It’s empty! (Luke 24.1-12)

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Luke 24.1-12 (It’s empty!)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Easter C, April 21, 2019
Tom James

One of my pet peeves is opening a pantry door in the kitchen, reaching for that box of my favorite snacks, and finding that the box is empty. Why would someone leave an empty box in the pantry?! It’s one of the enduring mysteries at my house.
More than just empty boxes, though: things being empty is usually a bad thing. An empty gas tank is no fun, especially when it’s cold and rainy outside like it was yesterday. I hope not too many of you had to fill up in that blowing rain. An empty fridge is not good, at least when you’re hungry. And empty wallet or bank account isn’t great either, though sometimes we have to deal with that. Emptiness is also something that we at times find hostile and even forbidding. Being alone in a large empty space can make us feel even more alone. Being surrounded by emptiness can even make us afraid, unprotected and vulnerable. Sometimes, when we feel depressed, or when we feel like what we are doing is meaningless or pointless, we say that we feel empty inside, as if the abyss that surrounds us can become part of us.
It’s interesting though, that the greatest good news we Christians proclaim is that something is empty. He is not here. He has gone. This place you have come to in order to find him is empty.
Ancient tombs were sealed shut by a large stone, and the air inside would have been thick. The body in the tomb would fill the space with its fragrance. It wasn’t an empty space at all inside the tomb–it was filled with the heaviness of death. Of course, it was also filled with loss and grief. A death meant that someone was harshly removed from the dense network of human relationships in which we are all embedded. Losing a loved one, as many of us know, is losing a part of ourselves. In the case of Jesus, the tomb was also filled with disappointment and disillusionment–Jesus’ disciples were feeling lost and confused, defeated, afraid, and maybe humiliated. So, the tomb was filled, and its stone would have held in all the fulness, all the density, all the weight, of human suffering and loss. I always think about that on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter: “he descended into hell.”
The women who came to the tomb were playing the roles that women often played in ancient cultures–they were coming to the tomb to attend to a body, to make sure it was cared for. In life and death, women took care of the needs of people and their bodies. But these women, like all women, were more than whatever roles their communities expected them to play. They were disciples of Jesus—even, if the truth be told, apostles, since what an apostle did was announce the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Indeed, by that definition, these women were the firstapostles. The gospels are very shy about the centrality of women in Jesus’ circle of followers. The gospels were written in part to put a public face on the church, and the Roman world tended to be scandalized by the thought of women taking positions of leadership in any group. But these women were leaders. They were there as women, doing the thing that women were expected to do, but they came with Jesus’ teaching in their hearts, and they left with fire in their bones and a word of salvation on their lips.
These women, these first apostles, came to do battle with all the heaviness of the grave. They came with spices to beat back the ugliness of death. But what they found was the freshness of cool, empty air. It must have been confounding. Perhaps even frightening. In the Gospel of Mark’s telling of the story, in fact, those who found the tomb empty were terrified: the emptiness of the tomb was the emptying out of their sense of normalcy: tombs aren’t supposed to be empty. It was as if everything they knew had fallen into that abyss where they had expected to find Jesus’ body. Nothing made sense anymore.
The women’s first reaction was that they were perplexed. They were, we can imagine, disoriented by the emptiness. It wasn’t what they expected. When they saw two angelic figures standing there, they were afraid. But the emptiness itself didn’t make them afraid—only confused. He is not here. The tomb is empty. What now?
I don’t know if I’m remembering the story correctly—it was a long time ago. When I graduated from college, a friend and I decided to travel to Europe together for part of the summer. So, we got plane tickets, lined up a car rental in Paris, and then drove around several countries, not always sure where we were going or why we were going there. At some point, we found ourselves in Brussels. The traffic was thick, but as we were driving through the city, we found ourselves pushed out suddenly into a huge roundabout with no center. It was just a very large, wide-open circular space near what looked like the heart of the city. Now, I basically know how roundabouts work, but in the vast emptiness in that unfamiliar city I had no idea quite what to do—except keep to the right and hope for the best. It seemed like we could go anywhere, and yet the space wasn’t quite empty, either. There were cars diving in and out, and I knew that there would be wrong ways to navigate this traffic circle. But the problem was that I didn’t know exactly what the right ways were. I was disoriented by the sheer number of possibilities.
I have wondered if this traffic circle in Belgium isn’t a metaphor for many moments of transition in our lives. Being pushed by the flow of events in our experience out of our comfortable lanes with their reassuring solid lines into a wide-open space, sometimes we feel like we have no idea of what to do or how to be. Maybe it’s a move or a new job. Or maybe it’s a graduation or the birth of a new child. In our disorientation we become confused: the emptiness before us may feel like a loss, even a kind of death. But it is actually just the opposite. Sometimes, the times of transition that make us uncomfortable or even afraid are the very times when experience life at its fullest—we learn that our horizons are wider than we imagined, that our possibilities reach further than we thought.
When the disciples learned about the empty tomb, their confusion, the empty space they found themselves trying to navigate, was filled with memories. They remembered what Jesus had taught them. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has described the death of Jesus as an initial embarrassment for Jesus’ followers. They had expected him to continue to grow more popular, to gain more and more followers until the Jesus movement would become an irresistible force, and Jesus would be able to make real change, perhaps even liberating Israel from its bondage to Rome. The fact that Jesus died, crucified as a criminal and a rebel, was a shocking defeat. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way!
It was only as his followers began to search the scriptures, looking for the meaning of Christ’s death, Crossan says, that they began to realize that being crucified as a criminal and a rebel was written into his job description as the Messiah! It’s a grim picture: God’s chosen one is the one is to be rejected by God’s people.
And, yet, in the emptiness of the tomb, in the stillness of the cool air, the women feel something that will change the world. They don’t understand it yet. And, some two thousand years later, we are still struggling to understand it. But, like the women on the first Easter, we feel it. God’s choice of Jesus as the savior for humanity is not defeated by humanity’s choice to crucify him. God’s choice of the way of love is not destroyed by all the armed militancy of the forces of hate. God’s desire to claim us as God’s own people, to remake our lives, to rebuild our humanity, is not thwarted by our death-wish. God’s dream lives.
No spices are needed. The fragrance of death is dissipated. The air is fresh and cool. The tomb is empty. He is not here. Alleluia! Amen.

