Conquering the World

The risen Lord says—“In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33)

I’m all right—Thank the Lord!–at least for the moment; but I don’t treat all rightness as a permanent state of being. Because it never is. The truth is that as we get older we are forced to acknowledge how fragile and contingent our lives are. Anything can happen at any time to upset the balance. You wake up one morning and suddenly you are not all right. Suddenly you are in danger of being overwhelmed by the world.  Your defenses are breached and your walls are swarmed with problems, fears, and illusions.  Blue fades into grey. Depression, that noonday devil, which was always lurking outside the door, starts scratching at the window and trying the locks.  At the moment I am all right, as I said, but I know from experience what it is to be overwhelmed, and I recognize that a lot of people—some of whom may be reading this right now–are in danger of being overwhelmed these days.

So all of us need to hear the cheering news of that verse from John’s Gospel, where the risen Christ says to those of us danger of being overwhelmed–I know better than you yourselves that in this world you face persecutions of various kinds. I understand suffering, all kinds of suffering, and I know your present situation, so don’t be afraid. You can take courage because I have conquered the world! 

And what is the world that Jesus overcame? It is the sum of the hassles of our existence. For the early Church, the first hearers of the Gospel, the world was the place where concrete persecutions were taking place every day. Opposition and harsh discrimination by a hostile society were a living reality for those first Christians. But we need to translate their situation into our own lives, because our suffering—though just as real–is of a somewhat different kind, more vague and elusive.  There are terrible persecutions of Christian believers taking place right now. Modern Americans, however, are seldom if ever mistreated for their religious faith. We do suffer indifference, but that isn’t quite the same. But although we do not face the kind of bloody persecutions of the early Church did or the horrific religious terrorism taking place in Africa and Southeast Asia, we do have to endure the martyrdom of ordinary life–the operation that goes wrong, the anxiety that turns out to be even worse than we had imagined. The agony of separation–indifferent children and negligent parents. The dying dog. The straitened bank account. The fear of old age, of forgetting or being forgotten. The world for us is as much a theater of suffering and danger—real and illusory—as it was at any other place or time.  

And it is that world that Jesus conquered for us.  It is still out there, but through his Cross and Resurrection, the Lord gives us the courage we need to face whatever comes along. And not just to face it, but to overcome it. Are we helpless in the face of harassment? In his Letter to the Romans St. Paul answers resoundingly: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:37-39). In short, there is nothing we cannot deal with if we realize that we are not alone. We tend to think of ourselves as self-sufficient, beloved—on our own. So we try to handle our hassles ourselves. We struggle with the world alone.  But as long as we maintain the illusion of our autonomy we go on doing the same things, making the same bad decisions over and over again. In order to escape pain, we make mistakes that cause us further suffering.

 The good news, however, is that we can indeed overcome the world—we can be “more than conquerors,” but not alone. Never alone. Our conquest comes when we recognize that we are part of the whole, which is Christ, and stop tormenting ourselves by trying to conquer the world by ourselves. Christ has done that for us. His conquest of the world is cosmic–in his gruesome suffering on the Cross and his glorious Resurrection from the dead he overcame death and the power of shame and guilt once and for all. Our conquest of the world through him is more commonplace and ordinary, but no less real. When we acknowledge that by Baptism we have been made a part of the risen Christ, we can deal with our experience of being overwhelmed with the help of his Spirit. Our little lives are part and parcel of his great Life. And when we fully realize that, we can begin to overcome our own particular kind of harassment, rather than be overpowered by it. He has conquered, and he will not let us be beaten. Christ is able to make us all right, beloved, even when we are not.

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Happiness and Great Joy Luke 24:50-52

From the Gospel of Luke these words: “Then [the risen Lord] led [the disciples] out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”

But why “great joy?” On closer examination theirs doesn’t exactly seem like a happy situation. It was the great good-by–the last appearance of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. The risen Lord had withdrawn from his disciples to be “carried up to heaven.” Now they are now on their own and vulnerable.  Jesus has turned them loose into a cruel and dangerous world in which each of them in one way or another would be butchered for the sake of the Gospel. They could not have anticipated their own grisly ends that day at Bethany, but they must have realized that their lives hereafter would be without ease or security, and yet it says they were filled “with great joy.”

