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by
Greg Garrett
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July 1 - July 18, 2018
This conversation did not, as I hope you recognize, constitute my discernment process to enter seminary. In fact, I’m not sure this vision, or whatever it was, ever came up when Greg Rickel began talking about what he thought might be my call to teach, preach, and serve the Church.
The point is that now I can begin to see the end of the story. And now perhaps you will remember the one thing growing out of the story that I can say with any confidence: I have been called to go to Nineveh. Because just as God called Jonah the Hebrew prophet, I believe we are all called to go to Nineveh. Not the city; but a place we may not want to go, yet have to go.
What do we mean when we call something a “sign”? The Greek word semeion that is typically translated in the New Testament as “sign” refers to a spectacular—maybe a supernatural—event that points toward the reality of something big, usually the reality of God breaking into this world.
Rabbi Susan Lippe notes that the four chapters of Jonah can be summed up simply in three sentences: God cares about all the people. Jonah only cares about himself. God wins.4
Jonah’s story is our story, or at least it is a story that sheds light on our story. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, in laying out the pattern of the universal hero’s journey, noted that in almost every such story there is the possibility that the hero will refuse the call when it comes.
So to seek to live under the Sign of Jonah is to be flawed but faithful. It is to remember that the message is always more important than the messenger. It is to proclaim that message, even if we don’t understand the complete shape of it, even if we don’t completely agree with it, even if we don’t know God’s purpose within it. But it is also to seek such an understanding of God that, like Jonah, we can be enlightened.
Let’s say we accept the call instead of stumbling from dark place to dark place—what will that mean? For some of us, it will mean a formal commitment to be a Professional Christian—a priest, minister, pastor, youth leader serving in a church or some other formal capacity. For some, it will mean consciously living a life that demonstrates our values are not society’s values, but rather those of love, sacrifice, mercy, justice. For some, it will mean living a life in which we bear witness to the God who has made that life possible.
we go out into the world to bring the Word to life, and the Sign of Jonah goes in front of us to remind us that the message is more important than programs, more important than buildings, more important than the approval and acclamation of those we encounter along the path. Although we can and should pray that the places where God sends us to serve will grow in favor with God, we are called first to proclaim the kingdom, not to stuff people into a pew.
as hard as it may sometimes be to forget that this is not about us, we must become transparent so that the message can be seen through us. If we seem to be shining, it is only because we are reflecting God’s glory. We become carriers of a message greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon, and certainly much greater than ourselves.
Because, God be praised, the Sign of Jonah is not about whether or not you want to go to Nineveh. It’s about whether or not you go. Lord, open our lips. And our mouth shall proclaim Your praise.
If I was going to call myself a Christian and try to follow Jesus, I had to do the hard work of struggling to understand how the whole story of Jesus—including the hard sayings—might speak to me in my present circumstance. Even if they made me wish Jesus had never said them.
They’re hard because they call us to live counter to our current way of life, to value things that seem valueless, and to reject things that society tells us are precious.)
Ricky, like a lot of us, is more comfortable with “tiny infant Jesus.” He doesn’t act up. He doesn’t say anything controversial.
Or it could be that we’re drawn to a vision of Jesus like Buddy Christ in Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma—a new Jesus cooked up by the Catholic Church because the image of Jesus on the crucifix was just so depressing. “Christ didn’t come to earth to give us the willies,” says Cardinal Ignatius Glick (George Carlin). “He came to help us out. He was a booster!”
the personal Jesus we see the Church pushing in Dogma: The statue of Buddy Christ Cardinal Glick unveils is winking and has a thumb up. He’s the kind of guy you’d want to be your savior if you got to pick, because Buddy Christ might ask you to go fishing or take you skiing, but he would never ask you to leave your home and family, give sacrificially, watch out for the poor and the suffering.
I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:49–53)
As Søren Kierkegaard argues in Fear and Trembling, if we aren’t willing to give up the things we love most for God, then we make a mockery of our love of God when we do, grudgingly, offer them up. (And if we don’t make our families, our wealth, our possessions, or anything else we love more than God an idol, why would we need to offer them up in the first place?
To follow Christ authentically is to walk a path that has always brought controversy and conflict in its wake, and I don’t think it’s surprising that so many people who spread the words of Jesus over the years have shared His fate.
The peace of Christ is not a numbing anesthetic; in fact, the peace of Christ will sharpen our swords against injustice, against hunger, against hatred and bigotry, and against any institution that promotes them.
We have domesticated Jesus, or have tried to, we have turned Him into something either cuddly or endearing, and while I have no doubt that Mary found her God-given baby cuddly and that many of those who loved Jesus during His lifetime found Him endearing, it is not the baby or the winsome carpenter we worship, pray to, and adore.
Toward the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), the first of the stories in The Chronicles of Narnia series to be filmed, two characters are speaking of the majestic lion, Aslan, the ruler of the world, who has just sacrificed his life to redeem a traitor and who has subsequently been brought back to life.
Whatever Jesus calls us to, whatever hard sayings we run across, they are all coming from the God trying to lead us to new beginnings. Thomas Cahill notes that Jesus “knows perfectly well that he’s asking the impossible.”4
So let’s embrace the whole of the story we’re given, even if at first glance it seems hard, painful, or dangerous. Jesus is not a tame lion. But He is good. And in this new beginning, He will find us, and raise us up.
Still, the Bible is front and center in the Christian tradition as a devotional text, a tool for worship, even, in some cases, an idol that supplants the God it is intended to point toward. (Is a book really “holy”?) But as important as the Bible is in Christianity, some Christians read the Bible badly and some not at all.
