Be Still!

Text: Psalm 46

If this were some decades ago, we would be celebrating not Christ the King Sunday but rather Judgment Sunday. Or, as this church’s Swedish ancestors would have called it, Doom Sunday. In 1925, this jolly label was replaced pretty much everywhere by Christ the King Sunday. That, in turn, has sometimes been modified to the Realm of Christ Sunday, presumably for the sake of people who have problems with monarchs.

Regardless of its name, this feast Sunday was a reflection on the happy day when the powers of the world will be displaced finally by the power of God, whether that be the end of time or the restoration on earth of God’s rule as intended in creation. One of the readings for this day, but in another year, is from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, where the sheep are separated from the goats. This is a judgment-at-the-end-of-time scene, but it is also about living according to God’s hopes in the present world, reminding us that caring for the hungry, the sick, and people in prison is caring for Christ. Right now, right here.

This double-meaning of the day—both heaven and earth—plays out in the readings. On the one hand, the Gospel today from Luke is usually read during Holy Week, but put here to make us think about what kind of king might die on the cross and what might be in store for him, and for us, after death. Remember me, says the criminal, when you come into your kingdom. That will be today, says, Jesus, but clearly not here on earth.

The psalm, on the other hand, is about present hope in the midst of chaotic danger. The God of Jacob—one name of God, our God—is our refuge and strength. Very present, the psalm says. In times of trouble—very now. The sentence both characterizes God (God is a person who provides refuge) and identifies God (where someone should turn to when they need refuge).

This psalm, Psalm 46, was the inspiration for the Lutheran theme song, A Mighty Fortress. Refuge, the word we sang today, is sometimes translated as stronghold—thus, fortress. Looking at things this way, God provides refuge from dangers around us. Refuge from natural destruction—of which we have seen too much these past few weeks, but which is always with us no matter how we behave or what we think. Though the earth will move (meaning perhaps earthquakes), the mountains shake and tremble, the seas (helped by the winds) roar and foam.

And refuge also from human destruction, political dangers, and violence. Kingdoms totter, it says. Nations get into an uproar. Wars rage. We do more harm to ourselves than nature ever has. Even when we know that wars do not make glad the people of God.

This psalm is not a treatise on the existence of evil and God’s role in it. It is not an essay on theodicy. It is about our relationship with God. It presupposes evil, or at least acknowledges it. Human and natural. The psalm characterizes and identifies us—as a kind of people who turn to God in times of inevitable trouble. Rather than turning to some other source of power. The power of violence or money, for example, or the power of ourselves alone. Who is our refuge among the many we might choose? God is.

This psalm is partly a song of hope and partly a song of confidence, but mostly it is a song of reliance. It is a paradigm (which is a more like a rule of thumb than a formula) for understanding and living in a difficult world.

A refuge is a stronghold, but it is also a place of quiet peace. A communal refuge from external threat, but also an individual refuge from the chaos of our lives. And from the cacophony of our internal conversations: worries, second thoughts, guilty thoughts, dark anger, regrets, fearful timidity. What St. Augustine, writing about this psalm, called “the contentious uproar in the human mind.” We can be as easily distracted and kept apart from God (and from each other) by the noisy crowd inside our heads as by the scary events outside us.

We are not very fond of kings, officially. Nonetheless, kings at their best represent an embodiment of refuge. Kings ideally sit on the throne in the service of humans and under the guidance of God. They provide a stronghold against external threats. They lead us and keep our minds on what matters. A monarch in the abstract cares for his or her people and provides for them. A coronation, like an inauguration, or an ordination, is a statement of hope and a statement of trust given.

We give to kings the power to settle disputes and to reconcile discord. We hope that God will do that. In our often heartbreaking attempts to organize the world, to keep the peace, to ensure prosperity, we natter away, doing as best we can. But we know that all this talk is often grandstanding or whistling in the dark and posturing. When God in the psalm shouts “be still!” God is not trying to calm us down but to shut us up. Stop it! Enough with the wars and the uproars. This is good news. Kings take charge for the good of all, and like children who get wound up too tightly, we desire and welcome the voice of authority. We know from all of human existence that we have not done very well untangling our own troubles and we pray for God’s intervention.

In spite of our suspicion of real-life monarchs, we persist in calling Christ a king because we want a king.

God is in the midst of the city. This is a psalm about expectations of God’s presence among us here. The God of Jacob is our refuge. The psalm is a celebration. Our refuge is not some other thing besides God, and our refuge is not some other God. Our refuge is not only at some other time, and it is not in some other place. The king of the universe is with us in our midst. The God of Jacob is our refuge.

Suffering, Hope, and All Things

Text: Luke 21:5-19

The dominant story of Christianity is “suffering relieved.” Suffering, relieved. What was lost is found. What is broken is restored.

