Turning Our Palms into Crosses

       What an incredible day Palm Sunday is.  As a kid, I remember going to church and bringing home a palm cross that had been made for me by somebody else, that I put in a drawer in my room.  I really didn’t know what it was all about, except that next week would be Easter and  I could look forward to my Easter basket, some candy and eggs.

After I was ordained and had a church of my own, Palm Sunday became a much more complicated day.  I had learned how to make a palm cross and I would teach everyone how to do it at announcement time.  Taking that long frond of palm and slowly fashioning it into a cross was a great way to dramatize what the day was all about.  How Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and people laid palms before him on the road, those same long fronds that they held in their hands, but it didn’t take long for them to turn on him and cheer as the high priests turned him over to Pilate and the Romans then put him on a cross and killed him. In the same way that we turned our fronds into crosses to take home with us.

The long gospel of the day was also something that we did differently than I remember as a child.  Most years, we would divide it up and take parts, sometimes even in costume and dramatize it.  I would usually be Pilate because of my ecclesiastical robes and we would act out the whole thing.  Bob Lord, our fabulous organist would create grand music at the time of the earthquake and thunder.  We were always deeply moved by the whole production.

Palm Sunday is much more than the beginning of Holy Week.  It is a day to summarize the whole of the meaning of the coming of the Christ to us; his humanness, his divinity and the incredible compassion that he had for all of us.  He willingly went to the cross to die for us and to show us the depth of God’s love for all of humanity.  We don’t always understand that.  We get caught up in the day to day details of our   lives and we often miss the presence of God all around us.  That is what Palm Sunday is trying to drive home.  Sometimes we are tempted to skip on to Easter to make a happy ending out of it all.  Holy Week ought to short-circuit that.  We need to go through the week, experience the pain and the loss before we get to the resurrection.  That is what we all do in our lives.  Death and loss are human experiences.  We all have them and we suffer from them.  It is incredibly important to understand that our God loves us through this experience, and has experienced it also.  This is why Jesus death is important to us.  Without having the loss, the resurrection loses its meaning.  We too will rise.  Those whom we have lost have risen.  We will see them all again.  But without knowing about death, how can God help us with our rising?  That is the meaning of Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

The Power of Psalm 51

       Legend has it that Psalm 51 was written by David after that remarkable encounter with the high priest Nathan when he was caught in his adultery with Bathsheba.  This is when Nathan told him the story of the man with the little ewe lamb that he had nursed from birth, who had to give it up to his master to be the center of the feast when a guest came for dinner, although the master had a whole herd of sheep of his own.  When David said that terrible things ought to happen to that cruel master, Nathan pointed his finger and said to David: You are the man! (2 Samuel 12: 1-12) Supposedly the great king then went back to his room and wrote this incredible psalm that we have used every Ash Wednesday and on the Fifth Sunday in Lent as we consider our own sinfulness before God.

We always approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week with great trepidation.  I know that Easter is coming, but it is the second Easter that we celebrate, not the first one.  The first one was approached by the disciples and the women with terrible fear.  They had experienced the horror of the crucifixion and the loss of the body from the tomb.  They had no idea what had happened.  Neither would we.  Resurrection is not really in our vocabulary, except as a hoped for event that supposedly will follow our death.  We have never seen a resurrection and neither had the people surrounding Jesus in his last days, except for the few people whom Jesus restored to life.  There are those Christians who approach Easter as a given.  I always hated coming into the church on Holy Saturday and smelling the flowers that the altar guild was arranging for the next day.  Holy Saturday ought to be the day that God is dead, at least if we follow our own theology that Jesus came to us as the incarnate God. Yes, I know that the altar guild had to have time to get ready for Easter, but the theology is clear.

Easter ought to be a surprise.  We ought to be astonished at it.  It is impossible, yet it is right before us.  I have stood at many, many caskets in the church and profoundly wished that I could do a resurrection.  The family sits in tears and friends are around them in comfort, yet that person who means so much to them lies before us all in a casket.  Yes, there is resurrection, but it is not at that moment evident.  It has always been my job as a priest to help to produce the faithful evidence of the resurrection.  That is what the lessons at funerals try to do along with the remembrances of friends and the homily that I would always try to preach.

