John 12:20-36
20Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
27“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” 29The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” 30Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
I once served a church whose population was made up mostly of older adults. I presided at a decent number of funeral services for the members of that congregation as they passed on, and I came to know the liturgy we United Methodists use for the service of death and resurrection quite well. Especially poignant for me are the words said and shared at the place of burial: “Jesus said, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but it if dies, it bears much fruit.’” I have stood at many a graveside saying these words that I prayerfully hoped were received as comfort in a time of mourning. I have said them over the lives of those whom I have not known well and those whom I have known and loved as if they were members of my own family. They have come to be a kind of portal for me from this life to the eternal, representing both the loss of what we hold dear in this life and the gain of the life that is to come, the resurrection proven and promised to us in Jesus Christ.
It’s a paradox that the world in which we live is hesitant to accept. We do not or cannot embrace the idea that in order to be faithful to the Christian life there are things we may have to lose, pain we may have to feel. Our society tells us that success is all about gaining: gaining wealth, gaining status, gaining the right size house and the right brand of car, sending our kids to the right schools. We value what looks right, not necessarily what is right. We experience pain and loss as things to be avoided. As Australian theologian William Loader puts it,
“Pain is real, even for the triumphant, confident Jesus of John[‘s gospel]. Pain is sometimes the path of truth and its avoidance a denial. Not exactly the theme of a society which flees from pain.”
On the other side of the coin, there is something that is safe about dwelling in loss, isn’t there? There is a safety in mourning over a single grain of wheat that never was able to produce any fruit to speak of, perhaps never put in the right situation in which to grow. The world was unkind to it; woe are we who knew it and feel the loss of that grain and all its potential. Sound silly? Listen to us when we talk about jobs we have lost, relationships we have lost, the sad situations in which we find ourselves from time to time and how we were right there, ready with our single grain to make something grow, but we just never got the chance and it withered away before we ever had the right opportunity to grow. Death is about the only thing in life we cannot escape or make excuse for so that we don’t have to own up to the permanent loss we experience and over which we have absolutely no control.
Even here in the twelfth chapter of John, Jesus is trying yet again to share with his disciples what is about to happen to all of them. They are in Jerusalem. The cross is not to far away now. They are at what the language of music calls the penultimate step in the journey to Jerusalem: this is the next-to-last moment—one of mourning for what was while what will come to pass is still a short ways off in the distance.
Those moments of standing at a grave where a body is just about to be laid to rest call into my mind images of Jesus in the garden. While there is certain finality in the images of caskets, dirt, and shovels all around, there is still a moment of “it’s not over yet” to be felt and lived by the loved ones starting with deep sighs into the last moments of the presence of the beloved’s body in front of them. And yet, they are to get up from those chairs covered in velour, step out from under that tent, and go forward into life—a new way of living without the one whose body has just been officially turned over to death. Jesus knew that this moment was coming for the twelve and the crowds who had come to follow him and love him everywhere he went. He wanted to prepare them for the penultimate step and the ultimate reality: it would be difficult losing him. His death would be tragic, and their sense of loss would be great. But there would still be much life to be lived and joy to be had in the days and months to come after his resurrection.
And so he was still teaching them about this journey of faith that we share with them even today. They had grown accustomed to the parts of the faith journey that were joyful: healing, teaching, perhaps even the spiritual high of challenging the leaders of the synagogue on matters of God’s goodness rather than blind adherence to and, therefore, distortion of God’s law. They had gotten used to following their leader. To consider the death of Jesus, and even his resurrection was to consider that everything would change forever. Their beloved leader would no longer be with them. The synagogue might treat them even more unkindly than they had been treated before. Who would heal the sick? Who would raise people from the dead? Who would teach in parables? What would happen to this life, this movement they were living day to day? It wasn’t even a question of what they would lose but how much they would lose when they lost Jesus. I believe that if I were in their shoes I might be gathering up all the single grains I could find that were falling to the ground and trying as long and hard as I could to hold them together until someone or something else came along that could bind them together into bread for the world again. Grace, hope, risk and wisdom, light: it’s all well and good when Jesus is there to direct the journey. But the thought of going it alone? That must have been terrifying for those who had been his closest friends and companions.
Could they even see what was to be gained by his crucifixion and resurrection? We know that for days afterward they hid in a locked room for fear of being discovered as his disciples. Still trying desperately to gather up all those grains of wheat before they fell to the ground to be trampled by the mob of nay-say-ers and people poised in the most annoying “I told you so,” stature, the companions of Christ were not yet able to see the power of the resurrection at work in their lives or in the world. They could not yet know what they stood to gain by continuing the ministry of Jesus—a ministry of healing, love, forgiveness, mercy, and grace in a world that was broken, unloved, grudge-holding, unkind, and unjust. Would they be bound by the regret of having lost years of livelihood that they surrendered when they said yes to the call to follow Jesus? Would they be torn apart by loneliness for the “good ole days” when they got to live with Jesus who healed, taught, and transformed the world in their everyday journey together through life? There was a lot at stake.
And so there is for us. There is a lot at stake when we enter into the journey of faith with Jesus. He calls us, not just into belief in his identity as Son of God, Savior of the world, but also to a life lived in that belief. That means that we believe that God really did love us enough to send God’s Son, and that Christ loved us enough to come to us. Jesus was, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, the new covenant God made with us, and we are to take an active part in living out that covenant. And the reward of faith is not great riches, the easy life, the best of all things. It will from time to time be pain and loss.
