Of faith and floods

About lunch time on Monday, I held my breath with the entire seminary community as a flash flood swept into Leibrock Village, the seminary’s student housing complex.

Cars floated through the parking lot and at least a foot of water lapped through the ground-floor apartments. Twelve families, one faculty member, and the housing office have been displaced.

In less than an hour, though, students and church members swarmed through the Village, rescuing books and personal photos, moving furniture, drying out carpets and soggy clothes. Donors came forward to pay for motels and food for displaced students, and the university’s maintenance crews cleared debris. That evening, I walked through the hallways, listening to students’ stories and praying with them.

Watching so many people respond so quickly in helpful ways reminded me of the importance of proclaiming the gospel through actions as well as through words—and that’s what our worship will focus on Sunday: proclaiming God’s love in word and deed.

I’ll preach on Luke 10:1-11, 16-20, which tells the story of Jesus sending out pairs of disciples to announce the good news, cast out demons, and create community. Our other lessons include 2 Kings 5:1-14, the story of Naaman’s healing, and Galatians 6:1-16, in which Paul urges us to bear each other’s burdens.

In addition to celebrating communion, we’ll sing “Lord, You Give the Great Commission,” “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” and a hymn of the congregation’s choice.

Prime-time prayers

Watching TV and movies can be a spiritual practice, said a speaker at the PC(USA) General Assembly, but it takes a discerning spirit to make it work.

Freedom to serve

Late last week, I stood in the sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta singing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

It was an emotional moment for many in our group of pastoral theologians from around the world, which had traveled together to the church where Martin Luther King Jr. had been pastor.

But some in the group, myself included, couldn’t lift up our voices because of a strong awareness of the racial and social oppressions that still plague the church and the nation.

It would have been easy to let our experiences silence each other or to let shame and judgment have their way. Instead, later that day, we had a frank and honest conversation about our feelings and experiences.

In the end, we didn’t pretend to have healed the hurts of the world or of ourselves. But we did listen to each other speak honestly, ask for forgiveness, and affirm our desires to understand each other’s perspectives. Later that night we sang and danced together to the beat of African drums, grinning and laughing and clapping our hands in rhythm.

That, it seems to me, was a proper use of Christian freedom: living by the Spirit, guided by the Spirit, submitting to each other as a servant people. God was at work among us!

We’ll talk more about Christian freedom on Sunday, when we gather for worship and to hear a sermon on Galatians 5:1, 13-25, in which the apostle Paul writes about living in the Spirit rather than the flesh.

Our other lessons will include 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14, in which Elisha experiences the Spirit of God, and Luke 9:51-62, in which Jesus asks the disciples to free themselves from the things of this world in order to follow God.

We’ll sing “I Sing the Mighty Power of God,” “Eternal God, Whose Power Upholds,” and a hymn of the congregation’s choice.

Until then, God’s shalom to you and the whole earth—-and I hope to see you Sunday!

Shameless

A sermon on Luke 7:36-8:3:

Imagine you’ve invited the pastor for an intimate barbecue on your back patio.

You’ve got smoked chicken, grilled sausages, a big bowl of guacamole, 10 pounds of corn chips, cold beer, coke for the kids, and huge slabs of bloody beef just waiting to be slapped on the grill.

You’re sitting around the table, telling jokes, sharing news of the day, when your neighbor walks up.

Your neighbor. You know the one—the woman whose husband never seems to be around, the one with low-cut blouses and short shorts, the one who spends her time in dubious Internet chat rooms.

Now, you’ve asked her not to let herself in through the back gate. You never invite her to your cookouts, and you’ve tried to tell her that if you want her company, you’ll ask her over. But she never seems to listen. Invited or not, here she is.

Here she is, standing behind the preacher, kneading his shoulders and rubbing sunscreen on his neck, pouring him a glass of iced tea and kissing his cheek.

She’s embarrassing you. You don’t want the pastor to think she’s a friend or something.

But he just sits there smiling, as if what she’s doing is OK with him. And suddenly you’re angry: You can’t believe a man of God is behaving this way.
And then he says, “Hey—I’ve got a riddle for you. Ready?”

II.

That’s just the situation Simon the Pharisee has found himself in. He’s invited this Jesus, the teacher everyone’s talking about, to dinner at his house; he’s put out quite a spread; and here comes this scandalous “woman of the city,” walking right through the courtyard and up to the table, kissing the guest of honor’s feet and rubbing scented oil on his callused toes. Worse yet, she starts to cry, and her tears carve shiny tracks across his dusty feet, and she dries them with her hair.

This woman’s making a scene at Simon’s banquet. Her shameless behavior dishonors him and his guests. Not only that: She is unclean, a prostitute, and by touching Jesus she’s made him unclean too. Simon—a Pharisee, a member of the most righteous sect of Judaism, the ones who always get things right, who know the law backward and forward—Simon can’t believe Jesus would tolerate her touch.

“If he were a prophet,” Simon thinks, “he’d of known who and what kind of woman this is who’s touching him—that she’s a sinner.”

In one phrase, he judges them both.

III.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I sure do recognize Simon. Once I caught myself acting just like him at a funeral—a funeral! Instead of comforting the sobbing woman next to me, instead of being in prayer for the dead man’s family, instead of listening carefully and prayerfully to scripture, I was busy judging:

“They call this a worship space? There’s not even a cross. Looks more like a warehouse to me.”

“Man, I wish I could preach like that guy. He’s good. Makes that other pastor sound like Elmer Fudd.”

And my personal favorite:

“I can’t believe she thought a flowered, scarlet dress was appropriate for a tragic funeral like this.”

Now I’m confessing these thoughts to you not to ask forgiveness or to brag about what a sinner I am, but to say: If this nameless woman had shown up at my banquet, I would have acted just like Simon.

But Jesus--Jesus asks a riddle.

IV.

Riddles were common entertainment at New Testament era banquets, and I imagine Simon might have thought—maybe with relief—that Jesus was trying to shift the party’s attention from the woman lavishing attention on his feet. So maybe he readied himself for a good joke. But the joke is on him.

“A certain creditor had two debtors,” Jesus says. “One owed 500 denarii, and the other 50. When they couldn’t pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?”

And Simon hesitates. Where is Jesus heading with this? “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt,” Simon says.

“You have judged rightly.” But before the guests can raise a toast to Simon for getting the answer right, Jesus goes for the jugular.

“Do you see this woman?” he asks. “I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.”

Our friend Simon forgot the basics of Middle Eastern hospitality. He’s been so busy judging Jesus and this woman—thinking of himself as the pious and righteous one at the table—that he hasn’t noticed his own shortcomings. And now he’s doubly exposed: by the shameful display of this nameless woman and by his own lack of hospitality, which is a major cultural faux pas.

“Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven,” Jesus says. “Hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

And he turns to the woman: “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has restored you to wholeness; go in peace.”

And the story ends.

V.

So who is the hero of this story?

It’s easy to pick Jesus as the hero. After all, the point of the story is the different ways in which two religious men respond to a nameless, shameless prostitute, right? That is one way of making sense of this story.

But I wonder if maybe Luke intends the woman to be the hero here.

In the other canonical gospels--Matthew, Mark and John--this story is told just before Jesus dies, and it happens at the house of a leper, not a Pharisee. And the other gospels include several different characters--you remember Judas saying, “Why was this ointment not sold and the money given to the poor?” In those other gospels, the point of the story is that the woman is anointing Jesus to prepare him for his death.

But that’s not what Luke is up to here. He places the story earlier in the ministry of Jesus; the only other major characters are a Pharisee and a prostitute—the sinless and the sinful, in the popular mind of his time; and the point of the story isn’t death, or how to respond to a sinful woman, but the forgiveness we receive in Christ.

Might Luke be illustrating with this story how a forgiven sinner ought to respond to Jesus? If so, this nameless woman is the hero.

She knows how sinful she is. She knows how much grace Jesus can extend to her. And she responds with grateful and humble hospitality. Because she expects much, she receives much—and loves much.

But Simon . . . . Simon’s problem isn’t his conduct, but his attitude and his self understanding. He thinks of himself as pious and righteous—as any Pharisee would—and so he has no awareness of his need for forgiveness; he loves little because he expects so little of God’s love. And in doing so he excludes himself from grace.

Only the sinful prostitute receives the blessing: “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

She loves much because she is forgiven much; she recognizes her need and therefore receives the grace so freely offered.

VI.

What if through this story Luke is saying that our capacity to love Jesus is related to our ability to recognize the depth of the actions, thoughts, self-understandings and attitudes that keep us separate from God?

What if Luke is saying that the way we show our love for Jesus is related to our ability to receive the forgiveness, grace and love he offers in such abundance?

Simon loved little because he could only receive little; he did not recognize the depth of his need.

The woman who knelt at Christ’s feet received much because she knew how much she needed and she was open to receiving it.

It’s been said that the brief version of the gospel can be found in the phrase: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

That’s what this scripture passage is calling us to—repentance, recognition of our wounded sinfulness and brokenness, acknowledgment of how much we need to be forgiven. It’s only when we recognize the depth of our need that we understand the depth of grace.