I want to come to the moment of Easter cleansed of my doubts, cleansed most of all of my sins.  Cleansed of those things that have kept me away from God for so much of my life.  That is the value for me of Psalm 51.  I can put myself in the shoes of King David and remember the things that I have done that have separated me from not only God, but from those around me.  This is when forgiveness becomes more than a word.  It is when I understand the mercy and grace of the God who loves me more than anything else.  That is when I become free to see the enormity of the resurrection not only of the Lord Jesus, but of me also.

The Guy in the Rainbow Wig

       How many times have I seen the guy in the rainbow wig sitting in back of the goal posts at an NFL game with the sign that says John 3:16.  He wants us all to get the saving message of that passage of scripture:  the words from John’s Gospel that says so clearly For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.  There isn’t a more beautiful statement of God’s purpose in sending Jesus to live among us than that, the clown wig notwithstanding.

Oh, I sometimes have a problem with the “believe in him” part of that passage, but I’m not going to let my quibble with a couple of words diminish the infinite power of God’s love.  I believe that God’s mercy surpasses ours in every way.  When we get to the Kingdom, we will discover a number of people whom we don’t believe ought to be there.  But that is our problem, not God’s.

For the past week and a half, Rosie and I have been sitting on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean trying to relax and restore ourselves.  Looking out over that vast ocean has reminded me over and over again about the unlimited mercy of God and the vastness of our ignorance of God’s Kingdom.  All that we have are the scriptures to tell us about God’s love and we have argued about them forever.

     I have, for example, a problem with the reading from Numbers where the people cry out for food and water and God sends poisonous serpents among them to bite them and to kill them.  (Numbers 21: 4-9)  That doesn’t sound much like God to me, but that is early in the Old Testament and God is still getting used to the crabbiness of the Hebrew slaves whom he rescued from their impossible lives in Egypt.  The people complained to Moses and Moses prayed about the problem of the serpents.  God told Moses to put a serpent on a pole  so that everyone who is bitten, when they look at it will live .  That is the source of Jesus’ comment in John’s Gospel to Nicodemus about himself being lifted up so that people could look at him and be saved: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  There is that “believes in him” problem again, but I know that Jesus meant his crucifixion to be the salvation of humankind.

        I have seen some wonderful things happen with people at the moment of their death.  One woman said, “I never knew it could be so beautiful” almost with her last breath.  I know that Steve Jobs said “Oh, wow” when he died.  Who knows what we will find beyond this life.  I only know that God craves our presence even more than we crave his love and mercy.  That is the overwhelming evidence of Holy Scripture.

So is that good news for you?  I hope so.  We all know that we have fallen short of what God has intended for us to be, and that his forgiveness is overwhelming.  That isn’t a license to sin, but it is certainly comforting for those of us who have not lived up to what we know God has in mind for us.  Looking at the ocean has been a helpful reminder for me.  It has been a blessing for me.

Getting Away From It All

         Vacations are wonderful things.  They are an opportunity to get away, to reflect and to think about how life is going and how we want it to go.   Rosie and I are at Long Beach, North Carolina for the next two weeks, a beach where we had a beach house for a number of years, where the kids grew up and where we learned a lot about the ocean and how it affects the land.

There is no question that the ocean is in charge.  When we bought our beach house in 1979, we stood out on the deck and we gave it to the ocean.  That relieved us of a lot of worry over the years about what was going to happen to the place.  I remember every time that there was a storm on the east coast, my stomach would tighten up and I wouldn’t calm down until the storm was passed.  Ultimately, it was one of those storms that claimed the house.  It was a very large nor’easter that dumped three feet of snow all over the east coast and produced winds of hurricane strength at Long Beach and the house never really had a chance.  We had endured a number of hurricanes, one year two in one week, but this was a different sort of storm.  We thanked God that we had had the place for fifteen years, and we had so many wonderful memories of the place; but we gave it up and realized that the ocean had finally claimed its own.

So we don’t have a beach house any more, but we have a lot more than that.  We have the ability to rent a place down here and savor the memories and enjoy the beach without the worry.  That is a great deal in itself.

