A Diner at the End of Time

Who hasn’t read The Shack, the book by William Paul Young that’s sold millions? At the heart of the book is a pain so deep, so searing and disturbing, Mack, the book’s main character, nearly goes mad in his grief. It’s the pain of a parent who loses a child. He labels his pain, “the great sadness.” The book is a lamentation of loss swallowed up by the great love of God. Mack’s pain is experienced early in the book and it overshadows the story until the love of God is finally understood and experienced in the form of forgiveness and grace and acceptance. The author of The Shack claims it is a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.” If that’s true, all of us have a shack we’ve built and continue to refresh and remodel or else your shack has become a deserted, dilapidated old thing abandoned as you’ve been released from its power to imprison you.

Following the battle on Mt. Gilboa, a messenger sought out David with the news that both King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed. The messenger clearly believed he was bringing good news to David. And why wouldn’t the messenger think so? David was the heir apparent to the throne. But David did not rejoice with the news. From somewhere deep within him a howl boiled up so articulate and anguished that hearing its poetry so many years later, we still shudder under its power and pain. David understood tragedy and what it was to ache with loss. In his grief, David articulated a universal pain all of us feel:  Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! (Psalm 130:1, NRSV) David’s lament is a cry of pain and we’re not quite sure what to do with that. What do we do? Likely, we pretend not to notice as this sort of pain is too raw for our timid spirits.

In describing the experience of a mother of a small child who had just died in the hospital, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross observed that she looked numb, blank and expressionless. So she said to her, “You look like you’re in such pain that you might scream.” And the woman blurted out, “Do you have a screaming room in the hospital?” She was serious. Kübler-Ross said back to her, “No, but we do have a chapel,” which was a silly answer because the mother immediately replied, “I need just the opposite. I need to scream and rage and curse. I’ve just been sitting in the parking lot and cursing and screaming at God. ‘God why did you let this happen to my child? Why did you let this happen to me?’” And Kübler-Ross answered, “Do it here. It’s better to do it with somebody than out in a parking lot all alone.”

These words from II Samuel are a scream of pain, and David will not be quieted, he will not be comforted, and he will not be ignored. David ordered his lament be taught to the people of Judah. “Write this down and teach it to the people,” he commanded, “so they will know how to speak of the pain that fills their hearts and seeks its own release.” Pain can silence us, you know. We can lose so much that no words can be found to speak of it. It is important for us to find the songs and symbols and rituals by which we may articulate our hurt.

Over the years, we have come to embrace the Vietnam Memorial in Washington as a symbol of our national hurt and pain over soldiers who served in that terrible time in the 60’s and 70’s but also as a continuing reminder of the devastation and loss a nation feels over any losses of war. Amazing photographs from the Wall speak to us as eloquent, but silent, witnesses, telling us of the deeply felt griefs that attend a pilgrimage of pain to the dark and haunting wall of that memorial.

Parents, now elderly, come. Surviving children, now grown and older than the age of most of those whose names are carved on that memorial, come as if drawn by a mysterious, unknown power. Wives and sweethearts come. Veterans wearing camouflage jackets of uniforms long outgrown visit the monument, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches – soldiers with a strong sense of guilt come. One veteran explained that at the memorial, most people feel a strange sense of guilt. Some feel guilty because they fought the war and did not die as their friends died. Some feel guilty because they did not fight the war and in fact protested it; others feel guilty because they neither fought the war nor protested it, and indeed, never gave much thought to the war until they were confronted with the solemn silence of the black marble monument and all those silent names.

Maya Lin, the architect of the Wall, in designing this funereal symbol said that looking at the Vietnam Memorial would be like “looking at a wound in the earth.” The way to healing begins by refusing to be silent. It begins by embracing a pain we refuse to ignore.

It’s interesting to read how Jesus handled his own grief at the grave of Lazarus. Fully present in his own feelings, Jesus wept. He felt the darkness of his soul’s pain and expressed exactly what he felt. He didn’t try to stifle his tears by damming them up inside. Instead, he openly wept. Then he resolutely called Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus stepped out wrapped in dead man’s linens. Jesus said something that most of us miss because we’re distracted by the appearance of a dead man from the stench of death. Jesus looked up into the wideness of heaven and confessed quietly to God, “Father, I thank you that you heard me.”

Simple isn’t it? David commanded the people of Israel to stop in their joy that they could finally lift up a new king and commanded them to see this as a moment to remember. We’re invited, no we’re commanded, to launch our griefs and our deepest pain into the depths of God’s love knowing God hears our cries and attends to our sorrows.

Otis Redding gave voice to the lyrics and others have since covered the Chris Brown song, “Try a Little Tenderness.” It’s hard not to sing the song without a sense of soul because the lyrics are so plaintive about our need to experience life as tenderly as possible. All of us desperately need a little tenderness to counteract the sapping of hope.

We live in a time when the song needs to be refreshed as a reminder to us that heartfelt kindness needs a revival. Otherwise we’ll be overwhelmed by the cynicism of our day that threatens to redefine us.

“Be kind …  for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” Philo, Jewish philosopher who lived squarely in the time of Jesus, said these words consistent with the great teacher from Nazareth (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and very much in the spirit of Paul (“Be ye kind to one another”). Words like those were written in a terrible time and more than likely it was the simple truths that needed to be emphasized to one another … something along the lines of sanity spoken into an insane time. In all of Philo’s writings, there’s no mention of this Galilean teacher and miracle worker who would surely have been known by Philo. However, he’s clearly commenting on a universal need of his day, namely, that people are burdened daily by the sheer challenge of living in tough times.

Perhaps we live in just such a time. Although we don’t live under the oppressive power of a emperor’s hard-fisted regime bent on stifling every element of our lives, we do live in an oppressive time that makes our lives burdensome. The economy has taken its toll and millions are struggling to hold their lives together. Thoreau observed “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” A life described as “quiet desperation” may be as close as one can come to describing a loss of soul.

Richard Rohr wrote in his daily devotional for today:  “Walter Brueggemann says the job of the prophet is to free people from their numbness. That is also the task of the church. It is to wake people up, to bring them to consciousness, and not just to comfort them in their unconscious state. I am afraid a lot of soft piety and too quick religious comfort does precisely that. The giveaway is when one finds no attitude of service, volunteerism, or compassion for the outsider emerging from one’s attendance at church services.”

It’s such a small thing to be kind. It’s an act of intentional consciousness as antidote to the numbness of being overwhelmed by our burdensome lives … but what a world of change can be unleashed by it.

Everyone has a special childhood fear of some kind or another. And for many, the fears of childhood are so strong we remember them clearly into adulthood. Thankfully, most of our childhood fears are not based on reality but figments of our fruitful imagination based on all things we don’t understand. Do you remember how frightening your childhood was? There were ghosts in the closets and behind the doors. There were monsters under the bed or in the attic. There were all kinds of scary sounds we didn’t understand. Things that go bump in the night and “lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”

We adults can smile about those things now; every child can understand that every adult has at one time or another experienced the same fears we feel on occasion. Every adult, no matter how brave they may appear, has cried like little babies when they were scared. Everyone’s had their scary moments and cried out in the night for their parents to come and turn on their bedroom lights and hold them until they could go to sleep.

Just before halftime of Super Bowl XXIX, a commercial, carrying the theme, “The right equipment makes the difference,” offered a fresh twist on the story of David and Goliath. Picture an adolescent with shoulder-length hair wearing a simple smock cut to mid-thigh and short sleeves so his young athletic build had the freedom of a full-range of movement. Dangling from his left hand was a leather sling and in his right hand was the shepherd’s staff on which he leaned ever so slightly as it offered him support.

Standing before him was a line-up of the most intimidating, burly men one could imagine, most of them with long dark hair wearing uncut shaggy beards. All of them were wearing bronze armor with crested helmets and clutching either a sword or a spear. The men taunted the small boy who stood alone in front of them. Then the tallest and fiercest of the men stepped forward.

Unshaken and unwaveringly calm, the boy fingered the round smooth stone in his hand as he loaded it into the sling and began to slowly twirl the stone over his head, faster and faster the sling blurred as the camera zoomed in closer. Suddenly the sling stopped as it was unfurled and the camera’s focus shifted to the giant’s stunned face as the stone that was spinning in the sling was now embedded into his forehead. The giant slumped to his knees and his whole body fell forward and the boy moved in to retrieve the stone. After prying it out of the giant’s forehead, he looked at it in the palm of his hand and smiled, then he held it up to the camera to reveal the Wilson Sporting Goods logo. Welcome to the Madison Avenue version of the Bible …

There are giants in the land that frighten us still. Even the toughest among us feel fear like little children when we’re afraid. The giants we face today torment and bedevil us. Fear is a potent, powerful enemy and we can become enslaved by our fears. Some fears are so traumatic you don’t go a day without thinking about them. They follow you like your shadow. Our injuries don’t even have to be exotic or life threatening to be significant. They can be ordinary experiences that are painful and personal for them to stick to us like flypaper. In fact, they can be so ordinary that we underestimate their power. They can lurk just under the surface and we consider so insignificant we’re too embarrassed to deal with them. Unresolved, they become crippling and we suffer immensely. Fear is an amazingly powerful emotion and most of us are emotional prisoners to our fear.

After 30 years in prison, Nelson Mandela spoke eloquently of his fears. Not only had he defeated apartheid, the giant in his life, he had been elected the president of South Africa. In his inaugural address in 1994, he said these words:  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”

How big is your fear? Are you standing on the field of battle frozen in a silence that consumes you or are you down at the brook selecting five smooth stones confident that God will help you meet the challenge?

His name was Charles and he was a fellow student at the seminary when I was there working on my Masters. Charles carried all his books in a backpack slung over his shoulders – not because backpacks were in, because they were not popular then like they are now. Rather, he carried his books in a backpack because he had to as both hands were busy with maneuvering on the two forearm crutches he used in order to get around. Charles was a student preparing for ministry just like every other student at the time – only he was unlike every other student in that he suffered from a particularly complicated form of cerebral palsy. His disease had struck him as a young child as it often does. The usual symptoms were evident – he slurred every word he tried forcibly to speak, his limbs would not act according to his instructions to them and his arms and legs would flay from side to side making walking anything but easy.

What I liked most about Charles was the homemade sign he hung around his neck like his own self-statement. On it was a simple Bible reference, Exodus 4:11. In that simple verse was wrapped a sermon of profound implications for anyone inquisitive enough to look it up. When I read the Scripture, it describes when God ignited the bush in the desert where Moses was watching idly over his father-in-law’s flocks. God then described a mission he wanted to take Moses on that would place him in front of the Egyptian Pharaoh asking Pharaoh to “let my people go.” After God gave Moses signs of power and authority, Moses finally blurted out his most personal excuse:  “Please, LORD, I have never been eloquent, for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). To which God responded, “Who made man’s mouth? Or who makes him dumb or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11)

Charles could have withdrawn into the betrayal of his body because he was the least likely student to ever become a professional minister. What church would hire Charles as their pastor when they couldn’t understand what he was saying? He could have shut down all efforts to extend himself outside the disease giving in to its arbitrary and severe boundaries. But unlike Moses, the great emancipator of Israel, Charles bravely ignored his limitations and hung a sign around his neck for anyone curious enough to reach for their Bibles to read. “Who makes tongues? Is it not I, the LORD?”

Charles figured, even if he couldn’t speak with great eloquence, he could still speak a message in ways other than words. The words of St. Francis of Assisi must have been Charles’ inspiration:  “Preach the gospel,” he said, “and if necessary use words.” And so Charles, struggling down the hall to his next class, grunting and straining with every movement, preached a sermon to a school of preachers. With every painful flailing step, Charles preached powerfully to us: “Preachers, tell your story! Tell it with words if you have them. If you can’t form the words, tell it with acts of kindness. Tell it with mercy and God’s gracious welcome.”

The world is just not that big … and like-minded churches are connected by the slenderest of threads. Some threads are created whenever any one of us moves away and joins another church in another city. A wormhole of affection can be created that way between two congregations simply because of lives that are shared and relationships that are maintained. Most often, it comes from how one church sees the world similarly to another … through grace rather than shame … by seeing persons as wounded rather than vile … and choosing to love them because of their wounds rather than rejecting them because of whatever “ism” is in their lives.

Those threads can come from either clergy or laity. Joey Pyle - last summer’s intern at HBC - now serves as Associate Pastor of the Spring Creek Church in Oklahoma City and we have connections with that good church. Our friend Steve Graham, former pastor at Second Baptist Liberty, was the founding pastor at Spring Creek. This past week, Steve shared an experience he had recently while worshiping at Spring Creek with Pastor Preston Clegg who now serves as their pastor. In preparing the congregation for the experience of communion, Preston told the church this story …

Communion around Spring Creek is always a special time for me.  It’s special because of the event itself, but it’s also meaningful because of where the bread is purchased.  We purchase our communion bread from a baker in downtown Oklahoma City.  It’s just a small bakery shop with one employee and a million fragrances.  I enjoy chatting with the baker every month when I visit the shop.  I always learn something from him, and I love to watch him make the bread.  He makes it right there in front of you.  It’s always fresh.  Every month he takes me back to a small room in the back of the bakery.  A table stands in the center of the room, and jars of flour line the shelves around the walls of the room.  The jars have labels on the front of them.  One label reads LEAVENED while another says UNLEAVENED. One jar says WHEAT while another reads RYE.  Jars like this surround the room.

This week I walked into the bakery, and he greeted me with a smile. “Let me guess, communion time at Spring Creek,” he said.

“Well, sort of,” I replied.  I told him about this gathering.  “We are hosting a meeting of Oklahoma Baptists.”

He said, “You mean, I am feeding all the Baptists in the state of Oklahoma!!!”

I replied, “No, not all of them; just the best of them.” So I tried to explain this group to him. I told him about CBF churches in Oklahoma, and what they stood for.  I told him about our missions and ministries.  He listened intently at first, and then he began to walk around the room.  He pulled a cup of flour from this jar, and a cup of flour from that jar.  He walked over to a couple of jars in the corner.

One said YOUNG, and another said OLD.  He took a cup from each and spread it over the table.

“Can you get both of those in one loaf?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. He drew a cup from a jar marked RICH and one labeled POOR.

“Are you sure about this?” He looked me square in the eyes and said, “Yes, this is good news for ALL the people.”

He took a cup from a jar labeled LIBERAL and a jar labeled CONSERVATIVE.

“Two entirely different outlooks,” I said.

“But it’s the same love, isn’t it? It’s the same love.” Then he began to walk around the room and take flour from jars that came from all over the world. He took a cup from the HISPANIC jar and the ANGLO jar. He took a cup from a jar labeled INDIA and one from KENYA and another from AFRICAN-AMERICAN.

“All that in one loaf?”

“It’s one kingdom. It’s ONE kingdom.”

Finally, he took a cup from a jar labeled DEMOCRAT and another labeled REPUBLICAN.

I said, “My gosh, that has to be two separate loaves right there. You can’t get both of those in one loaf.”

He smiled and said, “I thought you had a higher calling and a different mission altogether.”

I knew he was right.

He took all that flour and kneaded the dough, and was able to get all that in one loaf. He handed the bread to me.  Now I could be wrong about this.  I am not sure about it.  But when he handed the bread to me, I could have sworn there were holes in his hands.

“I don’t know how you did this. This really is a miracle.”

He said, “That’s what I do.”

“Yes, that’s what you do.”

The congregation could hear the gunshot as Dr. George Tiller was murdered in the narthex of his own Lutheran church in Wichita on a sunny Sunday morning. Tiller’s wife, who sang in the church choir, also heard the single shot that killed him. Dr. Tiller was serving with two others as ushers for the church where he and his family had worshiped for years. After the shooting, his alleged killer was arrested two hours north of Wichita as he approached Kansas City on Interstate 35. He was traveling at the posted speed limit and the officers who arrested him surrounded his car with their weapons drawn. Without a word, the suspect got out of his car and raised his hands compliantly above his head. He seemed expectant this would happen before he reached his home.

Dr. Tiller had been assassinated in front of a handful of fellow members who witnessed the shooter aim and fire. No one else was hurt as the shooter kept Tiller’s friends at bay with threats of shooting them. While no one else was shot, Tiller’s family (wife, children, grandchildren) and friends, his church, his community and even the nation have been wounded in grief.

No matter what one may think about the complicated moral and ethical issues of abortion, Dr. Tiller was apparently abiding by both federal and state laws that severely restrict how and when an abortion may be done.

Phill Kline, a well-known Kansas City attorney was elected several years ago as Kansas Attorney General running on a right-wing pro-life platform that held Tiller as the poster child for the cause. Once elected, the Attorney General consistently hounded Dr. Tiller for records with counter-charges that Kline’s office exceeded the rights of privacy normally accorded patients in his efforts to stop “Tiller the Baby Killer” from serving women who chose to have an abortion. Kline’s open conflict with Tiller left him as a political victim to the backlash of voters who perceived the Attorney General’s efforts had been more personal than legal. Kline was replaced in the fall elections and Tiller was subsequently acquitted of all charges.