God is ready to forgive you, to accept you, to wash you clean and send you out into the world with a heart that’s calm and empty of the anxiety that churns there all too often.

Can you accept that? Can you humble yourself enough to accept that Jesus wants to turn to you and say, “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you whole; go in peace”?

Or will you be like Simon, reclining at the table, sure of who you are, measuring others, and yourself against them, heart shut tight against the love that’s close enough to touch, the love that is a guest in your life this very moment? Can you accept the forgiveness of the Christ sitting across from you, holding out the bread of life, saying, “Take and eat. It’s broken for you”?

Friends, your wounds are healed; your sins are forgiven. You are saved in faith, restored to wholeness, made complete. Your ability to accept that, to live as if that is true, will shape the way you love yourself and those around you.

So repent—turn toward God, toward life, with a new mind, a higher mind, a mind that knows that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation: everything old has passed away; everything has become new.

Repent and believe the good news of the gospel: In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. Alleluia! Amen.

Subversive sayings

In a world that wants to reject creeds ("I'm spiritual, but not religious"), Luke Timothy Johnson sees Christian creeds as "subversive documents" that open possibilities rather than shutting down debate.

Johnson's point, I would argue, is precisely why Presbyterians include a creed in worship each Sunday and why a collection of creeds makes up the first part of our church constitution.

Come and get it!

With all this rain, I feel like I ought to preach about Noah and the Ark on Sunday!

Wet or dry, though, we're having a community barbeque dinner on Saturday, June 12, at the church. About 45 people from the community and the church have said they are coming, and we hope others will just “drop by.”

So come "taste and see" with us. We’ll start serving food at noon; entertainment (music, puppets, clowns, a piñata, and games) will occur all afternoon; and about 3p we’ll close by singing hymns together in the sanctuary.

If you know people who’d like to attend, please invite them; the serving line will be open from noon to 3p.

On Sunday we’ll gather in worship to celebrate God’s great hospitality to the people of the world. I’ll preach on the story of the woman who washes Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:35-8:3). As you prepare for worship, reflect on who’s the hero of that story--is it Jesus, the woman, or Simon?

Other scripture readings Sunday include 1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a, about the faithfulness of Naboth when asked to give up his land, and Galatians 2:15-21, in which Paul speaks of the power of vulnerable love. We’ll sing “O for A Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Just As I Am, Without One Plea,” and a hymn chosen by the congregation.

A God who dances

This is a sermon based on John 16:12-15; the sermon started with the congregation looking at the painting "Circle Dance" by Ann Altman (you can see it here), naming what those gathered for worship saw in the painting:

people of all colors holding hands and dancing
the mathematical sign for "infinity" formed by the ribbon held by the dancers
the sun on the horizon, which the dancers are looking at
the festive air of the community at play

The things the congregation noticed about the painting also evoke an ancient understanding of the Trinity as a community of persons “dancing around” together.

American Christians tend to be more familiar with the economic Trinity—-from the Greek word oikos, referring to a system of household management in which each person has a particular function to make the whole work as efficiently as possible; oikos is related to English words economy and economics.

Because we’re more familiar with the economic image of the Trinity, and because of our modernist culture’s emphasis on hierarchy and organization, many of us tend to think about the Holy Trinity as a sort of divine organizational chart or family tree:

God at the head, the family patriarch;
Jesus as middle management, only person in family Dad will listen to;
Holy Spirit as sort of divine babysitter watching kids while parents out for a millennium or two.

[Can’t you just hear the “babysitter” Spirit scolding: “You kids! You might think it’s funny now, but just wait until the Second Coming!”]

II.

But thinking about the Three-in-One God as a sort of “holy organizational chart” has become problematic in our postmodern world, where people are rightly suspicious of top-down hierarchies and power structures that impose the wishes of one person or one class or one group on everyone.

Thinking about the Trinity as a group of people dancing around together--the image evoked by the painting "Circle Dance"-—is an ancient understanding inherent to the reading from John.

Theologians call this understanding “the social Trinity.” One way of envisioning it is as a circle of equals, holding hands and dancing. In Greek, in fact, this vision is called the perichoresis of God—“peri” like “perimeter,” meaning “around,” and “choresis” like “choreography,” meaning “dancing.”

So the social Trinity is literally a vision of “the dancing of God,” three persons in one circle, circling and weaving a pattern of love and power, none of them at the top or center or bottom, but forever spinning in an equally shared glory.

It is this “dancing around,” God as a fellowship of equals, that keeps the word of Jesus alive for us today, able to speak to us and to our lives in fresh ways through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

III.

In the passage we read from the gospel of John, Jesus is speaking to his disciples just before his death. They don’t understand that he will be leaving them, and Jesus knows there is much they cannot understand until they experience his death and resurrection: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

He knows their future will be frightening and uncertain—that without his presence, the sheep will scatter and risk losing sight of the truths he has taught them.

John and his community, late in the first century, faced a similar problem: For them, Jesus provides access to God in ways never before possible; he shares in God’s character and identity—reveals to them the truth of who God is. But those people who had actually known Jesus were dying, breaking the direct link those Christians had to Jesus.

So if the revelation of who God is, is lodged in Jesus—a living, breathing human—what happens when Jesus and the people who knew him are gone? Was the revelation of God seen through Jesus limited to one particular moment in history, or was it valid for the future?

We’ve got similar concerns, sometimes. As our lives careen ahead, things happening left and right, kids growing up too fast, our bodies starting to sag, our hair falling out, we forget to look at it all from the vantage point of what Jesus taught. After all, his words were spoken a long time ago. They were valid revelation 2000 years ago. But what can the bible say about the kind of uncertainties that frighten us today?

We worry about our kids and grandkids going off to college or to make their fortune in the big city. Will they make the right decisions? Will they find a job that pays a living wage? Will they drink and drive?

We worry about our parents. Is that forgetfulness we’ve noticed something benign or is it the beginning of Alzheimer’s? How will I take care of them when they can’t take care of themselves?

We worry about ourselves. Am I really committed enough to this marriage to stay through the tough times? Retirement is so close—what if the stock market does more damage to my IRA? Will my cell phone give me a brain tumor? How come God feels so far away when we used to be so close?

IV.

In the gospel reading from John, the reassurance that Jesus offers to the disciples is the “Spirit of truth” who will guide them into all truth.

This is a Spirit who plays a teaching role, leading the way, guiding the community of Christians into the life-giving revelation of God in Jesus. “The Spirit will not speak on its own,” Jesus promises, “but will speak whatever it hears.”

This is a Spirit in continuity with Jesus—speaking what Jesus spoke, just as Jesus spoke the words of the Creator God.

“The Spirit,” Jesus says, “will declare to you the things that are to come.” This is not a Spirit of prophecy, but a Spirit of proclamation, declaring the Word of God in the new and changing circumstances of the disciples’ lives—a Spirit that leaves the future of all believers open to fresh proclamations of Jesus’ words.

“The Spirit will glorify me,” Jesus says. This is a Spirit who makes visible the identity of Jesus and therefore of God.

“All that the Father has is mine,” Jesus says. “For this reason I said that the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.” This is a Spirit who participates in the fullness of Jesus’ revelation of God and declares that fullness to succeeding generations.

This is not a top-down, hierarchical arrangement; the Spirit is not a “babysitter” sent to hold a place until Jesus returns. Jesus and the Spirit are one God with the deity Jesus called “abba.” For John, the presence of the Spirit is not the presence of particular gifts, as it is for the Apostle Paul, and it is not a Spirit who is actively directing the community as in the book of Acts. Rather, for John the Spirit is the continuing presence of Jesus, a teacher and witness to the gospel, through whom the presence of God is known.

Jesus and the Spirit and God are equal—-and they are one in a dynamic, flowing relationship. For that reason, we can trust the way the Spirit intercedes in our lives; the Spirit “makes it possible for all believers to share in the good news of the incarnation, because the [Spirit] makes Jesus present to believers, even though Jesus is now physically absent” [Gail O’Day]

V.

Even in his absence, Jesus is reliable and loving; he has not ignored our future but abides with us through the presence of the Spirit. There are no temporal or spatial limits on his love.

So how do we experience the abiding love of Jesus through the Holy Spirit?

First, we recognize that the Holy Spirit was not sent to individuals, but to the community as a whole. Just as God can be understood as a community of persons, dancing around together, the Spirit enlivens the church as a community of persons. The presence of the Spirit is not a subjective, individual experience of God, but a presence that keeps the community of believers that is the church grounded in Jesus’ revelation of God.

Second, we recognize that the God we see through Jesus is found in scripture. As we read the bible, it is the Holy Spirit that leads us into fresh encounters with the words of Jesus at times of particular need—it is the Spirit that interprets the ministry of Jesus to keep its offer of God and God’s love alive in our lives today.

That is why it is so important to soak ourselves in scripture—-to read from the bible every day, even if it is only a little bit. We need to put our stories, the stories of our lives, into conversation with the story of Jesus. When we do, the Holy Spirit will make those ancient words relevant to our contemporary experiences. The Spirit doesn’t bring new illumination, new revelation, but allows Jesus’ words to continue to be effective in our lives.

This happens because scripture—-in the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola—-is like a searchlight, playing over our lives and highlighting different parts of our inner landscapes at different times. I experienced it myself this week—-I logged on to my favorite Internet prayer site and slowly read the words of Jesus aloud, and as I did I understood the events of my day differently. The words of the gospel lit up a dark corner of my soul and helped me understand how God was offering comfort in a specific situation.

It is the Holy Spirit that makes the Word of God fresh so it applies to our lives in new ways—ways we have not anticipated. Just as the disciples in John could not yet carry what Jesus had to teach them, because they could not understand until they experienced the crucifixion and resurrection, there are things God has to say to us that we cannot bear until we experience particular moments in our lives. Those understandings are opened to us through the grace and presence of the Holy Spirit, whose work is the work of God in Christ.

VI.

The social Trinity—-that vision of an undivided God as a dance of three equal partners—-has been called “a family of love” by Irish Jesuit Frank Doyle. The Trinity is a family that invites us in to be a part of its daily life. We are constantly and consistently invited to join the dance, to enter into a relationship with this God through dialogue with scripture, led and taught by the Holy Spirit, who helps us understand the words and presence of Jesus Christ which reveal the character and identity of God.

May we listen carefully to the words spoken to us as we are able to bear them, and may we never decline the invitation to dance. Amen.

The mysteries of creation

As thunderstorms blasted Fort Worth last night, I opened the door so my 2-year-old son could see the hail.

He wanted to pick up a hailstone, so we stepped out onto the stairs--just as the wind ripped a huge pecan limb from the tree that shades our house, slamming it against the roof and then against the porch.

It landed right on the stairs where we had been standing a second before.

Somehow, I had scooped my son into my arms and spun back into the house without even knowing what was happening. The cracking noise as the limb came down must have sent my automatic nervous system into action, saving both of us.

“That was scary!” I said, heart pounding. But my son just smiled. “No, daddy,” he said. “I not scared. I happy!”

How often does God snatch us away from danger that we don’t even recognize, while we just grin and feel excited?

How often do we glimpse how wonderfully and fearfully made we are are? We’re so artfully put together that the sound of cracking wood can send our bodies into action faster than our minds can comprehend what’s happening.

We’ll celebrate the wonders of God’s creation and protective presence in worship this Trinity Sunday--the day in the church year when we ponder once again the mystery of God as Three-in-One.

During worship, God's grace will come to us through the bread and wine of the sacrament of communion, and I’ll use a painting titled “Circle Dance” by Ann Altman to help me preach from John 16:12-15.

Other scripture lessons will include Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, in which woman Wisdom takes delight in God’s creation, and Romans 5:1-5, in which Paul talks about the saving grace of Christ. We’ll sing “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” and “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” and “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”

WORSHIP AT AUGUST CENTER: We’ll gather for prayer, singing, and the Lord’s Supper at 2p Sunday, June 6, at the August Healthcare Center on the west side of town. Come join us for this short service of worship with residents.

Burn the midnight oil

People of faith across America will leave a light or candle burning overnight Sunday-Monday as a part of "Lights for Human Dignity," a protest sponsored by The Interfaith Alliance against atrocities in Iraq.

Suicidal pigs

At lunch today, we talked and prayed about the story of Jesus healing two demoniacs in a cemetery near the sea from Matthew 8:28-34:

When he came to the other side [of the lake], . . . two demoniacs coming out of the tombs met him. They were so fierce that no one could pass that way. Suddenly they shouted, "What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?" Now a large herd of swine was feeding at some distance from them. The demons begged him, "If you cast us out, send us into the herd of swine." And he said to them, "Go!" So they came out and entered the swine; and suddenly, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and perished in the water. The swineherds ran off, and on going into the town, they told the whole story about what had happened to the demoniacs. Then the whole town came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their neighborhood.

It’s a mysterious story. Why would the demons ask to be sent into a herd of pigs? Why would the people of the town ask Jesus to leave? (One good reason: The pigs that drowned themselves [and the demons!] represent a source of income and wealth.) Why doesn’t Matthew tell us what happened to the two people healed of demon possession?

This story appears in a part of Matthew’s gospel that takes great pains to demonstrate the power that Jesus has over evil—he is no “ordinary” magician, but someone to whom the wind, the sea, demons and illnesses must submit. All he has to say to the demons is, “Go!”—and they immediately obey.

Some scholars think the series of healings Matthew writes about in chapters 8 and 9 speak of the need for disciples to submit—or surrender their own will—to the power of Jesus, just as the powers of evil submit.

Where in your life is God calling you to surrender to a good and gracious power greater than you? Where are you bracing yourself, creating resistance, where you might receive healing if you stopped protecting your ego and instead surrendered to the power of God? What “pigs” do you stand to lose if you obey, and what do you stand to gain? Could you recognize the power of God if it freed you from your demons—or would you be so afraid that, like the people of the town, you’d ask Jesus to leave your neighborhood?

Things to think about as you prepare to celebrate the feast of Pentecost, the day that commemorates God sending the Holy Spirit to the early church.

God’s Spirit is with us still, and worship is one place you can encounter it. This Sunday, the day of Pentecost, we’ll have a dramatic interpretation of John 14:8-17, 25-27, the text from which I’ll preach.

We’ll also pray a special version of the Lord’s Prayer from New Zealand, illustrated with art and photos. Our other scripture lessons will include the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) and the story of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21).

We’ll chant an invitation to the Holy Spirit, sing a hymn of the congregation’s choice, and sing the hymns “Spirit” and “Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove.”

God’s shalom to you this week—and I hope to see you Sunday!

Pedaling for pleasure

My son Ben has a new tricycle, and the first thing he says every day is: “I want to ride my bike!” (It reminds me of that old Queen song “Bicycle” . . . but I digress.)

Every night Ben pedals down the sidewalk toward the park, grinning, while I try to keep up. It’s a pleasure to see him enjoy the strength of his body as it delivers the experience of self-propelled speed.

Remember how powerful it felt to whiz along on your bicycle in the cool of the evening air?

Without fail, as I follow Ben around the park, my attention shifts somehow from the pleasure of watching him to my own pleasure in the moment: the tickle of the breeze in my hair, the warmth of the sun on my skin, the colors of the sky.

Even in the chaos and darkness of today’s world, God has given us much to enjoy, and some of the simplest pleasures can be discovered by focusing on what we experience through our bodies. The world around us, and the ways we experience it, can be a rich source of reflection on the goodness and providence of God.

I hope you’ll join us Sunday for worship, when we’ll focus on a verse from the book of Revelation that calls Jesus “the bright morning star.” Our sermon on that theme will draw on Revelation 22:12-14, 16-27, 20-21; our other lessons will include Acts 16:16-34 (in which the gospel gets some folks in trouble) and John 17:20-26 (in which Jesus prays for unifying love between his disciples).

We’ll sing “If Thou but Trust in God to Guide Thee,” “Take My Life,” and another hymn that will be chosen that morning by the congregation.

Changing darkness into light

A sermon on Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5:

The brightness of the afternoon sun, the warmth of May, the smell of spring rain: None of the things I treasured about last week betrayed the fact that our world is shrouded in darkness. But it is.


The horrific execution of American businessman Nicholas Berg in Iraq, unveiled to the world on videotape Tuesday, was juxtaposed a day later with the release to Congress of even more photographs of the American military abusing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Accords.

Do we need any other proof that something evil has this world in its clutches? Because there’s plenty:

AIDS is ravaging Africa and Asia and the inner cities of America; rates of adolescent suicide and adolescent pregnancy continue to rise; the fastest-growing jobs are low-paying, service-industry positions with little opportunity for advancement; children are sexually abused by parents and other people they trust; human greed continues to condemn the majority of the world’s citizens to poverty and hunger.

Do you think our new high-school graduates—the thoughtful ones, at least—are wondering: “Where am I headed, and where is the world headed? What is the purpose of my life in a world like this?”

But Christians have always lived in a world like this—and always asked those nagging questions.

II.

When the prophet John wrote his letter to the seven churches of Asia—the letter we know as the book of Revelation—Christians not only faced brutal persecution that would only get worse. They also lived in a tumultuous region, a part of the Turkish coast ravaged by war and natural disaster.

John wrote in the late 90’s of the first century, a time when the reign of three emperors in two years gave rise to never-ending political turmoil. The Roman Empire was struggling to hold onto its power, fighting war after war. Widespread famine devastated the villages, and the earth itself seemed unstable; earthquakes rocked the area and in 79 Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and its neighbors and creating a massive cloud of ash and darkness across the region, which added to the widespread anxiety. There was tremendous social and economic discrimination.

On top of it all, the church was in crisis. Its apostolic leaders—those who actually knew Jesus—were dying, and the church lacked a firm structure or sense of self-identity to lead it into the future. Christian converts were mostly poor, lower-class people with little hope for power in the political and social structure of the Roman Empire.
And they were asking: Where are we headed? Where is the world headed? What is our purpose in a world like this?

John’s letter to the churches, his revelation, is an answer to those questions: Our destiny and our purpose, John concludes, is the New Jerusalem, a heavenly city where we will live in the direct presence of God, face-to-face with the Holy One that no human being but Christ has ever seen, engulfed in endless light.

III.

“I saw no temple in the city,” John writes, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. . . . The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and God’s servants will worship God; they will see God’s face, and God’s name will be on their forehead.”

This is a vision of a place where there is no separation between the holy and the profane, where God is ever-present to us, where all of reality is a temple and the divine presence is directly, intimately available. In this city, God is present in the midst of the everyday, not limited to some designated holy place or some special holy time. In the New Jerusalem, all of the people of God will be priests, and God will claim us as God’s own, inscribing on our foreheads the Holy Name that no one has ever known before.

“And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it,” John writes, “for the glory of the Lord is its light, and its lamp is the lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut. . . . People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”

This is a vision of a city where everyone is welcome, all the time. All of the nations will be there—even those who had given their earthly allegiance to the emperor, to false gods, to economic prosperity for a few rather than justice for all; all of the nations will be there—even those who persecuted the Christians.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,” John writes, “. . . On either side of the river is the tree of life . . . ; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore.”

The nations—wracked by war and disease, plagued by discrimination and poverty, turning toward false gods for comfort—the nations will be healed of all that troubles them when they enter this city that is also a garden, where the tree of life and the river of life both dwell. And nothing accursed will be found there anymore.

Notice that John doesn’t say the inhabitants of the city will never have been unclean or practiced abomination or falsehood, or have been cursed, but that in the fullness of time, when all of creation is transformed into the New Jerusalem, everyone will be made clean and pure. All things will be made new.

John’s vision of the New Jerusalem pictures a purified and redeemed humanity and a fallen world delivered from the bondage of evil by the God whose grace transforms both pious individual souls and all of creation.

It is significant that John’s vision of the end of time takes place in a radically inclusive city rather than an idyllic wilderness. At the time, cities were metaphors for—and living sources of—safety and protection. Early Christianity was an urban religion, a faith that had to do with establishing justice in the gates of the city and witnessing to the truth in the marketplace amidst the complexities of social, economic, and political life.

Has John chosen a city as the symbol of eternal salvation because a city is the realization of human community, the concrete living-out of interdependence as the essential nature of human life? In a city, the tasks of life are divided up; each one of us does a part and the beauty of life is not a solo performance, but a symphony.

As community, a city is not streets and buildings, but people. The whole, not the individual, is central. And behind John’s imagery of the New Jerusalem is his conviction that God’s final dwelling place is in and with God’s people. The city as a whole is the community of believers, the living, breathing temple in which God dwells.

With this vision, John affirms this world and its value and pictures eternal salvation as the making-whole, the healing, of the world and of history itself. He envisions transcendent salvation as a world in which all that is human is taken up and transformed, a world in which nothing human is lost.

John’s words about the New Jerusalem are not a literal description of a vision of the holy city and eternal reality. Rather, they are a metaphor that allows a glimpse of the character of the eternal world to break through into our daily existence.

The depth and detail of this vision, and its location at the end of John’s letter, speaks to its importance in his theology. He is describing the ultimate destiny of our lives as individuals and of the life of the entire world. The meaning of John’s revelation is the revelation of the character and nature of God’s goal for creation—and God’s goal for each of us.

IV.

This is the vision toward which we live and move, and in which we can—and do and will—have our being.

But this is more than a vision for the future. It is an orientation for life in the present.

If John is correct about where the world is finally going under the sovereign grace of God—and I think he is—then every thought, every prayer, every move, every deed in some other direction is out of step with Reality and is finally wasted.

Do not let your lives be wasted. Live in ways that are in step with this vision—practicing what theologian Rebecca Chopp calls “anticipatory action.”

Act in your daily lives—at the breakfast table, the post office, the school—act in ways that anticipate justice for all. Act in ways that help make God’s radical inclusivity a reality. Act in ways that lead to peace and to open doors and to the end of grief and to the end of death. Act in ways that transform yourself and others for participation in the marvelous city through which flows the river of the water of life. Act in ways that acknowledge and value our interdependence as creatures of God and residents of a holy city in which we will see God face-to-face.

God’s goal will be fulfilled, no matter what humans do to thwart it. This vision from John calls us to recognize our wounds, our sinful ways, the ways in which we veer away from the reality of the New Jerusalem, and to repent—turn toward a new way of living, a way of living that anticipates the New Jerusalem here and now.

In our baptism we were chosen to be an active part of God’s kingdom. In our baptism, each of us has been called to a sacred vocation, some sacred work that God created us to do. And by living into that vocation, that work full of purpose, we are helping make the New Jerusalem a reality.

Perhaps your vocation is teaching children. Perhaps it is listening to someone who is hurting or alone. Perhaps it is singing God’s glory. Perhaps it is tending God’s creation, or discovering the cure for cancer, or caring for a baby God has entrusted to you, or finding a way to end hunger. Perhaps it is aging faithfully and helping others to do the same.

Vocation can be tricky to identify, but you discover your vocation through prayer and through listening to your life. Pay attention to the moments that give you joy and make you feel a part of some bigger purpose. Ask yourself: If time, training, or talent was no obstacle, what would you do for God and the church in the world?

No matter how you have answered that question in the past, know that your vocation shifts over time. What God calls you to do in your twenties might be quite different from what God calls you to do in your forties or sixties or eighties or nineties.

But no matter what your age, there is sacred work for you to do, work that contributes to the real/ization of the New Jerusalem, work that adds to the transformation and salvation of all of creation, from the tiniest earthworm burrowing in the soil along the Trinity River to the farthest star you can see at night from the football field up on Methodist Hill.

Yes, our world is shrouded in darkness. But a light shines at the heart of Reality, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

God has called you as an instrument of sacred work, to add to the light of the world. Listen to that call and respond to it with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.

And keep John’s vision before you: a holy city bathed in light, where darkness never falls. It is your destiny, your inheritance.

May it be so among us this very day, in the name of the World-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver. Amen.

"The Lord is risen!"

That headline's quite an affirmation on the day after the execution of an American citizen in Iraq and on the same day that Congress received new photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners-of-war.

These are dark times, and I suspect they will grow darker yet as the war in Iraq continues.

But people who belong to Christ--people like us--affirm that a light shines in this darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Simply put, the transformation of creation, God's ultimate purpose for us and the entire cosmos, will reverse the dark wounds of humanity and bring healing and justice to all.

We'll talk about that vision for the future, and what it means for our lives, in Sunday's sermon based on Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5: the revelation of the New Jerusalem in the fullness of time. For the third week, we'll experiment with multimedia in worship, taking a look at various depictions of this vision throughout history.

Our other lessons will include Acts 16:9-15, about the apostle Paul creating a new Christian community in Macedonia, and John 14:23-29, in which Jesus offers comfort to his disciples even as he says goodbye.

We'll sing "Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty," "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," and "O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee."

BUTTERFIELD BOOTH: Make sure you stop by the church's booth at the Butterfield Stagecoach Days Saturday in Harwood Park in downtown Bridgeport. Church members staffing the booth would love to meet you, and we'll have new brochures for you to take a look at.

LUNCH ON SUNDAY: Our congregation will have a feast day this Sunday with a potluck lunch in the fellowship hall following worship. Please join us! The Presbyterian Women will lead a program on their Birthday Offering, and I'll teach a second lesson on hospitality titled "Entertaining Angels."

COMMUNITY DINNER: We’re inviting more than 100 people from around Bridgeport to join us for barbecue, games, and singing on Saturday, June 12. If you'd like to attend, drop me an e-mail.

Pass the salt . . .

Jesus told us that his followers should be "salty"--have a particular taste, and particular uses, when compared to the broader culture.

Keeping ourselves salty, however, can be a challenge--but this quick assessment from Christianity Today can remind us how to keep a unique Christian flavor in all parts of our lives.

Food for the body and for the soul

Thanks to all who brought food for the hungry last month. Today we delivered at least eight sacks of groceries to the food bank at First United Methodist Church. The staff there reports more requests for assistance than is typical at this time of the year. We’ll bring food again on the third Sunday of May (May 16).

Our “month of experiments” in worship will continue Sunday with repeated, meditative readings of the sermon text and the interplay of images with the sermon and the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll also sing the contemporary hymn “Child of God” (which some of you might remember from a while back).

To prepare for worship, read Acts 11.1-18, which tells of a strange dream that Peter had that helped him see that God was extending the covenant beyond Israel to include the Gentiles. And then look at the hot water he gets himself into! In the sermon, we’ll explore at one way the conflict in this scripture is being played out in the contemporary church.

Our other readings will be Revelation 21:1-6, about the arrival of the New Jerusalem—God’s perfect community in the fullness of time—and John 13:31-35, in which Jesus gives us a new commandment related to love. We’ll also sing “Spirit of the Living God” and “Today We All Are Called to be Disciples.”


Hoping to see you Sunday—

Branding, Brueggemann style

A prayer from Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann:

"You mark us with your water,
You scar us with your name,
You brand us with your vision,
and we ponder our baptism, your water,
your name,
your vision.
While we ponder, we are otherwise branded.
Our imagination is consumed by other brands,
- winning with Nike,
- pausing with Coca-Cola,
- knowing and controlling with Microsoft.
Re-brand us,
transform our minds,
renew our imagination.
that we may be more fully who we are marked
and hoped to be,
we pray with candor and courage. Amen"

Middle East policy criticized

Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA)--the national body of our denomination--has strongly criticized President Bush's policy in the Middle East in a recent letter.

You can read his message to the president here.

Growing up, bit by bit

One of the delights of being a parent is watching your child progress through “developmental stages”—the points at which they develop new skills and abilities.

My son Ben, for example, is learning to draw with a pen he holds by himself, to recognize the letters of the alphabet, and to tell right from wrong. All of those activities reflect the “developmental stage” he’s working through. Psychologists tell us a child has to “master” one stage in order to progress to the next.

Our life with God goes through similar stages—points at which our relationship to the Holy One changes in significant ways. Often described as “stages of the journey,” the “developmental stages” we encounter in our life of faith can be identified in various scriptures.

One of the scriptures that clearly points to various “stages” in our life with God is the beloved Psalm 23. Although this psalm is usually associated with funerals, it also has a lot to say to the living and to those who aren’t grieving.

As you read it in preparation for worship, think about what parts of the psalm speak to you most directly. Why do those parts attract you? What do they have to teach you? How might God be providing care and guidance, given the parts of the psalm that speak to you?

Our other Sunday readings will be Acts 9:36-43, about Peter healing Dorcas; Revelation 7:9-17, in which all the world comes to worship the lamb who is also the shepherd; and John 10:22-30, in which Jesus speaks of himself as the good shepherd.

We’ll sing “Ye Servants of God, Your Master Proclaim,” “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” and “Blessed Be the Ties That Bind.” We’ll also celebrate the Lord’s supper—and everyone’s welcome at this table!

Emerging concerns in the PC(USA)

Several times a year, the executive director and stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly--our "national office"--send a letter to pastors sharing their observations about the life of the denomination.

Here is their letter that arrived this week:

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We greet you in the joy of the risen Christ! This is the latest of our seasonal communications to you to offer a word of encouragement, to share some of our thoughts about the life of the church, and to invite your input to us. In this letter, we want to offer to you some of our experiences and learnings from these past three years of having held consultations with our presbyteries and synods across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A). We hope our thoughts and questions will both challenge and encourage you in your particular ministries.

Many of you may have participated in one of the consultations. We, along with our colleague Gary Torrens, visited fifteen synod and 100 presbytery meetings. Perhaps the thought of being at 115 governing body meetings might not seem very exciting, but it has been a wonderful experience for us. In fact, we have said many times during these consultations that this may have been the most significant thing we have done in our second terms in these offices.

We set about these consultations in response to an action of the General Assembly to consult with our presbyteries and synods. Each of our consultations focused on the theme, "A New Testament Church in a New Century." That theme emerged from our conviction that we are living in a whole new context for ministry in a postmodern, 21st-century world. We believe this new context of ours has huge parallels with the experience of the New Testament church, namely, a Pentecostal world of people from every race, tongue, and nation living among us; a church struggling, like the church in Corinth, to find unity in the midst of our diversity; a dis-established church in a secular culture much like the Roman Empire; and a spiritual hunger much like Paul found at the Areopagus.

In the midst of just this kind of world, the Holy Spirit transformed the New Testament church from being a group of discouraged and divided followers of Christ into being a community of disciples that "turned the world upside down for the gospel." Just as the Holy Spirit was at work then, we believe the Holy Spirit is at work now, calling the PC(USA) to the same kind of renewal so that we can "turn the world upside down for the gospel" in our day and time.

While we have seen churches with real problems and struggles, we have also seen the Holy Spirit moving in congregations all across this denomination. The first question we asked everywhere we went was, "Where is God leading your presbytery (or synod)?" As you might expect, we got a wide variety of responses. What impressed us most was that, almost without exception, we found presbyteries and synods who are confident that God is leading them and their congregations in ministry! That sense of confidence that God is at work among us is a real source of strength and encouragement for all of us.

A number of common themes emerged in those dialogues and conversations:

· growing and widespread consensus that evangelism is our first calling and that justice is God's great intention for humankind;

· passion to revitalize our congregations;

· priority for reaching out to the rich multicultural reality of God's people;

· a focus on building a new generation of leaders, both lay and clergy, for the life and mission of the PC(USA);

· a growing number of partnerships with Christians around the world in ways that bring transformation there and here;

· a valuing of our polity with its emphasis on discerning the will of God through the collective and shared leadership of ministers and elders;

· hunger for the peace, unity, and purity of our church.

These priorities are expressed in very different ways in our diverse presbyteries. The churches and forms of ministry in the Presbytery of Alaska, where most churches are on different islands and only two can reach one another by road, look very different, from those in the Presbytery of New York City, where there are many churches on one island. Despite these marked differences, some very important common priorities are emerging among us across the denomination.

We are struck that, while there are deep disagreements on the "hot button" issues dividing our church, these are often not the primary concerns of our presbyteries or the congregations they represent. The primary passion and growing energy are around the common themes we heard expressed over and over again in our consultations.

We have made a commitment to shape our ministry and organizations to serve this emerging consensus of where God is leading us in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and we encourage you to seriously and prayerfully do the same. Where do you see the parallels between the New Testament church and the PC(USA) today in your own context? Are the common themes we've identified the same themes at work where you are engaged in ministry?

Sharing these particular reflections with you seems most appropriate as we move from Easter into Pentecost. From these consultations we have an uplifting sense of hope for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). There are undoubtedly many painful changes that we need to make to be a faithful and dynamic community of faith in 21st-century America. However, we have sensed the Holy Spirit at work among Presbyterians across this denomination in powerful ways, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with you in building a New Testament church for the 21st century.

Yours in Christ,
John Detterick, Executive Director of the General Assembly Council
Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly

Showing your scars

A sermon on John 20:19-31.

She refuses to wear a bathing suit in public anymore. She’s too embarrassed by the stretch marks on her abdomen that record her transformation from “child-free young adult” to “mother.” She wishes her body still looked the way it used to look.

Men who are going bald use Rogaine and implants to hide their shiny domes.

Ronald Reagan, throughout his presidency and after, dyed his hair black to hide the gray that marked the passage of the years and the stresses of his life. (And there were plenty of good reasons for Ronald Reagan to go gray!)

Franklin Roosevelt carefully arranged photo opportunities so the public wouldn’t see his wheelchair or his legs mangled by polio.

The actor Johnny Depp, when his romance with Winona Ryder ended, was left with a tattoo reading “Winona Forever.” He had it altered so it wouldn’t be a constant reminder of the past.

We live in a culture that teaches us to hide our imperfections, our scars. Our bodies, our lives, our minds are supposed to be seamless—perfect, without blemish, without a hint of the hard times we’ve come through in the past. So many times, people who are dying have said to me, “At least I know when I get to heaven my body will be perfect and whole again”—as if simply being in heaven wouldn’t be enough.

We are obsessed, sometimes, with hiding our scars, those things that show that life has marked us. It’s easy to believe those scars keep us from being whole. They frighten us, and they cause us to hide parts of ourselves away.

II.

The disciples, according to the Gospel of John, have hidden themselves away behind closed doors on Easter, the day Jesus was resurrected. I imagine the windows are shuttered, and the followers of Jesus sit in a smoky room, in the dim light of an oil lamp, feeling deeply grieved. Their hearts are broken and they are afraid for their lives: Jesus was hung on a cross to die, and they have laid him to rest, but now his body is gone from the tomb. Mary Magdalene says she has seen the Lord, resurrected, but they don’t know whether to believe her. The future that had looked so bright a few days earlier as Jesus entered Jerusalem, a future that promised the coming of the universal rule of God, has grown dim and uncertain.

I wonder: Do the disciples feel safe behind the locked doors? Or do they feel like prisoners of their fear? Are they gathered to comfort one another or to avoid the powers of darkness that loom outside in the city streets of Jerusalem?

What have people said to them on the street and in the marketplace, what have they seen or imagined, that creates the fear that leads them to hide behind locked doors? What scars are they hiding from the world? Have they been robbed of their hope? Or are they waiting a revelation? It seems that “fear of what the authorities may yet do to obliterate the memory of Jesus still dominates them, and so they have locked the doors in self-protection.”

I imagine them sitting quietly, in groups of three or four, talking among themselves, doing what most people do when someone they love has died: They’re telling stories, sharing memories. You’ve heard those stories. “Remember when?” they say. “I always loved the way . . . .” “I just wish I’d told him . . . .”

And then, in the midst of the story-telling, as if their words had the power to raise him from the dead, Jesus stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.”

They don’t recognize him at first. But when he shows them the wounds on his hands and in his side, they know who he is and they rejoice. And he says it again: “Peace be with you.”

A week later, it happens again with Thomas in the room. The followers of Jesus are sitting behind closed doors when he appears to them and says, “Peace be with you.” He shows his hands and his side to Thomas, who immediately confesses: “My Lord and my God!”

When I read this passage, I wonder what it means that the followers of Jesus don’t recognize him until he displays the scars on his resurrected body, the wounds left by the nails and the spear. Even after he is raised from the dead, Jesus carries the scars inflicted by the world—they are, in fact, a key to his identity. He is the wounded healer who comes to his frightened disciples and says, “Peace be with you.” What power those words must have carried to people hidden in fear behind locked doors, with their stormy hearts full of grief!

