Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, and we begin our 40 day journey of Lent, our 40 day journey with Jesus to the cross. The season of Lent is a spiritual journey through the wilderness, modeled on the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness following His baptism. It is preparation for the times we all spend in the spiritual wilderness, for those dark nights of the soul, for those desert places in our lives when we see little before us to feed our spiritual hunger and thirst, and God seems far away. It’s a time for reflection, introspection, repentance, and renewal of our faith and our relationship with God.
Our Psalm reading for today is a traveling song of sorts, a song about being on the journey of faith, such as the 40 day journey that lies ahead of us. The Psalms, of course, were the songbook for the Jews and early Christians. The Psalms are in many ways the most human-feeling parts of the Bible. In much of the Old Testament, we get history; we get laws and commandments; we get prophets pleading with us to change our ways. In the Gospels, we get biographies of Jesus, in Acts, we hear of the beginnings of the early church, and in Paul’s letters and the other epistles we get theology. But reading the Psalms is like overhearing someone praying or singing to God, like overhearing someone’s most secret thoughts, someone’s cry from the heart. While we clean up our speech when we’re in public, our private thoughts and prayers can run from adoration of God, to anger over life’s circumstances, fear of danger, rage at those we see as our enemies, and back to gratitude to God. However polite and appropriate we are in public, our private thoughts aren’t always so pretty. And the Psalms are like that. The same Psalm 139 that begins with words about God knowing our sitting down and rising up, and of our being fearfully and wonderfully made, near the end breaks into a plea for God to kill the wicked. Psalm 137, in which the Psalmist speaks of never forgetting Jerusalem, ends with these words to Babylon: “Happy are those who will take your children and dash them against a rock.” (Congregations with a “safe church” policy may want to avoid having this guy help in the nursery.) The Psalms aren’t all sweetness and light – not hardly! They reflect the whole range of human emotion, and Psalm 25 is no exception.
In Psalm 25, the Psalmist pours out his heart to God – his trust in God, his plea for God to protect him from his enemies, his pleas for forgiveness, his humble willingness to follow where God leads, his gratitude for God’s faithfulness. While our life circumstances are very different from that of the Psalmist, we all know the feeling of being overwhelmed by life’s troubles – bereavement, illness, loss of employment, family problems. Some who read these Psalms know the pain of being uprooted and dislocated, of being a stranger in a strange land, “alone and afraid in a world they never made.” In all these circumstances, we, like the Psalmist, can cry to God – “To you I lift up my heart; do not let me be ashamed; do not let life’s troubles overwhelm me.” With the Psalmist, we can ask for God to teach us God’s paths. We can plea for God not to remember the sins of our youth – in the words of the hymn we just sang, “remember not past years.” And throughout Psalm 25 comes the refrain of God’s steadfast love – “be mindful of your mercy, O God, and of your steadfast love, for they have been of old.” “According to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord.” “All the paths of God are steadfast love and faithfulness for those who keep God’s covenant and God’s decrees.” Steadfast love – steadfast love – steadfast love – this refrain of “God’s steadfast love” is what can keep the Psalmist – and us – going through the worst that life can offer.
Our reading from Genesis speaks of God’s protection for the family of Noah. The flood waters – which have wiped out human and animal life except for those in the ark with Noah – are receding. God says, “The waters will never again become a flood to destroy all flesh” – and the rainbow is a sign of this promise from God. And we can claim this promise – though the flood of trouble around us threatens to carry us away, God will not allow it to destroy us. The rainbow is a reminder of God’s promise of steadfast love.
Our reading from I Peter sees the reference to the flood waters as a reference to baptism. As the flood destroyed the wicked, while Noah was saved, in our baptism our sinful nature is drowned, and we are saved and claimed for Christ. The reading also speaks to Jesus “preaching to the spirits in prison”, that is, proclaiming salvation to the spirits in hell. This is where the phrase from the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell” comes from. This tells us that God is with us on our journey, and that Jesus will literally go through hell in order to save us. That’s how much we are loved by God. In our baptism, God says to us, as he said to Jesus, “You are my beloved son – my beloved daughter – with you I am well pleased.”
