The power of story

1 Corinthians 15

Four years ago, when this scripture last popped up in the lectionary, I preached a sermon on Harry Potter since a verse of this scripture reading is quoted in the final book in the Harry Potter series. In 2020, with everything going on in the world, I feel pretty much like doing that again. But rather than talking about my own journey in coming to see the Harry Potter story as a reflection of the Gospel-story, which might mean something to some of you but probably means nothing to many of you, I thought it would be more useful to talk about why these themes from 1 Corinthians are so powerful both for the Gospels and in stories in general.

The line that appears on the gravestone of Harry Potter’s parents in Godric’s Hollow is 1 Corinthians 15:26, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” For Harry (and, I think, for many of the rest of us), this is a bit of a confusing verse. We know that death is bad, and we understand the importance of death being defeated, but we might wonder: Hasn’t that part happened already? Wasn’t that the point of the cross? And if that part has happened already, then shouldn’t we view death more like a necessary rite of passage—certainly not as an enemy? Harry questions this too, because in his world, the bad guys are the ones trying to conquer death. The villain, Voldemort, has a name that literally means “flees from death,” and he surrounds himself with folks he calls Death Eaters. The good guys, by contrast, understand that death is but the next great adventure (Dumbledore).

So, it’s all very confusing. It’s much like our own tenuous relationship with death. As a Christian, we might well wonder how we are supposed to feel about this thing that seems to have all the power, and, yet, our faith says something different. “Death, where is your sting?” says the scripture.

Well, if we’re being honest, the sting is that death ends the only life we know. That is a very real sting. Even more broadly, death is not just physical deaths. At this moment, we are experiencing the death of expectations, the death of plans, the death of normal, even the death of hopes and dreams. The sting of death is that things are just not right.

I have found that when the world is upside-down, the best cure is a good story. However, I say this not as a means of escape. Too often, we treat stories as if they are either unreal or distant from our lives, especially when we are reading fiction. I believe this is a mistake. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

Love in a time of division

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

            We most often read this at weddings for couples who are quite obviously in love. When it’s read that way, it feels like sappy wisdom, like a toast at a wedding. Perhaps that’s what Paul is doing in this scripture, we might imagine—writing for lovers. But that’s not the truth at all.

            The church in Corinth was a community of believers that have forgotten how to love one another. They were a community torn by disagreement and strife. It’s a theme lifted up chapter after chapter. Paul isn’t preaching to the choir; he is telling them to get their ducks in a row, because they don’t look like a loving community of believers. He’s reminding them what it looks like to love.

            We need to be reminded how to love one another. It’s about being honest with our hopes and fears and dreams, being honest about all the ways we are grieving right now, and all the emotions we are feeling. Love is also remembering that we are all in different boats at the moment. Some folks are financially secure but physically vulnerable; others are financially vulnerable but physically secure; others are both or neither. Love considers the place of the other.

            The last couple weeks I’ve talked some about meaning-making in light of the pandemic, especially that one of our great weaknesses in this moment is that we don’t know how to wrap our heads around this one. When we find ourselves confronted with meaninglessness, it is all the easier to fail to see the humanity in others. We need to feel secure first; then we can consider loving others.

Still, we need to love.

            Love is the greatest—even greater than faith and hope—because love is both for right now and for eternity. It is not faith that once realized is no longer needed, and it is not a future hope that is always elusive; it is available to us in this moment. But this also means that love is the easiest to lack, because there is counter-evidence to living a life full of love everywhere you look. There are people to disagree with, people who just don’t get it, and other people who seem to get it but, worst of all, willingly choose to treat us with disdain nonetheless.

            Love persists through these things, because it is the ultimate; it is not dependent on anything, not even agreement. Loving someone is not weakness; it is not letting others off the hook. Love is the strength to understand the actions of another come from a place that we will never completely understand. Love is believing that even though I don’t get you, nonetheless you are a beloved child of God. You don’t need to like other people to love the humanity in them, and you don’t need to hang out with them on weekends.

