Preacher's Study - 4 Easter

Monday morning in the Preacher's Study

First thoughts about next Sunday's sermon (4 Easter Year C)

Todd Townshend

Right in the middle of the Easter season, the Lectionary leaps from resurrection appearances to the tenth chapter of John and faith statements about Jesus. In that chapter we hear Jesus saying, “I assure you that I am the gate of the sheep” (v. 7). “I am the gate” (v. 9). “I am the good shepherd” (v.11). “I came so that they could have life—indeed so that could live life to the fullest” (v. 10), and this Sunday, in response to the question, “Are you the Messiah?”, we will hear Jesus say, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” (v. 27,28).

 These statements are taken from the life of Jesus and they are applied to the time of his resurrection life. It makes a difference to hear them in the season of Easter, now that Jesus has been crucified, raised from the dead, and seated at the right hand of God in glory. Jesus knows his followers and gives them HIS life in abundance.

Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30). Together with the Spirit, the intimacy between them is unparalleled, and the “I am” sayings in John attest to this from many different angles. Preaching from John 10 does not call for simplifying summaries. A straightforward statement is juxtaposed with deeply symbolic ones. God chooses to give life to sheep and shepherd freely, persistently, and in the face of every challenge. An emphasis on the shepherd might help preachers to avoid allegories unsupported by these texts. This shepherd provides all and promises all. He knows his sheep by name, and is so desperate to give them life that he would lay down his own life so that shepherd and sheep might rise together. This is the way to abundance.

Could we think of this abundance of life as a conversion to the pneumatic/Spiritual life promised, won and given in Christ’s resurrection and ascension? If a sense of abundant life marks our conversion to God, we no longer seek some other kind of fulfillment or existential peace. How does this affect our mission as Christians? Is God’s focus merely me as “the sheep” or is it really the flock, or both?

The preacher this Sunday may want to proclaim that a full understanding of Christ’s abundance allows us to stop striving, to stop becoming idolaters, to stop setting up pet gods and instead accept the Shepherd’s care and presence, trusting the Shepherd to find pastures and protect the life of the flock. Abundance requires not vain striving but instead a joyful worship of God in Christ—a joyful mission, indeed. 

(This blog is adapted from the entry I wrote with Darren Marks in Abingdon Theological Companion to the Lectionary (Year A): Preaching Year ,  edited by Paul Scott Wilson. I can recommend this resource series very highly)

Baptism and everyday rituals of life & death

Baptism and the Wide Expanse of Life

Benjamin M. Stewart

“Baptism into Christ demands enough water to die in,” Aidan Kavanagh famously wrote.[1] Many newer baptismal fonts have indeed recovered the dimensions of the tomb (as well as emulating the bodily scale of bathing pools, wells, fountains, and flowing streams).

But even as fonts have recovered the capacity of the grave as living bodies are baptized into the death of Christ, actual Christian graves have receded from view. Memorial services without the bodily presence of the deceased are common. Increasingly, the dead have been “banned from their own funerals,” writes Thomas Long.[2]

For all of the attention paid in the liturgical renewal movement to the recovery of fonts that can evoke the realities of the grave, Christians have paid little attention to the grave itself—a liturgical symbol of astonishing importance and rich baptismal significance in the lives of early Christians.

Christian interest in death and beyond has not waned, as Rob Bell’s and N.T. Wright’s Amazon.com rankings demonstrate. But how can the rich theology and practice of baptism extend to Christian ritual at death? Can our renewed and enlarged practice at the font expand our sense of baptismal living and dying?

Perhaps Christians can learn from other groups recovering stronger rituals at death, like the recovery of the chevra kadisha burial society among the Jewish community (pictured below[3]), and the practices of natural burial among the ecologically minded (pictured further below[4])?

Here’s a question to stir the waters: how can an expansive theology and practice of Christian baptism expand our everyday rituals of life—extending all the way to our ritual at the time of death?

 

 Rabbis teach the practice of ritual immersion as part of the care of bodies at death.

The assembly lowers a simple pine coffin into the ground at Ramsey Creek conservation burial ground.

Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart is Gordon A. Braatz Assistant Professor of Worship and Dean of Augustana Chapel, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He will be featured as one of our plenary speakers at our June 27-29 conference with NAAC in Chicago, “Stirring the Waters: Reclaiming the Missional Subversive Character of Baptism.”

