Good Friday

Faith: FAIL. God Punished.

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they, too would be arrested; faith: FAIL. Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, as Jesus, hanging on the cross to pull off another miracle, save yourself and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!!

Peter’s famous denial three times echoing Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This person is the disciple upon whom the Church. Peter, the so-called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into sand at the crucifixion.

The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure and faithlessness. Yet, despite this, as T.S. Eliot wrote “We call this Friday good.”

Its goodness lies in God’s total submission to his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willing suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not suffering (of ourselves or another) sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God because we suffer.

“How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God falling into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land.

God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he intends to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; it's only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out pain, but rather following Jesus we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The cross’ affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his embrace, arms stretched out on the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure and humiliation. Today we come to the cross to be embraced by Jesus’ crucifixion and to be resurrected with The Christ.

(Reprinted from Good Friday, 2012)

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and  the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His own creation to deliver this message of healing, love and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightening-bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”. 

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and definitive act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of a gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own un-created end---all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff and many would feel much better with “April Fools!”.  Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead and buried.  Stay tuned.   

Fifth Sunday of Lent

"Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” 

The speaker in Isaiah is God, trying to redirect His people's attention from the pains of the Babylonian exile and towards a new exodus---a return home that has echoes of last week’s Prodigal Son parable.  God is making a way in the desert, bringing water to barren soil, renewing life from death.  Today’s Old Testament from Isaiah is almost a response to Psalm 137 “By the rivers of Babylon; there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.”  God is pleading with His people to “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not” to re-establish His relationship with them.

I think it was more than a preoccupation with a sense of loss; it was a sense that God had spoken through the prophets, especially Moses, and that is where the sought comfort and understanding.  The prophetic reality of Isaiah, however, were calling them to abandon defining themselves by their history, and look to God now and realize God is calling them to a living relationship.  Like all great prophetic literature, the past is only useful insofar as it points forward.

Today’s gospel of the woman and man caught in adultery and Jesus’ response is an excellent illustration of being called to the present.  They dragged the woman to the feet of Jesus in an attempt to catch him pronouncing the death penalty that was prescribed under the Holiness Code of Leviticus (20:10), but in so doing, Jesus would have been guilty under Roman Law of carrying out capital punishment, which had been banned for the Jews.  If Jesus pronounced a pardon, he would have been guilty of heresy.  Jesus, however, brilliantly escapes this trap with the legendary reply: “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone”.  This took the steam out of the crowd and foiled the plan of the religious leaders to trap Jesus. Alone with the woman, Jesus does not condone the sin of adultery but merely says that since she was not condemned by anyone else, so he will not condemn her.  He only admonishes her to “sin no more”.

Using the Law as a tool for announcing God’s condemnation of a sinner was looking back and missing the reality of God’s present love and concern for humanity.  Using tradition and text as a tool of power still has its hold on religious authorities in the Christian church today.  Jesus was sent to fulfill the law in his person; text becomes the Word only when it is faithful to the living and present reality of a relationship with God in the Holy Spirit. Sin is an occasion for communal grief and prayer, not condemnation, for “we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God”.  By grieving sin and loving the one who sins, we heal.  We can only love the sinner by loving ourselves first as God loves us.  Loving means not encouraging sin, but supporting the struggle.  The unrepentant sinner separates him or herself from the community, but the community still longs for a homecoming, still longs for a renewed relationship.  As a community of sinners, the best we can do is keep picking ourselves up and leaning on God’s unending grace.  Our response to ourselves is Jesus’ response to the woman (and equally pertinent to the man not dragged before Jesus) is go, and sin nor more.  We can only hope to begin a righteous life if the journey begins with love and support.  Lent is the ideal time to make this beginning because Easter is a celebration of this resurrection.

Fourth Sunday of Lent

The Lost and Found

‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you;
I no longer deserve to be called your son.’
 
These are the words of the Prodigal Son, and they resonate with us as we journey through Lent more conscious of our need to God’s abundant grace.  Just as the Prodigal Son contemplated the richness of his father’s estate while he was stealing scraps of food he was using to feed pigs, we too sense the almost unfathomable richness of God’s goodness from which he pours out His grace upon His creation.  Lent is not only a time to consider our sinfulness, but it is also a time to contemplate  how the nature of sin is such that it can lead us to a life of spiritual poverty, where our souls are famished for lack of nourishment.  We cannot exist off of scraps meant for  pigs! 
 

