The Great Vigil of Easter 2018

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Great Vigil of Easter March 31, 2018 A letter to Giovanni Daniel Aguilar on the occasion of his baptism. Dear Giovanni, This is a holy night. “This is the night when [God] brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.” “This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin and are restored to grace and holiness of life.” “This is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death and rose victorious from the grave.” This is the night when you are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. This is the night when you have become an important part of the body of Christ. This is the night when we all remember who we are, from whence comes our salvation, how we are called to live our lives, and why it all matters. This holy night is the beginning of a journey for you that you will follow into and through your own death. You will journey through valleys and over mountains; your way will be both smooth and rocky. Sometimes you will dance and rejoice along the way and at other times you will feel so weary and heartbroken that you don’t know how you can go on. During all of those different parts of your journey, my prayer for you is “May you remember.” May you remember, during those times in your life, when darkness weighs upon you like a tomb, that the light of Christ shines within you and will light your path into the darkness. May you remember, no matter what happens, that you belong to God; that your baptism is a sign that God loves you, that God cherishes you, and that you are not alone. May you remember the promises that your parents and godparents and all of this community have made to you—that we will walk with you as your sisters and brothers as you seek to follow Jesus. May you remember, every time that you lift your shining face to God with your hands outstretched to receive the bread and the wine, that you are being fed the body and blood of Jesus who loves you, so you may go out into the world to share that love with others. May you remember that belief is not so much about what you think but belief is about choosing a path and following it; belief is about how you live your life. May you remember that Christ, our hope, is arisen, and he goes before you on your journey so that you may follow where he leads. May you remember that you have been buried with Christ in his death and that you share in his resurrection, so you have absolutely nothing to lose. May you live and love with joy and abandon. May you remember the truth of the Mystery of this holy night: “that God’s love is stronger than death.” Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

Good Friday 2018

Good Friday 2018 March 30, 2018 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. “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” It’s no mistake that 2 of our four readings for today are poetry. Poetry, through its space, its absence, it sparsity, often expresses for us what prose cannot. It reveals without having to explain. It echoes without having to say. I’ve been reading an anthology of poems over the last couple of weeks. It is titled Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope by Malcolm Guite who is an Anglican priest and himself, a poet. In the introduction, Guite describes the purpose of the book: “This book is written to give voice both to love and to lamentation, to find expression for grief without losing hope, to help us honour the dead with tears, yet still to glimpse through those tears the light of resurrection.” He continues, “It is written in the conviction that the grief that we so often hide in embarrassment, the tears of which some people would want to make us ashamed, are the very things that make us most truly human. Grief and lament spring from the deepest parts of our soul because, however bitter the herbs and fruits they seem