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.
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