More Than a Carpenter

So I was at a retreat with a group of college students at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center in downtown Richmond. It was back when I was in campus ministry and I had taken a group of students who were living together in intentional Christian community to see how another intentional Christian community lived. Richmond Hill is in an old Catholic monastery high on the top of Church Hill in Richmond. The nuns moved out about 25 years ago and an ecumenical group has run it ever since.

If you go there, they will put you up in some of the old cells that the nuns used to use. Over the doors there are the stenciled names of Catholic saints. There’s the Ignatius room, the Augustine room. Well, I was staying in a very small room at the end of the hallway. The only furnishings in the room were a desk, a chair, and a small twin bed. I fell asleep with the chair right up against the bed.

In the middle of the night I woke up with a start. I had a very strange feeling that someone was watching me. I opened my eyes and there, straddling the chair and looking at me, was the King. That’s right. You know who I mean. Elvis was sitting on that chair. It was such a vivid image that when I actually woke up awhile later I had a hard time convincing myself that it was only a dream. And who knows?

I don’t know what that vision meant. At the time I took it to mean that I was really hungry for some evidence of God’s power and my brain did that crazy thing brains do in dreams and gave me a king. But it was during a low period in my life and, strange as it was, it did tell me that God was present.

Today, though, we talk about the real king. It is the last Sunday in the Christian year. Next week we begin Advent, which is the first Sunday of a new Christian cycle, and we will start moving toward Christmas. The scripture lessons will take us back to the promises of the Messiah’s coming and then to the beginning of Jesus’ story in a manger.

The Christian year always ends with this day, though. We may start with a baby. We may walk with Jesus through the sufferings and the trials of his life and death. But we end the year with this image of kingship and we ask ourselves what it means to call Jesus, not just our friend, not just our brother, not just a carpenter, not just a great human being, but the one who will reign forever.

This is not an easy thing for us to hear. Our world doesn’t make it easy for us to talk about who Jesus is for us. There are all kinds of competing claims out there. All kinds of messages. All kinds of options. We might pay lip service to the idea that Jesus is king, but it’s hard for us to live it out.

Last year the Pew Forum came out with a study on how Americans think about their faith and what they found is that most of us use a kind of cafeteria style to put together a set of beliefs. We take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, throw it together and come up with beliefs that are individual as we are. For instance, almost 40% of Americans attend worship regularly at multiple places, 28% at worship of different faiths. 22% of Christians say that they believe in reincarnation, which is about the same percentage as in the general population, and even though the Christian story, centered on Jesus, has a very different message about what happens to us after death. Other people say that they mix their beliefs in Christianity with astrology or crystals or nature worship.[i]

This doesn’t surprise me. It tells me that we are a spiritually confused and spiritually hungry people. We see people who have experienced powerful mystical experiences and we are attracted to that. Like Julia Roberts discovering Hinduism in Eat, Pray, Love. We like the idea of something new. And maybe we have heard about Jesus for so long that we think we know him. Maybe he’s become so thoroughly domesticated that we can’t see him as wild and holy anymore. He’s like the sweater Grandma knitted us when we were teenagers. It’s warm. It’s comfortable. But we’re a little embarrassed to wear it out in public because we’re not sure how stylish it is.

There are dangers to being confused, though. I have talked in several sermons recently about the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a Christian theologian working through the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and into World War II. Bonhoeffer watched as the Christians around him began to compromise their beliefs in order to conform to the pronouncements of the Nazis. When the Nazis said that Jewish Christian converts shouldn’t worship with German Christians, the main Christian church agreed. When the Nazis said that clergy ought to pledge an oath to Hitler in addition to committing themselves to serving God, the Christians agreed. When the Nazis said that the Old Testament was degenerate and the cross was a bad symbol because it revealed weakness, the church got rid of both.

