Sermon for 8.26.12

Scriptures for this week are Here

Neil Armstrong died yesterday, the first man to walk on the moon.  What you may not know is that the first food and drink ever shared on the moon was the Body and Blood of Christ: Buzz Aldrin brought consecrated bread and wine from his church in Houston, and there in the lunar module, he and Neil shared communion before the moonwalk.

This is going to “out” me as a “woman of a certain age,” but I remember that moonwalk quite clearly.  I was a child – too young to be staying up that late – but my parents insisted.  They said I would never forget the night I watched a man walk on the moon (and they’re right, so far).  So I stayed up late, wrapped in my fluffy purple bathrobe, sat squished between my mother and my father on the old beige couch in the living room, leaned my head on my father’s shoulder, and worked hard to keep my eyes open as the television screen showed fuzzy black and white pictures.  And I watched as a man in a white spacesuit climbed down a ladder onto the moon, and I listened as the static-y voice said, 

“That’s one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind.”

Afterward, later that night before my parents finally put me to bed, my father and I decided to walk outside and look up at the moon, to see if it was different with those dusty footprints on the surface.  We walked out into the warm summer night, he held my hand, and we gazed up.  I looked at the moon, so tiny and so high up, so white and so cold in the darkness, and I said, I don’t see the astronauts up there.  My father smiled and said, that’s because they’re so far away that you can’t see them – but they’re there.

And it seemed to me, as I stood there in my fuzzy slippers, holding my father’s hand and gazing up, that I stood at the center of the universe – that that sidewalk where I stood in an apartment complex in Philadelphia was a little point around which everything else revolved – that the night sky with all its stars, with the tiny moon and the tinier astronauts, made a circle all around us where we stood, and beyond that somewhere, making a big circle around the entire outside of the sky, somewhere beyond everything I could see, was God, encompassing everything, encircling it all.

God was so very, very far away that I could never see him.  But somehow, God could see the astronauts, and God could see all the people standing on the earth gazing up into the sky, and God could see me.  Because God was very far away, yet God was very close – as close as my father holding my hand, and as loving and protective.  That’s how it seemed to me.

Which is not so far from how the ancient Jewish people saw God – God as far away, enthroned in a heaven that somehow encircled the earth and the sky, and encompassed everything there was, with the earth at the center of the universe, and the Temple in Jerusalem as the center point of everything on earth.  They knew that God was far away and higher up than anything they could imagine; yet they knew that God also makes God’s home right here with human beings. 

Solomon’s prayer in the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures today dedicates the Temple in Jerusalem to the God of Israel.  Yet the Jews never thought God could be contained in any one structure, so Solomon calls the Temple a home for God’s name, not a home for God – he knows the Temple can never contain all of God’s glory.  Where other ancient peoples worshiped idols that could be localized in a place or even a statue, the Jews always knew their God to be much bigger than human imagination.  So when they built the Temple in Jerusalem, the magnificent Temple, full of gold and marble, one of the great wonders of the world, they built it not as a home for God – but as a connection point, a passageway between heaven and earth; a place where people could experience God’s presence .

The Jews knew just as well as we do, that God is found everywhere, that every moment of their lives was infused with God’s presence, if only they could open their minds to understand that presence – so God was far away and yet as close as their own hands and lips and hearts.  Which is why they saw every human act as holy and blessed – the kosher laws recognized that the smallest, most human of acts, like eating, was a holy thing, done in thanksgiving and recognition of God’s blessing, the gift of life.

Yet, because human beings cannot always see God’s presence in ordinary life, because we don’t always remember to look up, because we get caught up in the ordinary stuff of human life, and forget that every molecule is a gift from God, we create places where we come together, places where we experience God’s presence in worship.  Places where, as Solomon says in his prayer, God’s name shall be there – a focal point for us to experience God’s presence.

Solomon dedicates the ancient Temple in today’s prayer.  In this ceremony, the ark, which holds the very tablets that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as a cloud descended on the mountain and Moses talked to God, face to face – that same ark, with the stone tablets, has been carried from place to place until this time.  In today’s reading, it is carried in and placed in the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. 

This moment of homecoming for the ark is so holy a moment, so infused with the experience of the presence of God, that the Bible can only describe it as a cloud that filled the temple, the glory of God filling the house of the Lord.  And Solomon stands before the altar and prays that God’s presence will be with all who pray there – all Jews who come and offer sacrifices, and all foreigners too, all outsiders who don’t know God and yet yearn to experience God’s presence; that God may hear their prayers and answer them.

I read this account of the dedication of God’s Temple, and I picture this image of a cloud filling the Temple, and my question becomes: where and how do we experience God’s presence? 

