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Peace, and Merry Christmas.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Pentecost 19 October 11, 2009
Pentecost 19
October 11, 2009
When I was a teenager, the poet Archibald Macleish wrote a very popular play in which JB, a corporate executive in the course of a few weeks lost everything that mattered to him—his job, status, wife, children. A few weeks ago the Coen brothers who wrote and produced the movie Fargo, came out with their latest film, A Serious Man, about a Jewish college professor who struggles to cope with the collapse of his life and stay decent and upright at the same time
Both the play and movie were inspired by the Book of Job which we will be reading as our first lesson for the next few weeks. This ancient book, probably written about 500 BC, still has the power to move and challenge writers and readers.
Like a fairy tale the Book of Job begins, “once upon a time”: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”
He was a good and righteous man, with a loving wife, ten healthy children, not a rich man but comfortably well off.
The story moves to a fantastical scene. At a gathering in heaven, the story goes, God brags about Job, how good and righteous he is. Satan, who strangely enough is sitting right there with God , says, “Of course he’s a good man. Why not?—he has everything a human being could want. But, God, what if we were to test him? What will happen if you take everything he possesses away from him? I’ll bet you that he won’t love you then!”
God agrees to the wager. Job’s troubles begin. First all Job’s beasts are killed, then his servants, then tragically, his children.
At first Job bears it. He refuses to complain. Then Satan says to God, “Ah, but what will happen if his body is stricken with disease? Will he still endure in silence?” Satan then inflicts loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” Job’s response?—he still will not complain “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
Three friends come to console Job in his misery.
They don’t do a very good job.
Have you ever been in pain of some sort and the pastor or relative or friend drop in and you know they’re good people and they’re just trying to help, but they manage to say all the wrong things?
Job’s friends are like that. Specifically, the friends think they’ve got an explanation. “Job,” they say, “You must have sinned against God. Repent and God will return to you all that has been destroyed.”
Instead of consoling Job, their words prod him into defending himself. He knows himself, knows he has not sinned. “But you must have,” his friends argue.
Job refuses to give in. Almost in a frenzy, he cries out, “I am innocent!,” and he challenges God to listen to his case. He wants to bring God into court.
He’s sure he’ll win: “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. . . . he would give heed to me . . . and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.”
Strong words. But then Job’s defiance cracks and he seems to lose his nerve. Job admits that he’s terrified. Because now suddenly the worst thing happens—JJob can’t feel God, can’t hear God, can’t in any way sense God’s presence. When he calls out, God doesn’t answer. For Job—God is utterly hidden.
One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 139. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also . . . “ All places on earth and in heaven: “Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” Such confidence in God’s constant presence, no matter what is happening.
But Job reverses those words of confidence and it’s chilling—: “If I go forward, God is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”
Anyone who has lived to adulthood has walked through those terrifying times when nothing makes sense, when we are stripped of what we love. When someone we love is stricken with a terminal disease, or our wife or husband leaves us, or our adult child rejects us, or we suddenly take a clear eyed look at the world around us crawling with cruelty and injustice.
It’s then that we need to know that it is ok to pray like Job. “Where are you, God?” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?” It is not only ok, it is Biblical to cry out our indignation, our anger, our sense of abandonment.
It is always ok to pray the truth of ourselves. What is not ok is to lie to God about who we are or what we are feeling.
This is what I most dread in my role as pastor: when I am called to a hospital room or a funeral home, and someone demands that I defend God.
A grieving wife asks me, for example, “Why did my good husband have to die so young when terrible criminals live long lives?”
The worse thing I can do is give her what she wants—an explanation.
If I did, I’d be like one of Job’s “friends,” trying to second guess God. Trying to make sense of what just doesn’t make sense.
The best thing I can do is to walk alongside her and help her to pray Job’s prayers: “Where are you, God?,” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?”
When you go through a hard time in your life, don’t be afraid to pray with Job’s honesty. Lightening will not strike you, God’s hand will not rise up against you.
Remember that it is not only Job who prayed this way. On the cross, Jesus, God’s Son, bleeding, straining for each breath, cried out in pain and terror the Job-like words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Only once he’d cried out his despair, could he go on to utter words filled with trust: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
October 11, 2009
When I was a teenager, the poet Archibald Macleish wrote a very popular play in which JB, a corporate executive in the course of a few weeks lost everything that mattered to him—his job, status, wife, children. A few weeks ago the Coen brothers who wrote and produced the movie Fargo, came out with their latest film, A Serious Man, about a Jewish college professor who struggles to cope with the collapse of his life and stay decent and upright at the same time
Both the play and movie were inspired by the Book of Job which we will be reading as our first lesson for the next few weeks. This ancient book, probably written about 500 BC, still has the power to move and challenge writers and readers.
Like a fairy tale the Book of Job begins, “once upon a time”: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”
He was a good and righteous man, with a loving wife, ten healthy children, not a rich man but comfortably well off.
The story moves to a fantastical scene. At a gathering in heaven, the story goes, God brags about Job, how good and righteous he is. Satan, who strangely enough is sitting right there with God , says, “Of course he’s a good man. Why not?—he has everything a human being could want. But, God, what if we were to test him? What will happen if you take everything he possesses away from him? I’ll bet you that he won’t love you then!”
God agrees to the wager. Job’s troubles begin. First all Job’s beasts are killed, then his servants, then tragically, his children.
At first Job bears it. He refuses to complain. Then Satan says to God, “Ah, but what will happen if his body is stricken with disease? Will he still endure in silence?” Satan then inflicts loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” Job’s response?—he still will not complain “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
Three friends come to console Job in his misery.
They don’t do a very good job.
Have you ever been in pain of some sort and the pastor or relative or friend drop in and you know they’re good people and they’re just trying to help, but they manage to say all the wrong things?
Job’s friends are like that. Specifically, the friends think they’ve got an explanation. “Job,” they say, “You must have sinned against God. Repent and God will return to you all that has been destroyed.”
Instead of consoling Job, their words prod him into defending himself. He knows himself, knows he has not sinned. “But you must have,” his friends argue.
Job refuses to give in. Almost in a frenzy, he cries out, “I am innocent!,” and he challenges God to listen to his case. He wants to bring God into court.
He’s sure he’ll win: “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. . . . he would give heed to me . . . and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.”
Strong words. But then Job’s defiance cracks and he seems to lose his nerve. Job admits that he’s terrified. Because now suddenly the worst thing happens—JJob can’t feel God, can’t hear God, can’t in any way sense God’s presence. When he calls out, God doesn’t answer. For Job—God is utterly hidden.
One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 139. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also . . . “ All places on earth and in heaven: “Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” Such confidence in God’s constant presence, no matter what is happening.
But Job reverses those words of confidence and it’s chilling—: “If I go forward, God is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”
Anyone who has lived to adulthood has walked through those terrifying times when nothing makes sense, when we are stripped of what we love. When someone we love is stricken with a terminal disease, or our wife or husband leaves us, or our adult child rejects us, or we suddenly take a clear eyed look at the world around us crawling with cruelty and injustice.
It’s then that we need to know that it is ok to pray like Job. “Where are you, God?” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?” It is not only ok, it is Biblical to cry out our indignation, our anger, our sense of abandonment.
It is always ok to pray the truth of ourselves. What is not ok is to lie to God about who we are or what we are feeling.
This is what I most dread in my role as pastor: when I am called to a hospital room or a funeral home, and someone demands that I defend God.
A grieving wife asks me, for example, “Why did my good husband have to die so young when terrible criminals live long lives?”
The worse thing I can do is give her what she wants—an explanation.
If I did, I’d be like one of Job’s “friends,” trying to second guess God. Trying to make sense of what just doesn’t make sense.
The best thing I can do is to walk alongside her and help her to pray Job’s prayers: “Where are you, God?,” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?”
When you go through a hard time in your life, don’t be afraid to pray with Job’s honesty. Lightening will not strike you, God’s hand will not rise up against you.
Remember that it is not only Job who prayed this way. On the cross, Jesus, God’s Son, bleeding, straining for each breath, cried out in pain and terror the Job-like words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Only once he’d cried out his despair, could he go on to utter words filled with trust: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Pentecost 17 September 27, 2009
Pentecost 17
September 27, 2009
When I was a girl, whenever my parents left me at my grandparents’ house, I’d take their big black bible off the shelf and settle down with the Book of Esther. Here it is in the Old Testament, only ten chapters wedged between Nehemiah and Job. It was my favorite Bible story.
For good reason: it’s got romance (sort of), humor, suspense, and best of all for a ten year old girl—a poor girl who not only becomes a queen, but also a hero.
During the whole church year we only read the little bit of the Book of Esther in today’s first lesson, so here’s a refresher on the plot:
We travel to Persia, where many Jews made their home after they were released from captivity in Babylon. In Persia, they lived mostly without persecution, easily Integrated with the rest of the population.
One day King Ahasuerus, reveling with his friends, orders his queen, the beautiful Vashti, to display her beauties before the court. She refuses. Irate and pressed by his courtiers who are worried that their wives might learn a lesson from Vashti, deposes her as queen.
In good fairy tale fashion, Ahasuerus orders all the young women of the kingdom to come to the palace so that he might—after they’ve undergone twelve months of spa treatment—choose a new queen.
Esther and her uncle Mordechai are Jews living in the capital. Esther enters the contest for queen and Ahasuerus chooses her. Meanwhile a lowly courtier named Haman is promoted by the King to be his Chief Officer. The honor goes to Haman’s head and he demands public honor by all the citizens, but Mordechai won’t bow down. Haman finds out he’s a Jew and decides to get rid of him by destroying the whole Jewish people.
Mordechai, terrified for their people, tells Esther to go into king and reveal that she’s a Jew. But to go in without an invitation means death. Even though she’s frightened, she takes on the responsibility. She orders Mordechai to ask all the Jews to fast on her behalf; she fasts as well. Meanwhile, Mordechai publicly protests the decree by lying in sackcloth and ashes at the court gate. Haman so infuriated that he builds a gallows 75 feet tall and goes into persuade the king to execute Mordechai on it. But by coincidence the king has a sleepless night and reads in the court annals that Mordechai earlier had foiled a plot to overthrow the king. King wants to reward Mordechai, and is shocked when Esther tells him that Haman is preparing to execute him as well as Esther and all the Jews in Persia. King Ahasuerus sentences Haman to death. After the King leaves Esther’s room, Haman throws himself on her couch to plead for his life. The king thinks he’s attacking her and orders Haman to be executed on the gallows he has built for Mordechai.
It’s a great story!
But over the 2500 years since it was written, it has been controversial.
Martin Luther hated it: “I am so hostile to this book that I wish that it did not exist for it .. . has too much heathen naughtiness.”
Ordinary Jewish people have always loved the Book of Esther, and read it aloud on the annual feast of Purim. But some scholars and authorities disliked it. For one thing, neither Esther nor Mordechai act much like Jews. Even by today’s standards they were not observant Jews.
That means that Esther and Mordechai were apparently living outwardly at least, completely assimilated (in that case, Persian) lives—no kosher, no ritual baths, no peculiarly Jewish dress.
And there was an even more important problem with the Book of Esther. In the entire book, there is no reference to “God.” Not one! A bit surprising for a book of the bible.
Those peculiarities are why now, as a grownup, I still love the Book of Esther.
Because it’s just for those reasons that the story of Esther can speak in a special way to us. We’re Christians trying to live good Christian lives while looking, talking, and acting a whole lot just like everyone else around us. We’re mostly not super-religious and we certainly wouldn’t describe ourselves as holy.
Like Esther and Mordechai, we live our lives in a society which worships many things other than God—wealth, power, beauty, possessions, status
In our lives, as in Esther’s, God does not appear as a burning bush nor does God knock people off a horse with any frquency There are no hugely extraordinary events, there are no stunning miracles.
There’s just—well—life. The situations we find ourselves in, the people and communities we care about.
And as faithful people in a world without God’s direct word and without miracles, how do we live? Like Esther and Mordechi, we make the best choices we can in the circumstances we have. Like Esther and Mordechi, we hope, quietly, that we and God are going in the same direction, and then do our best.
For most of us, as for Esther and Mordechai, the closest we’re going to get to a miracle are coincidences.
Mordechai’s hanging out in the marketplace in just the right place and time to overhear the plot against the king. Chance? God’s prompting? Who knows?
The king’s insomnia—Indigestion? God’s prompting? Who knows?
I suspect we’ve all had those experiences in which we’ve wondered—is this a coincidence? Or the brush of an angel’s hand?
I just had an experience like that. I’m the volunteer chaplain on duty at Speare Hospital this weekend. On Friday, I got to the hospital around quarter of two in the afternoon to begin my shift.
I’d signed in and was heading down the corridor to stash my purse when I heard a voice say, “You’re the lady who did the funeral for my grandmother, aren’t you?” It turned out that yes, I was that lady. I’d deeply loved the grandmother, and through her illness and death, I’d become acquainted with the whole family.
The woman went on: “You’ll never believe this, but my mother-in-law is in intensive care and people are coming from my church to do a healing service in ten minutes.” And at the same instant we spoke together. She said: “Wouldn’t you love to come?” and I said, “I’d love to be part of it, if it’s all right.”
So at 2:00 I was standing at the woman’s bed, in a circle with family members and others, praying for peace and healing for her. And all the time, I was shaky with awe. If I’d come into the hospital in the morning as I’d planned, or even a half an hour later in the afternoon, I would have missed this moment of grace..
The upshot of all this is this:
All we have is our ordinary lives and every once in a while an amazing coincidence. No burning bushes, no miraculous healings—but standing at that bedside that day, it was enough, it was enough
September 27, 2009
When I was a girl, whenever my parents left me at my grandparents’ house, I’d take their big black bible off the shelf and settle down with the Book of Esther. Here it is in the Old Testament, only ten chapters wedged between Nehemiah and Job. It was my favorite Bible story.
For good reason: it’s got romance (sort of), humor, suspense, and best of all for a ten year old girl—a poor girl who not only becomes a queen, but also a hero.
During the whole church year we only read the little bit of the Book of Esther in today’s first lesson, so here’s a refresher on the plot:
We travel to Persia, where many Jews made their home after they were released from captivity in Babylon. In Persia, they lived mostly without persecution, easily Integrated with the rest of the population.
One day King Ahasuerus, reveling with his friends, orders his queen, the beautiful Vashti, to display her beauties before the court. She refuses. Irate and pressed by his courtiers who are worried that their wives might learn a lesson from Vashti, deposes her as queen.
