Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Today we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday we rewind to six days before Passover, followed Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is Jesus washing his disciple's feet and telling them "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we, once again, meditate on The Cross.

So today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion, of God's love of His creation.

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 lightning 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 defining 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 uncreated 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

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.

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Seeing is Believing: Living a Transparent Life

                 In today’s gospel reading from John, we have the rather remarkable statement comparing from Jesus “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” suggesting that like Moses’ raised staff, simply by looking at the crucified Jesus, we will be saved; a very compelling theory of atonement that is often overlooked. It reminds me of the devotional response to the elevation of the host after consecration taken from the Apostle Thomas at realizing the body before him was Christ: “My Lord and my God”. 

              Sometimes witnessing a great act of faith can lead us to faith itself; that is why reading Scripture and biographies of holy men and women are equally powerful to strengthen faith, and for some, lead them to the Faith for the first time. Great works like Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, and other stories of faith are a rich source of illumination and sustenance. Devotions such as Adoration, prayer before icons, or simply being fully present in a beautifully designed sacred space can lead one to a deeper communion with God.

               However, not only the works of others can shine the light of faith into the world, but we ourselves can live in the light of faith when we allow others to witness our failures and also the faith that sustains us in the hope of living in a perfect relationship with God while we are yet sinners; living transparently before God and the world allows the world to witness our humanity in our failings and our relationship with the Divine in the grace we have received. We can live in God’s presence as sinners because through Christ we have been redeemed.

               Perhaps this week we can more fully appreciate our gift of sight as a great source of faith, not only in what we see but live fully in the light so that others may witness not only our crucifixions but also our resurrections. As John says in today’s gospel, “But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,  so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”

3rd Sunday of Lent

People Don’t Have Loopholes

John Bergsma, a Bible scholar, quipped “Written codes have loopholes, but persons do not “ in response to a very important truth gleaned from today’s readings. He made this observation in comparing the written Law of the Covenant delivered by Moses with the embodiment of the Covenant in the person of Jesus. The evolution of our relationship with God has shifted somewhat from reference to text as the sole authority to referencing relationship. It would be a fundamental error to suppose that Christ abolished the Law, that sacred text is eclipsed by an individual’s perception of the Divine, but in Jesus as the Christ, the Law has been fulfilled. It was fulfilled through his complete obedience to the Father and sealed in his willingness to “accept death, even death on a cross”, and his subsequent resurrection.

What compelled Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t adherence to a code of conduct for saviors, but perfect obedience borne of a perfect love of God, the Father, and humanity.  Love is the spirit undergirding Divine law and animated Christ’s life on earth. Although the money changers in the Temple did not violate the letter of the law, in price gouging and taking advantage of the pilgrims, they violated one of the Commandments to not steal, which is a violation of the higher law of relationship and love.

During Lent, with its fasts and requirements for abstinence, we can let legal requirements eclipse the need to see our discipline as a means to an end; the end being growth in love. Our observance of the letter of the law can lead us, as it did for the money-changers, into violating the higher love embodied in the life of Christ. We can begin with “Thou shall not steal”, but in Christ we grow into giving the one in need of a coat ours, even though the Law does not require it.

First Sunday of Lent

Follow Me.  I Know the Way Out.

Hunger, Powerlessness, and Inadequacy:  These are the weak spots Jesus struggled with.  Very often, we consider the battle and Jesus’ victory and overlook how the desert affected Jesus.  For us, going into the desert for forty days would involve a backpack full of food; it would be suicide to make such a journey without sufficient food and water; however, we can survive without food for forty days if we are in good health and have adequate water.  Jesus was hungry.  Fasting allowed Jesus to experience the temptation to be independent of needing others to bake his bread as well as the understanding that life is more than the sum total of our physical desires and needs.  On a deeper level, Jesus experiences the profound understanding that, though the Son of God, he needs other people, and that centering one’s life around physical desires is an error (Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God). Ultimately, we cannot even rely completely on human communion, but upon God our creator.

            Jesus’ next vulnerability was his feeling of powerlessness.  Exploiting this, Satan offers Jesus complete domination over the world’s countries if he would worship Satan.  Look at what being submissive to God the Father had gotten him: hunger pangs and feelings of worthlessness.  There is that famous line from Paradise Lost where Satan says “Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven”.  This was a test of Jesus’ resolve for the mission; success wasn't on Jesus’ terms, they were on God the Father’s.  He replies to Satan quoting again from Deuteronomy “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.”   How often our fear of being powerless leads us to believe getting power is the answer, that realigning our priorities to become powerful is our ultimate goal rather than seeking the Kingdom and serving God.

            The final temptation came in the form quite unlike all the others.  It was the ultimate showdown.  In the desert of despair, with no visible sign of God’s presence, and Satan close at hand, the desire to experience God’s care and concern in some manifestation become Jesus’ greatest vulnerability.  Just give me a sign of your love!  Everyone feels this, especially when things are not going well.  Satan’s answer was to call God’s hand and turn Jesus’ test into God’s test.  Now it is Satan who is quoting Scripture:

“He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,”
and:
“With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Satan quotes from Psalm 91 and Jesus responds with a third passage from Deuteronomy  “You shall not put your Lord God to the test”.  The very source of his reasoning---Holy Scripture—was turned against him.  How often do foes of God’s love and unconditional grace bend scripture to turn it from a source of healing love to a weapon?  This round of Bible Darts over, Satan departs “for a time” suggesting that the tenacity of Satan grows, not diminishes, with defeat.  Being holy and being hounded have a long tradition of being paired, but like Jesus, we may be for a time in the desert; but simply because the journey gets tough doesn't mean we walk it alone.  At every turn, the community animated by the Spirit joins us and reminds us that we follow Christ into the desert.  As the man standing at the bottom of a deep pit asks the other man who came to help him why he jumped in to be with him, that now they both were stuck.  The man who jumped in to rescue him said “Don’t worry.  I've been here before and I know the way out”.

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

The Authority to Heal

Jesus is distinguished from other teachers today by being characterized as one who “teaches with authority”; what does this imply?  For one thing, those who taught scripture in Jesus’ time would reference other sources as the basis of their teaching, not claim an independent power of interpretation. To some extent, scripture scholars do this today in what is called exegesis, or the attempt to understand through careful critical methods the intent of the original author by considering language and context of the scripture under study. When a person simply uses oneself as the basis for interpretation, it is called eisegesis.  Jesus’ method of teaching, “with authority”, and the action of commanding demons positioned Jesus as a great prophet in the line of Moses.

Jesus did not use any particular rite of exorcism, no formula, he simply commanded the demon to come out, and the demon revealed Jesus’ identity as “the Holy One of God”, the same language used to describe the priests in the line of Aaron. Jesus is being revealed in Mark as having the priestly and prophetic qualities of the Messiah. The demon is promptly silenced because to reveal him as Messiah would only fully be revealed after his resurrection and in light of his kingdom “not being of this world”; the time was not right.

Mark’s gospel portrays God’s presence in Jesus as one that is imbued with the power to act as God, to teach as God would teach, and heal as God would heal. Jesus does not initiate a “battle plan” to overthrow the Roman authorities, but ignites the world with God’s saving love.

We, like Jesus, are empowered to act. Through the Holy Spirit dwelling in all believers who follow Christ, our presence announcing God’s love is imbued with the healing authority of God. Our lives should rest on the confidence that although our world is “passing away” as St. Paul preached last Sunday, it is within this world that God continues to act with great compassion and healing.

Such radical Good News often divides, as it did in Jesus’ time, and even among his disciples. Our unity with one another doesn’t come so much in the authority of our “scribes”, though scripture and the teachings of our institutional elders is an important foundation for our faith, our unity comes through our sacramental union with the Body of Christ----one another as mediated by the Holy Spirit.

What is truly a life of radical service is more than political action, social justice and committees, although these must be an integral part of our being Good News; radical evangelical service seeks communion--being with-- with the sick, hard-hearted, and demon-possessed of the world. Rather than simply developing programs of change, we are the change, and the power of God when we become good news one person at a time. This is how the Kingdom is announced, and the reign of God proclaimed.

Third Sunday after Epiphany

Repent and Believe in The Good News!

     The gospel reading of Jesus “collecting” his disciples has always been a compelling story for me. Fishermen, like farmers, live from harvest to harvest; perhaps, fishermen even more so since you can’t really store fish for any length of time. So all the more surprising, they felt compelled to leave their nets, their boats, their way of life, and follow an itinerant rabbi, Jesus. 

     In our Old Testament reading, Jonah really wants nothing to do with carrying out what looks to be a one-way mission. Assyrians were not only non-Jews, they decorated their palace walls with images of impaled Jews. It’s no wonder Jonah walked the other way. Ironically, after being detoured from his call by being swallowed by a “big fish”, he delivers his message to the King and, amazingly, it works. The people of Nineveh repent and God spares them. Jonah, the reluctant prophet, succeeds; most other prophets of the Bible don’t. That’s why the stories of the prophets are mostly cautionary tales to the hard-hearted with a message to repent. As amazing a story as this is, though, it is less about Jonah and more about God’s great mercy and compassion for anyone who repents, who “turns around” and set out in a new direction. The people of Nineveh, having turned around, found God’s mercy. Jonah was indignant. As a Jew to brash Jew-hating Assyrians, he was hoping for God’s slaughtering of these folks. He complains bitterly to God that after all this work, the people were spared. Jonah also made a turn in this narrative; or, rather, he was turned. God turned Jonah around. He, in turn, helped turn Nineveh.
     “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men” were Jesus’ words to James, John, Simon and Andrew, who left their nets, made a 180, and began their life-changing journey with Jesus. Simon and Andrew “abandoned” their nets; James and John left their father alone--- even taking the men they hired. I’ve always wondered what kept Zebedee in the boat. I suppose not insisting that his son stay, Zebedee also had given something up: his two sons.
     Repenting is both a turning away and a turning toward something (or, in this case, someone).
The Ninevites turned away from their disrespect of God, and moved into a new life. Jesus’ fishermen didn’t turn away from sin, but turned toward a greater life in allowing themselves to follow their hearts. You don’t have to be living in sin to repent, you can turn away from something that is of lesser value. Turning towards something better may not be as spectacular as abandoning mortal sin for virtue, but more often than not, most people who follow Christ are not grand sinners living depraved lives.
     One great act of repentance might be to turn away from the extraordinary for the ordinary. It may be repenting from the praise of friends and social accolades and turning towards those whose lives are so full of pain that a “thank you” for your act of love isn’t forthcoming even on a good day. Perhaps your call is to turn away from a social life that and towards a life with more family time. For those who live alone, perhaps there is a call to abandon the security of living a predictable, secure life, where you are the CEO of everything, and embrace someone who needs your healing in their wounded life. Whatever our call, one thing is for certain, we are called to walk with Jesus. It is a journey of healing, of terrifying times well out of sight of land, with heartbreaking separations and joyful reunions, but ultimately the life that conforms most closely to our truest nature as being formed in the image of God.

The Baptism of the Lord

"This is my beloved Son, with Whom I am well pleased"

            It is easy to treat today’s Baptism of the Lord as an historical feast.  Indeed, there is good historical reasons to believe Jesus was baptized by John since there has always been a controversy between the Christians and “Baptists”(those who continued to follow John the Baptist) over this event; however, what is at work in today’s readings is connected with epiphany, God’s healing presence in the world shown in Jesus. God acts through Jesus and is therefore made manifest to the world.

            In the scripture reading from Isaiah, we learn of the servant-messiah.  Jesus, as this servant-messiah, will extend God’s covenant between his chosen as “a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”  Jesus’ baptism is a mandate of healing and a drawing together of the nations. In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, which was originally a second part of the Gospel of Luke, it is God acting through Jesus, not Jesus simply obeying orders from on high; Jesus is in perfect relationship with the Father, and his life among us brings God’s blessings. This gives us a crucial insight as to what it means to be a follower of Christ.

            To follow Christ is more than an imitation of Jesus’ actions; it is a call to a deepening relationship with God the Father.  As Christians, we must become animated with God’s love for humanity, and that animation is only possible through God’s Holy Spirit.  As apprentices in our spiritual journey, we begin like all good apprentices by imitation. We learn to love, to heal and represent ourselves as ethical and moral people with a high calling, but this is not our end.  Our end is perfect communion with God.  What we imitate in Christ goes beyond his actions on earth and focuses on his relationship with the Father.  It is only from this fuller communion with God the Father that our true vocation as Christians is being fulfilled.  While living a life based on high moral and ethical standards is important, the much more enduring significance of Jesus’ baptism resides in coming into full communion with God the Father from whom we have been estranged since Eden.

            This need for a deeper, fuller communion is achieved only through prayer and God’s grace received in the Spirit.  That is why baptism is so essential; it invites the Holy Spirit to enable this essential communion.  To put it a different way, Thomas Merton, a monk and mystic, wrote that the Christian must do more than simply do the will of God.  He or she must will the will of God.  We cannot have this deeper communion without the Holy Spirit and the baptism that bestows upon us the calling to move beyond imitation and to manifest God to the world as Jesus made God known to the world.