easter reflection at palmer 2024...

Recently, Fr. Richard Rohr wrote that Easter: "is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty."

What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life. Surprise of surprises! It doesn’t fit any logical explanation. Yet this is the mystery: that nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love.  

That's ONE of the reasons I LOVE Easter Sunday: I love its music, I love its flowers, I love its promise that God’s love is ALWAYS with us no matter what. AND I love the courage it gives me to live into the Spirit of Jesus like the women in today’s Bible story: on that first Easter morning, no one knew exactly what it all meant except that while he lived Jesus showed us God’s tenderness, creativity, patience, compassion, and grace; and as he died, weeping “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he showed us God’s incomprehensible commitment to forgiveness. Easter was all about REAL shock and awe – and that’s my starting point. Preacher Brian McClaren tells us that:

In his living: Jesus showed us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only spoke of God’s unbounded compassion – he embodied it every day – In the way he sat at table with everyone, in the way he was never afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners. In his living, Jesus embodied a very different vision of what God is like…. 

So, too, in his dying where he showed us that: God is not revealed in killing and conquest or violence and hatred. No, God is revealed in the crucified one — giving of himself to the very last breath – giving and forgiving. God is like Mary Magdalene, standing witness in a vulnerable solidarity; or his beloved mother Mary who held him close to her heart in prayer when that was all that was possible. And now it’s Easter – the first morning of a new age saturated in grace – and NO one knows exactly what to do. The men are in hiding, the women are bewildered by the rolled away stone and the appearance of angels, and it looks as if Jesus has somehow gone AWOL – which, I must confess, strikes me as GOOD news in a truly upside-down kingdom kind of way. Here’s what I mean…

· I don’t always get living by faith not sight, ok? Like some of you, I get cranky and worn-out. Sometimes I want to rush to get the job done or control events so much that I miss being with a loved one when they need my attention; or, worse, overlook them when they cry out for love.

· And THAT’S why I find the initial confusion of Easter morning to be such GOOD news. It says to me – and ALL of us - that even when we make a mess of things – or can’t see the forest of God’s grace for the trees – this NEVER inhibits the Lord from unleashing a mystical blessing on Easter morning that promises the spiritual presence of Jesus will be with us forever! In good times and bad, when we’re grounded or unhinged, faithful or even lost in sin: God is WITH us whether we grasp, comprehend, or believe this or not.

And that’s what today’s Bible story asks us to celebrate: the Easter promise that God’s love and forgiveness is ALWAYS available to us through the spirit of Jesus. Now, let’s be clear, such radical grace is bewildering. Incomprehensible and seemingly beyond reason. So, tradition asks us to practice trusting this love that we can’t explain or comprehend – it’s truth but we can only experience and acc-ept – or as our 12 Step buddies put it: we have to fake it till we make it.

And to assist you in doing this on Easter Sunday, I’ve asked Donna Lee to help me with two new songs for our community. Easter, you see, is really a festival of faith not an intellectual exercise in linear thinking. It’s experiential. Soul satisfying. More a matter of the heart than the head. Which is one of the charisms of singing together: when we really get INto it, scientists have found that our hearts start to beat together in unison as if we were one body. St. Paul calls this the body of Christ re-membered. Over the years two songs have become foundational in my quest to practice trusting God’s grace so I want to share them with you. The words are on the communion insert in your bulletin, so let’s try this together. Donna Lee and I will sing the first verse and chorus through once and then we can we sing all 4 verses together, ok?

Now, there are four parts to this song and each verse invites us to experience the mystical love of the Lord a little deeper. To begin, we’re reminded that God comes to us in our ordinary, everyday, working, and walking around lives – not JUST holidays or holy times – but every day: I looked up and I saw my Lord’s a’comin’ down the road. Can you think of an ordinary time when you became aware of God’s love?

What about the wisdom in the second verse: I looked up and I saw my Lord a’ weeping? Anyone here ever wept? Maybe cried because you were hurt, or you realized you had hurt someone else? This verse recognizes that we’re going to get it wrong SOMETIME in our lives; and Jesus not only KNOWS this – knows it so well, in fact, that he weeps for us in love - but comes to us spiritually when we’re lost and hurting. Did you catch that? Being with us is about grace, not judgment so that we never need be afraid or ashamed to call out for help. NEVER!

That’s the heart of the third verse concerning the Cross: I looked up and I saw my Lord a’dying on the Cross. Part of the Easter story is that Jesus came into the world to show us that when we hurt another, neglect them, take someone for granted, or abuse their love… something dies. Trust is broken. God’s heart is wounded. The Cross shows us graphically what it looks and feels like when love is killed – but it also shows us God’s way to deal with that loss. Someone far smarter than I put it like this: Jesus didn’t die so that you don’t have to; rather Jesus died so that you would know HOW to. He didn’t die instead of you; he died ahead of you – and he didn’t rise so that you don’t have to but so that you would be able to rise with him! Are you still with me?

The Cross is not so much about substitution, as about participation. Do you recall what Jesus kept telling those he loved: Follow me – follow me into life, into death, and into life beyond death. Which is what verse four tells us: I looked up and saw my Lord… what? Rising from the grave. Easter is the assurance s that our sins and mistakes, our selfishness and pain, are not the end of the story. They CAN bring us new life, new love, new possibilities. In Jesus, God comes to us where we live, loves and cares for us when we hurt, weeps and dies for us when we are selfish or cruel, and KEEPS coming back to us with new life and forgiveness so that we can get back to loving others again as was the plan in the beginning.

That’s why Mary Magdalene, a trusted friend of Jesus who became the apostle to the apostles, accompanied Jesus even to the tomb. When Magdalene first met him, SHE was hurting. She was broken and not in her right mind; but her confusion and pain didn’t stop Jesus from befriending her with healing because God’s love meets us where we are. We don’t have to be good enough, holy enough, or pure enough to taste grace. Mary’ story insists that Jesus met her where she was and shared God’s love with her: he wept for her pain, he helped her become healthy and whole again, and then he asked her to give to others what he had given to her.

And that’s what he asks of us on Easter: that WE, too share God’s love with the world. And, when Jesus went to the Cross, not only did Mary WEEP for him, she kept him company so that he wasn’t alone during his suffering. She didn’t know what would come next, but she HAD learned the importance of staying connected in love during her hard time, so when her time came to stand and de-liver for Jesus, she was ready to give back as good as she was given. She couldn’t fix things – Jesus was still going to die on the Cross – but she could bear witness in love. And when WE do THAT, as impotent as it can feel, we’re not only RE-membering Jesus, we’re sharing God’s love like we’ve received it – and God’s love carries with it the courage to face hard times.

Easter asks us to trust God’s grace even when we don’t know exactly what that means. Or what’s going to happen next. Today we’re told that the women fled the tomb in uncertainty and fear. A writer in The Christian Century recently put it like this:

The resurrection is unknowable in the way we like to know things, the journalistic who-what-when-where-how that we grandchildren of the Enlightenment think comprises truth. But St. Mark was different: he was willing to have his life changed before he understood fully what was changing it. Actually, this is the only way life ever really changes. You won’t understand marriage until you’ve been hitched for a while—maybe not even then. You’re not going to know what it’s like to have a baby until you have one. You don’t even know your profession until you’ve been in it a while. Nothing in life is obvious immediately. It all grows on us. And this is how we approach the resurrection of Jesus at Easter: we can’t and won’t understand it until we let it grow on us.

