Date Night: April 28, 2019

John 20:19-31
Psalm 150
Acts 5:17-32

Horatio Alger Jr., the son of a Unitarian minister, made a name for himself in the last half of the 19th century writing stories of teenage boys who, through hard work, pluck, and a generous helping of luck, escaped poverty. Originally set in East Coast cities, he would eventually expand his palette to include the American West, that landscape of rugged white individualism. Alger’s name remains synonymous with this form of rags-to-riches tale.

These days, we have a love-hate relationship with these narratives. We want to be able to celebrate hard work and talent, but also realize that many who work hard all their lives remain trapped in multigenerational poverty, that there are structural and systemic barriers, that our supposed safety net is often a series of hoops and silos that diminish and demean. When we rightly celebrate those who escape poverty, we run the risk of blaming those who are still poor for being poor.

My own father experienced grinding poverty during his childhood. His father, a Norfolk cop, developed tuberculosis. A meagre pension and relocation to a sanitarium in Albuquerque left the family dependent on a local soup kitchen. Dad was determined that his own children would never experience that sort of hunger. He had huge vegetable gardens, and worked non-stop, 24 hours on as a firefighter, 24 hours off, then with a second job on his weekdays off-shift. Mom worked for much of my childhood too, various clerical and sales jobs. Amazingly, my sisters and I were not feral, but always supervised. I was not untethered and wild until I was a teen, but that is a different sermon.

Mom and Dad would have laughed at parents scheduling a date night, which wasn’t a thing for working class folks in the 1960’s and ’70’s. Didn’t happen. The best they could manage was to have friends over for cards every other Friday night. But somehow, when I was eight and my sisters were still toddlers, Mom and Dad managed to schedule an actual anniversary date.

And there, in that giant cinema of an earlier age, the curtains opened, the screen came to life, and my little butt was in the seat between them.

No idea how that happened. I asked Mom about this recently. She remembers it clearly, but can’t remember why I crashed this exceptionally rare night out.

On the screen? Fiddler on the Roof. It must have made an impression, on them, because the soundtrack was often on the big old console record player in the living room, along with Camelot and Oklahoma, and made an impression on me, which might explain a lot. I still have many show tunes committed to memory, though nothing could have prepared me for hearing Harvey Fierstein singing Golde’s half of “Do you love me?” in the fall of 2001 at a fundraiser for 9/11 victims and their families.

My favorite bit in Fiddler is that portion of “If I Were a Rich Man” when Tevye dreams of people coming to him posing “questions that would cross the rabbi’s eyes.”

And now, well, I’m not a rich man, but I am the rabbi, and you often pose questions that do cross my eyes. You think I’m supposed to know answers to the big questions, life, the universe, and everything, and I don’t know, no matter how many times I quote Douglas Adams’ infamous answer, 42.

Being part of a Christian tradition without a creed allows me to figure out for myself what I believe, leaves room for doubt, but ultimately I am here because I do believe something, construct my faith on the foundation of the story of this Jewish reformer that people experienced as an encounter with the divine, the story of the evolving faith of a thousand years before his short life, of two thousand years since he was executed and somehow cheated death.

When folks say “My life is running out. What comes next?,” I say “I don’t know. No one does. But this is what I believe…”

Our two readings today are about belief, what it means to believe, what it can cost to believe. Thomas has had a bad reputation throughout the ages, but in the latter half of the last century we discovered an actual Gospel attributed to Thomas and realized that the form of Christianity we received, orthodox with a little “o,” was in direct competition with other understandings of Jesus, just as those who created orthodox Christianity and the canon of scripture were competing with followers of John the Baptizer and of the Pharisaic movement in first century Judaism. There was a drift toward ways of thinking called gnosticism, which emphasized secret knowledge, and Docetism, which suggested that Jesus only seemed human, but was actually non-corporal, a spirit, for all things material, including bodies, were considered evil, hence John’s rebuttal, the emphasis on wounds that could be touched, on the body of Jesus and the fact that it was good, that this was a body a hemorrhaging woman could touch and be healed.

We now understand much of this reporting as polemic, not that this understanding diminishes the underlying truth about Jesus, his life and ministry, but it can distort the heart of Christianity if we are not attentive, if we get caught up in the excess against other understandings.