to bear, their real root is Love, and I believe that it is Love who made the world and made us who we are.”i (Similar, I think, to what we do here on this day together.) One of the poems in this anthology that has captured my imagination this week is titled Onlookers by a poet named Luci Shaw. It has two layers to it: how we are all onlookers, outsiders to each others’ griefs and suffering and also it captures the scene of Jesus’s crucifixion from the perspective of the onlookers. Onlookers By Luci Shaw Behind our shield of health, each of us must sense another’s anguish second-hand; we are agnostic in the face of dying. So Joseph felt, observer of the push and splash of birth, and even Mary, mourner, under the cross’s arm. Only their son, and God’s, in bearing all our griefs felt them first-hand, climbing himself our rugged hill of pain. His nerves, enfleshed, carried the messages of nails, the tomb’s chill. His ever-open wounds still blazon back to us the penalty we never bore, and heaven gleams for us more real, crossed with that human blood. ii I’ve been especially struck by the lines: Only their son, and God’s,/ in bearing all our griefs/ felt them first-hand, climbing/ himself our rugged hill of pain. We remember this work of Jesus in “bearing all our griefs” today, not just as we hear the reading of John’s passion, where a rather triumphant Jesus strides through all of the scenes of his crucifixion. We remember this work especially when we read together Psalm 22, hearing echoes of Jesus’ last words in the less triumphant gospel of Mark that we read this past Sunday. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Truly heart-breaking last words for Jesus. I read recently that it was standard practice in Jesus’ time to cite the first phrase of a text in order to refer to the entirety of the passage.iii So, while Jesus certainly could have intended for his last words to be words of heart-break, joining in and bearing the griefs of all who have felt themselves separate from God (really, that’s all of us) he could also have been pointing his onlookers toward the totality of Psalm 22. The echoes of truth that show that even though our griefs, our sufferings isolate us, even that we can offer to God in prayer, and God does not ever truly forsake us. This psalm that Jesus speaks, which starts so starkly, ends on a triumphant note proclaiming God’s power and attention which go so far as to even “deliver a people yet unborn.” The poetry of Psalm 22 gives us a new way of encountering the Paschal Mystery—Jesus’s death and resurrection—and experiencing the intersection of that with our own ongoing deaths and resurrections throughout our whole lives as we, too, flow between the waves of lament and rejoicing, of agony and alleluia. Surely, he has borne our griefs… Today, may you have the courage to name before God your griefs, your infirmities, knowing that they have all already been held and felt by our Lord Jesus on the cross. May you offer them to God’s love, to be transformed in and through the resurrection. In closing, I want to share with you another of Luci Shaw’s poems from the Love, Remember anthology. Our Prayers Break on God Luci Shaw Our prayers break on God like waves, and He and endless shore, and when the seas evaporate and oceans are no more and cries are carried on the wind God hears and answers every sound As he has done before. Our troubles eat at God like nails. He feels the gnaw of pain on souls and bodies. He never fails but reassures He’ll heal again, again, again and yet again.iv i. Guite, Malcolm. Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope. Canterbury: 2017, ix. ii.Ibid. p 99 iii.Feasting on the Word Commentary. Ed David L. Bartlett and Barbara B. Taylor. Westminster: 2008, Pastoral Perspective on Psalm 22 by David J. Wood. p 290 iv.Guite, Malcolm. Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope. Canterbury: 2017, 65.

