5th Sunday in Lent Year A 2020

The 5th Sunday in Lent-Year A March 29, 2020 Today, it seems that our lectionary insists that spend some time dwelling with death. From the image of the prophet Ezekiel standing in the middle of a valley of dried out and scattered bones to the story of Lazarus, dead in the tomb and called back to life by Jesus, on this 5th Sunday of Lent in which we find ourselves scattered and sheltering in place, watching the numbers of the death toll rise, we are invited to think about death within the context of our faith. If you’re like me, you’ve tried to avoid it. Now, I’m not talking about hunkering down, sheltering in place. These are ways that we are caring for one another in this unprecedented time. I’m talking about all the ways I fill my time, the busyness, the “projects,” the almost-obsessive watching of the news and social media. What I’ve discovered this week is that in my avoidance of thinking about and dwelling with the reality of death which is all around us, then I am also missing out on the ways that God is working in and through and among all this. Our readings and their insistence upon making us dwell with death for a moment reveal to us that our God is a God who takes things that are dead and dried out, stinking and scattered and chooses to breathe God’s breath and new life into those old, dead things to make them new and alive in different ways. Our God calls the scattered and exiled home. Our God mourns with and then restores the broken-hearted. Even now, we see glimpses of the resurrection that is to come, perhaps not in the way that we would like it to come, but resurrection and new life will come none-the-less. But in order to see resurrection when it happens, and it will happen, we cannot hide our faces from death. This past week, I have continued on my quest to discover or rediscover the spiritual practices that give me life. I went from staying up too late watching the news, to trying to go to bed at a decent time and setting an alarm and waking up earlier than the rest of my house, so I could sit out on our screened porch and drink coffee, listen to the birds and pray and journal. About half-way through the week, I read a meditation from the daily email by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr through his Center for Action and Contemplation. This meditation helped me sit with the aspects of death in my life and in that process to find new life, resurrection. I’m going to share aspects of this meditation with you this morning, and if you find it helpful, then I invite you to pick it up as a prayer practice this week. But at the very minimum, I invite you this week, as things continue to shift rapidly around us, to spend some time reflecting on how you may be avoiding death and at the same time, avoiding the possibility of encountering resurrection as it is happening all around and inside of you. You may close your eyes if it helps you focus. “When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully to God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and our anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys, successes, and strengths alone. . . Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or descend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense, we distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained in a couple of buckets. So when we’re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by simply holding the word help before God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing thoughts.”i ii I invite you, now, to be still and breathe, and to ask God for the help that you need, focusing on the general word “help”. (silence) “Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and into a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word help go and in its place hold more specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of vague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word guidance before God. Or patience. Or courage. Or resilience. Or boundaries, mercy, compassion, determination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace. . . .iii I invite you to sit in silence, and breath, and to name before God what you specifically need. (silence) “Along with our anxieties and hurts, we also bring our disappointments to God. If anxieties focus on what might happen, and hurts focus on what has happened, disappointments focus on what has not happened. Again, as the saying goes, revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing, so simply acknowledging or naming our disappointment to God is an important move. This is especially important because many of us, if we don’t bring our disappointment to God, will blame our disappointment on God, thus alienating ourselves from our best hope of comfort and strength. . . .” I invite you to take a moment to breath, and name your disappointments to God. (silence) “Whether we’re dealing with anxieties, wounds, disappointments, or other needs or struggles, there is enormous power in simple, strong words—the words by which we name our pain and then translate it into a request to God.”iv Our God is a God who takes things that are dead, and dried out, stinking and scattered and chooses to breathe God’s breath and new life into those old dead things to make them new and alive in different ways. Our God calls the scattered and exiled home. Our God mourns with and then restores the broken-hearted. Even now, we see glimpses of the resurrection that is to come, perhaps not in the way that we would like it to come, but resurrection and new life will come none-the-less. But in order to see resurrection when it happens, and it will happen, we cannot hide our faces from death. i.The Path of Descent: Praying in Crisis. Wednesday, March 25, 2020; https://cac.org/praying-in-crisis-2020-03-25/ ii.Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality (HarperOne: 2011), 104. iii.Ibid., 116–117. iv.Ibid., 119–120.

4th Sunday in Lent Year A

The 4th Sunday in Lent Year A March 22, 2020 “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.” What a gift it was to me to discover that the beloved and familiar 23rd Psalm was our assigned Psalm for worship together today! In this season of wilderness in which we find ourselves, these familiar words can be words of comfort and inspiration for us. I tried to remember the first time that I knew the 23rd Psalm, and I could not, because I feel like I have always known it. Perhaps I learned it in Sunday school as a child in children’s chapel when we would read from our little 1928 prayer books. Perhaps it has been internalized in my adulthood at some point; perhaps it was through reading it and praying it through so many funerals as a priest of the church burying people who I loved. I wonder if you can remember first knowing the 23rd Psalm? Think for a moment about the thoughts and memories that this familiar Psalm evokes for you. This week, I spent some time with colleagues talking about this old, familiar Psalm. The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has written extensively about the Psalms, and in his book, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, he writes about how the psalms fall into three different categories. There are psalms of orientation; there are psalms of disorientation; and there are psalms of reorientation. Brueggemann categorizes the 23rd Psalm as being one of the psalms of reorientation. The psalms can be a great gift to us in this uncertain season because they articulate things that we are often not comfortable articulating. (Think Psalm 22 which we read on Good Friday that begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? * and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; * by night as well, but I find no rest.”) Of these psalms of disorientation, Brueggemann writes, “I have tried to show that a major move of the Psalms is to move from an ordered reliable life to an existence that somehow has run amok. The Psalms give expression to that new reality of disorientation, when everything in heaven and on earth seems skewed…”i In this schema of psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, the 23rd Psalm is a Psalm of reorientation. It is a song of thanksgiving and of confidence. This psalm offers its comfort and finds its meaning in the truth that “it is God’s companionship that transforms every situation.” Brueggemann concludes his portion on Psalm 23 by writing, “Psalm 23 knows that evil is present in the world but it is not feared. Confidence in God is the source of new orientation.”ii It is important for us to remember in these strange and frightening days that Psalm 23 is not just a psalm of comfort but it is a psalm of thanksgiving, of gratitude, and of confidence. It is a psalm whose speaker has known hardship and suffering but has come out on the other side through the grace of God. It is the song of a person of faith who has learned to trust God even when times are difficult and frightening, frustrating and confining. It is the song of a person whose confidence is firmly rooted in God through a sense of gratitude for all the times that God has already shown up and offered care. When we tap into a regular spiritual discipline of gratitude, then we are more inclined to remember the ways that God has been with us all throughout our lives, and we are more inclined to see the glimpses of surprising new life that God offers us, even in these strange and frightening days. This past week, I received a gift in my email from Anam Cara Ministries. It is a 2 week self-guided retreat titled: From Isolation to Invitation A two-week guide for retreat in a time of quarantine. iii In this lovely offering, there was a whole section on gratitude, about how gratitude isn’t so much as a feeling as an action, about how we have to work to strengthen our gratitude muscles, and how we can be grateful even when we are lonely, sad, anxious, or afraid. I especially appreciated the practice which was invited for this portion of the retreat, and so it is my invitation to you to join me in practicing gratitude and reconnecting with your confidence in God this week in the light of the beloved 23rd Psalm. I invite you to spend some time creating a gratitude list for your life by considering different blocks of time in your life. This is an activity that you could do in one sitting or it is something that you can do over a series of days. First start with your childhood. “Think of all the people who helped you before you asked. Make a gratitude list for the doctor who delivered you, the nurse who held you, or the teachers who helped you learn to read and write and do math—even the bus drivers who got you to school, and the janitors who ensured it was kept clean. You may not remember their names, but without them you wouldn’t be where you are.” For 10 minutes jot down as many people, experiences, events, books, clubs, activities, lessons, etc. as you can think of which brought something good into your life during your childhood. Then move on to your