Those of us who were fortunate enough to hear Rabbi Berman preach last week, listened to him ponder why he always gets the hard lessons when he’s scheduled to preach! And my response to him was that the lessons are always hard. They are either hard to believe or easy to believe and hard to stomach. It reminds me of what my grandmother always says about getting old not being for sissies. Holy Scripture is not for sissies! Encountering scripture, for me, is something like an archaeological dig – getting through layers upon layers of heavy stuff piled on top of a mysterious and beautiful mosaic floor that has tiles missing when you finally get down to it; or like mining for valuable gems – my own definition of the word “exegesis” is “mining for meaning.”

During Eastertide, our lectionary gives us no lessons from the Hebrew Bible. The effect, I think, is to overemphasize a break between Jesus’ followers and his tradition and his people.  Instead of Hebrew Bible lessons, we have passages from the Acts of the Apostles’ romantic accounts of the beginning of Christianity (Volume II of the Gospel of Luke), written toward the end of the first century. Today it’s Peter raising Dorcas from the dead with a line that is almost exactly the same as what Jesus said to raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus reportedly said, “talitha cum” which means arise or wake up. Here Peter says, “tabitha anasteythi” which means arise or wake up. In other words, Peter was ministering just like Jesus. During Eastertide, we have passages from the Revelation to John, the apocalyptic political manifesto written from exile about how, in the end, God is going to set everything right that the Romans have set wrong. The Romans were going to get what was coming to them. And during Eastertide, we have passages about resurrection appearances – except we have run out of those stories, and now we’re back in the middle of the Gospel of John, in the winter during the Feast of the Dedication – in other words, Hanukkah!

Hanukkah may worth mentioning, according to John, because it notes the passage of time, but just saying winter could have done that. I think John mentioned Hanukkah is the celebration of liberation from the Syrian King Antiochus who had defiled the temple. When Judas Maccabeus and his brothers reclaimed and rededicated the temple a miracle of abundance occurred. One of my Jewish friends said the other night, every Jewish holiday is essentially celebrated like this: we hear a story of how the bad guys tried to wipe us out, God was faithful and we were liberated. We are free, so let’s eat!

But the folks who surrounded Jesus in this story were not in a celebratory mood. The verses just before this say that people were divided about whether or not Jesus was possessed by a demon – whether or not he was crazy. The question these people ask, literally translated, is “how long are you taking away our life?” It’s an idiom that in modern Greek means, “how long will you irritate us?” “How long are you going to drain the energy right out of our heels?” “Your craziness is making us crazy.” The gathering word is more like encircling or surrounding – it’s more confrontational in its sense. This is not a story of a gathering of people with a sincere desire to get a question resolved. Indeed, what happens next in the story is that enraged people take up stones to throw at Jesus, the argument continues a bit more and Jesus escaped to the desert.

The thing is that this may be pure fantasy – this scene may never have happened. More plausibly, it might have happened that Jesus’ followers were accused of being crazy and driving others crazy and making folks mad enough to kill them. We could all picture that. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched does it? And, as the saying goes, just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Here’s what I think is going on in this story. There is a debate going on about identity that goes something like this: “Just who do you think you are, Jesus, the savior of the world?” And the response from Jesus is, “I’ve told you that the work I do testifies to my relationship with God. I’ve told you about the work but you aren’t getting it. Actions speak louder than words. If you were following along, you would get it because my actions would be speaking to you. But you’re not following – you’re not watching what I do. For the folks who are following along, my work gives them a sense of timelessness, of Oneness with the universe without beginning or ending – that no-one can take away. It’s amazing. I’m doing God’s work.”

Now I know that this stuff is so incredibly loaded – I got a preview of how hard this passage is to hear when we spent some time in Bible study in our vestry meeting last week with this story. So bear with me a minute. Think again about an archaeological dig. We’ve got to remove the weight of the Christological controversies of the second, third and fourth centuries and the load of Trinitarian doctrine that developed out of those controversies. And before we even get to that, we’ve got to dig through our own knowledge of exclusive, hurtful – nay deadly forms of Christianity through the centuries since then. It will take many bulldozers. (I am one.)

Jesus is not saying that these people cannot be followers. He is not saying that they should be followers or that they can’t or don’t have a chance to experience timelessness because they aren’t followers. He’s just saying that the reason they don’t get what he’s talking about is that they’re not followers. Jesus is saying that his followers have something that can’t be taken away – an experience of One-ness that transcends chronological time – a fullness of life. He is not saying that he and God are one nature or essence or person. Jesus is saying that in his actions, he’s completely united with God.

Barbara Brown Taylor recently wrote, “When people wanted [Jesus] to tell them what God’s realm was like, he told them stories about their own lives. When people wanted him to tell them God’s truth about something, he asked them what they thought. With all kinds of opportunities to tell people what to think, he told them what to do instead. Wash feet. Give your stuff away. Share your food. Favor reprobates. Pray for those who are out to get you. Be the first to say, ‘I’m sorry.’”(1) It is maddening isn’t it?

And it’s one thing to imagine it in church and quite another to put it into practice in real life. And real life is what Jesus means when he’s talking about eternal life. He’s certainly not talking about some never-never land kind of heaven. The Church may have promised that, but I’m quite sure Jesus never did. Jesus’ actions were all answering the question, “is there life before death?”

What does it take for any of us to hear Jesus’ voice and follow Jesus’ lead to answer that question for people who just don’t have much experience of life before death? What do you need in order to string together many acts of kindness without developing and nursing a grudge? What do you need in order to: “Wash feet. Give your stuff away. Share your food. Favor reprobates. Pray for those who are out to get you. Be the first to say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Visit with those who are lonely. Care for those who are suffering. Welcome strangers – remembering what it feels like to be a stranger?
I imagine that the answers are different from person to person and from congregation to congregation. The answers in this congregation about what it might take for any of us to hear Jesus’ voice include those bulldozers that I mentioned earlier, some better translations, and heaps of compassion and the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whatever Jesus might have said and whatever else his followers reported that he said. And even when we get through all of that, I can tell you from personal experience, it’s often still very hard to hear. In my head, my difficulty hearing usually has something to do with fear. I don’t know about the voices in your head that make Jesus’ voice hard to hear. Maybe they’re voices of fear or maybe resentment or indifference, or sorrow or despair. It’s not coincidental that the central command in the Hebrew Bible is “listen to the Holy One!”

The answers in this congregation about what it might take for any of us to follow Jesus’ lead in helping people experience life before death include regular involvement with a friendly and welcoming community, plenty of encouragement and support, and a large dose of beautiful music. (You didn’t think I was going to say that did you?) In this congregation, many of us need a large dose of beautiful music to recharge our batteries. It is our way of getting a hand to help us up (as Peter gave to Dorcas). Many of us need beautiful music in here so that we can go back out there ready to wash those feet, give that stuff away, share our food, favor reprobates, pray for those who are out to get us (and there are people out to get us), be the first to say, “I’m sorry,” or the last to say “I told you so,” to visit people who won’t want us to leave, to provide some tender loving care to people who are hurting (even if they’ve brought the hurt on themselves), to do justice and to love mercy with friends and strangers – especially strangers.

On this “last cantata” Sunday, I can tell you that the music today is going to nourish most of you for at least a couple of weeks to come, but don’t stay away for long. Beautiful music will happen here week after week, all summer long, I guarantee. And you are going to need nourishment because the world will need your acts of kindness more than ever.