 Jesus never had a beach house.  I’m not even sure that he had any house at all.  The Gospels tell us about his ministry, but there is very little about his personal life.  We know his friends and those whom he met and helped, and those who conspired to bring him down, but where did he live?  All over the place is what I would suspect from the stories.  Foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head, he said at one point.  That is certainly in keeping with how he directed himself and his disciples.  There was no place to accumulate things, no dining room table, no kitchen.  He lived off the kindness of strangers and got through his life as best he could.  What was important to him was doing the ministry that consumed his life.  Things meant nothing to him.  People and their needs were all that mattered to him.

Ultimately, his ministry devoured him.  He infuriated the powers that were important in his culture and they crucified him.  He knew that this would happen, but he lived his life and conducted his ministry anyway.  What was important to Jesus was showing all of us the compassion of God in the ultimate sense.  That God Almighty could come down to earth in flesh and live life with us, even through death and still remain God.  What is ultimately important is that the God whom we crucified rose from the dead and beckoned all of us to follow.  That is the relentless beauty of the power of Jesus message to all of us.  Do we think that we are unworthy?  Certainly we are.  We have broken every one of God’s commandments and we have treated our neighbors with scorn and judgment, but we are still welcome in our Lord’s presence and eligible for God’s forgiveness.

We are getting ready to celebrate the great feast of Easter when we remember the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection.  The certainty of our own resurrection is also a part of our celebration.  My hope for myself is that I can live my life in the light of that glorious miracle and show the love that God has given to me in the way that I treat all of those who surround me.  What else is important?  Certainly not a beach house.

Taking Lent Seriously

        Here we are again at the beginning of the great season of Lent, the yearly preparation for the magnificent feast of Easter, which this year comes on April 8.  This is the time of our year when we remember our sins, look for forgiveness and think for a while about what it means to live as Christians.

I have always been sensitive to the profound criticism of Christianity that it has created more carnage than it has prevented.  This is certainly true if you look at the trail that the faith blazed through the world after Constantine legitimized it in 325.  The cross went before the armies after that.  Papal sponsored crusades littered Jerusalem with Muslim bodies and many, many Christian martyrs were burned or beheaded because of their beliefs that somehow conflicted with the ruling monarch under whom they lived.   I think of William Tyndale who only wanted to translate the bible into a language that the people could understand, who was burned for his efforts. I don’t know what to do with all of the instances of chaos caused by religion, not the faith, except to acknowledge them and realize that keeping the peace on this earth is up to each of us, even in the face of rejection by the community in which we live.

Our political discussion about faith these days it seems to me is more about morals and accusations than it is about faith itself.   This latest brouhaha about contraception is an excellent example.   The bishops of the Roman Catholic church claim that the national health care program requiring contraception to be provided by the insurance companies representing faith organizations is evidence that the President is not operating as a faithful person.   I am generally appalled at the statements of these bishops and our political leaders who claim to be faithful people, but show in their politics and in their lives that they are anything but.   The Rev. Franklin Graham stated recently that he “isn’t sure” whether or not President Obama is or is not a Muslim.  That  has been refuted numbers of times, but it still comes up in this strange way in our political conversation.   Our presidents for quite some time now have always ended their addresses to the country with a strong “God bless the United States of America.”  Certainly that is a confession of faith, but it isn’t one that rings true to those who oppose our presidents politically.

I would love to see more faith oriented discussion in our political concourse.  If we had it, we would have more dialogue about our responsibility for the poor and the outcast among us.  We would spend much more time talking about those in terrible need and much less time worrying about how the rich get richer.  It really wouldn’t be hard to do this.  It would, of course, mean disappointing the “K” street lobbyists, and leaving behind some massive political contributions, but it would certainly be better for the country and for all of those who have been left behind in our economic woes of recent times.

It isn’t all misery either in our religion.  Christianity has been remarkably instrumental in creating many charities that take Jesus’ words seriously about taking care of the poor and the outcast.  Across denominational lines, wonderful things are being done to help people in dire need cope with the distress that has been produced in their lives.  I am in awe of the reading programs, the food distribution sites, the housing that has been created to care for the homeless.  All of this is generally done without requiring professions of faith as a cost to it.  It is done only because of the deep need that is evident in our communities.  More of this is what we all need, and more involvement by each of us in the work that so urgently needs to be done.

