The Second Sunday of Easter-Year C

Easter 2C_2022 April 24, 2022 I’d like to start a campaign—to change the designation of our patron saint. Instead of people calling him Doubting Thomas, I’d like to start calling him Need for Certainty Thomas. Or maybe Evidenced-based Thomas? True, it doesn’t quite roll of the tongue as well as Doubting Thomas, but I feel our patron saint has been horribly misunderstood throughout the centuries. Because I believe that out of all the disciples, Thomas is the most like us. Think about it. The little that we know of Thomas is that he is a problem solver. He isn’t scared enough to stay locked in the room with the other disciples when they are afraid they will also be targeted for death as Jesus’ closest friends. Thomas is the rational pragmatist of the group. So, when the Risen Christ appears to the disciples and Thomas isn’t there, Thomas wants to see it for himself. He wants answers and certainty, and all they can give him is wonder and mystery. We modern people have grown accustomed to being able to find answers after a quick search in the palm of our hand. We are accustomed to the place of science and rational thought in our modern world, which provide answers to so many of the deep mysteries our ancestors just had to live with. We’ve been taught answers by the church since childhood, and when we show up here, it is often our secret hope to get more answers to the deepest dilemmas of our lives: how to love those who differ from us? how and where to find peace in our frenzied, frantic lives? what is our purpose? I think at the heart of Thomas’s demand for proof is a demand for answers. “What do you mean he’s back from the dead? How on earth did that happen? Maybe if I can see it, see him, then I’ll understand what has happened.” Thomas keeps asking the others for answers and all they can do in response is marvel at the mystery they have seen unfold before them in the person of the Resurrected Jesus. When Thomas finally encounters the Risen Christ for himself, he asks him for certainty, and in response, Jesus shows Thomas his scars from his wounds—the mystery of new life out of brokenness. So today, what if, instead of being here in search of certainty, we opened ourselves to the mystery of God’s love, which is so much grander than we can even begin to imagine? What if instead of answers we sought out uncertainty? What if, here on out, we made a choice to come here not in search of answers, but rather looking for mystery?I i. This homily was inspired by my listening to Brene Brown’s interview of Richard Rohr. You can access it here: Spirituality, Certitude, and Infinite Love, Part 1 of 2 - Brené Brown (brenebrown.com)

Easter Day 2022

Easter Day 2022 April 17, 2022 I have a Facebook friend, only an acquaintance in real life, who is, among other things, a well-known cartoonist. This week, he shared a cartoon, and his caption was “did this a couple of years ago. Seems fitting for this year, too. #holyweek” The picture is drawn as if one is inside a cave or a tomb. Written in dark ink on the dark walls of the tome are the following words over and over again: “Fear. Anger. Hurt. Hatred. Depression. Anxiety. Hopelessness. Pain. Frustration…” The words are swirling and spiraling chaotically around a hole in the center of the tomb that is filled with light. And if you look closely into the distance in the light, you can see three small crosses. The yellow light is also filled with words in white in the distance: “Hope. Love. Faith. Life. Alleluia.” (The artist’s name is Marshall Ramsey, and his original artwork is linked on the church’s blog post under worship resources on our website or on our Facebook page, if you want to see it.) I’ve been sitting with Marshall’s drawing through this past week, as we have walked through Jesus’s footsteps in his last days—from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; to the last supper with his friends when he offered them his love in an act of service in washing their feet and he instructed them to do likewise; to his crucifixion and death on the cross and his last words creating Christian community by commending his mother and beloved disciple to each other’s care and modeling what self-emptying love in that community should and can look like. And even though spring is breaking out everywhere here, something about where we are right now and all that we have been through in our common life in these last couple of years feels like those shadowy words are still swirling all around us in a chaos of darkness. “Fear. Anger. Hurt. Hatred. Depression. Anxiety. Hopelessness. Pain. Frustration…” Our gospel reading for today is Luke’s version of the resurrection. This may be my favorite of the four resurrection stories, and it’s probably because the women are front and center in this story. Luke offers these women disciples up as a picture of faithfulness and discipleship that is contrasted with the male disciples who all run away and abandon Jesus at the end. In Luke, the women gather together at the foot of the cross as Jesus hangs there suffering. They keep watch with him as he dies, and when he is taken down from the cross, they follow his body to the tomb, and they see where he is buried. And then, Luke tells us, they hurry home to prepare the burial spices and ointments so they can go back to the tomb and anoint him for burial once the Sabbath observance is over. That’s where our story for today picks up. The three women—Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and Mary Magdalene—are up in the dark before dawn, sleepy and sad and making their way to the tomb to offer their last act of care for Jesus. When they get to the tomb, they are perplexed to find the stone rolled away from the entrance, and they become terrified when they encounter two men in dazzling white who say to them: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” So, they hurry back to the male disciples to tell them what they have witnessed—the empty tomb, the strange, dazzling men with the strange dazzling pronouncement—and Luke tells us that the men don’t believe them, and they think it is “an idle tale.” I appreciate Luke’s contrasting pictures of discipleship because we all have a little bit of each within us. We are all a strange mix of faithfulness and fear, a strange mix of a willingness to show up and bear witness and of abandonment when things get difficult. We are a mix of altruism and selfishness. Deep down our inner cynic that scoffs that the story of resurrection is just an idle tale is at war with the part of us that longs for a path out of the dark tomb, the part of us that hopes that God’s love really is stronger than all the dark forces in our hearts, our lives, this world…stronger even than death. The good news for us today that we celebrate on this Sunday and on every Sunday is that Jesus has already gone before us creating the way out of the tomb of “Fear. Anger. Hurt. Hatred. Depression. Anxiety. Hopelessness. Pain. Frustration…” And even Death. And into the resurrection light. Can we be brave enough to live our lives as if it is, in fact, the truth and not just an idle tale? Can we choose this day and beyond to live our lives in “Hope. Love. Faith. Life. Alleluia.”

