blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

I preached at my church yesterday. I though I would post the transcript of my sermon. I preached on the assigned Gospel text from the lectionary: John 20:19-31. At my church, after the sermon we discuss together what we thought about it and what God may be saying in our midst. I included some of what we talked about as part of the sermon.
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“The Sweet Breath of Jesus: a new creation and a new politics.”
Isaac
April 17, 2004

The lectionary gives us John’s text today, this Sunday after Easter. John’s narrative sort of messes up the church calendar. If we follow the plot line of Luke and Acts, as the calendar does, then we have to wait a couple months after Easter for Pentecost. But John is gracious enough to give the disciples the Holy Spirit on Easter—for John Easter and Pentecost are combined. So, today we get another Easter sermon, but as if Jesus rising from the dead isn’t enough, this time we get the Holy Spirit.

It was the evening of the first day of the week—a few days after the Jewish and Roman authorities killed Jesus. That same morning Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene near the tomb. She returned to the rest of the disciples and told them that she had seen the Lord. I am not sure how the disciples took Mary’s words—whether or not they believed her. John doesn’t give us an account of what they thought of Mary’s testimony. But, John does tell us that that same evening they gathered together behind locked doors in fear of the Jewish authorities. But you can’t lock Jesus out. Jesus appears in their midst. Jesus does the same thing the following week when Thomas decides to show up for church. After Jesus shows them the marks of crucifixion, he tells them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And with this he breathed the Holy Spirit onto them.

Now, I grew up in a Pentecostal church where there was a lot of talk of how the Holy Spirit takes hold of people and makes them laugh or shake or scream or any number of things. I am still trying to understand that part of my story. But I can say that those things are not what Jesus is doing here as he breathes the Holy Spirit into his people. This is a corporate event not a personal one. In this Holy-Spirit-breath, God is doing something new in Israel, the people of God. But as soon as I call this Jesus-breath “something new,” I have to point out it is a type of “newness” that God has done before in Israel.

In the witness of Genesis we Gentiles who have been engrafted into Israel, see our beginnings, we see the newness of human life. In Genesis 2 we read how God breathed “the breath of life” into the human God formed from the earth. In this creation God joined dirt and spirit to form a new creation—the human being. It is this breath and only this breath that sets human beings apart from the animals. God’s breath of life is completely a gift. The human does not deserve it. God can always take it away and humans would fade into the mass from which God created us. The human life is completely contingent on the God who creates. But from the depths of his love for creation, God chooses to sustain human life through the gift of God’s breath. This creation account is the story from which the people of Israel learned their identity. Genesis 1 and 2 is the foundation of their unique identity among all the other nations’ competing creation narratives. In this story the people of God understand their existence as completely dependent on the God who revealed Godself as the “I AM.” A specific vocation comes along with this unique identity—that is, Israel is called to be a blessing for the nations. A people who breathe life in the desert.

But as Israel’s story progresses, we see how she loses her unique peoplehood by choosing to worship the gods of the nations and sets up political structures like those of the nations—for example, they choose a king for themselves, despite God and Samuel’s warnings. They destroy their identity by engaging in religio-political idolatry when they bow their knees to foreign gods and entrust their national security to strategic political alliances with powerful nations instead of the God who promised to fight for his people. We can read about this sort of idolatry in Isaiah 31: “Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord!”

With the temple destroyed and Israel living under foreign rule, the prophet Ezekiel prophesies a new hope for the people of God. Ezekiel 37 reads, “the hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones…dry bones.” The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the lifeless bones. So Ezekiel prophesies: “Come, O spirit, and breath upon these slain, that they may live.” Then Ezekiel reports, “I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.” This valley of dry bones, this unfaithful Israel, these people who have offered God’s precious gifts to foreign gods, will receive new life. The Lord God has not abandoned his people. Later, at the end of chapter 39 God points Israel forward for a new beginning through the power of the spirit: “I will never again hide my face from them, when I pour out my spirit upon the house of Israel.” This promised spirit, alluding to the primordial power of Genesis 2, will enter Israel and re-create a faithful people.

