Author Archives: mbj

Building on Rock

Yesterday was a big day for our family – our son Sam graduated from high school. Soon he leaves home for a summer job far away, and then he heads off to a college that is farther away still. I am reaching the end of whatever capacity I had to guide and protect him, at least on a day to day basis, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been wanting to give him something that lasts — a touchstone, a compass, a rock. This week I went on the Internet and looked for a Bible with a leather cover. I looked at books and ended up buying one that was called Living a Life That Matters, and, in case that wasn’t good enough, another that was called, Leading Lives That Matter.

I felt like Moses in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, who wanted so much to pass along the deepest wisdom he knew and the most likely path to joy: to love God with our whole heart and mind and strength. As Moses said, “Put these words of mine in your heart and soul… Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” [Deuteronomy 11:18-19].

We want so much to pass on to those we love the deepest treasure of our hearts, the hard-won wisdom that we’ve found. What a satisfying ceremony it must have been yesterday at the Cathedral to those of you whose children were confirmed and to those of you who were confirmed or received into the Episcopal Church. It is a precious thing to know that each day we have a choice to make between a blessing or a curse, between building the house of our lives on the rock of God’s love, and building it on shifting, unreliable, unstable sand.

Listening to God, carrying out God’s will in acts of love and mercy – that is what gives our lives a sure foundation. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” [Matthew 7:24]. Rains fall, floods come, winds blow, but that house stands firm – unlike the house of the foolish man, whose house falls down with a crash because it was built on sand.

I can’t protect my son from the storms of life, but I do know that in his life, as in yours and mine, storms will come. The day of reckoning will come. For a while we may be able to get away with building our lives on sand – on shopping and acquiring more things, on entertainment, on trying to gain power over other people or compulsively trying to please them. But sooner or later we will step forward, desperately reaching for something solid, something everlasting on which to stand.

I have a story for you. I heard it this week on an audiotape by Kathleen Rusnak, a Lutheran minister and hospice chaplain who travels around giving lectures on lessons learned for living from the dying.¹ Kathleen explains that when we learn that we have only a few months left to live, we often begin to carry out a “life review.” It’s a time of reckoning for us, a time of coming to terms with our lives as we look back and ask: What was my life all about? How did I spend my time? What was important to me? What was my purpose for living? What did I accomplish? What do I regret? What is left undone? What did I wait too long to do? Who did I love?

Then Kathleen talked about a man she met who had been given a three-month prognosis and was in the care of hospice. By the time she – the chaplain – met him, he had spent nine months in hospice and had refused to see most of the team – not the social worker, not the chaplain, but only the nurse. He was a strong, independent, 70-year-old fellow, a tough guy, a man who avoided feelings. “Married, grown children, retired, dying.” Ten days before he died (though of course no one knew that then), he told the nurse that he wanted to see the chaplain. Kathleen was glad to do it and made the appointment. The man’s wife answered the door, looked at Kathleen, and said, “I don’t know what he wants to see you about, but whatever you do when you go in that room — and I’ve put a chair beside his bed so you can sit there – don’t you tell him he’s dying, because he doesn’t know it.”

Kathleen said, “I don’t set the agenda in the room; he does. I’m not going in there to tell him anything. He asked to see me, and I’ll see what he wants.”

Kathleen walked into the room and was there for all of five minutes. Yet she calls this one of the most significant encounters of her life. The man, she says, was rude and crude; he didn’t say hello, didn’t look at her.

She sat down in the chair beside his bed and he said, “I’ve been thinking about my life. When I was a child,” he said, “my mother died and my sister raised me. She did a good job. I never told her that; I never thanked her. In fact, I’ve been mean to her my whole life.” Then he talked about work. “I spent forty years at the same workplace and the guys I worked with always reached out to me. They invited me to lunch and to do things together with their wives. But I always said no – I was interested in my own world, in my money, in doing what I wanted. I ignored everybody.” Then he talked about his marriage. “I had a fifty-year marriage. It was a bad marriage, a crummy marriage. I never told my wife I loved her. On weekends she had to go out with her girlfriends. Why? Because I’d stay home and read my book; it was my time.”

Then he looked at Kathleen. He was finished. He had told the chaplain three places where he was stuck. Then he asked, “Can you help?”

On the tape, Kathleen paused at this point to ask her audience, a group of hospice workers, what they would have said in reply. Oh, said one, I would have assured him of God’s love; I would have told him that God forgave him. Oh, said another, I would have reminded him that he must have done some good things, too; I would have tried to help him put the bad things in perspective.

Well, the chaplain didn’t do any of that. When he said, “Can you help?” what she said was, “Yes, I can. You’re not dead yet. Is your sister still living? Are some of your friends at work still around – are they in the neighborhood, in calling distance? Your wife is right here. What are you telling me these things for? Tell them. Call your sister and ask her to come in, or speak to her on the phone. Tell your wife you’ve been a bad husband. Don’t tell me – tell her.”

The man added one last thing. He said, “My wife doesn’t know I’m dying. Please don’t tell her; it would upset her.”

“Why haven’t you told your wife you’re dying?” asked Kathleen. “Because I think she knows. You did sign those hospice papers.”

Then she saw his vulnerability, for he said – and it must have been a difficult thing to say – that he was afraid that if he told his wife that he was dying, he would start to cry and never stop.

Kathleen replied, “I can only tell you what has happened when other people in your situation have told loved ones that they are dying. You’re going to start to cry, and then you’re going to sob, and you’re going to cry so hard and for so long that you’re going to think you won’t be able to stop, and she’s going to cry, and she’s going to sob, and then you’ll get these dry heaves of the eye ducts, and you’re not going to be able to cry anymore, so you’re going to look at each other and you’re going to get giddy and silly and you’re going to hug each other, and then you’ve got a beginning – because if you don’t tell them you’re dying, you can’t deal with any of these issues.”

The man said, “OK, come back next week.”

And she did. The man’s wife met Kathleen at the door and she said, “I don’t know what you did with him last week, but there’s been a stream of people going into his room, and they’ve all been coming out crying. His sister, and the people he worked with — and even my sister, whom he hates – they were invited in and they came out crying. He told me he was dying; he told me what a rotten husband he was and what a rotten marriage we had. It doesn’t make everything better between us, but it helps that he said it. We sat on the sofa and went through all the pictures of our wedding, the birth of our children, buying a house, vacations; he phoned his lawyer, he made his will; he called in the kids and gave them things; he called the priest and the funeral home; he even picked out his hymns.”

Kathleen was amazed – she hadn’t expected the man to do a thing. She went into his room and sat down on the chair.

He said, “I did what you said… But I have one last regret.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I didn’t live my whole life like this.”

Kathleen said, “Look what you’ve discovered about yourself, that you never thought existed in you.”

To use the terms of this morning’s Gospel, that man discovered rock. As death approached he saw that his whole long life had been built on sand. What a waste it had been, all that hiding, all that self-centered meanness and refusal to connect! By the grace of God, the man used his last days to touch the rock of God’s love. He re-connected with the people around him. He apologized and made amends; he expressed his gratitude; he shared his love.

That’s the rock we get to touch today: that place deep inside us where God is always speaking to us in a voice of love. If any part of your life is built on sand, let it fall. Let it fall. Today is the day to reach for the rock, to set our lives on the rock of God’s love. Whether we are launching into life, as my son is, or whether we are reaching the end of our days, today is the day to listen to God’s love and to act on what we hear.

1. Kathleen J. Rusnak, Ph.D., “Because You’ve Never Died Before: The World of the Dying”; her Website is www.thebrickwall2.com. The story as told in this sermon is a shortened, edited version of a story she tells. Used with permission.

Running to the Empty Tomb

Friends, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be back in this chapel and to share this service with you. One of my great losses in moving away from Cambridge four years ago was the loss of easy contact with this place, and with you Brothers, and with this community of faith. I rejoice to be with you today and to have a chance to reflect on this morning’s Gospel.

What interests me most in the scene we just heard is imagining what the beloved disciple experienced on that Easter morning. Of course, other characters also appear in the story of the empty tomb – Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter – but it is the beloved disciple who most attracts my attention. That is lucky for me, I guess, because he is the one whose feast day we are celebrating this morning. But even more than that, I wonder whether his experience of the Resurrection can tell us something about our own experience of the risen Christ. I wonder if, by imagining the experience of the beloved disciple, we can take the journey with him and discover how his encounter intersects with ours, and ours with his.

I have to tell you right off the bat that I majored in literature. If you listen to “A Prairie Home Companion,” you know from Garrison Keillor how hapless English majors are – they’re the ones who end up lost in dead-end jobs because of their idiosyncratic interest in symbols and images and stuff like that. English majors get no respect. And yet, as my friend and colleague Rob Hirschfeld likes to say – (he is, by the way, a member of the Fellowship of St. John, but was unable to join us this morning) – as Rob likes to say, John’s Gospel is the gospel for English majors. Everything in this Gospel seems to have been written for a reason – every detail counts, every repetition is deliberate, every image has some meaning to convey.

So with the zeal of an English major I roll up my sleeves and dig into this text, and, maybe because I’m not only an English major but also an Episcopal priest – and you know how we preachers love to make three points – what I notice about the beloved disciple in this passage is that he does three things.

What does he do first? He runs. As far as I can tell, this is the only scene in the entire Gospel of John in which anyone runs. Elsewhere in the Gospel, people walk; they stand; they come forward; they step back; they come in; they go out. At one point Mary of Bethany “got up quickly and went to Jesus” [John 11:29, 31] – but no one runs.

Except in this scene. When Mary Magdalene sees that the stone has been removed from the tomb, she runs to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. When the two of them hear the news, we’re told that they “set out and went toward the tomb” – the usual pace of things in this Gospel – but suddenly in the next verse they are both running, and the beloved disciple is moving so fast, he outruns Peter and reaches the tomb first.

Running – that’s an image of urgency and eagerness, an image of a passionate, whole-body desire to come and see. The beloved disciple wants to see what’s going on. He wants to see if what Mary told them is true. He can’t move quickly enough – maybe he is breathless, but he doesn’t care – he wants to make his way to the tomb as quickly as he possibly can, with no detours, no delays, no pausing to put his affairs in order first. He knows where he needs to go and he runs.

That to me is as good an image as any of what it means to be on fire for God. In those blessed times, we gather up all our scattered energies and we focus them on God. We want nothing more than God, nothing less than God, nothing other than God. We want our lives to be directed toward God, our hearts to be turning toward God, our prayer to be focused on God. Nothing else is enough.

That holy fire blazed up in all of us at one point or another in our lives, or we wouldn’t find ourselves here this morning. The decision to explore a monastic vocation, the decision to make a life profession, the decision to commit oneself to the Fellowship of St. John – all these decisions came out of some experience of clarity and fervor in which we saw that we wanted our lives to head toward God. Every time we sit down to pray and touch that deep longing for God, we become the beloved disciple and we start to run to the tomb.

But let me add this. Like the beloved disciple, what we will find, we don’t know. How God will show up, we don’t know. Whether God will show up, we don’t know. Whether we’ll recognize the signs of God’s presence when God comes, we don’t know. We run because we thirst for God, but what we will find we can’t possibly predict or control. As we run, we must drop our expectations behind us, as a runner sheds the stuff she’s carrying so that she can be lighter on her feet. Let your prayer be fervent and pure – that’s what the disciple says to me as he runs. But don’t imagine for a moment that we can know in advance what we’ll find. The mystery of the living God can never be grasped or tamed, never locked away in a box – or a tomb. When we run toward God, we always run toward the unknown.

So that’s the first thing. And here’s the second: when the beloved disciple reaches the tomb, the Gospel tells us, “he bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in” [John 20:5]. Now that’s a curious moment. The beloved disciple wants so eagerly to see that he runs, but when he actually gets there, he pauses at the doorway and does not enter. The text seems to highlight this move – or, I should say, lack of movement – by contrasting it with what Peter does. When Peter reaches the tomb, he heads straight in.

Why does the beloved disciple pause at the doorway? Of course the Gospel never tells us, so we can imagine whatever we like. Did he simply need to catch his breath after running so hard? Did he suddenly get fearful or timid and feel a need to hold back? Either of these is possible, of course, but I’m going to argue for something else. I think the beloved disciple stopped at the doorway because he wanted to gaze. He saw the same thing that Peter saw – the linen wrappings lying there, as if Jesus’ body had somehow released itself from the wrappings without disturbing them – but unlike Peter, the beloved disciple stopped to gaze. He needed not just to see, but to see deeply.

When it comes to prayer, we need ardor, yes; we need fervor – of course. But we also need to gaze. We need to be willing to give prayer some time, to let it unfold, to let a deeper truth come forward and to speak in silence to our hearts. How can we take something in if we only give it the quickest of glances? How can we apprehend the holy Mystery, the living Presence, if we treat it like a drive-by fast food joint – drop by, place our order, and go? God doesn’t work like that. Prayer takes patience – even if several of the latest books on prayer are sub-titled “101 Quick Ways to Pray,” “Quick Prayers for Compassionate Caregivers,” “Quick Prayers for Determined Dieters,” “Quick Prayers for New Moms,” and so on. There is certainly a place and a need for quick prayers, no doubt about it. And yet the beloved disciple reminds me that if I really want to see, if I really want to perceive the Risen Christ and to be drawn into the living Mystery of God, then I must pause at the doorway to gaze. As a friend of mine says about prayer, “Don’t quit five minutes before the miracle.”

Prayer can’t be hurried any more than love can be hurried. When my son Sam was a boy, we had a nighttime ritual of saying the Lord’s Prayer and then exchanging the words “I love you” several times – “I love you,” “I love you, too” – back and forth. Not only did we have to say it over and over several times – these had to be the last words that Sam heard before he went to sleep.

One night I finally admitted to myself that I found this repeated verbal dance rather tedious. “Why do we have to keep repeating ‘I love you’ over and over?” I asked my son. “Why can’t we just say it once?”

Sam’s answer was disarmingly simple. “I want to feel it inside me before I go to sleep.”

Ah, don’t we all. There are times when God calls us to run hard and fast, but there are times when love asks us to linger and go slow. To say, “I love you” with complete attention. To say it a million times over, if we need to, until we and the other person are laughing with joy and those three small words can hardly contain the love that has poured into the room. To hear God say it to us again and again until divine love has penetrated the dry soil of our hearts and we spring up, as Isaiah says, “like willows by flowing streams” [Isaiah 44:4].

The beloved disciple is willing to wait and to gaze without grasping, until at last he feels drawn to step inside. And that is the third thing he does. He “went in” – that is, he stepped into the Mystery – and he “saw and believed” [John 20:8]. The Fourth Gospel uses the word “believe” a full 96 times, and the Gospel’s whole purpose is to invite its readers to do what the beloved disciple did: to see and believe, and so to live, to receive everlasting life.

