A LESSER LOVE FOR RELIGIOUS CLODS

A lot of folks these days are too spiritual to be religious.

Some of them do exercises and meditations

         to get themselves into the zone.

Others just think about how everything is as it should be

         and exude positivity.

They are often contemptuous

         of the merely religious people in churches.

We are too ordinary, small minded, and boring.

If the spiritual people wanted to read a Gospel,

         John would be the one for them.

In John, we don’t see much of the human side of Jesus.

Someone said, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ feet never quite

         touch the ground.

John is about believing your way into a mystical union

--believing in something too mysterious to express.

Only near the end, does love come up.

 And even then, the love Jesus commands is “agape” – a spiritual love

         that is absolutely unconditional 

-- which I would be entirely for

– if only I were capable of it.

My capacity for love is more humanly flawed.

People have to be pretty lovable for me to even put up with them.

It’s a lofty thing we got going here.

Jesus had been lofty all along in John,

Then his first three resurrection appearances

were over the top.

He walked through walls.

He invoked the Holy Spirit on the disciples.

He was loftier than ever.

Then things take a very odd turn in today’s lesson.

This is a very different Jesus.

John has the appearance to Mary Magdalene,

         then to all the disciples,

         then to doubting Thomas.

And there the book stops with Thomas’ conversion from doubt to belief.

That’s the thrilling conclusion.

John explains the purpose of the book and says “the end.”

The curtain comes down. It’s over.

Then John runs back on stage and says

         “Wait! Wait! There’s something else!”

And we have today’s lesson added on like an afterthought.

Here’s what happened:

John’s community, reading their story that ended

with last week’s lesson,

practiced their mystical spirituality for several decades.

But reality kept tripping up their spirituality.

They were hemmoraging from internal strife.

They fought like cats and dogs while preaching agape,

         unconditional love, all the way.

 As John’s community struggled with their failures

in the art of spiritual love,

         they remembered one of the old stories.

They remembered another appearance of the Risen Lord

         that hadn’t seemed important before – because it didn’t fit.

But now, it became so important,

         they added a chapter to their gospel.

They added this story.

Remember in the previous Resurrection Appearances,

         Jesus was even more elevated and spiritual

         than he had been before.

But in this last appearance, Jesus is different.

He shows up unassumingly on the beach.

He seems like a grizzled old fisherman.

They don’t even recognize him.

He offers, not spiritual wisdom, but fishing advice

-- as old fisherman do.

The disciples finally recognize him and rush to worship their Lord.

But instead of doing something spiritual,

         Jesus has built a campfire.

Instead of saying something profound like

 “I live in the Father so if you live in me and I in you,

then you will live in the Father and the Father will live in you

and you will all be one as the Father

                  and I are one” or some such thing – instead, he says,

         “Let’s cook up some of those fish and have breakfast.”

This is a very human Jesus – a Christ of the ordinary.

This disconcertingly normal appearance of Jesus cooking breakfast

         over a charcoal fire as poor people do all over this earth

         is where we get our Anglican sense of “the sacred ordinary.”

In his classic essay, The Anglican Way, Dean James Fenhagen

         described our pedestrian spirituality as “holy worldliness”

         and “worldly holiness.”

 The father of Humanistic Psychology, Abraham Maslow, said:

         “The sacred is in the ordinary . . . . It is to be found

         in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, one’s friends and family,

         in one’s own backyard.”

Much of what goes by the name “spirituality” is not like that at all.

It is pretentious.

The “spiritual” people are better than the ordinary clods,

         way better than the religious clods in churches.

Much of what goes by the name of “spirituality” is escapist.

Do a special technique taught by an exotic person with an accent

         and imagine you are in some pristine place of peace and solace.

It will take your mind off the messiness of reality.

You can forget about unpleasant things

         like hunger in Haiti, gang violence in America,

                  or the loneliness of elderly people in Nevada.

But Anglican spirituality is the spirituality of today’s lesson.

It is pedestrian. It cooks breakfast.

It even washes the dishes.

Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite monk

whose monastery job was cook, waiter, and bus boy.

He wrote his classic book, The Practice of the Presence of God,

about finding God while keeping house.

The most brilliant theologian I’ve ever met, Sarah Coakley,

         said in a sermon at Harvard,

         “I am not good enough to be spiritual. I’m religious.”

