Donald Sterling, racism, and the vacuous realm of little formed ideas

Donald Sterling doesn't seem like a very nice guy. Let's get that out of the way. Also, it's hard to sympathize with a person who makes prejudiced comments--and even more so when that person is filthy rich. He's basically your classic villain we are taught to hate, and honestly I have very little desire to fight against that perception. But what I want to do is give a little perspective on the lessons that can be learned from this situation. [If you don't know what I mean by "this situation" read here before going any further]

So, Donald Sterling said some rather stupid things about race in a private conversation that happened to be taped. There's no excuse for that. But I have to tell you: I've heard worse. I've heard it on the internet, but I've also heard it from people I know. I've heard racist jokes and comments that are terribly insensitive and naive. I've heard many stupid things said in my life. Admittedly, none of them from a person as rich as Sterling but I've heard them, and I'm sure I'll hear them again.

This doesn't mean it's OK. Actually, it means it's much worse.

The Thomas in all of us: Searching for faith in a proof-driven world

Scripture: John 20:19-31

           There may be no character in scripture who elicits such polar reactions as Thomas. Maligned as the doubter by many and defended as the truest disciple by others, he is a walking paradox. While most of the disciples are fairly anonymous—seriously, tell me a story about Bartholomew—Thomas is known for his stunning acts of faith but, more often, for this critical moment in John’s Gospel where his belief is dependent on proof.

            The conflicting opinions on Thomas are summed up nicely in an exchange from the 2006 movie, The Da Vinci Code. If you’ve never seen The Da Vinci Code, well, first of all, just don’t; it’s a conspiracy theory laden story that takes about ten steps too far into fiction while pretending to be actually plausible. But putting that aside, the typical exchange between characters in The Da Vinci Code goes something like this: Character A brings up a biblical character, a piece of art or artifact, or an historical event, then Character B spouts some stereotype about that character/artifact/event, allowing Character A to chastise Character B and assert that their simple understanding is really an elaborate hoax perpetuated by groups C, D, and E for purpose F in order to accomplish G, given criteria H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, and P. At which time, Character B blindly accepts Character A’s analysis as flawless and the story moves forward.

            The fact that The Da Vinci Code topped the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks says some sad things about humanity, but that’s maybe another issue (and, if you’re looking for a little hope for humanity, the one book that outsold it in 2003 was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

            More on point, in one of these exchanges in The Da Vinci Code the two characters are talking about Thomas. Naturally, Character B wastes no time jumping to the stereotype, saying, “Oh, you mean the doubter,” and, predictably, Character A becomes agitated that Character B does not know Thomas’ whole story, at which point I have a brief moment of hope that perhaps we will learn something useful from The Da Vinci Code. But—alas—it is not to be, because instead of talking about the interesting Thomas who shows signs of faith earlier in John’s Gospel, suggesting that there is more going on in this story than simple doubt, Character A instead goes off on a typical wild tangent about the church’s cover up of the Gospel of Thomas, which in his estimation was Thomas’ true legacy. I don’t remember what happens next, because I think every time I have watched this scene I have turned the channel in disgust.

Bike tour, church, and the collision of passion

            And we’re off! Well, almost. On May 8^th I’ll be heading to Turtle River, Minnesota and the start of a week-long bicycle ride across the NW Minnesota Synod of the ELCA to bring attention and raise money for hunger-related causes. It’s been quite the undertaking already. There was route planning and lodging and meals. Then there were the events along the way. We’ll be having concerts, a film screening in a local theater, a hunger simulation, programs on Indian Reservations and local schools, roundtables with local governmental and church leaders, a mini bike tour of Bemidji, visits to food shelves, and worship services all along the way.

            In short, this has been a lot of work even before turning over the first pedal. But it’s also been the best kind of work because it’s been people who are passionate, finding the intersection of things they believe in. In all, we’ve had around 100 people in on planning local events, and many more on the various moving parts of putting the whole picture together.

            For me, it is an important reminder that when we find things that we are passionate about the work doesn’t feel like work. I’ve seen that in the Cornerstone Food Pantry closer to home. The amount of hours that have gone into making that a success and the continuous resources that go into it are difficult to fathom, but it’s where peoples’ passions lie. Nobody complains because there is nothing they’d rather be doing.