As God’s children, like the Prodigal Son, we are afforded all that God has even though we have wandered away from home with the mistaken belief that the true richness of the world was something we create rather than something we experience in communion with God.

So many Christians in their youth leave the church for what they think will be a richer life without God and the sacraments, only to return when tragedy strikes, returning with the spiritual maturity they left with.  Some were driven out of the church by harm done them by the very community they called family.  Some left because it is inconvenient to rise early on  Sunday and they would rather be doing something else; they can always worship God on their own.  Then there are some who never return, who die without their birthright of the sacraments and the comfort of absolution.  Whatever the reason for leaving, during Lent it is we, the faithful who must be a sign of God’s finding them and inviting them to return.  We must be of the mind of the father in the parable who doesn’t wait for his son to reach him, but runs out to meet him at first sight.

Where do we find these prodigal Christians?  They are all around us in our daily lives.  Invite them back.  Let them know that God’s love never abandoned them.  Remind them of the parable of The Prodigal Son and the enthusiasm of the father, and that God’s love extends to them no matter where they are in their spiritual walk.  So many feel unworthy and use that as an excuse to stay away; we never become worthy, but we all cultivate love and gratitude from the soil of the humble awareness that our Father has embraced us on the road, clothed us, put a ring on our finger, and invites us to celebrate being found.

Third Sunday of Lent

 "...whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall."(1Cor. 10:12)

 St.Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians gives us an enticing frame for today's gospel.  Paul is writing to the wealthy and sophisticated church at Corinth, which he founded and  nurtured as a spiritual father---the father of a spiritually adolescent community.

Paul admonishes the folks at Corinth to be careful of being spiritually proud.  Many believed that simply by partaking of the sacraments they were being given the fullness of salvation rather than the orthodox teaching that the sacraments are a process of salvation, the "food for the journey".  He alludes to the Jews in the Exodus who "...all drank the spiritual drink . . Yet God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the desert."  The sacraments must be approached with humility, a sense that they indeed confer grace, not a sense of entitlement.

Jesus's call to repentance likewise uses allusions to the past folly of those who presumed favor with God, but he goes further by using a parable of an unproductive fig tree.  The landowner wants the fruitless fruit tree uprooted, but the gardener intervenes and suggests a little individualized attention---to take a "wait and see" approach in the hopes that the tree will be producing within a year.  Clearly this allegory positions Christ as the Gardner and God the Father as the landowner; the fig tree is Israel. Though the three gospels contain a story involving fig trees, Matthew and Marks are similar (withering curse of a fig tree by Jesus), the story in Luke---aside from the figure of the fig---is different.  The "fruit" of Luke's fig tree is associated with the expectation that Israel will be righteous before God, that they will live out the covenant; however, they have turned away from righteousness as primarily demonstrated with how they treat the most vulnerable.  Luke's gospel is focused around justice for those ignored and outcast.

Jesus's deeds in the following chapter after his call to repentance is a wonderful illustration as to how Jesus was fulfilling the Covenant: he healed and liberated a woman who was crippled and "incapable of standing erect."  Most telling, was his calling "the leader of the synagogue" a hypocrite for objecting that healing cannot be done on the sabbath.  Jesus replies rather forcefully: "Hypocrites! Does not each one of you and the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering.  This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?" This was the repentance the previous chapter was calling Israel to: Repent to heal, and heal to repent; forgive to be forgiven.  Healing was not an option for Jesus, it was the core of his ministry.  Repentance means, literally, to turn 180 degrees. 

The repentance of this Lenten season asks us to become amazed at the injustice in the world; but working for a cause can be just as insidious in leading us away from healing others as becoming obsessed with preserving orthodoxy (Jesus healed on the sabbath!).  Jesus tended to the woman first.  His priority wasn't to make a point; the woman wasn't a visual aid. Jesus responded to the need as it presented itself, and then tended to the dried up fig trees in the synagogue.  

For our Lenten meditation, let's consider ourselves in this scene not as Jesus, and perhaps not even as the crippled woman, but as part of the crowd of orthodox observers who are upset at Jesus' violation of the sabbath.  If we can sit with this for a few minutes, we can clearly and unequivocally proclaim:  "We're not there yet!"