Creating Enemies

This is a sermon I preached for Calvary UMC in Frederick.

Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48 (NRSV)
 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Sermon: Did Jesus stutter?*

One of the variants of the meme.

There is a meme that I see from time to time that shows Jesus sitting beneath a tree, surrounded by people. He's teaching, and he says, “Love one another.” Another speech bubble appears from the crowd; “but what if,” the crowd asks, “what if they are gay or Muslim or have less money than me or don't have a home or have a different skin color or were born in a different country or voted for someone I don't like?”  And Jesus answers, “Did I stutter?”  Jesus tells us in our scripture reading today from Matthew’s Gospel to love our enemies. He tells us to pray for those who persecute us! And he doesn’t stutter when he says it.    

But we can still get around the difficulty of this scripture because, really, who are our enemies? After all, we are not superheroes. Most of us anyway. We aren’t fighting shadowy villains in spandex bent on taking over the world. Nor are we feudal kings fighting other lords for land, even though we might be side-eyeing our next-door neighbor for planting an ugly bush on our side of the property line. While there may be plenty of people we don’t like, enemy is probably not a word we use in our daily vocabulary.  But we do have enemies. And some of them are taught to us.

Some of you remember the Cold War, right? My dad loves bad 1970s action movies, so I have seen many many movies in which all the bad guys have terrible Russian accents. The epitome of evil, such movies teach us, can be found in Soviet Russia. It seemed so silly to me, but remember, I was two when the Wall between East and West Berlin came down. I never had duck and cover bombing drills in school. But I have experienced the creation of an enemy. When I was in ninth grade, we huddled in Health class and watched the news when the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City came down on September 11, 2001. I was taught pretty quickly that I had enemies after all. At first, it was just learning about this terrorist group called Al Qaeda. But eventually, through news reports that constantly used the word “Muslim” to describe the word “terrorist,” I forgot about white domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, and learned that Muslims were the real terrorists. And terrorists were my enemy.

No one ever said to me, “Shannon, Muslims are your enemy.” But through media and people’s fear, that notion kind of sunk into me. So imagine three years after 9/11, when I went on my first trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I found myself surrounded by Muslims. It was a little confusing. They were not very scary. We went to a big international event one evening when we on that first mission trip and I saw people wearing shirts in English that playfully, or snarkily, read: “I am a Muslim. Do not panic.” In fact, the Muslims I met had undergone far worse terror at the hands of Christians during the genocide in the 1990s than I had experienced on 9/11. But how easily we create these universally bad people in our imaginations.   If it had not been for Muslims, I might not be the Christian I am today. You may have heard me tell this story or read about it because I talk about it a lot: Ðana was one of our translators on that first trip to Bosnia, and she is who I visited earlier last month when I was on vacation. She is a Muslim; her father was killed near the community mosque by Christian soldiers when she was a child. One day, our host Saja took me and my sister with her and Ðana to a friend's house for a dinner. Being on a strange continent with strange people who didn’t speak our language eating strange, but surprisingly tasty, food in front of a house that was still stained with bullet holes should have been terrifying. But my sister and I sat thigh to thigh on a tiny bench and ate, listening to the drone of the huge beetles that zoomed around the porch light as well as the music of the almost-guttural Bosnian language. And in the midst of this, Ðana reached over and hugged us to her. “I love you,” she said. 

Ðana, a Muslim woman who had grown up during a war in a country that most USAmericans cannot locate on a map, a woman I had only known for something like two days at this point, told me and my sister, white Christian Americans who had idyllic childhoods but whose country was waging a war against Muslims in the Middle East, that she loved us. And it was in that moment of her telling us that she loved us that I felt God telling me that God loved me.   Love your enemies, Jesus said. He doesn’t tell us why. But in my life, loving someone I was taught was my enemy opened up new worlds for me. It was one of the most transformative experiences of my Christian journey. 

Now you might not get a chance to go someplace like Bosnia to test out Jesus’ command to love our enemies. But Muslims are not the only enemies that have been offered to us. Throughout history and in every culture, we demonize and marginalize.   And right now our culture seems to be all about the creation of enemies, along religious, racial, and political lines especially. Two weeks ago, I went to a preaching conference where two senators were also invited to speak. One of those senators was Cory Booker from New Jersey. He shared a lot about how we are in a moral moment as a country, one that should transcend political parties and he shared what he called the Tale of Two Hugs.

The first hug was between President Obama and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. Senator Booker joked about how it was an awkward man hug, but pointed out that no matter how awkward it was, it was used as a political weapon against Governor Christie. How dare a good Republican hug that terrible President Obama! But Senator Booker reminded us how awful the devastation was after the hurricane, how exhausted and upset Governor Christie was. And how in that pain, the president reached out in compassion and the governor received it. Similarly, after Senator John McCain’s cancer diagnosis, when he came back to the floor of the senate, Senator Booker crossed the aisle to hug him. And he immediately received hate tweets. How dare he, a progressive, hug a terrible Republican! But Senator Booker said he saw a brother, one he disagreed with often but one who was a fellow human being, in pain, and so he reached out in love. 

Now in some ways, these men are enemies. Unlike me and Ðana who, when we first met, were teenage girls who liked the things all teenage girls liked despite the differences of our backgrounds, Republicans and Democrats often have competing agendas. And those agendas matter. Often, when we read the Gospel lesson to love our enemies, we use it to mean that we ought to just let people take advantage of us, that turning the other cheek when we are wronged means let ourselves be abused over and over again. We pray for those who persecute us and neglect voting against that persecution or marching in the street to speak out against it. I don’t think that’s what the scripture means at all. What Jesus is telling us to do is to recognize one another as human beings, as people in need of love and prayer even when we come from different backgrounds. Even if we disagree with one another. And that love and prayer can be transformational and draw us closer to God.

Jesus explains, For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?...And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Jesus tells us that there is a reward in loving even those enemies. That there is more to the abundant life he calls us to than us only hanging out with people who look like us and act like us and think like us. Instead, God intends a more beautiful world, one of real relationships and transformed hearts--- not only our enemies’ hearts, but our own hearts as well.

Now, I admit that I am preaching to myself this week. Not because society has created new enemies for me, or because some have been constructed when disagree with people, but because some of my friends were deeply wronged. You may be in a similar situation, sometimes seeing enemies at work or at family gatherings or even here at church. And you may see them as enemies because they are simply different from you and you don’t understand them, because they disagree with you, or maybe because they deeply wronged you. This scripture gives us direction to liberate us from the fear and anger with which having enemies burdens us. It reminds us that we don’t have to live this way; that instead we can choose to see one another as human and call one another to live in a new way together. 

Because Jesus doesn’t stutter. He says we are to love one another. Even when we disagree. Even when we are angry. Even while we keep working for justice. Even then we love. And we pray. My prayer for us is that we take this scripture to heart and learn to expect transformation.




*The original title of the sermon and refrain throughout that reference a meme perpetuate ableism. Rather than stuttering, we should be asking if Jesus misspoke. I am committed to reeducating myself about the ableism I've internalized and will work to not make such thoughtless mistakes in the future!

Rainbow Covenants

I wrote this sermon for Calvary UMC based on one I wrote back in 2014 for Presbury. It is a story that has captivated me and I've been trying to move out of the way enough for the Holy Spirit to share it.

