Entangled States

When we have completely given up, God has not. God acts and out of the darkness, new light bursts forth. Easter is the proof that death and despair do not win in the end.

Here is something we easily forget about Easter morning: nobody was expecting it.

The women walking to the tomb in the dark were not going to witness a resurrection. They were going to finish a burial. They carried spices. They were already wondering aloud who would roll the stone away. Their category for what was about to happen did not exist. It wasn’t something that they could anticipate. None of Jesus’ followers did – even though he had told them.

The disciples hiding behind locked doors were not waiting for news of an empty tomb. They were waiting for the knock that would mean the authorities had come for them next.

Even those who had heard Jesus speak of rising on the third day had apparently filed that away as metaphor or misunderstood it entirely. Because when the news came, nobody said: yes, of course, just as he said. They said: this cannot be. Mary Magdalene’s first instinct was that someone had moved the body. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were walking away from Jerusalem — the direction of defeat and resignation.

What this means is that the resurrection was not wish-fulfillment. It was not the disciples’ grief generating a vision that matched their hopes. It shattered their categories rather than confirming them. Nobody was primed for it. Nobody produced it. Nobody even asked for it in quite that form.

God acted. Unilaterally. In history. In a way that required nothing from those first witnesses except that they be present to receive it, and even then, they barely could.

You can view the sermon here.

I’m going to be at San Jorge in Central Falls for Palm Sunday. It’s a congregation that worships in Spanish and my sermon for this Sunday reflects that – and it doesn’t make sense to post here.

My friend Andrew Gerns has offered his sermon for this week if you’re looking for something timely and in English:

Here’s a bit of what he’s written:

No one really knew what to expect. Some people thought that Jesus would lead a revolt. Others through he’d take over the Temple and call down angelic armies. Of course, none of it will go as planned—or so some thought. Jesus did not rally the people to throw off the chains of oppression. There is no revolution. And while Roman soldiers did not scoop up the people who greeted Jesus… this time!… the authorities exerted their power, just the same.

Before the week is out, Jesus will be arrested and the might of Rome and the power of the official Temple religion—which was at the heart of the religion and economy of Jerusalem— will fall on the head of Jesus. He dies a public, criminal, traitor’s death on a cross, outside the very gates of the city he rode through, not even a week later.

Normally, that would be the end of the story. We might have remembered Jesus’ entry into the city with the same sorrowful appreciation that we have for the Tank Man. Yes, it was stirring to see one man stand up against the tanks…but the tanks still won. And no one knows whatever became of the brave young man. It might have been stirring to see Jesus’ peasant parade in contrast to the Roman legions. But the legions, it appears, still won.

But the legions did not win, not in a final sense! And what was defeated was not an army or a government or a corrupt merging of power and religion. What was defeated was death. What was defeated is sin. What is defeated on the cross is every human attempt to make things serve in the place of God. What is put down is every complex structure, every kind of manipulation that both make us seem to be in control of our little universes, but which hide the fact that we are God’s creatures and responsible to God and each other.

If you’d prefer a video though, here’s my sermon on this text from three years ago:

The story we hear today from John’s Gospel is one of the great set pieces of the New Testament. It’s almost theatrical—you could stage it. There’s a man born blind, sitting where he has always sat. There are disciples asking the question religious people always ask when they encounter suffering: “Whose fault is this?” There are neighbors who can’t believe what they’re seeing, parents who are terrified of getting involved, religious authorities who are so certain they already know how God works that they cannot recognize God working right in front of them. And at the center of it all, there is Jesus—making mud, touching a stranger’s eyes, and doing something so odd, so physical, so deliberate, that we’d be wise to slow down and ask why.

Because what Jesus does here is not just a healing. It is, if we have eyes to see it, an act of creation.

The whole narrative turns on the question of recognition: who can see what God is doing, and who can’t?
The people who miss it in this story are not bad people. They are devout, careful, learned. But they have already decided what God’s work looks like, and so when God’s work shows up in a form they didn’t expect—in mud, in mess, in a man they’d written off—they can’t take it in.

The one who sees it is the one who was given new eyes, clay eyes, God-made eyes. Eyes that hadn’t yet learned what to filter out.

You can see the whole video by using this link.

Over the next few weeks, including this weekend, my calendar is such that, between travel and other commitments, I’m not going to be able to keep my weekly sermon posting schedule.

I’m sorry about that. And extra sorry that this weekend I don’t have a sermon from three years ago to share instead.

But I see that one of my favorite preachers, Andrew Gerns, has already posted his sermon for this weekend.