Now in Jerusalem, on Easter evening, Jesus stands in the midst of his disciples—the twelve tribes of Israel restored—and breathes a new beginning into existence. But this new beginning is ancient, reaching back to the opening scenes of Israel’s story. Reaching back to when God breathed life into the first community—”man and women God created them.” That community walked with God in the garden, communed with the divine, sustained by the gift of God. But the people of God chose another way. They chose the gods of foreigners. But the true God would not abandon Israel. God promised to restore the house of Israel, to pour out God’s spirit on those dry bones. And John’s Gospel tells us Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon Israel. When the resurrected Jesus breathed the Spirit into those gathered disciples he uniquely joined himself to those people and joined those people to himself. Something new has happened in the story of those who followed Jesus. When Mary Magdalene saw the resurrected Jesus near the tomb, she thought things were going to continue just as they had. Jesus is back and we can keep on hanging out with him as he does miracles and teaches. But something more is planned, something more profound than Mary’s imagination. Jesus tells her, “Do not hold on to me. I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Do not hold onto me, Jesus says, because what I want to do in you and the rest of my followers will explode all your conceptions of my mission. Just wait till I get back.

As Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon his followers, he says “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the enfleshed Word, identifies this new creation, these gathered disciples, with his own life and ministry. The reason why Jesus wanted Mary to let go is because in this new creation Jesus is more present in and among us than he was before. Through the gift of the breath of Jesus we are now his body, we are now his ambassadors on earth, proclaiming the Kingdom Christ lived and taught through our lives together. “We are a new creation, everything old has passed away; everything has become new” (2 Cor.5:17). And as this new creation we are sustained by that Holy-Spirit-breath. Jesus is now closer to us than our very existence because he is the fabric which holds our lives together. Jesus, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, permeates our being and links us to one another. We, together, are the body of Christ, commissioned by Jesus to continue his kingdom work.

But this is not a call for pride. We must remember that the Holy Spirit is a gift. We don’t deserve the Spirit. Our lives together are completely dependent of the sustaining gift of God’s Spirit. Our unique peoplehood can fade into the chaos from which God called us out if God chooses to take away the Spirit from our midst. We don’t posses God; God possesses us. Therefore we count it a blessing to share in the Kingdom of the Son. We cry out with the Psalmist, “Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary” (Ps.150). We are this sactuary and we praise God through our corporate life of worship. Jesus tells us, now his body, what it means to participate in his life. He links the reception of the Holy Spirit with our ability to forgive sins. Jesus says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Forgiveness of sins is part of God’s mission and through the gift of the Spirit we are called to participate in that divine ministry. In the command to forgive we understand that our peoplehood is not simply for our own sake. We exist for the blessing of the nations. Forgiveness is how we are a blessing for the nations. When we forgive we now breathe God’s Spirit on others. Forgiveness is the inauguration of a new beginning.

We, the assembled people of God, the body of Christ, are now a new creation with a new politics: forgiveness.

Originally I planned for my sermon to head toward the other assigned texts for today at this point. But I had to scrap that plan when I looked at the calendar yesterday. Today, April 18th is Holocaust Remembrance Day…and I think we need to remember. We must remember because remembering is part of the practice of forgiveness. We must remember that Christians killed Jews and they justified it with some of these same passages we read tonight. Remember in John the disciples locked the doors “for fear of the Jews.” And, in Acts Peter accused the Jewish leaders of killing Jesus. “You killed Jesus,” he said (Acts 5:30). Now think how easy it would be for those who misunderstand the nature of the church to use passages like these in service to their quest for power over others. In my sermon I interpreted “the Jews” as “the Jewish authorities” or “religious establishment” in order to correct a misperception of the nature of 1st century Judaism. In that time, as now, there is no such thing as a monolithic, normative Judaism. No one could speak on behalf of Judaism as a whole. There were many competing factions claiming faithful Judaism. There were even Jewish groups who claimed to follow “messiahs” other than Jesus. Followers of Jesus were thoroughly Jewish and attended the Synagogue and performed Temple rituals like any good Jew would. So… No, the Jews did not kill Jesus, but those Jews who were appointed as power brokers by Rome in order to keep the people quiet killed Jesus.

