Mountaintops, the Force, and Faith: More Reflections on My Ordination

In United Methodist tradition, ordination happens at Annual Conference (you can read a summary of our annual conference here or here) through the laying on of hands by bishops. My experience was a blessing, especially because in addition to my wonderful bishop, the bishop who ordained my mother and another bishop were present. The bishop who preached the ordination service preached the exact sermon I needed to hear. But I also like how in other traditions the local church has more of a role in the ordination service, and how it is more personal. So the Sunday following my ordination, I designed the service with a nod to our ordination service to include my local church, Presbury United Methodist Church, who has had a pretty big part in shaping me as a pastor after all, and share my call story.

Scripture: Matthew 28:16-20 (NRSV)
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Sermon:

Let us pray:

Patient teacher, we give you thanks. We should always start with thanks because no matter how low in the valley we may feel, and no matter how steep the climb up the mountain can be, there is always something to give thanks for. So we do. We thank you. And we ask through the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts this morning that you may help us always to give thanks for your presence all around us. Amen.

In our scripture today, Jesus directs his disciples to go up a mountain. Mountains have great symbolic importance in scripture. One of the names for God that you will find in the Hebrew Bible and you may have heard in praise songs is El Shaddai. There are a few different translations for this name, especially some interpreted as a feminine name for God, but one of the usual ways we translate it is God of the Mountains. It is a name that symbolizes power and majesty, as mountains also illustrate power and majesty. Mountains are also the site where pretty important things happen in the lives of people of faith. Remember that guy Moses we sometimes talk about? Well, he was called to lead the Hebrew people to freedom when he was on a mountain. Later, he received the Ten Commandments when he went up a mountain, Mount Sinai or Horeb. In the New Testament, Jesus takes Peter and James and John up a mountain to pray and he is transfigured before them. His face and clothes glow and Moses and Elijah appear beside him. God speaks, revealing to these disciples that Jesus is God’s beloved son and they are to listen to him.

Throughout the history of our faith, even modern day history, mountains are synonymous with God’s presence and power. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech given before he was murdered. He said: 

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Powerful words. Mountaintops are a place of vision, where Rev. Dr. King saw the kindom of God or the Promised Land, saw God’s intentions for us and was moved to continue God’s work no matter what he may face.

So mountains are important physical and symbolic sites for us as people of faith. And one mountain in particular in our scripture today served as both physical and symbolic in the disciples own journey. At this point in the story the disciples are in a valley. Valleys we have also heard of before--- does the verse, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, sound familiar to you? Jesus has resurrected by the time we get to our story today, he has appeared to women, and they've shared what he told him with the disciples, but some doubted. The pain and horror of Jesus’ death is too fresh. But no matter their hurt and confusion, they go up the mountain anyway, and there they meet the risen Christ. Some still doubt. But they meet him all the same. Jesus does what he always does. He teaches, gives them direction, loves them. Some of them are finally getting it. Some still aren't. But then he says: And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

I've preached on this verse before, and within the last two years, so it's probably bad form to preach it again. But I'm going to anyway. Because that's the key to everything. I am with you always. God is with us in the valleys and on the mountains. God is with us in our worship and in our doubt. God is with us when we are joyful and when we are despairing.

I have experienced this in my own life. My call to ministry, which I have also used in a sermon fairly recently--- it's terrible to be ordained for a day and already reusing sermons! Ah well. Anyway, my call to ministry happened after a sojourn in the valley. God had called me to be a missionary. When I was fifteen, I had such a transformational experience on a mission trip to Bosnia that I understood God to be calling me to similar work in my adult life. I planned to go to Cameroon to study abroad and my parents would not let me go, which felt like a betrayal by God since my mother was also my pastor. I studied abroad in France instead, and while that was an amazing experience, it was also lonely. I was confused. I didn’t understand why God would call me and then wouldn’t open doors for me to live out the call (now of course, as I go on our AppalachiaService Project trips I see God is, but that’s another story). All this to say: I was nineteen and in a very dark place spiritually. When I came back to the states, I lived in DC and would not have gone to church except someone told me just to try a church called Dumbarton. Dumbarton is a radical place, a church that explicitly welcome all people regardless of sexual identity or gender expression. This was a place where anyone could lift up personal prayer concerns and joys in the same moment one could plead for prayers for far away war-torn countries. It was a church where people could open up their hearts and use their hands and feet to do the work of Christ in the world. I joined their young adult group that met in the Methodist building on Capitol Hill to do bible study together and talk about science fiction. And even though I was still mad at God, even though I still didn’t hear God’s call on my life anymore, I felt myself moving out of the valley and slowly back up the mountain. 

An ordained elder attending the church who was working at a faith-based, non-profit invited me to Student Forum's MOSAIC service, which in that year was held in DC. MOSAIC is the young adult ministry working for a fully inclusive United Methodist Church. This is not just about sexual identity but about welcoming people of all backgrounds and races and ages, about helping us as a church to truly reflect the diversity of the body of Christ. It was there that I could no longer deny God's call on my life.

The lights were dim, the chapel small but filled with warm bodies swaying slightly to the music from the guitars. And my friend walked up to the altar where communion lay and she took the bread and broke it. It was rainbow challah bread. And at that moment I felt like I belonged, I felt that this was home. It was a feeling of completeness that I wish for everyone. And I knew in that moment that God was calling me to be like my friend, breaking bread and building community in such a way that all people feel welcomed and loved. 

Now, as I always say when telling my call story, there were plenty of times before May of 2008 when God called me. People in my home church will tell you that they knew I was called when I was in elementary school. My mother knew when I was in middle school. The agnostic and atheist I lived with in DC at the time knew it. Heck, I remember looking a little at seminaries when I was in France--- I knew it but just wouldn't admit it. This is how the call on our lives works--- and we all have a call, whether or not it is to ordained ministry. God is always calling us because God is always with us.

And there have been valleys and mountaintops since. My experience of the exam for becoming a provisional elder was emotionally awful and followed by the ugliness of General Conference 2012, I wasn't sure I was going to stay Methodist. And then I went to Deer Creek and Mt.Tabor, and they reminded me that God has given me gifts for ministry. They have a gift for teaching pastors, and they took a tired, nervous young woman who was frustrated with the church and even a little frustrated with God, and you turned her into a confident pastor.
And I have been in a valley since my miscarriage. Maybe even before, frankly, because of our battle with infertility before we even got pregnant. And I certainly am not far away from that valley yet. But the overwhelming love I received yesterday--- the cards and texts and messages and posts about the live stream on top of having almost my whole immediate family, people from my home church, people from Mt. Tabor, people from Presbury, friends from high school, friends from seminary, congratulations from colleagues--- that was a mountaintop when I heard again the call to go therefore and make disciples. People all around the world need to feel that kind of love, so if I'm feeling it I can't keep it bottled up! I need to go, therefore, and share that love.

Bishop King, who preached the ordination service, told us we have to keep moving. So that is my invitation to all of you. When you are in those valleys, keep on walking. Try looking for higher ground, if you can, but keep on walking. Because the Force is with you always. I mean, God. God is with us always, to the end of the age. 

 

Do you want to be made well?

This sermon was preached at Presbury United Methodist Church as part of our exploration of the Gospel of John using the Narrative Lectionary.

Scripture: John 5:1-18

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath.

But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.

Sermon: “Do you want to be made well?”

Let us pray:

Patient Teacher, Holy Healer, we come to you this morning seeking wholeness.

May the words of scripture as interpreted through the words of my mouth,

and the meditations of all our hearts point us down the path of wellness! Amen.

Jesus' ministry on earth is a healing ministry. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are filled with story after story of people lining up to be healed by Jesus. There is a scene in Jesus Christ Superstar that shows us how overwhelming the need was for those seeking healing. You can see in the picture of the scene how it is as though Jesus will be swallowed up in a sea of needy people. The Gospel of John does not describe people coming after Jesus in such physical desperation, but healing is still a central part of Jesus' ministry in John's Gospel. Healing points ultimately to God's power, and can be a sign by which people begin to believe in the Good News Jesus brings.

