From Worship to Way: Midwife New Life!

Sermon, 5/9/10 (Ascension; Mother's Day). “Lord, is this the time when you (fill in the blank)?” How often we, like the earliest disciples, ask a question like this of God! But so that our empty tomb might become a fulfilled life, we have to let God ask us that same question …

Scriptures     Exodus 1:8-21    Acts 1:1-11

From Worship to Way:

Midwife New Life!

One of my favorite contemporary comedians is a frizzy-haired, sleepy-eyed deadpan artist named Steven Wright. Manipulating time fascinates Mr. Wright. A police officer, he said, once pulled him over for doing 80 miles per hour in a 55 mile per hour zone. “Do you realize you were doing 80 miles per hour in a 55 miles per hour zone?” the officer asked him. “Yes,” Wright replied, “but I wasn’t going to be out that long.”

Another time he visited a restaurant whose marquee declared, “Breakfast Anytime.” “OK,” Wright told the wait staff, “I’ll have French Toast during the Renaissance.”

The marquee of that same restaurant also declared, “Open 24 hours.” Wright visited one time, and the owner was locking it up. “But the sign says that you are open 24 hours,” Wright complained. “Yeah,” the owner replied. “But not in a row.”¹

In a more serious vein: Sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – know all too well the everyday struggles that their perceived manipulations of time can bring.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is not something I would wish on my own worst enemy. I suffered from this debilitating disorder for five interminable years during my mid-twenties. And “disorder”, I discovered, is a perfect designation for PTSD.

For when I suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder, the whole body became like a bad picture tube. My head may be one place, while the rest of my body was elsewhere. All too often, I could not accurately identify a given feeling with a given lived experience – the feeling that accompanied my experience may hit me, say, an hour later.

So I felt like I lived in a time warp. And that’s depressing. And the depression that accompanied my PTSD only complicated matters because, living in that time warp, I felt like I had been depressed all my life. There were no happier yesterdays … and there definitely wouldn’t be any happier tomorrows. I felt caught; trapped, in time. All perspective had been lost.

That’s the big lie of PTSD, for me: that time, like water torture, filled in all around me … rather than I fulfilled the time. Time used me; I did not use it. Or, as ex-prison inmates often say, “I simply did the time.”

Now, I do not know if the first disciples were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder between Good Friday and Pentecost – between losing Jesus’ life and gaining their own² – but this awkward 50 day interval between complete dependence on their rabbi to Spirit-filled interdependence on one another seems to have been a most confusing and painful for them. Even with that great, good news of Easter – Jesus is risen! – it was all so … disorienting. Confusing and painful enough that the disciples probably felt stuck in time.

And so, stuck in time, the disciples ask the Resurrected One today a question. A question not about sharing the Good News of his liberating defeat over death to the ends of the earth. Rather, it was a question wrapped up in their fears of the end of the world.³

And that question is: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Which is, of course, the one thing they wanted of a political Messiah all along. “Isn’t the present time on our side?” they were asking. “Won’t you now get these imperial oppressors off our backs?”

But Jesus knew what the real question of faith and hope was. It was not, “Is this the time?” Jesus knew that the real question of faith and hope was, “Do you have the time?”

The time in their lives – and in ours – to be his witnesses to their oppressors of injustice and fear. And then, out of that time, the sense of place to live into God’s space: as Jesus puts it today, “to the ends of the earth”.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 response to the so-called moderate white clergy in Alabama known for all eternity as the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, offers us this liberating message. He admonishes us that “time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively … Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of (those) willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”⁴

Oh, but it is so tempting for us all – regardless of what and how we may have suffered – to either experience a life-changing event or simply reach a stagnant place, and then wallow in the mire of “Lord, is this the time? Is this the time when you are going to come through for me? Is this the time that you are going to come through for us?”

How many of you remember the late Eldridge Cleaver? If you have never heard of Eldridge Cleaver, and lest you think otherwise, he was not a member of Ward and June’s family in “Leave It to Beaver”. Au contraire. Eldridge Cleaver was the prominent and endlessly colorful information minister, or spokesperson, of the militant Black Panther Party based in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

During one of his countless speeches, Cleaver – an ex-convict – shouted out, “So many people want to REEE-habilitate me. But tell me this: How can anyone REEE-habilitate me when I’ve never been HAAA-bilitated?”⁵

Later in his life, after writing his bestselling Panther manifesto Soul on Ice, Cleaver became a Christian and wrote a sequel: Soul on Fire. Though he struggled many years thereafter with addiction to crack cocaine, Cleaver at least glimpsed through a newfound faith his HAAAbilitation as someone who at least sensed he was – as he had been all along – created in the image of God.

