Resurrection Sign

Resurrection Sign

Text: Matthew 12:38-42

Brian K. Blount, President, Union Presbyterian Seminary

(Installation Service for Pastor Gary Charles, October 30, 2016)

This scripture does not contain a fun Jesus saying. You were probably thinking to yourself as I read it: “why in the world did Brian choose this decidedly-not-fun Jesus saying on the occasion of this intentionally fun celebration of Gary starting out his ministry here at Cove? Isn't there a nicer version of Jesus that Brian could have invited to worship this morning?”

Anybody who reads the gospels knows that they contain two distinct Jesus moods. There is the nice Jesus, who sighs such soothing sentiments as "take my yoke upon you and I will give you rest." And then there is the hard Jesus, the one who passionately pounds out provocations like "you brood of vipers." Doesn’t our scripture highlight the hard Jesus? Why did Brian invite the hard Jesus to this particular party of the pious?

Here is probably a good opportunity for me to blame it on God. God told me to preach on this scripture this morning. It’s about divine inspiration. It’s a Holy Ghost thing. You non preachers wouldn’t understand.

To tell the truth, I hardly understand it myself. I was thinking about Gary and I was thinking about this wonderful celebration and I was thinking about preaching and I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought, "Oh!!!! That text where people ask Jesus for a sign and Jesus refuses to give them a sign." In my half sleep state, I couldn't even remember in which Gospel Jesus said this. I don't like Matthew all that much as far as the gospels go. I know, the four Gospels are supposed to be like your children, right. You don't love one more than you love the others. You certainly don’t say it out loud if you do. You love them all equally. That's the parental story and every parent in his or her right mind had better stick to it. So, if someone comes up to me and asks, "Brian, which gospel do you like the best?" You know what I'm gonna say. "I love them all equally." Well, do you like one of them less than you like the others? "I love them all equally." OK. But the truth is, in the middle of the night, I am hoping and praying that Jesus didn't say this in Matthew because I just don't like Matthew as much as I like Mark.  Mark's my favorite. I might as well go ahead and say it. And Matthew drives me crazy. Because Matthew spiritualizes stuff. For example, when he listened to the story of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, instead of sharing what Luke shared, “Blessed are the poor,” Matthew interpreted what Jesus said as “blessed are the poor in spirit.” People like it when you tone stuff down, make it all “spiritual” so they don’t have to do anything to change anything physical or literal in their lives or in their world. People love to be ALL SPIRITUAL. “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Matthew would have loved that! Spiritually Poor?! I want to hear about God blessing the literal poor. Let those of us who are materially rich but spiritually poor buy our own blessings. But noooo, Matthew claims that God has gone all spiritual!!!! Doggone it, Matthew!!!

Yes, I know this is poor gospel parentage. I ought to love Matthew as much as I love Mark.

So,...feeling chastened, when I got up in the morning and my head was clearer, even after I realized that Jesus speaks the pertinent sign language in the Gospel of Matthew, I said, I'm still going to use it. And, thank goodness, for once, Matthew doesn't spiritualize. He doesn't interpret Jesus to be saying that folks seek a spiritual sign from Jesus. As Tom Long notices, this is a demand for physical proof. Tom writes: “Having tangled with Jesus, the leaders now demand to see some credentials...[they] have now pulled him over and want to see his license.” Rightly, Matthew therefore does not hear Jesus strike back that only a spiritually misaligned generation seeks a sign.  Jesus takes this as a real, physical, literal challenge and he responds with real, literal anger and sarcasm. For once, Matthew doesn't water down a thing. He just says what he heard Jesus say. And that is probably why, upon waking up and being more clear headed and right minded, I should have looked for another scripture.

