Trusting The Rope Will Hold
Preaching
Gathering Up the Fragments
Preaching As Spiritual Practice
Then Peter began to speak to them: "... You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ -- he is Lord of all ... he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him ... They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day...."
-- Acts 10:34a, 36a, 38b, 39b-40
... She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God."
-- John 20:14-17
There is a world of difference between believing things about Jesus and believing in Jesus.
The two are related: you can't believe in Jesus if you don't hold certain convictions about him. You can't know him without knowing about him. The difference is like the difference between reading about love and falling in love, between studying the proper technique for rock climbing versus knowing what it's like to lean back in mid-air, entrusting your life to the rope around your waist and the person beneath you.
Nonetheless, faith in Jesus begins by learning about him. Learning about him is no easy task, particularly now, when distortions and misperceptions about him abound. The caricatures of Jesus in culture are among the greatest obstacles to believing in him -- or worse, they can lead to belief in a false Jesus. But I wonder if it isn't easier to hold onto caricatures we reject as a means of avoiding knowing him as he is and risking a relationship that might change us.
This is what I know about Jesus. He was born in Palestine during the reign of Herod the Great. He grew up in the town of Nazareth. He emerged as a public figure in his early thirties, rising out of the movement begun by the John the Baptist, he had a ministry of healing and teaching that lasted about three years, focused primarily in the region of Galilee. He made the fateful decision, however, to bring his message to Jerusalem, the center of religious and political power. There he openly challenged the religious leaders of his people, which did not sit well with them. He also aroused suspicions of the Roman authorities and that led to his crucifixion, a form of death they reserved for insurrectionists and escaped slaves.
It's impossible to understand Jesus without placing him in the tradition of the spiritual prophets of ancient Judaism. These were people who had a strong sense of a spiritual realm that informs and gives meaning to human existence. Jesus was exceptionally connected to and empowered by this spiritual realm, and he used his connection to heal people and teach them how to live. He lived to help people know God as he knew God. As we heard his disciple, Peter, say about him, "Jesus went around doing good."
The world religions scholar, Huston Smith, describes Jesus this way:
Circulating easily among ordinary people and social misfits, healing them, counseling them, helping them out of chasms of despair, Jesus went around doing good. People tend to dislike being interrupted, but it was impossible to interrupt Jesus because he simply dealt with what was at hand. He did so with such single-mindedness and effectiveness that those who were with him found their estimate of him persistently modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave.1
Jesus was also an extraordinarily vivid teacher. "Jesus talks of camels that squeeze their humps through needles' eyes," Huston Smith writes. "His characters go around with timbers protruding from their eyes while they look for tiny specks in the eyes of others and of people whose outer lives are stately mansions while their inner lives stink of decaying corpses." His teaching style was invitational. "Instead of telling people what to do or believe," Smith writes, "he invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so, their behavior would change."2
Jesus' core message is simple, summarized in a few, often-repeated phrases: "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Love your enemies." "Blessed are the poor." "Forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven." "Come unto me all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."
Most of the time Jesus told stories: of buried treasure, lost coins, and sowers in the field; of a good Samaritan (which would be like us telling a story today about a good terrorist), and of a man who had two sons. More than anything Jesus wanted people to believe two important facts of life: God's overwhelming love for us and of our need to accept that love and let it flow through us.
Jesus lived in such a way that people believed him when he spoke of God's love, for he himself loved freely. His heart went out to all people, no matter if they were rich or poor, young or old, saints or sinners. He knew that everyone has a need to belong and he encouraged those who had the means to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to their tables. He loved children and he hated injustice for what it did to the most vulnerable people. He also hated hypocrisy, for what it did to the human soul.3
This is who Jesus was when he lived on this earth. I want you to know these things about him and more, all that helps you understand why our ancestors began to speak of him as the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, how they came to the extraordinary conclusion that in Jesus we see not only what it means to be fully human, but also God.
In the words of Saint Paul:
Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on the cross.
-- Philippians 2:5-11
From the gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people ... He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own people, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
-- John 1:1, 3-4, 10-12, 14
These are beautiful and essential Christian teachings. But you know, if that's all that the church did -- teach about Jesus and pass beliefs about him down from one generation to the next -- it wouldn't be enough. As important as these teachings are, quite bluntly, it wouldn't be worth your time and effort to come to church, nor mine, if learning about him were all we were here to do, if in the process of learning about Jesus we didn't come to believe in him in a way that makes a difference in how we live.
