P&F Lectionary Commentary: 4-Easter 05/06/2001

Lectionary Commentary

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Commentator's Note: Easter is the most unsettling season of the Christian year. We are challenged to reframe our world view and expand the realm of possibility to include the miraculous and unexpected. The resurrection breaks down the walls of limitation within which we have confined ourselves and our understanding of God’s presence in the world. New life bursts forth in our hearts and minds, in our marriages and relationships, and in our social order, when we least expect it. This new life can neither be predicted nor controlled, but comes as a grace when we most hopeless about ourselves and the world. During Easter, the preacher’s task is to invite the congregation to widen its vision of divine creativity and human response so that it can discover the resurrection in everyday life.

Acts 9:36-43. What are we going to do with Dorcas? This is a twenty-first as well as first-century question. “We’ll have to bury her,” so said the Christians of Joppa. Today, we may choose to give the same response. The story is so untamed and anachronous that we are also tempted to “bury” it, or, at least, omit it from the readings of the day. You cannot revive a person who has been dead as long as Dorcas. After a short time, the brain dies and the rest of body follows suit. A flat EEG, brain death, is irreversible, and even if we could revive one such as Dorcas, she would be in a permanent vegetative state.

We can bury this story in a number of ways. We can literalize it by solely seeing it as a matter of flesh, bone, and heart beat. We can trivialize it by identifying it with first century superstition or an alteration in one’s existential attitudes. We can marginize it by identifying it solely with a change in Dorcas’ social position, from unclean to clean. Many of us follow Bultmann’s dictum that anyone who can turn on an electric light must reject the miracles of the New Testament. The closed system world of orderly cause and effect does not permit such dramatic and anomalous events. Yet, to dismiss these stories entirely would be to accuse the Christian community of bad faith, superstition, or delusion. If some approximation of this event did not occur, could the first century Christians have gotten away with proclaiming a falsehood any more effortlessly than persons in our time?

What are we going to do with Dorcas? The world view emerging from the new physics, ecology, and the intersection of spirituality and medicine suggests another way of looking at this story. While we cannot conclusively affirm or deny this particular event, we can affirm that divine mystery and sacred healing often defy the limits we place on reality. Non-local causation and directed intentionality, the faith factor, and extra-sensory perception must be denied in the closed system, linear, and reductionist view of reality. From this perspective, God exists solely as a distant and ineffective bystander, influencing the soul but never the body. In contrast, the dynamic, open-ended, multi-factorial, and relational vision of reality opens up the possibility for unexpected and surprising events to occur. While we must always balance our mysticism with rationality, we must also assert that a miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature, but the revelation of deeper laws of nature, currently unknown to us. Conscious experience and the analytic mind survey part of reality. In the vast penumbra beneath and beyond the conscious mind, uncharted frontiers and unexpected possibilities beckon to us. We must expect the unexpected in order to open ourselves to God’s surprising grace.

The raising of Dorcas is reminiscent of the healing of Jairus’ daughter. While it is unclear whether Jairus’ daughter was dead or in a coma, she was healed by an interplay of Jesus’ power and his expulsion of the nay-sayers who surrounded the dying child. In like fashion, Peter puts outside of the room all of those persons who believe the child to be dead. He creates a positive atmosphere within which the healing can occur. While qualitatively different, our own personal healings are facilitated by surrounding ourselves with optimistic and hopeful companions rather than persons who place limits on our spiritual, emotional, or physical well-being. Finally, Dorcas’ healing arises from the compassion of the community of faith and the disciples. Without love, there can ultimately be no healing. As the Epistle of John affirms, perfect love casts out all fear. Love also breaks down the walls of limitation and awakens us to a world of unexpected possibility.

The preacher might very well invite her or his congregation to reflect on the limitations they place on themselves and on God. Is it possible that our prayers, hopes, and actions can transform the world in unexpected, surprising, and miraculous ways? As one theologian noted, when I pray coincidences happen.

Psalm 23
While the healing of Dorcas stretches our theological imagination, Psalm 23 invites us to experience the familiar in a new way. Psalm 23 is not just for funerals, but for discovering the trustworthiness of God in everyday challenges. The juxtaposition of Psalm 22 and Psalm 23 is hardly accidental. Authentic faith must respond to all the seasons of life. Psalm 23 invites us to affirm that nothing can separate us from the love of God as well as to remember those desolate valleys where God’s protection and guidance make a way where there is no way.

In the course of her homily, the preacher may ask her congregation to see their own lives in light of Psalm 23: Where are your dark valleys? What internal or external enemies assail you? Where has God’s protection and guidance brought hope and transformation?

For those congregations familiar with times of meditation and silence within worship, the preacher may suggest a guided meditation in which the worshippers imagine God’s companionship in the darkest valley. As Whitehead asserts, God is “the fellow sufferer who understands,” but God is also the strong companion who saves and sustains in life’s most difficult moments.

