In autumn, I see what always is— with a sound like the soft clattering of water the eloquent air wends its way and plucks a leaf, tired and shining from its sapped branch, and the leaf loiters, then spirals and gyres, flits and lifts, roaming the atmosphere’s labyrinth, its form fit to each instance of air.
The fallen leaves alight where they’ve been borne, stacked and bent and lofted on spears of grass where they settle and gently moulder. They’re staked lightly by their stems, or ridged edges, but when a gust sweeps low over the ground they tilt and waver like flames.
The snow will come, when the branches are stripped, and the leaves left will be pelted down and interred under the wet weight of frozen light, and all will be close and cold.
Bootsteps, snowmelt, squirrelscurry and summer burn leave them tattered, threadbare, flecks of their former selves. Their flaming color now a dull gloam, life decayed down to sullen loam, and they are waiting. Waiting in winter and in spring, in summer and in autumn, waiting always for what will be—a seed.
A major part of our family’s life ‘on mission’ is Erin’s vocation as an artist. Two weeks ago, she had the opportunity to speak with a women’s recovery home about a sculpture she made, based on the Gospel story of the woman at the well:
I’ve often wanted to write about my ceramics, but the truth is, I have trouble finding enough rhythm in my studio practice to make it happen. I have trouble finding rhythm in most of my life. Rhythm comes in short snippets of time, and usually, if it comes, it means production in the studio is flowing, not computer tasks. The extra stuff–photographing, developing portfolio/website, writing–just takes a back seat and ends up getting done only if it’s essential. I’ve been so thankful for the extra time while the kids are at preschool. It’s about 12 hours a week, eight of those hours I have Virgil. And there have been several discouraging sick days. Discouraging, first, because preschool is a financial investment for us, and second, because I feel like I’ve failed my children’s immune systems.
But when things are going according to plan, (and Virgil is a good obedient child when I instruct him to take a long morning nap) those hours are packed full of hands-on making. They’re too precious to be used on extra stuff. So, when to write… I cannot multitask while reading or writing. Unlike my husband who can be fully engrossed in a book while utter chaos is happening around him, and praise the Lord he can. A lot of his seminary work gets done with one child crying at his feet, one climbing on his back, and the third crumpling all his papers. I exaggerate, but not really. So, how do I solve this problem? Get up at 5am, of course. Well, it was 6am, but kids don’t get the memo on daylight savings, so 5am it is. Virgil is often my little alarm clock. He’ll wake up around the time I want to get up. I’ll feed him, and put him back down. Sometimes when I walk by Eleanor and Ames’ room I’ll see the faint light of the book light that Eleanor got for her birthday a few weeks ago, and I’ll hear the familiar sound of pages turning. This girl is unstoppable. We debated letting her have a light because we do actually want her to sleep, but we realized she just reads in the dark, holding the book up to the window to gather the faintest light. So the book light will hopefully save her eyes, at least.
None of that is why I’m writing now. I’m writing now about my sculpture Living Water. Doing figurative sculpture full time is a dream of mine. Right now, I do it on the side. And really it serves a very important function. Particularly, with Living Water, based on the Samaritan woman at the well, who is part of an unfinished series on the women who met Jesus. There’s only two right now. The important thing is while I was making the two I have, I had no intention of ever selling them. Any maker or artist will tell you it just makes a difference, you wish it didn’t but it does. It doesn’t mean the pieces you’re selling aren’t meaningful for you. It just means: do it well, but get it done. This mostly applies to functional work. Sculpture can be priced higher, so taking your time is more reasonable. Living Water took a lot of time, she was a therapeutic process for me. She was about meditating of the story of the Samaritan woman and her encounter with Jesus at the well.
I have a dear friend–a mentor–at church who frequently volunteers at a local drug recovery women’s home, The Foundry. When I told Betsy about Living Water she insisted I come and talk to the women. I was excited by the prospect. I’d really like to get more comfortable speaking to groups, and I haven’t had any opportunities to do so in a long time. We set a date in early October, and I started writing. The more I prepared the worse I felt. Why would these women care about what I have to say? They’ll probably hate that they have to listen to another talk about Jesus.
I knew I didn’t want it to feel like a Bible study. Bible studies are great, but I’m coming to show them my sculpture, and tell them about it. But also to tell them about the story of this woman who met Jesus. Another tricky part was that I don’t know any of these women, and really don’t want to make assumptions about who they are. I can assume they’ve had a hard life, or at least a hard season. And while I’ve never experienced drug addiction myself, I have had hard seasons. So I wrote it all out, the evening arrived, and here I was–in front of a group of about 30 women awkwardly holding a sculpture. One woman asked if I wanted “something to set that on”, and while she was getting a table, a woman asked, “Did you make that?” At my response, there was a room full of awe. As Living Water was set on the table the table-retriever said, “Wow, it’s even more amazing up close.” So, a good start. I gave my little talk. Each woman was fully engaged the entire time. And afterward the room was filled with comments and questions. Lots of questions about the process, and comments about the connection to the story. One girl pulled me aside while others were getting an up-close view of Living Water. She said, “I’ve been wanting to give up today, this gave me hope.”
The whole experience was such an encouragement to me, an encouragement to do sculpture. I still think about those women a lot, and look forward to coming back. I’d love to do little classes and get some art therapy going. We’ll see what comes of it. The following is my talk on Living Water.
Pottery is primarily what I make and sell. Sculpture is more about feeding my soul. It helps me to slow down, pause, and process through life or meditate. And that’s just what this sculpture was for me. She’s titled Living Water. Making her was about slowing down and processing, and even meditating. She’s based off the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. So while sculpting her, I meditated on Jesus’ interaction with the woman.
This started about a year ago. I was in a bible study, and each week we would look at a woman who had met Jesus. We spent a lot of time noticing Christ’s gentle and intimate character toward these woman. Noticing how she responded. Thinking about how we would’ve responded. What would that interaction be like? And we also noticed how these interactions were a part of Jesus’ larger ministry. So that was the motivation behind sculpting the woman at the well–to spend time really learning about her and her interaction with Jesus. I have sculpted one other woman who met Jesus and have dreams of doing a series of them.
Tonight I want us to do some processing together about this with the woman at the well, also known as the Samaritan woman. The story of scripture begins with Jesus and his disciples coming to Samaria. Samaria being the region containing people who were part of the covenant people of God, but, who, in various ways compromised their faith, and were rejected by the faithful Jews. His disciples went off the find food, while Jesus rested at a well. A samaritan woman came up and he asked her to get him some water. She’s astonished. Likely embarrassed. And we learn later on in the story she’s been with several different men. Jesus reveals that he knows this. So let’s put ourselves in her place–beat down, living with shame and guilt. With, really, no way to have restoration, hopeless. I’m going to paraphrase part of this interaction found in John 4, reading it in first person.
I came from Samaria to draw water. And a man said to me, “Give me a drink.” I replied, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me. I’m a woman from Samaria.” He answered me, “If you knew the gift of God, and who It is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” I replied, “But you have nothing to draw water with, the well is deep. Where do you get living water?” And he said to me, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give her will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give you will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” And I said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
We are desperate without this life source. We are just grasping, cupping whatever water we can find and tossing it into our mouths. Betsy introduced me to a book called A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. The famous Psalm: the Lord is my shepherd… I read the chapter on “He leads me beside still waters” as I was finishing up Living Water, and still meditating on the idea of living water. The shepherd was leading his sheep down to a cool clear mountain stream. But along the way several stubborn sheep kept stopping and sipping from small muddy puddles likely filled with manure and disease. And the shephard is urging them on: “Go, go, you foolish sheep. I’m leading you to a stream flowing clear and pure.” And still the sheep kept going after the muddy pool. We are those foolish sheep. We just can’t trust that it will be provided. So we grasp and grasp after what we think will satisfy. And we’re left thirsty and desperate. “Lord, I’ve been waiting and waiting. You’ve forgotten me.”
I know the Samaritan woman felt this way. What was her hope? I’m sure she not only felt forgotten by God, but rejected by him. She’s messed up. She’s given her heart to other gods. She’s compromised her faith, She’s grasped for muddy water. She didn’t trust. She’s guilty of sin of having had many different husbands. Maybe she knew there was supposed to be a messiah coming. She probably thought if there was a Messiah, he would’ve come by now. Maybe if he did come: she was a Samaritan. She wasn’t included in the salvation anymore. So she grasped for her own Messiah. As husband after another came and went, she kept saying: “Maybe this time this man will restore me, will give me hope.”
Jesus, in this small, seemingly insignificant interaction, has come to declare: you have not been forgotten. God remembers you, and not only that, he wants to give you everything. He wants you to be overflowing with life.
She goes into the village and proclaims what Jesus has done for her. She’s been forgiven. She’s been filled. She is a well spilling forth with eternal life. Sharing what Jesus has done. The life he’s filled her with.
Christ wants our heart. He wants us washed in his forgiveness. Baptized into eternal life.
Very often. I hear Jesus’ words, “The water that I will give you will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” And I still find myself left saying, “But where, where can I find this living water??” I’m parched. I’m beat down.
The famous words of St. Patrick come into my heart:
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left.
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise.
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.
St. Patrick’s Breastplate
Christ is our living water. We have a well of living water available to us always. There are times when we aren’t being filled from those around us or we feel God is distant. In those moments when we’re exhausted, we feel empty, parched, barren. In those moments pray: “Jesus, I am so thirsty. Nothing can quench my thirst. Give me your living water.” And think about it. Feel it fill you. Physically feel it fill you with eternal life. Fill you with Jesus.
“O God, of your goodness, give me yourself, for you are enough for me. I can ask for nothing less that is completely to your honor, and if I do ask anything less, I shall always be in want. Only in you I have all. Amen.”
What follows is the text of a sermon I preached yesterday at Faith Anglican Church in Cordova, TN. It’s a sermon for All Saints’ Day.
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All Saints’ in Autumn
It’s fitting, I think, that All Saints’ Day falls in the middle of autumn. Autumn is that season—at least in the Northern Hemisphere where the celebration originated—when dormancy and death fall over the earth’s vegetation. At this point the harvest has already been gathered, the merciless winter draws nigh, and we look around wondering what’s next. It’s the season when our minds are gently turned towards considering again our own mortality, the fact of our deaths yet-to-come. When many of us remember acutely those who have already gone before us.
Culturally, we get this—even as All Hallows’ Eve get commodified and twisted, we still recognize, as every culture has, that we can’t escape death, that we’re powerless before some forces still greater than us.We put fake skeletons in the yard, dress up as the ghostly and uncanny. But we keep it at an ironic distance, we sugar it over with candy.
On All Hallows’ Eve, we ask the question as old as sin—what happens after we die? Or maybe, when we’re a bit less self-focused, we ask the corollary question, the same question we find ourselves asking when we’re especially engrossed by a compelling story: what happens at the end?
On All Saints’ Day, we receive the answer.
All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day remind us that, though we do not yet see it, the world to come is closer than we imagine. The border between heaven and earth is thin, even porous. And what happens in heaven matters for how we live on earth, and vice versa.
This is why our passage for this morning is from Revelation—a book which has the same sort of purpose. It’s a vision of heaven, intended to make sense of our own time, place, and experience. Revelation is also known as the Apocalypse of John. And apocalypse means ‘unveiling,’ the taking away of a veil. Something which has been hidden, for reasons best known to God, is being revealed to his people. Apart from God, we live lives bounded by powers and ideologies, bounded by our own habits and small vices. We have lenses through which we understand our lives of making and doing, getting and spending. But these lenses are corrupting, distorting, they’re more like blinders than glasses. Revelation would knock these off and restore our eyes to see “the greater purpose of the world’s transcendent Creator and Lord.” (Bauckham)
Reading Revelation
Now, if you think anything like I do, Revelation intimidates you. Because these visions John witnesses and records are bizarre. It’s heavy on sensational imagery, it’s overflowing with Scriptural references we may or may not catch, it’s now laden with a whole lot of theological and cultural bickering and baggage, and you’re never quite sure what you’re supposed to take literally, or symbolically, or figuratively, or spiritually.
But for all its complexities, we can bring to Revelation a couple simple observations which help us hear it more clearly. Most importantly: Revelation is a book about Jesus Christ. Revelation 1:1 lays it out plainly: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2 who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.”
Jesus is the one who has unveiled parts of God’s ultimate plan to his Church. He’s letting us in on the secret. And He Himself is the central part of that plan. Jesus is the Lamb of God, who alone is worthy to break the seals and judge the world and receive the praise of the saints, and He is the protagonist here, the central character.
And a second observation that will help us hear Revelation clearly: All throughout the visions, Jesus acts towards humanity in two fundamental ways: either Judgment, or Blessing. And it’s the relationship to Jesus that determines which you will receive from him. At times, Revelation seems to be a litany of judgments that Jesus unleashes on the sinful and rebellious world. And indeed God’s wrath towards wickedness will be unleashed in power, and all evil will be eliminated. It is a fearsome thing; more terrifying than the worst horror we’ve seen in life or on a screen. God’s judgment is so terrible and just that at the end of chapter six, those under judgment are begging that mountains and huge rocks would fall on them, just so they could hide for a moment from their terror at God’s holy judgment.
But interspersed between these judgments we get glimpses of the transcendent blessing received by those who know and who serve and who have been saved by that Lamb and his sacrifice. And what form does that blessing take?—the privilege to worship, as the Psalmist says, “to dwell in the house of the Lord… to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”
And that’s what we’re peering into in our text from Revelation 7. We get a glimpse of life in heaven.
Salvador Dali, Paradiso Canto 20, illustration
Hearing & Seeing
Our passage begins, “After this, I looked,” which means to understand what’s going on we have to go back a bit.
The vision of chapter 7 reiterates a pattern you can find throughout Revelation: John hears a promise of the First Covenant, and then raises his eyes and sees its New Covenant fulfillment.
So for example, in chapter 5, John is weeping because there’s no one to open the scroll. The scroll that is the Father’s plan for the judgment of the Old Order and the redemption and recreation of his New Order. Then an elder tells weeping John that the promised “Lion of the tribe of Judah” has conquered, John raises his eyes and sees not merely a muscular, confident, glimmering King–one like the Apostles we saw back in Acts were expecting when they asked Jesus about the Kingdom of Israel–John sees instead a “Lamb standing, as though it had been slain”. Is this what conquering looks like? Is this victory? To be slain like a lamb?
To we who know Jesus, yes! We know that our Lord Jesus conquers sin and evil and death not with swords and armies, but by becoming sin for us, for paying the debt of death our sin deserves, for rescuing us from our captor Satan and leading us in a final exodus out of bondage and into his kingdom. Jesus subverts our notions of power and victory; He shows us that glory accompanies sacrifice. And we’ll come back to in a minute, that glory accompanies sacrifice. But back to chapter 7.
Remember the pattern: John hears the First Covenant promise and sees its New Covenant fulfillment. By chapter 7, the triumphant Lamb has opened the first six seals, and judgment is prepared to fall on those who live in rebellion against God. But in chapter 7 we pause, and get a sort of parenthetical detail. Before the judgments of chapter 6 are enacted, four angels at the four corners of the earth are holding back the winds of judgment so that another angel can move through the earth, marking on the forehead those who belong to God with the “seal of the living God.”
And here at the beginning of Chapter 7, John hears (v. 4) “the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.” John hears those who are sealed, that is, those who bear the seal of God on their foreheads, those whom God claims as his own, and who will be preserved through God’s imminent judgment. And those whom John hears of are members of the tribes of Israel, those with whom God covenanted, but when he raises his eyes, he sees an innumerable multitude, composed not just of Israelites, but of those from “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”
Are these different groups? No! They’re the same, just understood in two different ways. Let’s start with the number: 144,000–This is a number of perfect completeness in biblical symbolism–12 tribes x 12 x 10 x 10 x 10. Who are the 144,000? They are a completed Israel, the full company of God’s covenant people.
And I use the word “company” intentionally, because the passage then lists the subgroups, very methodically and specifically, right? “12,000 from the tribe of Judah, 12,000 from the tribe of Reuben…” Why does John take the time to list all this? Because this is a census, like we’ve seen in the Old Testament, this is an accounting of the people. And in ancient times, you take a census when you’re about to march into battle. These 144,000 who have been sealed are God’s warriors, meant to go out and wield the gospel of Jesus the Lamb in and against the world. And as that word goes out, people of every tongue and tribe and nation and people join the ranks. So when John looks and see an innumerable multitude, he’s seeing the real dimension of the true Israel. The New Covenant people of God are the true Israel—and they are from every age and every language and every people.
Here is a vision of God’s promise to Abraham in its fulfillment. What were the promises to Abraham? “Look toward heaven,” God tells him, “and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be.” (Gen 15:5). Not only countless descendants, but also that through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And John sees it realized—in that vast vision.
But what are they doing? What does life in heaven look like?
Agnus Dei(Cordero místico), Jose Campeche y Jordan
The Worship of Heaven
Heaven, as it’s revealed by Scripture, is a worship service. It’s a liturgy. Look at what the multitude are doing (v. 9-10): “standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”
Notice their position: these blessed saints, Christ’s body, the Church—are standing before the throne of God. Do you remember the Old Covenant? Only the highest priest could enter the holy of holies on one day a year, after a week of washing and offerings and preparation, and even then they tied a rope around his waist because he was as likely as not to die from being in the presence of such a holy God. And yet, in this vision, here is every believer, every person marked with the seal of God, standing, unveiled, seeing God face to face, gazing upon the beauty of the LORD.
Notice their clothing: white robes, which an elder will tell John in verse 14 were “washed…and made white in the blood of the Lamb.” Do you remember where clothing first appears in Scripture? Do you remember in Genesis, when God sewed animal skins to cover the shame of nakedness that a sinful Adam and Eve brought on themselves? What a long way these robes are from those tunics. These white robes don’t merely cover shame; they proclaim the gospel of forgiveness, they proclaim the glory of purity, of righteousness, that Jesus shares with us when we are united to him by faith.
Notice what they’re holding: palm branches. These recall the palm branches Israel carried and waved at the Feast of Tabernacles, where they celebrated God’s provision of fruitfulness and remembered his protection as they made pilgrimage after the Exodus. And, let’s just notice here–they’re wearing clothes, they’re waving branches–they have bodies. The saints in heaven are not disembodied spirits floating around, they’re not projecting avatars in some metaverse; they, like Jesus, stand before God’s throne in resurrected bodies.
And notice what they’re doing: crying out, in unison, in a loud voice, the acclaim of their Savior and God. While judgment is soon to fall around them, they declare with joy “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (v. 10).
Here they proclaim an inverse Hosanna. You probably remember that “Hosanna” means something like, “Save us, we pray! Deliver us!” This Jesus’ admirers shouted as they waved their palm branches, when Jesus entered Jerusalem before the Passover, “Hosanna to the son of David.” But now, since the Jesus the Lamb has been slain and has claimed his victory over sin, death, and the devil, and has and ascended into heaven, the saints now proclaim, “You have saved us! Deliverance belongs to our God!”
Martyr-Priests
But, wait a second, we’ve described them, but who is it exactly we’re seeing worship in Revelation 7? We’ve said they’re the full multitude of the sealed, but what does that mean? Who is this host? That’s the question one of the elders asks John, and for which he has no answer.
It’s a crucial question for us, this morning, because if this is the vision of what life in heaven is, we should want to know who gets to participate.
