Kierkegaard, Reason and Peace – John 20:19-31 and 1 John 1:1-2:2

John 20:19-31 and 1 John 1:1-2:2 – Kierkegaard, Reason and Peace [1]

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on April 12, 2015

 

[sermon begins after two Bible readings]

John 20:19-31 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” 26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

1 John 1:1-2:2 We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— 3 we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4 We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. 5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7 but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
2:1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2 and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

 

[sermon begins]

Christian churches all over the world do things so differently from each other.  I have friends that worship with huge screens and rock bands.  I have friends who sit and contemplate in silence.  I have friends that sit in front of gilded altar gates and gold rimmed icon paintings, the smell of incense filling the space.  Worship among my Christian friends runs the gamut.  I’ve said it time and again to people who visit here and people who ask me about churches in general, “I hope you find a congregation through which you can hear God’s voice.”  Hearing God’s voice may have to do with worship form, or theology, or music.  It may have to do with the connection between life and scripture.  It may have to do with your family worshiping together in a congregation for generations.  But, mainly, I hope you hear God’s voice.

In the John reading today, God’s voice comes in the person Jesus.  Alive and well and peaceful.  Talking with his friends who are locked in a room, afraid.  They go into hiding not knowing which way to turn after Jesus has been killed.  But then he shows up.  After he’s killed on a cross.  Dead for three days.  He turns up.  In a room.  Among his scared and shuttered friends.  And he says to them, “Peace be with you.”  He says it again for Thomas a week later.  Lord only knows what Thomas has been getting into while his friends were hiding in that room.  “Peace be with you,” Thomas is told by the risen Christ.

There is a unity among the disciples in this story from John today.  Even through Thomas had missed the first visit from Jesus and demanded a sighting to believe with the same information, the other disciples continued to include him in the group.  He then has his own visit with the risen Jesus.  All is well.

A few generations later, when the book of First John was written, a disagreement has happened. There has been a split in the community that Thomas and some of the disciples began.  Some of the people have left to form a new one of their own.  Raymond Brown summarizes the fight between the two groups as being over “their ideas about Jesus, about the Christian life, about eschatology, and about the Spirit.”[2]  Along the same line, this past week I had a chance to speak with a woman who attended a funeral here with Augustana.  She was telling me about her church both in terms of its worship and its denomination as compared to a few of the splits from within the denomination.  It just seems to be the nature of people to disagree and separate.  There is certainly a parallel from the earliest Johannine communities to the denominations of today.

These splits in community give us pause to circle back around to original fear of the disciples in the closed up room.  More specifically, Thomas’ fear.  He wasn’t in the first locked room the week before.   Perhaps he isn’t afraid of the political climate that threatens his life like the other disciples seem to be.  Perhaps he is more motivated by the fear of missing out.  His friends had an experience that he didn’t have and now he wasn’t sure about anything.

Soren Kierkagaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and Christian, is known today as a great thinker.  One of the ways we know he was a great thinker is because he was a prolific writer before his death at the age of 42.  Kierkegaard seemed to write, at least initially, to work things out in his own mind.  He, like Thomas, wasn’t sure about anything.  The timing makes sense.  His birth in 1813 followed closely after the deaths of Enlightenment thinkers David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

In his early journals, Kierkegaard had a thing or two to say about fear.   He wrote about the doubt, trouble, and anguish that he, “wanted to forget in order to achieve a view of life.”[3]  But, to his mind, the ways in which he was trying ignore certain details to achieve a full view of life, showed themselves to be distractions.  Distractions that came out of the fear that Kierkegaard would falsely give a result to himself that he didn’t believe in.  As he says it himself in his early journals, “…out of fear that I should have falsely ascribe a result to myself.”[4]  There, in that sentence, is one of the gifts and curses of the Enlightenment.  The fear that I would inadvertently say I believe in something that maybe I’m not 100% sure about.  Or maybe even worse, that I would participate in something and give a wrong impression of what I believe.

