SACRED CLOWNS AND HOLY FOOLS: Palm Sunday 2021
The past 10 days have been an emotional roller coaster for me – or many of us, too – and now it is Palm Sunday. Seven mass shootings and massacres just last week – NOT two – but seven. Count them:

· Tuesday, March 16: eight people slaughtered in Atlanta.

· Wednesday, March 17: five people in Stockton, CA mowed down in a drive-by attack.

· Thursday, March 18: four people murdered together in Gresham, OR.

· Saturday, March 20: five people outside a club in Houston, TX were shot but not killed.

· Saturday, March 20: eight adults in Dallas, TX were wounded by an unknown assailant.

· Saturday, March 20: at an illegal party in Philadelphia, PA six adults were shot and one died.

· Monday, March 22: ten people including a police officer were killed in a shooting in King Soopers supermarket.

Filmmaker and cultural critic, Michael Moore, got it right on Face Book when he posted: From Atlanta to Boulder, SEVEN mass shootings over the past seven days across the USA. We’ve been praying to get back to normal and for America, you can’t get more “normal” than this: So who wants a whole new friggin’ normal? Add to this the spring-break/super-spreader madness, the next round of stimulus checks, a deepening commitment to vaccinations, the surge of enrollment in the expanded Affordable Care Act, record snow fall in the mountain states, the teaser of spring’s imminent arrival following the vernal equinox, Georgia’s new voter suppression law, the Senate’s affirmation of Dr. Rachel Levine as the nation’s first trans cabinet member and it was a week of extreme highs and heart-breaking lows. I was up and down, in and out, and all over the place emotionally and spiritually last week. So, when I came across this poem by the Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski who died this past week, too, I spontaneously combusted into a grateful but exhausted puddle of prayerful tears:

Try to praise the mutilated world 

Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, 

drops of rosé wine. 

The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. 

You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; 

one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. 

You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. 

You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together 

in a white room and the curtain fluttered. 

Return in thought to the concert where music flared. 

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. 

Praise the mutilated world - 

and the gray feather a thrush lost, 

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. 

This is Holy Week 2021 – and every Holy Week, for that matter – a sacred time scared by sorrow and cruelty yet sodden with the presence of vulnerable love, acts of tender mercies, and just a hint of Easter blessings that are as yet still masked and obscured from our sight by darkness, anxiety, and grief. It is a time for the freedom feast of Passover and Peter’s denial, the betrayal of Judas and the fidelity of Mary Magdalene. Some of our Jewish friends have described the liturgies of this season as the ritual experience of feeling sadness within our joys, and exuberance within our sorrows to remind us that neither should ever constitute the entirety of our expectations. I would add because both are always with us.

In our faith tradition, Holy Week is when we come to grips with the Cross: symbol of our faith, sign of excruciating suffering, doorway into God’s love. “Behold,” says St. John the Baptist, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Behold indeed: behold the bearer of inconvenient truth, behold the nonviolent messiah who exposes the horror of state sponsored violence used against a culture’s outsiders in order to maintain cohesion, behold a small and silent savior.

When I behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, I no longer see Jesus as victim or God’s ransom sent to pay off our original sin. No, now I see him as the gentle warrior of the holy who, like his mother before him, freely chooses to accept God’s invitation to incarnate love in his flesh. And he does so by showing us what capital punishment and cultural violence looks like from the perspective of the scapegoat. Not the victor, not the powerful, not the military or police force or the winners, but the beaten, the discarded, the outcast, the losers and prisoners. Look at THIS, Jesus tells us from the Cross, and know that you can make better and more compassionate choices. Behold, the Lamb of God, who exposes to you what it looks like to execute your fear rather than embrace it.

· THAT is what calls to me on Palm Sunday 2021: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world by showing us the consequences of our choices and offering us a better way. If we were together in public worship today, we would be grounded in polar opposites. First, we would bless the palms and sing songs of joy only to quickly shift into the proclamation of the Passion Narrative and the Bible’s lengthy recitation of all that happens to Jesus on the way to Golgotha and the Cross.

· Today’s liturgy was crafted to be an extended encounter with paradox: ancient Jerusalem shouts, “Hosanna, hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” with one breath, only to later snarl, “Crucify, crucify, crucify that man” with the next. It is not a senti-mental recreation of what took place 2000 years ago, but a consciously schizophrenic, unsettling, simultaneously intimate and alienating confrontation with the mystery of our faith and the consequences of our choices. The prayer of invocation from my old United Church of Christ prayerbook sets the stage well:

Loving God, who in Jesus Christ triumphantly entered Jerusalem, heralding a week of pain and sorrow, be with us now as we follow the way of the cross. In these events of defeat and victory, you have sealed the closeness of death and resurrection, of humiliation and exaltation. As we wave our branches of palm, we recognize that they will become for us symbols of martyrdom and majesty… Travel with us now, Lord, that we may trust that your whisper silences the shouts of the mighty and quiets every voice but your own. Speak to us this week through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we may receive grace to show Christ’s love to the world in lives committed to your service. In Christ, with you and the Holy Spirit, who live and reign forever as one God, we pray. Amen.

This prayer suggests that we consider the worship of Holy Week to be a living poem. I heard Naomi Shihab Nye interviewed by Krista Tippett last week on her clarifying and holy radio program, On Being, and was arrested when she told us, “I think that all people THINK in poems.”

… this is very important — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem. And in fact, at this late date, I have started putting that on the board of any room I walk into that has a board (whenever I lead a class in poetry.) She amplified this saying: I just came back from Japan a month ago, and every classroom, I would just write on the board, “You are living in a poem.” And then I would write other things relating to whatever we were doing in that class, but I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. “What do you mean, we’re living in a poem?” Or “When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?” And I’d say, “No; when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another — that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.”

That’s what worship during Holy Week aspires towards: savoring, pondering, wondering, wander-ing, waiting, thinking, listening, weeping, laughing, eating, waking, sleeping into the holy as it has been made known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We rarely speak – and even more rarely teach in Christian formation – that our Holy Week observances are a choice to con-sciously live into our lives as a poem – and all the more the sorrow – because a poetic conscious-ness offers us the spaciousness to listen, discern, and go deep. One of Shihab-Nye’s Japanese students told her after a seminar:

In Japan, we have a concept called ‘yutori,’ and it is spaciousness. It’s a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it’s leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you’re going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around.” Or — and then she gave all these different definitions of what yutori was, to her. But one of them was: “And after you read a poem, just knowing you can hold it. You can be in that space of the poem, and it can hold you in its space, and you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see differently.”

Holy Week gives us a full seven days of spaciously and symbolically entering into the agony of real life that is also filled with the life-saving presence of the holy. In fact, the whole week is conceptualized as a solitary and continuous act of worship with a call to awareness at the start of Palm Sunday but NO closing benedictions until the last hymn of Easter Sunday! It is one, long, spacious seamless garment that must NEVER be labeled a day of holy obligation. How can we be OBLIGATED to open our hearts and minds to faith as poetry? That smacks of a cruel, controlling, manipulative deity who is the polar opposite of Jesus.

A spirituality of obligation reeks of shallowness creating a culture of clock watchers and hoop jumpers instead of poets, mystics, and sacred clowns. Not women, men, and children ready to welcome the whole of life so that we might see, feel, and act differently beyond our grief.

No, Holy Week is our time to practice praising a mutilated world. NOT a spiritual fantasy, not magic or escapism, but praise and mourning intimately intertwined. Shihab-Nye wrote about speaking to her Palestinian-born father in the aftermath of September 11th that sounds like Holy Week to me:

I call my father, we talk around the news:

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?” 

I sense something similar where we’re what does a true follower of Jesus DO now.? And I believe that Holy Week gives us part of the answer. We start with Hosanna – quickly move into the foot washing of Holy Thursday – and then nearly tumble in confusion to the cries of crucify him. Along the way we get on our knees and live as servants not leaders. We listen as people just like us betray the ones they love and cherish so that we might own some of our own deceits. We spend a lot of time in the darkness as candles are extinguished rather than lit, the exact opposite of the growing light of our Advent wreaths. And for two full days – 48 empty and anguished hours – we’re told to wait. And wait and wait some more. And just when we think we’re supposed to stop waiting and make a broken peace with the grave, new life suddenly and mysteriously appears within us. In ways that defy logic but feed our hearts, we find ourselves unable to do anything except sing Christ the Lord is risen today – alleluia!

I’ve come to trust that living poetry between Palm Sunday and Easter morning is how we learn to live and even sing praise for a mutilated world in the manner of Jesus as Christ. Part of this has to do with joy and grief. Most people, I suspect, believe their experiences with happiness and sorrow are unique. We tend to feel that what WE’RE living is more important and profound than what others are encountering. Not that we want to deny their reality.

But without some critical perspective, many of us live in a childish and self-centered way, where we imagine that OUR anguish as well as our exuberance is special. Consequently, part of what the next seven days tries to tell us is that our pain is just a part of life. It is no more IMPORTANT than the experiences of another but no LESS so either. What we feel is what everyone feels as life matures. Joy, pain, anxiety, and trust are a part of the shared human experience no matter who we are or where we live. Somehow this hard and humbling truth has become sadly obscured in so much of contemporary Western Christianity. And I suspect this is at least one of the reasons for the deep and mean-spirited divisions that wound our politics.

In that interview, Krista Tippett said: “There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain.” Once the best of our religions insisted that the key to coexistence began by waking a mile in another’s shoes. The poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, added: I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that another person might be experiencing. (Religion and spirituality strive for empathy and solidarity.) But these days, when you listen to the loud voices all over the world, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence? That WE are all a part of a whole?

Some of the big personalities in our story, the archetypal characters like Judas and Peter, Christ’s mother Mary or Magdalene, the aloof Pontius Pilate or the slimy politician King Herod, give us poetic windows through which we can look at ourselves and ask: where am I in this story? What do I feel as it unfolds? Who am I most like this year? How have I changed? How MIGHT I be changed over the course of a new year so that I might think and act differently? More like Jesus. That’s what can happen if we walk through Holy Week in another’s shoes: we can discover something about how the holy is calling us to go deeper.

And one of the sacred truths of Holy Week is that Christian people do this all over the world: in Palestine and Peoria, Mozambique and Michigan, Sao Paulo and San Francisco. Every year we have a chance to ask ourselves what do I have in common with others throughout the world – and how can I walk for a spell in their shoes? We’re also get to ask: how have we been changed over the past year – and what does that mean? I know that some years I’ve felt like Peter denying my Lord three times – or three thousand times – but there’ve also been years when I am more like Mary Magdalene standing at the foot of the Cross trusting that God’s love is greater than the sorrow I feel when death breaks my heart. Doing this in the company of others helps me know that whether I am in Rome, Riyadh, Rangpur, or Raleigh, NC people just like me are trying to recognize our shared humanity during Holy Week, too.

In fact, millions and millions of people like you and me are discerning how our joys and sorrows can become one of the places we meet God. That’s why the liturgies of this holy week are not passive: they insist that our bodies live into the poetry of the Cross. To do it right we have to move around and feel the words so that they unclog our hearts. This is one of the ways the Lamb of God brings healing into the world. In those embodied, participatory, subversive liturgies we experience a solidarity beyond race, class, gender, age, and ability.

That’s one of the blessings I have been given by being a part of the L’Arche Ottawa community where people with and without intellectual disabilities from all over the world live and move and learn to love one another as one body. Henri Nouwen, who served as a L’Arche chaplain for ten years, said that L’Arche is built upon the body not abstract words. It is a way for the words to become flesh. “The community is formed around the wounded bodies of those with and without physical and intellectual disabilities where feeding, cleaning, touching, holding, and waiting is what builds community. It is the heart of prayer at L’Arche.”

One of the truths that I have been asked to own at L’Arche is that my pain as well as exuberance is NOT the center of the universe. It I am a part of the whole, then my feelings and experiences are just a part of reality, too. A reality filled with pains and joys that are real but never the totality of creation. L’Arche is a simple and sacred place to learn about the marriage of humility and solidarity.

· The first year I participated in the Holy Thursday foot washing liturgy at L’Arche, I was a stranger. I’d played guitar for a few retreats and shared supper with my new friends at Mountainview, but I didn’t know anybody very well. And that night, in candlelight, about 100 women, men, and children of different faiths, races, spiritualities, class backgrounds, physical and mental abilities gathered into ten small circles of ten where we were asked to wash one another’s feet.

· Now, I didn’t grow up with a foot washing tradition, but I love it and have made it a part of the various faith communities I’ve served over the past 40 years. In my group that night, there were young women and men from Syria, a few Francophone Quebecers, a mostly nonverbal woman Anglophone in a wheelchair, another nonverbal woman with more physical abilities, and me.

After the welcome and opening prayer and songs, we all sat together in an awkward silence for a moment or two. Then, as group leader, I knelt and asked: “Are we clear what we’re to do now?” There were a few questions – and I needed a bilingual person to do a bit of translation into French – and then I said: “Please know three things about this sacrament. One, there’s no WRONG way to do it; if you share it with love it will be perfect. Two, it is mostly a nonverbal prayer. It’s about being vulnerable and tender with our bodies so don’t fret if you feel awkward, ok? And three, at the close of each foot washing, the one whose feet have just been washed is asked to give a blessing to the one who is kneeling.” Most of those in my circle that night were new to L’Arche making the two core members, those with the physical and/or intellectual disabilities, the experts.

But they were nonverbal so I suggested I could model what this was all about and then pass it around the circle. I was already kneeling in front of a refugee from Syria, so I took off his shoes and socks, gently poured warm water over his feet, and sensed the presence of Jesus in the process.

· Everyone’s feet are different, right? Some are beautiful, some are broken, some are young, some are old, some are clean, and some are not. But all of our feet place us closest to the ground – that’s something we have in common – so feet really put you in touch with this body prayer – and it is as tender and sacred as the first time you hold a newborn baby.

· When I finished washing my new friend’s feet, drying them carefully with a towel, I forgot that he was going to bless me. So, he gently put out his strong hand upon my head and said with authority: God’s peace is within you and upon you, James, servant of Christ Jesus. May you always know and trust this. Amen.

For a moment I couldn’t see – I was so disoriented as tears poured from my eyes – so I just knelt as he kept his hand on my head. And when it felt right, he helped me stand and move back into the circle so that he could wash another’s foot. Smiles and tears, hands and feet, opened our hearts to the Living God in that night over the next 20 minutes. Each person with different abilities knelt to become a servant using their gifts with love, then rose in their own way to become the font of another servant’s blessing as the incarnational Lamb of God took shape and form before our eyes.

Reading Fr. Nouwen’s journals I found that he, too experienced what I did during his first encounter with a L’Arche foot washing ceremony: “Everything within me wants to move upward,” he wrote. “Downward mobility with Jesus goes radically against my inclinations, against the advice of the world surrounding me, and against the culture of which I am a part… Wherever I turn I am con-fronted with my deep-seated resistance against following Jesus on his way to the cross and my countless ways of avoiding become small, poor, and invisible… (but) sitting in the basement room in Paris, surrounded by forty poor people, I was struck again by the way Jesus concluded his active life. Just before entering the road of his passion, he washed the feet of his disciples and offered them his body and blood” to be sustenance.” Nouwen added that:

The words of Jesus to Peter (at the close of St. John’s gospel) reminds me that Jesus’ transition from action to passion must also be ours if we want to follow his way. He told Peter, “When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you like, but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will gird your waist and take you into those places where you would rather not go.” Come to me, Jesus keeps saying, come and let me wipe away your tears…for the voice of Christ does not offer us a solution to our problems, but a friendship. It does not take away our burdens, but promises to be there with us to help us carry them.

Mostly without words, always with intimate, respectful, and safe bodily touch, the foot washing ceremonies of Holy Week push us towards sharing our humble lives as beautiful, broken, living, breathing, fearing, and trusting vessels of Christ’s love. This is how we behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Fr. Nouwen put it like this:

I don’t think you’ll ever be able to penetrate the mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus until it strikes you that the major part of Jesus’ life was hidden. Even the “public” years remained essentially invisible as far as most people were concerned. Whereas the way of the world is to insist on publicity, celebrity, popularity, and getting maximum exposure, God prefers to work in secret. You must let that mystery of God’s secrecy, God’s anonymity, sink deeply into your consciousness because, otherwise, you’re continually looking at it from the wrong point of view. In God’s sight the things that really matter seldom take place in public… Jesus’ life is marked by an always deeper choice towards what is small, humble, poor, rejected, and despised.