youth/young adulthood: Take 10 minutes to list as many of the people, experiences, events and lessons from your youth and young adulthood which helped you to grow and which contributed in some way to who you are now. “What would you say to the coaches who inspired you to achieve a goal, the musicians who wrote your favorite songs, or the boss who gave you your first job? What about the friends and family who laughed at your jokes and loved you through your bad moods? Your list could get very, very long—for you have been given a lot.” For those of you who have been alive a bit longer, you could do this by decade or by seasons of your life. Keep going with making this gratitude list until eventually you get to today. As another writer puts it, “Today may be a great or a horrible day, but you can start wherever you are. At times I walk through my house and look at what fills it. I’m grateful for the farmers who grow the coffee I drink, for the workers who take away my garbage. I remember meals around my table, or the friend I was with when I bought my butter dish. I look at cookies my neighbor dropped off, the quilt my grandma made. I’m grateful for the mailman who carries letters to my door each day, for the friend who sends a card, and for my job that pays the bills. As I remember what I’ve been given, I practice saying thank you. Expressing gratitude changes something in me, and it changes the people I thank. When I express gratitude to someone for something, I shatter the lie that I’m on my own and no one cares for me. I have been given so much; I have benefited from the beauty others offer to the world.”iv Take 10 minutes to list the things you are grateful for today. You might want to walk around your home to look at and touch various objects you have. As you consider each item, think about where it came from, how it got into your possession, and how it’s served you, entertained you, or supported you in this season. In closing, I’m going to invite us to go back and to read the 23rd Psalm again together slowly, savoring each line and the confidence that our God inspires in us as revealed to us through gratitude. If you are so inspired, I invite you to pray this Psalm every day this week, with your family or on your own, to remember your confidence in God and the gifts of new life that God offers even in this season. i.Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. p 123 ii.Ibid p 156 iii.From Isolation to Invitation A two-week guide for retreat in a time of quarantine by Jenny Walley, Dr. Matthew Green, and Tanya Lyons https://mcusercontent.com/7499435774ed1dd632448147c/files/6dde3fac-dcae-4cb9-8088-88e67672df0e/Isolation_to_invitation.pdf pp 13-16 iv. This part of the retreat was adapted from Chapter 18: “The gift of gratitude” from The Gifts I Never Knew I Had: Reflections on Ordinary Treasures, Tanya Lyons (2019)

3rd Sunday in Lent Year A

Lent 3A_2020 March 15, 2020 “Keep Calm and Carry On.” This slogan originated in Great Britain as one of a series of posters by the Ministry of Information in 1939-on the eve of World War 2. This 3rd poster in the series was never actually posted in the public because it was being reserved for a scenario such as the German Blitz bombing, but by the time the blitz bombing happened, the posters had become unpopular with the British people who viewed them as patronizing and divisive. Thus the poster campaign came to a halt before “Keep Calm and Carry On” was ever employed, but the image with the British crown and the slogan have been rediscovered of late and have struck a chord in popular imagination in these modern times. Just a few years ago, this image was everywhere you looked on social media in various spoofs. The flip-side of this “Keep Calm and Carry On” is actually panic, and we see it everywhere we look these days. We see panic at the grocery stores, in the barren wilderness of toilet paper aisle. We see panic on the news. We see panic on social media. For me, panic has taken the form of trying to read and absorb as much information as possible. I would dare say that none of us has ever been in a situation like this before, so we don’t even know what it means to “keep calm and carry on” at this point. What are we as people of faith supposed to do when panic seems to be everywhere? Our Old Testament reading shows us today that panic is nothing new. We see the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and in a full blown panic (that most likely has started with one or two but then spreads like an epidemic throughout the entire company). They are [understandably] worried about not having any water. They doubt God; they become divisive; they forget how God has already saved them. And as a result of their panic, God’s actions of providing water for them out of a rock in the wilderness become remembered as the sight of their panic, their quarreling and their testing of God. (As another commentator put it: “When the going gets tough, the Israelites get grumpy.”—boy if that doesn’t hit close to home!) In the Psalm today, we see the same pattern, but it makes it more personal: the remembering and recitation of God’s saving works—the ways that God has saved us and the injunction (spoken in a separate voice, in God’s voice) to harden not your hearts, don’t test God; don’t panic; don’t be like the children of Israel in the wilderness or you will be denied the rest and peace of God. The Psalm is a reminder of how our own panic blocks us from receiving God’s blessings, God’s peace.i You know, we aren’t so very different from the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness. We like to cruise along, thinking that we are in complete control of our own lives, that we are completely independent of each other, that we make our own destiny. And then something comes along that proves we are wrong. We are not in control. We are, in fact, completely interdependent upon each other. What individuals do makes a difference in the life and death of others. In times like this, it is important to just stop; to remember that God is God and that we are not. I’ve been thinking about sayings from two different modern day wise women today that I want to share with you. The first is from The Rt Rev Barbara Harris, the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion (Suffragen Bishop of Massachusetts) who died a couple of days ago. In all my copious reading on the internet, I came across a picture of her with the following quote: “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” It’s a reminder from scripture how God went behind the Children of Israel to protect them from their enemies when fleeing Egypt. “The God behind you is greater than the problem in front of you.” It’s an important reminder to me that God is with us, even in this most unusual set of circumstances. The other thing I’ve been dwelling with is a poem by a contemporary poet named Lynn Ungar. You may have seen this. She has, just this week written a poem titled Pandemic. Pandemic What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.ii –Lynn Ungar 3/11/20 Your invitation this week is to refuse to commit your heart to the panic around you and instead to commit your heart to this unexpected gift of Sabbath; to settle into our community stillness and then to reach out with your heart and to find new and more life-giving ways to be connected with each other in this unusual and uncertain season. i. This portion of the sermon was reworked from a sermon I preached on Lent 3 in 2014 at St. Peter’s by the Sea ii. http://www.lynnungar.com/poems/pandemic/

2nd Sunday in Lent Year A 2020

The Second Sunday in Lent-Year A March 8, 2020 I can’t hear the verse from John 3:16 without thinking of my former co-worker Don London. Don used to like to quote John 3:16 in the noonday chapel service at Stewpot, which was an exceptional worship experience, filled with people from truly all walks of life. Homeless men and women would sit beside successful business people, attorneys, work-from-home moms, and we would all worship together. In that setting, Don would quote the King James Version’s translation of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And then he would say it again: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And then he would look around with a big smile on his face and say to the gathered congregation: “How many “whosoevers” are here today?” It was often the homeless and the poor folks who caught on first, and would raise their hands. And Don would keep asking the question, looking around, until everyone in the room had caught on and had raised their hands embracing the notion that they, too, were a “whosoever” that this verse referred to. John 3:16 is one of the most often-quoted, often referenced verses of scripture. From Martin Luther referring to it as “the gospel in a nutshell” to the guy in the clown wig who used to hold up the sign that read John 3:16 at professional sporting events. It has also been used in more evangelical churches to emphasize the importance of being “born again” by accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior and believing in him. I wanted to see this passage with new eyes, so I took a deep dive into it this week, and here is what I found. First, it’s important to remember that Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews. This means that Nicodemus is well-versed in scripture, as is Jesus, so we must read this passage as if we were getting to listen in on two biblical scholars talking about their understanding of God. Nicodemus comes to Jesus under cover of night, earnestly seeking deeper understanding, and Jesus responds to him in a different way than Jesus usually responds to Pharisees who are out to trap him in very public displays. Jesus goes so far as to use gentle humor with Nicodemus as they talk. The crux of what Jesus is trying to impart to Nicodemus seems to be about the nature of God, and he uses references to two different stories from the Old Testament which Nicodemus would have picked up on to emphasize his point. First, he references Numbers 21 (verses 4-9), which is a time when the children of Israel are wandering in the desert after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. They take a detour, to avoid Edom, and the people become impatient and begin to revolt, complaining against Moses and God, who has provided them with manna to eat in the wilderness so they do not starve. Numbers says, “The people spoke against God and against Moses, [saying]‘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.” This is a story about how God’s people rebelled against God, and how God relented in punishing them by telling Moses to create an image of the very thing that was making them sick, and putting it on a pole, so that when the sick looked up it, they would be healed. The other story that Jesus references in this passage is from Genesis 22 (verses 1-14), when God tests Abraham and tells Abraham to take his only son, Isaac, to the land of Moriah to offer him as a sacrifice to God. It seems Abraham is prepared to go through with this demand; he goes so far as to bind his son and to stack the wood and light the fire, and he even draws his knife to kill Isaac when an angel of the Lord stops him just in time and provides a ram to use as a sacrifice in Isaac’s place. It’s an astonishing story about Abraham’s fidelity and devotion to God. Another point that I encountered as I was diving deeper into this gospel reading this week is the way that very familiar King James’ Version of the John 3:16 has actually muddied its translation for us because of an older use of a simple word. When we hear the word “so” as in God so loved the world, we think of it in the ways that we usually mean so—like I am so tired or I am so hungry. For us, “so” is a synonym of very or abundance. We might understand that Jesus is saying “God very much loved the world…” But when the KJV was translated, so had a different meaning. The Greek word houtos which is translated as “so” in this passage actually means “in this way.” Jesus is saying, “God loved the world in this way…” In the gospel of John, “the world” is representative of an entity that is hostile to God. And when we look back at the Numbers passage that speaks of our rebellion against God, you could go so far as to translate it as “God loved the God hating world in this way…” Jesus is emphasizing the nature of God for Nicodemus, this faithful Jewish scholar and leader in two ways: 1. He is underscoring God’s desire to save sinners, even those who are in open rebellion against God. And 2. He is underscoring God’s deep devotion, commitment, and fidelity to humankind. He’s answering Nicodemus’ unspoken question, “in what way does God love?” by saying in this way…And this is a little bit about what the cross means to us—it is a revelation of how much God wants to save even those who rebel against God to follow the devices and desires of their own hearts and the lengths God has gone to in order to do that. So, what does that all have to do with us? I read a story from another preacher that gets to the heart of all this. He tells about hearing a story from his parishioner Tom and his encounter with his son. He writes, “Several nights earlier, Tom's six year-old son Benjamin protested his bedtime. Frustrated by his father's refusal to budge, Benjamin finally became so frustrated that he said, "Daddy, I hate you!" Tom, possessing the presence of mind I wish I more frequently displayed, replied, "I'm sorry you feel that way, Ben, but I love you." To which Benjamin replied, "Don't say that!" Surprised, Tom continued, "Ben, but it's true -- I love you." "Don't say that, Daddy." "But I love you, Ben." "Stop saying that, Daddy! Stop saying it right now!" And then it came: "Benjamin, now listen to me: I love you...like it or not!" He continues, “Even at six years old, you see, Benjamin realized that in the face of unconditional love he was powerless. If Tom had been willing to negotiate -- "I'll love you if you go to bed nicely" -- then Benjamin would be a player: "Okay, this time, but I'm not eating my vegetables at dinner tomorrow." But once Tom refused to negotiate, refused to make his love for his son conditional on something Benjamin did, then Ben couldn't do anything but accept or flee that love.” He concludes, “The same is true with us. If God makes God's great love for the world and us conditional, then we, suddenly, have tremendous power. We can negotiate. We can threaten to reject God's love. We can even tell God to take a hike if we don't care for God's terms. But when God just loves us -- completely and unconditionally -- and when God just goes and dies for us, well then the jig is up, there's just nothing we can do to influence God.”i How many times in our relationship with God do we try to work to earn God’s love, or our salvation. What would happen if we spent some time this week recognizing that we are already loved, not matter how often we rebel against God, and that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, nothing more needs to be done? For God loved the God hating world in this way, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Like it or not. i. David Lose at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1525