But I'm stubborn. And I remember. I remember one of my teachers. Cain Hope Felder is his name. Cain preached the sermon the only time I have been installed at a church. It was a time before I'd ever met Gary Charles. It was 1982. I was 24 years old. 23 years of my life I had been a Baptist. Before the end of my first year as a Presbyterian, I was being installed as the pastor of Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church. And Cain, though not using this text, preached about a sign. A sign of God that Cain said was manifested in my crossing over, like the people of faith crossed over the Jordan to become a new people. I had crossed over a denominational line and yet had remained within the family of faith, in a new way. That, he said, was a sign. Of God. At work.

On the surface, the request for a sign from Jesus that God is at work seems like such an innocent request. We look for such signs all the time. Don’t we? Don’t we?

But this is precisely where Tom Long finds it difficult to understand the leaders who are asking Jesus for a sign. “What do they have in mind?” he asks. “What else in the way of a sign could they conceivably expect? They have already seen miracles of every imaginable type: The blind see, the deaf hear, lepers are cleansed, the mute speak, the paralyzed walk, the demon- possessed are made whole. They obviously want something more, something even more dramatic that will assure them that Jesus is from God. Maybe a light shining from heaven would do the trick, or perhaps a voice from the skies.”

In fact, in Matthew, there was a voice from the skies. At Jesus' baptism. Matthew makes it clear in the way he narrates the story that Jesus was not the only one who heard the voice. The voice spoke to everyone. "This is my beloved, son," they heard the voice say. So, there was a voice in the sky. Right?! They actually had such a mighty sign. And still they do not believe.

One starts to think that perhaps the problem isn't that there are signs, but that there ARE signs. God has given them signs. All the healing, all the teaching, all the from the sky speaking. They had sign after sign after sign. The problem is that the signs are pointing to something they don't want the signs to point to. The signs are pointing to Jesus and Jesus is doing stuff that they do not find acceptable. They think something is wrong with Jesus and they want a sign to prove that Jesus is all right. All right with God, that is. All right with their kind of God, that is.

If I want God to validate what I'm doing, what I think is right, no matter what, then I want a sign that says, "Brian, yes, you're right." I don't want a sign that says something contrary to what I want to do. I want the sign to confirm what I want to do, even if what I want to do is not what everyone else wants me to do. So, when I ask my wife, after a wonderful meal, "do you think we should order dessert?" I don't really want her to weigh the appropriateness of getting a calorie rich dessert after the very full meal I've already had. I already know I don't need dessert.  I already know I should just tell myself "no." I ask because I want her to tell me "yes." And if she tells me "no," I think I want to find out what's wrong with her. That's when I want her to give me a sign that she continues to maintain control of all her mental faculties. So, even though it makes no sense to her, it makes perfect sense to me when I then ask, "are you feeling all right? Give me a sign." I mean, she told me "no" on the dessert. Something must be wrong with her. I need a sign that everything is actually all right. Whenever I ask her, "what did you think of my sermon this morning," I don't want an honest appraisal. I don't want THE TRUTH. I want a lie. A nice, Christian lie. Because if I'm asking how it went, I already know it didn't go as I had wanted it to go. I ask because I want her to tell me, "Oh, you knocked out of the park this morning, preacher!" So, as soon as she starts off with something like, "Well, you know..." then I know it’s no longer about the sermon; something must be wrong with her. So, I need a sign from her that everything is all right. So, even though it makes no sense to her, it makes perfect sense to me when I interrupt her before she can go on with whatever sermon observation point she is intending to make, "are you feeling all right? Give me a sign." I mean, she is actually going to answer my question honestly!! Something must be wrong. I therefore need a sign that everything is actually all right.

The scribes and Pharisees here are caught up in the exact same situation. They need a sign because something is clearly wrong with Jesus!  They want Jesus to stop doing things his way and start doing things their way. Because he's not just healing folks, he's teaching folks. He's teaching by how he lives and what he says. And he is doing and saying some dangerous stuff. Breaking laws that ought not to be broken. Touching people who ought not be touched. Hanging out with people who ought not to be hung out with. And claiming that this kind of radically disreputable behavior is the kind of behavior God desires.

