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

John 11:1-45
Fifth Sunday in Lent

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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.

Evidence of Grace: Hope

Romans 5:1-4
February 23, 2011

A few weeks ago, Irv Welling passed along what is said to be a Cherokee story he heard recently at an awards dinner. The story goes like this. One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. The grandfather said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.” The one you feed.

It occurred to me when I read that story that it could stand for our entire MidWeek series on virtues as evidences of grace and vices as obstacles to grace based on Steve Shoemaker’s book The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. It all depends on which wolf we feed. Tonight, I’m talking about feeding hope. Not having hope; not finding hope; not needing hope; but feeding hope.

In the Bible, hope is presented as something God gives. The prophet Jeremiah wrote to the people of Jerusalem who had been exiled to Babylon, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). God gives hope, Jeremiah says. As that verse from Jeremiah implies, hope is always about a future with God that stands somehow in contrast to or in tension with the present. Whatever the circumstances of the present may be, hope holds out an alternative future in the plan of God for welfare and not for evil, for shalom and not for ra‘, the Hebrew text says.

The apostle Paul calls God “the God of hope” who will “fill you with joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Shoemaker points out that “In the New Testament, hope is always a noun [or a verb], hope, never an adjective, hopeful, or an adverb, hopefully; [because hope] is far more than some subjective feeling we conjure up. It is a power given us by God, the God of our hope” (Shoemaker, p. 174). Hope is a power given to us by God. It is like a wolf inside us—if we will feed it.

God is our hope, the source of our hope and the object of our hope. “Hope in the Lord,” says the psalmist (Psalm 130:7; 131:3). “I hope in the Lord,” says Paul (Philipians 2:19). Hope is not some vague, wishful and wishy-washy feeling that “everything will be O.K.” Hope is a persistent and tenacious conviction of the soul that God really is at work in all things for good (Romans 8:28), even when you and I cannot see the good for which God is working. After all, Paul reminds us in Romans 8:24-25, “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Ah, patience. There’s the rub. In an era of fast food, fast cars, fast facts, fast internet, fast money, fast games, fast answers, fast weight loss, fast living, fast-acting, fast and furious, we do not hope for what we do not see because we wait for nothing with patience. The problem with the hope that comes to us from God is that it does not come as a gift on a silver platter to privileged and entitled people who are impatient and in a hurry. “Lord, give me patience, and give it to me right now.”

Hope comes, says Paul in Romans 5:1-4, from the long, slow work of the cultivation of our character which comes from the expansion of our endurance which comes from our experience of suffering. God sows hope like seeds in the dirt of our lives, seeds that must lie in the dark, underground, in order to germinate and sprout, to be cultivated, watered, fed, weeded, trimmed and pruned only eventually to be harvested as ripe and full-grown hope. The quote from Steve Shoemaker's book that has been at the top of our MidWeek order of worship for this series speaks of all of the virtues and of each of them. So, hope “is a gift from the Creator, an evidence of natural grace, and [hope] is also a habit, a discipline consisting of difficult choices and the day-by-day, step-by-step determination” to choose hope. In other words, to “have hope,” we must “feed hope.”

We must day-by-day and step-by-step determine to choose hope among the many options we have for relating to ourselves and to God and to others and to the world. I say to myself, “In this situation, I can choose cynicism; I can choose despair; I can choose apathy; I can choose anger; I can choose retribution. I have many choices, and I choose hope. I am going to feed hope.”

Ezekiel saw a vision of a valley of dry bones, the bones of Israel in exile, who cried out, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost!” But in that valley of dry bones, Ezekiel heard God say, “I will put my Spirit within you and you shall live!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the valley is exile or illness, a broken family or a broken heart, a lost job or a failed test, God puts God’s spirit within us for life. In Egypt, Israel cried out to God under the murderous oppression of Pharaoh, and God raised up the voice of Moses, who demanded for God of Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether Pharaoh is a political tyrant or an exploitive workplace, an abusive parent or spouse, or homelesseness or hunger or poverty, God’s spirit is always on the side of liberation. In the Easter story, we, like the women who were there, are asked, from the empty tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the tomb is in a garden or a graveyard or a failed marriage or a faded dream or an addiction or a dead end of one sort or another, God’s spirit is always on the side of life.

That’s the voice that gave Martin Luther King, Jr., the spiritual fortitude to announce on the night before he was assassinated, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .
With this faith I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” We are all in the business of carving “a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” Carving a mountain of hope from a tunnel of despair takes a tenacious faith in God that God is working for good regardless of how things look at any given time or place. It takes passionate confidence that in the end, God’s kingdom will come, God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And it takes faithful listening to the voice that gives us reason to choose hope.

Which wolf in you will win? The one you feed. So feed hope.


