Reflections on the Palms and the Passion

A few years back (alright, maybe more than a few now since I was still in parish ministry) I read the following words on a blog post and put them in my Palm/Passion Sunday file. I don't remember where I saw them or who wrote the post; but hopefully not a good friend whom I am about to now insult. But I've heard very similar words many, many times over the years on the lips of both clergy and lay people who wish that Palm Sunday didn't have to include the reading of the Passion. Here's what I read:

"I am thinking of starting a campaign to bring back Palm Sunday, without the additional observance of Passion Sunday. Palm Sunday was always one of my favorites growing up as a preacher's kid, and it was all about the palms--and a lot of them. It was celebratory and festive when, as child, I got a chance for a hands-on worship experience and a glimpse of what royalty could look like."

So the argument goes. This year as we continue to maintain physical distance and stay away from our church buildings we don't need to have this "argument." There will be no parades.

Yet it occurs to me that maybe this is exactly the time to do some more serious theological reflection, which is the purpose of this post. I won't be preaching on Sunday. But many will be, in new ways, including by way of broadcasting from empty churches or their own living rooms. So I offer these thoughts, early in the week, in the hope that it might stimulate thought and maybe even conversation. My goal is not to antagonize anyone but perhaps to plant a seed or two that may grow for next Holy Week. 

Whether or not the thoughts quoted above have merit, what struck me when I read them and now these years later is how nostalgic the writer was "for those festive and celebratory days when she was a child." Some of the comments in agreement with this post went further, and sounded pretty self-righteous. One in particular struck me: “we do the Passion today because a majority of people are too lazy to come back on Friday, but they are not too busy to go out to Outback…” 

Alright, so the internet may not be the place to have an adult theological conversation!

I wasn’t privy to the liturgical discussions that the editors of The Book of Common Prayer had back in the mid-1970s when they recommended this change. Maybe they did say, “hey, we better squeeze the Passion in with Palm Sunday because everyone will be at Outback on Good Friday.” But I seriously doubt that. That's just snark!
And regardless of whether they “caved in” or not to modern “realities” and regardless of whether or not some future edition of The Prayerbook ought to go back to the way things were, I want to argue that the liturgy we have works, precisely because it is complicated. What has not caught up is our theological reflection or our Biblical interpretation. In other words, I don't want to go back to the “good old days” for theological reasons. 

A brief aside, however, before I continue.Since leaving parish ministry I have seen a regular move of the Passion Narrative to the end of the liturgy, rather than in the middle, where the gospel is usually read. I wish I'd seen this done or thought about it when still in the parish because I think that does work - and I think creates a better space for hearing that narrative. By the way, in liturgical traditions like mine you get a synoptic account of the Passion on Sunday and then John's Gospel on Friday - so hearing it twice in a week is not a bad thing! Anyway, I confess I do like this move and maybe the next revision of this liturgy could make this more normative. It works well and leads into Holy Week well.

But I don't think that's what those who want to "only do Palms" have in mind. Regardless of where the Passion Narrative is read (usually in parts, as a drama) my point is simply that it should be part of the same liturgy with the palms.

Why? Because, while it’s true that the move from Palms to Passion feels abrupt, I think it has been made to feel more abrupt than it really is because we have misunderstood the little parade that we usually enact as we enter into Holy Week. I disagree that it is supposed to be “merely festive and celebratory and a glimpse at royalty!”  If you want that, then go back and watch the last royal wedding; the preaching was outstanding! I want to try try to see a deeper political and theological connection between Palms and the Passion Narrative. 

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “who is this?” The crowds were saying, “this is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.”  

The whole city was in turmoil.  That doesn’t sound very festive to me! In Greek, that word is the same one from which we get the English word “seismic.” Matthew suggests that the whole city was “shaking” – even trembling.  Those are never words that mayors like to hear, whether we are talking about literal seismic shifts or the more metaphorical kinds. Mayors like stability.  

Estimates of the population of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day run around 40,000. But on high holy days like Passover, as many as 200,000 pilgrims would travel to Jerusalem. That's five times the normal population. Think about cities when they host the Olympics or the Super Bowl and you begin to get some sense of the electricity, the buzz. But add to that the political context of Roman occupation. This isn’t a Thanksgiving Day parade. It’s a political rally. And potentially more than a rally. Maybe the start of a revolution. Think Tiennemann Square or Tahir Square or a million person march on The Mall in Washington and I think we get closer to the tensions that go to the heart of this day.

Now add to that tinderbox the religious dimensions: the meaning of Passover itself and the messianic hopes of Second Temple Judaism and the yearning for a Son of (King) David to save Israel. It's intense. When we sing All Glory Laud and Honor, maybe it's a protest song. 

In their book, The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’ Final Week in Jerusalem, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg imagine another parade across town: a display of Roman imperial power, as Pontius Pilate rides into the city with horse and chariot and shining armor and the brass bands playing John Philip Sousa marches. (Well, maybe not so much the Sousa!) That’s where the festive royal parade really is: that's where the display of Roman imperial power is and the flexing of political muscle. Because the Roman authorities are worried that a riot might break out as these pilgrims gather to remember that old, old story of the Exodus: a story about how the bonds of Pharaoh’s oppression were loosed and the captives went free. If people start to see the connection between Pharaoh and Caesar, they might start telling old Caesar to let God’s people go! 

So what exactly is Jesus doing as he rides into town on an ass? Is he mocking Pilate and the Empire? Is it a counter-demonstration? Is he reminding his people that Passover isn’t just a remembering of the past, but a challenge to all misuses of power and authority in every time and place? 