It is easy to disrespect security, beloved.  Security seems such a timid and faint-hearted thing, lacking in excitement.  But there is a very great deal of good to be said for it. Security is a great gift, beloved.  A lot of people around us live without it—without the safety of a dependable job or a reliable income, without steadfast relationships, or even a decent place to live. But for those of us who have a safety net, who are secure, the emotional result is—or should be—happiness. If we are blessed with a refuge in this dangerous world we should be content.

Of course, not everybody who is gifted with security and well-being is content. We all know people who should be happy—from the material point of view at least—and emphatically are not. There is a lot of dissatisfaction around us–a world of discontent.  It takes an active awareness of your blessings and a thankful attitude toward them in order to be happy, and not everyone has that. But for those who do, as I said, happiness is a very good thing.

But happiness is not joy—the great joy of the disciples as they returned to Jerusalem, is something else entirely.  For one thing, happiness is singular. It is something that you feel in yourself, by yourself and for yourself.  It flows from tasks successfully completed and honors received, from the admiration and the good will of others. Happiness often comes from finishing a difficult task; joy comes from an adventure that is just beginning. “Weeping may linger for the night,” the psalmist says, “but joy comes with the morning” (30:5).

Joy is plural. Whereas happiness is something you can feel all alone, joy is something that comes in the company of someone else, beside you, looking out at the world together. It is fugitive and harder to define than happiness, more precious and more difficult to grasp. It transcends cause and effect.  You can often achieve happiness if you simply work at it hard enough, but you have to be captured by joy. Joy is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and like all the gifts of the Spirit comes and goes like the wind, unbidden.

There are, however, certain ways of putting yourself in the way of joy. The best one is friendship. Friendship is about doing things together—giving and receiving. Friends walk together, eat together, talk together, share confidences, and wait together for what will happen next. The disciples felt joy together as a circle of friends worshipping Jesus. That’s what the Church is, or should be—a place where friends share an experience of the new reality of the Resurrection—a reality in which anything is possible. Our lesson says that the disciples went back to Jerusalem from Bethany together, and there they “were continually in the temple blessing God.” They were about to have their lives launched into the unknown. They knew they were a band of adventurers in a new world. They had no security whatsoever, except the experience of the risen Lord they all shared. And from that shared experience came great joy.

Of course, they would pay for their great joy with great pain. Friendship has its dangers. But joy comes when we make ourselves vulnerable enough to make friends with strangers. We live in a world of uncertainty, beloved, and uncertainty breeds cruelty. But joy demands that we open ourselves in a way that means that almost inevitably we will get hurt—perhaps seriously.

You have to take a chance on friendship to open yourself to joy. But it is worth it, because joy is the best thing we can experience in this life, beloved. It is literally a taste of heaven. For many who feel it, happiness is enough—but not for you and me, beloved. To be a follower of Jesus means wanting something more from life than just contentment. We want to feel the freshening wind of the Spirit. We thirst for something more than happiness—the great joy of the disciples. To put yourself in the position where you may feel that joy is what the new life of Christ is all about. So you and I have a decision to make–a daily choice. We can live in our security and be happy. Or we can put ourselves on the line with the chance of experiencing joy, that highest gift of existence. It is up to you. It is up to me. Nevertheless, I feel free, beloved, to wish you joy.

The Yes! of Eternity (Rev. 7:11-12)

From the Book of Revelation come these words: “All the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, singing, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!’”

Am I the only one, or have you also noticed how swiftly time moves along as you get older. When I was young Time was always old. He dragged his feet. I was always impatient with Time–always waiting expectantly or anxiously for him to produce something that never seemed to arrive. A day could last a week back then. A month could just as well be a year. Oh time—Father Time–always finally caught up with me at last, but painfully, slowly like an old man leaning on a crooked stick, complaining all the way.