Scripture:

Hebrew Bible: Genesis 9:8-17 (NRSV)

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Gospel: Mark 1:9-15 (NRSV)

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Sermon:

Let us pray:

Patient Teacher,

we give you thanks for this scripture even when the stories within it are hard.

Open our minds today. Open our hearts.

Write your covenant within us, so that these stories we read become more than just children's bedtime stories. May they become our story. Amen.

How many of you have heard the story of Noah's Ark before? It is somewhat familiar, I know. Most of us if we have any religious background at all growing up hear about it as children. Look at the animals in the ark! we say, mimicking the lion's roar. When I was a kid, we used to read these silly stories written from the points of view of the animals on the ark. We used to laugh and laugh at Noah trying to keep the elephant away from the mice they were so terrified of. But when you take a moment to read the Genesis account, you realize that this is not a nice happy story. Lots of people die. Earlier in chapter six of Genesis, the scripture actually says that God was sorry God had made humankind. It is a heartbreaking, confusing, terrifying tale. But from the terror emerges this beautiful promise, a covenant, one of many that God makes with us throughout our history as people of faith.

You may have heard a tale of terror this week if you turned on the news. Or maybe you didn't. Can something really be a tale of terror if it replays over and over again to no effect? But surely what happened in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Wednesday was the kind of evil that would make God regret creating us.

When I think of the story of Noah and the ark now it is the idea of God who is angry and frustrated and done with the world that sticks with me. It sticks with me because it is an image that makes me uncomfortable. And because it is a feeling I understand. I scrolled through images of the victims, read stories about them, heard the nonsense from Washington about thoughts and prayers but no action. And I thought, you know what we need, God. Another flood. How can we possibly come back from this? How can we rebuild in a world where so much has gone so wrong?

But God does not work like we do, thank goodness. Well, in the story of Noah, God does take on some decidedly human tendencies, which makes me wonder that we decided the destructive flood came from God because humans have a capacity for violence we would like God to have as well. I'm not so sure God does share those qualities. But there is something in this story that God does share with us. And that is grace.

God is able to redeem even the worst of situations. A flood was coming, everyone would die, but maybe God could still save us. And God did. Noah built the ark. Teachers and coaches gave up their lives for their students. First responders saved who they could. And now survivors are claiming their voices and standing up to politicians who refuse to enact common sense gun laws to try and save more children from the horror they lived through.

We may think in these stories of terror that God should pack up shop and move on. But if God does that, then we don't have to change either. We get to wash our hands of the world, stop trying to figure out how God is calling us to change it. We don't have to sit there and be grieved over loss as we move toward new life anyway.

But God has made a covenant with us. Set a rainbow in the clouds to remind God’s self, supposedly, but also to remind us: new life is possible.

I see the story of Noah as a resurrection story. Sure, it is a much more depressing resurrection story than the one we will read in forty days, but it is about new life that comes out of the horror of death. Not because of the horror of death--- God doesn’t need destruction to bring about new life. But new life is always possible for humanity. The thing that makes Noah’s story a Lentan one is that it covenants with us, requiring us to rebuild. To try again. To take forty days to dig deeper into spiritual disciplines, to fast and pray, and turn our lives back to God.

So already I have suggested in this sermon that maybe it wasn't exactly God who caused the Flood like the text says. Now I am reading a responsibility for us into the covenant we read this morning. If you look carefully at the covenant we read, God covenants with us that humanity will never again be destroyed by a flood. There is no response for humans. It isn't a “if you do this, then I will do that” kind of covenant.

Maybe the Gospel story explains this part better. In the scripture we read from Mark, Jesus has been baptized. He emerges from the water, the heavens open, God names him beloved, and then he is immediately driven into the wilderness. We can presume he is still wet, that’s how quickly he moves. He doesn't have time to celebrate his belovedness; he gets right to work in the wilderness, relying totally on God in the midst of difficulty to discover what his identity as Beloved means for his work here on earth. God never says, “This is my Son, the Beloved if he does all the things I want him to do.” But Jesus knows that his identity as Beloved of God means that he has a responsibility to help live into the kindom of God.

And so do we. God's covenant with Noah says there is no such thing as too far gone. We might not believe God, but that is what the rainbow tells us anyway. There is no violence, no grief, nothing that is too far gone that God can't eke some good out of it. And we, as beloved children of God, baptized as Jesus was, also have a responsibility to work with God to eke out this good. We are agreeing to work with Jesus to renew the world from the inside out.

I was talking to Pastor Beth this week about this passage from Noah. When I read it now, I picture less the art we find in children's Sunday school rooms, and instead I picture an experience I had the last time I was in Bosnia.

Bosnia, to those of us who remember the news in the 1990s, is one of those places that seemed to once mirror the wickedness of the world that must have so disappointed God. During the war, neighbor killed neighbor, concentration camps were established, mass rape was used as a calculated tool of war. Today, the violence is not rampant though tensions still course along ethnic lines, but corruption still defines the country. There is apathy, disgust, hopelessness. A dark rain flooded the country with a hate so powerful that it is a wonder anything is left, but even today stagnant water left over from the war seems to cover so much. Bosnians know the wickedness of humankind. They have wondered if God can ever pull them out of the violence they have endured--- if they are too far gone. Bosnians know what Noah felt, looking over the wickedness of his fellow humans as those first fat drops of rain fell on his nose.

That wickedness is always very apparent in graveyards in Bosnia, especially if you can look across and see just how many graves are marked 1993 or 1994. And one day, I found myself in one of these graveyards. I had gone with my friend Đana to visit her family because it was Bajram (or Eid), a family, food, and faith-oriented holiday. First, though, we stopped at the community graveyard; during Bajram, one also says prayers for the dead. The cemetery sits almost precariously up on the mountain, rows of skinny white graves sticking out into the sky. We stopped the car and got out to see Đana's cousin Dijana and her family were already there. Dijana and Đana covered their heads with these huge scarves and went over to the graves. I stood around awkwardly trying to keep Dijana's three-year-old and Đana's two-year-old from falling down the mountain. But at one point I paused and looked up at the two cousins praying, their veils flapping in the mountain breeze, at this little line of graves all with the last name Domazet--- most of whom I knew. Đana's father was killed during the war in 1994, her mother from a heart attack when she was in her early forties, her grandmother from Alzheimer’s, and her aunt from cancer. Đana was crying, and reached over to touch her mother's grave. So much loss in such a young life. So much pain. The floodwaters in life had taken so much from her. And yet, yet here we were. The sun was shining, the grass was so green, and two toddlers were running around hand-in-hand laughing.

Đana rebuilt her life. She decided that the destruction of war, the pain of grief, the constant fear of loss would not keep her from living. Noah rebuilt his life, built a home and planted vineyards. And many in the community of Parkland, Florida, are rebuilding already as well, refusing to let violence have the last word in their community.

Perhaps there is a part of your life that needs rebuilding. Perhaps there is a part of you destroyed by fear or apathy, shriveled by bitterness and loss. Invite God into those places this Lent. Look for rainbows, seek goodness together. Perhaps that means taking up a practice like gratitude journaling--- forcing yourself to look for the good in your life and nurture it. Perhaps that means becoming an advocate as many students are, standing up to death-dealing things in our world and working to stop them. Perhaps that means spending time in service, helping someone else to rebuild.

The rainbow covenant reminds us that God will work beside us to bring life from dead situations anywhere and anytime. Won't we choose to work with God?

An Afternoon in a Refugee Camp

The refugee camp in Bijelo Polje, 2004.

When I was fifteen, I visited a refugee camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I don't remember much about it--- I think the people there were refugees from Kosovo maybe? I don't remember much what the camp director told us about how the camp ran, how many people were there, how long people could expect to be there. But I do remember the children in the camp. How we tried to play games with them but really the kids were clinging to us so tightly we could barely move our arms to toss a ball, and the ball would come right back to us. My sister, who was fourteen then, said she still remembers the face of the little girl who held her hand the entire time. She remembers trying to get her to play but she'd just smile, shake her head and just hold her hand. I remember not all the children had shoes, but perhaps it was just because it was summer? I remember the concrete everywhere--- different from the images of tent cities with blue UN tarps like we usually see on TV nowadays. But this camp was concrete encased in a chain link fence. I remember the faces of the children pressed into the fence as we left.

The woman who translated for us while we were in Bosnia went on to work in a local school there and I remember her telling me that the children at that camp went to her school. So these refugees had different opportunities than ones crossing the sea or living in a tent on a border somewhere. But whenever I hear about refugees in the news, I remember the feel of tiny hands gripping mine with fierce longing. I remember the faces of children so desperate to be treated as something other than a criminal or a burden or unwanted that they were willing to attach themselves to a stranger like me who could not even remotely speak their language or, let's be realistic, throw or catch a ball.

And so when the president of my country issues an executive order banning refugees from entering the country for 120 days--- except those from Syria who will be banned indefinitely--- I get angry. How dare we prioritize a mythical concept of safety over the lives of children? I remember the faces of the kids watching us leave--- those were not the faces of terrorists. Those were not the faces of threats to our national security. They were the faces of children wondering why they lived in a cage. Wondering when they would have a home. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from their homes, including nearly 21.3 million refugees. Over half of refugees are under the age of 18. These are the people we are really rejecting.

So let's stop allowing our politicians to feed us lies about our safety and instead embrace our fellow human beings. Call your representatives. Financially support organizations working with refugees. Reach out to local organizations that help with resettlement (if you are in the Baltimore area, check out the Refugee Youth Project). Pray and work for a world where people are not forced from their homes in pursuit of peace and stability. Remember that it is not our safety that is a concern but the safety of these children in camps.

Iman Means Faith

This is the answer I gave to our Board of Ordained Ministry about an experience with peace with justice ministries I've had as a pastor. I wanted to write about my experience of Islam to counter the hate-speech that seems to be acceptable today, but, without the time during Advent, I thought I would recycle this:

A group of women from a church were sitting in a restaurant during Advent, and talking about how Mary of Nazareth, Jesus' mother, has been represented across cultures, including an Arabic representation. Mary is revered in some Muslim communities and is mentioned more in the Qu'ran than she is in the Bible. Except in the middle of this conversation,  one of the women said, “Well, if that's true, then it's too bad they [Muslims] all are still so violent.” 

Comments like this, willfully ignorant, incorrect, and even hateful, about Islam are too common in our churches. I have served congregations in Harford County, a largely white county, overwhelmingly Christian, and also woefully illiterate on other faiths. Some Christians do not see why such illiteracy is a problem, but the reality is that illiteracy breeds violence and intolerance. In his book on Christian identity in a multi-faith world, Brian McLaren writes, “Our root problem is the hostility that we often employ to make and keep our identities strong--- and whether those identities are political, economic, philosophical, scientific, or religious.”¹ If I wanted to interrupt the hostility, I would need to engage in peace and justice ministries that fostered interfaith relationships.

My own faith became stronger through my friendship with Muslims who I met through a mission trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004 (and have returned to visit at least eight times). I have always felt called to interfaith youth work, believing in the South African concept of ubuntu, that we become who we are through relationship with others. I never expected to be about to do interfaith work in homogenous Harford County, but when preparing to teach confirmation, I sought non-Christian congregations to visit, and somehow came into contact with Tasniya Sultana, an organizer for Project Iman, a Muslim Girls youth group. We met, had a great time, and began to plan ways for our youth to get together.

The first year, we met twice, starting by meeting with Project Iman during Ramadan. Their group was much bigger than our own, particularly because only my girls in youth group were invited the first time. I also ended up bringing a few younger girls with my youth (whose pictures ended up in the paper).² Some of the youth went to the same school! We began with a craft where we learned to write our names in Arabic and talked about our favorite holidays. We shared stories, explaining in very basic terms how we walk in the footsteps of many of the same giants of faith, Abraham who they call Ibrahim, or Jesus who they call Isa, for instance. They spoke of Ramadan and the sacrifice of Ishmael (Isaac in the Bible). When our craft was finished, we stood up and got in a circle for a game. One of the leaders of Project Iman read a series of statements and we were supposed to take steps into the circle if the statement was true for us. She deftly included theological and scriptural statements along with statements about our families and favorite foods. And then they prayed. We sat at the tables in our own attitude of prayer while they prayed before breaking their fast. The girls from Presbury were quiet. I didn't see suspicion or self-righteousness or anything our culture teaches us about how Christians should see Muslims; instead, I only saw wonder and openness.

The second time we met was at Presbury. We ate together and painted birdhouses as a craft to go with the scripture I shared, Luke 12:22-29, about how we should not worry for God is with us. Then I had questions about how our faith teaches us to deal with worry and fear. One of the leaders from Project Iman said she loved the scripture! But the most powerful experience of the night was when we moved to the sanctuary and shared about our worship experiences. I told the kids they could ask each other whatever they wanted, but I also asked them questions. It was fascinating to see what kinds of questions they had for us, how they noticed the colors in the sanctuary and asked about their meaning, as well as to see how excited they were when I asked them to tell me about how they worship. It was a safe space where the Muslim girls were asked questions not to put them on the defensive but just out of wonder. And we as Christians were able to model Christ's hospitality.

Rev. Emily Scott, a Lutheran pastor of a dinner church called St. Lydia's in New York, said recently: “Sometimes you are seated next to someone so different, that you don't know how to start a conversation. And then something happens. In that moment, heaven and earth overlap, and God builds a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be.”³ The interfaith relationships between Project Iman and Presbury are fostering those moments where God builds a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be, a world of peace and justice where Muslims and Christians are more interested in eating, laughing, and sharing together than fighting or using hostility to shore up our identities. Our plans for this ministry are to expand it to all our youth, as there is now a Muslim youth group for boys that Project Iman works with, and to have not just dialogue together, but to work together for justice too. For Ramadan in 2016, we are planning a 30 Hour Famine-type event to raise money and awareness about world hunger. We want to continue to create that overlap between heaven and earth, that glimpse of earth as it should be, in our little corner of Harford County.



1Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), 63




2See Nimra Nadeem, “Muslim, Christian girls join for interfaith iftar,” The Baltimore Sun, 28 July 2014, accessed 14 July 2015, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/fallston-joppa/ph-ag-comm-interfaith-muslim-christian-20140728-story.html.



3Emily Scott, from a talk at the ELCA's national youth gathering posted by Nadia Boltz-Weber on Facebook, 18 July 2015, https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/v/t1.0-9/11752340_859677020806230_5199339091003344713_n.jpg?oh=0222e446a363352940c43655630e7477&oe=56155FCB.

"Avenge Our Blood": Martyrdom and Empire Building in Revelation 6:9-11

This paper was written for Dr. Moore's class on Revelation almost a year ago now. I was thinking back on it, hit by a wave of nostalgia for my academic days at the same time I have been reading up on nationalism and martyrdom again. So I decided to post it! 

"When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, 'Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?' They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed."

-Revelation 6:9-11¹

The year is 1389, the place is Kosovo, and Prince Lazar is leading his people against the forces of the Ottoman Empire to defend the independence of his people. He is killed, delivered into the hands of the enemy by one of his own and from then on, so the story goes, Serbs become a martyred people of sorts, people we see in Revelation 6:9-11 under the altar crying out, not for independence, but for vengeance. This was not always the story in Serbia, of course, but it is one that came into being in the nineteenth century, and so even today this defeat more than six hundred years ago, it is a battle that is remembered.² During the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, war criminal and then-president of Republika Srpska within Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, used to appear publicly with what were essentially bards who sang, “Serb brothers, wherever you are, with the help of Almighty God / For the sake of the Cross and the Christian Faith and our imperial fatherland / I call you to join the battle of Kosovo.”³ Within this one folk song, we see both the imperial imagination of Greater Serbia and the explicit call to join this 600-year old battle in the name of the suffering of the cross. Lynda E. Boose explains, “Not many nations celebrate a defeat as the cradle of their nationhood, but by doing so Serbs seal their history within a mythic imaginary in which the Serbs are forever victims, situated for perpetuity in the place of resentment and unassuaged revenge within a story that promises to confer heroism in the present only through return, repetition, and revenge.”⁴ In this paper I posit that Revelation also serves within a mythic imaginary to present Christians as forever victims in such a way that God's vengeance becomes more important than freedom in the construction of Christian identity just as revenge was more important in the construction of a Serb nation than independence. “Martyrdom was--- and continues to be---” as Elizabeth A. Castelli in her work on martyrdom and collective memory asserts, “such a critical building block of Christian culture.”⁵

I want to stress here that the relationship between Serbia and Yugoslavia is different than the colonial power of Rome, for example. Though there is a very strong sense of the process of empire building in the Serbia-Yugoslavia relationship, there is less an understanding of Serbia as a colonizing power during the conflicts in the 1990s. Yet I was intrigued by reading Revelation next to Serb nationalism because, to add yet another layer, I think this relationship will bring into focus the way that Revelation is used, particularly in more fundamentalist contexts, to negate the hegemonic power of Christianity in the USA and claim an oppressed experience.⁶ As Castelli points out, “The politically right-wing Christian Coalition mastered the use of the language of religious persecution and martyrdom to deflect and defuse virtually any critique lodged by any opponents of its theocratic political project.”⁷ This is, of course, a paper that merely wades into a much deeper, vastly more complex discussion, but I see it as an important process of connection to use as a tool to counter cries of “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

Revelation is written for and about martyrs; it is a textbook for martyrs.⁸ In Revelation 6:9-11 we see glorified slaughtered bodies and, as I have already suggested, are invited to ask for vengeance alongside these bodies. These verses are not the only ones that glorify martyrs, of course, for Jesus himself is the “Chief Martyr figure:” “The earliest description of Jesus in Revelation occurs in 1:5 when he is called 'the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings on earth'. These titles are especially appropriate in a work concerned with martyrdom.”⁹ Thus, the martyrs beneath the altar are following in the footsteps of Christ, sharing in Christ's work and purpose. So too, Serb nationalists using myths like the defeat at Kosovo and the novels of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), portrayed themselves as Christ-like. There is a conflation of Serbian ethnicity and Christianity (specifically Serbian Orthodoxy) called Christoslavism, that stresses Serb Christian suffering at the hands of Muslims/Turks. Andrić, writing just before World War II, gave Serb nationalists an incredibly gory image of martyrdom in the fictional description of a Serb peasant being impaled by Ottoman authorities in his novel The Bridge on the Drina. This description is explicitly like Christ's crucifixion scene.¹⁰ Castelli writes of early Christian martyrs what could be written of Serb nationalists: “by aligning themselves with Jesus' own victimhood, they claimed as well the immediate divine vindication that Jesus himself, according to Christian teaching, enjoyed.”¹¹ Thus, when John is glorifying the martyrs under the altar, he is putting into sequence a chain of events that not only links but begins to conflate the suffering of the martyrs with the suffering of Christ. Their deaths become part of the divine project. So too, by placing the impalement of a Serb alongside the crucifixion of Christ, Andrić has conflated Serb suffering with Christ's suffering, making their suffering divine. 

What is interesting is that despite real experiences of martyrdom, the two images of martyrdom I mentioned above, Revelation 6:9-11 and Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina, are fictional. Castelli reminds us, “Martyrdom as a product of discourse rather than of unmediated experience.”¹² Martyrdom, then, does not have to be factual, but is constructed to create identity. It, as identity is, is imagined, but this imagined quality does not have a less real effect on bodies. Benedict Anderson in his work on nation writes that a nation is a fraternity of individuals, and “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as to willingly die for such limited imaginings.”¹³ Anderson's phrase “limited imaginings” is in reference to the fact that a nation is inherently limited as nations are constructed in opposition to an Other; yet, limited imaginings in identity construction through martyrdom has another connotation as well, one in which identity is caught in a non-life-giving way. Martyrdom here offers not comfort in the face of or resistance to oppression but just death, an ideology of death.¹⁴ In the case of John's revelation, some of this limited imagination comes from the fact that John's paradoic mimicry of Rome has continued to such an extent that he cannot escape a vision that does not critique the structure, only replaces the Head. Stephen D. Moore explains, “Yet the difficulty of effectively exiting empire by attempting to turn imperial ideology against itself is regularly underestimated, it seems to me, by those who acclaim Revelation for decisively breaking the self-perpetuating cycle of empire. To my mind, Revelation is emblematic of the difficulty of using the emperor's tools to dismantle the emperor's palace.”¹⁵ John's mimicry is trapped within the cycle of empire, unable to imagine a new way to form identity, left only with an ideology of death.
So John's martyrs are dying for the same system that kills them, only Sovereign Lord, holy and true, is the tyrant Caesar now. In a similar way, Serb nationalism trades places with those they claim are the oppressors, Turks who impale innocent Serb peasants, by becoming génocidaires. The focus on vengeance that we see in the martyrs' cry seems to be one of the focal points of this failure in imagination, beautifully summed up in Moore's own questioning of the martyrs' lament of how long:

“But what does the cry for vengeance from under the altar, heard and heeded by the one seated on the throne, actually effect?...An eye for an eye? No, not an eye for an eye. What Revelation seems to be saying is this: If you gouge out the eye of one of God's witnesses, or even refuse to heed them, God will gouge out both of your eyes in return. And not only that but he will puncture your eardrums as well, and tear out your tongue, and sever your spine, and plunge you into a timeless torment. Or, what amounts to much the same thing, he will have you tortured for all eternity in the presence of his Son and his angels (14:9-11), the smoke of your torment ascending like incense...It's the 'forever and ever' that seems to make the punishment spectacularly incommensurate with the crime...”¹⁶

This is a cycle of a failure of imagination, a cycle of ever-more violence that can only end when all the Romans/Muslims are slaughtered. And perhaps then someone new to slaughter would be created; how else to maintain restrictive and totalitarian power? Mitchell G. Reddish uses Donald W. Riddle's work, to claim “that the functional purpose of both apocalyptic literature and martyrologies is social control of the group in a time of persecution.”¹⁷ We could lop “in a time of persecution” off of that sentence. Unfortunately, what has happened is that Revelation and the national myths of martyrdom have been used as forms of social control to accumulate more power in the hands of the oppressors rather than offer comfort the the oppressed. Returning to Castelli's critique of the Religious Right quoted at the beginning of this paper, tales of persecution and martyrdom serve to “deflect and defuse” real critique and real attempts at imagining new ways to relate together. 

