Incarnational thinking...

Early last week, I was struck by the realization that many in my congregation are doing the most incredible and profound "christian formation" work that I have ever known.  Two examples:

+ Each month at our church council, a question generated by the council members is researched in advance (by me.) This gives us a shared study resource to consider before we devote upwards of 45 minutes to a discussion and question/answer session.  The first two questions this year have been: 1) What does it mean to claim that Jesus died for our sins? and 2) How can we know the difference between God's will and our own? 

For the first gathering, I wrote a brief summary of competing understandings of atonement theology that generated a passionate discussion - complete with hymn references - of how we find wisdom and concerns in all of the ways scholars and theologians have wrestled with the Cross. At our second meeting my assignment was more open-ended: Christianity teaches that Jesus is the embodiment of God's image in the world; so, to understand God's will in our lives, go first to the Scriptures and see what they teach you. Well, people truly went to the Bible - they did their homework - and they came back with both insights and questions that were profound.

+ For this year's Good Friday encounter with song, story, silence and solidarity I invited the band to do two things based upon our theme of misunderstanding:  1) Pick a Biblical character in the passion narratives that you want to know better and write a brief narrative about how that person might have been misunderstood by Jesus, how they misunderstood God's grace in the life and death of Christ, or how they themselves experienced misunderstanding in any of its layers.  And 2) to come up with a song from any realm that speaks to the lives of one of the narratives (in this case we have been considering Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, Peter and Judas.) 

Well, the songs have been incredible - everything from the Police's "Secret Journey" (for Peter) and U2's "Until the End of the World" (for Judas) to Billy Preston's "You Are So Beautiful" (for the Virgin) and "One Moment More" by Mindy Smith (for Magdalene.) We're also using Mose Allison's "Everybody's Crying Mercy" to summarize the confusion Christ experienced from those he loved.

This is Christian Formation for adults that matters: it meets them where they live and invites their serious spiritual reflection. What's more, this way of doing study together grows out of our ordinary lives and asks us to think about God's grace in an incarnational way.  To say that I am blown away and energized by all of this would be an understatement. What a blessing.

the unfolding of holy week...

As Holy Week 2014 unfolds among us - with some families taking vacation time away - many of us grieve the most recent gun attack in Kansas City.  In what was intended as a hate-crime against Jews at a Jewish center by a lifelong anti-Semite, the shooter ended up murdering three Christians.  What a bitter and ugly irony.  In this morning's NY Times, columnist David Brooks reflects on the ethical values celebrated by our cousins in faith as they mark yet one more Passover. "In Moses, the leader of Israel's liberation," Brooks writes, "there is the quality of anivut."

"Anivut, Rabbi Norman Lamm once wrote, means a soft answer to a harsh challenge; silence in the face of abuse; graciousness when receiving honor; dignity in response to humiliation; restraint in the presence of provocation; and forbearance and quiet calm when confronted with calumny and carping criticism." 

Brooks makes clear that leaders - political and spiritual - must practice the binding and training of their souls so that we move beyond our wounds.  Without this, we will pass on our own pain and hurt others in the process.  Clearly, the witness of Jesus moving through his betrayal and passion highlights what "anivut" looks like for those with eyes to see.  As another wise teacher, Richard Rohr, has written:

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become “sacred wounds” and not something to deny, disguise, or export to others.If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. Indeed, there are bitter people everywhere. As they go through life, the hurts, disappointments, betrayals, abandonments, the burden of their own sinfulness and brokenness all pile up, and they do not know where to put it. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

And so we, too, gather to observe and mark another Holy Week in pursuit of God's transforming love.  Here's what's going on this week...

HOLY WEEK SCHEDULE AT FIRST CHURCH:

+ Maundy Thursday - April 17 - 7:00 p.m.:  The heart of this gathering is humility and servanthood as expressed in the footwashing and Passover meal Jesus shared with his first disciples.  My message will explain - and demonstrate - the origins of both before we celebrate the Eucharist one last time before Easter Sunday.  NOTE: Our Sunday School staff - and childcare worker - will be present for this service and children are welcomed and encouraged to be present.  After the first 20 minutes, Crystal, Mark, and Janet will take out children out of worship for their own Maundy Thursday event as we move into the service of Tenebrae.  I am so very grateful for our Sunday School staff's commitment to not only be present, but to help our children go deeper.

+ Good Friday - April 18 - 7:00 p.m.:  MISUNDERSTOOD. Good Friday is a time for deep reflection on what is broken, what is wounded and what is sinful within and among us. It is a meditation on consciously moving through death into new life - including both grief and suffering - that can transform death into Christ-like compassion.  Our band and others have been working on a liturgy that explores not only how we often misunderstand the love of God, but how those misunderstandings erupt into wounds.  This team has written biblical narratives based on Mary Magdalene, Judas, Peter and the mother of Jesus, Mary as one way to crack open the theme of misunderstanding; contemporary music by U2, Mose Allison, Mindy Smith, Mason Jennings and the Police will be shared, too.  Our Sunday School staff and childcare folk will be present, too should some of our younger participants need a break. The liturgy will conclude with extinguishing candles on a 10' cross.  

