Author Archives: mbj

“Get up and eat”

“The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’  He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights…”
–1 Kings 19:7-8

Those of you who come to church every week have probably noticed that as far as the Gospel reading is concerned, someone seems to have pushed the pause button.  For a while now our Gospel text has been drawn from the very same chapter of the Gospel of John.  Today we reach the midpoint of a stretch of five Sundays in which the Gospel passage comes from Chapter Six of John’s Gospel, the chapter in which Jesus feeds the five thousand and then launches into a long meditation on being the bread of life.  The imagery of Jesus as bread from heaven, as bread for the soul, is so evocative and so important that here at the height of summer our lectionary brings it back to us week after week, so that we can chew on it a while – savor it, relish it, wonder about it, and perhaps really take it in.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells us today.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).  Jesus is offering himself to us as food and drink, and naturally our minds turn to the Eucharist.  What wisdom are we learning here, Sunday after Sunday, as we listen to the familiar words of consecration and receive again the bread and wine?  How does receiving Communion shape our souls, so that gradually we come to radiate the love that created us and that will greet us at our journey’s end?  There are many ways to answer these questions, for the Eucharist is inexhaustible — it can never be fully grasped or explored.  We are in the presence of a mystery that is larger than our minds can fully comprehend.  But as I consider the Eucharist, three things stand out for me, three ways that the Eucharist teaches us how to take in the bread of life.  As I see it, the Eucharist speaks to us about intimacy, attention, and thankfulness.  So I will say a word about each.

The God I meet in Jesus, the God I meet in every Eucharist, is a God who seeks intimacy with us, a God who longs to draw close.  So many of us are filled with self-doubt.  So many of us speak harshly to ourselves, or find constant fault with ourselves.  What a contradiction it is to that inner voice of self-attack and self-rejection to meet a God, Sunday after Sunday, who is eager to welcome us home, eager to listen to us, to bless us, to receive us just as we are.  There is something very intimate about standing up to approach the altar, about stretching out our hands to receive the bread and hold the cup.  God in Christ is longing to meet each one of us in particular, and as we take in the bread and wine, we are saying Yes to that encounter, Yes to a very personal, quiet, and intimate moment in which we take God into our depths.

When I distribute the bread, I trust that the bread I am placing in each outstretched hand will go exactly to the place in that person’s soul that most needs healing or transformation.  Perhaps the person is coming to Christ with a broken heart, or perhaps the person is restless and dissatisfied, searching for something more.  When we kneel at the altar rail, we may be worried or angry, lonely or joyful.  It doesn’t matter.  Whatever we bring with us to the altar – whoever we are, whatever our wounds or delights – Jesus longs to meet us right where we are, to heal us, to give us what we most deeply need: himself.

These quiet moments of communion offer us intimacy not only with ourselves and with Jesus.  They also give us a glimpse of our connection to each other.  We share the one bread.  We drink from the same cup.  And afterward, as we return to our seats and sense the presence of others who share our wounds, our longing and healing in Christ, we may be startled by the sudden discovery that we are part of one another.  We share a connection that goes deeper than any merely social identity.  Now Christ’s blood is flowing in our veins.  Now Christ’s body becomes our body.  We can never again fall for the illusion that we are isolated and alone, or that our identity ends with our skin.  We are part of a larger whole.  Through the Eucharist we taste our intimacy with Christ, and Christ is always enlarging the boundaries of our love.  There is no limit to love.

So, I am learning about intimacy.  The Eucharist also teaches me to pay attention.  Let’s be honest here.  For those of us who often come to church, it can be easy not to pay attention.  Many of us have probably memorized most of the words and gestures, and it is easy to slip into automatic pilot and just go through the motions, standing, sitting, or kneeling at the appropriate times, while our minds rush hither and yon from one distraction to the next.  It’s not surprising, really – we live in a fast-paced, go-get-‘em culture that favors multi-tasking and speed.  Some years ago I read an article in Newsweek that reported that the goal of fast-food outlets is to get to 90: that is, “to take an average of 90 seconds from the moment a driver places an order at the menu board to the moment when the food is handed out of the takeout window.¹”  I wouldn’t be surprised if the food goes down in 90 seconds, too, before we’ve had a chance to really taste it.  Most of us live faster than humans are designed to live.

I think it’s vital that the Eucharist be a meal that we do not hurry, a meal to which we give our full and undivided attention.  For this meal, at least, we park the car and put down the cell phone.  We shut off the TV.  We take our time.  We savor the familiar words.  We give reverent attention to one bite of food, one sip of wine.  We know that God is intimately present to us, and we become as present to God as we can, listening for the nuances, the surprises, listening for what happens within us when the experiences of the week just past come up against the truths of God.  Every Eucharist has something fresh to give us, some new insight to disclose – but only if we pay attention. 

And isn’t paying attention one of the basic practices of the spiritual life?  When we pay attention, we notice the present moment.  We find the sacred not in some transcendent, untouchable realm somewhere else, in some heavenly place “out there,” but right here in the present moment, just as it is.  Contemplative awareness is sometimes defined as living on the spot where you are, or living in the now, making contact with the present – and staying there. Maybe learning to be present for this sacrament is a training ground for learning to be present for the rest of life.  Every moment can be a sacramental moment, a moment of perceiving and participating in the presence of God, but that can happen only if we are paying attention, only if we are awake.

And finally, the Eucharist teaches us to give thanks.  That, of course, is the meaning of the Greek word, eucharistia: thanksgiving.  In our “Great Thanksgiving” we recall the blessings of life and above all God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ.  Every week, we proclaim that it is a “right, good, and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks” to God.  What a powerful reminder of the fact that when we are fully engaged in life, we are full of thanks.  Whenever we look clearly into experience, we realize that everything is surprising, everything is gift.   I awoke this morning – thank you!  There are people to love – thank you!  There is work to do – thank you!  There are challenges to face – thank you!  There is a breath to inhale, a breath to exhale – thank you!  I am alive, and here I am, in this miracle of a day – thank you!  As Jewish writer and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”  When we make a practice of giving thanks, thankfulness eventually takes hold of us, not because something special has happened, but just because we are.  Why is threre something rather than nothing?  Why am am I here now, rather than not here?  In our brief lives, we live an unfathomable mystery.  What to do in the midst of a glorious mystery?  Give thanks, give thanks, give thanks.  More than one person has begun to seek God simply from a need to give thanks.

Intimacy.  Attention.  Thankfulness.  These are three spiritual practices that I learn from the Eucharist.  Like Elijah, we may arrive at the table feeling depleted, even desperate, and yet when we do what the angel urged Elijah to do, when we “get up and eat” (1 Kings 19:5,7), we discover that in the strength of this food the journey ahead is not too much for us.  Jesus came to bring us life, abundant life, and thanks to the gift of himself in the Eucharist – and moment by moment as we go through our day – our deepest longing is satisfied.  God is with us to strengthen and guide, to bless and give cheer, and we do not walk our journey alone.