Which brings us to our Gospel reading from Mark. We actually read part of this passage a few weeks ago, on the Sunday after Epiphany, back in mid-January, when we remembered the baptism of Jesus. But now we go further. In Mark’s usual condensed fashion, Mark takes us directly from Jesus’ receiving a blessing from God himself to Jesus’ going into the wilderness, to be tempted by Satan. And that’s often how it is with us. We can experience some moment in which we feel God’s presence so close to us, and we want to hang onto it. And yet life carries us from these moments of intimacy with God, out into those dark nights of the soul where it almost feels like God has forsaken us. The moments of intimacy with God are like an oasis, where we can draw the nourishment that will carry us through the lean times, through our time in the spiritual wilderness, so that we have the strength to come out on the other side stronger for the experience, grateful for God’s steadfast love, even through those times when God seemed far away.
“Lead, kindly light, amid the circling gloom – lead thou us on.” God leads, and we follow, through our urban wilderness of Philadelphia, where one can be surrounded by people and yet very much alone, alone in the crowd; and through the wilderness in our souls where we cry to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” Like Peter when he tried to walk on the water toward Jesus, we may at times feel the ground giving way beneath us, and reach out a hand, saying, “Lord, I’m sinking.” Yet we can have confidence in the promises – the many promises - of God’s steadfast love, God’s steadfast love that carried the Psalmist, carried Jesus, and will carry us through the wilderness. Amen.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Transfigured
M Night Shymalan was acclaimed for his 1999 movie “The Sixth Sense.” You may remember the plot: a little boy who claimed, “I see dead people” is seeing a therapist. The therapist, played by Bruce Willis, listens to the boy tell of seeing the spirits of deceased people who do not know they’re dead. Meanwhile the psychiatrist is struggling with his own sense of estrangement from his wife, who does not speak to him and turns away from him when he’s in the room with her. The twist in the plot is the therapist ultimately discovers, to his dismay, that he himself is one of the dead people that the boy is seeing, and that his wife’s apparent silence and distance are expressions of her grief at his demise. This change in perspective allows the viewer to see everything that has gone before in a new way. The viewer who thought he or she was watching events unfold according to one pattern, found themselves at the end of the movie remembering these same events from a very different perspective.
In Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 9:2-9) Peter, James and John find themselves in a plot line that could come from one of Shymalan’s movies. You could say that it even involves the disciples seeing dead people. Peter had just declared his insight that Jesus was the Messiah – but then Jesus had disappointed Peter and the others by foretelling his suffering and death, that Jesus would be a very different Messiah than they expected. We’re told that six days later, Jesus led Peter, James and John up to a high mountain, away from the other disciples. Then Jesus was transfigured before them – “his clothes became dazzling white, whiter than any bleach could make them.” On either side of Jesus were Moses and Elijah, who spoke to Jesus.
What are we to make of all this? It’s certainly interesting to read about long-ago mountaintop experience, but what does that have to do with us?
I suspect many of us, maybe all of us, have had what could be called mountaintop experiences, times when, even if only for a few minutes or even a few seconds, we were seemingly lifted up out of our normal routine and given a moment or two of transcendence – moments when we could see beyond the normal daily humdrum and business to feel a sense of the big picture, a sense of connection with everything around us, a sense of knowing and being known, perhaps a sense of the eternal significance of the ordinary acts of love and caring that are part of our daily routine. Celtic Christians had a phrase – “thin places” – for their experiences of finding the veil separating earth and heaven seemingly thinner than usual, so that they could almost glimpse beyond time into eternity. These brief mountaintop experiences can provide perspective and renewed passion to help us slog through the muck and mire of our daily lives.
Our time in worship can sometimes be a mountaintop experience. Occasionally God breaks through the routine of familiar hymns and Scriptures to touch us directly. The words of a hymn go right to our souls, and we well up with tears of gratitude. Notes from organ accompaniment or other sacred music may seemingly reach right in and touch and heal our broken hearts. A Scripture strikes us as if God had written those very words just for us and just for the circumstances we’re going through. Perhaps a sermon illustration helps us see a nagging longtime frustration in a new light.
We can carry with us the memory of those mountaintop moments, those times when God seemed especially close. They can give us the perspective of eternity – the perspective that we’ve never had an ordinary, meaningless day in our lives, that no such thing as an ordinary day exists, that God is in us and in our neighbor, that God can use our most seemingly throwaway conversations and meaningless acts to bring about salvation, to usher in the Kingdom of God. As Christian writer C. S. Lewis put it,
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
May God transfigure our perspective on our neighbors, on our lives, and on the many gifts that God bestows on each of us – that every waking moment contains opportunities for service to God, that every encounter with another human being contains the potential for a life-changing encounter.
In Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 9:2-9) Peter, James and John find themselves in a plot line that could come from one of Shymalan’s movies. You could say that it even involves the disciples seeing dead people. Peter had just declared his insight that Jesus was the Messiah – but then Jesus had disappointed Peter and the others by foretelling his suffering and death, that Jesus would be a very different Messiah than they expected. We’re told that six days later, Jesus led Peter, James and John up to a high mountain, away from the other disciples. Then Jesus was transfigured before them – “his clothes became dazzling white, whiter than any bleach could make them.” On either side of Jesus were Moses and Elijah, who spoke to Jesus.
What are we to make of all this? It’s certainly interesting to read about long-ago mountaintop experience, but what does that have to do with us?
I suspect many of us, maybe all of us, have had what could be called mountaintop experiences, times when, even if only for a few minutes or even a few seconds, we were seemingly lifted up out of our normal routine and given a moment or two of transcendence – moments when we could see beyond the normal daily humdrum and business to feel a sense of the big picture, a sense of connection with everything around us, a sense of knowing and being known, perhaps a sense of the eternal significance of the ordinary acts of love and caring that are part of our daily routine. Celtic Christians had a phrase – “thin places” – for their experiences of finding the veil separating earth and heaven seemingly thinner than usual, so that they could almost glimpse beyond time into eternity. These brief mountaintop experiences can provide perspective and renewed passion to help us slog through the muck and mire of our daily lives.
Our time in worship can sometimes be a mountaintop experience. Occasionally God breaks through the routine of familiar hymns and Scriptures to touch us directly. The words of a hymn go right to our souls, and we well up with tears of gratitude. Notes from organ accompaniment or other sacred music may seemingly reach right in and touch and heal our broken hearts. A Scripture strikes us as if God had written those very words just for us and just for the circumstances we’re going through. Perhaps a sermon illustration helps us see a nagging longtime frustration in a new light.
We can carry with us the memory of those mountaintop moments, those times when God seemed especially close. They can give us the perspective of eternity – the perspective that we’ve never had an ordinary, meaningless day in our lives, that no such thing as an ordinary day exists, that God is in us and in our neighbor, that God can use our most seemingly throwaway conversations and meaningless acts to bring about salvation, to usher in the Kingdom of God. As Christian writer C. S. Lewis put it,
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
May God transfigure our perspective on our neighbors, on our lives, and on the many gifts that God bestows on each of us – that every waking moment contains opportunities for service to God, that every encounter with another human being contains the potential for a life-changing encounter.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Cooties
Do you remember back in grade school, there always seemed to be one or two kids who nobody liked? Maybe they came from poor or otherwise troubled families, and their clothes might be frayed hand-me-downs. They were always the last to be picked for games at recess, and always walked home from school alone. In my small-town grade school, there was Sheila, whose family was very poor. Everyone said that “Sheila has cooties.” As she walked home, the kids would chant, “Sheila has cooties, Sheila has cooties.” Nobody wanted to get too close to Sheila, because if you did, you might get cooties too. I have no idea whatever happened to Sheila, but I doubt she has a lot of fond memories from her years as a student in elementary school.
This week’s Gospel reading (Mark 1:40-45) reminded me of Sheila’s plight. In his travels, Jesus was approached by a leper – a man who had the skin disease of leprosy. Leprosy was a dreaded disease – disfiguring, and thought to be highly contagious. This was 1900 years before the discovery of penicillin or any sort of treatment, and so the only remedy was a public health approach – quarantine and isolation – just as some may remember for TB and flu and other epidemics before the invention of antibiotics. The idea of quarantine is that the authorities couldn’t cure those infected, but they could at least try to slow down or stop the spread of the disease by isolating the sick person. The book of Leviticus has very detailed instructions on how to tell leprosy from other skin diseases, and what procedures were to be taken in case of infection. Leviticus 13:45-46 “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
In our Gospel today, the leper acted outside of the prescribed procedures – rather than shouting “unclean”, he asked Jesus for healing – “if you choose, you can make me clean.” After which we run headlong into a translation problem. Most of our Bibles say that in response to the leper’s plea, Jesus was moved with compassion. But some more recent translations may have a note at the bottom that says, “alternate translation – Jesus was moved with anger” – perhaps at the isolation the man had to endure. Exactly what Jesus felt, we don’t know – the translators aren’t certain, and neither are we. What we do know from the text is that Jesus said, “I do choose” and healed the man.