Bonhoeffer looked at all of this and he could only conclude that Christianity as a religion had failed. If a thousand years and more of Christian teaching in Germany had produced people who couldn’t put up any more resistance than that, then perhaps the religion needed to die. If Christians were able to hear the gospel message and then go on and do whatever they wanted, including doing things that were directly contrary to the gospel, what good was the title Christian? What Bonhoeffer said from his prison cell in the darkest days of the war was this: “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. 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.’”[ii]

Bonhoeffer feels far ahead of his time in talking like this. Or maybe it’s just that our culture today feels a lot like his, not because we have Nazis challenging the Christian message but because we have so many other ways in which that message is being challenged. If we use Christianity as our grounding, it seems to be only in the bumper sticker sense.

Colossians has a much larger vision of who Jesus is. Remember that the early church grew up in a Roman Empire that was also a place of many competing religions. The Christians in Colossae would have been very tempted to be just like we Americans are, picking and choosing from a menu of religious options. What made Judaism and Christianity so threatening to the Empire, though, was their insistence on making these outrageous claims for a single God.

The letter to the Colossians says that Jesus was not just a great person within this world, he was also the one who liberated us from the power of darkness and transferred us into a new kingdom. We may have been a people marred by sin and stuck in our tired stories of failure, but we do not have to be that any longer. We have been forgiven and freed for new life with a new ruler who is not like any other ruler in the world.

He was human, but Jesus was also the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, which means he was there at the beginning of all creation. Everything was created thorough him. He is the head of the body, the church. He was there at the beginning and he will be there at the end. He was God. And he was God in a way you never expected. He was God in a way that went to the cross and died and made a way through his blood to peace and life.

Now if you believe that, it means that it challenges every other way of thinking. If you believe that, it means that you can’t live in the world in the same way. If you believe that, it may make you uncomfortable sometimes. But it may also make you understand the greatest power the world has known.

Robert Capon writes that when we Americans think of a powerful Jesus, since we don’t have kings anymore, we think of Jesus as Superman.

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way." If that isn't popular christology, I'll eat my hat. Jesus -- gentle, meek and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than‑human insides -- bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It's got it all -- including, just so you shouldn't miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.[iii]

Yet the way that Jesus saves is so much different than that of a superhero. He is thoroughly human and the life he calls us to is to be thoroughly human ourselves. If we follow this Jesus we will encounter each other in deeply personal ways and we will experience a new way of being human.

There is a popular story that tells about a person walking down the beach. She sees a man standing at the water’s edge and flinging starfish into the ocean. She also sees that the beach is covered with starfish and that even if the man stayed there all day he would never be able to make a dent in the number of beached starfish. So she goes and says to the man, “Isn’t this a little silly? You’ll never be able to save all these starfish. There are just too many.”

The man pauses for a moment, then picks up one more starfish and tosses it into the water. “I saved that one.”

Living in this world as a Christian can seem like a silly and pointless thing at times. Following Jesus can seem like a waste. “What good are we to the world?” we might be tempted to ask. Why should we live differently than this world does? But we follow one who says, “I desire that those whom you have given me will be where I am.” Jesus comes to lose no one and invites us to discover what it means to reign with him. Thanks be to God.

Colossians 1:11-20 (NRSV)

May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.

He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

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[i] “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 9 December 2009, http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/Many-Americans-Mix-Multiple-Faiths.aspx.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethke, April 1944, quoted in “Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity” on the blog Experimental Theology, 10 Oct 2007, http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2007/10/bonhoeffers-religionless-christianity.html.

[iii] Robert Capon, from the website CrossWalks Christian Resources, Brian P. Stoffregen, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke23x33.htm.

Crossing into the Kingdom

There is nothing quite so delightful as a gift given at just the right moment. Or better yet…there is nothing quite so delightful as a gift received at just the right moment. I’m not ignorant of what season this is. It may be Christ the King Sunday on the liturgical calendar. It may be the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. It may be yet one more week before Advent begins and Christmas is still a whole month away, but I know what the season is. Friday was Black Friday. The Internet sellers are expecting their big business to hit tomorrow on what they call Black Monday. (Such ominous names that are supposed to bring such joy to retailers!) We are in gift frenzy and in the midst of all of it, I’m thinking of the few times in my life, and I mean the very few, when I have experienced and seen true and real delight in the giving and receiving of a gift.

I’m thinking of the Christmas when my Uncle Dick couldn’t think of anything he wanted for Christmas except a flashlight and everybody in the family gave him a flashlight. He had 18 flashlights and I don’t think I ever saw him as happy as he was on that Christmas.

Mostly, though, I think of children who are still getting the hang of the present thing. When a child’s eyes light up at a gift it is the purest form of joy. They don’t know that they are supposed to withhold some of their excitement. They don’t know that they are supposed to be skeptical about why they are getting this particular gift. They’re not sizing it up to estimate their value in the eyes of the giver. They aren’t wondering if they can take it back to exchange it for a better size or color. When a gift is given and received at just the right time, it’s magic.

I’m afraid that’s what we’re trying to recapture in all of our mad frenzy this time of the year. We have seen that delight and that joy once or twice in our lives and we are desperately trying to recapture it. For some of us, beneath the jadedness and disappointments we have with the season, we still want to believe in the magic of a gift. But we’re going to have to dig down beneath a lot of crusted-over old layers to get back to the little child. And a store-bought present is not going to be enough for the excavation, much as we love them.

Which, in an odd way, brings me to this disturbing scene in our gospel lesson this morning. Here we are ready to go into Advent and the scripture lesson today takes us right back to another Black Friday – the day when they took Jesus outside Jerusalem up to a hill called The Skull and nailed him to a cross, raising him up to die between two criminals who were also crucified. It’s a strange place to go to end the cycle of the Christian year. After all, Christ the King Sunday is supposed to be the day when we celebrate the coming reign of Christ when, at the end of all things, Jesus will come again in glory to rule in majesty and power. This is the culmination of everything. The end of the story is Christ at the right of God, not a dying thief at the right hand of the dying Jesus, right?

There’s a reason for this story being told on this day, though. It’s a story that has to do with kingship and how we misunderstand it and what we do to those who presume to tell us that we’ve got it all wrong. And if we don’t listen to this story, we’re in danger of forgetting everything the cross has to tell us about the power of God. When we talk about Christ coming in glory, it is a glory born of this journey to the death. Soon and very soon we are going to see the king, the spiritual says, but the king we see will be the same one who was on that cross outside the city with the words nailed above him: ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

So there he is. Lifted up and brought down all at the same time. It was not all that unusual that his final companions were criminals or that his final stand should be outside the gates. Jesus was always one who spent his life on the edges, on the margins, among people who weren’t exactly socially respectable. He was the one you could find at table with publically-identifed sinners – prostitutes, taxcollectors, malcontents, lepers. That’s where he hung out. So why not a final stand with two men who are not known by their names but only because of what they’d done? We call them thieves because tradition says that’s what they are, but they are generic sinners, standing in for all of us.

As Jesus is pronouncing a final blessing over the people, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing,” the crucifiers are performing some last indignities – dividing his clothes among them by throwing lots. At the beginning of the gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his followers, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.” [Luke 6:29, NRSV] Now here he is offering not only his cheek but his entire body, and giving away his coat, his shirt, his very self for the enemy he is forgiving.

There are people watching. With them their leaders. And their talk is of salvation. They scorn Jesus as he dies and they wonder why he doesn’t save. “He saved others; let him save himself if he really is the Messiah.”

Closer in the soldiers are asking the same question. They bring over their cheap wine to Jesus as if he were one of their drinking buddies having a bad day. They mock him and they say, “The sign says you are the king of the Jews. If you’re the king, why don’t you save yourself?” Save yourself.

Closer still is the criminal hanging beside him. But his question is the same. “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself.” But then he adds something, which perhaps is the plea behind all of the other questioners, too. The criminal doesn’t have anything to lose by saying it, though. He not only says ‘save yourself’ but he also adds ‘and us.’ Save yourself and us.

Is it just me or do you hear a plea behind all these scoffing words directed at Jesus? Just as loud as the voices that cried “Crucify him,” are all of these voices that say, “Save yourself,” but are they not really all saying, “Save me”? Just like when we are dealing with an adolescent or a person who is acting out in some really destructive ways, we have to listen to what’s not being said. And when we hear what the crowds are not saying, perhaps it is just what the one criminal does say – “I’m saying ‘save yourself,’ but save me.” Now the criminal is probably saying this in a very cynical way. It’s a way for him to make fun of Jesus and the power that the title King of Jews seems to confer on him. For him it has probably always been about ‘saving me,’ and so this is just one more way of proclaiming his self-interest. But there is it any less real for the crowds?

What must they have been thinking? For some it must have been relief. Jesus was threatening to turn a lot of things upside down and even some of those who were hoping that he would stick it to the powers that be were probably a little fearful of what the result would be. It all sounded so good – loving our enemies, bringing God back into the house of God, welcoming the stranger, forgiving the sinner – but what would happen to the world as we know it if those things really became the standard of the kingdom? Do I really want those things?

Because when you get right down to it, if Jesus had turned out to be who he said he was all of those people deriding him from a distance would have had to face a horrible truth. If Jesus was who he said he was, they would have to change. They would have to be transformed. And some of us are so attached to our sins, so enmeshed in our mess, so limited in our vision of who we are and what we could be that we would rather put up with the demons than to send them packing in the light of Jesus’ love.

C.S. Lewis has an image of this in his book The Great Divorce, which was Lewis’ attempt to describe heaven. In the book the main character meets a ghost, the shadow of a real person worthy of heaven, who has a red lizard, which represents the temptation to lust, attached to his shoulder. The ghost is told by an angel that he will not survive unless the lizard is killed and separated from him, but the ghost is reluctant to let the angel kill it. As he finally gives permission and the angel begins to act against the lizard he struggles when he realizes it is going to cause him pain. The angel responds, “I never said that removing it would not hurt you, only that it would not kill you.” It’s a wrenching fight, the man screams in agony, but in the end the lizard is transformed into a magnificent stallion that carries the man off into heaven.[i] The man could not recognize his own salvation because he was so closely attached to his sin.

I have a sense that the people watching Jesus weren’t so blind. I think they must have seen their own salvation there on the cross, but refused to acknowledge it for fear of the pain changing would involve. But also for fear of giving into a deeper hope. This is where the connection with the gifts comes in, because I feel one of the reasons we so seldom see the deep joy and delight we seek in our gift-giving is that we are not willing to give into those emotions for fear of appearing naïve or weak. We’ve got too many barriers to our joy. We had too many losses or too many disappointments to connect again with what it feels like to be truly touched. Or maybe we’re too busy orchestrating the occasion – making it the perfect Christmas – that it fails to be perfect for just that reason.

So then there’s Jesus. What is it that keeps us from loving Jesus? Our questions may be the same as those folks watching and scoffing from a distance. Who’s going to throw their lot in with a king whose hanging on a cross dying? Who’s going to sell out for Jesus when he’s so obviously uncool? Who’s going to put all their eggs into the basket of a savior who tells his followers to leave behind the lives they have known, to leave behind their kin, their wealth, their comfort, their status – everything on which they had built their lives – and to take up their cross and follow him? Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to follow this king into his kingdom?

Are you going to do that? Are you going to give your life to a man that the world is mocking? That the world is deriding as powerless? As a pretender? As a fool? Are you going to stake your life on the life that Jesus promises or are you going to stand on the sidelines protecting yourself from any small flicker of hope because sophisticated people just don’t do that. People who have it all together do not give themselves over to such things. The in-crowd is not into Jesus this year because the in-crowd is always into irony and protecting itself from getting genuinely invested in anything. There will always be something novel but never anything really new because the way of the world is continuation not transformation. The way of the world means you should never get excited about Jesus. You should never put your hopes in Jesus. And for goodness’ sake, you should never give your life to Jesus.

But here’s this other thief. This other man hanging on a cross next to Jesus. This other criminal who has seen what all of these others have seen. But somehow he has seen something more. And he rebukes, not Jesus, but the other criminal. “Don’t you have any fear of God at all, for you and I got the same sentence of death that this man got? And we were judged rightly because there was cause for our sentence. But this man did nothing wrong.” Then he spoke to Jesus. And he doesn’t say, “Save yourself.” And he doesn’t say, “Save me.” What he says is, “Jesus, remember me. Remember me when you enter into your kingdom. When you enter into your kingdom.” There is no doubt in this man’s mind. Jesus has a kingdom. Jesus is a man worth investing his life in. Jesus is a man worth giving himself to, if only to be remembered before God.