5th Sunday in Lent Year B

5th Sunday in Lent Year B March 18, 2018 One of my friends who writes a daily meditation recently wrote the following: “A magazine declared a ‘good week for self-reliance’ when ‘an Italian fitness instructor became so frustrated with the dating game that she married herself in a lavish ceremony.’ Apparently it was a bad week for wisdom and humility.” She continues, “We Americans see self-reliance as extremely desirable, often to the misguided place of failing to cultivate community. In the church, we speak of having two or three gathered to seek God, but we don't appreciate the power of our seeking together. Being with others in our quest for God keeps us humble and lifts us up when we haven't the strength to go on alone.”i Our gospel reading for today gives us glimpses of this seeking God in community as well. John tells us that Jesus and his followers are headed into the Passover in Jerusalem when some Greeks approach Philip saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip’s response is to go find another disciple, Andrew, and tell him, and together, the two of them go to tell Jesus. Now, at this point, we don’t really know what happens to the Greeks, whether or not they ever have their request to see Jesus granted. What we do know is that Jesus’s eyes are already set upon the cross, that he emphasizes that those who follow him must continue to follow him into self-sacrifice, service to others, vulnerability, and offering themselves up to God’s love in the face of suffering and evil. In all of scripture, when we have stories of people seeing Jesus, encountering Jesus, they are always transformed. Sometimes they are healed; sometimes they are restored to their community; sometimes they are convicted, because Jesus holds up a true mirror in front of them showing them how they have turned from the light. Sometimes they are disappointed because the way of following Jesus is much more demanding, much more difficult than they expected. But every time, no matter what the outcome, that person, after encountering Jesus is transformed. And our tradition teaches us, from as early as the Acts of the Apostles, that this transformation most often occurs within community. It is, in fact, the true work of the church—to invite people into being transformed by God. And when I think about my life and about the times when I have “seen” Jesus or about the times when I have been transformed by God, it isn’t during times of certainty and strength. They are the times in my life when I am most uncertain, most heart-broken; or they are the times in my life when I am most connected to others, especially those who are uncertain, vulnerable, or heart-broken themselves. Those are the times when I see Jesus. Those are the times when I am transformed. We are going to be talking more about transformation after Easter, but I want to invite you to begin thinking about this now, in our final days of Lent. Think about the times when you have encountered Jesus, when you have been transformed, in your faith, in your thinking, in the way you live your life. Beginning next Sunday, we are going to walk through Jesus’s final hours as a community of faith. We will participate in his final teaching to his disciples in the last supper and the footwashing. We will bear witness as he suffers and dies on the cross, and remember before him all of the suffering and injustice in this world. We will enter the dark tomb of the church behind the single light of the Paschal candle, remember the stories of our faith, and we will baptize sweet Giovanni Aguilar into the body of Christ and welcome him as a member of this community. And then we will celebrate the resurrection together. Every year, our three holiest days—what we call the Triduum—are found on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and at the Great Vigil of Easter. These give us meaning, understanding of who we are as followers of Jesus. And thankfully, we do not walk this way alone. We look to see Jesus in the Paschal Mystery that is revealed in Holy Week, and we seek to be transformed together as a community. This past week, I read an article titled: “Church Is What We Create with Each Other.” It is a lovely, poignant article that I commend to you to read (I’ve got copies here, and I’ll post the link on our Facebook page). In this article, the author writes about the ways that we are transformed through the community of the church saying, “For a long time announcements [in church] bothered me. I thought they kept us from what mattered, that they were housekeeping, business best conducted somewhere else. Was now really the time to talk about pancake breakfasts and broadband networks? But I’ve since come to understand that yes, actually, now is the time. Because I’ve learned — over many, many years — that church isn’t about order or quiet or even ritual so much as it is about showing up. For yourself, for God, and for the people around you who need to feel — just as you do — that the blessings and burdens of being a human are not theirs to bear alone [emphasis is mine]. Sometimes we feel that union of souls in sublime and obvious ways, like when we hear a fiery reading from the prophets or the psalms, or sing verse after verse of “We Shall Overcome.” And sometimes we feel it when someone stands up and tells us that she is looking for a new woodstove and please call her if you have a lead on a good one, not too expensive, not too far away.”ii “Church isn’t about order or quiet or even ritual so much as it is about showing up. For yourself, for God, and for the people around you who need to feel — just as you do — that the blessings and burdens of being a human are not theirs to bear alone.” Your invitation this week is two-fold. First, think about the times when you have encountered Jesus, when you have been transformed, in your faith, in your thinking, in the way you live your life. Think about how you would share one of those stories with anyone who might come to you and ask, “I wish to see Jesus.” And second, make plans to attend as many of the Triduum services here as you can: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday night. We need each other to see Jesus. We need each other to be transformed. We need each other to walk this way of the cross and to experience the true joy of the resurrection at Easter. i. Copyright 2017 by Carol Mead. March 8, 2018. www.holyordinary.com ii. White, Erin. Church Is What We Create With Each Other. March 15, 2018. https://onbeing.org/blog/erin-white-church-is-what-we-create-with-each-other

