The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A

April 21, 2008

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

At a meeting of the Stewardship Commission last week, someone shared an interesting observation from a recent national conference. We were reminded how, in the Hebrew Scriptures and still today in some branches of Judaism, God’s name was considered too sacred to pronounce. People found ways to talk around it without seeming disrespectful: substituting other words, spelling it without vowels, but never uttering it from their mouths.

Today, many religious communities are more at ease uttering God’s name. What we don’t speak about so much is money. People hear the word stewardship and we think of money, and it makes us feel uncomfortable: the church is hitting us up for money again. We dance around it, we allude to it, we do everything we can to talk about it directly. Maybe this tells us something about the predominant deity of our culture: how we’ve moved from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the God of the National Treasury.

As we’ve walked this journey through the Easter season from the initial discovery of the empty tomb to the appearances of the risen Christ to the revisiting of Jesus’ farewell discourse trying to make sense out of it all, we face the increasing temptation to go back to business as usual. We’re closer to the end of the Great Fifty Days, school is coming to an end, the weather is warming up, our minds are in other places. The cultural temptations flash their appeal to us again while the pro-forma language of God seems increasingly empty by comparison.

We’re in a place something like that of the Athenians, to whom Paul spoke and as recorded in our lesson today from the Acts of the Apostles: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For, as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown God.’” The language is vague, kind of like references to the cultural influences that tug on you and me and draw us in, that we know are there and are real, even if we don’t have the words to talk about them.

I was watching some advertisement on television the other day and it still isn’t clear to me what was being advertised—not a word needed to be spoken to feel the tug, the subtleties were enough to suggest it was something I needed, something that would make me feel complete, something I wanted to run right out and buy. Maybe it was the way the people in the ad looked: idealistically looking people, overly fit and carefully airbrushed to expose no blemishes; or maybe it was how happy and carefree they all seemed to be—without a worry in the world.

And when I think about it, marketers long ago figured out that their job was not to sell products based on their usefulness so much as on the psychology of self-fulfillment. Here is something, they tell us, which will make us feel better. Somewhere along the way many churches have bought into this psychology, too, whether through incorporating feel-good songs repeatedly praising some vague, amorphous God, or by adopting as the mark of success how closely we resemble upper middle-class suburbia or corporate America, or by using biblical imagery as a way to talk about, even to justify, the inequities in the world: why we have, and others don’t.

At the Trinity Institute Religion and Violence conference in January, James Carroll suggested that Americans have by and large adopted the biblical story as a framework for our national story. We think of ourselves, he suggested, as the new shining city on the hill, the new Zion, except that we have substituted the quest for freedom in place of the quest for salvation. If the mission of Zion was to be the light of salvation for all nations, we understand our mission to be the light of freedom. Carroll even went so far as to liken Abraham Lincoln’s sacrifice at Ford’s theater to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross—sacrifice for freedom and for salvation, respectively.

Carroll’s observations as you might imagine do not come without controversy, but they do invite us to be self-critical. In a nation in which most people identify as Judeo-Christian, even if many of these people don’t happen to be religiously active, how closely do we actually embrace what we proclaim in our faith? As we move farther and farther away from Easter day, how much do we celebrate or believe or let ourselves be transformed by Christ’s resurrection? To what extent is Paul speaking to us every bit as much as to the Athenians?

Now I must confess to you that I struggled with preaching this today. I struggled because I don’t want to sound preachy as if I know what it’s like to receive the faith more purely than you do, because I don’t. I don’t want to come off as hypocritical given that I am as much engrained in the trappings of our culture as anyone else. I become as intrigued with money, status, accomplishments, and so forth as the next person, and too often convince myself that accumulating more of whatever will solve all my problems, although it never does.

I don’t speak to you as someone who has been able to divorce myself of the secular culture, but then again I don’t think that’s really the point. Jesus never said, “Go, be by yourself, draw a boundary around yourselves and don’t cross it, be purer and holier than everyone else.” Jesus said, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” or “Take up your cross and follow me,” and he practiced what he preached all the way to Calvary. I struggle with what it means to take up my cross and follow Jesus. The cross sounds too foreboding; I’d rather find an easier way.

Paul wants the Athenians, and us, to see that God has not called us out of the world, but God himself has broken into the world through the incarnation and resurrection, that Easter is not about taking a holiday from the usual routine and then going back to usual. Easter is about God’s reaching in, dwelling in us, shaking us up, opening our eyes to see the world through a different lens, transforming us into new people, citizens of a new kingdom.

“Since we are God’s offspring,” says Paul, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

This Easter message is radical business. The early Christian converts, as we learn in the Book of Acts, pooled their resources and lived communally in a way that would make self-respecting property owners like me uneasy. They believed Christ’s second coming was imminent, and they went to any extreme to be prepared. Embracing the faith for some of them meant persecution and even martyrdom, but their faith was strong enough to withstand all things. God gave them all the strength, the courage, the perseverance they needed—just as he does us as well. Or, as Paul says, “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Some of you, I suspect, will approach me after the service with sentences beginning with, “Yeah…but.” “Yeah but things are different now.” “Yeah but we couldn’t realistically be expected to do what the early Christians did.” “Yeah but look how many things we’ve discovered since then. We know more. We’ve progressed. We have more sense.” I’ll be the first one to start the list.

But notice if you will a not-so-subtle shift there. Paul begins with God: “In him we live and move and have our being.” We, on the other hand, probably much like the high cultured Athenians, begin with ourselves. “We know more. We’ve progressed. We have more sense.” Paul looks at how God has woven us into his story; we look at how we can weave God into ours, and on our own terms. Again, I’m not pointing fingers here; I do this as much as anyone else.

If the Easter message is anything, though, it starts with God, not us. God is reigning in his kingdom, transforming us with his grace, shaking up the world, replacing dismay with hope and darkness with light and death with resurrection. It’s a radical message, but God has planted it in my heart and I’m grateful. I’m grateful because left to our own accord I know how destructive we human beings can be, but left to God’s grace, I know that we live in a new creation.

As for talking about money: it’s not nearly as uncomfortable for me as it used to be. Money is not the be-all and end-all; it is simply one way of measuring God’s abundant gifts in this creation. God has blessed each of us abundantly, and we are called to be talking about that. God has made us stewards, and we are called to be talking about wise and responsible stewardship. Christ has been raised from the dead, and we are called to be proclaiming that anew every day.

Amen.