            At the end of the day, loving people is a reflection of God’s love for us—love we don’t deserve. Which is great! Because most people don’t deserve our love either. We are truly all in it together, because none of us are good enough to earn love.

            We need to remember these days that most people are doing what they are doing out of love. Those who would like to see everything stay closed are operating out of love for the most vulnerable. Those who would like to see everything reopened are operating out of love for businesses, workers, and their families. Both are incomplete pictures; both are also necessary pictures. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to love one another. We’re just in different boats.

            I had a professor in undergrad who used to often say, “Think that you might be wrong.” I have found this to be good advice for important moments. In situations like these, we tend to dig in to positions. We become certain when we should be the opposite. We should realize that the problems facing us as a society are so big and varied that we can’t possibly hope to wrap our heads around them, so we should approach the problems humbly. The more serious the difficulties, the more cautious we should be to assume we are right. This might feel backwards, but it is important, because the moment we presume that others are out for the worst for us, then we will have divided ourselves in a way that is not easily reconciled. We need to admit that we don’t know.

            Uncertainty is the fertile ground for love. We are all just human beings who don’t know. That’s doesn’t feel comforting, of course. It’s much easier to believe in miracle cures and simple narratives to make sense of things. And it’s not to say that there aren’t those who will use uncertainty for malice—they will. All I’m saying is that there is power in staying united even especially in our uncertainty. Love requires vulnerability.

            It is hard to love, like most great things. I don’t want to love people who don’t get it; most of all, I don’t want to love myself, who also doesn’t get it. I am not in love with the situation. I often don’t know what to do with myself. I start doing one thing, forget what I was doing, and two hours later I’ve accomplished nothing. This is life right now. Our inability to process things is not a sign of a lack of love. Instead, we should be reminded that God loves us for the scatterbrained people that we are. That we can’t wrap our heads around the vastness of it all is simply a reminder that we are human and therefore in need of love.

            So, it’s funny, but Paul writing to the church in Corinth about love may be much more applicable in this moment than it is for weddings in saner times. We need to be reminded of what unites us—our humanity. We are people who don’t get it, who won’t get it, and who will let one another down, but we are also capable of loving one another and of remembering we are children of God, full of grace we don’t deserve.

            So, let’s work on remembering that together.

United in our Humanity, United in Christ

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

In his essay, Health is Membership, Wendell Berry talks about a hospital scene involving his brother, John, who had a heart attack with his wife, Carol, at his bedside along with a nurse tending to his care. Sitting in the ICU, Carol was distraught, as you might imagine. Berry recounts the scene like this: “Wanting to reassure her, the nurse said, ‘Nothing is happening to him that doesn't happen to everybody.’ And Carol replied, ‘I'm not everybody's wife.’”

            What Carol is articulating is the pesky scandal of the particular, which reminds us that generalities don’t work in the face of the specific, singular pains we feel. One of our immense trials with Covid-19 is this tension between what is happening to “everybody” and what is happening to those nearest and dearest to us. It’s little comfort if relatively few die if one of those relatively few is the one I love, but it all can feel like a roll of the dice. Some people—most people—will come out unscathed and say, “That wasn’t so bad!” while others will not come out at all.

            I’m a bit of statistics junkie, and there are a lot of statistics out there. There is also a lot of meaning-making around those statistics. We are meaning-making creatures, who are trying to make sense of a new and foreign reality. So, we latch on to stories that make sense to us, since everything is so new and the statistics can show pretty much anything. We need some coherence in our lives right now, so it’s only natural to believe whatever helps us get through.

