Jazzy Prayers
I wrote recently at Associated Baptist Press about my friend G. Travis Norvell and his quest to take prayer to the streets. Because of space I didn’t have time to tell some details I wanted to share, so here’s some more on the Rev. G. Travis Norvell’s prayer station at Jazz Fest in New Orleans last week.
Here’s a little background. Rev. G. Travis Norvell staked out a little station outside the front gates of New Orleans’ Jazz Fest last week. He set up where the crowds would pass by, with a sign that read: “Above Average Prayers @ Below Market Prices (Donations).” There he sat, with his manual typewriter, writing prayers for people who wanted them.
I was so curious about Travis’ experience that I asked him for more information. Here’s what I wondered and what he answered:
Where did you get the idea to do this?
A few years ago I wanted to set up a table and two chairs on St. Charles Avenue. On the table would be an urn of coffee, two coffee cups and sign that read Conversation? I would be in clerical garb. But I chickened out and never did it. I wondered if anyone would take me up on it… Then last week I heard the story on NPR about a guy who quit his job on April Fools Day a few years ago to write poetry. On any given day he sits on the side walk in San Fran with his typewriter and writes poetry for people. I thought that is great. I said, “I’m going to take my typewriter and write prayers for people as they enter Jazz Fest.”
Why the typewriter?
I love manual typewriters. But I also wanted people to have something they could physically hold in their hands or put in their pockets. People would stand around as I typed and then insist on reading them as soon as I finished. For a few people I read the prayer but even afterwards as soon as they had it in their hands they would read it aloud for their own ears.
What did you learn about people and how they think about prayer/God/the church?
A friend who grew up in the French Quarter put my experiment in an interesting perspective last night. He watched conservatives force their style of religion on people whether they wanted it or not whereas I offered prayer only if people wanted it. The amazing thing: people actually wanted it! They didn’t ask for direction or forgiveness or answers to deep questions. They asked for other kinds of help – blessings for a wife who couldn’t be there, blessings for on a class action lawsuit, continued happiness in their wedding, blessings for continued friendship. I would say it was first time I was around a group of people who were concerned with the present moment.
How did people respond to your offer of prayer?
People told me what they wanted me to write. No one would tell me at first, they would just talk. Then I would ask them what bands or music they were going to see then I would ask them what food they wanted to eat. Then I would start typing, about a sentence into it the person would then dive into a deeper level. It was like they knew I was serious and they didn’t want to lose the chance for an authentic prayer.
Why Jazz Fest?
Jazz Fest, for me, is like Christmas and Easter and Birthdays all wrapped up into one event. I’m already “at church” why not pray with and for “the congregation?”
Did this experience change the way you prayer of think about prayer?
I don’t know if the experience will change the way I pray but it will change the way I approach the blessing aspect of pastoral ministry…. As a pastor you always give of yourself but rarely either receive or let others receive. In some way I was offering at Jazz Fest for others what I need myself.
Give us an example of a Jazz Fest prayer.
Love Supreme, Help these people find life anew May the rhythms of this day fill their souls May they fill their bodies with bowls of pheasant gumbo May they let go of judgment and allow You to love this mass of humanity so that they can be the children you have called them to be. Amen. 
Everything Changes: From Barren to Bountiful
Everything Changes: From Barren to Bountiful
John 15:1-11
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed!
In the light of the resurrection we’re considering today and in these days following Easter, how life has changed. What about the message of Jesus becomes clear and compelling, finally, now that we know the tomb is empty?
As we discussed last week, our lectionary takes us back, back to before the resurrection, back to the ministry and teaching of Jesus. As you know, there was incidence after incidence in which Jesus tried to preach, heal, teach, all to demonstrate this new way of seeing the world and living in it, but all the people around him—even his disciples—didn’t quite get it. And we often don’t get it, do we?
How do we live the Gospel in this world in which we can’t often see our way clearly, when the voices of the world pull at us and confuse us, when we get stuck and turned around, not sure where our faith in Jesus Christ would have us move next?
Thank goodness that everything changes in the light of the resurrection, that we understand with new clarity that if God can bring life out of death, and if God can overcome desolation and hopelessness, then surely we can summon the courage to live the Gospel with conviction and purpose.