Moore begins his own exploration of the “self-perpetuating cycle of empire” with a quotation from Eusebius' Life of Constantine in which “those ministers of God” supped with the Emperor in his innermost apartments, sharing with him at his own table.¹⁸ Here, the empire that John has written against becomes the empire for which he prays. Those martyrs had rested long enough, it seems, to see their blood avenged as their own took the seat of power and promptly began the Crusades, etc. as the firsts of many militarized horror fantasies to keep them in power.¹⁹ When Slobodan Milošević became president of Serbia in 1989, he announced Serbs no longer had to rest a little longer. In Kosovo on June 28, 1989, exactly six hundred years after Prince Lazar's defeat, the Patriarch of the Serb Orthodox Church lit candles to remember the martyrs and Lazar, who is often depicted as a Christ figure, was pictured in icons next to pictures of Milošević himself.²⁰ What ensued was the vengeance the martyrs cried for; vengeance, not justice, not the pursuit of independence and freedom from dictatorships and Western Euopean-imposed boundaries, but vengeance that allowed Milošević to remain president until his arrest two genocides later in 2001. 

Of course, it gets a bit slippery to hold the threads of Serb Christoslavism with the false USAmerican fundamentalist sense of oppression with the martyrs of Revelation 6:9-11, and I do not want to give the impression that these three threads are the same, or to conflate the three. Rather, the parallels, the eerie echoes in these three diverse places, demonstrate that Revelation is a text of terror. Perhaps martyrdom is not always about the maintenance of power in the hands of the unimaginative; yet stories of martyrdom seem to be used very effectively not to counter empire but to build it. As Castelli admonishes, “One should worry about the staid, venerable, and ancient tradition that insists that death is a meaning-producing event, that truth and violence inexorably imply each other--- and that, indeed the first requires the second.”²¹ Again, it seems that to name Revelation as liberative is to sanitize its violence as redemptive without analyzing the horrific ways such violence has been realized historically and to subsume the cries of the oppressed beneath the so-called martyrs' cries for vengeance.
 
1Revelation 6:9-11, The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006).
2See Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996); and Lynda E. Boose, “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory,” Signs 28.1 (Autumn 2002): 71-96.
3Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 50.
4Boose, “Crossing the River Drina,” 80.
5Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4.
6I am relying on personal experience here, though there has been work done on the ways in which Christians falsely understand themselves as victims. My partner grew up at a Southern Baptist mega church in conservative, rural Harford County Maryland, and every time I have attended his church I have heard at least once throughout the service something that indicated that Christians are oppressed by the broader USAmerican culture. Most recently, this sense of victimization has centered around issues of reproductive rights and marriage equality.
7Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 199.
8Mitchell G. Reddish, “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse,” Journal For The Study Of The New Testament no. 33 (1 June 1988): 86.
9Ibid.
10See Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 37-52. Cited in both Boose and Sells.
11Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 51-52.
12Ibid., 173.
13Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (New York Verso, 1991), 7.
14As Tina Pippin writes, “The ideology of death— that death and martyrdom are valued and valuable for citizenship in the city of God— is throughout the apocalyptic vision.” “Eros and the End: Reading for Gender in the Apocalypse of John,” Semeia, no. 59 (1 January 1992): 196.
15Stephen D. Moore, “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah': Representing Empire in Revelation,” Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Publishing, 2006), 114.
16Stephen D. Moore, “Revolting Revelations,” God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198-199.
17Reddish, “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse,” 91.
18Moore, “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah',” 97.
19As Moore writes, “The Crusades, the Inquisition, and even the Holocaust itself (the smoke rising day and night from the ovens of Auschwitz and Belsen) are but some of the more notable manifestations of the militarism that animates Revelation. Indeed, anyone of these campaigns might have claimed a warrant for its genocidal fantasies in the sinister logic of this most dangerous of biblical books.” Moore, “Revolting Revelations,” 188.
20Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 68.
21Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 196.

Works Cited
Andrić, Ivo. The Bridge on the Drina. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Boose, Lynda E. “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory.” Signs 28.1 (Autumn 2002): 71-96.
Castelli, Elizabeth A. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006.
Moore, Stephen D. “Revolting Revelations.” God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 173-199.
---. “'The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah': Representing Empire in Revelation.” Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Publishing, 2006. 97-121.
Pippin, Tina. “Eros and the End: Reading for Gender in the Apocalypse of John.” Semeia, no. 59 (1 January 1992): 193-210.
Reddish, Mitchell G. “Martyr Christology in the Apocalypse.” Journal For The Study Of The New Testament no. 33 (1 June 1988): 85-95.
Sells, Michael A. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press, 1996.

Ants in My Pants

"Doubts," Pastor Judy Walker at Delta United Methodist Church announces Sunday morning, "are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." She was quoting Frederick Buechner and preaching on a little piece of Matthew 28:17: "but some doubted." Matthew 28:16-20 is usually called the Great Commission, the story in which Jesus tells the Eleven to, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations." But before Jesus commissions the Eleven, we see that not everyone believed that he had resurrected from the dead. And Pastor Judy focused on that, knowing that so few of us have heard it admitted in church that some doubted. Some still doubt. I shivered a little when I realized that she was preaching on the merits of doubt for faithful people: my answer to the provisional membership question for United Methodists seeking ordination concerning my personal experience of God was about the importance of struggle in my faith journey, and I even compared myself to Doubting Thomas, wanting to place my hands in the wounds of the Resurrected One.

But then Pastor Judy asked us to write down on a note card we had in our bulletin our answer to the question: What are the ants in your pants? There are times when naming holds a crushing kind of power, and naming through written word holds even more of that power for me. So here I am, preparing to be ordained in the Church, doing community organizing for a summer internship out of churches, thoroughly enjoying seminary, attributing my radical politics to my faith, and yet the first question that comes to my mind, the question that I have really been struggling with since first recognizing my call to ministry, is

What difference does Christianity make?
Notice that my question is not about if God's really there or who this Jesus guy is. It's not "What difference does Christ make?" I was thinking about why this was the other day while I was listening to mewithoutYou, and in "The Sun and the Moon," Aaron Weiss sings, "I used to wonder where you are. These days I can't find where you're not." That is how I feel. I have not always felt that way, certainly, and probably will not always feel that way, but now I can usually close my eyes and breathe in deeply, and then when I open my eyes again I see God in the laughter of a baby or the purring of a cat or in the mountains or even in the eyes of my sisters. Finding God is not the problem. I see God all the time, whenever I open my eyes even half-way--- the problem, for me, is that I often have difficulty seeing God in the Church.

In the sermon "Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity" on Jeremiah 8:22, a heartbreaking sermon written later in his life, John Wesley asks, "Why has Christianity done so little good in the world?" He saw, as so many of us have seen and continue to see, that despite the teachings of Jesus that show us a new way of living together, a way of wholeness and love, our world is just as unjust, as oppressive (if not worse) today as it was over two thousand years ago as Palestinians struggled under the yoke of the Roman Empire. But I think we have to expand the question out even more: not only why has Christianity done so little good in the world, but why has Christianity done so much evil in the world? People who call themselves Christians can often be such ugly people. I can often be such an ugly person, you know? So what's the point? What's the point of this whole organized Christianity thing if it is often the author of the ugliness in the world?

This is not a question I want to be asking myself as I seek to become a pastor.

And I can't end this blog post with an answer. I did not have some magical revelation that made Christianity, that made the Church, make more sense to me this week. I still hurt when I am rummaging through my bag and find that folded up piece of paper. I don't even read the question, but I see it in my mind, staring at me, asking me, What difference does Christianity make? But, though I still doubt, my heart was touched this week, soothed just a little bit so I don't hurt quite so much when my thoughts return to that question. And this story might not soothe you, but here it is.

On Wednesdays, I volunteer to work with the elementary school kids at York City Day Camp. I am super awkward with kids, though I love them, because I have always just let Kate and Suzanne work their magic on kids and considered myself not gifted in that department. Also, I am not even a little bit cool. So I usually let the kids make the first move, let them decide if they like me before I try and just get disappointed. Luckily for me younger elementary school kids are much more gracious to the uncool, and so I found myself sitting at breakfast with a bunch of six year olds who decided that we were friends. They just kept talking and laughing and being cute until one little girl started to sing. And then the rest of them joined in. It took me a moment to register what she was singing. It wasn't a silly song, it wasn't a camp song, it wasn't an upbeat praise song either. No, she was singing "Sanctuary."

Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary,
pure and holy, tried and true,
with thanksgiving, I'll be a living sanctuary,
for you.

Thank God I did not cry because then I would have really given away how uncool I really am, but I did choke up. See, I learned the song "Sanctuary" when I was in Bosnia and Herzegovina the first time in 2004. I always associate that song with my first intense spiritual experience, when I was assured of God's love for me (which I have written about here and here). And here were these children singing this song out of the blue in their slightly off-key fairy voices. I usually don't have as strong a reaction to the song when I hear it in church, but I had never heard it coming from just children before--- it's not one I've usually heard taught to kids, though they had learned it last year at the Day Camp.

And I don't know what it means, but now every time my fingertips brush against that folded-up index card, I hear those little fairy voices singing about being living sanctuaries. And maybe that's enough for me in this moment.

Reviving the Stones

Every time I land at the airport in Sarajevo, the same thing jumps out at me when we land. The buildings there are filled with holes, silent witnesses to a war that happened fifteen years ago. You drive along the road south from Sarajevo to Mostar and you still see damage from the shelling in town after town.

But the difference between Bosnia as I know it today in 2011 and back when I first visited in 2004 is huge. While there is still a heavy police presence in places like Sarajevo, gone are the SFOR and EUFOR troops that were around every corner in 2004. There are more roadsigns, better roadsigns. And there has been rebuilding. Though the bank remains as it did then, a skeleton, the old Turkish bath house has been rebuilt, though what it is now I don't know. And 2004 itself marked an important milestone in the rebuilding when the Mostar Bridge, a bridge that stood as a symbolic link between the Croatian and Muslim sides of the river, was rebuilt. I had thought for some strange reason when it reopened that they had fished the old stones from the river and used them to rebuild the bridge when in actuality they used stones from the same quarry, but I still like to think of those stones as bathed clean by the river. Indeed, the rebuilding of the bridge reminds me of how Nehemiah organized the people to rebuild the wall in Jerusalem, restoring Jerusalem: they have revived the stones out of the heaps of rubbish--- and the burned ones at that (Nehemiah 4:2).

But in the process of rebuilding, stones are not the only things to be revived but it is people who must pick up the burned and ravaged pieces of themselves and their homes to rebuild their lives. One of the ways communities are rebuilt comes through weddings. Coming from a culture of Say Yes to the Dress and Bridezillas, seeing a wedding as rebuilding is not a natural way to see a wedding. Weddings are usually productions to entertain (though sometimes also to celebrate). But Đana and Enis' wedding was different. It was a coming together of families and the community.

Now I don't want to completely idealize this wedding. The culture is patriarchal (as ours is) and one of the places in which that plays out most is in weddings. Women move to live with their husband's families the majority of the time, and the ritual reflects that. But all in all, the focus on coming together in this wedding, traditional though it was, really overpowered those more patriarchal elements. The party starts at her house. She waits in a room, visited by neighbors and family all congratulating her, but she stays in the room until family members from his side come to bring her out of the room (where they also give money to her family) and out to the front porch of her house where they have a banquet for her family and friends. Then, she leaves with her witness and her fiancé and his witness and the rest of his family who came to get her and they begin the journey to his home, where they will have the religious and civil ceremonies followed by the reception.

And it is a long day of eating and more eating. But it was such a cool drink of water as I think about Aaron and I getting married soon. Despite the fact that Suzanne got a little snippy because she didn't eat all morning and then we didn't know who was driving us to the wedding, this day seemed more stress-free, more community oriented than ours (as portrayed in the media) are. Đana didn't have to make any food (which was good because the week leading up to the wedding was filled with people coming to visit her until almost eleven in the evening!) or decorate, friends and family chipped in. It was a real coming together, which was important to everyone since Đana is such a presence there in their village near Mostar. She will be missed so much, and she will miss them so much, though she will probably be back often.

The whole day just felt as though we were all coming together to build something. Taking pieces of ourselves and offering it forward to the community. All night Suzanne and I laughed, sitting with Đana's cousins, taking funny pictures and drinking juice and eating cheese. It might sound weird to say it, but it was a spiritual experience for me. That laughter was an indicator of how different life could be, about how even when life may be sad, joy breaks through. Always. And I guess why this metaphor from Nehemiah of reviving the stones was so important to me was because I really felt run down after a year of taking too many classes, being too far away from Aaron, and having a challenging supervised ministry assignment. This wedding felt like not only a creation of Đana and Enis's new family, but it felt like Suzanne and I were drawn in too. I already had seen all of these people as my family, but the wedding felt as much a joining of my family with theirs with the way Suzanne was welcomed as a joining of Enis and Đana's families. And I needed that.

When the wall around Jerusalem was rededicated, the book of Nehemiah tells us that, "The joy of Jerusalem was heard far away" (Nehemiah 12:43). Đana and Enis' wedding was a day in which our joy was heard far away, I think. And many people around the world, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Norway to Chicago to Maryland to South Carolina entered into that joy as well.

Who is this?

The monthly sermon post! This is a sermon for Palm Sunday, that I first used on my preaching class with Dr. Gary Simpson at Drew. Today, I preached it at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I have been preaching once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor and will be sad to go, since this was the last Sunday I will preach there. But that means supervised ministry is almost over and I will have some time to write something for my blog other than a sermon!