Revelation 7:9-17
Many mainstream and liberal Christians are also tempted to push the “delete” key whenever they encounter the Book of Revelation. They wonder how Revelation can be recovered from the hell, fire, and brimstone imagery of Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth or Tim LaHaye’s popular Left Behind series. While we may object to the dubious end time calculations or the suspect morality of the rapture and the destruction of the planet Earth touted by certain writers, it is important that we reclaim the living truths of Revelation for our time. Theologians and bible scholars such as Walter Wink, William Stringfellow, and Ron Farmer (one of the leaders in the field of process hermeneutics) present new visions of this multivalent text that may enable Revelation to be a “revelation” in our time.

At the heart of this passage is the image of praising God in a time of persecution and struggle. While few of us expect to be persecuted because of our Christian faith, eventually all of us will face trials that call our faith in question. We will walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will grieve at the graveside, we will mourn lost possibilities and broken relationships, we will feel the pain of our own sin and half-heartedness. But, will we face these trials alone? Will we have the inner spiritual resources to emerge from the ordeal with a deeper sense of God’s presence and a deeper commitment to love. Pain and grief, persecution and woe, typically shrink our experience. Reality is confined to the prison house of the present moment. But, to the faithful ones, there is more. God is working even within our pain, desolation, and disappointment to bring forth wholeness and new life. God is faithfully presenting us a vision of the holy city that can emerge from life’s rubble. When that vision comes and gives us the insight and courage to transform our lives, all we can do is say “thank you” to the One who has been our companion and guide.

Still, at life’s descending edges, we need the vision of ultimate transformation for ourselves and those we love. While process-relational theology does not promise a “pie in the sky, when you die,” it speaks of the possibility of a holy adventure beyond the grave, an adventure in which what is wounded finds healing, what is lost is found, what is broken is restored. The “fellow sufferer who understands” is also the “creative companion” who transforms and makes new. When I ponder my own incompleteness as well as the deaths of my mother, a number of good friends, some of whom died too soon or burdened by too much, I pray that they may be part of this holy adventure where, “they will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them nor any scorching heat; for the lamb at the Center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. ” Such faith does not deny this world, but rather invites us to remember that this same shepherd is the center of our world and that the divine shepherd calls us to bring healing, beauty, comfort, and care to those around us, for we are also on a holy adventure right where we are.

John 10:22-30
This passage, like so many other passages from scripture, needs to be rescued from narrow, imperialistic exclusivism. Jesus' affirmation, “My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish,” has often been used to draw sharp lines between the sheep and the goats and the saved and the unsaved. From this perspective, there is no truth or salvation apart from a cognitive relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. As a former student of mine once said, “I know my parents are good people. They volunteer their time at the food pantry and soup kitchen. But, because they aren’t believers, I know that they’ll go to hell when they die.” My unsophisticated student is not alone in her views. Just think of the Catholic doctrine of “outside the church, there is no salvation. ” Although this doctrine has been repudiated by the Roman church, current versions of it – the fullness of faith is only found within the Roman Catholic Church – have dampened ecumenical relationships. Or, consider the statement of a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, “God does not hear the prayers of the Jews.” Narrowly read, this passage excludes Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Thich Naht Hanh, Martin Buber, from God’s ultimate care.

This passage needs to be read in light of Luke 15, the parable of the “lost sheep.” Far from exclusive in his care, the shepherd leaves the ninety nine “saved” to search for the one “lost” sheep.The shepherd searches for this wayward sheep until it is finally found. The word until captures the gospel message in ways that escape the linear understandings of salvation, because until has no temporal limitation. In God’s everlasting quest for wholeness, God will not stop searching for the lost until all are welcomed home, and this I believe goes beyond the grave.

Still, the theme of “hearing” the shepherds voice is essential. As I have said elsewhere in this lectionary series, “there are really only two kinds of persons in the world: those who are in God’s hands and know it, and those who are in God’s hands and don’t know it.” The passage ultimately challenges us to be attentive to God’s voice among all the competing voices. God is constantly encountering us in the events of our lives – in intuitive insights, casual meetings that become deep friendships, dreams, the words and faces of our spouses, children, and friends. Experiencing God in these ordinary encounters, however, requires a willingness, first, to believe that God is present in our lives; second, to believe that we can experience traces of God’s presence amid the many varied experiences of our lives; and, third, to open to the divine presence through spiritual disciplines such as prayer, meditation, chant, scripture and other devotional reading, and service.

The homilist might take time to explore the many ways we can hear God’s voice. (Helpful texts in this area are Maxie Dunnam’s The Workbook of Living Prayer, Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, Flora Wuellner’s Prayer and Our Bodies, and Bruce Epperly’s text on process spirituality The Power of Affirmative Faith).

This Sunday’s worship might include a generous time of silence or centering prayer. A workshop on centering prayer or meditation might be a good spiritual companion to this message. As parishioners prepare for the shifting schedules of summer, they may choose to embrace a summer spirituality, one that is grounded in extra time for prayer, meditation, and devotional reading. A sermon and workshop can serve as a catalyst for such spiritual adventures.

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