It is bad enough that Jesus is doing all the stuff he is saying and doing. What is even worse is that he is backing up all the stuff he is saying and doing with all these miracles. These  SIGNS!  The man has power!  Real, raw, outrageous power.  Even his enemies give him that. There is no need for the scribes and Pharisees to declare that Jesus is faking these events. They agree: he has power! So, how do you compete with a person with whom you so vigorously disagree who is so clearly powerful. Well, you don't challenge his power. You challenge where he gets his power from. That is what is really behind this request for a sign.

So, they put out the story that Jesus has power, but it is demonic power. It must be Satan's power. His power is a sign that Satan has broken loose in the world. Here is where Jesus unleashes the brood of vipers quote. And right after he calls them a brood of vipers, the snakes slither up to him, call him Teacher, so the crowd can see them fawning all over him, and they try to trap him by asking him for a sign. What they say out loud for the people to hear is that they want is a sign that demonstrates that Jesus is all right, that he is of God and not of Satan. Just clear this up for us, Jesus. Do a little magic. And connect that magic to God.

Devious. And smart. They want Jesus to make a show of power for the sake of showing power. That is in itself demonic, isn't it? Showing off power just because you have power. Prove you are smarter than everybody else by doing something that makes the rest of us feel dumb.          Prove you are wealthier than the rest of us by buying something the rest of us couldn't afford. Prove you are more powerful than the rest of us by putting some innocent somebody in her place. Go ahead, show off. And in showing off, prove to these people that you're not working to glorify God, you're working to glorify yourself. You're not divine. You're demonic. They don't want the truth from Jesus. They already KNOW the truth. They want Jesus to prove their lie. That's why they ask him for a sign. They need him to give them a sign so they can use that sign against him.

No sign, though. That's his answer. No sign.

Except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

Wait...What???!!!

Jonah! What???!!!

The. Sign. Of. Jonah.

And they will play a role in bringing that Jonah sign about. They will help create the circumstance that kills Jesus, because they did not trust that he was of God. And after they have destroyed him, after they have put him down, entombed him in the earth, God will raise him up in the way that God raised Jonah out of the belly of the sea monster. After they have satisfied themselves that Jesus is not of God, after they have taken Jesus’ life because he is not of God, ONLY THEN will God give them a sign. A completely unreasonable, incredulous, inconceivable sign. Life after death. Resurrection. Because something greater than the law is here. Something greater than Jonah is here. Something greater than Solomon is here. Something so great that it defies the reason that we seek to explain and make sense of our lives is here. Something that makes no sense and yet is the only sense God has to offer is here. Something unlike anything they have ever seen before is here. Something so inconceivable, in fact, that Jesus doesn't even try to explain it to them. He knows they would never believe it.

I suspect that even in the first century most of the people in the crowd thought the Jonah episode was the biggest fish story they had ever heard. That story makes NO sense. So, Jesus using it as the answer to their request for a sign is utterly, atrociously ridiculous. It's like you all saying to me, "preach us a sign today, Brian." And, in response, I say, "You evil and adulterous generation, no sign will be given to you,...except the sign of a great preacher, wonderful pastor, and incredible large church administrator who leaves one of the tallest of tall steeple churches, a church having perhaps the highest of visibility in a highly visible capital city, and follows God's call to a little rural church in a little rural town that most people will not have heard of."

There is your sign. That is how you know God is at work in your world. The God who raised Jesus has raised up Gary. In this place. Two years ago, who in here, including Gary, could have possibly seen this coming. You want to know God is still at work. Here’s a sign.

Gary.   Here.   Is a sign.

I read this crazy novel this summer. Gary knows I read crazy books. Books about end of the world stuff, apocalyptic stuff. A friend recently told me, in a kind of friendly, one-on-one personal faith intervention, that I need to let go of the zombies and the plagues and the end of the world scenarios and get back to Jesus. Okay, Jesus, here I come. But on the way back, I stopped off at one more end of the world novel. The Fireman by Joe Hall. Joe Hall is the son of Stephen King, a master of apocalyptic horror fiction. That should be enough to tell you something.

In the novel, the end came not from a plague or a meteor or a zombie apocalypse. The end blew in the wind that carried a spoor. A spoor. Of unknown origin. I wrote a story once. Literary people in the know told me that you need a believable start or no one is going to publish your story. I suppose the alternative is that you have a bankable literary bloodline, then you don't need a believable start. So, even though the author never explained this spoor, where it came from, how it could have really spawned, etc., I accepted it. And once I accepted that it existed, I could accept what it did to people, even though on the surface that made no sense either, and the author didn't give any medical reason for how it could work. But here it is. This spoor transmitted through ash to people. Not by touch. By wind. Ash spreading through the wind. So, when people were avoiding touching people who had contracted the disease the spoor caused, and were shunning people and all of that, when they burned the bodies of the people with the spoor because they were afraid of those bodies, the spoor took flight in the windblown ashes and infected people who breathed in those ashes. And since the ash was in the air all the time, the disease was spreading all the time. Here was some nice criticism of the way we treat people who are ill. We don't touch them. We put them away. We spiritually burn them. In the book, they literally burned them. They were burning corpses, because they were afraid. And because the spoor was in the ash of the burned bodies, their fear was literally killing them. Well, when you got the disease you were marked with a physical sign. The sign marking was another kind of nod to contemporary culture. The marking was a tattooing. It turned out as black drawings over people's bodies. People tried to hide the markings lest someone try to hurt or kill them because of them. Simultaneously beautiful and deadly. Because the markings would become even more beautiful, taking on color, and then the marks erupted into flames and the person spontaneously combusted into fire. They called the disease Dragonscale, because the marks created flames that destroyed the person in fire. And then, from the ashes, the spoor took flight until someone else breathed it in. Here was a disease you couldn't hide from others. And others were so afraid of it they shunned and destroyed people who had it. But every time they destroyed a person by burning that person the disease took flight into many other persons.

The plot twist was this. One of the heroes of the book was a man who had learned to control Dragonscale, so that instead of the flames destroying him, he used the flames to protect himself and others. For him, the marks were a sign of a potential new future, not a frightening old past.

Well, when I finished the book, after I got over feeling guilty for even reading the book, I chastised myself for falling for all this literal fire and brimstone with that tiny flicker of hope hiding within. And then, I thought about us today. Us people of faith. We’re all the time looking for signs, spiritual and physical markings of God. On people. In the world. But then I thought? Aren’t we already marked? Really? Not by tattooed skin from some spoor, but to those who are outside of our community, what we are selling seems just as crazy, doesn’t it? We are marked by the inconceivable sign that Jesus promised the leaders, and us: resurrection.

Resurrection is our ridiculous, ludicrous, Jonah-fish-story kind of implausible call sign.

Aren’t we, by the way we live, by the things we say, by the stuff we do the sign to this generation that points back to the meaning and truth and consequence of Jesus’ resurrection? Wasn’t that what Jesus was setting up when he told that brood of vipers that the only sign this world would ever see would be the sign of Jonah? Wasn’t he talking about Gary? Moving here? Wasn’t he talking about you? Moving whenever and wherever you move when you do something ridiculous and ludicrous for God. Aren’t you, aren’t we marked by Jesus’ resurrection sign? Wasn’t that what Jesus was really saying? Aren’t we the sign to our generation just as Jesus was the sign to his generation? Isn’t the resurrection tattooed all over us, a spiritual God- scale that influences how we live and what we do?

I know what you’re thinking! There he goes, spiritualizing. But the spiritual marking has a material, physical impact. Doesn’t it? You can’t see the sign of the resurrection on this church, in this place, on your life. And yet, doesn’t our resurrection marking make us do things, sometimes explosively good and outrageously transformative things that we might not otherwise have had either the courage or the foresight to do? Don’t we try to hide the marking sometimes, lest people think we’re strange? Don’t we feel compelled by the power of the marking sometimes, so we can’t help ourselves, we end up committing more of our time, more of our energy, more of our resources, more of ourselves than we had ever anticipated for causes and for people we could have never predicted would ever be important to us? Doesn’t God’s resurrection marking literally shake us out of the comfortable places where we live and work and minister and physically move us into situations and circumstances that just. seem. befuddling.

Aren’t we marked?

God Marked . . . by the same resurrection that was Jesus’ strange and mysterious sign?

And are we not, marked as we are by the resurrection, therefore God’s Jonah sign to God’s weary world? We are a sign to the world. Gary is a sign to us. Did not God give us a sign when God marked Gary and through the power of that marking called Gary here to Cove? What? Did you miss it? Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it? Good God, it’s tattooed all over him. It drove him here.

The day that Gary and I first met is marked in my memory. Indelible. Transforming. Empowering. Life giving. It was at the back basement door of the Carver Memorial Church. He had come to survey a hunger and food program being run out of one of our church buildings. He was drawing his church of folks who did not live in that impoverished community into the ministry of care in that impoverished community. He marked his church with the resurrection frenzy of bringing the possibility of new life to a community struggling in the throes of this life. And he has so marked every church since. His passion, his love for others, his humble grace amidst such overwhelming ability, his friendship, his dedication to being the very best at what he does for the community of God’s people, his sacrifice of his own strength and power to strengthen and empower others. You look at Gary closely enough, you listen to Gary closely enough, you watch Gary closely enough, and you see a man marked by the resurrection. You can’t help but see it. Because one thing Gary is not, it’s shy. Not with what he wants. Not with what God wants from him. Not with what God wants him to call forth from us. Gary doesn’t hide his God marking. It stands out. It’s all over him.

In that novel, people marked by Dragonscale were distracting. So, too, are God-Marked people distracting. Gary is distracting. You notice Gary. You always notice people who are marked. Don’t you? But Christians aren’t all that distracting any more, at least not in a good way, a really transformational way. I don’t know that the world is distracted by the resurrection marking on us. Jesus didn’t just talk about the sign of Jonah. We know that he became the sign of Jonah. We can’t just talk about the sign of the resurrection. Like Gary, by the way we live our lives, by the way we answer God’s call upon our lives, we must become the sign of the resurrection. We must become the sign that God is doing a new thing . . . in the midst of the old thing. We must become the sign that God is bringing new life to this world choking itself to death. So that people see the resurrection isn’t just an inconceivable, unbelievable fish story told about the faraway past. So that people see that it is not just a fantastical, apocalyptic story told about the faraway future. The resurrection story is a story about now. It can be. It will be. When we who are marked by its reality live its reality. Physically, literally, not spiritually, LIVE its reality.  Now. Like Gary is living its reality. Now. By how and by where he has followed God’s call. Now. I’m telling you, Gary is a sign. Everyone of us in here can be a sign. Of God. On the move. A sign of new life breaking through old expectations.

A person marked by the resurrection makes as little sense to most folks as Jesus answering the demand for a sign with the sign of Jonah. Gary’s move is a sign of faith in a world that seeks signs of reason. The reasonable view is that power is about numbers and size. We are so worried today about how big we are, how big our admissions numbers, how big our endowment, how big our Sunday attendance, how big our denomination, how big our church. In making this move, Gary has remained faithful to the resurrection marking that first compelled him into the ministry. God’s call that you care for God’s people, not about how many people you care for. God’s call that it is not how big your membership is, but how big your mission is. God’s call that it is not about how many members you drag in; it’s about how much resurrection witness you dish out. By his hearing that call and his following that call, Gary has yet again shown me that he is marked by the resurrection. In Gary Charles’ life, in Gary Charles’ ministry, God has provided a spiritual and a physical resurrection sign. We shouldn’t just marvel at this sign. We should use it, to help us mark our way, as we, too, do our best to follow God’s call. Jesus was right. Something greater than we have realized has happened here.