In good fairy tale fashion, Ahasuerus orders all the young women of the kingdom to come to the palace so that he might—after they’ve undergone twelve months of spa treatment—choose a new queen.
Esther and her uncle Mordechai are Jews living in the capital. Esther enters the contest for queen and Ahasuerus chooses her. Meanwhile a lowly courtier named Haman is promoted by the King to be his Chief Officer. The honor goes to Haman’s head and he demands public honor by all the citizens, but Mordechai won’t bow down. Haman finds out he’s a Jew and decides to get rid of him by destroying the whole Jewish people.
Mordechai, terrified for their people, tells Esther to go into king and reveal that she’s a Jew. But to go in without an invitation means death. Even though she’s frightened, she takes on the responsibility. She orders Mordechai to ask all the Jews to fast on her behalf; she fasts as well. Meanwhile, Mordechai publicly protests the decree by lying in sackcloth and ashes at the court gate. Haman so infuriated that he builds a gallows 75 feet tall and goes into persuade the king to execute Mordechai on it. But by coincidence the king has a sleepless night and reads in the court annals that Mordechai earlier had foiled a plot to overthrow the king. King wants to reward Mordechai, and is shocked when Esther tells him that Haman is preparing to execute him as well as Esther and all the Jews in Persia. King Ahasuerus sentences Haman to death. After the King leaves Esther’s room, Haman throws himself on her couch to plead for his life. The king thinks he’s attacking her and orders Haman to be executed on the gallows he has built for Mordechai.
It’s a great story!
But over the 2500 years since it was written, it has been controversial.
Martin Luther hated it: “I am so hostile to this book that I wish that it did not exist for it .. . has too much heathen naughtiness.”
Ordinary Jewish people have always loved the Book of Esther, and read it aloud on the annual feast of Purim. But some scholars and authorities disliked it. For one thing, neither Esther nor Mordechai act much like Jews. Even by today’s standards they were not observant Jews.
That means that Esther and Mordechai were apparently living outwardly at least, completely assimilated (in that case, Persian) lives—no kosher, no ritual baths, no peculiarly Jewish dress.
And there was an even more important problem with the Book of Esther. In the entire book, there is no reference to “God.” Not one! A bit surprising for a book of the bible.
Those peculiarities are why now, as a grownup, I still love the Book of Esther.
Because it’s just for those reasons that the story of Esther can speak in a special way to us. We’re Christians trying to live good Christian lives while looking, talking, and acting a whole lot just like everyone else around us. We’re mostly not super-religious and we certainly wouldn’t describe ourselves as holy.
Like Esther and Mordechai, we live our lives in a society which worships many things other than God—wealth, power, beauty, possessions, status
In our lives, as in Esther’s, God does not appear as a burning bush nor does God knock people off a horse with any frquency There are no hugely extraordinary events, there are no stunning miracles.
There’s just—well—life. The situations we find ourselves in, the people and communities we care about.
And as faithful people in a world without God’s direct word and without miracles, how do we live? Like Esther and Mordechi, we make the best choices we can in the circumstances we have. Like Esther and Mordechi, we hope, quietly, that we and God are going in the same direction, and then do our best.
For most of us, as for Esther and Mordechai, the closest we’re going to get to a miracle are coincidences.
Mordechai’s hanging out in the marketplace in just the right place and time to overhear the plot against the king. Chance? God’s prompting? Who knows?
The king’s insomnia—Indigestion? God’s prompting? Who knows?
I suspect we’ve all had those experiences in which we’ve wondered—is this a coincidence? Or the brush of an angel’s hand?
I just had an experience like that. I’m the volunteer chaplain on duty at Speare Hospital this weekend. On Friday, I got to the hospital around quarter of two in the afternoon to begin my shift.
I’d signed in and was heading down the corridor to stash my purse when I heard a voice say, “You’re the lady who did the funeral for my grandmother, aren’t you?” It turned out that yes, I was that lady. I’d deeply loved the grandmother, and through her illness and death, I’d become acquainted with the whole family.
The woman went on: “You’ll never believe this, but my mother-in-law is in intensive care and people are coming from my church to do a healing service in ten minutes.” And at the same instant we spoke together. She said: “Wouldn’t you love to come?” and I said, “I’d love to be part of it, if it’s all right.”
So at 2:00 I was standing at the woman’s bed, in a circle with family members and others, praying for peace and healing for her. And all the time, I was shaky with awe. If I’d come into the hospital in the morning as I’d planned, or even a half an hour later in the afternoon, I would have missed this moment of grace..
The upshot of all this is this:
All we have is our ordinary lives and every once in a while an amazing coincidence. No burning bushes, no miraculous healings—but standing at that bedside that day, it was enough, it was enough
Pentecost 12 August 22, 2009
Pentecost 12
August 22, 2009
I’ve been edgy all week.
At first I thought it was the weather—in the immortal words of Cole Porter, it’s just been “too darn hot.”
But then I noticed that I’d stopped listening to the news, started ignoring the newspaper. Hmm, I wondered, what’s that about?
Then I realized what’s going on. I’m scared. The health care “debate” has dominated the news and the level of anger and hostility at the town hall meetings has escalated and I’m feeling the threat of violence in the air. Something feels seriously wrong.
I’d like to ignore it and get on with my summer.
But like you in my lifetime I’ve witnessed violence in this country and certain of these incidents changed forever the way I see the world, especially the Vietnam War and the horrific string of assassinations during the 1960’s—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.
September 11th traumatized whole new generations of Americans and undermined their trust that peace and civility will prevail.
What can we Americans Christians do about hostility and violence?
Jesus gives us a clear answer about what we should be doing. In the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The catechism of the church (in the very back of the BCP) tells us that the basic mission of the church is to make peace: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”
Does that mean that we Christians are called to be wimps? Does God want us to give in and give up our principles and beliefs in order to “keep the peace”?
The writer of the second lesson today certainly doesn’t think so. He tells Christians to suit up (spiritually speaking) like a Roman soldier in full armor complete with the “sword of the Spirit.”
So does that mean, as opposed to being wimps, are Christians supposed to wade into disputes like the Crusaders of old full of self-righteous zeal and the conviction that “God is on our side”?
Nope—neither wimps nor militants. The passage from the Book of Ephesians is clear that the spiritual armor we’re talking about is not ours—not our strength, our “truth,” our righteousness—but God’s, God’s, bestowed upon our powerlessness by God’s grace.
When we try to construct our own armor, to forge our own sword, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we’re self-righteous, rather than righteous. When we have faith in our own opinions rather than in the mystery of God’s will. When we fight to the death with the sword of our own self-will.
The passage also says—and this is terribly important— the battle is not against our fellow human beings, our enemies, the bad guys.
No, the battle we’re armed and armored for is a lot scarier than that. It’s against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Against, that is, demonic powers, especially those of violence and hatred which can, like the demons in horror movies, take us over and possess us.
How can we become Christ’s peacemakers in a place and time that desperately need them? We need to start small.
First of all—and maybe this is the hardest thing—we’ve got to recognize the hatred and hostility, the rage and wrath we find within ourselves.
I’m slowly learning that if I’m angry a hefty percentage of the time, it’s probably not the other person or people I think I’m angry at that I’m really angry at.
There’s a good chance that the demons are really inside me and not in the other person—resentments from my past, triggering reactions way bigger than they deserve. So I try and remember that wonderful line from the old cartoon “Pogo”: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” I’m learning that this is a good time to beat a strategic retreat and do a bit of soul-searching and a lot of praying.
Secondly—as Christian peacemakers-in-training we need to look at how we act in the small things, how we are every day with one another in our families or in the church. Can we disagree with someone without hurting or degrading them? Can I admit that I may be wrong and you admit that you may be wrong and can we then stay in that uncomfortable place of disagreement until God’s wisdom and God’s Spirit has had time to work in us?
.
This week I happened to pick up a book on what’s called “the new monasticism,” Christians who choose to live together as communities in the world.
One story has stuck with me: The writer describes two men—one white and one black— who lived and worked together for years in an interracial religious community in the South. They finally admitted to each other and the community that they really didn’t get along very well and the reasons stemmed from race.
They finally went to a counselor. He showed them that they couldn’t make peace when one was always trying to triumph over the other.
The only thing that could help them, they finally realized, was to trust that God’s grace is powerful enough to work through and in them if only they could get their own egos out of the way. One of the men reported, “John [the counselor] taught me what was enough. It is enough to get the love of God into your bones , , , ,. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes. The rest of life, he taught me, is details.”
I’m still afraid of the anger seeping through this country right now.
But I know that God’s grace is infinitely stronger than the demonic powers of anger and hostility.
It’s not easy—but each day we can each in our own lives and in our lives together apprentice ourselves to a peace-making God, praying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Or, in other words, care for each other, forgive each other, do what needs to be done, and . . yes, wash the dishes.
August 22, 2009
I’ve been edgy all week.
At first I thought it was the weather—in the immortal words of Cole Porter, it’s just been “too darn hot.”
But then I noticed that I’d stopped listening to the news, started ignoring the newspaper. Hmm, I wondered, what’s that about?
Then I realized what’s going on. I’m scared. The health care “debate” has dominated the news and the level of anger and hostility at the town hall meetings has escalated and I’m feeling the threat of violence in the air. Something feels seriously wrong.
I’d like to ignore it and get on with my summer.
But like you in my lifetime I’ve witnessed violence in this country and certain of these incidents changed forever the way I see the world, especially the Vietnam War and the horrific string of assassinations during the 1960’s—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.
September 11th traumatized whole new generations of Americans and undermined their trust that peace and civility will prevail.
What can we Americans Christians do about hostility and violence?
Jesus gives us a clear answer about what we should be doing. In the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The catechism of the church (in the very back of the BCP) tells us that the basic mission of the church is to make peace: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”
Does that mean that we Christians are called to be wimps? Does God want us to give in and give up our principles and beliefs in order to “keep the peace”?
The writer of the second lesson today certainly doesn’t think so. He tells Christians to suit up (spiritually speaking) like a Roman soldier in full armor complete with the “sword of the Spirit.”
So does that mean, as opposed to being wimps, are Christians supposed to wade into disputes like the Crusaders of old full of self-righteous zeal and the conviction that “God is on our side”?
Nope—neither wimps nor militants. The passage from the Book of Ephesians is clear that the spiritual armor we’re talking about is not ours—not our strength, our “truth,” our righteousness—but God’s, God’s, bestowed upon our powerlessness by God’s grace.
When we try to construct our own armor, to forge our own sword, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we’re self-righteous, rather than righteous. When we have faith in our own opinions rather than in the mystery of God’s will. When we fight to the death with the sword of our own self-will.
The passage also says—and this is terribly important— the battle is not against our fellow human beings, our enemies, the bad guys.
No, the battle we’re armed and armored for is a lot scarier than that. It’s against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Against, that is, demonic powers, especially those of violence and hatred which can, like the demons in horror movies, take us over and possess us.
How can we become Christ’s peacemakers in a place and time that desperately need them? We need to start small.
First of all—and maybe this is the hardest thing—we’ve got to recognize the hatred and hostility, the rage and wrath we find within ourselves.
I’m slowly learning that if I’m angry a hefty percentage of the time, it’s probably not the other person or people I think I’m angry at that I’m really angry at.
There’s a good chance that the demons are really inside me and not in the other person—resentments from my past, triggering reactions way bigger than they deserve. So I try and remember that wonderful line from the old cartoon “Pogo”: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” I’m learning that this is a good time to beat a strategic retreat and do a bit of soul-searching and a lot of praying.
Secondly—as Christian peacemakers-in-training we need to look at how we act in the small things, how we are every day with one another in our families or in the church. Can we disagree with someone without hurting or degrading them? Can I admit that I may be wrong and you admit that you may be wrong and can we then stay in that uncomfortable place of disagreement until God’s wisdom and God’s Spirit has had time to work in us?
.
This week I happened to pick up a book on what’s called “the new monasticism,” Christians who choose to live together as communities in the world.
One story has stuck with me: The writer describes two men—one white and one black— who lived and worked together for years in an interracial religious community in the South. They finally admitted to each other and the community that they really didn’t get along very well and the reasons stemmed from race.
They finally went to a counselor. He showed them that they couldn’t make peace when one was always trying to triumph over the other.
The only thing that could help them, they finally realized, was to trust that God’s grace is powerful enough to work through and in them if only they could get their own egos out of the way. One of the men reported, “John [the counselor] taught me what was enough. It is enough to get the love of God into your bones , , , ,. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes. The rest of life, he taught me, is details.”
I’m still afraid of the anger seeping through this country right now.
But I know that God’s grace is infinitely stronger than the demonic powers of anger and hostility.
It’s not easy—but each day we can each in our own lives and in our lives together apprentice ourselves to a peace-making God, praying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Or, in other words, care for each other, forgive each other, do what needs to be done, and . . yes, wash the dishes.
Pentecost 11 August 16, 2009
Pentecost 11
August 16, 2009
The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”
Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”
When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.
I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”
Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.
We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.
August 16, 2009
The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”
Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”
When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.
I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”
Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.
We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!
In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.
Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.
This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.
The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.
Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.
Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.
Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”
Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!
In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.
Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.
This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.
The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.
Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.
Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.
Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”
July 12, 2009
Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 5th, 2009
Proper 9
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
Friday, July 3, 2009
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost June 21, 2009
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2009
It sounds like such a simple thing, the disciples’ saying “yes” to Jesus’ suggestion: “Let us go across to the other side.”
But it was a bigger, riskier “yes” than it appears. Jesus was raising the challenge level of his discipleship training.
First, as professional fishermen, the apostles knew their waterways and this was not an hospitable one. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake like Lake Winnepesaukee. It is shaped like a wind tunnel—12 ½ miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide—and it has a reputation for sudden wild storms which are more likely to kick up at night, just the time they were starting off.
And Jesus was leading them “to the other side,” out of their comfort zone in Jewish Galilee across to the seat of Roman territory. It’s as if Jesus was saying to them: “let’s go touch base with those vicious Roman occupiers who hate us.”
Now there’s nothing wrong with taking risks, is there?
Jesus could have been inviting his disciples on a first century equivalent of an Outward Bound program for guys who were new in the role of disciples.
It could have been a positive adventure out there on the lake, with Jesus like a good teacher instructing them, encouraging them, preparing them for what they’d find on the other side. It could have been an exercise in what people today call “team building.”
But it didn’t happen like that: instead their teacher fell asleep and the mother of all storms blew up.
At first they thought they could handle it themselves. After all, they were fishermen, accustomed to storms. Their teacher Jesus was a carpenter. What help could he possibly be to them anyway?
But the storm got out of control, way out of their control! They could hear the seams of the boat creaking, know from their past experience that they could only take one or two huge waves more before the whole thing was over and the sea sucked them all down into darkness.
Like the disciples, we cannot have a rich, productive, involved life without saying those big “yeses” to invitations that lead into an unknown future.
Some of us have said “yes” to marriage, some to an all-absorbing vocation, some to children . . . knowing that the “yes” carried risks, but confident that we could handle whatever came.
I know from my own experience what fun it is to take off on my own and steer my life straight ahead feeling the rush of my own power!
A little risk, a little challenge—great! I can handle it; I can manage; I’m in control.
When the sailing’s smooth, if I’m Christian, I know Christ is in there somewhere—but honestly, who needs him?
Until things start going very wrong.
It’s so easy to forget about the Christ who promised to abide in the very center of our being until the moment when we realize—O Lord, I’m drowning!, and then we echo the disciples’ cry, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Our cry might be: O Lord, don’t you care that my marriage isn’t working?; O Lord, don’t you care that our kid’s on drugs?; O Lord, don’t you care that the prognosis is unspeakably bad?; O Lord, don’t you care that my husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father is back in Iraq? O Lord, don’t you care that we’ve worked and worked and worked for justice and nothing’s change?
In the Gospel story, what did Jesus do? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and ordered the sea, “Peace! Be still!” as if the Sea of Galilee was an unruly pet dog. And abruptly the storm stops.
But let’s be honest here. We all know that many times, no matter how hard we pray, marriages break apart, sons or daughters persist using drugs or alcohol, loved ones die.
Christ in our lives is not (usually) a magician. Christ doesn’t (usually) make things all ok. What Christ does, is be there. There right in the boat with us, he takes the rudder from our hands, he invites us to give up the big lie that we are in control of our lives.
Christ stays there with us, powerfully loving us through the most painful, destructive situations. And yes—and this is just about impossible to grasp when you’re in the boat and the waters of pain and loss are crashing over you—Christ does do deeds of power—he gives amazing, impossible gifts of patience and peace and growth and hope and love even in the midst of the tumult.
I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence at death beds. I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence in people wearing themselves out for the sake of others—in, for example, the Untouchable women I met in India who risked their lives every week by gathering clean water for their village from the upper caste wells instead of polluted water from their own.
I see Christ’s loving powerful presence at the Offenders’ Program; I see Christ’s loving powerful presence in your lives as you deal with vicious storms that spring up when you least expect them. Yes, we give up control, or rather, the illusion of control. But what we receive in return is the powerful presence of God.
******
A month or so ago, a woman came up to us at the WalMart table. She held back tears as she told us about a life-threatening illness in her family on top of a heartbreaking marital breakup.
As I groped for some way to respond, she paused, was silent, and then added, as if she were surprised by the realization: “You know, it’s so odd . . . I’ve never felt closer to God.”
June 21, 2009
It sounds like such a simple thing, the disciples’ saying “yes” to Jesus’ suggestion: “Let us go across to the other side.”
But it was a bigger, riskier “yes” than it appears. Jesus was raising the challenge level of his discipleship training.
First, as professional fishermen, the apostles knew their waterways and this was not an hospitable one. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake like Lake Winnepesaukee. It is shaped like a wind tunnel—12 ½ miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide—and it has a reputation for sudden wild storms which are more likely to kick up at night, just the time they were starting off.
And Jesus was leading them “to the other side,” out of their comfort zone in Jewish Galilee across to the seat of Roman territory. It’s as if Jesus was saying to them: “let’s go touch base with those vicious Roman occupiers who hate us.”
Now there’s nothing wrong with taking risks, is there?
Jesus could have been inviting his disciples on a first century equivalent of an Outward Bound program for guys who were new in the role of disciples.
It could have been a positive adventure out there on the lake, with Jesus like a good teacher instructing them, encouraging them, preparing them for what they’d find on the other side. It could have been an exercise in what people today call “team building.”
But it didn’t happen like that: instead their teacher fell asleep and the mother of all storms blew up.
At first they thought they could handle it themselves. After all, they were fishermen, accustomed to storms. Their teacher Jesus was a carpenter. What help could he possibly be to them anyway?
But the storm got out of control, way out of their control! They could hear the seams of the boat creaking, know from their past experience that they could only take one or two huge waves more before the whole thing was over and the sea sucked them all down into darkness.
Like the disciples, we cannot have a rich, productive, involved life without saying those big “yeses” to invitations that lead into an unknown future.
Some of us have said “yes” to marriage, some to an all-absorbing vocation, some to children . . . knowing that the “yes” carried risks, but confident that we could handle whatever came.
I know from my own experience what fun it is to take off on my own and steer my life straight ahead feeling the rush of my own power!
A little risk, a little challenge—great! I can handle it; I can manage; I’m in control.
When the sailing’s smooth, if I’m Christian, I know Christ is in there somewhere—but honestly, who needs him?
Until things start going very wrong.
It’s so easy to forget about the Christ who promised to abide in the very center of our being until the moment when we realize—O Lord, I’m drowning!, and then we echo the disciples’ cry, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Our cry might be: O Lord, don’t you care that my marriage isn’t working?; O Lord, don’t you care that our kid’s on drugs?; O Lord, don’t you care that the prognosis is unspeakably bad?; O Lord, don’t you care that my husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father is back in Iraq? O Lord, don’t you care that we’ve worked and worked and worked for justice and nothing’s change?
In the Gospel story, what did Jesus do? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and ordered the sea, “Peace! Be still!” as if the Sea of Galilee was an unruly pet dog. And abruptly the storm stops.
But let’s be honest here. We all know that many times, no matter how hard we pray, marriages break apart, sons or daughters persist using drugs or alcohol, loved ones die.
Christ in our lives is not (usually) a magician. Christ doesn’t (usually) make things all ok. What Christ does, is be there. There right in the boat with us, he takes the rudder from our hands, he invites us to give up the big lie that we are in control of our lives.
Christ stays there with us, powerfully loving us through the most painful, destructive situations. And yes—and this is just about impossible to grasp when you’re in the boat and the waters of pain and loss are crashing over you—Christ does do deeds of power—he gives amazing, impossible gifts of patience and peace and growth and hope and love even in the midst of the tumult.
I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence at death beds. I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence in people wearing themselves out for the sake of others—in, for example, the Untouchable women I met in India who risked their lives every week by gathering clean water for their village from the upper caste wells instead of polluted water from their own.
I see Christ’s loving powerful presence at the Offenders’ Program; I see Christ’s loving powerful presence in your lives as you deal with vicious storms that spring up when you least expect them. Yes, we give up control, or rather, the illusion of control. But what we receive in return is the powerful presence of God.
******
A month or so ago, a woman came up to us at the WalMart table. She held back tears as she told us about a life-threatening illness in her family on top of a heartbreaking marital breakup.
As I groped for some way to respond, she paused, was silent, and then added, as if she were surprised by the realization: “You know, it’s so odd . . . I’ve never felt closer to God.”
Friday, June 12, 2009
Trinity Sunday June 7th, 2009
Trinity Sunday
June 7th, 2009
In the documentary Into Great Silence, about monks at a very strict monastery in France, one of the young monks decides to fill his time alone (which is a LOT of time alone) by “solving” the mystery of the Trinity.
You know: the Trinity— the Christian doctrine that God is One in Three persons. As one of the ancient creeds of the church puts it, “Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”
The young monk fills notebook after notebook. Finally, after a long time, he closes the last of the books and puts it aside. His journey has brought him face to face with a mystery, a capital-M Mystery, that simply cannot be solved.
But we’re humans and compelled to try and grasp mystery somehow. So we turn from the left side of the brain to the right: to art and literature and music.
Look at the window above our altar—what’s it about?—Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
Another artist’s attempt to grasp the Trinity is a famous icon by the Russian artist Andrei Rublov. In it Rublov portrays the Trinity as the three beautiful young men who visited Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis.
A recent attempt is this novel, The Shack. Everybody’s reading it (and that isn’t always a recommendation for a book!).
You may know the story:
Mack’s an ordinary guy who has suffered an extraordinary loss. His little daughter has been murdered. Several years after her death, he receives a mysterious note to return to the place where his daughter was killed. The letter is signed, “Papa,” which is his wife’s name for God.
God, at this point, is not an intellectual or theological issue. He feels utterly abandoned by God, furious at God, not willing to believe any more in God.
But he goes—he can’t help himself. And he does find God.
But NOT God the old white-bearded guy, but three very unexpected personalities:
Here’s Mack’s meeting with God the Creator: “. . . the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman. .. . she crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a little child all the while she was shouting his name . . . with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply-loved relative.” [82]
And here’s the Holy Spirit: “a small distinctively Asian woman . …..he had a difficult time focusing on her; she seemed almost to shimmer in the light and her hair blew in all directions . . . It was almost easier to see her out of the corner of his eye than it was to look at her directly.” [84]
Only Jesus, the Son, is described in familiar way although not the idealized Jesus of much Christian art: “He appeared Middle Eastern, and was dressed like a laborer, complete with tool belt and gloves. . . . His features were pleasant enough, but he was not particularly handsome—not a man who would stick out in a crowd. But his eyes and smile lit up his face and Mack found it difficult to look away.” [84]
As he stood and stared at them, “Mack thought: ‘Was one of these people God? What if they were hallucinations or angels, or God was coming later? . . . Since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing. But two women and a man and none of them white? Then again, why had he assumed that God would be white? He knew his mind was rambling, so he focused on the one question he most wanted answered. ‘Then,’ Mack struggled to ask, ‘which one of you is God?’ ‘I am,’ said all three in unison.” [87]
It was a “Trinity sort of thing,” Precisely.
The remarkable thing about this book for me was not the images of God as female, etc. Of course God is Spirit and therefore isn’t male or female; black, Asian, or white. Although it is great to break up our stereotypical image of God as looking like a white-bearded Gandolf in the sky.
The remarkable thing for me was how the writer, Wm. Paul Young, brings to life the abstract “doctrine of the Trinity” (three persons in One Godhead—“Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity”). How he actually makes the Christian mystery of Unity in Trinity and Trinity and Unity actually matter in Mack’s life.
“Papa” (the African-American woman) begins, “If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, without something essential even. . . “ And Mark stumbling, asks, “’we would be without . . . ?” She answers, “Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within Me, within God myself. I am love” [101]
Think about it: If God is Trinity, then relationship is basic to the universe. Nothing—not even God—exists utterly alone and independent. And it’s not only relationship, it’s a particular kind of relationship—a relationship of love.
The three persons of this Trinity share everything, even the wounds of Jesus: “[Mack’s] eyes followed hers [Papa’s] and for the first time Mack noticed the scars in her wrists, like those he now assumed Jesus also had on his. She allowed him to tenderly touch the scars, outlines of a deep piercing, and he finally looked up again into her eyes. Tears were slowly making their way down her face, little pathways through the flour that dusted her cheeks. ‘Don’t ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us dearly. Love always leaves a significant mark,’ she stated softly and gently. ‘We were there together.’.” [95-96]
Later Mack notices something surprising and says to Jesus, “I love the way you treat each other. It’s certainly not how I expected God to be. . . . I know that you are one and all, and that there are three of you. But you respond with such graciousness to each other. Isn’t one of you more the boss that the other two? I’ve always thought of God the Father as being sort of the boss and Jesus as the one following orders . . . . “ [121]
The persons explain that the Trinity is not a “chain of command” but a “circle of relationship,” a “relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over each other because we are always looking out for the best. [122].
God the Trinity doesn’t want “slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.” Mack replies, “And that’s how you want us to love each other, I suppose? I mean between husbands and wives, parents and children. I guess in any relationship?” [146].
The Shack shows beautifully, how, even though we can’t understand it, believing in a Triune can change the way we live our lives.
It can help us realize that like God, we are nothing if we’re not in relationship with others and with God, if we’re not enmeshed in circles of relationship.
And more— the Trinity gives us lenses to critique the relationships we’re in. Are they loving? Are they relationships in which we share one another’s wounds, our joys and sorrows. Do they show mutual respect for one another? Are they characterized by kindness and graciousness toward one another?
The relationship of equals is God’s vision for humanity, because that is the very nature of God. That’s what we should strive for in our own relationships.
It’s hard:. I can hold it for about a minute, until someone threatens my ego, or a bomb kills children, or the State Senate invites slot machines and casinos into my beloved state.
We are fallen away creatures in a fallen away world. But that doesn’t alter the nature of our God. Our God waits and hopes and continues to love us into ways of being together as humans who mirror the exquisite Triune dance of love.
June 7th, 2009
In the documentary Into Great Silence, about monks at a very strict monastery in France, one of the young monks decides to fill his time alone (which is a LOT of time alone) by “solving” the mystery of the Trinity.
You know: the Trinity— the Christian doctrine that God is One in Three persons. As one of the ancient creeds of the church puts it, “Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”
The young monk fills notebook after notebook. Finally, after a long time, he closes the last of the books and puts it aside. His journey has brought him face to face with a mystery, a capital-M Mystery, that simply cannot be solved.
But we’re humans and compelled to try and grasp mystery somehow. So we turn from the left side of the brain to the right: to art and literature and music.
Look at the window above our altar—what’s it about?—Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
Another artist’s attempt to grasp the Trinity is a famous icon by the Russian artist Andrei Rublov. In it Rublov portrays the Trinity as the three beautiful young men who visited Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis.
A recent attempt is this novel, The Shack. Everybody’s reading it (and that isn’t always a recommendation for a book!).
You may know the story:
Mack’s an ordinary guy who has suffered an extraordinary loss. His little daughter has been murdered. Several years after her death, he receives a mysterious note to return to the place where his daughter was killed. The letter is signed, “Papa,” which is his wife’s name for God.
God, at this point, is not an intellectual or theological issue. He feels utterly abandoned by God, furious at God, not willing to believe any more in God.
But he goes—he can’t help himself. And he does find God.
But NOT God the old white-bearded guy, but three very unexpected personalities:
Here’s Mack’s meeting with God the Creator: “. . . the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman. .. . she crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a little child all the while she was shouting his name . . . with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply-loved relative.” [82]
And here’s the Holy Spirit: “a small distinctively Asian woman . …..he had a difficult time focusing on her; she seemed almost to shimmer in the light and her hair blew in all directions . . . It was almost easier to see her out of the corner of his eye than it was to look at her directly.” [84]
Only Jesus, the Son, is described in familiar way although not the idealized Jesus of much Christian art: “He appeared Middle Eastern, and was dressed like a laborer, complete with tool belt and gloves. . . . His features were pleasant enough, but he was not particularly handsome—not a man who would stick out in a crowd. But his eyes and smile lit up his face and Mack found it difficult to look away.” [84]
As he stood and stared at them, “Mack thought: ‘Was one of these people God? What if they were hallucinations or angels, or God was coming later? . . . Since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing. But two women and a man and none of them white? Then again, why had he assumed that God would be white? He knew his mind was rambling, so he focused on the one question he most wanted answered. ‘Then,’ Mack struggled to ask, ‘which one of you is God?’ ‘I am,’ said all three in unison.” [87]
It was a “Trinity sort of thing,” Precisely.
The remarkable thing about this book for me was not the images of God as female, etc. Of course God is Spirit and therefore isn’t male or female; black, Asian, or white. Although it is great to break up our stereotypical image of God as looking like a white-bearded Gandolf in the sky.
The remarkable thing for me was how the writer, Wm. Paul Young, brings to life the abstract “doctrine of the Trinity” (three persons in One Godhead—“Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity”). How he actually makes the Christian mystery of Unity in Trinity and Trinity and Unity actually matter in Mack’s life.
“Papa” (the African-American woman) begins, “If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, without something essential even. . . “ And Mark stumbling, asks, “’we would be without . . . ?” She answers, “Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within Me, within God myself. I am love” [101]
Think about it: If God is Trinity, then relationship is basic to the universe. Nothing—not even God—exists utterly alone and independent. And it’s not only relationship, it’s a particular kind of relationship—a relationship of love.
The three persons of this Trinity share everything, even the wounds of Jesus: “[Mack’s] eyes followed hers [Papa’s] and for the first time Mack noticed the scars in her wrists, like those he now assumed Jesus also had on his. She allowed him to tenderly touch the scars, outlines of a deep piercing, and he finally looked up again into her eyes. Tears were slowly making their way down her face, little pathways through the flour that dusted her cheeks. ‘Don’t ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us dearly. Love always leaves a significant mark,’ she stated softly and gently. ‘We were there together.’.” [95-96]
Later Mack notices something surprising and says to Jesus, “I love the way you treat each other. It’s certainly not how I expected God to be. . . . I know that you are one and all, and that there are three of you. But you respond with such graciousness to each other. Isn’t one of you more the boss that the other two? I’ve always thought of God the Father as being sort of the boss and Jesus as the one following orders . . . . “ [121]
The persons explain that the Trinity is not a “chain of command” but a “circle of relationship,” a “relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over each other because we are always looking out for the best. [122].
God the Trinity doesn’t want “slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.” Mack replies, “And that’s how you want us to love each other, I suppose? I mean between husbands and wives, parents and children. I guess in any relationship?” [146].
The Shack shows beautifully, how, even though we can’t understand it, believing in a Triune can change the way we live our lives.
It can help us realize that like God, we are nothing if we’re not in relationship with others and with God, if we’re not enmeshed in circles of relationship.
And more— the Trinity gives us lenses to critique the relationships we’re in. Are they loving? Are they relationships in which we share one another’s wounds, our joys and sorrows. Do they show mutual respect for one another? Are they characterized by kindness and graciousness toward one another?
The relationship of equals is God’s vision for humanity, because that is the very nature of God. That’s what we should strive for in our own relationships.
It’s hard:. I can hold it for about a minute, until someone threatens my ego, or a bomb kills children, or the State Senate invites slot machines and casinos into my beloved state.
We are fallen away creatures in a fallen away world. But that doesn’t alter the nature of our God. Our God waits and hopes and continues to love us into ways of being together as humans who mirror the exquisite Triune dance of love.
Pentecost Sunday May 31st, 2009
Pentecost Sunday
May 31st, 2009
In our Confirmation classes for teenagers this year and in years past, here’s one of their favorite exercises:
We stand in a circle, preferably outside. Each person in turn lights a match and as in burns down says whatever comes into their heads about God, Jesus, their faith.
On a windy day outside, you may not have long. It’s amazing what gets blurted out. This year as we stood shivering in a circle in the parking lot up at the CLC, I remember one boy shouting out: “God wants me to make the world better!” before the flame blew out.
The point of the exercise? So that when someone suddenly turns to you and says, “So, why do you believe in God?”, or “Why do you bother to go to church?”, or “What do you Christians believe, anyway?,” you can answer with spontaneity and integrity.
These questions hardly ever arise after you walk out of church fresh from sermon and Communion or as you drive home after a church adult education class.
Nope, in my experience these questions pop up when you least expect them. And since people these days don’t have very long attention spans, you’ve got to whip out some response right then and there. In those situations you don’t usually have a lot of time to compose an answer.
That’s why the match exercise is so helpful. It’s amazing how a “tongue of fire” burning down to your fingers focuses the mind!
The feast of Pentecost—our special feast since we’re the Church of the Holy Spirit—is all about fire.
“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
A tongue: of course that’s a description of the shape of the vision of fire above their heads. But the Holy Spirit knows what She’s doing! Because those “tongue-shaped” flames loosened the apostles’ tongues.
They rushed to the windows and began to shout down the news that had been burning in their hearts for 50 days: “This Jesus we knew and loved has risen from the dead, and we have witnessed it ourselves!”
As if the matches were burning down in their fingers, they couldn’t wait any more. They had to shout out the good news.
Their words sparked answering flames in the strangers in the street who turned up their faces to see what all the fuss was about.
In fact the apostles’ shouts bypassed the listeners’ normal brain circuits and burned right through into their hearts and souls.
The language patterns that divided them, each from another—the diverse languages of Persia and Mesopotamia, Judea and Egypt, Israel and Libya—toppled before the fiery words of these ignorant Galilean fishermen and tax collectors. The Book of Acts quotes the hearers’ wonder: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power!”
God has a flair for the dramatic! And the disciples needed a bit of fire.
Notice that until the Holy Spirit came, Jesus’ friends, men and women, were waiting, isolated in their own safe little community, for whatever Jesus had promised was going to happen.
They prayed together, they told stories of when and where and how Jesus had first looked into their eyes and said, “Come, follow me.”
Each one had a different story of how the presence of God in Jesus Christ had changed their lives—in some cases, like his friend Lazarus, had given them back their lives.
But reveal what God, what Jesus had meant to them to the people outside that house?
No way. Too scary. Look what had happened to Jesus! So they agreed they’d wait until the time was ripe, until they’d practiced more, until they were really ready..
I’ll bet if Jesus’ followers had been left on their own, they would have grown old together in that little house in Jerusalem and never made a peep outside it.
But God had other ideas: One morning tongues of fire licked their heads and the Spirit of God said, “NOW!!”
Because there were just too many other people out there in the scary world outside who needed the fiery words of new life.
The “gift of tongues” on Pentecost means this:
Not the whole foreign language translation-without-dictionaries business, although that’s pretty neat.
But the real gift of tongues happened when Jesus’ friends poured out to other people what his life and death had meant to them, and other people felt a yearning for what Jesus’ life and death could mean to them
Each person who spoke spoke their own truth in the Spirit; each person who heard, felt their own longing for a more meaningful, more abundant, life.
We are living in the age of the Holy Spirit. We are all “Pentecostals”!
And when we speak our truth about our faith to another person, the Holy Spirit speaks through us.
I want to be clear that by “our truth about our faith” I don’t mean doctrines or dogmas. I don’t mean hammering abstract truths into people’s heads.
I mean fire! Our truth about our faith is whatever warms us—sometimes like a gentle fire in the stove on a cool evening, sometimes like a bonfire on the verge of veering out of control.
When you or I speak to someone out of that truth, our truth, they’ll feel the Pentecost fire. If they’re ready—and the readiness is God’s business not ours—an answering spark will spring into flame.
Match, please! [light] “God in Jesus Christ loves me. I am enough. I don’t have to be anything or anyone else”.-----------------Amen.
May 31st, 2009
In our Confirmation classes for teenagers this year and in years past, here’s one of their favorite exercises:
We stand in a circle, preferably outside. Each person in turn lights a match and as in burns down says whatever comes into their heads about God, Jesus, their faith.
On a windy day outside, you may not have long. It’s amazing what gets blurted out. This year as we stood shivering in a circle in the parking lot up at the CLC, I remember one boy shouting out: “God wants me to make the world better!” before the flame blew out.
The point of the exercise? So that when someone suddenly turns to you and says, “So, why do you believe in God?”, or “Why do you bother to go to church?”, or “What do you Christians believe, anyway?,” you can answer with spontaneity and integrity.
These questions hardly ever arise after you walk out of church fresh from sermon and Communion or as you drive home after a church adult education class.
Nope, in my experience these questions pop up when you least expect them. And since people these days don’t have very long attention spans, you’ve got to whip out some response right then and there. In those situations you don’t usually have a lot of time to compose an answer.
That’s why the match exercise is so helpful. It’s amazing how a “tongue of fire” burning down to your fingers focuses the mind!
The feast of Pentecost—our special feast since we’re the Church of the Holy Spirit—is all about fire.
“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
A tongue: of course that’s a description of the shape of the vision of fire above their heads. But the Holy Spirit knows what She’s doing! Because those “tongue-shaped” flames loosened the apostles’ tongues.
They rushed to the windows and began to shout down the news that had been burning in their hearts for 50 days: “This Jesus we knew and loved has risen from the dead, and we have witnessed it ourselves!”
As if the matches were burning down in their fingers, they couldn’t wait any more. They had to shout out the good news.
Their words sparked answering flames in the strangers in the street who turned up their faces to see what all the fuss was about.
In fact the apostles’ shouts bypassed the listeners’ normal brain circuits and burned right through into their hearts and souls.
The language patterns that divided them, each from another—the diverse languages of Persia and Mesopotamia, Judea and Egypt, Israel and Libya—toppled before the fiery words of these ignorant Galilean fishermen and tax collectors. The Book of Acts quotes the hearers’ wonder: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power!”
God has a flair for the dramatic! And the disciples needed a bit of fire.
Notice that until the Holy Spirit came, Jesus’ friends, men and women, were waiting, isolated in their own safe little community, for whatever Jesus had promised was going to happen.
They prayed together, they told stories of when and where and how Jesus had first looked into their eyes and said, “Come, follow me.”
Each one had a different story of how the presence of God in Jesus Christ had changed their lives—in some cases, like his friend Lazarus, had given them back their lives.
But reveal what God, what Jesus had meant to them to the people outside that house?
No way. Too scary. Look what had happened to Jesus! So they agreed they’d wait until the time was ripe, until they’d practiced more, until they were really ready..
I’ll bet if Jesus’ followers had been left on their own, they would have grown old together in that little house in Jerusalem and never made a peep outside it.
But God had other ideas: One morning tongues of fire licked their heads and the Spirit of God said, “NOW!!”
Because there were just too many other people out there in the scary world outside who needed the fiery words of new life.
The “gift of tongues” on Pentecost means this:
Not the whole foreign language translation-without-dictionaries business, although that’s pretty neat.
But the real gift of tongues happened when Jesus’ friends poured out to other people what his life and death had meant to them, and other people felt a yearning for what Jesus’ life and death could mean to them
Each person who spoke spoke their own truth in the Spirit; each person who heard, felt their own longing for a more meaningful, more abundant, life.
We are living in the age of the Holy Spirit. We are all “Pentecostals”!
And when we speak our truth about our faith to another person, the Holy Spirit speaks through us.
I want to be clear that by “our truth about our faith” I don’t mean doctrines or dogmas. I don’t mean hammering abstract truths into people’s heads.
I mean fire! Our truth about our faith is whatever warms us—sometimes like a gentle fire in the stove on a cool evening, sometimes like a bonfire on the verge of veering out of control.
When you or I speak to someone out of that truth, our truth, they’ll feel the Pentecost fire. If they’re ready—and the readiness is God’s business not ours—an answering spark will spring into flame.
Match, please! [light] “God in Jesus Christ loves me. I am enough. I don’t have to be anything or anyone else”.-----------------Amen.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Ascension Sunday May 24, 2009
Ascension Sunday
May 24, 2009
Every few years we get a Sunday like this.
By the church calendar today the day we call “Ascension Sunday” and by the national calendar, it’s the Sunday in Memorial Day weekend.
You might think—ah, it’s accidental, just a calendar coincidence. Yet there is something, something important, that ties these two together.
Last Friday afternoon I forgot it was the first day of Memorial Day Weekend and took 93 north from below Concord. Bad idea! You could hardly enter the traffic. Car after car, truck after truck, camper after camper, most loaded to the gills with summer stuff—kids, tubes, tents, bikes, boats, ATVs —you name it.
And what a day it was! Clear, not sweltering but warm enough for a beach barbecue—a day bursting with the promise of summer. Pure fun, yes?
Well, no, not really. Because what gives all those people time to get away for this weekend of summer good times is this nation’s annual honoring of men and women who have died in service to our nation.
So not pure fun: Most of these men and women died young. All left behind people—families, lovers, friends— who lived out the normal spans of their lives pierced by a double-edged set of emotions: grief and pride.
Tomorrow is their day with parades through the center of towns, veterans marching with their hands over their hearts and their minds filled with memories. High school bands marching behind them whose members, unless they have a brother or sister, a mother or father, a boy-or girl-friend in Iraq or Afghanistan—have only the faintest idea of what this is all about.
Memorial Day is a day when poetry comes into its own, because only poetry can begin to weave the mix of feelings together. A day when the simplest gesture is the most meaningful—a family placing a little flag and a bunch of lilacs on a veteran’s grave.
I wonder—maybe one reason the feast of the Ascension gets lost in the great liturgical span between Easter and Pentecost is that like Memorial Day it is emotionally complicated.
Just to remind us what happened, here’s how the Acts of the Apostles tells it:
“When [the disciples] were together for the last time, they asked, ‘Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?’
“He told them, ‘You don’t get to know the time. Timing is the Father’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.’
“These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, ‘You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left.’”
This is the moment when Jesus’ followers and friends have dreaded. They confronted with the fact that Jesus is really finally gone.
