We tie ourselves in knots when we ignore the Serenity Prayer because inner peace requires accepting our limitations to fix what is so obviously broken and THEN mustering the courage and tenacity to fix what can be repaired. We CAN and MUST make a difference – we CAN help one another, too – we’re NOT inept or inconsequential – we’re just limited and can’t give to others what we ain’t got!
· That’s the paradox of mature spirituality documented sacramentally today: it accepts limitations, honors boundaries, cultivates inward equanimity in order to concretely make a difference wherever and whenever we can. But not in all places at all times. North Americans are particularly infected with illusions of omnipotence and magical thinking: we middle-class, white intellectuals are deeply confused about this because so much of our outward lives are efficacious. We work hard, we’ve adequate resources to purchase what we need or want when we want it. So, letting go – relinquishing control – messes with our minds. It is truly a counter-cultural spiritual discipline we must return to repeatedly because we still believe we can think ourselves into a new way of being; when we must LIVE our way into a new way of thinking.
· My old buddy, the late Michael Daniels of blessed memory, used to tell me this constantly back in Cleveland after he got clean and sober. “You’re too damn smart for your own good,” he’d chide me. “You still think you can plan, work, and think yourselves into serenity even as your life careens out of control.” And he was right so what I’m about to say is not an abstract critique it’s just one beggar telling another where to find bread.
The fusion of Palms with the Passion reminds us that Jesus didn’t live in the Garden of Eden – and neither do we. He lived in occupied Palestine under the boot-heel of Roman greed and violence. As Howard Thurman would remind Dr. King: Jesus took the time to train his friends in contemplation before sending them into the world to confront suffering and injustice.
He required that they master a measure of inward peace born of grace before trying to redress the pain of oppression all around him. Consequently, Jesus regularly slipped away into the quiet of nature to reclaim his grounding. It wasn’t automatic for him – and if JESUS needed quiet time to practice calming his soul – well, let’s just say that we do, too. That’s the wisdom and rhythm of Holy Week: Palms AND Passion – joy as well as sorrow – the journey of letting go as well as receiving the unexpected gift of spiritual rest. “Peace, I give you” Jesus says in St. John’s gospel, “but not as the world gives it.” Somewhere along the line, this was misplaced in our tradition. Later it was all but discarded and lost but:
· The charism of Holy Week presumes 40 days: it’s about slowing down with silence, study, and prayer. The rich liturgies of Holy Week take time to carry us to Maundy Thursday and the foot-washing before the Last Supper, the agonizing emptiness of Christ’s death on the Cross on Friday, and the ecstatic festival of light and baptism on Saturday night’s Easter Vigil.
· Do you know that for the first 300 years of Christianity there was NO sunrise service? No, on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday adults who had already spent three years in training for their new life in Christ were stripped naked, fully immersed in the baptismal waters of a symbolic death, rose again to a new life of grace, were reclothed in garments of white before finally feasting upon Holy Communion for the first time. (SALT Project)
Slowly and carefully Christians were formed – not born; trained in their habits not just their minds. Do you recall how St. Paul put it in his training manual for new believers?
Here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embrac-ing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjust-ed to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God’s love and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you and respond to it quickly. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of im-maturity, God brings out the best in you, develops well-formed maturity in you, so that you are NOT squeezed into the conformity of the status quo. Peterson, Message, Romans 12)
The reclamation of this counter-cultural commitment is now upon us because let’s face it: the old ways are not working in culture, in church, in our civic or business spheres. Our Lenten small group study was taken by the way Barbara Brown Taylor describes our need for a FIFTH gospel in this era where:
The good news is that dark AND light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles; they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into is again. As different as they are, they all come from and return to the same source. And if I can trust that – if I can give my heart to it and remain conscious of it – then faith and trust become a verb, my active response to the sacred reality that the best of rel-igions in the world point to. (Learning to Walk in the Dark)
Take the ritual of foot-washing: most of us still think it’s just a Catholic thing – and for hundreds of years OUR way of doing church was mostly NOT what the Catholics do. We differentiated ourselves by subtraction: THEY do THIS, so WE do NOT. WE do Tenebrae – the service of shadows – on Maundy Thursday instead of foot-washing to distinguish ourselves from them. Same for Good Friday and the Easter Vigil: that’s what THEY do. Our tradition took the Wednesday Tenebrae out of the Catholic monasteries, moved it to Thursday, mostly ignored Friday and Saturday and replaced the Saturday night Easter Vigil of Baptism with a sunrise service on Easter morning. I submit to you that this mash up unintentionally eliminated the extended time we need for quiet introspection from most Reformation congregations. Our jumbled, rewritten rituals still have beauty and power – I love them – but they fail to help us savor what’s at stake in a mature spirituality that knows from the inside out how to negotiate the rigors of paradox within the tensions of contemporary life.
Let me tell you: there’s NO worship liturgy in the whole Christian tradition that leads us more into the power and beauty of patient humility and an honest assessment of our limitations than foot washing. I didn’t grow up with it, but after the United Church published our official worship book in 1986, I’ve used it faithfully. To kneel before another as a servant, not a leader; to let an-other hold my grubby, weird foot and gently wash and dry it before sharing Holy Communion in community is ALL about learning how to receive grace – liturgy, after all MEANS practicing the work of the people – because we’re not very good at this. Part of the human condition wants control. We like to GIVE gifts – initiate and guide life – but receive them quietly? Humbly? Not so much.
· Back in the early days of the pandemic when we realized that lock down was going to go on for more than a week or two, we shared a few Lenten prayer times with our family in Brook-lyn on Zoom – including a simple foot-washing ceremony with our grandchildren aged 3 and 5. I told the story from St. John’s gospel of Jesus offering his disciples an alternative to their bickering by putting a towel around his neck (that’s what these stoles represent, ok?), kneel-ing in humility and patiently washing their feet. Then I washed Dianne’s foot and invited our children and grandchildren to do the same – which they did. Five-year-old Lou washed mom-ma’s foot, 40-year-old poppa washed three-year-old Anna’s foot. It was slow, quiet and ten-der.
· Afterwards, as we talked and shared a closing prayer, we noticed Anna was still kneeling on the floor with her baby dolls: she was washing their feet. We quieted down to listen to what she was saying and heard: this is what Jesus asked us to do for one another. It was reverent. Simple. And exactly what Lent is supposed to evoke: a humble sharing born of trust that nourishes loving connections and a bit of patience for life’s paradox. No doctrine. No theology. No unrealistic expectations. Just simple acts of love honoring one another’s flesh.
As we go through the portal of Holy Week together this year, it feels to me like many of us know that the old ways of being church are over: young people confess that the faith they inherited from their elders is worn out. Wisdom keepers like Karen Armstrong say that “we’re living through a time of global transformation where religions are taking stock of what enmity has cost them and turning towards new wisdom about what it means to be fully human.”
Dr. Taylor writes that “we’re currently in the midst of that great rummage sale the Christian church seems to hold every 500 years” to decide what should stay and what should go. My prayer for you – my prayer for me – my prayer for all of us is that we give Holy Week this year time to take us deeper into the tension of a mature spirituality that loves the darkness as well as the light. That knows how to let go at least as well hold on. We don’t need more theology, doctrine, catechisms, abstract spiritual concepts, or academic study: we need more practice in patience, trust, acceptance of our limitations, more tender-ness for one another and ourselves, more silent contemplation, and more openness to the inward journey so that we can stay the course outwardly with one another like Magdalene did with Jesus.
She couldn’t stop Empire from executing Jesus. She couldn’t bring him back to life or change the minds of those addicted to patriarchy and violence any more than we can shake our legislators free from the idolatry of the NRA. But she could stand silent witness so that Jesus was not alone in the agony of his Passion. Magdalene embodied for Jesus what Jesus had earlier incarnated for her: open-hearted solidarity, walking with her through the darkness, teaching her how to trust that even in uncertainty there is a love greater than our fear, and doing so at the speed of the soul.
We’re living through a darkness that we cannot control or fix right now. So much of what we once took for granted is unraveling. Beyond the insanity of cancel culture, we haven’t yet begun to ack-nowledge the centuries of arrogance and the legacy of genocide that are, as Malcolm X prophesied, the chickens of racism and gun violence coming home to roost as we murder one another with abandon. Oh my God, there’s so much to confess, relinquish, and forsake in a culture that refuses let us grieve thoroughly. Holy Week is meant to give back to us the time we need to let go, accept and trust the counter-cultural humility, patience, and courage of Jesus. You know, Jesus doesn’t own a monopoly on this path: he came NOT to be called Christ but to give grace away as a fully conscious human being. So, let’s continue what we started in Lent: learning to walk in the dark together.
· To practice the inner peace Jesus promised. To learn from Mary Magdalene how to stand witness in solidarity with sisters and brothers so that no one need be alone when everything else seems to be falling away.
· To consciously lay aside all jargon, doctrine, dogma, and creeds so that we can discover that becoming fully human is what God’s heart yearns for in each and all of us. Dr. Taylor wrote:
What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most or-dinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, and stir.
Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of being real in our everyday, ordinary, walking around lives. As the journey ripens, young Amanda Gorman reminds us:
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.
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