Mark 8:27-38
David A. Davis
September 13, 2015

            It is the turning point in Mark’s gospel. Here at the end of the 8^th chapter; Jesus and the disciples at Caesarea Philippi. In terms of the story, the plot, these paragraphs begin a shift from all the healings and teaching in and around Galilee to a narrative movement that now heads to Jerusalem. That Jerusalem turn, it is paralleled in content with Jesus speaking for the first time about the suffering and death and rising again of the Son of Man. These pivotal verses in Mark, they bear such a weight of content for study, there’s so much going on, so much “gospel meat” that it sort of feels like the anchor or the center, the thickest part of the shortest Gospel. “Who do you say that I am?…You are the Messiah…The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected…and be killed…and after three days rise again….Get behind me Satan!…If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

            As Jesus and his disciples were on the way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, Mark invites the reader to listen in on their conversation. That piercing question from Jesus, the “who do you say that I am?”, it comes in the overhearing. Along with how he “sternly ordered them” not to tell anyone about him. It is as if Mark’s audience finds themselves listening in on what was a private moment. It doesn’t get any less awkward when Jesus talks about the suffering of the Son of Man and Peter takes Jesus aside to tell him to stop with the nonsense and Jesus, probably yelling back, calls Peter “Satan” of all things. It’s the sort of thing that ought to make you uncomfortable, like you ought not to be listening. You sort of don’t know whether to turn away or to keep listening, start taking notes, and then study the whole scene for a couple thousand years.

You are the Christ. And the church then and ever since affirms and explores the messianic identity of Jesus. The question for the Christian takes on an existential air for generations. “Who do you say that I am?” The not telling part, labeled by the tradition as “the Messianic Secret” leads to shelf after shelf in the library of gospel studies. Jesus and his Passion Predictions. No shortage of material there on how Jesus foreshadowed his death and resurrection throughout the gospels giving the reader a glimpse ahead while the disciples fall a step behind in terms of putting it all together. As for the matching rebukes between Jesus and Peter, it sparks the lasting fascination and character study of the Apostle Peter. The one Matthew’s Jesus refers to as the “Rock upon which I will build my church.”

The thickest part of the shortest gospel. An analysis of just these few verse, that brief private conversation offered up for hearing, the terminology that rises from the page like a first whiff of a bowl of soup, it sounds, it smells like the syllabus of an introduction to the New Testament class. It’s the kind of reading and study and reflection that Christians like us eat with a spoon. A Christian faith from the neck up kind of thing. And then, just then, just when you’ve sopped up all the knowledge you can from that iconic Caesarea Philippi moment, and you’ve studied and read and listened and talked, the whole nature of the conversation changes. It all shifts from overhearing to direct address. It turns out the only thing more uncomfortable than eavesdropping on the awkward encounter between Jesus and his disciples is when Jesus turns and includes you. Or as Mark puts it, “Jesus called the crowd with this disciples and said….” So easy to miss, Jesus shifting from the twelve and calling to the crowd. As all of Mark’s gospel begins the turn to Jerusalem, this is Jesus calling to the crowd, to the reader, to his followers, to you and me, Jesus calling to you, pointing to his own cross, and saying, “this is we’re it’s all headed, why don’t you come along?” Talk about uncomfortable.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” Jesus looking at us and nodding toward Jerusalem says, “so…. here we go. While the church wishes Jesus was still just talking to Peter and the gospel could remain a safe and sanitized academic exercise (from the neck up).

Just in case the reader misses the subtle broadening of the conversation beyond just the disciples, and therefore misses the notion that Jesus’ teaching here is no longer a matter of just “them” and then misses the move that Jesus takes it beyond what one thinks to how one lives, about the whole self, just in case you missed all that, Jesus drops a little shame into the equation. The followers of Jesus being ashamed of him and his word. The Son of Man being ashamed of his followers when he comes into God’s glory. There can’t be much that digs at the heart of being human more than “shame”. The only thing worse than experiencing someone’s anger and wrath is being on the wrong side of their disappointment and shame. Shame used as verb, “shaming” has been elevated to an art form that reflects humanity’s dark side. Shame. Shame has garnered a certain popularity these days. A Ted Talk on shame now as 4.5 million views. Shame works on a person, eats at a person, it erodes the self. If sinfulness is at the top of the list of what defines the human condition, shame can’t be far beyond. So when you’re working on shame, dealing with shame, coping with shame, you’re working right at the center of your being.

So forgive me if I don’t interpret the word from Jesus here as a threat to a backsliding, under-performing, wayward Christian who then has to sit in the corner of eternity’s classroom with a ‘dunce cap” on holding a sign that says “slacker”. No. Neither do I take Jesus to being setting a low bar for the gospel here, a sort of “as long as you don’t embarrass me or cause be to be ashamed of you” approach to faith. Christ’s call to follow him is way beyond shame. My takeaway is that with the reference to shame, Jesus is announcing that the prospect of taking up one’s cross and following him has implications that ought to reverberate all the way to the core of your being, to the core of what it means to be human. Not just for the life of the mind, but for all of life. The gospel reaches to the most tender places of what it means to be human and what it means for God to be God and what it means for our relationship; humanity and God. It is Jesus, looking at us and nodding toward Jerusalem and saying, “whoever is in…..has to be ALL in….your whole self…bring it all.” The thickest part of the shortest gospel is Jesus call to discipleship; his call for you to follow, to follow with your whole life.

An article in the Washington Post on Tuesday was entitled “How a consumer driven culture threatens to destroy pastors”. Colleagues and friends were filling my mail box with the link. Lauren McFeaters tweeted it out this week. The article cites a recent study that names the percentage of pastors overwhelmed, who work too much, who worry for their family’s financial security, who feel like they can’t keep up. It also included numbers about more personal struggles of loneliness, depression, struggles in marriage. As I read and thought about it, it occurred to me that another study and another article could easily be written about “how a consumer driven culture threatens to destroy teachers, or accountants, or doctors, or spouses who are home raising their kids, or “fill in the blank”. Within the article the author makes a solid theological point, however. A model for church life and faith that is consumer based and consumer driven, a “come to us because we will worship better, lead it all, have all the programs you need, innovate, teach your children, care for you, and make it all convenient at the same time: is bound to fail and is antithetical to the teaching of Jesus.

Or as Jesus puts it, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Andrew Fosters Conner, a Presbyterian pastor down at Brown Memorial Church in Baltimore puts it this way in response to Jesus call to discipleship: Jesus makes it clear that “you should be prepared to give everything for the sake of God—nothing’s off limits. Everything is required. I can’t stand that about Jesus. It makes building a church in our times really hard. ‘Come to our church and we’ll call on you to give everything that you have for Jesus—money, time, work, relationships, life— all for Jesus. ‘Do we have programs?  Yeah, we have programs—it’s called, take up your cross. That’s the program.!’”

How about an article entitled “How Jesus with his call to discipleship threatens to destroy a consumer culture?” (#Mark8). How Jesus and his call to discipleship threatens a consumer driven, what’s in it for me, you can never have enough money, perfectionist, win at all cost, demonize the other, shaming is an art form, voting for what serves me best, charity begins at home, lack of trust, bitterness on the loose, fear the stranger, money is power, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, the poor are losers, and I have to be right all the time culture.

Jesus call to discipleship, his invitation to follow, it is for all of you. All of you. Your whole life. Which means when it comes to the world we live in, the culture that surrounds us, and the faith to which we have been called it will not, shall not, cannot be easy. When Jesus is calling to you, pointing to his own cross, and saying, “this is we’re it’s all headed, why don’t you come along?” Uncomfortable doesn’t begin to describe it.

© 2015, Property of Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

David A. Davis
James 1:17-27
August 30, 2015

A long time ago I was meeting with a couple to plan their wedding. They were a bit older and it wasn’t their first marriage. They were very clear on their intentions for the ceremony and expressed some firm opinions. “It’s just going to us and our children” she said. “No flowers, no processing, no photographer, none of that.” They told me if they could all fit, they just assume get married there in my office instead of the sanctuary. Too big. Too formal. “Now for the service” he said, “you won’t have to preach or anything. I just want you to read from James.” And he handed me a list of verses, all from James. He smiled at me and said, “I know there’s not much Jesus in James, but there’s a whole lot of gospel.”

Just this summer I sat with a family to plan a memorial service. As we came to the specifics about remembrances and music and scripture, they had come prepared and had all the choices ready. As for scripture, one of the readings was from James. The rationale, the explanation for the James choice as it related to the family member who had died, as one of them put it, “Well, she wasn’t all that religious but she lived a life of service. She lived the gospel.”

James at a wedding. James at a funeral. James at a whole lot of places in between. With no sermon required (except today!)

“Do not be deceived, my beloved. Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, come down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of God’s own purpose, God gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we could become a kind of first fruits of God’s creatures.”