WWJR? (Luke 19.28-40)

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“WWJR (What would Jesus ride)?” (Luke 19.28-40)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Palm Sunday C/March 20, 2016

Tom James

Imagine the scene in any great American city. You have city residents, the poor and the wealthy and the many in between. You have city officials, and police officers, and first responders. Perhaps, in an unlikely confluence of events, you have the visit of a high national official, a representative, an agent of American power, perhaps the President, coming to the city with great fanfare, and you also have Jesus, coming through the back door, as it were, amid fervent hopes for change. Jesus comes not with blaring trumpets and scurrying secret service agents, and motorcades, but he comes with…  Well, what does he come with? In the gospel, he comes on a colt—in some versions on a donkey—but what does he come with in our imagined scenario today? What would Jesus ride?
Well. I’ve lived in Metro Detroit over the last several years, and, if Jesus were to come riding into that area, all I can say is that he better not be driving a Camry!
But the question is not a trivial one. Because it is not a trivial matter that Jesus rides a colt, or a donkey, in the biblical story of Palm Sunday. By the way, did you notice that there are no palms in Luke’s version? Perhaps this year we ought to call it “cloak Sunday,” because it was their outer garments that the hopeful lay in Jesus’ path in our text for today. But all versions of the story are careful to point out that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a humble animal, perhaps a rather small, stubborn one, an unruly and untrained one.
We shouldn’t miss the larger context. This is the time of the Passover, a time in which the nationalistic fears and hopes of Israel would be stoked, and the empire would be on guard. Pilate came to town also, the agent of empire, to firmly place a heavy lid on the proceedings. New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe this unlikely confluence of events like this:
“One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down from the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers from the peasant class…
On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’ procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. (p. 2)
Imagine the imperial procession’s arrival in the city. A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagle mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds; the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. the swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.”[1]
The contradiction between these two scenes, in the same city, at roughly the same time, is not to be missed. One, you might say, a kind of forced entry, an awesome expression of imperial power. The other, a drawn entry: Jesus has come because he has been drawn there by his sense of mission, by his own passion, and by the hopes of his people. Jesus comes as a kind of popular or even populist leader, you might say, riding a colt, or a donkey, but also riding the crest of a wave of national enthusiasm, being welcomed with shouts that give voice to excited resistance, a counter-parade on the opposite end of the city, and of the people, as Pilate.
In the middle of the twentieth century, during World War II, there was a pastor in France named André Trocmé. He served a church in a town called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France. Trocmé and his wife became famous for sheltering refugees, especially Jews. To his congregation, he told stories about Jesus’ life, drawing from Scripture. In one of them, he characterizes the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem as an animal possessed of the “spirit of contradiction.”[2]
Given Trocmé’s life, it is not hard to see what he meant. The “spirit of contradiction” is easy to observe in a stubborn animal like a donkey: sometimes, it doesn’t want to do what the rider wants. And if it doesn’t want to do something, it is not going to do it. Of course, if we are the rider, we aren’t necessarily going to like that. But it is easy to understand and appreciate the “spirit of contradiction” when you are living under the brutal occupation of an empire. Stubbornness, resistance, take on a new value in the face of oppression, and violence. Trocmé’s own life was the embodiment of a “spirit of contradiction.” Like a donkey, his actions subverted the will of those who thought they should be in charge. Like a donkey, he refused to play along in the rider’s game—in this case, the game of genocide.
Jesus, Trocmé tells his congregation, rides symbol of resistance. He, too, refuses to play the imperial game. But what would such resistance look like for us? What, to return to our original question, would Jesus ride? I actually have no idea. But maybe the question can be reformulated slightly: how would Jesus arrive? Who would he show up with? And who would welcome him? And, maybe much more importantly, how would we respond to him?
Whenever we remember Palm Sunday, or “cloak Sunday,” we should not forget that it is part of Holy Week. Jesus says, as he comes through the city gate, that if the people do not lift up a shout for him then the rocks themselves will cry out. It is a theme from Old Testament Scripture—when the people are under threat and under the heel of tyranny, the landscape itself cries out for liberation. The trees of the field clap their hands, the rocks roar with songs of deliverance.
But we know what happens next. Jesus passes through the crowds and into the heart of Jerusalem. He leaves the peasants and makes his way toward the halls of power. And the closer he gets, from the outer gate to the inner courts where Pilate broods and frets over the security of the city and over his reputation as one who either can or cannot keep the people in line, the less shouting of joy is heard, and the more frequently are heard murmurs and whispers of threats and intimidation.
We know what happens next.
So, when we ask what it would be like for Jesus to come to our home town, we have to ask where in the city we find ourselves—near the city gate, if you will, with those who praise him and shout “Hosanna!”? Or in the halls of power, hushed, with vested interests in normalcy and routine? Are we sheltering the weak and the vulnerable, the refugees, the poor, the overlooked, the grieving, the ill, the dying? Is that what we busy ourselves with as we wait for Christ to come? Are we risking our comfort and security that we might be neighbors to those who need us? Or are we holding on to comfort and security for dear life, hiding behind the shields and swords of prestige, reputation, or privilege?
As I say, I have no idea what Jesus would drive. Or whether he would drive at all. But he does indeed come into our city. As it was when he entered Jerusalem to shouts of praise, he comes bringing wholeness to us. He comes bringing words of hope and of healing.
The tragedy of Jesus’ entrance into any human city, of course, is that those words and that hope are continually snuffed out. No matter how much the needy welcome him, the human community as a whole has a way of crucifying him. Even if we are among his admiring throng, somehow we keep getting caught up in the imperial system. We keep getting ourselves invested in the way things are. We keep resisting him, choosing Pilate and his gilded shields and swords. We keep holding on to our comfort and security and privilege and saying “no” to a commonwealth in which those things are shared. And, as always, it is Jesus and his people who keep paying the price. This is the truth that confronts us during holy week. And, so, into the heart of the city we go.
In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

