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A sermon preached on March 30, 2008 based upon John 20:19 – 29, entitled, “The Wounded, Risen Jesus.”

One of the great privileges of being a pastor is that I get to hear peoples’ stories — more so, at least than most people do. One of the things I have learned is that everybody suffers in this life. Some more than others for sure, but everybody has burdens to bear, and that for everybody, sometimes these burdens can be exceedingly heavy.  In every life there are good times, but there are also bad times, and the bad times leave wounds.

People often tell me that it must be very difficult being a pastor in this regard — that is, hearing the stories of peoples’ suffering. And it is, but it is also, as I said, a holy privilege. Once I’ve heard something of the suffering people bear in their lives that goes largely unseen, I can’t help but feel a great tenderness towards them. In the course of living in community, we will inevitably irritate one another, and when this happens there is a temptation to write people off forever. Once, however, you’ve been given a glimpse into the wounds they carry with them, it becomes impossible to write them off.

In this world, however, we feel compelled to hide our wounds. We may regularly gripe, moan, and complain, but honest-to-God sharing about the things that really hurt us deeply, that leave us feeling terrified, helpless, or hopeless — this kind of sharing is taboo. We human beings tend to be so very competitive, living by the ’survival of the fittest’, and showing our wounds means exposing our weaknesses, the vulnerabilities of which our adversaries can quickly take advantage.

And so it is striking to me that in the Gospel of John, the very first thing Jesus does both times he appears to his disciples following his crucifixion is to show them his wounds — the holes pierced through his hands, the gash in his side. His resurrection body, at least according to John, was not perfect the way we tend to think of perfection, that is, blemish free.

Jesus still has his wounds, and he’s not ashamed to show them. This might sound a bit gruesome, but strangely, the wounds have become something beautiful for his disciples, a cause for joy. They are the sign that this is the very same Jesus whom they knew before. What he suffered in the past remains a part of who he is in the present — who he is now for all eternity. He is someone willing to suffer on behalf of love, someone willing to be weak, to be wounded for the sake of love. He did so in the past, and in some mysterious sense, he continues to suffer on behalf of that same love.

Oftentimes the greatest barrier we experience to coming to faith is caused by the presence of horrific suffering. This is the case in our Gospel story for the disciple Thomas. He is not merely stubborn, although this is often how Thomas is portrayed. He really loved Jesus, and has seen him suffer a most unjust death, and what he has witnessed is so ghastly that he simply cannot see anything good or redemptive in it.

And then, amazingly, Jesus does appear, and shows him his wounds, and that which for Thomas previously had absolutely no good in it whatsoever, is seen as cause for extreme rejoicing.

All of us — and some a good deal more than others for sure — suffer things in this life which, at the time, and for a good long time afterwards, appear to us to be nothing but bad. (I don’t need to spell this out; you know the sorts of things I’m talking about.)
The thing to try and remember is that what has no meaning whatsoever in the narrow picture of the present, may indeed have a meaning we cannot yet perceive in the big picture of life.

There are moments when, by the grace of God, we are allowed to catch a glimpse of what that bigger picture looks like.

One of my all time favorite stories is a simple one told by the doctor and writer Rachel Naomi Remen: 
When Sara became ill many years ago, bulimia was not yet a household word. Filled with guilt at her uncontrollable behavior, she was taken to specialist after specialist until someone able to identify the problem as something more than a teenage rebellion hospitalized her for a year. This had saved her life. Slowly she fought her way back from the edge, surrounded by concerned adults who could not understand why she was bringing this on herself. She did not understand it either.

As she described it to me: “Rachel, I was just so alone, I could not stop myself, and at the worst of it I was not sure that it was possible to survive this. I was very afraid. I remember thinking somewhere there must be someone else who has this problem, someone who has been able to heal from it. If they could live, maybe I could live too. Sara did not meet another person with bulimia, but after many years of difficulty she had somehow found her own way through and was able to recover. She cannot really say why. A few years ago, she was reading her evening newspaper and came across an announcement for a meeting of a bulimia support group. Sara is a middle-aged woman and has not suffered from this problem for many years, but the idea of a support group intrigued her, and she decided to attend a meeting to see what it was like. It had been a powerful experience. The desperately ill young people there had touched her heart, and, while she felt unable to help them, she cared about them and so she continued going back. Other than saying that she had bulimia as a girl she had not revealed a great deal more about herself but had simply sat and listened to the stories of others.

As she was about to leave one of these meetings, she was stopped by a painfully thin young girl who thanked her for coming and told her how much it had meant to know her. Her eyes had been filled with unshed tears. Sara had responded with her usual graciousness, but she had been puzzled. She could not recall ever speaking to this girl and did not even know her name. As she drove home, she wondered how she could have forgotten something so important to someone else. She was almost home before she understood. Her husband, who met her at their front door, was surprised to see that she had been crying. “Sara, what is wrong?” he asked in concern. “I have become the person I needed to meet, Harry,” she told him and walked into his arms.

The wounds of Sara’s earlier life are still a part of who she is today, though they no longer hurt her the way they once did. These same wounds, however, have become a instrument of healing and hope for others.

I have known some suffering in my life. Others have suffered far worse than I, but there have been extended portions of my life that I experienced as quite painful and barren. My family of origin was deeply wounded, leading to my parents divorce when I was 11.  I carried this woundedness hidden with me into my young adult years, leading me into much isolation and loneliness, and a very painful, short-lived marriage followed by the hardships inherent in being a single parent.  It sucked.

I stand here today, however, able to say to you with conviction that the recent years of my life have been the happiest years of my life. This isn’t to say that my life is perfect — that I don’t have my troubles and things that make me afraid.  I do, but overall, what I can say clearly is that my overall level of contentedness far surpasses what I generally knew during my teen years and my twenties and thirties. Nor is this to say that I have any assurance that I won’t know great suffering in the future. Chances are I will, since living and loving in this world leaves us so vulnerable.

But two things seem pretty clear to me in regard to my present happiness:
1) I don’t know if I would be able to appreciate what I have in life now if I hadn’t gone through the hard times of the past. How do you know what you have if you have never experienced being without it? 2) I don’t know how I would be able to experience compassion if I hadn’t been through suffering myself. How can you feel compassion for someone who has descended into the abyss if you haven’t spent any time there yourself?

Francois Fenelon, an 18th century writer on the spiritual life, had these challenging words to say about the suffering we endure: “We suffer, yet do not allow the mission of suffering to be accomplished in us. I pray the Lord that we may none of us fall into that torpid state in which our crosses do us no good.”

The Gospel lesson tells us a few important things about what it means to be the church. First, without Jesus, the disciples were huddled with fear behind locked doors. They were a mirror reflection of the world. Wounded, but terrified to let their wounds be seen, allowing their world to be terribly constricted.

It is not uncommon for people to feel as though church is the last place they would want to expose their wounds. I know someone who, in the midst of a time in her life when she had descended into the abyss, went to a certain church for the first time.  In the midst of the service, she began to cry. No one came to her; no one acknowledged her tears. Not surprisingly, she never went back to that church. The risen but wounded Christ wasn’t there, as far as she could tell.  It wasn’t a place where people had experienced the truth that Fenelon spoke of, that crosses could in fact accomplish a transforming mission in their lives if only they would embrace them.

Second, when Jesus appeared to his disciples, he breathed the holy spirit upon them, and commissioned them to a ministry of forgiveness — setting people free from their bondage to guilt and shame.

Oftentimes our response to our personal wounds is profound shame. We should be stronger, invulnerable, or so we think.    This shame is the first thing that needs to be overcome on the journey towards wholeness.   AA often knows this better than churches. There crucial first two steps are founded on the paradox that we only find power and healing at the point where we own up to our powerlessness and woundedness. Without an atmosphere of forgiveness, it is impossible to come to this discovery.

Third, simply showing up is important. Thomas didn’t show up at to church on the first Easter evening. He didn‘t feel like it, and because of his absence, he missed experiencing Jesus.  Fortunately, he came back the next week.

Fourth, there really is room in the circle for everybody in the church. When Thomas refused to believe what the other disciples told them about Jesus’ resurrection, they didn’t throw him out of the church.  They carried him.  It wasn’t necessary for Thomas to prematurely conform his beliefs to theirs in order to be accepted in their midst. They loved him where he was.

And finally, the Church is the community where we are given opportunity, over time, to catch a glimpse of the big picture, and in doing so, experience the peace that Jesus gives. To see that by and by all wounds will become beautiful. That there is a resurrection beyond every crucifixion. That our wounds can indeed become a part of what we have to offer in the healing and reconciling ministry of the risen Jesus.

A sermon preached on Easter Sunday, 2008 based upon Matthew 28:1 – 20, entitled “Good News or Bad News”

We’re here this morning for a whole host of different reasons. Some of us are here cause this is where we are pretty much every Sunday. Some of us are visiting family for Easter; some have been dragged here against our will under threat of a major burden of guilt. Some of us just don’t consider ourselves “church people” but we’re here because there is something about Easter that is enchanting, expressing hope in the face of death, and we’re here to catch a whiff of it.

Whatever the reason we are here, it is all good, and there no need for jokes about the roof collapsing — our roof is plenty strong. I would, however, invite you to listen for the sounds of angels singing and dancing — doing the conga line right now up there on our roof. (Pause to listen for angels.)
Anyway, whoever you are and for whatever reason you find yourself here today, I’d just like to plant the idea in your head that beneath any other reason, you are here because God wanted you here today. This is where you are meant to be today.

I want to let you in on a little secret. I was the one portraying the Roman soldier earlier with our children. I know you couldn’t tell, but yeah, that was me. Friday night it occurred to me that I needed to come up with a children’s sermon for Easter. The idea hopped into my head that I could dress up as a Roman soldier who was present at the tomb. Great! I’ll need a costume. I remembered there was a costume shop in Boonton. I’d never been there. I called the shop on the phone and the woman who runs it said, sure they had Roman soldier costumes, come on down Saturday afternoon. Which I did. I wasn’t sure precisely where the shop was; I parked my car just off the main street where it was supposed to be located, got out of my car, and as I stepped onto Main Street, I heard my name called out. I looked, and there, across the street, were my good friends Laurie and Joe Zelman. In Laurie’s hands were, amazingly, a Roman soldier costume.

Turns out she had had a Easter pageant the night before at her church, and she was on her way to return the costume. She and Joe had met some friends, which had delayed there arrival at the shop (otherwise, the costume would already have been turned in), but when I told her why I’d come, she handed me the costume and said it didn’t need to be back till Monday.

I was, to say the least, astonished. What did it mean? For me, it simply meant a little sign from God that I was where I was intended to be.

I want to invite you to consider the possibility that you are where you are intended to be today.

So we have before us this strange event that is reported to have happened 2000 years ago at a tomb just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, that involves the claim that a man named Jesus who had been crucified, dead and buried, was discovered to be alive three days later, and this time with a life and a body that could no longer die.

Is it true? That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Each of us must decide for ourselves. I can’t demonstrate to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is true, but the opposite is also true, no one can demonstrate to you beyond a shadow of doubt that it isn’t true.

I can offer you some evidence, however, the purpose of which isn’t to prove that Jesus rose from the dead, but simply to make the point that if you are predisposed to write it off as an impossible event that only a fool would believe, it isn’t necessarily so.

First off, the movement following the man Jesus had been underway for about two years (that’s all), and it was, in a certain sense, kind of pathetic. What I mean is that it was initiated by a peasant named Jesus, a son of a carpenter from a podunk town called Nazareth in a remote corner of the earth. The followers that this Jesus gathered around him weren’t “the best and the brightest;” they were fishermen and such, unlearned men, with no worldly power to speak of.

When they arrived in the big city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, they understood that Jesus was intent on confronting the political and religious authorities who together were oppressing the little people, the poor people, the nobodies. They were assuredly afraid, these followers of Jesus, but they harbored hopes that maybe, just maybe, things would work out swell there in the big city. That maybe through the intervention of God, the people in authority would give up their power, and that Jesus would be established as king, bringing justice and peace to the world, and everybody would live happily ever after.

No such luck.

The people in power, once it became clear to them that Jesus wouldn’t shut up and was intent on challenging their authority and power, well, they had no choice, really; they had to shut him up, just like John the Baptist before him. Jesus had to be killed, or else all chaos would break out, and so it was a no-brainer. The order and stability that everybody counted on (as opposed to chaos and anarchy) was, in their minds, the most important thing. And so, just as they had done to countless others before Jesus, the Roman soldiers put Jesus to death in an especially cruel and torturous manner in order to make an example to others who might consider challenging the stability of the established order.

Now it is important thing to keep in mind that in those days religious/political movements were a dime a dozen. Would-be messiahs came along on a pretty regular basis, always coming to the same end. The charismatic leaders of these movements and their followers were quickly forgotten as time marched on.

So here is the question: why was this one different? In short order the movement took off, despite the fact the charismatic leader had been crushed and the rag tag band of his followers driven into hiding, feeling pretty awful about themselves too.

The Jesus movement took off like wildfire. And these followers, previously none to impressive, suddenly became quite impressive indeed, stronger, bolder, more daringly loving than they had ever been before. And from the very start, their own explanation for how this could be so was that they had met this very same Jesus alive again — that death couldn’t hold him.

What are we to make of this?

Well, one explanation, would be that the followers of Jesus pulled off a colossal con job. It was a hoax; a scam. They stole his dead body themselves, and then told a bunch of lies that people believed.

But that doesn’t make much sense. How would a con job bring about such a transformation of the very persons perpetuating the con job? Charles Colson, one of Richard Nixon’s top aids, made the point that the 12 most powerful men in the land — sharp, smart guys every one of them — couldn’t keep their story together for two weeks about what happened with Watergate.

All four Gospels vary quite a bit about the details of what happened that first Easter (which would suggest they weren’t concerned with keeping their stories straight.) The two things all four Gospels do agree on, however, are that 1) the tomb was empty on Easter morning, and 2) women were the first ones at the tomb to witness this fact, and the first ones to see Jesus alive.

If the followers of Jesus were making this thing up, they assuredly wouldn’t have had women be the first witnesses, because women in those days were nobodies, whose testimony wasn’t even valid in court. And Mary Magdalene, the one consistent woman throughout, was a woman of particularly shady reputation.

The con job explanation doesn’t really work. The first Christians really were convinced that Jesus had risen.

Now, I realize what I just told you doesn’t prove a thing, but it does, I think, make it not unreasonable to believe something more compelling than a mere con job happened back there 2000 years ago. Matthew imagines there having been an earthquake in order, I think, to drive home the point that what transpired that day demands our attention.

In considering the claim that a man came back to life, defying the natural processes as we know them, it is important to acknowledge that this wasn’t just any man: this was Jesus, a man who had embodied an extreme sort of love, teaching his followers to forgive and to love their enemies. He paid special attention to the very people that the Empire and the authorities figured deserved no attention: the poor, the outcaste, the nobodies. To stand up for these very people was the reason Jesus had come to Jerusalem.

And it is important to recognize that the news of his resurrection wasn’t good news to everybody. It was distinctly bad news to those in power. Matthew tells us that in hearing this news, the Roman soldiers “ became like dead men.”

Empires have always been established on the assumption that there are plenty of people who are expendable and unimportant, and those who challenge the system can be made to simply disappear. Take away this capacity to make nobodies disappear, and the Empire loses the threat that keeps it in power.

So the news that this Jesus who was supposed to have been silenced on the cross was up and about telling his followers to keep speaking truth in his name to those who had killed him, well this was bad news indeed. The message always included the idea that with his resurrection Jesus was the first born of many to come; that there were countless other nobodies in the eyes of the empire who were somebody in the eyes of God and killing them wouldn’t silence them either. Bad news indeed for the people in power.

Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, wrote a letter to a friend from the infamous bunker where she and her beloved Adolph spent their last days before the end of World War II. In the letter she shared how the defeat of the Nazis she was witnessing was leading her to question the existence of God.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Is the resurrection good news, or bad news?

At the very same time, not far from that same bunker, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prisoner in a Nazi prison camp. Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian who had steadfastly stood up against the evil of the Nazis. For his willingness to speak the truth to power, Bonhoeffer was arrested and placed in prison. On April 7th, 1945, just a few days before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer began the day leading his fellow prisoners in a worship service. At the conclusion of the service, guards arrived, summoning “Prisoner Bonhoeffer.” He knew what this meant. Turning to his fellow prisoners, Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.” He was lead to the gallows where he was put to death by hanging. He went, confident that his life was safe with God, that he was dying with Jesus, and would rise with him as well.

You and I, we were created by God and placed in a spiritual journey. The purpose of the journey is to move towards the light and away from the darkness; to learn how to love and to forsake the fear and hatred that so often moves people in this world; to come to realize that every person has a soul, that nobody is a nobody to God.

We are, hopefully, “run of the mill sinners.” By this I mean we are still on the journey, we haven’t arrived, and there is within us both light and darkness, love and fear. We are sinners saved by grace; God isn’t done with us yet.

But being a run of the mill sinner is something quite different from being someone who has become thoroughly evil. People become evil when bitterness, fear and hatred prevails in their souls. It is often masked, because people who have become evil tend to be convinced they have no sin within them whatsoever. Like Hitler, they convince themselves that they are the children of light doing battle with the forces of darkness.

The first followers of Jesus were ordinary sinners, and the Gospels portray them as such when they receive the news of the resurrection, reacting with mixed emotions. The women depart from the tomb with both fear and great joy. The disciples meet Jesus on the mountain with a mixture of both belief and fear.

Those who have become evil, see this news as nothing but a threat.

They have reason to be afraid. The resurrection of Jesus announces to the world that God will prevail. There are no disposable people. All are cherished by God. So those who have had a vested interest in denying the inherent value of all persons have cause to be disturbed.

I’d like to end with a quote from an Easter sermon by Rowan Williams, that provided the insight from which this sermon arose:

Think back for a moment to the days when death squads operated in countries like Argentina or El Salvador: the Christians there developed a very dramatic way of celebrating their faith, their hope and their resistance. At the liturgy, someone would read out the names of those killed or ‘disappeared’, and for each name someone would call out from the congregation, Presente, ‘Here’. When the assembly is gathered before God, the lost are indeed presente; when we pray at this eucharist ‘with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’, we say presente of all those the world (including us) would forget and God remembers. With angels and archangels; with the butchered Rwandans of ten years ago and the butchered or brutalized Ugandan children of last week or yesterday; with the young woman dead on a mattress in King’s Cross after an overdose and the childless widower with Alzheimer’s; with the thief crucified alongside Jesus and all the thousands of other anonymous thieves crucified in Judea by an efficient imperial administration; with the whole company of heaven, those whom God receives in his mercy. And with Christ our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, by whose death our sinful forgetfulness and lukewarm love can be forgiven and kindled to life, who leaves no human soul in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to all the dignity of a name and a presence. He is risen; he is not here; he is present everywhere and to all. He is risen: presente.

A sermon preached on March 16, 2008 (Palm Sunday), based upon Philippians 2:5 – 11 and Matthew 21:1 – 11, entitled, “Knowing Right from Wrong.”

There was a collective groan that went out this past Monday when it was revealed that Elliot Spitzer, the ambitious, and from my perspective, young governor of New York, had done that which he should not have done, becoming yet another in a long line of “public servants” who have taken advantage of the power entrusted to them for selfish and illegal gain.

It is easy to feel disillusioned in the face of such news, particularly as Spitzer, a former District Attorney had presented himself as a reformer intent on rooting out corruption — committing crimes similar to those for which he had once prosecuted others.

A certain cynicism easily sets in.

And yet, through the long, long history of human beings behaving badly, there is something remarkable about the simple persistence of a moral code; an underlying sense of right and wrong. We human beings may perpetually fail to live up to this moral code–we may routinely try and twist it to justify our actions and to disguise our actions so that they appear noble when they are not; nonetheless, a deep sense of “right and wrong” continues to haunt us.

Listen in on much of our routine conversations and you will hear evidence of the weight it continues to carry. In describing some dispute we have with another person — a family member, a co-worker, a cashier — what you will often hear are anxious attempts to argue the case that our actions, and not those of our adversary, came closer to some universal sense of what good and bad behavior is all about.

Elliot Spitzer himself referred to this moral code in both of his brief, public appearances this past week. Said he: “I have acted in a way that violates my, or any sense of right or wrong.” “I failed to live up to the standard to which I hold myself.” “I am deeply sorry I did not live up to what was expected of me.” Even the young woman involved in the scandal seemed anxious about this same moral code when she expressed the concern that people would think of her as some kind of “monster.”

In one of his books, C.S. Lewis points out that if you study cultures throughout the world and throughout history, you will find “the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery and falsehood, the same injunctions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty.” If you are looking for some sign of the existence of a good God in what often appears like a very “God-forsaken” world, perhaps the best sign is to be found in this universal distinction between right and wrong. Deep down, we know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, because God put that knowledge within us.

Knowing right and wrong, however, doesn’t mean we will necessarily do the good. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he expresses what is very often the human experience when he says, “I can know the good, but I cannot do it.” There is something within us that fights against our consistently doing that which is right. This power was first expressed in Adam and Eve wanting to be like God — the drive to take the place of God, to be at the center where only God belongs.

There is something about attaining power that leads directly to the temptation to turn a deaf ear to what deep down inside we know to be right, indeed, to silence the voices that would remind us that we have strayed from that which is right and good. And so in the Old Testament, King David steals the wife of Uriah, and then murders him. And in the New Testament, King Herod tries to murder the baby who, he thinks, will grow up to take his throne. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so we have so many sordid tales of mayors, governors, and presidents, not to mention preachers and CEOs undergoing such spectacular public falls from the heights they achieved through their ambition.

In the context of this, there is something eerily familiar, indeed, quite contemporary, about the forces at work in the Palm Sunday story we read today. The issue of power and its corruption is at work behind the scenes. Jesus comes to Jerusalem, the political and religious power center, where he is greeted as the reformer who will clean up the corruption of the city. He is greeted as the new king whose rule will consistently be in line with right over against wrong.

As is so often the case, those who hold the power have been oppressing those without power. The political and religious establishment have been profiting off the poor. The center of this corruption is located in the Temple itself, where the peoples’ desire to be made right with God has become an opportunity for the powerful to get rich. Not surprisingly, the very first thing that Jesus will do in Jerusalem following his triumphal entry will be to enter the temple and drive out the money changers abusing the poor.

In the temple Jesus exercises an impressive display of worldly power. It is the closest that Jesus ever gets to physical violence, though no one is described as actually injured by Jesus‘ actions. It is a strange, and somewhat misleading event, in so far as it seems to suggest to those who have welcomed Jesus that he intends to use force to clean up the mess — that this is only the beginning, that there will be more overturning of tables and snapping of whips, and even assassinations if necessary to drive out the bad guys. It looks like kick-butt time, and those who are accustomed to having their butts kicked by the oppressors are excited about the comeuppance that seems to be about to happen.

But the cleansing of the temple turns out to be a symbolic act, not the start of a violent uprising. Much to the disappointment of those who welcomed him on Palm Sunday, there will be no further actions by Jesus that suggest violence for the sake of political change. By driving out the money changers from the Temple, however, Jesus has made it clear to the people in power that he is indeed a threat; that he has come to shine light into the darkness of the ways in which they have manipulated the moral law in ways that allow them to gain personally at the expense of others — to do that which is evil rather than that which is good.

And so this act seals Jesus’ fate; he will shortly die. The powers-that-be must have him killed if they are to keep their corruption covered up.

This week we will hear again the story of his execution. The strange thing is that his death should have put an end to him. But here we are, 2000 years later, hearing the story once more of how he spoke truth to power, and paid the ultimate price for doing so.

We often ask the difficult question of why it is that God allows so much suffering to take place in this world. We cannot help but ask the question, and we probably won’t find a satisfying answer. But here we have an extraordinary thing: Jesus, who our faith declares in some mysterious sense to be God incarnate in flesh, takes his stand with all those who suffer — all those who are oppressed. He will suffer as well, to the point of a very painful death. God is with us, even as we cry with Jesus, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

But here is another question, another mystery. Why did God create us human beings with such freedom? Each of us is born with the potential, in our own unique way, to become a Hitler, or to become a St. Francis, a Mother Teresa. To abuse the power given unto us, or to use it for the sake of love.

Day by day this great mystery is being lived out. Sometimes the choices before us are tediously mundane.
The choice to do the right thing, or not — for our families, our co-workers, our neighbors.
To chose to offer simple kindness, or to withhold it.
To gossip and back bite or to build bridges of understanding.
To forgive, or to hold on to grudges.
To tell the truth in love, or to cast webs of deceit.

Sometimes the mystery is lived out in the midst of horrible human agony. How, we ask,
could God allow the Holocaust? But then again, how was it that Oskar Schindler could chose to place his own life in great danger by sheltering more than a thousand Jews from Nazi extermination during World War II, and ultimately end up penniless?

We hear such stories of courage, of faithfulness, of kindness, and we realize again that there is indeed goodness and there is evil, and we are placed here to somehow muddle our way through, learning how chose the right rather than the wrong; to love rather than to hate.

We stumble. Repeatedly. This week we will hear how the Apostle Peter stumbled, thrice denying Jesus, only to be lifted out of his self-condemnation by his beloved, risen savior.
The one who placed us in this mystery does not give up on us. Elliot Spitzer’s political life may be over, but his life isn’t over, and there is grace in his tumble, as there is grace in all our tumbles. God isn’t done with him, or with any of us. Try again.

Here once more the words of the Apostle Paul: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death– even death on a cross.”

A sermon preached on March 9, 2008 based upon Ezekiel 37:1 – 14, and John 11:1 – 45 entitled “Weird Things”:

Death has been on my mind this week, for two reasons. One, I was present in the intensive care unit Sunday evening when Don Seeley, breathed his last breath. It is an extraordinary thing to be with somebody, when, one moment their body has life in it, and the next, the life has disappeared. I had just finished praying the 23rd psalm, and was praying over him with his daughter Karan, and he departed. It was sad, especially for Karan, who will miss her Dad terribly. But there was also a sense of blessing — it was a peaceful, gentle passing for a man who had lived a long life, whose body had been causing him a great deal of pain and frustration lately, and who had been missing his beloved wife of over 50 years who departed this world just three years earlier.

The other reason death has been on my mind this week was one in which I could not detect any sense of blessing. We heard that two seventh grade boys were killed in south Jersey when they were hit by a car while crossing a residential street. My son Bobby actually knew one of the boys, having spent four days with him at a soccer camp last summer. As you can imagine, it disturbed Bobby greatly, and me in turn watching my son grapple with death, as well as the reminder this tragedy gave that there are no certainties in this world that my own 12 year old son, so full of life, could not be suddenly snatched from me as well.

We heard that the funeral home where the boy Bobby knew was laid out had a line stretched out far down the street that took three hours to move through. It reminded me of the scene that Jesus came upon when he finally reached Mary and Martha, grieving for their brother Lazarus, dead too young.

This is a strange story that the Gospel writer John tells. On the one hand, it has such painful realism. It speaks of Lazarus’ dead body decaying, causing a terrible stench. It describes people grieving in an all-too-familiar way; two sisters visited by innumerable friends, weeping, their hearts filled with an awful sadness, and anger too, considering all the “What ifs”, such as, “What if Jesus had gotten here in time?” “Why weren’t you here, Jesus!”

Along with this painful realism, though, odd things happen here in this story — bizarre things. When Jesus hears his friend Lazarus is dying, he intentionally waits before coming. When he finally arrives four days after Lazarus‘ death, he seems quite calm, and almost puzzled by the terrible distress of Martha and Mary. But then he too, weeps, described by John as “disturbed in his spirit, and deeply moved.” And then, of course, the most bizarre thing of all occurs: he simply commands Lazarus, four days dead in the tomb, to come out, and he does just that, wrapped tightly in his grave cloths.

One of the things that happens throughout John’s Gospel is that people misinterpret what Jesus is saying or doing. Though it happens multiple times in this passage, I’d like to focus on the misunderstanding of the meaning of Jesus’ tears. Seeing Jesus weeping, the people say, “See how he loved Lazarus.” Although he does in fact love Lazarus, this is not the reason why he is crying. It would have been easy enough for Jesus to have kept this from happening. He is grieving because of the heartbreak he sees Mary and Martha and all the others are going through having lost Lazarus by death. He weeps because death bullies them so.

And so when he raises Lazarus from the dead, it is not for Lazarus’ sake. It is for the sake of those who are there grieving in such terrible pain, and intimidated by death.

What, we might wonder, would it have been like from Lazarus’ point of view? We aren’t told. I think, however, that it is fair to imagine Lazarus’ response as having been mixed, at best.

Some insight to Lazarus’ point of view might be provided from the experience of another Don, Donald Piper, who wrote a book entitled, “90 Minutes in Heaven.” I read extensively from this book a few months back, and I want to return to different portions of the book this morning. The book describes Don Piper’s experience of having been in a terrible car crash on an icy bridge, hitting a truck head on. Apparently he died, which is what the EMTs concluded when they arrived on the scene and couldn’t find a pulse. Don was trapped inside his car, and once the emergency personnel concluded he was dead and there was no hope, they took their time, waiting for the jaws of life to arrive to cut Don’s body out, and for the coroner to show up to officially declare him dead.

During the 90 minutes in which Don was believed to be dead, he had a glorious vision, which he describes in the portion of the book I read from last time. It involved going to the gates of heaven, where he was greeted by all the people who had loved him and preceded him in death. It was the happiest experience he’d ever known, and there was this wonderful music, and just so much love.

Suddenly, however, Don found himself back in his broken body, trapped in the crushed car; his body wracked with pain. He tells the long, difficult story of his rehab from the accident and the severe bouts of depression he suffered, before finally discovering a calling in what he had experienced, and began sharing what he had seen and learned.

I’d like to read a passage from towards the end of the book:

One time I shared my experiences with a large congregation that included my wife’s parents, Eldon and Ethel Pentecost. They’ve been consistently supportive and made great sacrifices during my accident and lengthy recovery.

Even today, I can say honestly that I wish I could have stayed in heaven, but my ultimate time had not yet come. After leaving heaven, if I had known that I would face two weeks in ICU, a year in a hospital bed, and thirty-four operations, I surely would have been even more disheartened from the outset. However, this was not my choice, and I returned to the sounds of one voice praying, boots crunching glass underfoot, and the Jaws of Life ripping through my shattered auto. (Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven pp. 202 – 3)

Lazarus obeyed Jesus’ voice — Jesus whom he loved — but what he left behind to come back must have been so very beautiful.

In Buddhism, there is a concept of souls evolving over time through reincarnation; that through numerous incarnations the soul learns the lessons of life, and eventually reaches the perfection that is nirvana, roughly equivalent to what we call heaven. And yet Buddhists believe that certain great souls, having learned all the lessons that life teaches and are ready to attain nirvana, chose not to enter into bliss. Motivated by compassion, they choose rather to be incarnated in flesh once more, to be in this world as a teacher of other struggling souls making their way through this world.

Perhaps Lazarus coming back to life on this earth has that same quality.

There is more to life than we can see or touch; more than we can understand. Weird things happen. We want things to follow clear rules so we know what to expect. The physical laws of Isaac Newton seemed nice and clear, and then Einstein called our attention to weird stuff that didn’t follow the rules. It was disconcerting.

The same is true with spiritual reality. We want there to be clear rules, about how prayer works, for instance. Pray in such and such a way, and we will be assured of getting certain results: that’s what we want.

But God is free, and maybe a little weird, and the mystery of God can’t be nailed down.

Though I’ve never thought of it this way before, one of the things this story of the raising of Lazarus is about is the power of prayer. Jesus is praying to his Father in heaven when he commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb.

Prayer is more powerful that we realize.

In his book, Don Piper tells a story regarding what happened at the scene of the accident– a story he only found out much later. A Baptist minister named Dick Onerecker was driving on that same road, and when he came to the roadblock created by the police to keep people away from the bridge where the accident had taken place, he felt God urging him to pray for whoever was in the accident.

Dick got out of his car and walked a half a mile past a long line of cars stopped in traffic in order to approach Don’s car. He told the policeman that he was a minister and asked if there was anyone he could help. The policeman pointed to a couple of people who had been shaken up in the accident, but weren’t seriously hurt. Dick asked about the person who had been hit by the truck, and the officer said that the man was deceased.

Nonetheless, Dick felt God urging him to pray for the man in the demolished car. Normally praying for dead people wasn’t something Dick did, but the God nudge was insistent, and he asked the policeman if he could nonetheless approach the car, which, undeterred by the officer’s warning of the grizzly scene he would encounter, is exactly what Dick.

There was a tarp covering the car. Lifting the tarp, Dick crawled in through the trunk of the car’s hatchback. It was very dark, but Dick managed to get close enough to reach over the backseat to place his hand on Don’s shoulder. He began to pray. As he did, he became quite emotional and broke down and cried. And he sang. Despite the fact that Dick wasn’t able to feel a pulse either, he prayed fervently that Don would be delivered of unseen injuries, meaning brain and internal injuries.

Dick was singing, “What a friend we have in Jesus…” when suddenly he became aware that the man he was praying for was singling along with him.

Generally speaking, I don’t think God wants to bring back to life people who have already died. But God’s Spirit is like the wind — that’s what Jesus says earlier in the Gospel of John. You can’t control the wind.

The important thing from our point of view is to be attentive to which way the wind is blowing. We are called to be wind sailors. If, at a certain moment, God is declaring that the dry bones will live again, then as foolish as it may seem, it is time to pray for just that.

Len Bostwick tells a story from his family of a time his mother was pregnant and the child within her womb stopped moving — there was no indication of life within. Prayers were sent up to God fervently throughout a long night, and in the morning, the doctor, to his great surprise, found a heartbeat; the baby was fine.

Weird stuff happens.

A 90 year old man in my first church told me a story of a time, when, as a young soldier with an attitude he disobeyed a command given to him by superior on a cold night, and ended up sentenced to solitary confinement for 20 days.

Half way through his sentence, he was going crazy. His mind roamed to thoughts of his mother back at home, and how each morning she had knelt for prayer after she made each beds, and he began to wonder about whether this God was real or not.

He himself began to pray fervently, and he actually gave God a test. “Get me out of this prison today by noon, and I will believe in you.”

Just before noon, the guards came to set him free. After lunch he was order to report to his commanding officer, who told him the reason he was being set free ten days early was that back at Christmas time when all of the soldiers had been given a special extended furlough, his mother was the only one who sent him a thank you note.

This is crazy stuff. You ask me, and I will tell you: don’t expect God to jump through hoops for you. Demand that God intervene on your behalf, and God is under no compulsion to respond.

But maybe this one time, God decided to do just that. Why? Who knows, other than to say that God is free to do as God pleases.

Don Seeley once told me at the end of a worship service that he was convinced that it was his father’s prayers that had kept him safe when he was a soldier in World War II for over 3 years. Don had witnessed many of his buddies get killed in the war.

I must admit that when Don told me this, my reaction was, well, that’s a beautiful thing the admiration and appreciation that Don has for his father, as is Don’s belief in the power of prayer. But my intellect said to me, “That doesn’t make much sense. What about all the other fathers who prayed for their sons, only to have their sons come home in body bags?”

But now I don’t know for sure. Maybe Don was right. But the thing is, the story of the raising of Lazarus tells us that even if Don hadn’t made it back alive from World War II, that on the deepest level, he would have been, nonetheless, safe–indeed more than safe; that if he were willing to receive the gift God offered him in the moment of death, he would have been received into a place more beautiful than you or I can imagine. That in a certain sense, the ones who died in World War II were more fortunate than the ones who returned to struggle on through the pain and heartache of this life.

Knowing this isn’t going to take away all the heartache of death. Jesus knew the truth about heaven better than anyone, and even he wept. To be human is to have your heart broken in this life. But we are not left as orphans. The wind of the Spirit blows in surprising ways. Pay attention, and follow the leadings of the Wind.

Friday Don had a heart attack. Saturday he seemed to be doing okay, but Sunday they moved him to intensive care. I came home in the late afternoon after being out all day, and I had a message from his daughter asking me to come up to the hospital. When I arrived at Don’s bedside, I immediately began praying, and before I was finished, Don’s heart had stopped beating. It was deeply moving to be with Don and his daughter as he took his last breath on earth.

Here is the eulogy I gave this morning.

Donald Milton Seeley (June 16, 1921 – March 2, 2008)

Donald Milton Seeley was born June 16, 1921 in North Bergen, New Jersey, the youngest of four sons born to Howard and Lillian Seeley. Don was preceded in birth by his brothers Howard, John and Bob. It was a very happy family, and throughout his life Don would remain close to his three brothers despite the fact that their careers would move them away to Michigan, Saint Louis, and upstate New York. Don’s father was a successful and respected businessman, and throughout his life Don looked up to him with great admiration. When Karan would refer to Don as the best father ever, Don would demur, saying that, No, he was the one who had had the best father ever.

After graduating from Union Hill High School in Union City, Don did a variety of things, including attend secretarial school before enlisting in the army in 1942 to serve his country in World War II, primarily in Italy. Throughout his life, Don was convinced that it was his father’s prayers that had kept him safe during the bloody war in which he witnessed so many lose their lives.

After serving for over three years, Don was discharged in 1945, returning home with gifts of Italian jewelry for all his nieces. Having always enjoyed numbers, Don enrolled in Rutgers to study accounting, It was there at a Rutgers Football game in the company of his brother Bob that Don’s father suddenly collapsed, dying from a stroke. Just a couple of years later Don’s mother would also die.

Following graduation from Rutgers, Don was employed by a railroad company. While working in York, Pennsylvania, Don met Helen on one of his regular trips back to New Jersey, and he fell head over heels in love. He would write at least two letters a week to the girl who stole his heart; letters full of charm, humor and much passionate romance; letters that survive with Karan to this day.

At Christmas of 1950 Don proposed to Helen, hiding the ring he was giving his future bride in a Quaker Oats Box. Five months later, on May 20, 1951 Don and Helen were married in the Episcopal Church of Holy Communion in Paterson.

Helen had endured a rather harsh childhood; her father was an alcoholic who gave little attention to his family, and her mother was severely handicapped in her capacity to express love. For a time as a young child Helen was shipped off without explanation to live with relatives in Scotland.

But everything changed for Helen when she met Don. He showered her with love and affection, and she gladly gave it in return. Don was the kind of husband who would kiss his wife before going to take out the garbage.

Don and Helen lived for a time in Washington, DC before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, where, to their great delight, Karan was born. There are wonderful pictures from Karan’s infancy that clearly show the depth with which both Don and Helen treasured their beloved daughter.

Shortly thereafter the family moved back to live in Haledon, Helen’s home town, before settling in Riverdale when Karan was four. Don worked for Westinghouse in Bloomfield.

When Karan was four, Helen gave birth to a baby boy, Don Jr., but the child was sick from the start and never was able to leave the hospital, dying from various infections after only two months of life. Despite enduring this great sadness, the family of three had a very happy life together, appreciating one another all the more deeply.

Karan remembers her Dad’s patience, and the way he was always there for her. Even when he didn’t know what to say — when there wasn’t much to say — he was always willing to listen to his daughter. She called him by her pet name, “Milty”, short for his middle name. They’d go fishing together.

The whole family would go on trips to the shore, to Cape Cod, and to visit the Uncles. Karan found surrogate siblings; especially her girlfriend Chris whom she met in ninth grade. Don and Helen would welcome Chris to come along on family trips.

After raising Karan and putting in several decades of work, Don and Helen retired at the same time, and then began to enjoy themselves together, traveling to such places as Australia and Alaska, taking cruises together to the Caribbean. Don would go each summer to visit his brother Bob for a couple of weeks at his house on a lake in Michigan, where together they would happily pass the time fishing.

In the early 1990s Don and Helen gave up the house in Riverdale, and moved to the apartment in Parsippany in order to be closer to Karan. They became active with local seniors groups as well as with the Elks.

Three years ago, in the midst of a pleasant evening out with her husband and her daughter, Helen suddenly collapsed, succumbing to a brain hemorrhage that quickly took her life. Don and Karan were stunned and heartbroken.

Don would never take his wedding ring off. Losing the love of his life, Don was devastated, but he was a survivor — a man of strong will and determination, and he soldiered on as best he could. He passed the time by reading and watching old movies, and he continued to make his summer trips to Michigan to fish with his brother Bob. He became a reluctant lover of cats, making sure Helen’s beloved cat Daisy got her daily treats. Sunday afternoons were spent at Karan’s house, where she would cook Milty dinner and do his laundry.

Don began attending my church, the Parsippany United Methodist Church, and when he felt he was ready, he took the vows of membership on September 24, 2006. It took a lot of courage to come to church alone at the advanced age of 83, quietly carrying his sorrow for his wife. In the couple of years we were privileged to know Don, he overcame a growing set of physical ailments that made it harder and harder for him to get to church, but nearly every Sunday he was there.

His last Sunday in church was just three weeks ago. By now Don required a walker to get around, and he had recently become partially blind, but there he was, determined to worship God. The children of our Church presented Don with a special prayer shawl made specifically for him. As they draped the shawl over his shoulders, Don became teary eyed, and all he could get out was a simple, heartfelt, “Thanks.” We all knew we had witnessed a God moment: that we had been blessed: by the God of great love, but also by the tender-hearted and courageous man who we were very fortunate to know in the final trek of his life on earth. We will miss Don.

We know Uncle Bob, the lone surviving brother, will miss his old fishing buddy as well. Don’s nephew Daniel and his wife Linda will miss their Uncle as well, as will the great nephews Evan and Ryan, not to mention various friends of Karan’s who couldn’t help but adopted Don as their own family member.

And most of all, Karan will miss her buddy Milty. You were a wonderful daughter. Your father knew you loved him.

The apostle Paul declares that “Love never ends.” Everything else passes away, but love is eternal. The love you have shared has not died. Your father loves you still.

It is so very beautiful where Don is now, more wonderful than we can imagine. Don doesn’t need a walker in heaven, and he has no problem seeing whatsoever. He is reunited with Helen, and their romance continues. Don Jr. is there as well, whole and healthy and in the fullness of his personality which he never really got to express here on earth. Don’s parents are there, and his brothers Howard and John. And all those buddies Don fought in World War II with who didn’t make it home; they’re there, too.

You will see him again one day, but in the meantime, the challenge is to embrace the gift of this life now: to find the same courage and tender-heartedness inside ourselves as Don expressed in his own wonderful way.

The challenge includes appreciating old friends, and making new friends as well; reaching out to others, and letting others reach out to you as well.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” said Jesus to his disciples the night before he died. Don is with Jesus, and the two of them are not leaving you orphaned. There love will be with you, always.

A sermon preached on March 2, 2008 based upon Ephesians 5:8 – 14 and John 9:1 – 7, entitled, “Simple Truth”.

Mathematicians and physicists are drawn to simplicity. Formulas and theories appeal to them when they are elegant and beautiful, which means not overly complex. If there are two theories that account for the same data, the one that is simpler, less convoluted, is the more appealing one. Physicists are presently searching for something called the theory of everything — some basic underlying theory that ties everything together, and their quest is based on this basic understanding that generally speaking, truth tends to be simple rather than complicated.

There is something similar at work in the realm of spiritual truth.

One of the reactions that people often have to the Bible is a certain bewilderment in regard to its apparent complexity. Something is said in one place that seems to be contradicted in another place. The concepts can be hard to understand. I’ve known quite a few people who in response to this are tempted to essentially give up on reading the Bible.

In reading the Bible, it’s a good idea to try to latch on to the simple ideas, because truth is ultimately simple. There was a verse in the letter to the Ephesians that caught my attention in this regard. “Live as children of light — for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.”

Why are we here? To live as children of light. What are children of light about?
They are about bearing the fruit of light which is “all that is good and right and true.”

How do you tell what is “good and right and true.” Here, I think, if our hearts are relatively clear, that which is good and right and true, becomes intuitively obvious. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to recognize it, if — and this is a big if — your heart is relatively clear.

The story from our Gospel lesson gives an example of this.

Jesus and the disciples come upon a man who is suffering; a man born blind. His life has been a constant struggle. How does one respond to suffering such as this?

His disciples respond by asking a big question, perhaps the biggest of all questions: Why did this man have to suffer so? Entire books have been written on this question without really solving the mystery of the question. The disciples seem to be asking Jesus to give them some kind of complicated intellectual answer that will explain the ways of God in terms of sin and punishment.

Jesus’ answer is much simpler. Why is this man here? He is here so that we the works of God can be displayed.

At which point, Jesus turns his attention to the man himself. Jesus draws close to the man. He spits on the ground and with his saliva makes mud. He is unconcerned about getting himself dirty, nor with coming into intimate contact with this man whom many assumed must be a sinner and therefore ritually unclean. Jesus exchanges bodily fluids, applying the mud he has made with his own saliva directly onto the man’s eyes.

In short, he shows compassion on the man. What could be simpler than this?

Now here’s the thing: in and of itself, this simple act of compassion of giving attention and human contact to this poor man isolated in his blindness would have been “good and right and true”.

Amazingly, though, the man is actually healed through this encounter. He can see for the first time in his life! The colors of flowers, the smiles of children, his parents’ faces, birds flying in the air — he sees it all for the first time!

A “good and right and true” act, if ever there was one. Who can deny it?

Alas, however, the rest of the chapter goes on to describe how the Pharisees did indeed deny that what had transpired between Jesus and this suffering man was “good and right and true.”

They question the man, then the man’s parents, then the man again, and end up condemning the man when he insists that is was Jesus who has done this for him, and that it is indeed good and of God.

Now the Pharisees are not dumb men. If you gave them an IQ test, they’d do quite well. Why can’t they see something that is as obvious as the nose on your face? They can’t recognize it, because they have an attachment to a system of thought (quite complicated) and the power system that goes along with it, and the simple truth of what has happened here between this suffering man and Jesus threatens these systems.

Until they let go of this attachment, they will not be able to recognize the simple truth.

In the course of living our lives in this world, attachments form in our hearts that block our perception of simple truth.

Perhaps this is why Jesus said that unless we turn and become like little children,
we will never enter the kingdom of God. Children haven’t developed these attachments. Certain things are obvious to a child. A lonely man born blind has attention paid to him, and lo and behold, he gets to see for the first time ever. That’s a good thing!

The adult would say, “You just don’t understand the complexities involved here. First off, the so-called “healing” — if it really was a healing — took place on the Sabbath, and that’s not how God works.” But before the adult can go onto the other points, the child gets bored, and runs off to play.

In our epistle lesson, Paul gives another simple piece of advice: “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”

Christianity is distinguished in understanding that Truth is not a set of propositions; it is not a system of thought, a theology or a philosophy — a set of ideas. Truth is instead, a person — a man named Jesus.

If you want to know what is true and right and good, watch and see what Jesus does. He reaches out to the outcaste. He doesn’t blame. He brings the lost into the circle. He forgives.

And one of the things that Jesus does that we pay particular attention to during the season of Lent is that he goes out into the wilderness for a time, to clear out his heart and head, just like his friend John the Baptist did before him.

Our souls get cloudy, so to speak. Lent is a season for going into the wilderness, metaphorically, if not literally, in order to let go of our attachments, so that we can become simple hearted again.

Getting close to death does this as well. That which is obviously good and right and true becomes clear once more when we draw near to death.

Shortly before his death George Fox, the founder of Quaker faith, was heard to proclaim: “Now I am clear, I am fully clear.”

I included the words of Lee Atwater in our Lenten devotional. Writing from his death bed, Lee Atwater also became fully clear. His words serve as a commentary on the story of the healing of the man born blind; a Pharisee turning and becoming like a child. Lee Atwater said:

“I’ve come a long way since the day I told George Bush that his `kinder, gentler’ theme was a nice thought, but it wouldn’t win us any votes. I used to say that the President might be kinder and gentler, but I wasn’t going to be. How wrong I was. There is nothing more important in life than human beings, nothing sweeter than the human touch.”

Or we could turn to the clarity of six year old Eddie Cogan of our congregation who once said to Sarah Jernstrom, “Your husband died. Some people die young, and some people live to be 100, and we don’t know why. I’m sorry that your husband died.”

People suffer. We don’t know why. We can argue about it. Or we can have their sufferings be a call to compassion — an invitation to see what God has been calling us to see all along, that we are, on the deepest level, brothers and sisters all.

A teacher asked his students how they could tell when the night had ended and the day begun. (Some might ask, “Was the teacher a Christian?” If not, I have no interest in hearing what the teacher had to say.) One said, “When you see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it is a cow or a horse?”
“No”, said the teacher.”
“When you look at a tree in the distance and can tell if it is a maple or an oak.
“Wrong again”, said the teacher.
“Well, then, what is it?” asked his students.
“When you look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him; when you look into the face of any woman and recognize in her your sister.
If you cannot do this, no matter what time it is by the sun, it is still night.”

On February 29th I was invited to speak at Temple Beth Am on the subject of Capital Punishment and the United Methodist perspective*. Below is the talk I gave:

If someone were to murder one of my loved ones, I am certain that my emotional response to the crime would be a desire to see the murderer die. At least initially, overwhelmed by my grief, I’m sure I would want revenge. I think that this goes without saying.

I don’t think, however, that our laws should be determined by our emotional responses; rather, our laws should express the kind of society we aspire to be.

Most of us have aspirations for our nation that it be a place where human life is cherished.

As a society we have every right to protect ourselves from those persons who have demonstrated a proclivity for committing murder by placing them behind bars for potentially life-long captivity, and indeed, we have the right to administer punishment — to enforce consequences to actions that are evil.

Capital punishment, however, opens the door to human beings making the judgment that
certain peoples’ lives no longer have value.