1. George F. Will, “At the Table/On the Road,” Newsweek, June 26, 2000, p. 68.

Radiance on the Mountain

I can’t imagine a more appropriate context in which to ordain and consecrate Rob Hirschfeld as a bishop than the Feast Day of the Transfiguration.  We’re on the mountaintop today, gathered to celebrate the transforming power of the Spirit of God.  As we heard in the passage from the Gospel of Luke, about a week after Jesus foretells his death and resurrection, he takes with him Peter, John, and James and goes up on the mountain to pray.  In the solitude of that holy mountain, with its long, sweeping vistas and its cold, clean air, Jesus’ prayer grows into an intense religious experience.  “While he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29).  To describe this change, Greek manuscripts use the word “metamorphosis” (metemorphothe);  Latin manuscripts use the word “transfiguration” (transfiguratus est).  Whatever you call it, it’s the same thing: at the top of the mountain, Jesus is swept up by the love that sustains the universe.  What Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and other stars”¹ so completely embraces Jesus that who he really is, who he has always been, is briefly revealed.  A dazzling brightness emanates from his face, his body, even his clothes.  The sacred radiance at the center of reality is shining through him, bursting through his seams, streaming from his pores, and even the three sleepy disciples can see it.

What just happened?  The holy presence that secretly abides within every person and every part of the created world has suddenly, briefly become visible to the human eye.  The vivid image of Jesus lit up from within accords with the experience of mystics from every world religion who speak of a vibrant, shimmering energy or light that flows through everything, although usually we don’t it.  In Asia, the cosmic life force is called chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit, and in many Eastern traditions, enlightenment is associated with a flow of energy throughout the body.²  Christian mystics likewise speak of the Holy Spirit as a Presence or energy that moves through the body, and the body of creation.  For Christians, there is something deeply personal in this energy: it is the dynamic, creative Presence of the Holy Spirit.  When we sense its presence within ourselves or in the outside world, God seems to light up the edges of things or to shine out from within them.  We see the hidden depth behind the veneer of ordinary reality.  The eternal makes itself known to us, and we may experience it as light, although it is beyond the reach of ordinary sight.  That’s where the language of paradox and poetry comes in, where mystics speak of a “dazzling darkness” or a “dark radiance,” just as in this passage Luke uses the language of paradox when he describes Jesus’ experience in terms of both a dazzling light and an overshadowing cloud (Luke 9:29, 34).  Something about perceiving that radiant darkness awakens our love.

I like it that God’s transfiguring radiance is at the center of this celebration, because I’ve heard some people say that Rob is a safe choice for the next bishop of New Hampshire – after all, he’s white, he’s a man, and he’s straight.  You might expect someone like that to be bland and timid, maybe to do what the disciple Peter did on the mountain.  Peter was so overcome by the vision of divine glory that – not knowing what he was saying (Luke 9:33) — he started chattering about building three tents or dwelling-places right there on the mountainside.  It is easy to identify with Peter, because when God shows up and we are confronted by the disruptive and untameable reality of holy mystery, our first instinct may be to try to regain control and to build some tidy, little boxes that we hope will contain the unruly energy of God – somehow box it in.  When we’re in that frightened-Peter mind-set, we want to play it safe.  

Bishop Gene Robinson and the Diocese of New Hampshire have been courageous in bearing witness to the liberating love of God over the past nine years, and I am sure that when Gene announced his plan to retire, some people were hoping that in its next election of a bishop, the diocese would choose someone safe.  Well, I’ve known and worked with Rob for a good long while, and I have to say that he is not safe – no, really, he’s not.  By which I mean that Rob’s fundamental intention is to liberate the love and creativity of the Holy Spirit.  Rob is a person of prayer, and anyone who returns day after day to the holy mountain of prayer and lets God’s creative life pour into him or her is going to be less and less satisfied with the status quo, less and less willing to settle for doing things the same old way, the way we’ve always done them.  Some of the ways that we’ve been doing things aren’t working, so it’s time to let the river of God pour forth into new channels of prayer and action.

I want to suggest two ways that we often misunderstand transfiguration.  One is to think that transfiguration is only for someone else – for Jesus, maybe, or for Moses.  Or maybe transfiguration is only for mystics or the really pious, or, heaven forbid, only for bishops.  I invite you to pull out your service leaflet and to take a look at the image on the front cover.  Please notice that this classic icon is not a picture of Rob being consecrated bishop.  It is a picture of Jesus Christ transfigured on the mountain.  But you know what?  It is also a picture of you, of your own true self when you allow God’s light to light you up!  The transfiguration that Jesus experienced on the mountain is available not only to him, and not only to the few, the elect, or the elite.  It is available to everyone.  As Irish poet John O’Donohue puts it, “there is a secret immensity in every life.”³.  The glory that shone through Jesus Christ is already shining in our hearts, longing to blaze up like fire and to melt away everything in us that is less than love.  Divinisation – the process of participating more and more consciously, more and more fully in the life of God – begins with our baptism, when our soul is united with Christ.  The incarnate Christ is our mediator, our doorway to the divine, the one who says, “Everything I have is yours; I give you my joy; I give you my glory” (c.f.  John 14-17).  Each of us has a chance to discover what that means in our very particular life, to become intentional about our spiritual journey as we seek day by day to grow in love and to make ourselves more available to God, more vulnerable and more open to God’s intimate presence.  Transfiguration is the flowering of our belovedness and our baptism, the fullest expression of who we were born to become – a people lit up with God.

But if we accept that holy transfiguration is in fact intended for us, then along comes a second misunderstanding – the temptation to make it a project of the ego, to claim credit, to strut, to parade ourselves, to make a show.  If the ego catches your soul preparing to ascend the mountain of God – if the ego sees you packing your water bottle, your compass, your map, and a change of socks – the ego is going to take notice.  “Hey,” says the ego, “If you’re heading up the mountain, I’m coming, too.  I want to polish myself up and look all gleaming and shiny, to stand above everyone and be important.  I’ll just hop in your backpack and inflate it a bit.”  So ego jumps in!

Rob tells me that soon after he was elected bishop, a friend said to him, with some excitement, “Hey, Rob, now you can climb up Mount Washington and look out at everything you see and say, ‘All this is mine.’” 

Of course that’s what the ego wants to do.  Jesus faced down that temptation, and empowered us to face it down, when he stood with the devil on a high mountain during those forty days in the wildernes and refused to worship anything less than God (Matthew 4:8-10). 

What’s odd and paradoxical about transfiguration is that we can reach the top of the mountain only when we’re willing to go down.  The path up the mountain is also the path that leads down, for it’s humbling to discover the ego in our backpack.  It’s humbling to notice how many parts of ourselves are not loving and not filled with light.  The higher we climb up the mountain and the more the soul is illumined by God, the more clearly we see our weakness and limits, our blindness and confusion, our self-centeredness and hardness of heart.  So the path up to holiness also leads downward into repentance and humility, into a more complete dependence on the mercy of God.  The more we open ourselves to divine light, the more we learn to gaze on ourselves and other people with compassion, for all of us are a work in progress, and soul-work takes time.