That’s why our song closes with the assurance that God’s loving presence changes everything even if we don’t fully grasp that now. Nowhere in this song or in the Bible is Easter explained, ok? It is experienced – it grows on the disciples and us as we practice trusting and sharing it. And that’s really why we’re here today: not to explain Easter or Resurrection or grace. We’re here to celebrate it, to trust it, and then share it. Like Clarence Jordan, great grandfather of Habitat for Humanity, used to say: the proof of Easter is NOT the rolled away stone but the carried away community that keeps on sharing love no matter what happens. But, as Diana Butler Bass notes: more often than not it takes some sorting out and time before we can celebrate God's presence in our lives and our world. Like the abrupt and startling end to St. Mark's gospel, today's story closes with NO clarity:

The passage for Easter this year is the original ending of Mark. In many ways, this short reading is puzzling. There’s no actual risen Jesus (just a “young man in a white robe” saying he has risen); there’s no triumph or joy. There are only women who have seen an empty tomb with its phantasmic herald: So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. That’s it. That’s the ending of Mark’s gospel and his entire story of resurrection. Verses 9 - 20 were added much later, no doubt because of this abrupt and unsatisfactory finale. I wish they hadn’t been added. For, without them, the story of that first Easter Sunday is the most human of all the accounts. It is simple, straightforward: mourners, an empty tomb, an otherworldly being, and a directive to tell everybody what happened that the frightened women promptly disobey.

Being afraid is a much more normal than shouting alleluia. Empty tombs and discarded burial cloths, spiritual visitations and conversations with the dead — these should make us tremble with wonder and fear. What do you say when you’ve seen such things? Nothing makes perfect sense. Mark is the most believable resurrection story ever told. But Mark didn’t let terror lead to denial. And fear doesn’t mean the women remained frightened forever. Instead, his account holds out an invitation, one the women surely remembered and eventually followed. The angel-ghost-whoever tells the women to go to Galilee — go back to the place where it all started — and “there you will see him.” Go back to the beginning. Go back to where the story began. And then, you will understand. You will see him.

So, I want to share with you another song: a prayer song that you can sing whenever you feel like the women confronting the empty tomb. Whenever you need encouragement. It’s a round to remind us how much we NEED one another. Donna Lee and I will sing it first two times and then we’ll break into a round. I will be part one over here – and she will be part two over there. And I’d like to have the choir join Donna in part two, ok?

The words are also in the bulletin insert so… is that clear? She and I will sing it through twice, we’ll ALL sing it through twice in unison, then we’ll do it as a round three times. And be certain to listen to one another during the round, ok? Listen to the beauty our Easter prayer offers. Listen for the love we’re sharing right now with one another and the Lord. And listen for the presence of Jesus in what we’re doing, too…here we go.

Jesus, Jesus, let me tell you what I know:

You have given us your Spirit: we love you.

This Easter, I'm with Dr. Bass - and St. Mark - and Jesus: 

We are invited to go back to the place where it all began. You need to know the whole story before it makes sense. You’ll see him as you follow him. Don’t get stuck in fear, even when people may think you’re nuts or don’t understand what you’ve seen. When nothing seems right. When the tomb is empty. When you’ve encountered the Unexpected One. He lives. You will see him. It may well be a miracle, but it is most surely a journey.

the blessed triduum 2024

NOTE: these are my worship notes from Maundy Thursday as my heart connected Palmer with L'Arche Ottawa.

Maundy Thursday, named after the Anglo-French word “mandatum,” means commandment. On the night before He died, Jesus told and showed His disciples one more word and one more embodied prayer that summed up all the law and all the prophets, a gift illustrating everything He’d said and done during His life on earth: Love one another do THIS to remember me. It’s the essence of the gospel in one command. Jesus called this his NEW commandment – and just so that we don’t forget what his love looked like, he put a towel around his neck, knelt on the ground, and washed the filthy feet of his friends and disciples. Do THIS to remember me – get down on your knees as a servant for one another – and love one another even in the most trying situations.

· There’s a fascinating play on words taking place here: whenever we serve one another in love, we are recalling – or remembering – the new commandment of Jesus. AND we are liter-ally and figuratively re-membering him. That is, putting his body back together again by our own acts of loving servant hood. Do THIS to re-member me.

· Maundy Thursday is ALL about this dual re-membering, ok? Trusting the command of Jesus to love one another as he loves us and making this flesh in our ordinary lives. One of the best ways to do this comes from the earliest days of our faith tradition that is older than even the service of shadow we know as Tenebrae: foot washing. In ways that are greater than words, washing the foot of another – and having your own foot symbolically and physically cleansed – is profoundly humbling and transformative. It is re-membering Jesus outwardly, inwardly, spiritually, and socially all at the same time.

The ceremony of foot washing evokes the sacrificial and sacramental love of God made flesh in Jesus nonverbally. Oh, there are tons of words we could pray and sing, and they’re beautiful. But nothing teaches us the deeper meaning of tender compassion like washing the foot of another and then having them do so to you. Nothing. Some of you know that I am a member of the spiritual life team at the L’Arche community of Ottawa, Ontario. It is an intentional community of people with and without intellectual disabilities that has been living the love of Jesus for over 50 years. It is where I learned to practice a spirituality of tenderness that trusts even the smallest act of love is holy.

· I started to visit L’Arche 7 years ago and during the first Maundy Thursday gathering I attended I was asked to help a small circle of folk wash one another’s feet. In that tiny circle of 12 were able bodied and strong women and men alongside those with gnarled limbs and profoundly limited physical dexterity. There were recently arrived refugees from Syria, students from Africa, core members with disabilities, and a few Anglo volunteers.

· After I briefly explained the HOW-TO aspects of this ceremony – the kneeling before the per-son seated next to us, taking off their shoes and socks, holding the other’s foot softly as warm water was poured over each foot, and then thoroughly drying your partner’s foot – a man from Syria said: James, don’t forget that after YOU wash the other’s foot, THEY are asked to give YOU a blessing. Isn’t that interesting? This ceremony is a sacred and reciprocal circle of tenderness. So that’s what we did…

I knelt before Cecile, a 70 year old community member who doesn’t speak in any language I could understand, but still shares sounds and expressions with vigor, and took off her shoes. Her feet were old, worn down by hard living and limited resources, cracked and dried out. Like the prophet Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant, Cecile was: like a root out of dry ground; she had no form or majesty that we should look at her, nothing in her appearance that we should desire her. She was despised and rejected by others; a person of suffering and well-acquainted with grief. Indeed, she was as one from whom others hide their faces: despised, neglect, and of no account.

· It wasn’t the first time I’d washed another’s foot: early in ministry I was introduced to hospice and learned to not only physically change the wounds of parishioners who had no family or resources to help them after hospitalization but wash them as they prepared to die.

· I used to say, only half kiddingly, I never learned about THIS in seminary. But God clearly wanted me to get over myself so little by little – with a lot of fear and trembling – I learned to change antiseptic surgical incisions and reverently bathe dying bodies.