I am not sure how I would argue this position if I were not a person of faith. There was a Broadway play a couple of decades back with the title, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” that dealt with the issue of the right of a person receiving life-sustaining medical care to choose to forgo such care. This is a quite different issue, but what struck me is the way the question was phrased in the play’s title: “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”

From a secular point of view, the answer to the question is obvious. Duh!? The life that exists inside my body is my life. If this is indeed so, then you could argue that persons who haven’t responsibly lived their lives — specifically, people who have used their life to take away the life of another; such persons have forfeited their right to life itself.

But what if, in the deepest possible sense, this isn’t my life at all? That the life I am privileged to live in this body is God’s life, not mine? The Biblical image of the creation of human beings in Genesis involves God breathing divine breath into a pile of dust. Apart from God’s divine breath, we are nothing more than a pile of dust. It is God’s life that inhabits our bodies, and we are stewards of this life. We can be good stewards or we can be bad stewards, but either way, it is still God’s life, and therefore sacred.

Well, what if the murderer shows no remorse whatsoever? What if the person commits this heartless, cruel assault upon another’s basic right to live, creating endless torment for the loved ones of the murder victim, and the murderer sits there smirking throughout the trial? Wouldn’t it be right, then, to take his or her life?

This, of course, would be what we would all want to do. But, if what I am saying is true — that the life that lives in the body of the murderer is not really his or her life at all, but rather God’s life, then whether or not he or she appreciates the inherent value of life is, in a certain sense, beside the point.

As I said before, I think the issue of capital punishment involves the question of, what kind society do we aspire to be? Capital punishment gives mixed messages in this regard. An advocate of capital punishment would say that it gives a powerful message that murder is WRONG: kill someone and you will pay the ultimate price; you yourself will die. On the hand, the practice of capital punishment implies that some people do indeed deserve to die.

If that is so, then how exactly does one determine who deserves to die? The husband who plots his wife’s murder could take the point view that he understood this woman in a way no one else understood her, and he alone saw how evil she was — that she was one of those people who deserved to die.

If capital punishment is in practice, then society has already agreed with the man that some people do in fact deserve to die. The wife killer could always simply argue, “Well, you just didn’t know her the way I did; if you did, then you would agree with me — she was one of those ones who deserve to die.”

Some might argue that as a general rule capital punishment should not be practiced, but that there are exceptions. Terrorists, for instance, who callously take multiple lives; serial killers, or people who torture their victims before taking their lives, for whom the sentence of death should remain an option.

Again, this creates inconsistency. This particular murderer deserves death, but the murderer of my family member did not deserve to die? Are you telling me that my loved one’s death was any less significant?

I now want to approach the question before us from another direction.

Generally speaking, there is a consensus among people regarding the importance of holding individuals accountable for their actions. When we say that a person has no responsibility for his or her actions, we believe we are diminishing them.

From a Biblical Faith perspective, to say that we human beings were created in the image and likeness of God is to say, among other things, that there is always within us some measure of freedom; that we are not merely a product of our environment and our genetic make up, and that we bear some measure of responsibility for our actions.

I believe this to be so as well.

I think, however, that our tendency is to see our freedom and accountability as being greater than it truly is.

The reason that I support gun control laws is that I question the sharp distinction often made between essentially “good” people and “bad” people, between criminals and law-abiding people, or even between “sane” and “insane” people. Opponents of gun control laws would say, “Keep guns out of the hands of people with criminal records and of those who have been hospitalized for psychiatric conditions, and allow the rest of us to have free access to guns to protect ourselves.”

I would argue, however, that we all have moments of insanity, when rage and delusion temporarily overtake us, which is why I don’t think there should be a lot of guns hanging around. Most of the time it would be safe for me to have access to a gun; but there are moments when it would not be. Best NOT to have guns lying around the house because of such moments.

From my faith perspective, there is both saint and sinner in all of us, and this realization requires a certain humility.

My understanding of the light and darkness, the saint and sinner that lives within myself is quite incomplete. My understanding of the light and darkness in others is even more limited, although on a routine basis I am inclined to think I do know about such things. God alone has complete knowledge of what is within our hearts — what motivates our actions — and for me to claim such knowledge reveals arrogance on my part.

In the Scriptures that Jews and Christians share, we hear of how King David orchestrated the murder of Uriah in order to cover his sin and to steal Uriah’s wife. When Nathan the prophet confronts him, at first the self-deception at work in David’s pysche keeps him from taking responsibility for his evil actions and identifying himself with the rich man in the little story Nathan’s tells him who stole and the poor man’s lamb so he would have something tasty to serve his guests. David’s response is to condemn the rich man to death.

Nathan’s reply, “You are the man.”

Scripture often embraces more ambiguity about the human heart than we are willing to accept. King David, the greatest of all Israel’s kings and instrument of much good in this world, was also a murderer. Can we embrace such a paradox?

Consider Job’s three friends as they claim knowledge of exactly how God acts in human affairs. “You are suffering,” they tell Job, “because you have sinned. Accept the punishment that God has justly delivered to you.” Why do Job’s friends feel so compelled to hold on to this point of view? Is it not because they find comfort in this neat and tidy but ultimately delusional view of how good and evil and the experience of suffering plays out in this world? “Job is getting what he deserves, and if we can simply keep our noses clean, we will avoid Job’s terrible fate.”

There is something comforting about the notion that we ourselves would never commit murder; that we are essentially different from the murderer. When we sentence others to death, we reinforce this view, which, I would suggest, involves a subtle kind of arrogance. Until we find ourselves in the place of severe temptation, how do we really know for sure how we would respond?

In the Christian scriptures, Jesus teaches his followers to pray a daily prayer that includes this line: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” which I take to be an acknowledgement of our basic frailty and our dependence upon God’s sustaining grace.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus implies that a person who has felt lust in his heart is no different from the person who commits adultery, and the person who has felt anger is his heart is, in essence, no different from the murderer, which is precisely why I don’t keep guns in my house.

There is a story in the Gospel of John about a woman who has been caught in the act of adultery, and on the way to take her to be stoned, the men who are about execute her ask Jesus what he thinks, “Should we stone her to death or no?“

Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone.”

To sin in one part of our lives indicates a capacity to sin in other places as well, given the right set circumstances. An interesting detail that John includes in the story is that the crowd gradually disperses, beginning first with the older members of the stoning party. The tendency is, the longer we live on this earth, the more opportunity we have to know something of the sinner that yet lives within us.

In Luke’s Gospel, one of the things that Jesus is portrayed as saying on the cross as capital punishment is being carried out upon him is, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We think we know the reasons we do what we do, but do we really? We often justify our actions with a noble reason, in which there is, perhaps, a degree of truth. But more often than not there are multiple motivations driving our actions, and we habitually delude ourselves about the power of the darker motivations at work within us.

Now, what I have argued here may strike some as discouraging. We long for more clarity in life than I am suggesting is possible.

But this, I think, is where compassion is found — in the realization that we are all — every single one of us — in this thing called life together. It is only when we face squarely the possibilities of both light and darkness within ourselves that we can begin to have compassion upon others.
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*Now although I do not always agree with every “official” position of the United Methodist Church, in regards our stance towards the death penalty, I am in agreement. Although Methodist opposition to capital punishment dates back to the 1920s, it was in 1946 that the General Conference of what is today called the “United Methodist Church” officially adopted a stance opposing the death penalty. Recently, United Methodists were actively involved in the movement that lead to the abolition in 2007 of capital punishment in New Jersey.

For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator.