stuff about the first shall be last. They come to Jesus and say, in verse 35, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” That’s not presumptuous, is it? It’s kind of like the prodigal son asking his father for half the inheritance without waiting for him to die, isn’t it?

Maybe the brothers thought they had earned this special treatment. After all, Jesus had asked them to go up on the mountaintop for the transfiguration when he appeared with Moses and Elijah and his clothes were transformed into a blinding white and God’s voice spoke from the sky. The only other disciple who got to be there for that was Peter. They also got to go along with Jesus into the synagogue leader’s home when Jesus raised a little girl from the dead. They felt they had a special relationship with Jesus.

“What do you want?” Jesus asks.

“When you come to power, let us be your right-hand men. Well, actually, let us be your right-hand and left-hand men – one on each side.”

Jesus shakes his head and says to the brothers, “You don’t know what you’re asking.” And they really don’t. These are the disciples we’re talking about, remember. So Jesus goes on to ask them if they can drink his cup. Now what could that mean? What is the cup that Jesus is going to drink? It’s his suffering and death.

In Mark 14:36 Jesus is praying in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest. He has taken three disciples along with him. Can you guess who? And even though he asks them to stay awake, Peter, James and John fall asleep while he is praying this prayer. He prays, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” That’s the cup he’s offering to James and John. And the baptism? It is the baptism into his death. As Paul says in Romans 6:3, “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”

That’s what Jesus knows is ahead – not the kind of glory that he disciples expect – but something much harder than they can imagine. And at the end, when Jesus’ glory is finally revealed on the cross, who does get to be on his right and his left? None of the disciples. Jesus is crucified between two thieves and they are the ones who are present as his glory is revealed.

James and John know none of this, though. So when Jesus asks them if they can drink this cup and receive this baptism they say, “We can. We are able.” Jesus accepted their commitment but goes on to tell them that what they ask for is not his to grant.

So the brothers go back to the other disciples. The reunion did not go well. You remember that this is the same group that was just arguing about who was the greatest. For the brothers to now go back to the other disciples, having sacrificed their relationship with them in order to secure a pledge from Jesus of special treatment – well, you can guess how that went over. I guess if the disciples had really been listening to Jesus and had accepted their status as servants of all – servants even of these upstart brothers – they wouldn’t have gotten upset. But they did, and so Jesus has to come settle the dispute.

“Look,” he says, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” The word ‘servant’ in Greek suggests a household steward, someone who might wait on you at the table. We get our word ‘deacon’ from this word. But Jesus doesn’t want them to get the impression that they should stop there. It’s not enough to be a servant with some status. They’ve got to go lower. “Whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of all.” A slave has no status. No legal rights.

Jesus goes on to point to himself as a model. “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve,” to use his status in an unconventional way, “and to give his life as a ransom for many,” to give up his status entirely in order to win the whole world and to save our lives.

Those eager, ambitious, foolish disciples – ready to jump to the glory seat without counting the cost or reckoning the purpose of the journey. So slow to learn, so slow to understand – and yet they followed, in wonder, fear and hopefulness.

A lot like us really. We are a people who often find ourselves following after Christ without any concept of what we’re doing. Oh, we made a commitment. We chose our course by saying, “Yes, Jesus is Lord,” but did we really have any idea what the journey would entail? Have we really given any thought to what might be required of us if we took this journey seriously? Do we yet know or understand how our own personal dreams of fulfillment are tied up in this Christian enterprise or what it will mean for us to find ourselves if the most prominent symbol for finding ourselves is a cross?

Jason Byassee, who teaches leadership courses at Duke Divinity School, wrote an article this week about David McClure as a model of leadership. McClure played on the Duke basketball team until last year and that is a very prestigious group to be a part of. Duke wins basketball games and stars from that program go on to be stars in the NBA. But David McClure was not a star. In fact, Byasee says, most folks probably won’t even remember his name.

