The Second Sunday in Lent-Year B

Lent 2B-2021 February 28, 2021 A couple of months ago, our bishop called me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with another priest who would be doing some work with a congregation in deep conflict. Just over the last couple of weeks, that work has really begun in earnest. We have a list of over 60 parishioners which we’ve divvied up, and now we are calling each one and listening to each one of them. The questions we ask are very broad and eventually, we’ll take the knowledge of all the different stories and experiences and weave them together into a tapestry of a report to help them figure out where to go from here. What has been striking as I’ve been making call after call after call this week is the deep heartbreak and suffering that each and every person I talk to has felt in this situation at their church, regardless of what side they fall on in the presenting conflict. Each person has been deeply wounded. And interestingly enough, each person has their own version of the story of what happened. At first I approached this with a sort of ideal for journalistic integrity, trying to get to the root of the story. But I quickly realized that wasn’t what was most important in the path back to healing for that congregation. This situation and several conversations I’ve had with parishioners through our two Lenten formation offerings have gotten me thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, what purposes they serve, and how we can look at these stories we tell ourselves with a lovingly critical lens. Our gospel reading for today starts in the middle of things. Jesus is on the road traveling around the prosperous, Roman area of Caesarea Philippi, which is near the Mediterranean Sea, and on the road, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples throw out names in a way that is reminiscent of school children in a classroom trying to find the answer the teacher is looking for: “John the Baptist,” “Elijah,” “one of the prophets.” So Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” And then you can hear the crickets chirping in the silent background of the classroom, until Peter ventures boldly, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus sternly orders them not to tell anyone. And that’s where our reading for today begins. Mark tells us that Jesus begins to teach the disciples that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again,” and Peter pulls Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. Mark then tells us that Jesus turns to look at his disciples while he rebukes Peter, saying to him, “ ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’” Not content to keep this teaching secret among his closest disciples, Jesus calls the crowd and says to them: “‘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 for the sake of the gospel, will save it…’” So what is happening here? This is the first of three times in Mark’s gospel when Jesus predicts his own suffering, death, and resurrection, and each time, the disciples can’t deal. Each time, they are confused, but they don’t seek clarity from Jesus. After Jesus’s second prediction of his suffering, death, and resurrection, the disciples get into a fight about who is the greatest among them, and after Jesus’s third prediction of his suffering, death, and resurrection, James and John go to him and ask if they can sit at his right and left hands when he comes into his kingdom. Over and over again in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’s disciples just don’t get it. Like Peter in today’s reading, they each have their own story of what Jesus’s ministry will be and their role in it. In each of our own stories, we are always the hero, and so the disciples cannot wrap their brains around this different story that Jesus is offering them—that he has come not to be a conquering messiah who will overthrow their oppressors and restore Israel to its proper place, and that each of them will be there, right by his side as conquering heroes. Jesus’s story is that he is called to live into the suffering of rejection by his own people, to be killed for it, and then to be resurrected on the third day. It’s hard for us modern listeners who have heard the story so many times to wrap our brains around the sense of craziness in Jesus’s story that his original hearers would encounter it. Who could even possibly believe that such an outlandish thing could happen, even if they were able to give up their own versions of the stories as conquering heroes to begin to examine what that would mean for them. The other aspect of this is the invitation of Jesus to live into suffering. Nobody wants that. Most of us will do whatever we can to avoid suffering. (I’ve started back running over the last couple of weeks, and every time I do it, at some point in the run, I think, “why on earth am I doing this?” because it’s hard and my joints are getting older every day.) And one of the ways that we avoid suffering is that we craft our stories in which we are the hero who does not suffer. Or when we can deny our suffering no longer, then in our story we become the victim upon whom suffering has been inflicted by bad people outside us. While God doesn’t cause our suffering, suffering is a part of the human condition. Jesus’s call in this passage is the call of discipleship which invites us to pick up the suffering that is already present in our lives and to carry it for as long as needed. When we face our suffering, not denying it and not blaming it on others, that is when the truth of God’s love can redeem it, allowing new life and resurrection to grow out of it. And once we’ve gone through that hard process of carrying the load of our suffering long enough for God to transform it and