Trinity Heights Church Podcast Trinity Heights Church

On Easter Sunday we celebrated the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and explored the implications of his crucifixion and return from the grave, often misunderstood to be the way that we might go to heaven when we die and leave this world behind, a world destined to end. Stephen stated that, “it may come as a relief to some of you to know that while it is true that the Easter message is at the heart of Christianity, it is not about the end of the world and how we can go to heaven.”John begins his gospel with, “In the beginning…” which theologian N.T. Wright jokes is like saying, “I just wrote a new and original symphony,” only to have the symphony begin with the famous opening of Beethoven’s 5th, because that’s exactly what John is doing: he starts his gospel by evoking the very first verse of the bible in Genesis: "In the beginning…"But this is John’s way of saying, “this story of Jesus, this good news that I’m about to tell you is a new creation story” and at the end of John’s Gospel, you find that, like in the account in Genesis, John begins to count the days. In the Genesis creation story the author lists the days of the week; John suddenly becomes obsessed with the days of the week. He keeps reminding us in the middle of all of this calamity - the trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus - which day of the week it is. The resurrection of Jesus is not meant to be understood as an odd event in the world; the resurrection is the beginning of a new world and points to the way the world is going to be. We are meant to look at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and see new creation.Because, we have all had hopes and dreams that we’ve lost or will lose. We all have something in us that’s been broken or will be broken. We all have people we love and care about, friends and family who will be taken from us and who we'll one day be taken from.Yet, the resurrection is a promise, that just as God has reclaimed Jesus from the grave one day he will reclaim all of creation, he will do this for creation and he will do this for you and for me. He will restore us to each other.  And, there is no greater promise than that.He is Risen.
 
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Like us during an election cycle when hopes ride high that if we can get the right person elected they will make the world a better place, the crowds had high hopes for Jesus when he entered Jerusalem. They hoped that King Jesus would banish the Romans who taxed them into poverty and executed them when they complained. The Pharisees offered a solution to the Roman problem: we need to follow the Torah with precision so that when we revolt God will guarantee our victory over Rome. But the Sadducees had quite a different solution: we can’t beat this superpower so the solution is not revolution but cooperation. Which agenda would you have supported: emancipation or survival? As is often the case the political solutions were out of touch with reality. How can the Sadducees talk with a straight face about ‘surviving’ to a people whose friends and family are being crucified? But then again how can the Pharisees talk about emancipation when going up against an unimaginably strong superpower? The chasm that usually exists between political & political reality is often because we haven't understood the depth of the problem we're up against. That was certainly true of the people in Jerusalem that day who externalized evil in the form of the hierarchies over them. Evil is "out there" and embodied by someone else. But Jesus refuses to offer simplistic solutions that were philosophically, theologically naïve about the problem of evil. He won’t let them externalize evil and locate it outside themselves and in someone else. Right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem he goes to the Temple and turns over the tables of the money changers. A symbolic act, a type of prophetic street theater, which said ‘look, it is at the heart of your institutions, it is in your parties and partisanship, it is in your political ambitions that evil resides. It’s all much closer to home. Jesus recognized that the disarray in Israel was symptomatic of a greater disarray in the created order and in humanity as a whole, a problem that was well outside the scope of the small political ambitions of the people which couldn’t possibly deal with the reality of evil as long as they externalized it in someone else.
 
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Luke chapter 9 and uses the phrase, “He set his face towards Jerusalem.”Luke is referring here to Jesus and his resolute focus on the holy city with the direction of Luke’s gospel hinging on these words. Once Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem, everything that follows falls in the shadow of this idea.The city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was many things. But most importantly, Jerusalem was the site of the holy temple and was understood to be the exact place on earth where the God of the universe had chosen to meet with his people. Jerusalem itself was seen as being the literal embodiment of the pulling together of heaven and earth. Right after Jesus “sets his face towards Jerusalem," he and his disciples are met with aggressive inhospitality as they pass through a Samaritan town. The Samaritans hated the impenetrable institutions and inaccessible hierarchies surrounding the temple and they rejected the temple in Jerusalem as the sole seat of God’s power, instead declaring their own Mount Gerizim and the temple on it as their personal center of religious life. The disciples get their feelings hurt when the Samaritans are not hospitable toward them and ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Jesus rebukes them and they continue on to another town. Jesus does NOT rebuke the Samaritans. He confronts the disciples for adopting an all too familiar posture, a holier than thou attitude that declared, “We are the chosen few and those unsophisticated, uneducated, unclean Samaritans, they should all do us a favor and die.”Jesus understood this insidious demonization of the Samaritans. He also understood the Samaritan’s inhospitality to be a forgivable misunderstanding.Jesus' slow march to the holy city was not to reinforce the elitist hierarchies of the temple. It was Jesus expanding the presence of God for all, with the site of the temple shifting from the physical building onto Jesus’ own body. And so Jesus himself becomes the physical embodiment of the pulling together of heavens and earth and ultimately makes himself available to the Samaritans, Jews and everyone alike.
 