I was lucky enough to go to Russia this summer – a land of contrasts, where you can see the gilded palaces of czars, filled with priceless artworks, next to blocks and blocks of Soviet-era apartment buildings, gray and square and stern, with conscious efforts to erase all beauty and distinction.  In the middle of all this, you can see the beautiful Russian churches, gilded and domed.  At the time of the Russian Revolution, there were 1,000 churches in St. Petersburg.  During the Soviet era, that number was reduced to 5 or 6 – people were too afraid to come – and lovely old churches were used as warehouses.  But, our tour guide told us, people never forgot their religion – they never forgot Jesus – in quiet, people kept telling the stories of Jesus.  And after communism fell, many people came and were baptized, and churches began to reopen – now there are 500 churches open in St. Petersburg.

We visited a number of them, and I had a similar experience in several of them.  One of the was the church called “Savior on the Spilled Blood” in St. Petersburg.  I walked into the cathedral, a feast for the senses, sparkling with color, and I gazed up and up into the golden domes, soaring overhead – and beautiful as it was, I didn’t see God there.

I looked around at the arches, the color-infused mosaics, the icons of Jesus and Mary and other saints, infused with architectural beauty – and stunning though it was, I didn’t see God there.

Then I heard music, and walked over to a tiny side chapel, and saw a congregation gathered for a midday service – a priest in vestments of gold, a small choir singing soaringly beautiful chants, incense rising in the air, and a group of worshipers, standing and bowing and crossing themselves.  I watched a woman enter with her daughter, and she showed the girl how to cover her head, and guided her hand to light a candle, and held her hand and showed her when to bow and when to make the sign of the cross, and I thought of the thousands of people in that church who had done the same thing, and millions of others who stand in worship and pray throughout the world every day, and the one or two hundred of us who do the same thing each week at Nativity. 

And in the middle of that group of worshipers in a resurrected church in a reawakening city – that’s where I saw the presence of God.  Because God is in the midst of us – God dwells in the community of worship.  God is with us when we pray.  God is with us when we tell the stories of Jesus.  And God is with us in the small and ordinary elements of bread and wine that we share, because Christ has chosen to come to us in this way.

And I think we know, here at Nativity, that any place can be infused with the presence of God – we who have created a beautiful place to worship in an ordinary office building on a very unremarkable street – but it’s not the beautiful things that make it holy.  We are building a bigger, more beautiful home for this church now.  But we build it not because God will live there.  We build it to gather a community:  the ones who are here already, and the outsiders that Solomon prayed for, who yearn for the presence of God, who we are called to reach. 

We build it so that in this community, we can experience the presence of God.  We build it so that generations of people can know his glory, glory that encompasses the universe, and yet is as close to us as our own hands and hearts, as close as the bread we eat and wine we drink, as we stand at the still center point of the beautiful turning world.

Sermon for 8.12.12

Scriptures for today are Here

I love the Olympics: I love the competitions, the drama, the fresh-faced athletes doing remarkable feats: the Michael Phelpses, the Missy Franklins, the US women’s soccer team.  And I love the non-US athletes too – like Katie Taylor, the Irish gold medalist in women’s boxing, and Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive, and Oskar Pistorius, the double amputee who sprints on two prosthetic legs. 

You look at those incredibly well-trained bodies and the things they do seem almost impossible, and yet you know that the moment of glory atop the medal stand is not the real story of their lives – the real story is what got them there.  These are folks who have spent almost every waking hour for years and years, doing the same things over and over and over, trying and failing and trying again – because that’s what it takes to become the best at a sport.

And yet there’s more to it than just practicing – these are people who have physical gifts, of strength and speed and flexibility, that you and I don’t have.  I read an article recently that said that many professional dancers have two genes that are different than the genes that most people have – there is something in their genetic makeup that means they were truly “born to dance.”  And I’m sure the same can be said of world-class gymnasts and swimmers and runners too – not to mention world-class writers, musicians, physicists, doctors, and so on.  Something in each of us makes us uniquely talented to do the things we are best at: because it begins with natural gifts, long before the years of work.

The fresh-faced, bubbly, incredibly poised winner of the women’s all-around gymnastics gold medal, Gabby Douglas, said after she won, “I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.” 

Some athletes who thank God for big wins seem to think it was God’s will to hand them the victory (and hand their opponents the loss).  But it seems to me that Gabby has more advanced wisdom: she seems to understand that God gave her the gifts she needed to become a great gymnast, and that everything she does to develop that gift, and delight in it, and give delight to others through it, gives glory back to God.  She understands her talent as a gift that came first to her, that she gives back.

That movement, of a gift that comes from God and then goes back to God, is what we can see in our scriptures today.  In the gospel, we read today the continuation of a story that we have been following for several weeks now.  Jesus is teaching in the wilderness, the crowds follow him, and when they get hungry, Jesus commands the disciples to feed them with a few loaves and fishes.  This is a vitally important story for Christians to know:  we can tell because unlike most stories, it appears in all four gospels.  So somehow this feeding story is a key to our faith, if we use it to unlock the right door, and understand what it is saying to us.

But where the other gospels leave that story for us to wonder about and marvel over, in John’s gospel, Jesus tell the disciples what this feeding means – essentially, he says that what he has done is, he has acted out a real-life parable.  A parable is something that surprises us, that opens our eyes to a deeper reality, that gives us layers of meaning to explore and experience.  Often parables are stories Jesus tells – there once was a man who had two sons, there once was a vineyard whose owner went away to a far country, etc.  In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t tell parables so much as he acts them out, in the miracles he performs.  The miracles are signs that point us to what God is doing through Jesus – symbols that open our eyes to a deeper reality.

So Jesus doesn’t just feed the crowds just to prevent them from starving, or even to get ooh’s and aah’s because he’s a miracle worker.  He very carefully shows how this miracle explains what God is doing through him, by reminding his Jewish audience of the most important story of their history, when Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, across the wilderness of Sinai to the Promised Land.

During their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, they got hungry and started complaining against Moses, the same way the people in today’s story start complaining – and God sends them bread to eat – manna in wilderness, bread in the desert that saves their life and sustains them on journey to freedom.  This bread they eat becomes the sign of the most important gift God gave to the Jewish people – the gift of freedom in the Promised Land.  They still eat the bread of freedom today, in the Passover matzoh that helps them remember the journey from slavery to freedom.

Over a thousand years later, Jesus acts out this ancient story by giving the people bread in the wilderness once more – then he turns the story on its head by saying something astonishing: he says, I am the Bread of Life.  Jesus takes manna story a step further: he says he is not only our Bread of Freedom, but also our Bread of Life.  Jesus is the manna that God has given us to eat, the bread that keeps us alive in our life’s deserts, the bread that means we will never be hungry again, the gift that ensures that we will never die.

So Jesus is more than someone one who satisfies our physical hunger: he is soul food, spiritual food, food that fills our true emptiness, the emptiness we experience in our spirits if we try to live a life without God.  He is the one God has sent to fill what French mathematician Blaise Pascal called the God-shaped hole in our hearts. 

Pascal talked about the emptiness and longing that most humans feel at some point.  Pascal said: "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in us a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This we try in vain to fill with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

The achievements, the possessions, the entertainments and pleasures that we work so hard for are ultimately empty – they will not fill the hole in our hearts.  Jesus is the gift that God has given us before we worked for the gift, before we deserved the gift, before we even knew we needed a gift.  Jesus is the food that satisfies our emptiness and our longing.

And in a sense, the Olympic athlete this gift reminds me of is not Gabby Douglas so much as Lopez Lomong, the US track team member who ran the 5,000 meters yesterday.  He finished in 10^th place, so he won’t be taking any medals home, but the race he won started long before this Olympics.  If you don’t know his story, look it up – it’s amazing.  Born in South Sudan in a tiny village without running water or electricity, he lived in one-room hut with his family, helped his parents grow subsistence crops without even a plow.

At age 6, he was in church one day when armed soldiers broke in, kidnapped him and the other children present, took them to a camp to become child soldiers, where they were starved and mistreated.  Three older boys befriended him, and one night, the four of them escaped from the camp and started running.  They ran without stopping for three days and three nights, in a journey he tells about in his book, Running for My Life, until they found their way to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he stayed for a number of years.

One day someone in the refugee camp said, the Olympics are on TV, let’s go watch.  Lopez didn’t know what the Olympics were, but he walked five miles to watch on a black and white TV, saw Michael Johnson of the US win the gold medal, saw him standing on medal stand with tears running down his face – and never forgot that moment.

Years later, he had the chance to come to the US as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan admitted as a refugee.  He was adopted by an American family, started running track, went to college, and in 2007 became a US citizen.  In 2008 he was selected as a member of the US Olympic team, and in Beijing was chosen to carry the US flag in the opening ceremonies – the biggest honor of his life. 

For Lopez Lomong, he received the gift of new life before he deserved it, a gift he never knew was possible – all his work of training and running for his adopted country came afterwards, out of gratitude for the new life he had been given.