Our second reading is also about belief. Don’t get distracted by the miraculous escape. Sure, it is there, but that isn’t the point of the story or of the Acts of the Apostles broadly. The power of God is not the point, for the gospel preached by Jesus and the story told in Acts are not of a powerless people passive in the face of divine manipulation. Focus on the miracles and you miss what is important, that regular humans are charged with making things happen, charged with courage and creativity. The gospel story is surely the story of God-with-us in the person of Jesus, but it is equally the story of the human response to the presence of God. This is especially clear when you understand Luke and Acts as a single work.

I’d like to draw your attention to one of the last lines in the text from Acts, as the apostles, including Simon Peter, are in police custody. They are charged with disobeying the orders of those with lawful authority. We’ve just come through Holy Week, and are painfully aware that a toxic mix of law and order and religion is exactly what crucified Jesus. The apostles insist that obedience to God is more important than obedience to human authority. If they had actually obeyed lawful human orders, as some Christians today suggest for uppity Jesus people working at our southern border, we probably wouldn’t be here, there would be no Christianity and no church, for teaching people about Jesus was unlawful. The apostles are engaged in a bold act of civil disobedience in very public settings. It would later cost Stephen his life. And there, in their collective response when confronted by the council, we find these words: “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.”

Humans killed Jesus. God raised him back up from the dead.

Let that sit there for a moment, for it is the opposite of what we’ve mostly been told.

Humans killed Jesus. God raised him back up from the dead.

That sure doesn’t sound like God demanded Jesus be sacrificed as a sin offering for humankind, a bloody repayment for disobedience and lost honor and fruit stolen from a forbidden tree.

“The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.”

From 2014 to 2017, GEICO ran an ad campaign for car insurance under the banner “it’s what you do.” In one commercial the setting is a slasher film. The terrified teenagers decide not escape in the conveniently located car, which is running, but instead choose to run into a barn filled with chainsaws. The tag line is “If you’re in a horror movie, you make bad decisions. It’s what you do.” Followed by the line repeated in every ad in the campaign, “If you want to save money on car insurance…” You get it.

In another ad, the machinery in a peanut butter factory goes haywire, and when the boss asks what happened, everyone points at a co-worker who happens to be a goat named Rick. “If something goes wrong, you find a scapegoat…” It could easily say “If you are a human, you find a scapegoat,” for Jesus was a scapegoat, killed by hanging on a tree, and then we set about the business of blaming God for the murder, for after we have done the violence, we seek to build the case, to justify what we have done.

So here is what I believe, about life, the universe, and everything. God is not the god of death. God is the source of life and love and and mystery, and a universe that is filled with creativity and entropy, and it is good, even if we bubble up into consciousness for a mere moment, finite and fickle and a divine firework, beautiful and amazing.

God does not order death, martyrdom, jihad or crusade or death penalty. Those are human things. When we try to blame God for human violence, we are making an idol, as small and as petty as humankind at our worst, a petty, fearful deity, and in the end, one I cannot worship.

The story of God is not frozen in words written three thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, translated from ancient languages, often poorly. The story of God is human encountering the mystical and holy again and again, interpreting it for their time and place, and slowly adding to that knowledge. And while, in one sense, many of us understand Jesus as a special encounter with God and ground ourselves in his story and his teaching, the word of God did not stop when he ascended into heaven or when the last disciple died or when a man named John had a hallucination on the island of Patmos.

God is still speaking and humans are still encountering God in a delivery room and at a super-collider, under the stars and under the sheets, anywhere that we are lifted up and made to dance, every time our hearts sing.

And prophets still speak the word of God, speak God’s truth in quantum formulas and in cries for justice, in some of the amazing new choral work that is being written for worship and in columns in the newspaper.

Anywhere that love and hope and selflessness are celebrated.

So when a courageous man took the ultimate risk and went and spoke the good news in Jerusalem and was humiliated tortured and executed, of course that wasn’t the end, for God is better than that, bigger than that. Death is our plaything. Life belongs to God.

What happens next? I don’t know. This rabbi’s eyes are crossed, for sure. But this I believe: if we live with courage and love and selflessness, that same God that conquered death will conquer death. Human evil is never the final answer. Not in the killing fields or at the lynching tree.

That is what gets me out of bed. It is what allows me to be with you when you grieve. Hope is everything. Easter is life. May we claim it, shout it from the roof tops, or at least play it, the song of our people, scratching it out as best we can like a fiddler on the roof.