            1 Corinthians begins by reminding us of the dangers of being split into rival groups in a time of crisis. We are united not by the vagaries of our suspicions about systems; we are united not by our political leanings; we are united not by our beliefs in what we should be doing for the economy or for health care. We are united in Christ. Full stop. And if your next thought is “Yeah, but…” then you are human, because we accept that promise of Christian unity as some kind of platitude when it is, in fact, that thing that matters. The scandal of the particular is that Jesus Christ died and rose, which makes the Christian faith not a set of axioms which can be interpreted in light of whatever stories we tell ourselves and whatever made-up theories we believe. Christians are united not in principles but in a person.

            This scandal of particularity plays itself out most dramatically in how we make decisions. Do we consider the numbers? Do we consider the big picture? Somebody should, we imagine, but what is the Christian’s role in the big picture? A few weeks ago, I had somebody lecture me on the value of a human being—that the definition of “value” was how much a person contributed to the economy. In this way, we reduce people to machines and we make decisions about economies based on that big picture that cannot concern itself with particulars. After all, particulars are what make people emotional, as if all of our emotions are signs of weakness.

            The big picture is important to keep in mind, but we are still singular people. And the Christian community (what we typically call the church) is this backwards group that believes that you leave the 99 sheep behind who are well and good to go looking for the one that is missing. The Christian community believes in seeking out those whose value is least according to the economic models, and instead we value them most highly of all. To me, that means that the church is always opposed to large-scale economic modeling. We are always fighting against the tides that reduce human beings to statistics. But it’s hard when we aren’t united.

Trusting in the right story

Acts 17:1-9

A long time ago, not long after Jesus died and was raised, there were these two guys named Paul and Silas. You may recognize their names because they have become part of a story that we have in the form of the New Testament, but in those days, they were just two men with their own story to share with people. However, their story did not square with the story that the people knew and understood. The peoples’ story involved a conquering king restoring the Promised Land to Israel and the defeat of the occupying powers. This was the story around which God’s Chosen People had formed their identity for hundreds of years. It was a story that was not so easily abandoned on the testimony of just two guys named Paul and Silas.

            I want to pause here, so that we might consider, “What are our stories?” What are the things we presume to know? And how do we know them?

            You see, these people already had identities when Paul and Silas showed up. Some of them were Greeks, some of them were Jews, all had their identities rooted in a certain culture and way of life. Paul and Silas came with a hard ask, “Give up your identities, because they are not ultimate. Your identity is in Jesus.”

            For those of us who are born Christian and who are brought into the faith by parents who had us baptized apart from our choosing, this is a foreign story. Our story has always been rooted in Christ. However, in our daily lives, we are barraged by other stories that claim our allegiance. In which stories do you put your trust? And why?

            I believe these are important questions to consider today, because there are countless stories out there. Especially when it comes to new and developing situations, the world is ripe for stories that serve the purpose of the storyteller. And it’s not as easy as seeing through the fake news, or whatever you want to call it, because your own deeply engrained story may also be flawed.

            The question is where to put our trust. What is the story that is worth it all?

Health, Community, and the Body of Christ

Acts 3:1-10

            Well, if this isn’t a fine kettle of fish to preach from this morning. Peter and John, disciples of Jesus, meet a crippled man on the road asking for money. He’s asking for that stimulus check. And what do they give him? Not money but health. One of those things that money can’t buy.

            Today, I’m going to resist the urge to use this scripture as commentary on what’s happening in our country regarding lockdown protests and whatnot. While I think there may well be something to be said there, I don’t want to distract from the astounding good news here. This is, after all, a story about health. Jesus and the disciples were healers of a very particular sort, which is much needed in our Covid-19 era.

            One of the formative quotes for me regarding health is a passage from Wendell Berry’s speech-turned-essay entitled Health is Membership. He said, “I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

            I find that quote so meaningful, because we, as church, are the body of Christ. Many members; one body. When one hurts, all hurt. Our society treats health as an individual enterprise. In fact, you could say there is little difference between going to the doctor or the mechanic; we treat our bodies like we treat our machines. A little fix here,; a little preventative maintenance there. But our bodies are much more integrated with the world than a typical machine. We are not just tools to impact the world, we are part of the world, and Covid-19 is revealing our interconnectedness in many ways both good and bad. Disease is spread within a community, whether by touch or through the air, or in the case of other diseases through an infected water supply, or poorly cooked meat. We are connected to one another and to the natural world in ways we continually undervalue.