But now lately Father Time as thrown his stick away and gotten himself a Harley Davidson. Once it lagged behind, now Time passes me by so quickly I have to run to catch up.  Time has become more light-foot as I have gotten less. And I ask myself–Have I slowed down so much, or has time speeded up? Or maybe both happened at once while I was distracted with other things?

No, time hasn’t speeded-up at all, of course, but our perception of time alters as we age. We are changing, not time. Aging is not just a physical process, it is a spiritual one as well. Time moves at the same pace it always did, minute by minute. What we feel as we get older is the “gravitational pull” of eternity.  The closer to the get to it, the harder eternity pulls on us. There is no point in pulling back, beloved. It is much stronger than we are.

But it isn’t all so bad either, that pull of eternity—quite the opposite. If we surrender and let it carry us along, there are definite advantages to having time speed up for us. Waiting is no longer weighty as it once was–the crushing boredom of youth is a thing of the past. Time hurries by. The things we dread come and go so quickly you hardly notice them until they are over. Things about which we were anxious tend to take care of themselves in due time if we simply say “yes” and let them go.

In the Book of Revelation the seer, who calls himself John, lifts the curtain of time to show us his vision of eternity. It is a circle—not surprisingly–with the angels, the elders, and “the four living creatures” surrounding the throne of God, the still point in the center of everything. And the whole vast congregation is singing a song of sevenfold ascription of praise, a song begins and ends with cries of Amen! In the Book of Revelation we see everything in time being pulled toward that point of convergence, the throne of God, with the irresistible centrifugal force of love. That’s what we feel as grow older, that pull upon our souls. And what seems to be time speeding up is really eternity tugging harder and harder on us. Surrender to it is all that we can or should do.

It is that little Hebrew word “Amen!” that is the key, beloved.  It almost but not quite translates as “Yes! Let it be so!” When we say “Amen!” we are surrendering to what is, and joining with creation, visible and invisible, in praising the One who calls himself “I Am.” When we say “Amen” we are saying “This is true!” I can stake my soul upon the Eternal because that alone is ultimately reliable.

Time always says “No!” to us, beloved. No, your life is finite—you are not going to live forever. Things will go unfinished. Possibilities will go unrealized. Joys will go unexperienced. And sooner or later your time will be up. And then what? But Eternity says a resounding, “Yes!” to our existence. It says time and futility have no ultimate power over us. Eternity puts everything else in perspective, and lets us say “Amen! Yes!” to the bad things that happen to us on the way, because none of it is ultimate, none of it lasts. And the good things? They are only foretaste of the things to come, when the vision of God will put an end to Time once and for all, when “No!” will die with Time, and everything will be “Yes!” forever and ever and ever. Amen!

153 Fish (John 21:9-12)

 

When the disciples “had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it and bread. Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.’ So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’”

There are so many things that the Gospels do not tell us that we would like know. I bet you can tick off a half dozen of them without half trying–Jesus’ appearance, both before and after the Resurrection, for example, and what he was doing during those thirty years before his public ministry began. Those are details that a modern novelist would give us–but the gospels are not a novel. The evangelists are not out to entertain us—although their lively stories may incidentally do that. Instead the Gospels are written to enlighten us as believers “so that [we might] know the truth concerning things about which [we] have been instructed” (Luke 1:4). They are not biographies of Jesus, intended to inform us about the details of his life; they are testimonies of belief in him as Son of man and Son of God, written so that our faith in him might be strengthened by their witness.

So mysteries abound–empty spaces that beg to be filled with details—and there is a great temptation for us to try to supply them. But the first rule in the reading the gospels aright is this–if you want to understand it, don’t meddle with it.  Don’t fill the empty spaces with the products of your own imagination. Take the story just as it is—or isn’t, as the case may be. And look for the meaning of what is there. The second rule is this–when the evangelists do tell us something, however incidental it seems, pay attention, because they think it is important in some way. They do not just toss details around. The details are crucial to the meaning of the stories the evangelists tell. Each one is part of the precious tradition about Jesus that was handed down to them that they in turn are passing along to us. The gospel writers do not waste time and ink on meaningless trivialities. Everything they write was at some point Good News to someone, even though it may puzzle us.