But what strikes me in this story is not so much the extravagance of the healing itself. The majority of the story focuses not on the healing itself but on the response of religious authorities who want to punish Jesus for breaking rules about the Sabbath. But none of this is what haunts me in this story. What haunts me is Jesus' question, “Do you want to be made well?”

Seems a bit of a rhetorical question, doesn't it? Of course, we want to be made well. No one likes laying in bed coughing up a lung for days, or that feeling of when you forgot to buy the tissues with lotion and now the skin on your nose is raw so just the thought of blowing your nose makes you tear up in pain, or how much it stinks not to be able to eat real food for days after you've had an upset stomach. Now those are all examples of passing illness, and we know there are many of us whose “not-wellness” has nothing to do with a virus or allergies. The man who Jesus approaches has been ill for thirty-eight years, the Gospel writer tells us. We're not sure what kind of illness he has, but we know that he cannot walk on his own, and we know that he sits by the pool of Bethesda hoping that the water will change him.

We don't know too much about the pool of Bethesda other than archeologists uncovered a poor on the north side of the temple in Jerusalem that follows its description. But water, as common and as necessary as it is for human life, holds a mystical element to it in most cultures. As Christians, our baptismal ritual shows us this, how we see God's salvific presence at work in a dabble of water. According to our scripture, people come to the pool in hopes that being immersed in the water will change them, heal them maybe. So perhaps, when Jesus asks the one man the question, “Do you want to be made well?” the man could respond, “If that were not so, why would I be here?”

But that isn't how the man responds. He is kind of defensive, actually, explaining to Jesus that yes, he wants to be made well, but how can he be made well if no one will help him? People won't help him, and thwart his attempts to help himself. He says to Jesus, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”

Do you want to be made well? Jesus asks.

Yes, but... we respond.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair of me to read the man's response as a bit defensive. He, after all, does not know who Jesus is, so why would he just respond, “Yes, please”? But even when we do know who Jesus is, I think we respond defensively to this question--- which reveals the way we call on God's help at the same time we refuse to trust God's presence. Yes, we do want healing, God, but we can't be bothered to take all that medicine, or make an appointment with the doctor, and you know God how much we hate talking to that psychologist! Yes, we do want healing, God, but it takes too much effort to eat right and exercise, too much effort to set aside time every day for prayer and bible study. Yes, we do want healing, God, but we can't bear to imagine our lives without that person, no matter how toxic they are. Yes, we do want healing, God, but we can't get to church and feel weird about calling someone over to pray with us.

We know there is something wrong with us. We can sense something is not right, whether it be a physical concern or whether is is something deeper. But often we want God to work on our terms. We want God to wave a magic wand and heal us without requiring any life changes on our part. We won't accept answers of healing if they don't look exactly like we want them to look and occur exactly when we want it to happen. We become impediments to our own selves as we seek to be made well.

But the thing about God is that, even when we put ourselves in the way, God can still answer prayer. So Jesus just says to the man, “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.” And so the man does. We have no narrative description of his joy and perhaps shock at his encounter with Jesus. We don't know what those who have known him for thirty-eight years have to say. All we know is that he stands up, rolls up his mat, and carries it with him to find home.

We do not know, either, if this man puts himself in the way of his continued healing. But we do know that there are others who try to keep him from being made well. Rather than celebrating his healing, religious authorities stop the man and chastise him for carrying his mat. And the man, as he did with Jesus, responds defensively while pointing out that he has undergone this miraculous healing. The authorities do not grab the bait. They are only concerned with making sure everyone follows their own little rules. So they demand to know who, without acknowledging him as a healer, said to the man to “take up his mat and walk.”

Much in the tradition of the religious authorities in Jesus' day, the church can be keeping us from being made well. There are others too--- commercials telling us that even if we feel well we aren't skinny enough and we don't have the right gadgets, for instance. But I was thinking recently about the ways that the church is so concerned with rules and propriety that we don't celebrate wellness.

