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One of my best friends growing up was Lynn Hutchinson. Lynn had a lot going for him because he was the fastest runner in our class. I don’t know about you but that was a big deal. Recesses seemed to always end with a great game of tag and Lynn just couldn’t be caught. He was lightning fast and avoided the dreaded tag, even if more than one of my friends and I ganged up on him. He would just turn on the jets and *whoosh* he would be gone.

We spent a lot of time riding our bicycles and that same speed could keep back a few bike lengths from him if he put just a little bit of effort into pedaling. Most of our bike rides were leisurely so that wasn’t much of a problem. We spent a lot of time on those bikes, and I have many fond memories of long rides on gravel roads, hiking up hills and coasting down the other side. As I recall we would often end our journey by heading over to a local grocery store where we put our dimes in the pop machine where the bottles nestled together in ice cold water. Orange Nehi was my favorite flavor and if you were lucky to have an extra penny, a wad of gum could maintain that flavor for several minutes.

Our lives were filled with fun and adventure, always looking for an abandoned road that might take us on a short cut to either an abandoned and haunted farmhouse or maybe, we thought, to a short cut that would take us to some distant land where pirates, damsels in distress or a lost treasure might be found. Saturday mornings were made for those adventures so week after week, we headed out on  and adventure that was pregnant with possibilities.

As in all good things, those days came to an end with Lynn and his family moved from our small town to a small city many miles away. Our hope was to find a way to overcome the distance so that our adventures could begin anew.

We were in the third grade when Lynn moved. As it turned out, Lynn had a way to make everyone feel as if they were his best friend and so as our third grade year began, Lynn began to send letters to our class to be read by our teacher. It was great fun to hear from him as I would close my eyes and savor every word. Lynn was as good a writer as he was a bike rider.

One day our teacher stood in front of us to tell us something that most didn’t know. Lynn had an illness that seemed to have been disguised. I didn’t know he was sick and I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it, let alone spell it. Our teacher said he had something called leukemia and it had caused him to go to the hospital. That seemed odd and for several weeks, we didn’t get a letter from Lynn. Instead his mother wrote the letters and so we began to follow his journey, in and out of the hospital. Then one day, through choked back tears and sobs, our teacher read the letter from Lynn’s mother that told a classroom full of unsuspecting children that Lynn had died. Just like that. Lynn was gone.

How do you tell a third grader that one of his best friends had died? I knew death was final but how was it even possible that a child could die? What did that mean? Dealing with such trauma as a child had an effect on me that lingers to this day. I suspect it’s one of the biggest reasons I struggle with the story that we heard this morning. The woman with the flow of blood isn’t a challenge for me, the little girl who’s father was the head of the synagogue, challenges me. It seems so out of whack, so counter intuitive that someone like Lynn would die, yet the little girl lived. It would be easy to spiritualize it all, keeping from the reality of the struggle. What is here that not only helps, but reveals the truth?

I know what it’s like to stand over a dying child. I’ve done that too many times in my life as a priest. I know the pain, the panic, the sense of disbelief as a child slips away from all those that love her. I have no pixie dust to spread over the child or the family to fix it. I only have empathy that feels the pain, the loss, the unbearable realization that death seems so uncompromising. I cannot give false hope, nor does giving a canned response about heaven helpful to anyone. Death seems so unrelenting.

The reality of life isn’t always comforting. Too often faith seems to be a way to avoid the reality that we all face. So unless we just write off this story as either a fable or simply a spiritual story that has nothing to do with a sick child overcoming illness an living, we have to encounter a truth that most don’t want to preach about: sometimes illnesses lead to death. Sometimes despite the fact that we pray hard, and enlist the help of others, people die. Is there hope in that?

Yes. Life doesn’t always turn out the way we hope. But it is important that we are honest about it. Repressing those feelings always lead us away from God, not toward God. Sometimes the good guys lose and hatred can seem to overwhelm love. Sometimes our friend dies. Maybe our first step into that mystery is to acknowledge our feelings of fear, or anger or just feeling rejected. We often don’t feel God’s presence because we aren’t honest with ourselves, let alone God.

Our greatest challenge is in making God a consumer item. It’s a kind of quid pro quo: I’ll follow you Jesus and you keep all the illness and death at bay. Indeed, sometimes illness is healed. And sometimes it leads to death. But to truly follow Jesus is to let go of the outcomes and find a place for our soul. Not to spiritualize this but the goal of our faith is to lead us back to where we realize we are connected to all of humanity: those who suffer and those who are healed. There is a different place of living that God calls us. It’s a place where Richard Rohr calls “cosmic or spiritual joy.” It’s something we participate in; “it comes from elsewhere and flows through our own life. To find it is to find how the saints could rejoice in the midst of suffering, which to most of us is unthinkable.” Praise God for physical healing but when we can come to experience this spiritual joy, no matter what we face, that is true healing.

I still remember Lynn to this day. I pray for him and have, every day. I am sure those prayers have changed since my theology has graduated from third grade but his memory is seared in my heart. I know he was healed, just not the way I had hoped.

Sitting at the bar I could sense it.  I was there, with others, sipping a cold drink, even though it the weather suggested something warmer.  It came over me like a long forgotten friend.  Her face was familiar but her name was now unknown.  It was like I knew her, all about her, but I couldn’t remember a thing.  The coldness of the bar, of my drink, of the weather outside, kept me from more than just vaguely remembering.

Those sitting around me did not know what I was feeling.  The football game was blaring on the television overhead and I barely noticed. All I could think about was the feeling that was vaguely awakening inside me.  It was familiar, yet so distant.  Like the memory of riding on a horse drawn carriage on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.  I remember that but it’s more like a stolen memory from a movie I once saw.  I can’t remember the title or what happened.  I just remember seeing it.

So as I sipped the soda that sat in front of me, the gnawing memory of something I could barely remember caused a feeling of deep longing.  I looked around the bar and it seemed like I was in a two-dimensional space, full of black and white people that were supposed to be in a 3D world.  It just wasn’t right.  It promised beauty but provided only a false sense of what I felt was something everyone should know but was slowly awakening only inside of me.

Faulkner.  That was it.  Faulkner had once opened a world that was more than Monday morning.  It was more than paying bills.  It was even more than life and death.  Faulkner had once opened to me a world of true human emotions that transcended the mundanity of life as I had come to know.  As I sipped that drink, I knew that there is a world more dynamic than what I usually face.  It’s more than the weekly schedule, where I should I be, what I should do, and then doing it all over the next week. But it’s a world that only a few can glimpse, let alone live in.  It is a world where those who discover it struggle to make sense of those who have no clue.  It is a world where my son Joseph lived and continues to beckon me toward it. It’s a world of deep emotions and truth.  A world that few experience.

As I continued to let myself into the truth of the moment, I wondered where it would lead.  I also wondered if I could describe it.  There was a nagging feeling that it didn’t matter either way.  Who cares if I could figure out where it would lead and no one, other than myself, even knew I was trying to describe it.  If I ever got to the point of articulation, would it mean I won?  Or maybe would it mean I stopped living into the elusive mystery that seemed so close to me at this moment.  Maybe that’s what Joseph discovered.  To truly live may mean to truly let go.  And just live.  And know that life is not found in two dimensions, where everyone pays their bills and everyone has a manicured lawn. Life is most deeply experienced in the tears and the joy, the excitement of new birth and the sadness of death.  

Sometimes I want to throw away my television sets.  To lose the two-dimensional images of a world consumed by what I should buy or how I should dress sounds very attractive.  But what if I didn’t know what Trump did or said?  That is an attractive thought.

The Gospel this morning, has Jesus facing controversy based on something that is significant to us as we seek to live faithfully.

Jesus is walking with his disciples on the Sabbath and they’re hungry so they do what any of us would do, especially if you live in Kansas and find yourself in a wheat field. You just take a couple of stocks in your hand and pull upward. Voila. You have a handful of wheat kernels you can eat… or better chew on. If you’ve ever done that, it’s not like a great feast but if you’re hungry it helps. But for those around him, doing anything close to working on the Sabbath was strictly forbidden. It was the law. And Jesus just let it happen. It was just too much for those who watched it unfold.

This isn’t the only time he got in trouble with religious folks; many saw him as a sinner, and the way they saw sin, Jesus sure looked like one. Sin was seen as a violation of God’s law and those watching Jesus on that Sabbath knew that keeping the Sabbath day holy meant no work. Not even if it meant that you had to go hungry. Even grabbing a couple of wheat kernels and popping it in your mouth was considered work, and thus it was forbidden.  

There were no loopholes here. If you broke the Law, it was understood that you were disobeying God. It’s not that they thought it was even possible to live in such a way where the rules weren’t broken, so most people in the first century (and it’s the same with us) walked around in existential dread that God was angry at them. Just like the people in the story this morning, this motivates our actions but in a weird way. We try to do all these things hoping that somehow, God will grade us on the curve. We know we aren’t perfect, so we drown ourselves in guilt and regret but never live up to our own standards, let alone what we tend to think is God’s.

It’s clear to bystanders that allowing his disciples to do any kind of work on the Sabbath, Jesus is violating the law.  What happens when we do the same? Is God mad at us? When we fail to live in such a way where the commandments aren’t violated, is God more pleased with us? Is our future on shaky ground because, no matter what our attempts are, we always seem to fail? Brian McLaren articulates the effect this struggle has on us. He writes that most of us walk worrying about the future, our own and the future of those we love. He writes that we feel anxiety “and a sweet, piercing sadness, not just for ourselves, but also for everyone and everything everywhere, all at once.” We do all we can to mask the sense of doom but “we can’t shake this sense that were in trouble… our civilization’s Jenga tower is about to crumble, our inner sanctum of normalcy is about to be breached, our global status quo is about to blow, our scariest worst-case scenarios are about to stop being imaginary.”(Brian McLaren).

Part of our anxiety comes from thinking that God is mad at us. Most of us in this room believe there is a God but too many of us misunderstand who God is, how God both requires from us and relates to us. It’s no wonder we walk around confused, full of sadness, absurdity, and despair.

That’s why the Gospel is central to us as we seek a way to be faithful. Our future seems so tenuous and who could blame us for the despair we often feel. Yet Thomas Merton helps here because he reminds us how futile our worry is: “it doesn’t matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it or not… We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” This draws into question the despair we might feel.

Sin isn’t make believe. Its power destroys lives and threatens us. But why did Jesus seem to ignore the law? We say all the time that Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Let’s take a quick deep dive into what sin is.

“Sin is when we fail to live in loving relationships with one another as God intended, and instead allow desire to take us down the path toward envy, rivalry, accusation, violence, and murder. Sin is violence against others, and especially the violence against them that we commit in God’s name.”

Sin exists but it is “primarily violence and the things that lead to violence. Sin is the primary human problem because sin is damaging and destructive to humans and all human relationships. Those who sin are both hurt by sin and hurt others with sin.” Notice I didn’t say sin was violating a set of rules. It’s deeper than that and more insidious.