            But God doesn’t.

The defeat of normal

Acts 1:1-14

I want to talk this morning about how God works opposed to what is normal.

            There’s one line in particular from the Acts 1 reading that caught my attention and brought me there. It says, “While they were eating together, [Jesus] ordered [the disciples] not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised.”

            Lately, I have a pretty good ear for moments in scripture where Jesus tells us to stay put (for some reason, I’m not sure). In this case, Jesus adds a simple instruction: “Wait.” Wait for it.

            Somebody should have told Jesus that we’re not supposed to wait for it in Easter. That was for Lent, now we are supposed to be living in the joy of the resurrection. That’s how the church year is designed. Get with it, Jesus! Nevertheless, that routine has never been a given, because in real life, finish lines move with regularity. The church year tells you: 40 days and then you will get to say “Alleluia!” again, but life doesn’t always tell you that. Grief, for example, lasts however long it lasts; there’s no obvious finish line. In real life, we wait in uncertainty more often than not.

            Right now, we are getting an object lesson in what waiting looks like for us as a society. We wait, and we know that there will be an increasingly large contingent of folks banging on the doors to end the waiting, to reboot the world, you might say, but the normal we are trying to return simply isn’t there anymore. It’s up to us what we do next, which is so tough, because we will grow increasingly impatient to find what was normal. The problem—the big problem, really—is that we are discovering, little by little, that normal is over. What was normal is no longer.

One of the Bible stories that has popped up in my head countless times in the last few weeks is the story of the Israelites wandering through the desert, especially I’ve thought of Moses, who led them for forty years but never reached the Promised Land. That kind of waiting is so brutal, because there are no guarantees you will see the other side—not on this side of life. So, I get the anxiety and the frustration, the desire to return to something that seems normal. It wasn’t long in the wilderness before the Israelites were begging to return to Egypt and slavery. Normal is powerful.

            Easter is the opposite of normal. Resurrection is the antithesis of normal. We are not a church of normal. If this pandemic is going to show us anything about ourselves as a church and as a society, it will show us that normal is not what we thought it was.

            Normal favors those in power. Pontius Pilate was a champion of normal; Herod the Great was a champion of normal. All those chief priests and scribes running around in Jesus’ life suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing were champions of normal. You and I might benefit from what is normal too, but that benefit comes at a cost. The vulnerable stay vulnerable; the poor stay poor; the oppressed stay oppressed. Human beings are much more attuned to the Easter story when things are not normal or when we understand that normal is not OK. It’s why people listen closer at funerals. When our normal is interrupted, we notice the God who has been there all along.

            We are all undergoing trauma right now, so it’s hard to argue against that feels normal but normal isn’t what we think it is. The Bible doesn’t say, “Normal is bad,” but the trend of scripture is God doing new things through often terrible circumstances. It’s not about getting back to where you were but about a new day where things are changed for the better. Those Israelites, wandering through the desert, were thinking, “What on earth are we doing?” Those disciples, hiding in their house for fear of the authorities who just crucified their rabbi, were thinking, “What on earth have we done?” Those early Christians, sitting in jail cells for their faith, had to wonder, “Is it worth it?” Those Christians, like Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, who stood up to empire and ended up on the gallows or in front of firing squad, had to ask, “Did it make any difference?” Normal is powerful, because normal takes no chances, but God is God not of the normal but the extraordinary.