In seminary, I was in a class with a vibrant, powerful woman who pastored nearby in New Jersey, and one day she shared with us a story about her first marriage. Her husband had become violently abusive, and finally she decided that she did want to be made well and she acted on it. She left her husband, took her kids, but was still stuck living in the same community. It was her church that came to her trying to get her to reconcile with her husband. When she refused, the pastors kicked her out of the church--- until they realized she had been the one tithing to the church and then they tried to invite her back!

I have always been deeply shamed by that story, by the church standing in the way of a woman's healing, the church punishing her for seeking to be made well. This is what the religious authorities did to the man Jesus healed. They belittled him, scared him, so that, though he didn't know who Jesus was at first, later when Jesus came to him, his response was not to get to know Jesus, the Light of the World, but to get his name so he could report back to the authorities.

The man was in the Temple, praying, giving thanks, but now there was a shadow over him. A sorrow, a fear maybe, that these religious authorities placed over him. So when Jesus found him praying, Jesus also found yet something else in the way of this man's full healing. Jesus told him not to sin any longer, hinting at the fullness of life that God's salvation could bring. But the man did not respond. When Jesus left him, the man went and told the authorities Jesus' name.

“Do you want to be made well?” This question is not as simple as it appears. Even our own selves and even those people in our lives who we would think would most want to see us well and whole and happy, like our own church, can be a stumbling block to the complete healing Christ offers each and every one of us. But this does not have to be the end of the story. Today we have the opportunity to open ourselves up, to come together in prayer, and to respond fully and joyfully to this question Jesus asks us. Yes. Yes! Yes, we want to be made well.

A Service of Healing with Anointing:

INVITATION

As the man waiting by the pool in Bethesda, we too wait for healing, healing of physical pain and ailments as well as healing of deep grief and emotional pain. Confession is not a prerequisite to healing, as we can see over and over again in stories about Jesus healing people. But, as we learned in the story of this man by the pool in Bethesda, we see how often we let others and even ourselves get in the way of Jesus' healing presence. So today we pray to keep ourselves open and willing to be made well.

CONFESSION

O God, Our Great Physician, Healer of every affliction, we know that too often in our pursuit of healing we reject you. We choose to listen to the voices that tell us we aren't good enough or that we are breaking rules that are more important than we are. We speak words of destruction rather than healing to our neighbors. We refuse to put our trust in your presence. Forgive us. Free us to be made well by you.

ASSURANCE

God doesn't need our hearts to be right to heal us. God offers us grace upon grace, over and over again, always offering to make us well, no matter what.

In Christ's name we are forgiven! Glory to God! Amen!

PASSING OF THE PEACE: Part of confession is reconciliation. That is why we pass the peace before communion, and why we should pass the peace this morning as well. Let us share signs of Christ's peace with one another!

OFFERING: As we have been blessed by Christ's offer of healing, let us bless others with our gifts, tithes, and offerings.

THANKSGIVING OVER THE OIL:¹

O God, the giver and health of salvation, we give thanks to you for the gift of oil. As your holy apostles anointed many who were sick and healed them, so pour out your Holy Spirit on us and on this gift, that those who in faith and repentance receive this anointing may be made well, may be made whole; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

ANOINTING

PRAYER AFTER ANOINTING

1From Healing Service 1 in The United Methodist Book of Worship.

"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.

Let Your Heart Take Courage

I preached this sermon the week I announced I would be reappointed from Deer Creek Charge to Presbury United Methodist Church. While I know the Spirit is present in the midst of the move, it is still a very difficult one. And Psalm 27 was a comfort to me this week.

 

Scripture: Psalm 27

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh— my adversaries and foes— they shall stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.

One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock.

Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me!

“Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, Lord, do I seek.

Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!

If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.

Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.

Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!

Sermon:

Let us pray:

God, our stronghold, shelter us this morning.

Bring us in close to you, that through the reading of this scripture

we may see your face. Amen.

