This has been a busy four weeks of Lent at Newman Church and in the world; in this month a lot has happened . . . a lot of new things. This past week, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey set a record for the longest speech in the history of the United States Senate, standing and speaking for twenty-five hours and five minutes.1 Just so you know, I will not be attempting the longest sermon in Newman Church history today, so we can rest assured in that. Instead, I want to think about how God’s new things help us not to give up when we are in the wilderness.
Through the prophet Isaiah, God says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”2
This is well-known scripture. When I was a member of the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ, I was for a short time a member of a team called the “New Thing Task Force.”3 This was a group of people who took up the question: how can we be a part of what God is doing now, and the new things that God will be doing next?
Part of this group’s work was experimental and hypothetical. For example, they explored what it would be like to apply the skills of improv comedy or improvisational jazz to worship services. It was wonderfully creative and fascinating.
The other part of the New Thing Task Team’s work was assessing current challenges in churches, and the world, and offering pragmatic solutions to our social isolation and deferred justice. The task force noted that we didn’t get to this wilderness for lack of trying to avoid it. Creative problem solvers have always been part of human history. But it takes time for problem solvers and innovators and justice seekers to catch up to the paradigm shifts of history.
One lesson of the Bible is that God intercedes, and when God intercedes everything changes: God creates; God floods; God burns; God speaks; God saves; God calls; God shakes the walls and brings them down; God recruits prophets; God becomes human; God heals; God suffers; God rises; God is resilient. The world changes.
In terms of appreciating change, one highlight this past week at the church was finding a time capsule downstairs while a small group of us was gathering May Breakfast supplies.4 The time capsule had been created by young members of the church in October of 1979, and it was opened by members of the youth group twenty-five years later in 2004.
I’ve laid the items out on a table in Memorial Hall for you to be able to investigate after worship today: there are corduroy bellbottoms, a 45 record by the band KISS, promotional materials from “one of the best science fiction movies of the year,” which was a little movie called Star Wars. And a cassette tape with a recording by the kids.
On the tape, some of the kids were asked their thoughts about the three biggest problems in the United States today. One of the young spokespersons said “The major problems in the United States today are the gas shortage, and the price of gas going up to a dollar, it’s pretty bad. Oil, heat, a dollar a gallon for that, and then you’ve got nuclear power with all these power plants going up. But the worst problem in this whole place is everybody worrying about who is going to be president next . . . we [held a mock vote] and I think Ted Kennedy won . . .” and then the group erupts into a light-hearted shouting match, with a group cheering for Jimmy Carter drowning out the rest of the group.
The challenges change. The challenges are similar, but we don’t give up.
Because God speaks. God changes, and we respond.
John’s Gospel can help us appreciate the winds of change because, friends, we live in interesting times, and God is doing something new with John’s Gospel in the twenty-first century.
As a reminder, the reading from John today takes place six days before the Passover (during which Jesus and everyone in his entourage goes to Jerusalem to observe the festival). It’s a prelude to what we call Holy Week (the remembrance that begins next week on Palm Sunday and goes to Easter). Jesus has come to the House of Lazarus, his dear friend who he earlier revived to life from death. The scripture says that Mary and Martha are there.5
To simplify a longer story, Diana Butler Bass has preached about a theory that Lazarus really only has one sister, and that is Mary Magdalene.6 John’s Martha was perhaps a third-century attempt to split Mary Magdalene into two people, Mary and Martha, by occasionally changing a letter in Mary’s name to create Martha, and thereby diluting or confusing Mary Magdalene’s importance to Jesus. Some speculate that for Mary Magdalene to have been:
- the first to recognize Christ as the Messiah (rather than Martha);
- the one to understand the symbolic significance of washing his feet with expensive perfume;
- to be with him at the cross;
- to be present at the tomb;
- and to be the first, in John’s Gospel, to encounter the risen Christ;
this would have made Mary Magdalene the foundational figure of the early church.
As Diana Butler Bass asks us, “What kind of Christianity would we have today if the faith hadn’t only been based upon, ‘Peter, you are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church’? But what if we’d always known, ‘Mary, you are the Tower, and [upon] this Tower we shall all stand?’”
It would be a very different church.
So don’t give up; the story is not over.
The New Thing Task Force that I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon identified a resource with seven roles for “caring for the souls” of your community.7 None of us has to do or be or carry all of the roles of care (some of us are rocks and some of us are towers), but by seeing yourself as doing one job in care of souls, perhaps we will all come a little closer to being ready for the new things that God will do among us in the days ahead.
There are seven roles in a soul-caring community are:
- The Gatherer: forms communities of meaning and depth
- The Seer: helps us approach the sacred
- The Healer: breaks cycles of violence
- The Steward: created the infrastructure for spiritual life
- The Elder: grounds our gifts in history and community
- The Venturer: invests in creative ways to support human flourishing
- The Maker: reminds us how to be human.
I’ve posted the descriptions in Memorial Hall.
As we approach Holy Week, may we pick up our jobs as Jesus picks up his cross, and keep marching.
May we all be attuned to the new things God is doing in our midst, today and always. Amen.
The featured image to this post is a fresco from the nave of the Dura-Europos church in Syria. The image dates to c. 240 and contains the oldest surviving depiction of Mary Magdalene. She is shown alongside two other women (the third now almost completely missing due to extensive damage), each holding a lit torch and a bowl of myrrh, as they approach Jesus’s tomb, which is still sealed. The image is in the public domain.