John's Gospel | Michael Valliant

Choose Wisely

Background: August 3-4 was a preaching weekend for me. The lectionary readings included 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a–the fallout from King David’s underhanded actions with Bathsheba and Uriah, and John 6:24-35, where Jesus talks about the sign of feeding the 5,000 and proclaims, “I am the bread of life.” Following is the text of the sermon I gave at Christ Church Easton, connecting the two readings.

I want to take us back a couple months ago, to one of our readings at the beginning of summer, just after Pentecost. It’s from 1 Samuel.

The people of Israel tell Samuel they want a king. Samuel passes the message along to God, who says, “You shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

Samuel relays God’s warnings of all the nefarious things a king will do. And then we hear:

“But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

Now, God wasn’t warning them that they were going to get a bad egg as a king. He was warning them against placing trust in worldly power; he was warning them against what being king does to people, how they can get caught up in all that goes with the position.

In the case of this particular king, God loved David. He wasn’t against him. And when all this went down with Bathsheba and Uriah, God didn’t give up on him. But David sure messed things up.

Not every story in the Bible has a fairytale, happy ending. We get the good, the bad, and the ugly—and some of the stories leave us in a bad spot. They are supposed to. The story of David and Bathsheba leaves us in a lurch.

I have to say, I like Nathan and the approach God came up with for him. The story about the one little ewe lamb and watching David get fired up about it—revealing that he still has some sense of justice and compassion in him, outwardly looking anyway.

God blasts David for what he’s done; He speaks to David in David’s own language, based on his actions and the things that are important to him. God didn’t say to Israel—“See? Didn’t I tell you bad things would happen if you went with a king?” Instead God still loves David, tries to work through what has happened, avoid anything like that happening again, and come to a better understanding and a better relationship on the other side.

And though God doesn’t say I told you so, the king issue is still a problem. In this case, a problem that may have a proposed solution, right in our readings over the last two weeks.

In last week’s reading, after Jesus had fed the 5,000 people with just a few loaves and some fish, they had a notion that Jesus was the prophet to come into the world.

“When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”

Jesus wants no part of the worldly power that the crowds want to give to him. God warned Israel that they didn’t want a king. Israel said, “oh yes we do, we want to be like everyone else in the world, the king can fight our battles, and we’ll be on the news just like the cool countries.”

The people witness the signs Jesus is doing and they think, well finally, here’s the guy, this is the king we’ve been waiting for. Jesus says thanks, but no thanks.

Jesus’s mission is much bigger, more profound, more earth-shattering, more kingdom-bringing than becoming the next king on a throne.

Remember, these aren’t bad people who want to make Jesus king. These are people who witnessed him healing and curing the sick. They followed him and Jesus loved them and had compassion enough that he performed another miracle and fed them.

In writing his Gospel account, John doesn’t call these things that Jesus is doing miracles: he calls them signs. Because they point to something bigger than the sign itself. And in this week’s reading, Jesus explains something about this sign. He says:

“Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

People eating their fill of loaves is what they do in the world of kings. Food that endures for eternal life is what they do in the kingdom of God. Jesus uses this feeding sign to point to the thing behind it: to point to God.

This is tough stuff for the people to get their head around. They’re not getting it. They ask:

“What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?”

Maybe now we can understand why Jesus walks away from the crowds sometimes. “What work are you performing?” Hey guys, Jesus is going to do another magic trick! Let’s set up a tent and some seats and take in the show!

The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is full of stories of the relationship between God and His people, where the people get confused, lose sight of God’s love and their covenant; they get tempted and give into temptation, and God keeps giving them course corrections. Reminders. “Remember, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob… I’ve done all these things for you.”

What we see in Jesus and what we see in the Gospels is what it looks like to make the right decisions, to repent from the wanting of kings and the low-hanging fruit of worldly desires, power grabs, and putting ourselves first. Where Israel wanders lost in the dessert for 40 years, Jesus doesn’t give into temptation during his 40 days in the wilderness. Jesus is the course correction, he shows us how to live in this life, what to focus on, who to care about, who to take care of, how to love, so that we move beyond our small, selfish selves, by giving up our lives and our want for kings and focusing on heavenly things and eternal life.

Every day we make choices. In some cases, those choices can move us away from God and towards the world who wants to be ruled by kings. Some of our choices can move us closer to God, closer to Jesus, who is trying to show us how to make the right decisions.

In her book, “An Altar in the World,” Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor is invited to go speak at a church in Alabama. She asks what they want her to talk about. The priest says, “Come tell us what is saving your life now.”

Brown Taylor says:

“All I had to do was figure out what my life depended on. All I had to do was figure out how I stayed as close to that reality as I could, and then find some way to talk about it that helped my listeners figure out the same things for themselves.”

“Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

How do we come to Jesus? How do we believe? What are things we can do to draw closer to God, to make the right decisions?

Tell us about what is saving you now. Here are some of things that have helped me lately:

Rest – I am less likely to rush into a bad decision when I rest, when I pause. We’ve spent the last couple Sunday evenings on the screened in porch and in the yard to watch the sunset and the sky. Taking an afternoon walk down the tree-lined, gravel lane to Claiborne Beach. Hit the reset button. If people’s energy is intense and they are spun up about something, as we see so often right now, if I have caught my breath and come to a situation rested, my chances of making good decisions are better.

Prayer – when I am in conversation with God, when I am listening, I am more likely to be looking at life from a bigger perspective than just my own. We stay close to people we spend time with. Prayer is a great way to spend time with God. At our healing service this week, someone talked about, when she feels distant from God, she starts her prayers with, “Lord, have mercy on me.” That puts us in a place of humility. Being humble can be its own category.