[1]Quoted by Janet Hunt, http://words.dancingwiththeword.com/2016/03/the-donkey-subversive-choice.html
[2]Ibid.

Extravagant care (John 12.1-8)

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Extravagant care (John 12.1-8)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church/Lent 5C (April 7, 2019)
Tom James

What’s the most important thing about human beings? What is it that makes us human? Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger said that perhaps the most important thing about us is that we care. “Caring” is more than what we do for other people, or for our pets. Caring is the basic pattern of our lives. We care not only for our loved ones, our animals, our friends—we also care for ourselves, for our bodies, for our projects, for our cars, for our yards, for our futures. Why do we care? We care because life is short, Heidegger believed. We care because things in our lives are valuable to us, and they are valuable to us because we know we cannot enjoy them forever. Care is related to our mortality, to the fact that we must die, and to the fact that we know it.
Have you ever had a brush with death? Maybe a bad car accident or a near miss? Perhaps you have struggled with an illness or have been concerned about the results of a medical test? I don’t listen to country music very often, but there was a crossover hit a few years ago about the singer’s wish that everyone could learn to live as if they were dying. Because it is only when we are faced with our mortality that we can truly experience the rare value, the treasure, that even the simplest details of life embody. It is also, perhaps, only when we know that we are dying that we are willing to take the risks that can truly make us alive.
In the movie, “The Bucket List,” two old men from very different situations in life but united by a terminal diagnosis of cancer discover together how they might truly be alive in a way that they had not been before. It involves wild things like sky-diving and mountain-climbing, of course (what would a “bucket list” be without those things, right?), but it also includes much riskier and harder things like mending relationships with estranged family members, and learning how to be open and vulnerable, when they had taught themselves to be invincible, and independent.
In other words, even though it takes terminal illness to do it, they learn how to care. In our gospel text for today, though, we witness an act of care that is inspired by someone else’s impending death. We read this passage during Lent because it is clear in the Gospel of John that Jesus drops by his friends’ house with full knowledge that he is making one of his last stops. Mary, because she seems to know it, too, pours out an amount of expensive perfume that might have cost her the equivalent of a year’s wages. This would have been a kind of burial preparation. She really cares! She cares enough to spend an extravagant amount, some might say a ridiculous amount, an amount all out of proportion with the good that it might do. After all, anointing someone for burial is not going to be able to fend off the stench of death for long when Jesus is killed. These kinds of acts, as impressive as they are, are not going to reverse the processes of nature. She can’t save Jesus by her act of love. So why expend so much of her wealth for the sake of such a futile cause?
Judas is a realist, it seems. Judas knows the value of a dollar. He realizes that extravagant acts of love are not going to save Jesus from his fate; he knows Jesus’ death is inevitable. In fact, a little later in the story, Judas sees no reason not to hasten it by betraying him to the authorities. In light of such inevitability, in light of such futility, wouldn’t it make much better sense to cut your losses and use your resources for something more useful? Couldn’t a year’s wages do a lot more good serving the very pressing needs of the poor? In fact, isn’t that the only sane strategy?
For a follower of Jesus, it’s pretty hard to argue with Judas’ logic. We think of Judas as the bad guy, but here he wasn’t far off from what Jesus had preached hundreds of times. In a world of haves and have-nots, in a world in which the rich regularly trample the poor, how can a Christian, a follower of Jesus, justify using her money on such a hopeless and even trivial cause, when the needs of the people are so screamingly evident? In other words, Judas cared.
But we all remember Jesus’ famous response. “The poor you will always have with you.” Now, we have struggled to understand these words over the centuries. Often, we have used them to justify our own indifference to the presence of the poor in our cities and towns. In that way, we have been probably worse than Judas, who was, apparently, not indifferent. Giving to the poor would not release them from the conditions that have made them poor, but it would make life just a little better, at least for a while. But I worry that we today quote Jesus from this text, and when we as North American Christians use his words to throw up our hands at the inevitability of poverty in our society, we do so in bad faith because it turns out that we have the power to do something about it. In a world where productivity is so high and technology is so advanced, there is no reason why anyone should go hungry, why anyone should not have a roof over their heads. So, when we say that there will always be poor people, I wonder if we are not excusing ourselves for our unwillingness to do something about it?