Chapter 6 closed with a desperate question: “Who can stand in the presence of the Lord?” Chapter 7 provides the answer. Those who can stand in the presence of a holy God are martyrs, they’re priests, they’re sheep of the Great Shepherd. Let’s consider each of those.
First, they’re martyrs. Let’s go back to some of the details. After the fifth seal is opened in chapter 6, John sees martyrs come out from under the altar of heaven, and the martyrs cry out, “How long, O Lord, before you judge? How long before you vindicate us?” They’re given white robes and, then, unexpectedly, told to wait. What are they supposed to wait for? They must wait until “the number their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.” They have to wait for more martyrs.
And now, in Revelation 7, here they are. These martyrs also have white robes, cleansed by blood. They have been witnesses on earth, they are the one who have endured what the elder calls a “great tribulation.” Whenever the Gospel of God’s Kingdom goes forth, it converts hearts and it provokes opposition. Those who bear public allegiance to God, over and against the rulers of this world, will face opposition, persecution, perhaps even death. But remember—these martyrs did not and could not possibly face their persecution, their suffering for Jesus’ name’s sake, alone. Remember the beginning of this chapter—these martyrs have been sealed. God has put his name upon them, and He preserves them, keeps them faithful, all the way through their suffering. And now these martyrs worship in glory the One to whom they were faithful.
We notice that martyrs are also priests. That seal on the forehead. Who else in Scripture bore the seal of the living God on their forehead? The high priest! In Exodus 28 we learn Aaron wore a golden plate on his forehead, identifying him, representatively, as “Holy to the Lord.” The elder says in verse 15 that these martyr-priests now come “before the throne of God,” just as the high priest did before the ark of the covenant, and they “serve him day and night in his temple.”
How else do we know these are priests? Look at what they’re doing. They are leading the worship of heaven. They’re leading it! In Revelation 5, it’s the four living creatures and the twenty-four elder archangels who lead the service. “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” And then the angels join in. And then every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea joins in.
But here, as the martyrs have been gathered in, we notice a change. It’s the human host of heaven now leading the heavenly service. The people declare God’s glory in salvation, to which, now, the elders and living creatures and angels all respond, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Martyrs will lead as priests in the worship of heaven, before the throne of the God who will bestow every heavenly blessing upon them.
And they do receive every blessing. Every blessing promised to Israel, every blessing promised by Jesus, every blessing for which you long in your moments of deepest need, or sharpest pain, or greatest joy, finds its fulfillment in the presence of God who now tabernacles with his people.
They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water,and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
This is life in heaven. This is the life that will be, when, as we sang, “the saints triumphant rise in bright array.”
Life in Heaven, Life on Earth?
This is the life of heaven. What does it mean for our life on earth?
For one, we can respond in worship. Revelation has preached to us the gospel to which we respond in worship. Jesus, the Lamb of God, has triumphed over sin, death, and devil. He has trampled down death by death. Only the Christian can truly say, “Happy Halloween,” Happy All Hallows’ Eve, because only the Christian can face the forces of evil and the fear of death with a goodness and hope surely secured by the conquering Lamb.
So we should worship, we should join in with the saints triumphant, the martyr-priests already leading the liturgy we will get to join. And we do! We worship with the saints in glory every time we gather before our common Lord to ascribe to him glory and honor and wisdom and power. It’s there, explicitly, in our Eucharistic liturgy, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name: Holy, Holy, Holy.”
So we can respond by worshiping. We can also respond by receiving comfort. We can rest a while in the unveiled knowledge that one sure day we shall stand before the throne of God and offer him with our whole being, in resurrected bodies, the worship which He is due. We can take comfort and take strength that we, too, have been sealed, in our baptism—you who are baptized have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance in glory. You have been marked as Christ’s own. And if you have not yet been baptized, let me exhort you to speak to Fr. Herb, to myself, to a fellow Christian about being baptized posthaste.
And finally, we respond by living as martyrs. Every Christian—every one of us who has been buried with Christ in baptism and raised into the power of his resurrection life and given the Holy Spirit—is called to martyrdom. Jesus was a martyr, and we do what Jesus does. What does a martyr do? A martyr witnesses and sacrifices. Jesus witnessed to the love of the Father, to the joy of the Kingdom. He sacrificed himself, that we might be forgiven and set free. And so we, too, must witness and sacrifice. Our lives must bear witness to the authority and lordship of the risen Jesus. We must bear witness to the forgiveness of sin that we have received at Jesus’ hands. And this witness we bear may cost us, as it cost the martyrs of Revelation. Perhaps we won’t be called upon to shed our own blood, but you may well be called to forfeit status, comfort, a promotion, a job for the sake of your witness to Jesus. And the reward for your witness—to rule with God in heaven—far exceeds the light and momentary affliction and tribulation we might face. We shall overcome, the martyrs say later in Revelation, we shall overcome by the blood of the Lamb, and the word of our testimony.
It that’s an intimidating call, it’s supposed to be. It’s a call to no less than sainthood. But take heart. It’s All Saints’ Day.
When the strife is fierce, the warfare long, Steals on the ear The distant triumph song. And hearts are brave again, And arms are strong, Alleluia, alleluia.
Jesus the Lamb has overcome the world, and to him, and to the One who sits on the throne belong salvation. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.
Raising of Jairus’ Daughter | Paolo Veronese | 1546
Audio of the sermon as delivered on June 27, 2021 at Christ the King Anglican Church in Birmingham, AL.
Introduction: What is it like to be a bat?
There’s a famous essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel entitled, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Now, I realize it’s probably not the best time in human history to talk about bats, but, here we go anyway.
From their pinched creepy faces to their webbed-hand wings, bats are weird creatures. Perhaps most strange is the way they sense the world around them—through echolocation. You know the expression “blind as a bat” because bats have eyes less for function and more to complete that terror-inducing, soul-shriveling look. Instead, to get around, they screech out their sophisticated and creepy bat-noises, and then they have just unbelievably fine-tuned ears to catch and interpret the echoes such that they know precisely where they are, what their environment is like, and how big the nearest prey or predator is.
And Nagel talks about bats in this essay as a way of exploring the elusive nature of conscious experience. He’s asking the question: Can we know what it is like to be any conscious subject other than ourselves? And he uses bats because their mode of being in the world—while sophisticated, is so utterly unlike our own. And he’s genuinely asking, can we have any idea what it’s like to be a bat?
And his answer is: No.
We love to explain things we don’t understand in terms of things that we sort of do understand. So when it comes to something as mysterious as consciousness, we humans will grasp onto anything familiar to try to explain it.
We’re also very good at seeing ourselves in other things—we anthropomorphize, to use the high school English class word. We attribute human qualities to non-human things.
So when it comes to bats, we humans can project, we can analogize, we can close our eyes and let out an “eeeee” and see how it sounds in the room, and think, ‘Yeah, I more or less know what it’s like to be a bat.” Or perhaps the more scientific among us can devise ingenious experiments and instruments to measure the pitch and quantify the decibels and pinpoint the mechanisms of echolocation, and then can think, “Yeah, I more or less know what it’s like to be a bat,” but even then, we only know a few things about bats. Our best objective observations lack entirely the first bit of subjective experience of being and always having been a bat. Whatever we imagine it’s like to be a bat is our human projection of human experience onto what we as humans can observe about bats. But it’s not actually what it’s like for a bat to be a bat. So we don’t actually know what it’s like to be a bat.
Where am I going with all this? Well this week, as I meditated on our gospel passage, a question persistently pushed itself to the front of my mind: “What is it like to be a Jesus?”
What is it like to be a Jesus?
That probably sounds like a silly question, even just grammatically. “What is it like to be a Jesus?” That indefinite article just sounds wrong. “A Jesus?” It might even sound a little blasphemous. Jesus refers to one person, thank you very much. But I think having the “a” there can be helpful, at least for a moment, because it forces us to consider that when we’re talking about Jesus, we’re talking about a truly unique person, a unique being.
It’s worth pausing from time to time and being overwhelmed at the brain-breaking puzzle of what a Jesus is. To ask, “What is a Jesus?” is another way of asking the question we heard out of the nearly-shipwrecked disciples’ mouths last week: “Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?”
And strong, true statements about what Jesus is and who Jesus is are possible because God has revealed himself in Christ—he has, in his mercy, stooped down and made himself comprehensible to us. The Gospels themselves are eyewitness accounts from the disciples, testifying to the identity of Jesus as Messiah and Lord and God. So we are, brothers and sisters, on firm ground in knowing who Jesus is.
But again, we’re faced with the bat question—we can affirm things about Jesus, absolutely. We can confess the creeds with surety of faith. But do we know anything about what it’s like to be Jesus? Do we have any idea what his experience was and is? Scripture tells us that Jesus knows our human experience as his own—he knows what it’s like to be a human—frail, tempted, tested, broken, joyful, despondent, hopeful, desperate.
But can we take a similar step: can we know something of what it’s like to be Jesus? Can we know something about the internal experience, the way of being, the way of seeing, the way of interacting with others, that Jesus introduced to this world? Can we know the heart of our Savior? Can we know the mind of our Lord?
Unlike Nagel and his bats, I think we can know what it’s like to be a Jesus, we can know, by God’s gracious revelation, something of how Jesus perceived and felt and acted, and that that knowledge reveals to us more of the glory of the Jesus who is the image of the invisible God.
Let me try to show you what I mean, in classic three-point fashion.
Jesus and Time
So our question is: What is it like to be Jesus? First, it is to inhabit time in a unique way. In this story packed with urgency and longsuffering, Jesus is unhurried, he is patient. His sense of urgency is tuned to a different frequency than every other person in the crowd and in the story. Time orders itself around Jesus, Jesus does not need to order himself to time.