            I wish we could be this passionate about everything else we do. It’s tough. I mean, nobody gets as excited for a church council meeting as we do for a bike tour meeting or a food pantry shift and I don’t expect that to be the case. But I wonder if what we do as church shouldn’t be feeding the same kinds of passions. This is no knock on people (least of all those who are already serving!); it’s a knock on the church’s ability to address the serious needs and desires of human beings.

Grace-filled insanity: Easter and the way of the cross

Scripture: John 20:1-18

             So, I have the thankless task of figuring out what to say on another Easter Sunday, and, like many who do this, it sometimes feels like the Holy Spirit just says, “Shut up and let the service speak for itself today.” And I probably should do just that, because I’m not sure I’ll really add much—sleep-deprived and hopelessly caffeinated as I am; like the kid who chases his ritalin with an energy drink. But, knowing the tradition as I do, I'm guessing there are some reading this who did not follow through Thursday and Friday of this week, and it strikes me that maybe my role is to tell you about where we’ve been, so you can fully appreciate where we are today.

            As such, I’m going to let you in on something crazy: Jesus died. On Friday. And not just operation table flat-lining but like bleeding out and embalmed and utterly stone-cold gone. So, that’s crazy.

And it was "good": A meditation for Good Friday

Scripture: John 19:31-42

            There is no more strangely paradoxical day in our Christian calendar than this Friday that we call “good.” Etymologists will tell you it’s good because it is a lasting vestige of the Old English; a word that once meant “holy.” So, this is “Holy Friday”—and I suppose that makes it more palatable. But I’m thankful that modern English (and the modern church) have held on to this antiquated name, because there is something decidedly good about it. While 99.9% of our lives are spent hiding from death, on this one day death is called “good.” On just this day we admit that maybe death isn’t the end of the world at all—maybe it’s precisely what this world needs.

            “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” says 1 Corinthians 15:26, which happens to have been picked up by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series and is partly why I have it on the tip of my tongue all the time. Well, tonight is the celebration of the beginning of the end of death. It’s not done yet, but death is in its last phase; it’s just barely holding on. But there’s also a sour side to this Good Friday. If what came out of Jesus’ death was good, it was still us that put him to death; it was still human beings in our glorious imperfection. We can’t get away from that. And sure, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, but that also means that death is going to outlast other enemies: poverty, war, prejudice, disdain. It’s awfully nice to know that death is in its own death throes, but it’s less nice to know that it’s still going to outlast us.

The 31st Psalm and the cross

Scripture: Psalm 31

I’m going to break tack today and do something a bit unorthodox for holy week and preach not on the Gospel but on Psalm 31, and I’m going to do this for a couple of reasons. 1. Because the narrative lectionary is great and it gives us everything in order and helps the story make sense, but there is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John and I think Maundy Thursday works best when we stand on the precipice before the crucifixion rather than diving in straightaway, and 2. because I never get to preach on Psalms except at funerals and the Psalms deserve more attention than that.

            So here we are.

            As it turns out, this psalm does allow us to talk about the timely subject of the crucifixion, because some of Jesus’ last words come directly from Psalm 31, verse 5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit...” In fact, in ancient times quotations from a source were often meant to indicate that the entire source was read, so it is very possible that Jesus actually prayed not just one line but the entirety of Psalm 31 while hanging from the cross. Either way, we have this odd but beautiful contrast between a psalm written by one who has been rescued and Jesus, hanging on the cross, nearing death with no hope of rescue whatsoever.

Palm Sunday and the Way of Despair

Scripture: John 19:16-22

Disclaimer: This is a sermon for a particular situation, though I hope it speaks broader than this one case. Names have been removed.

          When we think of what the cross means to us I imagine there are many answers: it means salvation, it means hope, it means peace, it means love—all the things that we want so badly for our lives. What we don’t want to admit, but what is most true of all, is that the cross means despair. The way of the cross is the way of despair, because the way of the cross is death. And death is physical death but it is also emotional death and all the losses we experience in our lives: jobs, relationships, and dreams. Even in the church we tend to gloss over death in order to get to resurrection and it handicaps us when it smacks us in the face, leaving us unnerved, timid, and hoping to move on quickly to something more cheery. Meanwhile, those most affected by it are left to cope, knowing that death is not so easily satiated. The way of the cross is long and arduous, and it leads straight through despair.