What do you think it looked like when the beloved disciple saw and believed? Did his face begin to shine? Did tears of joy spring to his eyes? Did he throw his arms wide and begin to dance? We don’t know what he did. What would you do?

His journey is our journey, for the story of our faith may well have the same three markers along the way that his does – we run toward the sacred unknown because we want to see; we pause at the doorway because we see but also need to gaze; we enter inside and now see and believe.

I must say a word about the final sentence in this passage, the comment that “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that [Jesus] must rise from the dead” [John 20:9]. There is a wonderful freshness to the experience of the beloved disciple. He is the first to believe in the risen Jesus, but he does so not because believing this fits with what the Scripture says, or because he has figured anything out intellectually. His direct religious experience comes first. Later he will have a chance to think about it, because language comes later, and thought comes later – for now, he is simply immersed in the kind of innocent, fresh, direct perception that is ours in prayer when language and thought fall away and we find ourselves contemplating the holy Mystery in silence.

I must end by thanking the Brothers of SSJE, these dear friends of mine and friends of yours who have helped us and so many others to connect with the beloved disciple: to claim our own desire to run toward God, to spend time gazing, and to step forward and enter the holy Mystery so that we too may see and believe in our risen Lord. The retreats and spiritual direction that we find here; the sacred spaces; the sacraments and services of worship; the friendship and companionship along the way; the Rule of Life that supports us as a trellis supports a climbing rose – all these have inspired and strengthened us in our journey into the heart of God.

And now, of course, you and I have a chance to give something back: to help the Brothers re-build these beautiful spaces, to offer them not just our moral and spiritual but also our financial support, to become enthusiastic contributors to their new building campaign, “Stone and Light.” I can’t imagine what my own journey in faith would have been like without these dear colleagues and friends, these mentors and allies in the quest for God. I give thanks for you Brothers, and for this assembled community that seeks, as the beloved disciple once sought, to be faithful friends of Jesus and to bear passionate witness to his living presence in the world.

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Coming to Believe

The story of the disciple Doubting Thomas invites us to reflect on the meaning of faith, on what it means to believe. We often think of belief as simply a matter of giving intellectual assent to a proposition. Ask the typical American: Do you believe in God? And the answer is likely to be yes – and that’s that. But is belief really no more than reciting formulas and creeds, no more than lining up the correct ideas and passing some litmus test of orthodoxy?

Billy Graham tells a wonderful story about belief. One morning an acrobat begins pushing a wheelbarrow across a tightrope suspended high above Niagara Falls. When he reaches the other side, he turns around and carefully pushes the wheelbarrow back along the wire, as a crowd gathers to watch in amazement. Then the acrobat takes a 200-pound sack of dirt, places it in the wheelbarrow, and pushes the heavy load along the wire, through the misty air. Again, after reaching the far side he wheels the load back to where he started, while the crowd holds its breath. When the acrobat is back on solid ground, he points to a man in the crowd. “You,” he says. “Me?” the man says. “Yes, you,” says the acrobat. “Do you believe that I can push a man in a wheelbarrow across the falls?” “Oh yes,” says the fellow in the crowd, “I believe you can.” “All right then,” says the acrobat, pointing at him. “Get in.”1

Belief is obviously more than piously agreeing that a set of beliefs is true. The Gospel of John – the source of today’s story about Doubting Thomas – is a long meditation on the subject of belief. By my count, John uses the verb “believe” a full 96 times, almost four times more than the word is used in the other three gospels combined. In John’s Gospel the word “believe” repeats like a musical theme in a symphony, or like a shining thread that keeps showing up in a big tapestry.

Just listen to some familiar examples: If you believe in God’s Son, you will not perish but have eternal life [Jn 3:16]; if you believe in Jesus’ name, you will receive power to become children of God [Jn 1:12]; if you believe in Jesus you believe not in him but in the one who sent him” [Jn 12:44]; if you believe in Jesus, even though you die, you will live [Jn 11:25b].

The end of today’s passage, which is arguably the climax of the Gospel of John, states very clearly why the Gospel was written in the first place: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” [Jn 20:30-31].

But should we think of belief as the decision to accept something even if it flies in the face of the evidence? That’s the kind of belief that Lewis Carroll satirizes in a conversation between Alice and the Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again:
draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One
can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.”

Thomas was not the type to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. Thomas wanted facts; he wanted evidence. He wasn’t there on the evening of the first Easter when the risen Jesus entered the locked room and stood among the disciples and said “Peace be with you” and breathed the Holy Spirit into them. Thomas missed all that, and so he refused to believe it. He had no use for second-hand testimony; he wanted to know things for himself, to find out for himself whether or not the Resurrection was true.

I like Thomas for refusing blind belief, for insisting on using his God-given mind and personal experience to help him discover what was true. That of course is part of the Anglican or Episcopal way: we explore the truth by consulting our direct experience and power of reason as well as by consulting Scripture and tradition. God wants us to use every resource at our disposal as we open ourselves to the truth and decide what we most deeply believe.

So it’s good to notice that Jesus does not rebuke Thomas for his doubts when Jesus appears again a week later – he actually welcomes them. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says again to the gathered disciples, and then he turns to Thomas and, without saying another word, as if he already understands what Thomas needs so badly to know, he invites Thomas to touch his wounded hands and side. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” he tells Thomas. “Do not doubt, but believe.”

“Reach out,” Jesus says to Thomas – and to us. Move beyond whatever place you may be stuck in your perception of reality and explore what is most deeply true. We all have our usual patterns of thought, our typical preoccupations and obsessions and concerns. It is when we reach beyond them – when for instance, our mind grows quiet in contemplative prayer and we discover that we can watch our thoughts arise and pass away and that we are not our thoughts, that we belong to a much larger, living, shimmering, non-verbal reality – it is when we no longer identify with our conditioned thinking that we begin to be freed of our tight little grip on both our certainties and our doubts. That’s when life really comes alive – when it begins to sparkle and to be full of surprise. That’s when we touch our direct experience and discover the deepest belief of our heart, which is deeper than what we think.

When Thomas reaches out to Jesus, what does he touch? He touches Jesus’ wounds. Jesus has risen from the dead, and his transfigured body can do things that no ordinary body can do, such as move through locked doors. You might think that the body of the resurrected Jesus would be entirely glorious, perfect, and intact, and yet his risen body still bears the wounds of the crucifixion. What does that mean? It means that the man who stands before the amazed disciples is in fact the same man who was crucified. The wounds in Jesus’ hands and sides are marks that identify him, marks that establish the continuity between the flesh and blood Jesus whom the disciples knew and loved, and the risen Christ who now stands before them – a continuity across the divide of life and death. The wounded hands and side of the risen Christ show us that Christ will never stop sharing in human suffering. He may rise to the Father and take his seat at the right hand of God, but his body will never lose its connection with our wounded humanity. He will never transcend his deep sharing in and empathy for our human brokenness and pain.

Jesus invites Thomas to touch his side, where, John’s Gospel tells us, a spear pierced Jesus during the crucifixion and “at once blood and water came out” [Jn 19:34]. That is an image of giving birth, for in the crucifixion the old humanity died and a new humanity was born. It’s an image of baptism, too, the sacrament that Matthew Ryan Dineen will experience in a few moments, and through which we are re-born by being buried in Jesus’ death and by rising to new life in him [Romans 6:3-11].