I looked to Psalm 27 this week and felt its waves of assurance wash over me as the psalmist names God our stronghold. I felt the praise of power and beauty, and wanted to join with the psalmist in his pursuit of beauty. But this is not where the psalm ends. There is an abrupt change in the psalm, where we go from praise to lament. It has caused some scholars to wonder if these were two or more different psalms stuck together. In any case, the tension between these two sections is awkward. In college I worked at a writing center, helping students hone their papers, and one of my primary critiques to everyone was that they needed to work more on transitions. There is no transition in this psalm from praise to lament between verses six and seven. You’ll notice in Cheryl Ann Toliver’s rewrite, which I included in your bulletin (see here), she finds it more convenient to skip the praise all together then try to explain this tension.

And it is one this to have this unresolved abruptness exist in the psalm. It is another thing to see the direction of it: praise to lament rather than lament to praise. In reading it I wanted to point out to the psalmist that it is more compelling to “begin with a wavering, almost desperate faith, more longing than hope” and then concluding with “a strong statement of conviction,” more compelling to move from “doubt to certainty, dark to light.” As one commentator on this psalm wrote, after all isn't this how faith and life are supposed to work? A tidy, seamless journey from doubt to certainty. Yet, as we at this church know in our personal journeys as well as in our corporate journeys within this congregation, neither our lives nor our faith journeys are so tidy.¹

We waver. Sometimes we go from the strong sure claims of salvation and fearlessness, to crying out for God to hear us and back again in a day, let alone how jumbled we find ourselves in our lifetimes. The psalmist goes from joy in verse six, saying that he will sing and make melody to the Lord, to painfully imploring God in verse seven: Hear O Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me!

This tension in this psalm has always spoken to me, drawing me to want to preach it long before I knew anything about an appointment. It is a perfect psalm for Lent, for “the Lenten journey can be a foray into the soul, offering us a good time to look deeply within ourselves in order to understand the [sometimes dark, always mysterious] realities that beset us.”² It is a journey where we ask ourselves how we can fear anything when God is the stronghold of our lives, when at the same time we ask why God is hidden from us. And it is a journey that is not linear, that wavers between our praise and our lament, between doubt and certainty.

At the very heart of the abrupt tension in this poem, though, at the very heart of this praise and lament is fear.

Throughout scripture, we are told not to be afraid. Abraham in our scripture this morning is told not to fear. We hear over and over again the angels at Christmas time telling us not to fear. Jesus tells us not to fear when he rises to life. I have always thought this was one of the most important messages of scripture, this constant whisper that we ought not to fear. Our psalm even asks rhetorically how, if God is holding us up, how we dare fear? But in this one little psalm, the abrupt change from joy to lament reminds us in Lenten fashion that even when we know intellectually that we are not to fear, our hearts don’t always get the message. We fear being abandoned by God. We are paralyzed by this fear, no matter how we try to let go of it. Just because we have intimately known God does not mean we don't find it easy in moments of crisis to feel abandonment.

Even Jesus himself cried out to God not to abandon him on the cross.

And so, in the spirit of Lenten self-reflection, I began to reflect on my own fear. I turned to the uncertainty I was feeling my first overnight at the hospital when I was a student chaplain. My first page was to labor and delivery, where a couple had just learned that twenty weeks into the pregnancy that they had lost the baby. Pregnancy is one of those moments in which there is often that kind of joy described by the psalmist, a confidence in God’s provision, a time in which we want to behold God’s beauty all around us. But such joy was abruptly brought to an end. What should have been a time of praise turned very quickly into a lament.

What first struck me when I walked into the room was that they were good looking people. The father had just come from work, still wearing a suit, though he had lost the jacket. He and the mother wanted to talk briefly, but after I prayed with them, they told me I could come back and check in later. When I did, the grandparents of the baby were there, so they gave me a brief update, and then thanked me in a “you can leave now” kind of way. I ended up being extremely busy that night, spending hours with another family who had lost someone, but that first family stuck with me. I pictured them spending the night together pleading with God, “Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation.”

I was the one who prayed that, who, in the same moment I knew God was cradling that family in God's hands through the care of the nurses, through the hugs of the grandparents, through the strength of the father as he held onto his wife--- in that same moment I could not see God, could not understand why such a thing could happen. I feared abandonment, feared that this family was lost in their lament, lost in those heartbreaking words of the psalmist struggling to see God’s face.

