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.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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.
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