Come now, and worship, but do not come alone.
Bring with you all the ones that you have loved.
the hands that held yours, the shoulders that carried you,
the arms that embraced you, the eyes that watched over you.
Bring also the skinned knees that you bandaged,
and the tangled hair that you combed;
the heads that butted yours,
and the feet that kept step with yours.
Come now, and worship, and bring them all along:
for God knows them well,
and welcomes them here.
An Episcopalian, a Lutheran, and a Congregationalist go into a bar.
I know this sounds like the start of a joke, but it is actually more or less a true story. Several years ago, my UCC colleague Eric Fistler told me that he and two colleagues were talking together, and they discovered that the three of them shared the same dream, of starting a new sort of church. A church that would worship outdoors, rain or shine, welcoming the homeless as well as the housed. A church that would celebrate weekly communion as it had been celebrated in the early church: as part of a common meal, at which food was freely given and freely shared.
But before the three friends could turn their dream into a reality, there was some planning to do: obtaining the blessing (and financial support) of their respective denominations; coordinating schedules with local food pantries and churches; finding a location and obtaining city permits. Finally Eric gave me a call, inviting me to their first worship service in downtown Northampton. It was January, and bitterly cold; one of the volunteers actually got frost bite that night. But slowly, from that first night, Cathedral in the Night began to grow.
Not long afterwards, I arrived one Sunday afternoon to help set up, only to discover that a small group of folks had already gathered just down the block. They had crockpots of stew, and a box of vegetables, that they were giving away free.
And I have to confess, my first thought was: Uh oh. We have competition.
Who did these guys think they were? So much preparation and thought had gone into our ministry; who were these upstarts who just showed up, without permission or planning, to hand out free food on ‘our’ sidewalk? Most frustrating, they seemed to be accomplishing what we were still struggling to do: they were engaged and connecting with the people on the street.
A few moments later, a young man from the group came over to our table. He looked to be in his early twenties; he had a beard, and wore a long skirt. He introduced himself as Tony, and he said:
“We’re packing up for the day but we have some food left over. Would it be okay if we bring it over here, so you could serve it at your meal?”
And he hurried off, to help fill our table.
I am not the first person to mistake an ally for a competitor; this sort of holy turf war is apparently as old as the church itself. In Mark’s gospel, we find the apostle John telling Jesus: We saw someone casting out demons in your name, but we told him to stop, because he wasn’t actually part of our group.
And Jesus tells them: Don’t stop him! Whoever isn’t against us, is for us.
Most of us know this expression the other way around: If you’re not for me, you’re against me. It’s easy to confound the two expressions, as if they were equivalent. And they would be, if the world were neatly divided into friends and enemies, for and against. But we live in a world of in-betweens and unknowns. What do we do, when we are faced with a new face? Do we operate under an assumption of friendship, or an assumption of conflict?
We don’t know who this stranger was, casting out demons in the name of Jesus. How did he know who Jesus was? Had he heard him preach, or maybe even been healed by him? Why did he strike out on his own, instead of following Jesus?
We don’t know what the stranger was thinking, but we can guess how the disciples must have felt. They had been hand-picked by Jesus, called to be his disciples and walk in his footsteps. And now, suddenly, here is this stranger, casting out demons. And I’ll bet the disciples first thought was:
Uh oh. We have competition.
Who did this guy think he was? Who was this unordained upstart who just showed up, without calling or commission, to heal people in Jesus’ name? Most frustrating, he seemed to be accomplishing what the disciples themselves were still struggling to do.
Why just the other day, a man had brought his son to the disciples, asking them to cast out the demon of epilepsy that was sending the boy into convulsions. The disciples had tried, but they hadn’t been able to cure the boy. In the end, Jesus prayed with the boy’s father, and the boy was healed; but it was discouraging, I’m sure, for the disciples, not to have been the ones to help him.
Deep down inside, we all long to be someone’s savior. We want to be the hero, the one who saves the day – or if not the hero, then at least the hero’s right hand man. If we can’t be Harry Potter, at least we want to be Ron or Hermione, and not just another nameless Hogwarts student. If we can’t be Batman, we at least want to Robin.
