No, Ideological Sermons Are Not OK

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Anglican, Bible, Catholic, church, church-state relations, communion, Evangelical, free church, homiletics, ideology, preaching, Psalm, Sam Tsang, sermon

Taking yet another break from the Anglicanism posts (I trust that Churl has received a somewhat adequate answer in part 3), I’d like to write some reflections on a sermon that I heard at a free church last Sunday. I don’t have any interest in attacking either the church or the preacher, so I will keep both vaguely anonymous and instead critique the individual sermon as it stands on its own. Because I’m starting to feel a growing conviction that silence in the face of hearing these sorts of things is a form of implicit assent from a passive congregation, I’d like to speak with a critical tone. My aim (once again) is not to attack the church or the preacher, but rather to say that the church would have been better served if the preacher had not preached what I’ll be calling in this post an ideological sermon, that is, a sermon that uses the text as a vehicle to push an abstract political agenda. Because this church employs a congregational polity, I’d like to state for the record that I am not a voting member of this congregation and thus my statements are not representative of the congregation; they should be read, in many ways, as those given by a sympathetic outsider. However, as a baptized member of the church catholic, I’d like to appeal to our greater solidarity in the communion of saints as I voice my critique.

To demonstrate my complete solidarity with this free church despite my sacramental status as a confirmed Anglican layperson (which I’ll discuss more in part 4), I’d like to first express my deep thankfulness for the work of this congregation’s second-generation English-speaking ministry pastor. Not only is he one of my longtime friends, but he is an incredibly thoughtful evangelical working within a free church tradition with young people and their parents, skillfully navigating the tricky political waters that often come with that terrain. While I sometimes disagree with his exegesis of biblical texts (he often waxes a bit too individualistic for my liking), his careful engagements with pastoral care in the congregation and his sincere efforts to engage the neighbourhood around him with more than simply token words of appreciation are simply inspiring. It is fascinating and joyfully exciting to watch the growth of his pastoral work, as well as the work of the people who compose that church in their music, hospitality, and theological reflection, and as a Chinglican, I am glad to attend their services on a semi-monthly basis. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and my hope is that even as we speak of ecumenical reconciliation movements between Anglicans and Lutherans with the Roman Catholic Church, we might also someday be able to talk more deeply about the reconciliation of the free church with communions that are increasingly recognizing the wrongheadedness of their embeddedness with the state. In this, I am also expressing my sincere gratitude to free churches as a whole for their witness against the church’s entanglement with the state, and I am hopeful that we will all one day be fully reconciled in Christ.

It’s in that context that I’d like to express my utter dismay at the sermon last week, a homiletical piece that was delivered neither by my friend nor by anyone who grew up at the church, but by an older white man in a prominent position at a local evangelical institution here in the Pacific Northwest.

Let me first unfold the piece as I heard it. I will follow my summary with a critique.

The sermon was purportedly an exposition of the first psalm in the Psalter. As the preacher ran out of time, his focus was on the first three verses, which I’ve reproduced here in the New International Version, which he was using:

¹ Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
² but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
³ That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.

The sermon was itself a spirited critique of compartmentalization, the notion that one’s faith should be kept in certain spaces but should not exert any influence on the secular parts of one’s life, including one’s schooling, employment, or romantic relationships. The danger of compartmentalization, the preacher continued, was that it allowed evangelicals to be defined by the culture surrounding them, particularly through the media (and especially, as he was quick to point out in this second-generation Chinese Christian congregation, by video games). As a result, he argued that evangelical faith’s influence in the culture was slowly waning, that marriage rates were dropping, and that evangelicals themselves did not know right from wrong, which was apparently visible in their voting patterns, as they would often vote in favour of sexual liberalization. The preacher’s diagnosis came courtesy of the psalmist: evangelicals have stepped too long with the wicked, stood too long in the way of sinners, and sat too long in the company of mockers, often to the point at scoffing at the values in their own faith. (He then added, ‘If you are rolling your eyes at me right now, then you’re probably sitting with the scoffers too.’ He said that exactly as I was rolling my eyes.)

