Religion, Politics, and Hope in Charles Kimball's "When Religion Becomes Lethal": A Review

Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011)


Anyone who watches CNN, FOXNews, or MSNBC should read this book. In fewer than 200 pages, Kimball leads his readers from the origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the latest disputes over Jewish settlements in the occupied territory of Palestine, Christian opposition to the construction of an Islamic center in Manhattan, and the bizarre rants of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Real people—militant Muslims, cocksure Christians, and hard-core Jewish settlers “prepared to facilitate the final conflagration”—populate these pages.

Kimball goes behind the news-media and talk-show sound bites to reorient popular perspectives on major events and introduce important players in the interaction of religion and politics among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For example, the widespread talk of a “clash of civilizations” among scholars and the public alike “reinforces a simplistic and dangerously inaccurate perspective.” Support for Israel among American politicians is entirely understandable if for no other reason than “Criticizing Israel has been political suicide in the United States.” As for September 11, 2001, “the world did not change on that fateful day. On that day, the United States of America simply joined the rest of the world, in a disturbing way. . . . The lethal threat posed by violent extremists claiming inspiration from their religion and prepared to die in suicidal self-sacrifice was [now] just as real in the United States as it had been in Beirut or Jerusalem.”

What separates Kimball from the often-heard sensationalists and fear-mongers who dominate the radio and television airwaves is his insistence that the world’s three great monotheistic religions contain within them and share in common convictions, perspectives, and centuries of practice living together that are fertile ground for hope and for action instead of despair, immobilization, and counterproductive responses to the challenges of the next decade and beyond. Explosive? Yes. Lethal? Yes. Hopeless? No. Kimball explains why on all three fronts.

This book is required reading for anyone who wants to—or presumes to—understand the interaction of religion and politics from Murfreesboro to Mecca and from Tulsa to Tel Aviv.

An Easter Journey: Where Is He?

John 20:1-18
Easter Sunday 2011

Have you ever tried to find Waldo? Do you know Waldo? The three-year-old in our family hasn’t graduated to Where’s Waldo? yet, but he is positively entranced by searching for Goldbug. Goldbug is a tiny yellow character hidden away in every double-page illustration in Richard Scarry’s delightful book Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Occasionally Goldbug is hidden in plain sight; but in most of the illustrations, he is only partly visible, sometimes barely visible at all. But he is always there for you to find if you have the powers of observation and the patience. “There he is!” “There he is!” “I see him!” our three-year-old shouts exuberantly when he finds him. For older kids, there’ Where’s Waldo?

Waldo is a character with brown hair wearing a red and white striped shirt, a red and white cap with a red ball on top, and round black glasses who appears—or disappears, as the case may be—in stunningly intricate two-page illustrations by British illustrator Martin Handford. If you haven’t had children in your home in the last 20 years, you may not know who Waldo is or what he looks like. But Waldo is present in every illustration, hidden in plain sight, always there for you to find if you have the powers of observation and the patience. Where is he? Can you find him?

In this morning’s familiar gospel lesson for Easter Sunday, it is Jesus of Nazareth who is the missing person. Four times in fourteen verses, the question of where Jesus is occurs in John’s account of resurrection morning. “We do not know where,” says Mary Magdalene breathlessly in verse 2 after running from the garden tomb to Peter and to John, who in turn run to the tomb to see—or not, as the case may be. “I do not know where,” she says through her tears in verse 13. “For whom are you looking?” asks the one whom Mary took for the gardener in verse 15. “Tell me where,” Mary says.

Up until resurrection morning, people who were looking for Jesus knew where to find him. In Luke 4, the crowds were able to find Jesus, even when he slipped away at daybreak to “a deserted place” (v 42). In the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, the crowds take boats from the city of Tiberius on the shore of the Sea of Galilee to find Jesus in the fishing village of Capernaum (v 24). On the night he was betrayed in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said to those who came for him, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me” (Mark 14:48-49). The way the gospels tell the story, whether Jesus was in the Galilee or in Jerusalem, it was not all that hard to find him. But on that first Easter morning, the enterprise of finding Jesus changed completely.

According to the gospel of John, it did not come without warning. In the seventh chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus said, “I will be with you a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come” (vv 33-34). That set at least some in the crowd abuzz, and they “said to one another, ‘Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What does he mean by saying, “You will search for me and you will not find me” and “Where I am, you cannot come?”’” (vv 35-36). So even though the resurrection of Jesus Christ broke on the world like a cosmic curveball, the gospels insist that Jesus tipped his hand before it was thrown.

Jesus said to Martha while her brother Lazarus was still in the tomb, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25); but those worlds sounded for all the world like a metaphor or a symbol of some sort, like words that meant something other than what they said. But that is precisely the power of a metaphor or a symbol: it is and at the same time it is not the very thing of which it speaks. The communion cups were being passed around in this very room some years ago when a first-grader in big church for the Lord’s Supper for very first time watched the tray come down the pew on which he was sitting and pass him by. He looked at the tiny cup in his mother’s hand and looked up at her and asked with eyes wide, “Mommy, is that really blood?” Startled, his mother whispered, “No, of course not. It’s grape juice.” The child paused a moment and then asked, “Then why did he just say it’s blood?” “We’ll talk about that later,” the mother whispered, as she hoped that later never came. The power of the cup of salvation is that it is the precious, saving blood of Jesus Christ; and at the same time, it is as common as ordinary grape juice or table wine. For those who have experienced it, resurrection is both a symbol, a metaphor, and the very thing itself.

Listen to what novelist and non-fiction writer Anne Lamott wrote about resurrection. “People who think we Christians are idiots or delusional for our beliefs get hung up on the Good Friday part—the part where Jesus is suffering, everyone is bad, God is mad. I try not to bog down in it, though, and not because of what [comedian] Lenny Bruce said, that if Christ had been killed in the modern era, we Christians would be wearing electric-chair charms on chains around our necks. It’s because I got sober, against all odds, and then I started hanging out with people who were trying to get sober too, and over time I got to watch a number of the walking dead come back to life—as I came back to life. So I believe in the basic Christian message: that life happens, death happens and then new life happens. I believe in resurrection. So sue me. Or go read something else” (http://www.salon.com/columnists/lamott.html).

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen,” the women at the tomb were told in Luke 24:5. So, if he is not there, where is he? My middle brother loves to tell the story about his freshman year in college when he was approached by an erstwhile collegiate evangelist who confronted him with the question, “Have you found Jesus?” To which my brother says he replied, “I didn’t know he was missing. I’d be happy to help you look for him if you would like.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ means that you don’t need to go looking for Jesus on a college campus or in a deserted place or in the Galilee or in the garden of Gethsemane. The resurrection authorizes and empowers Jesus to say, “Remember, I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20).

By the power of resurrection, the risen and living Lord is the One of whom the psalmist sings, “Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in [the Pit], you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as day, for darkness is as light to you” (Psalm 139:7-12).

By the power of resurrection, even in our darkest hour, our darkest hour of a devastating diagnosis or a terminal prognosis, even in our darkest hour of divorce or the death of a loved one or the end of a dream or the loss of everything we may have hoped for or worked for, even in that darkness, the risen and living One is present with us. Even there the hand of Christ leads us; even there the right hand of Jesus holds us fast.

If that’s not working for you right now, let me suggest that you look where Jesus said he would be. Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 28:20). Jesus did not say, “Where the thousands are, you will find me.” Jesus did not say, “Look for the crowds in the hundreds, and I will be there.” Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Look where Jesus said he would be, among “the least of these” whom he calls his brothers and sisters (Matthew 25:40): the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the inadequately clothed, the sick, the imprisoned. Just as you did to one of the least of these, you did to me, Jesus said. You will find me even where Anne Lamott did, among the walking dead coming back to life, together trying to get sober or together just trying to make it through the hour or the day or the week or the year of crisis, whatever the crisis might be.

The book of Colossians tells us that Christ is the “firstborn from the dead” in whom “all things hold together” (1:17-18). But the apostle Paul reminds us that the Risen and living One is every bit as present where things fall apart. In 2 Corinthians 13:4 Paul writes, “For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but . . . we will live with him by the power of God.” That’s why Paul can write, “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

In her darkest hour, Mary Magdalene stood weeping in the garden until she heard him call her name. And then she “went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). What I’m saying is that Easter means that if you have the powers of observation and the patience, and if you will put yourself where Jesus said he would be, you, too, can discover, “There he is!” “There he is!” “I see him!” “There he is!” Amen.


Photo by E. L. Malvaney, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

A New Testament Lenten Journey: Who Is This?