But NOTHING prepared me for washing Cecile’s feet because… beyond their brokenness and absence of traditional beauty - there was gift of Cecile’s face – her crooked, silent smile – the immeasurable warmth and trust in her eyes that told me she KNEW I would gentle. And, by the grace of God I was; not by my own power, mind you, but by the love evoked by HER vulnerability and faith. She empowered me to be tender. When I was finished with the foot washing and drying, I started to get up from my knees having forgotten to receive her blessing.

· So, she put one hand on my head and the other on my shoulder – and prayed for me. Her sounds, of course, were not intellectually intelligible but they were truly a blessing. And when she finished – and I was reduced to a puddle of emotions – she smiled and touched my face.

· I must tell you, friends, Jesus was in the house in that moment for me – and for the first time in decades I knew again what the Lord meant when he told us: do THIS to remember me.

The heart of following Jesus is, for me, all about learning how to do this well. I believe we’re ALL born with God’s love in our hearts, but as we grow up, pieces of it fall away. Maybe they’re hidden or forgotten because of trauma, abuse, neglect, apathy, busyness, or even privilege. There are so many ways our hearts are damaged or wounded or broken. The late Henri Nouwen used to say that those who chose to follow Jesus do so as wounded healers – women and men aware of their brokenness – who still share a measure of loving kindness in our moments of deep vulnerability. I sense that this is how we learn to both re-call the Lord Jesus and re-member him

As we ready our hearts now to receive him in Holy Eucharist, take a moment in silence to let the words of poet Jan Richardson sink in:

As if you COULD stop this blessing from washing over you.

As if you could turn it back, could return it from your body to the bowl,

From the bowl to the pitcher, from the pitcher to the hand that set this blessing on its way. As if you could change the course by which this blessing flows. As if you could control how it

Pours over you – unbidden, unsought, unasked, yet startling in the way it matched the need you did not know you had. As if you could become undrenched. As if you could resist gathering it up in your own hands and letting your body follow the arc this blessing makes.

So, let us now, bless this bread that gives itself to us with its terrible weight of infinite grace. Let us bless this cup poured out for us with a love that makes all things new. Let us gather around these gifts simply given and deeply blessed. And then let us go bearing the bread, carrying the cup, and laying the table within a hungering world.

an oblique sense of gratitude...

This year's journey into and through Lent has simultaneously been simple and complex: simple in that I haven't given much time or attention to the rituals and practices I once favored in the past; and complex in that I keep finding new ways that my time-tested demons keep morphing into new irritants and manifestations. It was genuinely sobering to realize that the ancient words of the old preacher, Qoheleth, in Ecclesiastes can still shed new light on my life: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; for there is nothing new under the sun. Traditionally, I've interpreted this insight historically, but in these later days of the second half of my life I find it is equally true ethically, morally, spiritually, and personally as well as politically.

Perhaps that's why this year I shied away from what had been long practiced personal Lenten disciplines. Once upon a time, I constructed a series of fasts to mark this sacred season. Like Jesus in the desert, I yearned for the Spirit to help me heal my inner wounds, questions, and confusion. This year, however, it felt like most of those efforts at piety were more self-righteous distractions than true balms of healing. Clearly, a spirituality of sacrifice used to resonate within when I was an earnest young believer. But today, as an elder who must pick and choose how and where I share my attention, the assertive and judgmental zeal of days gone by no longer works. Indeed, this year my solitary Lenten commitment consisted of making simple soups for supper. Not only was that sufficient for the day, but it felt like it was enough for the One who is Holy, too. And here's why:  

+ First, St. Paul really was right when he wrote that living into the way of Jesus is NOT about being squeezed into someone else's mode; but rather simply entering everyday as a servant of grace.

So 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. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him. (Romans 12: 1-4, The Message)

+ Second, small is holy and less is more. As an earnest urban intern in NYC, I learned that when a person came to the church in need, more often than not the more complicated their story the greater the bullshit. Over time this axiom hit me as true for my soul as well: the harder I make trusting grace every day, the more I am able to avoid living and loving in simplicity. How did Jesus put it in the sermon on the mount?

Don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong. You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you. (St. Matthew 5: 33-48, The Message)

+ And third, hubris can be a portal into trust rather than just one of the seven deadly sins IF I'm willing to own it and then let it go. Being full of myself can be a paradoxical blessing when I let it take me down a few pegs. Again, the sermon on the mount is instructive:

You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. (St. Matthew 5: 2-3, The Message)

Most days I don't need MORE to do - or think - or pray. There are troubles enough in every day. No, I don't need MORE, I need less so that I can attend to the love right in front of me. Or reign in my inclination towards self-pity when I am weary and just deal with it (whatever IT may be.) I suspect this is what the emptiness of the Lenten desert is all about: letting go of inward distractions so that I might be genuinely connected in grace. Of course, my old devotional practices gave me the words to explore spiritualities of descent, but true relinquishment doesn't start with sound. it needs silence to mature. It needs time to go deep. How did Psalm 51 put it: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

This Lent my fast from fasting showed me just how much I need silence. And space. And time to rest. Without these small expressions of grace, I am unable to discern the presence of the sacred in the ordinary. I become impatient and surly. I want more when the Spirit is offering me less. Frederick Buechner puts it like this:

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly... If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Fr. Rohr recently reminded me that is in the quotidian that Christ's shows up:

I’ve noticed in the Gospels that even after two appearances of the Risen Christ, the apostles return to their old job of fishing (John 21:3). They don’t join the priesthood, try to get a job at the Temple, go on more retreats, take vows, leave their wives, or get special titles. Nor is there any mention of them baptizing each other or wearing special clothing beyond that of a wayfarer or “workman” (Matthew 10:9–10). When the inner is utterly transformed, we don’t need symbolic outer validations, special hats, or flashy insignia. We can also note that the Risen Christ is never apparent as a supernatural figure, but is mistaken in one case for a gardener, another time for a fellow traveler on the road, and then for a fisherman offering advice. He seems to look just like everybody else after the Resurrection (John 20:15; Luke 24:13–35; John 21:4–6), even with his wounds on full display! In the Gospels it appears we can all go back to “fishing” after any authentic God encounter, consciously carrying our humiliating wounds, only now more humbly. That is our only badge of honor. In fact, it is exactly our woundedness that gives us any interest in healing itself, and the very power to heal others. As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers. Good therapists will often say the same.

It is with oblique gratitude that i return thanks form my inner anxiety this Lent. It has become an earthy portal to reconnect with simple grace. Onward to Maundy Thursday tonight... 

getting into the holy week groove...

We FINALLY got our seed and wildflower order in! By now we've usually had seedlings started but... my new gig at church, Di's health, playing a TON of music AND the fact that you can't plant anything here until after Memorial Day slowed everything down. For about seven years we've been learning what the land wants us to know about how to help it: how to add nourishment and water, what grows better where, and what doesn't work at all. We've given up on tomatoes except those we can grow up on the deck. Too little sun for too little time even in our wide open and fenced in plot. This year, in addition to my 15th attempt at raising more than one puny pumpkin, we're going with LOTS of wildflowers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cukes, peas, spinach and a variety of peppers. I am so ready for Mother Nature to lure spring back into these parts.

The past two weeks have been full to overflowing with music: band practices, open mics at Methuselah, private house party, two St. Patrick's Day gigs and our preparation for the Sideline Saloon next Tuesday. Each and every event was fun and more often than not pretty damn rockin' too. Dave and I are into a bit of Tom Petty and Gov't Mule right now as well as dusting off our earlier Beatles song as well. And then there's the joy and challenge of getting ready for Holy Week 2024.

+ This Sunday is Palm Sunday: in addition to the blessing of the palms at the start of worship, we'll be welcoming in a new class of members from every walk of life. It will be a celebration of grace trumping karma for sure. Worship closes with an extended reading of the Passion Narrative - this year from St. Mark's gospel - with precious little commentary. As those wiser than I have noted: this story speaks to us in different ways; it holds a multiplicity of insights that are best embraced personally while in community. So, like Christmas Eve, why try to do better that a reading that's time-tested and mostly free of dross?

+ Next comes Maundy Thursday on March 28: This liturgy, conceived in a Roman Catholic monastery in the 9th century CE, is beloved in much of the Protestant West. It, too, requires little oral commentary leaving each pilgrim to her/him self with Scripture, candle light, songs, and silence. 

+ Good Friday on the 29th: the Sanctuary will be open for silent prayer between 12 noon and 3 pm: the hours traditionally observed for the crucifixion of Jesus. A collection of Scripture and prayers are available to guide each person's journey into the darkness.

+ Easter Sunday: March 31st: the Palmer congregation hosts a lay led Sunrise Service this year followed by a pancake breakfast. At 10 am the whole community gathers for Holy Communion, hymns of joy, and an informal reflection for children using music to retell the Easter story.

lent five: bracing versus releasing as an embodied prayer

There are tons of reasons and excuses why people choose NOT to attend worship, right? You’ve used them, I’ve used them, we’ve ALL used them. One of my favorite worship stories involves a mother who has to wake up her son on Sunday morning. “Time to get ready for church,” she chirped full of sweetness and light only to be told by her son, “I can’t go anymore, momma, I’m just going to stay in bed.” Like any good momma would, she asked, “Why in the world would you say that honey?” Pulling the blankets up over his head, he moaned: “I’ll give you two good reasons, ok? One, they don’t like me; and two, I don’t like them. Please, just let me go back to sleep.” Undaunted, his mother replied: “Look, I know sometimes you just want a break but I’ll give YOU two good reasons why you SHOULD go. One, you’re 54 years old and two you’re the PASTOR! So, get your butt out of bed buster and get moving.”

· I share that golden oldie with you because there have been a few times when I didn’t want to go to church: sometimes I was burned out, other times I was being selfish or contrary. And early in my life, when I was a young boy growing up in Connecticut, I had a theological disagreement with my grandmother about worship that had lifelong implications.

· For about a year I went with my grandma Deanne to the Unitarian Universalist church of Stamford. My paternal grandfather had been pastor, so she felt very much at home there. When we started, I LOVED to enter the darkened old stone Sanctuary with its stunning stained glass and scent of centuries gone by still lingering in the air. Hearing the massive pipe organ took my breath away. And I was often enraptured sitting silently in that huge nave as the candles flickered and the gathered faithful raised prayers unto the Lord.

What I didn’t like so much was… Sunday School. Not the IDEA of Sunday School – I’ve always loved to learn – no, it was the content of our classes. Back in my grandfather’s day, this was a Unitarian Christian congregation; by the time I was attending with my grandma, however, the emphasis had shifted to the Universalist side of the merger. And, like the early days of so many mergers, both sac-red and secular, it’s easiest to gather the low hanging fruit first. So, with the best of intentions, our Sunday School celebrated what I came to call the lowest common spiritual denominator – we were learning to be nice liberals with good manners who knew how to share with one another – but who rarely spoke of God and NEVER spoke of Jesus.

Now, this is a viable spiritual path that clearly speaks to some, so let me be clear that far be it from me to denigrate this or any spiritual tradition, ok? I simply knew from a tender age that it just didn’t speak to me: it didn’t help me sort out a code of conduct for living nor did it teach me anything about prayer. Don’t ask me why or how I became so interested in contemplative Christian spirituality at such a young age because it was not in the air of our home nor the zeitgeist of our culture. But by 1st grade I knew that I wanted to follow Jesus. I didn’t really know what that meant at age seven, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find out in that Sunday School. I just knew that I couldn’t take another Sunday talking about dinosaurs and evolution. NOT that I denied science, then or now: I just wanted to know about Jesus. So, that summer, sitting on the porch of our rustic cabin on Lake Webster – and yes I know how to say Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug – I told my grandmother that I wanted to learn how to pray and live like Jesus.

· As best I recall, she gave me a concerned look, started to say something to me about Thomas Jefferson and the Deists, at which point I just silently got up and went to sit by the water as I realized my days at the Unitarian Universalist Sunday School were over. Then and now, I still find that the wisdom of God’s first created word in nature is often my ally when words no longer cut it.

· In time, I discovered that Jesus often retreated into the solitude of Mother Nature, too when he needed a place to listen deeply for guidance from his Heavenly Father. Our first reading to-day expresses the heart of a contemplative spirituality with great care:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Is-rael and the house of Judah. 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 – ev-en as I loved them. So, this is the covenant… will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, says the Lord; and I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

This oracle was first articulated to our ancestors in Judaism while they were in captivity to Babylon during the last 70 years of the 7th century before the Common Era. It was a mystical message of hope and healing then; and some one thousand years later was adopted by our Congregational founders. Notice that this text doesn’t abrogate the first covenant made on Mt. Sinai after the Exodus – Judaism is still viable and holy – for the new covenant is inward and honors a sacred love that never demands a one size fits all spirituality.

Some 500 years AFTER Jeremiah, Jesus told his followers that in my father’s house there are MANY mansions, right? The new covenant recognizes that there are a variety of spiritual paths that all have integrity – an insight worthy of respect as our Muslim neighbors enter the month holy month of Ramadan, ok? We need not all agree on how to love the Lord our God and our neighbors as ourselves in order to trust that salvation is still fundamentally God’s work not ours. Perhaps that’s why the new covenant implies that silence and trust are how the Lord puts God’s law within us. I will write my law upon their hearts and minds (not a stone tab-let). No longer shall they have to teach one another or say out loud: “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me within, from the least to the greatest. As Jesus said: the kingdom is where… within, right?

Now that last phrase in the Hebrew text literally says: every person will realize that their neighbor is a brother (or sister) because they will all KNOW me as I take away their sin and iniquity. That word, KNOW, in Hebrew is yada– a wonderfully paradoxical verb that COULD mean realized or acknowledged; OR it could mean, as it most often does in the Bible, sexual intimacy as in “Adam KNEW his wife.” Adam experienced Eve (and we hope to God that Eve experienced Adam) with profound pleasure, vulnerability, and trust. To KNOW is to trust God’s grace so thoroughly from the inside out that spirit and flesh embrace with joy. THIS knowledge, you see, is NOT abstract or aloof but boldly experiential, transformative, and incarnational. And THAT, dear friends, is what I was looking for – but never found – as a child while attending Sunday School with my grandma. Like the Psalmist of ancient Israel, I wanted to TASTE and see. I wanted to encounter something of the Lord with all my heart, soul, flesh, and mind – something mystical and vibrant – and intuitively I knew that Jesus was the key for me.

His spirituality is unique: it insists that there is NO delineation between the sacred and the secular for by faith heaven and earth are one just as the Lord’s Prayer tells us: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it’s already being done in heaven. Jesus teaches us to live as embodied prayers believing that contemplation is more than just resting in God’s grace – although it is that, too. The sixth century wisdom keeper, St. John Chrysostom, used to say that contemplation is “luminous seeing or knowledge impregnated by love.” What a brilliant description: wisdom impregnated by love. But not an emotional love, “but a quiet, clairvoyant intimacy with the holy that is physically grounded in the human heart.” Jesus puts it like this in today’s text appointed for the fifth Sunday of Lent:

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 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 will lose it while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servants be also – and who-ever serves me, the Father will honor.

This is simultaneously a de/scription of Christ’s passion – his betrayal, trial, suffering, death, and resurrection – and a pre/scription for practicing the prayer of relinquishment. Or, as they say in AA, learning to let go and let God. That’s the first insight of this text: the time was ripe for the Son of Man to be glorified – that is, to show the world the purpose and meaning of his ministry – by accepting and enduring the Cross. The Rev. Stephanie Sellers writes:

Jesus entered as he did, where he did, doing what he did, because God needed us to finally comprehend the truth: God is not a sky king who heads an empire; God is the love that gives itself away for the sake of more love. Jesus could only communicate that point by standing outside the power structures and inviting disciples to join him and discover new life with him on the margins. In Jesus, God shows us what it looks like to be this vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he could gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, so he and others might flourish as God intends. . . .

The Cross, you see, unites agape love – radical compassion – with disciplined surrender of self. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault put it like this: the Cross shows a mystical alchemy at work when the raw primal force of eros is subjected to the sacramental act of surrender in what contemplatives call kenosis. Borrowing an early baptismal prayer, St. Paul sings this hymn in Philippians 2:

Beloved, be of the same mind as Christ, having the same love, being in full accord. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. And in this humble act of self-emptying love, God exalted Jesus even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

· First, the Cross shows us what the marriage of love and humble sacrifice means: we SEE and KNOW what God looks like through the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus for Scripture says that on the Cross Jesus took on the shape or form of God. His hidden birth at Christmas tells us that God can and does show up any and everywhere – often in the most unexpected places like a cold stable in Nazareth – but his birth doesn’t show us what God looks like.

· Same for his table fellowship: Eucharist shows us a feast where no one need be shut out of the bounty of grace. But as much as I love that feast IT shows us what the kingdom looks and feels like in practice but the feast doesn’t show us what God looks like either.

No, in our tradition, only the Cross exposes the glory of God: humbly and intentionally love takes the form of a sacrifice and TOGETHER they show us what God looks like in Jesus Christ. That’s foundational, ok? We tend to forget in Western Christianity that the Cross is both Christ’s embodied prayer but also our own as well. You see, the same love that empowered Jesus to face the Cross in his time can ripen within us bringing blessings both to OUR souls and those we love the more we practice letting go and letting God. When love’s passionate energy is harnessed with humility, a sacramental sacrifice takes place that gives shape and form to God in Jesus Christ, AND, tutors us in the practice of Christ’s love.

God invites us into a new covenant, where by the power of the Spirit we can choose to allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces— our lives, our goods, our love, and our privileges —and share them all like a broken loaf of communion bread. By consciously and tenderly letting go of ego – letting it die within – grace begins to thrive and bear more fruit and before you know it, we are praying the wisdom of the Cross.

· Does that make sense? Are you still with me? Please understand I’m not asking does this make linear or even cultural sense because… it doesn’t. It’s not only paradoxical, ok? It calls into question a culture obsessed with an individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Letting go is NOT about acquiring; it’s about emptying; taking something you possess—your bread and power, your abilities and identities, your comfort and control, your treasured structures and even life itself—and releasing our attachment to them so that they can be useful to God’s love.

· It’s no wonder that St. Paul wrote that those who follow Jesus to the Cross have become fools for Christ. We are advocates of the upside-down kingdom. The way of the counter-cultural Spirit. Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount by telling us: You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed, too, when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

Our Western minds have been shaped by the blessings and disciplines of science – the pursuit of empirical evidence – or as Joe Friday said on Dragnet: Just the facts, ma’am. Consequently, the culture we have constructed is LONG on certainty but increasingly SHORT on nuance; a way of being where the bottom line has become the whole story. Back in 1934, T.S. Eliot warned us that this ob-session with the bottom line has consequences – and often they’re unintended. In “The Rock” he wrote:

The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death but not nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries have brought us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

So, every year Lent comes back around the circle of life with Jesus insisting that the grain of wheat must die before it can bear fruit. It must relinquish its essence in order to spread its wealth. That’s what he’s saying to those who grasp and clutch: trying to hold on to everything will ultimately cause us to lose it all. A mystical wisdom-keeper of the Western realm, Cynthia Bourgeault, gets it right when she tells us: It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us: there is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing.

· Now I may have said this out loud to some of you before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I am a slow learner when it comes to spiritual things. Often I’m late to the party. I eventually get there, but it takes me a LONG time. About seven years ago, I started to volunteer as a spiritual advisor to a small community of people with and without intellectual disabilities in Canada called L’Arche – that’s French for the ark. I would drive 6 hours one way to spend a few days in community sharing prayer, playing music for worship, and learning how to slow down and live from the heart of tenderness.

· One evening after playing some songs and sharing supper, I stepped into the living room to put away my guitar and found Geoffrey rummaging through my guitar case. Now, NO musician likes her or his instrument to be fondled without permission, and my first reaction upon finding my guitar in Geoff’s hands was… fury. I didn’t really KNOW Geoffrey yet – and he was a big, strong guy. To be blunt: I was angry that he’d violated my space by scarping up my VERY expensive guitar AND I was a little afraid for my well-being seeing that Geoff could probably flatten me with one blow. Somehow or another I jollied him into giving it back, packed up my precious guitar, and headed back to the states – taking the whole next six hours to fret and fumble over what to do next.

I wasn’t scheduled back in Ottawa for a few weeks so that gave me TONS of time to worry before I was to lead music for the community retreat. I know Psalm 37 urges believers NOT to fret and fuss, but… well, I’m a slow learner and I fretted the entire six hours back up to Canada without ANY clear strategy about what to do with Geoff. The retreat began, I lead some songs in English and French, and then sat with my guitar tightly in my grasp until lunch was served. I hadn’t seen Geoff, but I heard him as he sometimes shouted out words or thoughts that caught his fancy.

· I was still perplexed upon returning from the restroom when I saw him hovering over my guitar case and another wave of fear washed over me. Deep within I knew that trying to hold on to control was not going to work but I didn’t know what else to do. And then, thanks be to God, it hit me: I could sit down with Geoff before the next session, keep a hold of my guitar, and show him how to strum it while I played the chords. I didn’t know if that would really WORK but it struck me as a way to let go and try to let God… so I did.

· At first Geoff just looked at me. I gave him a guitar pick and he started to strum and before I knew it we were singing and dancing to La Bamba!Para bailar La Bamba para bailar La Bamba se necesita una poca de Gracia - Una poca de gracia pa' mí, pa' ti, ay arriba, ay arriba, Y arriba, y arriba Por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti sere Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba

It was both an answer to prayer AND an embodied prayer: I hadn’t remembered that the translation of La Bamba is: to dance la bamba you need a little grace – se necesita una poca de Gracia. And there it was: a vision of the Cross as the marriage of love and sacrifice. It showed me again what God looks like and how we are made whole. So, let me close with this practice that NEVER fails. It comes from the wisdom tradition that Cynthia Bourgeault celebrates in the brave little book: The Wisdom Way of Knowledge.

In any situation in life, if you are confronted with an outer threat or opportunity, take time to notice how your body feels. Inwardly are you bracing, hardening and resisting; or are you softening, opening, or yielding. If you go with the former – bracing – you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller and more selfish self with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later – letting go -regardless of the outer conditions you will remain in alignment with the sacred.

This is spiritual practice and maturity at its no frills simplest: a moment by moment learning NOT to do anything is a state of internal brace. Do you know what bracing feels like? (try it with your fists with me: 1-2-3 BRACE) How about letting go? (Try that, too: 1-2-3 release!) This, dear friends, is the good news for today. Let those with ears to hear, hear!

lent four: god so loved the kosmos...

Text: John 3: 14-21: And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 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.

My heart always beats a bit faster whenever today’s texts show up in the appointed readings both because St. John’s gospel is so rich with complex spiritual insights, AND, because this was the text my mentor, the late Rev. Dr. Ray Swartzback, chose when he preached my ordination service back in June 1982. Swartzy was a pulpit master: part Old Testament prophet and contemporary social critic, part skilled wordsmith and Bible scholar, and part devotee of Jesus committed to vigorous pastoral care and compassion. He earned his propers fighting in the Battle of the Bulge during WWII; when he returned stateside, he sensed the need to give whatever time he had left to nourishing life after encountering the rigors, trauma, and destruction of war. He served four different urban congerga-tions in the rustbelt before I interned with him in Jamaica, Queens, NY. His ordination sermon was entitled: Trapped in the Trappings and it’s been one of my guides for decades.

· Ray issued a prophetic warning to me in that sermon: do NOT try to be holier than Jesus. Rather, give yourself fully to loving the folk – and that means ALL the folk – those who fit in and those from the periphery, those who love God as well as those who are either ambivalent or even hateful. Remember: Jesus didn’t come to condemn the cosmos, but to love, nourish, and bring a measure of healing. Like the old song says: he’s got the WHOLE world in his hands

· So, in the spirit of both St. John the Evangelist and Ray Swartzback the urban preacher, let me risk unpacking some of the problematic and even uncomfortable parts of today’s readings for you because they not only strike contemporary people as troubling, but evoke a sense of God that no longer holds water. A creator who sends poisonous snakes to kill the community’s complainers? The source of creative and wild diversity throughout the cosmos who condemns those with doubts or existential questions about the meaning and purpose of life?

That, my friends, is BAD theology, a truth some intuitively embrace and vote with their feet, while others resist – especially if they choose to interpret the Bible literally. We would do well to recall that our spiritual cousins in Judaism long ago concluded that nuance, patience, and creativity are essential for making sense of the Bible. In fact, they crafted a four-tiered approach to Bible study using the acronym, PaRDeS, to keep things fresh. Pardes, in Hebrew, means orchard or garden, a reference to the paradise of Eden God created in the beginning.

P stands for p’shat meaning plain – a medieval exploration of a text’s literary, linguistic, and historical context – that strives to articulate what the words of Scripturehtml meant when they were first written, spoken, and/or collected. R represents remez meaning hint - a teasing out the allegorical possibilities of a passage – D is for drash from the Hebrew word midrash – the preferred, practical, and playful application of Scripture for everyday life – and S is for sod, meaning secret, or the creative consideration of the mystical and sacramental meaning of God’s word. The rabbis concluded – and we would do well to emulate – that the Bible is open to a host of interpretations – some are more useful than others – but all carry a piece of the truth. John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrims who came to this continent in 1620, told us that: “God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from the Holy Word,” than we now grasp.

· Such a perspective is essential if we’re to make ANY sense of passages like Psalm 61: I long to dwell in your tent, O Lord, forever, and take refuge in the shelter of your wings? Oh really? God has wings…?

· Same holds for a rigid interpretation of some of the purity codes like not ever touching pork: does that mean Christians and Jews can’t play football? Let’s not even open the door on some of the sexual references that today strike us as bizarre except to note that once upon a time women’s hair made into braids or a top knot was considered an offense to the Lord. No wonder Jesus quoted the prophet Hosea to the scribes and Pharisees saying: “There is something greater taking place than even the Temple so go and learn what this means: I, the Lord your God, desire mercy not sacrifice.” Compassion always trumps rigid rule keeping for Jesus.

So, with these qualifications, I think Bible scholar and pastor, Bruce Epperly, is right to ask: Is God for us or against us in these readings? Is God primarily punitive or graceful in nature?

Can we trust God’s love or is there a “hidden” violent side to God, inspiring fear and not companionship? The texts for today describe an ambiguity in divinity. Though they speak of divine rescue and global love, they also suggest a dark side to divinity. In the Numbers passage, God causes suffering and seems to be the source of punishment that far exceeds our misdeeds… (while) the gospel of St. John asks us to wonder: Is God the source of condemnation or does condemnation occur in the natural course of events in response to our actions? Can our love of darkness thwart God’s grace? What is the nature of this condemnation – is it a matter of inability to experience the fullness of God’s love or is it eternal in impact? Is there a limit to divine love and, if so, does it come from our side or our ability to say “no” to God? Is it possible to have moral responsibility without condemnation or accountability without destruction? These passages invite us to ponder the relationship between grace, punishment, and personal responsibility.

· We know many of our neighbors no longer find solace or hope in the institutional church now at least partly because of such passages. They intuitively sense what depth psychologist, Carl Jung, once said about the story of Job: with a God like THAT, who needs Satan?

· Declining numbers for the past four or five generations have given rise to a culture with NO experience with church. Episcopal lay theologian, Tricia Gates Brown, writes that we are “on the cusp of a change… where almost every aspect of our country is in upheaval — cultural, technological, political, environmental, and spiritual. We are well past the time when we thought we could reverse the tide…for this cultural shift is much larger than us.” And while there are clues that the tide is beginning to turn in this vast and epochal cultural shift that may result in a yearning for communities of compassion like the church, so much remains beyond our control. My hunch, Dr. Brown, writes:

Is that in time, the shared faith expression people get from religious services is something they will, again, long for. But only in the way we appreciate something so long absent that the reper-cussions of the absence become evident and undeniable… and it’s not likely to occur in my life time.

· So rather than lament and fret over this – or give-in to nostalgia or worse to fear – why not become allies of the Holy Spirit as St. Paul encouraged in Philippians 4 and give attention to whatever is “honorable, just, pure, pleasing, true and commendable: if there is any excellence or anything worthy of praise, give your attention to these things.”

· From my perspective this includes rigorously sorting out what is true and salvific, good and noble, even in our holy scripture, ok? And today’s texts are a GREAT place to start given the ambiguity and contradictions they describe about the nature of the Lord we’ve chosen to wor-ship.

I take my lead from a wise and wonderful Bible scholar, the late Rev. Dr. Walter Wink, who taught at my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and later went on to do truly remarkable re-search at the Presbyterian Auburn Theological Seminary. Walter used to say that there are at least three perspectives concerning Biblical interpretation and each is thoroughly grounded in Scripture.

· One is a literal reading of Torah – the Law in Hebrew – that’s shaped by Leviticus and Deut-eronomy. There are liberating passages within Torah but also severe restrictions concerning who is in and who is out – who is acceptable and forbidden – who belongs and who must be banished from community. Can you think of a Biblical story or character that speaks to this restrictive perspective?

· A second interpretative lens comes from the prophets: rather than celebrate an austere and fixed sense of who is acceptable to the Lord and who is not, the prophets ground themselves in the story of Exodus and urge us to incarnate acts that emancipate and heal people, the land, and all that lives and thrives in creation. Tradition suggests that the essence of the pro-phetic expression was synthesized in Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require but that we do justice, love mercy, and walk with God and neighbor in humility. Do you sense the differ-ence between the path of the prophets and those favoring a more simplistic sense of Torah?

· And then there’s the path of Jesus who is every bit as devout as the Pharisees but without their penchant for segregation: Jesus rarely offers an unyielding set of rules, preferring, in-stead, parables, stories, and testimonies of faith rather than inflexible tests of faith. That’s the school OUR tradition favors – testimonies not tests of faith – and while we haven’t always gotten this right – think of the genocide our founders enacted upon first nations people or our acceptance of slavery for way too long – one of the great poets and hymn writers of the Congregational Way, James Russell Lowell of Cambridge, MA, put it like this in Once to Every Man and Nation: New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; they must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Contemporary commentators insist that the readings for today are so curious and problematic that we MUST wrestle with them in worship, so here’s a few concerns:

As the story goes, when the wilderness people (of the Exodus) continue to grumble and misbehave, God gets impatient and angry and sends poisonous snakes among the people, whose bites cause several fatalities. The people confess their sin and ask Moses to intercede on their behalf. God relents and has Moses fashion a bronze serpent as an antidote. So, while God has offered a remedy, the snakes are still running loose, and people are still getting bitten… This story shows us a God who hurts and heals; a deity somewhat arbitrary and unpredictable whose moral ambiguity borders on abuse and should be called into question because the path of Jesus abhors even a hint of divine torment and terrorism.

The spirit, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus thoroughly rejects any portrayal of the holy as arbitrary and vindictive. As the Reverend Dr. Bruce Epperly put it writing in the on- line website Patheos: “If there is any redemption in this passage, it comes in recognizing that an orderly universe can involve pain as well as joy and that acts have consequences… any-thing more must be denounced as unworthy of Jesus and his love.” I would add that as St. John notes: the bronze serpent that Moses raises symbolically prefigures the Cross of Christ. Scholars at the SALT Project write: 

While God could have saved the Israelites by having them look upon any object at all, the chosen remedy is to look upon a bronze serpent, a vivid reminder — even in the midst of healing and restoration — of two things: first, the deadly, self-destructive nature of sin; and second, God's gracious transformation of even our worst into part of our redemption. The Christian cross can play this dual role, too reminding us of the many ways we turn against each other in violence and betray-al, and at the same time, of God’s graceful, transformative forgiveness and deliverance Like St. Paul wrote: we KNOW that in everything God works for good with those who are commit-ted to love. Not that everything IS good, but that God’s love is greater than even evil.

In the 21st century, connecting church with the cultural shift that engulfs us must include calling out bad theology even as we highlight the awesome accounts of sacred love that are beautiful, true, noble, and salvific. I like the way Pastor Dan Sadlier of Mosaic Church in NYC put it when he said that while formal theology can be confusing, the way of Jesus is pretty clear:

We move toward the poor, empower women, create space at the table for everyone who wants to eat, throw parties, widen the boundaries of family, poke holes in oppressive systems, don’t retaliate with violence, forgive the enemy, don’t horde, and be present with one another. Heal, share, and trust God as you push back the darkness because the kingdom is within and among us all.

So what do we do with the ambiguities and contradictions of today’s gospel? As you might expect, to make sense of this in OUR generation involves a choice. Some, like the Pharisees before us, are inclined limit and segregate God’s grace saying: ONLY those who confess Jesus as Lord the way I do are entitled to experience eternal life after life on earth is done. Others, and I place myself in this group, perceive at least three reasons to trust that salvation is way more inclusive.

First, throughout John’s Gospel, “the world” (kosmos in NT Greek) is a term used as shorthand for sin or estrangement from God — be in the world but not OF the world – which makes it all the more striking that Jesus says, “God so loved the world” (the kosmos) not, “God hated the world but loved the remnant of those who believe.” Second, in Torah, when God provides the remedy of the bronze serpent, the strategy is not to save just a few well-deserving Israelites, but rather to save “everyone” who had turned against God and then (for arguably less-than-noble reasons) sought deliverance (Num 21:8). And third, as if to clarify this very question, in the next verse Jesus underlines that God sends the Son not “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). (SALT Project)

I think this causes us to make a choice: do we trust that God loves ALL of creation and is doing all that is possible to heal rather than hurt? Or, is God’s love eclipsed by divine violence so that we worship not a God of mercy but one of retribution and suffering?

· To save, you see, is NOT to offer a pass to get into heaven at the END of this life – although that’s not excluded – rather the New Testament word we translate as salvation – soteria from the root sozo – means… to heal. To rescue from danger, pain, as well as the consequences of sin, confusion, and brokenness.

· So, what I hear in our new context is that those who choose to trust the way of Jesus – the path of forgiveness and compassion – are made whole. Healed. Empowered to pass on God’s love to others. Fr. Richard Rohr likes to say: if our wounds and sins are NOT transformed with-in, they are transmitted outwardly to others – most often to those we love the most. To be a part of the charism of this era, therefore, calls us to greet one another with open hands and arms rather than closed fists, hearts, and minds.

Reality is calling our community to incarnate an alternative to the chaos both by being creative and faithful to the gospel that Jesus makes flesh; and, by wrestling with the hard, troubling, and often unacceptable bad theology found in the good book. Symbolically, these challenging parts of Scripture are a lot like you and me: they’re real – they have to be dealt with – and by grace we need not be afraid to engage and be changed by them. Bad theology, like aspects of our own inner brokenness, you see, can point us in new and better directions IF we’re paying attention.

And that’s where sacred humor becomes part of God’s salvation plan: over the years I’ve discerned that most of us do NOT respond well to criticism, challenge, or what some overly pious people call speaking the truth in love. Most of the time, we just walk away from such insights and never find out the real issue. But bring a bit of self-deprecating humor to the table and suddenly hard truths within can be owned, named, accepted, and addressed. And you know who tells a GREAT story sat-urated in spiritual humility and humor? The mystics of Islam: the Sufis. One of my favorites involves the Holy Fool known as Mullah Nasruddin.

One day, the Mullah was sitting in a tea shop when a friend excitedly came in. ‘I’m so happy, my old friend,’ he gushed, ‘I’m about to get married and wanted to know if you had ever thought of marriage?’ “Oh many times,” smiled the old man. “When I was young, I very much wanted to and set out in search of the perfect woman. I travelled far and wide to find her. I went first to Damas-cus where I met a beautiful woman: she was gracious, kind, and deeply spiritual, but had no worl-dly knowledge, so I decided she was not the perfect wife. Later I travelled further and went to Bagdad and met a woman who was both spiritual and wise in the ways of the world. She was beautiful in many ways but we did not communicate well. Finally, after much searching, in Cairo I found her: she was spiritually deep, graceful, compassionate, savvy, and beautiful in every way. She was at home in the world and at home in the realms beyond it. In her I knew I had finally found the perfect woman.’ At which point his friend blurted out: ‘Why then why did you not marry her, Mullah?’ “Alas,” sighed Nasruddin as he put down his tea cup while shaking his head, “Alas, it seems that she was searching for the perfect man.’

We need not be trapped by bad theology: its existence in our Bible gives us a chance to name it, call it out, make it good and get it right just as we do in prayer and contemplation. And I submit to you that the more we do – and do it playfully and tenderly, with humble humor – the more God’s truth will shine within and among us to lead us from the darkness into the light.

For this is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And here’s why: so that no one need be destroyed; by trusting him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.

And THIS is the good news for today for those with ears to hear.

what a LONG strange trip its been...

One of the BEST rock lyrics ever penned is found in the Grateful Dead's anthem: Truckin'! It showed up on the American Beauty album in 1970 and became an instant winner. Written by Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and Hunter (three instrumentalists and their erstwhile lyricist) about "life on the road," Truckin' is a mid-tempo shuffle that joyfully proclaims: "What a LONG strange trip its been!" Truer words have rarely been shared in all of rock and roll.

The first time I heard this I had just entered the first year class at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI. I was already a Deadhead and LOVED Working Man's Dead. Taking in the groove of that era with other music geeks and progressive intellectuals was like a smorgasbord: new songs were happening every week and that fall was all about After the Gold Rush and Dr. John the Night Tripper PLUS the new Dead  and Lennon's solo album. What a trip that some 50+ years later, my precious 10 year old grandson is playing tunes from American Beauty. And, of course, the best of both Revolver and Rubber Soul.

relearning how to say yes and say no...

One of the challenges of my current incarnation is accepting limitations: it is a counter-cultural commitment to sometimes say no, right? Especially for clergy. Stanley Hauerwas once described clergy burnout as the result of living like a quivering mass of availability. Twenty-five years ago I began to learn about this commitment through the spiritual practice of "saying yes, saying no." (for more information see:

https://practicingourfaith.org/practices/saying-yes-and-saying-no/) Martin Copenhaver, retired President of Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, tells the story of his mother's strict NO when it came to sabbath keeping. He wrote:

At first, saying No usually looks like a form of self-denial. And often it is only later that we can see that the No is really the key to freedom. For instance, when my mother was a girl her family kept the Sabbath quite strictly. In accordance with the biblical mandate, they would observe Sunday as a day of rest. My grandmother would bake bread on Saturday to be served with warm milk the next day—their traditional Sunday meal—so that she would not have to cook on the Sabbath. When Sunday arrived, the children would not do their normal chores. The Sunday newspaper was kept on the top shelf of the China cabinet until Monday morning. They couldn’t talk on the telephone and they weren’t allowed to play any games, either. As a boy, I remember thinking that it sounded awful. My mother would say, “Well, actually, that was my favorite day of the week. After church in the morning, we would spend the day together. It was a busy family, so it was nice to have a day when you could eat dinner together without being so rushed, take walks and catch up with each other. Or we could spend time with friends.”

My aversion to Blue Laws notwithstanding, something was lost when Sunday became just another day of doing business. Not that I favor returning to a watered down theocracy, mind you. Not at all. Simultaneously, however, I know that actually articulating a commitment to Sabbath - and living into it - is baffling to most contemporary Americans. We may lament that our children and grandchildren have sports events when they might be in worship - or that families struggling to make ends meet now regularly work on both Saturday and Sunday - but our behavior tells a different story. The art and discipline of keeping the Sabbath holy has been ceded to devout Jews and Muslims as Christians rush about with more and more important tasks to complete. 

Back in our early days of Sabbath keeping I was scolded by a Cleveland matriarch for my selfishness in not answering the phone on my Sabbath day off.  The very notion that I would opt out of engaging was an affront to her - especially, she said pointedly: because our pledge pays your salary! In addition to the loss of Sabbath consciousness her fury was fueled by an understanding that a pastor is just like any other employee in the so-called helping professions. And as much as I protested and challenged such narrowness: it's in the cultural air we breathe and not easily eradicated. Copenhaver adds:

It is not insignificant that the Sabbath was established when the Jews were in exile. Their Babylonian captors wanted to get as much as possible from the Hebrew slaves. So they tried to make them work every day. But the Jews rebelled and insisted that one day a week they would refrain from working so that they could worship their God. In short, they said, “No. We are good for more than labor. We are made in the image of God. This is the God who rules over us all, Jew and Babylonian. Call us slaves if you will, but one day a week we will remind ourselves that we are precious in the sight of the one true God.” Somehow the 4 Babylonians knew that this was a form of rebellion that could not be crushed. And so they relented. One day a week they did not expect the Jews to work and allowed them to worship. (NOTE: you can read his entire reflection @

https://practicingourfaith.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Learn-to-Say-No.pdf)

The mystical wisdom-keeper of Western contemplation, the Rev. Dr. Cynthia
Bourgeault, notes that challenges to our commitments (be they Sabbatarian or not) are necessary in helping us strengthen, deepen, and modify them as needed. Questions and controversy, you see, reflect the healthy tension of natural new life where outdated truths are discarded and eternal insights fortified. How did the poet Rilke put it in Letter to a Young Poet?

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

But let's be clear: saying NO is still counter-cultural. It remains a discipline to be practiced. And requires patience along with a willingness to fail in order to sustain its life giving qualities. As a dear friend from L'Arche Ottawa wrote me: you can't keep adding commitments to your day without relinquishing others if you want a balanced life, ok? Upon accepting a call to serve as an Interim Minister during a time when my musical options were starting to flourish showed me just how much I needed a "saying yes/saying no" refresher course. Reality was squeezing some commitments out even as new ones were being revealed. Some, like needing to stay local during key holidays rather than traveling to loved ones, broke my heart. AND this reality is calling us all to become more creative and inventive in finding ways to stay connected. We haven't cracked that nut yet but the possibilities are beginning to strike me as wonderful even as I grieve what is being lost. Talk about paradox, yes?

The cultural/political/spiritual/emotional need to revive a healthy commitment to saying NO is all too obvious in 2024. But NOT in a theocratic/return to blue laws way. No, our rebellion must be a playful and tender rebellion that helps us affirm the best of this era while relinquishing habits that no longer celebrate life. Today, as part of MY Sabbath, I'm off to the library. There isn't a better place to practice saying yes and no for they are both part of the dance of life. I like how Copenhaver's essay concludes:

Here as elsewhere, it is not simply that we must learn how to say No to some things and Yes to other things. The two are more closely related than that. It is like they are two steps of the same dance. The No is implied by the Yes. The No frees us to say Yes. We say No as a form of Christian practice so that, finally, in the end, our lives might sing a word of affirmation: Yes, yes, yes!