This Journey to Easter is a wonderful event for our community and I am honored to be here. When, after all, does a bald white Episcopalian get to preach in a black Baptist Church? Now you all can say “Amen” and whatever, since my church is just now learning how to do that. Since you all might not know each other please take a minute to turn to someone you don’t know and welcome them here. Tell them “I am glad you are here.”

 At this stage in our journey to Easter we need to come to grips with two things:

1. The true nature of the cross

2. How we use the cross to cause harm to others

Although the cross is mentioned a number of times in the Bible, we tend to glorify the cross thinking of it as the image of our salvation. We sing hymns to “Lift High the Cross”, calling it the “glorious tree.” In Holy Week many churches leave a plain wooden cross in the sanctuary and then on Easter cover it with flowers symbolizing the resurrection.

But I have always been uncomfortable with this language and the flowers-on-the-cross practice. It obscures the original purpose, violence and brutality of the cross. The flowers of resurrection literally hide the true nature of the cross from our eyes. Do we cover it over and sing nice hymns to it in order to submerge the uncomfortable truth of the cross from our tender hearts?

The cross was an ancient means of public execution and humiliation practiced by the Romans and other cultures of the ancient Near East. It was a public display so that the victim would become an example for others not to follow in that path. Without breaking their legs, victims often hung on the cross for days before drawing their last breath. As we walk the final steps of our journey in Holy Week and we contemplate the agony that Jesus suffered, it might be helpful for us to get rid of all language and all images of the cross of glory, substituting them with what the cross really is – a violent, brutal means of execution.

So the next time you sing “Lift High the Cross,” you should make a substitution. Try singing “Lift High the Electric Chair.” … That’s right. “Lift High the Electric Chair” It makes it hard to think of the glory of the electric chair or the electric chair as a symbol of our salvation doesn’t it?

But that gets us around to the second concern – how we sometimes use the cross to cause harm to others. In my twelve years as a priest and pastor, I cannot tell you the number of times people from other churches have come to my church for counseling. I will never forget the woman who came to my office with bruises on her face saying that the pastor of her church told her that she should submit to her husband and endure the pain because Jesus suffered on the cross for her.

Yes, Jesus suffered a violent, brutal agonizing death on the cross. You can take that fact home with you. No one will dispute it. But in spite of our good intentions, can we stop causing more pain in the name of the cross. One act of violence is enough.

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians tonight we hear the same words of our Eucharistic prayer. We are comforted knowing that in some measure we are doing what Paul’s church at Corinth, along with millions of Christians for two thousand years, have been celebrating with the same commandment from the Bible. But what we miss in this snippet of scripture is the important context for these words. We will return to the context in a minute, but first we need to talk about natural systems in contrast to man-made systems.

Take a walk in a National Forest or somewhere that is mostly free from the human influence. Look at the plants around you. What you will find is a riot of diversity with lots of different kinds of plants blooming at different times and providing all kinds of valuable services to the forest community. This is nature the way God created the earth.

Now take a walk in a soybean field or even a pasture. You will find only one kind of plant or maybe just a few. The diversity of insects and animals and wide array of plants that were originally there are now gone. The field serves one purpose only: to provide food for humans or livestock. I am not making any moral or value judgments between these two examples. One is not necessarily better or worse than the other. Yet, our agriculture and landscape reflects what comes naturally to human nature while the diversity in the forest reflects one aspect of the nature of God.

Humans just don’t like change or difference. That is why most of us are so comfortable with our jobs, homes, families, and what seems to be a stable lifestyle. It is settling to us and comfortable. Imagine how stressful it would be to move every two or three years and start over with new friends in a new community. A few of you have done it, but most of us would be terrified by the prospect. We like to be rooted in one place. We like to have a universe that is (or at least appears to us) to be nice and stable.

That is why major weather events, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes get so much attention in the news. They disrupt our desire for stability. Social change can be equally unsettling. Lottery winners report that they often feel shunned by other people with great wealth. They do not share or speak the same social language and customs. In the same way, once thriving Episcopal parishes in California have imploded in a decade when the surrounding neighborhood becomes all Asian. The challenge to them was not lack of people to attend the church. The challenge was their comfort with social differences.