James at a baptism. The community of faith gathered not just here at the fount but gathered at the edge of God’s flowing river of promise. Celebrating life and birth and rebirth. As we dip again and again into the life-giving and life-sustaining waters of God’s grace. It is a sacramental pause of gratitude. Yes, this morning for Abrianna. Thanks be to God. But for all of us. To remember your baptism, to sense that mark, to know you have been sealed in God’s love, it is before all else, an act of gratitude to God. “I’ve been baptized”! It’s a synonym for “thanks be to God!” Here according to James, to be one of God’s first fruits, to be first among all that God created, it is to live a life defined by gratitude and generosity. Every generous act of giving, every perfect gift it comes from above and multiplies through the first fruits of those born by the word of truth. A baptismal prayer for Abrianna, for all the baptized, that God would be made known in the world through the gratitude and generosity of your life.

“You must understand this, my beloved; let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to anger. James for a presidential election. James, not just for candidates, and pundits but for you and me. James for times like now when the decibel level of the rhetoric in the public square includes such hatred and disdain for the other, when there is such a sordidness to the way people talk about those who they disagree with, when what should be a robust debate about complex international policies and a treaty is reduced to name calling and questioning someone’s heritage, when the presidential election is still more than year away and the absence of civility will continue to tramp on any hope for the common good, as “trickle down” becomes less of an economic descriptor and more of an apt phrase for the nastiness that can so infect and spread among people, not just those who act out in horrible ways, not just in those who make the news, but in people just like us.

James, no not just for politics and the world out there. It’s not that easy. Only a few weeks ago I was standing at a site in Northern Israel, in the Golan Heights, not far from Lebanon and Syria. It is the site that tradition names as Caesarea Philippi; that location described in the gospels where Jesus asked the disciples “who do people say that the Son of Man is?” and “Who do you say that I am?’ There are also springs there coming out of Mt. Hermon that flow into the Jordan River and there is archeological evidence of pagan worship. It’s a multi-faith site and on the day we were there it was very crowded with Christians, and Jews, and Muslims. There was a group of big strapping in shape college kids from the U.S. traveling with the Fellowship of Christian athletes. There were several groups of Jewish college kids from the U.S. traveling with Israel’s birthright program. A few groups of Muslim families were picnicking along the water.

As I was waited my turn next to some steps that led up to one of the informational signs in front of some ruins, another college group from the U.S. was walking by. A few young men from that group stopped right next to me, sort of fell out of line from their group and they were arguing. I mean they were really arguing. It was about something their trip leader had said just moments before as he taught from scripture. It had to do with the gospels and the Apostle Paul and the inerrancy of scripture. One of the guys was really revved up and they were going at it for all to hear. I took my turn in front of the sign, worked my way around to a dozen more or so around the site and when I came back to those same steps, they were still there arguing in full voice about scripture.

It was not lost, the irony. Those college kids may never get back there again, there in front of God and Christians and Jews and Muslims, at the site where Jesus asked the disciples “Who do you say that I am”, all those guys could do was argue. You would be happy to know, as my kids are always happy to know, I didn’t say anything. Though, in hindsight, maybe I could have said, “guys, guys…James.” James for the church. Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to anger. For your anger does not produce the righteousness of God.

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.”

James for dropping a child off at college. James for starting life together on a campus. James for a new school year. Doers of the word. Not forgetting. Persevering. Blessed in the doing. It sort of sounds like a version of parent launching a child and saying, “Remember who you are.” Or the saintly grandmother rocking a child and whispering “now you, you never forget where you belong.” Or the preacher standing before her congregation week after week just before giving the benediction, “Remember who you are, whose you are, and to whom you belong.” Not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts.

It won’t be a surprise to you but in my job I don’t travel all that much. When I do travel I often find myself thinking about the challenges and for those who travel all the time. Yes, I watch with envy as everyone else gets on the plane and I am in group 72. But then I remind myself how wearing it all must be, all the travel. Part of the misery, part of it that I never hear any one talk about is the tyranny and oppression and insult of the hotel room mirrors. They are big and they are everywhere. No one has mirrors like that at home because it is like looking at yourself first thing in the morning on a high definition screen. Those mirrors scrape at your confidence and sense of self, bit by bit. If it is only you and a mirror, maybe its better to forget!