+ Holy Saturday Easter Vigil - April 19 -  8:00 p.m.:  I have been invited to bring the sermon at this ecumenical Easter Vigil celebration hosted at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.  I am grateful and humbled because this is such a beautiful liturgy that traces the movement of God's love in time that climaxes in the Resurrection. I hope some will join me for this sacred time.

+ Feast of the Resurrection - Easter Sunday - April 20 - 10:30 a.m.:  We return to our own sanctuary for Holy Communion and the joy of God's love made real in Christ's triumph over the grave.  Our choir will sing, our children will be present for part of the joy and then return for Holy Communion and the people of God will bring honor to the Lord through prayer and praise.

MISUNDERSTOOD: Good Friday Encounter with Song, Story, Silence and Solidarity April 18th @ 7 pm...

NOTE:  As the rigors of Holy Week afflict and bless those working in places of Christian worship, I continue to labor towards the sacred Three Days we know as the Triduum. I think I have finished my worship notes for Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday morning. That leaves Maundy Thursday and some tweaking to do tomorrow - then it is on to both dress rehearsals and the actual worship encounters.  

Here, for example, in advance of our Good Friday experience, MISUNDERSTOOD, is what I believe I will be sharing with the gathered as way of interpretation.  Additionally, we will be performing a host of varied music from Mose Allison jazz with an ironic social commentary to flat-out spirit driven rock and roll from the Police and U2. If you are in town, THIS is the gig to attend! We will open the event with my take on "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" that has a mellow funky groove and we'll close the gig with a female-driven reprise of the same song. Identical words but a VASTLY different take... as befits the event, yes?

+

“Don’t let me be misunderstood…” Not only are these the words chosen to shape and guide tonight’s encounter, but they are sounds that leap from the heart of the human condition.  You don’t have to be religious or even vaguely spiritual to know that all too often our souls ache and our bodies tremble in fear or sadness because all throughout our lives, WE have been misunderstood.

It is a common knowledge the young people the world over feel like no one understands them.  Hell, half the time they don’t even understand them-selves as emotions swirl and hormones rage and social expectations try to squeeze them into a variety of molds that just don’t work. Women know a truckload about being misunderstood by men and mothers, employers and executives, clothes designers, psychiatrists and advertising moguls who have a one size fits all understanding of beauty, femininity and what makes for a life of meaning and satisfaction. And increasingly men too are beginning to articulate their own confusion about being confined to the roles and styles of rugged individualism and social conformity.

All around us are signs of misunderstanding from the culture wars and quest for true equality in our sexuality to the wounded warriors who after returning home from serving God and country find themselves consumed by the chaos of post traumatic stress disorder, unemployment all too often homelessness.  From America’s schizophrenia about race to our economic and political polarization, to paraphrase the old school dean of rock and roll Jerry Lee Lewis: there’s a whole lotta misunderstanding going on – and that fact is simultaneously frightening and discouraging.  It used to that we were an optimistic and even hopeful people when it came to the future, but that is no longer true among us.

So, as artists and people of faith, we asked ourselves:  how do we both talk about hope - and offer alternatives to inertia and despair - in a way that gets through to tjpse who have lost faith in technology, science AND religion?  Because that is what has taken place in post-modern society: nobody trusts the market place, nobody trusts progress and nobody trusts religious institutions any longer.  One of my mentors, the rock and roll genius Lou Reed, used to say:  You can't depend on your family, you can't depend on your friends, you can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on no end.

You can't depend on intelligence, oh Lord you can’t depend on God. You can only depend on one thing:  you need a busload of faith to get by – so watch it, baby!

THAT, dear people, is the paradox of this moment – we need faith AND all around us those things that once held our trust have disqualified themselves through greed, violence, stupidity and fear-mongering.  Enter the promise and healing potential of music.

+  The artist once called Cat Stevens who after his conversion to Islam took the name Yusuf Islam recently spoke about this before being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:  After despairing for a long, long time about what I could do about the hatred and mistrust in the world… it dawned on me: Even with the entire world sinking deeper into despair, we can still sing! The spirit of humanity can be subdued, but never vanquished. And nothing brings out that spirit like a good song. As a short film on Nelson Mandela I watched recently showed, he danced and smiled from East to West, saying, "It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself.”  So in 2001, after singing "Peace Train" for a tribute concert at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, in memory of the victims of 9/11, the sleepy train of peace-making through music began to chug its way slowly uphill again!