Matthew 21:1-11
Palm Sunday 2011

When I was a child, Palm Sunday was one of my favorite Sundays in the Christian year. I loved waving a palm branch as the children’s choir led the procession while the whole congregation sang, “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring!” I love a parade! Growing up as I did in good Lutheran churches, Palm Sunday’s triumphant entry was a welcome relief after all the gloom and impending doom of Lent.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that Palm Sunday is the spiritual and liturgical equivalent of the eye of a hurricane. When a well-defined eye of a hurricane is passing over land, the wind and rain disappear and the sky above is clear. Fear subsides, and people come outside. They are sometimes fooled into thinking that the danger, the gloom and the doom, are past. But when the other side of the eyewall arrives, the winds and the rain return with a vengeance.

That’s the part I did not understand as a child: the return of the storm in the events of Holy Week. The impending passion of Christ in Maundy Thursday’s Last Supper, betrayal, and trial; Good Friday’s crucifixion, and Holy Saturday’s descent into hell were lost on me as a child on Palm Sunday. It was only palm branches and children’s choirs and “sweet hosannas ring.” “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King.” Is this morning about the palms, or is it about the passion? Is it about the triumphal entry of a king who has come to reign or the arrival of a suffering servant who has come to die? That either/or makes Palm Sunday the most ambiguous Sunday on the Christian calendar.

It also makes Palm Sunday an excellent example of one of the great religious and theological and spiritual challenges our world faces in the 21st century. It is the challenge of selective listening and selective reading and selective believing and selective living.

We all know what selective listening is. One mom characterized it in her family this way. Her family’s “sense of hearing is, at best, unstable, and seems to work in their favor, rather than mine,” she wrote. “If I drop a few coins, my 14-year-old daughter . . . can identify their value by the pitch and tone as they hit the kitchen floor. This same girl, however, can’t hear the dog barking five feet from her while she’s watching television. Presumably, ‘selective listening’ is a genetic disorder, since her father, who was sitting on the couch beside her, didn’t hear the dog either” (http://www.parentinghumor.com/categories/familyparenting/sensorywarfare.htm).

Humans are not the only organisms afflicted with this malaise. I read recently that the law of selective listening is one of many “laws of cat physics”: “Although a cat can hear a can of tuna being opened a mile away, she can’t hear a simple command three feet away” (http://www.pawsperouspets.com/humor/catphysics.html). Cats, like teenagers and husbands, are notoriously selective listeners.

I’ve heard that selective listening even happens in church—so I’ve heard. “A Husband came home from church, greeted his wife, and lifted her up and carried her all around the house. The wife was so surprised, and she asked, ‘Did the pastor preach about being romantic?’ The husband answered, ‘No, he said we must carry our burdens and sorrow’” (http://blogs.rediff.com/prannath/2007/09/19/selective-listening/, alt.). Selective listening.

Selective listening is what made it possible for me as child to hear and to sing the Palm Sunday hymn, “Ride on, ride on in majesty, in . . . pomp, ride on” without hearing the totality of the second line: “in lowly pomp, ride on to die.” I heard the majesty and pomp of the triumphal entry and filtered out the humility and the death at the end of the parade. It’s a dangerously common religious disorder.

In his just-published book titled When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Charles Kimball—who in some ways still considers First Baptist Greenville a “home church”—describes the Islamic movement of Wahhabism, the “uncompromising, puritanical approach to Islam [that] took root in Saudi Arabia beginning in the 18th century and became “the most conservative of the four major Sunni legal schools” (p. 194). It features a strict adherence to what one particular 18th century Arabian cleric named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab “understood to be the beliefs and practices of the earliest Muslims.” In the second half of the twentieth century Wahhabism was exported around the world from Saudi Arabia, and it is now most infamously associated with the extremism and the violence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin. Wahhabism is a religious and theological and spiritual disorder of selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living.

But the threat that Wahhabism poses to the West in particular has given rise to a similar disorder among non-Muslims who are choosing to misunderstand and misrepresent all of Islam as though it were all Wahhabi. And it is not. If you associate all Muslims with the radical extremism of Wahhabism, then to be consistent in your thinking, you must say that all Christians are skin-heads and snake-handlers. But you know better than that. And you should know better about Islam also. Selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living is a common religious disorder.