Our gospel reading opens with Jesus and his disciples re-crossing the Sea of Galilee after the remarkable incident with the Gadarenes, who respond to his miraculous exorcism of the demoniac with rejection, in the words of a Richard Wilbur poem: “If You cannot cure us without destroying our swine, We had rather You shoved off.” So he does. And there, on the other side of the sea, is—you guessed it—another crowd ready to press him. Each person there likely has his or her own agenda—idle curiosity about the pig-killer, earnest desire for blessing, desperate need for healing. But in this great crowd, there are already two people in particular marked for Jesus’ unique intervention, one in a moment of acute crisis, another who’s at the end of a twelve-year trial.
Jairus is a man who leads the local synagogue. He is a respected, respectable, religious leader. He’s the man to whom you bow before you address him. But the urgency of a situation beyond his authority–the fading life of his beloved daughter— leads Jairus to push through a crowd and fall at Jesus’ feet. You might’ve experienced this same acute sensation of time passing in a crisis moment—Jairus can feel the minutes, the seconds clawing away at his daughter’s life.
Mark says simply that Jesus went with him. A whole crowd clamoring for his attention, and Jesus responds to Jairus’ desperate need. You can imagine pretty easily Jairus’ desperate relief in that moment, how he tried in a dignified way to get Jesus to pick up the pace, how annoyed he must have been that the huge crowd decided to just tag along to spectate the worst day of his life. But the hope that’s there, “The teacher is coming; she’s gonna make it!” And I’ve always been crushed to consider what Jairus must have felt when Jesus suddenly comes to a dead stop, and asks, “Who touched my garments?” Does Jesus not remember that Jairus’ daughter is at the point of death? That every second counts? The disciples definitely think he’s joking—“You see this crowd, Jesus? Who isn’t touching you? Let’s go!”
But Jesus’ sense of time is not that of the world. The order of his days is not the order of the minute agenda, or the optimized schedule, or the triple-urgent please read now. He—the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end—has all the time in the world. So when it serves his divine purpose—in this case, the healing and restoration of a woman who has suffered and been marked as unclean and divided from her people and the worship of God for 12 long years—Jesus is ready to pause in the midst of a time-sensitive crisis to look around, to give the woman a chance to work up the courage to tell him the whole truth, to look into her eyes and affirm her faith and restore her to wholeness.
But to Jairus, even as he witnesses this miraculous healing, that pause has to seem like a terrible mistake. Because in that pause, what Jairus sees as his last hope is extinguished, and the news breaks in from the urgent world—”Your daughter is dead. It’s too late. Don’t trouble the teacher anymore.” Again, we have a marked contrast in the perception of time. Where the world says, “It’s too late. It’s over. Time to move on.” Jesus can yet say, “It’s not. It hasn’t even started. Don’t be afraid. Only believe.”
When they get to the house, the world of efficiency has already set the mourners to mourning. When Jesus tries to recalibrate them, “Why are you mourning? She’s not dead, only sleeping,” they mock him. They don’t have time for a man who can’t see what time it is. But it’s they who have misread the clock, that when Jesus is present, today is the day of salvation, now is the year of the Lord’s favor.
So Jesus takes with him to the girl’s room only those who believe—Peter, James, John, and Jairus and his wife–he sits tenderly at the bedside, he speaks the girl back into life, and suddenly it is not a day of mourning, it is not the hour of grief, it’s breakfast time. To be Jesus is to determine, and not be determined by, time.
Raising of Jairus’ Daughter | Ilya Repin | 1871
Jesus the Conscious Conduit of God’s Restoration
What is it like to be Jesus? Second, it is to be a conscious conduit of the triune God’s work of restoration. There’s a detail we get in this story that I don’t think we get anywhere else in the gospels, outside the versions of this story in Matthew and Luke. It’s in verse 30: Jesus “perceived in himself that power had gone out from him.”
Isn’t that fascinating? I don’t think Jesus is being disingenuous when he stops and asks, “Who touched my garment?” There really is a crowd jostling around him, but someone in that crowd reached out to him in faith, even perhaps a confused faith, but a genuine faith that Jesus was the only source of restoration in a world which had only multiplied her suffering. And Jesus, God in the flesh, without physically seeing her, feels power go out of him, feels power respond to that faith, to the effect that this woman feels immediately her ailment leave her.
This is a bit speculative, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think we could extrapolate from this detail that Jesus always has some sort of sense perception of the kingdom of God working in him. I don’t mean some sort of spooky sixth sense. I definitely don’t mean Jesus is walking around like some video game character with a little green bar under him that depletes a little when he uses his power and then he needs some sort of power up or potion. I mean simply that Jesus, the God-man, in every interaction in his earthly ministry, could feel himself perched between the world fallen and the world redeemed, and can feel himself as the agent of that world’s restoration. I don’t think it’s too wild to imagine that at every healing and every exorcism and every natural miracle we read about in Scripture, Jesus can feel the world being put to rights, being restored to the created order which he also made in the beginning, and which God called “good.”
Which is just another way of saying that Jesus lived in the constant communion of the triune God, whose common work is the redemption and recreation of sinful humanity and this fallen world. Jesus is a conscious conduit of God’s restoration because Jesus is in in constant communion with his Father in the Spirit. He feels the good pleasure of his Father, he feels the anointing of the Spirit, he feels the righting of the wrong like the resolution of a song. And we get a suggestion of that feeling, just in this moment.
And this brings me to the the third point. What is like to be Jesus? It is to wield the fullness of divine power in perfect tenderness.
Let’s not miss one of the points of this passage: Jesus does what no human can do. Remember that the woman with a flow of blood has exhausted all of her options many times over. Verse 26 is just brutal, she “had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.” For over a decade, she has suffered without relief, and then Jesus restores her health in a moment.
And what Jesus does for Jairus exceeds his original hope. Jairus had begged our Lord to save his daughter from the brink of death. Instead, Jesus does the unprecedented: he reaches down and pulls her back up from death’s valley.
And yet we must also notice that Jesus does not perform these divine acts as a cold god, stoically dispensing divine favors to those who say the magic words. He performs them as a loving, tender savior, attentive not just to the most pressing need, but to the deepest need.
Consider again the woman: her suffering goes beyond the physical. For 12 years she has been unclean, untouchable, forbidden from joining her people, her family, in worship. Her approach to Jesus is not the desperate and bold begging of Jairus the synagogue ruler; her touch is defiling, she doesn’t want to be noticed.
Jesus will heal this isolation, this psychological scarring as well. He not only restores her to bodily health, he calls her forward, to make herself known that she and the whole crowd might know that her faith has been placed in one who would see her in full fellowship, fully accepted. ‘Daughter,’ he calls her affectionately, ‘your faith has made you well.’ She who has been cast out is welcomed back.
To the frantic and panicked Jairus, frozen at the news of his daughter’s death, Jesus doesn’t scoff at his loss of hope, “Don’t you know who I am?” Jesus looks him, eye-to-eye, and invites his deeper trust. “Do not fear,” Jesus says to him, not because there’s nothing fearful in this situation, but because He himself is there, alongside Jairus, even to the bedside of his daughter’s deathbed, and faith in this Jesus who accompanies us is the only means by which we will overcome fear and death.
And for the daughter, who has had her own terrible day, has lived her own death, Jesus has tender, unforgettable words, “Talitha cumi,” “little girl, arise.” And having raised the dead, while the room goes giddy with amazement, Jesus has the presence of mind to tend even to her rumbling living tummy.
La Résurrection de la fille de Jaïre | Gabriel Max | 1878
What is it like to be like Jesus?
So what is it like to be Jesus? It is to be perfectly unhurried and unpressed by time. It is to be a constant and conscious conduit of God’s restoration. It is to wield divinity with tenderness and total care.
Let’s take these observations one step further. Because the Gospels not only reveal to us what is it like to be a Jesus, they not only reveal to us the life and experience of the God-man, they also reveal that this Jesus who heals and makes clean and raises to life intends for us to become like him.
It matters that we know what it’s like to be Jesus because we are meant to be like Jesus. Paul is often on about it, “We have the mind of Christ. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Indeed, those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son (Rom 8:29).” Jesus came down from heaven, was made man, laid down his life and took it up in again in resurrection power that we might become like him. Not only freed from the bondage of sin and death, but freed for the experience of his divine life.
So I have some questions.
What would it be like for you to inhabit time in the way Jesus did, and does? What would it be like—not in some hypothetical or ideal life, but in your actual, daily life—to walk through your day not pressed by an unforgiving agenda or flitting from emergency to emergency, or from distraction to distraction, but instead to live as though this day is a day made by the Lord. What might you perceive, what ministry might be given you, when you see the child you need to calm, the traffic you need to endure, the tasks you need to get done, not as hindrances to your flourishing, or drains on your time, but as a moments intended by God?
What would it be like for you, like Jesus, to become a constant and conscious conduit of God’s restoration? What would you feel and see, again in your daily life, as you lived in full communion with the Father, through the work of the Son, in the union and power of the Spirit? How would your life—your same life, with the same relationships—come alive when you perceive that God intends to act for the restoration of the world in and through you?
And finally, what would it be like for you, like Jesus, to speak the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation, with tenderness and total care to the world in which God has placed you? What needs have you been divinely equipped to meet? What hospitality, what welcome, what relief has God sent you to offer?
I haven’t worked out the answers to these, they deserve your own reflection and prayer this week.
But let me offer a place to start.
Think of where Jairus and the woman begin and end their interaction with Jesus—with faith. And not a perfectly secure, flawlessly reasoned, impenetrable faith. Their faith is desperate, and opportunistic, and perhaps tinged with magical thinking. But it is real faith and it is effective faith because of its object. Jairus and the woman have a straining, vital trust in Jesus. If you are overwhelmed at the prospect of knowing what it’s like to be Jesus—if the very idea seems lightyears away from your own experience, look again at the Jesus that you long to be like. See him still the urgent minute, see him in an instant heal the years of pain. See him restore the woman, see him raise the girl. Then think of what would keep you from following this Jesus—and hear him say, “Do not fear, only believe.”