Believing in Jesus is not easy. If you struggle with your belief in him, don't imagine that you're alone. Or if you don't struggle because you've already decided that you can't believe in him, or don't want to, don't imagine that somehow sets you apart from the rest of us.
The writer, Kathleen Norris, describes her struggle with Jesus this way: "When I first began to attend church services as an adult, I found it ironic that it was the language about Jesus, meant to be the most inviting, that made me feel the most left out ... I felt a void at the center of things. My Christianity seemed to be missing its center." I can't tell you how many people have said something like that to me, that it would be easier to be Christian if we didn't talk about Jesus all the time.
When Kathleen Norris confessed her feelings about Jesus to a monk, he reassured her by saying, "Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another. Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive."4 Norris, like most of us, came around to Jesus gradually. "I caught glimpses of him," she writes. "One day in church I heard the lines, 'Do this in memory of me,' as if for the first time, as a plea from a man about to die. In my reading I encountered a thirteenth-century housewife who told of Christ appearing to her asking, 'Why have you abandoned me, who never abandoned thee?' " And then friends began to tell her how much they were inspired by her love of Christ. "I didn't think I had any," she wrote, "but I began to realize that the joke might be on me."5
What does it look like to believe in Jesus? I think we catch glimpses of him, too, and like Mary at the tomb, we don't recognize him, at first. Sometimes we don't recognize him at all. But other times, deep inside, we hear him call our names: Mary -- Mariann -- Frank -- Carole -- Steve. In that moment, we feel his presence and love.
One of the first times I consciously heard his voice was when I was in my early twenties. It was during a time when everyday life asked of me something I didn't know how to do. I woke up every morning anxious and afraid. One day, railing against my life as I took a walk, I asked, "Is it always going to be like this?" I didn't think of my question as a prayer, but it must have been, because the answer came immediately: "Yes." Then I heard: "But I will be with you." Imagine that. I wasn't alone.
Believing in him is also like leaning into thin air, trusting that a rope will hold. It involves letting go. When I imagine what it will be like to die, I think of leaning back, letting go, and trusting that God will be there to catch me. Believing in Jesus now involves practicing in small ways of leaning back and letting go as I live.
Believing in Jesus involves accepting change. Resurrection is about change. To believe in resurrection is to trust that we can have another chance, a fresh start. More than that: to believe in resurrection is to trust that no matter how bad things get, no matter how stark the failure or disappointment or grief, God can raise new life in us.
Let me suggest two concrete ways to practice believing in Jesus. The first: Whenever life gets hard, really hard, and you don't know if you can face what it is that life is asking of you, or to let go of, or to change, lean into the pain. Don't run away. Lean into it, and open yourself to the grace of Christ in that place. I promise you that he will meet you there. You can trust that the rope will hold, the ground beneath you is firm, and that you are not alone.
Second, whenever you are at a crossroads, when you have a decision to make and you aren't sure what to do, pay attention to what inspires you, makes your heart beat faster, and gives you joy. Follow your inspiration, and live by it, and I promise you that Jesus will meet you there. That doesn't mean that you'll succeed in living your inspiration: You will often fail, but so what? Whether we succeed or fail matters far less than the choice to live according to what inspires us. Failure is never the final word.
Inspiration takes many forms, some dramatic to help us through big decisions, and some rather ordinary. A student once asked Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard, what inspired him. No one was more surprised than Gomes himself by his answer. What inspired him, he said, was the beginning of each new day. "When I wake up each morning, I rejoice that I've been given a chance to start over. When I get up in the middle of the night, as I do from time to time, and stumble on my way to a private mission and hurt my toe, I don't swear. I say, 'Thank God I'm still alive to feel this!' For I know that when morning comes, I have a chance to start over."6
That is what today is for us, too: a new day, a fresh start, with the assurance of God's presence with us, and through us, in the world. We can make of it what we choose. We can go it alone if that's our wish. But if we choose to believe in him, Christ can be our companion and friend, our courage and inspiration. It's not a decision that Christians make once and are done with. It's a daily choice, and some days are easier than others. But as we invite him, day by day he comes and makes his home in us. He calls us by name. He is our strength, our peace, and our path.
____________
1. Huston Smith The Soul of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 48.
2. Ibid, p. 51.
3. This is a summary of Smith's description as found in The Soul of Christianity. I am indebted to Smith for this sermon's inspiration.
4. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), pp. 161-162.
