the call to something different

The call to something different. (Mark 16.1-8)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

March 31, 2024

The great Zen teacher and admirer of Jesus, Thich Nhat Hanh, offered words meant to help us on Easter. Jesus is alive, Nhat Hanh said, when his followers put his teachings into practice. Any time and any place we live as he taught, Jesus’ spirit and energy continue in the world.

I think of these words every Easter, and I have preached on them before. Yet I’m not sure I really understood them until last Sunday. After a lovely Palm Sunday service, we attended an afternoon performance of the Charleston Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Charleston Symphony playing side-by-side. They had chosen to play Antonín Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, a challenging and beautiful piece that lasted just over half an hour.

The piece was long enough to get lost in the four movements that Dvořák had written more than a century ago. It was a major-key symphony with melancholic minor-key sections threaded throughout. Dvořák suggested that he wanted it to feel like walking through a darkened wood before finally emerging into bright sunlight. As such, it felt nearly perfect for Palm Sunday and the shadowy week leading to Easter.

The musicians played the symphony beautifully, and at some point during the second or third movement, I began to get carried away. I didn’t feel as if I was listening to individual musicians playing notes off the page or an even entire symphony rising and falling with the time and motion of the music. Rather, Nhat Hanh’s words returned to me, and I felt that I was actually hearing Antonín Dvořák himself. The hall filled with music that had once filled his head. We were hearing him. His life, his feeling, his wonder at walking in the woods. If Jesus is alive when we put his teachings into practice, then so was Antonín when the symphony played his music. His spirit, his energy, were brought to life.

So there I sat, unwittingly beginning to celebrate Easter a week early. Or at least feeling that I was in the company of a 19th-Century Czech composer who liked to spend time in the forest as much as we do. I was jolted from this reverie at the beginning of the final movement, a bright trumpet fanfare that was positively joyous. Later, I would learn that the conductor Rafael Kubelík once instructed his players by saying to them: Friends, in Bohemia our trumpets never call to battle — they always call to the dance! And that’s how the symphony felt as it swelled toward its breathless conclusion. Like a call to a joyful dance. Like a walk on a sunlit path. Like a deep and abiding gratitude for this life.

I walked out of the hall feeling that we had all spent time with Dvořák. As I watched the young musicians filing out to meet their families and friends, I thought of how much work they had put into bringing it to life. They carried instruments and sheet music. They wore tuxedos and fine dresses. They had practiced for months. And they had brought the music off the page and into the moment. What a gift it was! And, of course, that’s Easter.

We gather this morning to remember and retell a story that’s far older than a bit of Dvořák’s sheet music. For a couple of millennia, people have been telling the story of how Jesus and the movement he began continued after his trial and execution. Today we heard Mark’s version of the story, which is the oldest of the four canonical gospels or the gospels that are included in our Bibles. Mark’s story of Jesus is the shortest and it moves swiftly; the whole gospel can easily be read in one sitting. In fact, if we had to describe the book in a single word that word would likely be: movement. Mark’s story really moves. And here, the end, is no exception.

After Jesus died and had been buried, we are told, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome go to the tomb to anoint his body with spices. When they arrive, they find the stone rolled away, a robed messenger who tells them not to be afraid, and an otherwise empty grave. Jesus is not here, says the messenger, he is going on ahead of you. You’ll find him there, just ahead, on the way. Then Mark says the women flee filled with terror, amazement, confusion, and wonder. It’s all a bit unclear. They said nothing to anyone, the gospel says. Not at first, anyway. They were afraid.

And that’s what scholars call the shorter ending of Mark. In some of the oldest manuscripts, that’s all we have. There’s a longer ending, too, but it moves almost as quickly. Jesus appears to a few friends and students and then he is gone. In either case, the idea is that the movement Jesus began will now be left to his followers. If it is to continue, they are the ones who will have to keep it alive. There’s nothing in the gospel that explains how exactly they should do that or how difficult it’s going to be or how deeply countercultural or all the trouble that it will cause. Mark just leaves us with this good news: Jesus is alive when we put his teachings into practice. And that we includes Mary Magdalene and Salome just as well as it includes you and I. So we had really better get to work.

