On March 13, the 1st Sunday of Lent, you will notice an addition to our sanctuary setting.

Our seating will remain in its normal front-facing configuration. But in the center of the room, in the midst of our congregational seating, a simple table will be placed, representing the sacred space we are symbolically opening in our lives for practicing a more continual awareness of the presence of God during the forty day Lenten season. God is in our intentional spirituality, and in our communal worship. God is in our workplace, and our homes. God is in our praise, and in our secret fears and failures. God is in the ordinary, as in the holy. Indeed, everything is holy, everything belongs to God.

During Lent, we will work to increase our awareness of God’s everywhere-presence in each of our own lives, exploring the theme: Altars in the World: spiritual practices in everyday life. Our sermon series themes will be drawn from conversations with Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “An Altar in the World: a Geography of Faith” We invite you to consider not “giving something up” for Lent this year; but rather, adding something to your own “Altar in the World” by joining us in worship each Sunday and after worship for adult learning around Spiritual Practices for Everyday Lives.

March 9 through April 17, Palm/Passion Sunday

Ash Wednesday Service, 3/9 7:00 p.m Taize and imposition of ashes

During the Sundays of Lent the preaching themes will be supplemented by adult learning following the service each Sunday, focusing on spiritual practices in our daily lives (Soup and bread will be served)

During the weeks of Lent, we will also share “Moveable Feasts” at homes in our faith community; as well as three Saturday morning opportunities to practice like St. Francis did, building our life together through labor and fellowship, as we build our prayer garden together.

The Practice of Encountering Others: gathering in community for friendship and prayer

Dinner/Moveable Feast Dates and Hosts:

1. Home of Chuck and Bonnie Hannemann (south) Saturday, March 19, at 6 p.m.
2. Church, Bible study and lunch, Wednesday, March 23 12:00 p.m. (noon)
3. Home of Belinda Vidal and Valerie Deville, March 29th, at 7:00 pm
4. Home of Doreen Ruggerio (north) Saturday April 2, 6:00 p.m.
5. Home of Pamela Armour (central) Sunday April 10, in the afternoon following worship
6. Home of Henry and Sandy Barrow (central) Sunday, April 17, 5:00 p.m.

Please call the church office or sign up for a dinner in the back of the sanctuary.

Lent 1, March 13 The Practice of Making Room in our Lives: emptiness

Text: Philippians 2 and Matthew 4
with Diane Shoaf, spiritual director and pastor, preaching & teaching
Adult Learning: the practice of centering prayer

Lent 2, March 20 The Practice of Walking on the Earth: groundedness

Text: Genesis 2 Laurie Kraus, preaching
Adult
Learning: lectio divina: listening with the heart

Saturday, March 26 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
we gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden
John German and Laurie Kraus, hosts

Lent 3, March 27 The Practice of Getting Lost: wilderness

Text: Exodus 17: 1-7 symbol: water/baptism
Adult Learning: Labyrinth walking prayers—wandering in prayer

Saturday, April 2, 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
We gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden

Lent 4, April 3 The Practice of Wearing Skin: incarnation

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14
1^st Sunday Lunch
Adult Learning: Praying in Color … drawing our prayers to God

Saturday, April 9, 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
We gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden

Lent 5, April 10 The Practice of Paying Attention: reverence

Lenten Cantata by the Choir, communion
Adult Learning: “those who sing, pray twice” exploring praying through simple sung chants and breath prayers

Passion/Palm Sunday, April 17

The Practice of Feeling: breakthrough
Text:
Passion Narrative in Matthew
Adult Learning: Sleeping with Bread: Holding
What Gives You Life (the Daily Examen)

HOLY WEEK OBSERVANCE

Maundy Thursday April 21, 7:30 Service of Shadows and Communion

Good Friday April 22 7:30 pm Taize and Prayer in the Garden

Easter Day, Sunday April 24 The Celebration of the Resurrection

“Supposing he was the Gardener?”
This Lent, make some space in your soul:
Join us, work with us, gather and eat with us, learn and explore with us….

Lent is a season for some discomfort and for looking at things from alternative perspectives “along the way,”….and therefore it seems important to pay attention to the discomfort or restlessness many of you have been kind enough to comment on, as you have reflected on worship during this season. Some have noticed that the sun coming through the east windows makes seeing the worship leaders a little more difficult. Others have shared that having “the cross beside us, instead of in front of us” is uncomfortable, and seems almost “wrong.” “It’s as if our attention is pulled from the cross, and is less clear to us. We have to strain to see the cross.”

This, too, seems symbolically significant to me. In the Lenten season, the texts of
scripture, week, by week, attend to the confusion and dread of the disciples
as they begin to grapple with Jesus’ prediction of his impending death. They
speak of the awkwardness of the journey toward Jerusalem, marked by embarrassing excess, frustrated confusion, heartbreaking betrayals, and surely, Jesus’ own very human dread and resistance to embracing the path he has chosen. So if we have found ourselves physically squinting into harsh light, a little disoriented as to our proper place, and straining toward a cross that was once always clearly before our eyes but is, in the moment, less easy to see and not entirely where it should be. . .maybe, in that, we are mirroring the paths of the disciples and Jesus.

On Passion Sunday, March 21, we turned our eyes toward the
smaller cross on the balcony. It was a time for reflection and community,
centered in the hearing of the choir’s powerful rendering of Mendelssohn’s
passion cantata, Christus., a time “away in a deserted place.” The cross
was behind us and before us as we heard sung and read the story of Passion
Sunday. With our Lenten journey coming to an end, we are gathering
our courage and our strength to face the Cross as Jesus did, when he
“turned his face toward Jerusalem.” Beginning on Palm Sunday, our sanctuary
will return to its more familiar forward-facing orientation, the beauty of
our rainbow celtic cross before us again

Across the way from the soon-to-be-demolished Cole Hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, six foam-core crosses were erected on what came to be known as Snow Hill. Five crosses were inscribed with the names of the
students killed during the Valentine’s Day shootings: Gayle, Catalina, Juliana,
Ryanne and Daniel; a sixth was turned the other way, its stark white façade
blank. Like the man whose suicide it commemorated, its presence offered
neither answers nor explanations.

But even that much ambiguity was too painful a burden for the violated university community to bear: within a day or so, the sixth cross was taken down; an action which honored the justified raw anger of the families and friends of the shooter’s victims. . .but left unaddressed the problem and the possibility presented by the life and death of Stephen Kazmierczak, the shooter.

Who
sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? In the world of
Jesus, the question was not as bad as it sounds. Maybe the disciple
who asked hoped there would be, for such an apparently difficult reality, a
somehow simple answer, hidden in the knowledge and the mercy of God. Like most
of us, the disciples apparently believed that their ability to tolerate
suffering would be enhanced by understanding the cause of suffering; by
being able to assign blame, thus escaping the awful randomness of bad things
happening to good people, and good things happening to bad. They also
believed, apparently, that Jesus—or the God in him—both had an answer,
and, more importantly, might be willing to share it.

Wouldn’t
that have been something? For God to tell us why? For Jesus
just to have answered the question for once—the man; or his folks; it
doesn’t really matter which one is guilty; just that someone is—so that the
painful scandal of God’s defenseless tolerance of undeserved suffering could be
laid to rest at last.

This
Sunday, we have achieved the pinnacle of the mountain of the Lenten season, and
begin our descent into the cold, dark days of the passion and death of Jesus.
In recognition of the fact that the forty days of Lent was a long time to be fasting, praying, and reflecting on sober spiritual themes in our lives,
the ancient church designated this fourth Sunday of Lent as “Laetare Sunday,” a
Sunday to give thanks for what is good in life, shifting our focus away from hard
times and hard work.

In token
of that spiritual coffee break, the colors for the day were lightened from
purple to a more cheerful rose, and folks who were denied meat and treats were
permitted, just for the day, to go back to their usual habits. God knows we
need such moments of light and ease, rest in the wilderness, so that spirits
are not broken by troubles we can neither resolve nor ignore. In a way, the
removal of the sixth cross—a painful reminder that one of those who died stole
the lives of five other beloved children—could be a kind of lataere, an
easing away from the burden of understanding or forgiving; an act of forgetful
mercy to help survivors make it through the long and sleepless night.

But there
are three hard weeks left before the dawn of Easter comes. And the problem of
the sixth cross and the question of the man born blind are burdens that must
eventually be picked up again and carried by the church; if need be, all the
way to the cross, that ultimate symbol of God’s heartbreaking failure to save
in the short run.

The
healing of the man born blind confronted neighbors, family, and religious
leaders with an undesirable gift. It was more than the restoration of sight to
a blind man: It restored an alienated, isolated loner to a place of dignity. It
turned a silent, dependent victim into an eloquent, self-determining,
challenging equal. It healed long-standing ruptures in the neighborhood, in
the blind man’s family, in the faith community, without even bothering to
ask whether those who were separated wanted to be reconciled. What Jesus
did was an act of forgiveness so radical its giver failed to even ask the
question whose fault is it, anyway? And some people got more than they
hoped for; and others, less than they believed they deserved.

The story
in the gospel of John invites us to consider how it might have been different
for the man born blind, his family, and his community of faith if, instead of
working so hard to make God make things make sense, they had just gotten down
into the mud with Jesus, and stayed there without anxiety or expectation until
the unfolding possibility of a miracle of grace let them all get up and move
on.

How it
might be different for us if, instead of trying to see it all and know it all,
we let the blind lead the blind, and waded into the work of our complicated
lives together, with hope and with patience. When the disciples asked “who
sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” they got far more
than they deserved with Jesus’ answer—but could they see it?

No
one sinned, said
Jesus, but that the work of God might be made visible. No one sinned.
When these things happen—to a man born blind, to a young man born angry, to a
mother, a child, a family, a father, or a friend—when these things happen to us
and to others, there is no easy answer, but there is a simple solution: don’t
run away, but get down in the mud, with whomever in your world is brave enough
and messy enough to join you; and make a healing paste of the dry dust and the
dirt of your life…apply it to your own eyes, and try to see the world a little
differently. No one sinned—but, let the work of God be manifest. Where
is God, or where can God be, through you, in the life of a crying child, an
angry town, a disgruntled worker, a hopeless situation, an answerless
question? What can you make in the mud that is beautiful, healing,
transforming, or even merely useful?

Lent
is about being in our lives—and in our lives’ questions—for the long haul.
The interminable story, the twisting plot, the lack of clean resolution, the
sudden, blinding experience of grace that somehow points us in a new and
unforeseen direction without ever, quite, wrapping up our loose ends. We don’t
control how God shows up to save us, or someone else. We don’t get to have all
the answers. But we do get to choose whether we are willing to receive our
sight, and what we will do with the knowledge that seeing gives us. Where we
want to show forth God’s mercy and love, and to Whom we wish to give our
ultimate allegiance: God, or someone, something with far less power to help us
see.

There
is a place still on the campus of Northern Illinois University where six
crosses stand: they are draped in Lenten purple and red, and like their
neighbors on Snow Hill, surrounded by flowers and gifts. None of the six
crosses bear names; all of the six are covered with words of sorrow,
compassion, forgiveness, love, and hope. Ryanne, Gloria, Juliana, Catalina,
Daniel AND Stephen are being remembered there; six children of God whose lives
were ended by violence, and whose souls are in God’s keeping. It will, I hope,
surprise no one in this sanctuary to learn that the place of six crosses, and
the place of prayer where six names are always spoken, is the Church—the brave
and fragile community of the baffled, the broken, and the believers: the
Church that Jesus is still making, here and now, with his body.

Amen.

Once upon a time, I lived not in a place
called “striving” or “testing,” as did the Israelites in this story: but in a
land named Absolute, in Certainty’s backyard: in a place where doubt was
searched out carefully, like a weed, and ruthlessly uprooted. I remember a
friend I used to have in those days, a thoughtful girl, who once questioned
whether the children of Israel could really have
walked miraculously across the Red Sea on dry land; for she had read
that the Red Sea was, in those days, a mere eighteen inches deep. This testing
of God’s word disturbed me, so I took the troublesome weed to my bible study
leader, who said, eighteen inches deep?
Well, then, the Israelites might have waded across, but, praise the Lord, God
drowned the Egyptians in a foot and a half of water!” In tending
the neatly manicured lawns of the Land of Absolute, the first law is You Shall Not Put the Lord Thy God to the Test.

I was thinking about my old smug and
certain self this past week when I found myself, literally, driving from the
old world of safety and certainty toward a place I had never been, where there
were more questions, and harder ones, along a way that was cold, slippery, and
dangerous. I was sent by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to help respond to
the shootings last week at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. On my way
there, I drove through the town of Wheaton, where I attended college. Wheaton
College, founded in 1860 for Christ and his
Kingdom, is a school with strict academic standards surpassed only
by its rigorous standards of belief. To go there, one must subscribe to a
narrow statement of faith and practice, affirming the literal truth of the
bible and a clear, unswerving path to salvation.

I was happy there: sheltered and well fed;
and it was many years before a Moses broke into my world to threaten and
challenge me with a flight toward freedom.. . .

When I drove by the campus last week I was
surprised how small it was; how little it had changed in thirty years. . .and I
thought, I could never go back there.

But going forward, as I recall, wasn’t
easy, either; then, or now. The campus of NIU in DeKalb is, like most state
universities, large and growing larger. Cole Hall, where the Valentine’s Day
shootings took place, sits in the heart of campus. Faculty and students I spoke
with described how the wounded and frightened geology students scattered in all
directions, finding shelter and support wherever they could. They will not go
back to Cole Hall: the way is barred to them by a yellow police line and by
the memory of what happened there, Members of the NIU community who also claim
an identity as people of faith have hard questions to ask God and one another:
they, too, are aware they cannot go back, and are wondering where the way
forward will take them, as a community, as persons, as believers. Those who
have been this way before know they are on the road toward a promised land—one
bigger than the land they left behind, if they are willing to move, as the
university’s new motto puts it, Forward,
Together Forward.

The people of Israel were nomads; ex-slaves
on the lam, with a wilderness of doubts about the integrity of their journey,
the reliability of their leaders, the reality of their ultimate destination,
and the faithfulness of the unknown god who had called them out. They could not
go back to Egypt; their lives depended upon finding a way forward. Yet they had
no idea where they were headed, nor how to get there without losing what little
they had left.

They left slavery behind and escaped with
their lives, but now they face survivors’ guilt, and carry survivors’
questions: why me? What do I do with this
new life I am being given? I can’t go back to the person I was before, so who
am I becoming? In the wilderness, unsure of their journey’s
direction or end, they are acutely aware they have no water. Desert journeys
are, as anyone who has undertaken one knows, dry and thirsty work. Have we gone up from Egypt merely to die in the
wilderness? All Israel cries with the fear and the torment of this
question; it is as though each voice, from cattle to children to adults, is
raised in a mighty and unified voice of fear and abandonment. Did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us and our
children and our livestock with thirst? It is a reasonable
question, and a reasonable request: give us
water.

Yet Moses, who just days earlier was
eloquent in victory at the Red Sea, is rendered speechless in the face of
Israel’s fear. He is from the old school, the one that obeys the first law and
its corollary: Don’t put the Lord to the
test, and Don’t question authority. In the face of his people’s
honest pain and confusion, he can only bluster: how dare you question me! How dare you challenge God. What right have
you to question the ways of the Almighty, or me, your leader? Confronted
by rage and bedeviled by uncertainty, he does not want the responsibility of
threading a path through a thicket of confusing choices and shifting variables.
Like us, Moses longs for a highway in the wilderness that leads unswervingly to
the promised land; well-marked, well-lighted, and with plenty of rest stops
along the way. He wants regular meals, a warm bed at night, and a clear
statement of what’s what. He does not want questions without answers: he wants
absolutes, and who can blame him? But such certainties are not part of the way
of freedom; but part of the life of Egypt, the way of certainty and security
and slavery that is mitzraim, another
word for Egypt that is also translated, “twice narrow.” It was a place they
left behind, whose doors were forever barred to them. They cannot go back, for
the old solutions and the rigid rules of life in bondage no longer apply. And
if Moses is paralyzed by fear; it seems to me that perhaps the children of
Israel, at least, are on the right track.

For it is their desire, their imperative,
to test the waters. They wonder, have we
made the right choice? Is this invisible God, are these all-too-visibly flawed
people trustworthy enough to help us find the way home? They are
alone in uncharted wilderness, on a risk-filled journey. They are caught in
the no-man’s land between deadly certainty and uncertain, unfulfilled hope, and
they are thirsty.

And as people will do when they are caught
uneasily betwixt and between; they turned on one another. They imagined the
worst, they doubted, they fought with each other and they blamed each other and
they blamed Moses and finally, in their rage and desperation, the hit upon the
solution, and challenged both Moses and God. Is
this God of yours reliable, or are we everlastingly to wait for the cosmic
other shoe to drop? Give us something to drink, they said, and prove your trustworthiness among us. And
then they waited.

The word in Hebrew for “testing” is nissah, and it means, to prove a person
and see whether they will act in a particular way, or to see whether the
character of a person is consistent. What the children of Israel hit upon, in
their desperation, was probably the only truly faithful act they were capable
of performing, there in the desert. They could not go back, relying on the
old, cold certainties: but they could go forward and ask God, Who are you? They could not yet have the
Promised Land, but they could build a relationship capable of bearing them
through the wilderness. They could not know the future, but they could know the
God who would lead them into it. They were able to say: we can’t do much, but we can give you an opportunity
to say who you are among us, and from there, maybe we can find our way forward
together.

In the twice
narrow place that was slavery in Egypt; life was hard. But the road
of freedom that passes through the dry and dangerous desert is, in its own way,
harder. It is a road fraught with risks, and unknowns, with dangers and with
doubts. But doubt can be the catalyst that makes our growing up into the image
of God a possibility. And striving with God, wrestling for even a bit of what
we need to sustain us along the difficult journey, might be the beginning of
faith, and a way through the wildernesses of uncertainty through which we travel,
on our way to our promised lands. If we cut off the avenues of doubt, we deny
ourselves the opportunity to ask whether God is essentially reliable. We lose
the chance to find out who God really is, and then we lose ourselves.

But when we ask, when we seek, even when in
fear and distress and hostility we turn on each other and on God with shrill
demands, God is there before us, the Giver of gifts, making a way in the
wilderness, standing in the rocks before us, bidding us come. It may not be much,
—it may in fact be pitifully little, when our needs seem so great: but by
Grace, it may be just enough. Go on ahead
of the people, the Voice said to Moses, take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on
the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the
people may drink. And he did, and God did, and the people did
drink. It was a small stony miracle in the midst of crying need—barely enough,
but enough to get by. And sometimes that’s the way it is in the wilderness:
not too much, just enough, and God there before us in the rocks, when we stand
beside each other and ask for what we need to survive one more day. Let us
pray, in words from T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash
Wednesday:

This is
the time of tension between dying and birth
The
place of solitude where three dreams cross
between blue rocks—
Blessed
sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer
us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach
us to care and not to care
Teach
us to sit still
Even
among these rocks,
Our
peace in God’s will
And
even among these rocks
Sister,
mother,
And
spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer
(us) not to be separated
And
let (our) cry come unto Thee.

Amen.

Almost everybody I know hates them, or fears them. I know I always did.

I grew up in west Texas and in Southern California, wandering in the fields and scrub desert, and I was taught—early and often—to watch out for snakes.

If I ever saw one (and I did), chances are, it was dangerous to me, poisonous, maybe even poisonous enough to kill me.

So I was always careful, in my freedom, maybe a little too much so. Maybe so much that I missed a lot in my childhood adventures, looking down and around for snakes,when I might have been seeing the world around me.

I remember a hike in the San Bernadino Mountains, when I was a girl scout away at camp. Well, I don’t actually remember the hike —or the mountains, or the girls who were hiking with me…. or really anything much about the camp at all

Except I remember that someone saw a snake, a diamondback rattler, I think it was and after that, it was all about the snakes even though I never saw another snake…not even oneit was about the snakes and me, stumbling through the woods, looking downafraid And that’s too bad.

Our ancestor story, here in the book of Numbers, is a little like that.

They had been making some progress through the wildernesswhen it happened they passed by the “Sea of Reeds” and Mt. Hor and they had a relapse.

Mount Hor was where they had buried Aaron, Moses’ brother.

The Sea of Reeds was what we call the Red Sea— the place where the Israelites hit a brick wall,And almost lost their lives, with water before them and the armies of Egypt coming up behind them.

It was a miracle, but I’m betting they remembered the terror,and the “almost” of dying.

Somehow, it seems, just passing by put the Israelites in mind of their fearsput them back in that old slave-world of terror and helplessness

And the story says, the people became impatient, and complained against God and Moses. I bet they did.

But then, the story does the snake trick I mentioned earlier:The Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people and they bit the people and many died.Just what we were afraid of.

Now, this part of the story is interesting.

First, because when the poisonous serpents came, the people, already angry and disappointed about their lot in lifeblamed Godthey believed (and so does the story)that God sent the snakes to kill the people because he was less like God to them,and more like they were: vengeful, superstitious, blaming, and a little guilty.

Of course, we’re modern people and we don’t believe God sends stuff to kill people.Do we?

The second interesting thing is this: we don’t actually know what it is the people were being killed byBecause the word translated “poisonous serpents” here is obscurein another place it is translated “fiery serpents”

But we don’t really know what it means… the word is “seraph”But it’s not clear what a seraph actually is, or does…Just that it’s something to be afraid ofsomething that can kill you.

I guess modern people can believe in seraphsSomething different for each of us, at different times, something that causes us to descend into a world of blaming and terrora world of fear and deathsomething that makes us look carefully down,And always watch where we are steppingso careful that we don’t get caughtso nothing kills us, and we miss the world, the hike, the mountain, the friends, our very life.

One “seraph” may bite and harry you into a dying way of being,Into yielding to the evil inclinationAnother one may bite me.

Alcohol for one, food for anotherThe security of wealth for one, or maybe the satisfaction of buying and having the belief that preemptive war, if carried on long enough, aggressively enough, will keep us safe….the idea that fear is what should govern our decisions and actions.

We all have motivations, values, weaknesses, experiences that, if we choose them as Ultimate, can kill us…. If you don’t want to die,the trick is, to know your seraph and to own responsibility for it: not to blame it on God or your neighbor.

Not to expect God, or your neighbor, to make a miracle and save you.But to do what you have to, to save yourself.

When we read the story in Numbers we see that the people, snakebit and scared,

prayed to God and to MosesPlease save us from these seraphs…please take them away from us.

But that’s not how it works.

Seraphs –whatever we fear or

whatever we set up as so important to us for good or ill

that it keeps us from seeing the world or living our life freely—

seraphs are a part of life

not something that God or someone else can take away from us.

We have to participate in the cure,

We have to do the work.

That’s why the oldest baptismal formula,

the one we used with Jakk and his family this morning

Asks us two things:

Do you turn away from evil?

Do you turn toward God in Jesus Christ?

From the moment of adoption into the family of God, we are taught:

The life of faith is about choices, it is about action.

The life of faith is not magic, it’s about hard work.

So I was looking at the New York Times this morning before I came to church.

And I saw this article on the front page:Dose of Tenacity Wears Down an Ancient Horror.

As luck would have it, it’s about the seraphs.

In Nigeria, in a place called Ogi, is one last part of the world infested with Guinea worms,“a plague so ancient that it is found in Egyptian mummies and is thought to be the “fiery serpent” described in the Old Testament as torturing the Israelites in the desert.”

^[1]

How about that?

Guinea worms are a parasite. You swallow the bad water, and later, 3 foot long worms burst out of your flesh, trying to get loose, and they explode your skin, and burn like fire.

And sometimes they can kill you.

They could be easily eradicated, if only people would make some simple, consistent choices about cleaning their water,

And being careful where they drink and bathe.

But people are superstitious. And they like to do things the way they always have doneAnd so it’s been hard to get the seraphs, I mean the worms, eradicated.

But President Jimmy Carter believes that people shouldn’t die from something so easy to take care of, and his foundation has spent lots of money and lots of time wearing down resistance and teaching the people to look up, and make different choices… and providing them with the tools and resources to live into those choices It’s not magic, it’s just hard work.

And Guinea Worm infestation is about 5 years away from being totally eradicated. I think that’s a nice way for a President to spend his time and influence, don’t you?

But back to the seraphs.

The people of Israel were told: God can’t take the seraphs away,

But we can do this: we can put one up where you can see it for what it is. We can put it high enough so that you have to look up and around at the rest of the world, and at everyone in it, we can get it up and away from you long enough to give you a choice:

Do you turn away from evil? Do you turn toward God?

That’s all it is, one choice at a time, all your life long

It’s what Jesus was trying to teach Nicodemus, there in the gospel of John.

Nicodemus, an influential, powerful, and affluent mancame to Jesus by night.

His life wasn’t working,but he was afraid to admit it.

Jesus told him: Looking down and hiding in the dark is killing you.

And God so loved the world… but you have to look up, be born from above. Make the choices, do the work.

It’s probably the best known verse in the bible, John 3:16

Godsolovedtheworldthathegavehisonlysonthatwhoseverbelievesinhim

shouldnotperishbuthaveeternallife….

But it’s not magic, not just a placard being waved in the stands at sporting events

It’s a choice to look up toward the light

To live within a world large enough to give you life

To love that world, and not to be afraid of the seraphs

Or to expect someone else to save you from them

To get up every day and do that… And then to do it all over again the next day, and the next.

Do you turn away from evil, and renounce its power in the world?

Do you turn toward God, following the way of Jesus Christ?

Do you?

Amen.

bottom line

There are two stories stretched out here before us this morning like blankets on the grass– and between them, an infinite world

of possibility and disappointment,

the possibility of making a real difference in a big, hard world

or the alternative that, by holding on to what we think we have,

what we know we believe with all the strength of our desperation and fear,

we may find ourselves hustled without explanation out the door and down the steps of the holy place, squinting into the bright sun, blinking back tears of hot shame and baffled disbelief.

How, after all we have done, after all we have tried so hard to be, could it end so badly?

How could the small choices of even smaller people matter so much?

Make no mistake, the invitation to come and hear Jesus is a dangerous one…for all of us.

On the green grass, sitting by the thousands, listening for a word from Jesus, a word from God, are, I imagine, all kinds of people.

By contrast, in the Temple, where the other story tells us Jesus became so uncompromisingly angry that day, there were only one.

But more about them, later—

When I think about the first story, one of my favorites in scripture, I see my grandparents, cousins, and brother, running under the trees past the picnic tables on Granddad’s Bluff, and hear our parents warning us sharply not to stray too close to the cliff’s edge … … our own children, lined up with sponges in their hands, being chased by a hose-bearing elder, shrieking in delight..I see friends from this church, waving from their blankets on a small rise on the golf course near the Biltmore hotel, wilting in the humid air, but happy to be gathering on the fourth of July to share a picnic with thousands of neighbors and watch the sky explode with color and light…

There was the smell of the foods of many cultures

the dark tints of bottles of wine, poured out,

the warm, yeasty odor of stacks of French loaves, fresh from the oven, the rich smell of meats grilling with a thousand different spices…when I think about this story, and remember all of its associations, I feel happy, welcomed, at home.

So it’s hard to read the end of this story…when the disciples of Jesus, and all his new friends, sit together and listen until the day fades and another kind of hunger rises, and with it, fear.

The teacher looked with compassion on the crowd because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding villages and buy something for themselves to eat. But he answered them: You Give Them Something to Eat.

Where are the mothers, reaching into their baskets, passing jugs of wine and loaves of bread to be broken and shared? Where are the fathers with their dried catches of fish, flaky and flavorful? Where are the children and the neighbors, making room on the green grass for a new friend, a seldom-seen acquaintance?

Don’t you get it? Jesus says. It’s a picnic! Everyone shares, everyone gives a little, everyone eats, and everyone is satisfied. But the disciples can’t remember, and they don’t have enough, and darkness is falling, and they are feeling threatened, hungry, and scarce. There had always been enough before, but, the story says: they didn’t understand about the Bread.

Now, before you judge them, before you say—how could they have not believed? how is it they didn’t understand? think about us, about what we have, and what we lack, and how easy it is, really, to forget about the Bread, and see only what we lack, when the dark is coming on, and the world is a hard and deserted place. Think about how, just a month ago, when the janitors and groundspeople who keep the grass green across the street at the University of Miami made public their fight for better wages and health care, how hard it was for the community to get that it was our responsibility to “give them something to eat.” The president of the university, Dr. Shalala, an ethical person, committed to health care for the poor, said that the responsibility lay with others, and encouraged those others to act…and it’s true, there are systems and agents in charge of such things. And My loaf and My piece of fish doesn’t really seem to have much to do with the Big Picture, usually….

But I like this green grass story that lies so close to home because it seems to me in a way, that, for a change, the disciples—who are, after all, all of us—got it when Jesus said—you get them healthcare, you get them something to eat…

In Miami’s own version of five loaves and two fish, the students petitioned, the faculty urged, the local interfaith and members of synagogues and churches wrote postcards and rallied the religious community, the press kept it all public, the hungry helped themselves…and look: passion was gathered, concern was awakened, space was made, resources were found: most everyone donated some of what they had to give…and the university said: we’ve listened to our community.

And the picnic is underway…and there are more to follow.

And he ordered them to sit down in groups on the Green grass. And taking the bread and the fish, he looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people, and all ate and were filled.

All ate and were filled, sitting on the green grass which had,

just moments before, been a dark and deserted place

And maybe for a minute, or two, the disciples get it:

That everybody brings something to the Table.

And everyone is supposed to remember about the bread—

That it is our job to remember, and to understand, and to listen to Jesus when he says: you give them something to eat..

Whatever it is. Whatever the issue.

Even if we do not know what we have to offer

And we do not know what on earth God can do with such

small and paltry gifts…anything we bring that is authentic, that comes from our heart of Love, is valuable to God, and God can use it.

And as long as we are willing to offer up what we have,

A fish, a piece of bread,

An hour,

An idea,

A letter, a room,

without reservation,

For the good of the whole community

It is valuable to God, and God can use it.

But if we are not: if we are not willing,

Then we might be the other kind of people,

The people from the story in the gospel of John

Who were hustled out of the temple where they were buying and selling

And left out on the steps.

It’s not that they were buying and selling that was the problem, I think

For not everyone who comes to the Temple to make a sacrifice has the right kind of coin, the proper offering.

Buyers and Sellers can also offer what they have

Valuable to God.

But what was wrong

What enraged Jesus

Was that these buyers and sellers cared nothing for the Other

Nothing for the Temple

Nothing for the community of which they were a part

Nothing for the Holy which the Temple represented.

They cared only for themselves

And their profit

The bottom line.

If by chance they had cared enough to come to the deserted place

to listen to Jesus

You can bet your life on one thing:

They would have been prepared with bread and fish

Commodities that they would not have shared

But would have sold

To the highest bidder.

And the grass would not have been green

And there would not have been enough

And they would have gone away rich

And hungry

I don’t know what you bring this morning

But I know you

I know you bring something

And that God can use it.

And I believe that the only wrong thing is to withdraw

And to refuse one another

And to refuse God.

So I beg you—not to sit on your hands and

Withhold sharing what you have brought

Your presence. Your heart. Your questions, your ideas

Your time. Your money.

Your prayers

Your grief or your joy

Because there are too many places

In this war-torn world, in our own community, nearby

That are deserted, where some people are hungry, while others are hoarding what they have, because they don’t understand about the bread…even though God is saying, over and over, You Give Them Something to Eat.

This is our story: we are the ones who remember the field of green grass

Where families and friends are celebrating…and how Jesus is reminding us

that we must freely give whatever we have brought to this place

So the Master can do something with it.

And sooner or later,

We will understand. Amen.

What is the opposite of faith?

asks the writer Anne Lamott, as she slogs through yet another day in the life—fighting with her 13 year old son, trying to build a relationship with the boy’s father, struggling with memories of her mother so bitter and angry that she cannot even bear to take the box containing her mother’s ashes off of the back shelf in the guest room closet, despairing of the war in Iraq and her sense of utter impotence—as a Christian believer—to make even the tiniest dent in her own hard heart, let alone in the heart of the world. What is the opposite of faith?

Doubt is the opposite of faith. Right?

Right? Only believe with all your heart, and doubts and conflicts, struggles and contradictions, will evaporate like the pre-dawn mist rising off the stone tomb of Jesus disappeared with the first rays of the sun on Easter morning.

On Easter Day of all days, it is tempting to take this way, this via positiva.
And there are voices in scripture who will help us, if this is our
choice. One such story comes from the gospel of Matthew—a gospel with
clean lines, brave conclusions, clear instructions. Dramatically
supernatural, unabashedly proselytizing, Matthew’s story of the
resurrection is intended to leave us with no doubts.

The writer of Matthew uses every device at his disposal to convince us that
the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection can neither be negated nor
explained away in ordinary human terms. Two earthquakes, a terrifying
“angel of the Lord,” all in dazzling white, the lies of the chief
priests and the scribes, the myth of the stolen body…all are drawn
forth and deployed like weapons of mass conversion to set the disciples
up for lives of glittering success as they are sent out with their
script and their strategic plan: go therefore and make disciples of
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…and
lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew’s gospel demonstrates the mighty acts of God in history; a certainty made
visible…. but: how can such a resurrection save us? We
know the dark side of certainty. We are gifted with the language of
Power, beguiled by the winsome forcefulness of our own mythology; sure
of our rights, our obligations, our mission to save the world. And
yet…we are not reborn, and somehow, sometimes, we know it.

