Tallulah Brown Van Zee
Mary Lee Talbot
Staff Writer
The Gospel of John begins with poetry. The Word, a poetic description of Jesus, was at the beginning of creation and came to life with human beings, called the incarnation. The Word became human and ended up being crucified by the state.
“This is inside baseball for Christian clergy,” the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis began her sermon at the 9:15 a.m. Wednesday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. Her sermon title was “Just Love, so Our Joy May be Full,” and the scripture reading was John 16:16–24.
“There is a lot of Christian theology that celebrates the incarnation, and then at the end, we get a theology of atonement, at-one-ment, that insists that Jesus had to die in order to make us one, to have our sins forgiven,” she said.
Lewis continued, “As a young preacher, all I preached was that the Son of God had to die. As I became an older preacher, I had to wrestle with this idea and what could have been instead because humans are capable of violence when they are afraid.”
People in the time of Jesus — the time of Yeshua, Ben Joseph — were confused and angry.
“Remember Jesus was not a Christian; he was Jewish. He was a rabbi who had a new teaching, a reframing of what his colleagues thought,” she said. “This was not a new religion; it was looking at the tradition through a new lens, the lens of love. The authorities felt threatened, and in anger, they responded in violence.”
Lewis admitted she had a difficult time believing in a God who would send a child to be killed by God. She told the congregation she had to believe that God did better, and we are the ones who killed God’s child. She urged the congregation to think critically. “If we say that love made flesh had to die, violence had to be the response. We are wounded, so we wound them. The airplanes on 9/11 were turned into bombs, and the catastrophic loss led to more violence.”
After 9/11, young Muslim men were asked why the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were attacked. The response was that the towers were too tall. “On Oct. 7, Hamas decided there was ‘too much,’ on the other side,” she said.
Lewis said, “If violence is the response to fear, it leads to more violence, and we have war all over the world. If we believe it is right to have a violent response to violence, we break the soul and that leads to the loss of life, safety and dignity.”
In the scripture reading for the day, often called the Farewell Discourse, Jesus tries to provide comfort for the disciples. He told them that he was about “to be out of here” because his ministry of love and justice had put his life in danger.
“Jesus told them they would be mourning and they would not see him, but the Spirit of love would comfort them,” Lewis said. “Jesus told them to love each other. The coming of the Spirit was not a consolation prize. The promise of a comforter means there will be joy, but they could not imagine joy on the other side of their loss by Jesus’ death.”
This joy would not be put off until everyone got to heaven, but was the way they were to relate to each other.
Lewis’ father died of ALS, and it broke the souls of her family. Yet every time she goes to barbecue some ribs or grill chicken, she can feel him standing by her.
“If there is a thing like resurrection, (my father) lives here in the present,” she said. “Jesus promised the disciples that he would be present to them when they loved each other.”
As she showed the congregation her “Just Love Liberates” T-shirt, she said: “My real super power comes from grief. We only get to a place of joy when we talk through grief. We can build a world together if we let ourselves mourn together, when we hold on when it gets hard. We will get to the promised land together. Everything else is commentary.”
The Rev. George Wirth, a retired Presbyterian minister, presided. Melissa Spas, vice president for religion at Chautauqua, read the scripture. Owen Reyda, organ scholar, performed “Prelude on a Theme by Orlando Gibbons,” by C.V. Stanford, on the Massey Memorial Organ. The Motet Choir, under the direction of Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, sang “If ye love me,” music by Philip Wilby and text from John 14:15–18. The choir was accompanied by organ scholar Laura Smith on the Massey Organ. Stafford, performed Toccata in D minor, by C.V. Stanford on the Massey Organ. Support for this week’s chaplaincy and preaching is provided by the Edmond E. Robb-Walter C. Shaw Fund.