Today’s parable, the parable of the vine and the branches, is one that you surely learned if you ever attended Sunday School. It comes from part of the Gospel of John that we think of as Jesus’ final words to his disciples.
If we follow the timeline in John’s Gospel, this collection of teachings, of last words, happened on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday and the crucifixion. The parable was part of Jesus’ last shot at instilling his teachings in the minds and hearts of his disciples.
What was the essence of what he wanted them to remember? What were his last and most important words?
Thinking about that this week, I learned that what you say at the end of your life, apparently, is often telling with regard to what you valued during this lifetime. The final words of famous people are the source of much interest. Here are some:
How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?
~~ P. T. Barnum, entrepreneur, d. 1891
Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.
~~ Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, d. March 26, 1827
Now comes the mystery.
~~ Henry Ward Beecher, evangelist, d. March 8, 1887
I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll start working on mine now….
In his parting discourse, his last words, found in John chapters 15-17, Jesus tells a vintner’s tale. The parable of the vine and the branches is part of several “last words” from Jesus—statements from Jesus trying to clarify who he was and who THEY were—who WE are—in relationship to God.
In this part of the passage, Jesus talks about himself as the vine, with God as the vine grower. We are the branches in this metaphor, he says. We can’t grow into the possibility of all we are created to be if we’re not connected to the vine—and not just connected, abiding, trading nutrients, giving sustenance. There are many things that can grow on a vine, of course, but those branches that are not bearing fruit, in Jesus’ metaphor, are cut off and thrown into the fire. Those that abide in me, Jesus said—who stay connected to the vine—will bear much fruit.
Vine, branches, fruit, abiding, cut off and thrown into the fire? What is Jesus talking about here??!? It all sounds so final and so violent…if you don’t do what I say, then you get cut off, burned up forever.
Believe me, there are many folks in my profession who have made good use of this passage as a tool to scare their version of Jesus into folks. But I am not so sure that scaring people was what Jesus had in mind here.
I recently attended a class taught by a master gardener. In this class I learned about carefully placing your garden beds to receive the best sunlight. I took copious notes about soil quality and mixing in compost. Water was a big topic of discussion—how much and how often to water your beds. Choice of plant was another important area he addressed. It was fascinating, I have to say, but in the end his presentation had very little to do with my yard.
See, my yard is, with all grace and kindness, a big, huge mess. I have recently moved into a house whose yard has not received the kind of tender care that Katie Harvey orPat Neighbargermight apply toward their yards. Before we got there, it had seen years and years of neglect; beds long covered under excess growth, and vines all over, well, everything. When I looked at my yard in the light of the master gardener’s class, I just had to sigh with despair. Water, sunlight, choice of plants? I don’t think so. For now the biggest task is clean up.
And so I’ve begun. Machetes, roto tillers, weed wackers, shovels, and some hired help later, I now have a yard that is bare as can be, a yard in which we can just now begin to watch for the new grass to grow and dream about what will live in the newly designated flower beds around the edges of the porch. And, as a result of all the work to clear things out, the back yard is now littered with a huge, huge pile of dead branches. Branches and vines, weeds, and undergrowth, all of the things growing in the yard that were choking out possibilities and causing me to leave the master gardener class in utter despair.
Jesus’ message about the vine and the branches sounds harsh, and it’s true that many, many preachers have used this parable to scare people into strange standards of compliance. But Jesus was using a metaphor, remember? And the life of someone who tends a vineyard as his livelihood is filled with carefully picking and choosing which vines should be nurtured and which vines are choking out new life and good fruit. Jesus is not talking about people burning in hell; he is talking about the good work of a vine grower, which involves cutting, pruning, and burning waste to make room for good growth.
It’s like my backyard. In order to even begin to think about what needs to grow, there is much that needs to come out…to be cut down and pulled out, to be thrown away and burned. It’s hard work, but it’s only when those tasks are done that we can see clearly the expansive possibilities of what might begin to grow.
As followers of this one who calls himself the vine, I wonder about the many ways in which we are called to prune and discern, to clear out and get back to basics, to abide in him…so that our lives can bear the good fruit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus knew that his disciples would hear many voices calling them away, distracting them from the task of abiding, of focusing on the essence of Gospel living, so our lives don’t become so choked with other things that we forget.
I thought about that this over the last few days, when there has been quite a bit of news coverage about the upcoming vote inNorth Carolinaover Amendment 1 to theNorth Carolinaconstitution. North Carolina’s Amendment 1 says that marriage between a man and a woman is the “only domestic legal union” that should be valid or recognized in the state.
In other words, on May 8th,North Carolinians will be voting on the issue of marriage equality when they vote on Amendment 1.
In the wake of all the conversation and controversy over Amendment 1, there has been quite a bit of religious talk, commentary by pastors, and use of Christian faith to advocate against this amendment, to use faith in Jesus Christ as an excuse to exclude people, to treat them unfairly, and to sometimes even damn them to burn in hell.
For example, Sean Harris, pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayettville, NC, preached a scathing diatribe last Sunday, which joined the efforts of arch-conservative Christians all over the state to scare people into voting for the amendment, a sermon in which he advocated hurting children you think might be gay, of beating the “gay” out of them. What this message has to do with equal civil rights, I am not so sure, but…
Marriage equality threatens family structures, they claim. It goes against the BIBLE, they profess. It violates the rules, they preach. Jesus wouldn’t like it.
When we Christians say things like this, I begin to suspect we were not listening very hard to the last words of Jesus. When Jesus talked about the vine and the branches, he was not advocating the imposition of more rules, the adding of layers of rigorous requirement that pile onto the simple words of the Gospel an unachievable standard that excludes people and obscures God’s hope for the world and, worst of all, dilutes that rigorous mandate Jesus gave us.
Love God, love each other.
Abide in me, Jesus said. Stick close and hold tight. The world will try to complicate your faith, to distract you from the life-altering way of Jesus. But don’t let yourself be choked out or misled by those who would try to catch your attention.
Abide.
And when you do, your life and the life of our community will begin to bear fruit, fruit that will shock the world with its courage and expansiveness, fruit that will begin to appear in places that were so cut off from the rest of the family of faith but who bloom and grow and bear fruit when they are welcomed in to the way of Jesus.
I think what Jesus was trying to say in his final words is that the life of faith is hard. It can be easily choked out by other things that pull at our attention and energy. It can even be choked out by the riotous growth of what the world might consider religion. It happens all of the time.
I think Jesus was trying to say that following the way of Christ is hard work; it takes discipline and prayerful discernment; it is not for the faint of heart.
I think that Jesus was trying to say that when we stick close…when we abide in Jesus, then we’re going to be constantly clearing out space for new growth, for more possibility, for a life of faith that is ever evolving and always becoming, and in new an unexpected ways, bearing fruit.
In the light of the resurrection, everything changes. While we thought God’s way was a way of rules and rituals, walls to hold people in and keep people out, really the way of Jesus invites us to cut back, clean out, stick close. Abide in me, he said…and you will bear much fruit. Amen.
Everything Changes: From Indifference to Interdependence
Everything Changes: From Indifference to Interdependence
John 10:11-18
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed!
For the past few weeks, since Easter to be exact, we’ve been reading Gospel accounts of Jesus’ post resurrection appearances. Today is different. As you may have noticed, there’s no story of Jesus appearing suddenly in a locked room, joining in on the disciples’ potluck.
Today we go back a little in the gospel of John to hear some words of Jesus describing himself as the “good shepherd”.
Well, that’s very nice. We all like to imagine Jesus the gentle shepherd, his long, wavy brown hair blowing in the afternoon breeze, his blue eyes twinkling with mischief, his robes swaying as he picks up a little fluffy white lamb and puts it gently on his shoulders.
Yes, that’s all very nice, but it doesn’t help all that much with this post resurrection situation, in which we find ourselves shaking our heads, wondering what just happened, trying to get our minds around resurrection. What really did happen, and how does life change for us in the light of the unbelievable?
Today the lectionary leads us back to a story about Jesus’ ministry, and part of our work today is to try to figure out why. It could be an oversight by the planners of the lectionary, right? Or we could be reading this for a reason.
It was St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order and Spanish knight who lived in the mid 1500s who reminded us to, “think with the church,” and so today we will trust that the planners of the lectionary had a reason for leading us today to the good shepherd passage in John’s gospel.
Maybe we misunderstood the first…or second or third time, or, like most in the crowd, shook our heads in disbelief when we heard Jesus’ teachings.
But now, now everything changes. In the light of the resurrection, how can we think with the church, as Ignatius said, to understand a little more clearly what Jesus really meant?
And so today we follow the rest of the Christian church (like sheep…) to the words of Jesus long before he was crucified and resurrected, in John chapter 10.
If there’s anything I learned growing up as one of five children, it was a fool-proof strategy for Easter egg hunt dominance. Since I am the oldest I had a natural advantage, but that didn’t stop me from discovering and perfecting some tried and true strategies.
For example, to dominate at Easter egg hunting, preparation is key. Clear advantage number one: take off those shiny, pinching church shoes and put on sneakers. You can get around the yard much more quickly and effectively in sneakers!
Make sure you have a big basket with lots of room—it won’t help anything if the eggs you find fall out of the basket.
Scout out the search site ahead of time. Offer to help your Mom water the plants…or take out the garbage…or feed the dog. It’s worth your parents’ suspicion to gain a few advanced minutes in the yard.
Plan your strategy ahead of time. Will you dominate by quickly appropriating the easiest eggs, or will you leave the most obvious ones for the amateurs and go instead for those second tier eggs—the ones everyone can find with just a little effort? Will you grab the colorful ones first, and hope the green ones blend in until you can get back to them?
Point your opponents in strategic directions. That is, “helpfully suggest” to the littler kids that you saw an egg “over there”—away from the mother lode.
Run faster, look harder, grab quicker…whatever it takes.
And best strategy ever: offer to help your parents hide the eggs.
It took me very little time this week to remember some of these genius strategies I perfected in the dog eat dog Easter egg hunts of my childhood. That fact in itself is rather troubling, as I now am pretty sure that, in the light of resurrection, dominance and exploitation of those who are weaker might not have been the true message of Easter.
And maybe something like that is key to why the church reads passages like the good shepherd passage during the weeks following Easter. In case we missed the point…in case we thought Easter was all about us…in case we thought of resurrection as a get out of jail free card, in case we sit back relieved that we’re finally and totally off the hook…we hear again Jesus’ words about being the good shepherd, and they remind us one more time that resurrection is a reality that changes all of us in the here and now, that moves us from indifference to the fate and wellbeing of others, to an interdependence that reminds us our lives are tied together…that we belong to each other…and that all of us belong to God.
Faith is not a competition to see who gets to the end first.
Who wins is of no consequence to God, even in Easter egg hunts.
Dog eat dog is nowhere to be found in our life together.
In the light of the resurrection, everything changes, and we are moved from indifference to interdependence, a reality in which my wellbeing and yours are critically intertwined.
If we go back to look closely at Jesus’ words we must read them within the context in which they were preached to hear the deeper message. Turn with me in your Bibles to our Gospel passage today, John 10:11-18, on page 872 of your black pew Bibles.
The parable of the good shepherd comes after repeated, frustrating attempts at conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees. The Pharisees were some of the ruling religious party in the temple, remember. They were the pious ones, in charge of making sure everyone followed the rules. They were the overachievers, the ones who had worked for years to perfect the best strategy for getting to the front of the line, the top of the pile, when it came to relationship with God.
Right before the parable of the good shepherd, Jesus had been teaching in the temple, as was his custom. He and the Pharisees got into discussion after discussion about who Jesus was, exactly, and conversation got so heated—the misunderstandings so intense—that Jesus had to run and hide—they had picked up stones to throw at him they were so frustrated with what they were experiencing.
Outside the temple, things got even more confused. As Jesus was passing along the road he ran into a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus healed the man, but the day happened to be the Sabbath, and in the eyes of the Pharisees Jesus had broken the law. Arguments ensued—Jesus was accused of violating religious rules; the Pharisees just couldn’t understand why Jesus would break the law. Jesus just couldn’t understand why the Pharisees didn’t put the wellbeing of one of their weaker members above everything else.
And so, it was into that context that Jesus told the parable of the good shepherd. When he did, you could hear that he was presenting a completely different paradigm than the standard by which all of them were living by up until that point. It was radical. It was different. It invited them to change…everything.
In Jesus’ parable, he talks about a herd of sheep. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often interact with sheep. The closest I have ever come was a year that I lived inNew Zealand and worked for a few weeks on a sheep farm during the season of shearing. That experience was enough to teach me that it takes a real calling to be in charge of a group of sheep. Their care and upkeep is not for the faint of heart (or nose).
You and I don’t know much about sheep, but everyone listening to Jesus talk that day surely knew what it took to manage a herd of sheep. While those listening would certainly have been a mixture of tradespeople, they lived in a society in which sheep were very important. Their milk, their wool, their meat, their use as sacrifices in the temple, their presence on the hillsides of Galilee…everyone was acquainted with the reality of sheep, and so they surely caught the differentiation Jesus was making when he talked about the good shepherd and the hired hand.
The good shepherd, Jesus pointed out, lays down his life for the sheep. He is not like a hired hand—someone who is hired to care for a flock. Oh, no, no! The good shepherd would do anything for the sheep—it is his duty to insure their well-being and good health, safety and nourishment. Why? Well, because, the good shepherd owns the sheep. He invests everything he has in those sheep because he and the sheep depend on each other. The hired hand, by contrast, does not. And since the hired hand has no investment in the sheep, the last thing he’d be willing to do is to lay down his life for them. The hired hand is there to make a buck; he is there to do a job and nothing more. The shepherd and the sheep belong to each other. Do you see the difference?
“I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus said. In the new reality of God’s kingdom, we belong to each other…we depend on each other.
I wondered this week about how mutual investment changes relationships. By coincidence, I’ve been wondering for awhile about the Capital Bikeshare program, especially since a new rack of bicycles was installed last year right across the street from Calvary’s front door. You know those red bikes that are all over the city?
So I called John Lisle, head of media relations for the DC Department of Transportation. He proudly let me know that DC was the first city in theUSto launch a bikeshare system in 2010. The collaborative qualities of the program, he bragged, are countless. Not only is the entire idea built on the idea that people pay into a system and share responsibility for and use of the bikes, but now the system is shared with Arlington and soon with the cities of Alexandria and Rockville.
I tell you, John Lisle is the perfect person to be doing media relations for the DoT, because when he talks about Capital Bikeshare he’s almost giddy. He calls the program “genius” and claims that when people pay an annual membership they seem to have some ownership over the bikes—so much so that incidences of vandalism or neglect are very, very low. People like the convenience of having a bike where and when they need it, and so they take care of the bikes. And with mutual investment, the city can afford bikes all over—enough for everyone who wants to ride.
It’s striking to me that we followers of Christ, people who live in the light of the resurrection, have a powerful metaphor for how our lives now change…right across the street from the sanctuary. The Capital Bikeshare models a little bit of exactly what Jesus was talking about when he explained the difference between the good shepherd and the hired hand.
Because, don’t forget, in the light of resurrection, everything changes. We are not followers of the one who rose to overcome death just so we can get what we want or climb to the top of the pile at the expense of others. No, in the light of resurrection we see that we follow the one who models a relationship in which he cares so deeply for us he would even give up his very life for us.
He is wholly invested in who we can become; he will act ever and always in our best interests and for our highest good.
And in the light of the resurrection, so may it be with us, among one another. We are followers of the one who would lay down his life for us, and as such we claim ownership for each other. We must care for each other as we’d care for ourselves. We must nurture and love each other as if we had a stake in each other’s wellbeing…because we do.
There is no more independence and walled off indifference. We belong to each other, just as we belong to God. We rise and fall together; our lives are predicated on the investment we make in the success of the other.
Indifference to interdependence. This can be a hard word to hear, especially in our society of fierce, independent, private individualism.
But in the light of resurrection, everything changes.
When we experience again the one who would lay down his very life for us, we begin to hear even more distinctly the radical call to live our lives for others.
In the light of resurrection, we belong to God; and we belong to each other. May it be so. Amen.
Everything Changes: From Fear to Faith
Everything Changes: From Fear to Faith
John 20:19-31
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed!
Well, everything changed for us last week, didn’t it?
For one thing, we got the alleluias back in worship, something over which Harold Robinson is clearly extraordinarily relieved. We heard the most beautiful music and we worshipped with the scent of the lilies wafting through the sanctuary. Brunch was amazing and, at least based on what I could see from my vantage point near the dessert table, folks were really celebrating.
And for good reason! Last Sunday was Easter, we were marking the resurrection of Jesus…and in a world where death is inevitable, that is no small thing to celebrate for sure.
This week we realize, however, that someone forgot to send a memo about the celebration to Jesus’ first disciples, whose lives we are able to shadow through the written memories of the gospel writers. All of the Gospels talk about what happened to the disciples and Jesus’ other followers and friends on the day of resurrection and into the week following Jesus’ resurrection, and I think it’s safe to say that what they were doing was not celebrating.
No, I think the word for it is more: cowering.
On the day that the women ran to the tomb in the early hours of the morning to tend to Jesus’ body, that day they discovered, much to their shock and amazement, that his body was not there in the tomb and, in fact, he was no longer dead at all. Depending on which account you read, the women either ran into an angel who told them the news or into Jesus himself, disguised as the gardener. Either way their world was shaken to its very core and they tried to make sense of this new set of circumstances. As you recall from Mark’s account last week, the overall news about the women was: they were afraid.
Cut to the male disciples, who did not go with the women to the tomb but instead were sequestered away, hiding behind locked doors, scared for their lives.
And, even more than the women, the men had good reason to be scared. After the events of the past few days, the entire city was up in arms. The temple leadership had done everything in its power to get rid of Jesus, stirring up the crowds and orchestrating a PR campaign for the record books.
Still, so much dissention reigned that the Roman government had had to get involved and Roman governor Pontius Pilate placed guards at the sealed tomb to make sure the rebellion was squelched, once and for all.
The men should have been afraid.
If they were publicly recognized as followers of Jesus, not only were they in danger from the rulers of the temple, now the Roman occupation leaders were involved, too. And if the women were right…if somehow the stone had been rolled away and Jesus’ body was missing…then they surely would be recipients of the wrath of both the temple leaders and the Roman rulers; people would think they’d stolen the body to continue the rebellion.
I don’t quite know to what kind of resolution the men thought hiding in a locked room would eventually lead, but they were scared, and their fear kept them hidden, unsure what would happen next. Jesus had died—they’d seen it with their own eyes. They’d given up everything to follow; they’d put their families at risk. They had given up their professions; they’d thought he was the one to overthrowRomeonce and for all. But as they sat there huddled in fear, listening with disbelief to the reports of the women, all they could see flashing before their fear-filled eyes were those images of his crucifixion, images burned onto their brains, images that totally changed the vantage point from which they each saw the world. When death and tragedy are the lenses through which you see the world, see your own life, well then fear is a reasonable response, don’t you think?
I recently had to have my eyes examined.
I explained to the eye doctor at my appointment that I thought something was probably wrong with my glasses. I have been having a hard time seeing things clearly, especially at night. Sometimes I can’t focus well, and as of late preaching has been a little more challenging (thank goodness for easy font size changes!). I thought perhaps it’s the type of glasses I’ve been wearing or maybe I needed a slight adjustment in prescription.
The doctor was so kind to me.
Choosing his words very carefully he explained that sometimes, as we age, the lenses in our eyes lose their elasticity. This means they do not focus as quickly or as accurately as they used to. It’s not really a problem that can be solved with an adjustment to the prescription, he told me. Instead, it’s time to start thinking about: bifocals.
Yes.
A minor adjustment to the eye’s normal focusing power is not going to cut it anymore. Instead, I will need two separate lenses, one for work like, say, preaching, and one for tasks like driving at night.
The exam proceeded then to the part when the doctor makes you look through the lenses and starts all this flipping action. Is it better with 1 or 2? 1 or 2?
As an aside, I hate this experience more than anything, as I am one who worries constantly about getting the right answer. I’ll get so nervous that I won’t be able to tell, really, which lens is clearer. 1? I’ll say hesitantly. If all I hear from the doctor is silence then I’ll say, “Okay, maybe not. 2?”