Have you lost relationships in your life because of your faith in Christ? Have you lost jobs or the possibility of work because of your faith? Have you had to set aside pleasures of life because enjoying them meant that someone else had to do without? Have you sacrificed material possessions so that you could contribute to the needs of the community of faith? Have you made changes in your life and life’s schedule because of your commitment to the church that have made it hard to do other things you might have wanted to do?
Yet what there is to gain by living in relationship with God in Christ! Have you felt the strength of your own spirit increased in prayer when you spend one-on-one time with God, both speaking and listening? Have you found joy in the holy occupation of attending to the life of the church when you’ve taught or participated in Sunday school or a small group? Have you found that your own life and faith are increased a hundred fold when you give back to God’s work a portion of what you have received?
Take time to consider along your faith journey what you have gained because of your relationship with God in Christ. Look around at the friends and community of support and encouragement you have here. Think of the opportunities you have found to serve others and the warmth it has brought to your heart because you answered the call of Christ to love your neighbors. Consider how your heart has been changed by the experiences you’ve had in the study of scripture and the Christian life you have lived in community here. And remember the joy of knowing that God is always there with and for us, in every situation, making something special out of the lives we’ve been given to live.
The journey of faith, which we have taken time and care to observe in this holy season of Lent, is one of loss and gain. It is one of death and life. Thanks be to God for the death and life of Jesus that shows us that pain is going to happen, but it is not the final thing. Life will come, joy will be restored, and God, eternal, will be with us every step of the way.
Amen.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Lent 4: The True Mirror
Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
John 3:14-21
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
How many times do you look in the mirror when you are getting ready to leave home? Actress Nicole Kidman doesn’t like to look in the mirror very often. She says she cares more about looking “healthy” than beautiful. I confess that I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors. I suffer from the usual amount of negative self-image: just enough to make me dread what I’ll see when I look in a mirror, whether at home or out in public where there seem to be plenty of chances for us to gaze at our own images wherever we go. If you’re like me, though, you also can’t resist the urge to look when your reflection comes calling. You suffer from the simultaneous desires to hide from the reality staring back at you and to scrutinize why that reality is so displeasing. It’s a little game that our image-obsessed society teaches us to play early on in life.
There is a brother and sister team in New York who are seeking a patent for a product they have developed called “true mirror.” It is a mirror that is actually two mirrors joined together in a box at a perfect 90-degree angle. When you look into a “true mirror”, you may see things you are not used to seeing when you check out your reflection in the storefront window. Brian Connolly, a New Yorker, who publishes a magazine called “Natural Health and Fitness”, bought one and used it for introspection. "I look into it for five or 10 minutes three or four times a week," he said. "It reveals parts of me I'm very unfamiliar with."
Some people love the true mirror; some people hate it. “Some people have even run away from it screaming," said John Walter, inventor of the True Mirror. "Then there are people who said they didn't see any difference." And to a few come painful moments of self-recognition. Walter recalls a movie actress who took one look into the True Mirror and exclaimed that she finally understood why she was always getting cast in roles portraying ‘tough, hard-boiled women.’ Before that moment, she said, she never could understand why people would see her that way.”+
Part of the journey of faith is discovering some things about yourself that you might rather not know. Just like we do not like to look at our physical appearance in a mirror of any kind, we also shy away from the characteristics and decisions that cause us embarrassment or shame. We’d rather hide our complaints against God for the terrible situations life hands us from time to time than let God see our hearts for all that they are—jealous, petty, and occasionally small. Of all of our relationships, we worry the most about being “perfect” with God—the one who designed us in the first place and knows us in and out, imperfections and all. We’d rather be fooled by funhouse mirror images of our faults and pretend that what we see is just a distortion of who and what we really are. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the closer we get to God, the more things about ourselves that we discover that would chip away at that relationship, and we hide them in the dark, or as we used to say it in children’s choir, under a bushel.
The Hebrew people had been journeying with God for quite some time. God had found a way to rescue them from Egypt where they were living in slavery after the relationship between the royal family and the family of Joseph had disintegrated. Moses, God’s servant, had led the Israelites against all odds on foot out of the bounds of their captivity. They were free; they could finally worship when and where they wanted. Their children’s children would never remember what it was like to be slaves to someone else. A new life was out there, courtesy of the God who has always come to their rescue when they were in trouble. That’s how much God loved them, and what did they do?
They spoke against God and Moses. They complained, not only about the amount of time it was taking to get to the new life but even about the daily food God was providing for them while they were on the journey. The complained that God had lured them out of their old life, bad as it was, and had led them into this new one that seemed to be worse than ever. Something had to be done to make this relationship right. They had to see the truth.
God showed truth to the Israelites in the desert with the serpent, the symbol we now use to represent the healing of modern medicine. Generations later, when the story of the bronze serpent on the pole had been told to every child of the Hebrews, they still had questions. Remember Niccodemus early in the third chapter of John? Deep into his faith journey with God, he encounters a disruption in Jesus and questions him about being born again. Then John offers us what is now a staple of our faith: the 16th verse of the third chapter: “For God so loved the world…” and the image of Jesus as the light of a world living in darkness. All those generations after the Exodus, we still hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the journey of faith is not easy, doesn’t always make sense, and still produces hope for new life that we cannot yet even imagine possible.