This week I wish we could be together to wash one another’s feet – but, like the Passover liturgy says – NEXT year in Jerusalem. If, however, you are feel called and would like to join with me and my friends at L’Arche this Thursday at 7 pm Eastern time, send me a note. We’ll be introducing the foot washing ceremony quietly at that time and asking people in their homes to participate how-ever it feels right. We will also be Zooming the stations of the cross on Good Friday at 10 am the following morning. The poet, Padraig O’Tuama, has said that for 10 years he prayed and walked the 14 stations of the cross everyday in his quest to find God’s loving presence in the midst of his pain. He’s written: “What I like about the Stations of the Cross, is that they don’t say, “Oh, 14 ok, but then, there’s the fifteenth one, where it’s all lovely, fantastic.”

No, in the traditional understanding, there isn’t a fifteenth station. The idea is to find hope in the practice of what seemed to be the worst. And it is the worst — there’s no pretense that abduction and torture and murder are anything other than abduction, torture, and murder; however, there is the understanding that within it, we can discover some kind of hope — the hope of protest, the hope of truth-telling, the hope of generosity, the hope of gesture — even in those places.

You may wish to join us for this time of quiet reflection on the Lamb of God, too. Drop me a note and I will privately send you the link. This is the hour when we proclaim with believers throughout the world: behold, the Lamb of God, who quietly, in small and mostly hidden ways, takes away the sins of the world with love – and invites us to join him. Pray with me:

O Jesus of the unexpected, for at least some of your life this was not how you imagined its end. Yet even in the end, you kept steady in your conviction. Jesus, keep us steady. Jesus, keep us steady. Because Jesus, keep us steady. Amen.

 

i think books are important and i write... but in my own language... arabic

Yesterday I was distraught. Today I am grounded and at peace. Yesterday the angers and darkness that always live within punched their way through my equanimity and snarled at life in general and those I cherish in particular. I hate when they escape. Today, I gave thanks to God that once again they made their appearance known both because they bring me back to quiet prayer and because in my frustration and humiliation they push me towards centering my heart again in grace.

I just returned from getting my second COVID vaccination - round two of the Pfizer shot - and I am full to overflowing with gratitude. After the inoculation, the dark haired, dark eyed female technician leaned over her desk to see the title of the book I brought for waiting: Henri Nouwen's Sabbatical Journey: the Diary of his Final Year. "What is this book about?" she asked with a slight accent I couldn't place. "It's about a priest's sabbatical." When she looked puzzled above her mask, I asked, "Do you know that word? Sabbatical?" She shook her head gently. "Well, it is a time of extended rest that takes place in some academic communities - a quiet time away from work mostly for writing - but religious institutions often share a sabbatical rest with their clergy, too." She nodded with interest. "Do you know what sabbath is?" Again, she said no. "Ah, ok" I smiled with my eyes and then with my words through my mask. "A sabbath is a break from work every seven days."

She paused and then said, "I like books very much and write a great deal, too. How do you select the books you read?" Not the conversation I expected. "Well, some I choose to give my brain a rest. Mostly mysteries for reading at night. Some I pick because I know the author's previous works and want to go deeper. And then there are the books I take home because I know nothing about the subject and want to learn more." She was smiling with her eyes. "I think books are so important. And I write - but in my own language." "And what might that be," I asked, "if you don't mind sharing?" "Arabic" she continued. "How interesting" I had to reply. "Earlier today I was reading the English poems of a Palestinian-American, Naomi Shihab-Nye, whose father was born in Palestine." We stumbled around saying her name and then I suggested we write it down. "Oh" she said with clarity, "Shihab. Does she write in Arabic?" I thought probably not but she often reflects on her Arab-American roots. I added, "This morning I read her words spoken to her father right after September 11th in something she calls '19 Varieties of Gazelle' that says something like...

“I call my father, we talk around the news

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

to plead with the air:

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?”

A silent paused filled the inoculation room. A shared albeit sad smile, too. We wanted to go deeper. I wanted to learn how she came to be here in Pittsfield giving a mostly elderly Anglo population their vaccinations? Where was her home of origin? But there were five other people waiting just outside the exam room door. So, we both sighed at the same moment and she said, "It was grand and extraordinary speaking with you." Touching my right palm to my heart I added, "It was a blessing for me. Grace and peace and safety be with you." She smiled... and I left.

I sat in the car filled with light. What mysteries are just below the surface, yes? Another of Ms. Shihab Nye's poem came to mind.

“Please Describe How You Became A Writer”: “Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?”

I wonder what tomorrow has in store for us?

sacred clowns and holy fools: lent 5

SMALL IS HOLY: Lent 5
As more and more US citizens are vaccinated against the scourge of Covid, more and more stories are starting to appear with titles like “the path forward: wise actions/next steps” and “what will the NEW normal look like?”

· WIRED Magazine shared their insights into the “perplexing psychology of returning to normal” stressing that healing and hope still necessitates the ability to live creatively with ambiguity – something none of us do well – even after a full year of anxiety. “Just because a war is over,” says Adrienne Heinz, research psychologist at Stanford University, “doesn't mean that what happened during the war doesn't still activate you, doesn't still haunt you in some ways… where a healing” still needs to take place. For many of us the archvillain here continues to be uncertainty.

· The NY Times wrote about the importance of finding ways to grieve what we might consider our small sorrows – those lesser losses born of good fortune and/or privilege – that stand in stark contrast to the death of 2.6 million people around the world during the contagion. Or the millions among us who have lost their jobs. “In the hierarchy of human suffering,” Tara Parker-Pope writes, “a canceled prom, a lost vacation, or missing seeing a child’s first steps may not seem like much, but mental health experts say that ALL lost must be acknowledged and grieved.”

· And the wisdom-keepers at the quarterly, YES Magazine, have been talking about the rediscovery of common ground as an important consequence of our shared grief. Vandana Shiva suggests that the path forward must be paved by reclaiming the commons: our common home, the Earth, our common future as sisters and brothers, our common commitment to sharing and caring for creation and one another in ways that strengthen nature’s gifts and recycle them in ways that help biodiversity and life-giving ecosystems thrive. I couldn’t help but recall a poem by W.H. Auden:

'O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window as the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor with (all) your crooked heart.'

During our midday meal most days, Di and I tell one another what we’ve been reading and how it’s touched our hearts and minds. This past week we’ve been especially aware of what we hope to retain from this year of isolation: deep introspection, for sure; lots of quiet time, too; the cooking, the careful use of resources, and a renewed appreciation for God’s assurances found within the cycles and seasons of creation have become pretty important to us as well. We’ve pondered what must be grieved and mourned, as well – the small sorrows that still weigh heavily within – even as we sort out our gratitude for the blessings. I hope it isn’t trite to say that like Dickens we’ve seen this year as the best and worst of times.

Like many of you, I’ve done a TON of reading during this sabbatical year of solitude, safety and solidarity. I never expected to work my way through ALL of writer Michael Connelly’s cop novels about Harry Bosch – but I have. I took in lots of Celtic spirituality and nature writing, too. And early this week I began what turned out to be Fr. Henri Nouwen’s last book, a journal written during his 1995 sabbatical from L’Arche, after which he died suddenly of a heart attack. You may recall from our Celtic Advent that one of the practices I try to honor is following the threads of serendipity that show up in my life. Like a Celtic monk on a pilgrimage, I wander within the seemingly random but curiously connected events to discern what they might be saying to me, where they might be leading, and if I am ready to trust the mysterious wisdom they reveal?