Gratitude – if I find something to be grateful for each day, my heart and my mind are aligned. If David had looked around and said, “Wow, look at the kingdom I have, the life I am living, and been grateful to God for it all, maybe he doesn’t put himself in the situation that gets him in so much trouble.

Heartbreak – this is about perspective. Over the past few weeks, I gave a homily at a friend’s funeral and watched his 16-year-old daughter give a eulogy for her father; another friend lost his wife about this time last year and now his brother is in home hospice. Another friend last week was in the church praying on her late husband’s birthday and we got to catch up, and what a gift to see that their love continues even now. So many people around us, our friends, our family, members of our congregation, are going through so much. If we allow our hearts to break with theirs; to know we can’t fully understand what someone else is going through, but we can try to be there with them; that’s what Jesus asked us to do. Heartbreak reminds us what things are most important and what decisions to make.

Study – I have so much more to learn about the Bible. God’s inspired Word; a library of readings for our learning, sometimes as night and day different as someone sleeping with a neighbor’s wife and then plotting to have that same neighbor killed; to feeding 5,000 hungry people who are looking for something more than food. When I spend time reading and reflecting, learning from Scripture, I am being fed with more than food.

Jesus is talking about feeding people spiritually, going beyond just our human hungers and thirsts. Not discounting them but using them to point to something bigger. To point to the one who was sent to give us these signs; the one who was sent to show us how to love and how to live; and when the crowds asked what they had to do, Jesus said believe in me. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Believing, when it comes to Jesus, isn’t about just agreeing with him, it’s not some mental exercise. It’s about how we live our lives, how we love, and what we do with our time. I still make a lot of bad decisions. But prayer, gratitude, rest, heartbreak, and study are some of the things that help me make the decisions God hopes I’ll make. As you go about your week, think about what things are helping you. What is saving you, bring you closer to Jesus, helping you believe, right now?

Protected and Connected

This past weekend was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. The lectionary Gospel reading for the day was John 17:6-19, after Jesus has given his farewell discourse to his disciples, and he looks up to heaven and prays for them. I referenced a bit of John 17 before and after the lectionary verses.

“Protected and Connected”

This is the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season. In our Easter lectionary this year, we have been heavy into John’s Gospel. We heard about the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus there. We read about Jesus appearing to the disciples and coming back again to make sure Thomas had the experience he needed to believe.

But for the majority of Easter, the lectionary doesn’t give us Resurrection readings. It takes us back into John’s Gospel just before Jesus was arrested. If Easter is a celebration of the Resurrection, why do we have these other readings?

Here’s one way of thinking about it. The Resurrection IS the good news—it’s the revelation, the payoff, it’s what changes everything. It’s part of the proof of who Jesus is. It’s why we get charged up for Easter Sunday.

In light of this good news, the lectionary then takes us back to look at the last things Jesus says to his disciples before he is arrested and killed. Why? Jesus did most of his teaching and talking before the Resurrection. What we’ve been listening to and discussing the past few weeks is Jesus’s farewell speech, where he tries to make sure the disciples get all the biggest points of what he taught and modeled for them.

We go back to Jesus’s final words to his disciples, so that we might all take those things to heart, so that we might believe, live into, and spread the good news, as disciples of Christ.

In today’s reading, Jesus has just finished giving this last speech. And what he does here is heartfelt, crucially important, and a model for us whenever we face difficult times.

“After Jesus had spoken these things,” John writes, he looked up to heaven and prayed for his disciples. Jesus wanted them to know, even though he was going away, he is leaving them in the care of his Father.

“Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles,” Duccio di Buoninsegna, tempura on wood, Wikimedia Commons.

I want to look at a couple aspects of Jesus’s prayer here. First, he prays specifically for his disciples, his friends. He says:

“I am asking on their behalf, not on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those you gave me, because they are yours.”

We know Jesus to be the savior of the world, as we hear so often in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…”… But here he’s not praying for the world, he is much more specific.

Praying this prayer for a world that is about to kill Jesus, using these words for a world that has rebelled against the way God intended things to be, wouldn’t make sense here. The disciples are the key to spreading the good news, to fixing things, to spreading God’s love. Jesus’s work in the world is being passed along—they are the ones entrusted with the right words, the knowledge of what needs to be done. Jesus is praying for his friends and the importance of what they have to do.

He knows he is leaving; he is not going to be there to protect them anymore, or to keep them in line; he knows what the world is about to do to him and he wants to keep them from scattering and giving up.

Jesus prays this prayer, out loud and in front of the disciples for their benefit, so they can see and hear him praying. In what he does, he is modeling something for them, which they are going to need, and he is showing them how close he is to the Father, which is how close they are going to need to be without Jesus there.

Jesus asks his Father to protect the disciples. And yet, look at what happened to many of them. They had difficult lives even after the Resurrection. Some were arrested, tortured, and a number of them were killed.

So I want to ask you a question: Did Jesus’s prayer work? Was it answered?

To get our minds around this, I want to talk about what it is to protect someone.

This is Mother’s Day weekend. Happy Mother’s Day to all the amazing moms here. You are so important in so many lives. When we think about protecting the way a mother might protect her children, we are talking about protecting them from harm.

My earliest memory of that kind of protection is when I was three years old. My favorite show was called “Emergency !”, which was about a Los Angeles Fire Department with one fire truck and an ambulance. I had a plastic fire helmet with the Emergency! logo on the front of it that I wore everywhere. I was obsessed with that show.