It occurs to me that if the youth symphony can bring Dvořák to life through effort, skill, and dedication, then so can we bring Jesus to life, bring his spirit and energy into the world by giving ourselves to the work of living out the things he was trying to teach. But these things don’t come easily. And they can’t really be done alone. It takes the whole symphony, I mean, the whole congregation, to breathe the teachings to life and ensure that Jesus’ spirit and energy continue. Yet imagine what would happen if we did.

Jesus taught radical inclusivity. If there is one thing that was clear about his life, it was that he was always crossing boundaries. He included women and children, who were not traditionally afforded status, he ate with outcasts and those labeled sinners, who lived at the societal margins, and he rejected the idea of having enemies outright and told stories to subvert such assumptions. The movement Jesus was starting was for everybody, especially those who had been left out before. According to the gospels, the only ones who really had trouble with it were those invested in the religious and political status quo.

Jesus offered a prophetic critique. He wasn’t afraid to challenge the harms of religion or turn over the tables when it became transactional. He said, time and time again, that the kin-dom he was teaching was different. It was made of everybody. It was spread out all around. It wasn’t to be found far away or in a great house of worship or publicly pious ritual, but rather in the simple breaking of bread and the sharing of what we have. In all of it, Jesus was critiquing religion that had lost its way and become judgmental, calloused, and hard-hearted.

And Jesus practiced creative nonviolence. When given the choice, he told his most zealous followers to put away their swords. He said to turn the other cheek. He encouraged forgiveness and the making of amends. Not just seven times, he said. But seventy times seven. As many times as it takes. To live by the sword, Jesus taught, is always to die by it. He chose the path of nonviolence instead, which was as countercultural in his day as it is in ours.

Just imagine what would happen if all Jesus’ followers were to put these things into practice on Easter. Radical inclusivity. Prophetic critique. Creative nonviolence. Or just imagine if we gathered in this sanctuary, and online, did. If we began, like those young musicians, to run our fingers across the page and begin the work of bringing it all to life. Hours of our dedication, practice, commitment, and love bringing Jesus’ spirit and energy into the world, here and now. It’s a vision, friends. But it’s also an invitation.

I left the symphony a week ago, but I’m still hearing that fourth movement. All those trumpets calling us to the dance. What if we left church in the same way, hearing Jesus’ call? That call to dance a new movement of love. Love that is inclusive and prophetic and nonviolent. And what if, in so doing, we really did bring his spirit newly to life, as we went from this place, saying: Happy Easter!

Amen.

instead of being afraid, she chose to be Black, queer, and beautiful

adding some Blackness to Zen tradition

Instead of being afraid, she chose to be Black, queer, and beautiful. (Jn. 3.16-17)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

March 10, 2024

When angel Kyodo williams was a girl, she read comic books. She liked the characters who were outsiders like herself. The X-Men comics were her favorites, particularly an antihero called Wolverine, who was misunderstood.

Like many in the Black community, angel attended the Baptist church. She liked the services, but she never felt them in the same way that others did. She wasn’t sure exactly how she belonged. She loved the stories about Jesus, which she read from her stepmother’s oversized white leather Bible. angel was drawn to the uncomfortable parts of his story. When Jesus cried out, “Why have you forsaken me?” it resonated with her. Sometimes she felt forsaken, too.

So angel wasn’t on track to become a spiritual leader or even a particularly religious person until she found a way that wasn’t common in the Black community. She happened upon Shunryu Suzuki’s classic book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and began to learn about Buddhism. Suzuki had been instrumental in bringing Zen to the West from Japan. Perhaps the opening lines of his book had grabbed angel. “In the beginner’s mind,” he wrote, “there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

This idea of beginner’s mind, that newcomers to the practice can see things that long-time adherents have lost, is key for many Zen people. They often enter the tradition with childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. The hope is to try and keep it, to practice as much as possible with beginner’s mind. And angel did that. Only she brought her own life experience with her.

At the time angel began to practice, Zen had made great inroads into the English-speaking population. It had moved out of Japanese immigrant communities and into the broader American consciousness, thanks to Suzuki Roshi, the Beat poets, and the new Zen centers that welcomed skeptics and seekers. Yet these centers were filled with mostly white people of privileged backgrounds. As a Black woman, angel observed her own discomfort with the whiteness of these spaces. And as a queer woman, she found that she felt a bit more at home in places like the Village Zendo in New York, where many gay men attended. She leaned into her feelings of searching discomfort. She was still an outsider at times, yet drawn to meditation, breathing, chanting, and being in communities attempting to liberate themselves from illusions.

When you listen to angel teach now, you can hear the result of her persistence. She kept going into the spaces that were available to her, but she also began to cultivate her own communities of love and solidarity. Her life was filled not only with Buddhists, but with social justice activists, Black women, queer artists, and many others all trying to respond to the moment in which they were living. She became deeply involved in movements to create lasting change. Black Lives Matter. The Poor People’s Campaign. The People’s Climate March. angel didn’t see the difference between the inner life and the outer one. “Love and justice are not two [things],” she said. Rather, in life we set our intention “to hear the cries of the world, to step into the experience of awakening to [its] suffering. . .and the desire to bring an end to that suffering.” Yet the only way to begin the work is to make the connection between contemplation and action.

angel teaches that what we need is to learn to sit with what makes us most uncomfortable. To begin, the discomfort may be in our heads. She laughs when discussing her first attempts to meditate. When we finally sit still, she says, “what we are confronted with is just the assault and the amount of thought and the mixed messages that just inhabit our body and our mind and our experience on an ongoing basis. . .when we sit, the first thing we’re met with is not quiet or calm or peace. The first thing we’re met with is, ‘Oh my God. Who is in here, and why won’t they shut up? How can I get them to stop?'” What meditation helps us with, angel explains, is slowing down enough to sort through all the voices and decide which ones truly belong to us. So many of them are passed down. This is our father’s voice or our mother’s. That is something the culture taught us about ourselves. This is something ingrained by capitalism. That is a bias of patriarchy. This is an inheritance of racism. That is the result of militarism. And so on. All of these things, all of these voices. . .and the only path to liberation is to sit with them and then free ourselves from the ones that aren’t really ours. Of course, it raises the question of who we truly are underneath it all. If we ever begin to ask that question collectively, or more importantly to begin answering it, then angel believes we’ll be on the path to a real transformation.

So she creates spaces for us to sit with and meditate on the things we’re most afraid of, the things that trouble our souls, and the things that make us so uncomfortable. She speaks often about cultivating a kind of fearlessness. Fearlessness doesn’t mean that we aren’t afraid; it means that we’re choosing to live with courage and resolve anyway. It’s a beautiful invitation, and issuing it has helped angel create mulitcultural, multiracial, wildly heterogenous communitites of great joy and power. Remember, she always felt like an outsider. And she leaned into that feeling of discomfort, following it into a new and liberating place.

It leads us, in a way, to our scripture lesson, which has made many of us feel uncomfortable because of the ways it has been used. John 3.16 has long been cited by evangelical Christians in order to draw a sharp dividing line between insiders and outsiders. “For God so loved the world,” it says, that God sent Jesus, “so that everyone who believes. . .may not perish, but may have eternal life.” Many of us have heard this used to claim there’s only one way of being or believing, or worse, to frighten others with ideas about reward or punishment in the afterlife. After listening to angel Kyodo williams, I am certain she would want us to meet our evangelical friends with compassion. To listen to what is at stake for them, try and hear what they are most afraid of, and perhaps even to understand that they are suffering. After all, anyone who sees the world in either/or, black and white, inflexible terms is bound to suffer.

Yet there is also the next verse, somehow less often quoted. John 3.17 offers a clear word of love and grace. God did not sent Jesus, it says, “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.” We may wonder why this more universal love isn’t invoked more often. Both verses are offered in the context of Jesus’ conversation with a religious leader named Nicodemus, who we are told, is himself afraid and doesn’t really understand what Jesus is doing. If only Nicodemus had time to sit in meditation and sift through all the competing voices in his head so that he could choose who he wanted to be without worry. The story doesn’t say much about what happened to Nicodemus afterwards, but we do know about Jesus. He went off, part outcast, part liberator, and lived his truth so fearlessly that we still tell the story. It’s there in print for any little Black girl to read after she finishes her Wolverine comic. It’s there for the rest of us to sit with, especially the parts that make us uncomfortable. Like forgiving our enemies. Praying for those who persecute us. Laying down our swords. Remembering the poor, the lonely, and the outcast. Getting free of our fears and so that we can just love everybody.

These are the things we’re invited to meditate on and then, once we are grounded in them, to give ourselves fearlessly in care for a suffering world. We may choose to join angel in the joyful task of creating radically diverse communities of spiritual and physical liberation. To this day, she wakes early, performs her yoga stretches, and sits in meditation. Then she makes a good strong cup of black coffee for the work ahead. Friends, may the same be so with us.

    Amen.  

*See angel Kyodo williams, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002)

and On Being with Krista Tippett, “angel Kyodo williams: The World is Our Field of Practice,” April, 19, 2018, accessed online at https://onbeing.org/programs/angel-kyodo-williams-the-world-is-our-field-of-practice/

not everything happens for a reason, but some things set us on a path

Not everything happens for a reason, but some things set us on a path. (Jn. 2.13-21)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

March 4, 2024

It was hard enough when my father died. He was still a young man, only 47 years old. I was younger still, a college senior. We were very close.

I left school for a semester to help care for him, and the days were a crash course in mindfulness. Don’t miss this moment. Every conversation matters. I felt life’s fragility in my chest.

So it was hard enough when he died. But then I returned to college, where I spent a lot of time in the religion building. And, friends, that’s when a new level of suffering began. Because have you ever experienced the certainty of young, evangelical, Christian men? It’s the worst. My classmates, having had no such experience of their own, were quick to interpret mine, smooth it out, try and make sense of it. I listened to their thoughts. I bit my tongue. My eyes filled with angry tears. Everything happens for a reason, they said. Finally, one day I snapped. What’s the reason? I demanded. They left me alone after that.

I did not believe, then, nor do I believe now, that my father suffered and died for some reason. And there is no reason that anyone could offer that would serve as consolation. I didn’t need anyone to try and make sense of my sadness. I just needed people to meet me where I was, which was a place of real grief and struggle. Things had fallen apart. The only thing I could honestly do was sit with the pieces.

My guess is that almost everyone in this room knows what I’m talking about. Everyone here has suffered. And so many have been offered the callous platitude that perhaps it’s all for the best somehow. But I still think it’s all right for us to answer back. How is it all for the best?

You must know, then, that I began my seminary training with this question in mind. For the three years of our master’s coursework, I looked for better responses than the ones I’d been given. I found some kindreds in Tolstoy and Camus, Sölle and Cone, Jesus, Qoheleth, and, on occasion, the psalmist. Yet much of what I found was unsatisfactory. So many had worked throughout the ages to try and fashion a reason for suffering or shape it into a story with a better ending. And I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was all a rather fancy form of denial. I still wanted room to grieve for my father without anyone trying to soften it.

It wasn’t until after seminary when I was a practicing minister that I heard someone say what I had been hoping to hear for years. She was not a Christian, but she was speaking with one. Pema Chödrön is the resident teacher at the Tibetan Buddhist Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I did not know her until I stumbled upon her interview with Bill Moyers airing on a local public television station. I was drawn into their conversation by its depth and the opening story she told. It was a story of suffering and spirituality, but she stopped short of saying that things in her life had happened or a reason. Listen to how she told it.