Sin is “living inhuman lives; lives that do not treat others as human beings made in the image of God, and lives that do not live up to our full potential as human beings in God’s image. Sin causes us to live as less than human.”

Here’s the key: “God is not angry at us for our sin. While sin is a serious thing, God is not concerned about sin simply because it is sin. That is, God doesn’t tell us to stay away from sin because sin offends, hurts or angers God. Purely from God’s perspective, sin just isn’t that big a deal. The reason God is concerned about sin and wants all humans to stop sinning, is not because God is offended or angered by sin, but because we humans are hurt and damaged by it.

Jesus tells us that the reason they believe the actions he allowed the disciples to take are sinful is that they misunderstood the reason for the Sabbath and the context in which the Sabbath laws were in place.  What was given to humanity was a gift of rest and reclaiming the goodness of creation. Don’t work, rest. Don’t push, enjoy. It was not supposed to be a restrictive commandment but a way to find happiness and health so that we can be faithful stewards. Law was given so that we can have wholeness in our lives and relationships. They weren’t supposed to be understood to keep God happy by obeying God’s rules. In a weird twist, we have taken something that was to give us freedom and health and right relationships into something burdensome and crushing. Jesus will have none of that.

Ultimately when we sin, we become alienated from God, from creation and from one another. It’s not about disobeying God, but, rather, it is us failing to live up to our God-given joy of being truly human. The goal is to not just live into a bunch of rules but rather, to become and live as fully human, like God desires. Things like lust, greed, theft and lying are sinful but not because they make God mad. They are sins because they deceive us to see others as a means to an end, and always lead to the very sin that crucified Jesus: violence against other human beings.

When we sin, it dehumanizes ourselves and other people in our lives, keeping us from living fully into the task God has given us: caring for others, creation and ourselves. God doesn’t want us to jump through hoops but rather to experience the goodness and promise of this life.  Jesus calls us to a depth of living that has nothing to do with keeping a series of do’s and don’ts but rather to a life where we love others as God loves us. That’s a life well lived. In Jesus name.

Funerals are strange things. At one level, it feels as if we should gather together and focus only on our devastation at our loss of Jan. It’s a huge loss and to not find a way to express it seems like we are avoiding the pain that Jan’s death brings. Life will indeed go on for us, but it will be different. For some of us it feels like we have been given the short end of the stick and we would rather not think about that. Just sort of swallow hard and find a way to go on.

Yet there is no denial here. We hear it in the lessons, the music, the personal remembrances; all of these are important to hear and embrace. Loss doesn’t go away when we deny it. It simply festers. It is important to feel our loss and it’s not a surprise that when we grieve deeply, its because we have loved deeply.

There is no use in denying our feelings because feelings refuse to be dictated by our desires. We tend to place values on our feelings, as if we can control them. We cannot. If we try to suppress them, grief ambushes us. As I told Rob, grief is like an unwanted house guest. You can make accommodations with it but it won’t go away. For many, grief is a lifetime companion but that doesn’t mean it will consume us. That’s why faith is a significant partner in our loss.

As humans, we are fully aware that life on this side of the grave will one day come to an end for all of us. As Rob talked to me about this, he referred to a poem by Linda Ellis. The poem reminds us that living our life fully is our faithful response to a life that one day will end. The poem begins:

“I read of a man who stood to speak
at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone
from the beginning…to the end.

He noted that first came the date of birth
and spoke the following date with tears,
but he said what mattered most of all
was the dash between those years.

Would you be proud of the things they say
about how you spent YOUR dash?”

Jan has completed her dash. She now rests with her family and friends who have gone before. We acknowledge the pain of our loss, celebrate her faith and thank God that our lives intersected with her during her time here. But is that all we have?

Jan was a woman of faith. She knew her gifts and talents were gifts from God. She thrived by sharing her gifts of teaching, singing, theatre, the love of learning, and friendship. Her marriage to Rob was a shining example of the goodness of life. And so we celebrate her life and our good fortune of having known her and being inspired by the way in which she lived her life.

Yet, we are caught up in the dichotomy of celebration and grief. We need to allow ourselves to live into the tension of both.

Many of you knew Jan better than I but I can say with conviction that Jan’s faith strengthened her in a life that wasn’t always easy. Despite challenges she faced, she was able to move through both challenges and triumphs with hope. She didn’t have a blind faith, she was much to thoughtful for that. Her faith was strong and unwavering, yet fully aware that problems don’t go away for those of us who share the same faith. She wasn’t a Pollyana but she was steadfast, even as she breathed her last.

We too must pass through the same door Jan has. But with a faith, steeped deeply in a God who loves us and never abandons us, like Jan we have nothing to fear. Our loss is acute, but our hope is greater. One day, when all that needs to be said is spoken and all of us will gather with Jan and others we love but see no longer, we will see that Death is not proud. Because of her faith, Jan now sees that love and life will have the last word. As John Donne has written:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Even though her body now rests in peace, it is the hope that she knew so well, that still fills her soul and gives us peace that one day, we will be reunited. Rest well dear Jan as we continue our journey. May our dash be as spectacular as yours.

I must confess that calling Pentecost the birthday of the church seems a bit too tame for me. I don’t mean that Pentecost is something else because it was on this day, a long time ago, that a group of Jesus followers gathered in prayer and had something incredibly important happen. When we call it the birthday of the church, our focus shifts from the powerfully mystical events that happened on that day to a desire to bake a cake and sing some songs.

It’s not surprising that we tend to tame things, especially those things that seem beyond our control. Why focus on flames of fire landing on heads or people beginning to speak in languages from around the world (which all make us a bit uncomfortable) when we can just throw a party.

We like a good party. We don’t like mystery and we struggle with a God that seems more invisible than present among us. When we start focusing on the mystical and the supernatural and the mysterious, we begin to feel overwhelmed. Control, not cleanliness, seems to be closest to godliness.

Yet, in its wisdom, the Church puts us face to face with the Holy Spirit, because you can’t have Pentecost without the Holy Spirit, and we start talking about the third person of the Trinity, there’s part of us that worry that we’ll start breaking out in speaking in tongues or handling snakes. That’s just a bit unseemly for most of us.

But God is a kind of unseemly God, isn’t God? We want to make this day a sort of general celebration that keeps everything safe. But, as Rachel Held Evans has written, “No one lives in general—not even Christ or his church. The Christian life isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of propositions, but about following Jesus in the context of actual marriages, actual communities, actual churches, actual political differences, actual budget meetings, actual cultural changes, actual racial tensions, actual theological disagreements. Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one. The reason the Bible includes so many seemingly irrelevant details about donkeys falling into pits and women covering their heads and Cretans being liars and Jews and Gentiles sharing meals together is because, believe it or not, God cares about that stuff—because God cares about us.”

But we would rather keep all of this under wraps so we don’t lose control. We have our ancients to thank for this since the early church seemed to be more about control than power. In fact, even the word Church has been manipulated so that we can keep everything in its right place. One of the first examples happened when biblical translators made a decision to change the Greek word for Church, Ecclesia (which means a people, a congregation or movement) to the Germanic word Kirche (which means building). If you consider church is nothing more than a building, then if you control the building, you control the people. You can do that when Church is Kirche but you can’t when it is a movement or ecclesia.

Pentecost is the day that, despite our efforts to control, God spoke right into that and said, “Nope. Try as you may, you can’t control the Spirit.” Jesus gave us a warning about the futility of control when he told us that the Spirit blows where the Spirit wants, not where we think She ought to. And so it was on that first day of Pentecost. We can only speculate what it was like but the writer of Acts describes the scene as “out of control. We read of “flames of fire” landing on the heads of those gathered and people speaking in languages representing all people groups around the world. They weren’t just babbling but proclaiming that God cares; God loves and God is about the business of bringing hope to a world grown accustomed to violence, greed and hatred.  

I find it ironic that since that day, we have struggled to understand what it was that happened. It hasn’t gotten any clearer in our day and age. How many of us say on Sunday mornings, “it’s time to go to church?” If the church is the people, then you won’t find it on your gps. If you want to see what the church was created to be, how we are supposed to live, take a peek at Acts 2:42.

Compare that to a church in the Czech Republic, that is made from the bones of about 50,000 skeletons. Upon entering the church, you are confronted with tens of thousands of skulls, skeletons, and bones. The walls and ceiling are covered with them. A giant bone chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The pulpit and baptistery are decked out with skulls.

The church was originally a monastery with a cemetery nearby. In 1278, the abbot of the monastery travelled to Palestine and returned with some dirt from the hill of Golgotha. He sprinkled this dirt in the cemetery, and when word of his actions spread, the cemetery became a popular place for people to bury their loved ones. Around the year 1400 a Gothic church was erected within the cemetery, and something had to be done with all the bones that were unearthed during construction. The bones could not be discarded or burned, for this would show dishonor for the dead. So, the bones were stacked in a lower chamber of the chapel. Over the years, the cemetery had to be expanded several times, and frequently, in times of war and during the bubonic plague, mass graves were dug, and thousands of people were buried at one time. Frequently, old graves were dug up to make room for new burials, and again, all the old bones were stacked in the chapel. Eventually, in 1870, a woodcarver was hired to put some order to the mass of bones, and from them he created massive bone archways, garlands of skulls, and a chandelier which contains at least one of every bone in the human body. A fascinating building but is it the church?

I’m pretty sure we won’t replace the Icons in Transformation with a bone-made chandelier but at least people would come in to peek at it. But lest we are tempted, I think it would take too much effort to make sure all the bones would stay in place. But if we can admit this, the church spends time, money and human resources to make sure everything holds together, even if we have two by fours and shingles rather than bones and skulls.

There is nothing wrong with making sure light bills are paid and our buildings and grounds remain in good repair but I wonder if through our diligence we keep things under wrap, trying to control God and God’s Spirit.  What would happen if we just let go? What is it we would stand to lose, or gain? We live in what feels like precarious times. As the great theologian Woody Allen said: “More than any other time in history, [humankind] faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The author Jeremy Myers reminds us that we “have been raised to new life in Jesus Christ. Our bones have been knit together to do amazing and beautiful and wonderful things! We are part of God’s church, God’s plan for this world. We have a leading role in the most amazing story ever told. We have been brought back to life so that we can carry forward the story of God. What will we do now? I, and all creation with me, cannot wait to find out. Rise up, O church of God! Have done with lesser things; Give heart and mind and soul and strength to serve the King of kings.”

Myers, Jeremy. Skeleton Church: A Bare-Bones Definition of Church (Close Your Church for Good, Preface) (p. 58). Redeeming Press. Kindle Edition.

Good morning! Happy Easter. Today is the easiest day during the entire year to preach. There is a lot going on here but it can be distilled down to a few basics: a cross, a crucifixion, a death, all of creation holding its breath and finally, this morning, an empty tomb. But as Brian Zahnd has written: “it would be a mistake to think we could sum up the significance of the crucifixion in a tidy sentence or two. That kind of thinking only insulates us from the magnificence of what God has done. In our ongoing quest to make meaning of the cross, we need to recognize that this conversation will never conclude—that there is always something more to be said.” For which this preacher is grateful.

