Easter Sunday: The Resurrection of the Lord

From Death to Life

The older I get, the less concerned I am about the historical facts of my faith.  Don't get me wrong, if I could know some historical fact regarding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I'd jump at the opportunity; it's more a matter of accepting the inherent limitations of living a life of faith regarding the type of knowledge faith reveals.  I see so many folks trading their faith for a type of intellectual dishonesty that makes bizarre claims in an attempt to find an empirical backing to what they claim to already believe.  Harold Camping comes to mind, as do the like-minded who, based on this man's "mathematical" calculations, predicted the end of the world and the Parousia on a specific date.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Another date was set; it seems his calculations were a bit off the first time.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Finally, Camping admitted he got the whole thing wrong and is no longer going to make any further predictions.  Humiliated, alone, pilloried in the press, Harold Camping takes his first step towards resurrection: crucifixion. 

There is no other way to resurrection than through crucifixion.  This is the substance of my faith when I proclaim each Sunday "He was crucified, died and buried.  On the third day, he rose again in accordance with the scriptures."

Crucifixion forces our hand breaks our plans for an orderly and carefully controlled life and puts us at the feet of the cross, or on it.  We will likely never have empirical, historical evidence of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but one thing is eminently probable: Jesus was killed on the cross by Roman and religious authorities who were threatened by the instability of challenged metaphors: Jesus said he was a king and Jesus said he was the Messiah.  The only possible way Jesus could walk to the cross was a faith born not in what would come after, but in the sustaining relationship of love he had with the Father.  Jesus' fear, and feeling of dejection in murmuring the 22nd Psalm "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" ends with the 31st Psalm: "Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." 

The Resurrection is what happened after.  The disciples witnessed it according to the accounts of Scripture.  But what my faith finds its foundation upon are the resurrections I've experienced in others and in myself that have their origin in The Resurrection. This yoking of death with birth is an incredibly rich source of imaginative literature and art. Easter is the "difficult birth" of a faith borne on the cross of a two-thousand-year-old man who claimed to be a king and Messiah; but the millions of new lives hewn from the roughness of the Cross is witness to a deeper and more profound truth than an historical event, and the Resurrection has lived long after Jesus walked the earth.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

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 is the disciple the Church was founded on. 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 of his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willingly suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we might respond when being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not suffering sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God.

“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 dropping 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 wants to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; its only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out suffering, 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 arms stretched out onto 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 in order to be resurrected with the Christ.

Posted originally in March, 2013

Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

“So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection.  The word is so infused with strong, positive idealism that Jesus’ call to be perfect seems rhetorical; no one can become perfect…..especially perfect the way God is perfect! The point is driven home in today’s gospel with the impossibility of the Jesus’ injunctions:

“You have heard that it was said,
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.

When someone strikes you on your right cheek,
turn the other one as well.
If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic,
hand over your cloak as well.
Should anyone press you into service for one mile,
go for two miles.
Give to the one who asks of you,
and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

            Couple this with last week’s gospel where Jesus said it was enough to feel lust and anger in order to commit sin under the Law. Indeed, the point is clear: no one stands justified by the Law before God. How, then, could Jesus follow this up with an injunction to be perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect”? Is this just another layer of impossibility heaped upon his earlier pronouncement?

            This gospel is situated in a section full of Jesus’ ethical teaching that extends from the Beatitudes in chapter five to capping off the Sermon on the Mount in chapter seven.  Interwoven with Jesus’ ethical exhortations, is the admonition to focus on seeking God, to seek the righteousness of the Kingdom first in your need and what is truly needed will be provided.  It is Jesus pleading with his disciples to focus away from the Law and on the Giver of the Law: God.

            The true Law is the law of love. Jesus proclaims that “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”  A compelling corollary to Jesus’ reply to the Scribes as to what the greatest commandment of the Law: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Fulfillment of the Law is only possible if it originates in the heart, not from a book. In the readings for today’s baptism, Ezekiel the prophet recounts the promise of God in relation to the Law:

“I am going to take you from among the nations and gather you together from all the foreign countries, and bring you home to your own land. I shall pour clean water over you and you will be

cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all your defilement and all your idols. I shall give

you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from

your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and

make you keep my laws….”

The ethical demands of Christianity do not come from a book as a source of fulfillment; the Bible is essential for foundational training and inspiration, but it cannot simply be followed without the gift of discernment given as a gift at baptism. We must learn by practicing all of our lives to submit to the Law of Love, of the compassion God showed for his creation by entering into our suffering and resurrecting it to new life. We then, freely enter into the world of those who suffer around us, and enter our own suffering, with the sure hope of the resurrection.  Our fleshy hearts were remade from stone because we need to feel the world’s joy and the world’s suffering as part of our spiritual journey seeking God, together, as a people living in the Promised Land of the heart.

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."  --Jesus

There is a popular refrain among some Christians: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!” No doubt the fatigue of believing that uncertainty is opposed to maturing in the spiritual life can lead one to wish such simple slogans are true. Biblical fundamentalism, though, is borne from a lack of trust—the antithesis of life in the Spirit. Our relationship with God is primarily one of prayer and communal discernment, not textual fidelity; such errors are not unique to Christianity.  The Jewish people of Jesus’ time also struggled to live a righteous life through God’s revelation in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). Genesis is the story of origins. Most important, though,  isn’t the scientific details of origin, but of the origin of our relationship with God and one another, and the origin of our breaking communion with our Creator. It is also a story of the origin of our reunion with God through the faithfulness of Abraham, in whom God counted faith as righteousness. Exodus outlines the struggle of God’s people in exile and the fight to regain Abraham’s promise and again respond to a promise.  A text didn’t lead the Jews into the Promised Land, the presence of God did. Then God organizes them and gives Moses the Law to order the people’s worship and life. Leviticus reveals the detail of God’s Law, and tellingly, the book that follows, Numbers, is about God punishing the people’s failure to keep the Law; so begins the wandering. Deuteronomy is the all about reaching the Promised Land and learning to obey God. This begins the messiness of relationship with The Divine---exile, and return; promises made, broken and reworked again and again by a God hopelessly in love with humanity. The struggle of God’s people is mirrored by our struggle to be faithful to a Word, a living Word, not a text; but there is a catch.

            To say we live by faithfulness to a relationship with God, not with a text can also lead to a complete disdain for the Bible.  What is needed is a greater understanding of the role of the Bible in our lives as Christians. We need to avoid the trap of textual fundamentalism and the other extreme of living disconnected from tradition and the wisdom of those who came before us. The Bible, when used wisely and within a broader community of interpretation, helps us to discern our life in Christ from a life moving away from Christ. The Bible isn’t a book of answers as much as it is a book of questions, questions of how to live the radical demands of Christ’s gospel.  John Parsons, a great missionary, famously wrote that “In the end, it's not an act of interpretation that is called for but a life of commitment to the truth. Interpretation must reach an endpoint, a decision. We cannot indefinitely suspend our judgment without risking self-deception and the loss of the message of love...”

            In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus confronts the stark reality that the Law, as text, isn’t enough to fulfill the Law; a change of heart is needed.  It is not enough to simply refrain from murder; one must treat anger with equal disdain. It is not enough to refrain from adultery, but cultivating lust by treating one as an object of desire should likewise be avoided. Making elaborate promises that lead to intrigue and misunderstandings is the error, but so is dithering to make commitments and honest communication.  When Jesus declared that “ I have come not to abolish but to fulfill [the Law] he indicated that fulfillment was only possible in a relationship of faith through him, not textual scholarship.  Scholarship only helps us understand the text; Christ penetrates the text to the heart of God.  We live in and through Christ, not in and through the Bible.

            What sustained the early Christians, who had no common scripture for three hundred years after Jesus, sustains us today—The Holy Spirit.  Living God’s word, in a sense, allowing each of our lives to write a gospel message to the world, is the natural extension of both an educated reading of Holy Scripture and the give and take of our life in the Spirit.

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

 

Your Mission: Blandness, Lowliness, and Darkness

Today’s gospel is kind of a pep-talk from Jesus to his disciples (as well as a cautionary tale for those who waste this potential).  He uses three metaphors to get his point across, comparing his disciples to salt, a city on a hill and a light. He doesn’t insist that they will become salt, city and a light, but that they are and must allow the world to see them so that the world “…may glorify the heavenly Father.” 