What set Tiller apart from others who provide reproductive services was his willingness to conduct third-trimester abortions for the women who needed them for medical reasons related to the mother’s health or the medical viability of the fetus. Tiller had endured decades of harassment in order to serve women and the social, moral and physical complications of pregnancy. He had been previously shot in both arms in 1993 by a woman who is still in prison serving a sentence for that crime.

Because he was willing to do abortions, Tiller worked as a medical provider with few peers. Some of those peers have been harassed out of practice unwilling to live with the threats from the minority fringe of persons so opposed to abortion they regularly talked in violent terms about those who legally provided reproductive services. One can imagine how cautiously medical students might think or feel about any practice that even remotely addresses the reproductive needs of women.

In the aftermath of his death Sunday, a casual reading of the strident voices from extremist bloggers and other cultural voices of the far right play like a view into the dark side of Christian fundamentalism with its loud claims and less-than-subtle violent threats to those who become targets of their tactics. An argument that connects those extremist views to the actions of this middle-aged extremist with mental problems should be considered.

How shall we measure the profound grief we feel over Dr. Tiller’s murder? How shall we declare the unquestioned condemnation this shooting deserves? How do we account for the voices of the secular right-wing press, who consider Tiller’s death as the moral harvest of his chosen medical practice? The terrorists have silenced one of their targets … but will their tyranny over law prevail?

Whenever you read from the New Testament, you need to pay attention to what I call “the silent witnesses” of the Old Testament in the form of Hebrew voices clamoring for attention. Most stories in the Christian Scriptures need to be heard and understood by what we learn from the Hebrew Scriptures. Why? Jesus must be understood not as the creator of a new religion, but as the Jewish peasant teacher who lived and taught within the context of his Jewish faith. Early Christianity was branded by Jewish belief and as it grew and matured, it stretched out beyond the confines of that faith until it morphed into its own distinctiveness. So, Christian scripture walks hand in hand with Jewish stories and teachings, each illuminating the other.

One of those voices was heard from Mt. Sinai where Moses was called to meet the God whose name was simply, “I am who I am.” The clarity of the moment was amplified by the appearance of God’s presence. It was a formative encounter that shaped them and gave them an identity and a mission, all characteristics true of Pentecost. In fact, the feast of the Pentecost originated from Jewish roots in the festival known as the Feast of Weeks that commemorated and celebrated the giving of the law at Sinai. That explains why there was such a large crowd in Jerusalem.

The second voice clamoring to be heard out of Jewish faith comes from Ezekiel … remember the valley of the dry bones? God’s Spirit came upon Ezekiel, who ministered in Israel in the time of the captivity and God led him far out of town to a valley where countless dry bones were scattered. We understand the bones to symbolize the desolation of Israel who were senselessly killed as others were deported from their land.

A government that doesn’t want us to see the realities of war prefers we have a more heroic understanding of war typically closely controls modern photographic images of war. But on occasion we the images of countless bodies that have been stripped of clothes, stripped of their identities as men and women, and that become just a pile of bodies. They’re the victims of war and must be buried away from our view or we’ll lose our heart to wage war. Somehow we tolerate that from those who control the efforts of war. “Out of sight, out of mind,” we reason.

The bones in Ezekiel’s vision were Israel’s victims slaughtered by the conquering armies in order to exercise domination over the vanquished. This was the carnage of war and witnesses of the people’s suffering in exile. When the Lord asked Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” the prophet replied, “You are the one who knows.” Then the Lord called out, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they might live.”

At the heart of this story swirls a world of images that interact with the meaning of Pentecost at a deep level. There are the fantastic signs of God’s invasion of life. There’s the wind and the sound of the wind, the upsetting of the normal order of things, the imagery of the flames sitting absurdly on the heads of everyone in the room, the power and energy overflowing out of the room showering upon the crowds of people below – all innocent to what was happening above them. The racket created by the 120 followers of Jesus gathered in that upper room became such a noise that they were like “a room full of bagpipes all going at once.”  The story also reminds us that God did not create witnesses ex nihilo (out of nothing), but rather took that which was deflated and scared and breathed new life into it. If we accept that all this energy released at Pentecost is about the invisibility of the Spirit who is wind, who is breath, then a whole new world emerges in meaning. Let’s play with that imagery …

In our lifetimes a totally modern point of view has emerged in that for the first time in human history, we can see the world in its totality as a sphere, a planet spinning in space as it circles our sun, an insignificant part of an immense system of stars and galaxies that extend so far beyond our comprehension it makes our brains buzz. The images of the earth from the surface of the moon are breath-taking in that the earth is the blue-green planet whose colors jump in comparison to the silvery-gray tones of the moon’s dull surface. From space, one can see the glow of the veil of the protective atmosphere that separates the surface of the earth from the vacuum of space.

