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‘B’ // Easter 4 // 5-3-09 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scriptures Psalm 23 [sung] I John 3:16-24 John 10:11-18
Presente!
Pastoral care specialist John Patton recalls holding a workshop many years ago with priests and bishops of the Episcopal Church. At one point, he presented to them a case of a priest who was facing, as he put it, “a multitude of difficulties.” Testing the waters, Patton asked the group, “What would you do?” Without hesitation, a crusty old bishop with no experience in counseling responded, “I’d be there!” Patton concluded, “I am sure that no one in the group had any question about the value of (that bishop’s) presence.”1
The power of presence. In this country at least, our life is long on object relations – cause-and-effect. We are taught to locate the cause of a problem, that we might apply a corrective – if not salvific – effect to counter it. The more complex the causes and hence knottier the effects, the more systemic our training and hence our thinking become to achieve better effects. “To” and “for” become our operative prepositions: Apply “y” effect to or for “x” cause, and good things will happen.
And yet – in the midst of best-laid plans for cause-and-effect social progress – what to do when Easter irrupts, and interrupts? What to do with a God who refuses to settle for mechanically substituting God’s self on the cross for us – instead personally representing himself and herself to us in the resurrection of the incarnation?
What to do with this God who has defeated the very cause and effects of death – and is now, in the resurrection of God’s very incarnation, ever-present? “Represent!” as they say on the streets – “Represent!” The God of Easter, who represents! A God who will not and cannot ever go away – whether we like it or not.
It’s the great, if at times annoyingly persistent, gift of Easter: A God who is ever-present. Karl Barth calls this God “the Eternal Yes.”
Need this pastor wonder why a reading of the 23rd Psalm is requested at most funeral and memorial services he has officiated over the years? Services rightly called a witness to the resurrection of the one who has just physically left us?
For it’s the ultimate Bronx cheer to death, this psalm. Affirming to the grief-stricken in a poetic power unparalleled by any other scripture that God’s presence is made known in the midst of death – and only in the midst of death – in the nearest and dearest of ways.
It takes the valley of the shadow of death in our lives to bring the presence of God so close to us. So close that the psalmist suddenly, at this point in the psalm, shifts reference of God from third-person to second.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” the opening intones. “He makes me … He leads me … He restores me.” And then, when death encroaches, suddenly the Psalmist gets intimate with the divine: “I fear no evil; for you … are … with … me.”
No longer a distant thunder of a God acting for or even to. But out of the shadow, the whisper of a personal God: “you – with me.”
God’s presence. An eternal presence, thanks to the Easter music etched large on this psalm’s final note: “forever”. An eternal presence, continuing on in the psalm even in the face of another, oppositional presence: those death-dealing forces known as our enemies.
Death has been defeated. God is with us … still, and always. God is present. Count on it.
Affirming God’s steadfast and everlasting presence – in all things – is the most basic and essential article of our faith as Christians, I have found.
If that be the case: How do we put our faith into action?
But wait: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For I have observed over the years that we thoughtful and proactive progressives often come up wanting on the faith side of things – at least at the beginning. And so we might do better to reverse the question, inquiring of ourselves: How do we act our way into this faith of God’s eternal presence?
Today’s Johannine letter writer comes to our Easter aid in responding to that question – How do we act our way into this faith – with a question.
Let us linger over this rhetorical response from I John for a moment: “How does God’s love abide” – translation: “How is God’s love ever-present” – “in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
As I prepare to leave you nineteen days hence, Northside – and as you approach the 50th anniversary of this congregation this fall, marking the time our congregation began as a new church development – let me make this simple prediction: The very faithfulness of you as a church for the foreseeable future – i.e., your presence in the world as the Body of Christ – will be made known most tangibly in the depth of your commitment to your dedicated outreach partnership with SOS Community Services.
And that commitment will be played out by acting yourselves into faith in God’s eternal presence by simply being present with the homeless families in our area. Simply being with them, beyond and even before attending to their physical needs. Responding to the “What would you do” question in the same way that crusty old Episcopal bishop would: “I’d be there!”
For nothing can improve upon or substitute for the gift of presence – sheer, tangible, physical presence – when it comes to faithful discipleship. When the table of God’s goodness is laid before you in the presence of these very families – persons our world of entitlement and consumption would have us call your enemies.
What a sacramental calling this partnership promises to be for this church! Remembering our baptism by being anointed at the same table with these “enemies”! And then cup of our salvation overflowing, all around: for them as well as for you!
On the third Sunday of every November, at the site of the longest ongoing nonviolent civil resistance campaign in the country, over 20,000 witnesses gather at the gates of Ft. Benning, GA to rally and vigil for the closure of the Latin American terrorist training ground there known as the School of Americas.
Often – as many of you well know – more fuss is made and ink is spilled over the handful who actually commit civil disobedience by crossing the line onto that military reservation. But what has struck me with greater spiritual force, year in and year out, is something else: the mass Sunday funeral vigil. A two-hour testimony to the witness of the resurrection of the untold hundreds of thousands murdered by their SOA-trained killers.
Nearly every one of the assembled holds a simple white cross with a name of a victim of the school etched on it. For two hours, several musicians from the giant stage by the Ft. Benning fence take turns resurrecting the names on those crosses.
They begin by singing out, “Oscar Romero,” and the 20,000-plus hold up their crosses and sing back, “Presente!”
Presente! – Present! As if the martyred were testifying beyond their graves – again and again and again – to the power of the Psalmist’s words today – to paraphrase:
“Even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, evil is not to be feared – for you, dear vigilers, are with me. Your cross – your presence – they comfort me.”
Presente! The martyrs, present with the vigilers. The vigilers, present with the martyrs.
In the months and the years to come: May the vigil of your Northside presence be felt along with the presence of the dispossessed being martyred on this side of the grave, as well.
May it be felt both ways. And then, and only then, will you come to know – in the valley of the shadow of your discipleship – that it was God’s presence you’ve been feeling, all along.
Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.
1John Patton, Pastoral Care in Context: An Introduction to Pastoral Care (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), p. 215.
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