What McClure did, though, was invaluable to his team. He was all over the court. He was the guy they put on the opponent’s best player to guard. He was the guy you could count on to do everything he could to get a rebound or a loose ball. He was the guy who set up his teammates so that they could make the shots that would end up on the highlight reels. One of his teammates said, “Somebody who doesn’t watch us closely won’t understand how important he is…He’s a glue guy. He does a little bit of everything.”[i]

Byassee says that glue is an interesting word because it’s also the word that St. Augustine used to describe the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is “the glue, or the love, between the Father and the Son. Likewise the Spirit is the One who glues us creatures to the Son and so to the Father.” Is it too much to say, then, that if we are to imitate the work of Jesus and the work of the Spirit in this world, that it will be something like the work of glue in binding people together rather than breaking them apart? Maybe, Byassee suggests, we need more “invisible, sticky leaders” who will lead by being servants…being glue.[ii]

What was the great failure of the disciples in this passage we read for today? I believe that is was their failure to count the cost of discipleship and the cost of discipleship is love – a love that gives itself to the world in service…a love that does not neglect the importance of our relationships with others…a love that reorders the values of this world for those who see it through the eyes of love.

In short, the cost of discipleship is a love like Christ’s, which neither forsakes the world for other realms nor is content to leave the world as it is. And if we are fools like James and John who foolishly answer Jesus’ question with the ignorant reply, “We are able,” the journey to the kingdom does not take us directly to a glory seat but instead leaves us at each other’s feet as servants of life in a land of death.

In the shadow of the cross we sense the light of resurrection. In the mystery of Jesus’ self-giving we find the brilliance of God’s love. You can be glue. Thanks be to God.

Mark 10:32-45

They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, "See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again."

They came to him – James and John, the sons of Zebedee – and said to him, “Teacher, we would like for you to do for us whatever we request.”

He said to them, “What would you like for me to do for you?”

They said to him, “Appoint us to sit, one on your right and one on your left, in your glory.”

Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Can you drink the cup that I drink? Can you be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”

They said to him, “We can.”

Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink and the baptism with which I am baptized will be your baptism, but to sit on my right or my left is not mine to give, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

When the other ten heard this they were angry with James and John. Jesus called them over and said to them, “You know that the ones who seem to rule over the Gentiles lord over them and the great exercise authority over them. It should not be so among you, but rather whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you will be slave to all. For the Son of Humanity did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

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[i] Greg Paulus, quoted in “Featherston: McClure is Duke’s ‘Glue Guy’”, GoDuke.com, 2/4/2009, http://www.goduke.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=4200&ATCLID=3662455.

[ii] Jason Byassee, “Invisible, Sticky Leaders,” Call and Response Blog, Duke Faith and Leadership Insititute, 10/15/2009, http://www.faithandleadership.duke.edu/blog/10-15-2009/jason-byassee-invisible-sticky-leaders.

My Life is an Open Book

Up in the mountains there was a family that had an outhouse out back on the property. There was a little boy in the family who hated using that outhouse. It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter and it smelled horribly all the time.

So one day the boy decided he was going to do that outhouse in. The creek that ran by the outhouse was up and he thought he could make it look like the work of the flood if he found a way to push it in. He found an iron bar and he went out to the outhouse, slipped the bar under one corner of the house and with one huge push he turned it over into the creek that ran right by it. The outhouse floated on away.

That night his father came in and told him they were going to have to take a trip together to the woodshed. There was always bad news for the little boy. The little boy asked why and his dad said, “Son, somebody pushed the outhouse into the creek today. Was it you?”

The boy ‘fessed up but he added, “I read in school where George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree and his father didn’t punish him.”

“Yes,” the boy’s father answered. “But George Washington’s father wasn’t in the cherry tree when he chopped it down.”[1]

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. But you and I know that as human beings we can resist confession even when we know it’s good for our souls. We don’t want to admit that there are things we have done that need to be brought up for air and light. We don’t want to believe that being honest with ourselves and others is necessary. We’re pretty content believing that we don’t need to change. We may recognize that inside there is turmoil and discontent, but somehow we get the idea that other people or outside forces are always the source of that discontent when, in fact, confession would reveal that most of what needs to change is in here.

This is also true for nations. Following the decades of enforced segregation in South Africa under the system of apartheid, there were a lot of folks who called out for retribution and pay back – to bring justice on behalf of the black and colored citizens of that country who had been locked out of anything resembling equality. Others felt that a process of sorting out rights and wrongs would be so massive and cause such dislocation that there ought not to be any looking back at all. Just keep moving forward.