Here’s a taste:

To this day, Photini the Samaritan woman is honored in many cultures. In southern Mexico, La Samaritana is remembered on the fourth Friday in Lent, when water flavored with local fruit and spice and is given to commemorate her gift of water to Jesus. As I said, the Orthodox know her as St. Photini. In Russian orthodoxy, she is Svetlana, which means “equal to the apostles,” and she is honored as apostle and martyr on the Feast of the Samaritan Woman.

She is remembered because when she recognizes the Christ her identity changes. She leaves her water jar behind and goes and finds her friends and neighbors to tell what she has seen and heard.

Jesus breaks down the barriers of gender and nationality and the woman is bold enough to both remind Jesus of what separates them — he a Jew and she a Samaritan — and of what connects them — their ancestor Jacob. Photini is audacious and spars verbally with Jesus and in the process she experiences him as prophet and, more than that, the Messiah. And she takes that news to her village, her family, her people. Both in the encounter and in the telling, she is changed from the inside out. Two people at the well meet each other’s thirsts.

You can read it here.

In this week’s Gospel we first meet Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus in the evening. Over the course of John’s Gospel we will see a slow arc of transformation in his story.

He starts by coming in private, at night, with questions he doesn’t quite know how to ask. He ends by carrying spices in broad daylight to the tomb of an executed criminal, in front of everyone. That is not a small movement. That is someone whose faith, uncertain and incomplete as it may have been, was nevertheless in motion.

I want to contrast him for a moment with Judas, because I think the contrast is illuminating.

Judas is also a complex figure, and I don’t think simple villainy does him justice. There’s a reasonable historical argument that he was a Zealot — someone who wanted liberation from Rome, who saw in Jesus the possibility of a leader who might actually do something about the occupation. And then Jesus wouldn’t. Jesus kept talking about the kingdom of God as though it were something other than political power, kept forgiving people who should have been enemies, kept refusing to become what Judas needed him to be.

So Judas, in a terrible irony, tries to force the issue. Turns Jesus over to the authorities, perhaps thinking this will precipitate the confrontation, the uprising, the moment. The ruler of this world, as John puts it, finds his opening in Judas’s impatience and disillusionment.

But notice what Judas was doing from the beginning: he wasn’t asking what God was up to. He was asking what Jesus could do for the cause Judas had already decided was the right one. He had a goal — liberation, justice, the overthrow of Roman power — and he wanted Jesus to serve it. When Jesus wouldn’t be recruited into Judas’s agenda, the relationship collapsed.

I have watched this same dynamic play out in the Church in my own lifetime, and maybe you have too. Politicians come to us for our organizational capacity, our volunteers, our moral credibility. Activists come to us for the same. And there is nothing wrong with any of those things — the Church should be engaged in the world. But what I notice, again and again, is that the people seeking our help are rarely interested in what we actually believe, or what God might be asking of us, or where the Spirit seems to be moving. They want to know what we can deliver for goals they have already set. They want to use the Church the way Judas wanted to use Jesus — as an instrument for an agenda that was formed somewhere else entirely.

The antidote is Nicodemus: someone who came with genuine questions about what God was doing, even when the answers were confusing and incomplete. That orientation — toward discernment rather than recruitment — is what distinguishes faith from politics, even when they are standing in the same room.

You can view the full sermon here.

Why does the Church put this reading at the beginning of Lent every year? Why start our forty-day journey here, in the wilderness with Jesus?

Because Lent is meant to be a time of burnishing and refining. It’s a time when we let God’s Holy Spirit burn off the dross and the dregs of our spiritual lives. When all the parts of our lives – and our common life – that we wish weren’t part of us are given over to God for reworking.

The fear that paralyzes us in the face of violence or division – that’s given to God for an upgrade.

The cynicism that keeps us from trusting or hoping – that’s swapped out for a new and better part.

The wounds from trauma, from broken institutions, from years wandering in cultural and spiritual wilderness – those are brought to the refiner’s fire not to be forgotten but to be transformed.

But here’s the crucial distinction: God’s testing refines. The devil’s testing seeks to destroy through calumny and false accusation. God puts us in the crucible to burn away what isn’t gold. The Assayer wants to prove there was never any gold to begin with.

We’ve been in the crucible – personally, communally, nationally. We’ve been tested. And we’re still here. Still gathering. Still faithful. Still trusting, even when that trust has been hard-won and costs us something.

The wilderness doesn’t last forever. Even Jesus’s forty days came to an end. Matthew tells us that after the devil left, angels came and ministered to him. After the testing comes the tending. After the trial comes the care.

This Lent, as we walk these forty days together, may we follow Jesus’s example: standing on the Word of God, refusing the Slanderer’s lies about who we are, trusting that the One who tests us does so not to destroy but to refine, not to condemn but to raise to dignity.

The wilderness is real. The testing is real. But so is the promise on the other side of it. And so are the angels who come to minister when the testing is done.

You can view the entire sermon at this link.