My cousin and I were playing in the neighbors’ yard next to the water where they had been building up the shoreline with rip rap, and they had a big pile of rocks and dirt. I remember standing on top of that pile, with my Emergency One! fire helmet on thinking I couldn’t be much cooler. We were throwing some chunks of dirt into the river and I wound up to throw as far as I could and tumbled down the pile, over the rip-rapped wall and into the river. I sank like a rock.

But my Emergency! helmet floated. To this day, almost 50 years later, I can look up from the bottom of that river and see that helmet floating. It wasn’t terribly deep, but it was over my head, and I couldn’t swim.

The next thing I knew there was a body breaking through the water, my Mom wrapped her arms around me and pulled me up and out of the river. She wasn’t right there with us, but she was nearby, she heard me tumble down the rock pile and looked and saw my helmet floating on the water.

She said she didn’t have any thoughts in her head, she just reacted, ran to the river, jumped in and pulled me out. For my part, I was a very grateful child: as she wrapped me in a towel and took me inside, I yelled at her for not calling the ambulance, because it would have been cooler if they had saved me.

That’s a mother protecting her child from harm. That’s a very clear and necessary kind of protection.

That’s not the kind of protection Jesus was asking his Father for. He knew that kind of protection didn’t exist for him or for his disciples in a world that had different priorities. They were doing something that was going to put them in harm’s way.

When Jesus prays for the disciples’ protection, he asks for two things:

Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.

I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but to protect them from the evil one.

He told them to abide in his love. He wants them to stay in that love, stay connected to God. Jesus knows that the good news, that the coming kingdom, depends on them—that the disciples are going to become His body and do the work of spreading the news to the ends of the earth, so that others might believe.

And he knows that there is pain and suffering, fear and distraction, and evil in the world—all kinds of things that could scatter the disciples.

With all these concerns on his heart, with everything on the line, knowing he is about to be arrested, hauled away, and killed, what does Jesus do?

He looks up to heaven, calls on his Father, and prays for his disciples. John gives us Jesus’s prayer in very theological way that is hard for us to make sense of. I wonder, to our ears, for our time, if it might have sounded something like this:

Dad, they know you. This crew you gave me, this rag-tag group of fishermen, tax collectors, and what all. You should see them, Dad. They might not always understand, but their hearts are in it, they are committed, they don’t give up. They are getting it. And they know it all comes from you. Everything that you’ve shown me, I’ve shown them. And they’re doing us proud.

I’m asking for them. Not for the world; the world who seem to come up with new and cruel and horrible things every day, the world that’s about to kill me… No, I’m asking for them, the ones you gave me, because they are yours.

I’m not going to be here anymore, but they are. They’ve looked to you through me, but I’m won’t to be here, I’m coming to you. I’m worried about them. I know there is a part of me that’s you, Dad, and there’s a part of me that’s like them, and that part of me is worried.

I’ve given them your word and the world hates them for it, just like it hates me, because I don’t belong to the world. The world. This place. This harsh, impossible, beautiful, incredible world. I’m not asking you to take them out of it—they aren’t ready to go where I’m going. But protect them from the evil one. We know what he can do. Keep them close to you and close to each other, that’s the only way this will work. And it has to work.

That’s what all this has been for, that’s why you sent me, that’s why I came, and now I am sending them out, just like you sent me. They can do it. I know they can. But they need your help, just like I do.

I’m setting myself apart, for them. Set them apart, Dad, in your truth. In your love. And it’s about more than them, it’s all those who will believe in me through their words—the people sitting in Christ Church Easton, 2,000 years from now—they won’t know you unless it’s starts with my disciples, my friends.

Dad, the world doesn’t know you. But I know you. And these who you gave me, they know you. And the way you have loved me, I’ve loved them. We’re all in this together. Keep them close to us.

Thanks, Dad. Love you.

Imagine the disciples watching and listening to a prayer like that. What an impact.

Sometimes the protection we need is to stay close to God. Life might take us through some rough places. A good friend who is a clergy person just shared with me his cancer diagnosis. He said, I know I’ve got to let the doctors do what they need to do and that I can’t control that. What I need to do is stay focused on God, stay close to God, through this.

We pray for healing, we pray for good outcomes, and we don’t always have control over those things. But praying, staying connected to and protected by God, gives us something to get us through life’s dangers no matter what happens.

That’s what Jesus wanted for his disciples. That’s what he wants for us.

I think his prayer worked.

Amen.

Doubt and Faith

Background: This past weekend (April 6-7) was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. The lectionary Gospel reading was John 20:19-31, which is popularly referred to as the “Doubting Thomas” story. I also preached on this passage last year and wanted to make sure to take it in a new direction. I am grateful especially to Debie Thomas and her book, “A Faith of Many Rooms,” which is quoted and referred to.

“Doubt and Faith“

It’s today’s reading where our friend Thomas earns the nickname that history and culture gave him: “Doubting Thomas.” And we are told not to be a Doubting Thomas.

I want to discuss whether doubt is a bad thing and whether in Thomas’s shoes, any of us might not do the same thing.

This is not the first time we meet Thomas in John’s Gospel. The first story he is a part of is the raising of Lazarus.

Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus that their brother Lazarus is sick, hoping that Jesus will come to heal him. Jesus famously waits a couple days before going to see them. And when he’s ready, he says to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

They know there are people in Judea who already want to stone and kill Jesus. Going back to Judea is exactly what they don’t want to do. They try to hash out whether this is a good idea and Jesus says, “Lazarus is dead, let us go to him.”

This is where Thomas pipes up and says to the group, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

If Lazarus is dead, and Jesus is walking straight into the storm and facing death head on, Thomas says, alright gang, let’s go die with him.