Audio of the sermon as delivered on April 11th at Christ the King Anglican Church, in Birmingham, AL.
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
1 John 5:1-5
Keeping the Feast
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
I’ll be honest, I’m exceeding glad those get to be my first words from this pulpit. Because that’s what every preacher really just wants to do. I mean, sure, of course, there’s the need for instruction and warning and correction and consolation and exhortation, but really it’s all aiming at that word of pure exultation. It’s all so many words to get to say with real feeling that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, Christ the Lord is risen today, let us keep the feast! Amen?
And I hope you’ve been keeping the feast, brothers and sisters. I have. I’ll give a small example. Some days at my school we’ll have speakers come and there will be lunch provided. And all Lent, I’d eat my way through those boxed lunches until I got to that cookie at the bottom. And every week, I’d sigh, I’d question the wisdom of fasting—“Did Jesus really command this?”—but then I’d finally relent, and offer the cookie to a Baptist.
But this week, brothers and sisters, we had a guest speaker, and I ate through my little boxed lunch, and came to that cookie at the bottom, and you know what I did? I ate that cookie to the glory of God. It wasn’t even good. It was an objectively disappointing cookie. But let me tell you, I experienced in that moment the joy of my freedom in Christ.
So here we are, sittin’ pretty only one week into the great Eastertide feast. The celebratory beer has been cracked, the festal steak has been grilled and devoured, you posted that Easter selfie on the social media site you’d set aside for forty days, and you looked great, by the way. You really did.
However, in the midst of the abiding joy I hope you are experiencing, you might also, in this past week, have had some rather un-Easter-like experiences or feelings. You might be experiencing not only Eastertide, but also Post-Easter Slump-Tide, or PEST, as I’ve called it ever since… I needed an acronym for this sermon.
But, truly, I don’t actually want to make light of the experience—it’s typical, it’s emblematic of the conflicted life we live on the near side of Jesus’ return, his final victory. It’s the flip side of the experience Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians 6: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing… as having nothing, yet possessing everything… as dying, and behold, we live.” In Eastertide we might find ourselves rejoicing, yet somehow still sorrowful; we possess everything, and yet we continue to experience loss; our life is eternally secure in Christ’s resurrection, and yet here are bodies are, still dying.
Already this week, perhaps, you’ve squared up against the world. You faced down what John had previously identified for us as “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16). Perhaps your sweet release from fasting revealed that certain pleasures still have too strong a sway over you. Or maybe the world has tried to reassert itself in response to your joy—a long illness continues to flare, a strained relationship continues to sting, an absence to which you will never adjust continues to cut a hole in the pit of your stomach.
Yesterday I was in North Carolina to help bury my Papa, my dad’s dad, who on Easter Monday slipped all too suddenly from this vale of tears.
Already, in the first week of the feast which celebrates Jesus’ great and final victory, you’ve experienced loss, defeat, despair.
Already, we’re asking again that question which John poses in today’s epistle reading from 1 John 5: Who is it that overcomes the world? Who is it? Who overcomes the world?
Now, because most of you here are followers of Jesus Christ, and any of you who aren’t yet at least know you showed up this morning to a Christian church to observe or participate in Christian worship, you can probably guess what my answer is going to be. But I want us to earn that answer, and show why it’s not just the pious response, but the true and vital news which we call gospel. Because that is the vital question, for each of lives: who is it that overcomes the world?
What does it mean to overcome?
As any researcher worth her salt will tell you, seeking an answer is a useless exercise if you don’t have at least some grasp on the question you’re asking.
We already have a pretty strong grasp—at least an intuitive one—on what John means when he says “the world.” The world is anything and everything that opposes the delightful rule of God. It’s your twisted will, it’s the devil and his works. It’s your lust and your gluttony and your anger. It’s every human system of oppression and exploitation. It’s your little addiction. It’s every spirit that does not confess Jesus. It’s internet porn. It’s chronic illness. It’s death. We know “the world” all too well.
But that verb—to overcome—that thing we’re supposed to do to the world—what does it mean? Actually, take a second, do some free associating. What pops into your mind when I say, “to Overcome”.
That word probably conjures a host of images, each of them, in its own way, a valid application of term.
You might go the literal and violent: to overcome is the valiant warrior victorious in battle or, more sinister, the invader who kicks down the door and claims what his not his own. Or, with March Madness right behind us, your mind might have gone to the underdog and the buzzer-beater. Or perhaps, your mind goes to that song, first a gospel song turned union protest song turned anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, “We Shall Overcome” with its stirring melody of solidarity and hope.
Each of these images has its truth, but I want to offer this morning one more picture of what it means to overcome—an image given by our other Scripture readings—and one which I think will best unlock the meaning of, and the answer to, our question from 1 John: Who is it that overcomes the world?
Picture a house, better yet, picture, if you can, a walled city, standing tall and proud. It is serene, it is noble, it is unmovable. You might be picturing Gondor at this point, but even that’s not grand or secure enough. Its walls are thick and its ramparts high, it’s pinnacled with blue pennants pointing in the breeze.
The Fortress Tower, Nizhny Novgorod. Nicholas Roerich. 1903.
But it was not always so. This was a besieged city—a city hard pressed by natural disaster and human attack. The enemy was at the very gates. But this city could not be shaken. It has weathered the worst storm; its enemy is utterly spent and empty. No threat can any longer stand against it, for this city has overcome, and it cannot be overcome.
That is the picture we are given in our reading from Isaiah 26 this morning.
In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: “We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.”
Isaiah 26:1-2
This song of salvation appears in the midst of a section of Isaiah which is primarily concerned with to the judgment of God against the world. “In that day,” it says, looking forward, from Judah’s present experience of imminent threat and uncertain existence to the day when God will judge the nations, and vindicate the people He has chosen for his own. So this promised city of Isaiah 26 stands in stark contrast to the city of Isaiah 25, in fact we have a sort of tale of two cities. If you simply cast your eyes over to chapter 25, verse two, we read there that God’s enemies can expect their cities to be turned into heaps, their fortified towns into ruins, their strongholds into rubble which can never be rebuilt.
So overcoming the world does in fact have that sense of conquering. God will overcome his enemies, which is to say God will soundly and permanently disempower, judge, nullify all the persons and forces which oppose his restorative purpose. He will turn every evil purpose to nought.
But all that judgment serves the higher, saving and renewing purpose of God–the establishment of that strong city. “As always,” one commentators writes, “God destroys the false, only to raise up the true.”
And so indeed, in response to God’s triumph over evil, Isaiah pens this song of thanksgiving in chapter 26: “We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks.”
Who is it that overcomes the world? We here have our answer: whoever lives in that strong, unconquerable city of God.
Where is this city? How was it built?
Well Deacon Zack, you might think, that’s all fine and pretty, it’s a lovely image, Isaiah’s a very nice poet. But what does it have to do practically with overcoming the world? What is this city? Where is it, exactly? How does a person enter it?
I’m glad you asked.
“In that day” Isaiah introduces the song. From Isaiah’s perspective, from Judah’s, this is a city yet to arrive. In fact, it’s a city that will come at the end, a city to remember in song until it arrives in God’s timing and God’s power.
We, beloved, are fortunate to hear this song on the far side of God’s mighty act of salvation. God has established this city, he has built it upon the chief cornerstone—the one the builders rejected—our crucified and risen Lord Jesus. This tall and proud city, unable to be conquered, has been established by Jesus who was and who remains “the light shines in the darkness, and which the darkness has not overcome.”
In the very Passion and Resurrection which we have just celebrated, God has established his salvation through Christ Jesus. He has sunk the walls deep and thumped the bulwarks into place.
This is the wall that protects: not only that Jesus has borne our sin, but that he has trampled down death by death.
This is the sure bulwark: not only that Jesus Christ is risen, but that the Lord is risen indeed.
How do we dwell within it?
“We have a strong city” Isaiah’s song continues. Who is this “we”? Dare we number ourselves among them? Well remember, the gates to this city are are open! The salvation is so secure, is so well-established and founded, the enemy is so spent and soundly defeated that the city doesn’t need to keep its gates closed.
And the gates are open to you who have faith. You who trust. Notice! When Isaiah writes that the gates are open to the “righteous nation that keeps faith” this is precisely in accord with John’s statement in 1 John 5: “This is the victory, this is the conquering power: our faith.”
You who believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah, you who believe that in Christ God has established his salvation: welcome in! For you “who trust in the LORD forever,” for you who “love the Father,” for you who “love your fellow children of God,” for you who “obey his commandments,” God flings open the gates and ushers you straight to the feasting table.
And We are Opening the Gates. Nicholas Roerich. 1922.
What if I don’t have the faith?
But. Perhaps this still doesn’t quite sound like good news to you. You whose faith is feeble, or faltering. What if—like Thomas—doubts assail you? What if the whole promise of salvation by faith seems a little too tidy to your cynical mind to be true?
What if you still feel the enemy—the world—assaulting you? What if temptations still hang on your soul like vampires? What if your very own body seems to have turned against you?
What if you feel far, far removed from a city of peace and light and security? What if you have built up your own walls, your own private bulwarks, which you desperately hope will fend off, even for a moment, your sadness and your pain? What if you feel alone—even utterly alone—in your suffering or your fear or your grief? What if, instead of the proud citizen of the peaceful city, you feel, instead, huddled and afraid and trapped in your own room?
Well, here is where I want to turn to our gospel reading from this morning, John 20. There’s so much in these post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, but I want to draw our attention to one detail that shows up twice. In John 20, when Jesus appears to his huddled disciples and when he appears to them again, when Thomas is with them, we read this, “the doors were locked.”