When it comes to being a faithful doer of the word, if left to yourself, I’m not sure a mirror and the law of liberty is enough. Any confidence in doing, in living the faith, it so easy droops and sags and dries up. Philosophers write about how you can’t really have a sense of self without a sense of the other. You can see a part of me that I cannot see. My sense of self is not fully complete and you help me to see all of me and I help you to see all of you. One philosopher calls it “the surplus of seeing”. The “whole of me” requires a surplus of seeing. In other words, a mirror is not enough. Or in terms of the life of faith, for doers of the word, a mirror and a bible is not enough. There has to be this surplus of seeing, there has to be others. Doers of the word, it requires that sense of others. That’s why doers of the word go to church. Not because their all that religious but because it is a way to see., to more fully see, to better know your whole self as child of God. The congregation, the community, the body of Christ is the mirror. Or as Tara Woodard Lehman put it in an essay on the Huffington Post, “I go to church because I have a really bad memory…I forget who I am and who God is.” By the grace of God, we’re not called to look in the mirror by ourselves.

One of the occupational hazards of ministry is that when you meet people anytime, anywhere, there is an almost compulsive need to share all that they think is wrong with religion, with the church, with the congregation they just left, with clergy. Folks forget that their aren’t many who understand the underbelly of church life better than pastors. Instead of just listening and nodding my head, maybe next time I ought to pull out a mirror. The people of God will always need prophets, saints, and martyrs who teach, challenge, and lead us. Those names recorded in scripture and in history. But along this journey of faith to which we have been called, when I look in the mirror, when my sense of self is complete with a surplus of seeing, what I see around me in the reflection is a sea of faces whose names are known only to me, and some of them to you, the faces of those who have been and are and will be blessed in their…doing.

“If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Oh, yes. No sermon required.

© 2015, Property of Nassau Presbyterian Church
Contact the church to obtain reprint permission.

Luke 9:10-13a
Rev. Dr. Robert Dykstra
July 19, 2015

“To be ashamed of oneself is to be in a state of total conviction,” writes British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Equals, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. 94). While religious communities often press their members for states of greater conviction, the experience of achieving total conviction in shame might give us pause in this.

The conviction in shame involves the total self, even one’s body self; it floods the self, raises one’s blood pressure, flushes the skin, makes us want to avert our eyes, hide our face, sink into the floor, imprisoned in humiliation and self-loathing. Total conviction may not be all it’s cracked up to be, not exactly a goal the religiously predisposed may want to pursue. We get a little nervous, and rightly so, when we see someone acting out of total conviction, religious or otherwise, in the news these days, and more often than not, I’m pretty sure, such acting out stems from an accumulation of personal or communal shame.

Perhaps we religious types, inclined to states of greater conviction, are more susceptible to shame than others, but everyone knows shame, everyone has felt it. Your earliest memories of childhood are ones likely infused with shame (Note to self: Why wouldn’t my kindergarten teacher allow me to choose the color of finger paint I preferred? I still don’t get it). Shame is sticky that way. It’s hard to peel it off once you get wrapped up in it. Effective shame-removal products or strategies are hard to come by, few and far between, though we keep searching them out: whether by losing ourselves in shopping, in electronic screens, in addictions of every flavor, maybe in writing sermons, even running for President in Donald Trump’s case – all of these incapable of ridding us of shame’s dreadful effects.

The experience of shame threatens our sense of hope for the future, my colleague Donald Capps suggests, threatens our sense that the future holds something worth looking forward to. Shame experiences always come unexpected; they surprise us, catch us off-guard and make painfully clear, Capps observes, “that what [we] wanted [to happen] did not happen, in spite of the fact that [we] fully expected [it] to.” Thus in shame we discover that not just our hopes but that we ourselves were misguided, “that we have been,” Capps says, “the victims of self-illusion” (Donald Capps, Agents of Hope: A Pastoral Psychology, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 123). Shame is the devastating conviction that our hopes were in vain, our expectations, our very selves deluded and untrustworthy.

Someone ran into our car while it was parked on the seminary campus last week. When I mentioned to the guy at the repair shop that whoever did it hadn’t left a note, he replied, “No one ever leaves a note anymore.” I felt a minor twinge of shame, I think it was, that I didn’t know this, that my expectations, my hopes for the world (or, at least, for the seminary community) were deluded. While sometimes the total conviction of shame washes over us in a big way, in a tsunami-like wave, as for the entire nation in the September 11 attacks, even little micro-threats to hope–learning that people don’t leave notes anymore–can add up over time.

And increasing doubts about a hoped-for future translate into increasing anxiety–less future means more anxiety–another familiar state of total conviction.

*******

All kinds of people, apparently thousands of them in our text today, a set-up for the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, are flocking to Jesus–and “flocking” may be the best way to put it, given that we are told in the Gospel of Mark’s version of these events that Jesus had compassion on seeing them “because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). An accumulation over time of little microbot attacks of personal shame, maybe accompanied by tsunami-like waves of national shame at being an occupied territory, diminishing hopes, their anxiety about the future, and ways these experiences of mind and soul had come negatively to impact the health even of their physical bodies: something like all of this propels them by the thousands to Jesus, as though they sense in him some alternative means of freeing themselves from the stickiness of shame and anxiety, from their states of total conviction.

  *******

In his book Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmundson, a literature professor at the University of Virginia, comments on the frenetic activities of his undergraduate students, who jet around the globe to accumulate exotic experiences, a lifestyle pace he attributes to anxiety in the wake of the “near-American Apocalypse” of September 11. “No one,” he says, believes that the whole [American] edifice is likely to topple down around us soon. But everyone now lives with the knowledge that today, tomorrow, next week, we can suffer an event that will change everything drastically . . . . Tomorrow the deck may be shuffled and recut by the devil’s hand. So what shall we do now?

The answer of Edmundson’s students, it strikes him, appears to be: Live, live, before the bombs go off in San Francisco or the water goes vile in New York . . . . On that bad day there will be, at the very least, the start of a comprehensive closing down. There will be no more free travel, no more easy money, and much less loose talk. . . . There’s a humane hunger to my students’ hustle for more life–but I think it’s possible that down below bubbles a fear. Do it now, for later may be too late. (Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 34-35)

The Times reported a few weeks ago that university counseling centers are seeing sharp increases in the number of students seeking help–a 15% rise last year at the University of Central Florida, as one example, where supply closets are being converted into therapist’s offices. “Anxiety has surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students,” The Times notes, though depression is holding its own just fine (Jan Hoffman, “Anxious Students Strain College Mental Health Centers,” New York Times, May 27, 2015). These developments are mirrored by students in the seminary across the street, as no doubt at the schoolhouse in this church’s back lot. Who says young people today are incapable of conviction? And it’s not as if they and the rest of us don’t have reason to be anxious. They do, and we are. No one, besides the occasional terrorist, leaves a note anymore.

 *******

 Jesus had compassion for them, these anxious throngs, Mark writes, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus welcomed them, is the way Luke puts it, even though Jesus had hoped for a time to get away from it all, to get away from those very crowds. “On their return [from the mission of the twelve] the apostles told Jesus all they had done. He took them with him and withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. When the crowds found out about it, they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured.”

Jesus’ disciples have just been promoted here to “apostles,” meaning “the sent ones,” on returning from their first solo mission trip, which appears to have gone very well. They’re excited, eager to tell him all about it, the youth group just back from Montreat, from backpacking in British Columbia. And Jesus wants to hear about it. He is the kind of leader who cares to hear about what they’ve seen and accomplished, who wants to listen to them, who takes pride in them and their gifts.

To do this, to give them and their holy exploits full attention, he proposes to take them on a retreat, wants to get away. Like men in a bar after the big game or like superhero fans at Comic-Con, he wants to hear all about it, wants a play-by-play, a blow-by-blow, a frame-by-frame, wants to know how it all went down. A small act of kindness, a teacher who pulls them aside, who gives them space, who attends with interest, who wants to know.

But you remember that saying about our best-laid plans? The retreat comes crashing to a halt even before it begins when the crowds get wind of it and rush to get there before him, these sheep without a shepherd, so great their weariness and need. Jesus responds to this interruption not in the way I would likely respond, not by rolling his eyes but by rolling up his sleeves, not by wondering why a guy can’t catch a break but instead by digging down deep and catching a second wind.

“He had compassion for them,” Mark writes; “He welcomed them,” Luke says, “and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured,” the exact same things, it’s worth pointing out, that he instructed his disciples to do as he sent them on the mission of the twelve: welcoming the anxious, speaking of the kingdom of God, healing those who need to be cured is what he wanted his followers to do, too. And on their return they couldn’t wait to tell him that they actually did, that they actually could.

This compassion, this welcome, this empathy, this grace when we least expect it, is the only remedy of which I’m aware for our states of total conviction, for our hopelessness, anxiety, and shame: a face that shines upon us in our moment of vulnerability and need.

It’s something that can be taught, something that can be learned. Jesus wants to teach us how.

