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what will it take?

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I guess it makes sense that most of the lectionary passages during Eastertide deal with Jesus’ appearances, but this week’s text (Luke 24:36-43) is another version of his surprising the disciples as they gathered in a locked room, still trying to figure out what was going on. Maybe we are all still trying to figure that out. Here’s where the story took me.

_______________________

When I first looked at the Gospel passage for this morning I was puzzled. Last week, the verses from John looked at Jesus’ encounter with the disciples on what we would call Easter evening. This week’s selection from Luke looks at Jesus’ encounter with the disciples on what we would call Easter evening. Why are we looking at the same story?

Well, it’s the same event, but it’s not the same story.

John begins the events of Easter morning with Mary going to the tomb alone and finds it empty. (Peter is also there but sees the empty tomb and runs off in excitement.) Then a man Mary assumes is the caretaker speaks to her and when he calls her name, she realizes it is Jesus. Later that evening, Jesus appears to the disciples who have locked themselves in a room and they struggle to trust it is him until he breathes on them—the verses we looked at last week. Eight days later, Jesus comes back for Thomas. Then there is one more story about him meeting them on the sea shore and cooking breakfast.

Luke’s account of events following Jesus’ resurrection starts at the tomb at dawn where the women found it empty and then ran back to tell the other disciples—the men—who didn’t believe them. Then later that day Jesus appeared to two of his followers as they walked back to their home in Emmaus. They didn’t recognize him until they invited him to stay for dinner. Then they ran back to Jerusalem to tell the others and while they were talking Jesus appeared in the room. That’s where our passage for today picks up the story.

He showed them his wounds and they were joyful, but still not sure, so he asked if they had any food and ate it in front of them. And they still struggled.

John’s account made it seem as though seeing was believing. Luke is less complimentary of the disciples, or perhaps more direct. He wants us to understand that trusting the power of the resurrection—the reality of it—is not easy, even when Jesus is standing in the room.

As I said earlier, both writers are talking about the same events, but they are not telling the same story—and we haven’t even looked at Matthew and Mark. It requires a spiritual contortionist to make the stories all fit together because the details don’t match. What they hold in common is that Jesus’ followers got to see him; they had the chance to see him and touch him and trust that he was no longer dead, but alive.

At the end of our passage last week, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who don’t get the chance to see in person and still trust.”

That’s us—that’s where we join the story, which brings me to a question: What does it take to trust God?

During Eastertide, we sing hymns that make huge theological claims about Christ overcoming sin and death and hell, and then we go back into our week and struggle to get through Tuesday afternoon. Maybe that is where we find our first resonance with the disciples: we don’t know how to take it all in either.

I said “we,” but I don’t want to be presumptuous. Each of us has our own experience with how we understand and trust who Jesus was and what he did, and that reality is underlined in the variations of the gospel accounts. What they all share is all four gospels come to a close without the disciples being sure of much of anything. They knew they had seen Jesus, but that didn’t explain much. They didn’t pick up where they left off. He didn’t stay long, or do a bunch of miracles, or tell new parables. He told them to go tell others, and then he left.

And they faced the choice of whether they would trust or not—and that is a choice they had to make over and over again for the rest of their lives, just as we do.

The fact that we are gathered for worship this morning is evidence that they, along with all those who have come after them, kept choosing to trust, particularly on the days that don’t feel much like Easter. A big part of the way they continued to trust is that they did it together.

On the night before he was executed, Jesus prayed that God would unite those who followed him. Early in the book of Acts, those outside of the young church marveled at the way the loved one another. You know what I am going to say next: faith is a team sport.

Translator Sarah Ruden says Jesus was being a bit sarcastic when he asked the disciples for something to eat, as if to say, “What is it going to take to get you to trust that this is real?” Perhaps that is a question we need to keep asking one another—without the sarcasm: What is it going to take for me to help you grow in your faith, your trust of God?

May we not assume that we are all getting along swimmingly. May we not settle for letting faith be a personal thing that we all just keep to ourselves. May we have the courage to encroach on one another, to ask what it will take, and then listen closely to the answer. The reason we are here is because those who came before us were willing to risk the intimacy that fosters trust in both God and one another. May we go and do likewise. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

take this breath

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
xr:d:DAGBytEHBbk:4,j:2034925312253202072,t:24040802

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted. Part of the reason is we have been in the throes of selling our house in Durham and buying a different house there and also dealing with Lizzy!’s recovery from her surgery to remove her eyes. Along with that I have been dealing with some sort of GI issue that has yet to be identified but has sapped my energy. All of that to say thanks for your patience and here is this week’s sermon based on John 20:19-29, verses that tell the story of Jesus’ first encounters with the disciples after his resurrection.

_________________________

I’ve always liked Thomas.

I like him because he is himself. He is honest about what is going on inside him. He must have felt like the poster boy for the Fear of Missing Out when he found out that Jesus showed up the one time he wasn’t in the room. The last time they had seen Jesus, he was dead. Now they were telling him Jesus was alive and they had seen him.

And he said, “Yeah—I’m going to need to see that for myself. I need to touch him if it’s going to feel real.”

The brevity of the gospel account doesn’t tell us if the others tried to talk him into trusting them, or if the castigated him for being a bit skeptical, but somewhere along the line he became “doubting Thomas” and the name stuck. For many, that’s the only way they know him.

But Thomas wasn’t questioning the theological underpinnings of the Resurrection; this wasn’t an intellectual exercise. The one to whom he had devoted his life had been killed—that was real—now he was being told he was alive again and doing fantastical things, and so he said, “Yeah, I’m going to have to see that for myself.”

Eight days later, they were all together and Jesus showed up again.

One of the things that is interesting is that it seems Jesus wasn’t with the disciples constantly after the Resurrection. The stories in the Gospels that precede the Crucifixion make it seem as though Jesus and his followers almost lived together. Yet over a week went by before they had contact with him. Once again, the gospel account doesn’t tell us anything about how either Jesus or the disciples spent that time. We don’t know if the others kept riding Thomas, or if they knew where Jesus was, or if they knew they would even see him again.

And then he showed up in the same room specifically, it seems, to present his wounds to Thomas. Jesus didn’t reprimand him or correct him, he just said, “Go ahead and touch me. Do whatever it takes to trust I’m really here.”

And Thomas exclaimed, “My Christ and my God.”

Like I said, I like Thomas.

But I want to back up for a moment and look at the encounter that took place without him because it seems Thomas was not so different from the others, and I’m not sure Thomas is the center of the real story in these verses.

It all took place in the evening of the day the women had found the empty tomb. In John’s account, Mary Magdelene was the only one who had seen Jesus, and they had not believed her. They had not gathered to celebrate; they were scared to death. They were hiding in a locked room when Jesus appeared among them and offered peace.

Well, that’s the way it’s translated, but poet Pádraig Ó Tuama points out that shalom is the way Hebrew people said “Hello,” much like they do today in Israel. In Arab countries they say, “Salaam.” Jesus appeared and said, “Hello.” And then, the gospel says, he “breathed on them,” which seems like an odd detail, but from what I learned this week it is the essential moment of the story.

In her new translation of the Gospels, translator Sarah Ruden that it was a folk ritual of the time to take in the last breath of a dying person in to your own mouth. When I told Ginger about it, she remembered working with a woman whose husband had died. She found a beach ball in the attic that he had blown up at the beach the previous summer and realized it was still his breath inside.

Jesus seems to have reversed the ritual. Ruden translates the verse to read, “He puffed air into them,” and then goes on to point out that the verb is the same for playing the flute.

It makes me think of how many Sunday mornings we have been moved by Valerie’s beautiful offerings with her flute and the way she can turn a piece of pipe into an instrument just by breathing into it.

Perhaps that is what inspired St. Francis to pray, “Make me an instrument of your peace.”

And then Jesus said the words about forgiveness depending on them, which feels like another way of saying that the only way anyone else will catch the melody is if you breathe it into them as well.

And then Jesus came back for Thomas, not because Thomas was a special case as much as to demonstrate how the melody of love and trust gets passed along. Jesus forgave Thomas for his fear, as he had done for the other disciples, and met him where he was.

“Go ahead and touch me.” And Thomas felt the breath of God flow through him as well. He was filled with the melody of love.

In Greek the word for breath also means spirit. Another way to think of the Holy Spirit is to think of the breath of God. The key verb in the Genesis story of creation is much the same in Hebrew: God breathed the universe into being.

At her church in Guilford, Ginger starts each service by inviting people to sit still and then to breathe in the breath of God and breathe out the love of God. Breath is at the heart of our very being, on many levels it seems.