Photo by sometimesong. Used under license of Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sometimesong/

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.

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Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
The Second Sunday in Advent 2010

In my experience, it is a common homiletical hazard that sermon titles are required of me for purpose of worship planning long before the sermon is actually written. This congregation has become entirely too urbane and sophisticated to want to hear a preacher talk about “the word that the Lord has laid on my heart this morning,” so I will simply say, “Don’t bother asking what the sermon title in your order of worship has to do with the sermon you are about to hear.” I will only suggest that you do as I have done this week, and listen for a word from God.

Of all the beatific visions of the end in the Bible, this one in Isaiah 11:1-10 is my favorite. I don’t mean “my favorite” as in a favorite gum-chewing, lip-smacking, toe-tapping “Top-40” hit. I mean “my favorite” as the one that most strongly shapes my understanding of God and of the world and of the church and of you and me.

There are other beatific visions in the Bible, to be sure. There is the “new heaven and the new earth” in Revelation 21. There is the swords-into-plowshares vision in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4. There is Isaiah 40’s “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low,” the crooked straight and the rough places plain that Gayle Gulley will sing in the Sanctuary shortly after 11:00 this morning. That aria is one of my very favorite parts of Handel’s Messiah. I suppose if I had grown up in Kansas, that might be my favorite beatific vision of them all, but as someone who has lived most of my childhood and adulthood alike on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge, I need more topographical variety for a vision to be beatific. I need rocks, hills and plains to repeat the sounding joy. I need every mountainside to let freedom ring. Scripture provides us with a variety of beatific visions of the end, and for all their distinct particularities and qualities, all of them share three at least three features.

The first feature is peace. Peace. We light the candle of peace, and we sing, “O come, Desire of nations, bind all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease; fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.” Whether your favorite biblical beatific vision of the end-time is the new heaven and new earth or the swords-into-plowshares or every valley shall be exalted, or the wolf shall live with the lamb (without having to replace the lamb every so often), your favorite vision of the end-time speaks peace to the world of fear and conflict and tension and war around you. And it speaks peace to the world of fear and conflict and tension and war inside you. Peace is one of the three shared features of every beatific vision of the end in the Bible.

A second feature of all of them is that the beatific end-time vision of God’s peace is ushered in by divine device, not human artifice. With Christians the world over we prayed from The Book of Common Prayer this morning, “We . . . eagerly await the kingdom of your Son, the Prince of Peace who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit now and forever,” in acknowledgement that it is not our kingdom or our power or our glory that ushers in peace. It is God’s and God’s alone.

You have heard me say this before, and you will hear me say it again. The fatal spiritual flaw of the liberal Christian theology movement of a century ago and the fatal spiritual flaw of the conservative Christian theology of our own time is that both of them erroneously assume that they can build the kingdom of God by controlling the kingdoms of this world. By controlling the congresses and courtrooms and institutions and armies of this world, they believe they can usher in the beatific visions of the Bible. When liberals or conservatives either one begin to think that way they commit idolatry by vesting more faith and more control in themselves and their respective theologies and ideologies than they do in God. We human beings want peace on our own terms and we want it now, and so we push God and God’s long-awaited vision to the side to worship and serve ourselves and build our own beatific vision of the end. But God’s peace comes to the world around us and the world inside us by divine device, not human artifice.

A third shared feature of every beatific vision in the Bible is that each one of them and all of them together fulfill the function of the apostle Paul’s observation in Romans 15:4, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” So let me share with you this morning why when it comes to “the encouragement of the scriptures” and “steadfastness” Isaiah 11:1-10 is the beatific vision of the end-time that most speaks hope to me, the vision that most strongly shapes my understanding of God and the world and the church and you and me.

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion [shall feed] together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

It is often called “the peaceable kingdom,” this beatific vision in which carnivores and herbivores, predators and prey live in peaceful coexistence with each other. It is a picture of nature as you and I have never known it. You will not see it on “Animal Planet” or the “National Geographic Channel” or on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” (I know that last one dates me, but so be it.) It is a picture of creation as God visions it, as God redeems, restores, renovates and regenerates it. If it were a “reality TV” show, it would be called “Extreme Makeover: Creation Edition.” It is a picture of nature and society and humanity as you and I have never known them.

It suggests that some day in some way there will come a time and an eternity when, to continue the popular reality-TV allusion, a harbinger of completion will call out, “Driver, move that bus!” And with that call will come the removal of the impediment to our seeing and to our being in a creation of God’s visioning, of God’s redeeming, restoring, renovating and regenerating: a new heaven and a new earth, swords-into-plowshares, every valley exalted and mountain made low, the leopard shall lie down with the kid (and the kid will still be there in the morning).

