Coming Attractions

I haven't been posting as much lately for a few reasons. I preached at the early morning chapel communion service at my church, Fourth Ave UMC, Louisville, this past Sunday. Preparing for the sermon took up some of my writing time. Also, I'm preaching again this coming weekend, filling in for one of my best friends at the Saturday evening contemporary service at Christ Church United Methodist, also in Louisville. He's taking the week off because his wife, who has cancer, went into to hospital for a bone marrow transplant.

Also I've had a bit of anxiety about law school and my vocation of late. I don't wish to dump the details on anyone at this time, but I've been struggling a little bit with my sense of personal identity since I left professional ministry, and there are days when the prospect of going to law school just doesn't fill the empty hole in my soul. Consequently, I haven't been sleeping this past week. That's how I cope with anxiety; I just stare at the ceiling waiting for morning. That doesn't help me get clarity in my writing, which means that even though I still try to take two hours a day to write something, the something that I write isn't always worth posting.

Also, I'm working on two books, neither of which is likely to see the light of day. The first is as of yet untitled, and is a collection of stories about my raising my son. Not quite a memoir, like David Eddie's fantastic Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad, but certainly inspired by that sort of writing. The second is tentatively titled Drawing Water Out of Rocks, and is a collection of cleaned up versions of my sermons, along with some newer ones that haven't been preached yet. It takes a great deal of my time, because I rarely preach from a manuscript. Usually I put together an outline, with notes like Tell the story of... scattered throughout to let me know where I'm going. The end result is usually a pretty engaging, somewhat scripted but mostly improvised - like old jazz, where the changes are marked, but the details are left to the musician's imagination - series of observations surrounding a text. So I've been taking my old outlines and trying to recapture what I might have said from the pulpit, rewriting each sermon.

Anyway, I have a few ideas in the works for this blog, so right now I'm taking a little bit of time to tease you with them:

1. I've been reading Elsa Tamez's The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead. Tamez is Professor of Biblical Studies at the Universidad Biblica Latinoamericana (Latin American Biblical University) in San Jose, Costa Rica. She offers an excellent reading of James from a Latin American perspective, focusing on James' solidarity with the poor and his call for social change. I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that, in light of Tamez's work on James, I'll be offering a couple of treatments of some of my favorite passages from that wonderful epistle.

2. A few years ago I picked up Robert N. Wennberg's God, Human's and Animals: An Invitation to Enlarge Our Moral Universe. Wennberg is a professor of philosophy at Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, California. I swore that I would read it as soon as I had some time off from school, and since this is the first semester in a very long time in which I have been in no way, shape or form affiliated with any school whatsoever, I've run out of excuses for ducking Wennberg's work.

Chapter five of his book, titled Animals and the World of Moral Theory looks at how several different important moral theories deal with the moral standing (or, generally, lack thereof) of non-human animals. He devotes a little bit of time to utilitarian ethics and how it treats the moral standing of animals, and while I think that by and large his treatment was fair, I have a pretty major bone to pick with him on his criticism of utilitarianism. So I'm working up a paper on a utilitarian response to Wennberg's "A Problem for Utilitarianism." The only problem with my paper so far is that every time I try to clean up utilitarian ethics to deal with Wennberg's criticism, it stops sounding very much like what most people mean by utilitarianism.

Anyway, look for those two projects in the coming days. At some point I'll have to finish my sermon for Saturday, so I might only get one of those two done before the end of the week. Having basically just two hours a day (that's how long Adam naps)to do my writing, it gets hard to finish the big projects.

Finally, I want to leave you with a continuation of my last Adam story, The Next Pistol Pete?

The first night that we had the basketball goal up, Adam slept fitfully. We woke up almost every hour, wanting to go play more basketball. He got up for the day at 4 am, which did not work for me. So Sami and I hatched a silly plan. The next night we told him that his basketball goal was very sleepy, and had to go to bed. We told him to tell it goodnight, which he did. Then, he walked up to it, hugged it, and gave it a kiss. He tried his best not to cry as I took it to go "sleep" in the basement.

Since then, telling the basketball goal goodnight has become a part of his evening routine. He won't go to bed unless he's seen his beloved goal put to bed first. He insists on hugging it and giving it a goodnight kiss. But at least he sleeps through the night again.

If only I could.

The Next Pistol Pete?

There are a number of legendary stories about basketball great Pete Marovich's childhood. His father was a basketball coach, and it is said that the young Pistol was never separated from a basketball. On a recent CBS special one of his former classmates said that on their rides to school Pete would hang out the window of a moving car, dribbling the ball down the street. Other old friends recalled him dribbling the ball all the way to the movie theater every weekend. Once inside, we would sit in an aisle seat, and dribble the ball throughout the movie. He would start off one side of the theater, then half-way through the movie he would move to the other side of the theater so he could practice with his other hand. And, of course, vice versa.

My son Adam has long shared his father's obsession with Kentucky's real religion, basketball. He already owns four different basketballs, and prefers each ball for different activities. He and his basketballs are nigh inseparable.

We often go to the park across the street from our house to play on the playground. But at that park there are also two full basketball courts, which often sport pick-up games for a variety of skill levels. I've been known to sneak out of the house from time to time to teach the kids from the nearby Catholic high school a thing or two.

Every time we go to the park to play, Adam insists on stopping by the basketball courts on the way home. If no one is playing a game, he'll trot out to the free throw line, bounce his imaginary ball, and then fling it toward the hoop. If there are people playing, he watches in awe before mustering up the courage to try to charge the court and take them all on.

Today was a dreary, dark, damp, rainy day. Adam spent most of the day by the window, looking out, pointing longingly to the nearby park, begging to go out. I continually said, "Adam, it's raining today. We can't go outside when it rains." He didn't much care for that. We had to find something to do.

The other day we went to Target. My wife Sami, upon seeing the perfect treat for her little one, creatively manipulated our budget (as breadwinner she is the queen of the budget) to include a Little Tikes Easy Score Basketball set; Adam's very own basketball goal! Since then it has been sitting in the back of our mini van, waiting for the mechanically hapless Daddy to summon the courage to assemble it.

Turns out courage is easy to summon with the proper motivation. The prospect of Adam spending the rest of our already mostly wasted day staring out a window pleading with the clouds to stop dumping rain on his beloved park was enough to motivate me to get off my ass and, the prospect of disillusioning my child who thinks me a demi-god be damned, try to assemble the goal still sitting uselessly in the van.

It was, it turns out, easy. Really, anybody could do it. Took me five minutes, at the most. (Though that could be because Sami helped!) Adam spent almost the entire evening dunking his favorite basketballs through his very own brand new hoop. He was in toddler heaven.

Tonight it was more difficult than usual to put him to bed. He was clearly tired, but he finally had something worth staying up for. To go to sleep would be to finally surrender his never ending game of hoop. We finally coaxed him into the crib by letting him hold on to his favorite ball, with the promise that at first light the game begins anew.

Liberating Grace

Don't expect anything deep enough to merit the lofty title I gave this post. I've been working on my sermon for this Sunday (I'm preaching at our early morning communion service this week, my fourth return trip to a pulpit since I left professional ministry), along with cleaning up some older sermons trying to turn them into something useful. I've been toying around with the idea of writing a book, tentatively titled Drawing Water out of Rocks, a reflection of my approach to scripture. As a former pastor of mine used to say, as soon as he realized his tangent had gone on a little too long, "I say that to say this," I've spent too much time working on stuff not related to this blog for this blurb here to be much more than a brief observation.

Reading Troy's post on his early experiences with religion (a must read, by the way), I remembered some of my own early experiences with religion. I can't narrate them in any sort of comprehensive story like Troy did. I don't have that kind of self-awareness or mental energy right now. But I can give a couple of observations.

My grandfather was a Southern Baptist pastor. [note: I need to clear up some confusion, for those of you who don't already know this. Sometimes I say that my grandfather was a Southern Baptist pastor, sometimes I say that my grandfather is a Southern Baptist pastor, and sometimes I say that my grandfather is a retired Southern Baptist pastor. The solution to this seems obvious, but it isn't. I am in fact talking about two different people, both of whom I consider to be my paternal grandfather. My grandmother was married to a Southern Baptist pastor, my grandfather, who died when I was in fourth grade. She then married another Southern Baptist pastor - evidently she didn't learn from the first time! - who I now refer to as my grandfather. He retired, but comes out of retirement from time to time to serve as an interim pastor for churches undergoing difficult transitions. Hence the confusion, which may exist only in my mind.]
His son, my father, was not very religious, so my grandfather was primarily responsible for my spiritual education. He taught me about God and the Christian faith, and helped me form my early non-critical theology. Then he died.

While I was just nine and a half years old when he died, I effectively became an atheist. The one who revealed God to me was gone, so, to me, there was no longer a God. My uncritical theology (a belief in whatever my grandfather taught me) was replaced by abject skepticism. He was dead, and as sure as I knew he was dead I knew that everything he had taught me had been a well intentioned lie. There was no God, no heaven or hell, no life after death, nothing. What you see is what you get, and you'd better grab it while you can.

I had a tremendous anxiety about death, but I have no intention of getting into that here, as I don't entirely understand it myself. Perhaps it was an obsession brought on by the contrast between what my grandfather had taught me about God, and the realization that the God that he loved and served had let him die so suddenly, leaving behind only questions and a grieving grandson. I really can't dig deep enough inside myself to arrive at an answer. Maybe there is no answer, there is only the reality of my anxiety. In any event, I was scared of church. It made the anxiety worse.

But by eighth grade I'd gotten over that, with the help of a girl, my first real crush. I was on the academic team at Morton Middle School (what? You thought I ran track!?!), and we had a meet at another local Middle School. On the opposing team was a cute blonde girl who smiled at me (a first). After the meet (or was it before?) she talked to me in the library. Turns out she went to the church that I was nominally affiliated with. I was a member, having been forced by my mother to go through confirmation class (Mom doesn't remember it that way, but this is my story) but I only went to church when Mom put her foot down and made me. But this girl remembered me from church, and wondered why I never went. I came up with some lame excuse, trying to sound cool. She invited me to Youth Group.

I knew she like me. I was wrong. She was just "witnessing" to me in the way that she knew how. It worked. I went to church just for the privilege of seeing her again.

If this were the story of my first "religious experience," which I used to call my "testimony" (as though there were a single point at which one got "saved," and as though there were a single salvation story) then I would give the long story of how I moved from being a lusty skeptic to someone who drank the religious Kool Aid but didn't die from it (or, perhaps, died and rose again, a new creation). But this isn't that story. I've told that story too much, so much that I don't even know what's true any more. When you are an enthusiastic teenager with some acting skills and a decent conversion story, you can find all sorts of groups who will listen to you tell your story - even and especially if it has been somewhat embellished - and give you the attention you desperately crave for it.

That's what my earliest experiences with religion turned into, a never ending quest for attention. The people at my church, especially those in and around my Youth Group, were very loving people. They saw my emotional needs, and saw it as their duty to try to meet some of those needs. They were, by and large, genuine, authentic people, who felt that God loved them and called them to love others. In that respect it was an excellent environment for me, very unlike my home environment (since I love my parents, and have a good relationship with them now, I won't get into the atmosphere of our house while I was a teenager; they did their best).

But they accidentally fed into some of my neuroses. The theology of that church, especially in and around the Youth Group, was principally concerned with sin and reconciliation. There was a real focus on universal human sinfulness, and the need for repentance. While we had a pretty full description of the word "repent" (not just to "feel sorry" for something you've done wrong, but to "turn around," or "turn away" from the sinful behavior) there was still a very emotional component to this. In order to fully repent, after all, one had first to feel sorry, to feel contrite. This was the way in which the Holy Spirit "convicted" you, so that you could then repent. Without this feeling there was no authentic repentance.

I was a depressed and depressing teenager. I wore all black, had long hair (some would call it a "mullet," but not to face face if they value their lives) and listened to hard rock, heavy metal, "grunge" and what is now called "emo." Like a good evangelical I constantly waged war against my fleshly nature. But, like every other teenager, I constantly lost that war. I was consumed by my spiritual battle, and consumed with guilt. This guilt, of course, had in that theological environment some merit. It was the beginning of spiritual depth.

I recall often talking to people at church about my feelings of self-loathing, using Pauline language. Most of the time they were impressed with my ability to see into human nature, to describe our spiritual condition, and to articulate my frustration over my innate sinfulness. I got a great deal of attention for it.

I was also often asked to pray aloud in public. My prayers also centered on sin, confession, and repentance. Often after I prayed people would, moved by my prayers, compliment me on them. Of course they didn't understand that saying "what a lovely prayer" took all of the spiritual value away from the prayer, feeding into a cycle of pride and guilt.

It was in this atmosphere, this theological and spiritual environment, that I met John Crissman. He was a college student, already married, and looking to help out with the Youth Group at my church. He started co-teaching a Thursday night Bible study with Paul Shafer, another hero in my life. I got to know him there, and started confiding in him. But he treated me differently. Rather than feeding into my feelings of self-loathing, rather than honoring this cycle of sin and reconciliation, he started breaking the pattern. He wasn't amazed when I articulated the wretched human condition, and how I participated in it. He understood how that theology was giving me permission to hate myself. Instead he started teaching me about grace.

Grace for John was not something conditional, not something that you earned by feeling a certain way about yourself or saying a certain prayer with just the right amount of contrition. Grace was not legal forgiveness for particular identified bad actions, called "sins." Grace was God's unconditional love, for me. Grace was God's accepting me as I was, and by accepting me, empowering me to change, not out of guilt or fear, but out of love. Grace was the power of God to break my cycle.

John taught me about the liberating power of God's grace. He also taught me that by thinking and feeling the way that I was, I was accidentally rejecting that liberating grace. He told me that God accepted me, and God loved me. Now I needed to love and accept myself.

John is not a theologian. As I've grown, in fact, our respective theologies have diverged a great deal. But John, because of his theology, and the way in which it has impacted his life, taught me how to love and accept myself, just as the theology which we share teaches me that God loves and accepts me. As such, John taught me two important lessons, which I hope to always take with me wherever I go.

1. What you believe about God impacts the way in which you approach everything else, and vice versa. When I was stuck in a depressive cycle of sin, guilt, and inadequacy, that shape how I viewed God. Similarly that view of God reinforced my negative cycle.

Our theology ought to touch our lives, and our lives ought to shape our theology. This business is not just academic abstraction.

2. How you give attention to people matters. This is particularly true, I think, with teenagers. John had been touched by love and grace, and wanted to share that with others. He came into my life at just the right moment, and motivated by love and grace, helped me to have a similar experience. Now I get to share that love and grace, that divine acceptance, with others.

Thank you, God, for John.

Thank you, John for being faithful to your experience of God, and for having such a constructive experience to be faithful to.

Purity to Compassion in Three Stories From Mark (Part III)

Finally! I'm taking the time to finish this almost forgotten series (even if, in order to do it, I have to type one-handed with a toddler climbing all over me, while watching/listening to the concert DVD David Byrne Live at Union Chapel, London to keep him relatively sedate - writing and parenting are not always compatible!). To catch back up, check out Part I and Part II.

Our third story, found in Mark 3:1-6, comes immediately after the second story, and combines elements from both of the first two stories. It, like the first story, is a healing story. But it, like the second story, also concerns Jesus' relationship with the Sabbath laws. In the NRSV it reads:

Again he [Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, "Come forward." Then he said to them, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Before we treat this text, I should note that both Matthew and Luke take this story from Mark. While Luke doesn't really change anything from Mark's version, Matthew contains a significant addition which we ought to discuss. Matthew 12: 9-14 reads:

He [Jesus] left that place [where he and his disciples had picked grain on the Sabbath, another story taken from Mark, whose version I treated here] and entered their [as in, belonging to the Pharisees in question] synagogue; a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, "Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. He said to them, "Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath." Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other, But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.

The big change in Matthew's story is that it has Jesus, in discussing the hypothetical fallen sheep, not so subtly reminding the Pharisees of Deuteronomy 22:4(albeit with the animal in question changed).

That verse from Deuteronomy is part of a series of moral duties toward neighbors, found in chapter 22 verse 1 through 4. The first three verses concern wandering animals, and essentially say that if you see anything belonging to your neighbor wandering astray, you must return it to your neighbor. This law applies to the sheep which Jesus mentioned (Deut. 22:1), but is also universalized (Deut. 22:3) to include even garments of clothing and anything else that could be lost.

Then we reach the fourth verse, which more closely parallels Jesus' hypothetical example, though it mentions donkeys and oxen rather than sheep. In the Jewish Study Bible it reads:

If you see your fellow's ass or ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it; you must help him raise it.

In other words, the entire community has a moral duty to help their neighbor, a member of the community, if that neighbor's animal has fallen. This moral duty should be the primary concern of the community, even on the sabbath. And Matthew's Jesus, in implying that the Pharisees would honor this law to the letter, have set some precedent for choosing compassion over purity in their interpretation of the law in the case of competing duties.

If then, they are willing to choose compassion over purity (that is, obeying one's moral duty to one's neighbor instead of obeying the letter of the Sabbath law) in the case of a fallen animal, why should they not make the same choice in the case of a crippled man? Do they not have a moral duty to that man which is even stronger than their duties concerning his property, the hypothetical fallen sheep?

While Matthew's Jesus clearly chastises the Pharisees, making them so angry that they plot to kill him, he at least tries to find some common ground with them. In reminding them, through his example of the fallen sheep, of an interpretation of the law which they might both agree on, his is using a shared position to try to help them to understand his position on healing on the Sabbath.

But Mark's Jesus makes no such attempt to find a common ground. He enters into the Pharisees synagogue, contradicts their teaching, attacks their character, and defies their religious laws, openly mocking their authority within their own community.

The synagogue was, after all, their turf, not his. Yet he calls the man with the withered hand to "come forward," and then asks the teachers of the law a pointed, almost polemical, question:

"Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?"

This is not an idle question. In fact, it may not be a question at all, its grammar notwithstanding. It seems much more like a statement, and a powerful polemical one, which sets up a very harsh dichotomy.

If in Jesus' ministry he makes a sharp distinction between purity and compassion, affirming compassion and rejecting purity (as it was understood in his day, and as it has often been exercised in his name - such as when a Baptist college in Kentucky, the University of the Cumberlands, expelled a student for being gay, ejecting him from their midst out of a fear that his identified "impurity" might make their entire group impure), he is here furthering that distinction in a most inflammatory way:

Imagine, if you will, two columns. One the one side you have Jesus, on the other side his enemies, the "villains" of our Gospel stories, the Pharisees. In Jesus statement which masquerades as a question, he places good on the side of Jesus, and harm on the side of the Pharisees; saving life on the side of Jesus, killing on the side of the Pharisees; compassion on the side of Jesus, purity on the side of the Pharisees.

No wonder they plotted with the Romans to kill him! It is one thing to teach another way of being religious to your closest disciples. It is another thing altogether to enter into the sacred teaching space of the established religious authorities, and not only challenge their teachings, but openly mock and defy them.

But the Pharisees had, in keeping and even expanding the letter of the law, perhaps forgotten that the law exists to serve God's people, and not the other way around. So one of their own, part of their religious community, within their own synagogue, has a withered hand. And Jesus has come to their synagogue, seen the crippled man, and had compassion on him. But it is the Sabbath. The demands of purity and compassion conflict. Compassion says that the community has a moral obligation to help and to heal. Purity says that the community has a religious duty to keep Shabbat, the Sabbath day holy.

Mark's Jesus sees the conflict, and realizes that the gathered Pharisees will keep their precious Sabbath, even if it means blowing this chance for one of their own to be made whole. Then Mark uses one of the most powerful Biblical images, when he says that Jesus "looked around at them in anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart."

The heart, according to Marcus Borg (from whom I've been borrowing too much lately - he reads just like me, only more so!) is a much more powerful metaphor in the Bible than it is in our everyday usage. It is "a comprehensive metaphor for the self (italics mine)," which encompasses and underlies our entire being. A closed heart, and hardened heart, is a heart which is incapable of moving or bending, it is inflexible, petrified, and as such, dead. It cannot be moved to compassion. It cannot see anything new. It is certain, and so cannot change.

Someone with a hardened heart cannot grow closer to God, because they cannot grow or change. Growth requires a willingness to change, to be moved, to acknowledge that you don't yet have a perfect understanding, and probably never will.

The Pharisees in this story already knew God. They had an experience of God and a relationship with God. That experience was within the system of purity laws, and the relationship was based on the purity laws which gave rise to that experience. The laws were from God, and the means by which to approach God and enter into relationship with God. They were the constant, the given, that which cannot be challenged or changed. The experienced God in purity, and by striving for purity participated in the nature of God, as they understood it.

But Jesus came into their space, and challenged their understanding of God, their relationship with God, and the way in which those two impact their actions. Jesus, of course, had an excellent critique. He called them to look at the fruit of their religion. They chose a strict observance of the Sabbath over the well being of one in their community. They chose a certain observance of the law over the health of one of their own.

But, too often the Pharisees are given too rough a treatment over this. We all ought to be able to relate to them, even if they are, in the Gospel stories, the enemies of Jesus. That's because we, too, are often the enemies of Jesus. We, too, choose to cling to our precious doctrines even when they are no longer serving our needs or the needs of our communities. We, too, have our hearts so hardened on the subject of religion that if Jesus were to enter into our church, mock our pastor, defy our ritual and call our entire way of being religious into question, we might plot to kill him, too.

So, if we see compassion as the way of Jesus, we must learn how to show compassion to those who reject the value of compassion - even if the Gospel writers do not always have Jesus being compassionate to the compassionless! We must fight the lack of compassion within ourselves rather than judging it in the lives of others. We must, in other words, be able to see some of the Pharisees in ourselves, and fight the Pharisee within rather than the Pharisee without. That often means having compassion for our external Pharisees.

Many of you know that I was briefly the pastor of a small country church in rural Kentucky. Not exactly a safe place for a city liberal! That church was a perfect example of the purity focus in religion. I tried to teach them another way to be religious. They, obviously, did not take kindly to that. Even though numbers and giving went up in my time there, many of the people in the church were certain that their survival as a church depended on getting rid of me. That is because God called them to be a pure people, and my teaching was impure. As such, my presence within their church could at any moment bring God's condemnation down upon that church.

Since I left that church, and then professional ministry altogether, I have often judged them for being so, well, judgmental. Their actions brought about a great deal of pain and confusion. But as I read this story from Mark, and as I saw the ways in which they were very much like the Pharisees in the story, I had no choice but to reinterpret what happened there.

I can see why the Gospel writers painted the Pharisees as villains. They must have certainly done Jesus a great deal more harm than my Phariseical church did me. But I wonder how Jesus would have felt about such an unsympathetic portrayal. Mightn't the Jesus who taught compassion have had more compassion on them that the Gospel writers are inclined to mention? Mightn't he have seen how hard they tried to honor their experience of God; how faithfully they clinged to their way of being religious?

That, of course, doesn't make them less wrong, and it doesn't take away the harm their way of being religious inflicted on the people who couldn't live up to their standards for purity. But it does make them more tragic and sympathetic characters, whose best intentions were still not enough.

When we think that we understand God, we become like those who cast out or grind down the one's who disagree with their vision of God. Our hearts become hard, inflexible, and dead. A little compassion for the Pharisees in our lives might just keep us from becoming Pharisees ourselves.