Did you notice how discombobulated people are in the Gospel this morning? Jesus’ disciples had to be more than slightly dazed and confused on that first Easter morning. I mean, they had gone through so much and seen things that would take the rest of their lives trying to understand the full meaning.

It’s not a stretch to say that the disciples are not the only ones who struggled to make sense of what Jesus had spoken, done, and taught. Even though the events of that first Easter took place over two thousand years ago, we are still working through it. The resurrection was unexpected and challenged everyone to come to terms with what it meant.

If we struggle making sense of Easter, we’ve got some pretty good company. I think we get stuck in the whole miracle of it.

Rachel Held Evans reminds us of the challenge of miracles, especially when it comes to resurrections that follow crucifixions. She writes that “some will argue that the Bible’s miracle stories render the whole thing intellectually untenable, proving only the gullible and uneducated believe the Bible to be true. Others attempt to rationalize the miracle stories by developing elaborate, scientifically plausible explanations for them, whereby Lazarus suffers a cataleptic fit, the wise men spot a rare triple planetary conjunction, and Peter walks a conveniently located sandbank in the Sea of Galilee. Still others spiritualize every apparent miracle as strictly metaphorical, from the virgin birth to the healing of the blind and deaf to the resurrection of Jesus. And of course, many insist that only a literal interpretation of all these events will do.”

Is there another way to move forward? Faith seems to be in rare supply these days. As one author has written Easter is more than just something that happened once upon a time. There are many things that work against us, as 21^st century people, that cause us to wander in circles in the wilderness of the promise of Easter. We live in a world that is not a happy place. Many of us, or our children or grandchildren,  grow up inside a world that seems so empty that so many are drawn to easy and glib fundamentalism. Anything, even silliness it seems, is better than meaninglessness.

All of this leads to a loss of hope. And what is left? Probably just possessions, perks, and power. The real threat that we face is that greed and violence might just destroy us. If it weren’t for Easter.

We don’t have to figure it all out or get it all right to show up on this morning. We just have to stay on the journey. All we can do is stay connected. We don’t know how to be perfect, but we can stay in community. When we are connected, emptiness starts to disappear and meaning emerges.

Easter wasn’t a coincidence. In the fullness of time, it all happened. But be careful lest we make it into something magical and available only to a handful of people. When Jesus emerged from the empty tomb he didn’t say, “there, now you can go to heaven.” He didn’t say, “go on with your lives as you always have. The only thing that has changed is that you’re now forgiven.” To make Easter into that is to make it a sort of celestial, divine quid pro quo. Just believe and you get a crown, sort of thing.

No Easter is so much more than that. It was violence that killed Jesus. And the violence didn’t come from God. It came from us…. From humanity. It had always been that way. Humanity, left to its own devices, always destroys truth. Humanity attempts to eliminate love. Control and power are the two values that are always pursued and never deliver what they promise. So Jesus subverted the whole thing. As an embodiment truth and love, humanity couldn’t stand to allow Jesus to continue. So he took the violence, humiliation and ridicule that always accompanies love, and bore the sin of it so that we could be released from the power of it.

We may still be seduced by such, but its emptiness has been revealed in an empty tomb, a resurrected Jesus and the birth of the most spectacular revelation of all time: God is love and in God there is no darkness, no violence, only humility, enduring love and a hope that cannot be silenced.

Bradley Jerzak reminds us that the prodigal son is the essence of all scripture. He urges us to look for Jesus every where. “Jesus is that moment of clarity when the prodigal son finds himself in a pigpen and asks himself: What am I doing out here in this pigpen? Jesus is the impulse to return, and he is the road home Christ is the Father’s embrace. Christ is the open door into the Father’s houser. Christ is the erring, the robe, and the banquet table. And surely, if Christ can be the Lamb of Passover, he can also be the delicious, fattened calf offered at the great feast of God Christ is even there in the Father’s plea to the elder son: “Please son, come inside. Join the party.”

This, my friends, is why we celebrate. Happy Easter. It’s time to join the party. Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Everything, absolutely everything has changed. Alleluia.

Good Friday 3.29.24

When my son died a week and seven years ago, I knew that I would never feel so lost and hopeless. Losing a child is something that I never expected to experience but I always worried that I would. That sounds like something made up to say in a sermon, but it’s so very true.  I lost my dad when I was 23 years old and the pain of that loss was also intense. It’s easy to conjure up the feelings I had for both my dad’s unexpected death and my son’s, Joseph’s. While I thought the loss of my dad would always be the worst experience of my life, I now realize that it wasn’t even a close second to losing Joseph. I’ve often used a metaphor to describe Joseph’s death. It was like my skin had been removed from my body, it was so painful that it felt like I was dying. Yet my life continued and the pain only got worse.

I couldn’t go on as a priest. One of the hallmarks of my ministry has always been transparency, passion and hope. I felt like both were evaporating. At times, I couldn’t breathe. I would gasp for air and then wonder if I couldn’t get enough oxygen, I would just close my eyes and stop trying. Even to this day, I am amazed that somehow, here I stand, having rediscovered the passion and hope that I had relied on for so many years. Indeed, I can say with all the honesty and transparency that I can muster, my hope is more intense and passion more authentic than ever before. I suppose that might leave you with a question: how could I ever find both after such a bone crushing experience?