Some of us are closer to that vision than others of us are. A couple years ago, our staff prayed for and visited a teenager who was hospitalized for months, first at Greenville Memorial Hospital and then at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and then back at Greenville Memorial. More than once during that time the doctors called the family in because they believed the young man’s death was imminent. Late in his hospitalization and his genuinely miraculous recuperation, a few weeks before he was able to return home I asked his mother—who had literally been by his bedside for months—what had kept her going. What she said surprised me: “I already know how this is going to turn out,” she said. “God is going to heal my son. I want God to heal my son in this life, so I can take him home with me. But if that doesn’t happen, I know that God is going to heal my son in the life to come.”

You see, the driver had already moved the bus for her. She could already see her son redeemed, restored, renovated and regenerated; and that gave her steadfastness and encouragement and hope through an unbearable ordeal that was a parent’s worst nightmare. In the worst nightmares of the world around us and the world within us, the vision of the calf and the lion [feeding] together (not latter on the former) offers us steadfastness and encouragement and hope that our children’s lives and our own lives like the life of all creation, will be redeemed, restored, renovated and regenerated.

One reason I am especially fond of this particular vision in Isaiah 11:1-10 is that it emanates from a nightmare scenario. It begins with what looks for all practical purposes like a dead-end story. We have probably heard some of these words so many times that we are immune to their effect, especially this stuff about a root of Jesse and a stump and a shoot and a branch. I would remind you that it starts with a stump. The beatific vision in Isaiah 11:1-10 does not begin with a tree of life or a sapling or a seed even. It starts with a stump, a tree cut down, cut off, caput.

You may or may not remember that last month in a sermon on Isaiah 12, I said that in this portion of the book of Isaiah we are reading words spoken in and to Jerusalem in a time of great fear and uncertainty, a time of national and international terror and crisis and war. There were several times during the forty or maybe even fifty-year-long career of the prophet Isaiah that the hopes and fears of all the years had weighed heavily on Jerusalem and its people.

During the decades of Isaiah’s preaching, the powerful and ruthless Assyrian army, the greatest military machine the ancient Near East had ever known to that day invaded Israel in the north in 732 B.C.E., and then captured its capital Samaria in 721 B.C.E., and eventually besieged Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E. after decimating Judah in the south in a march with siege engines and infantry against walled cities that makes William Tecumseh Sherman look like a child playing with tin soldiers.

In whichever moment of fear and uncertainty, national and international terror and crisis and war these words of Isaiah were first spoken, it was as though there was nothing but a stump left, a dead-end story at the close of a nightmare scenario. And yet, in the midst of an unbearable ordeal, it is as though for Isaiah of Jerusalem the driver had already moved the bus, because beneath the stump he could see the root, and from the root he could see a shoot, and the shoot he could see a branch, and the branch became a sign that God was not finished with God’s people, collectively or individually, that God was not finished with God’s creation but that God had redemption, restoration, renovation and regeneration in mind.

When you are cut down and cut off, when it is as though your life or your faith or your family or your church or whatever is near and dear to you has been mowed down level to the ground, I would remind you that it starts with a stump.

More than ten years ago, I cut down two crepe myrtles in my front yard. I hated to do it because I love crepe myrtles, but in the typical overdo-it landscaping of suburban America, the original owners of the house Bev and I live in chose to plant a dogwood tree flanked by a pair of crepe myrtles. I’m sure they were an exquisite combination when they were young, but as they grew and aged, they became competitors for space and sunlight and moisture and nutrients. And as fond as I am of crepe myrtles, I am fonder still of dogwood trees; and so I cut the crepe myrtles down to the ground, leaving two stumps on either side of the tree. And for more than a decade, I weeded and wacked and mowed crepe myrtle shoots in my yard until this fall I finally hired a man to pull them out with a truck.

You see, all God needs in God’s creation, all God needs in our lives and our faith and our family and our church is but a stump with a root in order for life and hope to be God’s tenacious and ongoing words. In Romans 15, when the apostle Paul mentions “the root of Jesse” in verse 12, he cannot help himself but to break into a marvelous benediction in verse 13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

The Advent message this year and every year is that God is not finished with God’s people, collectively and individually, and God is not finished with God’s creation. God still has redemption, restoration, renovation and regeneration in mind and under way. My hope and my prayer for you this Advent is that if only for briefest glimpse, God will give you the gift of being able to see beyond the stump, to see beyond the dead-end, beyond the nightmare, beyond whatever fear or uncertainty or terror or ordeal you may be experiencing to the beatific vision of God.

So, with apologies to Ty Pennington and the entire crew of the popular reality-TV series, I will be praying for you: “Driver, move that bus.” “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen.

Bus photo from The Port of San Diego, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 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.