Gary Brinn’s Blog

The second sermon going up tonight is the one I preached in the Divinity Hall pulpit on Thursday (where Emerson gave the Divinity School Address!) as part of the 2008 Billings Preaching Prize competition. It is really just a shorter version of a sermon I preached at First Cambridge last April. I made the finals this year, which will be held April 23rd, but I honestly don’t think I’ll win. I’m up against my dear friend Sheila, or as I like to think of her, “the Rev.” She’s a grandmother from Brooklyn, and wow does she have the Spirit!

(Update: Sheila did, in fact, win the Billings Prize, one of Harvard’s oldest awards, for “eloquence in the pulpit.” I am very happy to have been among the finalists, as the finals sermons were all amazing, and filled with God’s Word.)

The Sermon

The standard sermon for the story of Doubting Thomas goes something like this: Poor Thomas, he just didn’t have enough faith. It’s a good thing we have enough faith. Yeah us! Or maybe, I know you’re having a hard time believing the teachings of the church in light of the real world, but don’t be a doubting Thomas. This is not going to be that standard sermon.

Now, let’s imagine for a moment that I’m an author, and the Gospel of John is in manuscript form, and here I am sitting before my editor waiting to hear the magic words: cash advance. But instead what I hear is: “Let’s talk about the motivation of Thomas in the final chapter. I’m not sure you’ve made your case. The man has seen Lazarus raised from the dead, the storm stilled, walking on water, miracle after miracle. Why doesn’t he believe now? It’s just not plausible.”

We probably all feel a bit like my fictional editor. Just because something happened while I was out getting the milk and bread doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. Judas Didymus Thomas has been with these folks, these women and men traveling with and learning from Jesus, for several years. They’ve been through some amazing times together. And they’ve seen miracles, they’ve seen death defeated. So why doubt now?

It probably helps to think a little bit about what was going on when this text was written. Early Christians didn’t know what to believe about Jesus. Christianity was moving towards orthodoxy, but it wasn’t there yet. The authors of the Gospels were deeply involved in a struggle to understand. Jesus mattered, they knew that, but he always seemed to be just beyond their understanding.

One area of conflict was how were they to understand the resurrection? Was the resurrection bodily, with flesh and blood? Or was it a resurrection of spirit. This was a question not just about Jesus, but a question about what it meant to be human. This gospel story affirms the physicality of the resurrection, flesh and blood, stuff you could touch. One hint of the counter-argument can be seen in the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus.

Another struggle was between those who would come to define orthodox Christian belief and those who adopted other understandings of Jesus. The apostles most commonly associated with the heterodox group called the Gnostics were Mary Magdalene and Judas Didymus Thomas. Our text is about confirming that Jesus was resurrected in the body, and it is about deciding whose understanding of the Christ event is correct. That is not to say that these events did not happen. But it helps us to see the humans involved in the gospel story, in the creation of the gospels, in the decisions about which stories were written down and which were not.

So what are we supposed to do with the story of Doubting Thomas? If this text is very much about doctrinal struggles, what can a Christian today learn from it? Well, we can all admit that Thomas comes off looking like a knucklehead. But they all look like knuckleheads. Let’s start with Simon Peter. In the Lucan version of his call, we always skip to the line where Jesus says “I’ll make you a fisher of humans.” We ignore Peter’s first response. “Dude, I’m unrighteous. Go away.” I suspect Peter gets nicknamed Rock not because he is “the Rock of the Church” but because he is about as smart as a box of rocks. Who can forget the three denials? Of course, he gets it right sometimes too.

Then there are James and John, so rowdy that they get nicknamed the Sons of Thunder. I like to think of them as the biblical Bash Brothers. If you’re the right age to know the Mighty Ducks movies, you know what I’m talking about. “Dude, let us be your top two guys?” they ask Jesus. And Jesus’ response? “Dudes, you so do not know what you are asking.”

These guys don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what to believe, the gospels writers tell us that Jesus isn’t even trying to make it clear, because it will become clear on resurrection morning. The preaching and teaching and miracle, the feast in the Upper Room and the murder on the tree, it will be clear. The Holy Spirit will comfort them and inspire them and they will change the world. But they’ll still be a bunch of knuckleheads! Even after the resurrection. After he has assumed a leadership role in the early church, Peter still blunders at Antioch. “Unclean food? What unclean food?” They don’t know what to believe, what to do, how to act. But they do know this. Jesus changes everything!

They tried to explain Jesus in terms of his own Judean religion. They took up term of the Roman Emperor. They used many terms trying to describe who Jesus was, what he did, what he meant. And in the midst of this confusion and this grasping for meaning, they did an amazing thing. They changed the world.

No doubt, the mixture of sheer terror and overwhelming hope of that one weekend in Jerusalem stayed with the apostles, women and men, for the rest of their lives. The confusion, the shock. But they took their evangelion, literally the good proclamation, and they went out there and said this: Jesus changes everything.

Today, the name Jesus is controlled by the neo-Pharisees who have the audacity to speak for God. They’ve reduced Jesus to death insurance, to an excuse for self-righteousness, to a nationalistic warrior. Many of us sit back ashamed of what has been done in the name of Jesus, afraid to speak it in public. Jesus has been co-opted by Empire, by the individualism of the Enlightenment, by the thinly disguised selfishness of our economic system. You don’t have to be a theologian or a biblical scholar to see what is at stake. You don’t even have to be certain. You can be a knucklehead and spread the good news!

When I get up in the morning, a week and three snooze-buttons behind schedule, I can do so knowing this. God is good. Jesus changes everything. Even a knucklehead can get that! Do you know that Jesus loves you? That God is good? Does knowing Jesus change your life? We must be the ones to proclaim it. Jesus lives! Reclaim the name. When others preach hatred and division in the name of Christ, confront them, tell them they are worshipping idols of their own creation. If progressives are silent then Christianity will die a slow irrelevant death.

The world today wants Jesus, a real authentic mysterious Jesus. Easter Jesus is always just beyond our grasp, and that’s okay.

If we prayerfully engage the world, if we bring sacrament and Scripture and love with us into the world, we can change it. We can be the leaven in the loaf, not because we can do it on our own, but because Christ is with us when we are gathered in his name, because the good news is the tree and the empty tomb, because Easter is joyful hope, stunned confusion, it is fear and love , it is life in our amazing God.

We must reach back to that original Easter morning, and tell the world! Change the world. Proclaim the good news. Christ is risen indeed. Jesus changes everything. If Peter with his head of stone, if the Bash Brothers and Thomas and Mary Magdalene, if they could go out and preach, so can we. They didn’t know what they were doing either. They lived in that Easter moment. So can we. So must we. Welcome my knuckleheaded sisters and brothers. Welcome to the joy of life in Christ! Proclaim the name! Jesus the Christ, our salvation. Amen.

I’m putting up a couple of short sermons. First is the sermon I will be preaching tomorrow, Baseball Sunday. We’ve invited folks to wear their uniforms, team colors, etc, and to bring their equipment. We’ll be having a special blessing for the season. Brian Packham is leading the music, and will be serving up some baseball flavor of his own… BTW, Brian is an amazing musician. Check out his website: http://www.okihikoki.com/

The Sermon

Sermon
Baseball Sunday- April 13, 2008
Gary Brinn, Pastoral Intern

You might be wondering what baseball has to do with being a Christian. Well you could say that our whole story starts in the big inning, that Eve stole first and Adam stole second, and there was that incident with Gideon and the pitchers. But that would be silliness, and we’ll have none of that!

Actually baseball, or at least the ideas behind the sport, have a lot to do with being a Christian, and no, I don’t mean the competition, nor do I believe that God cares whether my overpaid professional athlete beats your overpaid professional athlete. But I do believe that baseball calls on us to celebrate this amazing creation, nature and ourselves, these amazing bodies. Sure, we sometimes have a disagreeable relationship with these bodies. They break down, ache, eventually they all will fail. But life is good, and these bodies, these amazing miracles, are a gift from God, a gift that Jesus took on himself when he walked among us. Of course, Jesus had a task in mind when he became human like us, but imagine the sensory delights of being one of us, the caress of his feet being washed, the taste of the salted fish, the texture of the sand as he bent down and wrote while challenging those who would throw stones. These bodies are amazing, and at their best they are agile and swift like David with his sling, the young athlete facing the great adversary.

But this sermon is not about the miracle of the body. It is about the infield fly rule and our covenant through Christ. To begin with, I’ll need to explain the rule. If a ball is hit and pops up so that it is a fly ball that will come down in the infield, the batter is automatically out, the umpire simply signals that the rule is in effect. Now you may ask why, after all, a pop-up that is in foul territory must be caught, even if it requires that the catcher run into the television cameras, that Jeter dive into the stands. The reason for the rule is this. If a ball is popped up in the infield and there is a runner on base, the infielders would be rewarded for NOT catching the ball. You see, if they catch the ball, only the batter is out. But if they drop it, they stand a very good chance of making a double play, getting two outs for NOT performing to the best of their ability. And every player, after a certain level of play, CAN make that catch. So without the infield fly rule, players are not rewarded for doing their best, they are rewarded for failing. It may not surprise you that the leagues with the youngest players do not have the infield fly rule, because there is no guarantee that they’ll make the catch, and if they hit a fly ball in the first place, its likely as not to come down in the infield.

Now Paul, in Romans, spends quite a bit of time on the difference between our covenant in Christ and the old covenant, what he calls the Law. This is tricky ground, our Christian story is marred by a history of anti-Semitism that finds its basis in supersessionism, the idea that the new covenant with Christ replaces or supersedes the old covenant completely. Theologians and scholars have argued this point for two millennia. In fact, the question of Paul and his relationship to the old covenant is the topic of much current research and debate. And the horrors of the Holocaust have made us keenly aware of the evil that can be done with a wink and nod from bad theology. So I’d like to avoid being tarred with the brush of supersessionism, but I will risk suggesting that there is a fundamental difference between the old covenant as it is portrayed in traditional Protestant theology and the new, and that that difference looks a little like the infield fly rule. Like the game of baseball without the infield fly rule, the old covenant did not reward you for doing your best. It rewarded you for doing enough. There were benchmarks you needed to meet, over six hundred rules regarding everything from social structure to honoring God, rules about purity and sacrifice and financial dealings. It didn’t matter what you felt, what your motives were, and there was no reward for going beyond the standards set by the Law. You just had to do enough. And if you kept the rules, as tough as that might be, if the nation kept the rules, there would be immediate reward. Like so many in the our nation today, there were always individuals looking for loopholes, for ways around the laws, the Sadducees for example. The various parties were in constant dispute over how to live in the law, or get around the law, to throw out the law, with only a tiny handful saying “the Law isn’t enough.” This nation is in the financial state it is because of this tendency to believe law is enough, is the boundary for appropriate conduct, and that whatever you can do to get rich is okay. You can skirt the law, regardless of whether it is ethical, right, or good, in fact you can even break the law. You are only foolish if you get caught.

Then, in the midst of the Judean system of Law came Jesus. And the message of Jesus was this. You think it is about the Law? You thought it is about obeying some set of rules, and if you just obey, you’ll be rich? Israel will be free again? Think again. It’s not about ticking off the right boxes. There is no such thing as enough. You can’t say I’ve obeyed enough Laws, I’ve honored God enough. There is no enough in the kingdom of God. Never enough love, never enough honor. The Law, Jesus asks? Really? Did you miss the whole spirit of the Law? It is love and justice, not a simple “enough.” What God is asking of you, what I am asking of you, has no limits. There is never enough. You’re not going to be rewarded for doing anything less than your absolute best. And that absolute best has only one limit, the boundary which separates this life from the next.