The crowd on the road to Jerusalem in this morning’s gospel lesson wanted a messiah-king so desperately that they threw down their coats on the road and cut branches from the trees to pave Jesus’ way into the city. They turned his arrival in Jerusalem into a parade with singing and cheering, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” They got the part in Zechariah 9:9 that reads, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he!” They got the “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” part. But in their desperation for a king in the image of their own projection, they ignored the rest of the verse: “humble and riding on a donkey” instead of instead of swashbuckling astride a stallion. They didn’t hear that part; they didn’t read that part; they didn’t believe that part; they wanted no part in living that part.

So later in the week, they were all surprised and offended when he offered no defense in response to the accusations that were made against him. When he was struck, he turned the other cheek. When he failed to meet their expectations as the kind of king they wanted they called for his crucifixion. That’s the kind of self-righteous sin that selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living can lead to. And every one of us is susceptible to it.

Some of us, for example, latch on to “Jesus Christ our Savior,” as Titus 3:6 puts it, and wish to hear nothing more of Jesus than that which feeds our personal faith and assures our “entry into the eternal kingdom” in the words of 2 Peter 1:11. Some of us, on the other hand, echo the words of the crowds in this morning’s gospel lesson who announce, “This is the prophet Jesus” (Matthew 21:11). We want an Old Testament Jesus, a reformer of the world order whose mission is centered on creating the ideal society, in spite of the fact that the Jesus of the gospels shows no interest whatsoever in establishing an ideal national or global or ecclesiastical society. He never ran for a seat on the Sanhedrin and he never endorsed a candidate for the Roman Senate. Pietists and policists alike turn their prized image of Jesus into a dashboard mascot whose head bobbles up and down in support of their every whim.

In contrast to the pietists and the politicists and self-centered crowds on the road to Jerusalem, the most important words in this morning’s gospel lesson are spoken by the bystanders in Jerusalem who on hearing all the commotion ask, “Who is this?” “Who is this?”

Every time you figure you have who this is figured out, your figuring will be inadequate. Every time you think you have found out who this is, your thinking will be confounded. Every time you believe you have who this is nailed down, the cross on which your believing nailed him will turn up empty. Who is this?

The New Testament says this is Joseph’s son (John 1:45), Mary’s child (Matthew 2:11), the brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Judas (Matthew 13:55), a Galilean (Matthew 26:69), a Nazarean (Matthew 2:23), a Savior (Luke 2:11), a prophet (Matthew 21:11), a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65), a madman (Mark 3:21), a rabbi (Mark 9:5), a slave (Philippians 2:7), a master (Luke 8:24), the king of the Jews (Matthew 27:37), the king of Israel (John 1:49), the Messiah (Mark 8:29), the Son of God (John 11:27), the Son of David (Mark 10:47), the Son of Man (Mark 8:31), God with us (Matthew 1:23), a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:14), a friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19), the lamb of God (John 1:29), the lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5), the Word (John 1:1), the true light (John 1:9), the Savior of the world (John 4:42), the bread of life (John 6:35), the light of the world (John 9:5), the good shepherd (John 10:11), the gate for the sheep (John 10:7), the way (John 14:6), the truth (John 14:6), the life (John 14:6), the vine (John 15:5), Lord and God (John 20:28), the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8), the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15), the last Adam (1 Corinthians 14:45), the crucified one (1 Corinthians 1:23), the risen one (Luke 24:34).

The mistake that the crowd on the road to Jerusalem made was not that they welcomed Jesus as king; their mistake was that they could not or would not see that the Jesus they welcomed is always and everywhere much, much more than a projection of our own expectations and desires. And that’s precisely why Palm Sunday is so important in the annual cycle of the Christian year: it is palm branches and passion.

The truth be told, not one of us can avoid selective reading and selective believing and selective living any more than teenagers, husbands, and cats can avoid selective listening. The question is not whether you are selective or not; the question is what your principle of selection is. What do you select and why? What are the consequences of your selection for your listening, reading, believing and living?

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the parade while the palm branches are waving and the sun is shining and the band is playing. We all love a parade. But Palm Sunday is the eye of a religious and theological and spiritual hurricane, a temporary respite before the storm begins anew with a vengeance in the upcoming week of the Christian year because who Jesus is is more fully and authentically revealed in the cross than in the parade.

So even now, as Holy Week begins, we turn our attention in the direction that Jesus’ attention had been focused all along: to the cross, to the cross, to the cross. There is no better principle of selection for listening, for reading, for believing, and for living than the cross. After all, it was the cross that was waiting at the end of the parade: “Ride on, ride on, in majesty ride; on in lowly pomp to die.”


Photo by davecurlee, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

A New Testament Lenten Journey: Mary, Don’t You Weep

John 11:1-45
Fifth Sunday in Lent

Bruce Springsteen - O Mary Don't You Weep (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Bruce Springsteen

Long before the invitation hymn that we will sing at the close of worship this morning was called a “spiritual,” it was a slave song: “Mary, Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Mourn.” It was a song of resistance and hope authored anonymously and sung religiously by persons whose bodies were owned and exploited by others, but whose spirits kept their eyes on the prize of freedom, and whose souls were never enslaved. “Pharaoh’s army got drownded; O, Mary, don’t you weep.”

The Mary of “Mary Don’t You Weep” is the Mary of this morning’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary. You know Mary and Martha from another story, a story that the gospel of John doesn’t tell but the gospel of Luke does. In that story, Martha expresses frustration over the fact that while she is busy with the work of the household, Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet reveling in his teachings instead of helping Martha. Martha says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” To which Jesus famously replies, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42). Poor Martha has taken a beating from preachers ever since: “Martha just doesn’t get it,” they say.

But in John’s gospel, Martha does get it. When she says in John 11:27, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she makes one of the greatest confessions of faith in the four gospels, right up there with Simon Peter and Thomas Didymus and the centurion at the cross and Mary Magdalene in the garden. Mary, her sister, in contrast, she who sat at Jesus’ feet, throws herself down at Jesus’ feet and weeps. Mary is undone in her grief and her pain. She does not “kneel” at all, as the New Revised Standard Version mistranslates the Greek verb piptō, “to fall.” She collapses in tears at the feet of Jesus. At which point the old slave song steps into the story as though it were a Greek chorus in an ancient tragedy and responds, “O, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drownded. O, Mary, don’t you weep.”

It’s one of the most influential and important of all the slave songs and spirituals that have survived into the twenty-first century. But it hasn’t been a popular cross-over song, by which I mean it hasn’t made the inroads into white religious culture and personal piety that so many spirituals have, like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Battle of Jericho” and “Wade in the Water” and “Deep River,” among so many others. We sing “Mary Don’t You Weep” almost every time we go to Springfield Baptist Church for our annual joint Communion service, but we don’t ever bring Mary back with us to First Baptist. This one doesn’t cross over very often.

And when it does a curious thing happens, as in the version we’ll sing this morning from the United Methodist hymnal. The only stanzas that get included are the “when I get to heaven” stanzas. White hymnals don’t typically include the stanza that sings, “If I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood.” In other words, I’d drown that Pharaoh if I had a chance. Or “One of these nights about 12 o’clock, This old world’s gonna reel and rock.” I wonder what that expresses in a song of resistance and hope among persons who are owned and exploited or among persons who are systematically denied access to economic opportunity and education and self-determination. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, but fire next time.” Judgment’s coming, don’t you think? “Mary wore three links of chain; every link was freedom’s name.” That’s a marvelous image of resistance and hope: every link of the chain by which you are bound has freedom’s name on it.

The problem, you see, is that when we whitewash those old slave-song spirituals and only sing the emancipation-hope stanzas without singing the slavery-resistance stanzas, we risk preaching only half the gospel. In the message of the gospel, there is no hope without resistance. The moral and spiritual power of hope is always found in the active refusal of the human spirit to give in to the way things are as the way they must be, the active refusal to accept what is wrong as right as a legitimate structure of society and the universe, the active rejection of what is demeaning and destructive to others and to one’s self. Hope is grounded in never giving in and never giving up cause “Pharaoh’s army got drownded, O, Mary, don’t you weep.”

“Take away the stone,” Jesus says in John 11:39. The voice of accommodation and acquiescence immediately repsonds, “Jesus, you can’t do that; it’s too far gone.” But Jesus refuses to accept the way things are in place of the way things can be, and so he calls to the one who is already in death, “Lazarus, come out!” And as Lazarus stumbles out of the darkness of the tomb into the light of day, Jesus says to those around, “Unbind him, and let him go.” That’s the gospel voice of resistance: “Take away the stone.” “Come out!” “Unbind her, and let her go.”