And off they go. Thomas has no fear and no problem going to die with and for Jesus.

Fast forward through John’s Gospel: there is the raising of Lazarus, Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, then his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. Now the disciples are caught up in uncertainty, grief, and the lost feeling of what was going to happen now.

The story of the empty tomb, of Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Jesus there that we just heard last weekend on Easter, has just happened. It is evening on that same day, the first day of the week, and the disciples are locked in a room fearing the same fate that Jesus met might be waiting for them at the hands of the Jews.

Jesus appears to the disciples. This incredible experience. But Thomas isn’t there. He gets back after the fact. And the disciples all tell him, “We’ve seen the Lord,” he was here with us.

Thomas says, unless I see it for myself, unless I see HIM for myself, I will not believe.

Author Debie Thomas was born in India. Her father was a Christian minister there and their culture has a special relationship with the apostle Thomas.
In her new book, “A Faith of Many Rooms,” which we’ll have a few small groups reading and discussing, she has this to say about Thomas and his doubt:

“Cautious. Skeptical. Stubborn. Daring.”

“A man who yearned for a living encounter with Jesus—an encounter of his own, unmediated by the claims and assumptions of others. A man who wouldn’t settle for hand-me-down religion but demanded a firsthand experience of God to anchor and enliven his faith. To me, this speaks not only to Thomas’s integrity but to his hunger. His desire. His investment. He wasn’t spiritually passive. He didn’t want the outer trappings of religion if he couldn’t know its fiery core. He was alive with his longing.”

I don’t know about you, but I have never been able to just accept something that people tell me without finding out for myself. This didn’t make for an easy job for my parents. They came home once when I was 9 or 10 years old, to find me stuck in the mud in the middle of the creek behind our house at low tide. I didn’t think I would get stuck, despite people warning me. My mom’s boots are still at the bottom of the creek there.

Another time, my mom had to come extract me from the clay they dredged out of Town Creek in Oxford, which I walked into–waist-deep to see how far I could get.

As a teenager spelunking in John Brown’s Cave in Harpers Ferry, in the pitch black with headlamps, a friend and I climbed up a wall about 20 feet to see what it was like. It took a minor miracle for us to make our way back down.

My Mom’s boots are still under the water in that creek.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church, I was baptized and confirmed at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, I attended St. James Episcopal School in Hagerstown for a time. As I got older, I kept at the periphery of church, I appreciated the teachings, I liked what this Jesus guy was all about, but I couldn’t make the leap from interested to invested.

I think I have always been Thomas when it comes to faith. I needed my own experience.

How does that happen? How do we find that kind of experience?

Let’s look at something that happens right after Thomas says he won’t believe unless he sees for himself.

After Thomas says he’s not on board, John writes: “A week later… his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them.”

A week has gone by, and Thomas is still there.

What does that tell us about Thomas? Even though he wasn’t ready to believe, even though he didn’t have the experience that the others had, he didn’t quit. He didn’t hang it up. He kept showing up. He was willing to give it time when he himself wasn’t feeling it.

What does it say about the disciples? They didn’t shun him. They didn’t ostracize him. They stood by their experience, they trusted Jesus, and they loved Thomas. They were willing to let things work themselves out.

Life goes on. The disciples stay together. Thomas keeps working through things. And a week later, Jesus comes back and gives Thomas the exact thing he asked for.

What do we learn about Jesus? He gives Thomas the experience that he needs to believe. He meets Thomas where he was and gives him his hands and shows him his side and says, “Do not doubt, but believe.” Thomas, man of his word, says, “My Lord and my God.” He believes.

What does that mean for Thomas? What does it mean for us to believe?

Here’s the thing about belief when it comes to faith. It sounds nice, it sounds reassuring: if you believe, you’re all set. If you believe, you’ll have eternal life. So how do we as Christians today show our belief? We go to church, meaning worship services. We take Communion. Maybe we wear a cross around our necks. If we’re on social media and someone says, “bet you won’t post the Lord’s Prayer,” we say, oh yeah, watch this… and post it… Hhhmm… that’ll show them.

I subscribe to the idea that if you want to know what someone believes, watch their actions. I think that’s what Jesus was and is banking on as well. If you want to know what the disciples did after their encounters with the risen Christ, go take a look in the Book of Acts. They risked their lives, they met in houses and walked and sailed hundreds of miles to win new followers of Christ. If that was a part of belonging to a church today, I think we’d all be in a bit of trouble.

One person whose journey isn’t outlined specifically in Acts is Thomas’s. Scholarship points to the idea that Thomas is who took Christianity to India. They have statues of him and monasteries and they hold that their Christian roots go all the way back to one of Jesus’s first disciples. A lot further than our roots in the United States go.

Debie Thomas outlines different stories that are associated with the apostle Thomas in India: the pared down version goes like this.

Thomas sailed to Kerala in 52 CE, so about 20 years after Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension–20 years after Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ. He wanted to preach to the Jewish colonies that were settled near Cochin.

He was very successful, converting both Jews and Brahmins and he followed the coastline south, winning hundreds of new followers and believers of Jesus and establishing seven churches along the waterways of Kerala. He crossed over the land to the east coast near Madras.

He was so successful as a preacher and a community builder that he made the devout Brahmins in the region jealous and angry and they speared him to death in 72 CE.

For 20 years, Thomas worked with the other disciples around Jerusalem and the Middle East spreading the good news of Jesus. And for the next 20 years after that, he went to strange lands where he didn’t speak the language, where he was an outsider, where it was Thomas and the Holy Spirit and the communities of believers he helped build. Right up until the religious authorities killed him for it.

