Trauma Transformed Spiritual Care Network

Sermon at Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ

July 5, 2020

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,^[a] and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, ² looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of^[b] the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. – Hebrews 12.1-3

All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them – Robert Benson.

One of the advantages of growing up as the son of a funeral director is that an early age I gained a keen awareness that the reality of death always frames the film we call life. How could it have been otherwise when my first bedroom neighbored the casket showroom in a Victorian funeral home in Bowling Green, Ohio? As a toddler, I rode my Big Wheel around the embalming area while my dad was working; my first paid job was washing the hearse and vacuuming the wilted flower leaves leftover from burials. In the course of my childhood, I viewed the mortal remains of not just a few of my fellow townspeople.

With this odd familiarity with the various and sundry ways in which we leave this world (and there are many), I developed a rather intense fascination with ideas about what stood beyond the veiled curtain of this mortal life – a life I learned that sometimes ends with alarming speed, violence, and unpredictability.

My quest assumed particular urgency in sixth grade when my maternal Grandmother died suddenly and tragically. In the sickening chasm of grief into which I catapulted, the bland reassurances I received from my pastor and Sunday school teachers about heaven seemed artificial, if not outright disingenuous. Plus, the picture of the afterlife they were painting looked unimaginably dull; I don’t think too many adolescent boys long to walk on streets of gold with winged angels flying overhead.

What did begin to fire my imagination were graphic depictions of an apocalyptic destruction of earth – preceded, of course, by the rapture into heaven of the few brave souls who had resisted “the mark of the Beast” and had been sealed with the blood of the Lamb. Much to the alarm of my parents, I became obsessed with the imminent end of the world. I worried deep into the night about the eternal destiny of every soul I encountered (including my desk mates at school who soon grew tired of my assurances that they were bound for hell unless they repented of their vile language and rule-breaking).

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Fortunately, by high school, I had mentors who helped me see that in Christianity salvation is not merely an otherworldly venture. Jesus came, not to condemn the world, but to save the world by ushering in God’s reign. The Jesus Way is just as much about the work of healing, reconciling, justice-bringing, and peace-making in the here-and-now, as it is preparing ourselves for what the Creed calls “the life of the world to come.”

One of the qualities I find most attractive in the more “Catholic” expressions of the Christian faith (Roman, Orthodox, Anglican,) are their ability to focus on God’s activity in the world without forgetting that the trajectory of Divine Love always transcends the realm of that which we can see with our eyes and know with our reason. The Kingdom of God is now but not yet. The world is hurting and broken but is also the dwelling place of the Divine Presence.

This balancing act is made possible by the doctrine of the Incarnation – the idea that God took on bodily form in and through Jesus of Nazareth. Because God became a human in Jesus, it is possible for human beings to share directly in God’s own divinity. Through the lens of the Incarnation, the world – battered and broken as it is – is also beautiful and good because it is in the process of being healed and restored to its state of Original Blessing.

Moreover, all who walk the Jesus Way are invited to share in that work of healing made possible by God dwelling in the world.  Central to the notion of Incarnational faith is the understanding that God makes the world holy (whole) by showing up in and through the everyday, human lives we lead with our bodies, minds, and spirits.

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A huge breakthrough for me occurred when I was introduced to the idea of the “communion of saints,” or the notion that somehow my life is inextricably part of and connected to all of God’s people who lived before me, all of those with whom I now share the earth, and all of children of God who will come after me when I am gone.

Saints are those people who mediate God’s peace, mercy, justice, healing, forgiveness, and grace to us in a special way. For a long time, my understanding of a saint was limited to the “great ones” of history. In addition to the official, canonized saints of the Church, in my pantheon of the Great Cloud of Witnesses were inspiring figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Dag Hammarskjold, Rosa Parks, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Bede Griffiths, and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador.

When I started doing hospice work in Boston while I was still a divinity student, I began to understand that saints were not just the “big” personalities of history. Defined as those who are powerful channels of God’s Eternal Now, saints literally surround us, if only we develop the eyes to see and the hearts to feel their presence.

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I remember the first patient I met in hospice, Ruth, as if it were yesterday. Ruth had endured decades of physical abuse, domestic violence, and mental illness and lay dying from ovarian cancer in the hospice house a few miles from Harvard Square. In the hours that I sat with Ruth, holding her hand and listening to her sobs as disease ravaged her already frail body, Ruth taught me more about life, dignity, death, and resurrection than the most learned theologians I was studying.

Kneeling beside that deathbed with the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows, my status as an “intellectual,” a theology student, and a professional “helper” faded into the New England autumn shadows. Even in the midst of her suffering, Ruth radiated a light, a peace, and Presence which I could neither deny, nor explain. Ruth invited me to see the world, not just as a vale of tears but also a landscape infused with Sacred Mystery, Beauty, and Divine Love. What mattered was my willingness to be a fellow pilgrim with a heart open enough to experience that mystery, beauty and love.  Over the course of my 25 years working among those at the margins of life, I have encountered many such saints like Ruth. They remind me on a daily basis that, in the end, nothing really matters more than embracing life with open arms and soft hearts.

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Quite frankly, were it not for the saints of my life, past and present, I am not sure how my faith would be sustained during these past months working inside the COVID-19 wards and trauma bays of Hennepin Health care and living in the midst of a pandemic which continues to devastate vulnerable communities – black and brown and confined elderly people  – with shocking unfairness. I live alone and have not had the comfort of seeing my children very much, in large part because of the fear some of their relatives have about where I work and what I might bring home. 

As a human being, I am created for communion and community and these have been very hard to come by – at least in person since March. Yes, there are also times I grow close to despair about the political disrepair, social alienation, economic and racial inequality, ideological fragmentation, and environmental collapse my generation has handed down to our children. 

My life has been blessed with much privilege – based on the fact that I am white and male and over-educated. There are days when the realities of racism, injustice, oppression, white supremacy, violence, poverty, addiction, mental illness, and tragedy to which I bear witness as a chaplain in a trauma center tempt me to use that privilege to escape to some enclave where I live closed off from the pain of the world – unencumbered by facts or news or people who don’t look like me or stories that might make me uncomfortable and push me to live differently or question why things are the way they are and my part in them…

Ah, but the saints in my life, past and present, through story and song and blessed memory and example, remind me that there is no road to glory, to Emmaus and the New Jerusalem, to transformation and union and bliss, except the one which traverses the sometimes dark and often treacherous path past Golgotha. In more contemporary lingo, no justice, no peace. We cannot really talk of healing until we have done the hard work of transformation.

I spoke of Ruth as one of the saints who sustain me. Let me honor two more (even though there are many). 

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My Dad. He was born at the end of the Great Depression to children of the Greatest Generation. When my Grandfather finally arrived home from his World War Two combat service in the Pacific, my Grandma had to introduce my Dad to his Dad because my Dad did not recognize him, he had been gone so long. After serving in the Army and working in a factory, my Dad followed in the footsteps of his uncle and became a funeral director.  

It wasn’t until I became a hospice chaplain, that I became aware of two things: how incredibly hard my Dad worked his entire life and how much of his work touched thousands of people – literally – and their loved ones through his care. And now I to I wonder – too late to ask him – how much some of that care must have exploded his heart? 

On the surface, Dad and I were light years away from one another politically. Looking back, I am not sure how he tolerated me on those trips home from college when, from my newly-found high-horse I belittled his sense of patriotism, criticized his political leanings, attacked his Middle American worldview, and started arguments just to make myself feel better. Sometimes he argued back but usually he just smiled and said he was happy I was getting educated about things he knew little about. 

When I came home after 18 months in Jerusalem a few years later, I had very much fallen off that high horse. I had seen more death and destruction than my thin, liberal idealism had prepared me for. My Dad was there – not to understand (he said he did not) but to listen, take me out for dinner, and to remind me that I was his son and he would always have my back.

In the ensuing decades, I presented a lot of other challenges to my father: broken relationships, failed plans, dashed hopes. I did not end up living the geographically, financially, and vocationally stable life he had led. But even as he declined from Alzheimer’s dementia, which finally took his life this past October, I ALWAYS felt loved by my father, in part, because I know now we shared a bond in the vocations to which we were both called. 

His was the vocation to tend to and care for the body of the ones who had died and for their loved ones in the most tender moments of sorrow. Mine has been to journey as far as I can go with those walking through the valley of the shadow and like my father, to be a channel of solace to the grieving who are left on this side of death’s dark vale. In this work, especially during the time of COVID-19, I feel God’s presence, as mediated by my father’s witness, more powerfully than words can describe. 

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The second saint (again, I have had so many!) who is sustaining me now is Elaine Garnes of Blessed Memory. I always knew her as “Auntie Elaine” because that is what she is asked me and my brother to call her. Elaine was the mother of one of my closest childhood friends, John Garnes, Jr. John became my classmate in elementary school when my family moved to Marion, Ohio, a Rustbelt City north of Columbus, when my father co-purchased a funeral business there. 