If freedom from doubt is the Resurrection you have come seeking today,
it’s a buyer’s market. There are Christians—and Christian
communions—everywhere, who rely heavily on the power of Resurrection
Certainty to bulldoze their way through the ordinary doubts and
darknesses of daily life, the wary skepticism of people who believe
differently, and the uncompliant, determined death—dealing that is life
in this world among the powers and principalities. Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away go the words of the old hymn, but in the hands of certainty, they are less a prayer than they are a militant call to arms.

The pastor of a large Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale was given nearly a full page one day this week in the op-ed section of the Herald, offering not so much his opinion or his faith in the mystery of resurrection as he stated just the facts, ma’am: that the factual—the factual evidence of the resurrection of Jesus was so compelling, so objectively attested, so logically presented, that there was no question of “belief” at all—rather, a universal intellectual and practical assent in the risen Christ akin to, say, knowing that Starbucks will give you a triple venti nonfat latte if you order it up and plunk down your $4.35.

This militant certainty that sets aside faith walks a clear, though dangerous path through our common life: cutting a swath recently through the small community of Pinellas Park, Florida, and the little hospice where Terri Schiavo lingers in a
twilight state of not-quite-living, compelling strangers—who do not
know the sorrow and the struggle of her family, and who do not have the
right to render judgment in this intensely private matter of life and
death—to bear witness to their utter certainty that there is only one
right divinely mandated choice for Life, and damn to hell anyone who
disagrees or doubts this action.

The New York Times carried
in recent weeks a series of articles describing the deliberate
humiliation and tormenting of Muslim captives detained at Guantanamo
Bay. Hard and shameful stories, that have caused people of conscience
in the military and out of it to question whether we have as a nation
lost touch with our core values of tolerance and compassionate mercy.
Yet more chilling, somehow, than all of these stories put together was
the one reported about a soldier named Smith, who, when asked by his
victim why? why are you tormenting me? replied simply because I am a Christian.

The opposite of faith is not, as we have been programmed to believe, doubt.

The opposite of faith is certainty.

Me,
I don’t do so well with certainty these days. The fixed script seems
rigid, unyielding. The formula doesn’t fit the fabric of life as it is
unfolding around me, around the people in the spiritual community I
call home. In the face of brokenness, doubt, and fragility … in the
midst of hard questions with no easy answers… in the heaviness of a
hospice room where Terri Schiavo lies dying while her family fights and
prays for clarity, for truth, for mercy; in Red Lake, Minnesota where
shattered families and a violated Native American tribal community are
listening for answers and gathering up the tangled threads of violence,
alienation and death; in these lengthening, soul-draining days of war,
in the small potent tragedies of families and individuals that cause us
to clear our throats and lift up our small voices in prayer, week after
week…lord, hear our prayer.

What does it
mean to make a disciple? What is the purpose of our baptism? How does
the meaning of Christ’s resurrection—so clear within the small world of
the ancient gospel witness, so difficult to touch and grasp in the hard
light of day—really have the potential to transform us? Does it?

The
ending of the gospel of Mark—which no observant person would dare to
call a “resurrection story”— is, as we receive it, singularly lacking
in miracle, almost devoid of hope, and ridiculously lacking in role
models, populated as it is by an ambiguous “man in white” and
frightened, silent women who, even when commanded, cannot muster a word
of witness to contradict the looming emptiness of the silent tomb.

But
what if the subtle scent of resurrection has been overshadowed by our
cheap dependence upon the trappings of power and certainty? What if
faith flowers there, and here, in the midst of the doubt and the fear,
instead of being badgered into existence by relentless constructions of
creeds and demands?

The words at the close of
the gospel of Mark which describe the reactions of the women who went
to the empty tomb are generally translated in the most unflattering and
destructive of ways: they were “alarmed”. They were overcome by “fear,”
“trembling” in terror—they said nothing to anyone because they were
“afraid.”

But I believe it is the culture of
Certainty that disvalues the unique and tender witness of the women who
went to the resurrection in the gospel of Mark. There is ample textual
evidence to suggest an alternative translation, one that honors the
nuances of fear, doubt and struggle that pave our pathways to grace,
and at the same time affirms that resurrection is possible not in spite of, but because of our attentiveness to uncertainty, doubt, and mystery: Listen: And
going out they fled the tomb, for trembling and ecstasy possessed them,
and they said nothing to anyone, for they were filled with awe.

I’ve been thinking that this year is for me, an Alligator Easter. Let me explain.

My
friend Eric the traumatic stress psychotherapist suggests that when we
are frightened or have experienced trauma, our thinking, spiritual
selves go into “fight or flight” mode. We lose the ability to think, to
explore creative options, and we reduce everything to the certainty
that we are must kill or be killed. My friend calls this being
possessed by our “alligator brain,” and we’ve all been there and done
that. You know what I mean…whether your experience is the profound
terror of a life threatening attack or accident… or the more
mundane—but no less threatening—experience of someone with power over
us threatening our well being; financially, professionally,
emotionally. Confronted with terror and threat, our certainty is fixed,
and our choices are two: eat it, or run away, so it doesn’t eat you. A
world of infinite possibilities dissolves into the orthodoxy of fear,
of violence. Our god-given creativity and imagination is smothered by
threat. Eric counsels that if we can only be aware that this is our
primitive response, we can be in charge of it, and change it. We can
sense our body’s tightening, feel the adrenaline that cuts off our
reason, and choose not to be controlled by it. Accepting our fear, our
distress, we can breathe, relax our bodies, free our mind—and soul—to
explore alternatives with creativity, courage, and grace. The key thing
is to breathe, and to know that we choose whether to die to our higher
self, our soul, or to be born again.

This is how
it is in the “resurrection story” that closes the gospel of Mark…there
is fear, and doubt, and the power to stay with it, so that something
else can be at work.

When our devotion to a
“faith” grounded in certainty tempts us, the witness of the silent
women in Mark calls us instead to a way of believing that is openended,
unfinished. A way of believing that acknowledges that God’s revelation
is always born in mystery, and worked out in our bodies through our
attentive, mindful participation in all of life’s experiences, mundane
and extraordinary alike.

When we are tempted by a
belief system that calls upon us to march off into a world of absolute
assertions that trample people’s rights and impose a tyranny of
Certainty upon ourselves and others—especially when we are facing hard
times and difficult choices—the women of Mark suggest that running off
half-cocked from the empty tomb to babble whatever it is we think we
know is at best, a useless expense of effort, and at worst, an
arrogance that tramples the fragile flowers that bloom in the fertile
soil of suffering and doubt.

If we are longing
for a strategic Christian plan of decisive, prescribed action, we might
try instead the discipleship of the women of Mark, who practice their
watchfulness at the crucifixion and a mindfulness at the empty tomb
that acknowledges that God’s revealing of godself is more in the
ordinary than in the spectacular or miraculous.

Mark’s
gospel invites every human being to comprehend that they—that we—are
made in God’s image, and therefore are capable of reflecting God in the
world.

Isn’t this what the other Christian
“Smith,” Ashley Smith of Atlanta, showed us when she, a wounded soul in
search of saving grace, encountered another broken child of God, the
fugitive Brian Nichols, who had raped and killed and fled justice in a
nationally televised manhunt two weeks ago. Taken prisoner in her own
home, Ashley confronted her terror and reached into the empty tomb of
doubt for grace. Like wisdom in the Proverbs, like God in the psalms,
like Christ on the cross, she set a Table for her enemy, and found a
brother. She listened to his story of failure and pain, and shared her
own, and in the breaking of bread and hearts, the mystery of
resurrection was made flesh.

In Greek, the gospel
of Mark ends with a preposition, “gar,” which means for. As we all
know, ending with a preposition is sloppy, incomplete, and
leading—which is everything a gospel should be, everything a
resurrection might become, if we let it.

Our
trembling is not terror — but holy awe, that in every circumstance, God
is doing a new thing… if we will allow ourselves to participate in it.

Our
speechlessness is not less, but more than words… as we consider not
what we are sure of, but what we are not…which is where God is bringing
a new thing to life, an eloquent silence that is an open space in which
in which we might write the resurrection’s meaning for ourselves.

Scripture: Luke 4:1-13 and Deuteronomy 26:1-11

I was just finishing my work out at the gym early Thursday morning when
I ran into a colleague from another congregation who paused in the
middle of his sweating and panting to greet me. When I asked how his
week was going he said, okay. Ash Wednesday service last night. I
nodded. Us, too. How was it? He grimaced. Poorly attended as usual. You
know how it is. Nobody wants to do Lent.