The apostle Thomas’s actions show how deeply he believed.

Debie Thomas asks this question: “What if doubt itself can be a testimony?”

She says, “If nothing else, Thomas assures me that the business of the good news–of accepting it, of living it out, and of sharing it with the world–is tough. It’s okay to waver. It’s okay to take our time. It’s okay to probe, prod, and insist on more… I need Thomas–doubter and disciple, agnostic and apostle–to show me what faith truly is.”

His doubt is honest. It is heartfelt. It is a part of who he was and part of the process of who he was becoming. Maybe you can see yourself in Thomas. Maybe doubt and questions are a part of your faith journey. They are still a part of mine. God can use our doubt as a starting point or to lead us further down the path he has laid out for us. As long as we don’t give up.

I wonder about Thomas and what his style of evangelism would have been. I picture him having a meal with a group of people who are eagerly listening to what he has to say. Except for one person sitting at the end of the table who has a raised eyebrow, shaking his or her head. Slow to accept, skeptical to believe.

I see Thomas smile, laugh a little, and say, “You’ve got doubts, huh? Me, too. Let me tell you a story about doubts and how they can be a part of faith.”

Believe

Lead in: I am in my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. April 15-16, with a last minute switch, was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for April 16 was John 20:19-31, which most people know for “Doubting Thomas,” the disciple who won’t believe that Jesus has been resurrected until he touches Jesus’s wounds for himself. We are all a bit like Thomas. The reading is where Jesus appears to the disciples for the first time after his death.

“Do Not Doubt, But Believe”

I’m a big fan of John’s Gospel. On the one hand, he’s a bit like the Rodney Dangerfield of the gospels—not enough respect to get his own lectionary year like the synoptic Gospels; on the other hand, every lectionary year is made better because we have John peppered throughout them.

For John, “believing” is a big deal. He uses the word “believe” 98 times in his Gospel, always as a verb, as something active and dynamic. He tells us at the end of today’s reading that these stories are written that we might believe that Jesus is the Messiah and through believing have life in his name.

Today’s reading is John’s version of Jesus giving the Holy Spirit to the disciples. Remember, John didn’t write Acts, that was Luke, so we don’t get the Pentecost telling of the story here.

There are scholars who say that John’s Gospel is the one most likely to have originated with an eyewitness account. We read the author describing himself as being there at the crucifixion and later, on the beach with Peter and the others. There are details in John that we don’t find in the others.

Let’s look at two stories of the giving of the Holy Spirit. At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, he says that after investigating everything he wants to write an orderly account of all that went on, talking to everyone he can. Each Gospel sets out its witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, and I love Luke (he gives us the prodigal son, the Road to Emmaus, etc). But when I think humorously about the way stories get passed down over time, there is some part of me that thinks about Luke asking everyone for their recollection of Pentecost:

“And there was FIRE! Fire? Yeah, FIRE! It was intense! And then people were speaking in tongues, remember that? And people thought we were drunk, and Peter was like, noooo waaaayy, it’s only 9:00 in the morning…”

In Luke’s telling of the story in Acts, it is a public event, a spectacle.

In contrast, listen to John’s account:

“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”

Maybe it’s because I tend prefer being understated, but I love the simple, straightforward, intimate and understated way John gives us the Holy Spirit. No crowds, no fire, no speaking in tongues. Jesus breathed on them and gave them a new Spirit. A new life in Him. A life that has overcome death.

Does that sound familiar? This is from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7:

“then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

I love that John sees what Jesus is doing and connects it back to the beginning (remember he starts his whole Gospel account with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) John wants to make sure we don’t miss what’s happening. This is new life, that comes through Jesus, which is giving us a direct connection to God.

I get excited about the Holy Spirit.

But let’s backtrack to where the disciples are in the reading and what’s going on.

Jesus has been arrested, crucified, and was buried in a tomb. The disciples scattered, afraid for their lives. Just before today’s reading, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, she ran and got Peter and the one whom Jesus loved (who we think of as John, the author) and they went in and found the tomb empty. And then the men left and went home. All Peter and John saw was the empty tomb.

Mary Magdalene stuck around, talked to angels, then encountered Jesus, who told her to go and tell the disciples, which she did. But none of them have seen Jesus for themselves yet. They might dismiss her story as being unbelievable story, saying she was overly excited at finding the tomb empty—she could have been hallucinating.

Now, they were hiding out together in a locked room, hoping not to be found or found out. As writer and pastor Frederick Buechner describes it:

“They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood in their midst—always in their midst, this man, turning up when they least expected him—and told them to breathe his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.”

6th century mosaic in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

Knowing that they are going to be scared out of their wits, Jesus’s first words to them are “Peace be with you.”

He reassures them. He shows them his hands and his side, so that they know it’s him and that this is real. And the disciples rejoiced. Of course they did. If there are scenes out of Scripture that you would want to be there for—this has to be one of them! This is massive. It’s transformative. It’s life changing. It’s death conquering.

Jesus gives the disciples what they need to believe. And then he gives them his Spirit and gives them work to do.

But Thomas isn’t there. The other disciples tell him what happened, but he isn’t having it. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

On the one hand, we can say, sure, everyone talks a big game when Jesus isn’t standing there, just you wait… But I think this is true to life. How many of us, when hearing friends tell us an unbelievable story, decide, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Even if it comes from people we trust, we still want proof. Thomas wants the same experience the others had.

So what does Jesus do? He comes back. He shows up again, just for Thomas. He gives Thomas what he needs to believe. Jesus doesn’t scold him, he is there for him and tells Thomas, “Do not doubt, but believe.”

