He had come to celebrate the Passover. Having traveled from Bethany, Jesus entered Jerusalem through one of its eastern gates to wild acclaim from the crowds that greeted him by stripping the fronds from the palm trees lining the road.

The waving of palms was a gesture that tells us something of popular expectations for Jesus. Some 160 years before the triumphant Judas Maccabeus led his victorious partisans into the Temple, bearing palm branches with which they cleansed and rededicated it after the defilement by the Syrian tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanies. The waving of palm branches reveals something of the expectations of Jesus as another liberator, who in the mold of Judas Maccabeus had come to free them from the hated Roman occupation.

At the same time as Jesus was entering from the East, another triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the West. The Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, at the head of his Roman Legion had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Pilate did not live in Jerusalem. He chose to avoid the city’s ancient warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. Pilate and his Roman administration preferred the sea breezes and Mar A Largo conveniences of Herod the Great’s former capital at Caesarea Maritima, now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea.

Pilate hated and feared the crowds of Jerusalem most especially during the Passover celebrations. But he had to come up to the city on his once a year visit with a show of preemptive force in order to forestall the potential for insurrection during the flashpoint of the Passover. A wise move, for the crowds that hailed Jesus, were in insurrection mood.

Holy Week commemorates the events beginning on Palm Sunday of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover. Three narratives or storylines intersect and clash with an alarming result as Pilate, the crowds, and Jesus all become caught up in an escalation of events none could control. The storyline of worldly oppression and political violence intersects with a storyline of populist resistance and nationalist longing for liberation at whatever cost. Both confront the third storyline which concerns the next installment in the epic narrative of God’s love and vision for the world.

Events take an unexpected turn and rapidly spiral seemingly out of control, culminating on the eve of the Passover with Jesus celebrating the Last Supper with his disciples, followed by arrest, mock trial, and crucifixion the following day.

On Maundy Thursday we will gather to celebrate Jesus’ Last Supper during which he washed his disciple’s feet, mandated (maundy) them to love one another, before instituting the Eucharist by establishing a lasting association between the Passover bread and wine and his body and blood soon to be broken and shed on the cross.

Holy Week is the week during which we accompany Jesus on the way of his passion. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion surfaces in identification with that of Jesus. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal. We journey with Jesus as part of a community that journeys to the cross bearing within us not only our individual maladies and sufferings but the maladies and sufferings of the world around us.

Liturgy is a form of dramatic reenactment through which as a community, we are transported into sacred time. In ordinary time and space, we remember. In sacred time we become participants in the timeless events that engulf Jesus.

By timeless, I mean that liturgy is more than ordinary remembering, it is remaking again the past in the present. Liturgy ushers us into a dimension called sacred time where the temporal divisions of past, present, and future blend together in the eternal now. In sacred time we become participants with Jesus – as if we too are part of his band of disciples during that eventful last week:

• Like them at his Last Supper, we experience the uncomfortable intimacy symbolized in his washing our feet.
• With them, we share in the breaking and sharing of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup.
• With the disciples, we accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane where we keep watch with him until Midnight.
• Over the following 15 hours of Thursday evening and into the Friday we call Good, we follow as part of the band of his disciples viewing with dismay and from a safe distance, the unfolding of frightening events of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion.

On Good Friday, the Gethsemane Watch begins again at 5:30am.  Departing at 8:30am, , members from St. Martin’s join other Christians’ en-route to the State House for a public marking of this day. The Good Friday Walk is not an action taking place in sacred time but in the here and now. It is an act of solidarity that looks in two directions; towards solidarity with Jesus, and at the same time solidarity for the alleviation of hunger among God’s sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers. I hope that many of you will find time for both forms of participation on the Friday we call Good.

Stations of the Cross will take place at noon and the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday at 7 pm.At the end of the Good Friday, we sing a hymn based on Jesus final words from the cross – it is finished. With the death of Jesus on the cross, the old order dies as Jesus begins his journey into hell where he vanquishes the ancient hold of evil over the world. We mark Jesus’ descent into the realm of the dead on Saturday.

On Saturday evening we gather in the waning twilight to celebrate the ancient liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Here in dramatic and timeless actions:

• we kindle the new fire and welcome the new Light of Christ into the world.
• we listen to highlights from the long epic story of our communal relationship with God
• we renew our baptismal covenant and welcome the newly baptized into the Church
• we celebrate with joyful noise the resurrection followed by an Easter party with champagne and chocolate.

On Easter Day we continue, joined by many from our wider community and beyond who are drawn to celebrate with us the resurrection – the new chapter in the epic narrative of God’s promise of new life.

Our memory fails us if we think of Jesus’ resurrection only in terms of “then” and not also in terms of “now.” We are not re-enacting Jesus’ resurrection; we are reappropriating Jesus’ resurrection power.-Br. Curtis Almquist SSJE

Visit our full Holy Week and Easter schedule here.

I was nine years old and my family was on a camping holiday in the summer resort area of Arrowtown, but a stones-throw from the now fashionable ski resort of Queenstown in Central Otago on New Zealand’s South Island. Each night the campsite hosted an evangelistic group, part of the Billy Graham Crusade, who showed movies and then issued a familiar evangelical ‘altar’ call. I remember thinking that I did want to put my hand in the hand of Jesus and make him my Lord and Savior. So I heeded the call and went up.

Did I understand the meaning of my action? No, I didn’t. Yet, I was motivated by something strongly felt within. Afterward, the evangelists escorted their new convert back to his family campsite, whereupon my essentially secular-minded parents reacted with concealed horror and quickly sent them away. I don’t know if a fear of child grooming was in their minds – in those far of days of social innocence concerning child abuse, I doubt it. Yet, an anxiety had raised its head; the anxiety of their son becoming one of those nutty religious people.

My essential childhood rebellion was, in fact, to become religious. Not in the nutty evangelical way my parents feared, but in a more conventional manner. After a flirtation with the heady energy generated by Vatican II Catholicism, I became a lifelong convert to Anglicanism – admittedly of a colorful Anglocatholic variety.

It seems strange and certainly unfamiliar to place the verb convert and Anglican in the same sentence. As the old Episcopal joke goes, those who should be Episcopalian already are. But conversion is what happened to me. My 9-year-old inarticulate desire to place my hand in the hand of Jesus found its fruition when at 15 I discovered the inestimable joys and richnesses of my first Choral Evensong.

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Over the past five weeks, we have been invited into an intimate engagement with God through Jesus. In John, the identities of God and Jesus are impossible to separate out. This merging of identities between Jesus and God is a principal aspect of the theology of John’s Gospel, a theology of intimacy and the primacy of love mediated only through relationship.

This year’s Lent program Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John has welcomed us into a relationship with John’s theological priorities via short and pithy one or two liners, each a daily text upon which we have been invited to meditate and journal our thoughts and responses. I haven’t managed to journal every day, yet nevertheless, each day I have been reminded of my 9-year-old self’s desire to place my hand in the hand of Jesus. My 9-year-old self-felt the intimation of something it didn’t really understand. Today, some 54 years later, I now understand it as an early soul yearning.

Soul yearning is a painful business because the yearning seems never to be fulfilled in the manner we expect.

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 Where are we to find God?

We approach John with confidence in its canonical status. We notice that it’s a different kind of chronicle from the synoptic tradition represented in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but nevertheless, we assume its ‘gospel truth’ and we normally don’t puzzle much over how different John is from the other gospels. Yet, such is the difference between John and the synoptic tradition that it’s an amazing thing that the Church ever thought of putting John on an equal footing alongside the other three.

In the gospel for Lent V we listen-in on a snatch of conversation between Philip and a group of Greeks – maybe Greeks, maybe Hellenized Jews, it’s hard to know. But the gist is they approach Philip and ask him: Sir, we want to see Jesus. The Johannine Community was formed from at least three very different groups coalescing around the teaching of the man we identify as John the Evangelist; a gradual process beginning in second half of the 1^st-century A.D. and completed around A.D. 90 with the writing of the gospel.

The alchemy of this process of assimilation led to the development of a distinctive theology that emphasized a high Christology that placed Jesus and God on the equal footing of preexistence. Drawing from the imagery of the opening verses of Genesis John begins with:

in the beginning was the Word (Jesus), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John’s Jesus is no longer the earthly Son of God, but the Logos or Word of God. God is Love, and Jesus is the divine communication of Love. Jesus becomes human in order to share with the world what divine Love looks like. The model of the relationship between God and Jesus then becomes the template for the relationship with divine Love for those who come to believe in Jesus. Believing is thus the paramount human response to God for John. Jesus’ commandment to those who come to believe in him as divine communicative Love is likewise simple;

love one another! By this shall the world know that they are of God.

Another distinctive aspect of the Johannine Community and its theology was the way the Holy Spirit becomes a personalized presence in each believer. Each believer is personally guided by the Holy Spirit. This gives the Johannine community a flattened hierarchy. It lacks an Apostolic teaching authority. Neither does it seems to need sacred spaces and rituals to worship God. John’s message is that God is worshiped only in Spirit and truth among those who practice the commandment to love one another.

John’s community is known as the beloved community. In his Gospel, everyone is simply a disciple following the inspired personal direction of the Spirit. The beloved community traces its identity through a collective memory not to Peter and the other Apostles, but to the disciple Jesus loved – the disciple known as John, the one who placed his head on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper.

The end result of the absence of structure and hierarchical order, with everyone a free agent under the personal tutelage of the Holy Spirit, rendered the Johannine Community vulnerable to splits. In the early decades of the 2nd-century, we find in the 1st Epistle of John, written not by the same author as the gospel, the outlines of a condemnation of a secessionist movement within the beloved community.

John’s beloved community splits asunder in the second decade of the 2nd-century A.D. The split is essentially over what it means to yearn for intimacy with God – or as I have put it – to place one’s hand in the hand of Jesus. The secessionists, perhaps the larger part of the Johannine Community, played down the earthy importance of the incarnate Jesus, believing that they enjoyed a direct intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit. For them Jesus became redundant. Consequently, they no longer felt bound by the commandment to love one another as the principal hallmark of membership in the beloved community.

The remnant of the beloved community in response now draws closer to the Apostolic Christians who receive them in, eventually embracing their high Christology as a defense against the threat from the secessionist gnostic heresies of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The Apostolic Church gradually accepted the writing of John the Evangelist as a gospel, and by the end of the 2^nd century has placed it in the canon alongside that of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

What kind of God do we desire?