Indeed, by this point, the disciples had heard their own eyewitness testimony: the tomb was empty. But as last weeks gospel reading from Mark reminded us: the fact of the empty tomb was not immediately and unambiguously good news. The women who found it trembled in awe and fear. The disciples, speechless at the wonder, knew that, practically speaking, this might end in accusations of grave robbing, of further insurrection, of, in the worst case, their own crucifixion. So the doors were locked. They were afraid. They had been faithless. They were not, in that moment, those who overcome.
And what happens?
Jesus laughs at the locks on the doors, he denies the deadbolts, he walks through the walls and he says, “Peace be with you!”
And so would Jesus step through the walls you’ve erected out of doubt and fear and sin and striving, and say to you, “Peace be with you. I am with you.”
The faith by which we enter the City of God, the faith by which we ourselves also overcome the world isn’t some abstract belief in the hypothetical might of an omnipotent God. You don’t get access to God’s festal city by figuring out a sufficiently grand concept of absolute power. No, the faith that overcomes the world is trust in Jesus, the Son of God who came to us and still comes to us in the midst of our weakness and fear and bids us peace.
Nor is it an abstract peace, an eternal coffee break or mindfulness exercise which would distract us from the horrors and evils and bitter griefs of this world. It is the real peace of the real reconciliation which Jesus made when he gave his body and shed his blood for you. It is the real peace of death’s defeat, of the resurrected Messiah sharing his incorruptible life with us. Of the only one who actually has it offering us peace.
In fact, this is the only way into the City of God, his dwelling place. The faith by which the righteous nation gains access to the city is not a clean moral sheet, a catalogue of perfect doctrine and flawless obedience. It is absolute dependence on our Lord and Savior Jesus.
This is our victory, John says—our faith. Or as Isaiah puts it, “He who trusts in God, she who stays her mind on Christ, will be kept in perfect peace.” This trust is not just a stubborn hope that someday things will go your way, someday you’ll finally catch your break. God doesn’t deal in vague, airy-fairy hopes; He puts skin in the game, He puts blood on your head. It’s a real victory Jesus has won, which means we respond with real, living, daily trust in Jesus who is Israel’s promised Messiah and the very Son of God.
When you fear, Jesus would burst in and say, “Look at me.” When you doubt, Jesus shows you the wounds by which he has overcome the world.
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Caravaggio. 1603.
You who feel with each new day that you have not yet overcome the world–indeed, you who feel that perhaps the world has overcome you, take heart. For in the moment you cast yourself on the mercy of God, and every moment you place your trust in Christ, you belong to the one who says, “Take heart, you who will have tribulation in this world, for I have overcome the world.” We who die with him with also be raised with him.
Jesus is the Paschal Passover lamb broke down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility between humans, whose perfect and final sacrifice rent the curtain which divided the Holy God and we impure persons. And he broke down that wall and rent that curtain that he might open wide the gates of God’s city and say, “Enter, my beloved.”
Alleluia. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast. Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. Its energy is spent. Its strength is split. The death that Jesus died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
So—peace be with you!—also consider yourselves dead to sin, brothers & sisters, and alive to God in Jesus Christ our LORD. Alleluia. Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die—as in Adam all face down the world flesh and devil—so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Shall all overcome the world. Alleluia.
Who is it that overcomes the world? It is you, my brother. It is you, my sister, who see Jesus the deliver of Israel, Jesus the Son of God Incarnate, who see him come to you and say to you, “Peace be with you!” Trust him, and walk through the gates. Sing the song of salvation, taste the feast of victory, of life which has overcome the world.
It’s the very end of Advent today, so I’ve more or less missed the window to post this, but thought I’d share it all the same, in hopes that it might be a worthwhile meditation for this Eve of the celebration of Our Lord’s nativity.
It’s a brief devotional I wrote for our church on the Second Coming ofJesus as preached in 2 Peter 3. The Scripture text comes first, followed by the meditation.
Hunters in the Snow (Winter) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Oil on Panel, 1565.
But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
2 Peter 3:8-18
Even in Peter’s day, just a few decades after the Ascension, Christians were fielding tough questions about the promise of Jesus’ return: “Where’s this judgment you all are on about? Where’s this Jesus you claim is coming back soon? Nothing’s changed, it’s all one day after the other, why bother with this doomsday talk?”
Some two thousand years later, we feel the questions even more acutely. They become the pained cries of our own hearts: Why does God let this show drag on? All around us, the prosperity of the wicked, rampant injustice against the alien and the widow and the orphan, the decay of our frail and frangible bodies. What’s he waiting for?
Peter tells us: God isn’t waiting at all. He’s at work.
The Lord isn’t missing an appointment, his clock isn’t running slow. God is patient for a purpose—he’s busy saving us.
In fact, he is practicing a divine forbearance; he is every day extending new mercies and adding sheep to the fold (you, believer, included).
Rest assured, the Lord will return. And his Day will arrive in planet-melting power and world-renewing glory. All creation will be his refining fire, and all that is not righteousness will dissolve. It’s a fearsome thing we long for—the vindication of Jesus’ return. We hardly know what we’re asking for (see Amos 5:18).
The comfort we seek in the midst of our waiting comes not in the perceived swiftness of God’s response, but in his proven character.
We’re waiting on the God for whom not only are a thousand years as one day, but one day is as a thousand years. We’re waiting on a God who is more present to us in a single day—attentive to our longing, bearing our pain, restoring us to life—than we could be in a thousand years. He fits a millennium’s worth of love and forgiveness and patience into each day. God is not only the eternal One in whom all time is relativized, He is also the all-knowing One who is wholly present to us, especially in our moments of need.
We wait on the God who is making us, in our faithful waiting, more solid and more real in a world that is dissolving.
Today, when inevitably you find yourself waiting for something—a queue to inch forward, a child to put her shoes on, a diagnosis to arrive, a lasagna to finish baking—find in that very moment an opportunity to thank God for his patience which is your salvation, his presence which is wholly attentive, and his promise which will not pass away.
Erinshares the saga of the kiln fiasco, and what might be next for her art
a piece in progress, dried clay, 2020
I’ve been asked many times during the lead up to this move and since: “Are you going to be able to do any pottery?” And my answer has been a happy: “Yes! I think so!” Since first really encountering ceramics seven years ago, making ceramics has been integral to my life. It has been a means for me to connect to the earth, to understand the nature of the physical world, to see beauty in the small, the mundane, and the slow. Ceramics entered my life when liturgical worship entered my life, and they’ve been intertwined since, and I imagine they always will be.
After graduating with an education in ceramics and sculpture I was burning to get to work and continue my ceramics. I settled into functional pottery because I love pottery, because I believe handmade pottery is important, and also, not least, because pottery sells. I stumbled through producing work while also taking care of a little baby Eleanor. And since having Ames, I’d taken an indefinite hiatus, setting aside ceramics altogether.
But it never stopped being a steadfast presence in my life. In the past two years, without even touching clay, I always felt things simmering. Ideas, or dreams, or something like that.
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It seemed that I would be able to get back to the work of my hands once we moved to Birmingham. One of the big attractions of this house was the full unfinished basement. It has a big ceramic sink right beside a walled-off section that creates a big studio space. There’s an old metal-framed paned window that’ll crack open (with some force) to let in some fresh air. It is perfect. And I still have so many dreams for it. After we moved in, I didn’t even think about the studio for a month or so (to focus on the house projects). Finally, though, I set up the studio with wedging tables and my wheel, my parents graciously brought down an old kiln they’ve been storing for me, and we’re up and running! Sort of.
The kiln ended up not working out with the plug I thought it would, so I needed an electrician to come and install a new outlet. Something I thought was pretty straightforward (my dad could’ve easily done it). I had some of my business money saved for this sort of thing, so I wasn’t worried initially about the cost.
Hours, many tears, and hundreds of dollars later, I got my outlet. The whole situation was a disaster, the doubts flooded in. Should I have just waited until my dad could’ve done it? Should I have gone with another company? Is the ceramic thing even something I should be doing right now?
One of my motivations for doing ceramics at all was to make a little money for our family, not to lose us money. Zack has always encouraged my ceramic endeavors; no matter what, he’s pushed me forward. But even with him telling me to move forward with all of it, I felt so defeated. I had been trying really really hard to spend literally no money (Zack does our grocery shopping, so this was actually possible, hard, but possible). It all felt like I was stepping backward. Most things since we’d moved felt like going backwards even though it was a big leap forward.
Well, now I was really up and running. A fancy new kiln power source and everything. I worked a little here and there. No real rhythm yet. I am still mothering the two little humans. After bedtimes I was too exhausted to work in the studio. Saturdays Zack would watch the kids while I worked. Sometimes that worked out, sometimes Ames freaked out because he wanted to be in the studio. (We had to immediately come up with the studio rule: “Look but don’t touch!” But Ames stressed me out too much, so he was banned). I still wondered why I was doing this. Is this really what I should be doing with my time? This is what I’ve wanted for the past five years, but was this the right time?
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Enter Eleanor. Eleanor doesn’t always take naps. I usually make her at least lie down for a rest time. But one day, after I put Ames down, I told her she could come down to the studio with me. She was excited to not have to nap, of course. And when I sat down at the wheel and it started to spin, her eyes lit up. “That looks fun!” She’s more careful than Ames, but I was still anticipating her wanting to touch everything or do it herself or help me in a way that wasn’t actually helpful. But she just stood beside me and watched.
She eventually started asking about the different tools. So I told her the names of all the different tools. And, as she figured out the general process, she would hand me the tools as I needed them. After each piece she would clean my tools. She was being so good I asked her if she wanted to touch the clay after I centered it. She said yes and giggled as she wet her hand and felt the smooth clay glide under her fingers. After that, she got to touch each piece after it was centered. She would be down there with me during Ames’ naptime and after I put Ames down for bedtime. And she loved it. I finally felt: yes, this was a good time for ceramics! and, yes, it was good for our family.