This pedestrian spirituality does not make us better

         than anyone else.

It is too ordinary.

It calls for an ordinary way of life – nothing to brag about.

But back to our Gospel lesson.

After breakfast, Jesus took Peter aside.

They needed a little reconciling after Peter had denied Jesus

         three times in Caiaphas’s courtyard.

Jesus asked him,

         “Simon . . . do you love me more than these?”

But the word he used for love was agape.

It meant, “Simon do you have the most unconditional,

highly spiritual love for me of any of the disciples?”

But when Peter replied, “Lord you know that I love you”

Peter used the word phileo – an ordinary word, not so spiritual.

“I love you as a friend.”

Jesus said, “Ok, feed my lambs.”

Then Jesus gave Peter another chance.

He asked again, “Simon do you agape me?”

But again Peter failed to rise to the spiritual challenge.

He said, “Lord you know that I phileo you.”

So Jesus said, “Alright, tend my sheep.”

The third time, Jesus changed the question.

He met Peter on his own human level.

         “Simon, do you phileo me?”

All he asked now was a human love,

         a human friendship, the kind of thing

         an ordinary bloke like Peter might be capable of.

And Peter said, “Yes, Lord, you know I phileo you.

I love you as a common man loves his friend.

I am not an enlightened saint but I can do that.”

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”

The good news is that an ordinary, fallible human love

         is all we have to do.

The bad news is the sheep and lambs part.

Ordinary human love doesn’t elevate us to a higher plane

than ordinary people.

Quite the opposite:

it will get us mixed up with those ordinary people

         who need us as sheep need shepherds.

Someone said,

“The problem with inviting Jesus into your life

         is that he brings his friends.”

And so it is.

Loving Jesus in our little human way

         doesn’t make us the least bit special

but it will entangle our lives with an odd lot of other folks.

Jesus will get us mixed up with all the wrong kinds

         of people.

Worse yet, we may even wind up caring about them.

IGNORING ANGELS

Our Gospel lesson tells a story about dawn,

the dawning of faith and hope.

It is about the disciples’ gradually coming to believe

that Christ is alive.

God sometimes acts all at once.

The trumpet blows, the earth shakes, the stone is rolled away.

But it takes us awhile to notice what has happened.

We get used to seeing things a certain way.

It takes awhile for our spiritual eyes to adjust.

The world may turn upside down,

            but it takes us awhile to notice.

We know the hour they nailed Jesus to the cross.

It was nine in the morning.

We know the hour he died.

It was three in the afternoon.

Death is easy to see.

We know about death.

We can pin it down, write the time and the cause  

on a coroner’s certificate.

But Resurrection is too big for us.

No one saw it happen.

We have no idea what it looked like.

We don’t know what time it happened.

I like to imagine it was in that deepest darkness

            just before the first pre-dawn light

– the time when people see not the slightest hint of light

            but the birds can sense it and begin to sing.

I like to imagine it was then, but we do not know.

All we know is that it was before sunrise.

We know that because Mary Magdalene

            made her way through the darkness,

            arrived still in darkness and found the tomb empty.

How did she know it was empty there in the dark?

She found the stone rolled away,

            then she must have gone into the dark burial cave

            and felt around for the corpse.

I imagine her heart was pounding there in the dark sepulcher

and she was shocked to find no body-- only earthen walls.

“So she ran,” the Scripture says. “She ran.”

She had come to find the cause of her grief,

            but instead she had encountered something

                        mysterious and frightening.

“So she ran” -- ran into the city,

            ran as fast as her legs would carry her

                        to Peter and John.

Panting, breathless, she blurted out

            --not the facts but her interpretation.

She said “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb.”

Who had taken him? She didn’t know.

Where had they taken him? She didn’t know.

Why had they taken him? She didn’t know.

But, knowing nothing, she assumed whatever had happened

            was bad, another insult, another degradation.

That was the way she was used to seeing things.

Peter and John raced to the tomb,

with the exhausted Mary Magdalene

            trailing along behind them.

By now it was early morning,

            so they could see a bit in the tomb,

            but they still had to go inside to be sure.

They found the linens that had held the body.

They found them neatly folded and set aside.

How did that happen?

What did it mean?

The Bible doesn’t say what Peter thought.

It says the other disciple “believed”

            but it doesn’t say what he believed.

In fact the same verse says that neither of them

            yet understood that Jesus was to rise from the dead.

Whatever they thought, they did not go rejoicing.

They just left, each to his own home.

But Mary Magdalene, still grief stricken,

            now frightened and confused,

            stayed at the tomb weeping.

After awhile she did something odd.

It was human but odd.

She stooped down to look back into the tomb

expecting it to be empty,

            and this time it was not empty.

This time she saw something.

She saw two angels sitting where the body had been.

Now here is my question.

When did these angels arrive in the tomb?

I may be wrong. I am mostly guessing.

But I assume they are the ones who folded the death linens.

I just can’t see the Resurrected Lord of Heaven and Earth,

            having just broken open the gates of hell,

            conquered death, and shaken the foundations of the universe,

            stopping to make his own bed.

The angels must have done that.

They must have done it before the disciples started poking around

            in the sepulcher.

So where were they when Mary first felt her way

into the dark cavern of death?

Where were they when Peter and John

            discovered the folded linens?

Had they gone out to run an errand?

Had they returned to heaven and then come back?

Or – and this is what I imagine

-- had they been there all the time?

Was it just that the disciples were so immersed in tragedy

            that they couldn’t see the angels

            who were there to comfort and reassure them?

The angels didn’t get a chance to comfort Mary Magdalene.

If they had been given a chance, we know from the other Gospels

            that they would have announced the Resurrection to her.

But Mary didn’t wait around for that.

She was too afraid.

She scrambled back out of the cave

before the angels could say a word.

Getting people to listen to good news is hard.

We are used to tragedy,

            so we have hard time hearing good news.

Mary was running away from the good news angels,

            when she saw Jesus there waiting to meet her.

But she didn’t recognize him.

She thought he was the gardener.

Instead of greeting her Lord,

            she thought she was meeting the very wrongdoer

            who had desecrated the grave and hidden the Body.

Notice how she acts,

            groveling before his authority.

She acts like someone whose car isn’t where they think they left it,

            assumes she has parked in the wrong place,

                        and it has been towed.

She’s apologizing for Jesus’ body having been left

            in the rich man’s tomb,

            so she’s offering to take it away

                        so it won’t be bother to them.

Then he calls her name. “Mary,” he said.

Maybe she remembered his words,

            “The good shepherd knows his sheep

and calls them by name”?

Maybe that is what opened her eyes.

Or maybe it was that she had been so lost in her misery

            that she had forgotten her true self.

Somehow, when Jesus called her name,

called her back to herself,

            she recognized him.

She listened to him,

            and she did what he told her to do.

She went to the other disciples and said,

            “I have seen the Lord.”

So here’s what I wonder.

How many angels are in my presence each day,

            in my car as I drive, in my office, maybe even at church?

How many angels do I ignore each day

            because my eyes only recognize ordinary things.

How many angels are whispering good news to me,

            but I am not listening?

And how many times each day

            do I meet Jesus but don’t recognize him?

Oh I have seen him a few times – usually in other people.

I have seen him in an old monk at a monastery.

I have seen him in a homeless hitch hiker.

I have seen him in a criminal in jail.

But how many times have I missed him?

I suspect my batting average isn’t even 1%.

How often do I grovel like Mary before authority

            or rebel against authority

                        because I see authority everywhere?

But the person in front of me isn’t trying to dominate me.

He is really Jesus, my sacred friend.

Well maybe that is alright.

Maybe it doesn’t help to criticize myself

            for all the blessings I overlook and fail to enjoy.

Maybe if I see only one out of every 10,000 angels

who offer me hope,

and maybe if I recognize Jesus only once in my life,

            that is enough.

It may be enough if it reminds me to watch out

for grace and blessing wherever I look.

Then maybe when I see the moon’s reflection

            coming toward me over your Sacred Lake,

            I will think that may be the light of Christ.

To encounter Jesus even once, or just to believe

that someone like Mary Magdalene may have met him,

            is enough to keep us alert to grace

            instead of assuming that there is only misery.

And it is enough to entrust us with a message,         

            the message that there is hope, there is mercy,

                        that sins may yet be forgiven,

                        that the wounds in our souls may yet be healed,

                        that broken love may yet be reconciled,

                        and all that is beautiful, good, and just

                        will someday be restored in God’s Kingdom.

God give us the grace to share this good news          

            with our brothers and sisters who need it so much.