The renowned Catholic scholar on John, Raymond Brown summarizes the importance of placing John’s Gospel alongside Mark’s, Matthew’s, and Luke’s. The Apostolic Church:

Chose not a Jesus who is either God or man but both; it has chosen not a Jesus who is either virginally conceived as God’s son or preexistent as God’s son but both; not either a Spirit who is given to an authoritative teaching magisterium or the Paraclete-teacher who is given to each Christian but both; not a Peter or a Beloved Disciple but both. (Raymond Brown. The Community of the Beloved Disciple)

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The Old Testament lesson on Lent V comes from the 31^st chapter of the Prophecies of Jeremiah. In it Jeremiah looks toward a new dawn when God will make a new beginning with Israel:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts … No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…   

Jeremiah’s proclamation witnesses to an older and enduring human desire to place our hands in the hand of God and to know God not as other, but as intimate self. Both Jeremiah and John the Evangelist emphasize that this self-giving of God is to us as a people and not a personal gift to us as isolated individuals.

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I think I was a lonely 9-year-old. Perhaps I felt no less lonely at 15, yet what I discovered then was that God found me in and through my encounter with a community.

My conversion was an experience not of finding, but of being found within a community at worship.

Since then, the continued pain and frustration of my futile search for God is because I keep forgetting that God finds me only in the presence of others, and not on my own.

Somehow this feels less of a gift to me than my expectation of being found personally, and uniquely.

In the face of my individual yearning to capture God and hold him to myself, God remains elusive.

We can so easily cast ourselves in the role of the seeker, diligently searching for God. Why is this? I think it’s because when we are the seeker, God hides. God hides, not from our soul’s desire, but from our searching-seeking-ego driven selves. In all our searching we fail to remember that God’s promise to us, a promise that echoes across transgenerational time from Jeremiah to John the Evangelist, is that God has first and foremost found us. We are not those who need to seek God, we are those who need to realize what it means to be already found by God.

The tension that destroyed the beloved community lay between those who believed that they could find God in an individual, personal, and privately special experience and those who believed God had already found them through their participation in the beloved community. It was these Johannine Christians who rejoined the church of the Apostles, which also believed that we are found by God in community, as a people.

As Anglican Christians, Episcopalians belong to this ancient Apostolic Tradition. We place community worship and solidarity of social action at the heart of any experience of being found by God. By being faithfully present in worship we commit ourselves to social solidarity with others, not in order to seek God, but because, together we hold to the promise from God that we have already been found

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As we enter into the season of our Lord’s Passion; as we walk with him the way of the cross, we do not make this journey privately or individually, but in the company of others. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. I invite you to be present this Easter not just on Good Friday or Easter Sunday, but throughout the unfolding of the liturgical journey throughout Holy Week leading into the Great Three Days of Easter. Be present with us as members of a community walking with Jesus to the foot of the cross – and from there, to journey on into the experience of new life on Easter morn.

 

Allopathy treats illness by introducing substances different from those that cause the disease. The central idea is to use a substance that is designed to combat and kill the disease. Western medicine is largely based on the philosophy of allopathy. We are all immensely grateful for antibiotics.

Homeopathy treats illness by introducing small amounts of the very same toxin, which in larger amounts is the cause of the disease. Homeopathy aims to use the same toxins as those causing the affliction in order to strengthen the body’s tolerance and resistance, eventually enabling recovery. Many Western medical practitioners remain skeptical of homeopathic philosophy, yet the action of a vaccine as compared to an antibiotic operates in a very similar way to homeopathic principles.

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I’m fascinated by the story in Numbers 21:4-9 about the infestation of the Israelite camp by venomous serpents. It seems that in response to their endless grumbling, God’s patience yet again comes to an end. God punishes the Israelites by sending an infestation of poisonous snakes among them with the result that many of them die. What really fascinates me is the implication of this story for a holistic understanding of spiritual-emotional-physical healing.

It’s an image of fighting fire with fire rather than deluging it with water. As is often the case, it doesn’t take God long to relent from his hasty acting out of anger. God instructs Moses to cast in bronze an image of the snake and raise it up at the heart of the camp. Anyone with snakebite has only to look up at the image, in order to be healed.

The real snake kills. The image of the snake of bronze heals. Fighting fire with fire rather than with water.

Numbers 21:4-9 is a graphic example of spiritual homeopathy. The same toxin has both the power to kill or to heal. The bronze image works like a psycho-spiritual totem. Healing is mysterious in the sense that while it may be impossible to trace the links in the steps of cause and effect – something the scientific mind likes to do, the effect produced is nevertheless real. Totem is the spiritual term that describes the bronze serpent.

A totem is a natural object believed to have spiritual significance. The totem of the bronze serpent raised in the heart of the Israelite camp exploits the matrix within which the poison that kills is now associated with the image that heals.

As a brief aside, it’s interesting to note that the caduceus, the double or sometimes single-headed snake symbol also known as the Rod of Asclepius is the symbol of Western medicine, the origins of which we trace back to classical mythology. But it also seems plausible that the imagery of the bronze serpent in Numbers draws from a larger tradition common across the fertile crescent of the ancient Middle East, eventually emerging into Greek mythology.

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Some weeks ago in my post On the Loss of Transcendence, I drew upon the fundamental connection between joy and suffering. From within the matrix of self-transcendence both joy and sorrow flow. This is the paradox of human spiritual and emotional life; positive and negative feeling, weakness and strength, are but the double sides of the same coin.

This Lent we have been journeying in our daily program with the Gospel of John. On Tuesday evenings we have been exploring our experience of the daily program. St Martin’s folk, like most middle-class Westerners schooled in rationalism, find directly reflecting on spiritual experience to be challenging. Temperamentally we prefer to know about, rather than know directly. Therefore in the interests of balance, in the Sunday adult forums, Linda+ and I have been presenting on the historical and communal context that gave rise to the unique theological themes of John’s Gospel.