That’s actually what the disciples had just been arguing about, as they walked along the road together: which among them was Jesus’ right hand man? Jesus reminds them that they are all servants of the same God. And so for that matter is this stranger they met on the road, the one who was walking his own path, casting out demons as he went.
He’s not the competition, Jesus tells them. He’s an ally.
I wonder if it is human nature, perhaps, to be jealous of another’s success, even – or maybe especially – when we are working for the same goal. In a world of scarce resources and limited opportunities, our future depends on our ability to outperform our peers. We fight not just for market share, but also for promotions, and so we compete — not just against the opposing team, but also against our own teammates.. This is how it is, in the kingdom of this world.
But in the kingdom of God, Jesus tells us, things are different. In the kingdom of this world, we try to climb the ladder; but in the kingdom of God, we help another to rise.
We, of course, live in both worlds. As disciples of Christ, we are called to be in this world, but not of it. That isn’t always easy to do, especially when your personal livelihood gets mixed up with your service to others. It’s hard to be pleased for another’s success, if it means they get the job, or the grant, or the glory.
Or the pledges.
The church, too, lives in this world of scarce resources and limited opportunities. And in an era when church membership in America is declining, it is easy to look upon the church across town as a competitor, instead of an ally. We hear of a thriving youth group or a successful outreach program in another church, and instead of rejoicing, we feel a twinge of envy. Why didn’t we think of that first?
But what if we really believed the words of Jesus, that those who are not against us, are for us. What if we really believed, that we were all servants of one God? What if we really believed, that there was enough grace to go around? God knows, there is enough need to go around. What if we were allies, instead of competitors?
And so an Episcopalian, a Lutheran, and a Congregationalist walk into a bar, and a new ministry is born.
Sometime afterwards, as we were setting up for Cathedral in the Night, some loud singing broke out down the block. Tony and a friend were entertaining the folks at their gathering with some old campfire songs. One of our own visitors came over to me and asked:
So who’s the competition?
That’s not the competition, I told him. Those are allies.
(from a sermon preached by Liza B. Knapp at Belchertown United Church of Christ, October 11, 2015).
(photo: Cathedral in the Night)
“The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey…
And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”
— Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
BEES are mentioned in the Bible only four times.
Three of those verses are about metaphorical bees. For example, in the first chapter of Deuteronomy (1: 43-44), Moses reminds the people, “You rebelled against the command of the LORD and went up into the hill country, and the Amorites who lived in that country came out against you and chased you as bees do.” The other two verses have a similar thrust to them. Metaphorically speaking, bees are an aggressive swarm – an attacking army.
(That’s how some of us experienced bees at last year’s Belchertown fair: as a hostile army, driving us away from our promised land of cotton candy and fried dough.)
The fourth Biblical reference to bees occurs in a story about Samson – you remember Samson, he was the really strong guy with the long hair and the unhealthy marriage – Samson kills a lion with his bare hands, and then some time later returns to site of his conquest, and he sees the carcass of the lion there, and he sees bees, nesting in the skeleton.
(I’m inclined to believe these are real bees, not metaphorical ones; the story just strikes me as too randomly weird to be an allegory.)
Samson grabs a handful of honey out of that skeleton, and shares it with his parents. Which brings me to another piece of Bible trivia: Bees are only mentioned four times in the Bible, but honey – honey is mentioned 58 times.
That’s a lot of honey.
In the book of Exodus, we are told that the manna in the wilderness tasted like honey. In the Song of Songs, the young lover tells his bride that her lips tastes like honey. In the gospels, we learn that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey. And in the book of Proverbs, we are warned that eating too much honey can make a person throw up. Always practical, the book of Proverbs.
In the book of Psalms, we are reminded that honey is a gift of God. “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it,” God says. “Listen to me, and walk in my ways, and I will feed you with finest wheat, and sweet honey in the rock.” (Ps 81).
Over and over, we are told that the promised land – the land that God promises to Abraham and his descendants – is a land flowing with milk and honey. When God calls out to Moses by the burning bush, God says, “I have seen the affliction of my people, and … I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey.”
(There are some scholars who have suggested that this “honey” might actually be fig syrup; but it’s the same word, in Hebrew, as in that story about Samuel and the lion and the bees, so I’m inclined to think they are talking about actual honey.)
And if the promised land is a land flowing with milk and honey, then we are forced to the inescapable conclusion:
The promised land was full of bees.
Now let’s think about that for a moment. Most of us are kind of wary of bees. Bees, after all, can sting, and that sting can be not merely painful, but deadly. I have a niece who is allergic to bees; she carries an epipen and tends to avoid flower gardens. She didn’t develop an allergy until her teenage years but I remember when she got her first bee sting. She was maybe three or four years old at the time. She came running in from outside, weeping, and in the midst of her tears she told us: “I wasn’t hurting it! I just wanted to pet it!” She learned on that day that even kindness is sometimes met by cruelty. That sting was a painful experience in more ways than one.
So I find myself wondering: what if we could have the sweetness without the sting? The honey, without the bee?
Would it still be the promised land?
In pondering this question, I decided to turn for counsel to a respected sage, someone known for his kindness and humility, someone whose words are few, but whose insights have touched many.
I am speaking, of course, about Winnie the Pooh.
Pooh knows a thing or two about bees; in fact, in the very first chapter of the book of Pooh, he shares his philosophy regarding the Reason for Bees: “The only reason,” he says, “that I know of for being a bee is making honey. And the only reason for making honey, is so I can eat it.”
The bees, however, beg to differ. You may remember how the story goes – how Winnie the Pooh borrows a balloon from his friend Christopher Robin, and floats up to the bee hive, pretending to be a little cloud. Christopher Robin helps with the deception by walking about with an umbrella. But the bees are not fooled. After a few moments, one of them gives Pooh a nasty sting on the nose.
Which is something of a moment of revelation for Pooh. In the light of this experience, he revises his theory. “I have just been thinking, [he says,] and I have come to a very important decision. These are the wrong sort of bees.”
That sting on the nose is an epiphany: Maybe, just maybe, there is more than one reason for being a bee.
Bees, of course, do more than just make honey. For one thing, they pollinate flowers, making it possible for plants to bear fruit. Bees are directly responsible for about a third of the fruits and vegetables that we eat. Bees make honey, it is true, but they also make almonds, and blueberries, and cucumbers, and squash, and tomatoes. Bumblebees are one of the few insects in the world that can pollinate tomatoes. Tomato flowers hold on to their pollen so tightly. Bumblebees grab onto a tomato flower and vibrate their wing muscles, at a precise frequency, right around middle C, and the pollen shakes loose. Bumblebees literally hum tomatoes into existence.
Ask a bear what bees are for, and he will answer: bees are for making honey. Ask a tomato what bees are for, and it will tell you: bees are for making tomatoes. Ask a bee what bees are for, and she will tell you, bees are for being bees.
There is a human tendency to view other creatures as existing for our benefit. Bees, flowers, other people – we tend to value them based on what they can do for us. And if this really is all they are for — if creatures exist only to serve our needs — then when they no longer do so, we can get rid of them. Why worry about the widespread collapse of honey bee colonies, when we can sweeten our cakes with high fructose corn syrup?
Maybe we get this idea from the fact that we have so much power over other creatures. The Bible tells us that God gave us dominion over the earth, and this century certainly seems to have borne out that fact. We’ve altered our atmosphere, we’ve emptied the seas, we’ve modified our genes, we’ve driven countless species to extinction, all in the space of a century or two. It’s easy to see how we might think of ourselves as the stars of this earthly drama.
But Jesus once reminded his followers that not even a sparrow falls to earth without God taking notice.
Or maybe, not even a bee.
It turns out, by making honey, bees don’t just make life sweeter, they make it possible. Possible for us, possible for the flowers, possible for the bees themselves. So if we start off pondering the reason for bees, we end up pondering the reason for being.
Ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In God’s hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of every human being.
(Job 12:7-10)
(Sermon originally preached by LIza B. Knapp at the Belchertown Fair Ecumenical Worship Service, September 20, 2015)
“What then should we do?” — Luke 3:2-18
In the first chapter of Genesis, God tells the newly created humans to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”
I think we can safely cross that one off our to-do list.
When Jesus was born, there were fewer than half a billion people on earth, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was less than 300 ppm – as it had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Today, there are over seven billion people on earth, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is over 398 ppm.