So when we turn to this wonderful but very puzzling chapter 21 of John’s Gospel we are told that the disciples caught a miraculous draught of fish by casting their nets on the starboard side as the risen Jesus tells them to. The meaning is clear—if you obey the Lord there will be a stupendous outcome. And when they hauled their net ashore there were 153 large fish in it.  Why 153 exactly? It is one of those details for which we have to account.

Well, maybe that’s just the number of fish they caught? Fishermen like to talk about fish, the size and number of the catch. Sometimes they have been known to exaggerate it. But this is not a fish story, beloved—it is a Jesus story, dense with meanings. And its concrete details are crucial to its message.

Over the centuries commentators on this chapter have offered all kinds of answers to the question—Why 153 exactly? There is no question that 153 is a mysterious number. In the fourth century St. Augustine of Hippo noticed that 153 is the sum of the integers 1 through 17 inclusive. It is also the sum of the cubes of its own digits (153=1x1x1 + 5x5x5 + 3x3x3). In that sense it is “perfect” number—a symbol of completeness. But what does it mean to our fish story?

Augustine’s contemporary St. Jerome writes that according to the Greeks, 153 is the exact number of species of fish in the sea. You can be sure that among those 153 there were some strange fish indeed. But leaving that aside, the disciples caught one of each kind and their net did not break. They did what the risen Lord  told them to do and the result was enormous and overwhelming, like the wine that Jesus transformed from water at the wedding in Cana (chapter 2).

In St. Matthew’s Gospel (4:19) Jesus found Simon and his brother Andrew, who were fishermen by trade, casting their nets into the sea, and he said to them—“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” The miraculous draught of fish is a promise that the net—the gospel—will enclose the whole world and not be broken. A powerful symbol of the multiplicity of Church’s mission and the universality of its message. Christ’s sacrifice ransomed for God “saints from every tribe and language and nation” (Revelation 5:9). Christ died for all humanity, and none of his “fish” will slip away; the net, The Church, will hold them all.

A lot of people are pretty disgusted with churches these days, their gross materialism, their political kowtowing, their scandalous divisions, their abuse and neglect of poorest and most vulnerable. This passage looks beyond the mess that churches are in to the promise of a universal triumph of the gospel message. As opposed to churches, that come and go, the Church is the net in which the world is caught. So it is significant that John tells us that in spite of such a large number of fish “the net was not torn.” The Church in the world has always been under great strain, but it is not broken. It has gotten dragged through the mud of late, but the net is not torn. God is still at work through it redeeming the world for Christ, and we each still have our part to play in that great cosmic drama of redemption.

St. John tells us that when the disciples come ashore they find that there are already fish and bread on the fire for their breakfast. The risen Lord shows ordinary concern for their hunger after a night of fishing. Everything seems ready, nevertheless Jesus asks them to ‘bring some of the fish that you have just caught.’ Nothing we do for Christ is lost, beloved. Perhaps God could bring about the Kingdom without us, but he uses our lives to bring those 153—all the world–to Jesus. How this will happen and when we do not know. All that we can say for certain is that in the meantime God provides whatever we need and accepts whatever we have to give

Wind Chimes John 3:7-8

 

In the Gospel of John the Lord says to Nicodemus, “’You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

I am trying not to accumulate more things, but I guess you would have to say that I still collect wind chimes. We certainly have a lot of them on our back porch. But I like the sound of them, the gentle tin tabulation, especially at night.  It reminds me that there are many things that cannot be explained—things that can be experienced only through their results. The wind is one of them. The life of the Spirit, the Resurrection life, is another.

Every year—and every Sunday of each week for that matter–we celebrate the Resurrection without knowing precisely what happened that first day of the week. The four gospels provide us with not just one story of Jesus’ resurrection, but many—stories of great beauty and power, but fragmentary. We feel the movement of the Holy Spirit in every one of them. But they are all quite different in their details, and it is impossible to make them fit together into one single whole.