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When Jesus is warned that Herod wants to kill him, he says, ‘Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem you who stone the prophets and kill those sent to you.’ Jesus recognizes that Herod is the most recent iteration of a long history of Israel’s leaders defending themselves from people like him in order to maintain the status quo.Matthew’s gospel tells us that Herod had all the baby boys in Bethlehem two and under put to death. Mark and Luke tell similar gruesome stories about Herod. George Orwell says: ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible’, and Herod was the indefensible status quo of Israel. When faced with a choice between Herod or Jesus, Israel’s leaders went with Herod. They had to narrate their reality so that they could make peace with the decision.Because language is used to defend the indefensible, Orwell explains that our ‘political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.'Joe Biden was the chair of the special senate committee for foreign relations from 1997 to 2003. During his tenure, Biden began to advocate for the invasion of Iraq 5 years before George Bush executed the war. After Bush waged a war of aggression, Obama became president and smoothed it all over. By that time Obama felt he could drop the euphemistic language and said ‘we tortured some folks’. He went on to explain, ‘While I don’t believe that anybody is above the law, I also believe that we need to look forward instead of backwards’. Obama instructed America to put the illegal war and the torture program down the ‘memory hole’ - another Orwellian term. Obama himself would go on to start new wars, renew the patriot act, and arrest more journalists and their sources than any president to date.     If the church is going to have a prophetic imagination, we have to be willing to break with the herd and refuse to speak the political language handed to us by the predominant culture. This may not mean success for the church in the sense of convincing others to see what we see; but the church is not called to be successful, but rather to be faithful.
 
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The prophet’s ability to predict events decades if not centuries into the future can seem mysterious and appear as if they have psychic powers or a crystal ball. But when we read Jesus’ words closely - and the words of other prophetic voices - we discover that Jesus and other prophets understood how their time and place was really functioning - regardless of how others said it was functioning. In other words the prophets had a far more intimate knowledge of their own contemporary situation than anyone else around them and it is this deep understanding of their contemporary situation that gives them such predictive powers. But this too is mysterious - why do the prophets understand their contemporary situation more deeply than the people around them? We can explore this mystery by considering the question that Jesus often asks his listeners ‘Have you not read?’      Given that the vast majority of people were illiterate in Jesus day this may seem like an odd question to ask. It seems the obvious answer is ‘no of course they haven’t read, because they can’t read or write!’But when Jesus asks this question he is addressing the literate Pharisees and the educated Sadducees and the cultured Herodians; in other words, Jesus’ sharpest confrontations are with the educated cultured class.And every time Jesus asks the question ‘have you not read?’, followed by a well-known passage of scripture, he is showing these self appointed guardians of Israel that they do not really know these scriptures in any meaningful way and are in fact at odds with their own texts.They had co-opted the language of scripture to tell the story in such a way that essentially pushed God out of the way and allowed them to seize control and maintain their own power. By asking have you not read, Jesus wanted to rescue them as he want to rescue us from a self-serving language that leads us astray and disconnects us from the realities of our own contemporary situation.
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During a TV interview, British comedian and outspoken atheist, Stephen Fry, was asked, “What would you do if you died and found out God existed?” Fry responded that he would walk up to God and say, "Bone cancer in children. What’s that about? How dare you create a world where there is so much misery that is not our fault. It’s evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"Stephen Fry isn’t wrong when he says that our world is full of injustice and pain. Jeremiah and the Psalms are filled with obvious anger and frustration directed at God, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician? Why has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?"The same feelings of resentment and rage that Stephen Fry directs towards God are in fact echoed with as much vitriol and despair within the Bible itself. Pastor Stephen once said, “The problem of evil and suffering in the world is as much a philosophical problem for Christians as it is for everyone. The question of innocent suffering before a good, all-powerful God is the engine that drives the entire biblical narrative. It’s in multiple psalms, every verse of the book of Job, in the cry of Jesus on the cross. The Bible creates space for and provides us language to bring our complaints against God.”The Biblical narrative itself is designed to hand us the language of lament in times when our own words fail us and when all we have is a wordless groan.In response to the Prosperity Gospel in American Christianity, Kate Bowler (professor of American Religious History at Duke who was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 35) says, “We don’t serve a Quid Pro Quo God. Our lives are built with such delicate material; it doesn’t take a lot to topple the whole thing over... our culture makes us feel embarrassed for the terrible things that happen to us. It makes us feel ashamed, lonely and like a loser. I would love if we had a culture that could embrace those of us that fall... give us a language and support to help us feel like we’re not problems to be solved, we’re just people to be loved.”
 
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