March 26, 2016 - Easter Vigil - Salvation History: Variations on a Theme, Variations on our Hope

Easter Vigil 2016

The Rev. Bingham Powell

Some say that history repeats itself. I don't think that's quite right though. Rather, I think that there are variations on a theme. And that theme that our faith teaches us is one of hope, of liberation, of salvation, of resurrection. Tonight is the Easter vigil. Our first celebration of Easter. And every year during the Easter Vigil we go back into the story of our faith, the history of salvation we call it, and as we go back we see some the ways that God has been working throughout history. We see the theme as it unfolds in various ways.

We started with part of the story from Exodus, the story of God freeing a people living in bondage, a people who had been crying out in the agony of their slavery and oppression. With the help of Moses (and Aaron and Miriam), God confronted Pharaoh, who claimed to be divine.

God told him to let my people go. And when Pharaoh refused, God tried all kinds of ways to convince him, finally getting the people safely across the Red Sea as we heard tonight.

And we heard those readings from Isaiah and from Ezekiel. They are written as prophecies, but there are stories here, there is a history behind the writings. These are stories of people who are living in exile. Refugees who have lost their homes, livelihoods, often family members due to the violence of war and conquest. And in the midst of this horror, the exiled refugees hear these hopeful messages from Isaiah and Ezekiel. These messages of water for the thirsty and food for the hungry. Messages of a people scattered among the nations being restored, sprinkled with clean water as a sign of their new hearts and new spirits that God will give them. Messages of resurrection, new life being breathed into old dry bones. We know from history that this hope was not misplaced, that these words were true and the people were eventually allowed to return and rebuild, that those who had sowed with tears would reap with songs of joy.

And finally we heard the story of Jesus. Living in a time not of exile, but of occupation, brutal Roman occupation, violent occupation to maintain the so-called peace -Pax Romana - though it surely wasn't peace for everyone. It wasn't peace for Jesus. It wasn't peace for his followers who lived under its brutality. After three years of preaching, teaching, and healing, the powers-that-be killed him as we heard last Sunday, as we heard on Good Friday, but in our Gospel tonight, we heard that they and their brutality did not get the final word but rather Jesus conquered death on the third day as the disciples find the tomb empty. "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Surely that is a question we need to keep asking. "He is not here, but has risen."

All variations on a theme. These aren't the only stories playing with this theme: the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph, Ruth and Naomi, David, Elijah and Elisha, Hannah, Esther, Jonah, Mary and Elizabeth, and so many others all play with this theme. All variations on a theme. Variations of hope in the midst of despair, liberation in the midst of bondage, salvation in the midst of destruction, resurrection in the midst of death. All variations on the light of Christ shining forth in the world's darkness, that light of Christ that we lit tonight.

We study history, therefore, not just to avoid the doom of repeating it as the old expression warns, but to give us confidence. Confidence in the midst of the awful despair of whatever challenges we face. God is doing good and amazing things to liberate, to save, to heal, to resurrect.

Our history teaches that ultimately there is no reason to be afraid. That does not mean that horrible things won't happen. They will. They will. Tragedy strikes our world every day. Those large scale tragedies like a terrorist attack or war, and those more individual tragedies of personal loss and suffering and pain. But God is working through them. God is playing variations on the theme. I think that Frederick Buechner puts it best when he is trying to describe grace: "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you."

I am with you. That is what God told Moses in the burning bush when Moses was afraid to follow God's call. God's first response to Moses' first objection was "I will be with you." That is what God told the people of Israel through Isaiah. "Do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God." That is what God told us in the incarnation when God dwelt in humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. And when God dwelt on the cross, that beautiful thing dwelling in that terrible thing. Jesus: the incarnation of God's promise to be with us. More variations on the theme.

Paul plays with the theme in our reading from Romans tonight: “

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead... we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his."

That is us. We who have been baptized; we, the Body of Christ. We share in both Christ’s death and resurrection. We are now making the new history - the new chapter in the salvation history - as we live our lives. Don't forget that it is all a variation on the theme. For God can free us also from whatever chains us; new life can be breathed into our dry bones today, too; death has been vanquished and resurrected life is ours to start living right now. God is still playing with the theme. Amen.

Holy Week Clergy Renewal of Vows, March 23, 2016 - The Foolishness of the Cross

Lessons: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12: 37-38, 42-50                       

Where is the debater of this age? I can give you a partial answer to that question. I met a lot of them last weekend when I was invited to judge at a high school speech and debate competition held at the University of Oregon. As a former high school and college debater myself, I was pleasantly surprised by these high schoolers. Many were solid in their reasoning and passionate in their argumentation and advocacy. They effectively tried to embody the various components of Aristotle's three-fold typology of persuasive rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos.