We don’t hear much about leprosy these days. As of a few years ago, the last leper colony, on the island of Molokoi, had only a handful of elderly leprosy patients. However, every society treats certain groups of “others” as lepers, or as though they have cooties.
Who are the lepers, the untouchables in our society? You know who they are – among them are the groups whom politicians beat like a piñata every election season, blaming them for all our problems. One example is the homeless, from whom we may avert our eyes as we walk down the street. (I’m as guilty as anyone else.) And it’s true that many of the homeless we see downtown are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Yet many in our society are living closer to the edge than we know, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being out on the street, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being one of those from whom we avert our eyes. And in today’s economy, if we’re not blessed with a strong support network of family and friends and church, we can find ourselves over the edge very quickly indeed.
Those with mental health problems frequently find themselves in extreme isolation. Our society frequently doesn’t treat mental illness as seriously as physical illness – the attitude is that the mentally ill are not “really” sick in the way that people with diabetes or heart disease are sick. Insurance companies frequently offer very limited coverage for mental health treatment – maybe 8 sessions with a therapist - if they offer any at all. Those without insurance may “self-medicate” with alcohol or street drugs. Employers who would offer common decency to a co-worker recovering from a heart attack may not offer anything like the same common decency to a co-worker struggling with severe depression. Jokes about multiple personalities or being treated like “the crazy aunt in the attic” can be funny – except if you’re mentally ill, in which case the punch line can feel like a punch in the gut.
Jesus told the healed leper, “Go, and show yourself to the priest.” In Jesus’ day, the priest had the role of reintroducing the healed leper to the wider society. We in the church have no magic cure for illness, but we do have a cure for the isolation of being shunned by society. The love of Christ enables us – and compels us - to include where others exclude, to embrace those whom others shun. For in the end, we’re every one of us broken in some way or another. All of us struggle with sin, struggle with frailties of body and spirit. While we try to distance ourselves from those who are different, using phrases like “the homeless” or “the mentally ill”, ultimately there’s no “the”, no them, only us, all of us. Ultimately the welcome we offer our society’s untouchables is the welcome God offers us.
This week’s Gospel reading (Mark 1:40-45) reminded me of Sheila’s plight. In his travels, Jesus was approached by a leper – a man who had the skin disease of leprosy. Leprosy was a dreaded disease – disfiguring, and thought to be highly contagious. This was 1900 years before the discovery of penicillin or any sort of treatment, and so the only remedy was a public health approach – quarantine and isolation – just as some may remember for TB and flu and other epidemics before the invention of antibiotics. The idea of quarantine is that the authorities couldn’t cure those infected, but they could at least try to slow down or stop the spread of the disease by isolating the sick person. The book of Leviticus has very detailed instructions on how to tell leprosy from other skin diseases, and what procedures were to be taken in case of infection. Leviticus 13:45-46 “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
In our Gospel today, the leper acted outside of the prescribed procedures – rather than shouting “unclean”, he asked Jesus for healing – “if you choose, you can make me clean.” After which we run headlong into a translation problem. Most of our Bibles say that in response to the leper’s plea, Jesus was moved with compassion. But some more recent translations may have a note at the bottom that says, “alternate translation – Jesus was moved with anger” – perhaps at the isolation the man had to endure. Exactly what Jesus felt, we don’t know – the translators aren’t certain, and neither are we. What we do know from the text is that Jesus said, “I do choose” and healed the man.
We don’t hear much about leprosy these days. As of a few years ago, the last leper colony, on the island of Molokoi, had only a handful of elderly leprosy patients. However, every society treats certain groups of “others” as lepers, or as though they have cooties.
Who are the lepers, the untouchables in our society? You know who they are – among them are the groups whom politicians beat like a piñata every election season, blaming them for all our problems. One example is the homeless, from whom we may avert our eyes as we walk down the street. (I’m as guilty as anyone else.) And it’s true that many of the homeless we see downtown are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Yet many in our society are living closer to the edge than we know, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being out on the street, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being one of those from whom we avert our eyes. And in today’s economy, if we’re not blessed with a strong support network of family and friends and church, we can find ourselves over the edge very quickly indeed.
