don't eat alone

My sermon for this morning.

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No one remembered exactly what happened.

They knew the tomb was empty when those who came to anoint the body got there—but the list of exactly who went to the tomb with Mary Magdelene differs from gospel to gospel, though all four make it clear that it was the women who first learned that Jesus was resurrected.

The men—the ones who get called “the disciples”—had fled the scene of Jesus’ execution and had gone into hiding. The women were the ones who stayed until Jesus had died. And they were the ones who went to care for the body once the sabbath was over.

The Roman practice was not to take the bodies of the executed down from their crosses, but to leave them to decompose, both to even further humiliate the one who had been killed and their families, and also to serve as a warning to others. Intentional humiliation was part of the plan.

Jewish tradition said the body had to be buried before the sabbath began. It was an essential kindness. Joseph of Arimathea, who was a follower of Christ and also quite wealthy, had a tomb (actually one intended for him) and also had the influence, as a rich man, to negotiate with those bent on death and to see to it that Jesus’ body was taken down and cared for rather than being left to rot in public. Jesus was placed in the tomb just before sabbath began on what we would call Friday evening.

As we know, right about dawn on Sunday morning, the women went to the tomb to finish the anointing, which, in those days, was work only done by women. They were neither rich nor influential. Most of the graves to which they might have attended would have held more than one body and probably had some way to open the crypt. Jesus’ body was sealed in a tomb intended only for one, and for a wealthy one at that, so it would have been well secured.

When it comes to the stone, each gospel account tells of its removal a bit differently. Matthew says there was an earthquake that made it roll away, even frightening the security guard. Both Luke (which we read today) and John simply note that the stone was moved. Mark recounts that as the women were walking to the cemetery, they asked themselves, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?” because they knew it wasn’t something they could do themselves.

I know I was supposed to focus on Luke this week, but that question grabbed me as I read the gospels again: Who will roll back the stone from the tomb?

Whatever happened that turned the crucified Jesus into the risen Christ could not have happened unless someone had rolled away the stone. Resurrection requires a rolling stone—and I don’t mean Mick Jagger.

Resurrection requires stone rollers.

Which brings me to the other thing that struck me this week as I prepared.

Ginger’s church has a sunrise service at Jacobs Beach in Guilford every Easter Sunday. That’s right, I’ve already been to church—at 5:35 this morning! Since my guitar is more portable than the church organ, I was the accompaniment for the hymn we sang—the same one that will close our service—“Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”

As I practiced, the opening lines struck me differently than ever before:

Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluia!
our triumphant holy day, alleluia!

Particularly the second line—“our triumphant holy day”—I stopped practicing and said out loud, “One day? That’s all the triumph we get? No!”

The schnauzers were puzzled by my outburst, but it was a revelation for me that tied in with my musings about rolling stones. We are not singing this morning because of something that happened one time on one morning so long ago that we don’t even have exact details. We are singing this morning because stones have continued to be rolled away across millennia, giving us the chance to trust that every last one of us are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

I did something in that last paragraph I work hard not to do: I used the passive voice. I said, “We are singing this morning because stones have continued to be rolled away.” I abhor the passive voice because it puts distance between the action and the actor. Politicians use it all the time: “Mistakes were made; actions have been taken.” It drives me crazy.

When I realized what I had written, I started to go back and fix it, but I decided it would be better to correct myself in real time because I want to underline that rolling away the stones requires an active voice. Stones aren’t just rolled away. Someone has to roll them.

And so I invite us on this Easter morning as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, to think in the active voice (I think that’s possible) about what stones we need to roll away so God’s resurrecting power can continue to bring new life into the world for more than one triumphant day.

We are called to be stone rollers; we are called to be those who practice resurrection—those who look for ways to make room for life in the face of all that would kill us and in the face of all that takes life from those around us.

The phrase “practice resurrection” is the last line from a poem by Wendell Berry called “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” which describes what it means to be a stone roller. Listen to this excerpt:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands. . .

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. . . 

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Berry was by no means a perfect man, and he worked hard to deal in specifics when he talked about practicing resurrection. What, then, are we talking about when we say we need to roll the stones away?

(Bear with me here—I’m going to stretch the metaphor a bit.)

We might say some stones are small and can be rolled away with ease; we just have to take the time to do it. What I mean is not all stone rolling is the stuff of Easter morning in terms of impact.

Now I’ll mix my metaphors to make my point: I spent part of yesterday cleaning the beds around our hosta and peony plants who are just poking their heads up through the soil for this year’s round of resurrection. I rolled away the debris that could impede their growth. It was a small and essential act. I rolled some small stones.

What small stones can we roll—what small, intentional acts can we do—to create space for growth and connection, to create room for new life to break forth?

What words of apology or clarification do we need to say? What habits do we need to change? What patterns do we need to reevaluate? How willing are to examine our presuppositions, or to imagine that we still have a lot to learn? How quickly do we judge instead of asking questions when we don’t understand something?

Some stones are larger and require greater effort and intentionality—even risk—on our part, calling us to ask how we can create room for new life rather than dig holes for more graves. To be able to speak the truth to power we first have to speak the truth to ourselves.

How can we start a conversation with the person in our neighborhood who has a sign in their yard that we disagree with or even detest? How do we turn our anger into compassion? How can we bring ourselves to feel what it would be like if our family members were the ones being accused and deported without due process of law? How do we give up having to be right so that we can choose to be loving? We are all going to need help rolling that stone.

Some stones are giant boulders and require continued effort over generations. Will we play a part in rolling them even just a little, or will be slip into the passive voice and just hope that stones get rolled away without costing us too much? In the poem, Wendell Berry said we should plant sequoias. (Again, I’m mixing metaphors to make my point.)

As many times as I have said that love wins in the end and if love is not winning it’s not the end—and meant it as a statement of hope, I want you to hear me say this morning—on this Resurrection Morning—I am pretty sure love is not going to win in my lifetime. Any stone I try to roll is going to be some version of planting a sequoia.

In the wake of the Civil War Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The next to the last verse says,

and in defeat I bowed my head
there is no peace on earth I said
for hate is strong and mocks the song
of peace on earth goodwill to all

He doesn’t end there, but that is the verse we are living in. We have followed Jesus from his birth to his death—a death that came about because he told people that God sided with the poor and those on the margins and those who were deemed to be of little value to society, other than to be the workforce.

So the powers that be executed him.

This morning, we have followed the women to the tomb to find that Christ is risen. If all that Easter means is that we have one triumphant holy day, then the power of the resurrection will last about as long as the forsythia bushes in the church yard. Luke says that those women and the frightened men they went to tell all went to their homes that night wondering what had happened.

They weren’t triumphant; they were bewildered. And so they kept gathering together and they kept telling the stories that mattered most and they rolled the stones of fear away from their hearts. Those are the stories we will read in the weeks to come.

Easter is about more than triumph, about more than a single victory; it is about more than one empty tomb. Jesus’ resurrection calls us to new life every day, to be stone rollers any time we see an opportunity, day after day with death all around us, planting sequoias we will not see grow large, offering invitations that cannot be reciprocated, taking care of people who cannot pay us back, clearing space for new life to grow and thrive, whether we’re talking about peonies or people.

Christ is risen today. Alleluia. And that only continues to matter if we keep rolling away the stones. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My sermon this week came from the last part of Luke 14, where Jesus keeps telling parables at banquets that speak to larger things. I know these stories, but had never seen what they have to say about anger.

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Today’s sermon is one of those that could use a recap like those that come up when you’re watching a limited series on television: “Previously on Whatever . . .” and then they show crucial scenes to get you caught up. So, previously on Sunday Sermons, last week we saw Jesus go to dinner at the home of one of the religious elite and he began by healing a man who had edema—a man whose body held too much water and yet he stayed thirsty—and then he told a parable about not jostling for position when you look at the seating chart.

Where we pick up the story today, as soon as Jesus finished telling that last parable, he turned to the person hosting him and said, “When you have a dinner, don’t invite people who will invite you back. It will be a much richer party if you invite those who can’t repay you, which may have made the host wonder why they had invited Jesus.

In the awkwardness of the moment, one of the guests said something akin to, “Well, when we all get to heaven everyone will be at the same table,” which evoked another parable about a banquet.

Jesus described a scene the people around him would have recognized, though it might seem odd to us. If someone wanted to host a dinner, they would send out the invitations and then, based on the responses, prepare the food so they had enough for everyone and didn’t waste anything. When the meal was ready, they would send for the guests to come and eat.