In the beginning, our spiritual ancestors the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. Jesus healed the incurably, chronically, ill. He recovered children and friends from the dead. He died on the cross and rose once again to talk and eat with his companions.

Underpinning this story and running in parallel with it is another: God loves the world. In the beginning, in Genesis, God calls the world and all things in it good, meaning suitable, harmonious. God so loved the world, we read in John, that God sent Jesus. God sent him, it goes on, to save the world, not to condemn it.

Together, these two stories make Christianity inevitably a religion of hope, worshipping and trusting a God whose primary longing is to heal a world God loves and all the creatures in it.

The episode we just heard in Luke seems like pretty much bad news, full of anger and destruction. But the events that Jesus predicts in it have already happened by the time Luke wrote down his Gospel. False prophets, battles, earthquakes, famines and epidemics. Though portrayed as a prediction, this story is really a report. It is a story not of fearful and anxious anticipation but rather one of loss and grief.

The Temple was an amazing structure, having in the lifetime of Jesus been expanded and renovated. Beautiful stones, as Luke describes it, gifts to God. Imagine a magnificent cathedral in size and grandeur. Yet in less than a decade after all this work had been completed, the Romans attacked Jerusalem, killed many of the Jews there, and destroyed the Temple. Just a few stones left one upon the other. All were thrown down, as Jesus said.

In times like these, nothing makes sense. People get socially and geographically disoriented. They get discouraged and feel helpless, seeing no way to proceed into the future. How—by what means and with what energy—can they go on living?

Jesus, quoted by Luke, tries to help the people make sense of what is happening in their lives. Presented as a prediction, it sounds like all these painful events have some purpose. And they include a kind of promise of protection.

And yet things turned out badly for the immediate followers of Jesus and for Jerusalem. The city remained occupied, people were persecuted, jailed, and killed. The promises seem vague in time and scope: when will the disciples gain their souls? What does that mean?

Christianity is an embodiment of hope. Yet this does not mean that Jesus is some kind of divine mechanic or repairman. That is not the essence of what we hope for. Jesus’ words are comforting not because he is promising to fix up the mess in Jerusalem. (He did not, as the report-disguised-as-prediction proves.) There is something else going on here. Something broader.

Apostle Paul writes that “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Christian hope is non-specific. We are not asking God to give us a hand with our list of projects. This does not mean that we should not ask God for that; we should ask God for everything we desire. But that even if God fixes up every broken thing on our list—a good job, peace on earth, a happy relationship—that is not enough. God has told us to expect more. We hope instead—or in addition—to know peace and completeness even though we live in a world of suffering.

We live a very short time in the grand scheme of things. Humanity—the species—is pretty new, and the life of each person is brief. But our faith tells us—grown from the essential Christian stories about God’s love and healing—our faith tells us while the universe is a place of both loss and redemption, that by nature over all—on net—redemption overcomes loss. Good is stronger than evil, as we sing, love is stronger than hate. The light, begins the Gospel of John, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overwhelm it.

Christian hope is not that God will make all things right, any more than God rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem. Or that God extracts good from all evil. Or that all things go according to God’s plan. Even though all those things may be true. It is instead that suffering is never the end of the story. That it is not even the main story.

Hope is a consequence of God’s grace. It is a form of grace, too—hope itself is a gift; why should we be blessed by being able to hope and find hope? But more than that, hope comes from grace like a plant comes from the soil. Amazing grace. God creates the universe and provides all things, including us. Including life. Our hope emerges because we are fundamentally grateful for the universe and for our own existence in it. Even when we suffer. Hope comes from knowing God’s grace, feeling it, living in a sea of it. Thankfulness is both a consequence of hope and its cause.

There are worries behind the scenes, so to speak, in the crowd. But even though their lives are at stake, and even though Jesus tells them they will be hunted down and persecuted, even though in fact they have been—even so, their own safety is not their main concern. What they want to know, it seems, is whether any of what is going on makes sense? How does the destroyed Temple fit into God’s long-time promise to Israel and fit into the actions and words of Jesus? Is their faith built on random weird and unconnected events? Is there meaning in the world and does God have a hand in it and do they have a part in it? Jesus’ short answer is: Yes. His words, which do not on the face of it seem comforting at all, oddly give the people hope.

We are in the middle of a very long and large story of healing and love intertwined. Things which seem to be one sorrowful way turn out to be something else. The horizon is long, chronologically and spiritually.

And what seems to be the end is never the end. Healing and rebirth are always possible, and redemption and renewal are the essence of the cosmos.

Don't Know Much

Text: Luke 20:27-38

We don’t know much about most things. We don’t know how the brain works. We don’t know how gravity works. We don’t know how life began, or what dark energy is.

We are like characters in the 1950s song by Sam Cooke, where the protagonist sings: Don't know much about history. Don't know much biology. Don't know much about a science book. But, I do know, he says, that I love you, and I know that you love me too. That pretty much sums up the Gospel reading today from Luke. That is how it is with God and us.