III.

And how puzzling it is that the resurrected and glorified body of the Christ still carries the wounds of the world!

That puzzle has been very much on my mind, because an agnostic friend asked me to explain Easter and resurrection in a way that was simple. That’s very hard to do, especially when faith doesn’t matter to the person you’re talking with, because there is no simple explanation of resurrection.

The New Testament describes resurrection in several ways, and a key to making sense of the different portrayals is to know that for the writers of the New Testament, “body” or “flesh” were synonyms for “human being.” “Resurrection of the body” means resurrection of a person, an identity. It means that who “we” are, the essence of our identity, will live again.

But, says the bible, we won’t be exactly the same. The apostle Paul says we will be planted as physical bodies but be raised as spiritual bodies. The first letter of John says we do not know what we will be in the resurrection, but we do know that we will be like Jesus.

So Jesus is our best model for understanding what “resurrection” means. He clearly lived again after his death. He was the same person the disciples knew when he was alive. He ate, he drank, he could be touched; but his body was mysteriously different. He had been transformed; he couldn’t automatically be recognized. He could appear and disappear from a room even though the doors were locked. In fact, in the Gospel of Luke Jesus has to assure the disciples that it’s really him and not a ghost.

Thus, the resurrection accounts in the New Testament tell us the earthly Jesus and the resurrected Jesus were alike but not alike. He was the same person, only in a different way. And the resurrected Jesus still carried the scars of the earthly Jesus. Those scars were, in fact, a key to his identity, a way of being certain the resurrected Jesus was the same man who died on the cross.

“Something like that,” says theologian Shirley Guthrie, “is what we may hope for as we look forward to life in the ‘spiritual bodies’ Paul tells us about. . . . In an unimaginably different and better way we will still be the individual human beings we are now.”

IV.

But we know something about resurrection already. We experience a version of it over and over again throughout our lives.

Think about the successful executive or effective parent, raised to a new life out of addiction to drugs and alcohol. Or the troubled and lonely teenager who goes off to college and discovers a new identity as an intelligent and competent person. Or the people who’ve lost all they worked for—their businesses, their families, their careers—but nevertheless find ways to reimagine their lives and allow God to transform them through their experiences of adversity.

We know about resurrection, about the way God brings new life to what we think is dead, about the transformations God makes possible. We know about it because we experience it; but the ways in which we experience resurrection in this life are just a taste of what resurrection will be like when our physical bodies die. Through resurrection, we’re the same person, only different.

But so often we hide the scars left by those things that marked us before resurrection. I wonder if that’s not a mistake? If we shouldn’t instead show those scars to those we love so that they can know who we have been, who we are now, and in our identities recognize the power of the One who transformed us?

After all, only in seeing Jesus’ wounds does Thomas surrender to the power of God. Only in seeing Jesus’ wounds do the disciples understand his identity and the meaning of resurrection. Only in seeing those wounds do we recognize: God is stronger than death. God brings new strength, new life, out of those things that hurt us. People won’t recognize that if they don’t see our scars.

V.

I hid one of my own my scars for years. It was a mark left by chronic depression, which has stalked my family for at least five generations. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my mother, her sister, my cousins and my brother have all wrestled with this particular demon. I have a cousin who committed suicide and another who attempted it; six family members rely on antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications to help them have abundant life; and for twenty years, I’ve taken antidepressant medications.

I used to hide what depression did and does to me. But slowly I came to see that not showing the scars left by depression—the impact on my marriage and my friendships and my professional life, the way depression made me feel about myself, the side effects from medication that I live with daily—not showing those scars cloaked the ways in which God had raised me to new life despite the depression. Others couldn’t see what God had done in my life because they didn’t know how deep my wounds had been.

Wounds like that hurt, but in my life God used them to teach me about myself and my family, to make me sensitive to the suffering of others, to show me what it means to take medication prayerfully rather than reluctantly. Living with depression has given me gifts for ministry. And through it I’ve learned that mental illness is not a moral failing or something to be ashamed of, but that when treated and respected it can bestow important blessings.

When I finally decided to show those wounds to others, I discovered that when other people saw my scars they were also able to see—and believe in—my resurrection. Knowing that I dance with depression gives some people hope that God can and will resurrect them from their own despair. When other people see my scars, they understand that the relatively strong and upbeat person they perceive me to be is the same person marked deeply by the wounds of depression.

Quite a paradox: wounded yet healed, broken but whole.

VI.

Each of us has scars that we hide, wounds that reveal who we have been and how God has worked in our lives to make us who we are now. If Jesus, who showed his scars to his closest companions, is the model for our own resurrection, maybe we are called to show our scars to others, too—to confirm that injured and broken people can be made whole again, that God does indeed raise us to new life, that God is stronger than death or any other power at work in our lives.

Jesus sends us as he was sent to say to the world, “Peace be with you” and show our wounds so that others might see the power of God in lives and thus know that they too are in a relationship with the God of infinite love who was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

Like the wind moving over the waters at the beginning of creation, like the breath of life God breathed into Adam and Eve, in this passage from John, Jesus breathes on his disciples to give them the power of the Holy Spirit, commissioning them to continue his work on earth.

We, too, are a part of that commission—people sanctified and sent by Christ when he says to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Through believing, we have life in his name and we are witnesses to that power.

Glory be to God Almighty, the One who is creating us, the One who is redeeming us, the One who is sustaining us, now and forever. Amen.

The Spirit and cyberspace

As many Americans seek spiritual nurture on the Internet as in church. Yet being involved in a congregation increases the chance that people will turn to the Web for spiritual friendship and connections.

That's the finding of a study released this month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

In a comprehensive study of Web behavior related to religion, the Project discovered that:

* 64% of the nation’s 128 million Internet users have done things online that relate to religious or spiritual matters

* Those who use the Internet for religious or spiritual purposes are more likely to be women, white, middle aged, college educated, and relatively well-to-do

* Evangelicals are among the most fervent Internet users for religious and spiritual purposes.

* The "online faithful" are devout and use the Internet for personal spiritual matters more than for traditional religious functions or congregational work. But their faith-activity online seems to augment already-strong commitments to congregations.

But only 17 percent of those who pursue the Spirit in cyberspace use the Web to search for places to attend religious services.

Overall, the portrait that emerges in this study counters, somewhat, the concern that the Internet will serve primarily as a venue for privatized religion.

"This study found that the Internet does provide people with sources of information, symbolic resources, and opportunities for networking and interaction outside the boundaries of formal religious bodies or traditions," the authors write. "Yet it also found that the online faithful seem more interested in augmenting their traditional faith practices and experiences by personally expressing their own faith and spirituality, as opposed to seeking something new or different in the online environment."

[Crossposted on Spondizo.]

Remember?

A sermon on Luke 24:1-12:

It’s an uphill walk from the bus station in Chihuahua, Mexico, toward the cathedral on the city’s plaza—not a walk you would normally look forward to with a 35-pound backpack strapped to your shoulders.

But we’d arrived at dusk, we were hungry, and the guidebook said there was a good, cheap, clean hotel—The Plaza Reforma—not far off the main square. So we hoisted our packs and started walking.

Now, I’d memorized the directions to the hotel during our bus ride, but finding your way through a strange city in the dark can be a challenge—particularly if you’re in Mexico and you don’t speak Spanish. So Karee and my brother were a bit skeptical when we got to the Hotel Reforma.

“I thought it was called the Plaza Reforma,” Karee said.

“Must’ve changed the name,” I said.

“Maybe we should ask to see a room first,” my brother said. The lobby was filthy.

But I was confident. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, “and it’s only for one night. Let’s just check in and find some dinner.”

Famous last words. I’ll spare the gruesome details, but suffice to say, we will never spend another night at the Hotel Reforma.

And in the morning, on our way to breakfast, we found the Plaza Reforma, a cheap, clean, well-lighted hotel just four blocks from the rat’s nest where we’d spent the night.

Without a word, Karee took the guidebook and read aloud the directions I thought I’d memorized:

“Going uphill from the bus station,” it said, “you will pass several small hotels, but this is Chihuahua’s red-light district. Best to keep going to the top of the hill, where there are three small, relatively quiet places to the right.” One of them was the Plaza Reforma.

Karee and my brother looked at me accusingly. “I guess I didn’t remember that part of the directions,” I said. But I was forbidden to choose the hotels for the rest of the trip.

What we fail to remember can change our lives forever. “The root of all sin,” some have said, “is forgetfulness.”

II.

It is just before dawn on the first day of the week, and the women who loved Jesus are walking in silence to the tomb. The chill of the desert air makes them shiver, and their bare feet are wet with dew. The fragrance of the spices they have prepared surrounds them. They are on their way to anoint the body of their master.

They are grieving, each in her own way, hearts heavy in their ribcages, dark circles under their eyes from a sleepless night. Every time they close their eyes they see his body and the nails being driven into his wrists. Their eyes are red from crying.

They have gotten up early, dressing in the darkness, careful not to disturb their sleeping families, to be faithful to their prescribed task. In their culture, the ritual of anointing the dead falls on their shoulders. It’s simply what you do when someone has died, much as we might make a casserole or pasta salad and drop it by the family’s house. Like us, they take comfort in that ritual task; it gives them something to focus on, something to do. They learned it from their mothers, and they will teach it to their daughters, and while it’s not much, they might say, it’s all we can do. Even saying that is a part of the ritual.

But when they arrive at the tomb, they find the stone door already rolled away. Looking at each other with furrowed brows, they duck their heads and shuffle in through the tiny door. But the tomb is empty. The body is not here.

The women are perplexed.

Here they are, ready to do their job, to get on with the business of ritual mourning, and the body is missing. Without it, their spices are useless. Without the body, what are they supposed to do, standing in the half-light of a rock-hewn tomb on the morning after the Son of God was put to death by human sin?

All that they had dreamed of, all of the hope they invested in Jesus, in the coming kingdom of God, was crushed at the crucifixion.

And now they stand there in the empty tomb, minds racing, trying to figure out where/what/how/why to go on. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland experience: Nothing is quite what it seems. Looking at the empty tomb through the lens of their life experience, there’s nothing that allows them to make sense of it.

Just what are they supposed to do now?

III.

We all know that feeling: Sometimes we’re just not prepared for what life throws at us.

The baby we’ve dreamed about, anticipated, joyfully prepared for, the baby who was going to make us a family: the baby never makes it home. What are we supposed to do?

The job we studied for, paid our dues for, counted on to fulfill our dreams: the job turns out to be deadening, all-consuming, a black hole ruining our marriages, our health and our relationships, but we’re too far in to get out. What are we supposed to do?

The family we used to love, the family we used to laugh and cry with, the family that was the center of our lives—now it’s only a place where people yell and nasty words are spoken and we never feel quite safe. What are we supposed to do?

What are we supposed to do when our dreams don’t turn out the way we wanted them to? When our hopes shrivel up like a pasture during a drought? Or our spirit becomes as skinny and pitiful as a calf whose mother’s milk has gone dry?

What are we supposed to do when life isn’t what we thought it would be, when we’re at that place we never dreamed of, when nothing in our experience allows us to make sense out of what’s happening in our life?

Sometimes, in our anxiety, we look for something—some peace, some sense of grace, some comfort—in a compulsive addiction to booze or drugs or sex or money, in the grinding pace of work and family and community that leaves no time to brood on what we’ve lost, in the grade we get on a test or in how much money we make or in how quickly our church is growing or what somebody else thinks of us.

But none of those things make up for what’s missing. So what are we supposed to do? What have we failed to remember?

IV.

Like us, in search of comfort, the women at the tomb have turned to an ordinary task—anointing the body—only to discover that things are not ordinary. And that perplexes them even more.

Then suddenly two men appear and say: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has been raised.”

And then come the words that are the pivot for the entire scene: “Remember how he told you.

“Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

“Then,” writes Luke, “then they remembered his words.” And immediately they recognize what has happened: Jesus, the Christ, has been raised from the dead. What the Master has said is true—a truth they see only by remembering the words that point to it.

Those words are what they need to overcome their anxiety and confusion, and they leave the darkness of the tomb for a morning growing brighter by the minute, eager to tell the rest of the disciples what’s happened.

By remembering the words of Jesus, they were able to recognize the truth about the empty tomb. Through the spectacles of their own limited experience, it meant nothing.

But through the more powerful lens of the gospel story, their confusion suddenly became clear through the act of remembering.

V.

Remembering, for a Christian, is not just to recall past events; it is to be aware of God’s presence with us at all moments, to carry the ancient story of God’s relationship with us into the present and into the future. Remembering brings the Kingdom of God into the present moment, allows us to see our lives in the context of the gospel, to realize who we are, truly, and whose we are.

For the women that morning, remembering the words of Jesus is a wake-up call. Just as an early-morning phone call in a strange motel room jolts you awake, those words of Jesus bring the women at the tomb to a totally different consciousness. They are able to see reality differently, to wake up and recognize the empty tomb as truth, because they remember what Jesus has said.

This is good news! In God’s Word we find resources to overcome our doubt and anxiety. Through God’s Word, we know we are not alone. In remembering the gospel story—using it to look at the events of our life in a new way—we can see truth; we can wake up and see our ordinary tasks, our ordinary lives, in an extraordinary way.

Part of discipleship means seeing the world through Christian glasses—and Christian glasses are different than the glasses of rationality, the glasses of capitalism, the glasses of sexism, the glasses of racism, or even the glasses of the Presbyterian Book of Order. Christian glasses remind us of the ultimate context of our lives. They show us where God’s story intersects with our story.

So I ask you: Where are the sealed tombs of your life? Where, in a fit of confusion or grief or disappointment have you sealed off something you love or something you are afraid of or something you are ashamed about, some relationship that was once important to you? What would you do if you rolled that rock away and discovered the tomb was empty? Would it frighten you or confuse you? Would you stand there, perplexed?

Or would you turn to the gospel story to make sense of it? Could you remember what Jesus said and see that empty tomb—that place where a new and unprecedented life begins—could you see that empty tomb through the lens of the gospel? Could you trust that by remembering the Word of God, your confusion and anxiety would lose their power?

VI.

Many Easter Sundays ago, when I worked as a chaplain, I stopped to visit a woman about to be discharged from the hospital. She was still hooked up to IV’s; her face was drawn and sharp, and she was very thin. But she smiled when I walked into the room.

Holding her hand, I said, “You must be very happy to be going home.”

“I am happy,” she said. “I am going home to die.”

Her name was Carmen. Her cancer had spread, and she had decided not to pursue treatment. She made a joke, and we laughed. She assured me that dying did not frighten her. “I trust God,” she said. “I trust God. And I want my family, my children, around me.”

When I left, she handed me a hot-pink, plastic Easter egg. “Now don’t you open that and look inside,” she said, “until it’s time to go home.”

I was amazed at Carmen’s trust in God as she peered into the face of death, and I wondered how it was that she had avoided the anger, confusion, and anxiety I so often saw in people who were dying.

Hours later, as I left the hospital, I reached into my pocket for my car keys and found that pink egg. When I opened it, a handwritten slip of paper fell out, like the fortune in a fortune cookie. It said: “He is risen! He is alive! Hallelujah!”

Carmen was dying, but she had remembered the Word of God. She knew what it meant to find the tomb empty, and she understood her life and death in the context of the gospel.

May we be as wise as Carmen, remembering the words of Christ in the midst of our confusion and thereby understanding our lives in a new way.

He is risen! He is alive! Alleluia! And amen!

India Calling

It started with an e-mail from God.

OK--not from God. From me. But perhaps God had a hand in it?

Read about church member Kay Pugsley's mission trip to India in February in an article from the April 1, 2004, issue of the Wise County Messenger.

Understanding Holy Week

The period that Christians call "Holy Week" begins Sunday, with Palm (or Passion) Sunday--the entrance Jesus makes into Jerusalem for the final week of his life as a human being.

The website Faith and Values has an excellent collection of resources for understanding Holy Week in the various Christian traditions.

Listening for God's call

Our callings from God aren't always immediately clear--nor do they always follow a straight line.

That's the essence of a Wise County Messenger article about our pastoral intern, Diane Oswald, and the path she's followed to ministry with the Presbyterian church.

Are you abundant?

A sermon based on John 12:1-8.

Not far from our house in Fort Worth is a neighborhood the police call The End. It’s less than two miles by car, but a world away by culture.

The End anchors Fort Worth’s drug trade. You can buy crack cocaine or amphetamines on the street corners the way you can buy ice cream from a handcart at the park near my house. The sound of guns is an every-day occurrence.

I try not to go to The End if I can avoid it. But one day, The End came to me.

On a Monday afternoon, a skinny old man knocked on our door.

“Howdy,” he said. “I’m a neighbor of yours and I’ve kind of gotten myself stranded. Do you think you could give me a ride?”

His body odor was overwhelming, and his speech had a rapid, staccato cadence you sometimes hear in a drug addict or a person who is mentally ill. He wanted a ride. My gas tank was on empty; I had a chapter write and a sermon to prepare for; I didn’t really have the time to give the man a ride. But I took him anyway.

Immediately, it became clear that he didn’t live where he’d told me. He wasn’t a “neighbor” at all. The directions he gave after we were driving took us deeper and deeper into The End, and I began to wonder where he was taking me, and why. I was afraid for my safety, if not my life.

And as I drove, surrounded by the stench of this dirty man, I began to wonder: Am I being noble or am I just being stupid?

The end of the story, of course, is that I made out just fine. I dropped him off, he said “God bless,” and I high-tailed it home like a mule deer startled by a gun shot. Nothing dramatic, nothing bad.

For the viewers at home: Do not attempt to replicate this stunt on your own; the driver in this story was a trained professional ignoring all of his professional training.

But the incident left me wondering: What will I do the next time someone—maybe even the same man—comes to my door asking for a ride?

Just what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in a situation like that?

II.

Imagine for a moment that you are having a dinner in honor of an out-of-town friend. Yours is a casual house, and everyone is barefoot, seated around the table, laughing, sharing hors d’oeuvres and maybe a glass of wine.