            This has been a terrible week—a week that feels heavier than any physical death I’ve experienced here. It’s hard and painful, and it stirs up feelings of regret, remorse and despair. This week has been about death as much as any week full of funerals could be, and we simply don’t know what to do with death. Culturally, we treat death as a spectacle; we fear and revere it and it becomes the breeding ground of rumors and banal platitudes. Despair makes us so terribly uncomfortable, and so we create rumors, trying to craft a story we can control, often turning to conspiracies to create meaning that just isn’t there. We do this about international stories of missing planes, just as surely as we do it about local stories that we know little about. All of this is very human, but it is an affront to the cross. The way of the cross is despair because the way of the cross is brutally honest about loss; it looks the monster of death in the eyes and embraces its emptiness. It admits that death is terrible and senseless, resisting the urge to give meaning to tragedy. It’s easy to say “It will be OK,” but much harder to sit with someone, knowing it’s not.

In Pilate's house: The politics of death, and the absurd politics of new life

Scripture: John 19:1-16

            “We have a law,” say the chief priests, “and according to that law he ought to die because he claimed to be the Son of God.”

            The juxtaposition in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the chief priests really could not be any starker than it is before Pilate. On the one hand, you have Jesus who just never seemed to care for religious or governmental authorities one way or another, and on the other hand you have chief priests who seem to care about nothing but political power. This is a first century case study in the workings of the church and the state, and it is immediately obvious that the chief priests may be more concerned with getting on the good side of the authorities than with religious purity. After all, if they didn’t have to suck up to the state they could have just dealt with Jesus internally—i.e. killed him on their own—and if they would have went that route it would have been a clear statement against heresy, but when they take him before Pilate they are playing a political game: this is about much more than dealing with a heretic. The chief priests have this opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: they can remove this pesky man who claims to be the Son of God and they can make the governor happy all at the same time. It’s a win-win.

            This is about politics. In fact, so much of what happens to Jesus is political. Jesus spends a good deal of time upending conventional notions of political power, talking about the kingdom of God over the kingdom of this world and the power of self-sacrifice and turning the other cheek, but at every turn those traditional systems of power are reinforced by the chief priests and governmental authorities who fear anybody who may chip away at the political weight they have worked hard to secure. It is in this political framework that we can make sense of what is happening before Pilate. The chief priests, electing not to put Jesus to death themselves, take him before Pilate—the local Roman authority—and get him to do the dirty work for them. The priests have the added benefit thereafter of saying, “We didn’t put him to death. It was the governor!”—lest the commandments ever come into question. But don’t get the idea this is about religious norms; it’s just as much about getting on the governor’s good side.

Walking on water: Thoughts on Peter and discipleship

           This year at Grace we’re reading though the Gospel of John, and the story of Peter's denial, which we read the Sunday before last, jumped out at me on the topic of discipleship, because Peter is pretty much our classic example of a disciple and yet he is probably most famous for two episodes: 1. trying to walk on water and sinking, and 2. denying Jesus three times. Neither of those things sounds all that disciple-y, but I kind of like that. I mean, if Peter were some character completely above reproach none of us could really relate to him. The temptation would be to hero-worship this guy, but instead the Peter we get is relatable and far from perfect—a really interesting case study in what it means to be a disciple.

            So, this morning I’m going to talk about the two Peter episodes and what that can teach us about being disciples ourselves. The first is Jesus walking on water. Probably you have some notion of how this story goes. Jesus walks on water out to the boat where the disciples are fishing, Peter sees him coming, leaps out of the boat—well, first he puts clothes on because he was naked, which seems backwards, but whatever—and then he attempts to walk out to Jesus. The crazy thing is that he’s doing fine at first. This is a better result than I would have expected, especially for a guy whose name means “Rock.” That rock was walking on water—at least for a couple steps.