            One aspect these images all share in common is that by themselves they are useless. Have you ever had a teaspoon of salt, or stared into a source of light only to be blinded when turning away, or heard of a thriving city cut off from commerce from other cities?  All of these metaphors suggest use in the context of need. Salt is used to season bland food, light to provide a way in the darkness and the visibility of a great city on a hill to attract people to its location.

            The nature of the gift always suggests the mission.  Salt brings life and sustains the freshness of food that otherwise would be bland and soon rotten. Our mission is to the bland. The routine of daily life where often people simply “go through the motions” is a dead-end ritual that often lacks meaning.  “Working for the weekend” suggests the only proper end of work is recreation rather than the value of work itself. Being the “salt”, Christians can bring tastiness, the hope of meaning, in living lives that celebrate all aspects of life itself. Animated by the Spirit, we have the power to live such a daily life others find meaningless, create community and flavor to the bland fare of modern work. We don’t have to be celebrated to find meaning; we can live a life of gratitude and allow our care and mindfulness to shape our work into something sacramental.

            Our mission is to darkness. There are places where fear imprisons its residents, but where people who are light chart a pathway out of the darkness.  Father Gregory Boyle in Los Angeles is a good example of one who has brought out the many lights hidden in youth gang violence by allowing his single light to illuminate hope and promise in a part of the city where hope and promise are too often well out of sight.  Today’s saint, St. Jerome Emiliani, in the darkness of a military prison found the light of Christ while captive, learned to pray and eventually lighted the way for thousands of orphans, the sick and the poor in establishing the Clerks Regular of Somasca. Our Christian heritage is rich with such lights, and the darkness is a time-honored mission.

            Our mission is to the hidden, the outcast and forgotten by entering into obscurity fearlessly to allow people to find dignity, love, and purpose in a world that tells them they are worthless is also a great calling.  The Alcoholics Anonymous parable of a man in a well will serve us here.  There was a man trapped in a well with no hope of getting out.  One man passes overhead and hears the cry for help, looks at the depth of the well and says he will go for help as soon as he can find someone with a long enough ladder to reach the bottom. A religious guy writes a prayer and drops it down.  Finally, a third man approaches and jumps down into the well.  The man in the well asks incredulously “Why in the world did you do that.  Now we are both stuck!” The man who jumped down replies “Yes. But I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.” 

            Our own darkness, blandness and hidden wounds are, though Christ, light, meaning and purpose for the world, because God bestowed these gifts to us through the Holy Spirit, as the famous hymn declares “When we first believed.” Such amazing grace is only realized though when it is accompanied by the fearless response of our calling to the bland, lowly and dark places in our world.

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

The Re-Presentation of Our Lord

     Today’s blessing of the candles is linked to the verse from the Song of Simeon which declares Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.”  This canticle is also said/sung daily in the office of Compline, the final prayer before bed for monastics and those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours.  There is a second part, though, to Simeon’s declaration which follows after the canticle.  In it is the substance of his prophecy:

“Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign of contradiction---and you yourself a sword will pierce—so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

     What a shift in tone from a moment of exaltation and celebration proclaiming revelation to the Gentiles and joy to the Jewish people.  Talk about a mixed message!  But, indeed, the revelation of God in Jesus as a Christ is full of these “contradictions”.  Let’s look at a few:

1.       God, all-powerful, comes to His creation as a servant and willfully sacrifices Himself in the name of love.

2.      Jesus, the Messiah, who comes to deliver Israel, comes as a healer and shows his strength in acts of compassion rather than military action against the Romans.

3.      Though a Jew, Jesus’ message spreads primarily in the non-Jewish world, primarily through Jewish disciples.

4.      Paul, formerly known as Saul, was one of the great persecutors of the early Church, whose conversion to Christianity did more to spread the gospel than any other disciple.

     It is the contradiction embodied in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1:18-25):

¹⁸ For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
    the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”^[c]

²⁰ Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²² Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

      How, then, to we re-present Christ to the world, the same Christ Mary presented to the Temple in Jerusalem?  The message of Christ is a message of love, full of all the contradictions and irrational behavior, sorrows and joys that come in establishing and maintaining relationships.  We find human relationships messy; what makes us think our relationship with God will be any less so?  God, the lover of humanity, whose overtures are awkward and self-revealing speak of a vulnerability and sincerity embodied in the contradictions of Christ and the gospel.

     Our true mission isn’t to spread the knowledge of God, because God has formed each human in His likeness, and planted this knowledge deep in every human heart.  What awakens the Spirit in each human is the great, contradictory gospel of Christ, the unconditional love of God for humanity. Our lights today are a symbol of that love.  I ask you to take your candles home, blessed to remind us that the best way to show God to the world, to re-present Christ, is to not avoid the darkness of despair, of poverty, of injustice or those living in darkness, but to bring with you the light of the Spirit, Christ’s love, that illuminates the love of God in every heart.

Third Sunday after Epiphany

Where is the light in this darkness?

I would like you to picture a scene.  It is dark.  I mean hand-isn’t-visible-in-front-of-your-face darkness.  The darkness is profoundly isolating.  Everyone assumes they are alone because they cannot see one another. Then, in the distance, is a single, fragile flame coming from a lit candle. It dips to one side, then to another, and seems to multiply, and then the number of flames increases revealing hands, then arms, then faces and finally entire bodies.  A deep sense of relief comes at not being alone, people immediately begin speaking, and finally, your candle is lit.  The person with the first candle comes among us, and that brings us closer together.  Our light intensifies as a group and attracts the notice of those farther away and they join.  Some in the group decide to leave and search for others; sometimes they return, and sometimes they are never seen again. The original bearer of the candle leaves us but leaves behind his candle; this candle can never go out. He tells us he will return some day, and we have been lighting more candles each day and re-lighting the ones that get blown out.

Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death, light has
arisen.From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew’s gospel quoting Isaiah)

Jesus was the Light John preached. Jesus is the “light in the darkness” and the “light of the nations” that gathers those in darkness together.  The Holy Spirit is an eternal flame left for us as a source of comfort, illumination and power.

As Church, each of us with our individual flame has the power of the collective---the nature of “church”, from the Greek ecclesia meaning “a gathering”—suggests a unified body.  What we have realized, though, is far from the unified idea.  Divisions abound among Christian communities and among members within each community. Divisions don’t simply follow denominational lines. The lines of division occur within each faith community much as they did at the time of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. And if you look deeply into the hearts of those set apart from one another, the fault-line is a divided heart.

This divided heart was most evident in the Corinthian community when Paul writes

For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers and sisters,
by Chloe’s people, that there are rivalries among you.
I mean that each of you is saying,
“I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,”
or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.”
Is Christ divided?
Was Paul crucified for you?
Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Did you notice among the list of “belonging” statements the correct answer: “I belong to Christ”? So why did Paul lump that reply in with the rest?  He did it to make an important point. Simply claiming to belong to Christ while refusing communion with one’s neighbor is disingenuous.  From the third chapter of Mark’s gospel Jesus broadens the concept of family:

Many people were sitting around Jesus. They said to him, "Your mother and brothers are waiting for you outside." Jesus asked, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" Then Jesus looked at those people sitting around him. He said, "These people are my mother and my brothers! My true brother and sister and mother are those people that do the things God wants."

One can’t love Christ and despise one’s brother(or sister!). Communities that are lights don’t define themselves based upon propositions, but upon devotion.  If we claim to worship Christ, we accept the differences among us not as challenges but as a sign the Holy Spirit is stirring things up. Of course not all that manifests itself in a community is the working of the Holy Spirit; that is why it is so important that everyone look to him or herself and humbly submit to the discernment of the larger community. It isn’t perfect, and sin and imperfections will always exist, but there is “light” if each of us recognizes a higher power other than simply strong opinions that must be defended at the expense of unity. How do we reverse divison?

We break down barriers by moving away from our well-defined groups to seek communion with those who claim our ideals and devotion but with whom there is disagreement. We also break down barriers by listening more attentively to one another within our denominational community.  Most fundamental of all, though, is the devotion of each member to prayer, to listening to the voice of God and seeking out that voice in one another.

The kingdom of heaven isn’t built by asking others to give up their lights to one among you who claims will “light the way”, but by drawing closer to one another, and sharing the lights that were given to each of you at baptism and continue to burn brightly this very day.