Now, here is a problem our ancestors never saw coming. So what does our faith tradition have to say to those of us who live in this brave new world of overpopulation and industrialization, of climate change and environmental degradation? When we read in the headlines of 500-year droughts and raging wildfires, of melting ice-caps and vanishing species; what scriptures do we turn to? Where do we find resonance? Where do we find hope?
Thursday morning, I was among the millions of people who tuned in to watch Pope Francis as he spoke to the United States Congress. In the middle of that speech, he told the lawmakers, “I call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity. I am convinced that we can make a difference. I am sure.”
This is the sort of language that caused Fox commentator Greg Gutfield to describe the Pope as the most dangerous person on the planet. Dangerous, because he calls upon us to change our course. Francis has asked for nothing less than a “bold cultural revolution” to liberate both the planet, and the planet’s poor — and he talks as if he believes it could happen.
In the past year I have been struck by the fact that many of the same people who used to deny the possibility of climate change, are now saying that climate change is already here and there’s nothing we can do about it. One minute it was too soon to tell; the next minute it was too late to act. We seem to have jumped straight from complacency to resignation, without any room in between for urgency. Without any room for hope.
But here is the Pope, claiming that we not only should, but could, do something. Here is the Pope, expressing both urgency and hope.
Of course, there are some who might point out that the Pope is not an authority on climate science, any more than Donald Trump is an authority on pediatric vaccinations. But the Pope makes no claim to know the science better than the scientists. His information comes from published research, not special revelation. But his urgency, and his hope – where do they come from?
Well, I can’t speak for Francis, but let’s go looking for ourselves:
John the Baptist appears at the River Jordan, fresh from the wilderness. He wears a coat of camel’s hair, he eats locusts and wild honey,he is a nature freak if ever we saw one. He stands there, with his feet in the flowing water, and says: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
I suspect that for most of us, a call to repentance wouldn’t really qualify “good news.” In fact, public calls to repentance often produce something of a backlash. No one wants to be publicly taken to task for their errors. It makes us feel ashamed, or defensive, or both. We don’t want to hear that we are “to blame” for global warming and so we tune out the science that makes us feel guilty.
But the word, “repentance” – or rather, the Biblical word metanoia – that word does not mean, “to feel ashamed.” The Biblical word metanoia means to change. To change our hearts and minds, and to change our lives, to change direction. Or, as Pope Francis puts it: “to redirect our steps.”
A better translation might be, “revolution.”
And so it is with John the Baptist; when the people ask John, “What then shall we do?” he doesn’t tell them to fast or to do penance or say five hail Marys . Instead, he tells them: If you have two coats, share one. If you have extra food, share that. If you have power, stop using it for your own profit.
John the Baptist comes along, wearing his cruelty-free clothing, and eating his macrobiotic diet, and calls the powerful to repent. No wonder Herod decided the John was the most dangerous person in Judea. He was calling for nothing less than a “bold cultural revolution.”
“Revolution” may seem like a strong word, but the truth is that repentance is always revolutionary, that hope is always revolutionary. “For who hopes for what he already has?” So asks the apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans. Such revolutionary hope, Paul believed, was not confined to the human race, but was shared by all creation:
“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”
Paul may never have envisioned a world with over 7 billion people, or a climate endangered by human activity, but he understood that the redemption of creation and the redemption of the human race were inseparable. And he had hope, that such redemption was possible. A hope based not on a clear vision of the future, but on a firm grounding in the past. God had liberated Israel from Egypt; God had liberated Jesus from the grave; and just as miraculously, God had liberated Paul from his own prejudice and hatred. If God could do all this, then surely, God might liberate creation as well.
God of creation:
Fill us with the hope of Paul,
and the urgency of John.
May we believe the good news,
and repent.
Amen.
PHOTO is of street art installation by Isaac Cordal; click here for the source, and for more images of his extraordinary work (blog text is in French, but the images need no words…)
TEXT from sermon originally preached by Rev. Liza B. Knapp at Belchertown United Church of Christ, September 27, 2015.
Remember that you were once a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. – Deuteronomy 5: 12-15 (NRSV, adapt.)
On the last full day of my family’s New York vacation, we spent the whole day in Manhattan. We visited the Sony Technology Museum on Madison Avenue, and the American Girl Doll Store on Fifth Avenue, and then went uptown to have dinner with my Uncle on the Upper East Side. We ordered pizza and shared an expensive cake that had been given to us for free because we happened to be passing by when a delivery boy accidentally dropped it on the sidewalk. (It was still in the box, so it was clean, just messy.)
Afterwards, we drove across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn, where we were renting an Airbnb apartment for the week. As we came off the bridge, a transformation occurred. Here there were only a few stores open and only a few people on the street: small groups of maybe two or three men walking together, dressed in long black coats and cylindrical fur hats. Most had beards; all had the long curled sidelocks that are the mark of an observant Hasidic Jew. And most remarkably, none of them seemed to be in a rush.
It was Friday evening, and Sabbath had begun.
The day before, we had taken our kids on the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. In the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, there is a museum, and in that museum, there is a glass case containing a hundred-plus years of Statue-themed souvenirs. Among these artifacts, there is a Menorah, an eight-armed candelabra used during the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah. Each of the menorah’s arms is a small figure of the Statue of Liberty, her arm uplifted to hold the candle.
The man who made that menorah was a German-born Jew, named Manfred Anson. Anson was a teenager when the Nazis came into power. Leaving his parents behind, he managed to escape the country, travelling first to Australia, and then to the United States. Anson’s brother died in a Nazi concentration camp, but his sister survived, and the two of them were eventually reunited in America.
I thought of Anson’s menorah, as we drove through Brooklyn on Friday evening, past the men on their way home for Sabbath. And I wondered at the meaning that the Statue of Liberty must have had for Anson, and for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who sailed into New York harbor, to be welcomed by her strong hand and outstretched arm.
On one level it seems like it would be almost sacrilegious, to incorporate such an iconically American figure into an ancient Jewish ritual. But the celebration of Hanukkah, the celebration of Passover, the celebration of the Sabbath, all of these are rituals of remembrance. They are the means by which Jewish families teach their children the story of their deliverance. Maybe the Statute of Liberty helped Anson to remember his.
You shall not oppress the alien who dwells among you; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in Egypt. – Exodus 23:9 (NRSV, adapt.)
The practice of Sabbath traces its origins to the Biblical book of Exodus, to the commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. On the Sabbath, God tells Moses, the people of God are to refrain from all work; not only that they may take rest, but also so that they may give rest to others. You have six days to work, God says, but on the seventh day, rest from your work, so that your ox and your donkey may find relief, and your servants and even the aliens living among you may be refreshed.
In the midst of the Sabbath, in the midst of this intimate family celebration, God reminds the people to show compassion to the foreignors in their midst – for, as God reminds them, “You know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” If the core story of our faith is a story of deliverance, then the core practice of our faith is the practice of hospitality. The two go hand in hand. We welcome the stranger, for we know what it is to be strangers in a strange land.
My own ancestors didn’t sail into New York Harbor. They sailed into Massachusetts Bay. William Knapp arrived from England in 1630, aboard the same fleet as Jonathon Winthrop, the first governor of the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony. And those of us who are not first- or second- but twelfth-generation immigrants, sometimes forget to remind our children that we, too, were once aliens in a strange land. There’s been a lot of conversation in the news about Donald Trump’s suggestion that we should deny citizenship to what he calls “anchor babies.” But the truth is, that every Mayflower descendent is descended from an “anchor baby” – a child born on American soil to uninvited foreign-born parents. It seems that somewhere along the way, some of us have forgotten the stories of our deliverance.
But today is our Sabbath. So today, let us remember. Let us remember the ancient stories of Israel’s deliverance, and let us remember the stories of our own deliverance. And, having been guided into port at last by God’s strong hand and uplifted arm, let us in turn take up the torch, to shine that light for all to see.
(Excerpted from a sermon preached 9/6/2015 at Belchertown United Church of Christ)
(Photo credits: Statue of Liberty – Liza Knapp; Menorah – Smithsonian Museum of American History
(for Charleston, South Carolina)
God of empty tomb and parted seas,
hear the prayers of your people,
for this is the moment
before the miracle
when seas are rough
and we cannot see land.
Awaken, O God, and help us believe
that you have not abandoned ship.