We were able to make it to Joseph’s bedside in just a few hours following our departure from Houston to Northern California. We knew that when we would get there, we would face something neither of us wanted to face. To see your first-born child clinging to life is a scene I hope none of you ever encounter. In fact is was worse than we expected. I wish I could tell you that my faith emboldened me to face whatever I would find in a powerful way, but that would be a lie. I felt many things but hope wasn’t there. Faith was but it took a back seat, making not even a murmur of a sound, acting as if it were simply a bystander, watching how I would deal with watching my son, slowly slipping from this life to whatever awaited him. I was mostly bewildered, wondering how I could go on without him. I also wondered what would become of Julie and me as we would soon have to gather around a freshly dug grave, watching our beloved son be lowered into a grave that seemed to have gotten it all wrong; he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to watch my body be lowered into the gaping mouth of the earth. And yet, there we were.

Much of what happened following his death is still a blur. There were arrangements to be made, people to be called and services to be planned. We had the funeral in Lawrence Kansas and a memorial service at the church where I served in Houston. At times it felt like I was situated outside of my own body, watching things happen. The busy-ness helped but I knew that there would come a time when there was nothing to plan, no one to call, nothing to do but to sit in this new reality, living in on an earth where Joseph was no more.

We had two services because we felt like it would help the church in Houston to be able to grieve with us. I am, to this day, grateful we made that decision. It’s not that I am so self-less but the sermon that the Bishop of Texas preached, still causes me to feel the love and support of not only the Bishop but also of God. Andy Doyle, the bishop, remains one of my most valuable friends.

When it was all done, I needed to reemerge. I was still the Rector of the parish in Houston and I needed to get back. In one of those moments of either grace or serendipity, I did make it back to preside and preach but that moment was either the best I could have imagined or the worse. That first time back in the pulpit was Good Friday. You would think I could have chosen better but I am not sure I could. For the first time in my life, on Good Friday I didn’t think about or even preach about Jesus. I was drawn to the broken heart of God, the Father. For the first time in my life, I got a full glimpse into pain of the Father.

I don’t know why I never considered the Father’s pain. I think I just thought that God knew what God was doing and since it was the plan from before time, then what the heck. Sure the Father allowed the pain, suffering, humiliation and death of his son, but that’s the story and I would rather ruminate on the loss Jesus experienced. Then God opened a new door and the beginning of my rebirth emerged.

There is so much more to this story but let me say it this way: the loss of Joseph forever changed me. God became more real to me. My theology changed. I became more accepting, more loving, more inclusive, more hopeful and more passionate. God never abandoned me. I never said “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” In fact I came to realize that even Jesus didn’t stop his recitation of the 22^nd Psalm with those words. What we fail to understand is that when someone in the first century would recite a psalm with just the first verse or two, the rest of the psalm was brought to mind. I had once thought that God had abandoned Jesus on the cross. I no longer believe that. Listen to a big part of this psalm:

But you, O Lord, do not be far away!
    O my help, come quickly to my aid!
²⁰ Deliver my soul from the sword,
    my life^[c] from the power of the dog!
²¹     Save me from the mouth of the lion!

From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued^[d] me.
²² I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;^[e]
    in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
²³ You who fear the Lord, praise him!
    All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
    stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
²⁴ For he did not despise or abhor
    the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,^[f]
    but heard when I^[g] cried to him.

²⁵ From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
    my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
²⁶ The poor^[h] shall eat and be satisfied;
    those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
    May your hearts live for ever!

²⁷ All the ends of the earth shall remember
    and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
    shall worship before him.^[i]
28 For dominion belongs to the Lord,
    and he rules over the nations.

²⁹ To him,^[ indeed, shall all who sleep in^[k] the earth bow down;
    before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
    and I shall live for him.^[l]
30 Posterity will serve him;
    future generations will be told about the Lord,
³¹ and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
    saying that he has done it.

Yes, God the Father delivered his son. In the process God the Father’s heart was shattered. I understood that in a powerful way.

You see: “The cross is not what God inflicts in order to forgive; the cross is what God in Christ endures as he forgives. This is an essential and enormous clarification! At the cross the Son does not act as an agent of change upon the Father. Orthodox theology has always insisted that God is not subject to change or mutation. Rather, God is immutable. Thus the cross is not where Jesus changes God but where Jesus reveals God. On Good Friday Jesus does not save us from God; Jesus reveals God as Savior! We don’t have to imagine the Son pacifying an angry Father in order to understand Good Friday as the epicenter of forgiveness.”

Zahnd, Brian. The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross (p. 16). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

It took me a while but as I allowed God to put all the pieces of my heart back together, I realized that through my story future generations will be told about the Lord, the goodness of God and despite the pain that life often brings, I will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

I’ve always struggled to preach on Palm Sunday. Over the years I’ve done a lot of improvising when it came to how, when and where I preached on this day. It seems like simply listening to the Passion Gospel is enough. Maybe the Quakers have it right, just listen to scripture and sit back and contemplate the words.

I think part of the problem is that we don’t want to get stuck on what is about to unfold in the next couple of days. We can handle the betrayal, denials and even the sham trial that Jesus faced, but we don’t want to focus too heavily on death. Save death for funerals or make it a metaphor for things that disappear from our lives, like bad relationships or a job that seems to zap the life out of us until we move on.

I think that’s why Easter is so popular, especially compared to Palm Sunday or Good Friday. I think we want resurrection, no doubt, but not the death part that seems to haunt us. Death is too big a deal and those of us who have experienced such loss, well it seems like we would be better off just dealing with it as quickly as we can. Sweep it under the proverbial rug before we have to come to terms with not just mortality of others but also our own.