******* 

Two days after the murders of nine parishioners at a Bible study at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston last month, family members of the victims lined up in a courtroom to confront the man who killed their loved ones. Again and again in this instance the message they delivered to Dylann Roof was the completely unexpected “Forgive You”: “‘You took something very precious away from me,’ said Nadine Collier, daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, her voice rising in anguish. ‘I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul’” (Nikita Stewart and Richard Pérez-Peña, “In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing Suspect in Church Shooting,” New York Times, June 19, 2015). Over and over again compassion and welcome when least expected, and we who were watching in awe and disbelief wondered if the world was about to turn.

Then just two days after that, on a Sunday when I expected that church’s doors to be bolted shut, maybe forever (“They may have to tear down the church,” I’d thought, “like Newtown’s elementary school, and we would understand if they did”), Emmanuel’s faithful instead flung them wide and poured through by the hundreds, nearly two thousand, filling every pew, overflowing even into the basement room where the shootings occurred four days before, and into the public square, with the rest of us watching those faithful dig down deep to discover a second wind of compassion and welcome as the only possible antidote for our terrible states of total conviction. And the world was about to turn.

*******

In an essay entitled “The Importance of Individuals,” published in 1897, William James (James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosphy, New York: Dover Publications, 1956, p. 261), America’s first and arguably still greatest psychologist, makes a case for the importance of our having heroes whom we strive to emulate, but also therefore for the necessity of choosing wisely just who our heroes will be. It matters, it makes a concrete difference in terms of what we value and how we order our lives, what heroes we choose. He writes, “What animal, domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?”

I understand all too well how naive it seems to suggest, as I am trying to suggest, that compassion and welcome could ever suffice in response to the devastating shame and increasing anxiety we experience in this era of near-American apocalypse. How could empathy and grace ever be enough to counter our terrible states, our terrorist states, of total conviction?

But if our hero is Jesus of Nazareth, of whom “scarce a word of sympathy with brutes should have survived,” if Jesus is Lord, then compassion and welcome is our secret superhero power, then empathy and grace the remedy entrusted to us.

*******

A former seminary student of mine is the son of a tall-steeple Baptist minister from a southern state. The student was open about being a gay man on our campus at a time not long ago when such candor was not common. He had come out to his conservative parents as a teenager many years earlier. Learning of his sexual orientation was not something they had wanted to hear from him. In the initial aftermath of his revelation, both sides maintained radio silence concerning his sexuality. Eventually, however, Tim decided to make a point of bringing up his orientation, to his parents’ discomfort, each time he went home for holidays or school breaks. He refused to allow them to ignore this important part of who he was.

His parents remained entrenched in their opposition long past his graduation from the seminary and for years into his first professional position as a non-ordained but openly gay youth minister in a working-class Presbyterian congregation, itself not entirely supportive of gay rights, in urban New England. Meanwhile, he began the process of preparing for a day when he might be allowed to be ordained as an “out” gay minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

That day finally arrived, as Presbyterians voted in 2012 to allow for the ordination of gay and lesbian persons. Tim asked his minister father not only to attend his ordination but, if he were willing, to offer the customary scriptural “charge” to the newly ordained minister. To his surprise, his father agreed. Likewise, though such an ordination strained the belief system of the little congregation with which Tim had been working, parishioners nonetheless rallied in their historic role and witness in hosting the ceremony.

A year or so after the fact, I received an email from Tim telling of his ordination service. He said, “My father gave the charge, which was truly an amazing moment. For me, it would have been enough if he had simply read the phone book, but he gave a beautiful charge and thanked the church for ‘being there for our son when our family was not.’ Not an accolade the [Presbyterian] church often receives,” Tim said, “but there were a lot of tears” (personal correspondence, May 6, 2013; see Robert C. Dykstra, “Zombie Alleluias: Learning to Live in the Space Between Worlds,” Pastoral Psychology, 63:5/6, December 2014, pp. 611-624).

Compassion and welcome when we least expect it, the only sure remedy for our anxiety and shame, and the world is about to turn.

*******

When Jesus saw the crowds, “he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured.” That’s it. That’s all. That’s enough. That’s who Jesus is. That’s what he does. That’s what he taught his disciples to do, what I’m wagering he wants us to do. A face to shine upon us, we sheep without a shepherd; our faces to shine upon others’, our modest superpower antidote for anxiety and shame.

© 2015, Property of Rev. Dr. Robert Dykstra
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