For us, the amazing thing is that God gives us the gift of life long before we deserve it, for no other discernible reason than that God loves us.  Jesus says today, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws them.”  That means that every single person who is here today is here because God wanted you here, drew you here to this place of new life.  You may think you are here for other reasons – you like the people, or you want something for your children, or someone else made you come.

And you may think that something in you doesn’t deserve to be here, doesn’t deserve to be forgiven and loved and cherished by God.  And you may wonder what God wants from you, and whether you have time or energy to include God in your life.

But the truth is, every person who comes to God is here because God hungered for us.  God is empty without us, just as we are without God.  God wanted us here, drew us here.  God gave us the gift of eternal life.  God loved us so much that God was willing to give the life of his Son for us. 

God is not something we add to our lives in order to make us better people, to help us stand atop our own medal stands in life.  God is the ground of our being, the giver of all gifts, the one who makes everything in our lives possible.

So as you come to the altar today, to share in the bread of life – remember that this bread is a sign that points us to the deepest truth of all.  God has given us all the gifts we need.  And God, through this gift, is drawing us deeply into God’s eternal life.

Sermon for 5.13.12

Scriptures for today are Here

My mother grew up on a wheat farm in northwestern Oklahoma.  It’s the flattest land you can imagine.  If you flew over it in a crop-duster plane, you would see below you a patchwork quilt made up of wheat and alfalfa fields in colors of green and gold, dotted with small white farmhouses, and roads forming the seams, running arrow-straight along the dividing lines between sections, half-sections and quarter-sections – measures of acreage in Oklahoma.  There, the roads run so straight that every now and then, you might be driving north, and suddenly the road jogs to the west for a few hundred yards, then turns north again.  That’s what they call a correction line – it's intended to make up for the curvature of the earth.  They’re serious about keeping the roads running straight around there. 

In that part of the country, everyone has a long memory.  So my mother recently inherited a quarter section of land called the “Strange Place.”  It’s called that not because it’s weird or unusual, but because in the first Oklahoma land rush, it was settled by a family named Strange – and though my Grandfather bought it in the 1950s, it’s still called the Strange Place. 

In a place like that, things don’t change very fast, and there are traditions.  My mother grew up there, the way girls are supposed to, raising lambs for 4H Club and taking Home Economics in high school.  But when she married my father, she became a city girl and a world traveler.  It wasn’t till many years later, after I was grown up, that she found something in those Oklahoma farm roots to make her own. 

She began watching her own mother making beautiful quilts – hand-piecing the colors together, all cut from material that used to be Grandpa’s work shirts or Grandma’s Sunday dresses, repurposed memories of days gone by.  My mother realized that this quilting was an art form that went back for generations – mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers all cutting up the remnants of old memories to make beautiful, practical covers for their beds, creating more memories, a patchwork collage of memories for their families.

Each quilt made carries deep within its seams the love of woman who made it and the memories of the family whose lives are sewn into it, and my mother has followed her own mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a whole line of women stretching back to the old countries they came from, in making beautiful hand-sewn quilts and other artwork, created with love.

This is why I have the privilege of wearing such beautiful vestments each week:  all my vestments were made by my mother.  Often people tell me how beautiful they are, and tell me that my mother should go into business to make clergy vestments.  And my answer is always the same:  she isn’t interested in doing it for money.  She only does it for love.  It never occurs to me to wonder whether my mother loves me – I can tell she loves me by the things she makes and does – they are love, lovingly put into tangible form.

I think love is like a patchwork quilt for all of us – a life full of patchwork memories, lovingly created out of pieces of events, small things from our beloved past.  Relationships with anyone we love are formed out of many small moments:  midnight feedings, evenings doing homework, laughter at the dinner table, things said and things left unsaid: the love that is lived out in carpools, shopping trips, meals together, late nights staying up and talking about the things that are important. 

For every relationship that is important to us, I think we create it not out of whole cloth, not out of a beautiful story with a magical plot like Cinderella, but rather out of a patchwork of these kinds of small moments, all pieced together in our minds to make up a picture of love.  By the love of those who first loved us, our mothers, fathers, other strong role models if we didn’t grow up in a traditional family, we learned how to love.  It is a basic truth of both psychology and Christianity:  we learn to love because we were first loved – before we were worthy, before we were deserving, before we had achievements to our credit and praises to our names, someone loved us, taught us what love is, and pieced us together out of love.

I think for most of us, learning about love is a patchwork quilt composed of many small events; all those small actions add up to a lifelong education about love.  Learning to love means abiding in love, living in the same house with love, loving and being loved day in and day out, through the most ordinary of activities, learning to love by letting love form us, transform us, piece us together.