I was reading this past week about how we have seen changes in the way we do funerals in the Episcopal Church since the liturgical renewal movement that led to the 1979 BCP. “There were black vestments; lots of gloomy hymns; sermons about how the loved one had just gone on to another place (as if death were no different than moving to Kansas City); “too much talk about the immortality of the soul and in general, according to this author, very little comfort for anybody with the wit to recognize that the corpse they were burying as a person they were going to miss like mad.” The author argues  that the church had pretty much lost its Christian nerve on the subject of death.

I would agree and suggest that despite the fact the prayer book changed the way we do funerals, we’re still stuck in a desire to push death as far away from us as possible.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that there was a Holy Week. My church had no services, we just jumped from Palm Sunday to Easter. In fact, I don’t even remember Palm Sunday as a thing. It was just a regular Sunday and the next one was Easter. No gloom and doom for us. No death, just resurrection. Of course we knew Jesus overcame death and the grave. So why focus on the part of the story that seems so troubling, after all we know how it all ends. It’s kind of like taping your favorite sports team on TV and then replaying it only after you know the results. Great way to watch a game, isn’t it? There’s no suspense, no drama, no concern or anxiety, especially if your team won. You can sit back, casually watch and let go of all the concerns that the other team might make a comeback.

I think that’s how we handle the Passion. Jesus is handed over to the authorities, he must go through a sham trail, is convicted and sentenced. Yes, there’s the humiliation of being stripped and hammered to a tree to die a slow excruciating death but you know, even though it’s Friday, Sunday’s a comin’. All this is happened but don’t worry, we win in the end.

If that’s our attitude, we miss out on so much. The whole story of the crucifixion has always been a stumbling block for those hearing the story. Remember Jesus was executed as a criminal by the Empire (Rome) and it appeared that Jesus was not powerful enough to resist Roman power. Many of those in the first century found it almost impossible to reconcile all this with what they had been told about Jesus, that he was the Savior of the world. If you look at it from this viewpoint, it’s no wonder that they couldn’t get their mind and heart around what they were being told: Jesus was the Christ, the redeemer of the world sent from God. Fine, they might have said but why couldn’t he have saved himself?  Paul would address this in his letters to the church and the Gospels themselves would unpack this but that was a generation away.   It’s not hard to imagine that this theological issue presented a hurdle that some folks couldn’t jump over. 

This very real problem might not enter our thoughts when it comes to the passion and holy week. We do know how it all turns out but if we skip over the week the whole story of Jesus life, death, resurrection and ascension will become just a part of a nice story, a fable if you will, that has little or no power to help us when we face loss in our lives.

We have to confess that Jesus suffering, humiliation, betrayal, denial and crucifixion is not only uncomfortable and troubling, it stands in the way of a theology that suggests that life well lived and blessed by God is a life that holds suffering and loss at bay. To follow Jesus, with that mindset, guarantees a life of ease, privilege and creature comforts. That kind of theology would have us believe that Jesus came down from heaven to make our life easy. As I participated in the Magdalene IV Stations last Sunday evening, I thought about the power of the passion in our lives. It is in the power of the passion that reveals God to us when “we see people overwhelmed by events or situations beyond their control; or we face the chaos, noise and distractions of life; or when we look upon people with disdain or annoyance that we tolerate only because we feel forced; or when the call comes in the middle of the night, or the doctor asks us to sit down for the test results, when it seems certain that we most dread; or when we find ourselves fighting back tears because we think they are signs of weakness; or when we make ourselves less able to understand be compassionate toward ourselves, and therefore to others as well; or when we stand among others who have been shamed or mocked; or when we avoid persons suffering from injury or illness or age because they make us uncomfortable; or when all seems lost, when we feel absolutely alone, completely drained, unable to even pray; This doesn’t help us much when we are holding the hand of our loved one when the news from the doctor comes and what we feared is what we hear. It doesn’t help us when we face discrimination and rejection based solely on our skin color or who we love.  

The innocent suffer and the tragic destiny of all truth leads to attempts to either snuff it out or to quiet it. God is most manifestly present with those the world rejects. Responding to violence through peaceful means seems impotent and so, despite the lessons of the Passion, we respond to violence with violence, continuing the cycle of death, destruction and devastation. But the story of the passion holds all that in its arms and suggests that despite what was expected, God moved in a powerful ways. And still does. Love indeed is more powerful than death. Despite our desire to just skip over the difficult parts, the Passion shows us that even in the midst of despair, hope is found.

What we just heard read from the Gospel is a big deal. Some say that this is the moment that everything changed for Jesus. In some ways, after Jesus cleared the Temple, the authorities believed that, if you understand the cliché, Jesus jumped the shark. They were at wits end and knew that if they were going to survive the occupation of the Romans, Jesus was simply causing too much turmoil. I’m sure they were upset that this upstart Messiah dared to challenge the way the Temple operated but the threat of Rome was probably their biggest concern. Rome valued law and order, peace and quiet among the people they occupied and clearly Jesus was stepping on far too many toes to just blow it off.

Of course, we usually read this story in different ways. Some make it a diatribe against capitalism; sort of railing against making money by selling items in the most holy of spaces.  Others look at how Jesus is anything but meek and mild, sort of making him into a kind of a middle linebacker for the Huskers, an angry muscular athlete who doesn’t mind knocking together a couple of heads in order to make a point. I am sure there are a lot of other things we can tack onto this story, making it sound more like a new, revised Jesus. No more of the meek and mild Jesus, riding on the back of a donkey, or making time for children in the midst of a busy schedule.

At least this is no Franco Zeffirelli Jesus, ignoring anything to keep his appointment with his rendezvous with the cross. Whatever you might think, it’s surprising to see Jesus so animated about a few pigeons and a dove or two being sold in the temple. So, as with so many stories in the Gospel, we need to take a deep dive to find the truth of what is going on.

I think we would all agree that we want to be careful to not just make something up that seems palatable to us and go from there.  I’m not sure what you have heard but one of the oddest takes that I heard someone say once is that this episode is why having church garage sales, with all the racks of ill-fitting clothes hanging near the reserved sacrament is wrong.  

Since we are about to have a book sale, I think it is incumbent upon me to let you know that there is nothing wrong with having one. Indeed, if you ever run across a Catholic Church having a bingo night, rest assured, it’s ok to swing into their parking lot and try your hand a game of chance. That’s not what this Gospel is about.

Nor is about Jesus being angry because somehow these people were violating one or more of the ten commandments like having no other gods before” the God of Israel. Of course, we play a risky game trying to get inside of the head of Jesus, but that has never been an issue with those who try to make sense of this rather odd scene.

One of the issues we share with our forebearers in the Church is that we often get confused with the stories about how God acts and how humanity consistently responds. What helps us here is to remember that when God revealed God’s-self first to Abram and later to a whole host of others including people like Moses and Miriam, Rachel and Jacob, Joseph and Elijah, Isaiah and Nehemiah, and many, many others, they struggled in the same way we do to understand who God is and how God acts. To cut them some slack, they didn’t have much to go on other than consistent encounters with God. They had a belief that there were a whole host of other gods surrounding them and all these pagan, gnostic gods shared many things in common, they presented their particular god as full of anger, retribution and violence. Because this was the only context they understood, they felt God was violent, capricious and desired getting even with humans who just never seem to get it. For these folks, the cross is a sign of God’s wrath being put on Jesus in order to satisfy God’s anger.

If we have this mindset we people did their best to calm down God by coming up with an elaborate sacrificial system. Somehow, they felt, if they could slaughter some animals, God’s re-tributive justice could be satisfied and they could live in peace, or as close to it as possible. They adopted a custom familiar with the religion of pagans that lived near them by practicing children sacrifice, in an attempt to satisfy an angry god. In fact some scholars believe the refusal of God to accept the sacrifice of Isaac was a paradigmatic shift for the children of Israel. No longer would God allow such horrific action in order to appease God. As I already have said: God doesn’t need to be appeased because God loves; God isn’t angry and God doesn’t practice re-tributive justice. God’s justice is restorative because as we prayed on the first Sunday of Lent, God does not desire the death of sinners but rather, that they be restored.

By the time our Gospel story takes place, the sacrificial system had become quite specific and, if you ask me, quite unsettling. There were all kind of ways to sacrifice but most involved things like birds, and smoke and a whole lot of blood.

Of course as Midwesterners, we find such things a bit over the top. But it would be wrong to simply dismiss all of it. There was a reason sacrifice became a part of Temple worship and there is much to learn from studying it.

When Jesus entered the Temple in the story that is shared this morning, there are people who are selling many things but mostly they are selling animals to be sacrificed. Lest we think Jesus is the first one to take exception with this practice, we ought to take a look at what God had said through the prophet Hosea: “for I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and an acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Even so, this significant reminder that there was no need to appease God through sacrifice had gone largely ignored. I think we understand that. It’s hard to drop traditions that are so meaningful to us. Yet, it would serve us well to remember a seminal belief in the Episcopal Church that in Latin says “Lex Credendi, Lex Orandi” or “prayer shapes believing.” For us, that is why in our bulletin we print the following: “all who feel called are invited to receive communion.” I love that because this table doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to God and God will never turn anyone away from experiencing God through communion. We pray that way and it shapes what we believe.

Jesus walks into the Temple, notices that Hosea’s prophetic voice was still being ignored, turned a whole bunch of tables upside down and then uses a homemade whip to drive people out. Simply put, Jesus was telling people they had it all wrong. It was love that God desired to share and receive, not sacrifice. And this apparently was too much. It was the final straw and soon a decision would be made that for the benefit of all people in Israel, Jesus would have to be silenced.

Here we are two thousand years later. Our task is not to find ways to appease God but to share in the love God has for all people. God is not angry, vindictive or full of re-tributive justice. God is love and in God is no darkness at all. Our task is to realize that God’s love soaks deeper into our world when we take what we have experienced, love, and share it with all, especially with those different than us.

I came across a quote this week that made me think about our journey of Lent, under the shadow of the cross. “Whoever feels attracted to Jesus cannot adequately explain why. We must be prepared to be always correcting our image of Jesus for we will never exhaust what there is to know. Jesus is full of surprises.” (Adolph Holl) 

I like this thought because it resonates not only with my experience but also with scripture. The disciples were clueless about what Jesus was doing as the events toward his arrest, betrayal and denial drew near. There are some scholars who believe that Judas was attempting to push Jesus to take forceful action when he made the decision to betray him. I don’t suppose we can ever really know but clearly Jesus was not dissuaded from continuing his journey toward that fateful week despite the attempts to subvert his actions. Jesus was not following the desires of his followers. Instead, his journey was deeper and more mysterious than those closest to him understood.

Often in our own lives, our expectations about how Jesus will respond to us seem equally mysterious. Jesus is full of surprises. We don’t always get what we anticipate but we are never outside of the love that God freely offers us despite the uneasiness that life often presents. As we continue taking the steps of Lent that lead to the cross, I am reminded that no one expected Jesus to be crucified and certainly an empty tomb was bewildering to all those who were following him.

Yet don’t let the surprises derail you. God has promised never to abandon us and I am a witness to that truth. I encourage you to keep your hearts open and pay attention because an encounter with God is both amazing and always surprising.