The path down the mountain also propels us to seek God in our ordinary lives – not just in spectacular experiences, but also in the daily round of family life and committee meetings, in the apparently humdrum routine of what we do every day.  How is God shining through this moment, as I wait in line, as I drive my daughter to a lacrosse game, as I plan a meeting, as I wash the dishes?   Can I breathe in God’s light right here, right now?  For God’s brilliance is always just below the surface of things, visible to eyes that have learned to look at the world with kindness and compassion.

Sometimes we begin to shine, and the people around us feel the blessing and catch the fire.  You notice that when Jesus was filled with light, his disciples shared in the experience, too: they saw his radiant face and clothes; they were overshadowed by the same cloud that overshadowed him; they heard the same divine voice that rang in his ears.  There is something about religious experience that is not for ourselves alone: when one person lights up with the presence of God, other people light up, too.  It’s infectious.  It’s catching.  And so other people are inspired to take up their own spiritual journey and to learn how they, too, can become who God intends them to be.  They, too, will be impelled to engage in the great work of our time – to tackle climate change and poverty, discrimination and war.

In a few moments Rob will be examined by the Presiding Bishop and will make a series of promises.  The bishops will lay their hands on his head and pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to his own path to transfiguration, not just for his own sake and for the salvation of his soul, but also in service to the light that shines in you.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to shepherd the secret immensity of each person he meets, to help you see and know that God is shining out from within you and that everyone has a place in God’s heart.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to tend the hidden radiance of this diocese, to bring to light your creative possibilities and to encourage and share in your ongoing quest to be transfigured into love itself.

Rob, we thank you for your willingness to do this.  I urge you to keep doing what you’re doing: to carry the pure light that shines in you, and to hold fast to the practices that make you available to God.  Set aside regular time for solitude and silent prayer, for rowing, painting, and writing poetry, for taking long walks to nowhere with Rocky.  

You know that bishops are like an oak tree – they stand in a high place and, like a lightning rod, attract a great deal of energy, both positive and negative.  So I urge you to stay grounded, to sink your roots deep into the love of God, so that you don’t get knocked over.  Keep listening to the inner voice that always whispers in your ear, as it whispers in every ear: “You are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Welcome your inevitable failures and lapses, for they are part of the journey, too.  Thanks be to God, it’s the path down the mountain that teaches us humility and forgiveness.  Our failures can be the gateway to compassion for ourselves and other people.

And I hope that you will savor the ordinary, the challenges and tasks of family life, the routine business of the Church – for a secret divinity is hidden within each moment.  Beneath the humdrum of the ordinary, we can hear the drumbeat of the Spirit. 

There are plenty of  challenges ahead – no question about that.  So let’s look to the light, to the glory, and take this journey together.

1. William Johnston, “Arise, My Love…”: Mysticism for a New Era, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000, p. 115.

2. Ibid.

3. John O’Donohue, “The Priestliness of the Human Heart.”

No Leisure Even to Eat

“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”
–Mark 6:31

By deciding to come to this retreat, you accepted Jesus’ invitation to come away for a while and rest.  Like the apostles, we may be very busy, living scattered and distracted lives, hurrying from one task to the next, “coming and going.”  Many of us know what it’s like to  be “coming and going” inwardly, too, feeling full of confusion, handling conflicting emotions.  Jesus knows that we need to come away to a quiet place of solitude and inward listening, so that we can sort out what is in us, rest in the love of God, and touch our essential nature as the beloved of God. 

I am moved by the observation that the apostles had “no leisure even to eat.”  Those of us who struggle with food may very well eat with no sense of leisure – maybe we eat standing up or on the fly, while we’re driving or reading, working or otherwise multi-tasking.  We may grab every possible opportunity to eat, but eat without satisfaction, without really being filled.  We may eat with a sense of shame or guilt, anxiety or disgust, rather than with a sense of serenity and leisure.

Whether or not we’re wrestling with an eating disorder, we come away on retreat because we’ve reached a point where we want to stop our restless “coming and going” – we want to find our center in God, that still place deep within where we know that we are seen, known, and loved.  We come away on retreat because we want to find leisure to eat: we want to learn not only to handle food more wisely, but also to appreciate and to take in each moment as it is given to us. We want to breathe in the love of God that is given to us breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, and to let that love tranform our lives. We want to learn what it feels like to be fed.

Jesus knows the need of the apostles to come away and rest a while, and find leisure to eat — and he knows our need, too.  Jesus the good shepherd knows our hunger to be seen, known, and loved, and our longing to be healed and made whole.

Heaven knows that when we were small, for one reason or another the important people in our lives may not have noticed or been able to provide what we needed and were most hungry for.  So how precious it is when our hungers are seen and taken seriously!

A wonderful story comes to mind that I heard a while back. 

A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant.  The waitress took the orders of the adults, then turned to the seven-year-old. 
‘What will you have?’ she asked. 
The boy looked around the table timidly and said, ‘I would like to have a hot dog.’ 
‘No,’ the mother interrupted, ‘no hot dog.  Get him meat loaf with mashed potatoes and carrots.’
‘Do you want ketchup or mustard with your hot dog?’ the waitress asked the boy. 
‘Ketchup,’ he said. 
‘Coming up,’ she said as she started for the kitchen.

The people around us may not think we are real – but Jesus knows we’re real.  Jesus knows that our longings matter.  Like the waitress in the story, he turns to us and asks, “What will you have?  What are you hungering for?  What is the longing so deep that you can barely put it into words?”

Jesus came to bring us life, abundant life, and the first way he works with our desires is to awaken them.  For those of us trained since childhood to believe that our needs and feelings don’t matter, and that everyone else’s desires are more important than our own, it is startling to meet in Jesus someone who takes our desires seriously.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ very first words to those who approach him are, “What are you looking for?  What do you seek” (c.f. John 1:37).  “Ask,” he says elsewhere, “and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-11).  In other words, risk expressing your desires in prayer.  Dare to give them voice.  In the face of all the pressures to shut down, to go numb, to stay anesthetized, dare to listen for the power that rises from your depths, for the deep Yes that is connected to your life-force and your deepest creative energy.  The God we meet in Jesus is a passionate God, a God who provokes and nudges and galvanizes us to join in the dance of life, and who wants to awaken us to our full potential as human beings.

If the first way that Jesus works with our desires is to awaken them, the second is to set them free.  He says not only “Ask, seek, knock,” but also  “Leave it, drop it, sell it.”  Drop your nets and follow me.  Sell your possessions.  Put it down.  Give it away.  Let the dead bury the dead.  As Jesus says in Mathew’s Gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid.  Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:14).