The Gospel for Lent IV is drawn from John chapter 3, where the writer we know as John draws explicitly from Numbers 21. In so doing he forges an astonishing theological connection between the totem of the bronze serpent raised up in the midst of the Israelite camp and Jesus, raised high upon the cross.

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 …. 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.

Jesus is raised on the cross, not as an allopathic (combative) condemnation of sin, but as a homeopathic source of healing. As we gaze on an image of suffering, John’s core theological theme of God is love connects joy with sorrow, love with fear. Like joy and sorrow, love and fear are both manifestations of the same emotional matrix. Within the shadow cast by the totem of the cross, the impulse of fear that erupts in hatred is transformed into new energy for love.

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Socrates said that the unexamined life is a life not worth living. The season of Lent is akin to a laboratory for honing our capacity for spiritual reflection on the deeper currents that flow beneath the surface of our lives.

Beneath the surface of our day-to-day living, lie the toxins of shame, guilt, and the pain of relationship loss and failure –

that which the Irish poet John O’Donohue in his poem A Morning Offering calls the dead shell of yesterdays. But here also we find the grace of restoration and liberation or to draw from O’Donohue again to do at last what we came here for and waste our heart on fear no more.

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Mostly, we try to manage this process of self-reflection by ourselves. But we can’t always manage it alone. We are relational beings, and so there is a limit to how far we can get by simply talking to ourselves or even talking to God within the privacy of our own minds. When we can’t make progress on our own, what is needed is to be able to share our struggles with a trusted person within a larger context of God’s grace.

On page 447 of the Book of Common Prayer, many Episcopalians are surprised to discover the section called the Reconciliation of a Penitent. Reconciliation is one of the objective sacraments of the Church. It sets out a process designed to aid us when we feel emotionally or spiritually stuck, as when we sense that something is blocking the reworking of the toxin of pain and confusion. Unlike modern counseling which brings a psychological framework to bear on self-examination, Reconciliation brings a forgiveness framework to bear on our internal struggles.

The challenge of forgiveness is not whether God forgives us, but can we forgive ourselves!

Self-forgiveness flows from the grace of knowing we are already forgiven. We encounter that grace when we come to stand in the shadow of the cross.

Infected by the venom of life’s snakebites, feelings of self-condemnation, feelings of shame and sorrow, we come to stand in the shadow of the cross. Here we discover that our sorrow brings us to a deeper appreciation of joy.

The principles of spiritual homeopathy show us that sorrow and joy form parts of a single matrix.

Standing in the shadow of the cross we come to also face those inarticulate longings of the deepest regions of our heart.

In the shadow of the cross we come:

haunted by the ghost-structures of old damage – to be blessed by the longing that brings us here and quickens our soul with wonder – and the courage to listen to the voice of desire – the wisdom to enter generously into our own unease and to discover there the new direction our longing wants to take. (My paraphrasing from O’Donohue’s poem For Longing)

The Episcopal Church best sums up access to the sacrament of Reconciliation as all may, none must, but some should. Some people find in the Reconciliation of the Penitent a valuable and regular part of their spiritual formation. For others, it is a homeopathic healing action, taken at a particular time in pursuance of a restoration of an emotional and spiritual balance and health. Either way, this Lent why not consult with a priest near you?

A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs on John 2:13-22

                                                               

Lent came quickly this year, didn’t it? Hard on the heels of Christmas. But for some people that I spoke with before Ash Wednesday, it couldn’t come quickly enough. They may not have been mentally or logistically ready, but they were spiritually ready; for a season of reflection, prayer, and repentance. When the world comes to be too much with us it can be a genuine relief to step back, breathe, and relieve our hearts’ burdens by laying them down, opening them up, and naming them. That’s the beginning of repentance. It can be hard work to look deeply and critically at where we have missed the mark, but having done so we have a chance for a new start. And it’s easier to make a new start when we’re not carrying so much baggage.

So to that end, three weeks ago we began the annual journey of relearning who we are as Christians and whose we are as children of God. On Ash Wednesday, after receiving the ashes as a mark of our creatureliness and our mortality, we said the Litany of Penitence (which I commend to you for reading and prayer—p. 267 of the Book of Common Prayer.)

The Litany of Penitence is a confession, yes, but it’s more detailed than our General Confession. It gets specific about our sins, and I do mean Our. It is really important to read the Litany in the dual context of our selves as individuals and ourselves institutionally and culturally. This is when we turn our gaze not only to what have we done—or not done– but also to those sins in which we are complicit. It can be a searing examination:

We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us… Have mercy on us, Lord.

We confess— Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people, Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work. Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, 

Have mercy. We confess. Accept our repentance. We are called to own up to our failings and to accept God’s invitation to do better. The Litany of Penitence makes viscerally real the harm that we have done to God’s people and to God’s creation. But the purpose is not to make us wallow in guilt. It is to make us pay attention. And change. That is what true repentance is—it is a returning, a realigning, a reconnecting.

Okay so far. But here’s where we can be drawn up short: 

Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us;
Favorably hear us, for your mercy is great.

“Let your anger depart from us.” 

I confess that I have struggled here. I have stood in this pulpit, and in that chapel, in KidZone upstairs and sat at the coffee shop in Wayland Square proclaiming a loving, merciful, creative and compassionate God, yet, here it is; a God whose anger seems to need to be appeased in order for me to obtain mercy. How do we absorb this? How do we reconcile these competing images?

“In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 

How do you un-see an angry Jesus? You can’t. Or perhaps it’s better to say, you shouldn’t.

Many of us—most of us, probably– prefer an image of Jesus’ face filled with love, wisdom, and compassion. The vision of Jesus’ visage instead suffused with anger, even outrage, wielding a whip of cords—this is hard to face, particularly for those who might have experienced anger directed negatively; in a way that is abusive, controlling, and manipulative. For these people, an angry Jesus is especially difficult to un-see, or to see in anything but negative, un-hopeful, light.

It is important, though, to remember that, just as love has many definitions—romantic love, agape love, parental love– so does anger. And if we are to engage this morning’s Gospel constructively we need trust that the anger of Jesus here is not controlling or abusive, born of his insecurity or fear. This is the protective anger of a parent who sees a child darting into traffic, yelling, “Stop!!!” This is righteous anger; an anger born of a need and desire to bring into alignment something that has gone off track—the kind of anger that can catalyze change. The kind of anger that can make people stop and listen.

So no, you can’t un-see an angry Jesus. But you can stop. And listen to him. You can try to see what he sees. According to New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, one of the motifs John uses in this passage is a framework of replacement:

“’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … he was speaking of the temple of his body.” 

In positing Jesus as a replacement for the Temple, the author of John’s Gospel was alluding to the alienation of his community from the synagogue, and their need to reinterpret Jewish institutions from a Christian perspective. Here Jesus was redefining what was holy for God’s people. He was saying that the Temple authorities had forgotten who they were by effectively allowing commercial interests to be the driving force behind the worship of God. People could not have access to worship if they did not have the right currency with which to purchase animals to sacrifice—doves for the poorest and livestock for the wealthiest. No money, no sacrifice. No sacrifice, no worship. And this was a crucial issue. The Temple authorities had become gatekeepers, focused more on what could keep people out rather than what should invite them in. They had forgotten the essence of their identity—People of God who, before all else, were called into exclusive relationship with their Creator and Liberator: “I am the Lord your God…you shall not make for yourselves any idol…” The idol had become money. The idol had become access and control. And Jesus was calling them out.

Jesus was calling them to remember who they were. And in remembering their identity they were invited to see where holiness truly lay. Not in the stones of the Temple but in Jesus himself. The temple of his Body.

Think for a minute about Incarnation. The Incarnation—the embodiment– of the Christ in the human form of Jesus is an expression of God’s creative love for us; showing us how precious we are, and not just us, but all of Creation, which has been called the first Incarnation. Creation is holy. Creation is sacred—loved into being at the very beginning. And when Jesus stood in the Temple and declared that he was the Temple—tear this temple down and I will raise it up in three days—he was saying a couple of things. First, he was saying that God resides in the Temple of his body—a prime example of the High Christology that marks this Gospel. And he was also saying that not just his Body was holy, but all that God has created and called beloved is holy as well. Jesus may be the ‘big I’ Incarnation, but ‘little i’ incarnation is all of us, and it is no less holy, sacred and beloved.

So Jesus was grieved—righteously angry that the people had forgotten what was holy, and he challenged them to remember who they were and whose they were.

To repent

To repent is to turn. As we look into the face of an angry Jesus we are called, not to face him and fear him but to turn and to stand with him. With him and in him. To see what he sees. To see where we have gone off track, or where, like a cherished child, we’ve run into traffic, headed for disaster. He calls us to stop! To turn and see through his eyes the many, many beloved creatures of God that we do not see—that we do not truly see– for how precious they are.

The Litany again invites us:

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done:…for our blindness to human need and suffering… For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us…

Accept our repentance, O Lord. Help us to see what you see, through your eyes—the eyes of love. Accomplish in us the work of healing, wholeness, and reconciliation, that we may show forth your hope, your compassion, and your glory in the world. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, some of us attended a seminar on how to prepare for a mass shooter event. Our St Martin’s takeaway from this session is the realization that we must develop a clear protocol of steps, documented on cards publically displayed, that instruct our vergers and others in leadership on the steps to follow in the event of such an emergency.

On Thursday, I met clergy colleagues from the Central Deanery at our monthly lunch and I learned that in some parishes the takeaway from this seminar was a reinforced belief that parishioners must now come to church armed. All the priests around the table were of a common mind concerning carrying guns in church. We all believed and continue to believe that unless you are a member of the police, i.e. those charged with an official duty of care to protect the public, the bearing of arms in church begs significant theological questions. We also recognized that the protection of gun free spaces continues the age-old understanding of the church as a sanctuary space – a place of safety free from the creeping paramilitarization of our civic life.

The current gun debate and the more controversial discussion about guns in schools and churches seems only to further generate copious heat but little light. The failure to make sensible traction in this debate is a failure to confront the enemy within that confounds all sides in an attempted conversation, namely fear. Fear, as in a state of pervasive fear-fullness has extended an icy grip upon our hearts. Fearful hearts feed a culture of communal paranoia in which everyone becomes afraid. But the question never asked is – Of what are we afraid? What lies at the source of our fear?

Guns in church

Issues of major civic controversy have contested histories.