Imagine my surprise last week when on the same day that the Vatican released their statement condemning same-sex marriage as a sin, my FB newsfeed showed pictures from dear friends vacationing in Mexico as part of their 20-year wedding anniversary celebration. What a holy mash-up: the withered and ugly words of a fearful institution alongside the vibrant and holy smiles of two lovers who just happened to be the first same-sex couple I had the privilege to counsel and then officiate at their wedding back in Tucson, AZ on the first Saturday after Easter. And just so that I wouldn’t miss the message, on that same evening I read these words from Fr. Nouwen’s journal:

Why am I so tired? Although I have all the time I want to sleep, I wake up with an immense feeling of fatigue. Everything requires an immense effort, and after a few hours of work I collapse in utter exhaustion. Without wanting to, I feel a certain pressure within me to keep living up to that reputation as a Catholic priest, writer, and spiritual director to do, say, and write things that fit the expectations of the Catholic Church, L’Arche (where Nouwen was in residence), my family, my friends, my readers… Lately I feel caught in it all and I experience it as restricting… What does it mean now to fulfill my vocation? Does it require that I be consistent with my earlier way of living or thinking, or does it ask for the courage to move in new directions, event when doing so may be disappointing for some of the people I love? (Sabbatical Journey, p. xii)

Like many contemporary people of faith, ourselves included, Nouwen found himself making new connections, leaving behind some of the old certainties that had once given him focus but now had outlived their usefulness, exploring new possibilities. He was growing deeper into the mystical love of Jesus and all its revolutionary alliances. Nouwen knew all too well that the more profoundly he followed the path of the rebel Jesus, the more he would need to leave behind other parts of his life – even some shaped by his life as a priest. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

I was delighted to discover that Nouwen had been nurturing a deep friendship with some circus, highwire acrobats. They were his inspiration for an incomplete spiritual reflection on deep trust. “The daredevil flyer,” he observed, “must never catch the catcher. Rather, he must wait in absolute trust.” Nouwen’s circus connection tickled and touched my heart given my own awareness of the spirit of Jesus guiding me as a sacred clown. In so many ways, it felt like what the prophet Jeremiah was saying to us in today’s appointed reading:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with you. It will not be like the covenant that I made with your ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. In this covenant: I will put my law within you, I will write it on your hearts; and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. No longer shall you teach one another saying, “Know the Lord,” for you shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, as I forgive you and remember sin no more.

As the week ripened, more and more experiences illuminated Lent’s linkage of opposites for me: the sorrow alongside the joy, the brokenness entwined with the healing, the violence of hatred and fear juxtaposed with hearts breaking open in tender compassion and cries for justice, institutional judgement alongside embodied love – and Nouwen’s own yearning to fly high above his weariness that required a staggering trust in God’s commitment to catch us. One more marvelous mystery showed up on that same day, too: this poem by Nicolette Sowder that in my heart ties all the serendipity together:

May we raise children who love the unloved things
the dandelion, the worms & spiderlings.
Children who sense the rose needs the thorn
& run into rainswept days the same way 

they turn towards sun...
And when they're grown & someone has to speak for those
who have no voice - may they draw upon that wilder bond
those days of tending tender things – and be the ones.

Being, living, speaking, trusting, feeling, and seeing life as the ones who will speak for those who have no voice – who witness the unloved things and honor them as both as kin and kindred – is how I am starting to understand what life beyond the lockdown looks like for me. The spirituality of Jesus as God’s sacred clown connects so much together as essential. As I reread St. John’s gospel, I’m finding that Jesus starts with the wisdom of his prophetic Jewish mentors and then goes on to discern new ways to take this love deeper. The ancient words are never static for him, stuck in an ancient history, but more suggestive and subtle. Today’s text, for example, draws on Isaiah 56, Zechariah 14, and Jeremiah 21 that all insist that unity and peace among different people and cultures can only come about if we let God’s grace disarm us. If we are intentional about giving up some of our securities, the holy will show us how discover new beauty in our common humanity. But this will not come cheaply: learning to trust that God’s love is sufficient to catch us when we fall in a world of uncertainty and chaos means dying to self.

As we now stand on the cusp of containing the contagion – and sorting out some of the chaos – the invitation to die to self, warrants our vigorous attention. It is a comprehensive call to commitment for contemporary disciples who, like Nouwen, realize that trust is how we are given eyes to see the unity of love within our paradoxical truths: trust reveals the commons, trust honors our mourning as well as our feasting, and trust helps us negotiate the very real uncertainties that still exist at this moment in history. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Those who follow Jesus rather than merely “like him on Face Book,” live as he does with abandon, simplicity, trust, and focused joy as well as sorrow.

As I studied today’s text from St. John’s gospel this week, I found that there are four other times in this gospel where St. John has Jesus introducing a spiritual insight about the meaning of disciple-ship with the words: very truly I say unto you unless. Bible scholars say that this is a well-known Middle Eastern expression for giving your word to another person. It is part of the honor code of the region that assures another that what you are about to say is absolutely true and from your heart. Beyond his call to die to self, Jesus shared four other assurances from his heart about living a life of faith:

· John 3:3 where Jesus tells Nicodemus: Very truly I assure you that no one can see the kingdom of God without being sired from above. (That is, inspiration form the Spirit.)

· John 6: 53 where Jesus tells some Judean religious scholars from the Temple in Jerusalem: Very truly I assure you that unless the Son of Man becomes your food – eating his flesh and drinking his blood – you will have no sacred life within you. (Hyperbole not literal truth about being nourished by the sacred.)

· John 13: 8 where Jesus tells a belligerent Peter: Very truly I tell you that unless I wash your feet, you will never be a part of me. (The way of Jesus is upside-down and grounded a life of servanthood.)

· And John 15: 4 where Jesus speaks to those who were closest to him: Unless you abide in me as a branch abides in the vine you will bear no spiritual fruit within or among you. (Abide means to rest as in come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest – life within the unforced rhythms of grace – rather than the compulsions and obligations of a cynical and utilitarian culture.)

It’s fascinating to me that beyond these examples, St. John has Jesus using the very truly I say unto you, expression 24 other times in his gospel. The abundance of these assurances points to the profound anxiety that was all too alive and well among the early church – something we can all appreciate. Cumulatively, they tell us that living into God’s grace by trust means: 1) the presence of the holy will saturate our humanity, 2) servanthood rather than selfishness is the way into the unforced rhythms of God’s grace, and 3) resting in Christ’s love is how our flesh will bear spiritual fruit.

Each of these commitments have their roots in ancient Israel’s poetic prophets - specifically Zechariah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah – each of whom speaks to their people’s experience of uncertainty, exile, and suffering and each of whom Jesus reinterprets for his context. St. John’s gospel, you see, is packed with the poetry of the prophets because, you may recall, part of its original purpose was polemical: this was an intra-Jewish argument about the meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Those who followed Jesus tended to be Jews from the northern areas of ancient Israel, while those who opposed him were mostly southern Jews with an allegiance to the Temple leadership in Jerusalem – and you can see why St. John uses the tradition of the prophets to paint a picture of Christ’s significance.

· First, St. John connects the buoyant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem for his final Passover with a description of the king of ancient Israel’s jubilant return to Jerusalem after the exile in Babylon during the 6th century BCE. Zechariah says: Now we rejoice greatly, O daughters Zion! Now we shout aloud, O daughters of Jerusalem! For lo, your king comes to you; trium-phant and victorious, yet humble and riding on an ass. Palm Sunday links Jesus to the end of exile and the testimony of the prophets.

· Second, St. John wants us to know that as Jesus led the people who were with him in Bethany for the healing of Lazarus into Jerusalem, he is revisioning and reclaiming what took place 500 years before this in Isaiah 56 where the joy experienced at end of exile in Babylon drew people from every tribe and nation into the community of God’s love: I will bring them all into my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer… so that my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations—said the Lord. 

Jerusalem is that mountain – literally God’s city of peace on a hill – where Isaiah 56 tells us that those who had once been shut out of the sacred community, specifically eunuchs and foreigners, were now welcomed as kin as they all practiced sabbath. Not keeping kosher, not circumcision, not even maintaining the traditional sacrifices. All that was NOW necessary was sabbath. Rest. Freedom for each person to become fully human in the spirit of sacred love. Which sounds to me a lot like Jeremiah’s insight that there would come a time born of forgiveness when doctrine, law, rhetoric, rules, and rituals would no longer define God’s people as unique and holy because at the appointed time the essence of the holy would be written upon our hearts:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with you. It will not be like the covenant that I made with your ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. In this covenant: I will put my law within you, I will write it on your hearts; and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. No longer shall you teach one another saying, “Know the Lord,” for you shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, as I forgive you and remember sin no more.

Jesus is immersed in references to the ancient prophets of Israel in St. John’s text not only because they were Christ’s mentors, but also because Jesus gave new shape and form to their wisdom in his flesh – and this gospel wants even those loyal to the priests and scholars of the Temple to see the ancient truth made new in Christ. To underscore the importance of this theological affirmation, St. John tells us that there came a time when those all-around Jesus learned that the word of restoration that brought Lazarus back from death into new life was touching countless other souls, too. It evoked a new sense of hope that could not be contained and had erupt into a celebration parade with dancing in the streets.

What was usually a procession into Jerusalem in preparation for the rituals of purification prior to the festival of Passover were now ecstatic – and this was part of Isaiah’s teaching, too: God’s grace would draw ALL the people together in community: I will bring them all into my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer… so that my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations—said the Lord. And how does this gospel begin today’s reading but to note that in Jerusalem for the Passover on this day were Jews AND Gentiles. It is the symbolic fulfillment of the gathering of the nations by God’s grace and prophesied by Isaiah – and Jesus named it as such.

· One Bible scholar put it like this: when the story tells us that some celebrants from Greece ask to see Jesus, this is symbolic language saying that even those outside Judaism now believe and trust in Jesus: “This is a sign for Jesus that his hour has come: now his message of peace and trust can cross over the frontiers of Israel into the whole world (just as Isaiah prophesied.)” (Vanier, p. 210) Now the spirituality of Jesus could show a world divided by religion, superstition, fear, race, class conflict, and the struggle for power that historic barriers could be broken.

· Beyond Israel there were those open to the path of prophetic grace just as the Magi were as they prefigured this moment at Christ’s birth. This is why St. John has Jesus saying: My hour has now come – let the Son of Humanity be glorified – which literally means lit up or exhibited with brightness - for now we are ready to hear from the heart of grace. Very truly I tell you from my core: unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it falls to Mother Earth and gives up itself, it can bear much fruit. And let’s unpack this because literalists or fundamentalist get it all wrong when Jesus they point to these words concerning loving and hating our lives.

The LIFE that Jesus is speaking about is not simply our physical being but our value system. I’ve said before that this gospel juxtaposes opposites so that we discern the paradoxical nature of God’s wisdom. Here Jesus is saying the status quo – the world – has one set of operating values that teaches might makes right. Some have cynically paraphrased the 23rd Psalm: Yea, I walk into the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil because I am the meanest, baldest MOFO around who will kick your butt so don’t mess with me. Before the pandemic, our culture and economy insisted that reality was driven by utilitarian bottom lines and true value was getting the biggest bang for the buck.

To the contrary, Jesus prays: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is already being done in heaven. There is another set of values where selfishness is not primary: in the kingdom – or kindom as some prefer – selfishness is what pushes out outside of our intimacy with the holy. It is the antithesis of grace. If we’re addicted to winning, if our compulsions are all about competition and success, we are dead to the kingdom because we’re enmeshed in the values of the world and it is THOSE values, habits, fears, and addictions that Jesus tells us from the heart must die.

Nearly every day over this past year, we’ve seen these values in conflict as those who refuse to wear a mask celebrate the kingdom of selfishness. Those who wear masks do so for their own safety, of course, but also to care for those more vulnerable than themselves. It is incomprehensible to me that some faith communities who claim Jesus as Lord have demanded an exemption from public health precautions because they inhibit the full expression of their faith. In another context, Jesus was clear: greater love has NO one than this, that we lay down our life for the sake of another. The kingdom of selfishness is the antithesis of Christian servanthood.

Every time I hear one of the fundamentalist preachers or ultra-conservative priests carping about masks and the lockdown, I cannot help but hear Jesus saying: unless ye become as a child you shall never enter the kingdom of God. Five months ago, when we were last able to see our precious grandchildren in the flesh, 7-year-old Louie was terrified that he might be carrying the COVID virus undetected. So, he not only kept his mask on at all times, but when he hugged us goodbye, he held his breath and pinched his nose closed. HE got it – at seven – a little bit exaggerated but his love was all about taking care of those who might be more vulnerable than he. On our drive home, Di and I wept a little even as we gave thanks to God for his tender and trusting child-like kingdom values.

Let’s be clear: we KNOW the conflict of values and commitments Jesus spoke of is real – it IS a matter of life and death – and COVID has taught some of us the importance of dying to those aspects of our culture that value some lives over others. So has Black Lives Matters. And the Me, Too movement. Jesus tells us in today’s text – but over and over again, too – that “the hour has now come for the values of love to triumph over selfishness.” Just ask the more than 3,500 Asian American/Pacific Islanders who have been bullied, spat upon, attacked, harassed, violated, or even murdered over the course of just last year alone if now isn’t the hour. In L’Arche, this reality is sometimes articulated like this:

To die in order to bear much fruit, to separate ourselves from our psychological tendencies and need for recognition, to live our loss and grief openly and fully, to know in the deepest places of our hearts that we are loved and held by Jesus, all of this is the only way we can stay grounded in solidarity with the weak and wounded. To die to self is to rise up in love and live gently with all we see and touch.

That’s what’s underneath Christ’s words when he says: my hour has now come so whoever serves me, must follow me for where I am there goes my servant as well. That’s what this past year has made clear to me: that I must continue to die to myself. Die to my privilege. Die to any illusion of superiority so that I might live gently, openly, and tenderly in solidarity with others.

Especially those who have no voice. And I must invite other people of faith to do their part in dying to self and privilege, too so that there’s room in our culture to discover what we hold in common. From my experience I sense that for people like you and me this is a time for quiet responses – careful, tender, and sacrificial replies to the agony, grief, and chaos we all have known – the way of the servant not the leader. Our culture’s wounded are rising up and organizing again – finding their true voices as they must – and calling out for allies and partners in soul-force actions like the Poor People’s Movement that promise to transform our nation from the bottom up. We have supportive roles to play in this healing work and I look forward to doing so more publicly in the year ahead. Just this weekend our AAPI sisters and brothers were out in the streets calling for solidarity and justice in the wake of the slaughter in Atlanta.

What concerns me is that there now a growing chorus of voices from among America’s more privileged and mostly white faith communities - sisters and brothers who do justice, love mercy, and seek to walk with God and neighbor in humility – who are demanding that a MORE visible. MORE vocal, and MORE challenging and confrontational role in public affairs in order to counter and balance-out those more strident, ugly, racist, misogynist, nativist, conservative, and fear-filled Christian voices that are among the major purveyors of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxer lies, and so many of the super-spreader events for Jesus.

How do we as mostly white and privileged people of faith move into this new era of uncertainty with faith and trust in public? They are saying something like: "OUR Christian witness during the pandemic has been too quiet, too unnoticed, too humble and overlooked to capture the public’s attention. “If Christianity is to come through this with any credibility, the quiet Christians need to speak up and tell their stories of the pandemic. In effect, those who humbly followed the guidelines, who cared for others by doing things never imagined, need to counter the ethical malpractice committed by other Christians… and tell the world how we have fed hungry neighbors, provided masks for the poor, lobbied politicians and business leaders to maintain safe practices in their cities and towns, prayed for the sick, the dying, and the mourning, created alternatives for pastoral care, raised money to cover hospital bills, reached out to those suffering isolation, and honored the dead with online memorials and socially-distanced funerals.”

So, I’m going to risk getting this completely wrong, and upsetting some of those I love and respect, but I don’t hear the Spirit right now calling for a better public relations campaign for our mostly bourgeois and wealthy congregations. Nor do I sense the gospel inviting mostly white and middle-class congregations into new and public leadership positions to reclaim our privilege and notoriety. “What should I say: Father, help me out of this moment? No, it is for this reason that I have come.” Do you recall what Jesus said to us in the gospel text for Ash Wednesday?

When you share your resources for compassion, do so quietly and in private. Do not let your right hand know what your left is doing. And when you pray do not be like the hypocrites who love to be seen suffering out on the street corners so that others might notice them. Rather, when you pray go into your room, close the door, and lift up your prayers in private. And when you fast, do likewise, not to be seen and called pious. Wash your face, anoint your head and open your heart to God quietly.

In ways we’ve rarely had to consider before, Jesus is saying to those of us who love him who are white and privileged people of faith: come and die to self with me. Come, let go and trust that God’s love is greater than your fear. Or your imagination. Or your experience. Come, as the Canadian musician, Alana Levandowski, says: and be a quiet part of the willingly exiled moving in solidarity with the wounded because that’s where the kingdom of heaven is happening – and always has been.

my roman catholic brothers got this one wrong: reflections on their prohibition of same-sex marriage

This morning I am angry and saddened that once again my Roman Catholic brothers - and they are ALL brothers - chose to affirm that only the possibility of procreation defines a healthy, sacred sexual relationship and, thus they maintain the historic prohibition of priests from blessing same sex marriages. To be clear, this is not a new conclusion or doctrine. 

The Roman Church has long taught that all sexual congress must hold the possibility of conception for it to be in alignment with God's holy purposes of creating life. As an honorable and ethical commitment, this doctrine opposes euthanasia, war, capital punishment, and other acts of violence that interrupt the natural flow of life. The late Archbishop of Chicago, Joseph Bernadin, spoke of this as a calling into a seamless garment of nonviolence that protects the innocent and supports and advocates for the weak. In many ways, I resonate with and even respect aspects of this doctrine. It strives to make nonviolence normative in a utilitarian culture. It seeks to protect unborn children from infanticide as enforced in modern China. It encourages working people to organize into unions and associations to bring a measure of balance to class conflict. And it warns us of the moral ambiguity implicit in mercy killing. All too quickly euthanasia accommodates a society to the destruction of human beings born outside the dominant culture's comfort zone - like people with physical differences or those with intellectual disabilities - and helps us become comfortable with genocide. My nation's experiments with eugenics; Nazi Germany's extermination of gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals, communists, and Jews; Pol Pot's killing fields; the 100 days of Rwandan slaughter where 600,000 minority Tutsis were executed by the majority Hutu tribe; or the Bosnian-Serbian ethnic cleansing war are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the slippery slope of using death as a tool for social organization.

At the same time, however, I recognize the multiplicity of equally profound problems with a one-size-fits-all implementation of this doctrine. The Roman Catholic opposition to birth control comes to mind first as does the nearly universal rejection of it by sexually active American Catholics. A woman's right to exercise complete control over her body's reproductive system is another. And let's not even open the door to the tortured theological anti-logic of St. Augustine's "just war" theory that has allowed some to use the Sermon on the Mount and Christ's call to "love our enemies as ourselves" to justify wars of aggression on behalf of "a greater good." 

The "escape hatch" to doctrinal rigidity was celebrated in Vatican II with the caveat that all human activity - including that required by the church - must be prayerfully and honestly constrained by the contours of an individual's conscience. Again, this holds water for me: at least in theory it places what occurs between the holy and the human above the limitations of the institution - even an institution ordained by God. As the Jesuit magazine, America, recently wrote: this means that some of the Catholic clergy will continue to bless same sex marriages clandestinely - and the evolution of human social relationships will be ignored by the Roman Church for yet another generation. A wise colleague from within my religious tradition, who first entered ministry as a Roman Catholic priest, summarized the problems in the Vatican's recent statement prohibiting a sacramental blessing upon same sex marriages clearly:

It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex. The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan. So the point is the question about the "transmission of life" where the sacramentality of marriage is based almost solely on the couple's openness to and ability to procreate. (Vernon Meyer, FB, 3/15/21)

The ethical complications of applying this ancient doctrine to contemporary culture are staggering. Consider the cisgendered couples who are unable to have children and denied the blessing of a sacramental marriage because of biology. Or those whose conscience causes them to oppose bearing offspring. Such denials make no sense, but are essential to a rigid implementation of this doctrine. And what about the sacramental marriages that are annulled? After following elaborate and Byzantine documentation to say nothing of the significant "suggested" financial contributions required to help move this process forward: what of that marriage? Does it magically disappear? What about the children from that union? Are then now illegitimate? None of this bothers to recognize the other equally ethical spiritual traditions that draw different conclusions about human sexuality which include the intense but disciplined ecstasy of Tantric yoga and the shared emotional and physical intimacy nurtured between two adults in a covenant of commitment as advocated by the Reformed wing of Christianity.

What makes the restatement of the old doctrine offensive, and challenging for those of us who are in solidarity with our LGBTQA kin, is our new context. Throughout the world, 21st century people are recognizing that "new occasions teach new duties, as time makes ancient truth uncouth." Marriage equality is now normative in 29 nations. Increasingly, civil society recognizes the significance of extending equal rights and protections to all its members. Late in 2020, Pope Francis publicly articulated his own commitment to this trend: civil law must care for and protect fairly society's most vulnerable members including LGBTQA citizens who are often the victims of violence, prejudice, hatred, and discrimination. As a pastor and former bishop, Francis knows how homophobia and hatred denigrates and abuses the queer community in all too deadly a manner. He has quietly but consistently urged civil laws to include same sex marriage protections. It had been hoped, therefore, that his insights would quietly take precedence. Nothing dramatic would change but incrementally the institutional church might catch up with civil society. 

Monday's announcement by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith "prohibiting priests from blessing same-sex unions... because the Church does not and cannot bless what God has called sin" dashes that hope. America magazine quoted the Reverend Bryan Massingale, a gay Catholic priest and professor of theology and social ethics at Fordham University: "Priests who want to engage in pastoral outreach to the gay and lesbian community will continue to do so, except that it will be even more under the table...than it was before.”

Twenty plus years ago on the Saturday after Easter, I was blessed and honored to celebrate my first same-sex marriage in Tucson, AZ. It was a sacred and holy event. Di and I are still in touch with this couple who bring joy to the world, support to their local congregation, and encouragement to younger LGBTQA folk that God's love is deeper than an institutions fear, confusion, and mistakes. I give thanks to God for their fidelity even as the wider church fails them. I stand ready to share God's blessings in sacramental ceremonies of marriage with all who are called by love to grow together in covenants of commitment. And do so trusting that as the Spirit changed the hearts of the early church to welcome into equal fellowship Gentiles who came to faith beyond the ethnic confines of ancient Israel, so too all human beings who seek to live their love with responsibility, compassion, and justice. 

small is holy: lent four - sacramental waiting and nashutan

 Lent Four is an invitation to let go and trust deeper... today's live streaming and text.

TThe texts appointed for this day, the Fourth Sunday of a Holy Lent, are dear to my heart – but also perplexing. 

· I say dear because they are passages from the Bible used by my beloved mentor, Ray Swartz-back, to preach my ordination into ministry celebration back on June 6, 1982. I was his last seminary intern after a long line of clergy in training, and we grew to love and respect one another profoundly. His ordination sermon was entitled, “Trapped in the Trappings,” a warning not to lose sight of what’s most important in ministry: caring for real, wounded, beautiful and always broken human beings as well as Mother Earth. Nearly 40 years later I still listen to his wisdom in my heart though he’s long been on the other side of this life.

· Dear but equally perplexing because while I have literally lived with these texts for decades, studying them as well as pondering their value, they continue to reveal new insights, twists, surprises, and challenges to me even after all these years. One of the mysterious gifts embedded in most sacred scripture carefully considered over time within a variety of traditions is nuanced wisdom disclosed ever more carefully. Nietzsche spoke of this as the blessing of a long obedience in the same direction. “The essential thing 'in heaven and earth'” he wrote, “is… that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; for this… has always resulted in something which has made life worth living."

One of the spiritual practices of a sacred clowns is mining the insights of our tradition beyond the obvious. That is, refusing the ephemeral in pursuit of the eternal and forsaking the buzz of immediate gratification or the empty calories of intellectual junk food to savor a feast of authentic soul food in “whatever is honorable, just, pure, commendable, beautiful, and true,” as St. Paul told the young church at Philippi in his advice to “set your minds upon these things.”

As we move conscientiously into year two of our covid culture with all its conundrums, I want to share with you a few new insights that have bubbled to the top of my ruminations on these ancient texts. The late Huston Smith, father of comparative religions in North America, used to say that, “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” Fr. Richard Rohr amplifies this noting that no matter how outwardly different the world religions seem, there is a core of shared sacred truth in our wisdom traditions that shows us how to live with integrity and a lively sense of awe in even the most anxious generation. Rohr writes that wisdom keepers:

Distinguish between two interconnected planes: reality and knowing, scientific empiricism and a trans-cendent/immanent reality, real truth encountered through meditation as well as contemplation”. (In this) religious language, discourse, theology, laws, symbols, and rituals (that are) conditioned by historical, social, and cultural contexts, are seen as means, as metaphors and “pointers,” to the divine, not as ends in themselves. (Our wisdom traditions therefore) affirm a belief in the transcendent Unity of all religions and, as perennial philosophy maintains, a divine reality enables universal truth to be understood… For those of us living in the 21st century—an age of globalization, mass migrations, and increasingly multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies—mutual understanding and respect, based on religious pluralism rather than religious exclusivism, are extremely critical to our survival.

To grasp this sacred wisdom as revealed in our Judeo-Christian scriptures, however, requires the addition of one more reading – a pericope my mentor, Ray, insisted was essential at my ordination ceremony. It comes from II Kings 18 wherein the young ruler of ancient Israel, Hezekiah of the 8th century BCE, tears down the ancient pagan symbols built into the temple in Jerusalem by Solomon in 957 BCE and smashes the bronze serpent Moses once raised up to save the tribes of the exodus because it had now become: NEHUSTAN – a thing of brass – a worthless, superstitious idol rather than a meaningful symbol of spiritual truth and light. The brief text reads:

When King Hezekiah discovered the lost book of Moses, Deuteronomy, he abolished the heretical shrines in his nation, smashing the pagan pillars set up in the Temple in Jerusalem, and cutting down the sacred trees planted inside the Temple to the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah. Then he smashed into pieces the copper serpent that Moses had made in the desert because now the people of Israel were offering sacrifices to it as an idol when it was, in fact, NESHUSTAN – a mere thing of brass – and not of the true God.

Adding this story into the mix with the other two illuminates the subtle transformative quality of our evolving Scripture and tradition wherein over time one ancient text corrects an even more ancient text. When we combine them into our contemporary context, the old hymn using James Russel Lowell’s poetry comes alive as we sing: New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient truth uncouth; they must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth. Old Testament Professor Walter Brueggemann calls this the “imaginative remembering” of the Bible that celebrates God’s invitation into an “alternative humanity” – women and men faithfully incarnating justice and compassion – as we strive to live beyond the limits of our brokenness without either sentimentalizing or denying reality. This third story completes the circle so that we might know something about sacramental waiting, the ubiquitous banality of evil, and the sacred significance of smashing traditions from time to time when they have out-lived their usefulness.

We start with Moses and those fleeing slavery in Egypt who, for a generation, lived in the desert. About a month ago, I started to reread Chaim Potok’s, Wanderings: a History of the Jews. It’s perfect for my late-night sessions of sleeplessness. As a dense but poetic treatment of the origins of ancient Israel, it includes series explorations into Scripture, comparative religion, mythology, as well as contemporary archaeology. One of the facts that Potok raises is that no one can clearly verify where Moses and his wayward band of former slaves, social misfits, and ethnically diverse people went during that period in time we know as the Exodus.

Not only is there no satisfying description of this era in the Bible – one strand of the story suggests that those fleeing Pharaoh escaped by a northern route while another says the horde left Egypt and headed south – neither is there any independent archeological or historical evidence to substantiate what took place in the wilderness. Potok’s words only amplify this ambiguity: they were a pitiful rabble, a mass of frightened, quarrelsome Asiatics wandering through the merciless sand and stone wilderness somewhere east of the Nile valley. Their ranks were comprised of descend-ants of the sons of Jacob, Israelites they were abruptly called, beginning with the last two chapters of Genesis… We are told there were among them more than six hundred thousand males capable of bearing arms (in the exodus) but that is surely a flourish… How many slaves really made the escape? Three thousand? Thirty thousand? We will probably never know… (Same goes for the) competing stories we’re told of where the escaping slaves went as they wandered… perhaps they went north and turned east and south… maybe they went towards the Gulf of Suez in the south… but they might have gone through a more central route… all we know from the Biblical account is a cloud of obscurity.

Professor Brueggemann adds: “Of the great exodus narrative surely it has behind it some defining emancipatory happening. It is, however, an occurrence to which we have no (historical) access and cannot make certain (any of its) claims.” Karen Armstrong summarizes the scholarship that posits three main waves “of early Hebrew settlement in Canaan: one was associated with Abraham and Hebron that took place about 1850 BCE. A second wave of immigration linked with Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, settled in Shechem in what is now the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank… and a third wave of Hebrew settle-ment occurred about 1200 BCE when tribes claiming to be descendants of Abraham arrived in Canaan from Egypt.” (A History of God, p. 12) I highlight this now because the exodus is a story we think we know very well, but probably don’t. Mark Twain wasn’t kidding when he said: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you DO know for sure that just ain’t so! The more I study and pray over our sacred texts, the more clarity Twain’s aphorism provides.

In our first story, therefore, all we can say for certain is that the Moses tradition that began about 1200 BCE is shrouded in mystery. Whatever original source material that remains in these texts, however, has been heavily redacted by “a later generation of the sixth century exile in Babylon” – priests and religious scholars – who used the earlier exodus memory to define their “own emancipation from Babylon.” In fact, exodus and exile became the primary way future generations of Jews described the essence of their identity for generations to come. You can hear it in the lament of Babylon that has been conflated into the experience of Moses: The people became impatient along the way… and began to speak out against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’ Other comparable accounts speak of the exile of exodus as God’s people grumbling and murmuring against God and Moses. Lent encourages us to consider this grumbling for at least two reasons.

First, it is a lively description of what naturally takes place whenever we have to endure changes beyond our control. We crumble and fuss. My mother used to say: we piss and moan. Every day during the lockdown we’ve seen this type of lament as impatient neighbors, friends, and family quit wearing masks and start to party together after our own tedious exile of solitude. Ruth Frey of Trinity Church Wall Street where my children and grandchildren worship writes: Changes we do not choose demand changes we must choose. For the Israelites, the exodus from slavery into the wilderness meant fleeing the before times of bondage and oppression into the wilderness of the completely unknown — the “new times.” As they did, they struggled to trust in the steadfastness of God and uphold their part of the covenant to: do justice and follow God’s guidance. We, too struggle not only with what has been lost, but what has been revealed… for the pandemic reveals what many of us chose not to see in the before times — the injustice, inequity, and poverty. As the saying goes, now we “can’t not see it.” Too much has been revealed to go “back to normal.” As people of faith and followers of Jesus, we are called to see and live outside of the confines of the before times and step into God’s radical, unlimited love.

But Lent reminds us to have no illusions about how demanding this can be: we all yearn to be in control, even before the pandemic, but we’re not. Grumbling easily overtakes discipleship and the hard work of patient love in these experiences. So, we read this story of our ancestors struggle with faith again to see something of ourselves.

· Which causes me to wonder if you ever give yourself holy time for grousing and murmuring. Carping as a natural type of prayer? These are trying times – and have been excruciating for some So, let’s not add shame to the mix. It’s probably wise and even healthy to have a chance to carp about how crappy this past year has been from time to time. There are Psalms that do it. Support groups do it, too. Why not give one another permission to share this frustration, anger, and grief from time to time within the safety of God’s love?

· I remember feeling liberated when I read Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, the story of a beloved professor’s journey into ALS. As his disease grows more trying, Morrie tells his former student that one of the ways he stays sane is by taking a full 20 minutes every morning after waking and getting ready for the day to be really pissed off: I get angry with the holy, my health, the state of my body and the world he confesses to Mitch. After crying, ranting, and raging for twenty minutes, he said, then I bring it to a close saying something like: I’ll meet you here again tomorrow, O One who is holy, same time, same place. We read this story every Lent not only because it is true, but because we might redeem it prayerfully, too.

The second reason to consider this story has to do with sacramental waiting. After acknowledging the complaints of his people, Moses hears from the holy that they need help with a change of heart: the frightened and anxious people must learn to redeem their undefined time so that it becomes a resource rather than a burden. Fr. Henri Nouwen wrote that all around us are signs from the sacred given to help us redeem anxious time IF we’re willing to see them:

Life is not empty waiting. It is knowing how to wait filled with trust – in the knowledge that God will fulfill the promise to renew everything and offer us a “new heaven and a new earth.” We can see the beginning of this fulfillment as nature speaks of it every spring; as people [speak] of it whenever they smile; as the sun, the moon, and the stars speak of it when [they] offer us light and beauty; and all of history speaks of it when amid the devastation and chaos, men and women arise who reveal a love that lives within them… I don’t want to go through this life complaining, I want to honor the first rays of God in each day and give witness to the many manifestations of the Holy Spirit among us.

But this takes practice, yes? Intentionality. We’ve talked about this type of waiting before – what it means to practice sacramental waiting that gives shape and form to the holy within our humanity. Gertrud Mueller-Nelson writes in To Dance with God that sacramental waiting – a holy and disciplined patience – “invites us into the feminine wisdom of God.” Our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives. Instant gratification has become our constitutional right and delay an aberration… we equate waiting with wasted time and hate all that is inefficient. But there is a waiting that is good and holy and necessary for all that is be-coming. As in pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a recon-ciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never ever a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is NOT whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming, symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value.

During our Celtic Advent series, we used a symbol like Moses used the bronze serpent in the desert; ours was the Advent wreath which began when European pagans took a wheel off their wagon and added candles to it to symbolize the growing light in the darkness of winter. We used it to focus our attention on stepping out of our busy mode – our anxious, complaining, and uncertain mode – to light a candle, say a prayer, sing a song, and listen to a reminder of God’s presence and light even in the darkness.

One of the reasons Advent is my favorite liturgical season has to do with its earthiness: there are so many tactile resources from Mother Earth to focus my heart. Lent, on the other hand, while of the desert, feels less tactile and connected to the rhythm of nature. So, why not become more inventive?

· Once again, I’ve found Gertrud Mueller-Nelson a precious ally, as she describes a remarkably simple symbol steeped in the desert wilderness. Make a handmade cross and place it in a desert pot with a cactus. If the pot’s on our table, we might pray something like this every morning: Greater love has no one than this that we lay down our life for a sister or brother. This prayer moves us beyond our complaints and empties out a bit of anxiety to create more space for the grace. She suggests we might add something every week to our desert cross like a small pot with herb seeds. Or a pussy willow. Or some sign of spring returning to Mother Earth.

· The more we can give our prayers beauty, shape, and form the more we’ll stick with them. We might even become so bold as to try to memorize the Serenity Prayer as the essence of sacramental waiting: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Our ancestors in the desert exodus used symbols to help them look beyond their fears and complaints – even that snaky symbol of fear helped them practice sacramental waiting – and we can, too. I’ve been moved by a poem in which C.K. Williams echoes the wisdom of sacramental waiting obliquely when he speaks of the mystery of his mirror. 

I'd have thought by now it would have stopped,
as anything sooner or later will stop, but still it happens
that when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in a mirror,
there's a kind of concussion, a cringe; I look quickly away.
Lately, since my father died and I've come closer to his age,
I sometimes see him first, and have to focus to find myself.
I've thought it's that, my precious singularity being diluted,
but it's harsher than that, crueler, the way, when I was young,
I believed how you looked was supposed to mean, something graver, more substantial:
I'd gaze at my poor face and think, "It's still not there." Apparently, I still do.
What isn't there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less.
Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us?
All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we're after is just a less abrasive regard:
not "It's still not there," but something like "Come in, be still."

“Come in, be still.” That’s part of what the gospel of St. John is after: building on the way Moses lifted up a serpent in the desert to bring focus to his peoples waiting and healing, St. John tells us that we must lift up Jesus to help our people trust God’s loving presence in the wilderness. I fully affirm this at the deepest symbolic and spiritual level: lifting up the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in a visible manner is what it means for God’s words of love to become flesh. As another favorite hymn puts it: Lift high the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim, let all adore and praise this sacred name.

But we must be especially clear about what we mean when we say this: when I celebrate the Cross of Jesus, I am NOT advocating the Cross as the symbol of a God who demands the death of Jesus to pay off the burden of our sins. That picture of the Cross requires a God who is dangerous, mean-spirited, cruel and even abusive – and there is nothing salvific or hopeful about such a deity. Yes, I know such theology has been normative for many for 1500 years, but it is truly NASHUTAN – a vile thing of brass – that must be smashed. That’s why my old mentor included it in my ordination ceremony: he wanted me to always remember that there is a time to build up as well as a time tear down – especially in our spiritual tradi-tions.

In today’s gospel, we’re told that God did NOT send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but to make it whole and healthy. That’s what the Greek New Testament word sozo used in St. John means. To save as in to make whole. To give us health and preserve us for life.

· One of the things I’ve had to practice smashing as NESHUSTAN, a thing of brass that no longer serves the Lord, is my old understanding of salvation. It is NOT about escaping punishment now or into eternity. It is not about bribing God with superstition. And it is not about looking at the Cross like an idolatrous snake on a pole.

· No, eternal life – salvation – being born from above is all about living awaked to every moment and knowing how your life matters. That’s what saved by grace means: it means we have experienced God’s love and are willing to go into the wilderness with trust that our wounds will be transformed as we share compassion with others. The more we experience this inward transformation, the more we can trust that this miracle can be multiplied in our outer world, too. The OLD way of salvation that demanded the execution of Jesus has become NAHUSTAN to me, an idol of superstitious brass, that must be smashed because it is dangerous and untrue.

You see, if you look closely at the words that close St. John’s gospel for today, you have to see the bold intentional comparison/contrasts he makes. Bible scholars call them parallelisms where one reality is placed next to another so that we can choose what is true and of the light and reject what is false and unhealthy. Today’s text contrasts choosing God’s love or perishing – the presence of Jesus in the world or living with condemnation – belief and trust with disbelief and fear – light and darkness – truth and lies – doing what is healthy or what is broken. Verses 20-21 reads: For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God. And where it gets really interesting and holy for me is found in the final parallelism: doing evil vs. doing what is true. 

Our English translations of the Greek New Testament here have made a mess of things by using a loaded word like evil when St. John actually speaks about phaulos – what is foul – what is petty, what is trivial, what is careless and base. When WE consider evil, we imagine heinous and horrible deeds like murder, theft, racism, sexism, bigotry, and violence. Evil in our contemporary lexicon means Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, separating immigrant children from their parents and keeping them in cages for years. But that’s not what St. John’s says. HE writes phaulos – being foul – doing petty, selfish, careless, and mean-spirited things to others.

· Bible scholar, Brian Stoffregen, suggests that those who practice or do phaulos are those who hold on to petty hurts, emphasis trivial concerns, and live with substandard morals. THIS is how they hate the light, wound themselves, and bring pain to others. By contrast, the text actually tells us that those who do or practice the truth – alatheia – strengthen the light, multiply the grace of Christ in the world through their own flesh, and make God’s love visible. By practicing the truth, we lift high the Cross. Small wonder that Eugene Peterson reworks this text in The Message to read: This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world (in Christ Jesus) but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were… addicted to denial and illusion and pettiness (which) hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But those working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the God’s love can be seen for the blessing it is. I’m willing to go so far as to say that clarifying and correcting this ancient text with contemporary scholar-ship is every bit as important as King Hezekiah smashing the bronze serpent of Moses in his day. Our old superstitious theology of the Cross can blind us to the ubiquitous banality of our brokenness so that we refuse to see how cumulative pettiness and hanging on to trivial hurts shrivels our hearts and hides away the true light of God’s love within us.

Most of us are NOT evil in the ways of depravity and corruption. We are not mass murderers, greedy thieves, or moral scoundrels. But caught up in trivial concerns? Wounded egos? Petty arguments that blow things out of proportion? Holding grudges? I know that I can say: oh yes, been there, dome that for sure – and probably still do so, too. Mike Yaconelli, a past mentor to the youth ministry movement all over the USA, once cried out: “The problem with so much of religion (today) is not corruption. It is not institutionalism. Nor is the problem that sometimes the minister runs away with the organist. No, the problem is pettiness. Blatant pettiness.

Petty people are ugly people. They are people who have lost their vision. They are people who have turned their eyes away from what matters and focused, instead, on incidentals. The result is that the rest of us are immobilized by their obsession with the insignificant. It is time for us to quit pretending that pettiness doesn't matter: it is a cancer that’s been allowed to go undetected; a molehill that has been allowed to become a mountain; a disease which continues to result in terminal cases of discord, disruption, and destruction. Petty people are dangerous people because they appear to be only a nuisance instead of what they really are -- a health hazard.

No wonder the gospel calls it out. No wonder St. John contrasts ignoring pettiness as the path into obscurity with living into the truth and paying attention as the way of God’s light. Apparently small things matter: small things can be holy – or hurtful. Small obsessions can become distractions and then big problems for everybody. That’s likely why the wise, old wordsmith of Vermont, Frederick Buechner, told us: “What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, as the huge monk in cloth of gold put it, than being able from time to time to stop that chatter inside us including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.” And he offers two small clues for relinquishing the madness and reclaiming the light.

· First, there are some things we must let go: Let go of the dark, which you wrap yourself in like a straitjacket, and let in the light. Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you—your children's lives, the lives of your husband, your wife, your lover, your friends—because that is just what you are powerless to do. Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought.

· And second let go of the noise: the inner chatter and trivial junk that clutters our hearts and minds and replace it with a bit of healing silence: God knows I am no good at this, but I keep trying, and once or twice I have been lucky, graced. I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt the promise of the promised. I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved.

Every year the Lenten retreat into the desert with Jesus invites us beyond bumbling our way into the silence, by asking us to practice it. Nourish it. Incrementally and in small does at first but intentionally taking the time to be still within. That way the blessings of letting go need not be accidental. They can become an integral part of our journey of faith. The blessing, St. John promises, is that those working, doing, practicing, and living into the truth welcome God’s light and by doing so are embraced by God’s love from the inside out.