Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Casseroles, Cakes and Grace Abundant

Olivia Hamilton
Fourth Sunday in Easter, Year C
April 10, 2016

It has been my experience that in times of great shock, or sorrow, or in times of transition more broadly, food plays an essential role. I remember last January when my niece was born, and my partner and I traveled to Tennessee to meet the baby and to help out around the house as my sister and her husband settled into the shock of this new life as parents. It was oddly quiet those first few days, and there wasn’t much for us to do, all we could think of to make ourselves useful was to cook. We probably made a dozen trips to the grocery store while we were there that week, and far more soups and casseroles and cakes than anyone in the house could possibly eat.

This is a seemingly universal tenant of human life: when a friend is in a state of shock or sorrow or newness, we get out the pots and pans. We reach for the time-tested carrot cake recipe. We order the pizza, extra cheese, or invite them over for ice cream and bad reality TV.

As many of you know, Marilynne Robinson, one of my favorite novelists, was here giving a lecture on Monday. I found the lecture dense and perplexing, and hearing it solidified that Robinson’s fiction does more for me, spiritually and intellectually, than her essays. Either way, in preparation for her visit, I recently re-read Housekeeping, my favorite novel of hers, and perhaps my favorite novel ever, and I have been thinking about why this book occupies such a profound position in my imagination as a Christian.

Housekeeping is a somewhat somber story about the repeated abandonment of two young sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are raised first by their mother, and then when she dies by their grandmother, and then when she dies by their two ill-equipped great aunts, and then by their peculiar aunt Sylvie who drifts into town after years riding the rails. The narrative is one of loss and transience and “other-ness.” The chaos of the girls’ lives sets them apart from their peers, and Sylvie’s poor housekeeping, among other odd habits, make them the talk of their small, flat, prairie town. Towards the end of the novel, this tension between them and the rest of the town comes to a head when a group of church ladies arrives at the house in order to check-in on the girls, and to attempt to keep them from running away -- becoming drifters, like their aunt Sylvie. The women come bearing armfuls of cakes and casseroles, and also with motives “complex and unsearchable but all of one general kind,” Robinson writes through the narrator, Ruth. “They were obliged to come by their notions of piety and good breeding, and by a desire, a determination, to keep me safely indoors.” Needless to say, the casseroles and cakes are never eaten by the girls. Ruth says, “the food they brought couldn’t fill the hunger I had.”

If Housekeeping is a story of transience and abandonment and insufficiency, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, another one of my favorites, is one that elicits rootedness and belonging and abundance. The novel is a long love letter written by an aging minister, John Ames, to his young son. He reflects on the joys and challenges of ministry, ancestral folklore, and even the way light looks coming through the trees. Where Ruth and Lucille are perennially abandoned by those that should love them, John Ames’ letter to his son – which he knows he won’t read or be able to comprehend until after he is dead – is a soliloquy of gratitude for a life well lived, an acceptance of a fate that is in God’s hands, and perhaps most of all, a way of expressing a deep sense of the abundance of home amid the transience of the changes and chances of this life.

In John Ames’s letter, he recalls countless casseroles that were brought to him over the years by church ladies, but this time they seem, in a way, to be redeemed. It is in these well-intentioned meals that he has found comfort over the years. They are emblematic, I think, of the goodness of people, and of the Church at its best – a network of people nourishing one another in thought, word, and deed, even in the face of instability and uncertainty. There is a scene that I remember well where the minister John Ames feeds his son bites of all of those lovingly-delivered casseroles, a bean salad made by Mrs. Brown, a fruitcake made by Ms. McNeill, and he writes “I thought of the day I gave you communion. I wonder if you thought of that also.”

Robinson uses these characters and storylines, their casseroles and cakes, to explore deeper questions about the human experience: how are we able to cope with loss and abandonment? How do we come to terms with the abundance we’ve been dished? How is our daily experience, our eating and drinking and sleeping and moving, shaped by the knowledge that death will not have the final word? How are we as individuals, and as a Church, called to live into our ministries?

In the scene from John’s Gospel, the disciples encounter Jesus for a third time after he had been raised from the dead. You’ll remember the moment I told you about when I went to visit my niece for the first time, and all I could think to do to stay busy as my world was being radically altered by this new life was to go to the grocery store? I think this moment is an iteration of that same story line. We know that the disciples know that Jesus is alive. We also know that all they can think to do, when faced with the shock of the new, is to mill around the beach until finally Peter suggests…I guess we should go and try to catch some fish? In the unfamiliar territory of life after death, the disciples seem to cling to the mundane rhythms of their old lives, unsure of what to do with their time, without a clear sense of purpose. So, naturally, they focus on food. They lower their net into the water, just as they have done a thousand times before, hoping to catch a handful of fish. Yet when they do, they find that the water is barren. I love the humanity of this moment: the disciples know on some level that their world has been radically altered, yet they still can’t imagine the goodness and grace and abundance, in short the new way of being and living, that Christ’s Resurrection makes available to them. They still cling to old ways of thinking and living.