After a lot of lens-flipping, the doctor finally settled on the right two lenses. One would help me see far away and one would help me see close up, for tasks like preaching. And it will take awhile, he explained, for me to learn how to navigate the double prescription. One lens will help see the world more clearly in some instances; the other lens will work under different circumstances.
Think about this metaphor of lenses when you think about the disciples huddled in that locked upper room for that week following the Jesus’ death. They were seeing their world through the lens of the crucifixion, which understandably left them filled with fear. And when you’re filled with fear, a very normal response is to stop…to stop and to cower, to become incapacitated because the fear with which you see the world is so intense.
It’s into this kind of situation, one where the disciples were frantically thinking about what their lives would look like now that Jesus was dead, that Jesus showed up.
John’s account tells of two of Jesus’ appearances, one to the group of ten disciples minus Thomas, and then again a few days later to the whole group. Poor Thomas gets a bad rap here, known throughout all of Christendom as the fateful doubter, but we know from reading the other Gospel accounts that the same was true for all the disciples. The women had run to tell them, but all of the disciples were so afraid, they were viewing the world through the lens of fear, that they adamantly insisted they would not believe the women until they saw for themselves. All of them, not just Thomas!
I’d like to point out here that you’ll notice how everything changes. It doesn’t change from doubt to faith, it changes from fear to faith. Of course the disciples had doubts—wouldn’t you? All of them had to see for themselves and even after they did you have to know they sat around in that room, rubbed their blood shot eyes, and stared at each other incredulously. Was that really Jesus? You mean he really meant what he said about spreading the Gospel message in the world? You mean this is more than just a political campaign? You mean he’s really (gulp!) the son of God?
Are you sure?
And you know they were having a hard time, because when Jesus appears the first thing he says is: “Peace be with you.” Can you imagine? All those disciples, crowded into that upper room, scared to death? The physical affects of fear are real and very intense. Although I am fairly sure I could have come up with these myself, I actually looked them up:
Difficulty breathing
Racing or pounding heart
Chest pain or tightness
Trembling or shaking
Feeling dizzy or lightheaded
A churning stomach
Hot or cold flashes; tingling sensations
Sweating
Fear…it was real and it was palpable, and, understandably, they couldn’t seem to figure out what came next.
Jesus must have known that a group of fear-filled disciples who could only see the world through the limited lens of their own fear would never, ever change the world.
The lens needed to change; resurrection needed to become real for the disciples to embrace the promise of what was ahead—a whole world that would be changed by the Gospel message.
So Jesus shows up. And when they see him—both the 10 disciples the first time and Thomas the second time—a little click occurs. Like seeing the illuminated letters on the wall in the darkness of my eye doctor’s office, it was like the correct lens was finally put into place and the disciples could see again. Jesus was alive, and so fear—heart-stopping, life-crippling fear—was miraculously transformed into faith.
And so faith was born. It may have been small at first…tentative and weak. But faith is what fear became when everything changed, when the truth of the resurrection became real in the lives of the first disciples. With the perspective of resurrection to change the way they looked at the world, the disciples were incapacitated no more. They were miraculously able to move from fear—utter, disabling fear—to faith.
And that faith was just enough faith to lead them to unlock the door to that upper room and head out intoJerusalem.
It was just enough faith to turn insecure, unsophisticated fishermen into bold proclaimers of Jesus’ Gospel.
It was just enough faith that they gave up their very lives, so convicted that this Jesus, this resurrected one, had the words of eternal life.
It took a little while, but when the truth of the resurrection had sunk in, finally, everything changed. The disciples saw the world in a whole new way; their perspectives radically shifted; they moved from fear…to faith…and everything changed.
In the light of resurrection, what has changed for you? Is fear still nipping at your heels, keeping you from stepping out in faith to whatever is next for you?
Well, I have to tell you that Christ is risen…and because Christ is risen, everything changes.
Unlock the door, come out of hiding, embrace the promise of the Gospel in your life, move from fear to faith. Look around, through the lens of Jesus’ resurrection, will you?
When you do you will see that everything has changed.
We Pray for Children
As the Children, Youth and a New Kind of Christianity Conference closes today, I was asked to pray this prayer. It’s adapted from a piece written by Ina Hughes, and it’s too beautiful not to share.
