April 23, 2009 by djackson.

I’m having a Markan Easter. Both terms probably require some explanation.

“Markan” as in Mark’s resurrection narrative. “Easter” as in yes, I know, we did the lillies in church and new clothes and eggs nearly two weeks ago but, if one uses the liturgical calendar, it is still Easter for another five weeks, clean through the end of May as we go smokin’ toward Pentecost then set sail across the wide green sea of Ordinary.

But why Markan? Well, it’s Year B in the lectionary, which means it is the turn of Peter’s nephew to step forward from the jazz quartet known as The Four Evangelists and solo on the basic themes of empty tomb and angels. His riff drew the spotlight on Resurrection Sunday, the gospel reading in the principle service. But it’s more than that and I’m not sure I can explain.

Mark originally ended his gospel at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter. I know that’s a debated conclusion and I’m no textual critic but I’m sufficiently comfortable to work from it. This means that in place of a big finish - the trumpet blare of Matthew’s Great Commission, say, or Luke’s soaring brass as Jesus ascends, we get a haunting flute melody that fails to resolve. “They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

The real problem here is that all of this happens before we see the risen Jesus. We never see him, not in Mark’s original telling. “He is going ahead of you,” the angel whispers, teases, warns: he’s out there somewhere so keep a weather-eye open. “Go tell his disciples and Peter.” The one you betrayed is alive, and he’s looking for you; a guy could take that a couple of different ways.

That’s the kind of Easter I’m having. I know Christ is risen. I know it not only because I’ve read the story but because we who are the church are reading the story, together, once again and for about the two-thousandth time. And more than arguments about the tonnage of tombstones and the fighting capabilities of Roman commandos, I find truth in the story because, when I get inside and live it, it works; it’s a “livable’ story, if you will.

I know Christi is risen, I just don’t - for the moment, at least - know where. The story tells me clearly, and experience confirms, where he’s not - not in that tomb, not more gave-fodder fed back to the topsoil to keep the earth’s crust from collapsing, not dead. I’m very sure where he’s not. But a negative assertion still leaves an awful lot of slack in the line. “He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Well, that narrows it down considerably; we can at least rule out Waxahachie. “There you will see Him,” sometime; and that’s if the women get over their case of the vapors and deliver the message.

This was one of those years, in other words, when I confess by faith Christ’s resurrection and his presence in his church and the world. But I confess that I haven’t seen him, haven’t heard him. He’s out there somewhere, but I’m not somewhere - I’m right here. I did my Easter stuff: went to Holy Week services at my church, read the Triduum offices from the Book of Common Prayer, changed the draperies in the seminary chapel from purple to red to gold, went to church on Resurrection Sunday. Christ is risen, and I didn’t do any of this to make that true; I did it to recognize the truth already there. But let’s face it: I was being dutiful, not passionate.

It is tempting, at such times, to do what the early church evidently did when, probably at various times, they nudged and adjusted Mark’s ending into a more acceptable shape. There’s no problem with the last eleven verses - they don’t contain anything heretical, nothing that challenges core doctrine, nothing, in fact, that we can’t find done or said by Jesus elsewhere in the other Gospels. In fact, that’s probably the idea. These editors weren’t heretics, not Gnostics looking to reshape Jesus into some kind of Olympian avatar. They cut their stones from good quarries, solid Christian granite. Those last sections are a sort of pastiche, a cut-and-paste that gives us Mary Magdalene and Emmaus and enough lurid teaching to keep the snake handlers in venom and fangs. They are all true words of Jesus, true experiences with Jesus.

But they aren’t, most likely, Mark’s experience, nor that of his community.

As I say, that’s what I’m tempted to do myself. I know the ingredients. I’ve had Easter seasons where Jesus showed up in my heart or mind or sweat glands or digestive tract or tear ducts. I could manage it - go to a church Easter pageant or watch Mel Gibson’s movie, maybe re-read The Shack, get a good friction and frisson going. And it would all be legitimate enough; people do experience Jesus that way.

People, but not me; not this Easter, anyway.

I love Mark for having the guts to write only what the Holy Spirit inspired, to leave room for those Easters that he perhaps knew would come in the long years ahead (could he have had any idea how many?) when, for reasons having as much to do with our workload as with our spirits, Jesus wouldn’t be all that easy to spot at Easter. I don’t know; this show has over a month left in the run and the Lord might manifest his presence before closing day, might, for all I know, literally show up for the big Show Down itself. (Even so, Lord Jesus, come!) Meanwhile, I’ll go on, because Christi is risen. He’s out there somewhere - maybe just outside my door and I’ll walk headlong into him as I leave to answer a colleague’s summons.

Posted in General | No Comments »

April 16, 2009 by djackson.

Yesterday was tax day, so of course nobody’s very happy. Disgruntled citizens assembled to lob teabags onto the White House lawn but didn’t have the proper permit. Someone finally heaved a box of Lipton over the railings, an act that sent Secret Service agents and ultimately a robot onto the North Lawn to defuse or safely detonate the cache of orange pico. In Austin, governor Rick Perry attended a tea-tantrum and muttered vaguely about revoking the United States’ right to be a part of Texas.

Nothing new here. Taxation apparently goes all the way back in human history, and well beyond the human species. Marc Hauser of Harvard University says that when a rhesus monkey scores some high-grade chow, like coconuts, he lets out with a holler that brings the rest of the troop running to cash in on his find. He can always keep mum and scarf the vittles up by himself, but if he gets caught the other monkeys beat the tar out of him and gobble all the goodies anyway. Young male miner bell birds Down Under have to feed the dominant male’s brats and stand sentry duty over the nest or the big guy wallops them good, and vampire bats expect a gorged colleague to barf blood for his buddies to share.

But these days, it seems like we have taxation on steroids - or crack. As personal incomes plummet, tax revenues crash. This leaves money-starved municipalities looking for creative ways to cash in. For instance, if you cause a wreck in Winter Haven, Florida, the local authorities bill you for the cost of sending out the cops. Ohio’s pending state budget packs a punch of 150 new or increased fees. Washington D. C. plans to assay a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 per month and New York City will mulct you a c-note for idling your car near a school for over a minute.

And, of course, the people passing the laws and profiting from the fees are never the ones who actually have to scoop up the money. Meg Seymour, town clerk of Londonderry, New Hampshire, who did not create the $25 fine on non-renewed dog licenses in her town, tells the New York Times, “Let’s just say that we’re the ones who take the venting. You have no idea.”

See, people don’t like paying taxes, they really don’t like paying new taxes, and they’ll holler at any target that presents itself.

Welcome to the world of Levi the tax collector.

Mark 2.14 introduces Levi (aka’ed elsewhere in the Gospels as Matthew), perched on a stool in his tax booth near the seashore in Capernaum. Note a couple of important things here. First of all, Capernaum sat on a newly-minted border between territories carved out in the turf war between the three sons of Herod the Great. When the old man died the boys set up new boundaries and, as governments tend to do, began charging fees to cross lines that, a generation ago, didn’t exist. You literally got hit going and coming. The old timers recalled the days before this system existed and it doubtless peeved them to shell out for what once was gratis.

Second, Matthew’s physical presence at the point-of-pay means that he ranked pretty low on the revenuers’ food chain. Luke evidently invents a word for Zaccheus, whose biblical business card reads, “chief tax collector” (Lu 19.2). Zaccheus hired guys like Matthew to get out there and actually shake people down; that’s why the little fellow had time to attend parades and shinny up sycamores. So Matthew got the dirty looks, the death threats, the slashed tires on his Yugo and the graffiti on his tax booth. And the teabags on his lawn, come to that.

Then Jesus, with a fine catch of professional fishermen on his stringer, happens by and includes Matthew in the kingdom. For all we know, Matthew had been slapping liens on Peter & Company just days before, and now he’s one of the boys. I’ve heard people claim that the Lord recruited Levi because he needed somebody with a head for figures to handle the finances. Wrong on two counts: First of all, Jesus put Judas in charge of the checkbook, and we all know how that worked out. Secondly, the last we see of Matthew’s shop there’s an “Out of Business” sign hanging on the door. Oh sure, by the next day they’d hired another drone, but Our Lord stages a one-day revolution that lets Rome know her time has come. You can’t use the story of Matthew to argue that church should be run like a business, since Matthew’s actions are a crazy business indeed.

So what lessons does the Lord have for us a day after April 15? Let’s try a few:

1. Might as well go ahead and render to Caesar. Hold out on him and he’ll send his boss monkeys to crack your coconut.

2. Don’t snarl at the clerk who takes your check for the parking fine. She’s just trying to do her job, and she gets the same money whether you pony up or not. It isn’t as if she works on commission.

3. Expect strange company if you journey on the Kingdom trail. You may have to shake a hand that was in your pocket yesterday, let someone cry on your shoulder who not long ago was breaking your back.

4. Find ways to leave the tax booth. Slinging teabags at the first family probably won’t have much effect beyond making Bo sick when he scarfs one. Kingdom creativity should open more than hearts - it should open minds to see new ways of opting out of systems of oppression.

Oh, and this one for free: never let a freshly-fed vampire bat mistake you for a member of the clan.

Posted in General | No Comments »

April 12, 2009 by djackson.

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” – Luke 24.5

Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!

And if Christ is risen . . .

He cannot be kept consistently entombed in architecture, liturgy, or tradition,

But moves mysteriously from synagogue to seashore and village to village,

And we must seek him always afresh.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

And if Christ is risen . . .