Of course none of the gospel writers was present for the Resurrection. All four—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–worked with hand-me-down accounts of Jesus’ appearances to his disciples. Each draws upon his own resources. Yet all four evangelists speak with equal conviction as if he and he alone is telling the “real” story. But no two accounts are at all the same. So we are left with their attempts to describe the indescribable, explain the inexplicable, and make sense of something that makes no sense of at all, logically speaking—that transcends common sense reality and alters that reality forever. Now that the dead have risen anything can happen.  No wonder the stories they tell are like the sound of wind chimes—random beautiful notes—but not a tune.

This much we can be sure of–some women found Jesus’ tomb empty. They told the disciples, but were not believed. Then something began happening to Jesus’ shocked and grieving followers, who up until then had been holed up for fear of the Jewish authorities. Suddenly in gardens, along dusty roads, and in closed, locked rooms the Lord began to appear to them, not as a ghost but as The Living One. And they were changed by their encounter with him. The evangelist John tells us that “he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  The other evangelists don’t tell us that—each is different from all the rest. But all are agreed on this much–The disciples were merely alive up until that point, but now they were awakened to a new kind of life by the breath of the Spirit.

So in a way the Resurrection is a birth story–the birth of a new kind of existence, yours and mine. It is our birth story.  “You must be born from above,” the Lord tells Nicodemus, the Pharisee who came to him at night, and Nicodemus doesn’t understand. So by way of explanation Jesus compares the experience of the unhampered life of the Spirit to the movement of the wind. We feel it, but we cannot explain its coming and going. We can only experience the effects of it—its cooling breath on a summer afternoon, the violent swaying of the trees in a storm, or the sound of wind chimes in the night.

And the effect of the Spirit’s coming into our lives is freedom—specifically freedom from fear. We don’t know exactly what happened that first day of the week, but we do know that the disciples were changed by it, they were born again, this time from above by the power of the Spirit. And that pathetic, terror-struck little troupe of followers who had been cringing with fear were suddenly emboldened. They were no longer afraid. They caught the Spirit of the Risen Lord Jesus, which is courage above all else. In every aspect of their lives the early Christians found a new and intoxicating freedom. Acts 4:31 talks about the prayers of the early Christian community– “When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.” They had been trembling themselves. Now their courage made the house in which they were praying shake. And boldness in the face of life’s challenges is that Spirit’s most basic gift to us.

There are many things that frighten us, beloved, I am frightened of the snake that lives at the bottom of my garden. Whenever our paths cross my heart misses a beat, my chest tightens around my breath, and my blood turns to ice water.  But I am not afraid of him, because I know that he is a harmless fellow. Just a common garden snake, filling his little corner of God’s creation. And he is more afraid of me, because he knows that I might kill him. But I am not going to do that, because I am not in the habit of killing things I cannot make–my father taught me that.

I am frightened, but I am not afraid. There are so many things in the world that might well frighten us that are not so harmless, beloved. The newspapers are filled with stories of sectarian violence and tragedy. You cannot escape the feeling that things are falling apart all around us. There doesn’t seem any longer to be a center of human decency holding it all together. We are frightened for our children and grandchildren inheriting such a world, so violent and divided. We are frightened for ourselves too, beloved. We never know where we are going to end up, and how we will end. All that world of uncertainty surrounds us. It is natural to be frightened. But that does not mean that you and I as Resurrection people should be afraid.

Most of our fears are illusory. They don’t amount to anything. They are the anticipation of things that never happen. Other fears are real enough. But if God raised Jesus from the dead, for those who put their trust in the Son of man who is also the Son of God, there is nothing to be afraid of. The power that death had over us is broken. We can face whatever comes.

To be a follower of the Way is to be confused, beloved. It was always like that. The story of the Resurrection is a confusing story. It was confusing for those who took part in it. It was confusing for those who attempted to tell it. It is confusing for us, who are part of that story because we are believers in it.  But the effect of the Resurrection is apparent and clear to all—unhampered boldness and courage in the face of life’s uncertainties.  The Spirit of the Risen Christ moves mysteriously—like the wind—and takes us with it. We don’t know where we came from or where we are going.  But when we hear the sound of the wind it should remind us not to be afraid—it will be all right.