Author Archives: mbj

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.

Now is the Time To Wake from Sleep

N

ow it begins: a fresh start, a new season, a new year. Like a great wheel, the cycle of the liturgical year has turned. Last Sunday the church year ended with the Feast Day of Christ the King, and today on this First Sunday of Advent, we embark on a new year of our life in Christ.

“Advent” means “coming” or “arrival,” and during these four weeks that lead up to Christmas we prepare for the first coming of Christ, when God became incarnate in Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Advent has the makings of a joyful season. We look forward to Christmas, to holiday parties and festive decorations. We anticipate the exchange of gifts and the renewal of friendships with people we might otherwise have lost touch with. We savor the colorful lights that can cheer our hearts when the days grow short, and we savor the joy of making wreaths and lighting candles against the darkness.

But Advent has a sober and reflective side, as well, for in Advent we also look ahead to Christ’s Second Coming. We look ahead to that last, great day in the unknown future when, as today’s Collect tells us, Christ “shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” Advent invites us to look up from the immediate concerns of our daily lives – how to get our kids to basketball practice, how to get that stain out of the rug, how to meet the next car payment – and to ask some big questions. Where am I heading? Where’s my life going? To what end am I living – with what intention, with what goal? Knowing our destination gives direction to the journey, so it matters how we imagine the end. Do we think that everything will end pointlessly, with a bang or a whimper? Or is something better coming?

Christianity tells us that at the end of time, everything on heaven and earth will be fulfilled and completed in Christ. We lift up that promise in the Eucharist when the celebrant prays to God, the Father and Mother of our souls, “In the fullness of time, put all things in subjection under your Christ.” What does that mean? It means that at some unknown point in the future, everything will be gathered up in God’s love, and ordered by love, and upheld by love. It’s one of my favorite lines in the Eucharistic prayer. It tells us where we’re heading: we’re heading to God.

But are we ready for that unknown moment when God will meet us and judge us and transform everything with love? Scripture makes it clear that at the Second Coming we must be prepared for judgment as well as grace. I expect that some of us flinch a little when we get to the part of the Nicene Creed where we say that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” We picture Jesus on the judgment throne, separating the sheep from the goats, rewarding the one and punishing the other, and we cringe. We know the sting of being criticized by a parent or teacher or someone in authority. We know how much it hurts to be found wanting. We can be our own harshest critics, and we fear a God who will pass judgment and condemn us all over again. Are we ready for judgment as well as grace?

When it comes to thinking about the judgment of God, I was very much helped several years ago when I read the text of a lecture given by Huston Smith, a well-known scholar of world religions. His remarks captured my imagination, and I want to share with you part of a letter that Huston Smith read aloud. In this letter, a history professor describes a near death experience that he had in course of a severe illness.

The man reports that he found himself standing in a flat, barren, blue-gray place and that he felt beside him what he calls a “Being” – capital B – whom he never saw. He writes, “Its presence was constant, enormous and powerful. With the Being beside me, exuding love and comfort to me, I re-experienced my life…from three different perspectives simultaneously.

“One perspective was my version of my life as I might have recounted it to anyone patient enough to listen. However, it was not so much the reliving of [outer] events as it was re-experiencing the emotions, feelings and thoughts of my life. Here were the emotions that I had felt and why I had believed that I had them. Here were my conscious reasons for the actions that I had taken. Here were the hurts I felt and my responses to them. Here was my emotional life as I recalled having experienced it.

“However, as I was re-experiencing my version of my life, I was also experiencing my life from the perspective of those with whom I was involved. I felt what they felt, I lived their emotions as they acted with and reacted to me. This was their version of my life. When I thought they were clearly out of line and reacted with anger or thoughtlessness, I felt the pain and frustration my actions caused them. It was an absolutely different view of my life and it was not a pretty one. It was shocking to feel the pain that another person felt due to what I had done even as, when I did them, I believed myself to have been fully justified because of the person’s own actions. At the time, I had told myself that I was justified, but even if that were true, their pain was real. It hurt.

“And there was more. At exactly the same time I experienced a third view of my life. It was not my version, with my justifications. It was not that of the others in my life, with their versions of my life and their own justifications for their own actions, thoughts, and feelings. It was an unbiased view, free of the subjective and self-serving rationalizations that the others and I had used to support the countless acts of selfishness and lack of true love in our lives. To me it can only be described as God’s view of my life. It was what had really happened, the real motivations, the truth. Stripped away were my lies to myself that I actually believed, my self-justification, my preference to see myself always in the best light.

“I did not find myself in Hell, but I was suffering torment. It was horribly painful to experience the fullness of my life and I was filled with contempt for myself. How could I have been so incredibly stupid as to believe my own lies? Why was simple compassion so difficult? In particular it hurt to discover that I had been hiding behind my own version of logic in order to deny emotional truths.

“All of this – the three-way re-experiencing of my life and self-judgment – was simultaneous and yet distinct. There was no such thing as the sequence of events that we believe time to be.