The Sadducees attempt in this passage to trap Jesus into acknowledging the absurdity of the resurrection. The Sadducees were competitors with the Pharisees for power and control of the theological agenda at the end of the first century. The Sadducees held that there was no resurrection of the dead. They accepted as authoritative only the first five books of the Bible—the story from Adam through Moses—and in those books they found no evidence of resurrection.

The Pharisees, in contrast, argued that all of scripture, including the prophets and the psalms, revealed God’s truth. And that the Bible therefore supported the notion of resurrection. Apostle Paul was a Pharisee, and it is not a coincidence that so did the newly emerging Christian community formed largely by Paul. The Pharisees (and the Christians) suspected that the Sadducees, even though Jews like themselves, were not really Jewish (much as some Christians today deny that others are Christians, based on some doctrine that they do or do not hold).

The Sadducees felt that God operated within the current world and within its limits. The promises God made to each of us were promises made to living human beings. They were godly and real, but they did not extend beyond life, past death. The covenant that Moses brought from Sinai was not secular, but it was about this world.

This was a difficult position to hold by the time Luke was compiling his Gospel. The Romans by then had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and it was clear that the power that held dominion over Palestine then and there was Rome. Many many Jews had suffered and died, and the survivors wondered what meaning the covenant had after the destruction of the center of religious and political life.

The notion of resurrection from the dead was thus appealing: God’s promise continued past death and therefore could be trusted eventually (even if not presently.) God did not mean for the Romans to have the last word. In one sense the position of the Sadducees was one that, from the view of the Pharisees and of Jesus, lacked imagination. God was doing a new thing here, or perhaps better to say God was making a new announcement about an eternal thing.

This was not just whistling in the dark, or extracting good out of a bad deal. The Pharisees thought the Sadducees were settling for too little. The Pharisees expected more from God.

Though our claims about resurrection usually seem to be statements about our own nature (what is death? what happens to us after death? how will it be for us and others? what do we hope for?), the discussion that Jesus has with the Sadducees here is more about the nature of God. Can God be trusted? Is God’s power over the universe limited? What is God’s reach and scope?

The words “resurrection” and “eternal life” and “heaven” are not synonymous (that would be a good topic for Bible study), but they cover similar ground. What the Sadducees want to know (or want to argue against) is whether all things end with death and if not, what happens next, regardless of what we call it.

We often think of heaven as some place, either carved out of this world, or existing above and beyond it. “When I get to heaven, going to put on my shoes, going to walk all over God’s heaven.” But the details elude us as much as they fascinate us. Is heaven the way Dante imagined it? Or is it like things here in Cambridge, only much better? Will we see people there that we have loved and lost? Will we be like ourselves? How old will we be (what age would you pick)? Will we be stripped of our diseases, quirks, and weirdnesses that in some ways define us?

And questions broader but just as unanswerable: Do we go to heaven right after death, and if not, what happens in the in-between time? Is heaven just for people? How about animals? How about creatures from other planets in the universe? Is it going to be boring? Is it necessarily pleasant? About these things the Bible, our source, is silent.

What Jesus seems to be saying to the Sadducees (and to all who overhear his conversation) is that heaven—“in the resurrection” rather—is not like any of this. You Sadducees, even you who do not believe in it, he says, are asking the wrong questions. Heaven, eternal life, resurrection of the body; it is not like this, not very much like things you know about. Not about marriage or brothers or laws of property and power. What happens after death is not a continuation of what happens here, only forever. Thank God for that, for we do suffer in this world. But we cannot say that it is like that except nicer and cleaner. Heaven is not a place that recaptures or recovers the past.

But neither is it nothing, as the Sadducees claim. We learn here, as they do, that there is death and that there is something more. Death’s catchment area is this world. Death is the end of many things, but it is not the end of everything. What happens after that is certain but unknown.

And different. It is not what you think. Assumptions we hold become meaningless. Systems of power become powerless. Relationships change. And what we experience in our lives here is not all that God has in mind for us.

Jesus is not giving us this story in Luke to tell us how resurrection works. Not to explain resurrection. The Bible is a book about God and God’s relationship with us. This story is not about the mechanics of the cosmos, but about God. To God, all things are living, Jesus says. Human life may not be endless, but God’s love for humans is.

We know just a little about God. Things that are revealed to us in scripture and in our living. But our job, if you want to call that, our destiny, our hope, is not to know about God. We do not have to know how God works. We just have to know God. To know God and to love God and be loved by God.

Or as Sam Cooke might put it: Don’t know much about divinity, don’t know much about theology, but I do know that God loves me.

In the now and in the later, Jesus tells us that we are alive to God. That is how it is with God and us.

Saints, All

Text: Luke 6:20-31

Who are the saints that we commemorate on this day, All Saints Sunday?