So let us practice for a moment and focus on our breathing.

Breathe in the breath of God.
Breathe out the love of God.

Feel the presence of God inside you, the melody of creation, the holy spirit that connects us all, and trust that we are instruments of peace. We can change the world by the way we breathe. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

PS — I can’t pass up the chance to point to this old gem.

lenten journal: friday night lights

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

friday night lights

at the funeral home
on a friday evening

one of the speakers
quoted Mary Oliver

“four small stones
hugging each other”

an image of love
in a roomful of loss

the one who just
lost his husband

took the words in
with the rest of us

and then stood up
to say thank you

we walked out to
an embracing sunset

mary talked about
the sun as well

she was at the beach
I was in a parking lot

same sun same love
different stones

all in need of embrace
all ablaze in gratitude

at the funeral home
is it that simple?

Peace,
Milton

 

 

lenten journal: affirmation season

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

affirmation season

the best part of
deacons’ meeting
on the night
after the Oscars
was when one said,

“how long has
it been since
we told the staff
they were doing
a good job?’

after a short
silence
another replied,
“it’s always
a good time
to say that”

someone else
volunteered to
send cards

none of us was
designer-dressed
neither did we
discuss who
was doing the
best work

true affirmation
doesn’t demand
competition
only celebration
and the intention
to say it out loud

skip the statue
the superlatives
and just say,
“thanks for
showing up
every damn day”

“I noticed”
is another way
of saying
“I love you”

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: before & after

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I know I was not the only preacher who mentioned that we are close to the four year anniversary of the beginning of the Big Lockdown. That, along with the scripture passage, got me thinking about befores and afters.

______________________

Before and after.

The two words are often used together to describe a change or a transformation:

before we met . . .
before my father died . . .
before our first child was born . . .
before I finished my degree . . .
before my knee replacement . . .
before the diagnosis . . .
before the promotion . . .
before we opened our business . . .
before we moved into our house . . .
before the war . . .
before 9/11 . . . .

How about this one? Before the pandemic began . . . .

Can you remember what life was like? This week marks four years since the lockdown began and the whole world had to deal with a reality none of us had experienced. There was life before March 2020 and life after. Even though COVID is no longer the threat it once was, life will never be the same for any of us, maybe for anyone.

Our lives are filled with before and after moments, some of them more profound than others, but we continue to evolve, to grow and change, in part because of what happens and how we choose to respond—both parts of the equation are crucial.

Though we talk about before and after, we live in the afters; we don’t know we are in the befores. Things happen and we go on living, trying to figure out what to do.

Life is full of chance encounters and uncertainties, things we can’t explain or control, AND we make choices about what we do, say, and feel in the middle of it all, and those choices shape our lives.

Cosmologist Brian Swimme writes about coming to a deeper understanding of that dynamic as he watched his son chase a frog by a creek one afternoon.

Yes, the existence of our son rested on uncountably many chance events. but that was not the whole story. In the moment I became aware of a fundamental branch point, I ran down the pathway that led to Denise. [his wife] Whatever would come forth after that had for its base that conscious decision that she was my life. Thomas Ian did not come from a purely random process. He came out of a decision that transformed all of the events of our past from chance to necessity. They became necessary in that they were just what they had to be in order for us to embrace it all and make it our destiny. (269)

The phrase that caught me most in that paragraph is “a decision that transformed all of the events of our past from chance to necessity.” That’s the language of before and after. It is also the language of faith, as we reflect on how we come into relationship with God.

Do you remember your life before you began a life of faith—however you would define that phrase? Perhaps it was, as they say, a “come to Jesus” moment; maybe it was a gradual series of events, a slow turning, that led you to a moment when you realized things had moved from chance to necessity. Faith is an ongoing relationship, a continuing act of creation, a contagion of befores and afters, but do you remember how it began? Can you point to other watershed moments along the way?

I wish we had time to tell all of those stories this morning. Let’s take the time to do so along the way in the days to come. For now, I’ll tell this one.

It was by chance that I was born to parents who decided to move to Africa. By that I mean I had no choice in the matter. The month of my first birthday, we sailed from New York Harbor, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the port of Beira, Mozambique—thirty-two days on a passenger freighter—because my parents wanted to be missionaries. We left Africa for good on my sixteenth birthday.

I came to faith as a child in Africa. I grew up in African churches filled with music and rhythm, with joyful people who lived hard lives and didn’t have much, but who shared most everything.

We came back to the States on leave three times before we came back for good. The third time I was in tenth grade and was a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas—by chance. I had never been a part of a youth group centered around faith, nor had I been in an American high school. I experienced a different kind of diversity among the students at Paschal High School. All of it changed—expanded—the way I thought about God and about faith.

After Ginger and I married and moved to Boston, my faith went through another before and after as we found our way to become part of the UCC that began by chance: a colleague of Ginger’s called to say her church needed a youth minister.

Again, New England had a different vocabulary for faith and mine expanded to a wider definition of belonging that resonated with the way it felt when I was a kid in Africa, except it was even more expansive.

Those three highlights are far from the whole story, but I hope they communicate that faith is not something we possess; rather it is something we are part of, a creative process that is burgeoning and ongoing.

What is your version of that story? What is our version? How did the chance happenings of our lives bring us to choose for Mount Carmel to be a necessity in our lives? Remember we found each other because you asked Jake Joseph to preach—by chance—and he told you and me that we were a match.
Now we are necessary to each other.

How did we choose to let the fact that we met become a choice to love one another in Jesus’ name? Because that is what we are doing here; we are now necessary to each other’s lives, to each other’s stories. We are the story. The last sentence of our passage for this morning says, “God prepared for these good things to be the way that we live our lives,” or put another way, “God made us for this.”

We are built for befores and afters. We are created to grow and learn, to adapt and change, to imagine and belong, to love and be loved, just like everything else in the universe. We are made to make each other necessary. May our lives reflect our calling. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: making stock

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

making stock

the air was as cold
as it was grey today
and the forecast of rain
sent me stacking the
stock pot on the stove
pulling poultry bones

from the freezer
as well as a couple of
bags of celery butts
and carrot ends
garlic fresh parsley
and a sliced lemon

its been simmering
through sermon prep
and basketball games
turning tap water
into the promise
of meals yet to come

the oldest meaning
of the word is the
trunk of a living tree
from which life spings
the rich reduction
is a soup nursery

new life will come from
the scraps and bones
of other meals
a good word as lent
boils down to its
magnificent defeat

scraps and bones
are the stuff of life
and death it seems
the rain both waters
and wearies us
come it’s time to eat

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: saving time

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I am writing on Friday night, but most of you will read this on Saturday or later, which means this wa the night to write about daylight savings.

saving time

some time in the night we will be
robbed of an hour of sleep in
order that we might save daylight

the thieves will leave nothing but the
promise that the hour saved will be
kept safely and returned in the fall

but no one adequately explains
the for this sleight of hand
this spring-loaded arrogance

the sunrise I saw this morning
through the giant airport windows
took all the time it needed

perhaps we should begin a
tradition of staying up until
we think the clock springs forward

and then laugh at ourselves
for thinking we could save time
or that our clocks are of consequence

precision and perspective
keep time to different rhythms
one of the matches a heartbeat

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: rain on me

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

rain on me

today was a rainy day
to which the rain
never fully committed
the mist loitered
without purpose
the showers were
scattered unfocused
rather than pelting
me as i walked
the moisture wafted
like a parachutist
blown off course
putting the whether
in weather
in it all I found
companions
in the raindrops
knowing I was not
the only who felt
a little off my game
there’s more than
one way to fall
and to land
not all clouds
speak in storm

Peace.
Milton

lenten journal: spiritual practice

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

spiritual practice

start with intent
make a promise
show up and then
miss the next day

live with failure
then deal with grace
you did not write
everyday this lent

easter will come
good friday too
the season does
not ride on you

faithfulness and
perfection are
not synonyms
saints miss the mark

write down a word
then another
remind yourself
that practice does

not make perfect
you will fail again
and love will keep
expecting you

believing you
how many times
do we need to
remind ourselves

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: foolishness

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

On evening this week, I rewatched Serendipity, one of our favorite movies. At one point, Jeremy Piven’s character encourages John Cusack’s character to be a jackass—to be willing to be foolish for love. Today’s sermon centered around 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, a pasasage in which Paul admonishes the struggling church in a similar fashion: to embrace the foolishness of God’s love. Here’s how it went down.

_______________________

I learned something this week. Well, a couple of things.

The fact that February had an extra day this year sent me searching for information about how we mark time. The basis of our calendar comes from one that Julius Caesar put in place in 45 CE—named the Julian calendar—and it has the twelve months we know, but it lost time somehow. In the late 1500s Pope Gregory XIII implemented the Gregorian calendar, which is what we use now. (That’s what I learned: the Pope was powerful enough to set the calendar for the Western world.) Protestant countries were slower to implement it, since the Reformation had just happened, but, as you know, it became the way we number our days.

I tell you all of that to remind us that Christianity has not always been in a place of power. Gregory XIII might have been able to tell the world how to mark time, but Paul wrote to a small, struggling congregation in a city that either ignored it or disparaged it and under a government that oppressed it.

Our other lectionary passages for this morning carry the same tone of Paul’s letters. Lynn read about the handing down of the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew people who received them were nomads at the time, wandering the wilderness looking for home. The gospel passage we did not read this morning is the account of Jesus turning over the tables of those who had turned the Temple into a merchandising opportunity, but he had no real power to make them stop. It was a brave and courageous move that probably looked foolish to most, to use Paul’s word.

As he said, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are involved in a dying world, but for us it is the power of God.” Foolishness. Absurdity. Which begs the questions: Have we staked our lives on nonsense? and Is it so wrong to be foolish?

“The message of the cross” is one of those phrases that sounds as though everyone should know what it means, but the definition is not that clear—like home fries. Almost every breakfast place has their own version and they use the same name, so it’s hard to know what you’re going to get.

One of the loudest definitions of the message of the cross through church history is one soaked in shame: Jesus died and it’s our fault. The depth of our sin—of our “fallen” humanity–required the blood of Christ to be shed in sacrifice. Though it is a prominent explanation, it is not what Paul was saying. That theology had not yet come into play. For Paul, “the message of the cross” was another way of saying the life of Jesus because he saw Jesus’ death as an extension of the way Jesus lived—speaking truth to power, caring for those at the margins, calling people to justice and compassion.

Paul was writing to a divided congregation that had chosen sides in any number of power struggles. After Paul founded the church, a man named Apollos picked up the ministry and people separated over which minister they liked better. In our passage we read about a clash between Jews and Greeks. The earliest followers of Christ were all Jewish. As the church grew, people from other ethnic and religious backgrounds followed Jesus as well. In Corinth, they weren’t mixing well.

People dug in on their stances. They wanted to be right, or they wanted to be in charge, or they wanted things to be done the way they thought they should be done, and so they chose ideas or doctrine or background over relationship. Remember, this is the same congregation that had divided over whether a Christian could eat meat that had been offered to idols. If there was a way to disagree about something, they found it. They wanted to be in charge, to be in control, to be the Ones Who Decided Things.

Paul wrote to say, remember our origin story: remember the message of the cross, which is God poured God’s self into human form not to stage a blazing conquest but to show us who we were created to be. Jesus showed us the extraordinary power of a life lived in love, and the love he lived out was so extraordinary that it threatened those who fought for power to the point that they killed him.

This is the absurdity, the foolishness that draws us together down all the days since then: God is love and we are God’s people, loved by God and called to love one another. We trust that love can change the world. We trust that love can save us.

The Ten Commandments read like a don’t-do-that list, but they are fundamentally about how to live in loving and trusting relationships. Jesus flipped the tables to say worshipping is about belonging, not profit margins. In a world that is obsessed with power and wealth (I’m talking about our world now, not Corinth); in our world that has become accustomed to being constantly at war; in our world that categorizes people rather than understands them; we are called to trust the foolishness of God, the absurdity of the words Paul wrote later in this same letter:

Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude, it doesn’t seek its own advantage, it isn’t irritable, it doesn’t keep a record of complaints, it isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

Epictetus was a Greek philosopher who lived around the same time as Paul. He wrote, ““If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” We might paraphrase his words to say, “If we want to be faithful to our calling to love God and others we must be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

It doesn’t make sense to say it is enough to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Living like that will not keep us safer, or make us richer, or put us in a place of power. It will give us courage to trust that to gather here each week to invest in one another’s lives actually matters.

And that is why we keep coming back to the Table—to feed one another and tell the story of the magnificent foolishness of God’s love—to trust, once more, that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

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