In the atmosphere is all the air ever created for this planet. All the air that ever was cushions the earth from the rays of the sun and protects us from the harsh emptiness of space. When we breathe, every breath we take has been in the world since the creation. There is nothing new about it, just the same renewable air being shared throughout the eons of time of the earth’s existence over the last 4.5 billion years.

Playfully, Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “The same ancient air just keeps recirculating, which means that every time any of us breathes we breath star dust left over from the creation of the earth. We breathe brontosaurus breath and pterodactyl breath. We breathe air that has circulated through the rain forests of Kenya and air that has turned yellow with sulphur over Mexico City. We breathe the same air that Plato breathed, and Mozart and Michelangelo, not to mention Hitler and Lizzie Borden. Every time we breathe, we take in what was once some baby’s first breath, or some dying person’s last.”

Recognize in the imagery of the air, ancient and renewed with every generation, and the universal nature of it. All of us are renewed and sustained by God’s gift of oxygen. None of us owns it or controls it. It is invisible and takes no notice of who uses it, as it is God’s gift to all of us. Likewise, in the church we don’t own the air we breathe any more than we own the good news of God’s love and acceptance of us. There’s no exceptionalism at work here, whether we’re talking about the air or God’s grace, as all God’s creatures are welcomed to it and blessed by it.

So we might ask, when Jesus took his last breath, what happened? Probably the same thing that has happened every time someone has died. The gospel writers are emphatic about what happened on the cross in the mid-afternoon in which he was crucified. “It is finished,” he said, and in the King James Version of the Bible it says, “and he bowed his head and gave up his ghost” (John 19:30, KJV). The ghost referred to by John was not a spook, but the word in the Greek, pneuma, usually translated as, “spirit.”

See how it all works together? Mighty wind, spirit, ghost, Holy Spirit, breath … the gospels tell us in his first post-resurrection appearance, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22 NASB). Barbara Brown Taylor toys with the imagery and suggests that Jesus’ last breath did not simply dissipate as so many last breaths do. Instead, she argues, it grew in strength, until it became a mighty wind, spinning and gaining in power like one of those modest storms that cross the Atlantic along hurricane alley until the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea turn them into a full blown hurricane capable of blowing off the roofs and destroying homes and disrupting the lives of everyone in its path. God doesn’t need to create out of nothingness to carry on because God has always taken old things and renewed them, re-invigorating them with the Spirit who puts new flesh on bleached bones bringing them back to life. The wind that blew back then blows today and when that which is dead comes back to life, witnesses rise up to tell their story. What was blown back to life in the upper room is the church and we are a part of that great story.

This spring marked the 103rd anniversary of the birth of the Pentecostal movement in America. It began April 9, 1906, in the house of a janitor named Edward Lee. A black Pentecostal preacher named William Seymour anointed him with oil (in biblical fashion) and the Spirit came upon him. Lee broke forth in ecstatic speech and said, quoting from our Scripture passage on the Day of Pentecost:  “This is that!” That night Seymour began preaching and a revival broke free in a movement now called the Azusa Street Revival. Within days the crowds began to build and the people came. So many came they moved to a bigger building. Once a day couldn’t sustain them so they met three times a day. There were as many as 800 in the room with hundreds more outside peering into the windows, all of them trying to get as close to the action as they could. The revival went on for three years and people came from every race and class. All the nationalities were there and social groups high and low were involved. Gender lines were not recognized and women and men alike were called to preach and minister.

You see, when the Spirit breaks free of our boundaries and our superficial isms, the Spirit can move freely like the wind and blow where it wishes bestowing power – enough power to put flesh on a pile of dry bones. Do you believe that?