“In the end, I heard a judgment on my life, but it was my own judgment of myself. It came from within me and it had my voice. My life was clear to me. I was a failure.

“And through all this the Being was at my side. I felt nothing but love and support from the Being. It exuded emotion: you are loved, you are lovable; your worst fault is that you are human. It goes with the territory. I remember the words, ‘Don’t worry, you are only human.’

“I was in emotional agony. It was terrible to know that I was a mere mortal, just like everyone else, for I had thought that I was so much better than that. But the Being accepted me. The Being was letting me know that it was not acceptable to hurt other people, but it is part of the human condition. It’s not all right, because it hurts other people, but it is all right, because it is what humans do.”

The account goes on, but I will end here, only adding the man’s closing sentences, which are these: “I remember making a positive decision. I wanted to come back to life. I wanted to do what I would be needed for. I then began my slow climb out of the coma and into consciousness.”*

What a powerful account of what it may be like to stand at last before the One “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid” [Collect for Purity]. Christians believe that the God who will come to judge us at the end of our lives and at the end of time is also the God who created us and who gave his life to redeem us. As a priest friend of mine wrote a few years back, “We [will] stand in the presence of Christ whose hands still bear the wounds he bore to show us how much we are loved” [The Rev. Susan B. Curtis, sermon, 11/27/94]. The eyes that gaze into our soul will be the eyes of love.

We don’t know when that last day will come – our last day or the world’s last day. Jesus himself warns that no one knows the details, no one holds the map or the time-table that can tell us exactly when and how the reign of God will finally be accomplished – not the angels of heaven, not Jesus himself, but only God the Father. But we do know this: at some unexpected moment, that day will come. So we need and want to stay awake. “You know what time it is,” Paul says. “It is now the moment to wake from sleep” [Romans 13:11]. God will come among us, Jesus says in today’s Gospel, as unexpectedly as a flood, as decisively as a kidnapper, as secretly as a thief. These disturbing images can shake us up, and that’s the point: God will break in at any moment. “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” [Matthew 24:42].

So now is the time to clean up our act, to sort out our life, to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light.

Now is the time to abandon whatever stupefies us and puts us to sleep – whether it be the drone of the media or the call to consumerism, a fondness for complaining or the inner voices of worry and self-attack.

Now is the time to lay aside the old habits of egotism and greed, of violence and unkindness – the old patterns, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans [Romans 13:13], of drunkenness, quarreling, and jealousy.

Now is the time to look ahead with hope, for, as Paul also says, “the night is far gone, the day is near” [Romans 13:12]. It’s as if we were standing in the doorway of a dark house, looking out to the hills beyond, and in the sky we can see the first glimmer of sunrise. Behind us is darkness, but ahead of us, light.

Christ has come, so the dawn is shining on our faces.

Christ is here, so we know we’re not alone.

Christ will come again, so we step out boldly through the doorway, leaving everything less than love behind.

*Quoted from Huston Smith, “Intimations of Mortality: Three Case Studies, The Ingersoll Lecture for 2001-2002,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2001-2002, p. 15.

Heading for Healing

For those of us who like a good story, today’s a good day, because today we have a pair of fine stories to consider – the story of Elisha healing Naaman the leper, which is found in the Second Book of Kings, and the story (from the Gospel of Luke) of Jesus healing ten lepers and receiving a word of thanks from one of them. 

Let’s take a look at Naaman’s story.  He’s an impressive fellow, this “commander of the army of the king of Aram.”  The land of Aram bordered the land of Israel and the two neighbors were often in conflict.  Naaman is a “great man“ and a “mighty warrior” whose victories in battle have earned him the admiration of his king.  Naaman is a big shot – I imagine him being a proud and self-sufficient man, a man acutely aware of his own accomplishments and importance.  But at the same time Naaman also suffers from leprosy, a debilitating disease that in ancient times was incurable and considered the most devastating illness you could possibly have.  So that’s his situation: a man of public power and prestige with a deep and ingrained illness gnawing away at him that only God can cure.

The action begins when a young girl who was taken captive by the Arameans from the land of Israel and who now serves as a slave to Naaman’s wife comments to her mistress, “Oh, if only Naaman were with the prophet in Samaria!  He would be cured of his leprosy!” 

The slave girl obviously has no social standing whatsoever – she’s young, she’s a slave, she’s a girl – but apparently her mistress has the good sense to listen to her.  After all, what if the girl is right?  What if Israel’s prophet really can cure Naaman’s illness?  So Naaman’s wife talks to Naaman, who talks to the king of Aram, who in turn sends a letter to the king of Israel that says, “I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy” [2 Kings 5:6].  The next thing we know, the king of Israel is reading the letter and tearing his clothes in despair.  How in the world is he going to cure Naaman’s leprosy?  Only God can do that!  Is his enemy, the king of Aram, just trying to pick a quarrel?

At this point the hero of the story finally makes his entrance: Elisha, the man of God.  He hears that the king of Israel has torn his clothes and he sends the king a message: Don’t you worry. