Love in the Dark

I don’t know about you, but for me, this is a dark time of year. Literally: I didn’t see the sun at all yesterday. But more than that, it’s a dark time in my soul. I don’t want to get too melodramatic on you, but the end of fall semester is always the worst time of the year for me. It’s cold and dark and all I want is tea and blankets and pajamas and I have all this stuff to do that requires not-pajamas.

Actually, that's a lie: I do know about you: I talk to you, and I’m friends with a lot of you on Facebook and I know what kind of mood this group is in:

ALI HENDERSON: December 3, 10:26 am:

            “Let's take bets on how long it will take to write this 10 page paper, because I have 23 hours left to get it done.”

SARAH DAVIS: December 6, 11:00 pm:

            “Current Mood: Face plant Cat.”

ANDREW HARRISON COX: December 6, 4:00 pm

            “Study Tip: Stand Up. Stretch. Take a Walk. Go to the Airport. Get on a Plane. Never Return.”

ELIZABETH REID: December 2, 12:16 pm:

            “On the second week of Christmas, my teachers gave to me: 5 all nighters, 4 hours of crying, 3 mental breakdowns, 2 thoughts of dropout, and a month of anxiety.”

Are you feeling overwhelmed? I am. And so are you. You are feeling stressed, out of control, you are juggling work and school and extracurriculars and choir concerts and job interviews and interviews for grad school programs. You are freaking out about your future and your finals and maybe even about going home for break (don’t think we don’t know that home is not always a warm and relaxing place for you). You’re worried about decisions to be made and presents to buy for roommates and passing your final exams and where you’re going to live next semester and who you’re going to live with.

Even more, you have friends who are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, maybe with all of these things, but maybe with bigger things, too, things so big that you don’t understand them and you can’t talk about them and all you can do is sit in silence with them in their pain and cry.

The world we live in is overwhelmed, too. People are mourning the deaths of their children—of our children—of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Of Peter Kassig, who was 26 years old when ISIS beheaded him. We are rebuilding in Gaza, after weeks of bombing left families without homes. We are fighting in west Africa, trying to get on top of this massively contagious disease that is killing entire villages of people.

We are overwhelmed. Our friends are overwhelmed and the world we live in is overwhelmed.

And despite that, despite all these things….you have come here. You could be anywhere else, doing any number of urgent things that must be done and you decided to come to church this morning.

That says something about you.

Maybe it means that you, like me, were raised in a family that only skipped church if you were bleeding or throwing up and neither of those things were true about you this morning so here you are.

Maybe it means that your roommate was too loud this morning and once you were awake, you decided to make the best of a bad situation.

Or maybe. Maybe it means that you came to church not despite the fact that you were feeling overwhelmed and out of control, but because you were feeling overwhelmed and out of control. Maybe you came here because this is the place you go when you need… something. Help? Companionship? Love?

As we’ve gone through 1 John, we’ve had this idea of love kind of bashed into our heads and you’re going to get it one more time:

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed to us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another....God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment because as he is so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also" (1 Jn 4.7-21).

The author goes on to say a little later: “Anyone who hates her brother or sister cannot love God; how can you love the parent without loving the child?”

We have been adopted into the family of God through Jesus’ death. God is our father; you are my sisters and brothers.

Love one another.

Love is not a feeling, but a response: God sent his son to die. Love one another like that.

Invest in one another.

Take care of each other.

Help each other.

Ask how you can help, don’t wait to be asked.

Pray for each other.

Ask about that, too.

Feed each other.

Hug each other.

Support each other.

Love one another.

If you don’t, who will?

When I look at the world, I am overwhelmed by their overwhelmedness.  Forget the world. When I look at this group, I see a group of people who are struggling. I know your struggles, I know your insecurities, I know your concerns. I feel them too! and I am here to tell you that the love you show each other will drive out that darkness.

Mysterium Fide

I have heard it said that when Peter first made his confession of faith, "You are the Christ," he didn't really understand what he was affirming. Jesus’ death was still in the distant future and certainly his resurrection was a surprise to the disciples.

Perhaps on the day of Pentecost, preaching his first sermon, Peter could see a bit more clearly what it meant to say that Jesus is the Christ but still he did not know the full demand that confession would make upon his life.

I have heard it said that when Peter was dying on a cross because of his confession, he still did not see the full picture. But certainly, by God’s grace, he saw it more clearly then than he did in the beginning.

The first time I made this confession was when I was baptized. I was 11; before much of life had confronted me, and I made it for a really bad reason. I am grateful that God honored that confession despite my ignorance.

The last time I made this confession was on Saturday when I participated in the Eucharist at my best friend’s wedding.

Like Peter, when I first made my confession, I did not understand what I confessed. By God’s grace, I see more clearly now than I did then, but anyone who knows the state of my heart will quickly see that my understanding is still incomplete.

My prayer is that I can continue to make this confession until I see fully.

The Faces of Jesus by Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner. The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 1974.

The Faces of Jesus, by Frederick Buechner is a biography. Buechner retells the “life story” of Jesus, in beautiful prose. The overall impression of the book is that of “the jerky haste of an old newsreel” (45) which mimics the gospel writers’ description of Jesus’ life as urgent and rushed. After all, Buechner reminds us, one doesn’t take time to draw detailed sketches “when you think the world is on fire” (ix).

Despite the haste, the face (or, rather, faces) of Jesus can be seen and understood in light of the gospels, argues Buechner, and his pacing does not detract from what is ultimately a gorgeously poetic account. At times, however, Buechner seems highly uncertain about the historicity of the gospels and his ambivalence requires him to focus on a more theological understanding of the text.

One example of his suspicion towards historical fact is his treatment of the virgin birth. Although Buechner includes a separate chapter on the Annunciation, he points out that our earliest sources, the apostle Paul, Mark, and Matthew, do not record that aspect of Jesus’ life (8). Buechner argues that there is “another kind of truth” (16) and ultimately his position falls uncomfortably between the two types of truths. No matter what happened on the night Jesus was born, the world changed forever. Perhaps, Buechner says, this is the only truth that matters at all.

When discussing Jesus’ earthly ministry, Buechner says that we must have a clear understanding of the world Jesus inhabited. Unfortunately, he is quick to add, this is a difficult task at best, and impossible at worst (31-32). While the gospels do tell the reader some things about the cultural, social, and political world Jesus lived and ministered in (mostly by inference), the majority of the gospels presuppose a familiarity with the milieu being described therein. No matter how much we learn about the peripheries of Jesus’ ministry, we will still never fully understand who Jesus was or what he thought about his life, much less what he would think about the way his followers changed and adapted his life to suit their own purposes (36).

As Buechner focuses on Jesus’ ministry and the events leading up to Jesus’ death, I found several points of contention. First, Buechner’s treatment of the woman at the well in John 4 strikes me as unkind and unduly harsh. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the woman is impressed with Jesus’ fortune telling abilities above and beyond his claim to be the Messiah and although it is true that she poses the question to the rest of the village, “Could this man be the Messiah?” it strikes me as rhetorical, especially since Jesus himself just confirmed it.

Perhaps his discussion of the woman at the well’s response to Jesus is a result of the author looking for ways to prove his thesis that Jesus’ ministry was less than a roaring success (49). Buechner argues that the parables are never understood and Jesus is never said to have made a single convert, and therefore his ministry is a failure. The gospel account, however, says that by the end of his ministry there are crowds of people following Jesus wherever he goes, excited and enthused to make him their king. Perhaps one might say that his ministry was not the success Jesus anticipated it being, but to argue that it is unsuccessful seems a stretch.

The most disturbing point of Buechner’s work is that the resurrection of Lazarus was not effective. In Buechner’s version, Jesus, shaken by the death of Lazarus and unwilling to accept that this is his fate as well, attempts a resurrection, which seems to be beyond his ability. “It is not a living man who prepares to come out again into the unsparing light of day but a living corpse” (52) writes Buechner. In view of these chilling words, Jesus decides that something more must be done and so he “set his face towards Jerusalem” and his death.

The mood of this story reframes everything Buechner recounts afterwards and it makes for great effect. However, the crowd’s response to this in the gospel does not seem to allow for such a Gothic Romantic interpretation. This reading seems closer to something in one of the Bronte sisters than the gospel.

“If there are certain events that [the gospel writers] cannot tell without improving on them a little with each retelling…there are others that  almost in spite of themselves they seem unable to tell except in the curt monosyllables of fact” (56). The Last Supper is one of these stories, says Buechner, and of all the stories in the gospels that we have read in an overly spiritual manner, it’s this one: Jesus, unafraid and confident in his coming death, and his disciples, blissfully unaware that the crisis is upon them. Buechner reinterprets the story to his advantage by adding an element of anxiety to the Last Supper that most retellings ignore. He sketches Jesus as afraid and uncertain, the disciples as confused and anxious about what will take place.

From an historical perspective, it is impossible to read the crucifixion as anything other than a tragedy. The madman, Jesus, has been caught at last and he dies at the hand of the very system he attempted to change. It is here out of necessity that Buechner turns to an almost entirely theological perspective. It is not just the man, Jesus, hanging on the cross, but Christ, the preexistent Word of God, who has been sent into time for this moment. “Out of this terrible death…came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live it is to stand with one foot already in eternity. To participate in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ is to live already in his kingdom” (74).

From an historical perspective, it is impossible to read the resurrection as anything other than a fairy tale or a myth told to simple, pre-Enlightenment people. “Who knows what the truth of it was?” (87) questions Buechner, and from a solely factual position, we cannot know. But, as Buechner concludes, we are aware of Jesus’ resurrection not through the absence of his body, but through the presence of his resurrection in our lives. “If Christ has not been raised,” Paul insists, “then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (93).

Overall, The Faces of Jesus is a beautifully written poetic retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. Buechner makes the story captivating and this is his primary strength. Good storytelling is a gift. It is obvious that he is responding to the third Quest for the historical Jesus and is working to maintain a theological perspective in his writing despite the general mood of society and at times this can make The Faces of Jesus seem slightly dated, as the concerns of the third Quest have mostly fallen to the wayside. However, Buechner takes a big step in integrating a theological perspective into an historical perspective. More Christians could learn from his example.