One of the best known poems to be written in memory of one who died on the fields of battle was written in 1915 as soldiers in untold numbers were slaughtered in Europe. Canadian surgeon John McCrae was no stranger to the carnage of war, but he was shook by witnessing the death of friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer. After seventeen days of continuous battle involving Canadian, French, British, Indian and German troops, McCrae reached the breaking point when Helmer was killed. With no chaplain present, the battle weary doctor buried Helmer just outside the tent where he conducted surgery trying to save the lives of the wounded. Venting his anger at the futility of war, McCrae sat down and penned these words …

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Dr. McCrae sat down and in twenty minutes penned lines that gave voice to the emptiness he was felt as he sat across the road from a cemetery where the poppies had blossomed in the ditches adjacent to the graves. He handed his fifteen lines to a young officer who was moved by what he read. “The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word ‘blow’ in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.” McCrae tried to throw the poem away, but later retrieved the scrap of paper and it became a fitting tribute to the cost of war.

Not much has changed. We’re still trapped in the sands of the Middle East and lives are still in jeopardy as we chase the ghosts of al Qaeda in the impenetrable mountain ranges of Afghanistan and the hostile villages of Pakistan. Eighty million dollars has been proposed to shut down the prisons of Guantánamo although where those prisoners will go is uncertain. Former Vice-President Cheney relentlessly carries on in his ideological war with the new President over the moral nature of torture.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, perhaps the poppies will blow again if only in our hearts. Maybe in their gentle swaying to the invisible whispers of the wind, we can find the resolve to listen to our hearts and hunger for peace.

Christian Scriptures (most of us simply call them “the New Testament”) essentially contain two large, epic stories. Both stories are grand, sweeping stories that take multiple books and several writers to tell.

By the way, I love what Karl Barth once wrote about the story of Jesus described by the ancient writers of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). While Jesus is not specifically described there per se, Barth claimed all the Old Testament writers were in essence like a crowd of people standing on a street corner all pointing heavenward and all speaking excitedly about that which they were pointing. Barth felt the Hebrew storytellers were prophetically describing One who was yet to come, and the reader of those stories could see the street corner from one of the upper floor windows of the building they were in but couldn’t see where the crowd was pointing because of the position of the building; likewise, neither could the reader hear all the crowd was saying. But it was obvious, he concluded, Jesus was the one they were pointing to and speaking about. So we can glean much from reading these two epic stories from the New Testament and hear from the multitude of writers a larger story that takes in our own stories and helps us meet God as God wants to meet us.

First there’s the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish carpenter’s son whose story is told in four familiar forms with four different points of view through four different storytellers. We call those writings, the gospels. Each of them echoes the others but they point their stories toward different audiences with the story of Jesus being told for certain audiences. I like how they resonate but still have distinctive voices. Sometimes it can be confusing, but mostly it’s a nice variety of reverberating stories that create a composite picture of what “God-with-skin-on” meant by joining us in the human story. Interesting is how each gospel tells the story on its own and doesn’t depend on repeating everything every other gospel has - some stories are in one, two, or three of the gospels but there’s very little all four gospels include. Seems we need all four to round out any one of them.

They tell of an obscure boy born in poverty in Bethlehem (what we would consider an answer to the question, “where are you from?”) as Joseph and Mary had traveled back to participate in a Roman census. The gospels clearly portray Jesus as the child at the center of a prophetic vision. The gospels give us a few stories from his first year or two but almost nothing beyond that until the inauguration of his time of teaching. It’s not until we get to the telling of his cousin John’s story (who was the opening act for Jesus as an adult) that he is finally introduced and explained.

From that point on there is an intensity about the telling of his three-year teaching life. Only then do we understand he came to preach about the Kingdom of God, his catch-phrase that points us toward a commitment to God that supercedes allegiances to any other lesser commitments. Jesus adopted Isaiah’s image of one who would come to “bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recover sight for the blind, set the prisoners free and to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” So purposeful was he about these things he disturbed the power systems of his time by unmasking them and ultimately those power systems conspired to execute him. The story of Jesus formed the basis for the first epic story of Christian Scripture.

The second great epic in the 27 books of Christian Scripture is the story of what happened to his followers after Jesus was killed by Roman order, buried, and three days later resurrected from the grave appearing alive on Easter morning. These next two Sundays focus on those strange days following the resurrection that lead us to that which was described on Pentecost.

The epic of the church takes off at the point of the story just as Jesus’ story was wrapped. What we learn in the coming of the Spirit was the unleashing of God in yet another form as the power of resurrection was internalized into the disciples who received an awesome sense of power when the Spirit of God was given to them on Pentecost.

Throughout the letters of Paul and the handful of other writings, we look upon the story of the disciples (known now as ‘apostles’) and the other first-century followers of Jesus as they endured incredible persecution for their faith and yet we marvel at how committed they were in telling others about this Jesus. At first they became known as “followers of the Way,” but later they took on the name of their teacher as “Christians.”