He then proposed two solutions to this evangelical erosion. First, he noted that in contrast to the acts of stepping with the wicked, standing with sinners, and sitting with mockers, it was important for evangelicals to spend much more time with fellow evangelicals who shared their faith values and could ask those going astray from these values how their thinking worldviews were consistent with evangelical faith. However, he quickly noted (and this was his second point) that the psalmist proposes a much more radical solution: it is to be rooted in the ‘law of the Lord,’ that is, the Word of God as revealed in the literal Scriptures, and to meditate on it day and night. In other words, while community is nice, the preacher argued that it was incumbent on individual evangelicals themselves to read the Bible, to meditate on it day and night, and then to be individual trees planted by streams of water, yielding their individual fruit in season, keeping their individual leaves from withering who prosper individually in all that they do. In short, God calls individual evangelicals to forsake the crutch of social relations and to apply his word literally in all situations in an individualistic way. Calling for solidarity among all evangelicals (and especially free churches) around this individual reading of the Bible, the preacher ended with an attempt to forge this reading of Psalm 1 as the central identity piece that defined who evangelicals were and how they should engage the world.

It’s like this preacher was just asking for a critique from the church catholic. I’m happy to give it to him.

Let me emphasize first that while this theology certainly floats around in this free church, it certainly isn’t the main thing that I often hear preached. In fact, as I said before, my friend’s work (the pastor) is much more thoughtful than the standard evangelical caricatures that I’ve also seen floating around. Indeed, if there is an exception to Churl’s scream against evangelicalism on the blog, it’s my friend. My critique, however, is not one of evangelical theology writ large, then, tempting as that might be. (Indeed, how can one critique evangelical theology writ large if evangelicalism itself is such a fragmented movement at present? More on this in a separate post.) Following the individualism in the sermon that was preached, this is simply a critique of one individual sermon unfortunately preached by someone of some stature in the local evangelical community, which means that despite its capacity to stand alone, it’s not something that should be overlooked. It should be rigorously engaged and refuted for the sake of the church’s well-being.

So without further ado, the critique:

This sermon, as it stands, did an utter theological disservice to both the gift that is the free church and the body that is the church catholic. It did so by reducing the church to an ideologically-driven community and the Scriptural text to an ideological manifesto. Let me take both in turn.

The gift that is the free church to the church catholic is its witness against Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican complicity with the development of modern nation-states. The story is often told in the free church that while the Protestant Reformers broke away from the Catholic Church because of Rome’s increasing corruption of both doctrine and ecclesial practice, they also quickly sold the church to the state in the German states, the Calvinist city-states, and the English nation. Standing against the ideological co-optation of the church by the state so that all citizens of those states became nominal Christians, the free church wrested control of church governance away from the state and put it into the hands of the people in the churches themselves. This was the origin of a particular kind of free church governance, one that prized congregational autonomy and the decision-making of the congregation itself over against any kind of hegemonic elite rule. The Chinese evangelical variant of this free church polity originated from evangelical congregations in North America whose senior pastors ruled the congregation with an allegedly iron first. Discovering the free church’s polity, Chinese evangelicals planted free churches with bylaws that wrote out the pastor from church governance, enshrining power within a democratically-elected deacon board that was always directly answerable to the congregation while putting pastors under the charge of the congregation and the deacons to make sure that they were doing their job of prayer, congregational visitation, and the ministry of the Word. Some ministers in this polity have described it as utterly oppressive, subordinating the clergy to the will of the people, while others have said that it is freeing to know that administrative matters are not within the provenance of the pastoral staff and are conducted instead by the congregation. Seeing the merits of both sides, my friend pleads ambivalence.

In any case, to reduce any of this free church polity to an ideologically-policing community does the free church a major disservice. At a textual level, this theological interpretation of Psalm 1 is already a hermeneutical blunder (shout out to New Testament exegete extraordinaire Sam Tsang and his blogs on Scripture and preaching), failing to take into account how the ‘wicked,’ the ‘sinners,’ and the ‘scoffers’ are framed in the Psalter and in the Torah: they are not framed as people who don’t hold ideologically to Christian values, but as greedy, exploitative, backstabbing, traitorous thieves seeking to murder the innocent, exploit the poor, and do violence to their communities for individual, private gain. The ‘mockery’ of the mockers is not the mocking of Christian ideological values (which is why I was rolling my eyes); it is the act of wickedly mocking the innocent, the righteous, and the pure in heart, the ones who do not take bribes or charge interest on their loans, the ones who help the poor and the least of these without thought for personal gain, the ones who forego wealth accumulation to be in radical solidarity with the downtrodden. Hang out with those who mock the poor, the psalmist says, and your entire way of life will become exploitative and scheming, out of step with the way of life prescribed in the Torah with its preferential option for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