Notice, Thomas doesn’t get kicked out of the club for doubting. That is one of the wonderful aspects of this reading—there is room in our faith for doubt. It is okay to want to see for ourselves. It’s okay not to believe just because everyone else tells you to. Jesus works with Thomas.

And Thomas believes; seeing is believing as they say. Jesus then delivers the showstopper of lines, a line so important to faith: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That’s us. I don’t know about you—I haven’t encountered the bodily resurrected Jesus in the flesh. But I have come to believe. How?

Think of the work Jesus is asking the disciples to take on. To help people believe, when they haven’t seen him for themselves.

Here is Frederick Buechner again:

“The risen Christ is risen in his glory, but he is also Christ risen in the hearts of those, who although they have never touched the mark of the nails, have been themselves so touched by him, that they believe anyway. However faded and threadbare, what they have seen of him is at least enough to get their bearings by.”

Believe. What does that mean here? Is that an intellectual affirmation? Is it convincing ourselves and never doubting? Is this just a box we have to check off? I don’t think so.

For the disciples, their belief was foundational to the mission Jesus gave them. If they didn’t believe, what kind of witnesses would they be? If they don’t believe, why would anyone they meet want to believe?

Jesus’s life and love and good news are dependent on the disciples to continue to spread it out into the world. He was inviting them into an intimate, dynamic relationship with him.

And the same thing is true of us now. If people are going to come to believe in Jesus, it probably won’t be because they have had a bodily encounter with the resurrected Christ; it will be through the Holy Spirit, which is carried and passed on by the NEW body of Christ, the church, US.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his book, “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief,” talks about a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum. She was in her 20s when the Germans occupied Holland. She watched her world turn into an utter nightmare. She was sent to a concentration camp at Westerbork before being shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

She wrote in her diary: “There must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?”

Williams describes her attitude and commitment like this:

“She decided to occupy a certain place in the world, a place where others could somehow connect with God through her. She took responsibility for making God credible in the world. She took responsibility for God’s believability.”

What if THAT is what believing in God, believing in Jesus, means. That with and through our lives, we take responsibility for God’s believability. How many of us would say that we believe if that were the standard?

That’s what Jesus is asking of his disciples. But he doesn’t leave them on their own to do it, he doesn’t abandon them. He shows up. He brings them peace. He breathes his Holy Spirit into them.

The fact that we are gathered here in a church worshipping and loving Jesus, trying to understand his life and example, and bearing witness to the good news of his Resurrection says that the early disciples, with God’s help and the Holy Spirit, were up for the task.

I wonder: are we?

Let me give a brief witness. Over the past month, my daughter Ava has been in and out of A.I. DuPont Hospital, three times, first for surgery, then with multiple ambulance rides for seizures she couldn’t come out of. She’s home now and we’re hopeful she’ll be back in school this week and going to her senior prom next weekend. But epilepsy is challenging at times, and it’s been a rough, slow, frustrating go of things.

Not once going through it, have we, or I felt alone. Through so many text messages, phone calls, people checking in before or after classes, the school systems offering help, prayers, hugs, you name it–I have felt the Holy Spirit and God’s love at work through friends, through this congregation, through family, sometimes through strangers–volunteers at the Ronald McDonald House or, nurses, doctors, and people working at the Einstein Brother’s Bagels at the hospital, who can tell you are beyond tired this morning.

My experience is not unique. One of the things that touches my heart the most is to hear how people have shown up, how people have been there, how people have been LOVE in the lives of others. The way we love one another, even as Jesus loves us, can help make God believable for others.

We can see the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world. We can be the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world.

In the dark and confusing times that we are in the middle of in the world right now, can our belief, can our lives, can our love, be a witness for God’s believability in the world?

Yes, we can be that witness. Yes, God’s love, moving through us, through our belief, and our lives, can be credible in the world. That’s how the Holy Spirit works. No fire required.

Amen.

Our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class with professor, Fr. Dan Dunlap and guest presenter, Dr. Tom Long, one of the United States foremost preachers. That is how we started Saturday.

No labels, just love: the woman at the well

“I want to love like Jesus”—that’s a goal that’s thrown around by both fans of Jesus and maybe even doubters. Most people agree that Jesus knew something about love. And that that was and is a good thing.

How many people can tell us more about what that kind of love looks like? Is it just a hopeful thing to say without any real substance behind it? Or are we willing to look closer as to what it might mean to love like Jesus.

John’s Gospel story about the woman at the well is a great model for what that kind of love looks like in action.

Throughout each of the Gospels, Jesus makes a point of reaching across cultural, social, and religious boundaries and barriers to include people who were cast out or left out.

True to that form, the woman at the well, per culture and circumstance, is someone Jesus should not have been talking to.

Going through Samaria, Jesus was in a region and among a people the Jewish people didn’t look kindly on.

It’s the middle of the day, incredibly hot, a time when no one would have been at the well. And here comes a woman to get water.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright spells it out:

“In that culture, many devout Jewish men would not have allowed themselves to be alone with a woman. If it was unavoidable that they should be, they certainly would not have entered into conversation with her. The risk, they would have thought, was too high to risk impurity, risk of gossip, risk ultimately of being drawn into immorality. And yet Jesus is talking to this woman.”

If her being a woman wasn’t bad enough, on top of that she is a Samaritan. The Jewish people and the Samaritans didn’t mix. The Jews wanted nothing to do with the Samaritans. And no way in the world would they have considered sharing food or drink with them, much less sharing a drinking vessel.

Jesus reaches out to the woman by asking for a drink. He puts himself out there. Asks for hospitality. He makes himself vulnerable.