In addition to encouraging people to find a congregation through which they hear God’s voice, I also tell people that, on any given Sunday, there are people in the pews for all kinds of reasons and thinking all kinds of things.  Like Thomas in that upper room with the disciples, our experiences and ideas don’t line up in tidy parallels or categories.  But also like Thomas and the disciples, we hold space for each other to experience and work through whatever it is we’re working through by way of faith.

Part of the way we hold that space for each other is worshiping together.  We begin worship with a confession that broken places exist in us but that God has our back and will not let go of us.  Like Thomas, we explore the Word, digging deeply into scripture, wounds, and possibility.  Like Thomas, we confess a faith so much bigger than ourselves and our ability to understand completely.  And, like Thomas, we share in Christ’s peace given to us by the risen Christ.

Today’s readings from Gospel of John and the book of First John, as well as Soren Kierkegaard’s works, all contain the writer’s reasons for writing them.  We are in worship together with our various reasons for being here and ideas about what is happening here.  Into all of that reasoning, walks the risen Christ greeting you with a word of peace.  “Peace be with you.”  As you share a word of peace with each other later in worship, this is the good word you continue to preach to each other.  “Peace be with you.”

Christ shares his peace with you and you are immediately captured up into something bigger than you.  You are part of the church, the body of Christ, people of the cross and resurrection given new life in the waters of baptism and new life in each other.   “Peace be with you.”




[1] No Oxford comma because Kierkegaard reflects the coexistence of reason and peace through his experience of faith.

[2] Raymond E. Brown. The Epistles of John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1982), xi.

[3] Soren Kierkegaard.  The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard: 1834-1854 (Great Britain: Fontana Books, 1938), 41.

[4] Ibid.

Dry Bones and Delight, An Easter Paradox – John 20:1-18, Ezekiel 37:13, and Romans 6:3-6

Dry Bones and Delight, An Easter Paradox – John 20:1-18, Ezekiel 37:1-3, and Romans 6:3-6

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015

 

[sermon begins after the two Bible readings]

Ezekiel 37:1-3 The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”

John 20: 1-18 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes. 11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12 and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

[sermon begins]

Have you ever had that moment when you realize you’re talking with someone you’re supposed to know?  Not recognizing them for whatever reason – maybe it has been awhile since you’ve seen them, maybe you’ve just met them only a couple of times, or maybe you went to elementary school with them a few years ago.  Then there’s that moment when something clicks and you realize you share a history with this person, however small it might be, and suddenly you’re in a different kind of conversation.  You might have people or stories in common so there are things to talk about beyond the small talk.  It’s a funny sweet spot between almost-friends and enough-strangers that you might even give each other some of the harder stuff from each other’s lives – getting laid off from work, marriage trouble, or child trouble.  When the conversation is over, you part ways, wondering about the moment of honesty.

It’s those moments of honesty that can feel like air to the dry and dusty places we don’t tell many people about.  Let’s face it, there are moments in life when things going on around us and in us feel like that valley of the dry bones in the reading from Ezekiel.  In the story, the Lord asks the question, “Mortal, can these bones live?”  And receives the answer, “Oh, Lord God, you know.”

What does God know?  One way to get at a small piece of that answer is to look to Jesus. In Jesus, God knows what bodies know from being born and growing up.  God knows what it feels like to be warm, cold, loved, betrayed.  God knows what it feels like to laugh and to hope.  God knows what it means to be afraid, to be in pain, and to die. God knows what it feels like to come to life in a tomb and walk around looking like a gardener whose been digging in the dirt.

What do we know?  Like Peter and the other disciple, we can know what we see but it doesn’t mean we understand very much.  The Bible story tells us that they see the tomb is empty and believe but “as yet they did not understand the scripture.”[1]  The evidence of tomb is examined.  It is indeed empty.  And then they go home believing what exactly?  That the tomb is empty?

Mary Magdelene stays in the garden. It’s mentioned four times that she is weeping. Her eyes, already puffy from lack of sleep during the crucifixion, must be an absolute mess as she walks around the garden crying.  The body of her teacher who was killed is now missing.  She runs into a stranger…maybe he’s the gardener…and she asks him whether or not he took the body somewhere else.  Confusion rules the moment.  It’s difficult to know what to believe.

Last Sunday afternoon, I left church in time to get my daughter over to her behind-the-wheel drive time.  I might add that I have her permission to share this story with you.  Still in my suit and pastor’s collar, the driving instructor asked me a few questions about Taryn’s driving followed by a few extra questions about whether I am called priest or pastor and where my church is located.  In turn, I learned a little about how he became a driving instructor.  Then off the two of them went in the well-marked student driver car.

Picking her up afterwards, we talked a little about her drive.  After a lull in the conversation, she told me that the instructor asked her this question, “If you could describe religion in one word, what would it be?”  She told him, “Hope.”  I asked her if he came up with a word.  He apparently chose, “Comfort.”  There are many things that I think are interesting about the two of them having this conversation.  The relevant one today is that neither one of them picked words like ‘truth’ or ‘certainty’ or ‘goodness’.  They did, however, pick words that capture the essence of the Easter story.

Like the disciples at the tomb, we see and believe in our experiences but don’t really understand them all that well.  Like Mary Magdalene, we have trouble recognizing the resurrected Jesus.  He had to recognize her first, calling her out of her moment of despair and calling her into his resurrected life.

This is all well and good for Mary.  She was confident enough in her encounter with the risen Jesus that she ran off to tell the other disciples.  But what about us, here, today?  Apparently the resurrection obscures who God is until God reinitiates contact by recognizing us and calling us by name.[2]  Calling us by name out of our place of sin or, like Mary, out of our place of despair.

One of the ways this happens is among people like all of us together here today. We know what some of our flaws are, the sin that hurts others people and ourselves.  And we know we know what some of the good in us is, created in the image of God.  We bring our worst and our best into the time we worship God.  We are almost-friends and enough strangers to be in some honest conversation.  Part of that honesty is recognizing that the mystery of what God does through the cross, tomb, and resurrection has little to do with a method for living life.   Cross, tomb, and resurrection are how we experience life – the pain of it AND the joy of it.  We know what God knows – these dry bones most certainly can live!

The church is the body of Christ, people of the cross and resurrection given new life in the waters of baptism, new life through Christ in the bread and wine of communion, and new life in each other.  Jesus Christ, who was crucified, God has raised! In that resurrection God gives us hope, the promise of life, the promise that God is with us now, and that even death cannot defeat the power of God for us and for all the world![3]

Thanks be to God!

Romans 6:3-6 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.

[1] John 20:9

[2] Rolf Jacobsen, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary. Sermon Brainwave podcast about John 20:1-18 for Easter Sunday, April 2009 on WorkingPreacher.org. http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=61

[3] David Lose, President of The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.  Sermon Brainwave podcast about John 20:1-18 for Easter Sunday, April 2009 on WorkingPreacher.org. http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=61

Called Good (Friday) for a Reason [OR Radical Inclusion is the Religious Freedom of the Cross] – John 18-19

Called Good (Friday) for a Reason – John 18-19

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church for Good Friday on April 3, 2015

 

[sermon begins after the two Bible readings excerpted from John 18-19]

John 18:15-18, 25b-27   Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest, 16 but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in. 17 The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” 18 Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.

25 Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” 26 One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” 27 Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.

John 19:16-18, 25b-30, 40-42 Then [Pontius Pilate] handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus; 17 and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.

25b Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. 28 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

40 [Joseph of Arimathea] took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. 41 Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. 42 And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

 

[sermon begins]

 

We began Lent on Ash Wednesday confronted with our own mortality.  Ashes are smeared on our foreheads in the sign of the cross and we are told, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  A glaring reminder that life on the planet, our baptismal journey, ends in death.

Death leaves us longing for the spiritual. But in the meantime, we are stunned by its lack.  There is no heartbeat, no breath.  All is quiet.  From where we sit on this side of death there is no dressing it up.  At the bedside or roadside or war-side, wherever we encounter death, it is stark, austere, and unnerving in its lack of immediate meaning.  Death is simply absence.  Gone.  On this side of death, it is nothing more.

We begin Lent faced with our own mortality and a sign of the cross.  At the end of Lent this Good Friday, we are confronted by the cross itself.  Longing for the spiritual, we are stunned by its lack.  There is no heartbeat, no breath.  All is quiet after the betrayal, denial, ridicule, and execution.  The adrenalin fades.  The frantic hype is gone.  “It is finished.”  Jesus’ last words.  Finished.  All that’s left is to put him in a tomb and leave him there.

But the quiet of death breeds disquiet. Unnerved by the immediate lack of meaning the attempts to make meaning begin immediately.  Centuries of Christian thought have produced atonement theory after atonement theory.  Some more satisfactory than others.  Regardless, Gerhard Forde argues that all of these theories hold us “in a false relation to God,” most often reducing Jesus’ death to an unsatisfactory commercial transaction.[1]

Time and again in the New Testament, Jesus’ death is explained simply as “for us”.[2]  That is all.  “For us.”  Which necessarily means that Jesus died “for you.”  Jesus died for you.

Jesus died for you for the forgiveness of sins.  Because isn’t that what Jesus did in his life here on earth?  With the authority of God, he announced forgiveness time and again, and time and again, until finally he was killed for it.  Forgiveness, already available, already announced by Jesus, was that for which Jesus was killed.  He spoke a word of forgiveness until he hung on a cross for it.  For you.

The hands of the betrayer, the hands of the denier, the hands of the ridiculer, the hands of the executioner.  Those hands are ours hands in all the ways we take things into our own hands.  Determined to put conditions on what God’s gives to us unconditionally, we cannot hear this word of forgiveness.  We can’t hear it for other people.  And we can’t hear it for ourselves.

The cross is God’s answer to the re-imagining of God that we do. That re-imagining that leaves us separate from God.  Oh, so you think you know who God is?  Well, what about a God who hangs dead on a cross and gets buried in a tomb rather than use divine power over and against the very creatures whom God loves. Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.”  Jesus on the cross simultaneously reveals the scope of divine power poured out to reveal the depth of divine love as we are drawn toward God.  When the self-sacrificing love of God, given fully, is made known to you, when this message of divine love gets through to you, you are drawn by God back into relationship. [3]

With great intention, Jesus hangs on the cross.  And, in one of his final acts while still breathing, does something radical.  Jesus turns to his own mother and then to the beloved disciple and redefines their relationship with the cross in between them.  “‘Woman, here is your son…then he says to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’”

Not only does Jesus draw us into relationship with God through the cross but Jesus redefines our relationship with each other at the foot of the cross – standing with the cross between us, Jesus intervenes.  Drawn back into the relationship with God our Father, Jesus the Christ turns us towards each other in a new way.  And God knows the world needs us to be with each other differently than we are at the moment.  Look as close as the cranky person next door or exclusion laws masquerading as religious freedom in several of these United States.  And look as far away as murder by plane crash in the French Alps or execution across religious differences at the Garissa University in Kenya.  We need every bit of help we can get to stand down and stand with each other.  As Anne Lamott writes, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”[4]

At the cross, love is freely taken up for us and for the sake of the people next to us.  In the same moment, we have everything to do with what happened at the cross and we have nothing to do with it.  We are culpable AND we are passive spectators who are being handed a stark realization of our common powerlessness.  In this way, the cross cannot be used as a method to live life.  The cross is the way we experience life.  Longing for the spiritual, we are often stunned by its lack.  Yes, the cross is the way we experience life.  Humbled by our participation in a death on a cross, made confident through the self-sacrificing love of God.  The cross is radically inclusive of all people which necessarily includes you.

Jesus says, “It is finished.”  Can you hear the whisper?  Finished.  His final moment. All that’s left is to put him in a tomb and leave him there.[5]

 



[1] Gerhard O. Forde.  A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism (Eerdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids, 2004), 221.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Koester, course notes, 12/1/2010.  For further study see: Craig R. Koester, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

[4] Anne Lamott.  Traveling Mercies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).

[5] On Good Friday, cross and tomb are the focal point so that hope is reflected out of suffering that is real rather than as false optimism denying painful realities.