 “The earliest mandatory gun carrying law is a 1619 Virginia statute that required everyone to attend church on the Sabbath, “and all suche as beare armes shall bring their pieces, swords, pouder and shotte.” Those failing to bring their guns were subject to a three shilling fine.lxi This law was restated in 1632 as: “All men that are fittinge to beare arms, shall bring their pieces to the church….”lxii While the original motivation in colonies both North and South for bringing guns to church was fear of Indian attack, by the eighteenth century, the Southern colonies‟ concerns appear to have shifted to fear of slave rebellion. Virginia‟s 1619 and 1632 statutes were somewhat vague as whether all white men were required to come armed to church or not, because of the qualification “fittinge to beare arms.” The requirement was more clearly restated in a November 1738 statute that required all militiamen to come to church armed, if requested by the county‟s militia commander. Other language in the statute suggests that protection of the white inhabitants from possible slave uprising was now the principal concern.lxiii 

Rhode Island‟s 1639 law ordered that, “none shall come to any public Meeting without his weapon.” There was a fine of five shillings for failing to be armed at public meetings.liv Maryland did likewise in 1642: “Noe man able to bear arms to goe to church or Chappell… without fixed gunn and 1 Charge at least of powder and Shott.”lv The Rhode Island town of Portsmouth passed a similar requirement in 1643,lvi as did New Haven Colony in 1644.lvii 

In 1637 Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson‟s Antinomian heresy threatened the social order. Hutchinson‟s beliefs had spread rapidly through Puritan society, and “some persons being so hot headed for maintaining of these sinfull opinions, that they feared breach of peace, even among the Members of the superiour Court… those in place of government caused certain persons to be disarmed in the severall Townes, as in the Towne of Boston, to the number of 58, in the Towne of Salem 6, in the Towne of Newbery 3, in the Towne of Roxbury 5, in the Towne of Ipswitch 2, and Charles Towne 2.”civ”. From  Colonial Firearm Regulation  by Clayton E. Cramer

It seems that there were exceptions to arms bearing in the 13 Colonies. External enemies: Indian’s, and slaves were prohibited where possible from carrying arms. But so too were those deemed internal enemies also prohibited: heretics, and Catholics. In fact, for the privilege of being barred from the Colonial militias, Catholics were given the privilege of being taxed twice over. Following the Boston Tea Party, the British government proceeded to confiscate guns held by the local militias in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to impose law and order by use if the standing army. This move only further fanned the flames of revolutionary zeal.

Following the successful outcome of the Revolution, continual anxiety concerning the possibility of potential British reinvasion, together with a continued communal anxiety about Indian attack and slave revolt led Congress to enact the Second Amendment giving constitutional protection to the right of the citizenry to bear arms in self-defense and defense of the community and the state.

Changing context

The right to bear arms is understandable within the colonial and post-revolutionary historical context. However, the argument that the context that pertained in colonial and post-revolutionary American can be in any realistic manner a blueprint for America in the 21^st- century remains a highly contested and contentious one.

Fast forward 300 years and we find that anxiety concerning a communally feared ‘other’ against whom an armed civilian populace was seen as a necessity -no longer reflects our context. Modern-day Americans have no need to protect themselves against Indian attack, slave revolt, the undermining of civic order by heretics, not to mention Catholics or the threat of invasion by a foreign power. Communal and national anxieties of this variety have been replaced by something much more frightening -a fear of one another.

Today the Second Amendment is defended as a necessity in order that we might defend ourselves against our neighbor. In some quarters the right the bear arms is viewed as a necessary protection against even our own government. There is a common saying that the best defense against a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun. Yet, in our society, beyond a clear threat from armed, unstable individuals and criminal elements, who is it we define as a bad man?

Mutual mistrust now leads us to view our very neighbors, especially those we can identify as somehow different from ourselves, as the objects of fear. A paranoid mindset has taken hold of our imaginations so that our neighbors become viewed as potentially dangerous and unpredictable.

Because we can’t know what anyone might do, coupled with the realization that anyone might be carrying a gun, everyone becomes an object of our fear.

Gospel guidance

In Friday’s text from Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John, our Lent 2018 program, we read: 

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, [the doors being locked for fear of the Jews] Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’. After he said this he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

In his reflection on this text Brother Geoffrey posed the question: Where are the locked places in your life?

The first disciples were afraid. They had locked themselves away for fear of the world on the other side of the door. For John and his community of Christian Jews, their fear and anger focused on their Jewish neighbors as the community of the synagogue that had recently expelled them. Writing some 60 years later, in the period following the fall of the Temple and the expulsion of the Christian Jews from the synagogues, John uses the experience of the first disciples as a metaphor for his own community’s struggle with fear of neighbor. What is John’s answer to that fear? It is Love. To be more exact it is being loved. But as I explored last week in To Resist Being Loved being loved requires something of us!

In the section of Mark’s Gospel read for the second Sunday in Lent Jesus speaks plainly about the need to rebuke the pervasive state of fear-fulness that grips our hearts and imaginations. To paraphrase his words he seems to be saying:

if anyone who wants to follow me they must first confront their fear, bear their own and one another’s pain and do as I am doing.

In the words get behind me Satan, Jesus rebukes Peter’s unconscious state of fear-fullness, provoked by the foretelling of his arrest and death. His reference to Satan clearly suggests that Jesus sees this state of fear-fullness as misalignment with God, and a state that exposes us to a realignment with the values of this world – values that pose self-defense and aggression, flight or fight, as the only available options.

Now here’s the ultimate question:

is the preservation of one’s own life a principle that takes priority over every other principle and value in life?

If we look to the gospel message for an answer, it’s clear that Jesus does not think so.