What the country did, though, was to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People were invited to come and stand before the commission and to testify to what they had seen, what they had experienced and what they had done. The results of the commission were mixed. It allowed truth to be told but it did not always lead to reconciliation. But for some of the people who came, just being able to tell their story was a powerful act of confession.

In Capetown, South Africa, a man told the Commission the story of how he had been shot in the face by the police during a political gathering in one of the settlements. As a result he lost his sight. “He also told of how, two years later, the police beat him with electric ropes, suffocated him, forced him to lie in an empty grave and tortured him in other ways.”

When he was asked how he felt after having delivered his testimony, he replied, “I feel that what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn’t tell my story. But now it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story.”[2] Confession – revealing what is deep and most true about us – for individuals and for nations can be healing – like getting sight back.

Why am I talking about confession this morning? It’s not just because we’ve been talking about it this week in the wake of David Letterman’s confession of moral failings on national TV. That was a strange sort of confession. It was brought about because of the threat of extortion. It was done in front of his studio audience and it was not really clear if he was doing the whole bit as a monologue. Even Letterman himself called it creepy.

No, the reason I want to talk about confession is because I believe that’s where we go when we pay attention to the passage from Hebrews this morning. “The word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

That’s quite a statement. It says to me that if we are really confronted with a new life in Jesus that it is not just some pleasant little endorsement we are making. We’re not just choosing Jesus in the same way that we choose a brand of clothes. I might choose a certain designer or a certain label because I want the brand to speak for me – to tell other people that I have a certain kind of taste or certain values. My clothes, rather than my words or actions will speak for me. I might still be an insecure, hopelessly uncool person, but my clothes will tell you something different.

That’s not how it works with Jesus. Jesus doesn’t just want your endorsement – Jesus wants your life. Jesus doesn’t just want you to put a fish on your car and go on as if nothing else has changed – Jesus wants you to fish for people. Jesus doesn’t just want you to go to church on Sunday – Jesus wants you every day of the week. And it’s because Jesus has a two-edged sword.

That’s a violent image, isn’t it? The word of God is more cutting than a two-edged sword, piercing down to the joint and the marrow, laying us open so that there is nowhere to hide. Because, you see, Jesus knows what that if you are going to be transformed it’s got to be a change right down in the center of your life, where soul meets body and where your intentions, your thoughts and your desires are born. That raw stuff that is at the center of us all – the stuff we don’t want to acknowledge, the stuff we don’t want to pull out for others to see, the stuff that we keep hidden away, stuffed inside – that’s the stuff Jesus knows needs to be changed because it’s our true self. And no matter how much you try to paper it over or put fish stickers on it or dress it up in your Sunday best – that stuff is going to be around your soul like a millstone until you bring it out through confession.

When you think about it we wouldn’t want that word of God to be anything less than a two-edged sword would we? A word that left us just the same as we have always been is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t confront sin and woundedness is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t speak truth to us, that didn’t liberate us, is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t open us up to something greater than ourselves so that we could experience real redemption, real reconciliation, real forgiveness, real transformation – this is no word of God at all.

The theologian Karl Barth says:

An imagined Word of God, …however well and truly imagined, as a mere dream…remains outside the real world and existence of [human beings], leaving the other subjects in the sphere of our world and existence unmolested, but also unillumined and unconsoled in the depths of their creaturely existence. But now God has become [hu]man, and therefore Himself a creaturely being, in His Son, and in this human world of ours His Son lives on in the form of His instruments and their witness. So His power in this testimony is also a concrete power at the heart of this sphere, consoling and healing, but also judging and assailing.^[3]

Do you hear what Barth is saying here? A word of God that only consoles us without also judging our lives is not worthy of being called God’s word. A word of God that only heals without assailing us is not worthy of the name. We want a God to turn the world upside-down because look at the world!

And here’s the good news – God has sent the word that the world needs for its salvation. The word is Jesus Christ. As Hebrews says, this is our great high priest – God’s son – who came and lived among us. Who knows what our weaknesses are like because he was one of us. He was tempted like we are, though he did not sin. And because he is priest he can make the offering that needs to be made.

You remember the sacrificial system that God had established in the Hebrew scriptures. In order to atone for the people’s sin, the priest would take an animal and sacrifice it on an altar. He would take a knife and pierce the animal until it was laid open before God. The priest would do this over and over because the problem of sin was never “solved.”

Now, Hebrews says, Jesus has become the priest who offered himself as sacrifice. Once and for all. He has gone to the cross and laid himself open for the worst that could be done to him. Pierced in his side. And victorious because ultimately God is victorious over sin and death. Ultimately God wins. And God is merciful and God loves you and me and this world so much that God does not want us to remain as we are. God wants us to win, too. To be made new. “When anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation; everything old has passed away. See, the new has come” [2 Co. 5:17].

The folksinger Nanci Griffith has a song called “These Days My Life is an Open Book.” In the song she is talking about raw and desolate her life is as she looks for love in this world. She sings this song as if to a lost lover who now only exists as a memory.

“These days my life is an open book,” she sings, “missing pages I can’t seem to find. These days your face in my memory is in a folded hand of grace against these times.” She’s singing about a lost lover but what if that lover is God? What if that lover is the one who knows who she is…who has walked beside her in this world and who knows her story is not a tale of loss but a promise of grace “against these times”?

What if your life were an open book with a story being told in its pages? And what if that story were being written and rewritten by a God who loves you and who wants to make you whole? What if there is a home for you and me? And what if we go there together? To go with boldness and openness before the throne and to let our lives be remade in the likeness of our brother Jesus? What if? Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 4:12-16

For the word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

So then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the son of God. Let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses - he was tested in every way that we are only without sin.

So let us approach the throne of grace with openness so that we can take hold of mercy and find grace for help in time of need.

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[1] Adapted from http://www.jokesaboutfathersday.com/fathers_day_joke_690.html.

[2] Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Vol. 5, Ch. 9, http://www.polity.org.za/polity/govdocs/commissions/1998/trc/5chap9.htm.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.2, [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956], p. 676.

Jesus: A Gift for the World

Earlier this week, my great aunt Bess sent me a little package of things she’d been going through. There was an old book and a pamphlet and several newspaper clippings about my uncle Jim Kitchen. I’ve talked about my Uncle Jim before, I believe. He was the brother of my uncle with the rather unusual name of William Nicholas Alexander Amber Robert Thomas David Jingling Poker Fiddlestick Stumptoe Kitchen. We called him Uncle Nick. But if Uncle Nick got the eccentric name, Uncle Jim got the eccentric trophy.

Uncle Jim lived in Blackstone, Virginia and he was a preacher and a teacher, among other things. By the time I got to know him, though, he was retired and living in a house on one of the main streets of town. According to these newspaper clippings he was well-known to the neighborhood because he would sit out on the front porch of the house and greet people passing by on the sidewalk. He had a long, snow-white beard that had tobacco stains in it. And he was generally pretty unkempt, which befitted an old preacher living on his own.

Inside, his house was a maze of old books and papers stacked floor to ceiling with a narrow path through them. It was a good representation of what his mind was like, too, a treasure trove of stories and biblical reflections and family history, all kind of strewn about in no particular order. As a child, I used to love to go to family reunions and talk to Uncle Jim for exactly that reason, but I don’t think many folks knew how to take him. He was part of our family, and a glorious part, but not many of my family members would have chosen him to be our representative to the rest of the world.

So what does the Christian family do with Jesus Christ? I get the feeling that we’re not really sure what to say about Jesus. We’re comfortable with Jesus being the great teacher who welcomes children and tells wonderful parables. We like what he does with the disciples and the way he tweaks the sanctimonious religious leaders for their hypocrisy.

That we can deal with. But when we make exalted claims for who Jesus is…when we talk about him as someone more than just a human being who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine…when we talk about him as the Son of God…then it can start to make us nervous. Because this Jesus starts to make a claim on us and on the world. To believe in this Jesus is not to just admire a great person from the past; to believe in this Jesus means to change and to be different and to be transformed. What will the neighbors think if we believe in this kind of Jesus?