I have found over my fifteen-plus years in pastoral ministry that so many of us walk around fearing, deep down, we are created defective from the get-go. It runs deeper than guilt. It’s something called shame. Fearing that we won’t just do some wrong things, but that something is wrong with us. Fearing that we have never been HAAAbilitated. That we have never been given all the tools to enjoy life and live it according to God’s glorious intention and immense pleasure for us.

And so, like the first disciples staring blankly up into the heavens after an ascended Jesus, we find ourselves prone in our shame to pine for the great and powerful God to act “in God’s due time” – whatever that curious turn-of-phrase means. We are prone to look for God to REEEhabilitate, to restore, God’s kingdom among us, when we may never have looked around ourselves to begin with to see that God had stored it for us all along, right here in our midst.

So let’s cease all talk – in church and out – of “God’s due time”. All time is God’s due time – today and tomorrow! Our task is to come to an awareness of our meaningful place in that time.

A meaningful place, that we may come to live into God’s space. Not the fear-based end of the world. But the faith-based ends of the earth.

With Jesus’ disciples, we are tempted to worship him: to ask, “Lord, is this the time when you (fill in the blank)?” And yet, our God turns us gently from our worship of Jesus, to show us a way forward, or at least a way out …

It’s one of my favorite stories in all of scriptures – and one often overlooked in our narrative rush to Moses and Pharaoh. Two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah by name, sabotage Pharaoh’s orders for them to kill all Hebrew boys being born.

These Hebrew women, they exclaim to Pharaoh, “are vigorous and give birth before (we can come) to them!”

And so on this Mother’s Day – from these two midwives who can rightfully be called mothers of Israel’s liberation – we, too, can find our discipleship pathway in moving from worship to way.

For as these midwives ushered forth life, and quite secretively at that, from the painful labors of a people oppressed, we disciples of Jesus in places such as this sanctuary – secreted for this hour from our self-important Beltway world – find a way, often a most laborious way, to finally say:

·        No, I will not be a Sunday worship-gazer anymore, and yes, I will be a kingdom way-farer.

·        No, I will not wait for “God’s due time”, and yes, I will respond, “I have the time.”

·        No, I will not just be a member of the body of Christ within these walls, and yes, I will bear Christ’s body as a midwife of new life into the world.

From worship to way, “The Way”: what the earliest disciples called themselves even before they were dubbed Christians by others.

I often wish we had not played along with the world and taken that name.

For maybe – just maybe – if we can let go of the name “Christian”, we can begin to follow Christ’s way.

For maybe – just maybe – if we can let go of dear Jesus, we can stand up to our Pharaohs and our Caesars … for once, and on our own.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

¹Steven Wright, I Have a Pony cassette/album (Warner, 1985).

²At least one published commentator on this passage believes that the disciples are suffering from PTSD here. See Amy Booker-Hirsch, “Seventh Sunday of Easter”, in Larry Hollar (ed.), Hunger for the Word: Lectionary Reflections on Food and Justice, Year A (Collegeville, MN: Order of Saint Benedict, 2004), p. 112.

³Referencing the entirety of The Acts of the Apostles, Michael E. Williams notes, “The ends of the earth, not the end of the world, is the theme of this book.” Williams, The Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible (Vol. 12): Acts of the Apostles (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), as cited in www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/s050805.

⁴See www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.

⁵As told by Alcoholics Anonymous speaker Cliff R. of Oceanside, CA on an AA cassette tape, c. 1996.

Benediction …

In the movie “Bruce Almighty”, God – played by Morgan Freeman – schools Bruce – played by Jim Carrey – as to what a miracle is.

It’s not performing “magic tricks” for the people, God tells Bruce. It’s 

A single mom, who works two jobs and still finds the time to take her kid to soccer practice: that’s a miracle. A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to an education, that’s a miracle.

People want me to do everything for them. What they don’t realize is they have the power.

You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle.

Go out into the world in peace – to be the midwife of new life, through the labor pains of a new creation. 

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.