5. Ibid, p. 161.
6. Peter Gomes, "Starting Over," in Strength for the Journey (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 258.
-- Acts 10:34a, 36a, 38b, 39b-40
... She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God."
-- John 20:14-17
There is a world of difference between believing things about Jesus and believing in Jesus.
The two are related: you can't believe in Jesus if you don't hold certain convictions about him. You can't know him without knowing about him. The difference is like the difference between reading about love and falling in love, between studying the proper technique for rock climbing versus knowing what it's like to lean back in mid-air, entrusting your life to the rope around your waist and the person beneath you.
Nonetheless, faith in Jesus begins by learning about him. Learning about him is no easy task, particularly now, when distortions and misperceptions about him abound. The caricatures of Jesus in culture are among the greatest obstacles to believing in him -- or worse, they can lead to belief in a false Jesus. But I wonder if it isn't easier to hold onto caricatures we reject as a means of avoiding knowing him as he is and risking a relationship that might change us.
This is what I know about Jesus. He was born in Palestine during the reign of Herod the Great. He grew up in the town of Nazareth. He emerged as a public figure in his early thirties, rising out of the movement begun by the John the Baptist, he had a ministry of healing and teaching that lasted about three years, focused primarily in the region of Galilee. He made the fateful decision, however, to bring his message to Jerusalem, the center of religious and political power. There he openly challenged the religious leaders of his people, which did not sit well with them. He also aroused suspicions of the Roman authorities and that led to his crucifixion, a form of death they reserved for insurrectionists and escaped slaves.
It's impossible to understand Jesus without placing him in the tradition of the spiritual prophets of ancient Judaism. These were people who had a strong sense of a spiritual realm that informs and gives meaning to human existence. Jesus was exceptionally connected to and empowered by this spiritual realm, and he used his connection to heal people and teach them how to live. He lived to help people know God as he knew God. As we heard his disciple, Peter, say about him, "Jesus went around doing good."
The world religions scholar, Huston Smith, describes Jesus this way:
Circulating easily among ordinary people and social misfits, healing them, counseling them, helping them out of chasms of despair, Jesus went around doing good. People tend to dislike being interrupted, but it was impossible to interrupt Jesus because he simply dealt with what was at hand. He did so with such single-mindedness and effectiveness that those who were with him found their estimate of him persistently modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave.1
Jesus was also an extraordinarily vivid teacher. "Jesus talks of camels that squeeze their humps through needles' eyes," Huston Smith writes. "His characters go around with timbers protruding from their eyes while they look for tiny specks in the eyes of others and of people whose outer lives are stately mansions while their inner lives stink of decaying corpses." His teaching style was invitational. "Instead of telling people what to do or believe," Smith writes, "he invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so, their behavior would change."2
Jesus' core message is simple, summarized in a few, often-repeated phrases: "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Love your enemies." "Blessed are the poor." "Forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven." "Come unto me all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."
Most of the time Jesus told stories: of buried treasure, lost coins, and sowers in the field; of a good Samaritan (which would be like us telling a story today about a good terrorist), and of a man who had two sons. More than anything Jesus wanted people to believe two important facts of life: God's overwhelming love for us and of our need to accept that love and let it flow through us.
Jesus lived in such a way that people believed him when he spoke of God's love, for he himself loved freely. His heart went out to all people, no matter if they were rich or poor, young or old, saints or sinners. He knew that everyone has a need to belong and he encouraged those who had the means to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to their tables. He loved children and he hated injustice for what it did to the most vulnerable people. He also hated hypocrisy, for what it did to the human soul.3
This is who Jesus was when he lived on this earth. I want you to know these things about him and more, all that helps you understand why our ancestors began to speak of him as the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, how they came to the extraordinary conclusion that in Jesus we see not only what it means to be fully human, but also God.
In the words of Saint Paul:
Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on the cross.
-- Philippians 2:5-11
From the gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people ... He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own people, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
-- John 1:1, 3-4, 10-12, 14
These are beautiful and essential Christian teachings. But you know, if that's all that the church did -- teach about Jesus and pass beliefs about him down from one generation to the next -- it wouldn't be enough. As important as these teachings are, quite bluntly, it wouldn't be worth your time and effort to come to church, nor mine, if learning about him were all we were here to do, if in the process of learning about Jesus we didn't come to believe in him in a way that makes a difference in how we live.
