Easter Sunday: Why Search for Life in the Realm of Death? [Lk 24: 1-12]

Those women knew tombs.  The most solemn of "woman's work" was the washing and anointing of the body of a deceased person in that place to which people would come for many years to pay their homage in minds and hearts, to remember.

The women who followed our Lord from the Galilee all the way to Jerusalem watched him die and be taken down from the cross.  They would no doubt have seen Joseph of Aramathaea wrapping the body, placing it in a rock-hewn new tomb.  Then they would have gone home for the sacred task of preparing spices to be applied to the corpse.  It was always
wwa final act of love, and a notable exception to the legal proscription of work on the sabbath.

As they approach, the see that the stone cover has been rolled away and here, in the darkest and most fearful place -- the place of death, they find absolutely nothing.  No corpse, no shroud, no wrappings.  Absolutely nothing.  They are perplexed:  no doubt a combination of shock and confusion along with some sense of anger that someone has apparently stolen the body, an ultimate desecration of one who had already been through hell.

Then two spirit-beings remind them that Jesus predicted a comeback!  Now they remember.  This is world-shaking news, a complete reorientation of reality as commonly known.  Now they don't have to live in the past, mourning loss of their Master; now they can see that resurrection life lies ahead.  They are changed from people of fear and confusion to people of faith and confidence. They go forth to be sentinels of the word that love is stronger than hate, life stronger than death, peace stronger than all violence. They morph from tomb-crew to evangelists and when they approach the eleven disciples, these followers of Jesus don't get it.  The women get it.  Women always get it.

The greater good news is that the power of the resurrection can transform our lives here and now.  We can stop "searching for the living among the dead."  But it isn't easy, is it? We like living in the past.  It is comfortable, predictable, what we are used to.  It is easier for us to stay with the same life-denying relationships, those same self-defeating patterns of behaviour, the same compulsions, anger, anxieties, and fear.  We want to stay in the tomb, but that is not God's plan!

We can have a new lease on life, a second chance at living abundantly.   That new life begins at the baptismal font and leads to commissioning by apostolic hands in the sacrament of confirmation.  And this all happens in a new kind of living, loving, supporting community -- a second family we call our church.   So why are people searching for life in the realm of death?   Christ is Risen.  Alleluia!

Good Friday: Wrestling with John and Atonement

In John's one-off gospel, everything has a deeper meaning.  Everything is fraught with symbolism.  And that is sometimes good, sometimes bad.  As in our reading of the Passion tonight, it is bad when John's community tries to make a saint out of Pilate the monster and to make villains out of Jews by fictitious claims. The anti-semitism is palpable and pathetic, reflecting the disappointment and anger of that community at the failure of the Jesus Movement to catch the Jewish imagination.  By the time John's gospel came out, Christianity and Judaism had separated, the Church, in her own personal iest bnterest, was seeking a true rapprochement with the Empire, and, so, needed to fictitiously transfer responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus from the Romans, who executed him for treason, over to the Jewish leaders, and indeed the whole Jewish nation!

The symbolism is good when John's community shows Jesus' encounter with the cross as being the result of human sin, and the place where he defeats the powers and dominions of empire, greed, and hatred; and then rises again..  We see Jesus who is loving and forgiving to the very end -- wonderful message.

What happens when we attempt to explain the Cross?  Over nearly two millenia, Christian thinkers, inside and after the Bible, have concocted more than a dozen theories of the atonement.  All represent fallible human opinion, as faithful people try to create an "explanation" comprehensible in light of the extant culture and self-understanding.  All efforts to define a divine Mystery will necessarily fall short. 


In one early model, we find God and Satan arguing.  Satan agrees to release humanity (which is under his domination) if only God will arrange for the torture and death of his Son, Jesus.  God agrees and the deal appears done on Good Friday, but then God raises Jesus and thus gets one over on the Devil.
In another model, we see God's absolute love in Christ on the Cross.  We are impelled to begin living the life of Christ and, so, when God sees us he sees Christ and saves us.  In the nineteenth century, we find yet another theory -- penal substitutionary atonement -- the darling of evangelicals.  In that theory God (seemingly as viewed in ancient Israel) is angry and wants to punish us for failures, but instead  decides to arrange an ultimate propitiary sacrifice -- the torture and death of his Son  -- and thereby he is appeased, and can accept us.  Ask yourself what that theory says about who God is, who Jesus is, and who we are.  It isn't a pretty picture.