John’s right, you know: we love darkness. We love it because it hides all those things we’d rather not see or know about ourselves. And we think that if we can’t see them, then no one else can, either: especially not God. It’s like not looking in a mirror: if I don’t have to see what I actually look like, I can imagine my reflection to be whatever pleases me at the moment. When we avoid seeing our own image, we don’t have to confront the disappointment that God must feel at how far from God’s own image ours has turned out to be. We don’t have to feel shame when we don’t live up to the full potential God has given us or when we don’t use the gifts God has given us for the good of others or at all. We don’t have to be embarrassed at the decisions we’ve made in life that have hurt us or people we love…or even people we don’t know. We don’t have to think about the canyon between who we are right now and who we are called to be. It’s just so much easier to walk by the mirror and look in the other direction.
But every now and then we encounter a true mirror: one that shows us what other people see when they look at us. It sheds light in the dark places of our lives that we’d just as soon not show to the rest of the world, least of all to God. That true mirror reflects the judgment we pass on one another based on income, professional accomplishment, even the streets we live on; the racism we say is in the past until it comes to a question of what schools we’ll send our children to; the sexism we hide behind practicality when we say that there are just some jobs that men do better than women or that there are some places, like the home, that women belong rather than men; the heterosexism we passively participate in by sitting back and doing nothing to help our brothers and sisters in the LGBTandQ community gain the rights due to every human being; or the complacency we practice when we listen to the news and hear about war happening around the world and crime in our own backyards and still think that there is nothing we can or have to do that can stop it.
We just may find ourselves running away screaming from the true mirror, the light that no darkness can extinguish, in the name of shame and disgrace, thinking that the grace of God could not possibly be enough to save us from the poison of the mistakes we have made, the sin we have committed, the lies we have told, the relationships we have broken, the breakdown of community to which we have contributed. We have all been there, some of us finding ourselves there more frequently than any of the other stops along the journey of faith. But then we turn around, and out of the darkness Moses is still coming at us with that bronze snake on a pole, catching the light and reflecting it on us and on our dark lives. But here’s the thing: that snake is saving us. The symbol of our very life and death, it has the antedote for the poison we bring on ourselves when we choose not to let God shine light in our lives. We continue to do evil to ourselves and to one another, and we continue to let the poison travel in our system because we are too afraid to consider the remedy. How is it possible that God could keep trying and trying to help us, to save us?
We are now more than half way through Lent and the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. It is just starting to come into focus and we know the dark days and hours that are coming. If you were in his shoes, would you want to turn back? Would you imagine that it was better just living in the world that couldn’t figure out how to be in right relationship with God, hoping it would just get better someday? Are you at a place in your faith journey now that seems like to push forward and go deeper into relationship with God is scary and may require more of you than you are willing to give? Are you thinking that it might just be easier to continue to live in darkness because even though it may be bad, you’ve figured out your way around and learning something new might not work out the way you expect?
That’s the hard part about sticking with the journey. It’s not always hearts and flowers. Sometimes it is painful and troubling, especially when we take time to look back and wonder if we are better off for having begun this journey in the first place than we would be had we never considered a relationship with God. But when you take a look into a true mirror that shows you more than a 2-dimensional reflection of yourself, you will see something that is at the very core of everyone of us: the image of God. The same God who created us in the beginning is the God who loves us in the darkest of the middle days and who will gracefully welcome us in the light of the days to come when we finally come face to face with God and who we are. It is the same God who saved the Israelites in the desert and who sent the Son into a world where he would surely have to be eliminated because of the message of his life. And that is the same God who loves you and me enough to keep pursuing us even into these dark days when things seem to be getting worse and worse.
The good news for us today is that God will never desert us, leave us in the dark places of our wilderness forever, but we have to keep going on in faith. We have to believe that God loves us enough to send the Son into the world to save us, to be raised up in glory so that we could be raised up out of darkness and have the chance to live in light—the light of unexpected love, life-long grace and companionship, and the promise of a better life. So look into the true mirror, friends; look at the bronze serpent representing for us the darkest places along our faith journeys. See those places, those shameful places in our lives that pull us away from the love of God, and realize that God offers you a way out. It means confronting the very things about ourselves that we dread exposing the most. But it also means shining light on the promise of what can be—the reality of God’s saving love for us in Jesus, the glory of being forgiven for all of that which we would rather hide, and the promise of the milk and honey of love, mercy, and forgiveness, flowing freely and in abundance. Now that is a reflection I can’t wait to see.
In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen.
+ www.truemirror.com
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
John 3:14-21
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
How many times do you look in the mirror when you are getting ready to leave home? Actress Nicole Kidman doesn’t like to look in the mirror very often. She says she cares more about looking “healthy” than beautiful. I confess that I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors. I suffer from the usual amount of negative self-image: just enough to make me dread what I’ll see when I look in a mirror, whether at home or out in public where there seem to be plenty of chances for us to gaze at our own images wherever we go. If you’re like me, though, you also can’t resist the urge to look when your reflection comes calling. You suffer from the simultaneous desires to hide from the reality staring back at you and to scrutinize why that reality is so displeasing. It’s a little game that our image-obsessed society teaches us to play early on in life.
There is a brother and sister team in New York who are seeking a patent for a product they have developed called “true mirror.” It is a mirror that is actually two mirrors joined together in a box at a perfect 90-degree angle. When you look into a “true mirror”, you may see things you are not used to seeing when you check out your reflection in the storefront window. Brian Connolly, a New Yorker, who publishes a magazine called “Natural Health and Fitness”, bought one and used it for introspection. "I look into it for five or 10 minutes three or four times a week," he said. "It reveals parts of me I'm very unfamiliar with."
Some people love the true mirror; some people hate it. “Some people have even run away from it screaming," said John Walter, inventor of the True Mirror. "Then there are people who said they didn't see any difference." And to a few come painful moments of self-recognition. Walter recalls a movie actress who took one look into the True Mirror and exclaimed that she finally understood why she was always getting cast in roles portraying ‘tough, hard-boiled women.’ Before that moment, she said, she never could understand why people would see her that way.”+
Part of the journey of faith is discovering some things about yourself that you might rather not know. Just like we do not like to look at our physical appearance in a mirror of any kind, we also shy away from the characteristics and decisions that cause us embarrassment or shame. We’d rather hide our complaints against God for the terrible situations life hands us from time to time than let God see our hearts for all that they are—jealous, petty, and occasionally small. Of all of our relationships, we worry the most about being “perfect” with God—the one who designed us in the first place and knows us in and out, imperfections and all. We’d rather be fooled by funhouse mirror images of our faults and pretend that what we see is just a distortion of who and what we really are. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the closer we get to God, the more things about ourselves that we discover that would chip away at that relationship, and we hide them in the dark, or as we used to say it in children’s choir, under a bushel.
The Hebrew people had been journeying with God for quite some time. God had found a way to rescue them from Egypt where they were living in slavery after the relationship between the royal family and the family of Joseph had disintegrated. Moses, God’s servant, had led the Israelites against all odds on foot out of the bounds of their captivity. They were free; they could finally worship when and where they wanted. Their children’s children would never remember what it was like to be slaves to someone else. A new life was out there, courtesy of the God who has always come to their rescue when they were in trouble. That’s how much God loved them, and what did they do?
They spoke against God and Moses. They complained, not only about the amount of time it was taking to get to the new life but even about the daily food God was providing for them while they were on the journey. The complained that God had lured them out of their old life, bad as it was, and had led them into this new one that seemed to be worse than ever. Something had to be done to make this relationship right. They had to see the truth.
God showed truth to the Israelites in the desert with the serpent, the symbol we now use to represent the healing of modern medicine. Generations later, when the story of the bronze serpent on the pole had been told to every child of the Hebrews, they still had questions. Remember Niccodemus early in the third chapter of John? Deep into his faith journey with God, he encounters a disruption in Jesus and questions him about being born again. Then John offers us what is now a staple of our faith: the 16th verse of the third chapter: “For God so loved the world…” and the image of Jesus as the light of a world living in darkness. All those generations after the Exodus, we still hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the journey of faith is not easy, doesn’t always make sense, and still produces hope for new life that we cannot yet even imagine possible.
John’s right, you know: we love darkness. We love it because it hides all those things we’d rather not see or know about ourselves. And we think that if we can’t see them, then no one else can, either: especially not God. It’s like not looking in a mirror: if I don’t have to see what I actually look like, I can imagine my reflection to be whatever pleases me at the moment. When we avoid seeing our own image, we don’t have to confront the disappointment that God must feel at how far from God’s own image ours has turned out to be. We don’t have to feel shame when we don’t live up to the full potential God has given us or when we don’t use the gifts God has given us for the good of others or at all. We don’t have to be embarrassed at the decisions we’ve made in life that have hurt us or people we love…or even people we don’t know. We don’t have to think about the canyon between who we are right now and who we are called to be. It’s just so much easier to walk by the mirror and look in the other direction.
But every now and then we encounter a true mirror: one that shows us what other people see when they look at us. It sheds light in the dark places of our lives that we’d just as soon not show to the rest of the world, least of all to God. That true mirror reflects the judgment we pass on one another based on income, professional accomplishment, even the streets we live on; the racism we say is in the past until it comes to a question of what schools we’ll send our children to; the sexism we hide behind practicality when we say that there are just some jobs that men do better than women or that there are some places, like the home, that women belong rather than men; the heterosexism we passively participate in by sitting back and doing nothing to help our brothers and sisters in the LGBTandQ community gain the rights due to every human being; or the complacency we practice when we listen to the news and hear about war happening around the world and crime in our own backyards and still think that there is nothing we can or have to do that can stop it.
We just may find ourselves running away screaming from the true mirror, the light that no darkness can extinguish, in the name of shame and disgrace, thinking that the grace of God could not possibly be enough to save us from the poison of the mistakes we have made, the sin we have committed, the lies we have told, the relationships we have broken, the breakdown of community to which we have contributed. We have all been there, some of us finding ourselves there more frequently than any of the other stops along the journey of faith. But then we turn around, and out of the darkness Moses is still coming at us with that bronze snake on a pole, catching the light and reflecting it on us and on our dark lives. But here’s the thing: that snake is saving us. The symbol of our very life and death, it has the antedote for the poison we bring on ourselves when we choose not to let God shine light in our lives. We continue to do evil to ourselves and to one another, and we continue to let the poison travel in our system because we are too afraid to consider the remedy. How is it possible that God could keep trying and trying to help us, to save us?
We are now more than half way through Lent and the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. It is just starting to come into focus and we know the dark days and hours that are coming. If you were in his shoes, would you want to turn back? Would you imagine that it was better just living in the world that couldn’t figure out how to be in right relationship with God, hoping it would just get better someday? Are you at a place in your faith journey now that seems like to push forward and go deeper into relationship with God is scary and may require more of you than you are willing to give? Are you thinking that it might just be easier to continue to live in darkness because even though it may be bad, you’ve figured out your way around and learning something new might not work out the way you expect?
