Texts on Sunday, April 23, 2006
John 20: 19-31; Acts 4: 32-37
The story in Acts about that first Christian community can cause a little heartburn in a Christian. They held everything in common? No one claimed private ownership of anything? Most of us are not ready to go there before we die. Must Christian faith lead in that direction? Obviously, the church dropped this pattern like a stone too heavy to carry across the field for the church’s one foundation. Contrary to some televangelist boosters of the free market, they did not lose interest because they foresaw that capitalism could never get off the ground if Christians kept sharing so nicely. I briefly lived in a commune in Copenhagen that wanted to hold to this property plan. Even shirts and belts and shoes were supposed to go into the mix. However, it was plain to see that members who had the most dynamic personalities dressed the best and had a more freedom with the community coffer. Love did not rule quite well enough there, even though their intentions aimed high. We may suppose that early Christian communities dropped the all-share-all plan as soon as pride raised its head in some leader and hurt responded, and dissensions spattered all their intentions.
Perhaps no members of any traditional church will ever love one another in a manner that can support such sharing. Nevertheless, there is still something very particular to learn from this account. It is not their particular practice, but their need to express their most personal joy, this presence of the living Christ, in a plainly public way. One of the Bible’s clearest bells, rung brightly in every book, Old Testament or New, is that personal faith has bold public consequences. So dramatic and consistent is this phenomenon that we might use it to propose an hypothesis for testing and discerning the vitality of our own faith. Where there is no legible public consequence arising from faith in the risen Christ, there faith must be blocked by some other god, or stopped by some other hope for happiness than that which God gives. Make an inventory. How does your personal faith in Christ show up in public? I don’t mean to suggest that you cannot answer that question. I do mean that in your own mind and within your own church, it is a strong practice to work the stiffness out of the thinking joint so that you can articulate the consequences of your faith.
All the stories of Jesus’ appearing to his disciples after Easter show how this personal meeting of the presence of Christ becomes a public matter. In the story of Thomas’ resistance to mere belief, the evangelist once more brings the reader squarely into the picture, who feels something like this: “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.” Now, the world calls this disciple “doubting Thomas” and wags its head in disapproval and prods us to wish to be numbered among the other, truer, more faithful disciples. Thomas, goes the standard summary, was wrong to have doubted.
But consider. What if Thomas had not risked being wrong because he worried. What will they think of me–ten against one? I don’t want to be weird. I ‘d rather go along with the crowd. Pretending to believe, he would have had no encounter with his risen Lord. Why, he would be just like so many church people who are a little embarrassed by the seriousness of religion; who do not know what people mean when they speak of experiencing the risen Lord; who nevertheless do not ask, for they don’t want to look stupid; and who go through the motions of religion, hiding behind the fig leaf of belief in order to be in the group. Of course, there is no positive public consequence from such religion, because it has no grounding in personal experience. Here in the story of Thomas is encouragement for just this sort of person–encouragement not to go along with the crowd, but to cry out for your own experience of God’s living Word. “Unless I touch and am touched, I will not believe.” Then see how the Lord responds to your need. Then hear from your own heart the utterance, My Lord and my God! Then know for yourself that this most personal thing must go public.
The funeral of Rev. William Sloane Coffin took place last Thursday in New York City’s immense Riverside Church, where Coffin had been senior minister some twenty years ago. At the family’s invitation, Bill Moyers recalled some of his interviews with this renowned activist minister and former chaplain of Yale University. Coffin’s son David, whom I tutored in several subjects long ago, told the large congregation what it was always to have shared his father with the world, such that calling him “my” father seemed to David narrow and not quite aligned with reality. Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, told of her collaboration with Bill, and read from the extraordinary collection of Bill’s sayings, published recently under the title Credo–“I believe.” The family had asked James Carroll, columnist for the Boston Globe, to offer the eulogy.
Plainly, Carroll spoke from a deeply personal friendship. He opened, asking, Who was that man? He left a long silence, then began tendering answers to the question. Coffin was a man of paradoxes, he said, born to privilege, yet a sharp critic of all who hold fast to privileges; a veteran of wars and a fierce patriot, yet who charged all true patriots to be loving and severe critics of this nation’s wayward disregard of justice; a complex man of simple faith; in sum, a “composition of oppositions,” Carroll said, and much more.
One sensed that Carroll’s speech, like a symphony, had still another, larger movement to play, and yet, no matter how he enlarged upon his subject, mere praise could not carry the crescendo. At last the speaker intoned once more, “Who was that man?” Was there to be still another encomium? “We cannot finally answer or take the measure of Bill Coffin’s life and work unless we ask the question as Bill himself had it and lived it,” he began, “unless we ask that question about the man upon whose life Bill wholly staked his own. For the question of Bill Coffin is finally the question about Jesus. Who was that man? In Jesus, first and last,” he said, “we see the paradox, the composition of oppositions, the poor peasant Jew who shook the wealth and power of imperial Rome, the untutored rabbi who teaches all the world; the Crucified who is the living One. Only in Jesus can the question of the brilliant light of William Sloane Coffin find its answer. Who was that man?” With strokes like these, Mr. Carroll completed his portrait. The great room filled with a hush.