However, put into the context of the free church as a gift, the ideologization of Psalm 1 nullifies the whole reason that the free church broke away from the state churches: to escape the tyranny of ideology. The point of the church isn’t to teach what is right and what is wrong and to police its members’ values; it’s to live out a Christian life founded on an alternate mode of existence called love. This is arguably precisely why the free church had to depart from the state: it was the state that was policing its members’ values, co-opting theological concepts for its own political agenda. If the free church were to police its members’ ideological views, then we must ask what the political motivations of the free church vis-à-vis the state are. And if we were to find out that the free church withdrew itself from the state only to influence the state with its own ideological values more effectively, then does this posit that the free church was founded on a lie? I’d like to think not. I, for one and as an Anglican grappling with the baggage of state-entanglement in my own communion, treasure this witness from the free church that the church should neither be controlled by the state, nor have a political agenda to suggest to the state to enact on the free church’s behalf.

This brings us to the larger point that the preacher was trying to make: that individual Christians should be planted firmly in the Word of God, that is, the Bible read as an ideological manifesto. By relativizing the sociality of the Christian life (a good that is affirmed by Catholics in Henri de Lubac, by state-entangled Protestants in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and by free church theologian Miroslav Volf), the preacher is claiming that the church catholic is unnecessary and that everything we confess in the creed about the Holy Spirit is tangential to our common baptism. At one level, this assertion reduces the Bible from its complex canonical library, its purposefully ambiguous narratives about the mystery of everyday lives lived before the living God, and its radical disclosure that God is alive and incarnate in Jesus Christ. It strips away all of this textual richness and leaves us with an abstract code that can be mined for principles and values over morning coffee. There is nothing even literal about this sort of epistemic violence perpetrated on the text, except that it is literally a violent way of dealing with the text. It in fact enshrines the reader as interpreter over the text, drawing out values for his or her own interest in ideological formation with little reference to what Scripture is actually trying to tell the reader about God and the world. It is thus a betrayal of everything that evangelicals themselves purport to believe about the nature of Scripture, for the one that quickly becomes inerrant in this ideological reading is not the text, but the reader.

But to enshrine the inerrant reader as an individual Christian boasting of his or her firm ideological rootedness is a denial of everything that the Body of Christ stands for. The church catholic exists precisely to mitigate against these ideological claims to individual sovereignty. It tells us that our identity is not rooted in one’s individual ideological formation, but in one’s relation to the ‘other,’ in what Bonhoeffer called ‘being for the other.’ And here, the text of Scripture does not show us what values to hold. It unfolds for us these complex lives and stories of people in messy communion with each other, struggling between temptations to assume the ideological power to define the knowledge of good and evil and the life-giving way of the Torah to give ourselves up in love for our neighbour. This is precisely why the Lord Jesus founded a church, why St. Paul calls us to imitate him in love, why St. Peter calls us a holy nation and a royal priesthood, why St. John tells us that the Lord’s new commandment can be summed up this way: that we love one another as he loved us. Christian life is not about me and my rootedness. Christian life is about my neighbour, my brother, my sister, even my enemy, and whether I love them and give myself up for them.

And so I say to the preacher: no, ideological sermons are not OK. They are a disgrace both to your free church tradition (which is a gift to all of us in the church catholic) and to the church catholic itself (into which you confess yourself to be baptized). They reduce the means of grace which the Lord has given to us in both the Word and the church to abstract statements. They excarnate Christian life precisely where the Scriptures (and dare I say it, the entire Christian tradition) call us to incarnate life.

In short, I am saying to the preacher: by virtue of your baptism, you are better than this, and I am calling you out because you are my brother, preaching to your brothers and sisters, and as you get up to the pulpit and declare the whole counsel of God, you do not only speak privately to a church gathered by a common ideology. You are speaking to the entire church catholic because we Christians gather on Sunday not around abstract values, but around our risen Lord whom we confess to be in our midst. Don’t get up there and deny your solidarity with the church. Get up there and perform your ministry of reconciliation. It’s that to which the risen Lord calls us, whether we are free church or Anglican, Catholic or Chinglican. We are a gift to each other, exercising charisms that build up the Body of Christ in our collective witness that the old order is falling away and the new order of the Resurrection has already been inaugurated in the risen life of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

In short: please, please, preach the Word.