Then yesterday, a friend of mine who is a priest burst out: I hate
Lent. Lent is ridiculous. Lent is not what we are about, we are about
Easter. Lent is nothing more than the forty day bus ride that carries
us to Easter. Nobody wants to do Lent. Some years I think that’s what we
ought to recite, when we ritually inscribe ashes on the foreheads of
the faithful few, instead of the more traditional you are dust, and to
dust you shall return. Nobody wants to do Lent but Lent is doing you.

The truth is, Lent is doing usand our choices are not so much about
skipping the bus ride and living a life of endless Easter, as they are
about whether we are going to use our spiritual energy to enter the
desert time, the Lenten times, willingly and with our eyes and hearts
open, or rather to exhaust our spiritual strength in avoidance and
denial. Lent is doing us — in the turmoil in Haiti, and our confusion
about how to help; on the steps of city hall in of San Francisco and
New Paltz and Ft. Lauderdale and in the courthouses behind them; in the
memory of a grief not yet healed, felt as a pang when you least
expected it; in the weary anger and numbing exhaustion and sheer
depletion that comes sometimes just as the cost of getting through
another hectic, ordinary day. Lent is doing us: the desert is not an
optional tour, but an essential part of a soul-full life.

Scripture reminds us that the human story really begins in the
desert. You are dust, and unto dust you shall return. These are not
only the opening words of Lent, but also the words that mark the
beginning of the rest of Adam and Eve’s life, when they were done with
Eden and ready to enter the world. The ancestors who crafted and told
this story put these words into the mouth of God, reminding us that it
is a very part of our humanity, our god-given nature, to be shaped not
just by Eden, by the garden of delights, our joys and pleasuresbut
also, by dust: by the hard facts of lives that are shaped by work and
toil, by the earthy ”stuff” of relationships forged not in the
mindless bliss of romantic love, but in the real-time love-work of
conflict and compromise; by souls whose beauty is etched in the joy of
wisdom learned through pain and pondering.

We were not meant for Eden; rather, we began in the desert to know
what it was, what it is to be truly human. We are dust and deity. And
we continue in the desert, in the wilderness, as well. After Eden, it
is the story of the Exodus and the wilderness wanderings that has most
profoundly shaped the Jewish and Christian understanding of what it
means to be a child of God, a member of the tribe of those who choose
and are chosen for a life in God. The Exodus was only the bus stop, the
place we began the journey. Israel learned what it meant to be God’s
people in the wilderness. There, they received the torah, the
commandments. There, they learned how to trust, even in seasons of
deprivation, anxiety, and aimlessness. There, their slave-spirits were
tested and refined and prodded and poked into the beautiful,
independent, ornery fullness of free people. There, they learned that
the key to knowing how to choose among difficult options and the trick
to keeping the family together in hard times was to know how to tell a
good story. Read the story. They learned it they hard way and then they
taught us, that to be a people of God is mostly about practice, and
repetition, and knowing how to mark your life from beginning to end,
and to believe that that life has meaning because you, and God, are
together in the midst of it.

Listen to this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy, a story and a
commandment tied to the very moment when the people realized they had
left the wilderness and come into a place of sufficiency and grace.
Listen to what they were taught to remember, and to say, and to do:
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before
the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the
Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into
Egypt and lived there as a stranger, few in number, and there became a
great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us
harshly and afflicted us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our
ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice.

This may seem dusty and distant: but it is our story, and truly, the
stuff that frames and makes sense of our everyday lives. Let me give
you an example in an editorial by Diego Ribadeneira of the Boston
Globe, concerning why some ministers and religious activists support
civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians. The article began:

For centuries, from the early Middle Ages until the start of the
last century, many European countries had laws that put a cap on the
number of marriage licenses given annually to Jewish couples. It was a
way, says Rabbi Howard Berman, of trying to control the Jewish
population in overcrowded European ghettos. Berman, rabbi emeritus of
Chicago’s Sinai Temple, told this little-known historical account to
bolster his position on the controversial issue of whether gays and
lesbians should be allowed to marry. “We were strangers in the land of
Egypt,” says Berman, “We know what it is like to be told by external
authorities that we may not marry.”

What a challenge for most of us, who rarely think to read our faith
story, let alone to allow it to shape the way we are in the world, and
the choices we make here. Why do you support gay marriages, Rabbi? A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor, and he was oppressed in Egypt.

We began in the desert to know what it meant to be human; and we
learn in the desert to claim and to tell our human story. Do we even
know our own history well enough to claim it? Do we take it seriously,
whether it be our faith history, or our own?

Finally, the scriptures suggest that the desert is the place where
we learn to listen to hard questionsand listening, come to know who we
want to be. This may be the most crucial desert lesson of all for us,
who avoid at all costs quiet, empty spaces and empty desert time. We
fill our lives with advice and action, with noise and distraction and
busy-ness, and in filling our lives to such a brim, and keeping them
that way, we have emptied the well from which our souls must drink, in
order to be well and strong to give back to the world in thanksgiving
to God for what we have been given. We don’t have enough emptiness in
our living to nourish the fullness of a healthy spiritual life.

I think that Jesus of Nazareth knew this about emptiness and
fullness, and that wisdom is what sent him out into the wilderness. Now
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by
the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by
the devil. We don’t know how it really happened. We just know that a
man struggled with questions in his soul, resisted temptation, and
fulfilled his calling. Jesus thought enough of his life to attend to
the details, to take time to listen to hard questions, and to tell his
own, and his people’s story as a way of anchoring himself to his faith
and his history. Jesus believed enough in the meaning and
purposefulness of history to tell his people’s story– to quote
scripture– while he was making these important, private choices in his
life. Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit,” and just maybe, a great part
of what that means is that Jesus knew, and behaved as if, he was in the
Flow of the purpose of God as it was being played out in human history,
every single minute of every day. Perhaps the greater part by far of
Jesus’ being the Christ was not that he had access to God and God’s
purposes in a way that we do not, but that Jesus’ own awareness of the
presence of the Holy Spirit in his life was so acute that he was
literally incapable of devaluing the events and the living of his days
in the ways that we do so casually, every day of our lives. Living as
the Christ of God was as much about the discipline of understanding
life to be meaning-full and attending to it as it was about anything
else. And that is something we can do; indeed, must do, if we would
live as “Christian.”

There is no way around it: Lent is a desert season, harsh and
barren, when our serious obligations, our anxious struggling, our
awareness of the fragility of our lives and the lives of those we love
are permitted, even coaxed, out of the places where our deep sadness
and our anxiety lies hidden in shadow to rise to the surface and be
examined in the clear light of day.

Facing what we are, and what we have failed to be or become, we know
ourselves fragile, earthy, fallible, and we admit, even if just for a
moment, that we are not all we are cracked up to be, nor even quite
what we have pretended. But this is not a necessary evil, a bus-ride
toward Easter, but a life-tour that has meaning in and for itself. This
work of dust and ashes, hard though it be, must also be seen as
God-work. It is God-work that frees us from the burden of illusion,
pretense, and self-delusion. God-work that Lent is a time for letting
go, for telling our story and listening to the God-stories we have been
given with renewed passion and interest, for believing that the dry
work of the desert can bring us, by hidden paths, back once again to
the places, where God is still awaiting us. It is a necessary work for
us, and a good one. The poet T. S. Eliot describes it, this sort of
needful paradoxical transformation, in one of his Choruses from The
Rock:

The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.

In all of my years, one thing does not change.

However you disguise it, this thing does not change:

The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;

The men you are in these times deride

What has been done of good, you find explanations

To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.

Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

The desert is not only around the corner,

The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,

The desert is in the heart of your brother.

The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done,

And some of the things that were long ago done,

That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.[1]

[1] Eliot, T. S., ”Choruses from The Rock,” I, 1934, in Collected Poems 1909-1962, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc. 1970.

Scripture: Exodus 34:29-35 and Luke 9:28-36

On the day that my brother died, I was transfigured. Not, like Jesus was, into his truest spiritual self, luminous with light and radiant with power; but rather, into a person I do not, quite yet, recognize as myself. I had been taken to the airport, and was alone, awaiting the plane that would take me to my parents in Texas. I was, I thought, invisible but then, no rather, I was aching with such shock and grief that it must be shining in my face like a beacon.

Like Moses, I was changed and I could not imagine that people would want to have anything to do with me, as strange as I felt I had become. Still, I craved a human touch, evidence that my transformed self was still, somehow, tethered to the real-time world in which I had moved with ease only a few hours before. I went to the ATM to get some money for traveling, and there encountered the only person who would speak to me over that time of wilderness traveling. As I turned with my $100.00 to go to the plane, a man stopped me and begged for money. I felt
pressured, intimidated and then, unaccountably, enraged. Could he not see from my face that I was different, that I was not like everyone else? I spoke harsh words that as soon as they left my lips, I could not remember. I stuffed $5.00 into his handthe smallest bill I had available. I wanted to push him away from me, but it wasn’t necessary.