In the morning I did not want to go back, but I knew I had to, so I went up the room and could not help but be relieved when I saw it empty. But I went to the nurse's station and the nurse said, “Oh I'm glad you're here. They are in the recovery room.” Then she led me in to sit with the parents, who thanked me for coming and talked a little bit with me. I could not really understand what the mother was saying because she spoke so softly. The father said they were both doing much better that day. But then when I asked about the baby's name, which they had told me was Olivia, the father said. “It was going to be Olivia before we started having kids, before we even got married. It was always Olivia.”

The father did not rail against God, though he would not be in the wrong to do so. He never even asked why. He never seemed fearful. He certainly was not joyous, but he had a quietness around him that reminded me that the end of the psalm is not that fear, uncertainty, doubt. The end of this family's story was not the loss of a child. It was a father reminding himself of their love story, of how they were a family and would continue to be a family. It isn't an overwhelming perseverance in the face of tragedy. It was a name and an affirmation that his family was not over. As it had been, so it would continue.

Maybe I'm reading a lot into this father's words. But the quietness of that room, that room I so feared, was not the quietness of lament. It was the quietness of verse thirteen.

I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

I may not see goodness in this moment, the psalmist says, but I believe it exists. I believe I shall see it in this life, not just when I get to heaven. I may not feel God's presence now, but I know it is there and that I will experience it again. I cannot boldly proclaim my confidence in this moment, as the psalmist could at the beginning of the psalm, but I proclaim that one day I will be confident again.

Our stories are not these linear tales from doubt to faith. Our stories are journeys from doubt to faith to doubt to a glimmer of hope back to doubt and hopefully again to faith. They are these circuitous paths in which we can lament and praise in the same breath, but paths where even in the depths of lament there is that direction from God, that reminder that we will see goodness again.

And finally the psalmist encourages us:

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heard take courage; wait for the Lord.

Waiting is not the glamorous kind of courage we seek in the face of our fear. In fact, we see waiting as annoying not as heroic. But this is our task as Christians. To wait. Not passively, of course. We can't just sit back in our armchairs and wait for the rapture. But we do, in the midst of the dark and difficulties in our lives, survive our fear by waiting through the darkness to feel the light again. Waiting for the hope of things not seen.

Psalm 27 “is not a psalm about how God answers our prayers,” about how God brings us out of our sadness and darkness into joy again. Rather, “it [is itself] a prayer, even a plea, for patience, for trust, for the ability and the endurance to wait for the Lord, even when the Lord's arrival is a long, undetermined way off.”³ There are times in all of our lives, even sometimes just in one day, where we must courageously wait for the Lord. Where we must know, even when we don’t feel it, that goodness will return. Such waiting is a part of our Lenten journey as we come ever closer to the story of Jesus’ death.

So I encourage all of you this week to pray Psalm 27, even if you don’t feel the tension between doubt and faith, even if you are not fearful in this moment. Pray it for your friends or family who are journeying through dark places. Pray that you may have the ability and endurance to wait for the Lord in the midst of struggle. For God is there beside us in the midst of our struggle, being a light to us. May we open our eyes to see it.

Let us pray borrowing words of Cheryl Ann Toliver’s poem:

Now help us to wait for you, Lord God.

Help us to be strong and unafraid when we feel overwhelmed.

We ask this so we might endure the coming metamorphosis,

so we can become the people you call us to become. Amen.⁴

1See Richard C. Stern, Homiletical Perspective on Psalm 27, Second Sunday in Lent, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Year C, Volume 2 Lent through Eastertide, eds. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 57.

2Samuel K. Roberts, Theological Perspective on Psalm 27, Second Sunday in Lent, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Year C, Volume 2 Lent through Eastertide, eds. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 56.

3Richard C. Stern, Homiletical Perspective on Psalm 27, Second Sunday in Lent, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Year C, Volume 2 Lent through Eastertide, eds. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 59.

4 Cheryl Ann Toliver, “Psalm 27,” The Works of Cheryl Ann Toliver, 2003 reposted 19 February 2013, http://cherylanntoliverworks.blogspot.com/2013/02/psalm-27-worlds-gone-mad-our-god-given.html.