While technically Marion is in “North-Central Ohio,” its cultural fabric is Appalachian through-and through because many of Marion’s residents have roots deep in the hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky from which the robber barons of Marion’s steam shovel and steel industries recruited cheap labor to work in their factories. Marion could be a harsh place. It was pretty much the quintessential picture of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” – boarded up factories and businesses, soaring unemployment, class antagonism, widespread anxiety about the future in Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning Again” America.  A bumper sticker urged the last resident leaving Marion to turn off the lights.

One of the most prominent features of Marion as I remember it was racism – and not always the subtle kind. I heard the “n” word roll off the tongues of police officers, barbers, neighbors, coaches, and friends with shocking regularity. This is not how my parents talked but the fear and disdain of black people was part of the air I breathed as a child. Through the 1960’s Marion had a thriving chapter of Ku Klux Klan.

Enter the Garnes family, the only African American family on “our” side of town. I am not exactly sure when John Jr.’s parents, John Sr. and Elaine moved to Marion from Los Angeles for John Sr. to take a job in one of Marion’s industries. I know that John Jr. and I became fast friends. We were both sensitive kids and shared a love of those all day, black-and- white Godzilla movie marathons that showed on a Cleveland tv station. 

When the Garnes’ joined the same church as my family, John and I became inseparable in Sunday School, church camp, and the Children’s choir where we became famous for our duets.  I loved John but was still scared of him, well – really just scared of his blackness. This became very apparent the first time he invited me over for a sleepover. Even though John was my close friend, I had never been in a social situation where I was the only white person. 

Growing up where I did, I had been socialized into the norms of White Body Supremacy. (For more on this, read “My Grandmother’s Hands” by Resmaa Menakem). My little white body and brain had a fear-based reaction to being outnumbered by black people. Sensing that fear in me, Elaine went out of her way to welcome me, to make me feel like I was home, that I “belonged.”

Now, I realize how much of a precious gift Elaine gave me. She could have responded to my own inherited racialized trauma in a very different way because of her own racialized trauma history. Years later, I learned more about the challenges Elaine had faced because of racism. Raised in Jim Crow-era Washington, D.C., Elaine moved to LA to find a different life. That is where she met John Sr.  After Elaine died, my mom told me harrowing stories of the explicit and implicit racism Elaine had endured in her job at the state maximum security prison in our town. I can remember incidents where neighborhood kids attempted to vandalize the Garnes’ house with racist graffiti. When John’s brother got engaged to a white woman, I recall an intense debate among our adult youth leaders about whether the Bible forbade interracial relationships. I look back and wonder how Elaine, John, David and John Jr. not only survived but thrived in such a hostile place. 

I know that as a young person the thing I found most true about Elaine was her rock-solid faith. I am not talking about some pie-in-the-sky, things-will-get-better-if-we-pray-hard-enough-faith. I am talking about a faith rooted in centuries of surviving and struggling and suffering and overcoming. Overcoming, not based on white America helping black people, but overcoming rooted in the conviction that ALL people are created in the image and likeness of God and possess inherent dignity that no one can take away. 

Elaine made no apologies for who she was: an incredibly proud, Jesus-loving, African American woman living in a sometimes hostile environment. She stood up for her children, and she welcomed their white friends into her home as one of her own. Her witness gives me hope as I continue to confront my own racism and to use my power to fight White Body Supremacy here in Minnesota.

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I work in a racist health care system. I am not singling out Hennepin Healthcare. Actually, we are doing some good work there to confront racism, beginning with an acknowledgement of the reality of the historical trauma that many of our patients have experienced vis-à-vis genocide, slavery, boarding schools, segregation, mass incarceration, unjust policies (the list goes on). I am speaking about all health care systems in Minnesota which have a shameful legacy of participating in the creation of one of the worst racial disparity gaps in the nation. Racism and White Body supremacy are the soil in which we are rooted and the air most of us have breathed for a very long time. The murder of George Floyd is shining a spotlight on these shameful gaps and has awakened a lot of people to the need for systemic transformation. 

The impetus for this change should NOT be on the backs of black and brown people who have already suffered enough. White people must partner with people of color and indigenous people to tear down the system we have created for the benefit of white people, to build something which will equitably benefit ALL people. For me, especially in my role as a white leader in spiritual care, this journey has many miles to go. I have been on it for a while, and I do get weary sometimes…

And then, just as I did a few mornings ago, I wake up smelling eggs and bacon and grits cooking in Auntie Elaine’s kitchen. As far as I know, she never gave up or gave in or cursed the darkness the way I am tempted to do. Even when she was battered by the bruises of living in a racist society and system, Elaine welcomed me, a little white boy into her home and family as if I were her own child. She lived the Bible more than spouting it. And Elaine will remain one of my saints until I breath my last. 

Because of Elaine, and many others in my Great Cloud of Witnesses who have taught, led, inspired, challenged, and loved me along the way, this Jesus Way, I commit to keeping my heart open in hell;  to using my power “with” and not “for” people; to confront racism in my life and the system in which I work;  and to welcome “strangers” into my midst, not as enemies but as friends and fellow children of God.

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I think that the great Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton summed it up well when he wrote shortly before his own accidental death,

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

Saints are the ones who help us discover and fulfill the Love for which we were created – the Love that sustains us in this world and the Love that will carry us to that place where death and crying and pain will be no more because “the old things will have passed away and all things are being made new” (Revelation 21).

This holiday weekend, when we celebrate the birth of a country with such a mixed legacy for many,  I hope to spend some time remembering and giving thanks for all of the men, women, and children whose lives remind me of the Love for which I have been created and whose deaths teach me how to welcome my own death when that moment comes. May all of God’s Friends rest in peace and dwell with joy in God’s Eternal Now. Amen.

Why Paul Matters: Following Jesus in 21st Century Empire

David Hottinger
Mayflower Church, June 17, 2012

Reading: II Corinthians 5-6

Hmm…I am not sure whose idea it was to have a series on Paul here at Mayflower. In many progressive Christian circles today, the very mention of Paul is met with a collective groan of frustration if not outright contempt.

When I told several liberal-leaning colleagues that I had been invited to preach on Paul, one of them said, “Ugh, that guy took Jesus’ message of love and inclusion and turned it into a mess of condemnation.”

For a number of years, I would have probably said something similar. During my childhood in a more theologically conservative tradition with deep roots in Appalachia, I  remember hearing more Paul than Jesus. And the Paul I heard didn’t seem to like Jews, wanted women to remain silent in the church, and had some big hang ups about sex.

By high school, when I was searching for a Christian faith that allowed me to use my mind as well as fire my heart, Paul seemed more and more like the kind of religious zealot I wanted to avoid becoming: narrow-minded, dour, body-denying, world-loathing.

Well, over the years as I went on to study theology and my own spiritual path unfolded, I found it impossible to get around dealing with Paul. The progressive Biblical scholars, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan list a few of the reasons that it is hard for a Christian to ignore him.

First, there is the sheer volume of material either written by Paul or attributed to him in the New Testament – 13 of its 27 books.

Second, most scholars agree that Paul was the one chiefly responsible for expanding the Jesus movement beyond the borders of first century Judaism. In essence, all of us non-Jews have Paul to thank for the fact that we are sitting here this morning.

Third, Paul’s influence on the history of Christian theology and practice especially in the West, is enormous. From Augustine in the 5th century to Luther and Calvin in the 16th to John Wesley in the 18th to Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonheoffer, and Paul Tillich in the 20th, the writings of Paul have shaped much of the Church’s theology, particularly Protestant theology.

That is not to deny that teachings attributed to Paul have been used in Christian history to justify evil practices, including the subordination of women, the oppression of sexual minorities, the existence of slavery, blind obedience to unjust rulers, and the persecution of the Jewish people.

I agree, however with scholars like Borg and Crossan, who argue that to throw out Paul because of things done in his name would be a profound mistake.  In fact, as I have grappled with Paul again in recent years, I have come to believe that Paul’s writings and witness from the first century Roman Empire have much to teach those of us trying to walk in the Way of Jesus in the American Empire of the 21st.

This morning I want briefly to highlight five things that I believe Paul has to say today to those of us trying to follow in the Way of Jesus as progressive people of faith.

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First a short word about Paul’s life. Paul was roughly a contemporary of Jesus, probably born in the first decade of the first century and died sometime in the 60’s. Unlike Jesus, who grew up in the Palestinian Jewish countryside, Paul was from Tarsus, a thriving, cosmopolitan city in what today is southern Turkey. Jesus spent his whole life in the Jewish homeland while Paul hailed from the Jewish Diaspora – the significant communities of Jews who were scattered throughout the Roman Empire.