I don't know. But the text says "that the whole city was seismic!" As in "about to blow up." And politicians—especially politicians whose authority is being questioned—worry about angry mobs. They tend to want to squelch angry mobs. They call it “keeping the peace,” but it’s really about keeping order and far too often the powers-that-be often confuse the two. 

Jesus comes to bring lasting peace with justice that exposes the Pax Romana for what it really is.  During the Lenten season we pause to remember people like Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both of them and many others who have gone before us discovered the costs of discipleship when they stood for the gospel and against the powers of this world.

There is a temptation for Christians, particularly North American Christians, to turn this day into something that is merely individualistic and “spiritual.”  Something that has nothing to do with the worlds in which we live and move and have our being: to turn it into a nice “celebratory and festive parade.” But I think when we do that we distort its true meaning. Jesus taught us to look for, and to work towards, the New Jerusalem, the new Washington, DC, and the new Worcester. And that is what he is about, I think, as he comes riding into Jerusalem on this day.

A decade or so ago, I went to a Shabbat service at one of the synagogues in Worcester for a retirement/ going-away event for their longtime rabbi, Seth Bernstein. He was committed to interfaith work for over twenty-five years in Worcester and I had had several opportunities to work and teach with him. Included in the prayers at that liturgy was one from the Reform Jewish Prayerbook which captured my imagination. It’s a prayer for Shabbat, but I think it also works as a prayer to carry with us into this Holy Week. It's a prayer that has haunted me since first praying it and every year or so I come back to it and it feels even more important and even more relevant. 

And I have come to believe it provides a kind of bridge to connect the Palms with the Passion, as Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem. Because as we see when we hear the Passion narratives, the response of the authorities is swift and violent. As if often is. God may well bless the peacemakers. But very often, governments try to shut them up.

So here is that prayer.

DISTURB US, Adonai, ruffle us from our complacency. Make us dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with the peace of ignorance, the quietude which arises from a shunning of the horror, the defeat, the bitterness and the poverty, physical and spiritual, of humans. Shock us, Adonai, deny to us the false Shabbat which gives us the delusions of satisfaction amid a world of war and hatred; Wake us O God, and shake us from the sweet and sad poignancies rendered by half forgotten melodies and rubric prayers of yesteryears; Make us know that the border of the sanctuary is not the border of living and the walls of Your temples are not shelters from the winds of truth, justice and reality. Disturb us, O God, and vex us; let not Your Shabbat be a day of torpor and slumber; let it be a time to be stirred and spurred to action.Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kadeish Ha Shabbat.

Resurrection, and life

Today is the Fifth Sunday in Lent. The readings appointed for today can be found here. I already wrote some reflections on Psalm 130, posted earlier this week here. 

But what the heck; on Sunday mornings when we are gathered in our church buildings, the preacher can only get away with preaching one sermon. But in addition to Psalm 130, which feels so rich, I've also been praying with today's Gospel reading, from the 11th chapter of John, the raising of Lazarus. For anyone interested, here are some thoughts on that text as well. 

During this Lenten season, the Gospel readings have been coming from the Fourth Gospel. In my “preaching” (aka blogging through most of Lent) I’ve focused on the psalms. But John’s Gospel has been there all along…

Going all the way back to the seventh century, these were the readings (sometimes called the “scrutiny gospels) that were chosen to help form and shape converts to the faith during the season of Lent. These catechumens would then be baptized at the Easter Vigil. In our own time, these same gospel readings continue to form and shape us, helping us to take the next steps in our faith journeys by embracing the living Christ who gives us the new birth offered to Nicodemus, the living water offered to the Samaritan woman at the well; the one who helps us to see what we previously were too blind to notice in the same way he healed the man blind from birth. These gospel readings have layers upon layers of nuance and depth.

In today’s reading we get a fourth encounter, but in some ways it is more complex (and quite frankly it’s harder as a preacher to know which way to go with it.) At first glance it might seem obvious to say this is an encounter between Jesus and Lazarus: after all Lazarus was dead at the beginning of our narrative and walking around in a daze by the end. But here’s the thing: Lazarus speaks not a single word in this text.

We could come at this from the perspective of Jesus’ encounter with the disciples, and in particular, Thomas. Jesus has only a few days earlier “slipped away” from Judea where he was almost stoned to death. The disciples are completely aware of that and therefore are pretty anxious about going back but Thomas bravely speaks up: “Let us go with him so that we may die with him.” This is one of those great disciple ironies that all the gospel writers love—disciples never seem to get it. So Thomas is willing to go back to Judea with Jesus to face death, but the joke here is that in they are returning to see life. Clever, eh?

Or we could see this as an encounter between Jesus and “the Jews.” I need to say a word here before we go any further, and that is to just notice that this translation “the Jews” is unfortunate on so many levels. It is clearly not referring to all Jewish people then or now. That is obvious, since Mary and Martha and Thomas and Jesus and Lazarus are all Jewish in that sense. What the phrase really means is “the temple leadership” in Jerusalem. They are nervous about Jesus, a northerner who doesn’t conform to their expectations about what the messiah is supposed to do (or even what a good rabbi is supposed to do for that matter.) Jesus is in conflict with the religious leadership. Yet there is nuance here, too, that we do well to notice. When Jesus comes back to pay his respects to Mary and Martha we discover that they are already there to sit Shiva and that they have brought along casseroles for the family to eat. These temple leaders, as it turns out, are pretty good at pastoral care; they are there for Mary and Martha in their hour of need. They are not bad people; but simply (as religious people are prone towards) a bit narrow-minded and perhaps judgmental in their theological perspectives. No faith tradition has a monopoly on that, or is immune from it.

The second thing, however, to notice is that they are blown away by Jesus in this encounter and we are told that some of them did believe in him because of this sign.

So we could look at Jesus and Lazarus, or Jesus and Thomas, or Jesus and the Jews.

But for me the energy in this encounter is in the exchanges between Jesus and his two friends, Mary and Martha. We know from other texts about how they are pretty different (as sisters can be.) Mary is reflective and interested in just sitting and talking while Martha always seems to be running around the kitchen. (Although we do well even to take that with a grain of salt and read with a hermeneutic of suspicion!) But in this text we see that they are also similar (as sisters can also be.) Both confront Jesus with the same words, words that carry with them the hint at least of an accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Those words have energy for me because at some level they are words that many of us think (even if we do not utter them) when we lose someone we love, especially someone in the prime of their life. The text isn’t clear, but if all these friends are roughly contemporaries then that would mean that Lazarus is a young man in his early thirties when he dies. We know (as people a week away from Holy Week and as readers of John’s Gospel) that Jesus is not too far himself from meeting an untimely death. But in this moment, in this encounter, it is Lazarus who is dead. We aren’t privy to the coroner’s report. We only have these words of these two grieving sisters that if Jesus had been present, then this tragedy would not have happened.

Our Lenten journeys always begin the same way, on Ash Wednesday, with the reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Whether we have had a lot of experience with death or only a little to this point in our lives, it is the one certainty even more real than taxes for all of us. Yet very often death still catches us off-guard, It can sneak up on us, even if we have lived a good, long, and happy life; death still seems unfair and unreal. That is only magnified when somebody dies before their prime. But if all of us have some experience with death, I suspect it is also equally fair to say that most of us don’t have as much first-hand experience with resurrection.

I can remember when my dad died. I was a freshman in college. I suppose in my own way I wondered where God was when that happened and why my dad wasn’t spared. But I also remember being in the funeral home and thinking it wasn’t real, that my dad was just asleep and any minute Jesus might say, “Richard, come forth” and like Lazarus he would.

But of course it didn’t happen that way. He stayed dead. And the next day we stood around the gravesite in the Green Gates Cemetery in Hawley, Pennsylvania and I knew for sure by then that he wasn’t going to get up. And I think it’s only natural in moments like that to pray that half-accusing, half-desperate prayer: “Lord, if you had been here my brother, my sister, my father, my friend, my child…would not have died.”

There is at least some part of all of us that wants God to give us lives free from pain, free from those moments in the funeral home or standing at the grave of a loved one. We want God to just make death evaporate and disappear so that we don’t have to face it, so that it won’t happen to people we love and care about. We wish that we wouldn’t have to feel that much hurt and grief and sadness.

But that isn’t the God we get; not on the fifth Sunday of Lent and not even on Easter Sunday. Not in the midst of a global pandemic. We believe in the resurrection of the dead, not the absence of death. All created things are born and die; that is what it means to be created and not the Creator. There is no “get out of death free” card! Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Next weekend is Palm/Passion Sunday. We will remember, even if not gathered with palms in our church buildings, the story of the how Jesus was betrayed and denied by his friends and put to death on a cross by his enemies. Jesus himself wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane about whether or not it needed to unfold this way. And as he was dying, some people taunted him because they thought that if he really was the Son of God, then maybe he should now would be a good time to pull out that “get out of death free” card. But it doesn’t work that way. Not even for him.

“I am resurrection and life,” Jesus says. Not I will be or I once was, but I AM. Christ is alive, and that is our song not just at the empty tomb on Easter morning but it is our song whenever we encounter loss and grief and pain in our lives. It is our song by the gravesides of those whom we love but see no longer; when life is changed, not ended. When we dare to make our song, even if we sing those alleluias in a minor key.

But that song doesn’t immunize us from death. Rather, it allows us to not be so afraid of death (with God’s help) and then to see our way past death to new and abundant life. It allows us to trust that death will ever get the last word.

Mary and Martha mistakenly thought that somehow Jesus’ presence would remove death—that Lazarus wouldn’t have died if Jesus had been there. It’s an understandable feeling, but it doesn’t work that way. Jesus’ presence doesn’t negate death. Rather, it gives us hope that when we die life really is changed, not ended. It gives us faith that our dying and our grief and our confusion are never the end of the story, because we believe that hope is stronger than fear. We believe that Jesus is resurrection, and life. And that love is stronger than death. 

De profundis (Psalm 130): Reflections for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

The readings for this coming Sunday can be found here. Even though we are not using church buildings during this time of trying to "flatten the curve" of COVID-19, the Word can still be engaged and knit us together as One Body - with many members. I offer these thoughts on Psalm 130 toward that end. 

In the psalms, “the depths” is an extended metaphor for the depths of the sea, which is an image of death. In other words, the pray-er of Psalm 130 is not on the shore on a calm day watching the waves gently come in upon the shore as the sun rises. She is drowning and in a deep and dark place, or at least was there and has lived to tell about it. This is the wild, tempestuous dark night of the soul with thunder and lightning and waves crashing onto the boat.

Out of the depths, have I called: God help me!

Notice also that the pray-er does not feel completely innocent. If this is the end, there are some regrets. If God were to note what is done amiss, O Lord who could stand? Unlike Frank Sinatra in "My Way," it sounds like there may be more than a few regrets and some amount of shame or guilt.