Why did Jesus say it, then? Perhaps he wasn’t making a prediction about what kinds of macro-economic conditions we should expect in the future so much as making a more fundamental point about the kind of world we live in. In fact, in Greek, he doesn’t say, “You will always have the poor with you.” Rather, he says, “The poor you always have with you.” Not a prediction, but a present statement of fact.
But what does it mean? In a zero-sum world, a world of scarcity, you have to act fast, or forever have missed your opportunity. But the real world, Jesus seems to be saying, isn’t scarce in that way. The real world is abundant and full. Mary’s offering of expensive perfume, her extravagant outpouring, gives witness to an abundance, a grace, that Jesus himself has been announcing and enacting in his three years of public ministry. And, though it may seem odd to say it, the poor themselves are abundant, too. That is to say, the poverty of the poor cannot be dispensed with by means of a year’s wages. Selling the perfume and giving it to the poor would not have changed anything. Judas seems to forget that the calling to faithfulness issued by the realities of poverty and other kinds of human need is constant and persistent. We cannot escape the moral and spiritual claims the poor put on us. We can’t hide from their presence. We can’t get around the fact that they are here, with us in the world, in our communities. Poverty is not necessary—we really could end it—but as long as we have it, the poor are always with us. Philanthropy like the kind Judas is trying to advocate is often a way to separate ourselves from the poor, to satisfy our conscience that we have done what we can. Philanthropy can be of making ourselves feel better, of shifting responsibility for a society that allows poverty away from ourselves. Jesus wasn’t going to let Judas do that—and I don’t believe he will let us do that, either. The poor are always with us.
In contrast to Judas’ carefully measured philanthropy, in contrast to his desire to be useful and pragmatic, Mary’s gift is extravagant. But it is only an echo of the extravagant love of God, poured out in the life of Jesus, flowing out to embrace her. This kind of extravagance is not a sign of carelessness, but of care with no bounds, a care that believes in God’s abundance, a care that is not afraid of death, a care that is prepared to give everything. This kind of care is not the anxious, fearful care that Heidegger found when examined human experience, but a kind of care that joyfully believes in the kingdom of God—a kingdom in which community is possible among enemies, in which togetherness and care between all kinds of people begins to take shape, in which being a neighbor is not something you are because of where you happen to live but is instead something you do.
We live in a time in which anxieties over scarcity are probably higher than Judas’. We hear it in political debates of all kinds at the national level. We hear it in conversations about the fate of our congregation and its assets here. We care. But scarcity is not the truth. The truth is that our lives are filled with treasure just because we are embraced by a love that is insistent and persistent. We are graced with abundance because we are connected with God and with each other, and the resources of energy, imagination, and love that are available to us are therefore almost unending. The truth is that we are wealthy, not because of our bank accounts, but because of each other, because of our relationships that have lasted decades or even generations, because of the persistent calling of the poor among us, because of those who walk the sidewalks of East Toledo, because of the ceaseless presence of those who invite us to faithfulness in our midst, because of the endless capacity to be neighbor.
Judas is not the realist of the story, actually. Judas lives in a fantasy world, a world that isn’t real at all, a world of separation and segregation, a world of alienation and distance, a world where relationships are optional and easily dismissed. It turns out that Mary, with her extravagant gift, is the true realist. And not because Mary knows that Jesus is going to die—Judas knows that, too. No, Mary is a realist because Mary knows what it means for Jesus to live. Mary is in touch with the deepest reality of Jesus’ life, and ours; and that reality is grace, the grace of expensive perfume, the grace of costly time, the grace of insistent love. And so may we be also. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

Lost (Luke 15)

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Lost (Luke 15)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 4C (March 31, 2019)

Tom James
What is it like to be lost? Coins don’t have any feelings, and so they’re not bothered by it, but I’m guessing sheep are. Animals that are accustomed to being in flocks like to be in flocks. There’s security in being part of a flock—when wolves are around, there’s “safety in numbers” of a more than metaphorical kind. Jesus tells these three parables about lost coins, lost sheep, and a lost son from the perspective of the one who has lost them. But what is it like to be lost?
It’s hardly worth asking the question, in a way, because we all know very much what it feels like. We’ve been lost in stores as children, lost in unfamiliar cities. We’ve felt lost in the middle of the night sleeping in unfamiliar places. We’ve been lost in our thoughts. Lost in our anger. Lost in our grief. We have many experiences of lots of ways of being lost. You might say that it is the most familiar thing in the world, one of the commonest feelings that human beings have.
Sigmund Freud taught that our feelings of anxiety are rooted in earliest childhood memories. As infants and small children, we feared separation from our mothers because they provided for our comfort and our nourishment, and we felt utterly helpless without them. If Freud was right, feeling lost goes back to our earliest days, and is one of the deepest, most abiding sources of the anxiety we feel today.
So, at a very deep level, we know what it feels like to be lost. Does the shepherd know, then, what it is like for the lost sheep? Can the shepherd empathize? Part of what makes the shepherd want to go after the lost sheep, maybe most of it, is purely economic: a lot of time, energy, and money are invested in the sheep, and so the shepherd doesn’t want it to fall into danger because it would mean a loss of investment. But part of it, I’m sure, is that the shepherd knows that a sheep is anxious; the shepherd knows that it feels helpless when it is alone. We mammals are equipped with the ability to feel and experience another’s pain, or joy, or grief. Have you ever had a dog nestle up to you a little bit closer after a bad day? Every pet owner knows that compassion across the species barrier is real. And so perhaps the shepherd knows what it is like for the sheep to feel isolated and alone, and maybe that is at least of part of why they leave the ninety-nine and go and search for the lost one.
We don’t know whether Jesus told these parables together or not, or whether he told them in the setting described by Luke or in some other. Perhaps he told them many times. The gospels collect Jesus’ sayings from several sources, and we often don’t know where they originally come from. But Luke situates these parables of lost things, as he often does, in a conflict with Jesus’ critics. The critics are denouncing Jesus for hanging around bad types: “tax collectors and sinners.” Tax collectors were really collectors of tolls or tributes that didn’t go to provide services for the people but to pay for the military occupation of their country. And those who collected to the tolls were not government officials, but private contractors who made their living by skimming a little off the top of their collections. Most often, these toll collectors were fellow Jews who therefore profited from their country’s oppression so you might imagine that there we viewed very negatively. “Sinners” is a word that could have meant lots of things. For a lot of reasons having to do with our Western culture, we tend to think of sexual sin when we hear the word “sinners”—or at least some kind of moral offense. But the word “sinners” could have been meant simply to indicate people in a permanently unclean condition—perhaps because of what they did to earn a living, handling unclean animals or dealing with materials that caused ritual defilement—these were the kinds of jobs that nobody wanted, the kinds that today only immigrants with limited opportunities will take. Whatever these words, toll-collectors and sinners, referred to, it is obvious that they are the ones who bear shame. They are those who are outcast from polite company. They didn’t belong to their communities. They are the ones who are “lost.”
These parables teach us that God has compassion of just such people—that God empathizes with them, that God rejoices when they are gathered into the fold. A question for us might be, do we feel anything for those who are the outcast, the despised, today? Can we empathize with them; can we feel their pain? Or, are we so caught up in our anger at them or the in the offense that they cause us, are we so focused on the stigma that is attached to them, that they are no longer people we can feel any empathy for? Have they become something less than persons—objects to be scorned, rejected, mocked, but certainly not people with whom we might share things in common, like a meal, or a home, or a life.
The interesting thing about these “lost” stories in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke is that if we read them often enough, over time we begin to envy those who are lost. Why? Because so much attention is paid to them. Those who already found, we begin to suspect, are, like the older brother, those who set themselves against Jesus’ mission—indeed, they seem to set themselves against everything that Jesus stands for. They are the ones who are judgmental and overly confident in their own goodness. We may even begin to feel a little judged if we are among the found. We may get the idea that Jesus is searching us out in these stories, and finding that our foundness is actually a problem. We may not ever stop to ask, what is it like to be among these lost, but we perhaps we may wish a little that we were among them, because they are the ones that inspire so much effort, and, when they are finally found, so much rejoicing.
Michelle and I have become fascinated with British cop shows. I don’t know how this came to be exactly, but we are sure that the British are just better than us at that particular type of show. One of the ones we binge-watched a year or two ago is called “Happy Valley,” and it follows the late stages of a policewoman’s career while she battles her grief over the death of her daughter. The drama is that the person whom she believes murdered her daughter is just out of prison and is wreaking further havoc in her town. At any rate, we find that her life has really been torn apart by her grief. Her marriage fell apart, and she has been on barely speaking terms with her son. In a particularly emotional scene, her son confronts her with the way she has idealized her daughter’s memory, and it is only then that we find out that her daughter had been a troubled young woman with a long history of bad behavior, while her son had been a model citizen. Sound familiar? Somehow, in spite of this, perhaps because of this, this troubled young woman was her mother’s favorite, and we learn that the reason the policewoman fell out with her son after her daughter’s death is because she had said aloud to him that she wished he could have been the one to die instead of her.
It’s a dark twist of the same dramatic arc that we find in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Somehow the lost are favored, somehow they evoke empathy from us, or at least from some of us, like mothers, like Jesus, like the prodigal father, though in real life it seems that it does not always turn out that they are found in the end.
But I wonder if we have got this right, we who have divided up the world between the lost and the found. Are there really people who are found? Are there people who are secure and stable, self-sufficient and responsible, worthy of admiration and respect? By outward appearances, of course, there are. From what I can tell, most of us in this sanctuary fit that description. But are outward appearances all there are to the matter? Freud’s researches suggested that all of us are plagued from time to time with separation anxiety. We have deep fears of being isolated and alone because we know in the end that we are helpless creatures, all. No matter how self-sufficient we have become, no matter how successful; no matter what empires we have built, deep down we are vulnerable, and perhaps a little fearful. And you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see Freud’s point. All you have to do is be a reader of Scripture, and you will learn that all of us are fragile, weak, limited in our capacities to sustain ourselves. All of us are sinners, worthy of scorn to the scornful, worthy to be judged to the judgmental. But where are the judges, in the end?
In these stories, the kingdom of God seems to be made up of the lost, not of the found. But the good news is that none of us is really among the found. We pretend to be all the time, and sometimes in our pretending we separate ourselves from those who don’t make the grade, who are judged to be bad company, people we should shun, avoid, perhaps lock up, or somehow punish. And in our pretense we bring these stories from the Gospel down on ourselves; we invite judgment on our self-righteousness. But the good news is that the lost coin and the lost sheep are not representations of the bad behaving daughter who gets all the attention, but of all of us. The lost sheep, the lost coin, is humanity itself. God’s love is like the grieving cop, the mother whose heart went out to her wayward daughter, but the truth is that all of us are the wayward daughter. If you have ever been lost, you know that you don’t always know that you are lost. So, just because we sometimes forget our fragility, just because, like Jesus’ critics, we forget that we are judged with the same judgment that we sometimes put on others, doesn’t mean that God isn’t still seeking to gather us in, ending judgment once and for all.
The reign of God means the solidarity of all God’s creatures, all God’s children. Solidarity as beloved creatures of God, solidarity in vulnerability, solidarity in sin, and solidarity in grace. We all belong to a God of grace, and thus we share in the destiny of being found in the end. In the name of God, our creator, and our redeemer. Amen.

The faithfulness of “why?” (Isaiah 55.1-9)

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The faithfulness of “why?” (Isaiah 55.1-9)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 3C (March 24, 2018)
Tom James
My dad was in the grocery business, and so was his dad. One of the many things I learned from my father that has shaped my life as a consumer of groceries is a little trick that grocery store managers learn during their training. My dad called it “merchandising,” and it was a way of strategically placing items on display in places they might not ordinarily be to get the customer to notice and take an interest that they might not otherwise have had. The goal is to get people to make what he called “impulse buys.” I’m a bit of pushover for Oreo cookies, so I’m an easy target for a well-placed display even when I’m looking for something healthy. You could probably put it the produce section, and I’d think, “Yeah, I’ll pick up some Oreos to eat while I’m making my salad.” I’m sure we have all noticed this, so it’s no big secret, but apparently, there’s both a science and an art to merchandising.
Several years ago, Michelle and I were lucky to be able to take our family on a cruise. We decided to purchase guided tours to fill our days on shore. The tours were mostly interesting if a bit tiring, but one of the things that every tour guide was sure to do was to take us through a gauntlet of small merchants selling trinkets and souvenirs. It’s interesting how easy it is to get people to buy cheap stuff that probably won’t last very long to try and hold on to memories of a vacation that we’re probably going to remember anyway. I wondered about what the guides received in return for bringing vulnerable customers to these markets. Was that merchandising, too?
Our passage from Isaiah this morning takes up the imagery of a probably open-air market. “Why do you spend your money on what doesn’t satisfy?” It’s as if one vendor is calling out to someone who’s eye is caught by another vendor’s flashy display. “Hey, don’t look over there! He doesn’t have the good stuff. It’s not going to make you happy. Why spend your money there, when I have the best you’ll find anywhere, and it’s practically free!”
This passage comes at the end of a major section of Isaiah, written to the people of Judah who were in exile in Babylon, and speaks of the renewal of God’s covenant with Judah. Isaiah is using the image of an open-air market to call attention to the fact that we are easily distracted from what is important by things that are bright and shiny. Not just the people of Judah, who might have been tempted by easy shortcuts or positions of power and influence instead of the important work of rebuilding the nation. But us, today. We’re all too easily manipulated by what is attractively presented, what is trendy and popular.
I want to focus our attention on this one little word that we hear in this imaginary open-air market. “Why?” I suggest that, even though “Why” can be one of the most annoying words in the world if you are a parent of a pre-school child, it is also one of the most powerful for people of any age. One of the worst slogans of my formative years was “Why ask why?” It was as if to say that asking “Why” was pointless, because very often it can’t be answered and, anyway, any answer we might get wouldn’t change anything. But “Why ask why?” is cynical—it’s a way of saying we have to accept things as they are and not expect anything ever to get better.
Most of the time, when the question “Why” comes to mind, we are looking for an explanation, some kind of reason or rationale behind things that happen, especially when those things are bad or hurtful. Why did he treat me that way? Why are there so many potholes that never get filled? Why are the hymns so hard to sing? Or, here’s one: why is there so much poverty in East Toledo? Or, why is there still such a gap in pay between women and men? “Why” is what we ask when we wish to press the issue—to demand that circumstances justify themselves, and to signal that, if they can’t, they need to be changed. To ask “Why” means that we still believe in history, that we still believe in the power of human beings to make things better. Why ask why? Faith, that’s why.
But I suggest that there’s an even deeper, more important kind of “Why?” Sometimes, in moments of clarity, we turn that question back on ourselves. Why do I keep getting tricked and manipulated by slick merchandising? Why do I keep spending my money on what does not satisfy? Why do I continue to act in a way that is highly profitable for other people, people who do the merchandising, but not at all beneficial for me? Why do I quite literally buy into a lifestyle that popular culture puts before me as the key to happiness when all it does is make me feel inadequate because I can’t quite pull off the look, can’t quite measure up to the standard? The merchandisers always want us to want more, to feel empty. Why do I keep obliging them, when feeling empty makes me miserable?
Isaiah wanted Judah to ask those questions of itself, and I believe God wants us to ask those questions of ourselves today. The question is hard. The bread that doesn’t satisfy is all around us, isn’t it? The cheap trinkets of culture that we so mindlessly consume, their supply chains hidden beneath the manufactured veneer of shared wealth and success. So much of what we are taught to want is made in horrible working conditions, sweatshops in places like Turkey, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, places far removed from our awareness, and so as we consume them, we put ourselves in an alienating relationship, an exploitative relationship, with suffering peoples of the world without even knowing it. It’s bread that cannot satisfy because it hollows us out. As we consume without being able to have a relationship with where things come from or to understand how they got to us, the human connection with what we consume is lost, and not only do we feel empty, but we become empty.
Why do we spend our money on what is not bread, on things that can’t satisfy? Meanwhile, trash builds up. North of the state line, we have a proliferation of what we all “Michigan mountains,” large landfills that you could probably use for skiing. Other places, there are rivers of plastics; there is a collection of garbage that is as large as a large state floating in the Pacific; there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that the climate is actually changing in our lifetimes and droughts, fires and floods rage. Mozambique and Nebraska today are partially underwater because of devastating storms and floods.
Why are we so invested in what does not satisfy?
 It seems to me that what we need in our time is some spiritual discipline, some focused attention on what is important and what gives life. And part of that involves looking inward and probing our own hearts. As I said before, to ask “why?” is to demand justification. If can’t justify our wants—if they don’t really serve our interests, or if they do harm to our souls—then maybe we should reconsider them.
Our passage from Isaiah ends with some of the loftiest and, I believe, most hopeful lines in all of Scripture. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” These are hopeful words because they tell us that we are in a relationship with a God who is not bound by our wants, nor by our understanding. God has better plans for us that we can know or even desire. If we find ourselves caught up in a cycle of ignorance and guilt—and, as human beings, we will find ourselves there all too often—we can nevertheless trust God to keep nudging us, keep pressing us to ask the “Why” question of ourselves. The spirit of God is within us, and, though the voice of God is not always the loudest in the marketplace, it is far more insistent than any merchandizer’s gimmicks. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