To register online: http://www.rsvpbook.com/event.php?456526

For more information: http://www.associatedparishes.org

The following is the description of Dr. Stewart’s plenary session:

Matters of Life and Death

The Christian life begins with an embodied act that St. Paul describes as a “burial with Christ” in baptism. The renewal of baptism, then, reconfigures our patterns of living and dying. We will explore ways in which baptism invites us to honor our earthly bodies, reorients us to death, and welcomes us into abundant life.  

---

[1] Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (New York: Pueblo, 1978), 179.

[2] Thomas Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 75.

[3] Photo by Michelle V. Agins, The New York Times. See Vitello, Paul. “Jewish Groups Revive Rituals of Caring for Dead.” The New York Times, December 12, 2010, sec. N.Y. / Region. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/nyregion/13burial.html.

[4] Natural Burial at Ramsey Creek conservation burial ground, South Carolina. http://www.memorialecosystems.com/

Preacher's Study - 3 Easter

Thursday morning in the Preacher's Study

First thoughts about next Sunday's sermon (3 Easter Year C)

 

Todd Townshend

Some weeks the preacher does not begin sermon preparation until Thursday, so this week it will be “Thursday Morning in the Preacher’s Study”! 

In Acts we see some patterns of human response to the Resurrection Gospel and to the movement of the Holy Spirit of God. The patterns seem to be a response to the questions, “How does one become a believer? How does one acquire Christian identity?”

What follows can be applied to three passages from Luke-Acts, A) The Road to Emmaus (Lk24:13-35), B) The Road to Gaza (the Ethiopian’s baptism in Acts 8:26-40) and C) The Road to Damascus (the first account of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9:1-20). However, we will focus here only on the Road to Damascus as it will be heard this Sunday.

We are not Christians at birth, but through baptism. A person becomes identifiably Christian when he or she makes a confession that Jesus is Lord—Jesus is Christ—Jesus is Son of God. How do we get to that point? How do we lead others to it? I have learned a great deal from Louis-Marie Chauvet and his analysis of the patterns found in Luke-Acts. (see, The Sacraments, Chapter 2)

How does one make this “passage” to faith? First, in all three cases Luke places the action within “the time of the church”. The Lord is no longer visible. Beginning from Jerusalem (Cross, Resurrection, Ascension) and until he comes in glory, the time of the church must be a time of encounter and witness (“you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and to ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)) in a particular place (on the road A: to Emmaus, B: to Gaza, C: to Damascus).

Second, all three narratives clearly show an initiative on God’s part. The Lord is no longer recognizable, but the Triune God is still at work in the story. In Acts 9 it is an intrusion into Paul’s mission of the light and the voice of the risen, but not visible, Jesus.

Finally, the third parallel characteristic is that, in all three narratives, “this divine initiative, which alone allows the witnesses to accede to faith, happens through the mediation of the church.”

Here, the preacher may choose to focus less on Paul and more on what Paul needed from Ananias—with the hope that listeners (the church) may identify with both of them. The church, through each member, may act as a mediation for the work of God—at three levels.

1. The first level is speech. Notice the role of speech throughout Luke-Acts (indeed through all of scripture).  God—through the Word and the Spirit—acts in and through the speech of God’s people. 

2. “However,” Chauvet notes, “this faith remains incomplete as long as it is not ‘informed’ by a ‘sacramental’ gesture.” In Acts 9 it is the laying on of hands, and baptism by Ananias. Only then is Paul’s ‘sight’ restored.”  

3. The third level of mediation is often ignored in the interpretation of these texts: the eyes open but on an absence. On the Road to Emmaus, the risen One disappears as soon he is recognized; likewise on the Road to Gaza, Jesus’ witness, Philip, is “snatched away” by the Spirit. And because this presence has become invisible, the witness is urged to go on a mission of proclamation, and the witness is urged to embody it that proclamation. The passage to faith, which relies so heavily on the divine initiative and the Word’s interpretation, is incomplete without the gesture of reception and the act of witness, both of which are empowered by the Spirit. 

This language does not translate easily into a sermon—however, it does help one to recognize patterns which deeply inform the church about its own identity and mission. Perhaps it will inform the sermon this Sunday.