The Great Commandment

The Great Commandment

Which law is greatest?

asked the one tutored

            in structure,

                        in the weighing of truths.

He preferred his life mapped out,

always knowing what was best.

            He was respected,

                        knowing all the answers.

And so he put the Master to the test

as he might challenge a young boy.

            Which law is greatest?

                        How do you perceive the truth?

From the beginning we are enfolded,

we are blanketed in Creator’s love.

            How could we do less

                        than enfold God in return?

Incarnation made known in full

as it meets in us each;

our hearts embraced by Creator’s love;

our love embracing neighbors’ hearts.

Jim Melnyk © 3/31/2015

No More Secrets

Palm Sunday Yr. B; Mark, Collect of the Day, St. Paul’s, Smithfield, 3/29/2015

Jim Melnyk: “No More Secrets”

            In a few short moments we will participate in the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ – and this is just an opening to the whole journey of Holy Week.  I say “participate” for more than one reason.  First and most obvious to us is the way the story is told this morning and every Palm Sunday – a way that will be amplified as we participate in Holy Week as it stretches before us.  Many of us in the congregation will read specific parts of the story.  All of us, during the trial scene, will respond as the crowd crying out, “Crucify him!”  We are participants in the story. But we participate in another very real way whether we realize it or not. 

This is a moment of anamnesis for the Church – for the Body of Christ gathered.  Anamnesis, if you recall our instructed Eucharist last fall, is a sacramental word translated as “remembrance,” but it means so much more than simply recalling a past event.

When Jesus says “Eat this bread and drink this wine in anamnesis of me,” he is actually saying to us, “I am present with you in this holy meal just as I was present with my followers on that night of betrayal.”  It is as if we are present with Christ then, and he is present with us in the breaking of bread now.  Past and present become one as we participate in this Holy Meal – what we as Episcopalians call “Real Presence.”

We also participate in the Passion as an act of anamnesis.  We become present with Jesus in the midst of his final days.  As we read the many stories of this most holy of weeks, beginning with today’s passion narrative, we have already lined the streets of Jerusalem shouting our hosannas.  We then find ourselves present with Jesus as he breaks bread as a guest in an unexpected and troublesome place.  We are present with Jesus as the woman anoints him in preparation for his death and burial.  We receive his body and blood in the upper room, and feel cool water trace its way across our feet as Jesus kneels before us.  We flee with the male disciples and stand with Peter as the cock crows.  We stand at the cross under the darkened sky with the women who love and follow Jesus.  We observe his body placed in the tomb and we wait through a quiet, mournful, and yet expectant Sabbath.

But what exactly do we participate in, besides the obvious storytelling event this morning?  Mark’s Gospel stands out from the others in many ways – one being what has long been called the “Messianic Secret.”  Constantly throughout the Gospel Jesus has commanded silence from those who either understand him to be the Messiah or who are wrestling with that unfolding knowledge.  “Tell no one,” he commands his followers, “Tell no one until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”  This all comes to a screeching halt with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem – seemingly staged to remind everyone present of what the prophet Zechariah  had proclaimed, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Matt. 21:9). 

No more secrets.  No more secrets. We participate in a moment of cosmic truth-telling – behold the coming of the king! Yet this is a kingship that stands in stark contrast to what the people of Israel have historically yearned for – it is nothing like a traditional kingship.  And so it is no accident on Mark’s part that the events leading up to the betrayal and arrest of Jesus includes dinner at a particular house in Bethany. 

We should not – we cannot – skip over that opening scene in today’s Passion reading in a rush to get to the more memorable parts.  For those hearing this story in its earliest settings, this would have been just another juicy bit of gossip: Jesus at table in the home of Simon – of Simon the leper – and Jesus rather extravagantly anointed with oil by an unnamed woman.  Neither action was designed to sit well with his enemies.

Jesus was the fulfillment of all that the Torah teaches – complete, unwavering love of God, and an inclusive, forgiving, enfolding love for neighbor – including the very neighbors we would rush to exclude these days – even over religious differences.  

Jesus comes into the Holy City with a rag-tag gathering of disciples surrounding him, proclaiming a kingdom where all are welcome – a kingdom where there is “no room for dichotomies that divide and exclude” – a kingdom that proclaims the worthiness of every human being, simply because every human being is created in the image and likeness of God – a kingdom that affords even the least among us dignity – and calls us to embrace such a kingdom as something ultimately from God.

“Jesus will defeat evil, injustice, and other forms of death, not with the military might of kings [like that displayed by Pilate’s parade into Jerusalem at the Passover], but with the new life of the resurrection.  But that will come later” (Michaela Bruzzese, Sojourners on line: Preaching the Word, 3/29/2015).

In the meanwhile, we are left to participate in what author Lauren Winner calls “the saddest piece of the passion…the endless betrayal” by Jesus’ own friends and followers – people who “had eaten meals with him, learned with him…[friends who] had prayed together…had seen his miracles and his healings” (ibid).  It is indeed a horrific sidebar to the expected machinations of the powerful, those who will do anything they can imagine to retain their power and quench the Dream of God – quench the fires of the coming kingdom of God.

The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Mark:

Written On Our Hearts – Written In Our Hearts

Lent 5B; Jeremiah 31:31-34, St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC; March 22, 2015

Jim Melnyk, “Written On Our Hearts – Written In Our Hearts”

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”  For several weeks now we have listened to these words as our services have begun.  This is the ancient creed of Israel, the Shema, which all Jews are called to recite each morning and each evening of every day – and obviously important enough for Jesus that he called it the greatest of all commandments – followed immediately with: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

And yet, what does it mean?  What does it mean to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength?  Does it not mean to love God with all that we are and all that we may ever hope to be?  To love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength is to come before God with every fiber of our being, offering to God “ourselves, our souls and bodies” as the Apostle Paul (Romans 12), and one of our older Eucharistic prayers (Rite I) puts it – a self-offering to the God who gives us life and breath.  It is to seek from God the ability to love – to love both God and one another with our whole created selves.  But what in the world could motivate such love on our part? 

There are bunches of Facebook memes with Boromir from the movie version of The Lord of the Rings out there.  In the movie Boromir says, “One simply does not walk into Mordor.”  I can see one captioned, “One simply does not love God with all one’s heart for no reason at all!”  In today’s passage from John’s Gospel Jesus once again speaks of being “lifted up from the earth,” hinting at his coming crucifixion – at his execution. 

My sister-in-law Glyn writes, “In the cross, God speaks truth to power. There is no army storming the Roman Governor’s home. There are no riots in the in the temple courtyard. There is no angel of death killing the first born in each unbelieving household. There is only Love. [Love]Freely offered. [Love] Violently killed. And held up for all the world to see….”  She goes on to say, “But it only works if we are able to understand that God does not require this sacrifice. God in Christ offers the sacrifice. God is not angry. God in Christ suffers with us and for our sake. The sacrifice does not placate or mollify an outraged deity. God in Christ goes to the utmost length, allowing his arms to be nailed open in a posture of acceptance and embrace”(http://motherglyn.com/2015/03/21/twenty-eighth-day-of-lent-saturday-march-21-2015/).  One simply does not love God with all one’s heart for no reason at all – this incredible love from God is the kind of love that calls forth the Shema, or the Great Commandment, as a response in our lives.

For centuries people of faith have struggled with the whole purpose of the cross and with this call from ancient Scripture for complete abandonment to God.  And even if our minds can wrap themselves around the concept at all, we still struggle with the “how to” of it all.  It is all well and good to says, “Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” or, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” and all together another thing to make it so in our lives.

And if history is any indication, humanity as a whole has never found a way to love God with such reckless abandon.  From the first moments in the Garden, until this very day in the Middle East, Ukraine, or the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina, people – God’s people – find ways to ignore or trample God’s call to love.

The Shema, this wonderfully poetic creed Jesus quotes in the Gospels, finds its roots in the book of Deuteronomy.  Rediscovered by the Temple priests during the reign of King Josiah in the 7^th century before the birth of Christ, words such as these helped Josiah carry out great reforms in Judah.  It was also during Josiah’s reign that Jeremiah came upon the scene as one of Israel’s greatest prophets.  He, too, called Israel to reformation.  The great power behind words such as the Shema and the rest of Deuteronomy actually managed to put Jeremiah out of business for a while, having made such an impact on the leaders and people of Jerusalem.

Yet, as is often the case, much too soon the people’s faith wavered – and we all know what it means to have our faith waver, don’t we?  The wavering of faith, and the wavering of faithfulness, isn’t just an ancient thing, or a Jewish thing, or a Christian thing, it’s a human thing.  Vision fails and courage lags – and it does so in every generation. 

It is well and good to tell one another, “love God with your whole being,” and yet it is something so completely different to live that way.  And so God calls Jeremiah out of retirement, and it is through Jeremiah that God offers a new way – a new way inscribed upon the heart – a new way offered to the houses of Israel and Judah, and then, down through the ages, to all people.

“’The days are surely coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…This is the covenant that I will make… I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”

First and foremost the new covenant God proclaims through Jeremiah is made with the people of Israel and Judah.  Make no mistake – it is a renewed covenant with God’s firstborn before it is ever a covenant with the followers of Jesus who come to be called Christians.   It is a covenant that will once again show the overwhelming desire of God to welcome and forgive.  It shows just how much the Jewish faith is deeply rooted in forgiveness and grace. 

It is into this powerful relationship of forgiveness and grace that Christians will come centuries later.  This promise of new covenant relationship invites first the Jews, and then the Christian people, “to stand in grateful awe before the miracle of forgiveness, to receive it, and to take from it a new, regenerated life” and then share that new life with the world. (Brueggemann, To Build and to Plant, page 73)

Second, we cannot forget that the initiative is God’s.  It is God who makes this new covenant with us – just as it is God in Christ Jesus who chooses the way of the cross centuries later.  It is God who offers us forgiveness from the least to the greatest. 

And it is God who makes this new covenant by writing God’s law deeply within us, by writing God’s law upon our hearts. 

In older days we used to carve our initials with those of the one we loved on the trunk of a tree, with a heart surrounding them.  Do people still do that today?  Some of you remember seeing that, I’m sure.  This is what God does with and for us – only God’s promise – God’s love – God’s name alongside our names – is etched upon our hearts, and upon a tree on Calvary.

As Christians, we experience the promise of new covenant relationship written in our hearts and signed upon our foreheads in Holy Baptism. 

Like a door opening wide for someone to enter in, our hearts welcome the miracle of God’s forgiveness and grace – God’s promise of new life.  One task that lies ever before us, then, is to listen to our hearts – to look deeply within ourselves to find – and then proclaim, live, and offer to all – the rich promise of God’s grace which awaits each of us.

Something to Dance About!

Lent 4B; Num. 21:4-9; John. 3:14-21 

St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 3/15/2015

Jim Melnyk: “Something to Dance About!”

Author Isabel Anders recounts “an Hasidic tale about a famous rabbi who was on his way to teach at a village that was very interested in his ideas. This was going to be a very big event, and each Jew in the community made great preparations, pondering what issues he or she might ask the wise man about.

The rabbi finally arrived and, after the initial welcome, he was taken into a large room where people gathered to ask their questions. There was tremendous anticipation and excitement all around.

The rabbi walked silently around the room and then began to hum an Hasidic tune. Before long, everyone started humming along with his soft voice. As people became comfortable with his song, the rabbi started to dance. He danced everywhere in the room – and, one by one, every person danced with him. Soon everyone in the whole community was dancing wildly all together. Each person’s soul was healed by the dance, and everyone experienced a personal transformation.

Later in the night, the rabbi gradually slowed the dance and eventually brought it to a stop. He looked into each person’s eyes, one by one, and said gently, ‘I trust that I have answered all of your questions’” (Synthesis, 3/15/2015).

Anders tells us that story as we move past the mid-way point in Lent.  Our lessons make a shift to a focus on the Passion of Jesus.  The cross seems to beckon us forward, and like people passing a terrible car wreck on the side of the road, we resist looking at its reality too squarely in the face because the tragedy of it is painful – and the call to follow the One who was crucified challenges us in ways we would rather not experience.  We have heard Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow, and the reality of Good Friday will make that a difficult choice for us to make.  We need to take a moment, Anders tells us, and “catch our breaths in order to focus ourselves again toward the coming Passion – we need assurances of that sort” (ibid).

And so we have what has become an iconic passage from John’s Gospel as our lesson today. Now, John 3:16 is a beautiful, promising, hope-filled verse for sure.  In fact I recall reading somewhere about a woman who said this verse was so important in her household growing up that she could recite the verse before she ever knew her ABCs. 

The wonder and promise of God’s incredible love for us can be life-changing – and I believe this is the message Jesus is trying to impart to us.  It can also become – has also become in many Christian communities –  a litmus test by which it is decided who is in, and who is out, in the kingdom of God – I’m not quite sure that that’s what Jesus had in mind when he first spoke those words.

If you recall, we’ve mentioned a good bit lately about how early Christianity was first called The Way – and that the Way Jesus teaches is an all-encompassing, grace-filled, self-giving love that calls us into relationship with the God of all creation.  “No one shows greater love than this, to give up one’s life for one’s friends,” he tells us later in this same gospel (15:13).  Jesus brings to mind the manner and meaning of his death when he equates his being lifted up – his crucifixion – with God’s saving work by way of the bronze serpent in the wilderness.  As the serpent was lifted for all to see and be saved, so the Christ of God will be lifted up on behalf of the whole world.

 We have also spoken about the ancient understanding of the word we translate as “believe.”  To believe is not about ascribing to a set of doctrines or a list of required thoughts, rather, to believe is to set one’s heart – to place one’s loyalty – to give oneself fully to the idea or the person in question – in this instance, the life and teaching – the Way of Jesus.

In essence, Jesus is saying, “all who set their heart on my way – all who set their hearts on the all-encompassing, grace-filled, self-giving love of God” will have eternal life.  So perhaps that lets us off the hook of thinking that only those who are Christians – or Christians with a specific check list marked off – are beloved of God.  Many who do not follow Jesus still encompass the love and grace that he proclaims and brings.  Do you recall the passage from Mark’s gospel where John – possibly the author of today’s gospel – says to Jesus, “‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us’” (Mark 9:38-40).

So perhaps we can see the wide-open grace of God proclaimed by Jesus in John’s gospel – the grace that will in just a couple of chapters have him speaking to a Samaritan woman – a woman who is among the first to recognize Jesus as the Christ of God in that gospel, and call others to come and see (John 4). 

We begin, then, to see John 3:16 in broader depth – we begin to see that what it means to follow Jesus and to believe in Jesus is more than voicing a religious principle or doctrine.  We begin to see that following Jesus is about joining him on the way to the cross and beyond to new life, and we begin to see once again that belief in Jesus means giving ourselves fully to God as a response of our hearts and the courage of our wills.  But what, then, does Jesus mean by the phrase “eternal life?”

Biblical scholar N.T. Wright tells us the common thought about eternal life as a “promise of a timeless heavenly bliss” is not what the first century listeners and readers of John’s Gospel would have understood.  Wright tells us that one aspect of Jewish understanding divided time into two periods or eons: the “Present age” – ha-olam hazeh, and the “Age to come” – ha-olam ha-ba.  According to Wright, “The ‘age to come,’ many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the ‘present age’” (Synthesis, 3/15/2015).  We hear that thought echoed in Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23).

Wright goes on to say that for ancient Jews, of whom we must count Jesus, by the way, “God’s great future purpose [in the ‘age to come’] was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay” – a state I am willing to bet Wright sees just as real today as in the time of Jesus.

And so N.T. Wright translates the famous verse ending with “shall not perish but share in the life of God’s new age” – that is, share in the age to come (op. cit.).  Wright concludes his remarks by pointing out how much our mistranslations of this verse tend to put everything in the life and teachings of Jesus into a “supposed invitation to ‘go to heaven’ rather than the present challenge of the kingdom coming on earth as [it is] in heaven” (ibid).

So, what in the world does all this theological talk mean for us in practical terms?  Why get so caught up in redefining – or reinterpreting – words like “Way,” “believe,” and “eternal life?” 

Well, one answer is that it can help us see that God is so much bigger – so much more all encompassing – so much more giving, forgiving and loving – than many of us have been taught to believe from the time we were knee-high to a grasshopper.

Another answer is that understanding the difference between the “age to come” which is another way of saying the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, over and against some sort of a promised bliss in the great by-and-by, holds us to a higher standard of being as followers of Jesus.  Instead of seeing the suffering of this world – the brokenness of this world – the injustices of this world – as things to be addressed by God in some distant, heavenly, future, we come to understand that God calls us, as those who follow Jesus along the Way, to stand in the breach on behalf of our sisters and brothers and speak a word of redemption – speak a word of reconciliation – speak a word of justice, peace, and healing “to a world as it [groans and toils within] the ‘present age.’”

Jesus didn’t give us John 3:16 as a set of magic words to insulate us from the world and all its mess – Jesus gave us John 3:16 because as he says in the following verse, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (3:17). And that, my friends, is certainly something to dance about! (Anders)  Amen.