  This is what I am thinking of at the beginning of this season of Lent.  How do we let our faith set our agenda as people in our communities?  How do we help those in need rather than spend our time being critical of those in office who are trying as hard as they can to create an atmosphere where our help can be more useful.  May we come to our Easter this year more aware of how our faith impacts our surroundings so that we can find the risen Christ in our lives and see our Savior in the faces of the people whom we encounter every day.

What is the Transfiguration All About?

        When Rosie and I were in Galilee in 1981, we visited Mt. Tabor, which is supposedly the site of Jesus’ transfiguration.  The bus parked in the lot at the foot of the mountain and a team of five or six taxicabs driven by extremely manic Palestinians took us to the mountain top along a very windy road that looked to me like it was only one lane, except that we passed a couple of speeding taxis that were also coming down the mountain.  We were all terrified.  When we got to the top, we saw a beautiful basilica and a mountaintop that was shrouded in cloud.  I took a picture of this that hung in my office for many years.  There was a tour of German people in the basilica singing and their hymns added to the profoundly religious atmosphere that we found in that place.

I’ve always been struck by the story of the Transfiguration.  It seems to be such a wonder.  Jesus in prayer with Peter, James and John with the cloud coming down to cover them, Moses and Elijah showing themselves.   Peter (as always) speaking his mind:  Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah! and the Gospel of Mark goes on to say that he “didn’t know what to say, for they were terrified.”  Of course they were, and so would all of us have been, and they didn’t have Palestinian taxi drivers getting them to the top.  It is then that God’s voice speaks out of the cloud:  This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!  I’ve always wanted to preface that statement by God with a “shut up, Peter!”, but that seems to me to be a bit too obvious.

What do we make of this story.  Some scholars want to call it a misplaced resurrection appearance, but I think it has an authenticity much beyond that.  It appears in the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, in pretty much the same form.  I suspect that Mark’s is the earliest and the others took it from Mark, but that isn’t important.  What I think is important is that all of these writers chose to include the story because is is an elegant prefiguring of the resurrection, somehow making wonderful sense out of the ministry of Jesus that to his disciples who were living in it, was an incredible mystery.  Jesus tells the three of his followers to “tell no one of this until after the resurrection”.  Did that sink in to them?  I suspect not at the time, but after Jesus rose from the dead, the three of them remembered that experience and talked about it openly.  That is how the story got into the Gospel and was handed down to all of us.  It is, I think, a valuable insight into the mind of our Lord and the way that his followers came to understand what he was about.

What the resurrection provides for all of us is certainty beyond the grave.  A knowledge that when we die, we will find ourselves in the presence of our God and will be cared for with his undying love.  It is a matter of faith and faith alone.  I can’t prove it in any way at all, except by listening to the words that Jesus gave us and the example that he set.  His resurrection is the conquest of death once and for all.  Hope in a life full of disappointment and ultimately death that gives us a unity with our Creator and an elegant possibility of seeing all of those whom we have loved in our lives again present before us, recreated in wholeness, the way that God intended for them from the beginning.

C. S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce, talks about how busloads of people travel from the rainy city, which is his metaphor for hell, to heaven, where they meet many people.  Some of the travelers see some folks whom they don’t believe belong in heaven and so they get back on the bus to go back to hell, purely their own choice.  I think that is a wonderful description of our relationship with our God.  We have the choice always to remain with God, in all of our life, in the moments of our sins, even at the moment of our death.  But God never goes away and will always remain with us.  Those people who went back to hell were perfectly free to get back on the bus at another time to come back to heaven.

The prefiguring of the resurrection in the middle of Jesus’ ministry is an important reminder of where this all is going, and how our own lives are tied up in the Gospel.  Who of us hasn’t lost someone?   Our losses are a terrible grief and we live through them always with some kind of hope.  Our funeral services cry resurrection from their beginning to their end.  It is the essence of our faith.  Seeing our loved ones again in the pureness of God’s original creation is what we all long for.  Jesus’ resurrection promises that.  That is what the Transfiguration is all about and what it promises to the twelve and to all of us.