When we know what matters most, we can let other things go.  When we are in touch with our most authentic longing, we are free to release the people, places, and things to which we once so desperately clung.  It is an experience of inner liberation.  It doesn’t mean that we no longer enjoy the things of this world — on the contrary, we do enjoy them, we relish them, we delight in them, but what’s different is that now we enjoy them without clinging or clutching.  When we know, really know, that our hunger is for the eternal, that only the Infinite can satisfy our infinite longing, then we can eat with our friends and enjoy the food. 

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves,” the good shepherd says to us tonight, “and rest a while.  Let me awaken your desires, and let me set them free.  Let me feed you with the bread of life, for I see you and know you and love you.  Here your hunger will at last be satisfied, and in the strength of this bread, you will have power to give yourself as bread to other people.”

Just after the passage we heard in tonight’s Gospel, Mark goes on to tell the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.  In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost.  We will gather at this holy table so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed — not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves and the whole creation, every leaf of it and every speck of sand.  Sharing in Holy Communion helps us to perceive at last our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, and also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed.  Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin.  In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, our deep hunger is filled.  For this I want to say: thanks be to God. 

1. Jack Kornfield, “Respect for Parenting, Respect for Children,” Inquiring Mind, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring, 1992, p. 8.

Finding God in goodbye

My husband has led retreats for many years, and from time to time he invites retreatants to bring a poem to share with the group. Invariably, absolutely without fail, someone brings a poem by Mary Oliver, usually “Wild Geese” or “The Summer Day.” Just about everybody I know loves these poems – my husband does, and I do, too – but their selection has become so predictable that my husband and I sometimes joke about wanting to shoot those geese or to ignore that summer day. Well, the joke is now on me, for as I thought about this sermon and about the fact that Rob will leave Grace Church in two weeks and that in two weeks we will have to say goodbye, what came to mind was a poem by – you guessed it — Mary Oliver. It’s not “Wild Geese” or “The Summer Day,” but another poem, one entitled “In Blackwater Woods.” ¹ Here are its closing lines:

To live in this world

you must be able to
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like letting go. I don’t like to say goodbye. When we allow ourselves to care – when someone’s presence becomes important to us, when we open our heart to someone and we notice how our spirits lift when he or she walks into the room, we will probably be sad when the time comes to say goodbye. As Joyce Rupp puts it in a book called Praying Our Goodbyes, “Every goodbye has some suffering in it and the greater the parting the deeper the pain; the greater the loss, the … [larger] the empty space that accompanies it.” ²

No wonder many of us tend to run from goodbyes. It is so much easier to wave breezily, “See you later! Gotta go!” No big loss here; no need to feel much. It is tempting to make light of the sorrow that is part of saying farewell. Maybe we hide our sadness from other people by laying low and keeping quiet, or maybe we hide it from ourselves by staying too busy to feel anything, or by stuffing down our feelings with extra food or drink. “It’s no big deal,” we may tell ourselves. “And if I do need to grieve, I intend to do it fast and then get on with things.”

Trying to anesthetize oneself and to go numb is a familiar way of avoiding the pain of goodbye. So is getting angry. If I get angry with you just as you’re about to leave, then I don’t have to feel my sorrow about your going. What a convenient time to pick a fight!

But of course we can’t keep dodging the goodbyes of life if we want to experience life in all its mystery, depth, and fullness. We can’t keep skittering across the surface of things like motorboats on a lake if we want to grow in self-awareness and wisdom, or to deepen in compassion. It is when we face, feel, and pray our goodbyes that a loving God can find us, console us, heal us, and give us strength and courage to let go.

So let’s take Rob’s imminent departure from Grace Church as an opportunity for reflection. And if this goodbye is not the one that is most vivid to you right now, I invite you to choose another one to reflect on.

What has been stirred up in you since you learned that Rob’s tenure at Grace Church is coming to an end?

What has been most difficult for you as you anticipate his leaving?

What will you miss the most?

What have you learned from Rob or received from Rob that you never want to forget?

What gifts did he give you?

What gifts did you give him? (Please remember that when we entrust someone with our story, or allow someone to be with us at a vulnerable time, we are offering a gift to the other person, the gift of ourselves.)

What, if anything, feels incomplete in your relationship with Rob, and how might you complete it?

And if Rob has been a person and a presence who is important to you, how do you intend to embody or to carry out in your own life what you have seen in him?

As we reflect on these questions, we do so in the presence of the God who loved us into being and who sustains us invincibly through all the changes and chances of this life. The God we know in Christ is a God of infinite compassion. Today’s Gospel story gives us not one but two stories of Jesus’ power to awaken us and to make us whole. The woman with the flow of flood is healed, and the child is restored to life.

So I imagine Jesus coming to us this morning to say, “Right here, where you feel the pain of loss — right here, where you face the reality of separation — right here, where you need to say goodbye and where you glimpse the fact of death, which is behind every goodbye — I am with you. Dare to keep your heart open. Dare to admit how much you have meant to each other. Dare to accept how much you have given each other, how much you have learned and received from each other.” I imagine Jesus saying to us this morning, “Dare to love one another, for in the pain of separation, you will find that I am with you, and I will lead you to new life.”

That, to me, is the great surprise, and the great mystery: as we risk keeping our hearts open in the face of separation and loss, as we dare to experience and to express our love for one another, even in the face of goodbye, even in the face of death, we discover the love that has no fear of death, the love that transcends change, the love that no loss, no separation, no death can destroy. This love was ours in the beginning, even before we were born, and it is ours at every ending, too, as we say goodbye. Love is what we were made for, and when we dare to love, in union and in separation, in presence and in absence, as we say hello and as we say goodbye, Jesus Christ draws near, and bears us deeper into the heart of God, that place of infinite compassion and infinite respect. Sometimes other people are most present to us when they are absent. Sometimes God is most intimately present when we feel God’s absence.

In a little while we will share the Eucharist. I praise God because here at this table, where Christ gives himself to us again and again in the bread and wine, we will always meet – every one of us, the living and the dead, those who are near and those who are far away. Here in the sacrament of Holy Communion, Christ draws us to the heart of God, where everyone is present and where the limits of time and space have no meaning anymore. When we say goodbye to those we love – when we say “God be with you” and “God go with you” – we give thanks that love is all, that love is everything, that love will never end.

I give thanks today for the great work that God has given us to do – to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart — and for the chance to make a difference at such a crucial moment in the history of life on this planet.

1. Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” (from American Primitive, 1983) in New and Selected Poems, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p. 178.