And then your sister walks into the room with a huge, unopened bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume—16 ounces, a whole pound of the stuff—and someone says, “Whoa, Mary! What did you spend on that perfume?”

“Oh, a bit,” Mary says, kneeling before the guest of honor. “About $30,000, I think—a year’s salary.”

And then she empties the entire bottle on the feet of your out-of-town friend. The perfume runs down his ankles, over his toes, puddles on the floor, fills the room with its sweet odor. Then Mary begins to use her long, dark hair to wipe his feet clean. No one says a word. Everyone is stunned.

And then your brother, the one who embezzled all that money from the local Food Bank, explodes: “Geez, Mary! If you wanted to spend your money, why didn’t you give that $30,000 to feed the hungry and poor people of Wise County instead of wasting it like this?!”

You have no idea what to say or what to do. What would it mean to be a disciple of Jesus—not to mention an astonished host or a perfume-drenched guest of honor—what would it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in a situation like this?

III.

It is six days before Passover, and Jesus knows as he walks into Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem, that the countdown has begun. The priests and the Pharisees are waiting for him in Jerusalem, where they will arrest him and put him to death.

In the gospel of John, raising Lazarus from the dead was the act that cinched Jesus’ fate: The powers-that-be cannot tolerate this prophet or the allegiance he’s evoking from the poor and the outcast. He’s becoming too popular, too powerful, and the leaders are worried he will bring the wrath of the Romans down on their heads. So he must die.

But first, he will spend some time at home with Lazarus, with Martha and her sister Mary. In fact, the household is preparing a special dinner tonight for Jesus and his disciples.

Why has Jesus come to Bethany just before his death at the hands of the authorities? After all, this village and the house of Lazarus both are associated with the stench of death. Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days before he was raised—Martha herself complained about the odor even before the stone was rolled away.

Has Jesus returned to Bethany to remind himself of the stink of a decaying body, to meditate on his own impending death?

Or has he returned to Bethany, to the house of Lazarus, to remind himself of the power of God to resuscitate a dead man?

As he sat at the table with Lazarus and the apostles, was Jesus surprised to see Mary approach with a jar of oil usually reserved to anoint the dead? Or did he expect Mary—this woman who had sat at his feet in admiration, listening so closely to his words—did he expect Mary to recognize what was about to happen, to anoint him in preparation for his death, to anoint him in reverence to make up for the rushed and haphazard anointing he would receive in secret after his shameful death on the cross? Is that why he returned to Bethany?

There’s no way we can know why Jesus has come here, to sit at this table, and I suppose the reason isn’t all that important. What is important is that Mary approached him with a pound of oil scented with nard. She knelt at his feet—gnarled and callused, hardened against the rocks and sharp thorns, dusty from his wanderings—she knelt at his feet and gently took them into her own callused hands.

And then she poured the oil, all of it, on his feet, ignoring the way it puddled to the floor, the way its scent filled the entire room, driving away the stench of death. And when his feet were slippery and soft under her fingers, when she had massaged the bruised and aching muscles, she began to wipe his feet clean with her own long, dark hair.

Is there a more sensuous scene in the bible than this incredibly intimate moment between Mary and Jesus, two people who love each other, a moment lived out in the midst of their friends, gathered together at the table for a meal?

It is a moment of worship, pure adoration. I imagine Jesus reclining against the cushions, eyes closed, inhaling the odor of the perfume, a smile of pleasure on his face. It feels good to have someone rub your feet with oil and then wipe them clean.

Mary’s devotion that night at dinner foreshadows the way Jesus will wash the feet of his own disciples before the week is over. It also foreshadows his death six days later.

Mary is anointing Jesus as a dead body would be anointed, but taking it to an extreme. Rather than using a few drops of scented oil, she uses a whole pound. Her act is beyond reason, extravagantly so, a moment of overflowing abundance, a gratuitous response to love that wells up and spills over, enveloping the whole dinner party in its sweet, sweet smell. The fragrance of her love fills the whole house.

And then Judas speaks: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”

It is a show-stopping question, and it begs another: What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus at a moment like this?

IV.

If Mary brings the fragrance of love to this dinner party, Judas is the stench of death. In him, the power of darkness has manifest itself even in the intimate circle of Jesus’ closest friends. And his question—“Why was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor”—his question seems to negate Mary’s simple act of devotion.

So often in life the stench of death seems to overwhelm the fragrance of love.

There are the times we speak harshly to our child or spouse, spitting out words of death rather than words of life.

There are the times when depression and anxiety fill us with a loathing for ourselves and for all of life.

There are the times when we boast about ourselves instead of celebrating the achievements of others.

There are the times when build ourselves up by tearing others down.

There are times when people we thought were friends hurt us or let us down.

There are the times we choose allegiance to family or the lure of money over the liberating message of the gospel.

There are times . . . there are times. But you know what I’m talking about. You’ve experienced it in your own life. And at some time or another, each of us hears that voice that says: The good you’re doing isn’t good enough. You’re not really a disciple of Jesus.

V.

Some of you might remember the Church Lady, a character that Dana Carvey played twenty years ago on the comedy show “Saturday Night Live.”

Whenever she found someone doing something good, the Church Lady managed to twist it around so that the do-gooder was actually in the service of the devil.

“I notice you’re wearing your red gloves as you shovel the walk of your disabled neighbor,” she would say. “But do we maybe know whose color red is? Hmmm. I don’t know—maybe . . . Satan?”

And then she would do her Superiority Dance to celebrate her status as a true disciple.

That is perhaps the twentieth-century version of what Judas is doing at this dinner party in Bethany. He’s showing off, as if saying, “I have a better grasp of the gospel than you do.”

One of the purposes of this passage in the Gospel of John, I think, is to contrast the false discipleship of Judas with the authentic discipleship of Mary.

Judas thinks he can fake his way through, by appealing to the care of the poor and ignoring the death of Jesus that will occur because of his own betrayal.

Mary, on the other hand, doesn’t try to be a good disciple. She simply pours herself out, overflowing with love and devotion, adoring Jesus with all her being.

She is the first to serve him, the first to love him, the first to prepare his body for burial through the act of anointing. The sweet smell of that perfume fills the room, allowing everyone present to participate in her act of worship and thus in their teacher’s death.

This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus at a moment like this: to participate in his death while nonetheless acting in ways that proclaim the extravagant love of the living God.

In Mary the stench of death—both death in the past, as represented by Lazarus, and death in the future, as represented by Judas—in Mary, the stench of death is replaced by the fragrance of humble love.

V.

Unless you’re asleep this morning—and I’m not unaware of that possibility—you’ve probably noticed how often this morning I’ve emphasized the extravagance of Mary’s anointing of Jesus.

That image of Mary pouring forth the perfume, the way it cascades over the feet of Jesus and puddles on the floor, the way its scent fills the house, all of those details echo an ancient understanding of God.

Pseudo-Dionysius, a Greek theologian and mystic, wrote of God as a hidden spring, gushing forth, overflowing to fill the world with the power of divine energy so that everything participates in the generous and abundant love of God.

We are made in that image. Each of us. And in anointing the feet of Jesus in her extravagant way, Mary is activating that divine image in herself, living out what it means to be a true disciple of Jesus.

She is being sanctified. In telling Judas to leave her alone, Jesus is choosing Mary as one of his own. And being chosen as God’s own means she is participating in the nature of God. What belongs to God is holy, as God is holy. Those who are sanctified lead a special life because, instead of living according to the ethics of their own society or their own egos, they increasingly live according to the law of God’s kingdom. And God’s kingdom rests on a hidden abundance, an embarrassment of riches, built into the heart of reality and showering down on creation.

To be a disciple of Jesus is to live out of this abundance. To be a disciple of Jesus is to act in ways that communicate the fullness of life to others. To be a disciple of Jesus is to participate in his death, knowing that not even the grave can stop the love of God flowing through us and into the world.

Reformed theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes:

If whatever God has made and loves is holy, then life is holy in itself, and to live life with love and joy means sanctifying it. . . . To sanctify life does not mean manipulating it religiously and morally. It means being freed and justified, loved and affirmed, and more and more alive. Life in God’s Spirit is a life entrusted to the guidance and drive of the Spirit, a life that lets the Spirit come. . . . The Spirit of life is poured out and flows. . . . Through the Holy Spirit, God’s eternal life brims over, as it were, and its overflowing powers and energies fill the earth.

No one can “make” this life happen, be it through giving money to the poor or doing things intended to make us “better Christians.” One can only let this life be and let it come, as Mary did when she anointed the feet of Jesus. The life that Moltmann writes about is not achieved by works, but received as a gift, a gift of God’s grace flowing into the world through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Receiving that gift and becoming a channel by which it flows into the world to bless the life of others is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus at any time.

As Lent comes to an end and we move into the passion of Holy Week, may we prepare a way in the wilderness of our lives so that the living waters of the Lord might flow through us and into the life of others.

As God claimed us in the waters of baptism, so might we also claim God’s grace, participating in the death of Christ by which the fragrance of love replaced the stench of death for all time.

To that God of overflowing abundance, whose passionate love creates and sustains the universe as a graceful gift to those chosen as God’s own, be blessing and glory and wisdom and power forever and ever! Amen.