Speak to the violent of heart:
“Peace, be still!”
and may this storm, too, obey.
The water is wide, I can’t cross over,
Nor have I wings, that I could fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my Love and I.
Though seas be deep, and waters rough,
Though stormy wind and tempest wail,
We will cast off for the farther shore
And let God’s Spirit swell the sail.
I cannot see the other side;
What lies ahead is mystery.
By grace alone shall my wand’ring soul
Come safe to land across the sea.
(Painting by Peggy Anderson)
(1st verse traditional, 2nd and 3rd by Liza Knapp).
God of small things
we marvel that you should care
for the smallest of sparrows
and the tiniest of seeds
while we attend
to the large
and the loud
and the lofty
forgive us, God
teach us
to look with tenderness
on all your creatures
for you love us all
though we are
so small
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages… — Acts 2:1-21
A friend once told me this story: When she was a teenager, her family took a vacation to Germany. They travelled from city to city, staying in little hotels along the way, but on one particular night they found themselves lost, driving around in the pouring rain looking for lodgings, while her father – the driver – became more and more frustrated. Frustrated with the rain, frustrated with the traffic, frustrated with his inability to understand the German street signs. Finally they somehow found their way to a little pension with a vacancy sign in the window, and so they went inside and her father stormed up to the desk and banged on the bell. When the night clerk appeared, her father said, slowly and loudly, “WE… ARE… AMERICANS.”
To which the night clerk replied, “Congratulations, sir.”
We live in a multilingual world, and in a multilingual world, if you want to travel beyond your borders, you have two choices: you can demand that the rest of the world speak your language; or you can learn theirs.
Anglo-Americans tend to choose the former. English, after all, is a dominant world language; pretty much anywhere you go in the world, you can count on finding someone who speaks some English. Which is lucky, because most of us speak only our own language. In Luxemburg, nearly every citizen speaks four languages. The same is true of Aruba. But here in the US, seventy-five percent of us are monolingual English speakers. Because why learn another language, when the whole world speaks yours?
Today is Pentecost Sunday. Each year on this Sunday we celebrate the birth of the church – the moment when the Holy Spirit first swept through Jesus’ disciples. The Spirit swept through like a great wind, like tongues of flame, bringing with it the gift of tongues. Not mystical tongues, not supernatural languages; but ordinary human languages. Peter and the other disciples – native Galileans, all of them – were somehow empowered to share the gospel with travelers from around the world, in their own languages. The Spirit’s first gift, was the gift of translation.
Let’s think about that.
I travelled to Ghana a couple of years ago, and while I was there I had the opportunity to stay with a local pastor, who brought me with him to his church on Sunday. This church met in a school classroom, the only room in the village large enough to hold the congregation. The service was conducted mostly in the native Ewe language. English is taught in school there, and many of the people I met spoke at least some English, but in these small village churches many of the older folks had not been formally educated. So I was sitting next to my host, enjoying the people, and the music, but understanding nothing of what was said. And then, about halfway through, the pastor leaned across to me and said,
“We have a bit of extra time today, why don’t you preach a sermon too?”
The next thing I knew I was standing in front of a group of friendly, welcoming, expectant people, none of whom could understand a word I was saying. The pastor stood next to me, and translated as I went. At least, I assume he did; I of course could not understand a word he was saying.
It was a slightly surreal experience. I had to let go of my sermon in way that I don’t normally have to, because I didn’t know, really, what my words would mean to the congregation — what they would sound like, in their language. And so I had to trust. Trust in my host, trust in my listeners, and trust in the Spirit’s gift of translation — the power of the Spirit to transcend boundaries that I could not cross on my own. So I stumbled along through my improvised sermon, and as I did, I watched the expression on Rev. Dzanku’s face, and on the faces of the people in the congregation.
And I had the distinct impression that his translated version of my sermon was way better than the one I was preaching.
When European Christian missionaries first travelled to Ghana, they too were confronted with the task of translating their faith into the local languages. And immediately they were faced with a theological dilemma: what was the Ghanaian word for God? There were, of course, many words for God in the Ewe language, but the missionaries were convinced that all of these native gods were at best idols and at worst demons. How could they use the existing native words, without validating the existing native gods? How could their one true faith be expressed in the language of a heathen race?