And who does he do this to? A woman who is coming to the well in the middle of the day to avoid having to deal with people, someone who has a stigma on her, a shame.

Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” makes the point perfectly:

“The Samaritan woman is the Other, the alien, the outsider, the heretic, the stranger. Jesus breaks all the boundaries he is not supposed to break to reach out to her.

What Jesus does when he enters into conversation with a Samaritan woman is radical and risky; it stuns his own disciples because it asks them to dream of a different kind of social and religious order. A different kind of kingdom.”

Maybe that’s a clue for us. Loving like Jesus asks us to envision a different kind of social order, a different kind of kingdom.

I picture this woman and the gossip about her, the things said to her, the looks, the scorn, the judgment. And here is Jesus, a Jewish teacher, and how does he talk to her? Without judgment, without shaming, without looking down on her, and at the same time fully engaging with her and fully seeing her for who she is.

John, as the writer, packs a lot into this story:

This conversation is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the Gospels.
In John’s Gospel, this woman at the well is the first person to whom Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah.
She is the first believer in any of the Gospels to become an evangelist and bring her entire city to a saving experience of Jesus.

All this for a Samaritan woman. This encounter was a big deal to John for him to give it so much space and meaning, and it was a big deal to Jesus.

So how does Jesus go about revealing his identity to the woman? Does he prove himself by healing the sick? Does he feed 5,000 people? Does he raise anyone from the dead or turn water into wine? No. He has a conversation with her.

He offers her “living water,” which she doesn’t understand. But he sits with her, listens to her, speaks to her, and reveals who he is.

Cynthia Kittredge in her book, “Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John points out:

“That Jesus’ revelation and the woman’s realization of him come through dialogue is an important feature to notice… Jesus does no sign here. There is no miracle.” He makes a claim which then takes a dialogue, a back and forth to make sense of.

“This is a type of dialogue in John’s Gospel which reflects a way individuals and people come to faith—through a process of effort and discussion.”

Jesus reveals himself with no miracles or signs, simply with conversation, insight, and presence. He hears her, he sees her, he doesn’t dismiss her—he shares with her.

How did the woman respond? She goes running off to her town and tells absolutely everyone there. And Jesus stuck around and confirmed her testimony for people. She went from scorned outsider to credible witness.

Jesus restores her and transforms her.

Is this what it looks like to love like Jesus? Is this something Jesus still offers us today?

Here’s where Debie Thomas asks questions that we need to ask:

“Just as he does for the Samaritan woman, Jesus invites us to see ourselves and each other through the eyes of love, not judgment. Can we, like Jesus, become soft landing places for people who are alone, carrying stories of humiliation too heavy to bear? Can we see and name the world’s brokenness without shaming? Can we tell the truth and honor each other’s dignity at the same time?”

In the six-plus years I have been at Christ Church Easton, being a part of small groups has been a revelation for me in witnessing what becoming this kind of soft landing place can do.

For several years we ran the Alpha Course after our Saturday evening service, and we had between 90 and 100 people who would meet in the Parish Hall for dinner. Our youth group and leaders were a part of that number as well. Our Parish Hall was packed with food, laughter, and new relationships forming. Everyone sat and ate together before breaking into small groups, and over the course of 11 weeks we also went on a weekend retreat together.

That program became a landing place for people in recovery. In many cases these were people who were getting clean through Narcotics Anonymous. And it was a huge leap of faith for them to walk through the door of a church. Repeatedly we heard, “I didn’t think a church would want someone like me here.” People named and worked through shame they carried. They shared stories of why they started using; of their low points, in some cases being in prison; and they shared hopes and dreams—things like being able to be present, to be a parent in the lives of their children.

They went deep when they shared. And that gave permission for everyone else to go deep with their own struggles and failures. We had a congregation of people come to know by name someone who they might have dismissed, labeled, and judged. Which would have been the congregation’s loss.

Middle schoolers in our youth group would find and sit with—both in church and at dinner—the friends they made, in some cases big dudes covered with tattoos, who came to absolutely love these kids. There were no labels, just love. There were no more outsiders or outcasts, just a community of people, a group of friends. It has a holy thing and a holy time.

It looked a lot like Jesus with the woman at the well.

Fr. Gregory Boyle in his book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” tells a story about a former gang member who lived near their church and who liked to hang out his window to talk to people on their way by. One day Boyle was walking by and the guy yelled out, “Hey G, I love you,” and waved him by like he was blessing him. Boyle thanked him, and the guy’s reply was, “Of course, you’re in my jurisdiction.”

Boyle uses the idea of “jurisdiction” to talk about the area of our love, and he talks about God’s jurisdiction, the area of His love, which is all-inclusive.

When thinking about how to love like Jesus, we need to expand our jurisdiction to be as inclusive, as expansive, as Jesus’s. In the story of the woman at the well, he gives us the example of what it looks like to expand our love and compassion to include someone who had been left out.

We don’t need miracles or signs to accomplish this—it is something any of us can do. And we do it with presence, vulnerability, empathy, dialogue, listening, and seeing.

I want to leave you with some of Fr. Gregory Boyle’s words about expanding the jurisdiction of our love:

“Close both eyes; see with (eyes of your heart). Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves quite unexpectantly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

We’ve wandered into God’s own jurisdiction.”

That’s how we love like Jesus.

Amen.

* On Saturday, March 11, I preached at our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class (at Old Trinity Church in Church Creek, MD) on John 4:5-42, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. The text above is the sermon that I gave.

