The Weekly View

Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021

Dear St. Luke family,

Easter is the joyous celebration of new life in Christ; that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God.  It’s also a reminder that Scripture is not a seamless, consistent narrative.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John offer very different accounts of the first Easter.  In Matthew, two women go to the tomb (Matthew 28:1).  In Mark, it’s three women (Mark 16:1).  In Luke, we’re told “the women who had come with him from Galilee” returned to the tomb, but we’re not told how many women that is, or their names (Luke 23:55-56, 24:1).  In John, only Mary Magdalene visits the tomb on Easter morning, but she tells two of the disciples, who then rush to see the tomb for themselves, the only version in which men visit the tomb (John 20:1-10).  In the post-resurrection stories, John tells us Jesus enters rooms with locked doors (John 20:26), and eats a fish breakfast on the beach (John 21:9-15).  Luke has Jesus meeting two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).  Matthew’s Jesus gives the disciples the Great Commission (“Go and makes disciples …,” Matthew 28:19), while in Mark, we never see the risen Jesus; we’re just told by a young man, presumably an angel, that Jesus will meet the disciples in Galilee, just as he said he would (Mark 16:6-7).

There is no way to reconcile these stories.  They were told by different people with different memories of what happened.  They were put into writing at different times.  They were written for and first read by different communities with different concerns and priorities.  It is impossible for us to know which if any of these stories is factually accurate.  Rather than pretending they are consistent, or trying to mash them together into one story, the approach that most honors these Scripture passages is to treat them as separate narratives that speak for themselves.  Each one offers insights into the Christian community’s experience of the Risen Lord.  Each one offers profound meaning for our own Christian journeys.  And each one reminds us that Scripture isn’t the Encyclopedia Britannica or a history textbook.  Rather, Scripture needs to be read in its own historical and literary context, as well as in the context of the broadest biblical themes, with special weight given to the “rule of love” – that is, “How does this passage help the reader better fulfill Scripture’s highest law to ‘Love your Lord with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself?’”  

Jack Haberer writes, “Ultimately, the best biblical student is the one who not only seeks to understand but also is committed to applying the message of Scripture. ‘Be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers,’ says the writer James (1:22).”

This weekend, we are invited to apply the message of Resurrection to our lives.  We’ll visit John’s version of the first Easter at the sunrise service at 6:30 a.m., and Mark’s strikingly different version at 10:00 a.m.  How do these stories speak to us today, in Marin County, in April 2021?  How do they invite us to be “doers of the Word”?

Grace and peace,
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Dear St. Luke family,

This Sunday we begin Holy Week.  When I was a child, we went straight from the “Hosannas” of Palm Sunday to the jubilation of resurrection on Easter.  As someone asked me a few years ago, “Why would we want to revisit the events of Holy Week when we know how it ends?” 

It’s a worthy question.  I suspect there are many good answers, but I’ll give you mine:

The stories we hear during Holy Week show us that Jesus’ life, teachings, choices, and most especially his fidelity to God increasingly challenge the powers of this world.  He moves from being a nuisance to being a threat.  I do not believe God required Jesus to die or wanted Jesus to die.  I believe Jesus was willing to stay true to the truest truth he knew: the love of God for all people.  His death was the natural and human consequence of that fidelity.  As he makes his holy way toward a very human death, God’s love for the human family is revealed to us in its fullest.  The message is not that suffering is good, or that God wants Jesus or anyone else to suffer.  In fact, we learn that suffering is tragic, the opposite of God’s will.  It is my belief, based on what we see of Jesus in Scripture, that God weeps when God’s beloved children suffer.  And so, we learn that there is no place we can go, no depth to which we can plunge, no farthest shore to which we can flee, that God is not with us.  Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death.  What could possibly be more meaningful than to gather for worship again and again in the span of a week to remember, give thanks and stand in awe of God’s wondrous love? 

There is also the issue of contrast.  To journey with Jesus to the depths of betrayal, denial and crucifixion also has a way of raising our spirits to new heights on Easter morning.  When we call out, “Christ is risen; he is risen indeed!” it rings with a more exuberant joy and resonant truth because we have experienced the darkness.  

At St. Luke, we will gather on Maundy Thursday at 7:00 p.m. on Zoom.  “Maundy” comes from the Latin word that means “mandate,” and it refers to the new commandment Jesus gave to his disciples in the Upper Room – that we love one another as Jesus loved us (John 13.31-35).  We will observe Maundy Thursday with communion, contemplative Taizé chants, and prayers.  And we will gather on Good Friday at noon on Zoom with music and art that retells the story of Christ’s crucifixion, and centers on the seven last words of Jesus.

But first, we will worship together this Sunday, Palm Sunday, a day of irony on which Jesus is celebrated as a king, but we know what’s coming.  The crowd shouts “Hosanna!” which means “Save us!” or “Rescue us!” in Hebrew.  Scott Black Johnston asks, “When we wave our palms and boldly cry out, ‘Hosanna,’ do we dare imagine what we really want God to save us from?”  Maybe Holy Week is a chance to explore that question.

See you Sunday,

Grace and peace,
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Dear St. Luke family,

We’re just a bit over a week away from Holy Week, the week before Easter.  Churches around the world observe Holy Week with many different traditions and forms of worship.  The week includes five days of special significance:

• Palm Sunday, celebrating Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, a story told in all four Gospels;
• Maundy Thursday, remembering the night Jesus shared a Passover meal with his disciples on the night he was betrayed, and that set our pattern for the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper;
• Good Friday, the day Jesus was tried, convicted, and crucified;
• Holy Saturday, sometimes observed with an Easter Vigil;
• Easter Sunday, or Resurrection of the Lord Sunday, the day we celebrate Christ’s resurrection and victory over death.

The passage we’ll be exploring this Sunday points us toward Holy Week.  Unlike the other three Gospels, in John’s Gospel, Jesus always knows the future and walks willingly into it.  When two strangers tell one of his disciples they’d like to see Jesus, Jesus responds by telling them, essentially (but using John’s typically obscure and poetic language), “If you want to see me, this is what you will see: You will see that If you want to live, really live, you have to learn to give your life away; you have to learn how to die, like me.” 

Learn to die?  Yikes!  But remember, this is the same Jesus that says, in this very Gospel, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10).  Too often the Church has assumed Jesus means life after death but that was not Jesus’ concern.  So, what does it mean, for us, as followers of Jesus, to die in order to live – and not just survive, but live abundantly?  Will strangers who wish to see Jesus see him in us? 

And what can Holy Week teach us about all this?  We’ll observe Holy Week at St. Luke with Palm Sunday Zoom worship, a contemplative Maundy Thursday Zoom service of prayer and communion including music from the Taizé tradition, a Good Friday Zoom service of the Seven Last Words of Jesus, an in-person outdoor sunrise service at 6:30 a.m. on Easter morning (masks and social distance required), and festive Easter Sunday Zoom worship with communion at 10:00 a.m.

See you Sunday ~

Grace and peace,
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor