The Second Sunday in Lent-Year B

Lent 2B February 25, 2018 This past week, I’ve seen a meme going around on social media and in other sources. The meme is a picture of the back of a t-shirt, and it reads: “Dear God, Why do you allow so much violence in our schools? Signed a concerned student.” And then below that it reads: “Dear Concerned Student, I’m not allowed in schools. –God.” While I believe the point that is being made by this and shared by folks has to do with prayer in public schools (which I’m not going to talk about today), I have two problems with this meme as it relates to our understanding of who God is and who we are in relationship to God. (I’m very grateful for those of you who shared this meme on Facebook or in other ways with me, because it got me to thinking about all this and how it relates to our readings today.) The first problem that I have with this meme is that it suggests that we human beings can do anything that would keep God out of anywhere that God wants to be. That just doesn’t jive with all that we know about God as revealed in all of the scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments. God does what God wants to fulfill God’s purpose in and through creation. We can’t limit God, nor can we even stymie the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. Those who crucify Jesus are the prime example of our complete inability to stop the love of God from moving in and through and among us. Sure we have free will, but ultimately we know the end of the story: Love Wins. There’s a painting that hangs on the wall of my dining room. It was painted by one of my best friends from high school and was commissioned by my mother. On it is written the Latin phrase: “vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit.”i It means “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” Or even “Called or not called, God will be there.” Bidden or not bidden, God is present. The second problem I have with that meme as it relates to our understanding of God and our relationship to God has to do with our gospel reading for today. In it, we get a glimpse of a scene already in progress. Just before our reading for today, Jesus has asked his disciples who people say that he is, and Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus tells them sternly not to tell anyone and then our reading for today picks up. Jesus is teaching the disciples, his closest followers about what it means to be the Messiah—that he “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.” Peter says, “Lord, don’t go there! And Jesus rebukes him, calls him Satan, and tells him he is setting his mind not on divine things but on human things (remember, bidden or not bidden, God is there?) And if we hadn’t gotten the picture yet—then just listen to the eerie echoes of what is left out of our Psalm for today—Psalm 22—which is woven through the Passion stories and is the Psalm that we read in its entirety every year on Good Friday. How does it start? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress?” Jesus the Messiah, the anointed one, the one we call Emmanuel or God with us, is the one who suffers, and he will always be found with those who suffer as well. Our Lenten Prayers of the People put it beautifully when we pray to God: “May every sadness find you at its heart, and may there be grace when we suffer.” Over the last week, I’ve had periods of sadness that just seem to well up in me that I don’t really know what to do with. As a part of my Lenten practice, I’ve been reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lenten book for this year (each Archbishop of Canterbury recommends a different book for Lent each year). It is titled Say It To God: In Search of Prayer by Luigi Gioio. In the first chapter, he writes about how prayer isn’t about trying to overcome all the “noise” of our lives so that we can focus on the right feelings, be in the right mood to commune with God with no distractions. Instead, he writes, “What if we could understand noise not as that despite which we pray, against which we pray, but that out of which we pray? What if anger, jealousy, frustration—all those feelings that overwhelm each one of us several times a day—what if such feelings not only ceased to be an obstacle to prayer but became the scraps of wood that feed our prayer, that keep the fire of prayer burning?” Bidden or not bidden, God is there, remember? He continues, “Never should we think that we have to overcome our anger first, our frustration first, before we can pray. It can be difficult to believe it, but God is sincerely, deeply interested in each of our thoughts, the good ones and the bad ones, in every one of our feelings, the nice ones and the mean ones: all of them!” “The ultimate secret of prayer,” he concludes in the first chapter, “lies wholly in this: My God! My God! I say it to God, I present it to God, I am always with God and know God is always with me.”ii After reading this, I thought, well, it couldn’t hurt to give it a try, and so when I notice this particular sorrow welling up inside of me, I offer it to God. I invite God to be present with me in it. And it isn’t necessarily gone, but it has definitely been transformed into something that I can understand a little bit better. Because even though, “bidden or not bidden, God is present”, it helps us when we actually invite God to be present with us in those less than perfect moments. We grow more deeply in our relationship with the God who is always present, when we offer God our whole selves: the good and the bad, the grateful and the ungrateful, the kind and the malicious, the generous and the miserly, the hopeful and the angry, the joyful and the sorrowful, the loving and the hateful. God is present with us always in all of it. Bidden or not bidden. And God is especially present in the suffering. Your invitation for this week is to contemplate if there is some aspect of your life, your emotions, your heart, that you have been trying to keep God out of? Whether it is suffering or sadness, anger or envy or frustration, is there a part of you that you say to God, don’t go there! If so, what would it be like to invite Jesus, the one who knows suffering, to be present with you even there? i. Carl Jung ii. The quotes are from the last two pages of the first chapter.