Thoughts on Easter Morning

Today is Easter, the day of resurrection, the foundation of Christianity. I'm not going to give a theological treatment of Easter, or build any arguments. I'm taking the day off from that sort of thing. Instead I'm posting here a homily that I gave at an Easter sunrise service a few years ago, titled Thoughts on Easter Morning.

When I was a kid, I had an irrational fear of death. This fear colored every aspect of my life. I remember staying up at night, thinking about life and death, paralyzed by my anxiety. I also remember running around in circles, as if running from death. I thought that perhaps, if I kept moving, death might not find me.

The great American author and Presbyterian minister Fredrick Buechner once wrote that the fear of death is a fear of life. Likewise, a psychologist once told me, when speaking on thanaphobia, the irrational fear of death, that, until you are prepared to die, you cannot truly live. Life and death are so hopelessly mingled that you cannot think about one without thinking about the other. In fact, you cannot experience one without the other. Everything that lives dies. Likewise, death only touches that which lives. In many Eastern religions, death and life have been represented as different sides of the same coin.

Some of this comes through in Jesus’ teaching on death. He said, in Mark 8:35, that "…whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but, whoever loses his life for me and for the Gospel will save it." (NIV) We are not prepared to live until we are prepared to die.

I know that we who gather here this Easter morning to watch the sun rise are all prepared to die. And so, we are all very much alive, and alive for Jesus. Why else would we gather together this early in the morning to honor God? I also know that we are prepared to die not just because we have accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior – though we all have, and that acceptance of Christ is truly what it means to be prepared to die – but also because God has ordered our lives in such a way that life itself, and the world in which we live, prepares us for our deaths.

When I was a child, scared to death of death, death was not the only thing I was scared of. I was also scared of the dark. I hated night time, and, like most other kids, I really hated to have to go to sleep. I think that I intuitively knew that night is the time of death, and that sleep is a form of death. Each night, when we go to bed, we, to a certain extent, die. Each night we close our eyes, kiss a loved one, bid them goodnight, and then voluntarily surrender our consciousness. In the time we are asleep, we are dead to the world, we are dead to our loved ones, and we are dead to ourselves. And yet, we do this voluntarily, laying down our lives, as it were, and trusting God. Trusting God to not only run the world while we are gone (as if God needs out permission), but also trusting God to wake us when the sun rises and the morning comes.

The past week has been Holy Week, the week in which we honor the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, which culminates in today’s Easter celebration. The sun set last night, Holy Saturday, just as it set that Saturday all those years ago, when it set on a world in which Jesus was as dead as death itself. He had been in the grave two days, and surely some in the world had already forgotten him, even as his disciples mourned. But the sun rose the next morning, just like it always does, and as it rose, death turned to life. Jesus rose from the grave as the world rose from its slumber, and with him rose all of our hopes and dreams.

As we gather this Easter morning to watch night turn into day, we also gather to celebrate death turning into life. We gather to celebrate the resurrection of our risen Lord and Savior, and we know that with him, so we too shall rise. Just as we went to sleep last night with the faith that God would wake us with this sunrise, we know that, when it comes our time to die, we shall wake again. As the old day becomes the new day, so too, the old life shall become the new life. So, when we leave this place, let us leave as those who have died and been resurrected with Christ. Let us leave with the hope of our resurrection, and the knowledge that we have, through our salvation, already been changed.

Amen.

Marcus Borg Clarifies My Thinking on Faith

Yesterday I started reading Marcus Borg's The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, which I picked up on my vacation. I'm ot quite half-way through it yet, but I'm already struck by how similar it is to what I've been teaching the last few years. When I get really excited about something I've read, I read it aloud to my wife (she is very patient with this sort of thing, thank God!). When I read her passages from this book, she says something like, "That sounds just like you... only better!" My thoughts exactly.

Anyway, on the subject of faith, I've often taught that while we often see faith as belief in, or intellectual assent to, statements which can either be true or false, usually concerning the nature of God. But I argue that this is not really faith. That faith is much richer than this. I then teach on faith as "trust," which is personal and relational rather than propositional.

I sometimes include a story about my aversion to flying. I say that I believe that flying in an airplane is safer than riding in a car. I've seen good studies which demonstrate this. If I look at the data, it is clear that flying in an airplane is safer than riding in a car. But, I say, you will have a hard time getting me to agree to get on a plane. Why? Because I have no faith in airplanes. I may believe they are safer, but that belief is merely intellectual assent which in so way impacts how I live my life, because I lack faith.

So I contrast propositional belief with personal faith, saying that faith involves my entire being, not just my intellect. Faith rests in the person of God, and my relationship to and with God, rather than in statements about God.

But as I've been reading Marcus Borg's take on faith, I realize that I've been over-simplifying again. Borg identifies four kinds of faith, three of which are personal, and only one of which is propositional. He gives both Latin and English names to these faiths, and even identifies their opposites as a way of giving a fuller depiction of these faiths. Since I don't have the time or the energy to give a proper treatment to his accounts of these faiths - or views of faith - and since I have no desire to just type out the chapter which deals with this subject, I'm just going to briefly list them in a sort of rough chart. Hopefully this will lead to some decent discussion.

1. Faith as Assensus - that is, faith as intellectual assent (the English version of the Latin assensus, or "belief." This is the only propositional faith. Its opposites are "doubt" (soft) and "disbelief" (hard).

2. Faith as Fiducia - that is, faith as "trust" in the person of God, rather than trust in beliefs about God, which would be just another form of assensus, anyway. Its opposite is "anxiety" or "worry."

3. Faith as Fideltias - that is, faith as fidelity, "faithfulness" to our relationship with God. It is a kind of commitment or allegiance. Its opposite is "infidelity," which is described by the Biblical metaphors of "adultery" and "idolatry."

4. Faith as Visio - that is, faith as vision, a way of "seeing." This kind of faith colors how we perceive everything around us, everything that is. It impacts our view of the whole. Borg goes into great detail about this, but I won't go there because I'd like to know what this kind of faith means to you. How does your faith impact your way of "seeing" that which is?

The opposite of this faith is, as Borg puts it, "seeing reality as hostile and threatening or as indifferent."

Significantly, while faith is often seen in our churches as primarily propositional, that is, as concerning statements which may or may not accurately describe reality and the nature of God, three out of these four approaches to faith are personal, grounded in a personal relationship with an experience of the person of God which transforms our persons.

How does this speak to you?

Purity to Compassion in Three Stories From Mark (Part II)

Finally, the second story from this series, which in my amazing longwindedness I actually thought could be a single post:

The second story which demonstrates how Jesus (per Marcus Borg's paradigm) shifts the emphasis in the religion of his day from purity to compassion is found in Mark 2: 23-28. It concerns the Sabbath (Shabbat), and in the NRSV reads:

One day he [Jesus] was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?" And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions." Then he said to them, "The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath."

The law of the Sabbath was one of the most important and distinctive laws of ancient Israel. Observing the Sabbath entails at least two things:

1. Refraining from work.
2. Honoring God.

In the Decalogue the Sabbath law, found in Exodus 20:8-11 reads (in the Jewish Study Bible):

Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work - you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

This Sabbath law, then, points to one of the creation myths of ancient Israel, found at the beginning of the Biblical book of Genesis. The first chapter deals with God's activity in creation, God's "work." But, while the "work" of creation ends at the end of the first chapter, the story continues through the fourth verse of the second chapter. In the Jewish Study Bible Genesis 2:1-4, the conclusion of the first creation myth of ancient Israel, reads:

The heaven and earth were finished, and all their array. On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done. Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created.

So the importance of a day of rest is built not just into the laws of ancient Israel, but also into the mythology. As a myth is a story which is to convey meaning rather than a literal truth, we can look into this myth to see part of the meaning of the Sabbath law, which Jesus, in our story from Mark, violates.

The passages from Genesis and Exodus, in connecting the creation myth to the law of the Sabbath, connect the nature of God to the nature of humanity, which has been made in God's image. The creation myth, then, says that it is natural, is in built into the very fabric of nature, to take one day off each week.

The economy of ancient Israel, like that of the lands and peoples which surrounded in it the Near East, was built on agriculture. This was a tremendous step up, which allowed for the formation of permanent dwellings, leading nomadic peoples to settle and form civilizations. But if land is worked constantly, in becomes barren and wasted. Similarly, if people are worked constantly, they wear out and are ruined.

Thus, it is not natural to work all the time. It violates the patterns we see in nature, and as such it must violate God's design. On a simple level the seventh day, the day of rest, is included in the creation myth as a way of saying: "Even God took a day off, so you should too!"

This law mandating a day of rest was - as best as I can tell (I'm no expert on the Ancient Near East, but I've read a little bit on the subject) - unique to ancient Israel. It set them apart from the peoples around them.

To be holy - a word which comes up often in the literature on the Sabbath - is to be set apart. Thus, this law, which set ancient Israel apart, was very important to their notion of holiness. And holiness is what the purity laws are all about.

In its earliest context, the Sabbath law (which does not, in and of itself, spell out exactly what counts as "work") was a liberating law. In a world in which people worked constantly just to survive, it said that humans were made for more than just work. It gave a much fuller description of human nature, and gave those who were under it the space they needed to be more fully human.

How liberating must it have been, for the average worker in the fields of an agrarian society, to get to take a day off from work each week! Remember, this is the era of the seven day work week, not the five day work week we've all come to love. The Sabbath day, Shabbat, was a day to get out of the fields and into a sacred space. It was a day to be something other than just a worker; to be more fully human, someone sacred, made in the image of the Sacred.

But by the time of Christ the Sabbath was not always such a liberating concept. While the passages which we looked at did not specify what counted as "work," religion is not always comfortable with ambiguity. A definition of "work" would be forthcoming. Two tractates of the Talmud spell out "work" in more detail. And while this too must have been initially liberating, the Pharisees, the keepers and interpreters of the law in Jesus' day, wielded this law as an instrument of enslavement, not liberation.

[note: I'll deal with the Pharisees, the "villains" of the Gospels and the enemies of Jesus, in more detail in Part III of this series. While they are presented as the "bad guys," I can relate to them, and see them as being honest and noble defenders of the traditional faith which Jesus is attacking. They are complex characters who, while they oppose Jesus, cannot be reduced simply to the power hungry oppressors that they are sometimes reduced too.]

In our story, Jesus and his disciples, a wandering band of his inner circle who traveled with him and helped his ministry, are passing through a field. It is the Sabbath, but they are hungry, so they pick some grain from the field. Inconveniently for them, the Pharisees, religious authorities who specialize in the law, see them picking grain, and call them to task for it. They then rip into Jesus. What sort of a spiritual teacher, a religious "holy man," allows his best students to flagrantly and selfishly violate such a sacred law?

But Jesus says that the Pharisees have missed the whole point. "The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath." The law in question was designed to liberate workers whose basic humanity had been denied by their constant state of work. It taught that humans were made for much more than just work; they had been made in the image of a God who even in the midst of actively creating the world and everything in it, took some time for rest and reflection. This is built into the very fabric of the universe.

Picking grain in a field is considered "work" because ancient Israel was an agrarian society. Most people worked in the fields for most of their time. But these disciples are not farmers who need to be liberated from their labor. They are hungry travelers. In this case the Sabbath law is not freeing them up to be more fully human, it is oppressing them by not allowing the hungry to eat.

Thus purity (the strict adherence to the letter of the Sabbath law) becomes compassion (the recognition that the law exist to serve those under it, and not the other way around). In this case following the letter of the law violates the spirit of it. Jesus is not trying to undermine the Sabbath altogether, as the Pharisees mistake him for doing. Rather he is trying to recapture the liberating spirit of the law and transpose that spirit to his day.

Religion can be very conservative, and this is not entirely a bad thing. Many ancient traditions ought to be conserved, because they speak to a great wisdom. But that which is conserved must also be translated. It does no good to keep ancient laws if the wisdom behind those laws is no longer understood, and so the spirit of those laws can be translated for a new generation, and a new context.

So if we seek to conserve the wisdom of our religion, we must also understand the wisdom behind our tradition, and constantly translate that wisdom for a new generation and a new context.

What?!?

I got online to give my treatment of the second story from Mark (coming, I promise), when I say this, courtesy of the AP:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (April 10) - A Malaysian man said he nearly fainted when he recieved a $218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution, a newspaper reported Monday.

Yahaya Wahab said he disconnected his late father's phone line in January after he died and settled the $23 bill, the New Straits Times reported.

But Telekom Malaysia later sent him a $218 trillion bill for recent telephone calls along with orders to settle within 10 days or face legal proceedings, the newspaper reported.

It wasn't clear whether the bill was a mistake, or if Yahaya's father's phone line was used illegally after after his death.

"If the company wants to seek legal action as mentioned in the letter, I'm ready to face it," the paper quoted Yahaya as saying. "In fact, I can't wait to face it," he said.

Yahaya, from northern Kedah state, received a notice from the company's debt-collection agency in early April, the paper said. Yahaya said he nearly fainted when he saw the new bill.

Government-linked Telekom Malaysia Bhd. is the country's largest telecommunications company.

A company official, who declined to be identified as she was not authorized to speak to the media, said Telekom Malaysia was aware of Yahaya's case and would address it. She did not provide further details.

Now I'm going to start working on that story from Mark.

Touching the Leper, Revisited

[note: Sorry, I still haven't taken the time to give the treatments of the other two stories from Mark which were going to be included on this post. I got distracted by Palm Sunday and a vacation. I'll post those treatments as soon as I take the time to write them up.]

In a couple of weeks I'll be stepping behind a pulpit again. That doesn't happen as often as it did before I quit professional ministry, but it happens often enough for my taste. This afternoon I started thinking about what I might want to preach on. I keep coming back to the story of Jesus touching and healing the leper in Mark. In my previous post on that story, I asked a couple of questions:

1. Who is your leper?
2. How can you touch them?

Since then I've been wrestling with those questions, while also looking for sermon material. In the midst of that, I remembered a piece that I wrote many, many years ago, before I got into the ministry racket, and long before I left it. It is a simple devotional that I wrote during my first failed attempt at college, called He Did Not Have a Home. I wrote this as a freshman English major at the University of Kentucky, just after I got back from spending a week doing mission work at a homeless shelter, and just before I got kicked out of school for never showing up to class. Here it is:

Most of us feel a Christian duty to help the homeless, and this is good. But, I wonder sometimes about the effects, both on our souls and in the lives we are trying to help, of our execution of this Christian duty.

We tend to treat the homeless as moral objects, or a test. We have a duty to feed them, clothe them, and provide them with shelter. And this is very good. They need these things which we provide, mostly with honest motives. But, we tend to treat them the way that we feel about them, as burdens or moral obligations. Then, we feel good about ourselves, for we have done our duty.

They need more than that. They need love, and they need humanity. They need to be alive, feel alive, and feel loved. They need to feel like they belong, and that they have something of worth to offer. In fact, they need the same things that we need, because there is no "us" and "them". We are all children of the same God, and so we are all family.

There are so many things which we take for granted in everyday life, but perhaps (at least for me) the most crucial of these are conversations. Can you imagine what life would be like without the everyday give and take with our family and friends? But, among the homeless there are people who have literally gone years without anyone truly listening to them as if anything they say might have some worth.

Every man [note: I didn't have any idea about gender inclusive language back then!] has a story, and a need to be validated by having others listen to it and learn from it. So, if we really want to help a homeless man, perhaps this is what we ought to do: listen to him. Talk to him, and with him, as you would with any friend. Dirty your hands with his life, learn from his struggles and, in doing so, struggle with him.

We should remember, whenever we look into the face of someone who is homeless, that we are, in fact, looking into the face of Jesus. He too did not have a home.
_________

Shortly after I wrote this devotional/meditation my best friend Travis and I decided to take the main point in it seriously. On UK's campus is an excellent greasy spoon, Tolly Ho. The perfect college hang out. But it is right by an area of town where many homeless people congregate. We'd often go to Tolly Ho late at night (our first real taste of freedom, after all), and have to pass the assortment of homeless people on our way there. They'd often ask us for money. Sometime's we'd given them some, sometimes we wouldn't.

Handing out money on the street was a morally troubling issue for us. On the one hand we felt called to help. On the other hand, many people find themselves homeless because their lives have been ripped apart by addictions of one sort or another. Giving cash to an addict just helps feed the addiction.

Then it hit us: these people didn't need our money, and we didn't have much of that to give them anyway. They needed us to affirm their basic humanity. But how could we do that?

We decided that every time we went to eat at Tolly Ho, we would ask a homeless person to join us. Many of them were suspicious. Two college kids asking them out for dinner. What game were they playing? If our parents had found out, they would have probably killed us. But for as long as we had enough money to spend on milkshakes and onion rings late at night, we had enough money to share those milkshakes and onion rings with people who hadn't had a humanizing experience in a long time.

Each time we took someone out to eat at the Ho, we'd ask them questions about their life, and listen to them tell stories. It could be awkward at first, but as soon as they realized we were trying to get them to join a cult or anything, they'd relax, open up, and keep us on the edge of our seats for at least an hour. Many of them simply loved to tell stories. I wonder how long it had been since they'd sat in a diner relaying the sad but often comical story of their life to such idealistic kids.

Reality inevitably set in. We couldn't keep that up forever. We didn't have much money, and most of the people who knew what we were doing thought we were crazy. I flunked out of college. Travis dropped out, got married, joined the Marines, and had a lifetime's worth of heartbreak in just a couple of years.

We're different people now. But at least for a little bit we weren't afraid to touch lepers. And, in touching our lepers, we found that they weren't really lepers at all. We didn't heal them, of course. That's not in our power. We may not have done them any real or lasting good at all. A cheeseburger and a conversation don't often change the entire course of a person's life. But at least while we were touching them, open to and affirming of their basic humanity, they stopped being social lepers, and starting looking like real people, just like you and me.