When Mary falls in tears at Jesus’ feet, she does not yet know how the story ends. None of us ever does when we get to a point like that in our life. But the story of the resurrection of Lazarus is also the story of the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of Mary and the resurrection of Martha and the resurrection of all of us who refuse to accept the way things are as they way they must be, who refuse to accept what is wrong as right, and who reject what is demeaning and destructive to others and to ourselves. Yesterday’s venture in Operation Inasmuch in which more than 300 of us participated was an act of resistance and hope that things will not always be as they are now. Sending a mission team to Haiti—and going to Haiti this week—is an act of resistance and hope that things will not always be as they are now.

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26). That question, “Do you believe this?” is not just about eternal life as “in heaven.” Remember, now, in those old slave songs and spirituals “heaven” and “home” and “over Jordan” are codes for freedom, for emancipation in the here and now, not just in some life to come. Jesus refuses to accept Martha’s answer in v 24 that she believes in a resurrection of the dead at the end of time as what he means when he tells her that her brother will rise again (John 11:23-24). When Jesus asks, “Do you believe this?” it is a question about the character and quality of life here and now that we are all are called to live: a life of resistance and hope for others and for ourselves.

So when we come this morning to sing those “heaven” stanzas of “Mary Don’t You Weep”—“gonna run about and spread the news”—we are not just singing hope; we are singing resistance also in the name of the one who is the resurrection and life, in whom we never give up or give in cause Pharaoh’s army got drownded. O, brother, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. O, sister, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drownded. Take away the stone! Come out! Unbind him, and let her go!

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Kimberly Rebecca Thomasson and James Gresham Stephens

April 2, 2011
Colossians 3:12-17

The common expression “fall in love” may be the one of the truest images and at the same time one of the biggest lies our culture tells. “Falling in love” is a true reflection of what happens to us at the beginning of a romantic relationship if for no other reason than that the science of biochemistry has shown that the chemicals released in the human body when we are “madly in love” are the very same chemicals at work when people suffer from certain mental illnesses. From a biochemical standpoint, it’s hard to tell the difference between “love” and insanity. Love makes us crazy.

Most of you weren’t here at the rehearsal last night to see Jay skipping down the aisle—yes, skipping—as he and Kimberly practiced the recessional. Love makes us nuts. It makes grown men skip. But the expression “fall in love” is also one of the biggest lies our culture tells us. You may fall into a romance; you may fall into each other’s arms; you may even fall into bed. But love as the Bible understands it and as the Christian faith defines it is not something you “fall” into at all.

First, the Scripture from Colossians that you chose for today begins by calling you “God’s chosen ones.” It’s true enough that the book of Colossians is referring to all baptized believers by that phrase, but your choice of this passage as important to you in your marriage puts the expression “God’s chosen ones” in a special light this afternoon. I am convinced that you did not simply fall in love with each other; you were chosen for each other by God. You did not fall into a relationship; you were drawn into it by God to be a match made in heaven lived out on earth. Scripture tells us that “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1), and the same is true of a marriage. If you are not “God’s chosen ones,” each for the other, then you have chosen in vain. The time we have spent together in the last several months has convinced me that you did not fall in love; you were chosen in love and for love.

Second, in the Bible and in the Christian faith, love is an act of will, not a spill; love is a choice you make, not a trip you take; love is a commitment, not a fall. The Scripture passage from Colossians that you chose for today says, “Above all, clothe yourselves with love.” Love is something you choose to put on every day. Some days, love is relaxed and easy, and you spend your day in sweats. Some days, though, love is a labor of sweat and even tears, and it requires the grungiest work clothes you own. Some days, love is new shoes, new shoes, a whole store full of new shoes. Some days it’s beachwear, but some days it will be long-johns and a parka, trust me. But every day, your love for each other must be an act of will, a choice you make; a commitment you clothe yourself in daily no matter what the weather is and regardless of how you feel that day.

We all know that not everyone who gets married is capable of that kind of will. Not everyone is willing to make that choice. Not everyone is committed to being faithful as long as they both shall live. But those who are and those who do mutually and together discover a God-given character and quality of life together that is like no other.

It is a life together that “was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God. Into this holy union Kimberly and Jay now come to be joined” (Book of Common Prayer) and commit to clothe themselves every day in their love for each other as long as they both shall live.

Photo by Wayne-Amethyst Photography, used under license of Creative Commons.