Obedience

What is obedience? We say we follow Jesus Christ, the one whom the Gospel of John says is from above, and of whom no one accepts testimony. Incidentally, following Jesus does not mean being accepted, does not mean finding worldly power. The kinds of power that the world offers require that we would obey humans rather than God. It would be institutions, structures of dominance and control, even seemingly altruistic religious systems, that we would have to submit to, rather than the God who would rather mysteriously break us out of jails at night so that we might preach in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Obedience is such a difficult thing for us to grasp. Embedded into us by the opaque notions of "homeland security," "surveillance," and "patriotism," is a discipline of self-policing, following the laws of the land so as not to be caught and punished. A psalm says that the Lord confronts evildoers to destroy remembrance of them forever; to the contrary, the society we find ourselves in is founded upon insidious institutions cloaked in secrecy. We might say, "There's no need to worry about remembering the deeds of evil done--most folks didn't know they happened in the first place." And so obedience is difficult to grasp because often we are unaware of our options. So often the church throughout its history has seen nothing wrong with blending in--oh, there's salvation in it, but it's alongside everything else. The Gospel and the witness of the Apostles greatly shake up the notion of a comfortable conviviality between the body of Christ and the world. To obey God is to choose Christ, to seek to be led by the Spirit, not to be dictated by the powers of the world.

We must be acutely aware of what we are doing when we choose to worship God in the name of Jesus Christ. Our purpose is not to maintain some institution. The heart of the tradition we come from brings into question all alliances that would crucify Christ again given the chance. (If we were to observe history, they do crucify Christ again and again in the oppression of the poor.) But God has exalted Jesus so that we might be granted repentance, the ability to turn around, and forgiveness, freedom from the bondage of false power. As we worship, as we share the Eucharist, we boldly identify ourselves with Christ's suffering and death, his rejection by the earthly powers, and humbly seek to join in his resurrection glory. In our faithfulness, may we be guided by the Holy Spirit to the table and back into the world obeying God and not humans.

Acts 5:27-33, Psalm 34:2 and 9, 17-18, 19-20, John 3:31-36

She Has a Name

(A sermon preached April 14, 2009 at Adoration, Hopwood Christian Church, Milligan College, TN on John 20:11-18)

She has a name. Her identity has been condensed and construed and misconstrued and used for the purposes of various folk. She’s been called a former prostitute, once possessed by a handful of demons, a woman who may have been the one to shatter an alabaster jar to rub nard onto the soon-to-be-pierced-feet of the Lord. She’s the sultry seductress of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ adopted for film by Martin Scorsese. According to Dan Brown’s Code she’s a rose and the hidden wife of Jesus of Nazareth. Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles. She was weeping and “Jesus said to her, ‘Mariam!’” Although her name and identity have been confused for centuries, this Mary that we encounter today in John’s gospel has a name which Jesus knows, and when she hears her name spoken by the resurrected Lord her eyes are opened to see the world transformed. Hearing and seeing her being named, our understanding and our world can too be transformed.

We all have a name. When I was young, my mom has told me, I insisted that people would call me “Andrew,” nothing else. When I was eight, a little league baseball coach repeatedly would call me “Andy,” and I’m told that I would either ignore his address or correct him. I knew my name. On the rare occasions when I would upset my mom or get caught for doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, I’d know I really was in trouble when she would raise and tighten her voice saying, “William Andrew Jehosephat!” These days, when my girlfriend Christina greets me on the phone or at door saying, “Andrew! Andrew!” she reminds me of her love for me. Beyond that, I recognize the great responsibility that comes with being named by someone, the call it entails, the humility and gratitude it bestows and conjures.

The weeping woman we encounter in the gospel reading has lost her sense of identity, has lost the one person that had offered her hope. He has been crucified by the State at the behest of religious leaders who wanted to maintain the status quo, their sense of security. Mourning early in the morning of the first day of the week, according to John, she goes by herself to the tomb in which Jesus had been laid to rest only to find the stone covering the entrance rolled back. She retrieves Peter, and he and the beloved disciple run to find the tomb empty. While they head back home, Mary remains in the garden weeping for her murdered and disappeared leader. But Jesus, now mysteriously unrecognizable, appears to her and asks her what’s troubling her. She mistakes him for the gardener and asks him if he’s moved the body. Imagine Jesus’ voice, tender, slightly amused, yet sure and steady, “Mary,” he says. In saying that small designation, that name, Jesus reveals himself to the weeping woman, and she is no longer the weeping woman, she is Mary. In hearing her name spoken by Jesus her world is transformed. She sees herself as she truly is, who she has been, and is given the power to become who she is meant to be. She is a student, a pupil, a listener, a worshipper, a follower, a sister of Jesus. Understandably, her emotions all in mess, she grabs hold of her Risen Teacher. But in naming her, Jesus gives Mary the awesome task of apostleship; she is to be the Apostle to the Apostles, the first witness of the Resurrected Christ. Mary is named to go and tell the gospel, to name the resurrection, to name the new reality of the Word of God.

We come to worship to be named and to learn how to name. The liturgy of this worship service, with its songs and prayers, its words and practices, is meant to name us. We are a people called to worship, a people who have come out of the darkness of the night into the light of God’s presence. We see ourselves with honest humility and confess our sins, asking for strength that only God can provide, endurance that can only be maintained with others. The reading of the Word opens us up to God’s truth. We will join with the host of angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy,” and proclaim Christ crucified and Christ resurrected. We will come forward and receive the bread become Christ’s body, responding with “Amen” to the celebrant saying “the body of Christ.” Yes it is. Yes we are. We are named clean by the Blood of the New Covenant. Here tonight, we are named the body of Christ gathered from different Christian communities nestled in the hills of East Tennessee into a church building beside the banks of Buffalo Creek. So named, we must ask ourselves: Who have we been? Who are we? Who are we to become?

Being named by Christ does not end with simply being able to say, “I am Mary,” or “I am Andrew.” It’s a calling, a sending. “Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Being named means begin given a task. Jesus told Mary to tell the disciples that the world had been radically transformed because of the Resurrection. Now those who know Jesus have his Father as their Father, his God as their God. Like Jesus, Christian disciples have the gift of the Holy Spirit and, with humility and discernment, the ability to name things correctly, to bear light on things trying to hide in the dark. To see what this looks like for us imagine Jesus’ disciples, the body of Christ today, calling the wars, oppressive regimes, and financial crises of the world what they are. They have names—Idolatry, Greed, Racism, Theft, Sin. And imagine the disciples of Jesus today naming the poor and the neighbor: Blessed, Beautiful, Friend, Sister, Brother, Image and Children of God. By taking the time to name people and things, learning what they are, be they beautiful or in need of transformation, the Church of Jesus Christ participates in God’s work of reconciliation. It hears its call to continue the work of Christ’s gospel, “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Tonight, as we worship, as we sit, and stand, and kneel, as we sing, and greet, and reflect in prayerful silence, we are being named as the body of Christ, as children of God, as a people empowered by the Holy Spirit to go into the world as the light, as the presence of the One who emptied the tomb. May we listen carefully for our names and respond with great joy and thanksgiving: “Teacher! My Lord! My God!”

Amen.