Something decisive certainly happened to Thomas when he reached out to Jesus – some kind of inner transformation. His doubts fell away, his fear turned into confidence, and his sorrow into joy. “My Lord and my God!” he exclaimed, in the Gospel’s climactic recognition scene. Yes, it was Jesus – and at last Thomas understood who Jesus really was and who he had been all along.

Every Sunday we’re invited to state what we believe. “We believe in one God,” we say in the Nicene Creed, or “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” if we’re using the baptismal covenant. Usually we name our beliefs rather solemnly and with restraint – and that’s fine – but what an eye-opener it was last November at our “Creation Mass” – whose DVD, incidentally, we hope to release next week – when the choir launched into Horace Boyer’s Gospel setting of the Nicene Creed. Suddenly we were all rocking – do you remember that? We were all moving in our seats and feeling the beat and grinning from ear to ear. ‘Belief’ in God suddenly wasn’t a formal affair anymore, a tidy list of propositions to recite by rote and then tuck away in a drawer until next week. Suddenly we got it: ‘belief’ is alive. It is on the move. It can capture us – body and soul. It can make us want to climb out of the pew and into a wheelbarrow suspended high above Niagara Falls – to leap into life, to give ourselves fully to God, to trust with our whole heart and not to hold back.

1. Adapted from the paraphrase by Martin M. Davis, The Gospel and the Twelve Steps, quoted in Spiritual Kindergarten: Christian Perspectives on the Twelve Steps, by Dale and Juanita Ryan, Brea, CA: Christian Recovery International, 1999, 2005, p. 18.

Kindness in the Night

“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. “
– John 9:25

The night was closing in, and a little circle of people was gathered for the evening meal – Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, and his sister Martha, who was serving the meal, and his sister Mary, who took a great quantity of expensive perfume, bathed Jesus’ feet with it, and then dried his feet with her hair.

We hear this story every year on Monday of Holy Week, and I’d like to wonder with you about this gesture of Mary’s. What might it mean? Because John’s Gospel reads rather like a poem, every word and image has multiple meanings, not just one, so we can ponder a number of possibilities.

One meaning is the one that Jesus named: whether Mary knew it or not, when she anointed his feet she was anticipating his approaching death, anointing his feet as a mourner might anoint a dead body. His death was very close; the tension around Jesus was rising to a breaking point. The civil and religious authorities were plotting to take his life and looking for a way to arrest him. Mary seems to have sensed that. She understood the urgency of the moment; she longed to be of use, to offer a gesture of kindness; she felt the same longing that you and I feel when someone we love is near death. No one would speak a word of kindness to Jesus when he hung on the cross; no one would anoint his body after he was crucified; but Mary was there, on that dark night a few days before his death, offering Jesus what she could: the love that naturally flows from us when we know that someone we love is going to die. She anointed the feet that only a few days later would be pierced by nails.

A second meaning of the gesture – it praises extravagance. What a wild thing to do – to pour a pound of costly perfume over someone’s feet and then to wipe it away with one’s hair! It was scandalous, too — respectable Jewish women would never appear in public with their hair unbound. Mary had for the moment abandoned any concern about propriety; she had in a sense forgotten herself. She had relinquished the usual restraint that keeps us watchful about the impression we’re making and what other people think.

I think that’s how the deepest part of ourselves, our soul, wants to love God – with no holding back, with no hand on the hand brake. What would it be like to pray with our whole bodies, not just with our minds – to raise up our hands when we feel full of praise, to throw ourselves on the ground when we need to pray our penitence or sorrow – what would it be like to give our whole selves to God, body, mind and soul, to love God openly, with less caution and reserve? Maybe here in church we like our worship quiet and dignified, but when we pray alone at home, who is to stop us from letting our prayer be completely expressive? There are people who dance their prayer, or weep their prayer, or in other ways use their bodies to let their love for God be physically communicated. That’s an invitation I hear in Mary’s gesture: an invitation as we move into Holy Week to love God more boldly.

And finally, anointing Jesus’ feet brings to mind a familiar gesture of hospitality in that ancient culture: anointing the head of a dinner guest. If Mary had anointed Jesus’ head with oil, her act would have been quite normal, a gracious and traditional way of welcoming a guest. Anointing Jesus’ head would also have recalled how in Old Testament times a prophet anointed the head of the Jewish king [2 Kings 9:1-13, 1 Samuel 10:1]. Anointing Jesus’ head would have meant that she recognized him as the Messiah – literally, the anointed one.

Instead, she anoints his feet, and I can’t help but wonder if this gesture means to say that she does recognize Jesus as king, but as a lowly king, as a humble king, as the Lord of life who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey because he was the King of Peace, not a warrior king. Maybe she anointed his feet because that is the only way to anoint such a king, a king who on another dark night just a few days later would gather his friends for another supper, get up from the table, remove his outer robe, tie a towel around his waist, and wash his disciples’ feet. Perhaps Mary was anointing Jesus as the king who serves, the one who calls us to wash each other’s feet.

And here’s the last thing I’ll say – in that extravagant, loving gesture that combines anointing the dead and anointing a servant king, Mary herself is anointed. She wipes off the perfumed oil with her hair. The oil that she offered Jesus is now on her own head. That to me is a wonderful image of how this works – we give ourselves to Jesus with no holding back and we in turn are blessed. We express our love for him as fully as we can, in our prayer and in our lives, and we discover that we in turn have been anointed, that we in turn have been filled with his life and presence and energy, as if there is nothing we can give him that won’t be given back to us tenfold.

Ride on in Majesty

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil,
asking, ‘Who is this?’“

-Matthew 21:10

“Ride on! Ride on in majesty!” we will sing in a moment, as we contemplate Jesus entering Jerusalem, riding on a donkey. The crowds gave him the red-carpet treatment, spreading their cloaks and branches on the ground to smooth his way. They gave him a royal welcome, a welcome fit for a king. I can imagine people streaming from their houses and running to catch a glimpse of him. I can see them craning their necks and elbowing their way forward. A father swings his daughter onto his shoulders so that she can get a better look; a dog starts barking, and then a whole pack of dogs; a mother grabs her child’s hand so that he won’t get lost; and then look – here he comes on his donkey, with a crowd of people walking ahead of him and another crowd behind, and everyone is shouting, everyone is cheering and carrying on.

What do you imagine that Jesus was feeling? Was he caught up in the excitement and commotion? Was he smiling? I can imagine him drinking in these moments of praise and support, and his quiet joy when he looked into the crowds and spotted some of the people he had healed – maybe the man who had been born blind, and the man with the withered hand; maybe the woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, and the little girl whom Jesus raised from the dead – all of them rejoicing and grateful for the surprise of being healed. And the prostitutes were there, and the tax collectors, the lame and the lost, the hungry and the hurting – all of them welcoming Jesus as a king returning to his throne.

But for all the excitement that swirled around him, I imagine that there was sorrow and determination in Jesus’ heart, too, for he was riding into that city to confront the powers that be. He rode as a humble king, not as a conquering hero. He rode with no army but a crowd of well-wishers and a handful of friends, most of whom eventually melted away into the darkness, betraying or denying him or simply running away. He rode with no weapon but the weapon of truth, with no power but the power of mercy, with no strength but the strength of love.

He could have picked up a weapon – he could have marshaled his ragtag followers into a makeshift army – but he didn’t. He could not have done that and remained faithful to who he was and the deepest truth he knew.