But, nonetheless these texts and this day remind me that there is blood on our hands. Here, as we gather together as the body of Christ, we have to remember that we inherit a bloody history of oppression and subjugation. In order for us to live in our calling and practice forgiveness we must acknowledge the evil we perpetrate and to confront ourselves without illusion and deceit. We cannot conveniently forget. Or think people should get over it. Regardless of the validity of the accusations of anti-Semitism, I am struck by how Jews today were honestly afraid of an anti-Semitic backlash after Mel Gibson’s film. I think that is a good indication that we have more repenting and reconciling to do.

So maybe this still doesn’t hit close to home. If I am completely honest with myself I have to admit I don’t feel too anxious about this tension. Maybe God needs to work on me a bit more. Maybe I should make the effort to get to know Jews. I don’t know what it is. But, I can tell you what hits me all the time living in this part of the country and coming here every Sunday. Jon Butler, an American historian, calls it the “black holocaust.” If we really believe that we are Christ’s body, called to live as a blessing for the nations, and embody the reconciling work of Jesus, then we should be troubled. Jeremiah calls us “to seek the peace of the city” (Jer.29:7). This city is not at peace. The city is torn by a racial divide. The dominant culture still practices cultural and economic imperialism. The ethos of this culture still requires blacks to assimilate into the dominant white culture. If a black wants to succeed in their pursuit of the “American dream” they have to leave behind their “blackness.” This troubles me when I come here because we don’t embody the solution. We are not witnesses of Christ’s reconciliation. I want to say this here, in this place, because we must be truthful with ourselves. Our community is far too “white,” in a culture that makes no room for difference. Sundays are the only day of the week where blacks can escape from our cultural imperialism and not be ashamed of their “blackness.” If we expect to speak life, the new beginning offered through the Holy Spirit, to the world, then we better live like we have something to offer. And, if I am completely honest with myself, I am not sure what we have to offer. Without an example of a reconciling community, the world has no alternative but to use violence as the means to settle disputes. We can’t speak out against racism if we aren’t a reconciled community.

I am not sure how to be this community that breathes the Holy Spirit’s new life in the deserts of our cities. I don’t have any solutions. I know that reconciliation is pretty complicated. I know it isn’t enough just to have African-Americans show up here on Sundays and join us in worship. By doing that we merely exercise our cultural power of blacks and make them worship like us, be like us. NO. We are called to renounce power, like Jesus did, and live in the power of the incarnation, the power of weakness In Philippians 2, Paul commands us to follow in Jesus’ path of weakness: Jesus “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.” One of John Perkins “three R’s” is relocation. Maybe we should consider this type of geographic incarnation—after all, Jesus moved into our neighborhood (Jn.1:14). We do this not to satisfy our “messianic complex,” but in order to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” Our vision is blurred by power. We must see things like God sees them. We must see things from the underside of history, what the Latin Americans pastors call “the epistemological priority of the poor/oppressed.”

So what do we, this outpost of the Kingdom, this body of Christ, do? We must engage in conversations with blacks and learn—learn to see things rightly. Once we can see, then we can be the people God wants us to be. As Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matt.6:22-23). Our world is full of darkness and the people need for us to be the salt and light of the world. There are structures—Paul calls them “patterns” (Rom.12:2)—of this world that work against God’s kingdom, against the grain of the universe. These structures need the sweet breath of Jesus. And I know that it is our job to give people Jesus. And I know that the Spirit is here with us in our midst making us more like Jesus. So I think we need to talk about this with one another and pray for the Spirit to breath a new beginning in our midst.