Paul was a faithful Jew, a member of the Pharisees which was a movement dedicated to being as zealous and on-fire for God as possible. Even after his conversion to the Jesus Way, Paul did not understand himself as founder of a new religion called Christianity but as a prophetic reformer within 1st century Judaism.

Paul first shows up in Acts 7, several years following Jesus’ execution. Stephen, a Jesus follower, is being killed by stoning for his inflammatory and seditious claim that Jesus was the Messiah. We hear of Paul – then known as “Saul of Tarsus” approving of this persecution of the Jesus movement, which to Paul would have looked like blasphemous nonsense.

As a faithful Jew, Paul was waiting for the Messiah who would liberate Israel from her Roman captivity and inaugurate God’s reign of justice. Clearly, this Jesus of Nazareth who died on a Roman cross was an imposter, and his followers were leading the Jewish people astray..

Then Acts 9 tells the story of this same Saul having a profound experience of transformation about three-to-five years following Jesus’ death when he encounters the risen Christ near Damascus. That encounter changes him from Saul the persecutor of the Jesus Way to Paul the apostle of Jesus, especially to the non-Jewish world.

This divine revelation rocked Paul to his core and became the defining moment in his life. For the next 25 years, Paul travels by foot and by sea over a huge portion of the eastern Roman Empire, mostly in Greece and Asia Minor to cultivate small, communities of Jesus followers. He ends up in Rome finally where he was probably executed in the early 60’s.

Paul’s letters – written in the 50’s – are the earliest books of the New Testament.

Most mainstream scholars agree that Paul’s letters fall into one of three categories. The first are the seven letters definitely written by Paul: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. The second category is the three letters most certainly not written by Paul (but attributed to him as was a common practice in antiquity): 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus which were probably written around the year 100.  Into the third category fall the letters about which there is no scholarly consensus about authorship: Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians.

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So what does Paul have to say to those of us today, trying to make sense of what it means to follow in the Way of Jesus in 21^st century, superpower America?

I want to start by quoting Michael Gorman, a New Testament scholar who has noticed the similarities between Paul the Apostle and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Like Dr. King, Paul knew himself to be commissioned by God to preach and live a socially and politically charged message that

• Focused on the justice of God
• Called for the inclusion of outsiders in the beloved community;
• Necessitated the rejection of violence;
• Implicitly and sometimes explicitly challenged imperial power;
• Meant living in the shadow of the cross and the power of the resurrection;
• And resulted in much persecution and eventually death.

That sets the stage nicely from the five things I want to highlight.

1. Grace matters. Says Paul, through the power of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection we are made a new creation. The Christian Gospel – the ‘good news’ – is not a set of propositions we have to believe or repeat, but the account of how God enters history through Israel – through Jesus of Nazareth – to make Israel, the world, the whole cosmos right again.

Over the long course of Christian history, many people’s understanding of salvation got reduced to some things that one has to believe in order to convince God to let us into heaven. During the time of the Protestant Reformation a lot of ink – and blood – got spilled in debates about how God actually saves us.

Many Protestants, beginning with Luther, honed in on some language that Paul uses to present God’s saving work in primarily legal/juridical terms. Certain Reformation theologies made it seem like Paul’s primary message is that God is in the business of imputing or bestowing justice on a people who do not deserve it: We are bad. God is good. Jesus comes to cover us in God’s goodness or righteousness, even if we remain fundamentally “bad.”

In that view, all we need to focus on is God’s grace – God’s gift of love for us, even though we remain lousy, messed-up, dysfunctional sinners. On one level, there is truth in that: God does love us, no matter how messed up and dysfunctional we are. What got lost sometimes is any understanding of how God works through grace to change and heal us – so that we can carry out’s God’s work in the world.

Recent scholarship has helped us remember that for Paul the goal of salvation in Christ is not being declared innocent as in a legal transaction but in being transformed from the inside out. Through Christ we are not merely forgiven of our shortcomings – we are changed, healed, and empowered by the Spirit to be agents of God’s reconciling love for the world. When we are touched by grace, good works naturally flow from us.

Much of Paul’s language is full of wild, hopeful, passionate, even mystical declarations that in Christ God is doing amazing things to transform us:

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, with whom we have been reconciled through Christ, and by whom we have been given the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself, not counting the people’s trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is exhorting you through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God (II Corinthians 5).

2. The Church matters. Through and through, Paul was a Jew and understood what it means to be part of a people. For Jews like Paul, the path of following God is more of a communal than an individual affair. After his encounter with the risen Christ, Paul came to see that in Christ God had grafted onto Israel a new people – the church.

This will sound wildly un-American, but Christianity is not a lone-ranger path! Together, we are called to a new life in Christ. That way of life involves belonging to a community of fellow travelers – a community of grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, nonviolence and peacemaking

By definition, living in this new community of grace has profound political implications, primarily because often what the church values stands in contrast to what the world values.

One scholar says that the message of Jesus crucified and risen is a “theo-political” message – a message about God with political implications. Jesus was not crucified by the Roman Empire for preaching a God within but for proclaiming that the coming of the reign of God was at hand – something that stirred up hope among Jews and fear among Romans

The fear in first century Rome was that God’s politics were about to replace Caesar’s.  To say that Jesus is Lord (as Paul did many times) was to say that Caesar is not. And in imperial Rome, that was high treason. To declare that Jesus was Lord set the church’s way of non-violence, peacemaking, and reconciliation over and against the empire’s practices of domination, injustice, and inequality.

3. Peace matters. Paul begins and ends every letter with the words “grace and peace.”

Peace in Caesar ‘s Rome was achieved this way: prayer and sacrifice were offered to ensure that the gods were on the side of the emperor. The armies were sent to fight, conquer and occupy. When victory through overwhelming military force was achieved, peace was declared. Pax Romana. Hmm…does this sound familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper?

The Jesus Way delineates a very different path to peace.

According to Paul, peace enters the world not via the shock and awe campaigns of conquering armies but through the self-emptying, non-violent love of God’s Anointed One, Jesus the Christ, dying on a cross. NT Wright notes, “It took genius to see that the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love.”

In stark contrast to any peace built on violence and control, the peace of Christ breaks down walls of hostility and creates new communities of radical hospitality and reconciliation:

Galatians 3. 27-29. “As many of you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are on in Christ Jesus.”

4. The cross matters. The grace and peace we receive in Christ is free but not cheap. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by Hitler for his resistance to the Nazi regime, famously wrote about the danger of “cheap grace” in contemporary Christianity. By this, he was referring to the insistence that we receive grace with no corresponding transformation, discipleship, or conversion.

Paul reminds us that the cross is how God shows up most fully in the world – through self-emptying, sacrificial love. There is no Christianity without the cross. As Borg and Crossan say, “For Paul the cross revealed God’s passion, God’s will for the world a world different from the normalcy of this world of domination, injustice, and violence, all legitimated by the wisdom of the world. It also revealed the path of internal transformation, the path of becoming ‘ in Christ” by dying and rising with Christ.”

The cross reveals the way God is by revealing the way God works in the world – through foolishness and weakness and powerlessness, at least as they are usually measured

5. Resurrection matters. For Paul the cross of Christ is meaningless apart from the resurrection – the raising of Jesus by God from the darkness of a death into a new and transformed reality of life and hope.

The appearance of the resurrected Christ to Paul transformed him. In experiencing the resurrected Jesus, Paul began to see the cross, not as a sign of divine curse but as a means of divine blessing.

Borg and Crossan put it like this: “The empire killed Jesus. The cross was the imperial ‘no’ to Jesus. But God had raised him. The resurrection was God’s ‘yes’ to Jesus, God’s vindication of Jesus – and thus also God’s ‘no’ to the powers that had killed him.”

We moderns, with our mind-body dualism, have a hard time making sense of resurrection. While resurrection for Paul was clearly bodily, it was not just the resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse but about the transformation of his physical body into a “spiritual” or “glorified” body.

Moreover, the living Christ is not some kind of ghost who makes random appearances to people in mystical trances. Rather, Christ takes up residence and embodies his presence in the living communities of his followers especially when they gather to remember him, worship him, and do acts of mercy and justice in his name.

Because of resurrection, suffering and death are never the last word. There are those who might dismiss the passage we read from Paul this morning as pie-in-the-sky utopia-seeking:

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal (II Corinthians 5).

At one point in my life, I would have joined in our skeptic’s dismissal, just as I did with the rest of Paul. Before I started spending my work days in hospice houses and psychiatric wards and intensive care units and trauma bays as I am privileged to do now, some of the more mystical, other-worldly passages from Paul about “the redemption of our bodies” and “inner natures being renewed” and “eternity” irritated me. Doesn’t this kind of talk distract us from our work of ending wars, and fighting poverty and overcoming injustice in the here-and-now?