And yet, this person knows who God is: God is forgiver. That is who God is. That is what God does. God is compassionate. God is steadfast. God is merciful. Whatever else the whole canon of the psalms knows about God it is this.

And therefore, the pray-er eagerly waits. How eagerly? More than watchmen for the morning. More than watchmen for the morning. 

How eagerly? Robert Alter translates it like this: more than dawn watchers watch for the dawn.

We wait in hope. Whatever this day may feel like we trust that the sun will come out tomorrow. (Bet your bottom dollar on it!) Or as Julian of Norwich put it in the midst of the Black Death: all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. We cry out from the depths. We confess our sins. We wait and we wait and we wait...

But we wait in hope. We wait trusting that with God there is mercy. We trust that God is full of steadfast kindness. The Hebrew word is hesed. It occurs 248 times in the Hebrew Bible. There is a heresy of the Church that is alive and well and I hear it (sometimes even from clergy) that the God of the Old Testament is a judging wrathful God and the God of the New Testament is a loving abba who forgives. That is fake news, however. It’s heresy.

And we have to turn ourselves inside out to hold onto that belief; so if you still hold it, allow this Lenten season to be the time to let it go. Give that up this Lent! God is full of mercy, steadfastly kind and faithful. The one God – the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the God who forgives and forgives and forgives from the very beginning is the very same God that Jesus calls “Abba.” God doesn’t change God’s nature because of Jesus. The depth and truth of God’s nature is revealed in the Incarnation; God so loved the world, that God sent Jesus. Not to condemn the world, but to save it. Jesus is the embodiment of what God has been up to since creation. The Incarnation shows the lengths to which God will go so that we are not abandoned to the pit. God loves us like a mother loves her child, and can also give us a look like only a mother who loves her child can give.

God’s judgement is the flip-side of God’s mercy. But it’s not divided between the Old and New Testaments. End of lecture on this, but I invite you to pay attention to this even as the year unfolds, week after week. There are many weeks where we see grace in the Old Testament readings and judgment in the New. Although we also need to pay attention to the systemic reading of the Old Testament that can reinforce this belief, so better still is to read the Bible, on a daily basis, than the lectionary. When you do this, notice those 240 times when hesed is used to describe God’s nature in the Old Testament. Steadfast love. Steadfast love. Steadfast love. No matter how far we stray. Steadfast love.

This is why the poet can wait for the Lord even in the depths, even in the darkest hours. Because morning will come. Morning will come. Because weeping may endure the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Bet your bottom dollar on it.

And so we eagerly wait. More than watchmen for the morning. More than watchmen for the morning. More than dawn watchers watch for the dawn. Because God is faithful and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in hesed.

With God, there is plenteous redemption. Isn’t that a great phrase? Maybe I’ll steal that for my memoirs some day: plenteous redemption. God is so faithful and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in hesed that there is enough love for everyone. Plenty enough to redeem Israel. Plenty enough to redeem the Palestinians. Plenty enough to redeem the Church. Plenty enough to redeem those hurt by the Church. Plenty enough to redeem the ‘nones.”  Plenty enough to redeem all the little children of the world, precious in God’s sight.

Plenteous redemption. That is good news when the waves are crashing over us, when we feel lost and afraid and it feels like somebody turned out the lights. We wait. We wait in hope. We wait in hope for the God who is steadfast. We wait in hope for the God who is steadfast because in that God there is plenteous redemption.

This is not an Episcopal idea. It’s not a progressive idea or a conservative idea. It’s not a Protestant idea nor a Catholic idea nor an Orthodox idea. It’s not even an exclusively Christian idea, rooted as it is in the call of Abraham and the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through Torah and the prophets. It’s just true. God so loved the world. God has the whole world in Her hands: the little tiny baby, and you and me. All of us. There is plenteous redemption.

Wait for the Lord. 

Courage Unparalleled

My photo from  Ein Karem, in The Holy Land

Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, of Nazareth in Galilee was engaged to a man named Joseph, who was of David’s lineage. In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary heard a voice that said, “Shalom, favored one! The Spirit of God is with you.” 

A radiant light filled the room. She was frightened and confused. The angelic presence said to her, “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will bear a child, and you will name him Jesus. He will be called God’s child, for he is the one whom God has promised.” 

Mary said, how can this be, for I am without a husband?” The angel replied, “The Spirit of God will encircle you, and the power of the Most High will enter you. The child to be born is holy, for he is the child of God. Now your relative Elizabeth, in her old age, has also conceived a child. The one who was said to be barren is already six months pregnant, for nothing is beyond God’s power.” 

Then Mary said, “I am fully open to the will of God. Let it happen as you say.”
(Luke 1:26-36. Translation by M. T. Winter in The Gospel According to Mary: A New Testament for Women)

An excerpt from “The Annunciation,” by Denise Levertov

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

Exactly nine months from today we will celebrate Christmas. And because Jesus would, naturally, arrive on time, today is the Feast of the Annunciation: the day when the Church remembers Mary’s “yes.” Or what Denise Levertov has called, Mary's “courage unparalleled.”

There’s something about Mary, for sure. The Song she sings in this moment—the Magnificat—is about what is possible for all human beings, female and male, young and old—with God’s help. About what is possible for this tired world that God yearns to make new. 