Except when dinner was ready, the guests offered excuses instead of their presence, and not very good excuses at that. One said they had bought a farm and had to go see what kind of farm they had purchased and asked to be excused. Jesus’ audience would have understood that no one would buy a farm without having walked the land first. The second person said they had purchased five teams of oxen, also unseen, and needed to check them out and said they were sorry. Again, who does that? The last one said, “I just got married (which also meant the host had not been invited to the wedding feast) and I can’t come to dinner,” and offered no apology.

Needless to say, the host was angry. The meal was ready and the excuses were flimsy. They were all transactional. (Remember in that time a marriage was fundamentally a business transaction because the woman was considered property.) They chose acquisition over relationship, and the host did the opposite.

Actually, he did what Jesus had just talked about. He told his servants to go out on the streets of the city—the busy streets and the side streets—and get anyone they could find who needed a meal. When that didn’t fill up the room, he sent them out into the countryside and down the back alleys, and then he expressed anger of his own: “No one I invited will taste my dinner,” which sounds like he didn’t plan to ever invite them again.

But there’s another way to hear that last statement. It could also mean the host realized that once he had a party where he invited everyone—and I mean everyone—those who defined their importance by who they excluded would no longer want to eat at his table. They would write him off because he had nothing to offer them.

The words and actions of the host sent me back to something poet David Whyte wrote several years ago about anger. He said,

Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

I remember the first time I read those sentences. I think my head turned and looked at the book the way our pups’ heads turn when they hear a strange noise. I had never thought of anger as deep compassion. As I have told you, I grew up in a family where we talked about our feelings every fifteen years whether we needed to or not. Because my dad had grown up in a very volatile family, he was determined his family would not be that way. What he wanted was for us to not be explosive; what we ended up doing was swallowing most all of it.

The anger he was scared of was not what good anger is. The anger that appears to be the fuel for American society these days—the outrage, the violence, the division—is not good anger either. Jesus was angry a good deal of the time, but angry in a way that did not strike out in violence.

I learned how to get angry from Ginger, who is the most forthright person I know. Her anger is honest, current, and fair. She embodies what Whyte describes as anger in its pure state:

It is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics. . . . Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.

What I learned from Ginger was that anger was not something to be scared of, or avoided, or stuffed away. To be angry doesn’t mean to be violent. True anger is honest, even vulnerable. To be angry, by that definition, is to speak the truth in love. That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard to hear, but it does mean it’s a relational act.

When everyone he thought he could count on bailed on his dinner, the host turned his anger into invitations, rather than explosions. He filled his tables with hungry people and fed them. He did not become transactional and try to get even with what he felt had been done to him. He became more generous to more people. He couldn’t change the hearts of those who wouldn’t show up, but he could change the lives of those that did.

These are days that invite us to be angry in much the same way—to find ways to make our anger invitational. When others dehumanize, we can humanize. When others work to divide people, we can connect with people. When others try to out yell everyone, we can make room for others to speak. When others try to make us cynical, we can double down on hope. When we feel like the outrage takes up all the space in our lives, we can make time to cook, or garden, or talk to neighbors, or volunteer, or stay late at coffee hour. We can commit to calling family members we don’t agree with just to see how they are doing, just so they know we love them.

And when we see those who are consumed by outrage, let us also have the grace to remember they are actually consumed by fear—fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of losing something, or whatever their fear may be—and we remember that love is stronger than fear, which is why we can’t let our fear get the best of us. We must choose not to strike out in rage, but let our anger make us more generous and compassionate. That’s the only way that everyone can thrive. That’s the only way everyone gets fed. Amen.

In Luke 14, Jesus tells two stories about banquets while he is attending one—and then heals someone to boot. My sermon looked at the first parable; the second one comes next Sunday.

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Have you ever noticed that Jesus went to a lot of parties?

Throughout the gospels, as much as there are stories about Jesus preaching and teaching, helping and healing, we also find him at dinners and gatherings with all kinds of people, rich and poor. And as much as the gospels portray a divide between Jesus and the religious elite, he spent a fair amount of time eating and drinking with them, as our passage today shows. They may not have agreed on much, but they ate dinner together.

Our passage this morning is tells the first half of the story. We read about Jesus going to dinner, healing a man, and then telling a parable about a banquet. The part we will get to next week is he told another parable about a different banquet—all of it while he was at a banquet, as though he looked around the room and said, “This reminds me of a parable . . .”