Sure, there is that danger. But if we know anything about the Apostle Paul it is this: Paul saw everything that he did as part of a much larger move on God’s part to renew and transform not just Israel and the Gentiles but the whole world, the cosmos even. Paul catalogs for us several times the hardships he endures as a consequence of being a Christ follower: imprisonment, ridicule, rejection, beatings, torture. Eventually Paul will die a martyr’s death, perhaps in the Emperor Nero’s ferocious persecution of the early church.

But in the face of it all, Paul keeps forging ahead – preaching, writing, traveling, nurturing new followers on the Way of Jesus, affirming through his words and witness that God is at work in Christ bringing forth a world long promised by the prophets of old: a world in which the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and swords shall be broken down into ploughshares, a world in which death and crying and pain will be no more because in Christ the old things have passed away – and the creation has been made new.

This is the power of resurrection for Paul – power that is available to us as well.

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You will be hearing a lot more about Paul in the weeks ahead but for this morning, as you leave this beautiful sanctuary for the hustle and bustle of a world a world hungering for hope, I invite you reflect on what God might be saying to you through the ancient words and witness of Paul of Tarsus. Grace matters. The church matters. Peace matters. The cross matters. Resurrection matters. Above all, Christ matters. As our reading proclaims,

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The light of Christ is a persistent light. It shines through the most powerfully oppressive darkness, shines in the midst of devastation, disaster and upheaval, yet without explaining them, justifying them, or making sense of them. The gospel of incarnation and resurrection is not the answer to a set of questions. It is a persistent and defiant light…(Kenneth Leech)

Twenty-one years ago, I celebrated Christmas Eve in Bethlehem. In 1990, Bethlehem still lived under the boot of Israeli military occupation.  The first Palestinian Uprising was still in full force; my little group from Saint George’s Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem had to acquire special passes from the Israeli military to enter the West Bank to mark the birth of the Prince of Peace. The Middle East was just weeks away from the Gulf War which would commence with the American bombing of Baghdad , followed by the retaliatory Iraqi SCUD missile attacks on Israel.

Two months previously, I witnessed firsthand the aftermath of what was then the bloodiest day in Jerusalem since the 1967 War. On that mid-October day, seventeen Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli security forces outside of the al-Aksa mosque complex (or Temple Mount).  Seven of those people died at the Lutheran hospital at which I was interning. The floors of the grand Augusta Victoria Hospital literally ran with blood that terrifying afternoon.

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The folks back home were rightly thrilled with the idea that I would be attending Christmas Eve services near the site of Jesus’ birth. I had spent every Christmas Eve except for this one at my grandparents’ cozy home in the tiny hamlet of Portage, Ohio. My favorite part of the evening was our obligatory sojourn down the street to Portage United Methodist Church for candlelight services following my grandmother’s always magnificent dinner. The service concluded the same way each year; after hearing the Christmas story, we would light candles while singing “Silent Night” and quietly process from the darkened sanctuary.

I not only felt close to my family during those services  (how I loved to hear my grandmother sing). The idyllic and peaceful nature of the Christmas narrative made my childhood world feel safe and secure. Sure, as I got older, some holes began to appear in the literalistic theology with which I was raised. But I drew comfort from the predictability of celebrating Jesus’ coming in such a warm, enclosed environment. I suppose that that the Christmas story had become for me theological “comfort-food.” What is more heart-warming than a manger scene, complete with baying sheep, adoring wise men, and serenading shepherds?

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The reality of occupied Bethlehem on the eve of war was appallingly different from the idealized projections of my American childhood. As we passed through several military checkpoints that night, I encountered dozens of stone-faced, heavily armed soldiers on the lookout for would-be terrorists (or protestors). Armored vehicles roamed Bethlehem’s darkened streets, which were under curfew. A helicopter gunship hovered not far from Nativity Square, breaking the silence of the night with its whirling blades. Inside the Church of the Nativity itself, the congregation was limited to a spartan crowd of diehard Palestinian Christians. Most international Christians had cancelled their pilgrimages to the Holy Land with the looming threat of a Middle East conflagration.

Aside from the stark external scene, my faith that damp December night was in the process of being shattered. I had neither the emotional nor spiritual resources to cope with the trauma I was witnessing. By the end of college, the  “gentle Jesus, sweet and mild” of my middle-class, Midwestern childhood had been replaced by the “do-gooder, ” ethical role-model Jesus of liberal Protestantism.  Both of these versions of Jesus began to seem irrelevant in a land haunted by the screams of violence and oppression.

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And then I heard the Christmas story again, this time not from the confines of a comfy pew but from the ramparts of a town under siege. Our little group of Anglicans worshipped on the roof of the Church of the Nativity. One of the English clergymen, with us, the Rev. Peter Crooks, had spent the previous decade in Beirut until the threats of kidnapping and assassination became so prominent that his family had to leave their beloved Lebanon for the relative “peace” of neighboring Israel/Palestine.

In his meditation that night, Peter pointed out that the Bethlehem below us was far closer to the reality of the Bethlehem into which Jesus was born than the “Little Town of Bethlehem” imagery of traditional lore. Like late 20th century Bethlehem , the City of David in the first century was a town under occupation. Rome ruled Palestine with an iron fist, using the half-Jewish, puppet-king Herod to do its bidding with the locals.

According to Luke’s narrative, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because that is where Joseph and Mary had been forced to go by the imperial authorities in order to register for taxation purposes. In Matthew’s account, King Herod becomes so agitated by the news of Jesus’ birth that he orders every boy in Bethlehem under the age of two to be executed to prevent any threat to his corrupt regime. Joseph is warned of the coming slaughter in a dream and flees with Jesus and Mary to Egypt to seek asylum.  As with tens of millions people in today’s world, Jesus, the Anointed One of God, begins his earthly mission as a homeless refugee.

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Hmm, the celebration of Christmas did not seem such a quaint undertaking with a helicopter gunship hovering nearby and the whiff of tear gas floating through the chilled night air. As connotations of mistletoe, overstuffed stockings, and Jolly Old St. Nick faded from relevance, I heard the angelic announcement of Jesus’ birth with new ears:

Do not be afraid. I bring to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord…Suddenly a great company of heavenly hosts appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.’ (Luke 2.10-14)

From the vantage point of a war zone, Christmas is not merely a charming tale about a cute baby being born in a barn; the great good news of Christmas Eve is the startling claim that God has come to dwell on earth in human form. And not merely to be honored by doting wise men and adoring shepherds watching their flocks by night. This Emmanuel (which means, “God is with us”) child

has come to show strength with his arm, to scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, to bring down the powerful from their thrones and to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich empty away (Luke 1.51-53).

This is the night when God’s kingdom of justice, peace, healing and mercy enters history in a dramatic, new way. God’s Christmas kingdom calls into question our allegiance to what St. Paul labels the “principalities and powers of this world” (which take many forms and go by many names). This Christmas kingdom directs us away from our own frantic pursuits of comfort, power, and control and allows us to experience the true freedom found in serving one another and living in communion within the bliss of God’s Eternal Now.

God’s kingdom comes and transforms history using methods that might appear nonsensical, if not downright scandalous from the perspective of the kingdoms of this world. As a good, upstanding citizen of the American Empire in 2011, I pay homage to many thrones: Wall Street, the Mall of America, Big Medicine, the Pentagon, the Apple Store, Hollywood, Harvard….

The Christmas King beckons me to worship at some very different altars: in a stench-filled barn in the Palestinian countryside; along the back roads of Galilee, shoulder to shoulder with a throng of lepers, prostitutes and other social outcasts; on a hill called Golgotha where a naked, battered corpse lies nailed to a bloody cross; inside an empty tomb on a spring Jerusalem morning.

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It was in Bethlehem that I began to see the importance of always viewing Christmas in light of Easter. Our Christmas celebration of Incarnation (of God becoming flesh and dwelling with us) is a pie-in-the-sky exercise in sentimentality (and now consumerism) unless we remember WHY God came in Christ Jesus: to mend a broken world and to conquer the powers of sin, evil, and death.

As the Anglican spiritual theologian Kenneth Leech has put it,

The saving power of the Christmas celebration depends upon the truth that Christ is risen from the dead. It is the presence of the risen Christ in the eucharistic mystery which transforms a nostalgic memorial into a source of light and glory….It is the joy of the resurrection, of the Christ who is present through his conquest of death and decay which enters our hearts at Christmas.

Leech tells us that both Christmas and Easter are “festivals of light,” moments in which we are reminded of the destiny that God intends for each of us – to become “divinized,” to share in God’s light and life and love, from glory unto glory.