Believing in Jesus is not easy. If you struggle with your belief in him, don't imagine that you're alone. Or if you don't struggle because you've already decided that you can't believe in him, or don't want to, don't imagine that somehow sets you apart from the rest of us.
The writer, Kathleen Norris, describes her struggle with Jesus this way: "When I first began to attend church services as an adult, I found it ironic that it was the language about Jesus, meant to be the most inviting, that made me feel the most left out ... I felt a void at the center of things. My Christianity seemed to be missing its center." I can't tell you how many people have said something like that to me, that it would be easier to be Christian if we didn't talk about Jesus all the time.
When Kathleen Norris confessed her feelings about Jesus to a monk, he reassured her by saying, "Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another. Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive."4 Norris, like most of us, came around to Jesus gradually. "I caught glimpses of him," she writes. "One day in church I heard the lines, 'Do this in memory of me,' as if for the first time, as a plea from a man about to die. In my reading I encountered a thirteenth-century housewife who told of Christ appearing to her asking, 'Why have you abandoned me, who never abandoned thee?' " And then friends began to tell her how much they were inspired by her love of Christ. "I didn't think I had any," she wrote, "but I began to realize that the joke might be on me."5
What does it look like to believe in Jesus? I think we catch glimpses of him, too, and like Mary at the tomb, we don't recognize him, at first. Sometimes we don't recognize him at all. But other times, deep inside, we hear him call our names: Mary -- Mariann -- Frank -- Carole -- Steve. In that moment, we feel his presence and love.
One of the first times I consciously heard his voice was when I was in my early twenties. It was during a time when everyday life asked of me something I didn't know how to do. I woke up every morning anxious and afraid. One day, railing against my life as I took a walk, I asked, "Is it always going to be like this?" I didn't think of my question as a prayer, but it must have been, because the answer came immediately: "Yes." Then I heard: "But I will be with you." Imagine that. I wasn't alone.
Believing in him is also like leaning into thin air, trusting that a rope will hold. It involves letting go. When I imagine what it will be like to die, I think of leaning back, letting go, and trusting that God will be there to catch me. Believing in Jesus now involves practicing in small ways of leaning back and letting go as I live.
Believing in Jesus involves accepting change. Resurrection is about change. To believe in resurrection is to trust that we can have another chance, a fresh start. More than that: to believe in resurrection is to trust that no matter how bad things get, no matter how stark the failure or disappointment or grief, God can raise new life in us.
Let me suggest two concrete ways to practice believing in Jesus. The first: Whenever life gets hard, really hard, and you don't know if you can face what it is that life is asking of you, or to let go of, or to change, lean into the pain. Don't run away. Lean into it, and open yourself to the grace of Christ in that place. I promise you that he will meet you there. You can trust that the rope will hold, the ground beneath you is firm, and that you are not alone.
Second, whenever you are at a crossroads, when you have a decision to make and you aren't sure what to do, pay attention to what inspires you, makes your heart beat faster, and gives you joy. Follow your inspiration, and live by it, and I promise you that Jesus will meet you there. That doesn't mean that you'll succeed in living your inspiration: You will often fail, but so what? Whether we succeed or fail matters far less than the choice to live according to what inspires us. Failure is never the final word.
Inspiration takes many forms, some dramatic to help us through big decisions, and some rather ordinary. A student once asked Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard, what inspired him. No one was more surprised than Gomes himself by his answer. What inspired him, he said, was the beginning of each new day. "When I wake up each morning, I rejoice that I've been given a chance to start over. When I get up in the middle of the night, as I do from time to time, and stumble on my way to a private mission and hurt my toe, I don't swear. I say, 'Thank God I'm still alive to feel this!' For I know that when morning comes, I have a chance to start over."6
That is what today is for us, too: a new day, a fresh start, with the assurance of God's presence with us, and through us, in the world. We can make of it what we choose. We can go it alone if that's our wish. But if we choose to believe in him, Christ can be our companion and friend, our courage and inspiration. It's not a decision that Christians make once and are done with. It's a daily choice, and some days are easier than others. But as we invite him, day by day he comes and makes his home in us. He calls us by name. He is our strength, our peace, and our path.
____________
1. Huston Smith The Soul of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 48.
2. Ibid, p. 51.
3. This is a summary of Smith's description as found in The Soul of Christianity. I am indebted to Smith for this sermon's inspiration.
4. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), pp. 161-162.
5. Ibid, p. 161.
6. Peter Gomes, "Starting Over," in Strength for the Journey (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 258.