And yet, in the account of the Ascension in the Gospel of Luke, it says, “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Another emotional paradox: sorrow and joy.
In Latin America, there is a custom.
In commemorations of people who have died in the fight for social justice, someone will shout out the name of one of the deceased and the crowd will shout back, “Presente!” “present!” The person may have died, but their inspiration and the difference they have made will live on. Even in their absence, they are vitally present.
This shout of “presente!” is the lesson of both the Feast of the Ascension and Memorial Day: absence can turn into powerful presence.
In all the Memorial Day celebrations around the country tomorrow, the focus will be on this mysterious presence of those who are absent.
Not only in grief—and of course, over years, decades, centuries, personal grief for these deaths disappears—but most especially in the stories of service and acts of heroism. These stories say to us: Look around. They are gone, but their lives and their deaths still matter; this country still stands, we now are here after them, struggling to live out the ideas on which the country was founded.
Likewise, when Jesus’ followers turned their eyes down from the heaven and looked around them, they saw something quite new and totally unexpected:
What they saw was Jesus’ presence all around them, even though his body was utterly and finally gone from the earth.
Jesus’ presence was there in one another—they could gather together and remember what Jesus had said and done.
Jesus’ presence was with them every time they sat at table and took bread and wine, blessed them, and passed them around, remembering Jesus’ words, “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . that was given for you.”
And Jesus’ presence was with them in their passion to live a completely new way of life of generosity, service, and forgiveness.
I mentioned earlier that perhaps poetry may be the most effective way to express the tangle of emotions that occur when absence becomes presence.
I’ll close with a brilliant example by the American poet Galway Kinnell, in a poem called “Promissory Note”:
If I die before you . . .
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too. . . . .
May 24, 2009
Every few years we get a Sunday like this.
By the church calendar today the day we call “Ascension Sunday” and by the national calendar, it’s the Sunday in Memorial Day weekend.
You might think—ah, it’s accidental, just a calendar coincidence. Yet there is something, something important, that ties these two together.
Last Friday afternoon I forgot it was the first day of Memorial Day Weekend and took 93 north from below Concord. Bad idea! You could hardly enter the traffic. Car after car, truck after truck, camper after camper, most loaded to the gills with summer stuff—kids, tubes, tents, bikes, boats, ATVs —you name it.
And what a day it was! Clear, not sweltering but warm enough for a beach barbecue—a day bursting with the promise of summer. Pure fun, yes?
Well, no, not really. Because what gives all those people time to get away for this weekend of summer good times is this nation’s annual honoring of men and women who have died in service to our nation.
So not pure fun: Most of these men and women died young. All left behind people—families, lovers, friends— who lived out the normal spans of their lives pierced by a double-edged set of emotions: grief and pride.
Tomorrow is their day with parades through the center of towns, veterans marching with their hands over their hearts and their minds filled with memories. High school bands marching behind them whose members, unless they have a brother or sister, a mother or father, a boy-or girl-friend in Iraq or Afghanistan—have only the faintest idea of what this is all about.
Memorial Day is a day when poetry comes into its own, because only poetry can begin to weave the mix of feelings together. A day when the simplest gesture is the most meaningful—a family placing a little flag and a bunch of lilacs on a veteran’s grave.
I wonder—maybe one reason the feast of the Ascension gets lost in the great liturgical span between Easter and Pentecost is that like Memorial Day it is emotionally complicated.
Just to remind us what happened, here’s how the Acts of the Apostles tells it:
“When [the disciples] were together for the last time, they asked, ‘Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?’
“He told them, ‘You don’t get to know the time. Timing is the Father’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.’
“These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, ‘You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left.’”
This is the moment when Jesus’ followers and friends have dreaded. They confronted with the fact that Jesus is really finally gone.
And yet, in the account of the Ascension in the Gospel of Luke, it says, “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Another emotional paradox: sorrow and joy.
In Latin America, there is a custom.
In commemorations of people who have died in the fight for social justice, someone will shout out the name of one of the deceased and the crowd will shout back, “Presente!” “present!” The person may have died, but their inspiration and the difference they have made will live on. Even in their absence, they are vitally present.
This shout of “presente!” is the lesson of both the Feast of the Ascension and Memorial Day: absence can turn into powerful presence.
In all the Memorial Day celebrations around the country tomorrow, the focus will be on this mysterious presence of those who are absent.
Not only in grief—and of course, over years, decades, centuries, personal grief for these deaths disappears—but most especially in the stories of service and acts of heroism. These stories say to us: Look around. They are gone, but their lives and their deaths still matter; this country still stands, we now are here after them, struggling to live out the ideas on which the country was founded.
Likewise, when Jesus’ followers turned their eyes down from the heaven and looked around them, they saw something quite new and totally unexpected:
What they saw was Jesus’ presence all around them, even though his body was utterly and finally gone from the earth.
Jesus’ presence was there in one another—they could gather together and remember what Jesus had said and done.
Jesus’ presence was with them every time they sat at table and took bread and wine, blessed them, and passed them around, remembering Jesus’ words, “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . that was given for you.”
And Jesus’ presence was with them in their passion to live a completely new way of life of generosity, service, and forgiveness.
I mentioned earlier that perhaps poetry may be the most effective way to express the tangle of emotions that occur when absence becomes presence.
I’ll close with a brilliant example by the American poet Galway Kinnell, in a poem called “Promissory Note”:
If I die before you . . .
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too. . . . .
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Easter 4 May 3, 2009
Easter 4
May 3, 2009
The King of Love My Shepherd Is
In the Gospel according to Mark Jesus goes away in a boat to a quiet place with his disciples. This was to be a break, a much-needed “retreat” from the clamor of the crowd, a time for quiet prayer and reflection. But the crowds get word of it and follow him overland.
Jesus could have asserted his right to a few days off. But he looked at them, and the Gospel says, “he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd . . . .”
I don’t know why, but that line always grips my heart.
“Like sheep without a shepherd.”
Many of you know we raised goats for quite awhile. “Goats without a goatherd” doesn’t have the same force, because goats without a goatherd would be just fine. The “queen” goat would gather the herd and troop them off quite happily and efficiently into the woods or into the neighbors’ gardens.
But sheep left alone are—to switch the barnyard simile—like chickens with their heads cut off. They’ll panic, they’ll bolt every which way, even off cliffs
It’s the same for humans, isn’t it? In movies, when King Kong or Godzilla gets loose, the crowd scenes are always great—people running every which way. Unfortunately in real situations—fires, earthquakes, bombings—crowds in panic lose their minds, and push and trample one another in their race to safety.
3. “Like sheep without a shepherd.” The phrase brings up some deep and conflicted longings: on the one hand a desire to be independent, to “run wild” vs. a craving to be cared for, to be guided and directed, to put down my date book and cell phone and lap top and acknowledge that I am not ultimately in control..
Maybe that tension is why the 23rd Psalm is so powerful even today. As a pastor (and—did you know?—the word ‘pastor’ in Latin means “shepherd”) I use it frequently. Except for the Lord’s Prayer, it is the most powerful prayer I know.
At funerals of strangers, at least of a certain age, I know that many of those people gathered in mute sorrow in the funeral home parlor need to say something that touches their deepest selves. Sometimes the funeral director has taken me aside and let me know about conflicts that divide the families or other unhealed sorrows. The people gathered together in that room need to do something, say something together that will join them together, bring down the barriers, at least for a few minutes. What do we say together? The 23rd Psalm.
At our monthly Offenders’ Program Eucharist, we begin with silence, then a hymn, and then our congregation of damaged, socially ostracized men, the lepers of our time, say in unison: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not want.”
Susan Andrews, a Presbyterian minister, tells a moving story about the pastoral power of the psalm. She writes: “25 years ago, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of the poor and black. As a chaplain intern I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair. One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being—legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body. ‘Dear God,’ I thought, ‘what can I possibly say to this man.’
“The answer came intuitively. The words of the 23rd Psalm suddenly welled up within me. As the familiar cadence filled that putrid room, the creature before me changed. He stopped shaking. He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me. In that moment, he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long-lost faith. When this child of [God] died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.”
That family numb with grief and regret, those sex offenders who will never return to freedom, that man dying in the cancer ward of the psychiatric hospital had probably lived his life like a sheep without a shepherd, all open themselves to the grace of God’s transforming love when they breathe these words:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
And: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,
Thou anointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Now we’ve got to be aware that there are shepherds and shepherds.
There are, alas, managerial shepherds whose concern is for the bottom line: x number of good fat wooly sheep brought safely through lambing and kept from wolves. The managerial shepherd’s motivation is basically “success.” This sort of shepherd is strong on authority and organizational skills. He/she runs a tight ship. The sheep keep safe, sure, but unfortunately may be tempted to cull the underachievers, the weak, or the misbehavors out of the flock. If you belong to this shepherd’s flock, you probably are a sheep who’s always a little anxious, trying hard to shape up.
The Psalm and the Gospel paint a completely different picture. This shepherd’s passion is to provide for the sheep not just an adequate life, but abundant life! The sheep in the psalm sit down to a meal of oats on a fine tablecloth and lap up clear water from a silver cup while frustrated wolves look on from afar. This is a shepherd who isn’t embarrassed by the weak, the vulnerable, the hungry, the scared in his flock. Instead, this shepherd loves them best!
There two contrasting shepherds portray two very different experiences of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first can be simplistically described as God as boss. God as boss is the manager, the scorekeeper. The God who keeps performance records on each one of us. A “shape up or ship out” kind of God.
This isn’t the God we meet this morning. The God we meet this morning in the poetry of the psalm and in the person of Jesus?—this God loves each of us extravagantly! This is an outrageous God who cares for each individual precious one of us. Who knows each of us by name—Susan, Paula, Matt, Dan . . . . . Loves us—weak, strong, rich, poor, profound, silly.
This is the image of God as not the boss, but the lover.
Now this is not necessarily the image of God we were raised with! In my tradition, I was not made to feel loved, to feel special in God’s eyes.
But that’s not the truth about God. God is the lover, God is the caring shepherd. As a favorite paraphrase of Psalm 23 expresses it:
The king of love my shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
And he is mine for every.
May 3, 2009
The King of Love My Shepherd Is
In the Gospel according to Mark Jesus goes away in a boat to a quiet place with his disciples. This was to be a break, a much-needed “retreat” from the clamor of the crowd, a time for quiet prayer and reflection. But the crowds get word of it and follow him overland.
Jesus could have asserted his right to a few days off. But he looked at them, and the Gospel says, “he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd . . . .”
I don’t know why, but that line always grips my heart.
“Like sheep without a shepherd.”
Many of you know we raised goats for quite awhile. “Goats without a goatherd” doesn’t have the same force, because goats without a goatherd would be just fine. The “queen” goat would gather the herd and troop them off quite happily and efficiently into the woods or into the neighbors’ gardens.
But sheep left alone are—to switch the barnyard simile—like chickens with their heads cut off. They’ll panic, they’ll bolt every which way, even off cliffs
It’s the same for humans, isn’t it? In movies, when King Kong or Godzilla gets loose, the crowd scenes are always great—people running every which way. Unfortunately in real situations—fires, earthquakes, bombings—crowds in panic lose their minds, and push and trample one another in their race to safety.
3. “Like sheep without a shepherd.” The phrase brings up some deep and conflicted longings: on the one hand a desire to be independent, to “run wild” vs. a craving to be cared for, to be guided and directed, to put down my date book and cell phone and lap top and acknowledge that I am not ultimately in control..
Maybe that tension is why the 23rd Psalm is so powerful even today. As a pastor (and—did you know?—the word ‘pastor’ in Latin means “shepherd”) I use it frequently. Except for the Lord’s Prayer, it is the most powerful prayer I know.
At funerals of strangers, at least of a certain age, I know that many of those people gathered in mute sorrow in the funeral home parlor need to say something that touches their deepest selves. Sometimes the funeral director has taken me aside and let me know about conflicts that divide the families or other unhealed sorrows. The people gathered together in that room need to do something, say something together that will join them together, bring down the barriers, at least for a few minutes. What do we say together? The 23rd Psalm.
At our monthly Offenders’ Program Eucharist, we begin with silence, then a hymn, and then our congregation of damaged, socially ostracized men, the lepers of our time, say in unison: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not want.”
Susan Andrews, a Presbyterian minister, tells a moving story about the pastoral power of the psalm. She writes: “25 years ago, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of the poor and black. As a chaplain intern I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair. One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being—legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body. ‘Dear God,’ I thought, ‘what can I possibly say to this man.’
“The answer came intuitively. The words of the 23rd Psalm suddenly welled up within me. As the familiar cadence filled that putrid room, the creature before me changed. He stopped shaking. He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me. In that moment, he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long-lost faith. When this child of [God] died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.”
That family numb with grief and regret, those sex offenders who will never return to freedom, that man dying in the cancer ward of the psychiatric hospital had probably lived his life like a sheep without a shepherd, all open themselves to the grace of God’s transforming love when they breathe these words:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
And: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,
Thou anointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Now we’ve got to be aware that there are shepherds and shepherds.
There are, alas, managerial shepherds whose concern is for the bottom line: x number of good fat wooly sheep brought safely through lambing and kept from wolves. The managerial shepherd’s motivation is basically “success.” This sort of shepherd is strong on authority and organizational skills. He/she runs a tight ship. The sheep keep safe, sure, but unfortunately may be tempted to cull the underachievers, the weak, or the misbehavors out of the flock. If you belong to this shepherd’s flock, you probably are a sheep who’s always a little anxious, trying hard to shape up.
The Psalm and the Gospel paint a completely different picture. This shepherd’s passion is to provide for the sheep not just an adequate life, but abundant life! The sheep in the psalm sit down to a meal of oats on a fine tablecloth and lap up clear water from a silver cup while frustrated wolves look on from afar. This is a shepherd who isn’t embarrassed by the weak, the vulnerable, the hungry, the scared in his flock. Instead, this shepherd loves them best!
There two contrasting shepherds portray two very different experiences of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first can be simplistically described as God as boss. God as boss is the manager, the scorekeeper. The God who keeps performance records on each one of us. A “shape up or ship out” kind of God.
This isn’t the God we meet this morning. The God we meet this morning in the poetry of the psalm and in the person of Jesus?—this God loves each of us extravagantly! This is an outrageous God who cares for each individual precious one of us. Who knows each of us by name—Susan, Paula, Matt, Dan . . . . . Loves us—weak, strong, rich, poor, profound, silly.
This is the image of God as not the boss, but the lover.