We Remember

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Arab Spring, biopolitics, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, Centessimus annus, China, Chinese, dissent, geopolitics, human dignity, ideology, indigenous, John Paul II, Liu Xiaobo, orientalism, orientalization, redress, state, Tiananmen

June 4 is a day for remembering. This year is no different, for it is now the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, the event in which students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for over a month were brutally suppressed–the official term of protest from its observers is massacred–as they demonstrated for a new democratic regime in China.

It is thus a day to remember.

We remember that the fight for redress is not yet over. When a state uses military force against its own citizens and then attempts to paste over these events by denying their historical validity and diverting focus from them onto market reform, it is incumbent on all of us to remember that justice has not yet been served, that the state’s murder of people within its own borders is never just wherever it happens, whether in China in 1989, in the present in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Syria, or Turkey, or even in the history of the Americas in American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples. We remember because we are calling for the state to acknowledge its own crimes and to bring to justice those who maneuvered the state to commit these crimes.

But we remember also that our memory can be corrupted.  We also remember that the remembrance that these atrocities happened have also been used in the service of othering exclusion. We must remember then that when memory becomes corrupted, it can be used for the service of greater evil.

And thus we must also remember that China is not a geographical foil for the politics of life. We have heard over and over of the issues of life in various sites in China–a little girl run over by a truck, the countless road accidents, the melamine lacing of baby powder, the unethical production of under-regulated automobile parts, the human rights abuses against ethnic minorities. Recently, we heard of a baby boy flushed down a toilet by a desperate mother, and we heard of school principals sexually preying on their own students in collusion with government officials. As we hear of these issues, we are tempted to frame China as the space of the other, a space where life is devalued, a space inhabited by barbarians and country bumpkins and industrial crooks and political Fu Manchu masterminds, a space where everything should point to the events of Tiananmen being just business as usual.

Even as we remember for the sake of Tiananmen redress, we also remember that we must not give in to the temptation to see China as a unified geopolitical bloc. We remember instead that China is vast, that its political system is complex, and that its vastness and complexity belies many avenues of dissent. We remember that dissent is not always on the side of justice simply because it is dissent, that people we hold up as democracy heroes like Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo supported the Bush Administration’s Iraq War with the anti-democratic, neoconservative rationale of pre-emptive warfare in the hope of forcibly enacting democracy in the Middle East for American imperialist interests. We remember that China is not the unitary other, that people and politics as complex as our own go on there as well, and that our pleas for redress are coupled with the complexities of human sociality.

We thus do not remember in order to frame China as the geopolitical other. We remember instead that history is littered with spectacles of violence as various individuals, parties, regimes, and imperial rulers have attempted to exert their sovereign power to make the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ uniform. We remember that these efforts at racial, ethnic, and national subjectification are themselves born of unjust impulses. For what, after all, was the point of the crackdown at Tiananmen, if not to exert the sovereign power of the state to make an international example of those who dared to dissent against an ideology of Chineseness?

So yes, we protest as we remember. But how we protest can never be done with the methods of exclusion. As John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus annus, our protest is not waged by deploying alternate ideologies as foils to injustice. Instead, a constant focus on the dignity of the human person is a protest against ideology itself, grounding our critique in the reality that we are not primarily cogs in a state or market regime, but embodied persons who live and eat and sleep and feel and play and work and laugh and weep and love. Yes, we remember, but our memory grapples with the will to power inherent in something as banal as saying that all ‘Chinese’ people should be a certain way. Those of us who are Christians who join in this protest are thus uninterested in developing a new ideology of what it means to be Chinese. We are looking forward instead to the day when our human community will be constituted by the recognition that we are all made in the image of God.

Joy: a defiant sermon

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Advent, Aurora, Barack Obama, eschatology, Gaudete Sunday, hospitality, ideology, John the Baptist, joy, Luke, Newtown, Newtown Connecticut, politics, Pontius Pilate, public safety, Roman occupation, Sandy Hook

[I did not preach today, and I do not envy those who must. However, in solidarity with those who mourn and those who must preach despite their mourning, this is what I might have said. I was also very affected by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon on the Aurora shootings. God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me.]