I’ve resisted letting the Scripture speak to me as insight into God on a regular basis. And I’ll confess that I’ve done this mostly because I haven’t liked the way Scripture has been used on and around me in my life, the way others have read it in bits and pieces that corresponded to their worldviews, the way they have read those particular bits literally and focused on the things with which they agreed and ignored the things they didn’t.
We have to start with an understanding that what the Bible has to say is not just what its primary advocates in our culture think it has to say. And reading it in a way that pulls those other things—peace, justice, love, forgiveness, reconciliation, radical faith, daily practice—back to the forefront.
(“Justice,” by the way, refers not to the work of repaying people for what they have done, as in our criminal justice system, but to the Hebrew understanding of justice, tzedek, or “righteousness”: doing what is right for all concerned, trying to see that no one suffers or starves because of an unjust system.)
on the peace and justice thing: Some Christians think that holiness, piety, and morality constitute their most important responses to God’s call, and for them, peace and justice work are radical and on the periphery.
Others associate peace and justice with radical politics, or with a purely secular ethics and morality.
Many mainline Christian traditions in the twentieth century jettisoned much of what was religious about their practice and belief to do purely secular good works—liberalism instead of liberality, as Diana Butler Bass puts it, losing the connection between the inner life of the spirit and the outer life of action.2
1) There is a God, one God, a God of love and mercy who deserves our praise and worship. 2) Because there is a God, we should be changed, and that change should be reflected in how we treat one another. We should care for those less fortunate, the widows and orphans, the homeless and dispossessed. We should tear down the structures of power that elevate some and crush others beneath their feet.3
However people might have understood the Scriptures before Jesus went willingly to His own death, the crucifixion showed that God was not and would not be a conquering God, ruling over others as the kingdoms of the world rule, through compulsion and authority. The life and death of Jesus formed the period at the end of the sentence that the rest of the Bible writes: If God is real and we have experienced God, then we are called to be people of peace and justice.
The same folks who read the Bible absolutely literally, believing each verse means exactly what it says when it condemns men having sex with men in a verse in Leviticus, those same people who generally decry metaphorical and cultural readings of the Bible, seem to become all metaphorical and cultural whenever they run across passages about peace, justice, and radical self-sacrifice.
A system that elevates some and oppresses others, a system in which some feast and some starve is exactly the kind of system the Scriptures indict over and over again. We find this in the Laws and Wisdom Literature, in the Gospels and in Revelation. It’s everywhere, and it’s uncomfortable to see ourselves in that mirror.
Those of you who hold power now Hate anybody at the gate who questions you, And you detest anybody who speaks the truth. Because you have climbed to success on the backs of the poor And your wealth comes from your taxes of their harvests, You will build mansions of stone, But you’ll never occupy them. You’ll plant beautiful vineyards, But you’ll never enjoy wine from them. For I know the multitude of evil you’ve done, and your many sins: You persecute those who want to do the right thing, you take bribes, You push the poor to one side in the courts instead of helping them. The wise may decide
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For Paul, whose primary goal is to proclaim the Lord Jesus crucified (and raised from the dead, His life and teachings vindicated by God), then, this must be true: If Jesus is Lord, then the empire (Rome in Paul’s case) is not.
I love the country I was lucky enough to be born in (one of my students at Baylor once wrote in an essay that being born in America was like winning the lottery, and almost everyone reading these words is already a big winner), but I do not worship America. My faith and devotion should go to the One God, and I am trying hard not to manufacture other gods out of nation, family, success, consumption, or anything else the world pushes in front of my nose and tells me to value.
“Yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!”
This kind of depression is often first and foremost a medical condition. Michael’s death was not about a failure of faith, although suicide seems to be the definitive act of despair, and many people believe despair to be a mortal sin.
Psalm 130 begins, famously, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!” (Ps. 130:1).
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. (Ps. 22:1–2)
Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.(Ps. 22:3–5)
Whether you believe in this resurrection as a physical fact or as a narrative truth, the point is simply this: As J. K. Rowling knew in choosing the gravestone inscription for Harry’s parents in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (“the last enemy to be destroyed is death” [1 Cor. 15:26]), in the story of Jesus that we Christians abide within, death has been conquered, and our understandable obsession with what seems to be the end of our lives can be set aside.
O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant Michael, being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.3
If we have faith, then we approach death—even tragic death—with hope and even joy. And when I remember this, I begin to see that one of the reasons I’m still alive is to tell stories.
veneration
In the Roman tradition, lighting a candle to St. Mary or praying to St. Anthony to intercede on your behalf is nothing strange—in fact, it’s accepted dogma. As a Catholic publication notes, “From the earliest days, the Catholic Church would declare someone a saint only when there was a widespread reputation of holiness and some evidence that favors were granted through the person’s intercession.”1
But why are these saints saints? What possible purpose does remembering them serve in today’s world? How can their lives—and deaths—have meaning for us? One thing that matters is that, in the Anglican tradition of which the Episcopal Church is a part, saints are not venerated in quite the same way as in the Roman Church. A primary difference between the traditions is that Anglicans do not believe in prayer to the saints, who may then intercede on our behalf. Rather, they are presented to us as models of faithfulness whose lives can inspire and teach us.
Praise God for those in every generation in whom Christ has been honored.… Pray that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.2
the epiclesis, when the Holy Spirit is asked to come down and make the bread and wine our spiritual food—we