If you were raised in another tradition, or attended confirmation class some years ago, you might think of saints as people marked and named as special by the church. Krister Stendahl, Lutheran pastor, scholar, one-time bishop of Sweden, and former dean of Harvard Divinity School, once was a guest preacher at a church on Nantucket. It was the feast of Peter and Paul. But his wife, he told us at the time, had had to remind him that in the Episcopal church, in which he was preaching, it was the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul.

His point was that it was rare for Lutherans to give our church heroes saintly titles freely bestowed by other traditions. The feast days on which we celebrate them are named for their accomplishments rather than their saintliness. Thus we say the feast of Andrew, Apostle, rather than the feast of St. Andrew. The Confession of Peter, rather than the feast of St. Peter. The Conversion of Paul, rather than the feast of St. Paul. Mark, Evangelist, rather than St. Mark.

This is not just iconoclasm. Not just the Lutheran reformers’ queasiness with ecclesiastical ornamentation. The Lutheran practice reflects a theological prejudice: There is no basic distinction between spiritual performance that is excellent and that which is merely mediocre or even poor. We are, as the formula goes, all both saints and sinners. There is in fact no such thing as spiritual performance. We are only creatures, all in the same boat, all struggling as best we can—or maybe not even that hard—but struggling nonetheless. Our hearts are with Jesus, but that hardly makes us perfect. We suffer. We rejoice. We praise God. We fight with God. We forget God. So none of us deserve special gold stars. Or, as we celebrate today, we all do.

When it comes to sinning and sainthood, we are all in this together. But we need to be reminded of that over and over. We are brothers and sisters of all people. That is hard enough to remember. Even more demanding and hard to admit: we are all equally commendable and disgraceful.

Blessed, Jesus says in Luke, are the ones who are poor. And those who are hungry, who weep, who are hated. This seems impossible. To be blessed means to be fortunate, or favored; lucky, we might say these days. A blessing is a hope (or a small petition to God) that all things will go well, that you will thrive and prosper, that your life will be good.

The beatitudes—which is what this list of blessings is called—are ferocious in Luke. They are not wimpy good wishes. The word “poor” means someone reduced to begging, who has no other way to survive. It means wretched, miserable. The word “weep” means to wail, mourning in tears and with one’s whole body. To be excluded means to be put aside, cut off as in prison or a camp.

We cannot sentimentalize what Jesus is talking about, and we cannot spiritualize it, as the list in Matthew does: blessed are the poor in spirit, it says there; blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. In Luke, the blessings go to those who are really poor, really hungry, really treated as less than human.

The beatitudes in Luke and Matthew are similar, but they are not the same thing. They are each a list of blessings, but they are about two different things altogether.

The blessings given in Luke’s list to the poor and hungry make people uncomfortable. For four reasons.

First, it does not seem like the poor are blessed. It seems like they are not.

Second, people want to be blessed but they do not want to have to be poor to do that. They want to be blessed and rich, too. Which seems to make sense, but which is contradicted by today’s reading.

Third, they do not want to admit that God makes a special claim for the poor. God is supposed to be neutral in this, even though the prophets and the Gospels often say otherwise.

And fourth, and most germane on this day, they have a stake in considering certain people as essentially different from them.

We just spent, as most of you know, some time in Australia. We learned a little about the Aborigines, the indigenous people who lived there when the Europeans arrived. As in this hemisphere, those who lived there were displaced, conquered, captured, enslaved, and murdered. In some places, Aboriginal people were classified by the occupiers as “fauna,” so that they could be hunted legally and without shame.

To its credit, Australia is trying to undo a tiny bit of what can be undone, and is spending lots of time, money, and energy facing its history. We who have a similar history here regarding both Native Americans and especially slavery, and other people and nations who do, too, could take a page from their book.

If all people are saints and sinners, we cannot make cosmic distinctions between one whole class of people—the poor, say—and another. We cannot consider a kind of people to be virtuous and another kind to be wicked. We cannot use words like primitive and advanced to describe whole cultures. We cannot justify creating wealth on the foundation of the suffering of other people. We cannot, as much as it is in our power, to deprive certain others the blessings we have.

By specifying the wretched, hungry, incarcerated, oppressed people as the ones who are blessed, Jesus is more than making some strange and disturbing observation. He is instructing his disciples—his students; us—concerning the nature of the world about which he preaches. The distinctions that seem so obvious and inevitable are nothing. And should be nothing. And can be nothing.

Purity is not a Christian value.

Sainthood is not something we earn or deserve or nominate. It is God’s work, not ours. We are saints because God claims us.

Today we light candles, remembering and honoring those who have died. Not because they were so great. Like all of us, they were a complicated mixture of one thing and another. But because like us they have a place in God’s heart that is not in jeopardy. They were all sinners. All saints.