We fired a load, and then glazed it (Eleanor helped paint the glaze on). Then I loaded up the glaze fire and turned it on. It was supposed to run during the day and switch off at some point in the afternoon. The afternoon came and went. The evening came and went. The kiln was still firing. I didn’t know why it hadn’t switched off. The kiln is old, I thought, it must be having a hard time getting up to temperature. I’d worked with other kilns that took a long time to reach temperature. Finally, at 9pm, I shut it off manually. And a sinking feeling swept over me. My thoughts raced: it’s probably nothing, it must have been close enough for the glaze to mature, I hope nothing is wrong with the kiln, I hope I don’t have to refire it, maybe it did go over and just didn’t shut off, I hope my glaze didn’t run, but maybe it went way over, it would have to be pretty hot to melt the glaze off, surely I didn’t just ruin all the hours and hours of work.
Needless to say, I had a hard time going to sleep. The kiln would need to cool overnight before I could peek inside to see if everything was okay. But the more the thoughts came the more dread washed over me. What’s the worst that could happen? Literally. What is the worst possible damage? I thought. Like I said at the beginning, ceramics is tied up in all aspects of my life, spiritual life included. I began to pray, which turned into crying out. I remembered that first time I sat down in this new studio space. I offered it to God. I prayed the work of my hands would be His. Was He trying to tell me something? Didn’t He hear my prayer? If it’s a disaster, what am I to learn from that? I wrote out a prayer.
“…I do believe every detail is the work of your hands. Every moment, especially the ones I don’t understand you are at work…If this whole kiln is full of ruined pottery, will you use them anyway?…”
The next morning finally came, and up I rushed. Zack was already up doing morning prayer in the living room. I didn’t acknowledge him. I was focused. Down the stairs, into the studio, over to the kiln. I cracked the lid and shut it back again as quickly as I could. It was all ruined. Not only had the glaze melted off, the entire clay body had melted. It all turned to liquid.
I grieved the loss of the ceramics and hated myself for letting this happen. I was so embarrassed. I was taught to have a secondary thermometer, and I didn’t have one. The kiln had worked perfectly fine before. Of course I shouldn’t assume it’s going to work every time. On and on. I just couldn’t bear what I had let happen. The morning was hard. I had failed in the studio before I’d hardly started. That was to be my first load of finished pieces. I was embarrassed by my failure. I have a degree in this. This is literally the one thing I should be able to handle, and I failed.
The morning got worse as I braved the kiln, opening it up fully. I saw that not only had I lost all my ceramics, I lost the kiln too. If you don’t know what a kiln sitter is, then it’s a little hard to explain, but basically gravity didn’t do its job, and the mechanism that shuts off the kiln at a certain temperature didn’t trigger. The boiling clay/glaze liquid flowed off the shelves hitting the walls on the way down and pooling at the bottom. All that money for the plug, wasted. All the time I spent making pieces, wasted. All the potential money from the pieces, wasted. The kiln, wasted.
—
The reason for this hard experience hasn’t been fully revealed, but I have been given a peace about moving forward. If I hadn’t had those few good studio days with Eleanor I may have ignored the peace, and chosen defeat. But seeing a glimpse of the good of the studio I see what is possible. With the peace all those questions about if I should be doing this stopped. My mind was quiet. I don’t know fully what God was teaching me during those hard days, but I don’t believe He wants me to stop.
I’ve felt more serious about ceramics since this has happened. I still don’t know what my business will look like, but I feel a new breath of life into my work. I haven’t even touched clay since this happened about a month ago. But when I’m ready to jump back in, I’ll be in. I’m planning to ease out of pottery and into figurative sculpture (something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.) Another step of trust. Pottery sells pretty easily, but sculpture, I have literally no idea how to sell sculpture. But I’m excited and hopeful. Figurative sculpture has always spoken to me in a unique way. The human body carries so much meaning and weight, particularly the face. I’ll continue thinking about, experimenting, and making pieces involving face/head/bust. Maybe in a few years I’ll brave sculpting the entire figure…
I trust that God will be in the work of my hands, and I’ll keep learning along the way. I’ll have more failures (hopefully I’ve got my big one out of the way.), but I’ll keep learning trust. And I’ll keep making.
A couple weeks after the kiln over-fired my dad found a rare and really good deal on a nice used kiln. He drove 4.5 hours one-way to pick it up. Then drove it down 3.5 hours to us (they were at least coming to visit for Eleanor’s birthday party anyways). He surprised me with it, and installed it. An answer to prayer.
Some of you likely know how loathsome I feel about the internet, specifically social media. I cut social media out of my life a couple years ago, felt free, and decided I’d run a small business without it. Well, I guess I’m giving in to the dreaded screen. I’ll be easing back online (website, Instagram, online shop, etc.). I hope to do it all with the utmost caution and wisdom, but I’m doing it nonetheless. So, be on the look out for Erin Clemmons Ceramics. There will be plenty of virtual places to track this journey.
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. —-Isaiah 26:3—–
Aroostook Barn. Linden Frederick. Oil on linen.
Several events and struggles converged this past month under the thematic heading of “maintenance.” Perhaps I’m just getting older, but I’ve been realizing this week that so much of the substance of life has to do with the unglamorous work of maintaining things, especially the things to which you’ve made commitments. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, since the central task handed to Adam was one of “tending” and “keeping.” But I think this realization hits with a sense of surprise for someone growing up in this day and age.
For one thing, consumerism agitates against the task of maintenance. Our immersion in digital and televisual common spaces means we’re constantly inviting the risk of being ripped out into the vast sea of new commodities, new services, new experiences, all groping for our time, our attention, our money with powerful currents of targeted advertising. We’re also denizens of a throwaway culture—things are designed and optimized to be used for a flash and then phase out, so you have to buy a replacement, the new and improved version. You can’t even say we’re a culture that believes “Ending is better than mending;” we simply have no concept of “mending.”
And yet, in our consumption, we find ourselves laden with the obligations of possessing. You wake up, and you realize that your entire day has been claimed by the demands of things you already have. You have a lawn; it needs to be mown. You have a pet; it needs to get its shots, to be fed. You have central heat; the propane tank needs filling.
We accrue possessions, slowly but surely, to fill certain needs, but then those same possessions turn out to have needs of their own. In an analogue to Churchill’s famous dictum, “We shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us,” we might also say: We own our things, and then our things own us.
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But it’s not just our things. Much more significantly, it’s our relationships that require maintenance. Some of these relationships are chosen, some are not, but if they’re going to flourish, they all require time, attention, care. You have a neighbor; he needs help finding his lost dog. You have a wife; she needs your emotional support, your help with the children. You have children; they need pretty much everything.
We’re sometimes tempted to conceive of the life of faith in a similar manner. Evangelicals rightly value conversion, but can neglect that conversion is the first shuffling step of a journey up and into eternity. I believe and am increasingly convinced that God intends to be fully present and alive to the believer undergoing sanctification, but thus far most of my experience of the Christian life is one of failure and confession and weakness.
Vice is real, and deeply ingrained. It takes a long time to root out, replant virtue. It takes a long time for virtue to grow, and propagate. Most of the time of your Christian life will be unremarkable, mundane, often tedious tending to the fragile plant of your soul—through unremarkable, mundane obedience in mundane, tedious matters. It’s all Eugene Peterson’s “long obedience in the same direction.”
And the spiritual struggle in all this is that maintenance is so much less glamorous, less culturally admirable, less fun than acquisition. It’s fun to buy a house (ok, it’s not actually fun) and envision your new perfect life there; it’s hard to make three separate runs to the home improvement store just to repair some stupid rotted piece of window framing that you measure wrong anyway. It’s fun to begin a relationship, to court a woman into increased intimacy; it’s hard to comfort your wife through a tragedy. It’s fun to move denominations and explore a new tradition; it’s hard to get up early enough to pray the Morning Office. I’d rather buy something new than take the time to fix something old. I’d rather scroll Twitter and try on 200 new opinions than sit down and think hard about a single idea.
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This all sounds rather pedestrian, but the accumulated weight of life’s maintenance is just beginning to hit me. The temptation to novelty is strong, and it must be resisted. The goodness of a thing is not in its acquisition, though acquisition can be a good. It’s good to sell all you have for the pearl of great price, but then what do you do with it?
I yet believe that the true joys of life are on the other side of longsuffering care and patient, patient attention. I believe purity of heart is to refine the will to one thing—to love and obey God— and that the will is refined by the slow and perpetual washing of quotidian choices. The cure for novelty is, I suspect, “staying” our minds and trusting God. Now if only my living could line up with my belief.
Merciful and most worthy Father, teach me what to value. Don’t teach my mind—you’ve already done that. Teach my heart—the core of my desire. Let me forsake novelty for its own sake; make me to forsake the movements of vanity, of wanting to appear a certain way. To be is better than to seem. Teach me to be. I don’t have these things on my own, and I won’t get them on my own: Give me patience where I am restless. Give me satisfaction where I am avaricious. Give me courage where I am apprehensive and weak. Keep my attention stayed on you, and on the things you have given me to love. Make me forsake those things which hinder the sanctification of my family, my friends, my own soul. Do this for the sake of your love. Amen.
Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. —-Psalm 127:1—
July 6, 2020 | Moments before the longsuffering begins
Since we moved to Birmingham in late July, the great bane of my existence has been our new house. New to us, that is. It’s an older house, built in 1960, and very poorly kept. Really, the first thing I should say is that we’re genuinely, unreservedly grateful to have a home we can call our own. We’ve longed for a place on earth in which to plant ourselves, and begin the patient work of settlement. It doesn’t take much reflection on the plight of countless displaced and dis-housed people in the world to realize that all of my problems pale in comparison to the dark valleys so many travel. And yet, our trials and temptations are real, and are our own.