bring new life out of it, then we realized it’s not as hard or as scary as we first thought, and we get a little bit stronger, a little more faithful, and a little more resilient, every time we do it. But in order for this to happen, we have to examine those stories we use to protect ourselves from suffering. This past week, we got word from the diocese that they were releasing an update to the diocesan guidelines for gatherings in churches. When we got word of this new way that we were being called to adapt, my anxiety went through the roof, and I didn’t handle it well. I called a couple of friends and talked to them, which served to raise their anxiety, too. And then I talked to our bishop. And even though I heard the weariness in his voice at the end of a long day, I vomited my anxiety and my fear and my suffering all over him. And God bless him, like a good mamma or one of those best friends you have in college, he held my hair back for me while I did it. I realized the next day that I needed to go back and strip away the layers of the story I’ve been telling myself. And when I did that, I saw the layers of suffering underneath that it had been masking—my weariness with it all, my feeling that I am not equipped to be making the decisions that I am being called to make in this unprecedented season, my loneliness in this way of having to do church, my uncertainty of when things will be better, my disappointment I feel that they are not better already, and my deep longing for clarity of what it means to be faithful in this season. Your invitation this week is to join me in that work of peeling back the layers of the stories we tell ourselves that protect us from suffering. Consider starting with one area of your life where you can rationally determine that your reaction is a bit out of proportion to the situation or an area of your life where you long for clarity. And once that is done, spend some time with your suffering, maybe even make friends with it, so that we can pick it up and carry it as far as we need to until God transforms it and brings new life to us in and through our suffering.

Lent 1B-2021

1st Sunday in Lent Year B February 21, 2021 “’The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ This is one of the key phrases teachers use in “Godly Play,” a popular Sunday School curriculum designed for young children.”i “’The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ And yet we are invited into the wilderness during this Lenten season. In some ways it feels like we have never left the wilderness of last Lent. Certainly, we were forced into the wilderness in March 2020; we would have never chosen this life or all that we have had to learn to do differently. And this wilderness season has most certainly changed us. There will be no going back to how we were before this difficult season. Mark’s gospel uses the Greek word eremos which is often translated as desert or wilderness 10 times. In the rest of the New Testament, it is often used as an adjective to describe abandonment or as a noun to refer to a locality without inhabitants, an empty, abandoned, or thinly populated place. But in Mark’s gospel (and really all throughout scripture), the image of wilderness is ambiguous. ii The wilderness is a dangerous place because one is at the mercy of life’s extremes without our usual protections. There are wild animals, a harsh, barren landscape, and there’s an unpredictability to the wilderness that keeps it dangerous. The wilderness is a lonely place. It is a place where we only have our own souls and God to keep us company. It is far away from the trappings of every-day life and its distractions. The wildness is a monotonous place, where everything looks the same and every day feels like it slips away into nothingness. The wilderness is a dangerous place where temptations lurk and where we must face the deepest, darkest parts of our own hearts. And yet, Mark reminds us of the Biblical heritage that shows us that that there are gifts to be found in the wilderness. The wilderness is a dangerous place where God proves God’s faithfulness, over and over again. God shows up for God’s people, providing manna in the wilderness to feed them when they finally realize that are completely dependent upon God. The wilderness is a lonely place where Jesus retreats over and over again throughout his ministry to be with God, to stay focused on his mission. It is the place where Jesus first comes to know himself as God’s beloved, and he retreats there frequently to stay grounded in that identity. The wilderness is a monotonous place where a person can reconnect with the natural rhythm of our days, as the sun rises and sets day after day. It is a place where the few basic certainties of the landscape can give peace. It is a place where Jesus is allowed to rest from the demands and expectations of the crowds who flock to him for healing. The wilderness is a dangerous place because it is a preparing place. Jesus faces his temptations there as a preparation for his ministry and as preparation for the temptation that he will face at the end of his earthly life. “As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know.” iii This Lent, we are being offered the invitation by God to journey into the wilderness with Jesus. We are being invited to live into the difficulty of the wilderness and to embrace the strange gifts it has to offer. We are being invited to this dangerous, monotonous, lonely place as a preparation for Easter and for what comes next. ‘The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ i. Thomas, Debie. Into the Wild. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1660-into-the-wild ii. These ideas are from the book The Spiritual Landscape of Mark by Bonnie B. Thurston. Chapter 1 (pp 3-5) iii.—from Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert Jan Richardson’s The Painted Prayerbook, February 2008

Ash Wednesday 2021

Ash Wednesday 2021 February 17, 2021 I’ve lost count of the number of funerals I have done in my 16+ years as a priest. But I will never forget my first funeral which was also the very first time I celebrated the Eucharist as a newly ordained priest. As I prayed the beautiful and comforting words of our burial liturgy, I remember being woefully unprepared emotionally as I proclaimed the words at a certain point in the liturgy. As the years have passed, this part of the service no longer catches me unaware or by surprise, but it still fills me with a complex mix of feelings of hope coupled with the stark confession that one day I am going to die. It’s not unlike what rolls around every year on this day, Ash Wednesday, when I feel the grit of ash on my forehead and hear the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The difference is that those words are coming from outside me; one could even say that their awareness is being inflicted upon me—this call to remember. Whereas in the burial liturgy, when I speak these words on behalf of the gathered community, I am embracing their starkness, their truth, their hope on behalf of myself and on behalf of all the faithful: “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” This is the call to remembrance that we hear on Ash Wednesday every year. It is the invitation that is offered to us during the season of Lent that is often lost in the face of the call to repentance, to take something new on or to give something old up. At its very heart, Ash Wednesday calls us to remember that we are creatures, created by God, made of the dust of the earth and filled with the breath of God; created to be finite rather than infinite. And that when God created us in this finite state, God called us “good.” We are called to remember that there is both a starkness and a beauty in the brevity of our lives. And we are called to be mindful of all the ways and the times that we spend our lives denying this truth in our lives; exploiting each other and creation in our denial of our death; seeking to consume to fill the void; keeping on running and running to avoid what is at the heart of our very natures, which is our mortality. The former bishop of Atlanta who is also a liturgics professor, Neil Alexander, has written a brief paper on the history of ashes for Ash Wednesday in an attempt to help bishops, clergy, and the church think about how to mark this day in the midst of a pandemic. And Bishop Alexander writes about how before the liturgy used the practice of making a cross of ash on peoples’ foreheads, the church had an older practice on Ash Wednesday—that is to sprinkle ash on someone’s head. This practice, he says, harkens back to the sprinkling of dirt onto a grave during the committal in a burial service. This is something this church knows better than others, as our members did the graves for one another and as we often pass the shovel around during the committal service to share the burden of sprinkling soil on top of one whom we have loved. Today, more than ever, we are called to remember not just our status as creatures of God, made with the dust of the earth and filled with the breath of God, created to be finite rather than infinite. We are called to remember the gift of the resurrection, when, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, God proves once and for all that God’s love transcends the limits put on us in our creation, that God’s love breaks the power of death to make us a part of God’s new creation through the resurrection so that death is not the end but a change. We are called to remember the gift of new life that can come even through death. The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister writes, “Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” This Lent, I invite you into practices that will help you to remember that you are God’s creation, made to be finite and named by God as good, and invited into new life by God through Jesus’s resurrection. I invite you to embrace your creatureliness, recognizing the limits and boundaries of our existence as opposed to rushing to ignore or deny them. I invite you to discover practices that allow you to be grateful for the darkness that, like a rich soil, invite growth, and I invite you to use this time as a season to live into practices that support new life and growth in your spiritual life much like new life will sprout out of the moist, dark earth as the season moves forward into spring. In that way, this season can be a gift for us all as we look, once again, toward Easter. “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B February 14, 2021 This year, after Christmas, I really struggled with taking my Christmas tree down. I left it up several days after Epiphany, and because I had been so diligent in giving it water, it was still somewhat alive (unlike most years, when it is deader than a doornail by the time Epiphany rolls around, so I am very anxious to get the fire hazard out of our house). As I was beginning to make my peace with the fact that the tree had to go, I saw a picture that Lynn Wright had shared on Facebook of a lovely lighted birch tree that she had recently purchased. So I learned where she got it, and I shamelessly copied her. Just a couple of days after our Christmas tree had exited the building, the tree of light arrived to grace the dark empty corner. I had this idea to make it a Mardi Gras tree, so I put a few purple and gold Christmas balls on it with the intent to find some of our Mardi Gras decorations, like beads, to drape it in. But that never happened. So my tree of light sits glowing in the corner of the room with a sparse few colored balls on it. And I love it! It has been such a gift of light to me in this dreary season, and because I had dubbed it our Epiphany tree or our Mardi Gras tree, it has been a constant symbol and reminder to me of the light of the season that is celebrated in the stories of our faith, when God chooses to manifest Godself to us through the person of Jesus Christ. Today, on this last Sunday after the Epiphany, we have one of three ultimate manifestations of God in and through Jesus in Mark’s gospel. The first is through Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan (the story with which we began this season). The second is today’s story, the story of the Transfiguration of our Lord on top of the mountain as revealed to his closest disciples. And the third manifestation of God in and through Jesus in Mark’s gospel is in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. These three stories act as pillars for Mark’s gospel. As we approach the year-mark of this Covid-season, in which I’ve spent more time at home than just about any time in my life, I’m struck by Peter’s inclination to try to make the spot on the top of the mountain more homey, his offer to build dwelling places so the disciples and Jesus, Moses, and Elijah can all hang out together for a while and be comfortable. I wonder if Peter, like so many of us, felt a clear division in his life between the holy places, the places here he was most likely to encounter God—namely his local synagogue, the temple in Jerusalem, or on the top of a mountain—and the more familiar spaces like his home or his fishing boat? I can’t help but wonder if Peter and the other disciples felt a division that we so often feel between ‘ordinary life’ and ‘spiritual life’? “Ordinary life and spiritual life are the same life. Thomas Merton wrote in Thoughts on Solitude, ‘If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. We have the daily, domestic life of the house and the life of the journey. Sometimes the journey has the shining character of pilgrimage, but a lot of the time it manifests the trudging, putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-to-get-on-with-it-aspect. Happily, life also has what we call ‘mountaintop’ experiences, experiences of illumination and piercing joy. And while they are illuminating, they are also often mysterious.”i The Transfiguration is one of those mountaintop experiences in the midst of the journey from Jesus’s home in Galilee to Jerusalem, where Jesus will face his death. And while Jesus’s presence on the mountain offers its own initiative for this divine encounter, the real activity here is done by God. It is God who reveals the glory of God’s son on the top of that mountain. It is God who breaks into the monotony of the journey to offer the light of God’s presence to those gathered there and to allow that radiance to reflect upon Jesus. This past week, I read a blog post by a colleague of mine who shared a Celtic blessing. “Bless us, Lord, this day with vision. May this place be a sacred place, a telling place where heaven and earth meet.” She writes of this, “A telling place…Not a hiding place—not a place to escape——but a grounding place. This, we all long for.” She continues, “These days, many of us are missing familiar physical spaces—religious homes, watering wells, restaurants, libraries and schools, venues for sports, concerts, and theatre. We are learning anew that at the heart of our spirits are relationships, not any one physical space. Yet, too, we are realizing the countless ways our commons spaces elevate our spirits and call forth the best in us. These spaces are homes to us—homes that help make us who we are.” She then elaborates on this notion of “the telling space”: “All the physical spaces we call “home”—be they churches, family homesteads, or even a town or country—are merely pointers to the telling place that exists wherever the human spirit meets divine mystery. In this space within us and among us, we… [meet] God with all our senses. The telling place propels us forward in the deepest watches. You know it in the thoughts that awaken you in the night, in your prayers in the early morning, in your quiet listening to beloved ones in pain, in your solitary walks as you remember those whom you have lost and think on the things they told you. In these times, the telling place grounds you, calls you home, even if you feel you are in exile. The telling place reminds you who you are.” ii I think my tree of light this year was a pointer for me to the telling place, a timely and needed reminder that God shows up and reveals Godself even in the midst of the most ordinary, in the most homey, in the most tiresome, in the most mundane. And on this last Sunday after Epiphany, I give thanks for the reminder of the manifestation of God in Christ and the ways that God is always present, always revealing Godself to us in both the mountaintop experiences as well as in the ordinary drudgery of endless days. As we move into the season of Lent, a season that is normally associated with wilderness, we will be invited to look at wilderness anew and to see the gifts that it offers. We will be invited to use that season to help us remember who we are. Your invitation this week is to offer this Celtic blessing in the different spaces of your life and to look for the ways that earth and heaven meet there. “Bless us, Lord, this day with vision. May this place be a sacred place, a telling place where heaven and earth meet.” i. Thurston, Bonnie B. The Spiritual Landscape of Mark. Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 2008, p 36. ii. From the Rev Canon Ruth Woodliff-Stanley’s blog Paintbox: https://www.ruthws.com/paintbox/2021/year-b/fifth-sunday-after-epiphany?ref=email