City of peace (Luke 13.31-35

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City of Peace (Luke 13.31-35)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church/Lent 2 (February 21, 2016)

Tom James

The most important word in the Christian faith, says one prominent theologian, is “with.”[1]You’d think it’d be a longer word or a more impressive one! But the most astounding claim Christians make is that God is with us. In Jesus Christ, the power and presence of the God who made a vast universe comes to dwell—with. And yet, as incredible as this is, it falls directly in line with the whole, long tradition of Hebrew Scripture, in which God is painfully and hopefully with God’s people, in bondage, in exile, in the wilderness, in battle, and in miraculous crossings of seas and rivers. God is with the people wherever they go. God is not attached to a place, where people must come if they want to be with God. No, God is a God who goes with, who is to be found everywhere, who leaves no place profane and unhallowed.
But there is something about Jerusalem. Perhaps no place has been fought over as much as Jerusalem. It goes back thousands of years. It was brutally sacked in ancient times—many times over, in fact. It was taken and re-taken by Christian crusaders in the middle ages. It is riven in two by disputes between Jews and Arabs today, a dispute which in many ways is the continuation of the crusader wars. And that conflict over a few square miles, as we know, has implications for the global order itself: our own foreign policy in this nation has been shaped profoundly by it. A new round of fights has recently broken out over it. I’ve often wondered in recent years, in fact, whether the “global war on terror” begun in 2001 will be remembered by historians as a third world war, and how central the occupation of Jerusalem by European settlers will prove to have been in setting that war in motion. In any case, Jerusalem has been, in one way or another, a seat of power and a focus of political conflict virtually from the time of its founding, shrouded in the fog of ancient history.
But Jerusalem means, city of “peace.” It is the place of “shalom,” in Hebrew, of “salaam,” in Arabic. It is where God’s togetherness with the peoples of the world is symbolized most richly and with the most elevated hopes. If there is any one place that makes God’ “with us” the clearest, where human togetherness is supposed to be the most profoundly transformed by God’s togetherness with us, it is Jerusalem. Here, God shelters God’s people. Here, according to rabbinic legend, heaven and earth come close enough to touch.
Here is also where Jesus will go, and this is why he is not afraid of “that fox,” Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee who killed John the Baptist and who know seems to be gunning for Jesus. The Pharisees come and warn Jesus that he is a marked man as he long as he remains in Galilee, and the reader wonders whether they do so out of genuine concern for him, or to make Jesus afraid or to put him in his place. In any case, whatever their motivations, Jesus is undeterred by their warning. It won’t be a puppet ruler of Galilee, put there by the Roman empire, that will decide Jesus’ fate. Jesus will not die in Galilee but will go to Jerusalem, the city of peace where prophets are always killed.
This short passage is full of ominous foreshadowing. If we fast-forward in the story, it is interesting to find that Jesus does end up before Herod with his life on the line. This is during what William Herzog calls Jesus’ “show trial,” when he is hauled before Pilate, and sent to Herod, and then back to Pilate, and also before a group of elders in Jerusalem who scrutinize and condemn him. Herzog points out that to call these events a “trial” is probably anachronistic because the word suggests for us an attempt to ascertain whether a person is innocent or guilty. A “show trial” of the kind Jesus underwent, however, was not a juridical or judicial event but a political one. It was an effort publically to humiliate a person who has been determined to be an enemy of the state, much as in Stalin’s Russia. The outcome was not in doubt. No evidence was sifted, no cross-examinations by a defense were allowed. Witnesses were brought forward not to aid in determining the facts of the case, but simply to give voice to the state’s pre-determined condemnation of its enemy. That is why Jesus knew that he went to Jerusalem to die. He knew he was to enter the city, among throngs of palm waivers, as a man condemned.
So, in reality, Herod has no power of him, after all. Whether or not Herod wants him dead is immaterial. He will be killed because he is an enemy of the state, and the rulers of Jerusalem, in league with the state as they are, will kill him, just as they killed the prophets in generations past.
And still, Jesus goes to Jerusalem, to be with the people during the Passover. Why does he go? Is it because he thinks he has to die to satisfy God’s wrath at sinners? This is a later interpretation of the Jesus story that we cannot attribute to Jesus himself. Is it because he wanted to confront injustice there, to go straight to the heart of the powers that be in Israel and to call them out? Maybe. But he could do that in Galilee, just as John the Baptist did. There’s a really simple reason why Jesus wanted to go to Jerusalem, actually. It was Passover, and that is where the people would be, praying and longing for deliverance, faithfully remembering their traditions and rehearsing their hopes. Jesus wants to go and be with them in the midst of their occupation by the Roman empire. He wants to be with them as they are subjected to corrupt rulers who want to preserve the so-called peace of Rome because they have learned how to benefit from it. Jesus wants to go and be with the people as he calls out injustice, as he resists the reign of Caesar, and as he announces the kingdom of God in their midst. Just as he is with them in the Galilee, as he heals, casts out demons, counsels Jews to give Caesar back his dirty coins, sends out disciples two by two, aligns himself with those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. These are all ways that he lives out his desire to be “with.”
Commentators note about this passage that is heavily laced with human desire. Herod wants Jesus dead. Jesus wants to gather the people of Jerusalem like a mother hen gathers her chicks. The people don’t want to be so gathered. The same Greek word is used in each instance. And the overall picture puts the wants of Jesus, God’s Messiah, and the people of God, both ruler and ruled, in opposition. And, in many ways, this opposition isn’t just about what Jesus stands for. It is about who he is.
Not just who he was in the first century, but who he is today. Jesus wants to be with us. We, so often, don’t want to be with him. That’s the heartbreak of this passage if we would hear it as a message for us. Now, to be fair, I don’t think that there is any doubt that we are “for” Jesus, just as the Palm Sunday crowds would be, especially when he stands up against those who wrong us or others that we care about. And, of course, we would “vote” for him if given the opportunity. We would root for him in a heated primary. We’d like him on facebook. We’d speak up for him on social media, and maybe even troll his opponents. We’d even canvass for him, going door to door, if it came to it. Well, maybe not! But, anyway, it’s not as if we aren’t committed to the cause.
But “for” isn’t the most important word in Christianity, remember? Being Christian isn’t a matter, primarily, of being for something. It’s not a matter of being partisan. There is certainly a place for partisanship. After all, throughout Scripture God seems to be forthe outcast, the rejected, the poor. The Good Samaritan is for a Jewish stranger who has been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Jesus himself is for the woman caught adultery when the blamers seek to end her life in a torrent of stones. But God’s being for is not the cold willfulness of choosing “a” instead of “b,” blue instead of red, or red instead of blue. It is, rather, that God is for those whom God wants to be with. The God we see in the flaming pillar that leads Israel through the desert, that we see even more brightly reflected in Jesus, is a God of passionate involvement, a God whose most powerful act is not to create, nor to manage, but to dwell with, to inhabit. “God with us” is an even greater truth than “in the beginning, God created…” God’s partisanship, God’s being forus, is really just an aspect of the fact that God wants to be with us.
Being with is what God is. God is the one who wants to be with, who does not choose to be alone, isolated in divine splendor. God is the one whose very life consists in choosing community, of being together. And so, as we are aligned with God—if we feel that we must take a stand for God, let us never forget that being for God can only mean being with God’s creatures in their joys and in their sufferings. To be for God means to be with the victims of shootings and other violent attacks, in our own neighborhood or in New Zealand, whether they are like us or whether they are not. Being for God means being with those who are excluded from community or who are oppressed or exploited. Being for God, in fact, means acknowledging no boundaries to the call to be with. It means that no circle can be drawn around our love, that the human togetherness that we are for can’t be limited by the bounds of race, or nation, or religion. It’s daring and it’s dangerous to take that stand, because the powers of our world are all about breaking people up, keeping people isolated from each other, all about protecting and maintaining walls of division and hostility. But the object of our faith, the divine mother hen we know in Jesus Christ, is all about gathering the chicks, all about including everyone, all about with, even it kills her.
And, as grim as it sounds, that’s good news for us. For you and I are gathered, like chicks under the loving protection of a mother hen. And no matter how much we squirm, no matter how loud squawk, no matter how much we may seek to be isolated from God, God is steadfastly with us. God doesn’t abandon us. And because of that, we insist on being with each other, and on being withthe world, even if it kills us. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

[1]Sam Wells, Nazareth Manifesto: Being With God (Wiley, 2015).