The book of Hebrews in the Bible will not let us get away with a Jesus who isn’t divine. Jesus may be modest about his claims about himself in the first gospels. He may tell people who know who he is not to tell anyone else. He may treat his identity as a secret at times, but the Christians community that followed Jesus couldn’t say that. After walking through the death and the resurrection they knew that Jesus was more than another figure on the scene of history. Jesus was the one that all Israel had been waiting on. Jesus was the one the whole earth had desired.

So Hebrews uses some very exalted language to describe Jesus. It starts out with the note that in former times God spoke to us through the prophets, and the people of Israel could name them off – Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah – they had all tried to bring a word from God to tell the people that God had not forgotten the covenant with Israel…that God had not forgotten what he had called them to do…that God was expecting them to live up to the covenant and that a new day was coming. Now, however, God had spoken in a new way. Now God has spoken through a son.

This is when Hebrews starts piling on the titles so you can’t miss that Jesus Christ was different. “Christ is the appointed heir of all things.” An heir inherits all that a parent has and has authority over it. That’s what Jesus does.

Christ is the one through whom God made creation. Imagine that. At the beginning of all things, Jesus was there and everything was being made through him. It’s not that he just appeared on the scene in 1^st century Palestine. His history is as long as God’s history. This reminds us of the opening to the gospel of John where it says that “he was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” [John 1:2-3]. We may have seen God in a new way in Jesus, but Jesus was there at the beginning.

“He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being.” Another way to put that is that Christ is the exact representation of God's essential nature, the one who most reveals God. Christ sits at the right hand of God, above even the angels. Christ is the pioneer of salvation. He’s the one who went there first, who blazed the trail that leads to our salvation.

These are incredible titles we have placed on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. They point to a figure so unique and so powerful that the only proper response is worship and praise. Christ is at the center of what our life in the Church is all about. Yet people can live without Christ. And they do. I’m beginning to think that even the Church feels like it can live without Christ.

If it’s true that we can’t believe in a Jesus like this without changing then maybe that’s our biggest stumbling block. Because we are beginning to despair that we have the power to change. We can't even change ourselves, much less this messy world that we live in. We find ourselves wrapped in a complex web of turbulent issues where Congress can't even seem to agree on the colors of the flag, much less a way out of our health care crisis. We find ourselves trapped in personal disasters where our relationships and our jobs and our health all seem to be spinning out of control. We wonder where we’ll find the power to change and we certainly don't see what Christ has to do with it.

If Jesus is just a man, then why worship him? On the other hand, if he’s so exalted and raised up above us, who are we to him? We might say with the psalmist that Hebrews quotes here, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you should care for them?” [Psalm 8].

The author of Hebrews goes on and reminds the readers that Christ, even though he was raised to glory, also knew the suffering of death and the reality of human life. Hebrews continues to point to Christ's incarnation as a sign that God really wanted to enter our limited lives and for that reason we can call Christ "Brother" as well as "Savior."

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting in a cell in Nazi Germany in the final year of World War II, he started to write a series of letters wondering what Christianity would look like in years to come. Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and theologian who had worked underground during the rise of Nazi power. He had been very discouraged and disillusioned by the response of the churches during this period. When the Nazis demanded that the Christians put Nazi emblems up in the churches, they did it. When they demanded that the churches preach the racial superiority of the Aryan nation, they did it. When the Nazis demanded that the churches swear allegiance to Hitler, they did it. Bonhoeffer looked at the scene and to him it was confirmation that the churches didn’t believe what they preached. If they had really believed that the things Hebrews says about Jesus were true that would not have been able to live as if they weren’t…as if allegiance to Hitler were more important than allegiance to Jesus…as if salvation came through the Nazi party than through the cross of Jesus.

Writing to a friend, Bonhoeffer said, “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”[i]

So Bonhoeffer began to believe that maybe it wasn’t true that people couldn’t live without God. The world around him certainly seemed to have developed without any real reference to God. They had effectively sent God to the sidelines. Science had explained away a lot of the things that people used to turn to God for. Secular theories of government had taken God out of politics. People related to one another apart from any religious moral code.