+  That’s why WE are here tonight – and we hope that is true for you, too. We sense that by being together in song – and story and silence and solidarity – we can awaken what is human and holy not just in one another but in our culture.  You see, tonight is an act of non-violent resistance to the fear and loathing that surrounds us.  Like Dostoevsky proclaimed in another dark age:  beauty can save the world because it awakens our souls, stirs our spirits and connects us to a love that is greater than ourselves.

Now I know that some think this is idealistic – or naïve – or some loosey-goosey hippie mumbo jumbo left over from another era.  But if you know ANYTHING about movements for equality, justice and peace you know that they are ALL saturated with song.  Congressman John Lewis, one of the Freedom Riders from the American anti-apartheid movement, said that without the freedom songs there would have been no soul or courage to the struggle for racial equality. On the night brother Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in San Francisco, gay and straight allies spontaneously walked in candle light vigil through the streets weeping “we are a gentle angry people… and we are singing, singing for our lives.”  And on and on it goes…

So here’s what we've tried to do tonight with our MISUNDERSTOOD creation and we’ll only know if it was successful when we’re finished: We took the Christian chronicle of Good Friday and refashioned it with song and story to explore how God – or whatever you want to call that love that is greater than fear and hatred – can take our misunderstandings and shape them into something redemptive.  I asked each member of this ensemble to explore some music – and in some cases to write their own reworking of a sacred story, too – to express how human beings have ALWAYS experienced some degree of alienation and misunderstand-ing in their lives. 

Much as our culture would tell us otherwise, we are neither the crown of creation nor the center of confusion: people have been wrestling with misunderstanding for at least six thousand years and probably much longer. And the distilled wisdom of people who have listened to the pain and confusion all around them and then searched for a transformative meaning to it has something to teach us:  Namely that if we enter into the pain – if we embrace the confusion and pay attention to what is absurd, tragic and unjust within and among us – these very wounds can become our path into peace and hope and deeper compassion.

+  All the great religions – all the great artists – all the great musicians share an understanding that says:  if we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. Indeed, there are bitter people everywhere. As they go through life, the hurts, disappointments, betrayals, abandonments, the burden of their own sinfulness and brokenness all pile up, and they do not know where to put it. And when we do not know how to transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. (Richard Rohr)

+  Are you with me on this?  When we do not know how to transform the agony of misunderstanding into something healing, we will transmit it to other people and hurt them!  So tonight we’re going to practice sitting with our misunderstandings – and our fears – as we go into songs and stories and silence together. 

+  We’re even going to practice sitting together with all of this in utter darkness so that we might grow a little more comfortable with entering our wounds rather than running away from them or blaming or wounding others.

This is art as transformation – this is taking the beauty of our songs and stories – and trusting the silence – discovering something healing in the midst of all our misunderstandings.  The testimony of our elders is clear:  we ought not waste our pain – it can take us into a sacred place – it can give us the strength and tenderness to be an instrument of peace for others, too.  One of my favorite teachers, Richard Rohr, put it like this when he looked at Mary the Mother of Jesus:

As an example of holding the pain, picture Mary standing at the foot of the cross. Standing would not be the normal posture of a Jewish woman who is supposed to wail and lament and show pain externally. She’s holding the pain instead; think of the way Michelangelo symbolized this in the Pieta. Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. She’s trying to say, “There’s something deeper happening here. How can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?”For until you find a way to be a transformer, you will pass the pain onto other…

That’s our hope for this night: to interrupt the vicious cycle of passing on our pain to others. On behalf of these artists – whom I love and trust with my soul – let me thank you for coming out to join us.  May the Spirit of all that is holy be alive in our hearts that we might transform our pain and misunderstanding and so become instruments of God’s peace in the world.

 

Palm Sunday into the Triduum...

Here is a thoughtful and important article - and I offer it up in solidarity with my Jewish cousins who are celebrating Passover today - check it out:  http://sicutlocutusest.com/2014/04/11/no-christian-seders-please/

Today, in the Christian tradition, we marked Palm/Passion Sunday: it was beautiful and rich even though we pulled the plug on our planned ecumenical procession because of threatening rain.  We still paraded around the Sanctuary and sang songs of love and joy before shifting gears and centering ourselves in the challenge and paradox of the Passion story.  In a few hours, I'm headed out again for a LONG Good Friday band practice. This will be the first time all the players are in the same room with one another. And we will have our premier sound man, Rob, at the dials to get our mix just right. 

Here is a short reflection worth of Passion Sunday from Fr. Richard Rohr who makes it clear what has to die - something all religions talk about - but most of us continue to get wrong. THANKS BE TO GOD FOR THE WISDOM AND MINISTRY OF RICHARD ROHR!