We stand this month in these in-between days as we finish the fifty-day period of time between Easter and Pentecost. It’s a time wide with mercy and goodness. It implies that we too, can be faithful followers of the Way, all the while recognizing we stand in this great tradition that is traced faithfully back to the first-century. We can peel back the church, layer by layer, generation by generation, and see our story being told by this great epic of the church.

When Birdie entered the church office, she said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where’s that pastor of ours who’s spent his meager salary on an extravagant vacation that most of us can only imagine?”

Birdie knew many of our church members had vacationed in Hawai’i. Many had cruised the islands on one of those monstrous cruise ships while others had flown directly to Maui or Kauai to play golf or lay out on the beaches until their skins turned toasty. But the idea of their pastor going where they’ve gone to play is a stretch of their imagination.

Most of our members know my wife’s mother was born and raised in Honolulu and since she can no longer travel to see us, it’s up to us to go see her if we’re to see her at all. It’s tough duty, but I love her enough to go see her as often as I can. I know our church members suspect I love my mother-in-law more than my own mother. I love them both, of course, and resent the implications of conditional love.

I stepped out into the office hallway where I answered back, “Aloha!” The thought that I might be saying either hello or goodbye or both was beyond both Birdie and me so neither one of us were hung on the distinction.

When she came to my office, she said sweetly, “I sure hope you and your wife had a good vacation. As far as Hawai’i is from the mainland, I hope you felt like you left town and were able to relax!”

“Birdie, I only called the office twice and held my emails down to a couple dozen. I would call that a real getaway!”

“So what was the highlight?”

“I loved it all! You know me well enough to know I love the beach time we get. We did all the usual things folks do in Hawai’i, but there’s something we always do when we go. My wife’s dad died five years ago, so we paid our respects to his grave. And every time we go there from the day he was buried till now I can’t help but think he’s buried in paradise.”

“Preacher, tell me about that.”

“He’s buried in the State Veteran’s Cemetery on the far side of the island along with thousands of other vets who served their country. I loved the military honors that were a part of Dad’s funeral. But this veteran’s cemetery is different than most in that it’s located in a land that’s strongly tribal and ancient. So when we go to see Dad where he’s been laid to rest, there are signs everywhere of the Hawai’ian people who visit their loved ones regularly leaving beautiful flowers on most graves, trinkets of their lost one’s life and on national holidays, they even picnic on their loved one’s graves. Somehow it’s a beautiful and loving tribute that puts us mainlanders to shame.”

“That sounds so lovely … I wish I could see it for myself.”

“But the strangest part of all that is that my long-lost uncle who had walked out on his family thirty years ago is buried only 15 spots from Dad. I remember my uncle only vaguely from my childhood and knew he slipped out on all his troubles and disappeared from all contact. My mother-in-law had tracked him down a few years earlier for my Dad by asking about him at the VA in Honolulu using his Social Security number and learned he was living in the American Samoan Islands and living with a Samoan family. Later, he moved with his adopted family to Honolulu and was living as an adopted member of their family. When he died, they made all the decisions about his burial as though he was actually one of their very own.”

My in-laws attended my uncle’s funeral and were generously welcomed into this openhearted Samoan family. The next time we visited was for my wife’s father’s funeral and it was then I was introduced to this lovely Samoan family. They extended love easily and without any other reason than I was their adopted uncle’s nephew they opened their hearts up to include my wife and me.

All of this raises an interesting question to my notion that Dad has been buried in paradise because just a few steps away lies my wayward uncle. If Dad is in paradise, where’s my uncle? How does God call balls and strikes in such convoluted cases like this? My father-in-law was a good man. He loved his family and was faithful to his duties to God, his family, his country, and to every other commitment he might have made.

But my uncle was another matter. Never did I feel anything special with him, partly because he was so seldom around and partly because I knew his troubles would keep him from including me in his life.

Nevertheless, here they both lay. Both veterans loved their country enough to serve in significant ways through troubled times. Both had lived long lives. Yet there’s an indescribable difference to the quality of how they’d lived. And somehow they both ended up laying in a field of brothers in a place that is the essence of what paradise surely must look like.

Maybe there’s a sunny beach and a gentle breeze to stir the palm trees where God’s love is open and welcoming to all us wayward and weary travelers.

At least I hope so.