So How Do We Get Paid?

      The super bowl is over and the New York Giants are the champions of the National Football League.  The season is over until late August and we all need to get on to other things.  I thought that it was a wonderful game, a close game that could have gone either way.   There were some great plays and also some terrible mistakes.  I was astounded by the safety on the first play from scrimmage when Tom Brady threw the ball away from the end zone and gave the Giants two points.  It was also thrilling to see Mario Manningham’s miraculous catch of Eli Manning’s pass on the sidelines that brought the Giants to the fifty yard line.  That is the way that all games go, whether normal league games or the ones for the Lombardi Trophy.  There will be endless chatter about who could have done what and didn’t, or what a great play so and so made, but in the long run none of it matters.  The players and the coaches pocket their winnings and we go on with our lives.  I was somewhat amazed at the price of Super bowl tickets this year.  They were somewhat north of two-thousand dollars, without scalpers.  They were certainly out of my price range.

Clergy don’t make a whole lot of money.  Rosie and I have been comfortable in our work.  We have had excellent parishes who took good care of us, but we certainly didn’t get rich in the process.  I have loved working with all sorts and conditions of people and have received considerably more than I have given.  I still love to preach and teach and I am more than thankful when I see that those efforts produce fruit.

I am touched by the story in Mark’s gospel about the leper coming to Jesus and saying to him, If you choose, you can make me clean.  Jesus says back to him, I do choose. Be made clean!  There is no quid pro quo here, Jesus heals the leper because he is sick and needs the touch of God to be made whole.  He doesn’t even do it to make a believer out of the leper.  The whole story is the man’s sickness and Jesus’ ability to make him clean; but when I look closely at the story in Mark, there is indeed a price:  Jesus told the leper to tell no one about his healing, to go to the priest and offer the testimony that Moses commanded.  The Gospel says that the man didn’t do that, that instead he spread the story openly so that Jesus couldn’t go anywhere without people flocking to him, so he stayed out in the countryside.  Jesus got no payment for his work.   I doubt if Jesus could have afforded to go to a Super bowl game.  

I certainly understand the way that the leper felt.  If I had been healed of that heinous disease by Jesus, I think that I would have told everyone also.  What a magnificent gift that healing was.

In Second Kings, there is the story of another healing.  The Syrian General Naaman comes to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy.  Elisha doesn’t even come out to talk to him but simply tells him to wash in the Jordan river and he will be healed.  This makes Naaman angry and he complains loudly.  His servants ask him that if he had been told to do something difficult that he would have done it, so why doesn’t he just do what Elisha tells him?  The great general washes in the Jordan and is healed.  Elisha refused payment for this.  Elisha’s servant Gehazi chased after Naaman and got payment from him and took it back to Elisha.  Elisha rebuked Gehazi and told him that because of what he did, the leprosy of Naaman would cling to him forever.  A rather harsh punishment for charging Naaman for his healing, but for Elisha, like Jesus, healing had no price.  It is interesting that Naaman went away from Elisha praising God and declaring that no God had power but the God of Israel.

Healing without price, preaching without price is what God requires of us.  No wonder clergy are not paid well.  Some of them don’t want to be paid at all, such is their faith.  The reward for what we do in the name of God is the bringing of the Kingdom of God into the world.   That, in reality is not the job of the clergy, but the job of the whole Christian community.  We all are the ones who are to heal and preach without price that God may be made known in all the world.  The way that God is made known is by the work that we all do with those who are without resource, whether it is through illness or poverty.  Those who have lost their homes or their health or food for their table are the ones to whom we are sent,  not to convert them, but to help them.  That is the message that we get from the gospels and from all of scripture.  When we forget that, the whole of the Christian message is lost.

With our work clear, we can get on with reaching into the places in our communities around us where our resources are needed and in that way be the people of God in a world that needs God’s touch very much.   Our God will certainly help us in this work.  It is the reason that we are called together in community to be the Church.