Connected to God’s Family

The evening before Christmas Eve, two of us were asked by our Rector if we’d be willing to pinch-hit and lead prayer services and give short sermons on December 25 and 26. The 26th was my day. The Gospel reading for the day, which I needed to discuss was John 1:1-18, “In the beginning was the Word.” Not the one I would have picked for a first-ever sermon, but it was the right one. Part of a continually unfolding story.

An 11th hour, first sermon seems like something worth documenting and sharing, so here it is, with a few edits. And a quick note explaining the top photo: A few years back in a class led by Fr. Bill Ortt, he drew two circles–one with arrows all pointing inward, one with arrows all pointing out. And he asked, which circle looks like love?” The one with the arrows pointing out, away from ourselves to others. And (now) Rev. Barbara Coleman put her hands on her head, fingers out, looking like the circle showing apostolic, outgoing love. And her “apostolic antlers” have been a symbol/sign with a number of us since. Her husband John, pictured on the right, led prayers of the people at the end of the service, and Barbara told him he needed to get a picture of the two of us giving the sign. So there it is 🙂

“Connected to God’s Family”
December 26, 2021

Being called to do something is to be invited. It’s always an invitation. Studying Scripture, we learn that there is actually a right answer to being called—“Here I am, Lord.” When you try to make a point to answer, “Here I am,” you find yourself in some situations you aren’t prepared for. Like being asked the night before Christmas Eve services if you would lead morning prayer the day after Christmas. And have something to say about the prologue to John’s Gospel.

And here we are.

So what can we say about the opening of John’s Gospel?

If someone was to make a nativity play out of John’s introduction to the good news, it would not be a hit with families and kids. There are no shepherds, no wise men, no manger. It’s just words. But John is up to something at the beginning of his story that might just give us the most hope in the end.

Each of the four Gospel writers does something different with how they begin their stories.

Matthew gives us Jesus’s family tree, wise men traveling from afar, and does his best to make sure his readers know that this is the guy who is fulfilling prophecy; he is the King of Kings.

Mark skips any kind of birth narrative and gets straight to the story. I like to think of Mark’s storytelling approach as pulling up to the curb, opening the car door and saying, “Get in… Immediately!”

Luke is where we get shepherds and some of Mary’s joyful experience as an expectant mother, and Jesus’s connection to John the Baptist.

John goes back. Way back. To the Beginning. And he does it with incredible poetry. When I first sat down to really study the Gospels, John’s prologue gave me goosebumps. I am a sucker for language, but there is more.

The beginning John takes us back to is Genesis.

When you read Matthew, his genealogy for Jesus goes back to Abraham. Luke traces Jesus’s family tree back to Adam. One of the things John is telling us is that Jesus goes back even further—to the very beginning.

There is a Franciscan friar or monk named Richard Rohr who has written about the “Cosmic Christ.” He points out that Christ is eternal, that he has always been here. And that the incarnational Jesus, when he became human and lived with us in bodily form, happened at a particular time and place. But Christ as part of the Trinity is so much bigger than we can comprehend. And that’s where John takes us.

In our Bible studies, we have found NT Wright to be a wonderful guide for making sense of Scripture. He says this about John:

“that’s the theme of this gospel: if you want to know who the true God is, look long and hard at Jesus… The rest of the passage clusters around this central statement. The one we know as Jesus is identical, it seems, with the Word who was there from the very start, the Word through whom all things were made, the one who contained and contains life and light.”

That’s the goosebumps part of John for me. When I read him, I get that sense of awe, that sense of Jesus as the Word, Jesus as God. And that he has given us that same gift, of knowing God through him.

Do you ever get that sense of being connected to something so much bigger than yourself? There are times when I am watching a sunrise or a sunset; or it could be reading poetry—it actually happens a good bit here at Christ Church, listening to music during a worship service, or finding myself trying to scribble down notes about something Fr. Bill or Fr. Charlie mentions in a sermon. I have a sense, something I know but can’t explain, that I am, that we all are connected to the Divine.

I woke up today and learned that Archbishop Desmond Tutu died yesterday at the age of 90. I have a good friend and mentor that spent part of a semester at sea with Archbishop Tutu and he has such wonderful stories to share from that experience. Desmond Tutu is one of those people who I point to as being a huge inspiration and who has made me look and listen to what a calling in ministry might be. This summer and fall we had an outdoor evening prayer service on Thursdays, one of which fell on Archbishop Tutu’s 90^th birthday and we included several of his prayers to honor him.

Tutu spoke to this exact thing, that transcendent feeling of connecting to God in different moments of our lives, if we pay attention. He said:

“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful… and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”

These things, these experiences are reminders that we are wired to feel something more than just going through the motions of daily life.

I’ve talked recently about crying at Christ Church—and about how I have cried more in the past five years than maybe any other time. That it’s the kind of crying that comes from your heart being too full, so that something has to come welling up and out. And that welling up comes from being connected—both to God and to each other. That’s part of the package deal about loving God and loving your neighbor.

And that connection is what caring about each other looks like. That caring is love. And that love, that’s what was there in the beginning, that creative force that built and sustains the universe and that built and sustains us.

And that’s what John’s about. And that’s what God’s about. And that’s what we are supposed to be about.

I’ve seen that connecting and caring on full display at this church. We have all seen it in Bruce Richards and the last 18 years—it’s what the (pastoral care) Stephen Ministry is all about. That kind of caring, that kind of loving is what we are here on this earth to do. That’s the gift we are given of this life, the one that goes back to the beginning, goes back to the Word, goes back to Christ.

But it’s not meant to stop inside these walls. It’s meant to go out, apostolically. It’s the work that God has given us to do. And it feels right to end this morning’s message with words from Desmond Tutu to that effect:

“We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God’s family.”

Amen.