The man pocketed my cash and turned without a word. As he went, I realized that I couldnt remember his face. And I thought, who am I?

The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus in scriptures perches precariously atop a mountain, a moment of unbearable beauty flickering over a mass of needy, imperfect humanity: Up here, for a moment, life as we wish it would be: but down there, a reminder that our times away from the mess and the demands of real life are infrequent, and too few.

The story of the transfiguration marks a sea change in the life of the disciples: a life of learning and companionship, of healing and fellowship is over, the impending death of Jesus looms, fear and flight are just around the corner. Transfiguration marks the real-time end of the way things were — and the beginning of Jesus’ dying.

Theologically, it teeters recklessly on the edge of the precipice of Lent, glory fringing the edge of the dry and forbidding desert as if daring us to abandon our safe, our comfortable lives for an adventure on the edge. It is a time to examine who we are in the reflected light of Gods transforming presence and having seen, to decide what we might need to do about it.

Lent is a time for truth: for telling the truth to ourselves, for living in truth, authentically. In the life of Jesus, it was a time to say: the cost of what I have chosen to be is death. The price of my loving is losing the world. For the disciples, it was graduation day a time to look within themselves, as I did that day at the airport, and
say: who am I? Am I genuinely the person I want, in God, to be? These
rare, intimate moments of knowingourselves or anotherare
transfigurations: glimpses of the way we really are, with an option to
renew, if we are brave enough, trusting enough.

A psychologist friend of mine calls it working my mission: being
clear about what and who I have chosen to be in the world, and always
trying to live consistent with that mission. Never breaching my
integrity by choosing to act, or treat others, in ways that are
inconsistent with who I am called to be. He says it’s healthy for us to
do this: because if we don’t, if we live inauthentically, we will
experience stress and illness. We will not be at home to ourselves. And
then, after this lofty explanation, he remarkedI practice working my
mission all the time — and still, on my way over to the seminar this
morning I already breached my integrity two or three times just getting
through the traffic, and had to begin again.

Doing yoga yesterday, I remembered this story when our teacher put
us in a certain posture and then gave us a mantra to repeat, telling us
that the translation of the word was I am truth. Twisted into a
knotphysically, that is — I was pondering that mission statement when
she quietly added if this idea is uncomfortable for you, use something
else that you can repeat in your core. And I realized that I had
already forgotten the word, even while I wondered at my own discomfort.
Why should I am truth be an uncomfortable mantra for a Christian, a
child of God, a person who follows the way of Jesus to be salt and
light in the world? What might a more likely mantra be? I am a pretty
good person — I’ll try harder the next timeI don’t have enough time to
do it the way I shouldyou don’t understandjust doesn’t cut it, somehow.
Better, maybe, to try to twist myself into the discomfort, the Lenten
work, of trying to get centered in the idea that even I am truth.

It’s hard work, desert work. It’s hard for us, and harder, maybe,
for people who are walking that way with us. When the Law was received
by the Hebrew wanderers in their desert journey, Moses alone braved the
terror of holy Sinai. It was no safe place for the people of God: as he
went, the story says, the cloud covered the mountain, and the glory of
the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. But in the sight of the people of
Israel down below, the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a
devouring fire. And they were afraid. Later, the story tells us, when
Moses came down the mountain, the marriage of glory and dust was
manifest in him. Having twice braved the terror and the holiness of
sacred Mount Sinai, he came back to his people a changed man, though he
did not know it. The skin of his face shone, the story says, because he
had been talking with God. Moses received the law, he knew God face to
face — he was a man so stripped of the barriers of artifice, so
attuned to truth, that, though he thought he was just the same as he
had always been, his face shone. And the people couldn’t bear it;
afraid, perhaps, that what he knew and what he had become in the
presence of God was “catching,” somehow: that it would erode the
compromises the rest of them had made with truth in order to bear their
lives as wanderers and exiles. Shining in the transfigured face of
Moses was evidence that the glory of God could peacefully coexist with
and in mere humanity – but the people could not bear it. So Moses
veiled his face — literally covering up the evidence of God and
freedom that shone so visibly from his souland thus comforted and
diminished, his friends and neighbors could stand once again for him to
live among them.

The gospel describes how Peter and James and John went up on the
mountain with Jesus, alone, and there, saw him transfigured — covered
with glory and shining with light. And the disciples knew, though this
part of the story doesn’t acknowledge it, that this glory was bought at
the price of Jesus’ acknowledgement of his impending death. So that
when Peter and James and John saw how Jesus was changed, and yet
remained himself, centered and vulnerable to the knowledge that he was
a dying man — they were terrified. How is it possible to live at peace
with such hard knowledge? To face the end of all we hold dear, and
remain calm and serene? The disciples were frightened as much by this
living with truth as they were by the glory, as they were by the dying.
They offered to make dwellings, and wished devoutly that they could
stay with Jesus in the version of truth that was most clear, most
uplifting, most simple for them: that He was the Son of God, protected
by Light, above the dangers and the dirt of the world. But as the glory
drained away from the face of Jesus, a cloud overshadowed them, and
they were afraid. And as the holy cloud thickened into a cold fog
around the four men, Peter realized that even the blessing and the
presence of God could not save Jesus from his fate. This is my Son, my
Chosen, said the Voice with infinite pride and aching sadness, listen
to him. And the story ends, when the voice spoke, Jesus was found
alone, and they kept silent and told no one any of the things they had
seen.

We have much we could say about such transfiguring experiences –
but like the disciples, when the Voice stops speaking, we remain
silent, not knowing how or what to say. And our silence about ourselves
and about our lives is the silence of fear and deaththe veil that
separates us from them, and from living wholly as our authentic selves.
But as the saying goes, the truth will out it wants out, and will make
its way through us in glory, and stay with us in the desert, if we will
permit it.

That’s why, I think, the discussion of a Defense of Marriage Constitutional Amendment has provoked such an astonishing upwelling of communities and couples suddenly committed to the public demonstration of legal marriage between same-sex partners. Because such an amendment implies that we can force the world to be like we thought it used to be: one man, one woman, 2.5 kids and a station wagon in the suburbs but the world isn’t like that. Look at the transfiguring glory on the faces of those gay and lesbian couples lined up at the courthouse in San
Francisco, and elsewhere look around you at the families in our own church—and know that this truth is Out: love transforms us. The love between life partners of whatever gender needs the affirmation of the community, deserves the blessing of God, requires the protection of the state because committed, faithful loving partnerships, marriages and unions are part of the fabric of our common life, and visible witness to the God of love who has created us for one another, and for him.

And this grassroots uprising of civilly-defiant marriages is a
glorious, transfiguring portrait of life on the edge — of how we begin
to live life on the edge of what we genuinely are, and who God really
calls us to be. And it is the gift of transfiguration that we can see
it, that we can have a taste of how it can be on this maybe — long
journey — and the work of Lent to take up, alone and together, the
shining-forth of the truest parts of us, both the bad and the good,
which have too infrequently seen the light of day.

A priest I know believes Ash Wednesday says it all: We are dust,and
ashes. We are a people made from dirt and at the same time, a people
made in the image of God. We are dirt and deity, neither one more true
than the other.

And our work, as people of deity and dust is about facing our
hopes, and claiming them. It is about facing our fears, and letting
them do their new and strange work in us. It is the hard work each of
us do every day through the confusion and the ambiguity and the
difficult decisions to find out the ways and the wills of God, and to
do them. It is to see the faces of glory, and to ourselves shine with
it.

The author Frederick Buechner tells a story about how he remembers
this truth, and practices the Lenten way. He was depressed, in the
midst of a divorce, and riding a bus in the metropolitan New York area
during a cold, rainy March night. It was dark, and the smells, noises,
arguing and jostling of the people stuffed in the bus around him were
unbearable. He remembered that a seminary professor of his had once
said they should practice in public, seeing every person as a child of
God for whom Christ died. And so, disgruntled and bored, he began.
Christ died for you: punk rocker cursing in the back seat. Christ died
for you, old lady in a dirty coat. And for you..and for you and so it
went, around the perimeter of the bus, until he came to an empty seat
and a darkened window, and as he spoke: Christ died for you, it was his
own face he saw, shining in the glass that was dripping with rain as
with tears, even for you, he thought, and he was transfigured.