To see the centrality of the symbol of light as common to both incarnation and resurrection is to see how inseparable are the Christmas and Easter mysteries…Without Easter, Christmas has no point; without Christmas, Easter has no meaning. Both incarnation and resurrection have significance because in these events God is glorified in the flesh. The flesh becomes the source of light, the raw material of glory.

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Leech asserts another truth (the ignoring of which nearly cost me my faith): there is no Easter glory without having first passed through the dark night of surrender and of death. At many moments of my spiritual journey, I have sought an easier way

I want to be safe, pain-free, and in-control. I am comfortable with a Santa Claus God who gives me what I want, when I want it. Perhaps this is why I laugh so hard at the Baby Jesus prayer from the movie, Talladega Nights. How often does Ricky Bobby’s self-aggrandizing, consumerist spirituality look like my own ego-centered posturing and pleading with God!

From a Christian perspective, one problem with viewing  God as cosmic Santa Claus (who has his own “naughty” and “nice” lists which he uses to reward the “good” people and punish the “bad” ones) is that it flies in the face of the Scriptural account of who Jesus is, why Jesus came, what he taught, how Jesus acted, and the manner in which he died. The “health, wealth, and prosperity” gospel of large segments of American Christendom (Mainline, Catholic, Evangelical, and Liberal versions included) seems to have a lot more in common with the “Gimme, Baby Jesus” of Ricky Bobby than the Messiah we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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The Jesus of the Gospels invites us to an ongoing journey of radical transformation (conversion). While the Jesus Way might look foreboding at first glance, it is the path to peace,  fulfillment, happiness, and freedom far beyond our most wild imaginings.

In order to take that journey, we must not be afraid to hear the cries of a world in pain, to enter into the great anguish of one another’s broken hearts, to touch the sorrow of those who are suffering. For, as Kenneth Leech again reminds us, we cannot fully enjoy the Light of Christ until we have entered the darkness of death.

The gospel of incarnation and resurrection cannot be preached in an authentic and truthful way unless it faces the terrible reality of homelessness and meaningless death. It is these two realities which provide the only possible material context for the light of Christ.

For it is the homeless unwanted Christ of Bethlehem and the naked condemned Christ of Golgotha that the light shines with its strange persistence and its baffling power to draw people to its shining, enabling them to become dynamic agents in the historical process, lights in the world…It is a transforming light. As Paul says, we are being changed into the likeness of the Lord whose glory we have seen. (Kenneth Leech)

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I credit that Christmas Eve in Bethlehem with initiating a shift in how I live in relationship with God. A lot has happened in my life in the subsequent two decades: the birth of four amazing children; the painful ending of some significant relationships; the witnessing of hundreds of deaths as a hospice and hospital chaplain; work with persons living with severe mental illness; the losing and finding of numerous ecclesial homes; the discovery of new spiritual paths, friends, and teachers. Change is a constant with which I am intimately familiar.

While I cannot pretend to understand the tragedy and trauma to which I have been a witness, I know in my heart that the Light first made known as a babe in Bethlehem continues to emanate rays of compassion, healing, and mercy, even in the most despair-ridden situations. Blessed Pope John XXIII knew of which he spoke when he penned this Christmas prayer:

O sweet Child of Bethlehem, grant that we may share with all our hearts in this profound mystery of Christmas.  Put into the hearts of men and women this peace for which they sometimes seek so desperately and which you alone can give to them. Help them to know one another better, and to live as brothers and sisters, children of the same Father. 

Reveal to them also your beauty, holiness and purity.  Awaken in their hearts love and gratitude for your infinite goodness.  Join them all together in your love. And give us your heavenly peace. Amen. (Pope John XXIII).

Happy Christmas, friends. May Christ’s Light lead you home this night and in the nights to come.

Jesus wept.

“I am so sorry. I told myself that I wouldn’t cry today,” the elderly woman said to me as we stood at the bedside of her dying daughter. Martha was a faithful, church-going Christian. I doubted if she ever missed a Sunday in her small-town parish. Now, here she was in an urban, long-term care facility watching her only child succumb to a dreadful neurological disease. “I know that my daughter is going to a better place, so I have no right to cry; it’s selfish of me, right, chaplain?” Martha asked, choking back her tears.

It happened again not long after that, this time as a young child lay dying in the next room. Trying to make sense of why such a precious young life was being snuffed out in the blink of an eye, the distraught friend of the family proclaimed, “I guess that God needs her in heaven. I need to be happy about that. But I don’t feel happy…”

Where did so many of us get the idea that God expects us to streak through life as one, unending Hallmark card of giddiness and good cheer? How did we learn that we are supposed to suppress our grief and stuff our sadness because, after all, “God is in control?” Why do we feel compelled to pretend that everything is “okay,” even when it seems that our inner and outer worlds are hurtling toward collapse?

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By and large, chaplains are trained to offer “non-anxious presence” in the face of tragedy. Our place is neither to judge, nor to preach. Most of the time, I see myself as a “soul friend,” giving answers far less than asking questions. My faith is radically Incarnational, expressed most eloquently by the “Breastplate of St. Patrick” from the Celtic tradition.

Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

In other words, through Christ, God is already and always present and working in the world. God doesn’t need me to “make” anything “happen.” My calling is to help others recognize places in which they might recognize traces of the Divine Presence, even as they traverse the dark caverns of suffering, grief, and insecurity.
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This is far from easy. “Religious types” like myself are often terrified to admit the limits of our abilities and understanding. In the presence of agony, we feel compelled to provide explanations, to offer words of solace, to quote Scripture or utter soft-sounding pieties. Keeping silence is a skill no one learns in seminary (nor can I imagine any of my divinity school professors, save one or two Jesuits and a Franciscan sister, actually being quiet!).

The reality is that most people in intense distress neither want, nor need our words, no matter how well-intended. They are looking, rather, for shoulders to cry on, arms to grip, chests to pound, hands to squeeze. They seek eyes to witness their anguish and ears to hear their “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”

I learned this the hard way once upon a time when I came to announce to a father that his young son had died in a freak accident. No sooner had I opened my mouth with a basic expression of sympathy than did he forcefully ask me not to speak. I realized later that my attempt at words was more of a strategy to distance myself from the horror unfolding than to comfort this man.

More times than not, what is being asked of us as spiritual caregivers is, like Mary, to keep silent vigil at the foot of the cross. My job is not to be an “answer man.” I am there to be a fellow pilgrim along the Jesus Way, even when that Way takes me down paths I would rather not trod.

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In the two situations in which the bereaved apologized to me for crying, I felt led to make an exception to my general practice of pastoral silence. On both occasions, without thinking, really, the words, “Jesus wept,” leapt from my tongue.

One of the gifts of growing up on the “saw dust trail” of Appalachian, revivalist Christianity is that I learned my Bible well. From Sunday School “sword drills” to summer Bible camps, I was relentlessly taught the “old, old story of Jesus and his love.” Without doubt, the favorite verse in the Bible (next to the ubiquitous John 3:16) for every young denizen of evangelical Protestantism comes from John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” It is popular because it is the shortest verse in all of Scripture.

When I memorized it many moons ago, I was probably more focused on impressing the girls in youth group than I was on grappling with its theological implications. But the shortest verse in the Bible might also be one of the most profound in what it reveals to us about the nature and character of God. It is definitely one with which American Christianity needs badly to reacquaint itself.
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The scene from John 11 is a gripping one. Jesus is summoned to the grave of his dear friend, Lazarus, who has just died. Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha, are outside the tomb, the stench of death wafting about in the mid-day heat of the Palestinian hills. In accordance with Semitic custom, the mood was electric with grief: not the stoic, tear-swallowing, Minnesota kind – but the weeping, wailing, thumping-of-chests, Middle Eastern variety (I remember attending my first Palestinian funeral; it was for a teenager killed by Israeli security forces, and I could hear the wailing nearly three city blocks away).

Here comes Jesus – the Anointed One, Israel’s Messiah, the Word Made Flesh Dwelling Among Us. Yes, he comes as all of these but also as the friend of Lazarus. And what does Jesus do? Jesus, who in a short while will raise Lazarus from the dead, WEEPS. Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, CRIES. Jesus, who the Nicene Creed proclaims to be “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” breaks down and WAILS tears of grief.

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I do not pretend how to understand this passage intellectually. The older I get, the more I harken back to something said to me in college by of my most beloved spiritual mentors, Bishop C. Joseph Sprague. In those years, I was overwhelmed by many questions about how to reconcile the intense Christian piety of my childhood with the historical-critical methods of analyzing religion I was learning in college. I spent many hours hashing through my doubts and fears in Joe’s book-lined study, first at Epworth United Methodist Church in downtown Marion, Ohio and then at North Broadway United Methodist in Columbus.