I also love that Jesus, having just been raised from the dead, chooses to then do this profoundly simple and tactile thing; to eat fish and bread on the beach with his friends. Like the casserole that John Ames feeds his son, the breakfast on the beach is not necessarily a Eucharistic meal, but in a way, it too embodies precisely what this sacrament is about for us – gathering together, disciples ourselves, being nourished and sustained by one who loves us and gives us life. UCC minister and writer Nancy Rockwell writes about this scene, saying “[The season of] Easter is [like] a day at home. And days like that are about nearness. Nearness isn’t about acquaintances, or social friends, or party lists. It’s about the people who stop in and sit at the kitchen table with you when you have your bathrobe and slippers on.” Here is Jesus at home.

She goes on to say, “Easter is about being together, the joy of nearness that lives beyond all other things.” For me, that joy of nearness is so profoundly expressed when Peter - who we remember had denied Jesus three times - saw him on the shore. Rather than hiding in shame, he jumped off the ship and into the water, arms paddling gleefully and urgently toward Jesus. We don’t see Jesus here as some faint or phantom-like figure, we know him instead in this scene as the incarnate friend the disciples tenderly loved, and whose own love for the disciples was enough to dissolve even the deepest shame.

Perhaps this is the moment, for Peter at least, when the newness of Resurrection suddenly becomes real to him, and instead of idly passing the time, he understands that his life is full of purpose, and full of grace. The abundance of fish are a miracle, to be sure, but it’s the abundance of grace, I think, that we are really invited to pay attention to here.

In some ways, I think, the grace of Resurrection is too daunting for us to accept all at once. And perhaps this story highlights the ways that grace is known to us in small moments; a meal with friends that brings you back to the present moment and back to your body when you’ve been adrift in barren waters. Or, like with Peter, forgiveness from someone you’ve betrayed and an unexpected opportunity to express love where before there was harm. These are the moments that allow us to come to terms with the joyful shock of Resurrection, the reality of life after death.

Both the gospel text and Marilynne Robinson’s novel wrestles with similar questions about the human experience: questions of loss and abundance, transience and home, grace and purpose. It seems to me that something about being human means that even though we see indications of Resurrection all around us all the time, we keep living as if this isn’t the case. We keep dropping our nets into water where nothing lives or moves or has its being, and coming up empty, refusing to see that there is another way, needing to be reminded over and over again that God’s plan for us is yet unfinished, or that life after death is a possibility. 

But then when it seems like all hope is lost, something about our encounter with the risen Christ tells us to put the net in again, and next to come and eat. And then to go out into the world with our casseroles and our cakes, or with whatever we have to offer that might bespeak of Christ’s nourishing love, and to feed.



Amen.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Out From Behind Closed Doors


“Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said ‘Peace be with you.’”
 John 20:26

The Rev. Luther Zeigler
The Second Sunday in Easter
April 3, 2016

            Today’s gospel text is commonly called ‘the story of Doubting Thomas,’ and it would be reasonable to suppose that a sermon on this Second Sunday of Easter should focus on Thomas and his well-known problem with doubt.  And goodness knows, there is much to be learned from Thomas’ story about the relationship between faith and doubt, believing and seeing, and about Christ’s willingness to meet Thomas where he is. But, I submit to you, that as rich as that aspect of the story may be, there is just as much to be learned in today’s text by closely watching the interaction between the risen Christ and the other disciples. Let me try to convince you.
            In John’s gospel, you may remember, the risen Christ first appears to Mary Magdalene.   After discovering the empty tomb on Easter morning, and telling Peter and John what she has discovered, Mary then has her extraordinary encounter with her Lord.  Initially, you’ll recall, she doesn’t recognize that the strange man lingering near the tomb is the risen Christ – that is, until he calls out her name.  “Mary!,” he says.  And it is then that she realizes that it is Jesus who stands before her.  “Go to my brothers and tell them that I am alive,” Jesus says.  And so she does.  Mary, the first apostle, immediately runs to the other disciples to tell them the good news that Christ is risen. The first Easter proclamation. And that brings us to today’s text.
            Now, one might think that in the wake of such unexpectedly wonderful news, the disciples would be dancing with joy in the streets or that they would quickly return to the tomb in the hope that they too could greet the risen Christ.  But, no, that is not what the disciples do.  Seemingly afraid of even their own shadow, they instead retreat into someone’s house, we’re not told whose, behind locked doors, cowering in fear, apparently unsure of what to do next.
            Perhaps they are afraid that they too may be arrested and crucified if identified as one of Jesus’ followers?  Perhaps they are afraid that they might be accused of stealing Jesus’ body to fabricate a resurrection, as the chief priests had openly predicted?  Or, perhaps, they are even a little afraid of meeting the risen Christ?  After all, unlike the women and the beloved disciple, most of them had fled the scene of the crucifixion.  If I had abandoned my dearest friend in his greatest hour of need, I am not so sure I would be eager to see him quite so soon, if ever.  All of these are possibilities.  The only thing we know for sure is that the disciples are, once again, afraid.
             And so, they hide.  They lock themselves behind closed doors.  There is irony here, of course:  Just as the chief priests after Jesus’ death ordered that his body be secured in the tomb behind a big boulder with guards standing at the entrance, because they were afraid of what might happen next, so now the disciples, after hearing that Jesus is alive from one of their own, seek to lock themselves behind the security of a heavy door, also out of fear of what might happen next.
            The risen Christ, however, will not let our fears stand between us and Him.  Instead, He walks right through the locked doors of our fears, stands in our midst, and greets us with the unforgettable words:  “Peace be with you.”  Christ brings us “peace.”
            If we have learned anything in the gospels by this point, however, it is that Christ rarely brings us exactly what we expect or want; rather, he brings us what we need.  And that is equally true of the “peace” he brings to his followers.
            Undoubtedly the “peace” the disciples crave in that moment with their risen Lord is the “peace” of security, of being protected from their fears, shielded from their persecutors and the angry crowds.  The “peace” the disciples yearn for, the “peace” that most of us yearn for, is, I suspect, something akin to a warm and lasting embrace, an enduring respite from the storm of life, a return to the safety of a mother’s arms.
            But what we learn today is that the “peace” Christ gives is not nearly so simple:  “Peace be with you,” he says.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  This verse is a critical pivot in John’s text.  The “peace” that Jesus has in mind, it turns out, is the “peace” of being sent back into the world.  This is the crucial moment when Jesus turns his disciples into apostles; when followers of Jesus are transformed by the gift of the Spirit into messengers of Jesus.  The strange “peace” that Jesus has in mind is the “peace” of being sent:  of being sent into a sometimes hostile world, of bearing his message to those who have never heard it, of helping to bring about His Kingdom. 
            So, how do the disciples take this news?  Now, that they have seen the risen Christ, and received the Holy Spirit, and have been given the “peace” of this apostolic commissioning, and have been told to embark upon a ministry of forgiving sins, what do our wayward friends of Jesus do?  They go back into their house and close the doors.   There is no indication in John’s narrative that any of them take Jesus’ words to heart.  Instead, in the very next scene, we find the disciples, a week later, once again back in their house, once again with the doors shuttered.  Fear runs deep in the human heart.
            And yet, Jesus returns, and once more breaking through the doors of their fears, he stands among them, and says:  “Peace be with you.”
            It is at this point in the text, of course, that Jesus turns to Thomas, the one who had not been there the first time round, and shows Thomas the wounds from his crucifixion.  And, were we focusing on Thomas today, we might dwell in these verses:  appreciating how Christ’s willingness to show Thomas his wounds reveals our Lord’s deep desire to meet Thomas in his unbelief, so that he might dispel Thomas’ fear – a fear of believing without seeing. 
            But because our focus is on the other disciples, let us notice the fact that Christ reveals his woundedness not only to Thomas but to these other disciples as well.  And in so doing, he is, I am convinced, meeting their unbelief as well.  Their unbelief stems not from a fear of believing without seeing, as with Thomas – for they have seen the risen Christ once before – but, rather, their fear is in acting on their belief.  They are reluctant apostles.  Their Lord had a week earlier breathed the Spirit of new life into them, and invited them to go out into the world as his apostles, and yet here they remain, behind closed doors, seemingly paralyzed by fear.  By returning to them and showing his wounds, it is as if Christ is saying:  “See, I too was sent by our Father into the world, I have endured all of its cruelty and hostility, and I have the scars to show for it; and yet, here I still am, given new and everlasting life by the Father, so that I might now send you out into the world after me to continue the work of building God’s Kingdom without fear.”
            In this sense, the Easter miracle of today’s text is almost as stunning as last Sunday’s message:  not only do we learn that Jesus is risen, but we are reassured that he will come again and again and again to us, determined to break through our fears, willing to appear when we are least expecting him, resolved to dispel our confusion, and to make apostles of us.  There is a wonderful relentlessness to the love of the risen Christ, one that is not deterred by our feeble attempts to keep him at bay.  He keeps bursting forth into our lives. 
            Of course, throughout it history, right down to the present moment, the Church has often fallen back into the same fearfulness that plagued these initial disciples.  Too often we close ourselves off behind the doors of our churches, where we are comfortable, and feel safe.  And yet the “peace” Christ offer us here today in the word and sacrament we share is the same “peace” he offered to Thomas and his friends – a “peace” that, by its nature, sends us out into the world. 
            There is a reason why, at the end of our service every Sunday, we are dismissed with the words, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  We need to hear these words afresh, and take them to heart.  Like Christ’s first disciples we too need to claim and live into our Christian identity, not just within the fours walls of our Church, but out there, in the world.  We need to re-learn how to be apostles.                         
            So as you leave this place today, I invite you to consider these simple questions:  where is Christ sending you?  To whom can you bring the peace that passeth all understanding?