Scripture: Matthew 21:1–11 (from the Inclusive Bible translation)1

As they approached Jerusalem, entering Bethphage at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent off two disciples, with the instructions, "Go into the village straight ahead of you, and immediately you will find a tethered donkey with her colt standing beside her. Untie them and lead them back to me. If anyone questions you, say, 'The Rabbi needs them.' They they will let them go at once."

This came about to fulfill what was said through the prophet:
"Tell the daughter of Zion,
Your sovereign comes to you without display,
riding on a donkey, on a colt---
the foal of a beast of burden."

So the disciples went off and did what Jesus had ordered. They brought the donkey and her colt, and after they laid their cloaks on the animals, Jesus mounted and rode toward the city.

Great crowds of people spread their cloaks on the road, while some began to cut branches from the trees lay them along the path. The crowds--- those who went in front of Jesus and those who followed--- were all shouting,
"Hosanna to the Heir to the House of David!
Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Most High!
Hosanna in the highest!"

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths, demanding, "Who is this?"

And the crowd kept answering, "This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee!"

Sermon: “Who is this?”



I saw Godspell at Bernards Township High School a few weeks ago. It is one of my favorite musicals--- I prefer hippie musicals. And, though the song "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord" is a John the Baptist song, calling people to repent, I always hear this song and think of Palm Sunday. If you have seen the musical live, you may associate the rushing forward in the song--- which at the high school due to that large cast sounded like a herd of elephants--- with the forward motions of the crowd, proclaiming as loudly and joyously as you have to do to sing "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord."

And so this is the image I have in my mind of Palm Sunday, a rushing forward, a joyous preparation of Jesus coming to Jerusalem to assume his role as King, really. The occasion is one of such brightness and color that we almost skip over that verse, the one that is foreshadowing the events coming later in the week. You see,

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths,
demanding, "Who is this?"
Who is this guy riding a donkey with her colt alongside her into our city? Who is this person that has so invigorated the masses? Who is this and what does he want? What does he want with us?

Will you pray with me?

Gracious God, Patient Teacher, we ask your presence among us as we gather here. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts bring us closer to understanding who is this Jesus and how can we become better followers of him. Amen.

Thoughout my study of this passage this week, the question I kept coming back to was that "Who is this?" question. The text, though, makes it pretty clear who this is. In the beginning of the passage, we see Jesus as a great teacher, as one who gives instructions that are followed, as one who says "you will find a tethered donkey" there and it is so. And the author of this gospel tells us that this happened to fulfill what was said through the prophet. So who is this Jesus? The Promised One. The One the people have so longed for. The sign of this king was not a warhorse, not chariots drawn as Caesar would have it, no the sign of this promised one given to the people by God through the prophet was that a simple man would ride in without display on a dinky old donkey, still tied to her young colt. The people are clear that this man on the donkey is prophesying a change, and that is why they shout Hosannas.

I think the scene was one so like what we saw in Egypt. The people so overflowed with joy at the thought of their freedom. They stood in Tahrir--- which means liberation--- Square, together surging forward with a vision of the end of oppression and the beginning of a new way to be Egypt together. The whole city stirred to its depths is the world, people glued to the TV wondering what will happen next, asking who are these people?

But too often the asking of the question who is this? is the signal of fear. It is clear from the passage that Jesus has come to Jerusalem to change some things--- we can say that before he even overturns the tables in the Temple, which in the Gospel of Matthew, he does the same day as his entry into the city. A Palestinian man, who must be obviously poor, obviously dusty from extensive travel, sits on top of a donkey, rides through the streets, and is given the welcome of a great king. This is frightening for those in power; this is the time when their fear translates into a need to quash the uprising. Yet others are out in the streets shouting Hosannas.

The whole city is stirred to its depths as it is presented with a choice, to continue with the old way of living, the way of warhorses, or to try to do something new. To follow this strange man on a donkey.

The Who is this? question is really one about what truths we will admit to ourselves, about whether or not we are willing to let the God who is stirring us to our depths do something new in our lives or whether we are going to quash it within us, close our eyes, turn our backs on the processional.

We all have these who is this? moments in our lives, these moments when we see God and know who God is but we have to ask if we are willing to admit that to ourselves.

One of the most important Who is this? moments for me in my life happened when I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina on a mission trip for the first time. My sister and I were picky eaters, but we certainly were nowhere near starving, but our host, a tiny firey woman named Saja decided we were wasting away and so whisked us away from the rest of the group, bringing with us one of our translators named Ðana since Saja herself knew little English, to the home of her friend for a special dinner. Now, I was sixteen, out of the country for the first time, sitting at a table outside a home still riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel from the war, listening to three strange women chatting in Bosnian. Bosnian is not a language like French or Spanish where a lot of the words are similar to English either. But despite the confusion of the situation, my sister Kate and I just sat quietly, absorbing it all. Ðana became quiet soon too, and then she reached over to Kate and I and told us she loved us. She had known us for two days, and here she was telling us she loved us.

Who is this?It had to be God. I had known the woman for two days. I had lived an extremely sheltered life and spent my childhood planting pumpkins in my backyard that didn't grow until the year we moved, playing with kittens, and writing science fiction. Ðana spent her childhood hiding from the Serb and Croat armies. Her father was killed during the war and every day she leaves her house she passes the marker along the road where he had been murdered. She had never spoken English outside of class before she met us, and the only Bosnian word I knew at that point was the number 8 because it sounds like the word awesome. She was a Muslim whose people were targeted by Christian genocidaires and I was a USAmerican Christian in a post- 9/11 world. And yet the God within her reached out to me beyond all of those barriers and loved me.

And this is one of the moments in my life where I did recognize God, and that I still today rely on as the assurance that God loves me. Me of all people. This is what I imagine those folks along the road that day celebrating. Of course, my who is this? moment is not completely parallel to that of Palm Sunday. There, God had given them this radically different picture of kingship, but in that picture they felt God saying, as I felt in Bosnia, I love you. And I have a better way of living planned for you.

But with this recognition comes a call to a change. Are we going to be those people shouting Hosannas, or are we going to insist that we do not know the answer to the question Who is this?

Of course, even when we are in that crowd, shouting Hosannas on a Sunday,

where do we end up that Friday?

For sometimes we shout Hosannas on Sunday only to go into hiding Friday or even become the bloodthirsty crowd. We must remember that not all revolutions end peacefully. Right now many of us are praying for Libya, mowed down by a dictator. This is not another Egypt revolution, which though it did come under siege briefly by Mubarek's thugs, was overwhelmingly peaceful and joyous. But Libya resembles less this joyous parade to Jerusalem than it does the way Jesus left Jerusalem on Good Friday. We read in Matthew,

On their way out [of Jerusalem], they met a Cyrenian named Simon who they pressed into service to carry the cross. Upon arriving at a site called Golgotha--- which means Skull Place--- they gave Jesus a drink of wine mixed with a narcotic herb, which Jesus tasted but refused to drink.

Once they had nailed Jesus to the cross, they divided his clothes among them by rolling dice; then they sat down and kept watch over him. Above his head, they put the charge against him in writing: "This is Jesus, King of the Jews."2

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is a scene of rich color and vibrance, not the darkness pressing down on us of the scene of Jesus leaving Jerusalem.