2. Joyce Rupp, O.S.M., Praying Our Goodbyes, Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1988, p. 32.

Ascending into heaven

“Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth tremble before him.” –Psalm 96:9

Tonight we celebrate the feast day of the ascension, the day when the disciples’ vivid encounters with the Risen Christ came to an end. For forty days after that first Easter morning, the disciples had had a series of startling, joy-filled, hands-on experiences in which they touched and talked and ate with Jesus, who was filled with and shining with a divine life that the New Testament calls “resurrection.” And then, on the feast day that we mark today, the risen Jesus withdrew from the disciples’ sight. He no longer lived bodily on earth with his disciples, but, as the story tells us, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight” (Acts 1:9).

I’ve been pondering with some bemusement the timing of the election for the tenth bishop of New Hampshire. I don’t know how or why the decision was made to schedule the election so close to the feast day of the ascension, but in any case, here we are, praying our way toward Saturday accompanied by these images from the Book of Acts and the Gospel of Luke. Using the imagery that we’ve been given, we can’t help asking ourselves, “Just as Jesus was lifted up to heaven, will Rob be raised up to New Hampshire, will he be lifted up to become a bishop? And just as Jesus withdrew from his disciples’ sight, is Rob about to withdraw from our sight and to leave for somewhere else?”

We may feel some uncertainty as we gather here tonight, and maybe some impatience or anxiety. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, and in recent weeks I know that I’ve had moments of feeling as if time had slowed to a crawl, moments of wishing that I could somehow peer ahead into the future and see what was going to happen and how things would turn out. We may not find much comfort in the imagery of the ascension, which seems to be all about Jesus going away. Going away? Who needs that? What meaning or hope can we find in Jesus’ going away, and how can his departure deepen our faith at the very moment when we are wondering whether Rob is about to go away?

Here’s what I think. From start to finish, the Bible is a love story. Scripture tells us that God so overflows with love for God’s creation that — to use the familiar imagery — God in Christ descends among us, descends into our depths and finally into death itself, and then God in Christ gathers up all that he is and all that we are, and carries everything back to the Father, the Creator of all. What this means is that from now on every aspect of human life, every aspect of our selves, has been caught up in the life of God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing that we can experience, that God does not share with us. We have been drawn into the divine life of the Holy Trinity, whose loving energy circulates within us just as surely as air moves through our lungs and blood moves through our veins.

The ascension means that Jesus Christ is no longer limited to one particular place and time. Now we meet Christ everywhere. To adapt the words of St. Patrick’s breastplate: Christ is behind us and before us, above us and below us, beside us and around us. As the letter to the Ephesians puts it, Jesus “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10). Because of the ascension we encounter a Christ whose living presence infuses the whole creation, permeating everything with his life. And because of the ascension Christ is as close as our inmost self. As Augustine put it, “Jesus ascended into heaven so that we might return to our hearts and there find him.” God is now closer to us than we are to ourselves, the very archetype of all intimacies, and nourishing all our relationships.

There is good news in the ascension, for if God is now present in everything, if God is not bounded in time or space, if God’s love encircles and embraces and sustains all things, then we can let each other go with gratefulness and joy. Like you, I surely don’t want to say goodbye to Rob, yet if God calls him to leave, I know that God will be with us, and within and around us, above and below us, just as surely as God will continue to be with him. And if God calls Rob to stay, I know that God will be with us, and within and around us, above and below us, just as surely as God will continue to be with him. Either way, we’re all going to keep leaning on those everlasting arms!

Being elected a bishop is often associated with being lifted up, with being elevated, of enjoying a higher rank or status. But of course the God we know in Christ couldn’t care less about rank or status. God doesn’t care about prestige. The God we know in Christ is humble and lowly of heart, eager to serve and to set free. The only lifting up that God cares about is that we be lifted up in love — that we grow in love. The best reason to become a bishop is to keep growing in love. The best reason not to become a bishop is to keep growing in love. Bishop or not, priest or not, layperson or not, wherever the Spirit sends us, whatever God calls to do, what matters to God is whether we are growing in love. If Rob is elected bishop on Saturday or if he is not, what God wants most for him – and for us – won’t change. God simply wants him, and us, to grow in love wherever we are, trusting that the conditions and circumstances of our lives are the very place in which God wants God’s love to be expressed and to shine.

Last night some of us watched a video of the writer and teacher James Finley, who spent seven years as a monk under the guidance of Thomas Merton, and who eventually left the monastery to marry and to become a psychologist. Finley is a humble man, apparently without a trace of ego or self-consciousness, and in his gentle way he explained that a mystic doesn’t talk much about his or her visions and spiritual accomplishments. Instead, what a mystic says is, “Look at what love has done in my life. Look at what love has done.”

So let’s keep our eyes on love, and pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit, for the breath of God that Jesus breathes into his friends. The Spirit is with us tonight. It will be with us — and the good people of New Hampshire — on Saturday. And it will be with us in full glory on Pentecost, a week from Sunday.

I invite you to join me in a prayer of self-dedication that was written by Jerry May:

Loving God, do with me what You will, work in me as You will. Give me quiet or noise, peace or pain, clarity or distraction. Strip me or console me, wound me or caress me, for in my heart I am nothing but grateful for your Love. Amen.

Love one another as I have loved you

Twenty-five years ago, when I was in seminary, someone told me that a preacher should never say the word ‘love’ in a sermon unless the readings assigned for the day clearly justify it. It turns out that this is advice that I’ve managed to ignore in pretty much every sermon I’ve ever preached. Of course, the difficulty in talking about love is that the word is overused, misused, and trivialized in this culture, just as Mother’s Day, which we mark today, can be sentimentalized as nothing more than a “Be Nice to Mom” day — though, hey, that’s a good start.

For all its misuses, love is a valuable word, pointing to one of the most essential qualities of human life. And love is a gateway to God, for God is love. So let’s talk about love — today’s readings are practically awash in it. By my count, the word “love” shows up a full nine times in today’s Gospel: Jesus said to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love… This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:9-10, 12). And so on. The passage from the First Letter of John covers the same territory and mentions the word ‘love’ five times.

Today we proclaim the love of God, and that message may ring especially sweetly in the ears of those of you who just saw the film “Love Free or Die,” a documentary about the first openly gay bishop in Christendom, Gene Robinson, and those of you who walked in yesterday’s Gay Pride march in Northampton. We’ve been reminded this week of the damage that blind hatred has caused — and continues to cause — to our gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual brothers and sisters, and we grieve that so many Christians are still proclaiming a gospel of hate.

What I want to lift up this morning is that Jesus preaches a gospel of love and calls us to bear witness to love. That’s a message that we and the whole world need dearly to hear. In fact, Jesus gives it to us in the strongest possible terms — he commands us to love. In the two passages I just cited, the word ‘commandment’ shows up almost as frequently as the word ‘love’ — five times in the Gospel reading and three times in the epistle. “If you keep my commandments,” Jesus says to his disciples, “you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you…” And so on. (John 15:10, 12).