Good Friday 2022

Good Friday 2022 April 15, 2022 There’s a tradition in the Christian church of meditating or reflecting on the 7 last phrases of Jesus taken from the 4 different gospels. You may have heard of this; it’s often referred to as the 7 last words of Christ. I read a blog post this week that helped me think differently about one of these phrases that we encounter in our gospel reading for today. As Jesus hangs dying on the cross, he looks down and sees his mother and the disciple whom he loved keeping watch at the foot of the cross with other women. Jesus tells his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” And he tells the beloved disciple, “Here is your mother.” John’s narrator tells us that “from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” I’ve never really paid much attention to this part of the passion gospel, probably just assuming that Jesus is trying to make sure his mother is cared for after his death. But the blog I read this week suggests a deeper meaning to these last words of Jesus. The author suggests that in these words-- “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.”— “Jesus entrusts his beloved disciple and his mother to one another’s care as the first members of his church. This is the beginning of the family God longs to create, drawing the two of them and all of us in love, to love and to be loved.”i Jesus’s act of dying on the cross is the gift of God’s love, utterly poured out, holding nothing back, a willingness to be completely empty of self in relationship with God and with others. Theologian Cynthia Bourgeault writes of this: “[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being ‘a new creation’: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart.”ii. By commending his disciple and his mother to each other’s care and creating the first Christian community, Jesus is inviting them and those who follow after them to practice this self-emptying, this pure love, not just with each other or those who live or worship together in community, but the invitation even extends to practicing this self-emptying, pure love, with the whole world. In Jesus’s gift of self-emptying love, he has redefined the terms of unity; he has changed the very fabric of existence. His death on the cross invites and brings about not just private healing but healing that embraces all of our relationships.iii. “The question, then, is this: Are we prepared to participate in that healing? Are we willing to set aside petty differences, the secret satisfaction that comes with self-righteous indignation, the defining moments we find in conflict with others, and the comradery that we nurture with those in our tribe?” iv Our proper liturgy for Good Friday invites us to participate in that unity that Christ offers in the portion known as the solemn collects—when we pray for the needs of the whole world. And it’s as good a place as any to start in emulating this self-emptying love of Jesus. As we pray for the church—for its unity in witness and service—may we empty ourselves of what we think that means, of what we think that would even look like, and commend and release that to God. As we pray for all the nations of the world and their peoples and those in authority, may we release our judgements about the people of our nation, our leaders, the people of other nations and their leaders, and may we all see ourselves as the one united family of God. As we pray for all who suffer, may we release our fear of our own suffering, the fear that blocks us from seeing the humanity in others who suffer. And as we pray for all those who struggle with their faith, including even enemies of the cross of Christ, may we be humbled by the awareness that our beloved Jesus Christ died not just for all of us but all of creation. In closing, I’d like to offer a passage from C.S. Lewis written about these last words of Jesus. It is a fitting prayer for all of us, the family of God, on this day. “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.” With those words You mend our broken relationships, Inviting us to embrace a world Forever changed by your sacrifice.”v i. The Last Seven Words of Jesus: “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.” | Frederick Schmidt (patheos.com) ii. Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 2004), 86–87. iii.Part of this section has been paraphrased from the Patheos article referenced above. iv. The Last Seven Words of Jesus: “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.” | Frederick Schmidt (patheos.com) v. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Harper Collins, 1996): 6f.