Of course, they were people even when we weren't touching them. But, until we touched them we hadn't bothered to notice that.

Textual Observations on Palm Sunday

Today, as many of you know, is Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week. This morning the text for both my Sunday School class and our pastor's sermon came from Mark 11:1-11, in which Jesus finally enters Jerusalem, riding a colt. The text is an interesting one not just because of the story contained in it, but because it is one of the few stories which can be found in all four canonical Gospels. In addition to the version found in Mark's Gospel, you can also find it in Matthew 21:1-9, Luke 19:29-38, and John 12:12-15.

The story is often held as an example of how the Gospel writers told stories to try to connect the life and ministry of Jesus to sections of the Hebrew Bible. In this case, as Matthew and John disclose, the verse to which the story connects is Zechariah 9:9, which in the NRSV reads:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter
Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The textual problem, for those who see the Bible as being literally penned by God, without any sort of contradiction, is a simple one: What sort of animal did Jesus ride into Jerusalem on? The passage from Zechariah contains a single animal, but the way that animal is described leads to some confusion as the Gospel writers connect that passage to Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

In the Hebrew poetry, the donkey is the colt. So you have a single animal, which is a donkey, also describes as a colt, the foal of a donkey. Mark sides with the description of the animal as a colt, saying, in chapter 11 verse 7:

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it; and he sat on it.

Luke also sides with the colt. But John, who unlike Mark and Luke quotes the verse from Zechariah, describes the animal in question as a donkey, saying, in chapter 12 verse 14-15:

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written:
"Do not be afraid, daughter of
Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
sitting on a donkey's colt."

Matthew (who also quotes the passage from Zechariah), however, failed to appreciate what one commentary calls "the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry" in which "donkey is equivalent to colt." As such, he has Jesus riding on both a colt and a donkey! Consider his version of the story, through the 7th verse of the 21st chapter:

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent the two disciples, saying to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, 'The Lord needs them.' And he will send them immediately." [some manuscripts read: 'The Lord needs them and will send them back immediately.'] This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

"Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your kind is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on
a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of
a donkey."

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.

So, what kind of animal did Jesus ride, some critics ask: Was it a colt, a donkey, or both? And, of course, this is a good question, particularly if you are clinging to a notion of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, literally penned by an omniscient God. But phrasing the question like that, with three options, is repeating Matthew's mistake. This is because the verse from Zechariah, to which each of the Gospel stories points, uses colt and donkey interchangeably, to refer to the same animal.

But that doesn't solve the problem of reading the Bible literally, as though it were a systematic work which never disagrees with itself. After all, even if colt and donkey are the same thing, bringing three of the four Gospels into agreement on this point, Matthew with his two animals instead of one still sticks out. There is simply no way to twist his version to make it conform to the other three, as best as I can tell.

But does this pose a problem for those of us who read the Bible as a book which, while neither systematic or always literally true, still in a very real and powerful way reveals the nature of God to us? If we read the Bible first for meaning rather than truth value, it does not.

How then do we read these apparently conflicting Gospel stories for meaning? By looking at the verse from Zechariah to which they all point. In doing so we will see how early Christians understood Jesus, and Jesus' role in revealing the nature of God. Then we can bracket off the question of whether or not the stories are inerrantly true, or whether they just reflect Christian memories of Jesus interpreted through the lens of the Hebrew Bible.

The ninth chapter of Zechariah, which contains the verse to which each of these Gospel stories point, tells the story of the Divine Warrior, who is to restore Diasporic Israel. Verses 1-8, which set up the verse in question, have the Divine Warrior triumphally moving toward Jerusalem, in anticipation of the "day of the Lord."

Jesus in each of the Gospel accounts also moves triumphally toward Jerusalem, anticipating the climax of his ministry, which we remember during this Holy Week. Each of the Gospel stories in question today, with their reference to Zechariah 9:9, have Jesus finally entering Jerusalem, the Holy City at the center of the religion of ancient Israel. Jerusalem was the most significant city, the home of the Temple, the only place where sacrifices could be offered. Jesus, in his mission to invert the values of the Judaism of his day, had to at some point "conquer" Israel.

So, with images from the Divine Warrior, the Gospel writers bring a triumphant Jesus into a captive Jerusalem, where he is greeted as a hero and a liberator, a Messianic figure who will, like Zechariah's Divine Warrior, restore Israel.

This brings us to the verse in question, Zechariah 9:9. In it the Divine Warrior enters Jerusalem as a king, set to rescue the oppressed Daughter of Zion. But the imagery of the verse doesn't quite fit what would be expected for such a warrior. This triumphant king arrives "humble and riding on a donkey." This, according to one commentary, indicates "his peaceful intentions."

Of course, the story of the Divine Warrior does not end in peace, whatever his intentions in verse 9. After all, after the Lord sounds the trumpet in verse 14, we read this in verse 15:

The Lord of hosts will protect
them,
and they shall devour and tread
down the slingers;
they shall drink their blood like wine,
and be full like a bowl,
drenched like the corners of
the altar.

The Lord's allies, then, not only triumph over their enemies, been even sacrifice them! They "drink their blood like wine," and become "drenched like the corners of the altar." The altar was the place where animals were sacrificed. It was drenched with blood!

The Gospel writers still use some of this imagery in parallel to their story of Jesus. Jesus, like the Divine Warrior, enters Jerusalem with peaceful intentions, and is received like a hero and a liberator. And the story of Jesus also ends in violence and (per the Priestly macro story) human sacrifice. But it is Jesus, not the supposed enemies of God, who is the victim rather than perpetrator of the violence. And it is Jesus, not his vanquished enemies, who becomes the human sacrifice.

And, in the Eucharist, it is Jesus whose blood (at least metaphorically) is drunk like wine.

Palm Sunday marks the start of Holy Week, a week which begins and ends in triumph, but has tragedy throughout.

This morning our pastor gave each person at worship a cross made from a palm branch as a visual reminder that the journey which starts with a road full of palms eventually leads to the cross.