He cannot be recast as a respecter of hypocrisies he despised,

But still weaves word-whips to cleanse his Father’s house,

And we must invite this judgment.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

And if Christ is risen . . .

He cannot be kept from quarantined peoples whose skin or sin excludes them,

But shows up at all the wrong parties and eats with uncertified guests,

And we must join these feasts.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

And if Christ is risen

Our world is ever unmade

And ever making anew

And we cannot adorn a shrine

But must always seek a Person.

Posted in General | No Comments »

April 9, 2009 by djackson.

So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
– John 13.30

If we take light seriously, we have also to reckon with the fact that there is a night in which it shines.
– Helmut Thielicke

Lord Jesus we confess that like Judas we have slipped away from your table

When the light of your love shone too brightly to hide the greed in our hearts.

We have gone out, and it is night.

Bring us back to the light of your table.

You offer without price the wine of your saving blood.

We seek instead blood-money to buy what is not bread.

We have gone out, and it is night.

Bring us back to the light of your table.

You offer with your own hand the nourishment of love.

We choose our own bargain for the craftiness of gain.

We have gone out, and it is night.

Bring us back to the light of your table.

You have told us to give ourselves because all are our sisters and brothers.

Instead we have bought their birthright with a mouthful of subsistence swill.

We have gone out, and it is night.

Bring us back to the light of your table.

Amen.

Posted in General | No Comments »

April 8, 2009 by djackson.

An elephant may never forget, but rats do - especially if scientists have been messing with them.

Researchers at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, have cooked up a drug that chokes off the brain’s production of a substance needed to recall certain kinds of information. Specifically, the agent rejects memories of emotional associations. So far they’ve only tried it on rats but, depressingly enough, our brains don’t seem that different from a rodent’s. (How they figure out a rat’s emotions is a question my source doesn’t address.) The neuroscientists behind these experiments hope to use their discovery to treat dementia, addiction, improve memory and help people overcome trauma.

One possible application quickly occurs to theological types like me: forgiveness. Imagine a tablet that erases my recall of a wrong suffered. Grace in a capsule; take two pills and don’t call God in the morning. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but for as long as your medication holds out.”

But that’s just the problem: forgiveness, rightly understood, is not forgetting, but remembering and chosing to love. C. S. Lewis actually speculated “that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfefcted humility that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe.” Elsewhere Lewis argues that “real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness.”

I’m thinking about this as Lent limps toward its lean conclusion and we sink with a whisper into the Triduum - the Latin name for the three days that lead up to Easter Sunday. The first of these is Maundy Thursday, a day named after a commandment, specifically, a commandment that we remember something.

Maundy is also Latin meaning “command.” It gives us a batch of words that Americans don’t like very much at all, words like demand and mandate. The title derives from John 13.34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” That’s the directive, soothingly abstract, but Jesus welded it to a couple of distressingly concrete actions: footwashing and the Lord’s Supper. John records the former while the Synoptics detail the latter. Both occurred on the night before Jesus went to the cross, so that night, Thursday night, becomes Maundy Thursday, the day of commandment. And the latter of the commands I mentioned - the Lord’s Supper - Jesus presents specifically as an act of remembering: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Do what? Remember what? A body riven by my rebellion, blood that gushes from the wounds my sin inflicts. Not medicine ingested to help me forget, but food digested to make me remember.

Many times in Evangelical practice we keep only half of Jesus’ commandment. That is to say, we remember - but we choose the memory. Triduum receives short shrift in Baptist life. We reject as Catholic anything with a Latin name. We like to say we’re avoiding legalism but I think what we’re really doing is swallowing the forgetful pill. We like Easter Sunday and empty tombs and unoccupied crosses because they reassure us that the worst is over. Yes, Jesus had to die on the cross but he’s done with that now so we don’t have to think about sending him there or, worse yet, joining him there. “We recoil,” writes Richard Neuhaus, “The derelict cries, ‘Come, follow me.’ Follow him there? We close our ears. We hurry on to Easter. But we will not know what to do with Easter’s light if we shun the friendship of the darkness that is wisdom’s way to light.” If we’re not careful, Easter Sunday winds up meaning, not that Jesus overcame Calvary, but that it’s as if Calvary never really happened, or at least has been undone. And there’s all the difference in the world between a thing overcome and a thing undone.

So I think the Triduum is a good idea. Again, Neuhaus urges, “Do not rush to conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good. . . .Stay a while in the eclipse of light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.”

So go to church and take the prescription that keeps alive the memory of your sin. Then wait a few days. Then go to church and take the prescription that also keeps alive the memory of your salvation. Three days in the darkness will teach us to love the light.

Posted in General | No Comments »