Palm Sunday 2022

Palm Sunday 2022 April 10, 2022 Years ago, the church I served in Gulfport, Mississippi, decided that we were going to have a float in the Gulfport Mardi Gras Parade. Mardi Gras is as big a part of that culture as St. Patrick’s Day is here; different groups and organizations create these elaborate floats on flatbed trailers high off the ground. They spend lots of money buying stuff to throw, and people from all up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast come out for the parades—some in the daytime, some at night. We decided that we would do it as a church, and we would use some of our throws to advertise the church and the service times. As a family, three of the Lemburgs were planning to participate. (David wanted no part of it.) And Mary Margaret, who was in early elementary school, was especially excited about the prospect of rolling in a parade. We weren’t sure what to do about Jack, who was in pre-school at the time, but he wanted to do it, and as he had already participated in his Episcopal pre-school’s “crew of chaos” parade where they dressed up, rode their bikes and threw beads at their parents from a platform, we felt like he’d be ok. I was in charge of purchasing all of our family’s “throws” for the parade, and I spent weeks doing mathematical calculations that involved how many beads a person could throw in a minute multiplied by how many miles per hour the float would be moving, factoring in the mileage of the parade route. (It took me weeks because—English major—remember?) I was determined that I was going to manage and mitigate the chaos ahead of time because we certainly did not want our church’s float to get the reputation of not buying enough throws and running out way before the end of the parade. (In Mardi Gras culture, there’s no greater shame than people riding by on a Mardi Gras float and only being able to wave at you about half-way through the parade route because they have run out of throws!) The day finally came. David stayed home and avoided the chaos all-together. The other three Lemburgs, dressed in our animal costumes (the float theme was Noah’s ark), loaded up our boxes and boxes of beads and plastic frisbees and moon pies with stickers on them advertising the church into our spot on the float. And then we waited, and we waited, and we waited. Finally, after hours of waiting, the float began to roll. All of a sudden, the sun had set, and it was dark and the lights from the streetlamps and the other floats were dazzling. We were filled with so much expectation, as the float rolled out of the staging area onto the parade route, the kids and I scooped up our first handful of beads from the boxes at our feet. I quickly rehearsed with them the bead disbursal strategy of how many beads a minute they were supposed to be trying to throw, and then, we hit the crowd. Out of the darkness, we are greeted by thousands of people lined up along the street. They’re waving their hands. They’re screaming at us to throw them something. There’s loud music blaring from our float and the floats ahead and behind us. And we do the only thing we can do in the face of such chaos. We start throwing beads just as fast as we can scoop them out. It was pure chaos. A couple of minutes into the chaos, I look down to check on Jack who’s standing beside me, and he has those first two handfuls of beads we had scooped up for him before the parade started, and he is just standing there frozen holding them with his eyes as big as saucers. I pause from my frenzied throwing to try to show him how to throw them, encouraging him to throw the beads, and the kid doesn’t move. So finally, I give up and go back to throwing beads at all the people yelling at me to throw them something. The observances of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter are not unlike our experience riding on the Mardi Gras float in Gulfport. Many of us enter these observances with different strategies. Some of us opt out all-together. Some of us make meticulous plans to try to control the chaos. Some of us freeze up in the face of such chaos. The invitation to all of us, starting this day and rolling through Holy Week up to the grand parade that is Easter Sunday, is to let the chaos come. As we walk in the last footsteps of Jesus, the invitation is to give ourselves over to the riot of emotions, to the conflict and the hypocrisy of a crowd, a hypocrisy we are not strangers to, a crowd who will shout both Hosanna to the king and crucify him in the same breath. To give ourselves over to the shame and vulnerability of having our own feet washed and the quiet joy that is uncovered in and through acts of love and service. To give ourselves over to the discomfort of praying for all sorts and conditions of people—to pray for all those who Jesus offered his life for under the shadow of an ugly wooden cross. To give ourselves over to participating once again in the deep stories our own salvation, as if they are happening to us now, once again, rather than just happening to people who lived long ago. In order to do this, we have to show up, hearts open to chaos and ready for whatever it may bring.