Actually, what appears to have caused the parables was a man who sat down in front of Jesus at the dinner. He was ill. Our translation says he had “an abnormal swelling of the body,” which leaves lots of room for imagination. In the old King James Version, it was translated as dropsy, which, as a kid I thought sounded like he kept falling over. Today, we would say he had edema—a general swelling that comes from the body holding too much water. The odd thing about the condition is it makes the person suffering from it insatiably thirsty: they want what they already have dangerously too much of.

The man was a walking parable.

Luke says Jesus literally embraced the man, restored him to health, and then released him. The word translated as release carries the sense of being freed from imprisonment. I have a feeling the whole process took longer than the sentence Luke uses to describe it. However it happened, when the man walked away, Jesus looked at the room and saw others who were craving more of the very things that were destroying them, whether it was money or power or influence, and he told the parable we read about people trying to jump the seating chart to get to the head table because he was watching it happen in real time.

Jesus said, when you are at a wedding feast, don’t start by looking for your name at the head table, or sitting at what you think is the best table just because you think you’re seated with the important people. Don’t put the host in the position of having to say, “You realize this banquet is not about you, right?” and then walks you past everyone to the table in the back of the room. Instead, sit at the back and if they want you to move up they will find you. It’s nice to be noticed, but the ones who crave importance will be destroyed by their appetites and the ones who are content with themselves will feel nourished.

I got to go to a big banquet last Thursday night. Some folks in Ginger’s church invited us to attend the gala for the Women and Family Life Center in Guilford, which does amazing work in towns from North Haven to Middlefield to Old Saybrook. It was at the Woodwinds in Branford, which has a huge L-shaped ballroom, and it was packed. When we got there, we went up to a table and told them our names and they gave us a program with our table number on it. We were at Table 5.

Since I was already thinking about this passage, I noticed the feeling I had when they told me the table number. Because it was a low number, I could hear myself thinking, “That’s pretty good: the fifth most important table.” However they assigned seats, the only reason we were in the room was we were invited by someone who was on the board of the organization. It had absolutely nothing to do with me.

We found our table and it was just one away from the dance floor, which Ginger loved. We could see and hear the speakers easily. It was nice to be up front. But here’s the thing: the dinner was a buffet, and the tables with the food were at the back of either side of the L-shaped room, which meant when they started calling people to get food, they started with the tables closest to the buffet—the ones in the back.

We may have been close to the dance floor, but we had to wait to eat. No table in the room had all the advantages.

Jesus was in a room full of invited guests. The fact that they were there meant they mattered to the host in some way, yet some were determined to feel more important. Like the man with edema, they craved what they already had to the point that it did damage to their reputation and their relationship with the host.

And that makes me wonder what Jesus said to the man who was swollen when he embraced him.

I understand Jesus lived in a pre-medical society that looked at disease processes differently that we do. Or maybe I should say that the other way around. We live in a time informed by science that has taught us to think about diseases differently than they did in Jesus’ day. In some ways, we are relearning things they knew well—that many illnesses are not just physiological but are also psychological and spiritual. It’s all wrapped up together. Anxiety, depression, extreme anger, greed, and grief all have physical effects on us, as do joy and patience and kindness.

We live in a culture of craving. A great deal of the messaging that bombards us keeps saying that there is no such thing as enough. Whatever we have, we need to get more. Whatever we crave will not be satisfied unless we keep craving it. As a country, we are a lot like the swollen man, craving what we know will eat us alive.

Yesterday morning at Bible Study, we talked about using our sacred imaginations, which means giving ourselves room to fill in the gaps in the stories we read, to flesh out the details. As I think about Jesus embracing the man, I picture him looking in his eyes and repeating the words Jesus heard at his own baptism—“You are my beloved child in whom I delight”—and then letting the guy go his way.

Whatever he said let the man feel like he could stop craving. He was healed of his hunger.

I invite you to put yourself in the story this morning. Close your eyes and picture yourself at the feast with Jesus—picture yourself as the man swollen and thirsty. Now imagine Jesus embracing you, pulling you close and saying, “You are my beloved child in whom I delight.” Let those words sink in. Stand there for a moment, wrapped in the arms of love.

I know the story says Jesus released him but remember nothing can separate us from the love of God. You are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Now let yourself feel the release that comes with those words. Find healing from your hunger.

One more thing: we don’t have a seating chart at coffee hour. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I veered away from the Lectionary passage this week because I was captured by the story in Luke 7:1-10, which is about, well, stories.

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One of the things I like about living in Guilford is being able to shop at Forte’s Market, mainly because they have a real butcher counter where they grind the meat when I order it and are happy to cut steaks to my preference instead of inviting me to choose from an array of shrink-wrapped packages.

It is a family business that goes back almost a hundred years and is run now by Ron Forte—or at least he’s the one I know behind the counter. I say I know him, but what I know of him is a small slice of his life. I come into his store and we greet each other and then I tell him what I need and we usually have a short food-related conversation while he is getting things ready for me. He’s always pleasant, he treats his customers well, and he has a great laugh.

Still, I don’t know much of anything about him beyond his life as a butcher, nor does he know much about me, though if someone were to ask, we would both say, “Yeah, I know him. He’s a good guy.” (At least that’s what I think he would say about me.) But there’s much more to both of our stories than what we share at Forte’s Market.

In a similar way, we see news stories about people in the public eye and we can come away with the notion that we know them as well, perhaps because of the article, or because of a role they played in a movie we loved, or maybe an interview. I’ve heard more than one story about people who finally got to meet someone famous they felt really connected to only to find the person was not at all like they expected.

Jesus appears to have had such an encounter in our passage today.

Not long after he had preached, admonishing everyone to love their enemies, which is another way of saying not to settle for the simplistic story of who someone is, he was approached by the some of the religious leaders who had a message from a Roman centurion—a commanding officer in the Roman army—asking Jesus to help his servant who was deathly ill—and the servant was probably an enslaved migrant who had been forced to move to Palestine from another Roman colony.

The religious leaders were not being strongarmed by the Roman commander. It seems they really wanted to help him because he had been instrumental in making sure the town had a synagogue. “He loves our people,” they said—an odd thing to say about an officer in the army oppressing the country.

Can you hear the multiplicity of layers in this interchange? Most of the time the gospel writers paint the religious leaders as the bad guys, those who are critical of Jesus and do what they can to undermine him.

In this account, Luke tells a different story about them. They came to Jesus asking for help on their enemy’s behalf. And Jesus went with them. Before they could get to the house where the sick man was, another group came with a message from the centurion—this time, Luke says the officer sent “his friends,” and they told Jesus that the commander didn’t feel worthy to host him and trusted that the servant could be healed without Jesus having to go in the house. When Jesus heard their words, Luke says he was impressed and astonished.

“I haven’t found anyone who trusts like this,” he said, “even among those who grew up in faith.” And when the centurion’s friends got back to the house, the servant was feeling better.

Most of the miracles of Jesus are what one of my seminary professors called “parables in event,” which is to say the gospel writers told them to convey a deeper message in the same way they wrote down the parables so we would have to unpack the stories. And most of the miracles created situations where Jesus used the moment to teach a lesson that people don’t seem to be grasping.

It feels different here.

Everyone in the story plays a crucial role in creating the space for the servant to be healed. It’s as though they actually listened to Jesus’ sermon!

The centurion risked asking for help from the religious leaders, who then spoke to Jesus on his behalf. Then the friends came to convey how much the commander trusted Jesus could change things. And Jesus responded with amazement and compassion. Had the centurion or the religious leaders or the friends held to the common stories about each other, none of the conversations would have taken place and the servant would have died. Everyone was willing to be more and do more than was expected of them.

No one’s life can be summarized in a single story—a label, a characterization, an affiliation. I don’t mean to say there aren’t bad people. There are people who choose to damage and who encourage evil. We have to be aware and awake. What I am saying is to be human is to be complex. We are a lifetime full of stories that have shaped us. We are walking libraries, which means we have to be willing to do the work of learning more about each other than the most convenient or most recent or most sensational information if we want to be the kind of peacemakers Christ calls us to be.

The writers Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne were married for forty years. After his death, she wrote a book about her grief called The Year of Magical Thinking in which she said, ““We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

She’s a writer, so you have to give her room for a bit of overstatement because I’m sure they knew a lot about each other. Still, she learned, there was more to know—and she gives us something worth remembering: No one’s story is that simple. To love one another means to listen and to learn instead of label. To love means to open our hearts to be caught by surprise, to be curious rather than concise in our understanding so we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.

Peace,
Milton