And so our house which has undoubtedly been my greatest source of stress in a generally stressful season. The actual closing on the house was an unmitigated disaster (but makes for a rather long and dull story). When we finally got the keys, the power had been shut off for a week such that it was somewhere north of 87 degrees inside and the un-powered fridge had molded over. After a wretched night of bleach-scrubbing, we quickly learned that the previous residents had considered cleaning (of any sort) was really one of those optional things in life, and had opted to not. And so our first month in our new home was spent, not customizing and cozi-fying our space, but scraping and scrubbing and installing and painting and scrubbing again, just to begin to reverse the damage done to house over the past few decades. It’s all cost far more than I had hoped to spend, as well, depleting our savings at an unsustainable clip.
And the work is far from over, which I why I’m writing about it. House projects fill the margin of our lives, and I find I despise them, unhealthily so. I wake up on a Saturday morning set aside for house projects, and the will to even leave bed deserts me. I have all these intellectual commitments to the inherent goodness of manual skills, of building a home, of caring for a place. But when it’s actually time to get up and do the work, I balk.
It’s not that I’m afraid of work (though perhaps I am a lazy person); it’s that I lack the knowledge and skills to do the work well, and I hate to do work poorly. I didn’t grow up learning to fix things, or to build things. I hate to be out of my depth, to do things wrong, to learn by trial-and-error, to waste time (e.g. I spent two hours a couple weekends ago scraping unnecessary and ugly tint from giant window, only to break the entire window as I was almost finished).
I want to love manual labor and house-work, but I find I only really love intellectual and relational work. Which I think makes me an incomplete person—we were made by God, to some degree, for work. And that work is inherently tied to the basics of human existence—food and shelter not least. It’s tempting (if not financially feasible) to hire people to fix all the deficiencies of our home. I don’t think it’s right to offload all of those responsibilities to other laborers (though, of course, we’re in this world together).
I should also mention here that Erin has been a champion through all of this, not least though my own internal struggles. She has worked patiently & selflessly to make this ramshackle house a livable home. (Additional shoutouts to my family and Erin’s, and the Bishops, for their selfless hard work in helping us scrape and scrap the mess and slowly, slowly build something better).
I know I need a change of heart, but I’m not sure where exactly God wants me to end up in this situation. Will he teach me to love this work? Does he simply want me to die to self and pick up a saw, a paint brush? Am I supposed to realize my vocation really is to the work of ministry and I should focus all my efforts there? (Did Jonathan Edwards do house projects?) Or am I making too much of all this?
Lord Jesus, you have gone to prepare a house for us in the presence of the Father. What sort of house should I have in the meantime? Please forgive and discipline my sluggish heart. Make me to see what is good in manual labor, and not bitterly complain about the time that could be better spent. Which is, I guess, to pray that you would show me, by your Spirit, what I should really value. What is time? What does it mean to redeem the time? Quiet my restless heart, help to me to love the home, and to love still more your Kingdom. Amen.
Frühlingsabend | Adrian Ludwig Richter | oil on canvas, 1844
Song of Solomon 2:10-13, 8:6-7
Zack Clemmons | 13 September 2020
Opening Prayer
Our Father and our God, we give you thanks and praise that we are gathered today for such an occasion as this. We glorify you for the love with which you love us, and by which you fuel our own love. Lord Jesus, we praise you that your love that is stronger than death. And Holy Spirit, we welcome you now, and pray that you would bind and unite Matthew and Olivia this day, and fill their marriage with the sweet fragrance of divine love. Amen.
The Garden
Matt, Olivia, this is a beautiful day. It’s the kind of day when so many of the blessings and beauties of this life congregate and collide—promises made, vows performed, families unites, dear friends assembled, the solemn and joyful exchange of love.
It’s the kind of day poets and artists and even us ordinary folks sometimes try our hand at expressing. We write poems or paint paintings as we strain to name the deep goodness we encounter. And it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Scripture, too, puts words to this wonder, especially in Scripture’s sublime love song, from which we heard read just moments ago.
Come away, the bridegroom beckons, Arise, my love, and come away. And the first thing we might notice is that Love does beckons; it is a voice that shocks us out of our self-involved and sinful stupor, and then Love moves us; it takes us from where we are and teases us towards something new, something better.
And where does Love take us? To a garden.
Come away, for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come. Your heart almost bursts to read these lines, and to sense in them the fresh beauty of the Spring of Love. It is when we are enraptured by the beauty of a beloved we catch the scent of the fresh figs and the vines in blossom, that God is blowing our way a breath of the Paradise for which He made us.
Because this is what God intends for you, and what he has always intended for all of us—that we would delight at all times in the boundless country of His endless goodness, that we’d take an evening stroll together and hear the cooing turtledoves and watch the light come through the trees.
I hope you feel, today, right now, in this ceremony and in a moment as you make your vows, the fresh and fruitful Springtime of love. Breathe it in as one lungful of the love with which God loves you. And we who surround them this afternoon, see if you can’t also catch a whiff.
A Love Strong as Death
Of course, anybody can get sentimental about the sweetness of spring and the joy of young love. It is real, and it is good, but it’s also not enough.
I am sorry to say that the even sweetest day of the spring of love cannot sustain you through the long seasons of marriage. Spring gives way to the long heat of summer (or sometimes snow, as it turns out), the brittle aging of autumn, the bitter winter winds. The Bible does begin in a verdant garden, but it doesn’t stay there, and neither do our lives, because soon our sin, our selfishness, like an invasive and aggressive mold, infects everything and we’re cast out.
And you know, even today, that life is not and cannot always be a Spring garden. Even this particular wedding day has come at the end of a long season of waiting and uncertainty. For both of you, there have been jobs deferred, plans made and unmade, and there are destinations still to be determined.
But these are only the expected difficulties of life. Your marriage will encounter struggles and pains and tragedies you could not and probably should not try to imagine. And to survive the seasons, your only hope is to be caught up in a love stronger than death.
And the good news of the Gospel is that we have such a love. God’s love is not only the love that invites you to come away to the Garden of Delight. It is also the love that as Jesus says in John 15 abides, in famine just as well as feast. It is the love that draws near to our suffering, even in the flesh of Jesus the Christ. It is a love that bears a cross. It is the love that dies for the beloved, and still more that overcomes death.
God is coaxing you into the Garden of Love, but I warn you, it’s a trap.
You’re entering a garden that is actually a furnace. It’s true, you are in the midst of love that is all fragrance and ripe figs, but you will see it also flashes as fire, and it cannot be quenched with many waters. Marriage will be, for each of you, the primary forge of your sanctification. God will use you to burn the dross from your spouse—not in some stereotyped nagging or neglect—but God will slowly melt away your vices and purify your virtues simply by demanding that you no longer live for yourself. You each will be the occasion of the other’s daily death to self, and God’s Spirit alone will bring the daily resurrection.
No, he calls and coaxes you with the springtime love of this day, in order to draw you deeper into a life that is noble and demanding and difficult and lovely, and which will result in a still more glorious reality than we can yet imagine, of which the Springtime of love is but a foretaste. The Bible starts in a garden, yes, and it travels long in the valley of death, but by the power of our Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection, our story and the story of Mr. & Mrs. Avischious ends in a royal wedding feast.
So I have for you, Matt and Olivia, a twofold exhortation: First, I exhort you to delight in this garden of love. Delight in the glory of this day, and these newlywed years. And when you wake up tomorrow and the next day awestruck at the wonder of the good gift of a beloved by your side, know that this too is the love of God made flesh. Look at one another with the starry, teary eyes of love and know that God loves you.
And second, I exhort you to go fearlessly into the further seasons of life, know that your marriage can and will be sustained by the only love that is strong as death—the love of God in Christ. Stoke the flame of by practicing together the disciplines of sanctification, and cleave close to Christ’s bride, the Church.
God, who is Love, is beckoning you both—come away, my beloved. Even as you seal yourselves to one another, set me as a seal upon your heart and your arm. Matt and Olivia, may your covenant love for one another participate deeply in the mysteries of God’s love.
God’s love, which bids you welcome, and would host you at his table when you feel least worthy. Who gently calls you away, welcomes you to his table, and will supply your every need from the rich storehouse of his love.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There was, above all, an assumed competence in his relating to the world. No problem or project but sense could be made, order unfurled.
I remember
There were the tools of the trade— the tractor, the honeybee smoker, the lathe, the vice, the blade— Turning with me my own little baseball bat— Zack ’98 woodburned on the fat little barrel. And Piney Pony, of course, the little wheeled horse, now delighting down to the fourth generation.
I remember
No creature on God’s green earth caught him unexpected I see him Casually grabbing the smashed-head cottonmouth by the tail we had almost just stepped on. Cupping a carpenter bee and placing it in my trembling hand, saying, “These kind don’t sting.” Teaching me to bait and cast and reel, to snag the jerking flounder from midair, which he later filleted and fried.
My young and abiding awe at a house built by his own hand, the array of skill which set columns and screened the porch and plumbed the fountain and wound the staircase and papered the bathroom with the Japanese print.
As he got older, his hands less full, he turned to stories of jobs done well, and on the cheap— the house framed in one week flat.
For all his know-how, he had fewer words when it came to the things which exceeded him. This is where, I have to guess, he reached the realm beyond his competence, where he most met life’s limits—- the love of a faithful wife and sons, of the God whose own death won for him and them a crown eternal. Here God’s wide world exceeded his grasp, and could not be managed or advantaged so much as simply and gratefully received,
As when, untold decades older than us, in pale yellow swimtrunks, he led us boys into the regal, churning Atlantic, taught us to pick and choose just the right wave and then he stretched out his hands, ducked his head, and rode it all the way in.
Seascape with Distant Lighthouse Atlantic City New Jersey. William Trost Richards.
Clemmons on Mission 