But can love really be commanded? You know as well as I do that we can’t force ourselves to feel loving. We can’t make ourselves love anyone by sheer force of will, and we certainly can’t compel someone else to love us. By its very nature, love can only be freely given and freely received. So what’s all this talk about Jesus commanding us to love each other? Besides, isn’t there something in us that resists being told what to do, even if we know it’s the right thing?

I’d like to repeat a story that I know I’ve mentioned before — a true story. A friend of my husband was driving with his young daughter, and the girl was sitting in the front seat beside her father. I don’t know what they were talking about or what was going on in their relationship, but for some reason the little girl took it into her head not only to unbuckle her seatbelt, but also to stand up in the passenger seat.

“Sit down!” her father said, with some alarm.

The girl refused.

“I’m telling you — sit down!” he cried.

Again the girl ignored him.

“I mean it,” said the father, by now quite upset. “Sit down right now.”

The little girl glared at him, slid back down into her seat and buckled her seat belt. They drove on for a while in what I imagine was a rather electric silence, and then the girl turned to her father and announced, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am standing up on the inside.”

No, we don’t like commandments, even when they are issued for our own good. So if we imagine God as an authoritarian, power-hungry boss “out there” whose job is to control us and order us around and tell us what to do, when we hear the word “command” we are likely to rebel quite a bit, or at least to dig in our heels. And if we do carry out what we think we’re supposed to do, we may do it with a kind of grim compliance, while feeling secretly resentful — in short, sitting down on the outside but standing up on the inside. Where’s the joy in that?

I don’t think that a dutiful or sullen obedience was what Jesus had in mind when he commanded his disciples to love. The God that Jesus loved was not some belligerent commander-in-chief with a habit of issuing directives, but an intimate Presence that Jesus discovered in his own depths and whom Jesus adored in all things and beyond all things. I take Jesus’ “commandment” that we abide in his love and that we love one another not as an external directive but rather as a description of the inner structure of reality. Maybe the commandments of God are something like the laws of nature — like gravity, maybe, or like the speed of light. When we love each other well — when we try to be real with other and to tell the truth in love; when we give each other encouragement and support; when we try to ‘be there’ for one another, even if it comes at a cost to ourselves; when we reach out in love to those who are different, to the stranger, the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost — then we’re living in alignment with divine reality. We are tuning in to the hidden life of God that is circulating through all things.

Conversely, when we hold back from love — when we refuse to notice how our actions affect other people and the rest of creation; when our underlying purpose in every conversation is to get attention and to be admired; when we cling to our own opinions and insist on winning and being right; when we turn up our noses at certain people and write them off as lesser than ourselves or get busy trying to force them to change — well, we’re living against the grain of divine reality. We’re cutting ourselves off from the flow of love that God is always pouring out to us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re stepping away from the dance, turning away from the feast.

Some of us have been watching a video series on Wednesday nights that features contemporary theologians, and in one of them, Cynthia Bourgeault commented that we tend to think that we need to reach out for God, as if God were some far-off destination that eventually we might get to. In fact, she says, through an attentive practice of prayer we come to realize that God already abides within us, that God is our Source. Then every day, in all our decisions large and small of what to say and how to say it, of what do and why to do it, we can show forth that invisible, holy Presence within us, and can make it real and give it form. We don’t need to invent love from scratch; love wants to flow from us already. All we have to do it to let it happen.

That, I think, is what Jesus meant when he said to his friends, “I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16). Fruit emerges naturally from the vine; it is connected to the vine; its source is in the vine; its DNA comes from the vine. And so it is for us: when we are intimately connected with the vine of God’s love, we can’t help but bear fruit.

Priest and writer Henri Nouwen once made a useful distinction between “products” and “fruits.” Products are what the isolated ego creates; “fruits” are what the self-connected-to-God creates. When our isolated ego-self makes a product, we claim all the credit. We strut; we’re proud; we imagine we did it ourselves. But when our self-connected-to-God creates, we bear fruit. Even if our accomplishment took a lot of individual effort and determination, it emerged out of a loving relationship with God. It is filled with God; it is animated by God. And Jesus assures us that such fruit will last. Even if what we’ve done is very small — if love has moved us simply to smile at a stranger on the street, or to take a breath and center ourselves instead of reacting angrily to some perceived offense — even if what we’ve done is as small as picking up the phone to call someone who is lonely or sad — Jesus assures us that these fruits of love will last. They will make a difference in the long run, even if we know nothing about it.

I had a chance a couple of weeks ago to meet someone who knows how love can change your sense of who you are. I was on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., watching poet-farmer Wendell Berry receive the 2012 Steward of God’s Creation award from the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care. Like many of you, I’ve admired Wendell Berry’s work for a long time. His poems, novels, and essays are full of reverence for the Kentucky land that he has farmed for almost fifty years, and his perception of things is lit up with a sense of the holy. He is an old man now, and deeply connected to everything he loves, and when he was singled out for this award, he didn’t express one bit of interest in taking any credit for himself as an isolated human being. In his acceptance speech ¹ he remarked that what he had done wasn’t really traceable to any gifts that were innate to him. In fact, he said, “If you subtract from me and what I’ve done — my birthplace, my family that I got by birthright [and by marriage], and all that has been put in this world and that is still left in it to admire and be grateful for, all the beautiful things there are to read and look at and be grateful for, all the teachers I’ve had, a good many of whom didn’t even know they were my teachers, and all my friends and allies — if you took all these things away from me and what I’ve done” — and here he grinned and looked slowly around the room — “I and what I’ve done would disappear with a barely audible pop. I can’t thank you for this on behalf of myself. I thank you on behalf of my good fortune, which includes everybody here and a lot who aren’t.”

That’s the voice of wisdom and humility, the voice of someone whose life has born fruit because he knows his deep connection to everything he loves.

How is God luring you to grow in love right now? What happens when you rest a while in the company of that deep inner voice that says, “Abide in my love”? I suggest we take a few moments to breathe in God’s love in the silence, for the God we’ve been searching for is already here, closer than our heartbeat, inviting us to bear fruit, and blessing us with joy.

1. My husband, Robert A. Jonas, videotaped Wendell Berry’s remarks, which are posted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPBJlJmWXM

“I am the good shepherd”

What do you make of the image of Jesus as the good shepherd? Does this image hold any interest to you, any power? Except for folks who have some contact with a farm, I expect that most of us here don’t have much of a relationship either with shepherds or with sheep. At least that’s true for me. I haven’t spent time at Hampshire College watching the lambs being born, and I haven’t gone to the Holy Land and seen how shepherds work with their flocks. At first glance the imagery of sheep and shepherds may feel rather quaint and out of touch, as if in pondering this image of Jesus, Christians were reaching back to some distant and long-gone agrarian past that has no relevance to today’s urban, fast-paced, and technological society.