Now this is not necessarily the image of God we were raised with! In my tradition, I was not made to feel loved, to feel special in God’s eyes.
But that’s not the truth about God. God is the lover, God is the caring shepherd. As a favorite paraphrase of Psalm 23 expresses it:
The king of love my shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
And he is mine for every.
Easter 3 April 26th, 2009
Easter 3
April 26th, 2009
Last week, doing my chaplaincy stint at Speare Hospital, I met an elderly man.
I asked him if he’d like a visit and he said yes. He told me that he had just made a decision for a “Do Not Resuscitate Order” to be put on his chart.
I asked him, since he seemed to want to talk about it, why he had made that decision. He told me his story: Several years ago he was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. Shortly after he arrived, he “died.”
He “woke up” finally, and he described to me coming slowly aware of the lights in the room and the pain from the paddles, and seeing his son’s face.
But he remembers just as vividly how, before that, he had gone deep into a dark tunnel, feeling only one thing, he told me, “Peace, peace, peace.”
Now he is no longer afraid of death. He knows that he can embrace it as a friend.
I know a middle-aged woman who was poisoned by a toxic mix of chemicals on the job. She drove herself to the hospital. She doesn’t remember getting there, but what she does remember is a sense of flying through a beautiful light, and again, a great sense of peace.
When her husband lay dying of cancer, she was able to calm his fear of death by telling him her story, helping him visualize the joy she was sure lay ahead of him.
When people are around death, going through someone else’s death or one’s own near-death experience, they often bring back gifts to the living.
Jesus brought just such a gift to his disciples out of his own death and the amazing fact of his resurrection. It was the vision of a new human society, based on forgiveness.
After all, the Easter story is a story of forgiveness. The cruelty and malice of Jesus’ death confronted God the Creator with the worst that we humans can do. But God did not wreak vengeance upon us, or turn away from us in disgust.
Instead, God forgave us.
After his resurrection, Jesus appeared in a room full of people in serious need of forgiveness.
First of all, the disciples needed Jesus’ forgiveness. He was not only their teacher, but their friend, and they had totally messed up. They had run away, and in Peter’s case, denied him.
Maybe that was why they were so worried that Jesus might be a ghost. At that time, ghosts had a horror-movie-bad reputation for doing harm to the living. Perhaps Jesus’ “ghost” had come back to punish them!
Peter and Andrew, James, John and the rest knew they deserved Jesus’ anger and condemnation. So they were unprepared for the gift of forgiveness shining through Jesus’ first words to them, “Peace be with you,” or in Hebrew, “Shalom.”
Second, the disciples stood in need of forgiving one another. Can’t you imagine them saying to one another before Jesus’ appearance, “If you hadn’t persuaded me I wouldn’t have run away!,” or “Why didn’t you stop me?”
What’s the first line of defense when you feel lousy about something you’ve done? Blame somebody else for getting you into the mess in the first place. I’m sure there was more than enough blame to go around.
Jesus said, “Hold it. Here’s how you can live and work together from now on. Here’s how you can be my church: Change—work on being more courageous and more faithful, and when your brother or sister hurts you or seems to abandon you, forgive them. Pray for them, keep trying to see them as a beloved child of God and worth your care.”
Third, I’m pretty sure they were having a hard time forgiving themselves.
Imagine what was going through Peter’s mind when Jesus appeared among them: “He told me I’d say I didn’t know him, and I bragged, ‘Never, I’ll never disown you.’ It took, what?, about five hours? As soon as someone asked me, what came out of my mouth—‘Jesus who? I never met the man.’ He might forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself.”
Forgiving yourself is perhaps the hardest form of forgiveness. I know that I’ve had times when I could not see any goodness in me. That’s the reason I came back to the church after many years. I needed to kneel once a week say the words of the Confession in the Prayer Book and hear someone tell me God forgave me---because there was no way I could forgive myself. Only over time, slowly, slowly, like drips of water wearing away rock, could that forgiveness come.
Christ’s command to his disciples (which includes us!) to forgive and let themselves be forgiven is absolutely countercultural.
We live in a world in which the lust for vengeance passes like DNA from generation to generation among peoples and nations. We live in a litigious society in which someone always has to bear the blame and the blame always carries a price tag. On every level from marriage to international relations, to acknowledge one’s own contribution to a bad situation is a sign of weakness.
And if we dare to mention that as Christians we’re called to a life of forgiveness, someone will come back at us: “Let’s be honest— this idea of mutual forgiveness—it’s fine if we’re indulging in a fantasy about the kingdom of God. But in the short term—otherwise known as our lives— does God really want me to forgive people who have done harm—a negligent or abusive parent, a rapist or pedophile, maybe, or a tyrant like Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin? Shouldn’t they be brought to justice?”
But Christian forgiveness is not taking everything that happens to us with a sweet smile and a quiet, “Please walk all over me.” Forgiveness in the real world is a lot more muscular than that. Forgiveness means the heavy lifting of looking at a person who has done harm and seeing someone who is still a child of God. It doesn’t ask us to coddle them or set them free from the legal or moral consequences of their actions, but to try, try, try to do the hard work of holding them up in prayer to the justice and mercy of God.
It’s a lifetime of work and struggle, failing and succeeding. But each time we succeed, the world becomes a little different, a little better, a little closer to the vision Jesus brought us back from his death and for which we pray each time we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”
April 26th, 2009
Last week, doing my chaplaincy stint at Speare Hospital, I met an elderly man.
I asked him if he’d like a visit and he said yes. He told me that he had just made a decision for a “Do Not Resuscitate Order” to be put on his chart.
I asked him, since he seemed to want to talk about it, why he had made that decision. He told me his story: Several years ago he was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. Shortly after he arrived, he “died.”
He “woke up” finally, and he described to me coming slowly aware of the lights in the room and the pain from the paddles, and seeing his son’s face.
But he remembers just as vividly how, before that, he had gone deep into a dark tunnel, feeling only one thing, he told me, “Peace, peace, peace.”
Now he is no longer afraid of death. He knows that he can embrace it as a friend.
I know a middle-aged woman who was poisoned by a toxic mix of chemicals on the job. She drove herself to the hospital. She doesn’t remember getting there, but what she does remember is a sense of flying through a beautiful light, and again, a great sense of peace.
When her husband lay dying of cancer, she was able to calm his fear of death by telling him her story, helping him visualize the joy she was sure lay ahead of him.
When people are around death, going through someone else’s death or one’s own near-death experience, they often bring back gifts to the living.
Jesus brought just such a gift to his disciples out of his own death and the amazing fact of his resurrection. It was the vision of a new human society, based on forgiveness.
After all, the Easter story is a story of forgiveness. The cruelty and malice of Jesus’ death confronted God the Creator with the worst that we humans can do. But God did not wreak vengeance upon us, or turn away from us in disgust.
Instead, God forgave us.
After his resurrection, Jesus appeared in a room full of people in serious need of forgiveness.
First of all, the disciples needed Jesus’ forgiveness. He was not only their teacher, but their friend, and they had totally messed up. They had run away, and in Peter’s case, denied him.
Maybe that was why they were so worried that Jesus might be a ghost. At that time, ghosts had a horror-movie-bad reputation for doing harm to the living. Perhaps Jesus’ “ghost” had come back to punish them!
Peter and Andrew, James, John and the rest knew they deserved Jesus’ anger and condemnation. So they were unprepared for the gift of forgiveness shining through Jesus’ first words to them, “Peace be with you,” or in Hebrew, “Shalom.”
Second, the disciples stood in need of forgiving one another. Can’t you imagine them saying to one another before Jesus’ appearance, “If you hadn’t persuaded me I wouldn’t have run away!,” or “Why didn’t you stop me?”
What’s the first line of defense when you feel lousy about something you’ve done? Blame somebody else for getting you into the mess in the first place. I’m sure there was more than enough blame to go around.
Jesus said, “Hold it. Here’s how you can live and work together from now on. Here’s how you can be my church: Change—work on being more courageous and more faithful, and when your brother or sister hurts you or seems to abandon you, forgive them. Pray for them, keep trying to see them as a beloved child of God and worth your care.”
Third, I’m pretty sure they were having a hard time forgiving themselves.
Imagine what was going through Peter’s mind when Jesus appeared among them: “He told me I’d say I didn’t know him, and I bragged, ‘Never, I’ll never disown you.’ It took, what?, about five hours? As soon as someone asked me, what came out of my mouth—‘Jesus who? I never met the man.’ He might forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself.”
Forgiving yourself is perhaps the hardest form of forgiveness. I know that I’ve had times when I could not see any goodness in me. That’s the reason I came back to the church after many years. I needed to kneel once a week say the words of the Confession in the Prayer Book and hear someone tell me God forgave me---because there was no way I could forgive myself. Only over time, slowly, slowly, like drips of water wearing away rock, could that forgiveness come.
Christ’s command to his disciples (which includes us!) to forgive and let themselves be forgiven is absolutely countercultural.
We live in a world in which the lust for vengeance passes like DNA from generation to generation among peoples and nations. We live in a litigious society in which someone always has to bear the blame and the blame always carries a price tag. On every level from marriage to international relations, to acknowledge one’s own contribution to a bad situation is a sign of weakness.
And if we dare to mention that as Christians we’re called to a life of forgiveness, someone will come back at us: “Let’s be honest— this idea of mutual forgiveness—it’s fine if we’re indulging in a fantasy about the kingdom of God. But in the short term—otherwise known as our lives— does God really want me to forgive people who have done harm—a negligent or abusive parent, a rapist or pedophile, maybe, or a tyrant like Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin? Shouldn’t they be brought to justice?”
But Christian forgiveness is not taking everything that happens to us with a sweet smile and a quiet, “Please walk all over me.” Forgiveness in the real world is a lot more muscular than that. Forgiveness means the heavy lifting of looking at a person who has done harm and seeing someone who is still a child of God. It doesn’t ask us to coddle them or set them free from the legal or moral consequences of their actions, but to try, try, try to do the hard work of holding them up in prayer to the justice and mercy of God.
It’s a lifetime of work and struggle, failing and succeeding. But each time we succeed, the world becomes a little different, a little better, a little closer to the vision Jesus brought us back from his death and for which we pray each time we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Easter Day April 12, 2009
Easter Day
April 12, 2009
Here we all are, this golden day, celebrating the most glorious of mysteries, Christ’s triumph over death.
It’s a day that’s hard to wrap our heads around. Do we believe in this amazing possibility? Is the resurrection story we just read, the lovely and tender account of Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden historical or symbolic or both? Does it matter? Where are we with our small and ordinary lives in this story?
In the middle of Holy Week, I had an Easter dream.
I was in a big dormitory-like building with some friends. They all had to go off to classes, and as they left the room, each of them put a hand on my head in blessing. Then two of my closest friends said to me, “Why don’t you come and sit in on our class?”
After they’d left, I thought, “why not?” and started off after them.
It was one of those big old buildings—you might remember one like it from high school or college or work—where indistinguishable corridors branch off one after the other. It felt like a maze.
To make it worse, I’d forgotten to ask where the class was meeting.
Finally I spotted a figure at the end of one of the corridors and I scurried toward it, hoping to ask directions. It was a man, a priest, dressed in black with a collar.
When I got close to him I asked what he was doing there, just standing by a window, at the end of a corridor.
He said, “I’m spending time with Jesus.” Whoops!—because I didn’t see any Jesus, real or a statue or a picture or anything.
Then as I came closer I saw that the corridor widened out there to form a tiny open room on the left. Ah hah, I thought, and turned to the wall opposite the priest. But there was nothing there.
Then something on my left caught my eye, on the third wall, opposite the window. There was a portrait of Jesus done in a pale silvery metal. Not a statue, a slightly raised metal sculpture.
The priest smiled and said to me, “He likes to look out of the window.”
“Christ likes to look out of the window.” That’s when I knew it was an Easter dream.
Because on Easter morning Jesus burst out of the tomb. Why?
Because the Christ in my dream can’t bear to be separated from what the world is doing.
Christ sees what is happening. Sees true love blossoming, and babies born. Sees the trials of illness and death.
Right now, sees the pain of people thrown out of work, people who have labored honorably all their lives long.
Sees people scrape to make their rents or mortgages each month.
Sees savings disappear.
Sees economic disaster threaten the poorest and most vulnerable around the world.
On Easter morning he could not bear to be separated from the facts of the world. Not even a cave carved in the rock and blocked in by a boulder was able to hold him in.
In my Easter dream Christ was not where I expected him to be.
I expected him to be centered in a place of honor on the middle wall. I expected him to be the center of attention.
When you walk into a church, your eyes are directed forward, usually toward a cross and the altar. It’s like walking into a throne room or the presidential office—even the furniture arrangement underlines the importance of the queen or the president. They are “front and center.”
. Imagine walking into a church and having to search for the cross or the altar. But in my Easter dream, Christ was off-set. He was ex-centric, which means literally “out of the center.”
That’s what threw Mary Magdalene, wasn’t it? If by some incredible chance Jesus’ prediction had come true and he had risen from the dead, well, Mary might have thought, wouldn’t he be glowing and glorious and center stage, held above the earth by bands of angels singing “Hosannah”?
But Jesus Christ had never taken the place of honor.
Ex-centric throughout his life, most of the time he took back roads, visited obscure villages, took as friends women and men who in everybody else’s eyes were weird, dirty or in bad trouble. Until the very end, he stayed away from Jerusalem, Israel’s absolute center of power.
Jesus was ex-centric even in the triumph of the Resurrection. He revealed himself first not to temple leaders, nor to Peter, the first of his followers, but to a woman, Mary Magdalene. In a place and time when women had little importance, the first word we hear the newly resurrected Christ say is “woman.”
In my Easter dream I first caught a glimpse of the image of Jesus out of the corner of my eye.
That’s how Mary first saw him, wasn’t it, a shadowy, out-of-focus figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye?
You may come to church each week or just for Christmas and Easter. No matter how often or how rarely you come, I hope you find Christ here.
Yet I suspect that most often you bump into him when you’re not all dressed up on Easter morning! I suspect that most of your close encounters with Christ happen outside of church. You catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye in unexpected acts of kindness that lighten your day. Or in gracious acts of self-sacrifice, large or small. Or in friends who know you all too well and help you be your best self. Or in the mysterious voice that whispers to you when you are strained beyond your power, “Yes, you can go on. Be at peace. I love you.”
Where does Easter glory go, when it’s no longer Easter Day?
It doesn’t go, that’s the mystery. Christ’s Easter glory stays right where it belongs, in the world Christ loves, and watches, and moment by moment saves. We may not see it straight on, but wait! keep looking out of the corner of your eyes for glimpses of our ex-centric Lord leading us down unexpected pathways to a new and resurrected life.
April 12, 2009
Here we all are, this golden day, celebrating the most glorious of mysteries, Christ’s triumph over death.
It’s a day that’s hard to wrap our heads around. Do we believe in this amazing possibility? Is the resurrection story we just read, the lovely and tender account of Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden historical or symbolic or both? Does it matter? Where are we with our small and ordinary lives in this story?
In the middle of Holy Week, I had an Easter dream.
I was in a big dormitory-like building with some friends. They all had to go off to classes, and as they left the room, each of them put a hand on my head in blessing. Then two of my closest friends said to me, “Why don’t you come and sit in on our class?”
After they’d left, I thought, “why not?” and started off after them.
It was one of those big old buildings—you might remember one like it from high school or college or work—where indistinguishable corridors branch off one after the other. It felt like a maze.
To make it worse, I’d forgotten to ask where the class was meeting.
Finally I spotted a figure at the end of one of the corridors and I scurried toward it, hoping to ask directions. It was a man, a priest, dressed in black with a collar.
When I got close to him I asked what he was doing there, just standing by a window, at the end of a corridor.
He said, “I’m spending time with Jesus.” Whoops!—because I didn’t see any Jesus, real or a statue or a picture or anything.
Then as I came closer I saw that the corridor widened out there to form a tiny open room on the left. Ah hah, I thought, and turned to the wall opposite the priest. But there was nothing there.
Then something on my left caught my eye, on the third wall, opposite the window. There was a portrait of Jesus done in a pale silvery metal. Not a statue, a slightly raised metal sculpture.
The priest smiled and said to me, “He likes to look out of the window.”
“Christ likes to look out of the window.” That’s when I knew it was an Easter dream.
Because on Easter morning Jesus burst out of the tomb. Why?
Because the Christ in my dream can’t bear to be separated from what the world is doing.
Christ sees what is happening. Sees true love blossoming, and babies born. Sees the trials of illness and death.
Right now, sees the pain of people thrown out of work, people who have labored honorably all their lives long.
Sees people scrape to make their rents or mortgages each month.
Sees savings disappear.
Sees economic disaster threaten the poorest and most vulnerable around the world.
On Easter morning he could not bear to be separated from the facts of the world. Not even a cave carved in the rock and blocked in by a boulder was able to hold him in.
In my Easter dream Christ was not where I expected him to be.
I expected him to be centered in a place of honor on the middle wall. I expected him to be the center of attention.
When you walk into a church, your eyes are directed forward, usually toward a cross and the altar. It’s like walking into a throne room or the presidential office—even the furniture arrangement underlines the importance of the queen or the president. They are “front and center.”
. Imagine walking into a church and having to search for the cross or the altar. But in my Easter dream, Christ was off-set. He was ex-centric, which means literally “out of the center.”
That’s what threw Mary Magdalene, wasn’t it? If by some incredible chance Jesus’ prediction had come true and he had risen from the dead, well, Mary might have thought, wouldn’t he be glowing and glorious and center stage, held above the earth by bands of angels singing “Hosannah”?
But Jesus Christ had never taken the place of honor.
Ex-centric throughout his life, most of the time he took back roads, visited obscure villages, took as friends women and men who in everybody else’s eyes were weird, dirty or in bad trouble. Until the very end, he stayed away from Jerusalem, Israel’s absolute center of power.
Jesus was ex-centric even in the triumph of the Resurrection. He revealed himself first not to temple leaders, nor to Peter, the first of his followers, but to a woman, Mary Magdalene. In a place and time when women had little importance, the first word we hear the newly resurrected Christ say is “woman.”
In my Easter dream I first caught a glimpse of the image of Jesus out of the corner of my eye.
That’s how Mary first saw him, wasn’t it, a shadowy, out-of-focus figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye?
You may come to church each week or just for Christmas and Easter. No matter how often or how rarely you come, I hope you find Christ here.
Yet I suspect that most often you bump into him when you’re not all dressed up on Easter morning! I suspect that most of your close encounters with Christ happen outside of church. You catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye in unexpected acts of kindness that lighten your day. Or in gracious acts of self-sacrifice, large or small. Or in friends who know you all too well and help you be your best self. Or in the mysterious voice that whispers to you when you are strained beyond your power, “Yes, you can go on. Be at peace. I love you.”
Where does Easter glory go, when it’s no longer Easter Day?
It doesn’t go, that’s the mystery. Christ’s Easter glory stays right where it belongs, in the world Christ loves, and watches, and moment by moment saves. We may not see it straight on, but wait! keep looking out of the corner of your eyes for glimpses of our ex-centric Lord leading us down unexpected pathways to a new and resurrected life.
Good Friday April 10, 2009
Good Friday
April 10, 2009
Good Friday tells an all too human story.
On Wednesday night, some of us prayed the fruits of our meditations on this moment by moment portrayal of Jesus’ suffering.
It was clear from the prayers that we each brought our own lives, our own life experiences, to this exercise. The way of the Cross, the way of pain—that’s deeply understandable to us, because we know what pain is like.
We know what taking up an unbearable burden is like. We know what grief is like, so our hearts ache for Mary; we know what friendship is like, so we cheer for Simon of Cyrene; we know what compassion is like, so we long to be there with Veronica, a piece of torn veil in our hands.
Then, last night, after our commemoration of the Last Supper, we stripped the altar, we covered the gold cross, we even took away the consecrated bread and wine from the aumbry, this little box in the wall. See, it’s empty.
Empty, gone, like the hopes of Jesus’ friends.
But there’s more to Good Friday than the human story. Look at this painting of the second Station, Jesus takes up his cross.
Marcia Santore, the artist, reminds us of another crucial part of the story of Good Friday. Look how, around Jesus’ body, she’s painted flecks of gold.
Because this is not just the all-too-human story repeated every day in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, of the terror tactics wielded by the state.
The flecks of gold remind us that the story of Good Friday cannot be fully told without talking about God.
The Good Friday story really goes back to the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This Word, of course, is Christ. John’s Gospel goes on: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” That means that when God’s word sounded at the moment of Creation, Christ was in that word. All creation, which God found, “very good,” was made in the image of Christ. How wonderful! What happened?
When I was a little girl, a favorite birthday party game was “Gossip.” You might remember it: one person makes up a sentence and whispers it to the person next to her. That person whispers it to the girl next to her, and on and on round the circle.
The last person gets to say what she heard. Depending on how big the group is, what comes out at the end is a muddled, sometimes barely recognizable, version of the original statement.
In the same way, as creation evolved and especially alas, when humans appeared and human history began, God’s original creative word became distorted, soiled, turned backwards and upside down.
God could have turned away from the mess we made of the world. Christ might have scorned the world created in his image, like a writer who rips up 200 pages of a novel she’s worked on for years because it just isn’t any good.
But no. St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells what happened instead: Christ Jesus “though, he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
The original Greek is perfectly clear—I checked it: Christ was not sent or compelled to come according to some cosmic plan. No, he resolutely, freely emptied himself. He shook off godly privilege and became human, human enough to suffer death on a cross.
And God let him go.
You who are parents, imagine this: watching your beloved child leave home to go into the worst possible danger—to be a human rights worker in the Sudan, an army ranger in Afghanistan, a volunteer “peacemaker” using the fragile barrier of his body to block tanks in Israel/Palestine.
God lets Christ go and Christ feels the loss in his blood and in his bones. Not in John’s Passion Gospel, but in Matthew and Mark’s, Jesus screams into this cosmic void, this total emptiness, his connection with God apparently broken: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We can’t tell the story of the Crucifixion without realizing that in it, we and God are intertwined.
The human part: Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen, and John and Joseph of Arimathea catch their beloved Jesus’ body as the soldiers cut him down from the cross. They hold him and then grieve him into the tomb.
The divine part: God catches the dead Son. Catches the Word, the Word of light and life, and holds him, ready for the Resurrection.
But--- When Mary and the others bathe Jesus’ body before his burial, they are washing God’s wounds. And when God reaches out to catch up Christ, God’s arms wind up embracing not only Christ but us—all of humanity, and yes, all of Creation.
What words are left? Good Friday brings us finally to silence, and reverence, and awe.
April 10, 2009
Good Friday tells an all too human story.
On Wednesday night, some of us prayed the fruits of our meditations on this moment by moment portrayal of Jesus’ suffering.
It was clear from the prayers that we each brought our own lives, our own life experiences, to this exercise. The way of the Cross, the way of pain—that’s deeply understandable to us, because we know what pain is like.
We know what taking up an unbearable burden is like. We know what grief is like, so our hearts ache for Mary; we know what friendship is like, so we cheer for Simon of Cyrene; we know what compassion is like, so we long to be there with Veronica, a piece of torn veil in our hands.
Then, last night, after our commemoration of the Last Supper, we stripped the altar, we covered the gold cross, we even took away the consecrated bread and wine from the aumbry, this little box in the wall. See, it’s empty.
Empty, gone, like the hopes of Jesus’ friends.
But there’s more to Good Friday than the human story. Look at this painting of the second Station, Jesus takes up his cross.
Marcia Santore, the artist, reminds us of another crucial part of the story of Good Friday. Look how, around Jesus’ body, she’s painted flecks of gold.
Because this is not just the all-too-human story repeated every day in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, of the terror tactics wielded by the state.
The flecks of gold remind us that the story of Good Friday cannot be fully told without talking about God.
The Good Friday story really goes back to the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This Word, of course, is Christ. John’s Gospel goes on: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” That means that when God’s word sounded at the moment of Creation, Christ was in that word. All creation, which God found, “very good,” was made in the image of Christ. How wonderful! What happened?
When I was a little girl, a favorite birthday party game was “Gossip.” You might remember it: one person makes up a sentence and whispers it to the person next to her. That person whispers it to the girl next to her, and on and on round the circle.
The last person gets to say what she heard. Depending on how big the group is, what comes out at the end is a muddled, sometimes barely recognizable, version of the original statement.
In the same way, as creation evolved and especially alas, when humans appeared and human history began, God’s original creative word became distorted, soiled, turned backwards and upside down.
God could have turned away from the mess we made of the world. Christ might have scorned the world created in his image, like a writer who rips up 200 pages of a novel she’s worked on for years because it just isn’t any good.
But no. St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells what happened instead: Christ Jesus “though, he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
The original Greek is perfectly clear—I checked it: Christ was not sent or compelled to come according to some cosmic plan. No, he resolutely, freely emptied himself. He shook off godly privilege and became human, human enough to suffer death on a cross.
And God let him go.
You who are parents, imagine this: watching your beloved child leave home to go into the worst possible danger—to be a human rights worker in the Sudan, an army ranger in Afghanistan, a volunteer “peacemaker” using the fragile barrier of his body to block tanks in Israel/Palestine.
God lets Christ go and Christ feels the loss in his blood and in his bones. Not in John’s Passion Gospel, but in Matthew and Mark’s, Jesus screams into this cosmic void, this total emptiness, his connection with God apparently broken: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We can’t tell the story of the Crucifixion without realizing that in it, we and God are intertwined.
The human part: Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen, and John and Joseph of Arimathea catch their beloved Jesus’ body as the soldiers cut him down from the cross. They hold him and then grieve him into the tomb.
The divine part: God catches the dead Son. Catches the Word, the Word of light and life, and holds him, ready for the Resurrection.
But--- When Mary and the others bathe Jesus’ body before his burial, they are washing God’s wounds. And when God reaches out to catch up Christ, God’s arms wind up embracing not only Christ but us—all of humanity, and yes, all of Creation.
What words are left? Good Friday brings us finally to silence, and reverence, and awe.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Lent 5 March 29, 2009
Lent 5
March 29, 2009
Today Jesus finds himself dealing with perhaps the most subtle temptation he’s ever faced.
The temptation is not obvious. The story seems perfectly straightforward: Some Greeks who’ve arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover ask to see Jesus.
This is good news, isn’t it? It means that Jesus has become a celebrity even among Gentiles and foreigners. “Hey, while you’re in Jerusalem, try and see that Jesus fellow we’re hearing so much about.”
Philip and Andrew go to Jesus and tell him, with some excitement, because this means Jesus’ message and fame are spreading.
Jesus’ response is, on the face of it, bizarre.
He begins talking about seeds and fruit and dying and hating life and loving life and his hour is coming . . . –what in heaven’s name does all this have to do with the good news that a couple of Gentiles, non-Jews, from Greece, want to be introduced?
What’s going on?
I mentioned a temptation. Here it is: Jesus understands that if the Gentiles are coming to him, if his good news is spreading, maybe he won’t need to go through with the persecution and death he knows is coming. Maybe all he needs to do is back off from his message a little bit. Maybe he doesn’t have to challenge the temple authorities with such abandon. Maybe a little compromise—how much difference could that make?
Jesus is tempted. Like any human being, Jesus fears death. And the time is getting closer—it will be a only few more days, he suspects, until the soldiers will seize him and all the diabolical/human forces of evil will spring into action.
“Now my soul is troubled.” That’s as much as he says about it, but that’s enough to reveal that he wasn’t rushing joyfully toward crucifixion. He’s afraid. The arrival of the Greek fans indicates to him a way to get off the hook. This is Jesus’ moment of temptation. It’s so quick—a nanosecond of wanting to say “no—let’s do it another way.”
Jesus feels the excitement, the lure of success in worldly terms, among his disciples—the hope bubbling up that they’ve arrived.
And he dashes that hope, for himself and for them. “Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies,” he says to himself and to them, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Seeds. Every seed has a thin coat around it which protects it from taking in oxygen from the air. A seed is for all intents and purposes dead.
But then it lands in soil. It enters into a place of risk, a place of darkness.
Jesus must have felt that he was being cast down into that very same darkness, facing execution. How he must have wanted to be successful, to hold onto his life. But he needed to do as the seed does —go down into risk and uncertainty and death.
But this temptation isn’t just Jesus’. Every Christian, every human, tries to some extent to seek safety rather than new life.
We are seeds who refuse to “die” when we assert that our little selves come before anybody else. We can only break open by dying to the good old American attitude that the purpose of my life is my self fulfillment and “having it all.” We have to die to preoccupation with the big ME and my successes, my failures, and what other people are thinking about me. Die to the idea that I am the center of the universe. Spiritual growth means cracking the tough coating of our self-protectiveness and self-absorption to open up to the real needs of other people.
Inside every seed is an embryo, and in that embryo is a root which goes down into the ground, and a shoot that goes up into the sky. Every embryo has a root and a shoot.
When the dormant seed is planted into the ground and the soil temperature is right, the seed begins to take in water. It begins to expand, the seed coat is broken, embryo begins to mature and produce sugar and protein. Then out come the tiny root and the tiny shoot, and the shoots produce plants which produce more seed which produce more fruit. New life, resurrection.
That’s why Jesus knew he had to go down into death. He trusted that in some unknown way God would burst the seed of his dying forth into new life.
We too need to yield ourselves to be cracked open by the life-giving force of God working within us. It may hurt a little or a lot, but finally it will produce the tiny root, the tiny shoot.
This strange logic of the seed—and the cross—continues today.
Almost exactly 29 years today, Archbishop Oscar Romero preached a sermon in the cathedral in San Salvador. Over his brief time as archbishop, Romero had changed from a careful, conservative official of the church, to an activist mystic in passionate solidarity with the country’s impoverished peasants. He daily put himself at risk.
Romero’s text that morning of the Fifth Sunday of Lent was the same as ours today. Here is part of what he preached: “You have just heard in Christ’s Gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . .Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, as he prepared the altar for Eucharist, Salvadorean soldiers shot Archbishop Romero dead.
“If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Where are your places of darkness, your places of risk?
It wasn’t easy for Jesus, it wasn’t easy for Archbishop Romero, it won’t be easy for each of us to take the leap that propels us down into the “necessary darkness” that leads to the cracking of the shell and the miracles of the little shoots, the little roots, of new life.
March 29, 2009
Today Jesus finds himself dealing with perhaps the most subtle temptation he’s ever faced.
The temptation is not obvious. The story seems perfectly straightforward: Some Greeks who’ve arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover ask to see Jesus.
This is good news, isn’t it? It means that Jesus has become a celebrity even among Gentiles and foreigners. “Hey, while you’re in Jerusalem, try and see that Jesus fellow we’re hearing so much about.”
Philip and Andrew go to Jesus and tell him, with some excitement, because this means Jesus’ message and fame are spreading.
Jesus’ response is, on the face of it, bizarre.
He begins talking about seeds and fruit and dying and hating life and loving life and his hour is coming . . . –what in heaven’s name does all this have to do with the good news that a couple of Gentiles, non-Jews, from Greece, want to be introduced?
What’s going on?
I mentioned a temptation. Here it is: Jesus understands that if the Gentiles are coming to him, if his good news is spreading, maybe he won’t need to go through with the persecution and death he knows is coming. Maybe all he needs to do is back off from his message a little bit. Maybe he doesn’t have to challenge the temple authorities with such abandon. Maybe a little compromise—how much difference could that make?
Jesus is tempted. Like any human being, Jesus fears death. And the time is getting closer—it will be a only few more days, he suspects, until the soldiers will seize him and all the diabolical/human forces of evil will spring into action.
“Now my soul is troubled.” That’s as much as he says about it, but that’s enough to reveal that he wasn’t rushing joyfully toward crucifixion. He’s afraid. The arrival of the Greek fans indicates to him a way to get off the hook. This is Jesus’ moment of temptation. It’s so quick—a nanosecond of wanting to say “no—let’s do it another way.”
Jesus feels the excitement, the lure of success in worldly terms, among his disciples—the hope bubbling up that they’ve arrived.
And he dashes that hope, for himself and for them. “Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies,” he says to himself and to them, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Seeds. Every seed has a thin coat around it which protects it from taking in oxygen from the air. A seed is for all intents and purposes dead.
But then it lands in soil. It enters into a place of risk, a place of darkness.
Jesus must have felt that he was being cast down into that very same darkness, facing execution. How he must have wanted to be successful, to hold onto his life. But he needed to do as the seed does —go down into risk and uncertainty and death.
But this temptation isn’t just Jesus’. Every Christian, every human, tries to some extent to seek safety rather than new life.
We are seeds who refuse to “die” when we assert that our little selves come before anybody else. We can only break open by dying to the good old American attitude that the purpose of my life is my self fulfillment and “having it all.” We have to die to preoccupation with the big ME and my successes, my failures, and what other people are thinking about me. Die to the idea that I am the center of the universe. Spiritual growth means cracking the tough coating of our self-protectiveness and self-absorption to open up to the real needs of other people.
Inside every seed is an embryo, and in that embryo is a root which goes down into the ground, and a shoot that goes up into the sky. Every embryo has a root and a shoot.
When the dormant seed is planted into the ground and the soil temperature is right, the seed begins to take in water. It begins to expand, the seed coat is broken, embryo begins to mature and produce sugar and protein. Then out come the tiny root and the tiny shoot, and the shoots produce plants which produce more seed which produce more fruit. New life, resurrection.
That’s why Jesus knew he had to go down into death. He trusted that in some unknown way God would burst the seed of his dying forth into new life.
We too need to yield ourselves to be cracked open by the life-giving force of God working within us. It may hurt a little or a lot, but finally it will produce the tiny root, the tiny shoot.
This strange logic of the seed—and the cross—continues today.
Almost exactly 29 years today, Archbishop Oscar Romero preached a sermon in the cathedral in San Salvador. Over his brief time as archbishop, Romero had changed from a careful, conservative official of the church, to an activist mystic in passionate solidarity with the country’s impoverished peasants. He daily put himself at risk.
Romero’s text that morning of the Fifth Sunday of Lent was the same as ours today. Here is part of what he preached: “You have just heard in Christ’s Gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . .Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, as he prepared the altar for Eucharist, Salvadorean soldiers shot Archbishop Romero dead.
“If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Where are your places of darkness, your places of risk?
It wasn’t easy for Jesus, it wasn’t easy for Archbishop Romero, it won’t be easy for each of us to take the leap that propels us down into the “necessary darkness” that leads to the cracking of the shell and the miracles of the little shoots, the little roots, of new life.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Lent 4 March 22nd, 2009
Lent 4
March 22nd, 2009
For 20 years Will and I toured each winter with the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center doing a show on winter ecology.
My favorite part was at the end, when we’d all stand at the door as the children left, holding strips of fur or pieces of bone for the kids to touch. My job was to hold the live snake who had a feature role in the production. I invited everyone who passed by to touch the snake’s scales to see if they were slimy (they weren’t).
I was amazed how many kids and teachers scooted out in back of the line to avoid me and the snake. No way were they touching that thing!
Fear of snakes lies deep in the human psyche.
The story of humankind’s first sin in the Book of Genesis personifies the voice of temptation as the hiss of a serpent. “Tassssste of the fruit . . . .”
So when the Israelites began to complain of life in the wilderness where God had led them after liberating them from slavery in Egypt, God responded to their constant whining by sending poisonous serpents to harass them.
It seems an appropriate punishment, doesn’t it? A people, miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, hissing out complaints, being attacked by serpents.
Too often we move quickly to the happy ending, the bronze snake lifted up in the desert, everybody feeling better and temporarily repenting. So let’s pause here a minute in the desert with the snakes hissing at our feet.
The Israelites in the desert rail against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
Angry and bitter, they scapegoat poor Moses as if it’s all his fault.
There’s a good description of them and people like them in the second lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians: they are people living in the passions of the flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.
Now there is nothing wrong with the desires of flesh and senses—after all, God created them— but there is a lot wrong with living as if that is all there is. The Israelites refuse to remember their past, the suffering and slavery. They refuse to appreciate their present even surrounded as they are with God’s constant presence and care. They refuse to have faith in the future God has promised in a land “flowing with milk and honey.”
“Children of wrath,” they’re stuck in their own discomforts and wants, their anger and resentments against God, Moses, and each other.
That lesson from Ephesians reveals that sin is not so much a set of actions we can choose or reject, but a kind of pervasive muck in which we all get stuck, a vicious inheritance in which we all participate, a snake pit of greed and selfishness, hatred and wrath.
Here’s an example: All we have to do is walk out these doors today and go to Hannafords or the diner or café—or coffee hour—and I’m sure somebody will be talking about the AIG bonuses. It’s a colossal economic, political and moral mess. And just about everybody seems to be implicated. Politicians and journalists rail against financial managers for their greed, while at the same time they themselves are seething with wrath and oozing with self-righteousness.
Oops—here’s a good example of what I mean—look at me! I’m seething with wrath and self-righteousness. I’m hissing with anger and whining about how awful others are while conveniently forgetting my own frequent falls into self-righteousness and greed.
We are all “living in sin.”
Usually that’s a quaint expression referring to people living together without benefit of marriage.
But I find “living in sin” a helpful description of much of our lives.
“Living in sin” is living in a nest of vipers, where we poison one another.
I just finished reading Brideshead Revisited by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. Towards the end of the novel, a family incident shocks the main woman character, Julia, into looking, really looking, at her life.
Appalled, she cries out that she is “living in sin: “’Living in sin’ [is] not just doing wrong,” she says. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night. . . .”
Julia realizes that “living in sin” poisons and destroys everything, even the God who loves us: “Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave cloths spread on the stone slab, never the oil and the spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.”
If that’s all there is to life, “living in sin,” what is the point? If we are all serpents to one another what hope is there?
Lent gives us a gift, a hard gift: the knowledge that as humans we hold two wildly contrary truths together at the same time: Sin is real, it’s all around us and clings to us and we cling to it and it seeks to kill the spark of life within us---that’s the first thing. The second thing is that the God who loves us will do whatever it takes to save us from its venom.
What did Jesus say in the gospel today?: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” And then the clincher—the reason why, the words that make all the difference, that means that the snake pit is not the only life option: What did Jesus say? Why did Jesus come to us? Because “God so loved the world.” God so loved the world.
Let us pray in the words of Guy Tillson’s prayer for the Seventh Station of the Cross:
Holy Lord Jesus, beneath the weight of your cross, you falter again, exhausted and weary from the burden you bear. You took upon yourself our human weakness so that we might enjoy the very holiness of God. In our darkness, may we turn to your light; in our exhaustion, may we find rest in you; in our lack of purpose, reveal your way to us; and, in our failings, may we rise up forgiven. Amen.
March 22nd, 2009
For 20 years Will and I toured each winter with the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center doing a show on winter ecology.
My favorite part was at the end, when we’d all stand at the door as the children left, holding strips of fur or pieces of bone for the kids to touch. My job was to hold the live snake who had a feature role in the production. I invited everyone who passed by to touch the snake’s scales to see if they were slimy (they weren’t).
I was amazed how many kids and teachers scooted out in back of the line to avoid me and the snake. No way were they touching that thing!
Fear of snakes lies deep in the human psyche.
The story of humankind’s first sin in the Book of Genesis personifies the voice of temptation as the hiss of a serpent. “Tassssste of the fruit . . . .”
So when the Israelites began to complain of life in the wilderness where God had led them after liberating them from slavery in Egypt, God responded to their constant whining by sending poisonous serpents to harass them.
It seems an appropriate punishment, doesn’t it? A people, miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, hissing out complaints, being attacked by serpents.
Too often we move quickly to the happy ending, the bronze snake lifted up in the desert, everybody feeling better and temporarily repenting. So let’s pause here a minute in the desert with the snakes hissing at our feet.
The Israelites in the desert rail against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
Angry and bitter, they scapegoat poor Moses as if it’s all his fault.
There’s a good description of them and people like them in the second lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians: they are people living in the passions of the flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.
Now there is nothing wrong with the desires of flesh and senses—after all, God created them— but there is a lot wrong with living as if that is all there is. The Israelites refuse to remember their past, the suffering and slavery. They refuse to appreciate their present even surrounded as they are with God’s constant presence and care. They refuse to have faith in the future God has promised in a land “flowing with milk and honey.”
“Children of wrath,” they’re stuck in their own discomforts and wants, their anger and resentments against God, Moses, and each other.
That lesson from Ephesians reveals that sin is not so much a set of actions we can choose or reject, but a kind of pervasive muck in which we all get stuck, a vicious inheritance in which we all participate, a snake pit of greed and selfishness, hatred and wrath.
Here’s an example: All we have to do is walk out these doors today and go to Hannafords or the diner or café—or coffee hour—and I’m sure somebody will be talking about the AIG bonuses. It’s a colossal economic, political and moral mess. And just about everybody seems to be implicated. Politicians and journalists rail against financial managers for their greed, while at the same time they themselves are seething with wrath and oozing with self-righteousness.
Oops—here’s a good example of what I mean—look at me! I’m seething with wrath and self-righteousness. I’m hissing with anger and whining about how awful others are while conveniently forgetting my own frequent falls into self-righteousness and greed.
We are all “living in sin.”
Usually that’s a quaint expression referring to people living together without benefit of marriage.
But I find “living in sin” a helpful description of much of our lives.
“Living in sin” is living in a nest of vipers, where we poison one another.
I just finished reading Brideshead Revisited by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. Towards the end of the novel, a family incident shocks the main woman character, Julia, into looking, really looking, at her life.
Appalled, she cries out that she is “living in sin: “’Living in sin’ [is] not just doing wrong,” she says. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night. . . .”
Julia realizes that “living in sin” poisons and destroys everything, even the God who loves us: “Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave cloths spread on the stone slab, never the oil and the spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.”
If that’s all there is to life, “living in sin,” what is the point? If we are all serpents to one another what hope is there?
Lent gives us a gift, a hard gift: the knowledge that as humans we hold two wildly contrary truths together at the same time: Sin is real, it’s all around us and clings to us and we cling to it and it seeks to kill the spark of life within us---that’s the first thing. The second thing is that the God who loves us will do whatever it takes to save us from its venom.
What did Jesus say in the gospel today?: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” And then the clincher—the reason why, the words that make all the difference, that means that the snake pit is not the only life option: What did Jesus say? Why did Jesus come to us? Because “God so loved the world.” God so loved the world.
Let us pray in the words of Guy Tillson’s prayer for the Seventh Station of the Cross:
Holy Lord Jesus, beneath the weight of your cross, you falter again, exhausted and weary from the burden you bear. You took upon yourself our human weakness so that we might enjoy the very holiness of God. In our darkness, may we turn to your light; in our exhaustion, may we find rest in you; in our lack of purpose, reveal your way to us; and, in our failings, may we rise up forgiven. Amen.
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