Instead, Jesus poses the question:

For what will it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

We forfeit our lives when we live from a place of unexamined fear-fulness. We forfeit our lives when we fail to see God’s love of ourselves reflected in the face of our neighbor. I forfeit my life when I believe that my self-defense has a higher value than the possibility that I may be called upon to give my life to save another. In the face of a confrontation with someone with a gun intent on killing me, my being unarmed may result in my death. Although in that moment courage my may desert me, until then, I intend to live as best I can – knowing that living is a risky business.

The invitation heard in all the great religions is to transcend the limitations of our animal instincts. As John witnesses and we can all attest, the antidote to fear-fullness is love. But the commandment to love and be loved requires something of us, a particular kind of surrender of ourselves to God.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it.

No one has said that accompanying Jesus on the road to Jerusalem will be easy.

 

Verse 9 of Mark’s first chapter opens with these words:

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “ You are my beloved Son, with you, I am well pleased.”

It ‘s so good to get back to Mark’s gospel in the Lectionary’s three-year cycle of gospel readings. Mark’s narrative is spare and uncluttered with extraneous detail. As we can see in the passage above, Mark does not describe events from the safety of the past tense. He writes in the continuous present. Using the ing verb ending, Mark ushers us into the action as it happens, e.g. and just as he was coming up out of the water he saw the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

Mark’s language is also personal and direct. God speaks directly to Jesus: “You are my son, the Beloved, with you, I am well pleased”. It’s interesting to compare Mark with Matthew’s version of this same story where God says: “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”.

So who does Matthew think God is addressing? Certainly not Jesus! Perhaps the reason for the difference is that Matthew has already identified who Jesus is in his birth narrative. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is born as God’s son. Jesus already knows who he is and so God’s speaking at his baptism seems to be for someone other than Jesus’ benefit. But in Mark, there is no doubt that God is speaking directly to Jesus.

The question that intrigues me is this: is Mark suggesting that God is telling Jesus something he does not already know? Does Jesus know he is the Son of God before God identifies him as such at this moment of baptism?

Because Mark gives us no backstory on Jesus birth or origin, his appearing before John to be baptized is his first arrival on the scene. What really excites me is that in Mark, God does not talk about Jesus in the third person as reported in Matthew and Luke, but names Jesus, to his face, as the Beloved with a capital B. This is not a beloved, but THE BELOVED. And it appears from Mark’s construction of the story that the process by which Jesus comes to be the Beloved is not by birth, but adoption. We are also children of God, not by birth, but through adoption. And our adoption, like that of Jesus’, is through baptism, a baptism at which God names us also as beloved – although with a small b.

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This leads me to ask what is our experience of being be-loved by God?

We are coming to the end of the first week of our participation in the Lent Program from SSJE and The Virginia Seminary – Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John. The theme of this week has been the love of God. Each day we have been invited to respond to a short Scriptural passage and journal our responses and associations as the text as it works it’s way into us. I have found that what really works well for me is not to journal at a single sitting, but to carry the journal around with me throughout the day. In those moments of trying to remember to pause by creating a space between the ending of one activity and the beginning of the next, I read the text again and jot down some more associations and responses.

The real challenge for me has been to take seriously John’s message that God loves me. I am beloved, not because of anything in myself that is particularly lovable. I am God’s beloved, because God has first and foremost, loved me.

I have been curious to note my emotional response to being addressed as beloved. Theologically and intellectually I understand myself to be the recipient of God’s love. Yet, emotionally, I shy away from this for I feel and know myself to be both unworthy and ungrateful.

George Herbert’ poem Love Bade Me Welcome exactly describes my shying away. When God tells me I am beloved my natural reaction perfectly echoes Herbert’s words:

….I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. 

It’s as if I want to tell God: thank you, but no thank you! To be beloved of God is too intrusive and potentially demanding, too intimate a suggestion. It’s too much for me to accept because the reality of God’s love for me takes me way out of my comfort zone.

The human existential reality is that it’s hard to be loved. It is so much easier to the lover. The lover has all the control. Between us, and God, there is a continual negotiation going on around this issue of loving and being loved. As the lover, God pursues us and has no intention of respecting our intimacy comfort zones.

The Rev. Mr. Herbert says it best when he puts God’s negotiation and pursuit of us in this way:

….I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

Truth Lord, but I have marred them, let my shame go where it doth deserve. 

Because Herbert lived and wrote in a time when Anglican theology was strongly influenced by a Calvinist emphasis on Jesus’ sacrifice, he naturally continues: 

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? 

Ah, My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat,

So I did sit and eat. 

Finally, comes the human capitulation in the face of God’s relentless pursuit. 

If I was more spiritual I might say that my experience of God’s love for me is humbling. In reality, I shy away from it because I find it humiliating. I know that heaven is not about earning and deserving, but believing and receiving, yet, so much of my identity is predicated on being worthy as one deserving of God’s love only to the extent of having somehow, earned it – a ridiculous notion I know, but it’s buried deep in me and seems impervious to theological reason.

The truth is I am loved. We are all beloved because God’s love is gifted to us. Our response should be to open and receive this gift; letting our humiliation – our shame go where it doth deserve.

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Notice how Mark simply tells us that the Spirit drove Jesus out, in effect expelling him into the 40-day wilderness experience, being tempted by Satan? Again, note Mark’s preference for strong and active verbs; compare: immediately drove out – with Matthew’s more passive: was led out. 

Also, note how Mark provides no details as to the nature of the confrontation between Jesus and Satan. The detailed series of temptations come from Matthew and Luke, not from Mark.

I like Mark’s version better, not only for the stark beauty of its sparseness but because it allows us to populate Jesus’ time in the wilderness with our own imaginings.

Might Mark’s lack of prescriptive detail provide space to populate Jesus’ experience in the wilderness from within our own imaginations so that the 40-days become a more intimate struggle with our own demons?

As we move into Lent, let us look more deeply into our own experience of temptation and struggle. In particular, let us look head-on at the greatest temptation of all – to shy away from receiving our true identity as beloved of God

Mark ends this section with Jesus returning from his time of preparation in the wilderness to find John has been arrested. The time he says has come, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news! For us also, there’s no time to lose!

Listen here to Ralph Vaughan Williams setting of Herbert’s poem.

 

 

 

Margaret Wheatley writes about joy as an experience of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily experience. She notes how it’s possible to have joy in moments of great suffering. Noting that it is in pursuit of happiness that we estrange ourselves from joy, she speaks of joy being the same as sadness for both states embrace us with an energy that is beyond physical – laughing or crying – it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps this seems so paradoxical as to not be true until we realize that joy and sadness are both states of self-transcendence. When we lose connection to the transcendent we are left to the tyranny of self – a state of profound disenchantment.

Faced with a birth, a wedding, an anniversary – we are captivated by joy. In the face of a death, a disaster, a tragedy of personal or epic proportions, sorrow and sadness capture us as we suffer with, console, and love one another.

The joy we so long for may not be found on mountaintops but it must be found somewhere. It’s not distance that separates us from a life-enhancing encounter with the living God, but a preoccupation with self that makes self-transcendence impossible.

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The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy. Joshua Rothman in an op-ed in the New York Times last year wrote that Taylor:

has explored the secret histories of our individual, religious, and political ideals, and mapped the inner tensions that cause those ideals to blossom or to break apart.

Taylor’s massive opus A Secular Age explores the historical, religious, and political developments leading to our arrival in the current secular age. He contrasts the year 1500 when it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility of such belief for many today. He charts the route of travel as the culture of the West moved from the impossibility of unbelief to the impossibility of belief.

In the long 400-year emergence of our current secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment, Disenchantment denotes our loss of a connection to the transcendent.

When our connection to the transcendent is lost, all we are left with is ourselves – now occupying center stage. This is a place of great loneliness and disenchantment.

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Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between enchantment and disenchantment helps us to view the Biblical narratives as the product of an enchantment mindset. To the enchantment imagination, God is often frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, it fills and disturbs the relational spaces that separate one person from another. God is made uncomfortably known in the sweep of great events through the unfolding epic that is the story of history.

The enchanted mindset understands God’s presence in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. Thus God inhabits sacred mountaintops, sacred spaces. The encounter between the divine and human takes place only after a laborious journey up to the mountaintop where God dwells in a self-revelation in blinding light.

Yet at the same time, the mountaintop is a place concealed in thick cloud. What comes to be known there cannot be spoken about. On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of Jesus clothed in his divinity as the Christ. This is a fleeting experience, no sooner glimpsed than it is gone – forever eluding their desire to capture and contain it. Then the disciples must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying the experience. They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time, practice a kind of forgetting.

Events on the mount of the Transfiguration are only at a midpoint in a long process towards the dénouement or the final act in Jesus’ ministry. It seems that in the spiritual life peak experience is only a means to, and not an end in itself.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

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Today we do not look for God in material space-time. The acceptance by past generations, whose enchantment shaped expectations of encountering God in material objects and places is now firmly rejected by most of us as superstition. Nevertheless, the question is not does a separate spiritual dimension still exist for the modern imagination, but where and how does it exist for the modern disenchantment mind?

Spatial references to up and down don’t work in the same way for us. For us, God no longer inhabits the mountaintop. Heaven is no longer imagined as up there, or hell being down there. Yet, the metaphors of in and out still work for us. For a modern imagination, the spiritual realm is best conceived of as a parallel dimension that interpenetrates with space-time.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d been to the mountaintop, no one assumed he had actually climbed a mountain.

The mountaintop now becomes the metaphor for the possibility of a different order of experience, one that challenges our acceptance of the absence of the spiritual in lives given over to a preoccupation with our small self. We may no longer find God in the through the material world in quite the same way as our Biblical and generational ancestors did, yet, despite this God remains emotionally and experientially available to us.

The paradox is that while we reject enchantment as superstition, no generations crave with a greater intensity a desire of self-transcendence than we do. Magical realism, heroic superhuman sagas abound in Hollywood’s works. Opioids, marketed as a solution for physical pain establish a hold on society as a solution to the increasing levels of our spiritual pain.

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Margaret Wheatley speaks of joy as an example of a transcendent experience because joy is able to encompass both delight and sadness. Joy is not happiness, which is a very one-sided experience. Happiness is easily destroyed because it is the product of self-preoccupation. Joy radiates outwards, opening new pathways for interconnection and relief from self-preoccupation.

So here is the clue. For us today, transcendence is found in the web of interconnectedness with one another. We transcend the limited confines of self not into the emptiness of bliss, but into the joy of being fully present for one another. Wheatley quotes from the great 19^th-century Bengali poet and spiritual teacher, Rabindranath Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

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The Transfiguration story is a halfway point in Mark’s account of the life and times of Jesus. It marks the transition point from preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside to his final and eventful journey to Jerusalem.

The Visit of the Magi and the Transfiguration bookend the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on, we move into a different section of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Is there no better time than in Lent than for us to renew our engagement with the debilitating experience of our preoccupied and disenchantment self?