(Readings are taken from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C: Zeph. 3.14-18a; Is. 12; Phil. 4.4-7; Lk. 3.10-18)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Third Sunday of Advent is, as my wife likes to say, the day to light the pink candle. It is not without reason that this Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday, a Sunday when the readings, the music, the church decorations, and even the pink candle are supposed to be gaudy. It’s supposed to be a party, a day of joy. And thus, our first reading in Zephaniah 3, like our responsorial psalm from Isaiah 12, calls on the daughter of Zion to rejoice, for the Lord has saved her from her enemies; in our epistle from Philippians 4, St. Paul tells the church at Philippi to rejoice—‘and I will say it again, rejoice!’

If only we could.

Can we indeed say that the Lord has been the saviour from our enemies when 26 people, 20 of them children, are gunned down mercilessly in an elementary school in a Connecticut town? Can we rejoice with St. Paul when, in a completely unrelated incident, 23 kids are stabbed in a school in China? Are we even allowed to light the pink candle and be gaudy when we have endured our nineteenth such shooting spree in America in five years, countless such murders in China, and untold accounts of violence worldwide?

Compounding our grief is the way that these horrors have immediately been politicized. Barack Obama may have responded more as a parent than as a president, wiping away tears from his eyes as he read his statement on the Connecticut shootings, but already, our civil discourse from the left is screaming for gun control, from the right is raging for concealed carry firearms, and from the cynical is wondering how anyone in good conscience could manipulate grief on this level for politics. Our theological discourse is no better.  We have heard from the theologians and pastors who have no words or answers for our innumerable questions, and we have heard from those who have an answer that God in his sovereign will did not stop the bloodshed.  We want to celebrate the heroes—already, our Facebook and Twitter feeds are flooded by stories of teachers and the principal who sacrificed their lives for their students, and we do call them ‘heroes,’ except when we do, our voices choke with grief and we cannot actually say it, reframe the situation, and think positive about what hope we must have for humanity now.

No.  We are not joyful. We are not even pretending to be. We have had enough.

We preachers have been told that the task of preaching after such tragedy is difficult, if not impossible.  We are told that the congregation wants us to be empathetic, to simply understand, to keep our mouths shut.  Yet we are preachers, we are also told, and so we must say something.  Whether our theology is that we are shepherds over a flock, fellow pilgrims in the midst of the people of God, or somewhere in the middle of that continuum, the fact remains that, as much as it seems that no one wants any of us to say anything, our liturgy requires that we speak.

But what do we say—indeed, what can we say?—especially in the midst of such senseless violence on Gaudete Sunday?

The Gospel tells us that the crowds asked John the Baptizer, ‘What shall we do?’  The crowds asked John the Baptizer what they should do.  We are told that the crowds consisted of a motley crew of people, tax collectors and Roman soldiers in tow.  The crowds, we are told, are not innocent of violence, passive victims of Roman occupation with its culture of violence. The crowds, as implied from last week’s Gospel earlier in Luke 3, know very well the level of violence it takes to maintain Roman colonization in Palestine.  Pontius Pilate was known to violently repress, if not pre-empt, any sign of Jewish identity politics.  And this was just an example: we haven’t talked about the political intrigue at multiple levels of the colonial government managed by the Herods and the Temple rulers.  The violence then was as senseless as the violence now. And yet, with collaborators with these regimes of violence like tax collectors and Roman soldiers in the crowds, the crowds, it is implied, are very much collaborators with regimes of terror, empires of murderous liberation, cultures of death that fetishize weaponry for the recreation of bloodlust.

John is the voice crying out in the wilderness.  Like us, John had to preach, even in the midst of a senseless culture of violence.  Attuned to the injustice of the senseless violence they have experienced as well as their own complex complicity in it, the crowds ask John: ‘What shall we do?’

What does John tell them to do?

Does John give the socially and politically conservative answer, that what is simply needed is a conversion of the individual heart, that weapons control is useless because the central problem of personal repentance has not been solved?

Does John give the concerned parental response, that the private sphere is under threat from such violence, that public safety will soon be a myth if such violence continues, and that for the sake of our children, we must enact some policy to make sure this never happens again?

Does John give the ‘I have no words to say’ sermon, a reflection on mystery in the midst of grief, that God weeps with the wretched of the earth but really has nothing better to do than to cry with you as you are terrorized?

No.  None of the above.