Without trying to explain away my confusion or relieve me of my doubt, Joe, in his soft but passionate voice, said to me, “David, this Jesus faith we hold dear is never irrational but it is always transrational.” In other words, the Jesus Way cannot be reduced to our arguments, intellect, theories, ideas, creeds and dogmas. It may include those things but is always beyond them.

Moreover, the Love that tumbles empires and transforms frail and finite humans into courageous warriors of compassion and justice like Teresa of Calcutta, Jean Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Charles de Foucauld,and Dorothy Day is the Love most often encountered most profoundly in and through the times we feel most broken, abandoned, and grieved.

Nearing his death, Dr. Clyde Holbrook, the great lion of the Oberlin College Religion department, boomed at us:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you does NOT find God at the end of your argument. You find God at the end of your rope!“

With Jesus as our guide, might we also say that we find God in a puddle of tears? Our tears, most certainly. But also in the tears cried by Jesus. If Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus, then surely he weeps for us as we experience death’s unbearable sting.

Following the tragic death of his son in a flash flood, the maverick American preacher, William Sloan Coffin, Jr., was asked how he made meaning of what had happened. “This, I know,” said Coffin, “God did not send the water to sweep my son off that bridge. But God was there, and God was the first one to shed a tear when my son hit the water.”

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The idea of a God who weeps may be uncomfortable to many of us because it implies that God is vulnerable. When I am honest with myself, I must admit that I would often prefer a Zeus-like Superman god or a happy-clappy Santa Claus god over and against the self-emptying, bleeding God of Golgotha or the homeless, hunted God of Bethlehem. What good is a God who hungers, thirsts, mourns, and cries? How is the God revealed in Jesus supposed to help me conquer my enemies, triumph over adversity, and eliminate pain?

Hence we get to the scandal at the heart of the Jesus Way. The babe of Bethlehem and the corpse of Golgotha indicate that the Way of Love involves not eliminating suffering but transforming it. The Holy One uses the inevitable presence of brokenness and anguish in our lives to create in us compassionate hearts and courageous spirits. Jean Vanier, describes God’s way of being

which is not to be strong, wonderful, and all powerful but rather to be humble, to become human and to go down to the bottom, to become not only the servant but the rejected servant. At the bottom of the social ladder, he joins all those who have been rejected and with them he creates a new order, a new community. They are the starting point of this new creation, this new body of humanity which has been torn apart – and continues to be torn apart by the desire for power and prestige” (Jean Vanier, Befriending the Stranger).

The Jesus Way goes against many of the things I have been taught to value as an American: strength, speed, efficiency, independence, wealth, status, fashion, physical appearance, intellectual dominance. The God made known in Jesus calls me to admit my brokenness, accept my limitations, acknowledge my wounds, and make peace with the fact that the road to Emmaus always passes over the hill called Calvary.

This does NOT mean that we seek suffering or try to make ourselves miserable through acts of self-punishment; self-inflicted pain (whether emotional or physical) flows from an egotistical obsession with self. What the Jesus Way teaches is that WHEN suffering comes (and it will come to all of us, albeit in different forms), God can use it to enter us, empty us, and transfigure us.

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The tears that we shed for the brokenness of our world then become instruments of grace. Rather than being a shameful thing that “good” Christians should not do, crying can be an act of worship. Crying is a means of lifting up our grief for the agony of creation unto God’s tender Heart, where all things are held in Love and caressed by mercy.

St. Paul reminds us that the Spirit dwells within our deepest longings and most intense heartache:

The moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. God does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of wordless sighs, our aching moans” (Romans 8.26, The Message translation).

I think of this passage as I sit by the bedside of dying patients. In those last days and hours of life, verbal, “wordy” communication may have ceased. And yet I have often sensed at the deathbed a far more powerful form of spiritual communion taking place in and through the “wordless sighs” and the “aching moans” of those who are making their pilgrimage unto the Beloved who “will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21.4). This is the Beloved in whom all things are made new and in whom all of our longings are fulfilled.

Anglican contemplative and professed solitary, Maggie Ross, explores this movement beautifully when she writes,

It is only when we are willing to live in our wounds without hope of healing that we begin to live in faith – and thus in real hope – for it is only then that we give up the last vestige of the comforting illusion of control and exploitation and the denial of our creatureliness. Only when we wait, wounded, in the dark I AM, can we receive the sign of Jonah, God’s merciful love for us as we are. Only then can Christ fully dwell in us; only then can our wounds become his glorified wounds…only then by the radiance of Christ’s wounds in ours can the creation enter transfiguration” (Maggie Ross, Pillar of Flame: Power, Priesthood, and Spiritual Maturity).

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A confession: I am not very good at practicing what I preach. Tears do not come easily for me, and facing my own grief scares me. I will be reflecting more on that in the next post.

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For now, I am trying to make this prayer by Celtic spiritual writer, J. Philip Newell, my own Advent prayer:

In the darkness of the evening the eyes of my heart are awake to you. In the quiet of the night I long to hear again intimations of your love. In the sufferings of the world and the struggles of my life I seek your graces of healing. At the heart of the brokenness around me and in the hidden depths of my own soul I seek your touch of healing. O God, for there you reside. In the hidden depths of life, O God, there you reside” (Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer).

Advent blessings to you all.

My nostrils were already overwhelmed by the stench of spilled beer and stale smoke. As I knocked on the door of the trailer, Ralph eyed me suspiciously through the screen and then let me in with a grunt. “A fine mess of my street all of these n*****s have made,” Ralph pronounced with clenched fists.

As soon as I stepped into the sweltering trailer, I was greeted by an enormous Confederate battle flag hanging over Ralph’s sofa. Sitting beside the couch was a 12-gauge shot gun. “That gun is gonna be what they’re gonna get if any of THEM people come to my door,” Ralph informed me, pointing to several school-aged, African-American children sitting at a picnic table across the street.

Ralph was in the final stages of dying from esophageal cancer, and I was his hospice chaplain. Although I had witnessed my share of racism while growing up in a Rustbelt town where racial tensions were high, I had never encountered the venom with which Ralph spewed his hatred of black people.

During one hour of visiting Ralph on that oppressively hot South Carolina summer afternoon, I heard the “n” word uttered more times than I probably had in my entire life. Ralph was a character straight from the set of “Mississippi Burning” – a hardened, hateful, old-time racist who I imagined could have spent some time donning a white sheet, underneath the glow of a burning cross.

Every moral sensibility in me was offended by Ralph’s vitriol. And yet some power entirely beyond myself made me stay put and not run away. When Ralph saw that I was not going to be triggered by his outbursts, he quieted a bit and invited me to sit down. It was clear from looking at his skeletal frame and seeing him cough up streams of blood and sputum into an old coffee can that Ralph was not long for this world.

He began to tell me a little about his life which was, well…pathetic. Divorced and childless, Ralph’s only family member was a nephew with whom he had an ambivalent relationship at best. A son of poor, white, Carolina dirt farmers, Ralph left home early, fought in Korea, and then did construction work for a living.

I quickly got the impression that he had slashed and burned his way through life. Now facing his final days, Ralph was lonely, bitter, and – above all – scared to death. “I don’t know, preacher…Do you think there is any hope for me?” he asked in a hoarse, weak voice.

In response, I mouthed some churchy-sounding pieties about grace, forgiveness, redemption, etc. My reply lacked conviction, though. At that point in my life, I was embroiled in my own self-destructive spiral – of which I was horribly ashamed and over which I felt utterly powerless. Questioning God’s ability to change me from the inside out, I certainly had my doubts about the prospect of Ralph experiencing some kind of death bed transformation.

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Quite rightly, Ralph did not seem entirely satisfied with my all-too-easy answers that day. As I walked back into the oven that was late summer South Carolina, I felt like I had utterly failed Ralph in my role as a spiritual caregiver.

Sure, part of me wanted to rant and rave about Ralph’s ignorant stupidity, especially his unvarnished hatred of African-Americans. Lest we forget our own American history, the same evil that led fanatical men to fly planes into buildings nine years ago also once drove “true believers” of another sort to blow up Sunday schools full of young black children, bomb synagogues, and assassinate Civil Rights workers.

At another level, I found it impossible to condemn Ralph to a fate worse than my own. Driving out of that little trailer park on the outskirts of Columbia, I could see in Ralph signs of my own brokenness writ large; I just did a much better job of hiding the ways in which I was wounded and bleeding.

I may not have had a Confederate battle flag hanging in my living room, but my heart was jaded by violent thoughts and prejudice, especially towards anyone who threatened my ego (a long list indeed!). I didn’t spend my days smoking and drinking with a shot gun on my lap, but I had traversed through some very dark places. As hard as it was for me to admit, my brokenness was just as life-denying and love-destroying as Ralph’s.