Oratory was very popular in the ancient Roman and Greek world. Although certainly much older, classical oratory really took off in 5th and 4th century Greece and continued through the time of Jesus and beyond, at least for a few hundred more years. Demosthenes and Cicero were certainly some of the most famous, but oratory was an activity that everyone in the educated classes studied. It was as fundamental as the 3 Rs - reading, writing, and arithmetic - are today. Oratory was a hugely popular activity. People regularly went and listened to speeches and debates on all kinds of topics. And this was the world in which Paul engaged in ministry.

Paul, situated in this world, asked "Where is the debater of this age?" This was not a literal question whose answer would have been that they are found in every public square and building. No, this was a rhetorical question whose purpose is to almost dismiss his opponents, to mock them. Now, I have nothing against speech and debate. I enjoyed it. I still do. And I learned so many valuable skills from it. And Paul really doesn’t have any problem with debate either. He is being rather cheeky in his point, since he is a remarkably good debater himself and is setting up a solid argument that has stood up well through the ages.

But debate is ultimately about success and winning. You want to convince everyone - or at least the judges - that you are right; that your opponent is wrong. This was as true then as it is now. There are winners and losers. To win, to convince people, as Aristotle taught and as every orator would have learned in the first century when they read his work, you use some combination of your own ethos (your presence, your expertise, your position) and the pathos of your audience (their fears, their worries, their anxieties) and your logos (the carefully structured logic of your words). Ethospathos, and logos.

But Paul wants to remind his readers, this relatively young Christian community in Corinth, that what really matters is not the logos of our arguments, but the Logos of God. In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Logos became flesh. Paul points to the true Logos. Not the debater’s logos, not Aristotle's logos, but the true and ultimate Logos, the incarnate Logos, the incarnate Word: Jesus Christ.

And the image of the logos that Paul wants to start his argument with – remember, this passage is from the first chapter and Paul is setting the groundwork for what will come - is the Logos hanging there on the cross. "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God."

This is counter to everything that the debater - of Paul's age, of our age, of every age - cares about. Losing instead of winning; failure instead of success. The cross: that shameful tool of execution of the Roman State, designed to publicly humiliate the victim to make a point to the whole body politic. The cross: the equivalent of the electric chair or the needle of lethal injection or the gun of the firing squad or the hangman's noose or the lynching tree. The cross, this horrendous thing, is the foundation of true wisdom, of true knowledge, of true discernment, of true boasting. The cross is the foundation of Paul's argument that is going to take him into his audacious claims as the letter continues about what it means to be a baptized member of Christ's body - when he will claim that even the weakest, lowliest member is not only necessary, but often the most valuable - and his audacious claims about the primacy of love over every other gift that God could possibly give us. Paul is laying the groundwork for his argument about what life in Christ is really about.

Winning, success, power: these all pull at us constantly. They are seductive. We are all tempted to "love human glory more than the glory that comes from God" as we hear John say in our Gospel of some of the Pharisees who encountered Jesus. And yet, as Paul reminds us, winning, success, and power are nothing compared to God. The foolishness of God is greater than our wisdom; the weakness of God greater than our strength. Winning, success, and power are all useless in the light of the cross.

It's foolishness. It really is. Paul knows it. He says it. It's foolish. It is foolish to set the cross before the values of the world. But, it’s a similar foolishness to the foolishness of calling the old and barren Sarah and Abraham to be ancestors of great nations. It’s a similar foolishness to calling the murderer and poor public speaker Moses to lead a movement of liberation. It’s a similar foolishness to calling the foreigner Ruth to be the grandmother of David and calling the greatest sinner David to be the greatest king. It’s a similar foolishness to calling the much too young Jeremiah and the impure Isaiah and the contrarian Jonah to be God’s prophets. It’s foolishness. It’s foolishness for the Messiah to go to the cross, to be slaughtered like a lamb. It’s all foolishness. But it is the foolish wisdom of God.

And this is the foolish wisdom that we proclaim as ordained ministers: as deacons, as priests, as bishops. The foolishness of the cross we proclaim in both word and example. We sometimes carry unnecessary anxiety that our job is to convince others to follow Christ. (Though, if we are honest with ourselves, the anxiety is often to convince others to join our churches, to pack our pews, to increase our budgets, to succeed in worldly terms, basking in human glory).

But Paul is reminding us that our task is actually just to foolishly proclaim the cross. To keep sharing the story of the incarnate Logos, the incarnate Word, and not to stress about our own logos, our own words. To keep building up the Body of Christ in the light of the cross, valuing every single member, even the lowliest, especially the lowliest. To keep prioritizing love above all else. That is our task. That is our task today, as we renew our ordination vows before our Bishop. That is our task this week as we walk with our congregations and Jesus though Holy Week. That is our task always as we engage in the ministry to which God has called us. Amen.