Fifth Sunday in Lent-Year C

Lent 5C_2022 April 3, 2022 I don’t normally pay any attention to celebrity gossip, but I have to confess that I have been intrigued by the drama that began at the Oscars last Sunday between Will Smith and Chris Rock, and I’ve paid attention (much more than usual) as events surrounding it continue to unfold. On the surface, the altercation seemed to begin when Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s hair. And I think I’ve been more curious about this drama, because it seems that there is so much more going on below the surface of the encounter. i. ii. So, when I first approached this week’s gospel reading, it’s no surprise that all I could think about was hair. In this week’s reading Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha throw a dinner party for Jesus, and while they are all sitting at table, Mary gets up, anoints Jesus’ feet with some expensive perfume and then wipes them off. With her hair. It’s a lavish gesture that, I will confess, makes me a little uncomfortable. And it makes Judas uncomfortable, too, because he starts complaining about it, then and there: "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" And the narrator of John’s gospel is quick in that moment to point out: “[Judas] said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” And then Jesus utters a line that is so often quoted in unhelpful ways: "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." So, what’s going on here and how might it apply to us? First, let’s look at some context. In John’s gospel, Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead (in the chapter just before this). This has created quite a fervor in the area, and the temple authorities have determined that Jesus (and maybe even Lazarus, too) needs to die. They are worried that it is provoking too much attention from their Roman occupiers who will eventually come in and destroy the temple in the time between Jesus’s death and when the author of John is writing. Jesus and those around him know that all this is going on, and they are clearly dealing with it in different ways. Second, the more I dig into this, the more intrigued I am about the differences between Mary and Judas. I think the writer of John does us a huge disservice by attributing Judas’s words to the fact that he is a thief. I suspect there is much more going on under the surface there for Judas than that. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m reading sociologist Brene’ Brown’s new book titled Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. In this book, Brown defines and delves into 87 different emotions to help us map the skills for meaningful connections. This week, I spent some time with Chapter 8: Places We Go When We Fall Short, which discusses the emotions of shame, self-compassion, perfectionism, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment. In this chapter, Brown focuses on how shame and empathy are mutually exclusive. She writes, “The antidote to shame is empathy. Shame needs you to believe that you’re alone. Empathy is a hostile environment for shame.” Later in the chapter, she elaborates on this: “Empathy is an other-focused emotion. It draws our attention outward, toward the other person’s experience. When we are truly practicing empathy, our attention is fully focused on the other person and trying to understand their experience. We only have thoughts of self in order to draw on how our experience can help us understand what the other person is going through.” iii She continues, “Shame is an egocentric, self-involved emotion. It draws our focus inward. Our only concern with others when we are feeling shame is to wonder how others are judging us. Shame and empathy are incompatible. When feeling shame, our inward focus overrides our ability to think about another person’s experience. We become unable to offer empathy. We are incapable of processing information about the other person, unless that information specifically pertains to their view of us.” iv What if what our gospel passage is giving us for today is the embodiment of empathy in the person of Mary and shame in the person of Judas? In imagining how Jesus might be feeling as he walks toward his death, Mary gives him all the love she can summon to give him his burial anointing early. Whereas Judas, one of Jesus’s most zealous followers, is caught up in wrestling with disappointed expectations and shame, so he cannot think beyond himself in that moment and he turns to a common tool to try to diffuse his own discomfort—that is humiliation of someone else. Here is what Brown writes about humiliation: “…humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence…. ‘Humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.” She continues, “This connection between humiliation and aggression/violence explains much of what we’re seeing today. Amplified by the reach of social media, dehumanizing and humiliating others are becoming increasingly normalized, along with violence. Now, rather than humiliating someone in front of a small group of people, we have the power to eviscerate someone in front of a global audience of strangers.” She concludes, “I know we all have deeply passionate political and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me—even when I’m enraged or afraid: ‘Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.’” v It’s been intriguing for me to think about these under the surface dynamics in today’s gospel passage and also in the encounter between Smith and Rock at the Oscars last week. Your invitation this week is to pay attention to what’s going on below the surface—in yourself and in others. Try to note the times when you fell shame this week. In those moments, ask the Holy Spirit to help you turn away from that inward focus and turn toward the outward focus of empathy. i.This was a helpful blog post that I read about some of these under the surface issues. It is written by a black man, and it was helpful to me in understanding some of the significance of Rock’s insulting Pinkett-Smith’s hair: https://scottwoodsmakeslists.wordpress.com/2022/03/28/will-smith-chris-rock-and-the-math-of-black-sadness/?fbclid=IwAR26T4GvwkGIsWi6ftYw-1WqDQsRfGQFG0IHsOrg3DGZcIY7S9R1g_MiUfo ii. This was also a helpful perspective: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/two-americas-debating-will-smith-chris-rock-oscars-slap/629407/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1ftjkKEPf402nBmGY4rWGcSUy4HymGkB_NpNj9fgo6yVEjuVi5oQl9h4k iii.Brown, Brene’. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House: 2021,p 137 iv.Ibid. p 142 v. Ibid pp148-149