The apostle John in 1 John today continues teaching us about what love is.  Last week he said you can tell if someone loves God, because they love other people.  This week he turns around and makes the same claim in reverse:  You can tell that someone loves other people, because they love God.  By this he means they believe in Christ, and do what Christ has commanded.  And what has Christ commanded? What we see in today’s gospel: to love one another as he has loved us. 

It may seem like a circular argument: God loves us, we love God, God loves Christ, Christ loves us, we love other people, and all of those things are evidence of all the others; yet it is not circular.  It describes the truth of life and of Christianity, that our love for God is inextricably bound up with our love for other people. 

And the best picture we can find of what that love means is the life of Jesus.  John’s whole gospel has described Jesus lovingly patching together a quilt, through signs, events, relationships, that create a picture of God’s love.  The disciples who watched Jesus came to believe that Jesus was the truest manifestation of God; that to understand God, you only have to look at Jesus.  And when they looked at Jesus, they saw love.  Not love spelled out in beautiful poetry or happily-ever-after fairy tales, but love displayed in the patchwork ministry of healing the sick, helping the poor, forgiving the fallen, inspiring the hopeless, giving life to the dying, and giving his own life for us.

John makes two audacious claims in this gospel, and the first is this: that God is love, that the reason anyone loves is because God has first poured God’s love into us.  God loves us before we deserve to be loved, just as a mother loves an infant, and by loving us God makes us worthy of love; the love itself transforms us, pieces us together into a beautiful new, beloved creation.  Don’t underestimate how revolutionary this claim is: you only have to look at Greek gods and their jealousies and spats and manipulation of humans to serve their own ends, to understand that Christians believed something revolutionary in the ancient world: that God is love.

How do we know God is love? Not by thinking up abstract philosophies about love; we learn to love by watching love in action.  We don’t have to guess what God is like.  We can see God’s love in Jesus.  And as we abide in Jesus through our worship and prayer, as we live in the same house with Jesus, let Jesus pour his love into us through the ordinary everyday activities of our lives, Jesus’ love begins to transform us, and we become capable of letting that love of God flow through us and transform others around us into God’s beautiful patchwork quilts of love.

Which is the second important point John wants us to understand.  Because God loves us, we are called to love others; again, this is a revolutionary claim, especially in our individualistic world.  Christianity is fundamentally a religion lived in community: people can say, I can worship God on the golf course, or I can pray on my own, and these things are true, as far as they go: but the most fundamental truth of our faith is that God loved us, and therefore – therefore – God calls us to love each other.  Christianity is not a religion whose sole focus is developing our inner spiritual wisdom or gaining personal enlightenment or cultivating calm in a chaotic world or living the virtuous life – these things are important and good.  But Christianity is a practical, realistic faith that is lived out in a community, where we have the opportunity to learn to love each other through good times and bad times, and where we form ourselves into a multi-colored, many-faceted, patchwork community that reaches out in love to the world.

And if we are truly doing what Jesus commanded, people should be able to see that picture of God’s love in our lives.  Someone asked Mother Theresa:  how can anyone love all the people in the world?  Mother Theresa answered:  you can’t love everyone in the world, but you can love the person standing right in front of you.

Love is not an idea: it is something you can see, and touch, and feel.  And the fundamental truth of our Christian faith is that we worship a God of love, best seen in Jesus, and therefore – therefore – we must be a people of love.

How do others know that God is love?  They know because they have seen that love carefully pieced together in our lives, in the many small moments that display who we are, and they can see through us to the life of Jesus.  And through us, God’s love pieces together out of the worn-out, discarded, unloved remnants of our world, a new community of love.

Sermon for Easter 2012

Scriptures for today are Here (using gospel reading Mark 16:1-8)

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The song we sing on Good Friday recognizes that we were there as Jesus died. Because the life-and-death story that happened that astounding week in Jerusalem is the central story of our lives, all of us were there with Jesus. But something new happens on Easter morning, something unprecedented, something so far beyond the boundaries of what we know and expect, that the very questions we ask are transformed.

Were we there when God raised him from the tomb? asks the song’s last verse. And we have to answer, no, we weren’t there – because no one was there – no one but the angels, and God, saw the Resurrection at the moment it happened, no human being saw Jesus throw off that shroud that was covering him and stand up. We only see what happened later, the next morning. Mark shows us the women slipping through dark and empty streets – Mary Magdalene, the other Mary and Salome – hearts bursting with grief, eyes red and swollen from weeping, going to the tomb to anoint the body. We see them arriving at the tomb, wondering how to roll back the stone from the tomb so they can slip inside and give honor to death. And they find that God has done something absolutely inexplicable, that the stone that was blocking their way is already gone, and that Jesus is alive and free and on the loose.

