I’m nearing the end of my disappointing experience at Union Theological Seminary, and it’s hard to reflect upon the institution in any way that doesn’t feel sinful.
I may write a piece about it once I have a degree in hand, a sort of “Be ye warned” to prospective students, but only if I can summon enough grace and maturity to reflect on the school without bitterness.
Grumbling isn’t fun to read anyway—right? I’m level-headed enough to feel grateful for the doors Union has opened, mainly living in New York and meeting my partner, and serving at Old First Reformed Church. Yesterday I preached my last scheduled sermon there, and for the first time approaching the pulpit, I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t confident I’d written anything worth hearing, but I knew I’d written something I firmly believe about Christ and my faith, and so I felt peace.
I’m not accustomed to peace or dogma. The one constant of my entire spiritual life has been confusion. I’m still bewildered by almost everything religious, but I’m more reverent about the confusion now, and I believe something at last. So I’m thankful for Union, for being a school full of so many theologies and practices I’ve raged against that it clarified where I stood on many issues relating to God, humanity, and faith.
Some of that’s in this sermon, and for once it’s on point enough to mention gay Christians. So, here it is, preached on Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; and John 20:19-31.
Maybe because I grew up without it, I often find the lectionary remarkable. As probably all of you know it follows the liturgical calendar, the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and the Season after Pentecost, a way of measuring time my Evangelical childhood also lacked. My family’s church celebrated Easter and Christmas, but I only heard about Lent as something Catholics practiced, and described like a pagan ritual. Holidays were just a break from the pastor’s expositional preaching; he plodded through books of the Bible verse-by-verse so slowly it took him two and a half years to finish Romans. I suppose as far as children go I was rather pious. I prayed at night and throughout the day talked to God, but I remember church as the place where I fidgeted most, and holiday services as less sacred than the candles and eggs and stories we had at home. There was no ecclesial build up to these holy days, no anticipation, and certainly no denouement.
I would have benefited from some liturgical context as a child, because I benefit from it now. Intellectually, the Incarnation at Christmas and the Resurrection at Easter are impossible concepts to grasp. I learned about them as given facts like they were gravity or the Pythagorean Theorem. God entered the world as a Jewish baby in Palestine, and after he died he rose from the dead. To doubt this was a sin, which is how I heard the story of Thomas interpreted—always as a very wicked disciple. Thomas ate, drank, and traveled with Jesus for three years; he heard many times that Christ must die and on the third day be raised; and in fact he witnessed Jesus raise people from the dead, and he believed in Elijah and Elisha who had resurrected others centuries earlier. Thomas witnessed prophecy and miracles, and even heard the testimony of other disciples, insisting they had seen the Lord, and yet he could not himself believe. I was told, growing up, his doubts made him sin, and I was warned to never doubt and be so wicked myself.
Of course I sinned and doubted, and like most good Evangelicals went through a short period of atheism in high school. I learned about Darwin and tropes of mythology, and I had spent every night for four years, praying to God, asking him to make me straight. At 17, I decided if God couldn’t make that one little switch in my orientation, how could he raise a person from the dead?
Without any context in the Bible or liturgy or my teenage life, the Resurrection, like the Incarnation before it, was abstract, and absurd. The poet Christian Wiman wrote,
You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as “faith” or “belief”. If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.
As it happens, I missed him. My atheism lasted for about a month, and then I returned to God, because I couldn’t—and can’t—fathom a universe without him in it. I still didn’t understand the Resurrection, but I at least understood that some things elude comprehension, especially metaphysical things relating to faith and the creator of the world.
I still don’t understand a great deal of Christianity, especially these cosmic events of the Word becoming flesh and the risen Lord. I don’t believe this is sin to express confusion, even doubt. As I interpret the story of Thomas now, it is as a testament to how absurd the Resurrection has always been—so absurd not even eyewitnesses could be trusted. I can’t see Thomas as a wicked human, but just a human, painfully aware of mortality, of death’s inevitability and permanence, of how short and precious our lives are.
The liturgical calendar asks us to reflect upon this bare, brutal fact. The prophet Isaiah said, “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.” At the start of Lent we receive a mark of ashes on our forehead and are told to remember we are dust, and to dust we shall return. The mark is a cross, since Christ too was dust, and in Lent we are preparing for that moment on Golgotha when he cried out to God and then returned to dust, wrapped in strips of linen and placed in a cave.
In December we remembered Christ wrapped in swaddling cloths and placed in a manger. The narrative of Jesus is beautifully circular. Our calendar reflects its motion, cycling through birth, death, and life, then back again. Our oak trees and orchids and wheat fields reveal a similar kind of resurrection narrative, as does all of human history. We celebrate the births of nieces and nephews and children of our own, and we grieve our parents’ deaths, and we reflect upon mortality throughout our precious lives. Lent and Advent, Easter and Christmas teach us about death and life, preparing us and assuring us we worship a God who experienced mortality with us, and by resurrecting proved himself greater than mortality, testifying to the immortal soul within us.
It strikes me now that my church had no use for the lectionary or liturgical calendar, because that brand of Evangelicalism has very little use for this life. The physical world is but a waiting room, and the sooner death comes, the better. Jihadists believe a similar theology, which is why they’re so quick to kill themselves and 147 Kenyan students in the process. News reports like these make me wonder if it is not doubt but disturbing confidence in the afterlife that is a sin. Whatever prophets and pastors may say, we cannot know what awaits us beyond the grave—which is why we worry, and why our faith assures us, every year, that death is a reality, but so is life.
Jesus might have said something about the afterlife, walking from his tomb into a room full of disciples, likely fearful they too would be crucified by association. Instead of assuring them of mansions or crowns or 72 virgins, he only said, “Peace be with you,” and then again, insistently, “Peace be with you.” From our creation in the very beginning, the Book of Genesis asserts humans are both spirit and flesh, made from the dust of the earth and the breath of God. We are, in a sense, interlopers in this physical world, biological creatures but also spiritual beings, which accounts for our anxiety and unrest, our fears and insecurities and terror of the unknown, especially the grave. So Jesus commanded peace, peace in this mortal life, peace even with the reality and inscrutability of death, peace through the testament of his risen life, peace that like the Resurrection and Incarnation surpasses understanding.
The Book of Acts suggests the disciples obeyed his commandment quite well. We read how the early church abandoned private ownership and developed a system of generosity that would put modern welfare programs to shame. Right before this passage, Peter and John were imprisoned, and not long after it Stephen would become the first martyr, and then St. Paul would suffer beatings, shipwrecks, and house arrest, all with an otherworldly peace. When St. Paul lists the fruits of the spirit, “peace” is third, love and joy first, which also appear in our Psalm about kindred unity, and the fellowship in 1 John. “Don’t worry about a thing,” the songwriter Kurt Vile said: “It’s only dying.” As I understand it, the Resurrection is a testament to our spiritual selves, our immortal souls, the divine image God breathed into us in the Garden of Eden. Death cannot destroy God’s image in us, as Christ’s Resurrection reveals.
It is the Orthodox position to declare God became a man in Jesus so that he might die and rise to reveal his salvation, which is another mystical and mysterious concept. I consider salvation much more than a ticket out of Hell; we are saved, at least in part, by Christ resurrecting the image of God—which according to Calvin was lost when sin entered the world. Eastern theologians believe otherwise, and it may be our divinity, our spirit, was never lost, just ignored, forgotten when death and all its horrors became apparent. In conquering death, Christ could fill us once again with the Holy Spirit and its fruits, illuminating the image of God within us. So after the Resurrection, we see his disciples demonstrate love and fellowship and peace, even in this troubled mortal life and, we may hope, the next.
This is of course easier said than done. The opposite of peace is not war but despair. If I am absolved for doubting, I am guilty of despair every time I read about ISIS or environmental reports or the state of our nation, how it treats black citizens during traffic stops and women in boardrooms and gay couples at Indiana pizzerias. Despair is endemic in our society, and not without reason. Gray whales and honeybees are dying. The earth is getting hotter and more crowded. Our presidential hopefuls keep talking about the economy, as if an idolized GDP was the savior of the world and not the culprit to blame for so many of our ills. I sin by despairing every day because our planet and civilization seem so doomed. Surely Judeans under Roman occupation had similar hopeless thoughts, and so it was into that world that God came, and died, and resurrected, bringing peace even without political reforms.
I realize the Revised Common Lectionary is not the word of God—in fact it is barely 20 years old—but I believe it draws some enlightened truth out of the Scriptures. I believe these readings about unity and fellowship, generosity and peace testify to the salvific power of Christ’s Resurrection. They reveal why Easter is such a joyful celebration. We know we cannot avoid death in this life. Our redwoods and cats, spouses and friends are mortal, and we may grieve that, but we may not despair. Mortality is our reality, but our God is greater, and by his Resurrection he conquered death to bring us peace, now and eternal.
Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; unto him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
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