First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Isaiah 6 and 1John 5

“Could We Do It Without the Blood?”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 11, 2006

            I am a full-test kind of guy.  The thought of taking the caffeine out of coffee just boggles my mind.  De-caffeinated coffee . . . I just don’t understand.  Anything with the word light or half especially if it costs more propels me to other options.  I want butter not margarine.  I think a diet is what you eat, not what you don’t eat.  Again, I understand the notion that less is more, but not where garlic is concerned.

            I am the same way with belief- full plate, the whole shooting match.  I believe in the virgin birth.  The hardest part of that story for me is not the idea that Mary was chosen to bear the Christ; the hardest part for me is that when an angel came to her she wasn’t afraid.  Now that is hard for me to believe, but I do.

            I believe in Noah and the flood.  Although I don’t take comfort in the rainbow, I take comfort in the fact that Noah planted a vineyard as soon as he was off the ark.  I think it is fair to say such an experience required a glass of wine.  I also believe this is a story about God confessing to error.  And that is a story of real power. 

I believe in the tower of Babel.  I believe in this one mainly because it keeps happening again and again.  This is what my grandmother meant when she said, you’ll be too smart for your own good.  Even Presbyterians can say amen to that one.

            I’ve shared with you before my only doubt concerning the miracles of Jesus.  My only doubt is shaped by what is the greater miracle.  I tend to think the miracles of Jesus were playing it small.  That Jesus would multiply loaves and fishes, not a problem; that the people would be led to share what they had when the baskets passed, that one is a real stretch. 

For me this is the point of all the miracle stories.  This is what Jesus tried to say to the Pharisees about the paralytic dropped through the torn open roof.  He said, your sins are forgiven.  And they balked, saying who can claim this but God.  And Jesus challenged them, what is more difficult, to say your sins are forgiven or pick up your pallet and walk.  I think it’s harder to say, your sins are forgiven. 

The miracles of the blind seeing and the lame walking and the possessed at peace don’t make me balk.  I would have much more doubt in the Gospels if everyone got along, or if the disciples outdid one another in acts of love.  Now that would really give me pause.

Not everyone is as ready to believe these.  I know that.  And I don’t begrudge anyone doubt or even disbelief.  My only concern with the lack of faith is with those who believe there is power in not believing.  It is not uncommon, I have found, in pastors who came out of the 1960s and early ‘70s to hold this as true: the more they don’t believe, the more power they will have.  If they don’t believe, they will be freed from superstition and the trappings of tradition.

Some time ago, while I was on vacation, a former pastor preached to the congregation in Washington.  Given that he was a former pastor I didn’t think twice about extending the pulpit to him.  Yet, after reports came of his sermon and I listened to the tape of it, I had to take the drastic step of rescinding any further opportunities to preach.

Now I didn’t do this because I disagreed with the pastor.  There are many pastors I don’t agree with at all on matters of theology or philosophy or ethics or politics or whether green and blue do go together, and I would be more than honored to have them fill this pulpit or any other.  Whether you agree with me or not I tend to be right.  I have read enough history to know there is little unanimity except that where there is a good question there are many answers.

I rescinded the pulpit from him because he didn’t believe in the power of belief.  His sermon was filled with what he didn’t believe in.  Virgin birth, silly myth.  Resurrection, a convenient lie to build the church.  A moral code beyond the choice of each individual, pure oppression and as he put it, old white men being uptight and Puritanical.  Well, not only do I thoroughly admire the Puritans and find them the whipping boy of everyone who doesn’t like organized religion, but I also believe they brought some pretty amazing things to our culture.

But I digress.  I rescinded the pulpit because his message was that you will be free if you don’t believe.  The real power in life is found when you don’t believe anymore.  And that’s the line you don’t cross here [pointing to the pulpit].  For not only is this the opposite of what the Bible says to us, it’s also inhumane.  As humans we have to believe.  Be it in God, in others, in our selves, in hope for tomorrow, in love, in the truth; be it in baseball and apple pie, you have to believe because it is what makes us what we are.  You can know many things, but it is what you believe that makes you what you are. 

Belief in nothing is not freedom, but a kind of despair.  As I spoke to the pastor on the phone and he defended himself and his life the hardest part was not the embarrassment or the confrontation, but the deep seeded despair that marked his life.  That he had jettisoned his beliefs had left him powerless, and all I could hear was a kind of despair.

There is a freedom in not believing.  You are free from a lot of messiness.  Not believing in people frees you from disappointment when they let you down.  Not believing in the goodness of your neighbor keeps you safe from shock when they do something terrible.  Not believing in redemption and forgiveness keeps free from having to accept an apology.  Not believing in God frees the conscience from all constraints.  Yet the irony is: true freedom is always limiting.

Belief is a messy part of life.  And being a Christian is especially messy.  When in our reading today John said it was three that testified, he is making a mess of a pretty letter.  For if he it was the water and the spirit alone who testify it would have been nice and clean, but when he said the blood testifies, it wasn’t clean anymore.  It wasn’t clean and it wasn’t easy.  Believing in the blood is hard. 

We don’t talk about blood in Presbyterian circles.  We speak of life giving, of soul, of essence, but blood . . . not so much.  Believing in Jesus can be hard enough without blood.  Yet in truth, believing in the blood is where the power is found.  Without the blood there is no life.

When I think of believing in the blood my mind goes to one place, one person.  Flannery O’Connor wrote for less than twenty years before lupus took her at 39.  Yet I can’t think of an American writer whose work is more infused with blood.  Each one of her stories gets there somehow.  Her short stories are filled with violence and dying.  It’s pretty safe that someone will die in a Flannery O’Connor story and it will involve a gun a raging bull or a swift river or some other violent image.  She uses these graphic images oddly enough to describe the presence of grace and what it means to believe in Jesus, to believe in the blood.

I’m haunted by a line in her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  I read this story as a teen and the line which I can never get out of my head is spoken by the grandmother just before an escaped convict shoots her.  She says, “Jesus you’ve got good blood.”  Like so many characters in her stories the grandmother testifies just before she dies. 

Some have taken this to mean that O’Connor believes grace is violent.  Yet, after many years and reading her stories many times I find the violence and the blood are begging the same moment of faith in the blood: you die in order to live.  You must give your life away to save it.  And although I am ready and willing to believe Moses parted the Red Sea, this question of faith that makes me balk.  If you give your life away, the life that is returned to you is eternal.

Believing in Jesus that he was the Word, as John says, I believe that.  But when the Word says, you must lose your life to save it that’s the one giving me pause.  The pause comes not in reflection but in the real demand.  When you are really called to give your life away for others that’s the blood of which John speaks. 

For whether or not you choose to enjoy or find the freedom of believing in the miracles of Jesus is an extra, a bonus as it were.  Yet, what will you do when you must sacrifice for a spouse?  Will you become less so a child can become more?  Will you sacrifice your safety and anonymity so another will find the joy of a church?  Will you risk becoming a tither?  Would you lay aside the comforts of this land and dwell in the midst of extreme poverty?  This is what O’Connor tried to embody in her graphic images, these moments where we die in order to live again.

To give your life away for others is what it means to believe in the blood. It would be a lot cleaner if we could do without it, but it’s where the real power is found.  Norman Vincent Peale wrote the power of positive thinking, Jesus said, when the Holy Spirit comes upon you you will have power, John says, this belief conquers the world.  The power comes from believing that if you give away this life, you gain one that is eternal. 

Again, I don’t have a problem believing Jesus was resurrected.  It’s when it gets personal where I balk.  If I give my life away yet again will it come back?  It always has so far.  Amen.