To take up the thread of our earlier theme, in the ministry of William Sloane Coffin, the public consequence of personal faith cannot be missed. Now, examples from great lives often daunt our imagination of what is possible in our own. How many times I have heard church people rationalize their level of commitment to the neediest, saying, “I’m not Mother Teresa.” However astute the observation may be, it tells nothing of a person’s possibilities. James Carroll’s final claim in that funeral service must surely have rung a summoning bell in the deep inner rooms of more than a few listeners, for his word directed our gaze not to seek after Bill Coffin, but to seek after Jesus–to ask for an encounter with Jesus.
When I returned from the New York on Friday, I pulled Bill’s autobiography off the shelf. When it first came out, just before Bill began his ministry at Riverside Church in 1977, I had read this book very closely, for Bill was a mentor and friend to me, yet I did not consider myself a Christian then. In fact, I felt stuck in my disbelief, just like Thomas. I wanted to find out from Bill’s story what sort of an encounter he had had with Christ Jesus, for I trusted him more than any Bible story. But I did not find there any record of a personal encounter with the Lord. Instead, he wrote how in 1949, almost ready to sign up with the CIA for a tour of duty, he and a hundred others were introduced to Union Theological Seminary in one day.
[Reinhold Niebuhr] was the first speaker Saturday morning. On that occasion he was as eloquent a man as I had ever heard. He urged . . . us to go into the ministry only if we lost the battle to stay out. But an hour later, by the time he had painted a picture of the woes of the world including American racism and poverty, and had spoken of the need for church people to protest injustice in the name of God and human decency, I’m sure mine wasn’t the only soul crying out, “Take me!” . . . The afternoon offered no letup as we were bussed to various sites of the very woes we had heard described in the morning, notably East Harlem, where Bill Webber and three other recent graduates of Union had established a series of storefront churches. That night, still deeply shaken, I spent a couple of hours with Webber . . . He smiled at my confession that the events of the day had made mincemeat of my favorite contention that the churches were irrelevant to the social needs of the country and of the world. Then from him I heard the last persuasive words of the day: that ministers who had the courage of their convictions and knew what they were about had greater freedom to say and do what they wanted than good people in any other vocation. On Monday I sent a letter full of apologies to the CIA, and signed an application form to Union Theological Seminary. (p. 89)
As I read this so long ago, it seemed to me that, for Bill Coffin, the public consequence of ministry had mattered most to him, and that the most personal thing had not quite happened. But I was twenty-seven, profoundly out of sorts with the question of my vocation, to know what is worth doing. I did not find an answer here.
So very many things have happened since then. I see the question of the personal encounter with Christ very differently now. It will not surprise you that when I re-read his story the other night, I was drawn to different strands of his story. For example, over the page from what I’ve just read, he says of his first year at Union, “Slowly, I found myself changing from the seeker who looks hoping something’s there, to the kind who knows something’s there, if only he can find it.” (p. 89) Here is a young man in search of experience of Christ, just like Thomas.
Bill quit Union after one year and did actually go to work for the CIA for several years. It was five years later that he entered Yale Divinity School. There, he writes, “I gradually came to realize that the belief that Christ is Godlike is less important than the belief that God is Christlike. When Christians see Christ healing the hurt, empowering the weak, scorning the powerful, they are seeing transparently the power of God at work.” (p. 116) So, Bill did at last place his hand in the wounds of Christ. He came into his own personal experience of Christ and the public consequence has showered down upon us all for decades.
What about you? What is the public consequence of your faith, O Thomas, O Tanya, O Chris and Christine? Let’s the magical-Mother-Teresa excuses lie. Think rather of your work. Of your marriage, for marriage is one of your most public realities. The world cares about your marriage, and knows itself in part through your marriage, even after one of you is widowed. Think about your relationship with your children, for children are the flower of the public world: what issues from the most private moment between a man and a woman is the public, human world and its history. Think of the public consequence of your faith in your friendships as well, and finally in terms of your citizenship, which refers to the most comprehensive expression of your friendship with this world. The word “public” comes from the Latin for “people.” This is the simplest reason your faith must be public–because it is not for you alone, but for the people of God-for all of them.
What can you do for the people? See this. In our culture, the people are terribly afraid. Such is the natural, unspiritual condition of human beings, to be pleasure seekers who are terribly afraid of losing what pleasures they have, or have in mind, and suffering pain and loss. One of the tragic traits of Americans is that we claim to be so religious, and yet for so many, their religious theories aggravate the state of fear. See how easily Americans have been terrorized by their president and his advisors, who made cynical use of one disastrous day to intimidate this nation of noble traditions into surrendering precious spiritual gifts of honesty and respect and humane treatment for all. Now we make war and threats of war on obstreperous little nations and become like the worst of them in the process. We wiretap fellow citizens. We imprison citizens and foreigners without charge or access to counsel. We torture them, and send our vice president to the microphones to defend torture. We trash the environment and relieve the rich of their taxes. And so much more–it is wearying to think about. All this is possible only because the people are terrified, and because, in the main, they do not bring to awareness the contradiction between their terror and their desire for true faith. So many Americans do not accept that their personal faith must issue in public consequences of love and justice. If our hypothesis holds, they are terrified because some other god has gotten in the way of their encounter with true God. Some lesser happiness–homeland security?–has blocked and stopped their hope of a goodness and security only God can give.
What can you do out of utmost friendship for this frightened citizenship? Politics, however important, do not offer a big enough response. No–you who have encountered the Spirit of the Risen One know what it is to experience fear and yet, in spite of fear, to know yourself the more surely rooted and grounded in love which will never pass away. To live, to show, to speak this peace where there is no peace–this will be the most public consequence from this most personal thing.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2006
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