Or, as the psalmist once put it: How shall we sing the Lord’s song, in a foreign land?
If you want to be a missionary, you have two choices: you can demand that everyone else speak your language, or you can learn theirs.
In the 1800’s, the British colonies of Australia and Canada had policies of removing aboriginal children from their families, to be raised in government boarding schools where they would learn both English and Christian religion. Here in the USA, tens of thousands of native children were removed from their homes for the same purpose, and sent to the government’s Indian boarding schools. While there, they were forbidden to speak their native languages, even to their own siblings. By the time they returned home, some of them had forgotten how.
In a multilingual, multicultural, multigenerational world, we still have two choices: we can demand that everyone else speak our language, or we can learn theirs.
The former may be the American Way; but as the book of Acts reminds us, it is not the Christian Way. Christianity has been a translating faith, from the very beginning. The story of Pentecost reflects a historical reality of the early church. Jesus himself most likely spoke Aramaic; the writers of the gospels translated his teachings into Greek; these Greek texts were quickly translated in Coptic, Syriac, and Latin. True, they got stuck there, for a while, but were eventually translated, again, and again, into every language of the world.
In Islam, the only true Koran, the only true scripture, is the one written in Arabic, the language of Mohammed. But Christianity has no such claim to linguistic purity. Jesus’ actual, original words were already lost by the time the gospels were recorded. For us, the Word of God is not the biblical text, but rather the One whose story it tells. And that One is still speaking.
I understand the concern for authenticity. There have been mistranslations that have sometimes resulted in misunderstandings of scripture. We’ve all played the game of telephone, where messages get garbled as they are repeated from person to person; and those of us raised in the pre-digital era of dittos and Xerox machines remember when a copy of a copy was never as clear as the original. Our sacred texts and traditions are so important to us, it is no wonder that we worry that something might get lost in translation. But what if there is something to be gained in translation?
So what did I tell that welcoming congregation in Ghana?
I told them what the missionaries eventually figured out; that anywhere we might travel in the world, God has been there already. That when we cross the border, we do not bring God with us, but we find God there.
Preaching a way better sermon, perhaps, than the one we had in mind.
(from a sermon preached at Belchertown United Church of Christ on May 24, 2015)
After his crucifixion, Jesus pays a visit to his disciples. They are terrified, thinking he is a ghost. He tells them, I am no ghost. And to prove it, he asks, do you have anything to eat?
And they give him a broiled fish.
Most of us have seen paintings of Jesus in the manger, or in the cross. But what about Jesus eating a fish? Some of the earliest known Christian art comes from the Roman catacombs, the vaults below the city where tens of thousands of early Christians were buried. Crosses and mangers are rarely seen there, but fish are commonplace. And not just the stylized, abstract-looking fish you see on modern car bumpers; these are actual fish, realistic-looking fish with scales. Sometimes the fish is depicted by itself; sometimes it is part of a dinner scene. There are multiple images of people gathered around a table, sharing a Eucharistic meal — not of wine and bread alone, but of loaves and fishes. To the early followers of Jesus, fish was apparently as integral to communion as bread and wine.
Imagine our deacons passing around plates of smoked salmon at communion, and you begin to see just how much our tradition has changed.
A meal of bread and wine is a tidy affair. You can serve them up as bite-sized wafers and individual, sanitary shotglasses. But eating a fish – that’s a messy, visceral sort of experience. There’s bones, and scales, and gills to contend with. There are eyes, looking up at you. You know you are part of the food chain, when you are eating a fish. And maybe we feel a little uncomfortable, imagining Jesus pulling flesh from bone with his fingers.
But here he is, in Luke’s gospel — Jesus, raised from the dead, eating a fish.
The Greek word for ghost is pneuma – it means literally, breath, and metaphorically, ghost. As in, Holy Ghost. It’s the same word. Nowadays we usually translate it as Spirit. The disciples are terrified, for they think Jesus is a ghost, a spirit. But although Jesus promises the disciples that God will send a Spirit to guide them, he makes it clear that he is no Spirit. Jesus is no Holy Ghost; he is a living human being, eating a fish. Flesh and bone, made from flesh and bone.