Her soul magnifies the Lord. Think about what that means. I think it means something like, with God we can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. I think it means that when we do a little thing in the name of Christ it ripples out to change the world, magnified to the nth degree! It turns out that this new song is really a riff on an old song: Hannah’s Song. (That song can be found in I Samuel 2:1-10.) In other words, even as Mary says yes to a new world she draws strength from the past. 

Mary prefigures Pentecost, the day when Holy Spirit breaks down all walls that divide. For the Holy Spirit there is never “them” and “us” - only us, from every tribe and language and people and nation. Only beloved children of God. Mary models for us what it might mean to let the Holy Spirit blow through our lives and make us new in spite of the dominant culture’s expectations. She knew, as Hannah knew, that God cares about justice and cares especially for the poor. She knew that the deck is stacked and that in this world kids attending inner-city schools do not have the same opportunities that kids going to private schools or affluent suburban schools do.  

God loves all the little children of the world. But God wants the playing field to be more level and so somebody has to take the side of the underdog. That is what the liberation theologians mean when they speak of God’s preferential option for the poor and I think Mary is doing liberation theology in the Magnificat. When she riffs on Hannah’s Song, she stands in a long line of Biblical prophets, male and female, who know this. God knocks the proud and arrogant and powerful down a few pegs and brings up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty, not because God hates the rich but because God really does love the poor, the anawim: God’s little ones. All lives matter to God. But in a world where black lives are devalued, God insists that black lives matter. 

Our Lady of Ferguson, icon written by Mark Dukes

In this dog-eat-dog world the anawim need God on their side because the privileged generally do pretty well taking care of themselves Mary will teach her child, Jesus, to love the least among us as God loves them, and as she loves them. She will teach him how to read the prophets so that when his public ministry begins his first words will sound a lot like the song we heard his mother singing today.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His soul, too, proclaims the greatness of God.

Mary is called by God through the very same pattern that we find throughout the Old Testament whenever God needs to have a job done: from Abraham to Moses to Samuel to Isaiah with his “unclean lips.” The angel says, “I’ve got a job for you.” Like those who have gone before her, she is initially fearful and confused. “How can all this be?” she asks. The angel insists that it can be, because with God all things are possible.

And that’s when Mary sings: I am fully open to the will of God for my life! Like all call narratives, including the calls that come to us in our own lives, Mary has a choice. She chooses “courage unparalleled.” Like all of those called by God, Mary is free to say, “get lost angel!”  She freely chooses to say: Here I am! Send me! In so doing, she is the first and model disciple of Jesus. 

She is bold and courageous and strong in this moment, and not this one only. She will have to be bold and courageous and strong to raise a son like the one she raises. And she will have be bold and courageous and strong when her son walks the Via Delarosa some thirty years later, as her heart is pierced and her son dies on a tree. Mary has to bury her child, something no parent should ever have to do. But she had courage unparalleled. I think of Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg who also possess that kind of courage. And they give me hope for this world. They magnify my own soul, just by their witness.

So let's be clear: there is nothing passive about Mary. And while she may not have a starring role in the Bible, her role is crucial in the deeper, wider, tradition. Mary says “yes” to God and the world is changed. She is Christ-bearer, which is precisely the ministry to which you and I are called: to make room in ourselves for Christ to be born; so that the Word continues to be made flesh in this world.  

An authentic, courageous life of faith is not without its questions, struggles, uncertainties and fears. But with God, all things are possible. God comes to us, as to Mary, not because we are perfect, but because we are willing to open our lives to the radical transformation that the Spirit offers. May Christ be made manifest—and even magnified—through us, for the sake of this world. And when our time comes, may we find the courage to say yes. 

Joining God in the Neighborhood

Way back in the dark ages (in the early 2000's) I worked on and was ultimately granted a Doctorate in Ministry (D.Min.) degree from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. We were talking in that program, on "Gospel and Culture," about the Missional Church. Before it was cool!

These days everyone is asking with Alan Roxburgh and others about how we join with God in the neighborhood. How do we leave the building to go and see what God is up to? I think it's a great question - the question in fact. All who follow Jesus, all around the world, are sent into the world. When the worship ends, the service begins. This has always been at the heart of the gospel.

So I don't mean to minimize the work of Roxburgh and those who went before him: Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch and Darrell Guder (who was one of my teachers at CTS) and George Hunsberger and many others. I just need to say that I learned this truth first in Sunday School in the 1970's from Katharine Bates, who taught me to sing:

I believe this. And in diocesan ministry I've had to live this, trying to help people to realize that the church is not a building, but a people. That when buildings are closed or sold, the Church doesn't stop existing. Because the Church is not a building; the Church is a people. And what we are about is the Missio Dei, the mission of God in the world. It's been true from the very first Pentecost, even if at times we have suffered from amnesia.

In this difficult time in which we are living, I see an opportunity that I fear we are in danger of missing. I feel as sad as other people of faith do that we are currently out of our buildings. I get it that as sacramental catholic Christians we are missing the Eucharist. But I find myself asking: what can we learn during this wilderness time?

Well, perhaps we can put all these words into action, and open our eyes to what God is in fact actually doing in our neighborhoods.

I've seen more people walking in the past week than ever before. I live in New England which is not known for it's southern hospitality. At best when you see a stranger you might look at them. Maybe smile. But people in New England are actually talking to one another. For real. I'm not even kidding!

Not too far away, in Central New York, I read about this happening at my beloved Wegmans. Truly it brought a tear to my eye. It's also been my own experience at Wegmans in Northborough, MA. To be clear, no one has yet paid for my groceries nor have I given up any eggs, or toilet paper. But people have been kinder and friendlier in this time of social distancing. Or more accurately, in this time of physical distancing, people have been more social. People, at least those I see, are yearning for human connection.

Today I was walking in my neighborhood and one of the local prophets had written some words of hope to all those walkers.

"Spread joy in the world." What incredible wisdom! "Joy to the World," we sing at Christmas time. And then "let earth receive her king....let heaven and nature sing!" Not let the people gathered in the Church receive their king but let the whole world sing with the angels. Because, after all, God so loved the world!

I have nothing but respect and admiration for my mostly Luddite clergy friends who are learning to Zoom and learning how to offer worship through Facebook Live. Truly, they are a blessing. And truly we need some old familiar patterns of worship because it grounds us in the living God.

And yet, I hope that the disruptions we are all experiencing might also be an opportunity to reflect: where is God in the midst of all this disruption? It turns out God is in the neighborhood. The time is now for us to be there too - to be good neighbors in anxious times.

A Taste of Eternity

The Judean Wilderness (photo taken by me) 

“Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath.)

"In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch. A field full of weeds will not earn anyone's respect. If you want to succeed in this life (whatever your "field" of endeavor), you must spray, you must plow, you must fertilize, you must plant. You must never turn your back. Each year's harvest must be bigger than the last. That is what the earth and her people are for, right? Wrong god...In the eyes of the true God, the porch is imperative—not every now and then but on a regular basis. When the fields are at rest—when shy deer step from the woods to graze the purple clover grown up between last year's tomato plants, and Carolina chickadees hang upside down to pry seeds from the sunflowers that have taken over the vineyard—when the people who belong to this land walk through it with straw hats in their hands instead of hoes to discover that wild blackberries water their mouths as surely as the imported grapes they worked so hard to protect from last year's frost—this is not called "letting things go"; this is called "practicing Sabbath." You have to wonder what makes human beings so resistant to it." (Barbara Brown Taylor, in Why God Wants You To Rest.) 

NB: I spent a lot of time on Zoom meetings this week with clergy across our diocese. One issue that was raised there and in social media is how challenging it is to move all work to home and work remotely and for many with technologies (like Zoom) that add a layer of complexity. People seemed exhausted. I felt exhausted! This makes me think even more about the importance of Sabbath-keeping and the challenges we are now facing that may make that even harder. And more necessary...

What is the best way to translate the Hebrew word “Torah” into English? This is not an academic question. When we say “Law” we tend to think about police officers, lawyers, and judges. Along with that train of thought we imagine God with the scales of justice in hand, ready to pounce when we transgress and break the rules.

But this is not how Jews read the Torah. A better translation would be Instruction or Teaching. When you hear those words in English you tend to think of books and classrooms. You then may even think about how monks talk about a Rule of Life or how Jews refer to their leaders as rabbis, which is to say "teachers." Along that train of thought we might imagine God as desiring to form a people to live in a the world as light shining in the darkness, as salt of the earth, as leaven that makes the whole loaf rise.

The Decalogue plays an important role in Lent. In some parishes there is a tradition to begin with The Penitential Order and include the reading of the Decalogue as a way into corporate confession. It was given to the Israelites at the beginning of their forty-year journey through the Sinai Desert. They came there, across the Red Sea, as a bunch of ex-slaves. The Torah is given as a gift by God, sweeter than honey according to the poets, in order to form a free people.

The problem with thinking about the Decalogue as a list of ten rules you better obey or else is that there are no clear punishments attached. So we assume penalties for murder and stealing for example. But what is the penalty for taking the Lord’s name in vain? Eternal damnation?

And really, I mean…what’s the harm in a little coveting. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out, the whole advertising industry is built on coveting. It’s not like stealing, right? You haven’t done anything wrong?

Besides, we live in a busy and complex world; not like those naïve ex-slaves who lived thousands of years ago. If we need to catch up in the office on the Sabbath, what harm is there in that one? God helps those who help themselves, right? It’s in the Bible! (Actually, to be clear, that is not in the Bible; that’s Ben Frankin!) As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in the quote I shared above, “wrong God.” Rather, we worship a God who not only commands that we keep the Sabbath holy but who models this by resting Herself: six days of work is enough, and then it's time to sit on the porch and enjoy some lemonade. 

When the Bible speaks of the Sabbath, it is referring to the seventh day of the week, not the first. It is referring to that period from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday night. We Christians worship on Sunday because that is the Day of Resurrection. Sometimes when we start talking about the Sabbath we do so because we miss those days of Christian preferential treatment and we wish for a time when there weren’t sports on Sunday morning to compete with us. Those days are gone. This post is not about trying to go back to those days, but rather about finding a way forward.

Sabbath is meant as a day of rest. It’s not just about what we cannot do. It’s about how we are made. Two reasons are given in Torah for keeping Sabbath. The first is that it is built into creation itself. Even God, with all God had to do, worked hard for six days creating the world and then took a rest. Sometimes we get self-important; we think our work can’t stop. But if God stopped God’s work, maybe we should trust the wisdom in that and let it go too. It'll be there when we come back to it. 

The second reason the Torah gives for keeping Sabbath is the Exodus. Slaves don’t get a day off. Slaves had to work in Pharaoh’s economy making bricks 24/7. Free people are always in danger of falling back into slavery, of becoming slaves to their work. So the Sabbath is a gift given so that God’s people can remember and give thanks.

I don’t think God is weighing the scales of justice and deciding to send us to hell when we forget to keep Sabbath. That is not how I imagine God, nor is it how I imagine God operating. But here is what I do imagine God saying. It goes something like this:

Burned-out people are of no use to me. Your work is important but sometimes it can wait. Sometimes it must wait. Go to the gym. Go for a walk. Turn off the computer. Read a book. Bake some bread. Choose to do the things that lead to life, not only for you personally but for your family, your friends, your parish, your neighborhood. Remember that you are dust. Remember that going full throttle even on good things can kill you. The way to life is to build in what Rabbi Abraham Heschel so wisely called “a sanctuary in time.” It is in finding time for reflection and quiet and rest, unplugged time so that your life reflects a balance between work and play and rest. And believing that. And living that. Because you can’t keep going and going and going like the energizer bunny all the time. Trust me. Trust me.

There are very different chapters in our lives. Retired people, I’ve learned, are not necessarily without work to be done. Empty nesters do not necessarily find more Sabbath time in their lives. We tend to think of how exhausting newborns are but I think the busiest phase in my shared vocation with Hathy as parents was the time in Middle School and early high school when our kids were involved in a hundred things and not yet driving, so we did a lot of taxi service stuff.

One size doesn’t fit all, especially in a culture where we don’t just have one 24-hour period where the world stops. That might be nice but it isn’t going to happen.

So we need to practice. We begin, I think, by valuing the Sabbath and by taking it seriously. And never apologizing for keeping it. By claiming rest as a sanctuary in time, as something good and holy; not as a shirking of responsibility. We do that by remembering that the work will be there the next day. We may think it’s hardest to do this when we are parents with young kids but look what we are doing, as a culture, to our kids. They never get downtime either, until the power goes out. How's that for a metaphor?! 

We are incredibly blessed to have a Sabbath place in our lives. For us it is this little cabin in the woods in Vermont. Before cell phones, there was no way to call anyone up there. In fact even if someone died, which over fifty years has happened, if family was up there you called a neighbor and the neighbor walked over and delivered the message. No television and no computer. Just God’s good creation. What do you do in such a place? You cross-country ski, or snow shoe, or hike, or walk. You build a fire. You read. You play board games and cards. You cook a meal together. You breathe in and you breathe out. I hope you all have such a place in your lives. And I trust that if you do then you know what I know when I am there: that Sabbath is good and holy and life-giving. Tastes like honey! 

And that God is trustworthy because God remembers what we are made of even when we forget.

Another Sabbath place in my life is with the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. I make it a practice to spend some time at the monastery in Cambridge at least quarterly. There I read and pray with the monks and meet with my spiritual director and pray on my own. Without fail I know that when I leave there to head back to whatever faces me, I return a better person for it.

I want to keep practicing at Sabbath-keeping and become better at it. Not perfect but more skilled. Why? Because I want to model it in some way for others, especially younger clergy in my diocese. I want to not only quote Heschel or Taylor about Sabbath keeping but speak out of the depth of my own experience. I hope that when I die someone will speak at my funeral not only about what I did, but who I was. 

Without apology and without fear, I want to practice Sabbath-keeping until I start to get it right. To know what it is to encounter what is holy, through rest. To taste and see how good the Lord really is. 

Dominus regit me (Psalm 23)

I didn't need to write a sermon this week since we are not gathering for public worship due to COVID-19 restrictions. But kind of like cooking, sermon writing is a "normal" thing that helps keep me grounded. And this was meant to be part of a Lenten series at Church of the Reconciliation in Webster. 

I suspect that the 23rd Psalm has new meaning in these challenging days. So I'm sharing it early; no need to wait for Sunday! I'm continuing to reflect on the psalms in my own life and on occasion in this forum too and I commend them to you.

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In his commentary on the Psalms, “The Prayerbook of the Bible,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks: “who prays the psalms?” He offers a three-part answer: David, Jesus, and the Church.

The psalms are attributed to David.  No one seriously believes that David actually wrote them all, but Israel’s communal life, poetry and liturgy developed under King David and later under King Solomon. So in Israel’s poetic imagination, the psalms belong first to the shepherd-king, David.

Imagine David’s descendants, praying the 23rd psalm by the waters of Babylon, in the midst of exile. They had wondered how they could possibly sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land. But beyond their grief and anguish they discovered a language of hope. They refused to give in to despair. Imagine them praying for strength and courage in the midst of their homesickness even after laying up their harps and weeping: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

In reminding us that “David” prays the psalms, Bonhoeffer invites us to remember that the psalms existed before Jesus and before the Church, and that they continue to be prayed by our Jewish brothers and sisters to this day.

Bonhoeffer also reminds us that Jesus prayed the psalms. Luke’s gospel tells us that Jesus’ parents did all that the Torah required of faithful Jews. (Luke 2:39) On the eighth day of his life he was circumcised. (Luke 2:21) A month later his family went up to Jerusalem where he was presented to Simeon and Anna.  (Luke 2:22-38) When Jesus turned twelve, again his parents took him to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover (Luke 2:41ff). Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian! As a “son of the covenant,” Jesus would have learned to pray the psalms. In just two weeks we’ll hear him praying the twenty-second psalm moments before he breathes his last: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Today we remember that the One we call our “Good Shepherd” who knows his own sheep, and whose sheep know him, himself learned how to pray, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” (Psalm 23)

Because of Jesus—because of His life and death and resurrection, the Church now shares this extraordinary Prayerbook/Hymnal with the Jewish people. Corporately and as individuals we have learned to pray the psalms over the course of nearly two millennia. Peter and Andrew and the Zebedee boys and Mary Magdalene and those women from Galilee and all the disciples knew this prayer. So did Augustine and Aquinus, Julian of Norwich, Francis and Clare of Assisi, Catherine of Siena; so too, Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and Zwingli. So also Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each in his or her own way went through difficult times, when they would pray for God to “lead them to greener pastures and beside still waters…to restore their souls…to lead them in paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake”

This psalm is prayed in churches and synagogues and funeral homes when we bury our loved ones, offering the prayers of the faithful in our grief and in our trust that life is changed, not ended. Even among the spiritual but not religious, the words are familiar. No doubt this psalm was prayed at Auchwitz, as it was almost certainly on the lips of some of those who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on that field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. No doubt it has been prayed on the lips of some of those who have died from COVID-19, or on their behalf by those who love them.

This psalm has a life of its own. So my task is simply to call your attention to a few details that you may not have noticed before. Have you ever noticed, for example, that it begins and ends with the name of God? YHWH is my shepherd, we begin; and (like a bookend) at the very end: “…I will dwell in the house of YHWH forever.” It is as if this poet who lived centuries before John of Patmos wants us to recognize the Lord as “alpha and omega,” as beginning and end.

The poet imagines God as “shepherd.” In the agrarian world of the Bible everybody understood the vocation of a shepherd: to care for and provide for and protect the sheep. “Green pastures” are about food to eat. “Still waters” are about water to drink. A shepherd carried a staff—a crook—to beat up on predators that wanted to harm the sheep: i.e. wolves, or wolves masquerading as sheep. And also, on occasion the other end of that staff to drag a straggler back to the others.“Shepherd” was also political metaphor, however, especially after David the shepherd-king. To claim “the Lord is our shepherd” is the same thing as saying “Jesus shall reign.” In both cases we are making a political statement, not just a profession of faith. We are saying that our allegiance is to God, and not to any of the pretenders to the throne who want a piece of us. Not to any nation, but to the God of every nation.

The one who prays this prayer understands the core of Biblical faith: that what this God of ours is about is “goodness and mercy.” God’s steadfast love and mercy is beyond measure. God is love! Thanks be to God! And that love is so deep and wide that it is beyond our comprehension. It is God’s “goodness and mercy” that makes prayer possible, for without these qualities, God’s “otherness” would surely overwhelm and consume us.

Notice that in the body of this prayer, God is referred to in both the second and third person voice. The psalmist wants the listener to know that “God makes me lie down” and “God leads me” and “God revives my soul and guides me…” But then it is as if the poet forgets we are even there…in the midst of this prayer the poet addresses God directly:

          Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil

          For you are with me,

your rod, and your staff, they comfort me.

          You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;

                   You have anointed my head with oil,

 and my cup is running over.

          Surely your goodness and your mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life…

What this poet grasps—even before Martin Buber put it into words—is that there is no “I” without this good and merciful “Thou.” That is so difficult for us to grasp in a me-first society “I” is so often about ego detached from God, about self-fulfillment, and self-centeredness, and self-aggrandizement. But the psalmist shows us what an authentic “self” looks like when defined in relationship to “Thou;” namely an “I” that is defined by its relationship to God; a self that is not afraid, a self that trusts that God walks this journey with us. There is no place we can go where God is not with us.

The two greatest threats to full and abundant life are fear and isolation. We are wrestling with those in a big way these days. Again and again the poets of Israel dare to admit in prayer: “I am afraid.” Again and again they ask (as Job did): “why hast thou forsaken me?” Consistently, however, when people dare to utter such hard prayers, God’s response is the same: do not be afraid…for I am with you.

Think about this for just a moment. Take a moment to soak it in, for it’s at the heart of the “earthy” spirituality of the Psalter and especially at the heart of the Psalm 23. In fact, here is a hyper-link to my favorite metrical version of this psalm, The King of Love My Shepherd Is. I invite the reader to soak this in before returning to the few remaining paragraphs of this post...

This isn’t some pious cliché. It is what the faithful learn in the journey of faith. We live so much of our lives tentatively, acting out of our deep-seated fears rather than from a place of faith. I suspect that many of us are even more afraid of an authentic, real life than we are even of death. The poets of Israel admit this and name it: “I am scared,” they cry out. Again and again, in concrete ways, day-in-and day-out, God answers: Do not be afraid, I am with you.

There are times in our own lives, perhaps when someone we love dies, or when terror threatens to undo us, or when we are isolated and afraid that we also will pray: “why hast thou forsaken us?” To which our God responds: But I haven’t…I am right here…I am with you and making all things new. I am Easter-ing a new reality even now. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. 

The psalmist has learned these twin lessons of Biblical faith, bearing witness to David and to Jesus and to the Church that the essence of faith is trust, trust that God is our companion along the way:

         

          Thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

                   I will fear no evil

                             For thou art with me…

This poet knows who she is in relationship to a good and merciful God. There is nothing left to fear, even in the valley of the shadow of death. Because God is with us wherever we go. Like the mother of that runaway bunny, God won’t let us go. Surely, goodness and mercy will hunt us down all the days of our lives. 

Our Lenten journey is moving ever closer to the empty tomb, closer still to that encounter on the Emmaus Road, which is another way of saying the same thing:

Stay with us, we pray, for evening is at hand, and the day is past. Be our companion, Lord Christ—our shepherd and our king—on the Way. Give us faith to move mountains and to walk through valleys—even the valley of the shadow of death. Be revealed to us yet again, in the reading of Scripture and the Breaking of the Bread.