There was an older lady in the first congregation I served who
was elegant, generous, and aloof. She was liberal in all senses
of the word, but, despite regular encouragement from her pastors,
rarely participated in the hands-on work of the church she supported
with her dollars and her occasional presence in worship. She didn’t
have time to get personally involved, she said, handing over a
check for the Thanksgiving turkey dinner for the homeless, but wanted
to do her part. She was the widow of a prominent citizen of the
city, and spent most of her time golfing, or walking in the woods,
mostly alone, and seemed to my eyes, to be a little depressed.

It happened one day that this lady, I’ll call her Gladys, was in
the midst of a long walk on an unusually hot afternoon when she
lost her balance and fell down a slight incline. When she came
to rest, she was dirty, scratched, and to her irritation, limping
from a twisted ankle. Because she was closer to the country club
than to her home, she made her slow way through the field and up
to the steps of the country club restaurant, intending to call a
cab to return her to her home. She approached a nice looking couple
who stood nearby to ask them for a quarter to use the pay phone,
and was shocked when they averted their eyes, hurried into their
waiting car, and drove away without acknowledging her. Shrugging,
she continued up the stairs toward the restaurant, and was met at
the door by the manager, who spoke before she could open her mouth:
You’ll have to leave immediately, lady, this is private property.

I know what it is, Gladys snapped, my husband had his membership
here for thirty years. I’ve fallen, and I just need to make a phone
call to get a cab. I’m Gladys Wilcox, don’t you know who I am?
And the man replied, I don’t care who you are, lady, I
just don’t want you upsetting our guests. You’ll have to leave
immediately, or I’ll call the cops. And he shut the door in
her face. And Gladys looked at her reflection in the glass, dirty,
disheveled and upset, and thought to herself, why, I don’t look
like myself at all… I look like some homeless person, a crazy
woman from the street. And on the two mile walk home, she
had a lot of time to think, and pray.

A funny thing happens down at the bottom of the list of what we
call the “Beatitudes” in the gospel of Luke. We know
them best in Matthew’s version:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for there is the kingdom of heaven;
and eight more blessings, most as inclusive as the first, follow.
In Matthew’s beatitudes, there is plenty of room for all of us to
stand waiting on line in the kingdom of God; there is plenty of
room for grace, room enough for everyone. All blessings, no curses.
Matthew makes of the kingdom of heaven a place so inclusive that
no one will be left out in the cold. For we have all been poor
in spirit, hungry for righteousness, merciful and meek, at least
once in a while.

But mostly, we’re doing okay. And we feel compassion for those
who have not, and we do what we can to help them. But if we found
ourselves, like Gladys, mistaken for one of those others…we would
be like she was, uneasy, angry, and not a little diseased.

And that is where Luke’s beatitudes begin: with a crowd of people
who can’t be told apart.Some are disciples, chosen and special;
others are mentally ill strangers. Some are rich, patrons of good
works, others are desperately poor and terrified. Some run three
miles a day and eat green leafy vegetables, lightly blanched but
without too much salt; others are sick, and tired, and hungry, rooting
in garbage cans for supper and longing for a healing touch.

In Matthew’s gospel, we know who’s who, because the disciples are
Up on the Mountain, safely removed from the dirty crowds, quietly
on retreat with their Teacher. But in Luke… they are all together
on a level plain, jostling and juggling for position, trying to
get close enough to hear, close enough to touch. They are in a level
place, and, in addition, the gospel notes, they are on a level playing
field as well. For this race is handicapped, and those who have
the natural advantages are carrying a lot more baggage, so that
all might have an even chance at the kin-dom of God.

And Luke says:

and all in the crowd were trying to touch him,
for power came out from him and healed all of them.

How do we need to be healed? When we are the ones who Have, called
with Jesus to serve the Have Nots: to feed the poor, to care for
the suffering, to stand up for the excluded, the imprisoned, the
forgotten. What’s so wrong with that, after all, that Jesus should
in this gospel of Luke not bless us for participating in spiritual
hunger, but rather, burden us with Woes just because we aren’t at
the bottom of the human heap, desperate and forlorn?

A friend of mine, John Robinson, has been hired to serve as the
Presbyterian Church’s Refugee and Asylum Advocate. He came to this
work from thirty years in the pastorate, and out of his experience
as a disaster volunteer. It came to him to examine a case of a
congregation in New England requesting disaster assistance funds
from the 9-11 Fund of the PCUSA. One of the fallouts from 9-11
and the Patriot Act has been the increased scrutiny and tightening
of laws regarding would-be immigrants.

The Presbytery of Northern New England had, in the late 1990’s,
established a new church development in the midst of an Indonesian
immigrant community that had sprung up to serve the needs of a local
industry. This church, the first Indonesian Presbyterian Church
in the US, had grown and thrived, was self supporting and pointed
to with pride by the church as a model of diversity and Presbyterian
integrity. Until thirty men in the congregation, some of them
elders, all of them hardworking family men with US-born children
baptized in the church and growing up American, received word that
their visa status had been reviewed and they were being detained
pursuant to impending deportation. The church, the community, the
presbytery were devastated. They appealed to the General Assembly
for help, and John went to find immigration attorneys who could
build a case to secure the legal admission of these men into resident
status. For information, the report went to an advisory body of
the denomination, and then was referred up to the General Assembly
Council.

And what do you suppose their response to these dispossessed brothers
and sisters was? That they should have attended more carefully to
their legal status. That the church couldn’t afford to get embroiled
in an immigration controversy during wartime. That the denomination
ought not give the appearance of trying to help illegal aliens. That
it was too bad that the congregation was so strong and a flagship
of its kind and that families would be split, but really, we just
need to trust the government and not spend disaster funds on such
persons… because maybe someone might get upset and won’t give
money later for a ”regular“ disaster like a tornado
or a hurricane.

Luke’s Jesus handicaps the beatitudes, dealing out blessings and
woes in equal measure, because getting a little woe in our lives
is sometimes the only way we get the big picture, and get that we
are all in the same boat, people longing for healing and wanting
to touch the hand of God. If we don’t experience a little exclusion
ourselves, we aren’t gonna be horrified when we hear stories like
the one I have just told…and the best we’ll be able to muster is
a small check and a prayer on Sunday morning, and friends, that
just isn’t going to be enough to bring forth the kindom of God.

Friday and Saturday, Sally and I and our church staff participated
in a 16 hour compassion fatigue training event. It’s theme was
to explore why all of us, from time to time, get worn out, burned
out, and want to leave off doing this work to which we have all
been called, this work of healing and helping.

Eric Gentry, who
ran the workshop, spoke eloquently about these symptoms of compassion
fatigue we all have felt and then looked hard at each of us and
said: If you’re burned out, if you’re stressed, if you feel threatened
by what you hear and want to run away, good. I wish upon you symptoms.
We need to feel this way, he said, because if we don’t have symptoms
to remind us to care for ourselves, then we can’t genuinely care
for others. We need Woes, we need symptoms of compassion fatigue
and burn out to wake us up to the vitality of the work we are called
to do, and our need to remain healthy, nourished, and available
with our best selves to serve our mission of reflecting the path
of Christ in the world.

Our woe and discomfort is the symbol, the symptom of the dis-ease
of our lack of kin-dom health. We are woeful because we know things
aren’t right… we know we can’t be healed by covering up and denying…we
know we need to see things as they really are if we are to be healed,
and the kingdom is to come, and we are to be well.

So…to feel tired of listening, of caring, of putting time into someone
else’s need…is not a sign that it’s time to quit, but rather a sign
that this work you are doing is so important, and so important to
YOU, that you must bring to it your healthiest and best self.

We have to feel the woes in order to attend to our own health…to
know we too need healing, and to enter with genuineness and compassion
into the needing world of others. And that requires us not just
to hear the preaching of the beatitudes, but to go on beyond preaching,
as the old southern phrase has it, on beyond preaching into meddling.
Meddling with our lives, and with the lives of our companions in
this work, to make sure that we have just enough Woe to equip us
to bless others.

The holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl, a man who’s
suffering has earned him the right to tell us what suffering and
serving should feel like, put it this way: That which is to
give light must endure burning.

I imagine you can guess what happened in Glady’s life after she
finally limped home and saw herself not as she believed she was,
but as others saw her. What happened for her personally in her sad
isolation, and in her life in the church, and in her view of helping
and healing. I’m not going to finish the story for you, because
I hope you will finish it for yourself. And for us, working together
for the kindom at Riviera. And for the Christ of symptoms and blessings
and woes, who loves you as he loves each child of God, and wishes
that we would all know God’s power, and be healed. Amen.