All the great religions of the world talk a lot about death, so there must be an essential lesson to be learned through death. The problem has been that we might know something has to die, but throughout much of religious history our emphasis has been on killing the wrong thing and therefore not learning the real lesson. Historically we moved from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to various modes of seeming self-sacrifice, usually involving the body self.

God was not considered friendly. God was distant and scary. God was not someone with whom you fell in love or with whom you could imagine sharing intimacy. Instead, God was viewed as an angry deity who must be placated with some sort of blood sacrifice. Jesus presented a much different image of God, but it seems very hard for people to let go of their punitive ideas of God.

Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at the immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good and the worthy and the pure and the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. At this level, they export the natural death instinct onto others, as though it’s someone else who has to die.

The truth is it’s you who has to die, or rather, who you think you are, the False Self. Authentic religion is always about you. It’s saying you change first.

Here's one of the song we'll be working on tonight:

Loving the arrival of spring...

Di has a hot new IPHONE that takes panoramic pix.  Here is our front yard after 90 minutes of raking and dealing with a rugged winter.

After Palm Sunday - and the rigors of Holy Week - we'll tackle the back 40.  It is wonderful to be alive...

Let us go up to the house of the Lord...

Yesterday's long walk in the woods next to a RUSHING stream was sweet. Lucie was totally exhausted after about four miles and slept like a rock for most of the rest of the day. What a joy feeling the sun (finally) and hearing the flow of all that water. (Here's a selfie taken from the trail:  tell, WHERE did all those laugh lines and crinkles come from?)

Most of today will be equally chill with some serious time devoted to cleaning the land after our ferocious winter. Tomorrow, of course, is the start of our Christian Holy Week and Palm Sunday - and once that begins, it will be a total blur for the next 8 days with liturgies, writing and rehearsals. I love this time of year in the church calendar and sometimes fear it because of the emotional demands.

In the early days of ministry, about 8:30 pm on Palm Sunday I would discover myself tied up in knots and resentful. "There is so much to do at church" I would shriek to myself and whoever else was around. "Don't these people know how much I already do for them?" It wasn't pretty and by Maundy Thursday I was in knots with liturgical performance anxiety. You see, like many young clergy who are learning about pacing and prayer, I thought it all depended upon me to make Holy Week work.  And when something went wrong - as it always does - I flipped out. (Ask my daughters sometime about the close of Holy Week during our Cleveland days.)

How did I ever come to invert this sacrificial time of Jesus to be all about me? I know part of it was my own wounds - some of us need lots of therapy before we understand the right reasons for staying in ministry - but some of it was about an institution (and the individuals in that institution) who are hungry for awe and transcendent experiences. They project their deepest yearnings and needs onto both their clergy and their holidays. And, because we are just like them - human - it is inevitable that everyone will leave dissatisfied. Small wonder some churches let themselves be pulled down to the lowest common denominator as they put on religious performances for their people.  

Well, here's a news flash:  not only is Holy Week not about me (or you) it is about Jesus and what he shows us of God's love. Fr. Richard Rohr recently wrote this about the way Christ invites us to take our deepest pains and wounds into God's love so that the Lord can transform them.  For as our wounds are transformed - and healed - we, too are changed from the inside out; we become people who no longer need to pass on their hurts to others. Rather, we become instruments of God's peace.

Only people who have suffered in some way can save one another—exactly as the Twelve-Step Program also discovered. Deep communion and dear compassion is formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure. I do not know why that is true.

“Peter, you must be ground like wheat, and once you have recovered, then you can turn and help the brothers” (Luke 22:31-32), Jesus says to Peter. Was this his real ordination to ministry? No other is ever mentioned. I do believe this is the ordination that really matters and that transforms the world. Properly ordained priests might help bread and wine to know what they truly are, but truly ordained priests are the “recovered” ones who can then “help” people to know who they are too. We have been more preoccupied with changing bread than with changing people, it seems to me.

In general, you can lead people on the spiritual journey as far as you yourself have gone. You can’t talk about it or model the path beyond that. That’s why the best thing you can keep doing for people is to stay on the journey yourself. Transformed people transform people. And when you can be healed yourself and not just talk about healing, you are, as Henri Nouwen so well said, a “wounded healer.” Which is the only kind of healer!

Holy Week became one of the places where I felt myself being ground down like wheat.  For years I hated this grinding - and did my best to avoid it and run away from it, too. But eventually my "doing a runner" was far more exhausting than I could endure, so I had to enter it. And here's the thing: that the Cross is always moving unto the resurrection. Our pain and fear, our guilt and shame, our confusion and suffering have a point when they are placed into the sacred embrace of God.  Rohr continues:

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you, but in fact to bring you to God. So there are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted and everything can be used. After all, on the cross, God took the worst thing, the killing of God, and made it into the best thing—the redemption of the world! If you gaze upon the mystery of the cross long enough, your dualistic mind breaks down, and you become slow to call things totally good or totally bad. You realize that God uses the bad for good, and that many people who call themselves good may in fact not be so good. At the cross you learn humility, patience, compassion, and all of the Christian virtues that really matter.

Jesus says, “There’s only one sign I’m going to give you: the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Luke 11:29, Matthew 12:39, 16:4). Sooner or later, life is going to lead you (as it did Jesus) into the belly of the beast, into a place where you can’t fix it, you can’t control it, and you can’t explain it or understand it. That’s where transformation most easily happens. That’s when you’re uniquely in the hands of God.

Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego. It has to be led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns to call upon the Deeper Resource of who it truly is, which is the God Self, the True Self, the Christ Self, the Buddha Self—use the words you want. It is who we are in God and who God is in us. At this place you are indestructible!

I still find myself getting anxious as Holy Week begins to dawn - but at a deep level I know that NONE of this is about me - so I can practice letting it go. How did the ancient Psalmist put it: in Psalm 122:  I rejoiced when they said unto me let us go up to the house of the Lord...

The wind...

Once, in the early days of exploring whether or not our current community of faith was truly open to spiritual and numerical renewal, an often caustic critic complained that our "new" music was just reworked tunes from the 60s. The point, besides being snarky, was to diminish and diffuse the energy being unleashed by our genre-bending commitments in worship. In an effort to discredit my wisdom and experience, a small but active cadre pulled out all the stops. Because, as someone wiser than I used to say, "they prefer a burial society to the living body of Christ." So, time and again I would hear things like: "This isn't NEW, it is just a retread of the same old same old..."
This comes to mind this morning on our Sabbath for a few reasons - the most obvious being I saw Yusuf Islam's picture in our local paper at his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now I have been a fan of the Cat from the start - and have heard the sacred within his songs for over 50 years - so it does my heart good to see that he has reclaimed this truth over the past 10 years, too. He's been touring and playing songs new and old to capacity crowds all over the globe.  And it is my contention that it isn't nostalgia or marketing smoke and mirrors that draw people out to his music: it is the call to peace, hope and love.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Yusuf noted that after September 11th he played "Peace Train" for a grieving New York audience. He also observed that one of his heroes, Nelson Mandela, loved to sing and dance to his music, too. Songs of faith, hope and love seem to have no shelf life - they are timeless - and actually need to be heard again and again to nourish our souls. That has been my experience in finding music outside the Reformed church tradition that helps people in worship reconnect their experiences to the sacred words. 

Two times in the past three months I have found myself praying the new/old songs of Yusuf.  At our 250th anniversary as a congregation, the words to "Peace Train" took on a deeper significance for me both because they still describe the reality of the world, and, they highlight our hopes for reconciliation with our African American sister congregation. As often happens to me, as I sang the verse, "Now I've been crying lately thinking about the world as it is and why must we go on hating? Why can't we live in bliss?" I was weeping tears of sorrow and tears of compassion. That song - and it's bookend "Don't Give Up" - defined our festival of faith and gave it shape and form. This may be an old tune, but it has just a much juice as "Amazing Grace" or "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past." 

The other time came as we were burying our dear friend, Rick, who was one of the congregation's saints. A noble, gentle and faith-filled man who turned most of his pain and difficulties into ways of growing closer to God in love, I found myself praying "Moonshadow" as I wrote his eulogy. It so aptly described how Rick lived that we had to sing it - and did so a week later in my children's moment - because it rang so true. 

For years, I have prayed "The Wind" as part of my own centering prayer so it did my heart good to see that as the Cat came back he played this same prayer on Jimmy Fallon's show. After seven years I can say that I endured the snarky and often mean-spirited comments - and the periodic ambushes, too - because one of my antidotes came from Yusuf. He continues to be both a musical guide and a spiritual mentor of peace, hope and love.
Next month month I will be part of a three person panel of pastor/musicians at an American Guild of Organists dinner. It will be fascinating as we each talk about how we discover and use music in renewing the spiritual lives of the people we serve in God's love. You can count on the fact that the "Cat" will be a part of my reflections - and may actually show up on my guitar, too.

Onward to holy week...

Yesterday I was invited to preach the ecumenical Easter Vigil in our community. It was humbling and frightening at the same time. I usually pace myself fairly well for Holy Week but this threw my equations totally out of whack. What's more, during the weeks following Easter - when I usually disappear for 10 days of quiet time and reflection - I am going to be helping my father transition from his home of 41+ years and then spend some time in Brooklyn taking care of my dear grandson while his parents bring home the bacon. So, adding one more task to a demanding time rattled me.

Thanks be to God I was recently able to get some insight into my inner grief: it has been draining but as I play with the way my tears draw me closer to the presence of our living God, there is also consolation.  So, today I was able to write an Easter Vigil homily more than a week early. I will have time to both sit with it and then edit it, too.  Onward to my Good Friday meditation on our music and art presentation:  MISUNDERSTOOD. That, too, is close to completion leaving me only Maundy Thursday (and maybe a modified Vigil message for Easter Sunday) to hammer out.

Those who don't participate in regular worship have no idea how stressful this season is for church professionals. On one hand, we need to speak to our people from the heart - saying something of the Lord that has integrity and hope - and on the other hand we must find a way to pace ourselves for multiple worship experiences that all have deep emotional content. This is particularly challenging for introverts, yes?  With precious little down time in-between liturgies, it can feel emotionally overwhelming.

This Sunday four congregations will gather for a Blessing of the Palms - Lutheran, Methodist, United Church of Christ and Episcopal - before processing to our respective Sanctuaries.  After Palm Sunday, we'll have a 2+ hour band practice to nail the complicated songs for Good Friday. I am excited and pleased that this year a great deal of the Good Friday material has been written by band members - not the songs - but the prayers and biblical narratives. Time and again, I read about national church conferences where the same old top-down hacks gather to celebrate themselves and try to pass it off as "relevant." I don't think I'll be going to many of those conferences any more because right here in our small little community our lay people are doing incredible poetry, brilliant biblical interpretation and wildass musical creation.

Onward to Holy Week!

Don't waste your pain...

There were a lot of tears this past Sunday in worship - from me and from many others - as we looked our various wounds and fears in the face with the trust that in God's grace our pain isn't wasted. I know people who waste their pain. They neither learn from their mistakes nor profit from their suffering, but keep doing the same old things over and over expecting different results. As Fr. Ed Hays says, they refuse to learn the wisdom of their wounds. 

I've been told that there are some folk at church who are worried about me because I've been sad for so long.  My grief is deep, to be sure, and palpable. What's more, I made a decision sometime during Advent not to waste it or medicate it or distract myself from it. My hunch has been that I have been called to grow closer to Christ through this grief. And while I haven't known exactly how this would happen, I knew it would be revealed if I was patient and still and waited on the Lord. As another tradition likes to say: when the student is ready, the Buddha will appear.

Sometime during Lent I noticed a shift within - I was still agonizingly sad and often weary beyond words - but it was starting to feel less and less like a burden.  And when I read this from Richard Rohr last week, like the Apostle Paul, the scales fell away from my eyes. Not that I grasp everything this means, but I know it is part of the puzzle for me:

Many people rightly question how there can be a good God or a just God in the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world—about which “God” appears to do nothing. Exactly how is God loving and sustaining what God created? That is our dilemma.

I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is suffering love. If we are created in God’s image, and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God must also be suffering. How else can we understand the revelation of the cross and that our central Christian logo is a naked, bleeding, suffering man?

Many of the happiest and most peaceful people I know love “a crucified God” who walks with crucified people, and thus reveals and “redeems” their plight as his own. For them, Jesus is not observing human suffering from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with us and for us. He includes our suffering in the co-redemption of the world, as “all creation groans in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). Is this possible? Could it be true that we “make up in our own bodies all that still has to be undergone for the sake of the Whole Body” (Colossians 1:24)? Are we somehow partners with the Divine? At our best, we surely are.

Part of what I understand this to mean is that as I weep and grieve - as I lament the agony of those I love and reel against the pain so many suffer - I am actually growing closer to the Lord. My tears are an intimacy that I could avoid, but what a privilege to pray with my whole body and be embraced by God in my sorrow.  I am going to be sitting with this revelation quietly for the remainder of Lent into Easter.  Like the Mary the mother of our Lord, I need to be still and know that God is near as I ponder these things in my heart. In fact, I am more and more clear that Mary has much to teach me during this season.

Worship notes for Palm/Passion Sunday...

Worship Notes:  And so begins the seven days of Holy Week and the Holy Three Days of the Triduum that honor the passion, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.  These are sacred days, challenging days, compelling and complex days that both offer an alternative to the status quo but also way of being in gentle resistance to the realm of violence and conspicuous consumption.  As has become my discipline - and the order of life in our faith community - we begin on Palm Sunday with a blessing of the palms and an outdoor procession.  After the joyous start of the day, however, we quickly shift from Hosannas to Crucify as we read aloud the Passion narrative.  This year our text is taken from Matthew's gospel - chapters 26-27 - and I will share these brief comments from within the text we proclaim.

INTRODUCTION

On Palm Sunday – and all the gatherings we celebrate throughout Holy Week – there are multiple truths and symbols being shared that offer us a variety of insights. There are messages of forgiveness and hope taking place that illuminate both personal and political sin. There is the counter-cultural wisdom of God expressed in these words:  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. 

There is a summons to follow Jesus by living as a servant to all. There is a description of what happens to innocent people when we cast our fears and hatred upon a scapegoat.  And there is a complex and compelling description of human nature that illuminates how God is present in our journey from bravado to betrayal into the beautiful embrace of the Lord’s grace beyond all sin.

It is a universal story that encompasses all of creation.  That’s why it takes a week to tell it:  seven days to listen and seven days to wrestle with what we’ve heard. Seven days that become a symbolic journey between one Sabbath and another and seven days for entering the mysteries of the Cross.  Today we begin again our entrance into these seven days by joining with Christ as he enters into the city of Jerusalem. It is a ceremony that has been taking place in Christ’s church since the fourth century of the Common Era – and for nearly 1200 years has happened in much the same way – with the blessings of the Palms and a procession in the morning followed by an extended reading following the last days of Jesus on earth.

As you prepare to listen to the ancient story made new for our generation, ask yourself:  How did it come to pass that in just five days the crowd that began by cheering “Hosanna” turned into a mob screaming “Crucify?”  Listen now for the word of the Lord…  (we read aloud from Matthew's gospel about the disciples' promise to never betray Jesus.)

FIRST COMMENT

Part One of the Passion speaks to us of betrayal and bravado – it is something we all know about – it is something we have all done and probably will do again.  In this, we’re reminded that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Peter as well as Judas, soon all the disciples as well as the religious scholars and soldier:  ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

+  One of the essential truths of this story that we are asked to make our own is that NO ONE is to be singled out for blame here:  not the Jews, not the Romans, not the Priests or the Crowd or the Disciples.

+  As the French scholar, Rene Girard, has noted:  “Blaming anyone is completely beside the point of this whole story… for when we try to blame anyone, we are missing the exact point.”  The Christian gospel, you see, isn’t about this group or that group needing forgiveness; nor is about this individual or another needing grace. “It is about ALL of us needing forgiveness.”  And not just those who sinned on Good Friday – but all of us who have used our fear and hatred to wound and crucify others as scapegoats.

St. Paul was spot-on:  All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God – so – it’s not my brother, nor my sister, nor the preacher, nor the deacon but it’s ME o Lord that’s standin’ in the need of prayer. (The reading continues in Matthew through Peter's betrayal and shame.)

SECOND COMMENT

Part Two of the Passion points to the role of fear and how it pollutes our

deepest commitments.  Judas acts out of fear, Peter acts out of fear, the Chief Priests and Elders act out of fear and even the mighty governor for Rome, Pontius Pilate, acts out of fear.  And when our actions are motivated by fear, there is usually spilled blood – mostly innocent blood – as we try to punish and obliterate those who make us afraid.

+  One of the many truths Jesus exposes is what it looks like when societies make scapegoats of innocent people.  He chooses to become the Lamb of God who is sacrificed for us in order to show us the invisible horror that takes place every day when fear is the law of the land.

+  As he is betrayed and abandoned, as he is crucified to disguise the fears of those in control, he takes on himself the agony of everyone who is beaten, incarcerated, tortured and executed to make others feel safe and sacred. It is an ugly and wicked truth that touches everyone – and Jesus becomes the victim to show us why it must end. (The reading continues and concludes with Christ's death on the Cross.)

CLOSING COMMENT   

Over and over the Christian tradition has confessed that Jesus became the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  And in one way that is true:  he not only accepted onto himself our fears and violence, but he exposed it to the world from the perspective of the victim.  His innocent embrace of our violence, you see, is an upside-down invitation for us to stop. 

+  When we gather around the Lord’s Table for Holy Communion – when we sing Lamb of God – when we pray the Lord’s Prayer – we are not only making a decision to live in the loving way of Christ Jesus, we are promising to oppose the way of fear and violence.

+  Just as Jesus served his friends at the Passover Meal – know that all of them would betray him and then be forgiven even this most vile sin – we come to the table asking God for the grace to do likewise:  to become servants of peace and hope rather than fear and hatred.

+How does the Lord’s Prayer put it:  forgive us as WE forgive our debtors? Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on… EARTH as it is already being done in heaven?

+  Do you hear what I’m saying? 

Coming to the table – entering the stories and liturgies of Holy Week and spending time with their consequences – is a gentle form of resistance against cruelty and hatred and fear and sin.  It is a counter-cultural commitment that celebrates the values of Jesus as Lord.  It is a promise NOT to bow down to the idol of fear and scape-goating, but to trust that God’s love can make us all one by grace.  In a word, we come to the table to be fed and nourished by God’s peace that passes all human understanding.  And this, beloved, is the good news for today for those who have ears to hear.

credits:

1) www.stmaryhuntley.org

2) ?

3) www.stanneslincoln.org

A living faith...