That’s the hard part about sticking with the journey. It’s not always hearts and flowers. Sometimes it is painful and troubling, especially when we take time to look back and wonder if we are better off for having begun this journey in the first place than we would be had we never considered a relationship with God. But when you take a look into a true mirror that shows you more than a 2-dimensional reflection of yourself, you will see something that is at the very core of everyone of us: the image of God. The same God who created us in the beginning is the God who loves us in the darkest of the middle days and who will gracefully welcome us in the light of the days to come when we finally come face to face with God and who we are. It is the same God who saved the Israelites in the desert and who sent the Son into a world where he would surely have to be eliminated because of the message of his life. And that is the same God who loves you and me enough to keep pursuing us even into these dark days when things seem to be getting worse and worse.
The good news for us today is that God will never desert us, leave us in the dark places of our wilderness forever, but we have to keep going on in faith. We have to believe that God loves us enough to send the Son into the world to save us, to be raised up in glory so that we could be raised up out of darkness and have the chance to live in light—the light of unexpected love, life-long grace and companionship, and the promise of a better life. So look into the true mirror, friends; look at the bronze serpent representing for us the darkest places along our faith journeys. See those places, those shameful places in our lives that pull us away from the love of God, and realize that God offers you a way out. It means confronting the very things about ourselves that we dread exposing the most. But it also means shining light on the promise of what can be—the reality of God’s saving love for us in Jesus, the glory of being forgiven for all of that which we would rather hide, and the promise of the milk and honey of love, mercy, and forgiveness, flowing freely and in abundance. Now that is a reflection I can’t wait to see.
In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen.
+ www.truemirror.com
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Lent 3 2009: Top-to-Bottom
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
I suspect there are Sundays when you have a hard time convincing yourself to actually get up in enough time to get dressed and out the door for church. Perhaps some of you have a hard time (as I do) getting up and out the door any day that there is somewhere to be before lunch. And even though we try to make it easy for folks by starting worship at 5 minutes to 11 am, I suspect there are still those days when either it feels like getting up at the crack of dawn the way you do for 5 of the other days of the week to get to work on time or there are just a lot of other things you can think of that you’d rather be doing with your morning and early afternoon since it is your time, not work time. We are trained by a society that says that the weekdays belong to the boss and the weekends belong to us. It’s our time to do with what we choose. And fewer Americans than ever report now that they choose to attend any kind of worship on those weekend or other free hours. 100 years ago, this building housed the largest Methodist congregation in the state of Georgia. The place was regularly packed, as I imagine were the many other church buildings in Grant Park. It was just what you did with Sunday morning. Its not like that anymore, is it? Today we often suffer the grief of time we feel we’ve lost by coming to church for an hour or 2 or 3 on Sunday mornings. Children’s sports find it ridiculous that we would want to be anywhere else but a baseball or soccer field on Sunday mornings. The gods of television are making it easier and easier for us to just stay in and watch movies or any one of our top 50 favorite TV shows on Sunday morning instead of coming to church. Or forget any of that: we don’t have to settle for our own coffee or our own kitchens anymore; we can go take our pick of any local or chain coffee house and blend along with a newspaper or a friend and relax on Sunday mornings. Doesn’t it seem almost ridiculous that we would choose anything else?
And yet, we are all gathered here in this sacred space, expecting to meet the Spirit of God here and to go away changed in some little or big way because we were here to sing and pray. The world calls, urges, even pushes us in the other direction, but we all find ourselves here today at another spot along the journeys of faith we travel singularly and as a body. What seems foolish to the world watching us gather here has the power to save us because we have been here. Why in the world does God work like that?
It’s what Paul is saying to the church in Corinth: the church, the body of Christ, the community of faith doesn’t work the way the rest of the world works. You see, they were fighting among themselves in the Corinthian church. There were folks in that community who believed they had “special wisdom” and knowledge about the faith given to them by Paul himself. Divisions had come up among them, and they had sent word to Paul asking for his own wisdom to settle their disputes, sure he would know since he had introduced this faith to them in the first place. Surely he could offer them wise answers to their questions of authority and call one another’s foolishness out in order to settle the hard feelings and get them back on track for being a unified body of Christ.
Only he doesn’t give them the answers they might have been looking for. I have sometimes imagined that they sought justification for their self-created hierarchy of spiritual gifts and human wisdom, and Paul offers them a world and world order turned upside down. Remember that our God is not one who conforms to our standards, he says. Our God is one who, instead, has created God’s own world order—one that, by the way, doesn’t make any sense to us whatsoever.
Has Christian faith ever seemed foolish to you? Sometimes we get so caught up in setting and trying to live by the rules for how to be Christians that we forget how God has already set things up to be: completely the opposite of how we think they should be! Divine foolishness and weakness are on display in Christ’s cross. Fully human, fully divine: was God crazy to make this possible among our power-hungry species? No, not crazy. FOOLISH!!!! We worship a God who, by the standards of our world, is foolish and weak.
So why do we keep at it? Because the foolishness of God is what has saved us.
• This foolish God is always allowing the Hebrew people to repent in the stories of the OT after they stray time and time again.
• This foolish God makes it possible for Abraham and Sarah to have a baby when they are approaching 100 years old!
• This foolish God picked David to become the most beloved king of Israel even though he would go on to use his position of power to have the husband of the woman he desired to be killed in battle.
• This foolish God produces the savior of the world by using Mary: an unwed pregnant teenager
• This foolish God in Jesus appears to women first at the empty tomb
• This foolish God chose Peter, the one whose lack of faith caused him to sink in the water when called by Jesus, to be the foundation of the church we have committed ourselves to today.
• This foolish God calls Paul to preach the good news of the gospel after he has lived most of his life persecuting followers of Christ. Paul, who had spent his life hunting down followers of Jesus and putting them in jail or ordering their execution. Paul, who was quickly rising to the top of his game and in the eyes of the leaders of the synagogue when Christ met him in a journey across the desert and turned every idea he had about how life was supposed to be on its head.
Foolishness, indeed.
We go through life collecting a lot of things that we think will save us: save us from boredom, loneliness, being second-best, those dark places that contain our biggest fears and hurts. We put others down so we can lift ourselves up. We search and fight for status, promotions, high appointments, and round-the-clock entertainment while flying through this life at warp speed so we don’t have to notice our disappointments. If we get to the top fast enough, we won’t have to look down anymore, right?
Only that’s not the way life is. Not real life. Not life lived in the way of Christ. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We don’t look down on each other; we help each other up. The way of Christ leads us not to fight each other for the top spot but to race each other in goodness to the bottom, or as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, outdo one another in showing love. To this world in which we live, it’s as crazy an idea of success as choosing to go to church on Sunday mornings rather than all the places we could be right now. The way of Christ is upside down from how we think things ought to be.
There’s an old Catholic brother named Kilian McDonnell who, late in his life, began writing beautiful poetry based on his life and his life’s understanding of God and Holy Scripture. In one of his collections of poetry is a piece called “A Manual for Climbers”+ that reads as follows:
Surely, this is right.
One begins at the bottom,
like ascending the ladder
to conquer the fire.
One foot up, then the other.
No parachutes to the top,
no express elevator.
The faint need not apply.
God wrestled with primeval
darkness in the waters
of chaos. After seven days,
God rested. Not I.
To build muscle
I keep pumping iron.
If I stop to breathe,
I am back at the bottom.
After decades of climbing
I’m still on ground floor.
I had it all wrong.
You start at the top.
How could your life be different if you lived it top-to-bottom, not bottom-to-top?
Think about your work, your family, your relationships. Where are you headed? What are you building toward every day?
Think about your faith: where do you see yourself in this faith down the road? What do you hope will happen? How do you hope and expect to change?
Friends, I believe that the good word for us today is that it is foolishness that we practice together here. We get together every week and proclaim Christ crucified and risen. We believe that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. We know Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and because our ancestors in faith gave up the bottom-to-top lives that were set up for them by society—Abraham and his comfortable end of life; Peter and the family fishing business; Paul, the rising star of the synagogue—and started living lives headed toward the bottom, toward the ones never intended to hear the gospel, toward us. And perhaps the most foolish thing of all—that God would go so far to save us!
If you turned your life around, if it started going top-to-bottom, if you start climbing your journey of faith at the top with God, you’ll be headed out into the world that still needs ancestors of faith to share the news that God loves this world and everyone and everything in it.
Good for you for crossing society and getting yourself to worship today. It’s all downhill from here—where will your top-to-bottom faith journey take you next?
+ From Swift, Lord, You are Not. The Order of St. Benedict. Collegeville, Minnesota. 2003.
18For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
I suspect there are Sundays when you have a hard time convincing yourself to actually get up in enough time to get dressed and out the door for church. Perhaps some of you have a hard time (as I do) getting up and out the door any day that there is somewhere to be before lunch. And even though we try to make it easy for folks by starting worship at 5 minutes to 11 am, I suspect there are still those days when either it feels like getting up at the crack of dawn the way you do for 5 of the other days of the week to get to work on time or there are just a lot of other things you can think of that you’d rather be doing with your morning and early afternoon since it is your time, not work time. We are trained by a society that says that the weekdays belong to the boss and the weekends belong to us. It’s our time to do with what we choose. And fewer Americans than ever report now that they choose to attend any kind of worship on those weekend or other free hours. 100 years ago, this building housed the largest Methodist congregation in the state of Georgia. The place was regularly packed, as I imagine were the many other church buildings in Grant Park. It was just what you did with Sunday morning. Its not like that anymore, is it? Today we often suffer the grief of time we feel we’ve lost by coming to church for an hour or 2 or 3 on Sunday mornings. Children’s sports find it ridiculous that we would want to be anywhere else but a baseball or soccer field on Sunday mornings. The gods of television are making it easier and easier for us to just stay in and watch movies or any one of our top 50 favorite TV shows on Sunday morning instead of coming to church. Or forget any of that: we don’t have to settle for our own coffee or our own kitchens anymore; we can go take our pick of any local or chain coffee house and blend along with a newspaper or a friend and relax on Sunday mornings. Doesn’t it seem almost ridiculous that we would choose anything else?
And yet, we are all gathered here in this sacred space, expecting to meet the Spirit of God here and to go away changed in some little or big way because we were here to sing and pray. The world calls, urges, even pushes us in the other direction, but we all find ourselves here today at another spot along the journeys of faith we travel singularly and as a body. What seems foolish to the world watching us gather here has the power to save us because we have been here. Why in the world does God work like that?
It’s what Paul is saying to the church in Corinth: the church, the body of Christ, the community of faith doesn’t work the way the rest of the world works. You see, they were fighting among themselves in the Corinthian church. There were folks in that community who believed they had “special wisdom” and knowledge about the faith given to them by Paul himself. Divisions had come up among them, and they had sent word to Paul asking for his own wisdom to settle their disputes, sure he would know since he had introduced this faith to them in the first place. Surely he could offer them wise answers to their questions of authority and call one another’s foolishness out in order to settle the hard feelings and get them back on track for being a unified body of Christ.
Only he doesn’t give them the answers they might have been looking for. I have sometimes imagined that they sought justification for their self-created hierarchy of spiritual gifts and human wisdom, and Paul offers them a world and world order turned upside down. Remember that our God is not one who conforms to our standards, he says. Our God is one who, instead, has created God’s own world order—one that, by the way, doesn’t make any sense to us whatsoever.
Has Christian faith ever seemed foolish to you? Sometimes we get so caught up in setting and trying to live by the rules for how to be Christians that we forget how God has already set things up to be: completely the opposite of how we think they should be! Divine foolishness and weakness are on display in Christ’s cross. Fully human, fully divine: was God crazy to make this possible among our power-hungry species? No, not crazy. FOOLISH!!!! We worship a God who, by the standards of our world, is foolish and weak.
So why do we keep at it? Because the foolishness of God is what has saved us.
• This foolish God is always allowing the Hebrew people to repent in the stories of the OT after they stray time and time again.
• This foolish God makes it possible for Abraham and Sarah to have a baby when they are approaching 100 years old!
• This foolish God picked David to become the most beloved king of Israel even though he would go on to use his position of power to have the husband of the woman he desired to be killed in battle.
• This foolish God produces the savior of the world by using Mary: an unwed pregnant teenager
• This foolish God in Jesus appears to women first at the empty tomb
• This foolish God chose Peter, the one whose lack of faith caused him to sink in the water when called by Jesus, to be the foundation of the church we have committed ourselves to today.
• This foolish God calls Paul to preach the good news of the gospel after he has lived most of his life persecuting followers of Christ. Paul, who had spent his life hunting down followers of Jesus and putting them in jail or ordering their execution. Paul, who was quickly rising to the top of his game and in the eyes of the leaders of the synagogue when Christ met him in a journey across the desert and turned every idea he had about how life was supposed to be on its head.
Foolishness, indeed.
We go through life collecting a lot of things that we think will save us: save us from boredom, loneliness, being second-best, those dark places that contain our biggest fears and hurts. We put others down so we can lift ourselves up. We search and fight for status, promotions, high appointments, and round-the-clock entertainment while flying through this life at warp speed so we don’t have to notice our disappointments. If we get to the top fast enough, we won’t have to look down anymore, right?
Only that’s not the way life is. Not real life. Not life lived in the way of Christ. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We don’t look down on each other; we help each other up. The way of Christ leads us not to fight each other for the top spot but to race each other in goodness to the bottom, or as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, outdo one another in showing love. To this world in which we live, it’s as crazy an idea of success as choosing to go to church on Sunday mornings rather than all the places we could be right now. The way of Christ is upside down from how we think things ought to be.
There’s an old Catholic brother named Kilian McDonnell who, late in his life, began writing beautiful poetry based on his life and his life’s understanding of God and Holy Scripture. In one of his collections of poetry is a piece called “A Manual for Climbers”+ that reads as follows:
Surely, this is right.
One begins at the bottom,
like ascending the ladder
to conquer the fire.
One foot up, then the other.
No parachutes to the top,
no express elevator.
The faint need not apply.
God wrestled with primeval
darkness in the waters
of chaos. After seven days,
God rested. Not I.
To build muscle
I keep pumping iron.
If I stop to breathe,
I am back at the bottom.
After decades of climbing
I’m still on ground floor.
I had it all wrong.
You start at the top.
How could your life be different if you lived it top-to-bottom, not bottom-to-top?
Think about your work, your family, your relationships. Where are you headed? What are you building toward every day?
Think about your faith: where do you see yourself in this faith down the road? What do you hope will happen? How do you hope and expect to change?
Friends, I believe that the good word for us today is that it is foolishness that we practice together here. We get together every week and proclaim Christ crucified and risen. We believe that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. We know Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and because our ancestors in faith gave up the bottom-to-top lives that were set up for them by society—Abraham and his comfortable end of life; Peter and the family fishing business; Paul, the rising star of the synagogue—and started living lives headed toward the bottom, toward the ones never intended to hear the gospel, toward us. And perhaps the most foolish thing of all—that God would go so far to save us!
If you turned your life around, if it started going top-to-bottom, if you start climbing your journey of faith at the top with God, you’ll be headed out into the world that still needs ancestors of faith to share the news that God loves this world and everyone and everything in it.
Good for you for crossing society and getting yourself to worship today. It’s all downhill from here—where will your top-to-bottom faith journey take you next?
+ From Swift, Lord, You are Not. The Order of St. Benedict. Collegeville, Minnesota. 2003.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Lent 2 2009: Hope
Romans 4:13-25
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.”
Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
What was the last piece of good news you heard?
We’re not hearing much these days. Whenever I turn on the news on the radio or the television, I hear basically the same things: the economy is bad, it is getting worse, and the people with the power to fix it are fighting over what the best fix is. There is even talk on the news about how we should be talking about the bad news that we receive every day. Do you remember not 2 months ago when the world was watching the inauguration of this country’s 44th president? It was quite a day. Things seemed so good to me that day. Without ignoring our differences, we all seemed to be reading from the same script that day. For about 18 hours we were united again by something bigger than our parties or our politics in a way I don’t remember since the days immediately following the attacks on September 11, 2001. Joy and I were glued to the television all day. I know she’s way too young for TV, but I wanted her to be able to tell her friends that her crazy mommy made her watch the inauguration of this country’s first non-Caucasian president ever. After experiencing a campaign in which we heard the word “hope” mentioned so many times it almost because boring, I was once again filled with and surrounded by it that day. I confess that at times I was moved to tears thinking that Joy will never remember a country in which people of any other decent besides European don’t have a prayer of ever attaining an important elected office or that women are second class or second choice participants in most areas of professional life. I was hopeful because before my very eyes things were coming into existence that had never existed before.
We are 47 days into this new presidential administration, yet January 20th already seems like a lifetime away. Last weekend I heard some of the speeches made at a political convention, and it made me sad again. It made me lose a little hope. The spirit of a unified nation across party and political lines has disintegrated. What happened to the spirit of one-ness I felt just 47 days ago? A month and a half into a new era, and we’re tearing each other apart. Hope, huh?
William Sloan Coffin once said something about Christianity being unique because we really believe there is hope in a world in which hope has no business existing. That was the thing about Abraham—belief that God could make something happen that seemed impossible, hope that surpassed sanity in the case of his son Isaac. In our faith life, in our national life, in our individual lives, each of us has experienced moments of hope: belief in the possibility of things being called into existence that do not currently exist. And the one doing the calling is God.
In this holy season of Lent, we go along with Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. It is there that he will bring into existence the hope of an everlasting life in the presence of God—something we dare to continue to hope for even now. Paul recalls the work God did in Christ by raising him, body and spirit, from the dead and showing the world that the most impossible thing we could imagine—the fact that life doesn’t end when there is no more breath in this body—is not only possible but can and will be. Paul recalls the faith journey of Abraham, begun late in his life: when he was too old to father a child, he and Sarah had Isaac. When he thought his life and legacy were long past their prime, God gave him a new life to live and a new promise of a future he never imagined possible—to be the ancestor of a great nation of people. What a journey of faith he entered when he made a covenant with God!
The good news for us today is that our faith journeys will not always be easy they will always be life changing. When it isn’t easy, when you want to give up, when you think that nothing good will ever come of this faith or your life, when everything else in the world tells us that the world can’t recover from the situation in which we find ourselves now, that is when God gives us hope for the journey. God: who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. It came true for Abraham. It is true for Jesus. It will be for St. Paul, and it will be for you.
In the name of the Hope of the World. Amen.
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.”
Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
What was the last piece of good news you heard?
We’re not hearing much these days. Whenever I turn on the news on the radio or the television, I hear basically the same things: the economy is bad, it is getting worse, and the people with the power to fix it are fighting over what the best fix is. There is even talk on the news about how we should be talking about the bad news that we receive every day. Do you remember not 2 months ago when the world was watching the inauguration of this country’s 44th president? It was quite a day. Things seemed so good to me that day. Without ignoring our differences, we all seemed to be reading from the same script that day. For about 18 hours we were united again by something bigger than our parties or our politics in a way I don’t remember since the days immediately following the attacks on September 11, 2001. Joy and I were glued to the television all day. I know she’s way too young for TV, but I wanted her to be able to tell her friends that her crazy mommy made her watch the inauguration of this country’s first non-Caucasian president ever. After experiencing a campaign in which we heard the word “hope” mentioned so many times it almost because boring, I was once again filled with and surrounded by it that day. I confess that at times I was moved to tears thinking that Joy will never remember a country in which people of any other decent besides European don’t have a prayer of ever attaining an important elected office or that women are second class or second choice participants in most areas of professional life. I was hopeful because before my very eyes things were coming into existence that had never existed before.
We are 47 days into this new presidential administration, yet January 20th already seems like a lifetime away. Last weekend I heard some of the speeches made at a political convention, and it made me sad again. It made me lose a little hope. The spirit of a unified nation across party and political lines has disintegrated. What happened to the spirit of one-ness I felt just 47 days ago? A month and a half into a new era, and we’re tearing each other apart. Hope, huh?
William Sloan Coffin once said something about Christianity being unique because we really believe there is hope in a world in which hope has no business existing. That was the thing about Abraham—belief that God could make something happen that seemed impossible, hope that surpassed sanity in the case of his son Isaac. In our faith life, in our national life, in our individual lives, each of us has experienced moments of hope: belief in the possibility of things being called into existence that do not currently exist. And the one doing the calling is God.
In this holy season of Lent, we go along with Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. It is there that he will bring into existence the hope of an everlasting life in the presence of God—something we dare to continue to hope for even now. Paul recalls the work God did in Christ by raising him, body and spirit, from the dead and showing the world that the most impossible thing we could imagine—the fact that life doesn’t end when there is no more breath in this body—is not only possible but can and will be. Paul recalls the faith journey of Abraham, begun late in his life: when he was too old to father a child, he and Sarah had Isaac. When he thought his life and legacy were long past their prime, God gave him a new life to live and a new promise of a future he never imagined possible—to be the ancestor of a great nation of people. What a journey of faith he entered when he made a covenant with God!
The good news for us today is that our faith journeys will not always be easy they will always be life changing. When it isn’t easy, when you want to give up, when you think that nothing good will ever come of this faith or your life, when everything else in the world tells us that the world can’t recover from the situation in which we find ourselves now, that is when God gives us hope for the journey. God: who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. It came true for Abraham. It is true for Jesus. It will be for St. Paul, and it will be for you.
In the name of the Hope of the World. Amen.
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