            The story of the Bible is the story of God showing up in the ordinary and making it extraordinary. If you tally it up, God shows up far less often in burning bushes than in poverty and mourning places and tombs. In his life, again and again, Jesus walked into a situation where a person was hurting or dying or dead, and he never returned things back to normal. Instead, he demonstrated a promise of a better future—not normal but extraordinary.

            Today, I pray not to return to normal but to be led somewhere better. And I do so realizing that when God moves society it tends to take time. 40 years for the Israelites. We take that as a given, but their entire lives were spent in transition to something better. Generations passed. Our current situation isn’t going to be over in a day, or a week, or even a month. Even when we are back in worship, seeing each other face to face, it won’t be over, and it won’t be normal. Mourn that, grieve it, but also understand that everything God has made new has gone this way. We mourn change, especially dramatic change, but it’s only when we let go of what is normal that we discover that God is moving mountains for what comes next.

            What is normal anyway?

            Throughout history, disease has been normal. War has been normal. Short lifespans relative to what we experience today have been normal. We’re not looking for normal. The resurrection should remind us of that every week. When we come back together to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, that is anything but normal.

            This Easter season, which lasts fifty days, is a chance to embrace the abnormal—to remind ourselves that we will find routines again, but it should never be normal. Resurrection promises better.

We will rise

Mark 16:1-8

            The good news of Easter from the Gospel of Mark is abrupt and open-ended, which makes it stunningly appropriate for a service like this. It is certainly the least popular story of the resurrection from any of the Gospels, because we don’t get to see Jesus at all. He doesn’t meet the women at the tomb and he doesn’t appear to the disciples on the road. It is abrupt and somewhat disorienting.

            Welcome to 2020, never has there been such a disorienting Easter. If we stop to think about this scene that is set in Mark’s Gospel, it is stunningly appropriate for today. The disciples are hiding in their house, socially distanced from society, afraid that something was going to come and get them too. Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome go to the tomb to pay their respects probably because the men-folk were so afraid, but what do they feel when that man in white tells them the good news of Easter morning—that Christ is risen? Fear! The Gospel of Mark says, “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

            You know what happened in spite of their fear?

            Jesus Christ still rose from the dead.

            You know what happened in spite of disciples who never understand a thing that Jesus said?

            Jesus Christ still rose from the dead!

            You know what happened while the disciples were locked away in their homes?

            You guessed it: Jesus Christ rose from the dead!

            The good news of the resurrection does not wait for us to be in an adequate state of mind to receive it. In fact, resurrection is especially for those locked in their rooms for fear of what may be. Resurrection is for those who go looking to mourn at the tomb and discover that something startlingly new has happened, and all they can feel is fear, because new is frightening. Resurrection is terrifying, because the rules of the game have changed.

            As Christians, we are not expected to live free from fear. Instead, our fear does not define us, because it is not the ultimate reality. Even if the worst should happen, even if we lose everything and everyone we love, Jesus Christ rose from the dead for the sake of the lost and dead. It’s OK to be afraid because life offers no guarantees, but the miracle is this: Through Christ, death does offer us a promise. Still, that’s a bit scary, because we’ve never gone there before! It’s normal to be anxious, because life is worth living and we cling to the moments of sunshine that reveal a world that we feel in our hearts to be good. We cling to life because our loved ones are here, because we cherish those who come after us! We are anxious about what is coming, like the disciples—like Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome—because we know how valuable life is, that you can’t put a price on an hour, no matter how much the economists try.

            Easter Sunday puts our math to shame. It does not add up. So it is completely normal to be afraid. But, brothers and sisters, we can’t stay there. Fear is natural and it’s real, but there is something waiting for us that will calm our fears. Together, we will hold one another in those darkest moments. Together, we will proclaim Christ crucified, that God meets us in our despair and holds us with a promise of hope for something more. And then, together, we will proclaim that death is not the end, that disease will be defeated, because its endgame is not the endgame. Death won for a minute, but Easter morning revealed a truth that was more powerful. Death, where is your sting? Because we are a people of resurrection!