And yet, interestingly enough, the image of Jesus as a good shepherd is one of the Church’s best-loved images of Jesus. Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we celebrate what is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday and we read a passage from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John. What meaning does this image have for us today, and why does it carry such appeal? How we answer that question may change over the years, since every religious image has multiple meanings, and at different points in our individual lives and in our life together as a community, one or more of those meanings may suddenly stand out for us and have particular energy or ‘juice.’ What aspects of the good shepherd image speak most vividly to you this morning?

The first thing that I notice is that, as as our good shepherd, Jesus holds everyone and everything together. A shepherd is the person charged with keeping the flock intact, united, and heading in the right direction. I find something wonderfully reassuring about the image of God in Christ drawing us into something unified and whole, because at present we live in a world in which a good many things seem to be flying apart. Most Americans these days don’t put much trust in the institutions that we share — in the courts, the school system, the health care system, the political system, the financial system. Even the church as we’ve known it is in upheaval, as traditional denominations break down and new forms of worship emerge. In the midst of so much flux and uncertainty, it is comforting to muse on the reality of an abiding holy Presence, to ponder the good shepherd who contains and holds together all things. We don’t have to fear change — in fact, we may even want to throw ourselves with gusto into creating the changes we wish to see in the world — because within and beyond all the changes of life, there abides a loving Good Shepherd who is always drawing us into community and into communion with him.

Maybe you remember that puzzle¹  in which you are presented with nine dots on a page, lined up in rows of three, and you’re asked to connect the dots by making four straight lines without once lifting your pencil from the page. Try it however many times you like, but the only way to connect all nine dots with just four straight lines is to go outside the borders of the box. Solving this puzzle is an example of “thinking outside the box,” of moving beyond a given paradigm in order to perceive or to accomplish something that otherwise couldn’t be perceived or accomplished.

When we turn to the good shepherd of our lives, we do the same thing: we move outside the realm of our five senses, where we normally perceive everything as separated, and we open ourselves to the larger, sacred Mystery that embraces our complex, dynamic world. In turning to the Good Shepherd, we turn to the sacred unity within and beyond all things; we encounter the Absolute, the Ground of our being, the One in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). In the presence of the Good Shepherd, we know that there is more that unites us than divides us. The most breathtakingly diverse and varied group of people can be brought together and share a common vision and purpose because the Good Shepherd is with them, guiding them and loving them.

And that movement toward unity keeps getting larger. As Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16-17). Wherever I see communities gathering together in love and opening their borders in a larger and larger embrace to welcome the stranger, the “other,” the one who is different, I see the Good Shepherd at work, whether or not those communities name themselves as “Christian.” So that’s one thing I treasure in the image of the good shepherd: the crucified and risen Christ is the hidden unity at the center of things, and the one who inspires and impels us to create communities of love in which no one is left out.

And here is something else: the good shepherd that we meet in Jesus is someone who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). The hired hand doesn’t care about the sheep; he leaves the sheep and runs away when times are tough and things get scary. But Jesus the good shepherd is not like that. If, like a dim-witted sheep, you wander off somewhere along the edge of a precipice, as we often do, Jesus the good shepherd will come looking for you. If you get lost, he will search until he finds you. If you are abandoned by those who couldn’t care less, he will stand with you. If you are assaulted or bullied, he will weep with you and plead for you and work to turn the abuser’s heart. And if you are a hopeless case — as we all are, really — he will lay down his life for you. Wherever I see communities whose members are moved to reach out with compassion to each other and to the world, I know that they are listening to the Good Shepherd and that his presence is alive among them.

And what about our inner lives? What about all those energies and impulses within us that can be as chaotic as a bunch of sheep who have scattered hither and yon and who are vulnerable to hunger and thirst, to wolves and thieves? Can we learn to listen to the good shepherd who dwells within us and who gathers together all the various parts of ourselves and forms within us a unified community of love?

I remember sitting in prayer one day, patiently trying to keep my attention turned to God, when I noticed that a contemptuous inner voice was starting to lay into me, accusing me of one failure after another. To my great surprise, something else in me at once rose up and declared: “We don’t talk to each other like that in this house.” Whoa. The good shepherd had spoken. Out with the voices of self-hatred and contempt; it was time to listen to the inner voice of love.

In order to listen to the good shepherd who abides within us, we have to pay close attention. We have to listen with great attentiveness to our self-talk, and to notice whether it is loving and true. And we probably need to spend intentional time listening to the God who is greater than our hearts, and who does not condemn us, even when we condemn ourselves (1 John 3: 19-20). We hear the good sheperd in the divine voice of love that always speaks within us, for his voice calls us each by name, and he knows us through and through.

Before closing, I want to turn for a moment from the Good Shepherd of our souls to the good pastor of the Grace Church community. You may know that tomorrow Rob Hirschfeld is heading off to New Hampshire with his wife Polly, to take part in a series of interviews as he and the other candidates for bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire meet and greet the people of the diocese. A bishop is something like a shepherd of the flock, and that big staff that a bishop carries — called a crozier — is shaped like a shepherd’s crook. It’s possible that Rob will become the next bishop, the next shepherd, of New Hampshire.

Now, the election won’t take place for three weeks, but already I’ve heard a few of you wonder: Will we be OK? Will it be OK if Rob leaves? And I have to say that, much as I would like Rob to stay here forever and for everything to keep going as it has for the past many years, whether he stays or whether he goes, we will be fine. This community will be fine. Thanks in good part to Rob’s devoted service among us, we know that we are held together by the Good Shepherd who is Christ. We have pulled together as a community. We are open to enlarging our boundaries to the wider world and to all who venture through our doors. We are learning day by day what it means to lay our lives down for each other, to offer each other a word of thanks or forgiveness, a listening ear or a helping hand. We are supporting each other to listen inwardly in prayer to the Good Shepherd who speaks within our souls.

Rob has been a dedicated pastor, and because of that, we’ve become a vibrant community. Paradoxically, the more faithfully a congregation follows Jesus Christ and the more carefully it listens to the voice of the Good Shepherd, the more we members of the community are inspired to become leaders ourselves — to step out and serve, to encourage and to guide, to take risks and to think outside the box. I don’t know what to pray for, when it comes to the New Hampshire election, except to pray that God’s will be done. But I do know that whatever happens, the Good Shepherd will be with Rob and with each one of us, calling us each by name, urging us to follow, and empowering us to become the servant leaders that the world needs. God willing, we will joyfully say yes, wherever the road takes us — and if there are no roads, we trust that the Holy Spirit will create them out in front of us as we go forward.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box

At the foot of the cross

A few weeks ago I was sitting over supper with a group of family members.  As we finished our dessert, we started chatting, as our family does sometimes, about what Garrison Keillor would call “life’s persistent questions.”  For instance, in what ways do we change when we know that we are deeply loved?  What makes us feel creative and alive?  What happens when we die?  I can’t remember what sparked it, but with a burst of energy, my ten-year-old grandson, Noah, suddenly exclaimed, “What I want to know is: what’s up with having a crucifix in church?  It’s so gruesome.  Come on, there are children here!”

