Easter and a Love Supreme

DURING THE EASTER SEASON, the first reading in our lectionary becomes, strangely, a New Testament reading. Most of the year, we immerse ourselves in the scripture we share with the Jews, but after the resurrection we traipse through the book of Acts. The claim being made is that the history of God’s chosen people continues in the history of the church. God is still working signs and wonders. And these include the sharing of goods in common, the fact that there are no needy people among us, bringing awe and distress among our neighbors, and a dawning kingdom brought slightly closer. Just like in our churches and communities today, right?

These Easter texts are also deeply sensual and material. God’s reign is imagined as a banquet with rich wines and marrow-filled meats. Love between sisters and brothers is like oil running down the head, over the face. The resurrection texts themselves insist on this point more emphatically than any other: Jesus is raised in his body. This is the beginning of God’s resurrecting power breaking out all over the creation God loves. What could ever be impossible after a resurrection? Our limited imaginations of the possible (Can we make budget? Can we get a few more votes on this bill? Can we improve lives in this neighborhood?) are shown for the bankruptcy in which they are mired. A new order is here. We pray, God, make our imaginations match the sensuousness, the materiality, the grandeur of what you have already accomplished and, more daringly still, what you promise yet to do.

ON EASTER, trying too hard can yield the opposite result of what we intend. We do better to try for a base hit than to swing for the fences. Interpreting these texts well is work sufficient for this greatest of good days.

A central theme here is eating. Lavishly. Isaiah depicts an almost unimaginable banquet in sensuous detail. Films such as Like Water for Chocolate or Tortilla Soup or The Hundred-Foot Journey come to mind. Cynics call them “food porn.” Christians call it “the kingdom.” Imagine the greatest wedding feast you’ve ever been to and multiply it.

Jesus isn’t back among us for any time at all before he’s eating again. It’s often said you can’t open a page of the gospels where Jesus isn’t eating. Everywhere he goes there’s food and drink and friends and enemies and a party. Acts is keen to insist that the apostles ate and drank with him after he rose. The messianic banquet has begun. It is not yet as extravagant as Isaiah imagines. Not all the invitees are at the party yet; the poor are not yet the guests of honor; the proud are not yet brought low. But the appetizers are out. We call them sacraments. They have to change how we eat and drink and invite in the rest of our lives.

The story of Jesus’ appearance to Mary is one of the most beautifully wrought in scripture. It is almost unbearably understated. A rumor. A run. Rolled-up clothes. Belief. Tears. Misunderstanding. A name. A refused embrace. And a promise. So much, in so few words. Two observations for now. One, Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. The best explanation? Because he’s gardening. He is working on restoring the Garden in which God first planted us. Two, Jesus makes an oddly wordy promise: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” A Trinitarian point: Jesus makes his Father ours, and makes our God his. The great exchange of salvation is displayed here. We who are not natural children are graciously adopted. Plenty to talk about over dinner.

[ April 12 ]

Can God Breathe?

Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

AT SOME POINT a silly rumor spread that Christians are not interested in bodies, this world, or the material lives of our neighbors. These texts shout in the other direction. To read them is to see that Christianity is about all being fed, since the Word has come among us in a tactile way to allow us to touch and feel and handle him. Our faith is about being breathed on by a God who loves materiality enough to make it and become physically part of it, in Christ and in us.

The best part of the Acts text is usually left untranslated: “Great grace was upon them all, forthere was not a needy person among them.” The preposition is usually left out and replaced with a sentence-ending period. Acts means to say that “great grace” is seen in the fact that there is no one needy. The community without poverty imagined in the Promised Land is fulfilled here in church (Deuteronomy 15:4). The psalmist also imagines a promised land with unimaginable wholeness instead of our present fragmentation. Unity and friendship are like anointing (we might say “messiah-ing”), from Hermon in the north to Zion in the south.

Most people don’t think of God as someone we can touch with our hands. The 1 John text insists that the apostles have done just that. Most don’t think of God breathing. God does—on us—empowering us to forgive like Jesus does. These texts press us to say God is the most material thing there is. The question is not whether God exists, but whether we do (thanks Stanley Hauerwas, paraphrasing Aquinas). We exist in earnest by forgiving as God forgives, by touching others with food and kindness and friendship as God has done in our flesh.

This gospel passage is a handy counterpoint to last week’s statement by Jesus, “do not hold on to me.” Here he accepts Thomas’ challenge and shows him his hands and side. Caravaggio famously imagines Thomas jabbing his fingers inside. It is hard to imagine a more visceral illustration of our call to be “handlers” of the Word.

[ April 19 ]

Guilty Bystanders

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

IF YOU OR I were planning a resurrection, it would be spectacular. Cameras rolling, impressive tricks, news at 11. When Jesus is raised, he walks through a wall and eats a fish (thanks to D. Stephen Long for this observation). The resurrection is not a magic trick. It is the restoration of the cosmos, in all its ordinariness.

I confess a certain preacherly discomfort with Acts’ rhetoric. The apostles regularly say a variant of this: “God raised Jesus whom you killed.” It seems a seed for the church’s historic blame of the Jews for Jesus’ death, when scripture is elsewhere absolutely clear it is we who kill Jesus, all of us. Acts redeems itself here though: “You killed the Author of life,” Peter says (3:15). Is that even possible? By definition, God cannot not be. God cannot die. But by virtue of the incarnation, God’s flesh is as frail as ours. And as soon as it is, as soon as we can get our hands on God, it’s over. The murder that has blood on all our hands turns out to bring about our salvation. That blood doesn’t just soil; it saves.

Psalm 4 has been a favorite for monastic communities for millennia. They chant it at compline, the last liturgy of the day before they retire to bed. “I lie down in peace and sleep comes at once,” it exudes. Every time we lay our head down is a rehearsal for our own death and the hope we have that (preposterously) extends beyond it. Until then, how we walk through walls and eat ordinary food matters more than we can imagine. How we break down walls and share food can instantiate now the kingdom to which God is inviting all people. “Start practicing now to be a sweet little old woman or man when you’re old,” Kathleen Norris says. “Because however old you are, you’ll need all the time you have left to get there.”

[ April 26 ]

Love Abides

Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

A THEOLOGICAL argument broke out in a new-member class I was teaching. “Do you even think there is a hell?” one aggressive questioner asked from my left. “It’s black and white to me; you either accept Jesus or you go there,” another said from my right.

We hear plenty about the position from the right. Texts like Acts are behind it: “There is salvation in no one else,” it thunders. “For there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Less well known is the biblical pressure from the other side—the left: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” Jesus says. “I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16). Our deadlock was presaged in the Bible itself. In context, Jesus in John is probably referring to Gentiles—even though Muslim apologists suggest it refers to them; others see signs of extraterrestrials there (really!). The church is a multigenerational argument over how to read scripture well, through which we hurt one another and learn how to forgive one another.

It is striking how easily we avoid texts whose meaning is more plain: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” (1 John 3:17). We would rather argue theology than live that out.

Psalm 23 may be our most familiar verse in this lectionary, but it’s also the trickiest. Psalm 23 has been rendered toothless by incessant quotation, needle-pointing, and pop-culture referencing. It should not be used to offer generic, content-less “comfort.” It is rather about the more costly and difficult subject of enemy-love. God’s table in the midst of God’s enemies yields Jesus’ cross—the basis on which anyone is ever saved, anyone ever fed, anyone ever comforted, any other religion respected: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).