4th Sunday in Lent Year B

Lent 4B March 11, 2018 I had a former parishioner, who, when talking about the ways that God was working in his life or in our parish, would often say, “That God is a weird dude.” I couldn’t help but think of his saying in light of our lessons for this particular Sunday-the fourth Sunday in Lent. “That God is a weird dude.” In our Old Testament reading for today, we see the Children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness after escaping from slavery in Egypt, fresh off of a military victory that God has delivered to them. But, as is our nature, even in the face of such provision and continued care for them by God, they begin, once again, to complain. Numbers tells us that the people spoke against both Moses and God 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.” (Talking out of both sides of their mouths, much?) And at this point, the fifth time of their complaining in the wilderness, and I believe, the first time they have not only complained against Moses but have also included God in their complaints, God is finally fed up. And God sends a plague upon them, similar to the plagues God unleashed upon Egypt to help secure their release. God sends a bunch of “fiery snakes” upon them, and the people get bitten, and they begin to die. (Yikes!) The people very quickly see the error of their ways, run to Moses, and repent of their complaining. So Moses goes back to God, and God tells Moses what to do. The people have asked Moses to ask God to take the scary, fiery snakes away, but that is not what God does. Instead, God tells Moses to “make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” Moses does this, and the result is that “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” The people are still getting bitten by the fiery, poisonous serpents. But God has given them a way to be healed of the poison and to return to wholeness of life. Talk about a weird dude, and a weird story. And then we’ve got the gospel story for today. Our lectionary plops us right down in the middle of an ongoing story—that time when Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness to try to learn more about Jesus. The two have a whole conversation about how, in order to encounter the Kingdom of God, one must be “born from above” or born again (as some translations put it). Nicodemus continues to misunderstand Jesus, and then our lesson for today picks up, with one of the most famous passages from all of scripture: John 3:16. But before we get to John 3:16, we get John 3:14-15, in which Jesus compares himself to that bronze snake statue on a pole that we heard about in our Old Testament reading saying, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Weird dude. Weird stuff. Just what are we to make of all this? This past week in our forgiveness study, we looked at the first step out of four in the process of forgiveness. Interestingly enough, the first step in the process of forgiving one person who has hurt us is telling the story of how we’ve been hurt. We are encouraged to write down the facts and in that way, revisit the trauma. Now, this seems counter-intuitive, right? It seems that re-visiting old wounds and how we got them would stir everything back up and make it harder to forgive, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu assures us that is not the case. He writes, “When we tell our stories, we are practicing a form of acceptance. When we tell our stories, we are saying, ‘This horrible thing has happened. I cannot go back and change it, but I can refuse to stay trapped in the past forever.’ We have reached acceptance when we finally recognize that paying back someone in kind will never make us feel better or undo what has been done. To quote the comedian Lily Tomlin, ‘Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past’”.i This seems similar to the Israelites looking upon the thing which has caused them harm in order to be healed. It is certainly weird, but it works because God is involved in it. This connects to the gospel passage for today, too. One of the blog writers I read regularly, a Lutheran pastor named David Lose, writes about how when we read the parts around the oh, so familiar verse of John 3:16, this whole gospel passage can give us a new way of looking at the cross. He writes that it shows us that “the cross is not about punishment or payment but about healing…and only healing.” And he goes on to talk about how the Greek word that is translated as “judgement” in this passage, the word krisis, from which we get our own word “crisis” means less about the rendering of a sentence (like our word “judgment” suggests) and is more about separating and revealing. Krisis, like our word crisis, is about a decisive turning point, and so, he writes, “judgement, as it turns out, is about telling the truth.”ii So, the weird revelation in these two readings for us today is that God offers healing freely for all, but it often does not take the form in which we would expect. In fact, God’s invitation to healing for us means revisiting the story of the thing that has done us harm in the first place. Jesus on the cross is the icon of all this, how God insists on providing healing for God’s people in a way that is completely unexpected and even seemingly counter-intuitive. Your invitation for this week is to think about a wound that you bear and to revisit it, to look upon it, to tell the truth about it, and to offer it to God’s light and love for healing. i. Tutu, Desmond and Mpho Tutu. The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. HarperOne: New York, 2014. P 88. ii. http://www.davidlose.net/2018/03/lent-4-b-3-overlooked-elements-of-john-316/