And that gets us around to the context for Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church. Just ahead of the reading we just heard, Paul criticizes the Corinthian church for the manner in which they celebrated the Eucharist. The Corinthians were allowing social divisions within their culture to shape the way they celebrated communion. Paul was not a happy camper.

In the ancient world of the first century Roman Empire, social stratification was extremely strong throughout the empire. In a glance, people could determine social status on the basis of dress, transportation, servants, food, accent, housing, and so forth. It was common in a meal setting for the host to intentionally serve larger portions and better food and wine to people of higher social status. It was an accepted custom.

Paul believes the Corinthians dragging their social customs into the Eucharist compromised the Good News and everything their faith stood for. Two verses before our text tonight, he notes that “in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk.”

Like the California churches that failed to grow when their neighborhood changed, we too are faced with a changing town and neighborhood. Grace Church is one of the more loving, open, and socially accepting parishes I have had the privilege to serve. I also believe that God is calling us to open up even more.

“Do this in remembrance of me” is a kind of reminder note from Jesus. “Do this” means to feed 5,000 people without distinction. On the field that day were rich people, poor people, criminals, saints, prostitutes, beggars, bankers, lawyers, farmers, merchants, and fishermen. Jesus made no distinction between them. He just fed them. He also sat down for meals with the most hated people in his society – tax collectors, prostitutes, and gentiles.

We have plenty of people around us who really do not know the Good News that we proclaim so well at Grace Church. When we “do this in remembrance of Jesus”, our challenge is to get those in the wider community to sit down with us, have a meal together, and enjoy how God has made us better because of our new connections.

After all, God’s love is really about who we are connected to.

In seminary I once made a spreadsheet of all the different doctrines of atonement. I wanted to trace the history and development of the idea that Christ’s death on the cross atones for the sins we commit as baptized Christians. After spending a good deal of time studying this vast amount of theology, I must confess to you that I remain as confused and even skeptical about the “atoning sacrifice of Christ” as I did that day in seminary in 1997. For me the focus all seemed misdirected. Theologians want to ask what Christ’s sacrifice does for baptized Christians. I want to ask the opposite question: What are we going to do once we know about Christ’s sacrifice?

The Book of Acts records that the earliest followers of “The Way” (the original name for followers of Jesus) believed that Christ would come again within their lifetime. They pooled their money and possessions and lived in common with great anticipation of Christ’s second coming. The only problem was Christ did not return during their lifetime. This led to two schools of thought:

1. We’d better get serious about this Christian living business because it looks like we’re in it for the long haul.

2. Let’s just eat, drink, and be merry, for who knows when Christ will return to judge us.

The second behavior comes NOT from a sense of end-of-the-world fatalism but amazingly from a sense of outrage. One could argue that the crowd calling for Jesus’ crucifixion can be forgiven because they were ignorant. But I would argue that they called for his crucifixion NOT because they were ignorant, but they called for his crucifixion deliberately because they knew that this Jesus really was the Messiah. They had seen the miracles. They had heard his teaching. They knew friends who had witnessed signs. They were eager to welcome him into Jerusalem as their new king on Palm Sunday. Then on Friday that same welcoming group joined the all too human mob and called for his execution.

We are not very different. We know that Jesus is the Messiah and Lord of all, and yet we live our lives just like his killers. We stand with one foot in faith and one foot in our humanity. “HOW can there be a God who does not want us to suffer when God’s own son is tortured and executed?” “HOW can there be a God who does not want suffering in the world when in fact there IS so much suffering all around us?” “HOW, HOW, HOW?” we shout at the wind outraged by the silence.

How can we humans, as weak and vulnerable as we are, be expected to trust a God that seems to allow such suffering? The outrage at the inability of anyone to give a reasonable answer fuels the desire to just eat, drink, and be merry because there may be no tomorrow.

In the 1300s during the worst of the plagues in Europe, the people watched helplessly while 30 to 80% of their families and friends died horribly from the Black Death. They were understandably frightened and outraged. They blamed God. They lashed out. In some villages the priests were hanged, since if the villagers could not put God in the gallows, they could at least put his representatives there.  Yes, outrage at God leads to violence.

But there is some odd irony in the crucifixion of Jesus and the two criminals. It is Passover, and by custom Pilate can release a prisoner from his sentence at the will of the crowd. “Whom do you want to crucify?” he asks. “Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

Now this crowd wasn’t witness to the kind of unimaginable suffering of the European plague, but like us they did stand there with one foot in hope that what they saw in Jesus was real, and one foot in their squalid humanity. They acted like sheep in a thunderstorm, like any of us would act. They followed the mob rule of the crowd and they called out “Crucify him.”

Pilate wanted to get rid of the troublemaker Barabbas, but the crowd called to release him. Pilate could not find any charges to stick against Jesus, but the crowd called to crucify him. Barabbas did nothing to deserve his release; in fact he probably deserved the punishment set for him. But he got a free pass that day.

And so did we.

To be baptized means simply to be immersed. The original baptisms by John took place in a river where the person being baptized would be fully immersed under the water three times into the name of the Father, Son. and Holy Spirit. Coming up out of the water each time symbolized rebirth and new life. Like so much about church this splendid ritual of gathering by the river and really dunking people gradually morphed over time so we simply sprinkle some water on the forehead of the one being baptized. By minimizing the real thing we are saying sprinkling is enough. It’s symbolic anyway.

To be baptized INTO the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit comes from the idea that the very name of the Trinity carries power. We have a vestige of that notion in our legal system today where someone may speak on behalf of another person. But what is the power of that name?

Turn to page 308 [of the Book of Common Prayer] and look at the prayer after baptism. “Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon your servant the forgiveness of sin…” I do not think the wording there is a mistake. It is intentionally ambiguous.

The common interpretation of baptism is that OUR sins are forgiven by God. But we are made in God’s image. We are given the powers that Jesus’ disciples had, and in fact Jesus tells us he gives us GREATER powers than the disciples. One of those powers is forgiveness of sin.

There is so much pain and suffering and violence in the world at every level. From the intimate sphere of family life to our jobs and local communities, all the way to our nation and the world. You cannot drive down the street without encountering an aggressive driver. You cannot go to work or school without finding a bully somewhere. And you cannot turn on the news without hearing about bombs and bullets somewhere in the world.

The way of the world is to solve conflict by just having a bigger stick. The biggest guy with the biggest club wins the battle. But that is not what Jesus teaches. God may forgive our sins, but do we and so are we able to forgive the offenses others have done to us?

Many times in counseling I encounter people who say they are unable to forgive the parent for their alcoholism or their abuse, or they cannot forgive the betrayal of the ex-spouse, or they cannot forgive the colleague at work who gossiped and told lies. But if God has the ability to forgive sins and we are given the power to forgive sins in baptism, why do we say we are not able to forgive? In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to forgive our wrongdoings in the same way as we forgive others.

Forgiveness is not an ability we are given, it is a choice we make. The only difference we will make in this world as Christians is how we forgive others who have wronged us. We will relieve the suffering in the world one wrong at a time.

So get out there and do the hard work of forgiveness. You may not reconcile with everyone, and that is not the point. When you forgive those who have wronged you, your heart will change and you will be much closer to God.

One important aspect of the life of Jesus is that for every miracle performed in the Old Testament, Jesus does the same thing in his life only bigger or better. Elijah feeds the widow for eight days, Jesus feeds 5,000. Moses parts the Red Sea, Jesus walks on the sea. It is just like that line from the old musical, “Anything he can do I can do better.” Or “Anything Moses does Jesus does better.” Here we see again that Moses goes up to Mount Sinai where the appearance of the Lord was like a devouring fire on top of the mountain. Moses would stay there 40 days, and he would return to his people transfigured.

As perfectly modern people, we can lean on science to help us debunk the miracles of the Bible. Walk on water? Nonsense. Raised from the dead? Preposterous! Feed 4,000 in the desert? Are you out of your mind? Turn dazzling white and talk to two guys who have been dead more than a 1,000 years? What have you been smokin’?

Thomas Jefferson felt exactly this way. His response was to take the Bible and cut out what he considered the “authentic words and teachings of Jesus.” The Jesus of the Jefferson Bible is nothing more than a “mild humanitarian moralizer” who was executed as a criminal by the Romans. The Jesus of rational thought is about as close to the real thing as the life sized cardboard cutouts of celebrities where we stand next to them and have our photographs taken.

Going back to the story, the elements of magic pile on so much here that it is impossible for a modern reader to take them seriously: the dazzling white robes, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, Jesus talking to them, the glowing cloud on the mountaintop, the voice of God from the cloud… Who could actually believe that all this happened?

Atheist writers these days are making quite a bit of money claiming that this whole Bible and religion thing is all just fiction that is too bizarre to take seriously. A recent book title says it all for this side: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up.

Some writers in the ancient world held an equal disdain. In his Life of Nero, late first century author Suetonius described Christians as “a set of men adhering to a novel and mischievous superstition.” About the same period, the writer Tacitus took jabs at Christian belief as “pernicious superstitions.” Finally a second century governor in what is now Turkey complained to the Emperor Trajan about his efforts to prosecute Christians. “I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves serving as deaconesses, but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition.”

(A little aside here: One large denomination maintains that only males can be ordained yet here is a letter from a non Christian in the second century talking about female deacons. Hmmm…)

So here is my confession: I have been a scientist for more years than I have been a priest. Over the years I have tried to whittle down the mysteries and miracles. I have blended creative use of science with the literary devices of myth and metaphor. I find it breathtaking to consider the transfiguration might have happened just the way it is described.

C. S. Lewis noted that we should acknowledge those aspects of Christianity that we find obscure, difficult, or repulsive. When we own those things, we are less likely to “skip, slur, or ignore what we find disagreeable.” Even Harvey Cox, in his book When Jesus Comes to Harvard, warns us against whittling down the sweeping vision of Christian belief into something manageable and lackluster.

Consider the writers of the Gospel. In a time when being Christian was dicey at best and often life-threatening, why would the Gospel writers falsify a story that could easily be refuted? Why would they risk their cause knowing that outrageous claims would cause them harm financially, socially, politically, and even physically? No matter how bizarre the transfiguration may seem to us, would Peter, James, and John all have denied or downplayed the experience they had?

I can tell you that one of the humbling aspects of modern science is that for all of its accomplishments, physics and mathematics only have credible theories to account for about 1% of the known universe. You don’t hear much about this from the popular atheist writers. It might weaken their case and diminish their income. So in the 99% of the universe that we know nothing about, might there be room for realities we do not yet understand?

The important point here is not science versus religion. It is whether we can accept the breathtaking truth of these accounts. Can we allow the unsettling nature of the transfiguration to work on us? What if it really is all true? Can we accept a Jesus walking across the lake to us? Can we go up the mountain with him and meet long dead prophets? Can we begin to believe in the power of this Jesus so much that we can do similar things?

When we grow in faith to accept these things the way Peter, James, and John did, then we too will become like that burning bush Moses encountered. Scripture says it was on fire but it was not consumed by the fire. May this Gospel set you on fire, too.

For at least the first 800 years of the church, adults were baptized at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. They spent three years before their baptism in constant classes and in programs doing works of charity for the poor and needy. They were seated in a special area in church and were dismissed after the sermon to attend their classes or “catechism.” They were not allowed to take communion until after baptism.

The interrogatory portion of the baptismal liturgy where the celebrant asks questions of the candidates or their sponsors, and the candidates and sponsors respond, is an ancient part of our liturgy dating back to the earliest days of the church.

When a new religion enters a region of the world, it does not just appear instantly and wipe out all the earlier religious belief. There is a very common process we call “syncretism”, where pre-existing religious beliefs are incorporated into the new religion. In the early days of the church in the Greco-Roman world, people believed that different directions on the compass had different spiritual meanings. Native Americans hold similar beliefs here. The east, the direction most church altars face, is the direction of the rising sun and is considered the direction of spiritual enlightenment by many world religions. In contrast, the west, the direction of the setting sun, is considered evil.

In the early church there were no pews for people to sit during the 2.5 hour services. When the priest asked the candidates if they rejected the devil and all the spiritual forces of evil that reject God, the baptismal candidates would turn around, face west, and spit, indicating their rejection of the devil.

Temptation is such a natural part of life. Many of you may remember the old Bill Cosby line where the child tells her mother that “The devil made me do it.” Even as adults our motivation for doing something tempting or not doing it connects directly to our image of God and our understanding of Jesus.

Some of us have difficulty getting the idea of God as judge and punisher out of our heads and hearts. Many people like this will endure week after week of “You are bad and going to hell if you don’t shape up” preaching. In this perspective, there is almost no room for Jesus, the cross, or forgiveness. Punishment is almost all self-inflicted.

Others of us have slow conversion experiences. We tend to look upon altar calls, televangelists, and stories of instant conversion with suspicion. We know that God in Jesus Christ loves us and forgives us. It can take months or years or even a lifetime before the knowledge in our heads works its way into our hearts; just like Nicodemus.

We are going to merge the wonderfully scripted Gospel you experienced of Jesus’ temptation with the story for this Sunday of Nicodemus.

Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, is intrigued by the reports he has heard about Jesus. “Could this Jesus be the one? He wondered. So Nicodemus arranges a time to see Jesus at night. He does not want to be seen by his fellow Jews as this might cast doubts on his leadership. But nighttime in the Gospel according to John is also a time of unbelief, ignorance, and temptation.

In their first encounter, Nicodemus interprets Jesus literally and he completely misses the idea how one can be born again or from above (the word translated “born again” is ambiguous and could equally be “born from above”). In his first attempt to get to know this enigmatic Jesus, Nicodemus fails and he disappears from the scene for a while.

In chapter 7, Nicodemus reappears and makes a somewhat hesitant defense of Jesus. He seems to have moved from doubt to possibility. At the end of the Gospel when Jesus is buried, Nicodemus accompanies Joseph of Arimathea with an exorbitant and very expensive quantity of spices for burial. Through this Gospel Nicodemus in three appearances moves from complete doubt to possibility to the position of a generous believer.

Is not the journey of Nicodemus the journey all of us make? We have baptized little Andrew but does that instantly guarantee that he will become a generous believer? What kind of upbringing does it take to make someone a generous believer and what difference does it make in the world anyway?

It takes not just a village to raise a child, it takes a whole community of generous believers; people who believe so strongly in the outrageous claims of the Bible that they willingly give money and give of themselves to other people they don’t even know. Why do they give this way? Because Jesus gave himself for us.

What difference does it make in a world with earthquakes, tsunamis and burning nuclear power plants? Because whether we live in Fukushima Japan or Muskogee Oklahoma, every one of us will one day sooner or later face the dark abyss with the sign posted next to it that says “No hope.” That dark place may be loss of a loved one, disease, accident, or just the process of getting older. In that place we may encounter other generous givers who will be helping us. In that dark place we will also encounter Jesus who will take our place.

Andrew’s Christian life will likely be more like Nicodemus, the slow awakening journey. The Gospel is our guide in this journey. It boils down to the title of a popular movie a few years ago. “Pay it forward.”

Today we line up two stories from John’s Gospel. Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews comes to Jesus by night. The unnamed Samaritan woman at the well comes to Jesus in broad daylight. The contrasts continue. Nicodemus is a Jew and a leader. The Samaritan woman is of a tribe that had unfriendly, even hostile relations with the Jews. The Jews considered Samaritans to be half Jewish because they intermarried with Assyrian tribes for six hundred years. Talk about holding a grudge.

We are told that Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a righteous leader of the Jews. The Samaritan woman has had five husbands in a life that was likely more tragic than scandalous. She comes to the well at noon in the heat of the day to avoid contact with other women of the village. She is outcast and lonely. Her ancestors on the Assyrian side of the family tree worshiped idols. The Jews of Jerusalem haven’t forgotten it.

While both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman completely miss important things that Jesus says to them, look at who recognizes the true identity of Jesus. As we discussed last week, Nicodemus takes the entire three years of Jesus’ earthly ministry before he slowly warms up and believes who Jesus really is. The Samaritan woman is the first person in the Bible to whom Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah. Echoing God’s name to Moses, Jesus tells the woman, “I am he.”

So I ask you, does God have a sense of humor or what? Jesus first reveals that he is the Messiah not to Caesar, not to Pilate, not to the disciples, but to an unnamed, lonely, outcast Samaritan woman in the dusty outback of Samaria. And we read this Gospel story of the woman with five husbands the same week that Elizabeth Taylor with her seven husbands (or was it eight?) is called to her rest!

Today I want to introduce you to a topic you probably never knew existed. It is called the history of interpretation. For example during the period of slave trading in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was common for clergy to preach sermons to slaves citing passages from Paul that encouraged them to submit to their masters. Hopefully today we would never interpret scripture along those lines nor preach sermons like that. When it comes to the subject of the treatment of women by preachers and the public, sadly we often find ourselves stuck in the same kinds of interpretations we heard about slaves two centuries ago.

You can line up nearly two thousand years of preaching about the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and how Eve ate the apple of knowledge and wisdom after being tempted by the serpent. Right down to the present day you will hear sermons that say “Eve was tempted. She ate the apple. She committed the original sin.” But if you go back to the text you will find that it literally says “Adam was standing right beside her.”

NOW if you ask whether Adam as master of the household exercised good manly leadership in this situation you find that instead of grabbing Eve by the hand and saying “Let’s get out of here, this serpent is a nut cake” he stands there complicit in his silence. He must be thinking “OK, this seems a little shaky, so Eve, you eat the apple and let’s see what happens.”

NOW that we examine the text a bit closer the issue of who committed the original sin is not so clear. Any reasonable interpretation would have to say, BOTH were guilty. Yet the tired old interpretation that Eve was guilty and therefore women are somehow spiritually or morally inferior is an interpretation that benefits one party (men) at the expense of another (women).

In the same way, if you look at interpretations of this story of the Samaritan woman at the well, you find two thousand years of preaching casting her in the role of a harlot, a sinful woman of loose morals, and even the village prostitute. Yet a closer examination of this text reveals no information that would lead us to these conclusions.

Notice that Jesus does not mention repentance to her, so how can we conclude that her sin is an issue here? The woman could very well have been widowed, abandoned, or divorced multiple times. Her present “husband” could be an arrangement of financial dependence, sanctioned by Old Testament law where a childless woman must marry her deceased husband’s brother. There are all kinds of situations that would render this woman’s life tragic rather than scandalous.

When the woman says “I see you are a prophet”, she is making a confession of faith. Jesus in turn sees her for her dependence and loneliness. Jesus sees her not as a hated Samaritan, not as a woman, not as a person with a tragic past, but as a child of God – with value, significance, and dignity in God’s eyes. Given this reading of the text, why do so many churches perpetuate misogyny in our world today? Why do churches marginalize half of society?

The sad truth is that by interpreting, preaching, and insisting that women are somehow inferior to men, entire churches have historically benefitted. From Genesis to Revelation the projection of masculine fear of the feminine into preaching and the very framework of churches themselves has led to more human misery and suffering than all the wars in history.

What we hear in church and the framework for how our churches are organized matters to society. If the subtext of the sermon week after week contains a message about the inferiority of women, then you will find some families where violence towards women seems to be somehow condoned. If you see male clergy sticking to the tired old line that the disciples were all male, therefore only men can be ordained (I might add the disciples were all Jewish too), you will find businesses clinging to compensation and hiring policies favoring men over women.

If we can only rid ourselves of bias and judgment; if we can only rise above petty moralistic interpretations, these stories have powerful transforming messages for us. This story about the woman at the well is not at all about morality or her sinfulness. This story is about the identity of Jesus, the Messiah who offers us dignity and new life in a relationship with God.

After all, she is the first person in the Gospels to seek out others and tell them about Jesus. “Come and see” she says to her neighbors. Jesus is still at that well today. He looks you in the eyes and offers living water, new life, so that you may live abundantly. Like the woman at the well, can you accept his offer? Will you run to your neighbors to tell them about the Jesus you met at the well?