Before she was a revered Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön had been living a relatively quiet life with her husband in New Mexico. One day she was sitting outside drinking tea when he arrived home from work. She said her husband got out of the car, walked up to her, and said something that made the world stand still. Things haven’t been working between us, he said. I’m having an affair, and we need to get a divorce. Pema Chödrön said that in that moment, everything came apart. The life she had made, the identity she had, the home and family she had known. In the months that followed, she grieved for all of it.

Pema Chödrön said that, looking back, the experience itself was a kind of teacher. It taught her what Buddhists call groundlessness or impermanence. Rather than rushing to put it all back together, she simply sat with things as they were, which was a mess. The truth was not that everything was ordered according to some great purpose or plan, which must then be uncovered; the truth was that everything changed. Things were not, things are not, permanently fixed. Just look out the window and watch the changing weather. Just look within and observe your own turbulent feelings. Just remember your life and its many different seasons. Things are always in process. “The truth is,” she wrote, “things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and then they fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Oh, that’s what I most needed to hear. Some real honesty about our situation. Sometimes things fall apart and we haven’t got any explanation. Yet Pema Chödrön took one more step that was so helpful. It was a subtle step, but it made all the difference. Her experience of suffering led her to begin a meditation practice. She wanted to look more deeply into the nature of things, having felt a bit deluded in her life before. With time, she developed her practice, she learned and grew, she became a skillful teacher, then a best-selling author, and so on. Her teachings helped countless numbers of people. Even so, Pema Chödrön resisted the idea that her suffering had happened for a reason. It wasn’t causal, she explained. I didn’t have to suffer in order to then become some great teacher. Rather, I simply suffered. And out of the suffering, I began to ask if I might become more compassionate, more present, and more caring to others who were also suffering.

She moved from “everything happens for a reason” to “everything happens. . .and since it does, maybe we could soften our hearts toward each other.”

It’s interesting to look at this morning’s scripture reading with Pema Chödrön’s story in mind. Because it may help us to hear a text that is familiar to many of us in a new light. In John Chapter 2, we are told of a time Jesus went to the temple and angrily turned over the tables of the money changers. He was upset by a kind of transactional religion. Changing money and buying animals for offerings was a clear “if this, then that” kind of practice. It wasn’t exactly “everything happens for a reason,” but it was a way of bargaining with the Mystery, an attempt to interpret things and smoothe them out. Observe these rituals and all will be well. And this is the thinking that Jesus overturns.

This house is not a marketplace, Jesus cries. Then he speaks of the destruction of the temple, its basic impermanence, and its ultimate rebuilding. He isn’t talking about the structure itself, however; the gospel writer says he is talking about his own body. What mattered was not the stone artifice, but the flesh and blood temple of lived experience. Jesus is trying to get to the heart of the matter. Everything changes, he is saying. Everything has to change. Everything is going to change. Everything is impermanent. This has never been a popular message. But it has always been true.

Here we have Jesus predicting his own death, acknowledging his impermanence, which people around him in the gospels never seem to understand or accept. He is calling them to come to terms with mortality and learn to live meaningfully and well while they are here. Follow me, he is saying. Follow me away from the illusion of permanence. Follow me away from the bargaining tables of transactional religion. Follow me away from the need to explain or make sense of everything. Follow me on a path that is much more simple and demanding in its honesty, courage, and risk.

There is so much wisdom in his invitation. It is the wisdom that makes room for our lived experiences and the experiences of others. Like a college kid who once grieved for his father. A new divorcée who began to sit meditation. Or anyone else in the pews on Sunday, who, having suffered, feels they have been set on a path. None of these things happened to us for a reason. And still they shape us.

As Pema Chödrön says, it isn’t easy, this being human. Yet if we are open to life, we may still be transformed. We may learn to live wholeheartedly with compassion. Maybe that’s all the explanation we really need.

Amen.