The Third Sunday in Lent Year B

Lent 3B March 4, 2018 How many of y’all are perfectly happy with your body the way it is right in this present moment? You are content with the way it moves, the way it looks, the way it feels (not too tired, not too achy)? How many of you would be able to pray a part of the prayer that we pray at our weekly healing service with truthfulness, sincerity, and integrity: “God the Holy Spirit, you make our bodies the temple of your presence. We praise you, and thank you, O Lord.” Look, I’m right there with y’all. I spend 30 minutes every day doing workouts with a celebrity trainer who seems to be obsessed with “sculpting” different parts of my anatomy and also with “giving me the body I’ve always wanted.” I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a little concerning, and that there is a fine line between good health and fanaticism or ridiculousness. Plus, it’s Lent. And Lent is a time when we focus on our own our sinfulness, on the ways we have turned away from God and “followed for too long the devices and desires of our own hearts.” And for some reason, maybe it is because we live in a body-obsessed culture, we often spend much or our Lent focusing on the sins of the body. But today, we have a different model. We have Jesus, who we see in John’s gospel today, taking on the temple. Now, unlike the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) which locate Jesus’s cleansing of the temple immediately before his death and resurrection, this is early on in John’s gospel, right after Jesus’s first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. John’s gospel is also the latest of the four gospels, and it was written after the Romans had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. So we have a marked contrast between the other three gospel writers, who show how this particular act of Jesus is the final straw for the authorities in Jerusalem and is what eventually leads to his crucifixion, and the writer of John who is doing something very different with this story. The writer of John’s gospel is showing how, in Jesus’s ministry, Jesus has revolutionized how people relate to God. (Remember how John’s gospel starts: In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God…and the word became flesh and lived among us…”) The way that John tells this story of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple is to show the early Christians who find themselves without a temple, the central place in which to worship God, that we no longer need that. In the body of Jesus, we encounter God. God is not confined to a central worship space but is embodied in the person of Jesus and can be found in Jesus’s own suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection. God is revealed in and through the temple that is Jesus’ body, and therefore, God can be revealed in and through the temple that is our own bodies. When is the last time you thought of your body not as something to be changed or endured, hidden or minimized, not as something that embarrasses or betrays you? When is the last time you thought about your body without contempt, squeamishness, or fear? When is the last time you thought of your body as the temple of God’s presence? The poet Mary Oliver writes about the wonder of our bodies in a part of her poem titled Evidence: "…I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed. As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas, ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue. Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."i It is in and through the human form that God has revealed God’s self to us in the person of Jesus. Our bodies are gifts that God has given us, not something that we have to subdue or sculpt, deny or denigrate. Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That may be a challenge in and of itself to embrace, but there is a deeper challenge embedded in this awareness. “In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes that it is not possible to lean into God’s love for my body, without simultaneously recognizing that God loves ‘all bodies everywhere.” The ‘bodies of the hungry children and indentured women along with the bodies of sleek athletes and cigar-smoking tycoons.’ ‘One of the truer things about bodies,’ Taylor concludes, ‘is that it is just about impossible to increase the reverence I show mine without also increasing the reverence I show yours.’ In other words, once I value my own body as God’s temple, as a site of God’s pleasure, delight, and grace, how can I stand by while other bodies suffer exploitation, poverty, discrimination, or abuse?”ii In closing, I’m going to give you your invitation for this week, and then I’m going to follow it with a blessing for you. Your invitation this week is to make peace with your body, to acknowledge that it is the only vessel in/ the world that can hold, in a mix of power and/ sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,/ ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue; that it is the temple of God’s presence. To do this, you may consider praying: God the Holy Spirit, you make my body the temple of your presence. I praise you, and thank you, O Lord.” The second part of your invitation is to consider how you use your body to embody the gospel, the good news of God’s love to those around you? And finally, the Blessing. Blessing the Body By Jan Richardson This blessing takes one look at you and all it can say is holy. Holy hands. Holy face. Holy feet. Holy everything in between. Holy even in pain. Holy even when weary. In brokenness, holy. In shame, holy still. Holy in delight. Holy in distress. Holy when being born. Holy when we lay it down at the hour of our death. So, friend, open your eyes (holy eyes). For one moment see what this blessing sees, this blessing that knows how you have been formed and knit together in wonder and in love. Welcome this blessing that folds its hands in prayer when it meets you; receive this blessing that wants to kneel in reverence before you: you who are temple, sanctuary, home for God in this world.iii i. Evidence by Mary Oliver ii. Written by Debbie Thomas on Journey with Jesus Blog https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1675-the-temple-of-his-body iii. http://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/03/05/3rd-sunday-in-lent-speaking-of-the-body/