Those with mental health problems frequently find themselves in extreme isolation. Our society frequently doesn’t treat mental illness as seriously as physical illness – the attitude is that the mentally ill are not “really” sick in the way that people with diabetes or heart disease are sick. Insurance companies frequently offer very limited coverage for mental health treatment – maybe 8 sessions with a therapist - if they offer any at all. Those without insurance may “self-medicate” with alcohol or street drugs. Employers who would offer common decency to a co-worker recovering from a heart attack may not offer anything like the same common decency to a co-worker struggling with severe depression. Jokes about multiple personalities or being treated like “the crazy aunt in the attic” can be funny – except if you’re mentally ill, in which case the punch line can feel like a punch in the gut.
Jesus told the healed leper, “Go, and show yourself to the priest.” In Jesus’ day, the priest had the role of reintroducing the healed leper to the wider society. We in the church have no magic cure for illness, but we do have a cure for the isolation of being shunned by society. The love of Christ enables us – and compels us - to include where others exclude, to embrace those whom others shun. For in the end, we’re every one of us broken in some way or another. All of us struggle with sin, struggle with frailties of body and spirit. While we try to distance ourselves from those who are different, using phrases like “the homeless” or “the mentally ill”, ultimately there’s no “the”, no them, only us, all of us. Ultimately the welcome we offer our society’s untouchables is the welcome God offers us.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Wings
Today’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah 40 says, in part, “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.” Today’s Gospel (Mark 1:29-39) gives us one of Jesus’ secrets for how he was able to deal with the demands of the crowds who came to him for healing and help. Mark 1:35 says, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, [Jesus] got up and went to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” For Jesus to help those who came to him, he needed regular quality time in prayer to God.
Communities of religious – monks, nuns – maintain a balance between prayer and work, or in Latin, ora et labora. Both are necessary for spiritual balance and growth. They drew this model from the life of Jesus, who would periodically draw away from the crowds to draw near God in prayer. Both are needed – constant activity that’s not spiritually grounded can run itself into the ground with exhaustion; constant meditation exclusive of service can easily become a head trip, pie in the sky fantasy and self-indulgence. We might think of the two arms of the cross, the vertical and the horizontal. True connection with God – true vertical connection – will inevitably lead us to make a true horizontal connection with neighbor. Ora provides the grounding for labora.
At a time when I was feeling burned-out by work and church demands, I went to a conference sponsored by my denomination. The keynote speaker told the story of her conversation with a volunteer who complained of feeling burned out. The keynote speaker told the volunteer, “You’re not burned out. You haven’t even caught fire yet.”
The way to catch fire and keep the flame burning bright is to go regularly to God in prayer. Prayer is how we keep our ears open and pay attention to the direction in which God is calling us. Prayer is how we keep our eyes open to catch the vision of how our individual lives and the life of Emanuel Church fit into the larger life of the Kingdom of God. Like Jesus, we must come away from the crowds and our workaday lives, to spend time in prayer with God. Empowered by God in prayer, we, like Jesus, can then return to the crowds and our daily tasks, can go back to our places of ministry renewed, refreshed, and ready to soar with wings like eagles as we serve our loving God.
Communities of religious – monks, nuns – maintain a balance between prayer and work, or in Latin, ora et labora. Both are necessary for spiritual balance and growth. They drew this model from the life of Jesus, who would periodically draw away from the crowds to draw near God in prayer. Both are needed – constant activity that’s not spiritually grounded can run itself into the ground with exhaustion; constant meditation exclusive of service can easily become a head trip, pie in the sky fantasy and self-indulgence. We might think of the two arms of the cross, the vertical and the horizontal. True connection with God – true vertical connection – will inevitably lead us to make a true horizontal connection with neighbor. Ora provides the grounding for labora.
At a time when I was feeling burned-out by work and church demands, I went to a conference sponsored by my denomination. The keynote speaker told the story of her conversation with a volunteer who complained of feeling burned out. The keynote speaker told the volunteer, “You’re not burned out. You haven’t even caught fire yet.”
The way to catch fire and keep the flame burning bright is to go regularly to God in prayer. Prayer is how we keep our ears open and pay attention to the direction in which God is calling us. Prayer is how we keep our eyes open to catch the vision of how our individual lives and the life of Emanuel Church fit into the larger life of the Kingdom of God. Like Jesus, we must come away from the crowds and our workaday lives, to spend time in prayer with God. Empowered by God in prayer, we, like Jesus, can then return to the crowds and our daily tasks, can go back to our places of ministry renewed, refreshed, and ready to soar with wings like eagles as we serve our loving God.
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