Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 17, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of eternal life, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

We are in the weeds now on our way through the Great Fifty Days of Easter. When we have three readings like these, I think of what our resident Rabbi Howard Berman usually asks me when he preaches to us: “why do I always get the hard lessons?” My response to him is that the lessons are always hard. They are either hard to believe, or easy to believe and hard to stomach. Encountering Biblical texts, for me, is something like an archaeological dig: it’s difficult to get through layers upon layers of heavy hard 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 that you may or may not find! We are digging for evidence and mining for meaning when we search for beauty under the rubble in our sacred literature, and the question to ask about any scriptural artifact is not, “how and where is this still happening?”

During Eastertide, our lectionary offers 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, or First Testament lessons, we have passages from the Acts of the Apostles’ romantic accounts of the beginning of Christianity, written toward the end of the first century (aka the good old days). 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 Divine, the apocalyptic political manifesto written from exile about how, in the end, God is going to set everything right that the Romans are setting wrong. And during Eastertide, we have stories about resurrection appearances – except we have run out of those, and now we’re back in the middle of the Gospel of John, on the Portico of Solomon, in the winter during the Feast of the Dedication – in other words, Hanukkah!

The Portico of Solomon was a meeting place where people discussed scripture before and after worship. It was the Bible Study area at the Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon, of course, is associated with Wisdom, and wisdom is always what’s needed most when studying ancient writings. The view from the portico was of the Kidron Valley, a place of palace gardens and of tombs – an early version of Mount Auburn Cemetery comes to my mind. And it’s the valley of last judgment in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. The springs in this valley were the primary water supply for Jerusalem. [1] (In other words, the springs of the water of life.) Just beyond the little valley is the Mount of Olives.

Hanukkah, as you probably know, 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. So that’s what they might have been talking about in Bible Study that day. A friend of mine once explained to me that, almost every Jewish holiday is essentially observed 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! Let’s celebrate together! (That’s true about our Eucharist also, by the way.)

But the folks who surrounded Jesus in John’s 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; it’s more menacing. Indeed, what happens next in the story is that enraged people took up stones to throw at Jesus, the argument continued 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 (followers in the end of the first century) 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 – a sense of deep peace 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 and hard to hear, 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 and even deadly forms of Christianity through the umpteen 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 and through his actions, his behavior, he’s completely united with God.

Barbara Brown Taylor once 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.’” [2] 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, his behaviors, were 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? What do you need in order to practice love that is stronger than death?

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 employing 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, you God-struggler, the Holy is 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 includes regular involvement with a brave and welcoming community, plenty of encouragement, support, and forgiveness, and large doses of beautiful music to recharge our batteries, to restore our souls, to wake up, to rise up! It is our way of getting a hand to help us up (as Peter gave to Dorcas). Many of us need to experience beauty in here so that we can go back out there ready to wash those feet, give more 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 be 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, remembering that the gracious, merciful and compassionate Holy One is always in our midst.

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