I have a nuanced but imperfect faith: there are gaps I cannot explain and aspects I have chosen to embrace without complete comprehension. I think that is the working definition of faith, yes? It is trust that God is God. In this trust, I don't have to pretend to have a wisdom that can explain all things to all people. Rather, like the mother of Jesus, my calling is to ponder many things in my heart - holding them together - without knowing their full meaning. The gospel of John puts it like this at the foot of the Cross: Mother, behold thy son.

This is a call to contemplation - taking a long, loving look at what is real - and holding it deep within my heart. Some consider this a "simple faith" or even a "childlike faith" - and that is partly true. There is a deep peace that comes in surrender, acceptance and trust. Like Psalm 131 says:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
   my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
   too great and too marvelous for me. 
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   like a weaned child with its mother;
   my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

At the same time, however, it is a complex faith - filled with paradox - and saturated with unknowing. When I was doing post-graduate work at San Francisco Theological Seminary, there was a deep emphasis on making all of our academic work valuable for the local church. As my adviser used to say, "If you cannot talk about human suffering and God's place within it in a way that matters to the people in your congregation, you shouldn't be there." A bit harsh, perhaps, but equally true. No question vexes both clergy and congregation more than this one. Another challenge from the seminary was equally demanding: "Because you can never know all things, you have to figure out which gaps in your understanding you can live with." That is, with humility and patience, a pastor must come to terms with the limits of human wisdom and the vastness of God's mysteries.

Anything less, it seems to me, is hubris. In time I came to believe that a great deal of human suffering (but not all) can be explained and understood as part of God's creation: we were formed - and creation is so ordered - in such a way that we can learn from our failures and go deeper into grace through our sins. It is painful. It is often ugly. And it is always tragic. But, as Paul writes, in ALL things God works for good with those who love the Lord. Not that all things are good, but that all things can lead us into greater intimacy and trust of the Lord if we are willing to follow the way of the Cross.

Fr. Richard Rohr has been exploring this downward spiral as the way of holy wisdom for the past few years with verve and zest.  In this extended quote from two of his daily reflections, the central symbol of Christianity - the Cross - is shown to be the way of a faith that grows closer to the truth of the Lord even through our suffering.  It is NOT, mind you, the same as saying God caused suffering. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that God invites us to use our suffering to experience deeper love. 

The Cross teaches us to win by losing. But the ego doesn’t like that. The ego wants to win by winning! That’s the nature of the human psyche. And when the ego is not exposed for what it is, which Jesus’ teaching does very clearly, it simply gets out of control.

In a masterful game of smoke and mirrors, the Christian church has focused for centuries on judging the shadow self, which Jesus never wasted time on. He put all of his energy into revealing the ego self. But we have spent most of our time making people feel guilty about their shadow self, that part of us for which Jesus has great pity and sympathy and compassion. Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners (i.e., those who have not faced their shadow and often project their evil elsewhere).

Look at Jesus’ story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee’s ego had him trying to engineer his own righteousness. He could not see the shadow of his arrogance and judgment. The tax collector saw his sin, and realized his complete reliance on God’s mercy. It was the tax collector who went home “justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18: 14).

The commonly accepted version of Christianity has largely developed in response to individual ego needs for worthiness and significance. But in the biblical tradition you do not see this self-made, autonomous “getting it right” agenda that you see in later images of Christian holiness. Biblical rightness is primarily right relationship! There are no Promethean figures in the Bible. With the possible exception of Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Jesus himself, almost every other biblical character, whether in Hebrew or Christian scriptures, is shown as a transformed sinner, as someone who first does it wrong before he or she ever does it right. The Bible is full of flawed, wounded individuals.

By the grace of God, saints and holy ones of every century still got the

point of the transforming power of the path of descent, but only if they were willing to go through those painful descents that Catholics called the “way of the cross,” which Jesus called “the sign of Jonah,” which Augustine called the “paschal mystery,” or the Apostles Creed called “the descent into hell.” 

Without these journeys, there’s something you simply don’t understand about the nature of God or the nature of the soul. “Can you drink of the cup that I am going to drink?” Jesus said to James and John, who still wanted roles. “We can!” they responded, and he said, to paraphrase, “Indeed, you will and you must, but roles are not my concern” (see Matthew 20:22-23). Religion is largely populated by people afraid of hell; spirituality begins to make sense to those who have been through hell—that is, who have drunk deeply of life’s difficulties.

Christians speak of the “paschal mystery,” the process of loss and renewal that was lived and personified in the death and raising up of Jesus. We can affirm that belief in ritual and song, as we do in the Eucharist, but until people have lost their foundation and ground, and then experienced God upholding them so that they come out even more alive on the other side, the expression “paschal mystery” is little understood and not essentially transformative.

I have come to embrace what Rohr articulates so clearly:  until we have lost our foundation and experienced God's upholding, faith is more of an intellectual construct than a part of our soul.