Even more terrifying, the verdict was still out in my mind whether redemption was truly possible for the hopeless cases and losers and phonies and hate-mongers and hypocrites and failures of this world – all of the bastards like Ralph and like me. Were we destined to squander our gifts, hurt others, destroy ourselves and die miserable deaths, world without end? If so, what was I doing in the “God business,” pretending to help others with their spiritual crises, mired as I was in the mud and muck of my own pathetic struggle to surrender to a God of my understanding?

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I had planned to see Ralph the following week back at his trailer. The day before our appointment, a hospice nurse called to tell me that Ralph’s condition had declined so rapidly that his nephew had made arrangements for him to spend his final days in a nursing home where he could receive around-the-clock care.

My first thoughts went to the nursing home’s paid caregivers, the vast majority of whom were African American women. How would Ralph, the long-time racist who had threatened to shoot his neighbors if they came to his door, tolerate being cared for by black people? The kind of help that Ralph needed was as personal as it gets – toileting, bathing, feeding, etc. I predicted disaster for everyone involved.

Paralyzed by my own fear and loathing, I avoided going to see Ralph until the third day after he had been admitted. A bit to my surprise, I found him comfortably propped up in bed gazing out his window. Gone was the profanity-laced bravado and defiant swagger. The scowl with which Ralph first greeted me only last week had softened into a gentle smile. Ralph beckoned me to his side with his eyes and then extended his bony arms in warm greeting, “Preacher, I wondered when you were gonna get here.”

Just as I was going to utter some lame excuse for my delay in visiting, the unit nurse, a stout African-American woman in her late thirties, entered Ralph’s room. “Is there anything you need, Ralph? How are those pain meds working? If you are feeling uncomfortable, you have to let us know so that we can help you, okay, honey?” She spoke these words with a tenderness which left no mistake about their authenticity.

Expecting the worst, I turned back towards Ralph to see on his face a look of child-like contentment. “You’all are taking such good care of me,” Ralph whispered back. “I don’t…I don’t…I don’t deserve this.” Ralph’s voice trailed off in what I could see were choked- back tears.

The nurse seemed a bit puzzled by Ralph’s response and walked away to tend to other patients. I knew exactly what Ralph had meant. And it was shattering. “After how I have lived, how I’ve treated them people…Then they come in here all caring and kind and wash my face and rub my back. Damn it, preacher, they even change my dirty pajama pants. Ain’t no way on God’s green earth that they should be so good to me.”

Ralph couldn’t talk any more; his shoulders began to shudder in waves of sobbing grief, tears pouring down his sun-hardened cheeks. I, too, was speechless. What does one say after witnessing a miracle?

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Ralph soon fell asleep with me holding his hand. His breathing was shallow and labored, but he seemed to be truly at peace. One of the nursing assistants came in with a cool cloth and lovingly mopped the tiny beads of perspiration from Ralph’s brow. The corners of his mouth curled up again into a slight smile. He didn’t open his eyes. Ralph was sleeping the sleep of small child, relaxed and surrendered unto the embrace of a Love beyond all telling.

Ralph took leave of his mortal flesh later that night. By all accounts, his death was remarkably uneventful. I never found out if anyone was with Ralph when he died. I do know that every staff member on duty in his unit that night was African American.

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Most people in my line of work will tell you that we see very few “death bed conversions.” “People usually die as they have lived,” goes one hospice adage. In Ralph’s case this was decidedly NOT the case. From what I could tell, Ralph frittered away decades of his life drinking, fighting, cursing, and hating. He alienated his family, drove away his friends, and kept at bay any force of love that might have shown him a happier, more fruitful path to trod. It seemed that Ralph was destined to die as he had lived : conflicted, bitter, resentful, miserable, alone.

Instead, Ralph died on clean sheets, in a place where people truly cared for him. And not just any people – but people of color who Ralph had spent his life hating. Unbeknownst to them, those African American caregivers at the nursing home were conduits of saving grace to a man in desperate need of it.

Ralph knew that he didn’t “deserve” the unconditional love and mercy of his caregivers. That is the amazing thing about grace – it is a gift and not a reward. As an ancient slogan from the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, “God loves you, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it!”

The Prophet Isaiah reminds us that our thoughts and ways are not identical with those of the Most High. We are children of a loving Father, not nameless, faceless minions of a cosmic tyrant.

I have plans for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29.11)

Ralph entered the nursing home shriveled up in hatred for himself and others. At the loving hands of his caregivers, who looked beyond the shell of his bigotry and nastiness to see a beloved, beautiful child of God, Ralph got a taste of that Jesus Kingdom where

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3.16).

Ralph’s transformation came not in spite of the fact that he was a dyed-in-the-wool, hateful, racist; Ralph’s conversion occurred in and through the reality of his most loathsome traits. In other words, God used Ralph’s brokenness to bring healing. That which was most ugly in Ralph’s life unveiled that which was most beautiful.

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I am certain that the miracle that I witnessed at Ralph’s deathbed has played a role in my own journey from death back into life. Though my growth since those early years of ministry has been slow and uneven, I have repeatedly encountered the power of hope and the promise of grace.

Moreover, I have come to embrace my weakness and to make friends with my brokenness, rather than try to present a “perfect” self to the world. This is because the greatest healing in my life has occurred not through my “successes” but through my wounds and the places in which I am most needy and broken.

I would like to believe that I could have acquired the authenticity I bring to relationships and the authority I bring to ministry today without having hurt many people along the way through acts of betrayal and inauthenticity. That is not the case, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. I am free to live beyond the walls of fear, shame, and addiction not in spite of my failures but because of them.

This paradox of the spiritual life is beautifully captured by the Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, who was a close confidante of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and who is often called the “dean of American preachers.”

Any authenticity that we are going to have as persons of faith and any authority that we are going to have as witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ will come because of our exposure to bruises and scars and by wounds. There is no other way to authenticity. There is no other way…

I promise you this, if you can take whatever deep hurt that occurs in your life and hold it up before God and say to God, even in bitterness, of this which you despise and this which you hate, “If there is anything you can do with it, take, and use it,” I promise you, you will be utterly amazed at what will occur.

– Rev. Gardner C. Taylor (1918-), great American preacher, teacher, Civil Rights leader, mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Amazed I am, and by God’s grace, will continue to be amazed – one day at a time and world without end. Amen.

Death surrenders us completely to God; it makes us pass into God. In return we have to surrender ourselves to it, in love and in the abandon of love, since, when death comes to us, there is nothing further for us to do but let ourselves be entirely dominated and led onwards by God…

Lord Christ, you who are divine energy…set me ablaze and transmute me into fire that we may be welded together and made one…To receive communion as I die is not sufficient: teach me to make a communion of death itself.

~ Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and mystic, 1881-1955)

My mood that morning matched the dreary Minnesota weather. The truth is, it was one of those days when I had to force myself to go visiting patients. I felt weighed down with self-pity and agitation.  I debated whether to hang out at the office to do paper work, but I knew that William was in the final days of dying. After chugging another cup of coffee, I decided that I needed to go and say goodbye. I am grateful beyond measure that I did.
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I had only known William for about three weeks. By the time he came on to hospice, William had largely lost his capacity to speak because of a fatal respiratory condition that required a tracheotomy and constant suctioning. And yet William didn’t need words to communicate what defined his outlook on life. The joy of this man’s spirit literally glowed on him. I didn’t get to hear any of the stories about William’s generosity and compassion until the day of his funeral, but I knew that he was extraordinary just by the way he smiled.

It was breathtaking, really. William had over the past few years suffered unimaginable physical travails due to his disease process. By the standards of our health and wealth obsessed society, William had an exceedingly poor “quality of life.” At one point during my first visit with him I had to hide my initial revulsion at certain aspects of his appearance (and having grown up in a funeral home, I am not usually in the the least bit squeamish). Sitting before me, however, was a man translucent with an open-hearted graciousness and tranquility that defied explanation. Sadly, William’s condition declined very rapidly, and by my second visit he was barely responsive.
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On that final visit to William, he was nearing death. As I trudged my way into the nursing facility (still wondering if I was in any spiritual shape to “help” anyone else at that moment), I was overtaken by the sounds of loud, joyous, spirited, Black Gospel music echoing from William’s room.

At first my sensibilities were jarred. Where I grew up, death was a somber thing, only to spoken about in hushed tones with low-key organ music playing in the background (funerals had a way of constantly interfering with my play time as a child!). Through a CD player, William’s room, on the other hand, had been converted into a lively, passion-filled African American Baptist tabernacle. There was clapping and dancing and the shouting of “Amen!” and “Alleluia!”

And there was the lifting of hands. Barely conscious and seemingly unable to respond to verbal requests, William was lying flat on his back with his arms open wide and lifted up in the ancient posture of prayer and praise.

The sight of that undid me. Here was one who had endured years of what would seem to most of us to be unbearable suffering and who was literally at death’s door. And yet William appeared to be enraptured in a cloud of joyous surrender, ecstasy, and love. The “fire” of divine energy about which the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes was ablaze in that room.

Through my mind flashed those haunting last words of Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he was hung by piano wire in a Nazi death camp:

This is the end – for me the beginning of life.

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In a recently published work, Archbishop Rowan Williams and Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister explore the spiritual meaning of the word “alleluia.” Asking the question whether saying “alleluia” in the face of failure, disappointment, suffering, and death is just one form of “emotionally unhealthy self-deception?” they reply,

alleluia is not a substitute for reality. It is simply the awareness of another whole kind of reality – beyond the immediate, beyond the delusion, beyond the instant perception of things…it calls us to see all of life as life-giving, somehow, in some way, whether its present gifting is apparent or not…It is learning to cling to a sense of alleluia that carries us through life to that moment when everything in us has come to fullness and our only next step is immersion in God.

I learned more about William at his funeral the following week. The old hospice adage, “People usually die as they have lived,” certainly rang true in his case. William knew what I have yet to practice in my own life: “alleluia” applies as much to the valleys and shadows and dark caves of life as it does to times of health, brightness, and blessing. The man did not have an easy life, and he most assuredly did not die an easy death. He approached both, however, with gratitude and a smile.

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I entered William’s room (or should I say “temple”?) in a state of self-pitying glumness. After being given a small taste of the “communion of death,” I walked out a changed man. Just spending a few moments in William’s presence – as he made his dying into a profound prayer of praise and thanksgiving – reminded me that in the bosom of G-d, there is Life and Love and Belonging beyond my wildest imaginings. The Mexican folk song, Pues Si Vivimos, beautifully expresses the heart of Jesus’ message this way:

When we are living, we are in the Lord. When we are dying, we are in the Lord. For in our living and in our dying, we belong to God, we belong to God.

Alleluia for that. And alleluia for William and for all my guides on the Jesus Way who teach me that in every end – even the end which we call death – is the beginning of life.

“Come in from the cold, friend, and join us,”

Bobby instructed me. At the time, Bobby was hugging two of his hospice nurses as he bid them a final farewell. Later in the day, Bobby would be leaving with his son for a city in the South where he was planning to die surrounded by family. Beloved patient that he was, Bobby was being visited by a stream of nursing home staff, hospice personnel, and fellow residents who wanted to say goodbye.

The “cold” place from which Bobby called me was a corner in his room where I had positioned myself in order to hold my own grief in check. Even in the midst of physical pain and emotional upheaval, Bobby clearly sensed my sadness and pulled me close to join the “group hug” that was taking place at his bedside. For moments, which seem as if they were frozen in time, Bobby’s room in that squalid, over-crowded nursing facility became a holy shrine, a tabernacle of the Divine Presence, a place where God’s healing grace transfigured the wounds of our humanity into bright rays of love.

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“Come in from the cold, friend.” These words of invitation, blessing and embrace were spoken by a man who had lived many of his days and nights in the cold, both figuratively and literally. Born into a poor, Mississippi Delta family only a generation removed from sharecropping in the Jim Crow South, Bobby spent much of his life feeding his addiction to alcohol and then crack cocaine. Along the way, Bobby served in the Army, fathered a child, and burned nearly every bridge he ever crossed.

As a consequence of the “hungry ghost” of addiction which enslaved him, Bobby had become homeless for significant stretches of time and developed more than a passing familiarity with the backstreets, flop houses, detox cells, and men’s shelters across the Delta. One particular “bottom” in his addiction career took place a few years ago when someone in a group of men with whom he had been gambling behind a dumpster stole the new dentures he had acquired just the day before at the VA Hospital.

Why Bobby, in a drunken stupor, decided to seek another “geographical” cure two years ago by hopping a bus from Mississippi to Minneapolis with no more than the shirt on his back is anyone’s guess. Bobby had no family or connections in Minnesota. He told me that he had passed through the Twin Cities once back in his Army days and that he remembered the people being “nice” here.

What is clear is that when Bobby arrived on the Minnesota plains from the Mississippi Delta two summers ago, he was homeless, friendless, penniless, and sick with cancer. Bobby was at the end of his rope. Bobby believed that he had come North to die as he had lived – ashamed, alone, high, out in the cold.

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“God often writes straight using crooked lines,” Mother Teresa liked to quip. From the vantage point of polite, respectable, Middle American society, the lines in Bobby’s shattered, destitute, alienated life couldn’t have looked much more crooked. In many respects, Bobby resembled what the old psychiatrists used to label “a hopeless case.” He had been in and out of rehab for years, failed to hold a job for any significant period of time, and betrayed the trust of everyone who tried to love him.

The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous states, “The age of miracles is still with us.” At the time of the “Big Book’s” publication in 1939, the assertion that recovery was possible for “hopeless” addicts such as Bobby was met in many quarters by skepticism, even derision. As far as the reigning lords of medicine were concerned, the only “hope” for addicts entailed locking them up and throwing away the key.

Along came the movement of Alcoholics Anonymous, claiming that through the adoption of certain spiritual principles, men and women in the death-throes of addiction could be healed and go on to live meaningful, productive lives in the service of others. Six decades and tens of millions of transformed lives later, we now know that long-term recovery from addiction is possible; addiction is not a moral pathology or curse, but a treatable disease.

The paradox of recovery (as understood by the Twelve Steps) is that an addict can begin to get better only by first admitting utter defeat. The old, “false” self – and all of its striving for control, mastery, and escape – must die and be replaced by the True Self – the person who God, in love, created us to be.

To use Christian language, addicts must realize how “lost” they are before being “found” by the miracle of God’s grace. In Eugene Peterson’s contemporary rendering of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “You are blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and God’s way. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.”

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When I first met Bobby, he was a man who had lost literally everything in his life, including his health. And yet before me on that nursing home bed sat a living miracle. For the first time in his adult life, Bobby had achieved nearly six months of continuous alcohol sobriety. Friends from a local AA group faithfully came three times a week to take Bobby to meetings. In working the Twelve Steps with his sponsor, Bobby confronted the horrible wreckage he had made of his life and began to make amends to those he had wounded the most. Bobby would eventually reconcile with his family in the South, and they would come to Minnesota to take him home to die within the circle of their loving care.

Even as the cancer took its brutal toll, Bobby became the Good Samaritan of the nursing facility. He spent his days visiting bed-bound patients, wheeling fellow residents to the outdoor patio, and spreading good cheer in whatever hall he was wandering. No matter how bad he was feeling physically, Bobby never failed to ask those of us who visited him about our children and families. The day before he left Minnesota to die, Bobby snuck a $5.00 bill into my Bible with a note instructing me to give it to my daughter who was turning seven that week. Every person on the hospice team has a story to tell about how Bobby touched them. His lead nurse told me that in her decade of hospice nursing, few patients have affected her as profoundly as Bobby.

In the eyes of what our culture values – wealth, health, productivity, longevity, status, morality, etc. – Bobby was an utter failure. And yet he finished his earthly pilgrimage as one of the most grace-filled souls I have ever met.

Why? Because in his total poverty (spiritual, financial, relational, emotional), Bobby was embraced by the Christ Mystery in its most radical, scandalous simplicity: we are loved, cherished, forgiven, and accepted by the Beloved who created us to have life and have it more abundantly. Like the dying thief on the cross and the Prodigal Son, Bobby’s abject need invited him to encounter the “One Thing Needful.” Indeed, Bobby was ushered into the Heart of God, which breathes, beats, bleeds and burns for us with a Love beyond our ability to comprehend.

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“Come in from the cold, friend.” During our many hours together, I had told Bobby some of my own story. In our shared histories of brokenness and failure, I experienced a powerful bond with Bobby. More significantly, however, it was Bobby’s metamorphosis from dejected street-dweller to joy-filled, spiritual teacher that drew me to him. I have more often than not chosen to live “out in the cold” of my own fear, defensiveness, ego, and loneliness. Bobby reminded me that it need not be that way, that the Beloved’s arms of divine mercy are always open and ready to embrace me, bless me, and heal me.

As I made my way across that room to join the “group hug” taking place at Bobby’s bedside, I realized that suddenly I was walking on holy ground. Without even knowing what I was doing, I found myself kneeling before Bobby to ask for his blessing. When he placed his hands on my head and prayed for me, I knew that God was using Bobby – broken, mangled, frail vessel that he was – not to preach but to make present the Jesus Way in all of its messy glory.

Holy Week is here, and Resurrection seems all the more real to me because of my friendship with Bobby. “Come in from the cold, friend,and join me,” I hear the Risen Christ say. Saints like Bobby have shown us the path. Time to get those feet a movin’…