Jesus entered the city without a weapon, and yet, the Gospel tells us, “the whole city was in turmoil” – it was stirred up, it was shaken. The Greek word used here is the one used to describe an earthquake. The powers that be in this world are shaken up when the king of peace rides into town, when he rides into the boardrooms and back rooms of our country, when he rides into our hearts. There is an upheaval in the center of reality.

We may turn away from him. We may spurn him and deny him. And we do – we do it every day, in every malicious thought, in every word of cruelty or contempt, in every act of selfishness. When we get to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, you and I are every person in that tale – the family members and friends that, according to some Gospel accounts, stayed with Jesus until the end, but also the collaborators and the cowards, the crowds that turn on him and even the torturers themselves, since our government has no qualms about “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Every one of us can run away from love, but God’s love pursues us, all the same, meeting our violence with kindness, our sinfulness with forgiveness, our hatred and fear with the One who is “gentle and humble in heart” [Matthew 11:28].

As we enter Holy Week, we invite Jesus to ride into our lives and into our world – to shake things up, and turn things around, and open us to the love that makes all things new.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!

Now I See

“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. “

-John 9:25

We’ve just heard one of the seven miracle stories recorded in John’s Gospel. Jesus turns water into wine, he stills the storm, he feeds the five thousand – and, in today’s story, the next-to-last of his seven “signs,” Jesus heals a blind man. The purpose of these “signs,” as John’s Gospel calls them, is not so much to induce amazement as to show who Jesus is.

Today’s “sign” is that Jesus is “the light of the world” [John 8:12, 9:5]. He gives light to a man born blind and he rebukes the spiritual blindness of his adversaries. Jesus is the revelation of God, the light that shines in the darkness. Every detail in this story counts, so it’s worth noticing, for instance, that he tells the man to wash in the pool of Siloam, an image that suggests baptism. In the early Church, baptism was known as “illumination,” for Jesus is the light that illumines us at our baptism and draws us into the life of the Triune God. When Jesus spreads moistened mud on the man’s eyes, the word for ‘spread’ or ‘smeared’ literally means ‘anointed’ – again, a gesture that has been part of baptism ever since the early days of Christianity. The pool is named Siloam, which means “Sent,” just as Jesus was sent by the Father (the Mother) to give us light, and just as we too are sent out after our baptism to give light to the world.

But baptism marks just the beginning of our journey with Jesus. As we go along, we are tested. We wrestle with the big questions and we ourselves are questioned, perhaps by hostile unbelievers and perhaps by life itself, and we must decide and re-decide our faith. That’s what happened to the newly sighted man: his knowledge deepened over time as he came to know who healed him. At first, when he is interrogated by his neighbors, he can only wave his hand and vaguely refer to the “man called Jesus” [John 9:11] – whoever that is. Pressured by the Pharisees, the man now goes further – Jesus is “a prophet” [v. 17], someone with an especially close relationship to God. At the end of the story, after a long series of interrogations and debate, the man finally meets Jesus face to face. He sees him, he knows at last who he is, and he is finally ready to make the great declaration of faith, “Lord, I believe” [v. 38].

You might say that the man has been illumined. And the man stands for you; he stands for me; he stands for humanity itself. God wants to open the eyes of the blind, so that all of us can say, as this man does, “I was blind, but now I see.”

What do we see when our blindness is healed and we live in light? We see our interconnectedness. We move beyond what might be called the ego-self, the sinful, separated self that lives over and against other people, and we discover our larger Self – with a capital S – that lives in loving relationship with God and neighbor and the whole Creation. We live “no longer for ourselves alone,” as we hear in Lent at the Eucharistic Prayer, but for the one who lived and died and rose for us, the one who calls us out of our isolation and into loving connection with each other.

After the first manned space probe sent back photographs of the entire Earth, American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote: “To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers [and sisters] on that bright loveliness in the unending night, brothers [and sisters] who see now [that we] are truly brothers [and sisters].”

To me that is what it means to live “no longer for ourselves alone.” We take in the fact that the Earth is a whole; we perceive “its bright loveliness” in the darkness of space; we realize that human beings are kin, that we are members of the same family. Seeing a picture of the Earth from space invites us to a make a leap of consciousness, to move beyond the tight little tribal world of the ego-self and to claim our kinship with all humanity and all Creation.

What I’ve just said may sound very grand, but we live out this perception down on the ground, in the nitty-gritty drama of our daily lives. So I will tell you two little stories about seeing the light and living “no longer for ourselves alone.”

Story #1: a few months ago I sat down with some friends to watch “Amazing Grace.” Have you seen it? It’s a movie based on the life of William Wilberforce, the philanthropist who converted to Christianity and led the fight in Parliament to end the slave trade in the British Empire. After decades of struggle, Wilberforce eventually managed to persuade those in power in England not only to end the slave trade, but also – just before he died – to abolish slavery completely.

By the way, do you know who encouraged Wilberforce to take on the powers that be? John Newton, the Anglican priest and former slave-ship captain who saw the light, renounced slavery, and wrote the hymn we’ll soon be singing, “Amazing Grace.” I was blind, but now I see -words for all of us when we suddenly discover that the person or group of people we’ve exploited or demonized or pushed away is actually kin to us, a member of the same human family, equally loved by the God who loves us all.

Well, the next morning one of my friends who had watched the movie fell sick. As she told me later, she found herself crouched miserably over the toilet, and as she emptied the contents of her stomach, she began recalling the slaves who had crossed the ocean in ships, how they had been chained and forced to lie down in rows, crammed into a small space that was constantly lurching as the waves rose and fell.

My friend felt wretched physically, but she went through it in solidarity with the slaves. As her body heaved, she joined her suffering with the slaves’ suffering, imagining herself with them and praying with them and for them. Who’s to say that her prayers didn’t somehow relieve a slave’s suffering years ago? God is not limited by time or space, and an ardent prayer that we offer now can go out in every direction – backwards or forwards in time and to any place around the world. The point of this story is that suffering doesn’t have to isolate us, to cut us off from each other. Mental or physical suffering can easily close us down into our own small worlds, and yet my friend found a way, even on her knees in the bathroom, to stand with other people and to sense her connection with them.

She was suffering in something like the same spirit that Jesus suffered on the cross – with others and for others. She was sick as a dog, but she found, as many others have found, that when we consciously join our pain to the pain of other people, our pain can become a prayer, an expression of love for our neighbor and for God. There is something salvific in that, for through Christ, we participate in our own salvation and the salvation of our neighbor.

So we can stay connected with others even when we’re suffering and feeling pain, even when others feel joy and we do not. You know how sometimes one person’s joy can separate people from each other. Maybe a friend or colleague gets an award or a fancy computer, or lands the perfect job or the perfect partner, or finds the perfect babysitter or the perfect assisted-living arrangement – in short, what we want and don’t have – and we feel envy. We compare ourselves to the other person and feel competitive or unfairly treated. The other person’s joy brings us down – we’re not rejoicing with them, we’re grumbling and distant and alone in our pain.

Here is story #2: I live near the center of Northampton and from a second-floor window I can look through the space between two houses across the street and see a small view of hills. The window faces east, so in the morning I can stand there and catch a glimpse of the sun rising over the Holyoke Range. Every day is different, with its particular changes of colors and clouds, and I treasure that view.

Lo and behold, this winter a developer started building a house that will soon block the view. Intellectually I knew that this new construction was a good thing – it’s good to build in town and to make its population denser so that we can save from development our precious open fields and woods and farmlands – but emotionally I was upset. I was angry, envious, and sad – because that was my view! Someone was taking away my view! Someone else was going to enjoy it – not me! After some inner struggle, what finally turned it around for me was this: I imagined the unknown owners of that new house and in my heart I told them: I give you the view. May the sight of the sun rising over the hills make you as happy as it has made me; may it bring you peace.

And with that prayer suddenly it was I who was happy, I who was at peace. I had given “my” beautiful view to someone I did not know, and that sense of loving connection restored the harmony in my soul. I realized again that we’re all connected to each other, that we all belong to God, that we’re all here to love.

When the eyes of the blind are opened, our respective sorrows and joys no longer divide us from each other. We mourn with those who mourn; we rejoice with those who rejoice; and no one is left out. We live “no longer for ourselves alone, but for him who died for us and rose again.”

As some of our politicians like to say – “Make no mistake!” The path into light is a difficult path to follow. We need friends to share it with us, a community of support, people who will remind us of who we really are – God’s beloved, united in the love of Christ across our differences. I want to cultivate my own awareness of empathy and generosity, and I ask for your support as I try to do that. I want to support you as you grow in that awareness, too. Together, by the grace of God, we will be able to say with increasing confidence, clarity, and joy – “I was blind, but now I see.”

On the Mountain

It’s a rowdy season just now in New England and across the country – a season of hubbub and excitement. Today’s the day of the Super Bowl (in case you hadn’t noticed), and we’re gearing up for Super Tuesday. Whether it’s the wide world of sports or the wide world of politics that most captures our attention, either way many of us are charged up this weekend, ready to make history, with passions running high.

Yet when we walked into church this morning, we stepped into a different space. Here on our last, climactic Sunday of the Epiphany season, God summons us away from the clamor and commotion of our fast-paced and sometimes driven lives, and sends us up the mountain to pray, as Moses did, as Elijah did, and as Jesus did, as well. In the solitude of that holy mountain, with its long, sweeping views and its cold, clean air, we have a chance to sense – and perhaps encounter – what today’s second reading calls the “Majestic Glory” [2 Peter 1:17], the Glorious Majesty that we call God.

“Come up to me on the mountain,” the LORD said to Moses [Exodus 24:12]. And so Moses went up Mount Sinai and received the Law – the Ten Commandments – that established the covenant between God and God’s people. Moses spoke with God as one might speak with a friend, and his face shone with God’s glory.

“Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD,” the LORD commanded Elijah, the greatest of the prophets [1 Kings 19:11]. And so Elijah went up Mount Horeb and from its height the LORD passed by – not in the tumultuous wind that loudly split the rocks apart, not in the earthquake nor in the raging fire, but “in a sound of sheer silence” [1 Kings 19:12].

Like Moses and Elijah before him, Jesus headed up a mountain to pray. Six days after Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, and after Jesus told his disciples about his coming passion and death, Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and climbed with them the 9,000 feet of Mount Hermon.

On that high mountain Jesus’ prayer grew into an intense religious experience. As we just heard, “He was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” [Matthew17:2], an event that is recorded in all three of the Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke. To describe what happened, the Greek texts use the word “metamorphosis,” and the Latin texts, the word “transfiguration.” Whatever you call it, the meaning is the same: at the top of the mountain, Jesus was swept up into the love and infinite grandeur that created and sustains the universe. What Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and other stars”(1) so completely infused and embraced Jesus that who he really was – in fact, who he had always been – was revealed at last. The dazzling brightness that emanated from his body was a shining forth of his divinity. He was the light that shone through him, as the three disciples saw. To quote from today’s second reading: “we [were] eyewitnesses of his majesty” [2 Peter 1:16].

The story, despite being familiar, may sound far-fetched to the critical, rational, analytic mind, but mystics from a variety of world religions speak of a vibrant, shimmering energy or light that flows through everything. In Asia, for instance, 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. We can’t see it but we sense it close by. We might describe it as lighting up the edges of things, or shining out from within them. We experience it as light even though we can’t see it – and 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 Matthew uses the language of paradox when he describes Jesus’ experience in terms of a “bright cloud” that “overshadowed” them. Something about perceiving that radiant darkness can’t help but awaken our love.

We usually think of the Transfiguration in terms of the eye – in terms of light and a blaze of glory. We speak, as in today’s Collect, of “[beholding] by faith the light of his countenance,” and, as in that beautiful passage from today’s second reading, of being “attentive… as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts” [2 Peter 1:19]. Visual imagery is a powerful way to speak of God. But I think it’s good to notice that the story of the Transfiguration also speaks about the power of the ear to lead us to God – about the power of listening, the power of silence.

Take Peter, for instance. His eyes have been opened – he has seen Jesus’ face shining like the sun; he has seen Jesus’ clothes become dazzling white; he has seen Jesus suddenly draw to himself Moses and Elijah, the lawgiver and the prophet, the two most holy men of Israel; and he has seen that Jesus’ authority is even greater than theirs. And what does Peter do? He starts babbling – as I probably would, too. The Gospels of Mark and Luke add a comment that Peter doesn’t know what he’s saying – he’s frightened, so he starts chattering about building three dwellings right there on the spot, as if he’s trying to regain some kind of control over what’s happening, trying to make sense of it within his conceptual framework, to contain it and somehow box it in.

But even while he’s talking, poor soul – just as we all start talking to ourselves when our experience in prayer becomes too intense and we’re afraid of losing control – God interrupts Peter in mid-sentence, as if to put a gentle hand over Peter’s mouth and to say Hush. Then “a bright cloud [overshadows] them, and from the cloud a voice [says], “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

Today, on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, we recall how the season began. The dazzling star that led the wise men to the infant Jesus is now the light that shines from Jesus himself. The voice from heaven that spoke at Jesus’ baptism now speaks as a voice from the cloud, and repeats the same words, adding only: “Listen to him.”

Listen to him. Listen. That’s a message about hearing, about keeping quiet, about being attentive with our ears, as if we can only apprehend the fullness of God in Christ, or take in his glory, if we know a good deal about silence.

So how are we doing at listening – at listening to ourselves, at listening to each other, at listening to God? I can’t help but think of all the people who walk around feeling lonely, because no one really listens to them. I can’t help but think of all of us who are so eager to speak, so quick to insert ourselves into a conversation or to turn the conversation back to our own agenda, our own preoccupations and concerns, as if we’ve forgotten the kindly art of making space for someone else. I think of my own chattering mind, how I can fill it with voices from the radio and TV, fill it my own busy thoughts, judgments, opinions, and commentary, until I lose any sense of inner silence, any awareness of contact with God.

What would it be like to learn to listen? To walk away regularly from the world’s chatter and jargon and argument, and to listen in silence for the voice of love that is always speaking in our depths? Poet Adrienne Rich puts it like this:

“…there come times – perhaps this is one of them –
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires….”(3)

I know that when I make space for silent prayer, I find it easier to be more mindful when I speak; I feel more ready to listen to others, less hair-trigger ready to jump in with my instant reactions, judgments, or advice.

Sometimes God can only find us if we listen. Sometimes God can only speak if we are silent. Only as our minds grow still can we begin to glimpse what Thomas Merton discovered in his own practice of contemplative prayer: “There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility.”(4)

I wonder what it would be like if we kept listening to that inner silence – what metamorphosis, what transfiguration, would take place in our own lives if we returned regularly to that holy mountain. Imagine seeing Jesus’ face, all lit up with glory. What does he look like? What expression do you see in his eyes? And when you listen to his voice, what do you hear? What is it that Jesus wants so much to express to you? These are questions to explore in silence as part of a regular practice of prayer, a practice that we renew every year during Lent.

For we can’t stay on the mountaintop forever, much as we might want to. The vision of God is too much for the disciples, and they fall to the ground, overcome by fear. Jesus comes to them with great tenderness and touches them, as if to restore them to ordinary consciousness, and he tells them, “Get up and do not be afraid.” Strengthened by the light they’ve seen, they walk with Jesus back down into the nitty-gritty struggles of their community, where people are suffering and can see no way out.

And of course we too must make our own descent down the mountain if we want to be transfigured. The light of Christ can’t grow in us if we hide out from the world but only if we immerse ourselves in it. Mystical experience is not about fleeing from the world, but about being willing both to pray and to plunge into life, both to set aside time for solitary communion with God and to roll up our sleeves and move into our workplace and into our relationships with family and friends with one ear to the ground, as we look for the light, and listen to the voice – until at last the day comes when we “see Jesus in every aspect of existence”(5) and perceive at last that even the ashes of Lent – even the dust itself – is shining.

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

2. Ibid.

3. Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etude” (excerpt), The Dream of A Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.

4. Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, New York: New Directions, 1977, p. 363.

5. “The paths we travel on our sacred journey will lead us to the awareness that the whole point of our lives is the healing of the heart’s eye through which we are able to see Jesus in every aspect of our existence.” — St. Augustine

In the River with Jesus

There are many ways to pray with Scripture, but when we come to a scene as dramatic as this one, I find it impossible not to do what Ignatius of Loyola recommended: to imagine every detail and in my mind’s eye to let it come to life with all its colors and smells and sounds. When I stand with that crowd beside the river and feel the warm sun on my back and smell the dust in the air – when I watch Jesus begin to wade into the Jordan and glimpse the determination on his face, for he’s come all the way from Galilee to do this: he wants to be baptized, he needs to be baptized – when I watch his bare feet find their footing on the river’s mud and stones, and imagine the cool, clear water splash around his ankles, then cover his knees and finally swirl around his waist – when I see John’s sudden gesture of hesitation and protest, his reluctance to go through with this, and I hear Jesus’ quiet words in reply, saying something like, “Do it, my friend. Do it. I must be baptized so that everything can be fulfilled” – when I imagine John’s eventual nod of consent and then watch as Jesus closes his eyes and drops beneath the water’s surface, I want to enter that river with him. I want those waters to wash over me, as well.

There is so much I want God to wash away – so much that my hands, and all human hands, have dirtied and spoiled, so many words I’ve spoken, that we’ve all spoken, that have been sour in our mouths as we said them; so many thoughts I’ve had, that we’ve all had, that have smudged and tarnished the people and the world around us; so many things I’ve done, that we’ve all done, that have caused other people pain. I know only too well my own greed and impatience, my self-centeredness and unfaithfulness to God, my daily failures to love. I know the uneasiness of not being right with myself, not being true to the person that God created me to be. So I want to run down that riverbank and wade in after Jesus. I want God to wash away everything that troubles and confounds me, all my pettiness and stinginess and fretful anxiety – and to make me clean again, to make me whole. I want to plunge into that river with Jesus so that everything less than love can be washed away, so that everything smug and small and self-serving can dissolve like dirt and be swept away at last in the shining stream of God’s mercy.

Deep in the human heart there is such a tender and tenacious longing to be good. Mary Oliver puts it well in one of her new poems:

I would be good-oh, I would be upright and good
          To what purpose? To be shining not
sinful, not wringing out of the hours
          petulance, heaviness, ashes. ¹

“To be shining not sinful” – that deep longing is enough to bring us to the waters of baptism, that longing for our errors and failures to be washed away and for God’s light to shine through us again.

But that’s not the only reason I want to dive into the water with Jesus. It’s not just that I want to be made clean – I also want to set aside my fear of death. I don’t know whether we human beings are the only animals that think about their own mortality and the mortality of their loved ones, but I do know the dread I feel when death makes its inevitable approach, the way I catch my breath in dismay when someone I love is given a diagnosis I never wanted to hear. I do know how despairing we are all likely to be if the diagnosis is ours, how suddenly at sea we may feel, and in over our heads, wishing in vain that we could escape, as frightened as Jonah was when he was thrown overboard. As Jonah, that reluctant prophet, puts it: I was “cast into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me… The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountain” [Jonah 2:3,5].

Water can wash us clean, but water can drown us, too, so when Jesus begins wading into that river, he is showing us not only his desire and intention to wash away the sins of the world, but also his desire and intention to set us free from the power of death. He has come to rescue Jonah; he has come to rescue us all. So I want to wade in with him. Where Jesus is going, I want to go, too.

We know what happens next: he rises up out of the water and the heavens are opened to him. As Gregory of Nazianzus commented back in the 4th century, Jesus comes to the Jordan River “to bury sinful humanity in the waters,” and then “Jesus rises from the waters; and a drowned world rises with him.”²

“A drowned world rises with him.” In our baptism into Christ, we rise up just as Jesus rose, dripping, from the waters of the Jordan River. In our baptism, we are immersed in the waters of death. We die in Christ. We die with Christ. And then we rise with Christ. Imagine what that means: it means that from now on, our death is done with. It is behind us. That fearsome future event that lurks around some unknown corner has already taken place. We have died with Christ and we are now alive in Christ – and to whatever extent we can take this in, we are set free from anguish and anxiety. We are set free to love without grasping or possessiveness, without anxiety and without holding back. Maybe you know that in the early centuries of the Church, Christians were called “those who have no fear of death.”³

So when it comes to joining Jesus in the Jordan, count me in. I’m ready for my sins to be washed away and I’m ready to relinquish my fear of death.

The sacrament of baptism happens – and needs to happen – only once in our lives, but we reclaim its power every time we renew our baptismal vows, as we’ll do together in just a few moments. We reclaim its power every time we continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. We reclaim its power every time we persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord. We reclaim its power whenever we abide by these and all the baptismal promises that we’ve made.

And every time we live them out, we step back into the river – not into the Jordan River this time, but into the river of grace. The river of grace is always full, and, as another long-ago bishop once put it, “the river of grace flows everywhere.”⁴ At every moment, day or night, wherever we go, whatever we’re doing, whether we are sitting or standing, whether we are walking or lying down, whether we are speaking or silent, we can step again into that shining river.

The river of grace is always here and always now. It flows only in the present moment, and the trick is to stay alert to it. The trick is to stay awake. “See,” says God in the passage we just heard from Isaiah, “the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them” [Isaiah 42:9]. Do we have eyes to see that? Oh, we may say to ourselves as we stand in line somewhere and drum our fingers impatiently on the counter, this is just another empty, boring moment to endure, something to hurry through as quickly as possible.

But in fact this moment – and every moment – is not empty at all. It is full of possibility, full of potential: it is a moment in which we can receive the love of God that is being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit [Romans 5:5], and listen again to the voice that murmurs in our ears just as it murmured in the ears of Jesus after he rose from the Jordan: “You are the beloved.” Every moment is a moment in which we can consciously step into the river of grace and ask ourselves, What does love require? Is there a word I can say, or refrain from saying, that might encourage love to flow more freely? Is there something I can do, or refrain from doing, that will release a little more love into the world, a little more joy? And if there is no love in sight, if everything in me and around me is as dry as a bone, can I turn to God in prayer and ask God to send forth springs of living water?

Athletes and artists sometimes speak of being “in the flow” – caught up in that mysterious, almost magical consciousness in which we become completely attentive, present, and engaged in the task at hand. Maybe, for Christians, to be “in the flow” is to live in the river of grace – to be so united with Christ in his baptism, so attuned to our baptismal promises, so immersed in the present moment – that, without any trace of self-consciousness and whether we know it or not, we shine with his radiance. We reveal his glory.

1. Mary Oliver, “On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate,” Thirst, Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, p. 57.

2. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 39, quoted in Celebrating the Seasons: Daily Spiritual Readings for the Church Year, compiled and introduced by Robert Atwell, Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2001, p. 77.

3. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 107.

4. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, On Baptism, quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, ed. J. Robert Wright, NY, NY: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1991, p. 51.

Who was Joseph?

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” So begins Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, a story that in his telling gives Joseph quite a significant role to play. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and a mother, but it’s Mary – not Joseph – that I tend to think about at Christmas, Mary who gets the spotlight as the mother of Jesus, the mother of God. Of course no crèche would be complete without its figure of Joseph, but usually I don’t pay much attention to him. He wasn’t Jesus’ ‘real’ father, and in the story of Jesus’ birth and infancy, Joseph never says a word, he doesn’t even speak, whereas Mary (in Luke’s Gospel) gets to sing the “Magnificat.” I usually think of Joseph as a minor character in the drama of salvation, and soon enough he slips off the stage upon which Jesus’ life plays out, like a fellow with a bit part who quickly disappears into the wings. My Bible commentary points out that Joseph is mentioned only a few times in the whole New Testament, and that he drops out entirely by the time that Jesus begins his public ministry.

And yet here is Matthew in this morning’s Gospel, speaking of Joseph’s place in the story of Jesus’ birth, and I thought to myself: maybe it’s time to take another look at Joseph. Who was this man, and what did he do that enabled Jesus to be born? For all of us who long for Christ to be born again in our hearts, and in our homes, and in this troubled world of ours, what can we learn from Joseph?

The first thing to say is that Joseph was a “righteous” man. That’s not a word we often hear these days, unless we place in front of it that troublesome little word, “self.” Self-righteous – now that’s a word we recognize. “Self-righteous” conjures up images of a holier-than-thou type of person who looks down with contempt on lesser mortals. When we feel a surge of self-righteousness, we pull ourselves away from other people, and look down on them with pity or with scorn. I hear a tinge of self-righteousness, a kind of malicious glee, in some of the comments now going around about Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister, the star of “Zoey 101,” who finds herself pregnant and unwed. Self-righteousness makes us feel superior, and gives us license to blame and shame and to point an accusing finger at other people.

But that’s not how Joseph was. He was not a “self-righteous” but a “righteous” man. To be righteous is to live in right-relationship with God, to be straight with God, to seek to do God’s will. Joseph didn’t indulge in self-righteousness, even though the culture that surrounded him instantly judged and condemned a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock. I can imagine Joseph’s confusion and anger and sorrow when he heard that his betrothed had conceived a child. I can imagine him wrestling with shock and disappointment. But it seems that Joseph’s deepest commitment was to do what was right in the eyes of God. Rather than rush to judge or condemn, rather than take revenge by exposing Mary to public humiliation, Joseph treated Mary with respect and tried to protect her from the jeers of the crowd. And so, the Gospel tells us, “[he] planned to dismiss her quietly” [Matthew 1:19]. That decision must have been a costly one, one that required a strong dose of self-discipline and self-restraint.

So that’s the first thing I see in Joseph: a man committed to doing what was right, even when it came at personal cost. I see Joseph in every person who is quietly trying to do the right thing, even when there are no reporters or cameras around to make it public, no witnesses but the eyes of God. Heaven knows it’s hard to do the right thing. We see human fallibility wherever we turn, from the major league baseball players who couldn’t resist taking illegal steroids to the C.I.A. using torture to interrogate suspects and then destroying the tapes that recorded it. Doing right is no small thing, especially when no one is looking.

Some of you may have come across the rules for a good life that were laid out back in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Anglican priest and early leader of the Methodist movement. Here is what John Wesley wrote:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

I was so taken by that quote when I first read it that for years I kept it posted on our refrigerator. I think those words fit Joseph. He was a righteous man; he wanted to do what was right with God. That’s our own first step, too, in preparing for Christ’s birth. We clean up our life. We re-commit ourselves as best we can to doing what is right.

But there’s more. Joseph was also listening for God’s ongoing revelation. He was open to surprise, available for fresh encounter. When an angel of the Lord spoke to him in a dream, Joseph paid attention. Joseph knew, as we know, too, that the holy Mystery we call God can speak to us in our dreams, in our intuitive hunches, in that little flash of insight that opens up a new perspective and a fresh possibility. I don’t imagine that Joseph went through the day dutifully following a rigid set of rules, as if religious texts and religious traditions were like a handbook that tells you exactly what you’re supposed to do in every situation, or like a paint-by-number set in which all you do is color inside the lines. I imagine that Joseph lived with a prayerful awareness that the universe is much more magical and mysterious than that – that reality is not a closed system but is wide-open, and much more than a linear, logical, and predictable series of events. An angel can speak to us in a dream; a voice can sound from within a burning bush; we can quiet our minds in prayer and suddenly perceive something we’ve never seen before, or discover that what we had in mind to do was not at all what the situation requires and that we are being called to do something else entirely. Things are not always what they seem. As Hamlet says to Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

And so, “when Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife” and he named the child Jesus, which means Savior, just as the angel had told him to [Matthew 1:24-25].

So that’s the third thing to say about Joseph. Not only is he a righteous man, committed to living in right-relationship with God and to doing all the good that he can; not only is he a prayerful man, listening to his inner wisdom, ready to let God speak to him in a dream; he is also a man of action. He hears God speak in his depths and he brings it forth into the world. He makes manifest the word from heaven that came to him in secret; he listens to it and decides to change course. “Yes,” he says to God, and to Mary, “I will be a father to the child. I will claim him as kin. I will guard him and stand by him and keep him safe from harm.”

Because of Joseph’s willingness to respond to God and to accept the task that was given to him to do, Jesus Christ was born. Joseph may not get all the glory at Christmas, but without him – without his commitment to doing what was right, without his prayerful, willing spirit, without his decision to take the action that God was calling him to do – who knows whether Jesus would have been safely born into the world. It was Joseph who ensured Jesus’ safe delivery, and soon after that it was Joseph who protected his wife and newborn son by fleeing into Egypt and returning only after Herod had died.

I’ll tell you why I am drawn to Joseph this year: because he was an ordinary man trying his best to listen to God. And his willingness to serve God turned out to be enough: he had a role to play in the larger drama of salvation. Some might say that Joseph’s role was just a small one, but even so it was a necessary one. It was an essential one. And I think that’s true for us, as well. For all we know – and we may never know – the small good thing that we do today or tomorrow will make an immeasurable difference to someone else, and to God.

I think of Helen Keller, and her willingness to do whatever next good thing came across her path to do. She knew her limits. She knew that she was only one person, and that she herself couldn’t save the world. And yet, she wrote somewhere, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.”

Joseph did not refuse to do ‘the something’ that he could do, and so Jesus the Messiah was born, and human life was changed forever. With Joseph beside us to encourage us along the way, perhaps we too will open ourselves to listen to where Love is calling us to go and to follow where it leads. Perhaps we too will stand with Joseph in that Bethlehem stable, gazing at the newborn Jesus and marveling at the ways of God.