Both scenes are full of topsy-turvery reversals: in the first, a man is given the welcome of a king, though he comes without display, riding a donkey; in the second, a man is named a king mockingly as he is killed as a political criminal. But this Jesus is just as much our king here in this Good Friday scene as he is on Palm Sunday. This Good Friday scene is a fulfillment of that Palm Sunday picture. It shows that the answer to the Who is this? question is the one that got him killed.

We are in our last week of Lent, a time of renewal, a time of bringing life from ashes. We are spending this season of Lent, particularly this Holy Week, preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord. And when we are preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord, we have to prepare ourselves for those Fridays too, prepare ourselves to be willing to answer the question Who is this? even when we are stirred to our very depths.

“The Most Subversive Protest of All”

This is the sermon on Luke 5:38-48.1 I first preached it in my preaching class with Dr. Gary Simpson at Drew. I preached at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I preach once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor!

Matthew 5:38-48:2


You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I don't know how many of you have been following the revolution in Egypt but one image in particular from this popular uprising really struck me. You may have seen it, but if not, here it is, a woman kissing a police officer during the protests.3

This week as I preparing the sermon, this image was just stuck in my head. Like when you have a song stuck in your head and you can't get it to go away. So I'm asking you today to hold this image in your mind as we explore this passage together.

Will you pray with me?




Patient Teacher, one who calls us to be hearers and doers of your Word, open us up to the movement of your Spirit as we gather here. May we be so bold to find the Word that lives within us today. Amen.

You know those scriptures you hear all the time, but are never explained? This is one of those passages for me. It is from what the Gospel of Matthew calls the Sermon on the Mount, which, if you have been following the lectionary for the past few weeks, you have been reading. This passage in particular includes two of the (what are called) antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount: these are places where Jesus tells us something we have heard said (you have heard it that it was said), and then tells us to do the opposite. And these things we've heard, they make sense. I want to focus on that first part of the scripture this morning, on how we've heard the saying "take and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

Recently I was reminded that this rule was really used to be merciful rather than vindictive.4 If someone knocks out your tooth, allowing you to knock out their tooth brings a kind of equality and prevents people from killing those who have wronged them just by knocking out a tooth, you know? In principle, international rules of war operate on this same idea, calling it proportionality. For instance, according to the law of proportionality, if some lone person launches a hand grenade into your country, you can't declare nuclear war on their country. It is the same idea in our criminal justice system that the punishment should fit the crime, meaning that if you murder someone you get more time to serve than if you steal something from a store. Makes sense, right? It is about fairness.

Only, and I think this is what Jesus is pointing out, this eye for an eye system of handing out justice to one another doesn't work. You've heard Ghandi's saying, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." More often than not, an eye for an eye means that you have little Palestinian boys throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, and the Israeli soldier retaliating by shooting at them. You have a woman put in jail for a long time after killing an abusive partner, but big bankers swindling millions of USAmericans get bailed out by the government. When we read Jesus' call to turn the other cheek, we think that he is asking us to do something that is too hard--- without looking at our failed attempts to follow that system we see as reasonable, an eye for an eye.

This is not to say that turning the other cheek is easy in comparison. But I think when we read passages like this, we often write Jesus off as some hopeless idealist, asking us always to do the impossible, but Jesus here is not about making us feel inadequate. Eugene Peterson in his contemporary language paraphrase of the bible called The Message presents this scripture as saying:




Here's an old saying that deserves a second look: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth." Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: "Don't hit back at all." If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues you for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.5
Live generously, that's what Jesus is asking us to do here. It isn't about doing the impossible. It is about living into the abundance that God became incarnate in Jesus to show us how to do.

Living with an eye for an eye mentality ends up being so shallow. It ends up being about payback, a payback that seems no matter how many times you pay it still doesn't bring any sort of healing. We can't keep up with our own misplaced sense of fairness, thinking maybe it will bring us happiness or something. But it turns out that rather than caring for people and relationships, we are keeping a tally, only caring about that tit-for-tat stuff. It is not about living generously. We know from experience if we think about it that this attempt to follow an eye for an eye turns into this vicious cycle.

Now some of you might read this passage and say, well I don't think that being walked all over is living generously either. Because isn't that how we read it sometimes? After all, in The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases Do not resist an evildoer, which in and of itself seems to be all wrong as, Don't hit back at all. We can easily read this as meaning that we ought to just smile and take it. This is that notorious passage that has been used time and again to tell people to go back to abusive spouses. They use these verses to say that passivity and nonaction are good things. This reading in effect says then to take yourself out of an abusive situation, to liberate yourself, is against the will of God.

But how is this living generously? Giving in to abuse does not fit with the end vision of the kin-dom, the end vision of how humanity will live together as whole, healed persons, Jesus is painting for us in these verses. Though it is easy to look at these verses and see that a literal understanding of them is calling us all to be pushovers, in fitting these pieces in with our readings of other scripture and our experience of God as a liberating God we know that on a much deeper level, these verses are pointing to something much different.

Clarence Jordan, New Testament scholar, farmer and Habitat for Humanity founder, translates Do not resist an evildoer in the Cotton Patch Gospels, as




But I'm telling you, never respond with evil.6
The living generously comes out of this refusal to respond to evil with evil. By turning the other cheek, we are not passively avoiding conflict, but we are standing up for a vision of living that is much different from the world as we see it today. We are responding, but our responses don't fit into those rules society has come to see as true and sensible.

Here's a big picture example what turning away from tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye living looks like. I've spent a lot of time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, starting with mission trips and then continuing to go back because of the relationships I developed there, so I've read a lot about the history and it just so clearly shows that tit-for-tat system at its worst. See, during World War II, Serbs and Muslims were put in concentration camps by Croats. And then during the Bosnian genocide in the early 1990s, in the north of Bosnia, Croats and Muslims were put in concentration camps by Serbs. And in fact, the Serbs used the cultural memory of a battle lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1389 to rally people to commit genocide against Muslims. Today, the country is still economically destitute and every few months I see a report from the BBC asking not if but when the Balkans will erupt again. Or just during the European Cup a couple years ago some young man was killed in the ethnically dividing uproar over the Croatia-Turkey game.

Yet there is hope in the actions of those who move to break this cycle of retaliation. I have worked with a support group for Muslim women survivors of concentration camps. I go and sit with women who lived through the genocide and listen to their stories and the horrors they lived through, yet they don't look at their Croat or Serb neighbors with violence. In fact, they see in the other women the same pain and fatigue that reside in their own eyes. Their response to the wars they have lived through is not to teach their children that they have been wronged and so must wrong those who hurt them. No, they want to educate, to tell their stories, to make that much-talked-about but little-done-about mantra, Never Again true for their community. They are turning the other cheek, not by rolling over and staying silent, but by choosing to use their experiences to educate their community about the horrors of war and encourage them to instead come together to return evil with good.

Turning the other cheek, giving our coat in addition to the shirt off our backs, then are not some passive action, a nonaction that we so often think they are. Rather it is a conscious decision to look in the face of evil and say, I will not. I will not stoop to that level. I will not continue living in this world of cold supposed fairness that doesn't work. Jesus has shown us another way, a way of abundance.

This is the revolutionary kind of living Jesus is calling us to, a generous way of living breaking free of the old way. Let it be so for you and for me. Amen.