A ripple of laughter flowed around the table, followed by a rather pregnant pause.  I had the distinct impression that all eyes were about to turn toward me.  Was I going to answer Noah’s question or not?  I looked at him for a moment, considering what to say, and finally offered a few thoughts.  The conversation moved mercifully on.  But it is to Noah that I want to dedicate my homily tonight, for he asked a question that deserves a more complete answer.  Why do Christians focus so much on the cross?   What does the cross mean to us? 

Some critics dismiss the cross as proof that Christians are ghoulishly, even morbidly, fascinated with suffering and death.  But it’s obvious that Jesus didn’t value suffering for its own sake, as if being in pain were inherently virtuous or ennobling.  Jesus was not a masochist.  In all four Gospels there are times when Jesus deliberately avoided attack.  In John’s Gospel, the one from which we read tonight, Jesus sometimes steered clear of trouble by traveling in secret (John 7:10; 11:54), and during a visit to the temple he hid from an angry crowd that was about to throw stones at him (John 8:59).  After his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he removed himself from public view and hid with his disciples until the night of the Last Supper (John 12:36b). 

Jesus did not seek out suffering.  Suffering was not his goal.  What Jesus did seek was to do the will of God.  His goal, as we heard in tonight’s Gospel, was “to testify to the truth” (John:18:37): to let the divine life flow through him and to carry that healing, redeeming, transforming love into every situation, whatever the cost — “to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18, citing Isaiah).  When that message of liberating love came up against the powers-that-be of this world — the forces of cruelty, hatred, greed, and injustice — Jesus stood with the powerless and poor, the oppressed and forgotten, and was willing to suffer pain and be crucified. 

Love shone out from the cross that day, a love that has never died and that can never die, a love that continues to abide at the center of things and whose length and depth and breadth and height we humans are still groping to understand.

Yes, Noah, the cross is gruesome, but to Christians it expresses a divine love that is willing to go anywhere, even into the darkest, loneliest, and most brutal places of the world, and of our own selves, to embrace and transform everything it touches. 

I want to tell about a time I glimpsed the power of the cross with particular clarity.  One April morning back in 1995, a bomb exploded in a federal building in Oklahoma City.  I’m sure that many of you remember that event.  One hundred and sixty eight people were killed that day, including nineteen children. When I heard about it on TV and in the newspapers, I resolutely did not pray.  I refused to pray the next day, too.  Who wants to pray about suffering like that?  Who wants to get close to that much pain, or the evil that caused it?  Far better to keep busy, keep moving.  I intended to put my head down and look away.  I was sure that the bombing had nothing to do with me.

I held out for as long as I could, but within a few days I was practically propelled to my prayer cushion, as if my whole body had taken in what had happened and needed to pray every part of it through, as if my own body needed to find Christ’s body in the enormity of that pain.  When I was finished praying, I scribbled down what I had seen and heard in the silence of my heart.  I called it “A Prayer after the Oklahoma City Bombing”:¹

I am the building that was blown apart by a bomb in the “heartland” of America.  My heart is blown open.  The front of me falls away: I am the gaping floors, the broken glass, the dangling wires, the film of concrete dust that rises into the air.

This is my body.

I am the children who were killed: the little ones, the innocent, tender little people full of play and laughter.  The babies.

This is my body.

I am the women and men who were killed, the mother, father, husband, wife, grandparent, neighbor, relative, friend, startled by death on an ordinary day.

This is my body.

I am those who mourn: the suddenly bereaved, the shocked, the bereft.  I am the mother clutching a picture of her two children, the husband grieving his newly-wed wife.

This is my body.

I am the rescue workers, the medical personnel, those who hope against hope, and those who are faithful even when there is no hope, those who press on into the rubble, searching for the living, the wounded, the dead, searching for what is human, for what is loved.

This is my body.

I am the ones who planned and planted the bomb: the hardhearted, the fearful, the numb and angry ones who no longer care.  (When Timothy McVeigh is shown pictures of the dead, particularly dead children, he has no reaction at all.  Says one source, “[There was] nothing.  Zero reaction from that son of a bitch.  This guy is a stone.”)

This is my body.

I am the ones who fill the airwaves with venom and hate.  “Take them out in the desert and blow them up.” “Shoot ’em.”  “I hope they fry.”

This is my body.

I am the Holy Spirit, brooding over our bent world with bright wings.  I am the wings of Jesus, tenderly outstretched above the city, sheltering everything and everyone beneath.

This is my body.

I cannot hold it all.  I hand it to you, Jesus.  Hold it with me. 

And suddenly I see that I am handing you the cross: here, you carry it.  I cannot.

And he has taken it up.  He is carrying all of this, all of this.  The dead, the wounded, and those who mourn; the killers and those who were killed; the frightened, the angry, the sorrowful — he is carrying all of this, all of us, every part of us, into the loving heart of God.

 Looking back on that prayer, I am reminded that we hold everything in our bodies, that our body-selves already sense – even if dimly – our kinship with all things.  The moment we discover that kinship and make it conscious, compassion is born.  Everything is in us, and everything is held in love.

That long-ago prayer, which began in anguish and ended in joy, also showed me that if I prayed everything that was in me, eventually I would perceive my connection with everyone else.  I am the murderer and the one who is murdered; I am the abuser and the one who is abused; I am the hunter and the animal that is shot.  I am human, and everything human is in me — as it is in you.  And all of it is joined to the body of Christ, whose incarnation catches up every aspect of humanity and whose suffering love, poured out on the cross, embraces the lost and the forsaken, the embittered and the angry — even someone like you, even someone like me.  No one is left out of that loving embrace — neither the torturer nor the tortured, neither the perpetrator nor the victim.  I agree with theologian Richard Rohr, who says that this is exactly how Jesus redeemed the world “by the blood of the cross.”²   The crucifixion, he writes, “…was not some kind of heavenly transaction, or ‘paying a price’ to God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered.”

So when Noah asks, “Why do you care about the cross?” I want to tell him:

Because it is here at the cross that Jesus holds what we can’t hold, and bears what we can’t bear.

Because it is here at the cross that all our malice and ignorance, all our willfulness and pettiness and hardheartedness are continually met by the love of God.

Because it is here that we see God’s willingness to be utterly vulnerable, and here that we learn that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Because here we are set free from the power of death, and set free as well from the endless, futile attempt to save ourselves and to earn our own salvation. 

What do we see when we gaze at the cross of Christ?  A love without bounds, a love without limits.   

Tonight we venerate the cross, and we give thanks.

1. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, “A Prayer after the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Women’s Uncommon Prayers, ed. Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie Burke, Ann Smith, Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2000), pp. 276-277.

2. Richard Rohr, “Holy Week: Good Friday, April 6, 2012,” daily email meditation adapted from The Great Themes of Scripture (no longer available; see New Great Themes of Scripture”: http://store.cacradicalgrace.org