In fact, Jesus tells us, there is no greater love than to sacrifice your own life for another. And to prove that he meant it, he did it. Jesus was willing to carry the amazing, boundless good news of the boundary-less kingdom of God all the way to Golgatha, all the way to a grave that could not hold him. The message of Christ is the same message again and again… the Law is not enough. The law is a thing, and I don’t want a thing, Christ says, God doesn’t want a thing, God wants you. All of you, infinite you, nothing less.

What an exhausting challenge! You’re not there yet, whether you’ve served Christ for eight days or eight decades. Christ tells us repeatedly that we need to be willing to give up everything. Follow me, he says. Follow me to where the sick and contagious are housed. Follow me to where sinners join together. Follow me to the table, where we will break bread and share the cup in a way that transcends all of the old boundaries, all of the old divisions, that will not replace the Law but that will transcend it, that will fulfill it, that will make the Law all that it was supposed to be. Follow me, Christ says, on the road to Jerusalem, up the slope of Golgatha, into horror and sadness. And follow me, in love and shock and miracle, on the road to Emmaus.

You’re not done. I’m not done. How exhausting! But God HAS actually provided for that feeling of being incomplete. God has given us Sabbath, a day that God intends for us to rest. Not many of us do, and if you have kids you may feel like you can’t even choose Sunday as a day of rest, because the very sports leagues we celebrate this morning schedule practices and games on Sunday, even as we speak there are teams practicing, children missing church, missing Sabbath, for fear that their absence will land them on the bench. I know, having a Sabbath is hard. But you need that rest if you are going to give everything. Everything in love, of God, of your fellow humans, of yourself. And yes, to fulfill the Great Commandment, you must love yourself too.

The new covenant does not reward enough, it rewards excess. It rewards hearts that are opened, floodgates of love and compassion. It rewards your desire to do more, your efforts to do more, even if you don’t always live up to what you might hope. Christ doesn’t call for you to be perfect, Christ calls for you to try!

Paul’s letter to the Romans could be the pep talk of any coach. You are all part of a team. You all have a part to play. Outdo one another, do not lag in zeal, rejoice, persevere. What can you respond to such instructions but amen, let’s get out there and play in the fields of the Lord! Paul knows a thing or two about tough losses, about perseverance, about love. Paul is a pastor coach calling on the churches, ones he started like that in Thessalonika, and those he did not start, like the church in Rome, and ones today like First Congregational to go beyond, to go out there, to stand on the edge of what we think we can do, and to do just a little more. No reward for enough, Paul says. Give your heart. Give your possessions and your money. Give yourself.
And again I say, how exhausting! Jesus and Paul and God, our amazing God, may grant us Sabbaths, but never, on this side of the grave, will we have arrived, will we be sure that we have done enough. The check boxes have been erased, the tick marks are gone, no one is keeping score in this game, because it ain’t over until its really over, and we have loved beyond this life.

To be fair to the old Law, we must admit that the prophets got it right. They kept telling the people of Israel, the people of the Exile, the people of occupied Judea, that the Law wasn’t about check boxes and tick marks. But it took Jesus, it took God to say enough with your petty fighting about the Law, and enough, more than enough, with your efforts to get around the Law. I’m writing a new Law, writing on your heart. Play all out. Never stop until the final out. Never drop the ball because skirting the rules will give you an advantage! I know you can get that out. What I want to see is that amazing beautiful diving catch. What I want to see is that leap of faith. What I want to see is you best. Because I love you, more than you will ever know, more than you can ever measure, beyond all limits. Love one another as I have loved you. As my son has loved you. Run, and jump, and sing and love, and do so without measure. It’s never enough. It’s divine love!

Amen.