If I were asked to give an "explanation", I would say that Jesus lived a life totally in harmony with the will of God, completely opposed to the powers of evil and oppression, and without compromise with  every false value and every influence that prevents us from being the people we are called to be.  The necessary result was his death.  However, God refused to let the Dark Side win, raised Jesus, and us with him.

What we can now say is that we believe that in the Cross of Christ God was reconciling the world and showing God's deep love for us,   In a real sense, the drama unfolding before us can only be played in the human heart.  And it is only there that it can be understood.

Maundy Thursday: "You are What You Eat"

That is an ancient saying going back to primitive times when people believed that the character of a lion could be conveyed to a human by eating lion, that wisdom could come to one who ingested the meat of an owl.  And certainly, in some sense, we are what we intake.  Ingesting unhealthy food, drinking too much liquor, taking drugs -- these things can end up defining us, with the substance replacing who we really are.

In our reading from I Corinthians tonight, Saint Paul assures us that the very essence of Christ is con- veyed in the Eucharist, so that we can in time, by God's grace, be transformed into His likeness.  Paul also warns us that we commit sacrilege when we receive the Eucharist without acknowledging that the elements are the Body and Blood of the Risen Christ, under the appearances of bread and wine.  es He actually goes so far as to say that such sacrilege towards the Sacrament has led to illness and death!

We call it a Mystery -- a reality beyond our scientific understanding, beyond our sensory abilities to defect, yet received by faith and validated by its results in the lives of the faithful.  Unlike some others, the Romans and Lutherans, we do not seek to scientifically define exactly when and how the Christ a becomes truly present in the Sacrament.   We rather accept and believe it, and live into its reality as the core of our common life.

Palm Sunday: What are We Doing?

Hosanna was a nationalist, revolutionary cry o the lips of an oppressed people,  Hosanna was political, inflammatory.  Jesus, deciding to enter Jerusalem on that donkey,in emulation of a prophetic image from Micah about the coming messianic king, signed his own death warrant.  I want to be clear with you that, in the late gospels of Luke an John, the authority and role of Jewish authorities in the execution of Jesus are grossly exaggerated and the authority and role of Roman authorities are grossly understated.  That reflects the Church's attempt to establish peaceful relations with the Empire an the failure of the mainstream Jews to convert to the Jesus Movement.

George Gallup, the great pollster, once quipped that early Christians went to Jerusalem, as Muslims go to Mecca and Baptists to Tulsa.  The early faithful went to Jerusalem to walk the path of Jesus and to see the places he had been.  From the fourth century those who could not make the pilgrimage to the Holy City had a procession with palms in their local church.  We continue that practice some sixteen centuries later.  As we sang hosanna and entered our worship space, we were joined to the stream of countless faithful before us.  We acknowledged salvation.

But how are the events of this week salvific?  How do Good Friday and Easter reconcile us Suday to God.  That free gift is itself a mystery.  Over two millenia humans have tried to unpack that mystery.  More than a doesn't theories of the atonement, attempts to "explain" salvation, have been uttered  None is infallible, none is comprehensive.  We are called to live into that mystery with grateful hearts.  This week we relive the last days of Jesus.  We walked the triumphal entry this morning, we will visit the last fourteen events of his life in the Stations on Tuesday.  We will be there for Jesus' celebration of the Last Supper/First Mass on Thursday night.  We will watch with him one hour through the night  Then on Friday we will go with Mary and with John to the Cross.  Finally, on Sunday we will experience and celebrate once more God's victory over the Dark Side

Tuesday in Lent IV: Unpacking a Wonderful Psalm

The Psalms are a collection of hymns written and chose n for worship in the Second Temple.  They contain "notations" on how to chant them, but that information is lost to us.   They actually comprise five songbooks, in emulation of the five books of the Torah.  Generally, they transition from laments into praise.

We know that the Babylonians had a new year's festival in autumn, when they symbolically renewed the enthronement of their deity, proclaimed his dominion anew, and renewed their covenant with him.  This is the context of Psalm 46, which incorporated the same new year's time-frame and the elements celebrating God.  Psalm 46 is the quintessential such enthronement psalm, in which we see that God resides in the Temple and safeguards his holy city, and that waters flow to purify and nourish it into a  Second Eden.

In the beginning, God subdued all the disorderly primal forces of the universe that were making our human life impossible.  Thus, there was creation victory, and Zion is where it was remembered and proclaimed.  Unruly forces raged outside the Temple but those holy buildings made a visible statement to God's Chosen People that God is orderly and powerful over all that is chaotic and anti-human.

Indeed, God remains our "refuge and strength" and in Lent we have all that we need to renew our commitment to service and to take better care of ourselves to be strong witnesses for Christ.

[Our Saint-du-jour is James Loyd Breck who went ffar rom the East Coast to Wisconsin as a brave missionary and converted the Chippewa Nation, and also served in the founding of two Episcopal seminaries:  Nashotah House and Seabury.  Later, he founded a number of parishes out in California.  His focus was always the right one for a priest, to be an instrument of empowering of others for their ministries]

Lent V: What about Poverty?

As we have discovered the development in gospel texts from early Mark (about 71 CE) to late John (final, about 105 CE), sometimes we seem to be experiencing the telephone game as well as strong emphasis on each particular community's agenda.  Today's selection [John 12: 1-8] is a remarkable study: the anointing of Jesus.  As we follow the stream of time from Mark to John, the story begins in the house of Simon the Pharisee and ends up in Lazarus' house, putting him on the scene.  The woman morphs from just a nameless women whom Jesus lifts us as an example of faith, to a public sinner whom Jesus forgives in contrast to Pharisaic judgmentalism, and finally to Mary (of Mary & Martha fame).  The unction begins as an anointing of Jesus' head (symbolic of his kingly and priestly office), and moves to his feet, to emphasize the element of servant ministry important to John's community.

In the early gospels, it is the attendees whose criticize the use of expensive perfume for this anointing.  Then, the disciples become the critics.  And, finally in John, it is the super-villain Judas (a name that means The Jew) who complains about the cost.  Then we are amazed to learn that this very-likely mythical personage was actually the apostolic treasurer who used to steal money and would have converted monies used for the perfume!  Clearly we see John's disgusting anti-Semitic streak once again.  We are not fooled.

Jesus' reply here to the exceptional cost of the nard is to say that "the poor you have with you always" whereas he will not be around long.  That phrase has been used to suggest that the problems of the poor are so intractible as not to be worth any effort.  Better to get the fuzzies about the Lord and forgot those economically marginal folks. 

In our country we have 46.5 million people living in poverty, up more than 9 million in the last ten years,  48% of the population are now either poor or low income.  At the same time, our budding new aristocracy --the one-percenters --, own 43% of the nation's wealth and recently received tax cuts totalling $1.5 billion.   The bottom 80% of Americans collectively own seven percent of the assets.  Nevertheless, "the poor you have with you always."  Really?

Three quick thoughts on that.  First, we cannot separate Jesus from the poor, for he challenged all oppressive economic, political, and social systems.  He responded to people tangible needs, not just "thoughts and prayers."  Jesus resisted the Establishment so well he was executed by the Empire as a rival of Caesar, an enemy of the state.  Second, the Greek in the text may be rendered in present indicative, as usual, or present imperative.  If the latter, then Jesus is telling people to "keep the poor close to you."  Doesn't that sound more like the real Jesus?

Finally, Jesus supported the provision in Jewish Law for Jubilee, when in the fiftieth year people were supposed to remit all debts, release all land for re-distribution, and release all slaves.  That radical provision simply didn't survive the Chamber of Commerce lobbying in Jerusalem.  But Jesus wanted it enforced.  Jesus took it seriously.

We may not agree as how we should tackle the problem of poverty and take care of the poor.  But, in light of the huge and growing wealth gap in America, I do not believe we can argue that this is just the way things are, and Jesus would be ok with it.  No!  What to do is subject to debate.  Whether to do is simply unconscionable for us who claim to follow the Christ.  And we can do better as people people.