And you and I, all these centuries later, know the proper response to resurrection, don’t we? We know that in the face of resurrection, the only thing to do is shout Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!]

But somehow, the women, that Easter dawn, didn’t know to shout Alleluia. They didn’t know what to say at all. The angel tells them what has happened, tells them Jesus will meet them in Galilee, instructs them to go back to Peter and the other disciples and tell the good news. But they don’t – they are struck mute – they are silent – and more than silent – they are terrified.

The passage we read today is probably the original ending of Mark’s gospel, scholars believe. But it has a very sudden ending, an ending that leaves us dangling, this sentence that we translate as “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In Greek, it’s even stranger – the literal translation is something like “They didn’t say nothing to nobody” – a triple negative to emphasize just how silent they were. And then the last part of the sentence even ends with a dangling preposition, the word “for”: “they said nothing to anyone, they were afraid for…” As the preacher Thomas Long says, even in Greek this is an odd way to end a sentence, not to mention a book – it’s as if Mark had been dragged away from his desk in middle of a sentence. Is this any way to run a resurrection? The end just hangs there: they were afraid for … for … what?

It’s a good question, for on Easter morning what are we afraid for? Surrounded by Easter flowers, hearing glorious music, smiling with joy on this high holy day, surely we are not afraid for … for anything. But perhaps we will go home after this service, perhaps we will eat Easter dinner with our families and relax the rest of the day, perhaps tomorrow we will not be thinking of Jesus and his resurrection at all, and perhaps we will remember reasons to be afraid for … Perhaps there are troubles on our minds, a health crisis in our family, tax returns to finish, retirement accounts to obsess over, the security of our jobs to worry about; perhaps we are concerned about relationships with those we love, the conflicts in our world, the future of our children, the health of our parents, perhaps we are holding all this in and saying nothing to anyone, because we are afraid for …

And on Monday morning, perhaps it won’t occur to us that the resurrection of Jesus Christ has anything to say about those things that make us afraid for, perhaps we will think that Jesus Christ was only someone a long time ago and far away who has nothing to do with our world now, maybe we will think that the only reason to think about his resurrection will come in the long time future, when we begin to be afraid for our own death. Perhaps we are slipping through our own dark and empty streets, determined to take control of the next task ahead of us, and yet afraid for … what?

The terror and amazement of these women tells us something about ourselves. These are the brave ones. These are the ones who stayed with Jesus while all the male disciples ran away, the ones who followed him to the foot of the cross and who weren’t even willing to abandon him to the grave without caring for him first. Living with him dead, grieving his loss, mourning the end of his beautiful, hopeful, thrilling ministry – these things they understand how to do, bravely. And yet, confronted with Resurrection, their courage fails them.

And maybe we’re not so different from these silent, fearful women. Because the Resurrection shatters everything we’ve ever believed: the impermanence of life, the finality of death. Resurrection means we have to re-think our entire lives, re-orient our fears to something new. All our resignation to the evil of this world, our determination to live courageously in the face of heartbreak, our worries over the challenges of our lives, our stresses about how to roll away the stones that stand in our way – all these things are not enough to fend off death – but God is enough.

Into our human darkness comes God’s Resurrection light, and the fabric of our universe is torn in two. And we now have to learn to live in a new, amazing, terrifying world: a world in which the ultimate triumph belongs not to familiar, fearsome, inevitable death, but to thrilling, astonishing, resurrection life. We now have to adjust to living in a world where God loves us so much he will never, ever let us go. We have to learn to live as Easter people in a Good Friday world.

Fifteen years ago I had a small glimpse of what it means to live as Easter person. That year, on Maundy Thursday, I took my 5-year-old daughter Sarah to church. Maundy Thursday is the day we remember Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, his gift of bread and wine to them as a way to remember him, to bring his true, living, resurrected presence into our lives here and now, through the Eucharist. Maundy Thursday is the day also that we remember what that supper means, because in John’s gospel, Jesus demonstrates its meaning by washing feet, commanding us to wash each other’s feet as a sign that we love each other as he loved us.

At that Maundy Thursday service 15 years ago, we washed each other’s feet, so everyone had their own feet washed and everyone washed someone else’s feet. I sat down to have my feet washed and then realized that the person who was in line to wash my feet was my own 5-year-old daughter, Sarah.

And as she sweetly took my feet, one at a time, carefully poured water over them, tenderly rubbed them dry with a towel, I found myself unaccountably weeping – because I was remembering the countless times I had done these same things for her: tenderly caring for her infant body, washing, feeding, nurturing my child. And here, she had somehow learned to do these things for me.

And I realized that this is the natural order of things. First we are loved and cared for ourselves; then we learn to love and care for others. The love that we are given becomes the love we have to give away. Which surely is a very deep meaning of the cross and the resurrection – Jesus dies in an outpouring of love for us, so we can turn and pour out that same love for others. And as long as that love lives in us, we have nothing to be afraid for …

Why does Mark’s gospel and Mark’s Easter story end with a dangling preposition that leaves us dangling, this odd non-ending? I think it’s because the story hasn’t ended – the story continues with us. The women are silent because we are the ones who are given the story to tell. We are the ones who are given the love of Christ to share with others.

Go and tell the disciples that he is risen, and will meet you in Galilee, the angel says. Who are the disciples? We are.

Mark’s story doesn’t end because the story didn’t end with Mark. The story continues all through human history, the story continues with us. And that means that it’s to us that the angel is speaking.

Go into all the places of your lives, the angel tells us, all the Galilees we came here from, all the places where we make our everyday life, all the places we are afraid for… and we will find Jesus there ahead of us, waiting for us, waiting to lead us into new life and new hope. Go into the places of worry and fear, says the angel, and we will find him there. Go into the places of silence and amazement, and we will find him there. Go into the places God is leading us, places we never would have thought of on our own, places of surprise and discovery, and we will find him there. There, with us, to help us tell the story of his love.

Because, to all of us who are afraid for …, Mark’s gospel has good news today. The tomb is empty, the place of death can’t contain the living Lord. Resurrection has changed the rules of the game, and the world has been remade. We weren’t there when God raised him, but he is here with us now. The Resurrected One is truly present in our midst, teaching us to love and serve each other.

And although the women are silent, we know what to say: Alleluia! Christ is Risen! [The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!]

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Rabbi Micah Caplan said when he was at Nativity a couple of weeks ago that there is a tradition that we were all present in the central story of the Jewish people, the story of Moses receiving the law on Sinai. If that’s true, then, in a very real sense, the story we read today, of Jesus’ last tumultuous week in Jerusalem, is our central story – and we were all there, somewhere.

We recognize this fact liturgically by taking the roles of the people in the story, shouting “Hosanna” and also shouting “Crucify him”– it’s our story, we’re there. It’s the story of the human race – our hunger for power, the instinct of powerful people to scapegoat the weak in order to maintain their power, the self-interest that leads to human judges condemning the Son of God to death. We are all present as the Word of God falls silent, an event which puts the entire human race on trial.

But, though we are proved guilty of death of Jesus, there is hope for us. We call it Atonement, a word that means “at-one-ment.” In Jesus, God became at-one with human beings so that in Jesus, we might become at-one with God. In his death, we see the final act of the pageant that began at Christmas. In his cry of forsakenness, Jesus shows how completely he has entered into our separation from God – in death, he completes God’s offering of life to us. And because it is his offering to us, we are all present with him on Golgotha. We were there when they crucified our Lord.

So, where are you in this story, in your life, today? Maybe some of us are in the crowds that gather around Jesus as he walks toward Jerusalem, in a carefully stage-managed procession he arranged. There was nothing unusual about people entering Jerusalem for Passover. The reason he got attention was because he took some very specific and calculated steps – marching toward Jerusalem, healing and teaching and gathering crowds in towns, who all understood that this would be no ordinary Passover, because Jesus is walking in the footsteps of David, the first “Messiah.” You can imagine the people in each town Jesus walks through on the way to Jerusalem, getting intrigued and excited by the possibility that here, finally, was a new Messiah who would step into David’s shoes, throw off the Roman oppressors and establish a new Jewish kingdom. And at every town, dozens or hundreds more people would join his entourage, until it’s a huge crowd, marching to Jerusalem for the Passover, the feast of freedom.

Imagine the anticipation that is building as they approach the holy city – imagine what they are picturing – Rome will be overthrown, injustice and the oppression of the ordinary people of Israel will be stopped, a new day will dawn.

But if that is what they are hoping for, they will be disappointed. The last line of the opening gospel tells us what Jesus did when he arrived. The people are expecting an armed takeover of the holy city – and all he does is he goes to the temple and looks around, then leaves quietly, to come back just as quietly the next day.

Perhaps that’s the moment when the crowds lose heart, when some of them change from people shouting Hosanna to people hoping for crucifixion. When their dreams of takeover and power are shattered, when their leader proves to be a disappointment – that’s when they lose their faith in him.