You could say, “Yes, but what did he have to lose? The thief was never going to be confused for part of the ‘it crowd.’ The thief didn’t have to worry about he was going to look. He didn’t have to maintain an image any more. He was dying.”

The model in this story is precisely in the thief, though. When we look to the crowd and the soldiers and the thief we see them all asking Jesus a question so that they don’t have to ask it of themselves. They ask if Jesus can save himself so that they don’t have to ask, “Why can’t I save myself?” Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I make it work by my own efforts? Why can’t I achieve what I want in my job? Why can’t I make my family the all-American family? Why can’t I feel contentment in my heart and peace in my soul? Why can’t I buy the right accessory or live the right lifestyle to make it all make sense? Why can’t I save myself? Jesus, you can’t save yourself, can you? Jesus, you can’t save me, can you?”

So what I’m inviting you to today is an opportunity to give it up. Give up whatever crowd it is you’re trying to hang with. If you’re in school, it’s not a gang or a social group that’s going to save you. Give it up for Jesus. If you’re older, it’s not your job or your political party or your love interest or your community status or your neighborhood or your things that will save you. Give it up for Jesus.

What I’m suggesting is that there is within us the seed of our salvation. It’s what was implanted in us before we were born. It is what it means to be made in the image of God. And that has been distorted and bruised and battered by what we have done and left undone. Sin has mangled our lives in many ways. The devil has had his way with us, but one thing that the devil does not have the power to do is to take away from us the deep hope that informs our souls. The greatest challenge we have is not that we feel we have no power but that we fear the power we do have. We are afraid that if we let the world know the source of our true hope we will be ridiculed and ostracized and separated and maybe even sent outside the city with the criminals and the outcasts. And perhaps we will be. But who are you to deny the world the hope that is within you? Who are you to take the message of the new life we have in Jesus and hide it away? Who are you to live your life guarded and protected from disappointment by a wall of cynicism and irony?

When are you going to give it up for Jesus? When are you going to sell out to the king of Kings? When are you going to take your place in the chorus? When are you going to take the role that God has been preparing you to play for your whole life? When are you going to join the great big family that Jesus is making from the likes of you and me and accept that you are accepted and that you have work to do for the kingdom? When are you going to look to Jesus and say, for all the world to hear, ‘Remember me when you come into your kingdom’?

Some of you are old enough to remember when “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a new Christmas TV special back in the 60s. One of the most memorable scenes in that show is when Rudolph goes to visit the Island of Misfit Toys. This is a place where toys that are considered defective or otherwise undesirable are collected. It’s ruled over by King Moonracer, a flying lion who travels the earth looking for toys that are unwanted. He brings them to this land and looks over them. So there’s a Charlie-in-the-box and a cowboy on an ostrich and a train with square wheels. You know, misfits. But the wonder of the story is that these misfits help another misfit, Rudolph, discover what his deep purpose is.

You’ve got a purpose much greater than Rudolph’s. You’ve got a destiny prepared for you since the beginning of all time. All you have to do is claim your place in the kingdom and to join those that the world calls misfits – people who give it up for Jesus – the king of kings that we met on a cross, that we scorned, that we mocked, that we killed, but who loved us to the end and who will remember us, if only we ask.

Thanks be to God.

Luke 23:33-43
Then they came to the place called The Skull. There they crucified him along with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” They divided his garments among themselves by throwing lots.

The people stayed there watching. They and the rulers with them scorned him, saying, “He saved other; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the chosen one.”

The soldiers mocked him, too, coming to him, offering him their cheap wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.” And it was written over him: “This is the King of the Jews.”

One of the criminals hanging there was deriding him, saying, “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us.”

But the other one responded, rebuking him, “Don’t you have any fear of God at all, for you received the same sentence? And we were judged rightly because we deserve what we are getting for what we did. But this man did nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

He said to him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

[i] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1946], pp. 106-112.