In the midst of such colonization, terror, and violence, John’s answer is a call to radical hospitality. If you have two coats, he says, give one to your neighbour. If you have food and your neighbour doesn’t, share it. If you are a tax collector, don’t collect extra tips. If you are a soldier, you are not to use brute force, extortion, and the secrecy of lies to get your way.

John’s call to action is cryptic. It is as if in the midst of the senseless violence in both first-century Palestine and the twenty-first century globalized world, John is calling us to a defiant hospitality.  In the midst of violence, the Church defies the common sense of private security that we need to batten down the hatches and arm ourselves for safety.  No, John says, we open our doors wider.

John the Baptizer is saying what our other readings for Gaudete Sunday are saying.  Rejoice, St. Paul says, again I say it, rejoice, because hope against hope, sending your petitions with thanksgiving to God, the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding and defies the common sense of anxiety in the midst of this crooked and perverse generation will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Rejoice, the prophets Zephaniah and Isaiah say, for God is our savior from our enemies, he has removed our judgment, he sings over us now as songs are sung at festivals.  Rejoice.  Be hospitable.  Open wide your gates, daughter of Zion.

These acts of joy run counter to our feelings of horror, despair, anger, and rage at the events of violence that we have so viscerally experienced this week.  Our common sense tells us that we should be taking up arms for private security.  Our righteous anger should move us to call on the state to save us from our ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ ways.  Our emotional sensitivities know that any display of joy will be viewed as insensitive and that any mention of gaudiness should be regarded as distasteful.

How can we be so stupid?

Because, John goes on, someone is coming, mightier than he is, bringing a baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit.  Someone is coming, the thongs of whose sandals he is unworthy to untie, to actually do some justice, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to actually set the world right.

He is coming, John says, but as we look forward to his return, he isn’t back yet.  So yes, we should grieve at this present darkness. Let your voices choke as you remember Connecticut, as you think of China, as you contemplate the imperial cultures of death that have the world in its grip. Yes, we should have no words to say to explain the horror.  Yes, do be angry, rage at the senselessness. But as the people of God, in our sorrow and in our anger, in our disbelief at the level of injustice that has been perpetrated this week, in the activism for justice that will no doubt rightfully ensue from this, we also defy the common sense that calls us to take up arms and protect ourselves.  No, hope against hope, we declare with our actions that this is indeed a time to act, but with the radical acts of hospitality, to let our rejoicing not be empty words, but shocking deeds of expansive welcome to the stranger, solidarity with the hungry and the naked, and renunciation of the ways of extortion and greed.

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent.  Jesus is coming, winnowing fork in hand, to sort out the wheat from the chaff.  We grieve with the grieving, mourn with the mourning, are in solidarity with those who cry out against the senseless violence of this week, are stopped silent in our attempts to give simple answers about just what happened.  And yet with tears in our eyes, choking in our voices, and anger to the depths of our bowels, we rejoice defiantly by flinging open our hearts and our doors to welcome the stranger and love our neighbour. We do this because the one who holds the winnowing fork in his hand came to live and die as one of us. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, a victim of the very senseless brutality and injustice against which we rage today.  His disciples, once the followers of the same John the Baptizer who had proclaimed this radical hospitality, locked themselves in an upper room for personal security, fleeing, hiding, defending themselves against the unjust, horrible violence that took their Lord’s life.  And yet, hope against hope, defiant against all common sense, confounding all sense of reality, in a story that will strike us in our grief as the stupidest wishful thinking imaginable if only it didn’t happen, Jesus walked through those locked doors into that room and said to them, ‘It is I.  Do not be afraid.’

Cry out with joy and gladness, then, for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel, Jesus Christ who has died, is risen, and will come again. Lift up your hearts; let us give thanks to the Lord our God; let us share in the joy of the Triune God; let us love our neighbours with the expansive love of Jesus Christ who comes to us even now in our grief, in our horror, in our confusion, and in our anger, and says to us—indeed, hope against hope, he calls us by name and says, ‘It is I. I have risen. Do not be afraid.’

O God, we pray then, we have heard with our ears, our ancestors have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old; you with your own hand drove out the nations, but them you planted; you afflicted the peoples, but them you set free.  Yet you have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies.  You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations.  Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Rouse yourself!  Why do you sleep, O Lord?  Awake, do not cast us off forever!  Why do you hide your face?  Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?  For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. I believe; help thou my unbelief. O Lord, in you have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

Amen.