And that’s the place some of us might find ourselves in today: disappointed in God, wanting God to change the world, relieve oppression, end poverty, stop the world’s hurt, fix our lives, wanting God to use all that divine power to set things right for us. But if God governed through power, God wouldn’t be any different from us. God is going to take a different path – not the path of power, but the path of love, the path of atonement – and love will ask us to look at the world differently. Love will ask us to give ourselves for the sake of those we love.

Today, love might disappoint us, with its lack of satisfying power. And blessed are we in our disappointment, as we share that loving path with God; because God will use his love to share power with us, and to give us power to change things in our world, with God’s help.

Or maybe, we find ourselves in the person who owns the donkey. Jesus has apparently set this up in advance, in his carefully calculated scheme to fit the people’s hopes for the Messiah. He plans to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah that the king of peace will come to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. So he has arranged a code word with the donkey’s owner – “The Lord needs it.” It’s a code word – like Holmes saying to Watson, “The game’s afoot,” it means the time is now, God’s plan is underway.

So maybe that’s where some of us find ourselves today – waiting, hoping for a sign, wondering when God will call us into service –wondering what the next thing is in our lives, trying to make important decisions. And praying that God will come to us with a call – listening for something that will tell us what that call will be.

And blessed are we in our waiting, because the waiting time is the time God uses to speak into our hearts about God’s true hopes for us. And God’s call will come for us, to tell us when it’s time to join Jesus, to give what we have to give, to join him with what we have, even if it seems small, insignificant, symbolic, like a donkey. Whatever it is you have to offer, Jesus will say that is exactly what he needs.

But perhaps some of us find ourselves in the young man who runs off naked – it’s odd little story in the garden that appears in Mark but in no other gospel, and it doesn’t seem important. Many scholars think this young man is Mark himself, who wrote this gospel. We don’t know much about Mark, but in this story he seems to be an obscure young man, perhaps not a disciple, just caught up in the excitement, curious, following the disciples to the garden to see what will happen, and escaping naked, with nothing but his life.

And he might seem like an insignificant part of the story, but without him we might not have the story – because Mark goes on to write this story, to invent the whole concept of a gospel, to bring this story home to us, 20 centuries later.

And maybe that’s where we are today – obscure, vulnerable, but with a story of how Jesus has touched our lives, has changed us, has given us a mission. And God might be building in our hearts and minds a way to share that story. And blessed are we in our story-telling, because there are so many people in our world who need to hear this story we’ve heard today – the story of love.

Perhaps that’s not where you find yourself today. Perhaps you see yourself in Peter. Peter, the blunt, the outspoken, Peter, who always makes mistakes, Peter, the brave disciple who suddenly loses his courage. Peter, who denies ever knowing Jesus, and in denying it, somehow ends up telling the truth after all – saying the heartbreaking words, “I do not know this man you are talking about” – and it turns out it’s true: Peter never knew Jesus. Peter never believed Jesus when he said he was going to die. Peter always, to the end, hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah of victory, not of defeat on the cross – and Peter misunderstands, denies, disappoints, Jesus, and Peter breaks down and weeps.

And maybe some of us find ourselves there today – in a dark place, knowing that we have denied Jesus, that we have disappointed him, that we may never have known him at all, wishing that somehow, some way, he could forgive us. And blessed are we in our denial – for in our own failure, our recognition of our own weakness, we open up space for the Messiah first to forgive us, and then to work through us in a way we never expected. Like Peter, we have the potential to become true disciples, rocks on which Jesus builds his church.

And maybe there are many of us here who see ourselves in the women at the cross. They are powerless to change what is happening to the savior they love, powerless to change much about their world, but what they have, they give – their presence, and their love. At the end, when Jesus feels forsaken even by God, he is not forsaken by these women, who suffer themselves so they can be with him and comfort him.

And maybe some of us are those women, suffering ourselves, suffering alongside others we love, walking with them through the most difficult time. And blessed are we in our suffering, for we are doing for others what Jesus has done for us – and for those who suffer, yours is the kingdom of heaven.

And I think most of us, almost every week, every time we come to worship, can find ourselves in the disciples, at supper the night before Jesus dies – stretching out our hands to receive the bread and wine, the body and blood of Jesus. We don’t understand what Jesus is giving us, perhaps – not sure what he is about or what this gift of bread and wine means, but willing to accept it because he is the one who is giving it. We are willing to take the bread of life from the one who is the bread of life, willing to let him nourish us with his love, feed us with his life, inspire us with his death, become at-one with us in our own body and blood, so that we can be at-one with him, on the cross and in the resurrection to come.

And blessed are we as we accept in our hands the love of the savior who lives, and dies, for us. Blessed are we as we become at-one with the Body of Christ. Blessed are we who come here, today, in the name of the Lord.