So what was Christian belief going to look like? Bonhoeffer said that it wasn’t enough for religion just to be brought in when people talked about death or sin – those troubling areas where society is a little more open to a religious explanation. “It always seems to me,” says Bonhoeffer, “that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not only on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.”[ii]

So how do we put God in the center? How do we proclaim Christ in a world that seems to have no need of him? What do we do to say that Jesus is not just hanging out on the edges waiting for us to trip over something that makes no sense and then looking for divine guidance? What do we do to say that Christ changes everything?

Maybe the answer is in creating Christ-shaped places in which to welcome the change God wants to bring about. When we were in England it seemed like everywhere we went there were ruins of abbeys and monasteries. And they were all designed exactly alike. After awhile we got really good at walking into a ruin and saying, "OK. The altar was over there, the dining hall up there, the bathrooms were over here and the dormitories were here. Great let's go."

But one of the most affecting monasteries we saw was one near York, where we lived, called Fountains Abbey. A lot of it had survived including one place that really told me what monastic life was like. Near the dining hall, or refectory as it was called, there was a huge fireplace, large enough to place a tree for burning. It was the only place in the entire abbey that was heated and the monks were not allowed to be in this room except for a small portion of the day unless they were ill.

Now this is a stone building and England is cold in the winter. I can see in my mind's eye a young monk entering the abbey and facing that first cold winter. I see him in his rough wool habit huddled by the stone wall separating him from that warm, glowing fire - trying to soak up the little warmth that seeped through. I can imagine him trying to cope with the monastic schedule which would have him waking up at 2 in the morning for worship, followed by study in the cloister and work in the gardens before a simple breakfast. I can see him wondering about the possessions and family he left behind.

Yet in this new world, so different from the one he left behind, the monk encountered one figure in a very dramatic way, and that is the figure of Christ. The world of the monasteries was a Christ-shaped world that offered the power to change lives, both for those few who could take the vows and for those many who depended on the hospitality and service the monastics could provide.

In the Methodist Church we're not in the business of monasteries anymore, but we do have a calling to create a space in which people can find transformation. Even though we live in a world that thinks it can get along just find without Christ it is not true that we live in a world that is satisfied with itself. As my old Christian Education professor, Dick Murray, used to say, "A high-tech world demands a high-touch Church."

We are called to create a "touching place" where the castaways of a throwaway society can come to touch and be touched and to find the power to change. The Church can be a different space, a unique space in a world that values style over substance. But we can only be unique if we believe that we are, and we are only unique in what we have to offer for healing - and that is Jesus Christ, who is all of those fantastic things that Hebrews says he is, pioneer of salvation, representative of God, and heir of all things, yet who is also one thing more - our brother, who knows firsthand the lives we live and the deaths we die, who endured the suffering of crucifixion and death, to show us that God is not just above us but also with us.

This meal we come to share today is an invitation. It is an invitation from Christ himself to discover that Christ-shaped space where we can be transformed. We come to remember this Jesus of Nazareth who was one like us and yet like no other. We come to celebrate what God did through him then and what God continues to do now. We come to share with people of all times and all places who also eat this meal - saints who once walked this path and those in many different countries who walk it with us today. Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

In former times God spoke in many and various ways through the prophets, but in these last days God has spoken to us through a son, whom God appointed heir of all things, through whom God also made the worlds; he is the radiance of God's glory and the representation of God's essential nature and he sustains all things by his powerful word. Having made purification for sins, he was seated at the right hand of the Majesty in the high places, having become so much superior to the angels as he inherited a name more excellent than theirs.

For God did not subject the order which is coming, about which we are speaking, to angels. Now someone has testified somewhere,

"What are human beings that you remember them,

or the children of humanity that you visit them?

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;

with glory and honor you have crowned them,

subjecting all things beneath their feet."

For in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As for now we do not see all things under their subjection, but we do see Jesus, who was made for a little while lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honor through the suffering of death, in order that, by the grace of God, he might know something of the death we all face.

For it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should perfect the pioneer of their salvation through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one, and for this reason he is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,

"I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters;

in the midst of the congregation I will praise you."

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[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Letters and Papers from Prison,” excerpted in Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 2, ed. by William C. Placher, [Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1988], p. 163.

[ii] Ibid., p. 164.