Still, there is a sort of dream-like quality to these post-resurrection encounters with Jesus. The disciples start off talking with a stranger, and then somehow that stranger is Jesus. No one ever seems to see him coming, or going; he is just somehow there; and then, he is just somehow gone. These are the sort of things that happen when we dream. But then, on the other hand, here he is, eating a fish. So is Jesus a vision, or is he really there, in the flesh? Does it matter? Saint Paul saw a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, and it was enough to change his life. Thomas – also a saint – needed to touch Jesus’ living body with his own living hands. Can we be satisfied with a vision of the resurrected Christ? Or do we need something more, well, earthy?
It’s an old debate in Christianity: is Christ flesh and blood, or merely spirit? From the beginning, there were those that argued that Jesus was not truly a human being, but rather a spirit in disguise — human in appearance only. But it wasn’t just the idea of resurrection that bothered them; it was the whole idea of incarnation. The word made flesh, in the birth of Jesus. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t believe he had come back to life; they couldn’t believe he had been alive in the first place — at least, not in the biological, organic sense of the word. They just could not believe that divinity would sully itself with the blood and guts of biological existence. They wanted a God who would rescue them from the world, not become mired in it with them.
But for others, that was precisely the good news. The union of Word and Flesh – of the Mystery and the Mud.
A couple of years ago, my daughter had a good friend that lived next door to us, so the two kids used to run back and forth between the houses and play in our combined back yards. One day, the kids were outside and both my neighbor and I were inside, doing the dishes or something, and the kids discovered a mud puddle in the backyard. And they began to expand it, and it grew into a sort of a mud wallow. And the hole got bigger and bigger, and they got muddier and muddier, and somewhere along the way they come up with the idea to build a mud slide. On our porch. So they got a couple of buckets, and began hauling mud, and at some point my neighbor and I went out to check on them – whatever you are picturing in your minds right now, it was worse. But the thing is, neither my neighbor or I could bring ourselves to be angry with them. We made them clean it up, to be sure; but there was such delight and exuberance in their bodies and on their faces, that neither of us could bear to change that moment for them. They had found the mystery in the mud.
Now I know there are some of you out there who are probably shaking your heads over my parenting skills. But I do think we sometimes make a mistake, when we equate cleanliness with godliness. Because life is messy. Our bodies are messy, our food is messy, our planet is messy. And yet God created it. And God loves it. So much so, that God became flesh in Jesus, in order to love it better.
What about us? Can we bring ourselves to love the world? Can we say YES to this creation, to our creation? Because I’m not just talking about sunsets and mountains here. Because life is messy, and nature can be harsh, and God knows, people can be cruel. It’s understandable that some of us might want to distance ourselves from our mortal flesh; that we might seek a savior who would rescue us from such a world as this.
But just as the incarnation did not begin with a baby in a manger, so it did not end with a body on a cross. Because even after his death, there is Jesus, eating a fish. When Jesus escapes from tomb, he jumps right back into life, in all its messy biological incarnational splendor. Vision or not, he is, emphatically, not a ghost – not a disembodied spirit, but an embodied one. Like you. Like me.
We are tempted, sometimes, to act as if we were disembodied spirits, or rather, as if our bodies are nothing more than machines, our food nothing more than fuel. If our performance gets sluggish, we add some high-octane caffeine to the tank, and keep driving. One of my seminary professors once observed that now in the digital age we treat our biological bodies as if they were merely our avatars, rather than our selves. We are like Pinocchio in reverse – flesh and blood children, pretending to be puppets. We do not fully inhabit our bodies, or love them, or care for them; just as we do not fully inhabit, or love, or care for the planet that sustains them.
But if we deny our own incarnation, how shall we acknowledge our incarnate God? If we cannot not love creation, how shall we love our Creator?
So maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to serve up some broiled fish for communion now and then. Bread and wine, after all, are a few steps removed from their organic origins; but a fish, that’s another story. Eat a fish, and you know the stuff of which you are made. You are flesh and spirit, mystery and mud; and God loves all of you.
(scripture: Luke 24: 36-49)
(photo credits: Ghanaian fish market: Rahsaan Hall, used by permission; Catacomb Fish: source unknown; Catacomb Agape Feast: Wikimedia)
the Mystery and the Mud 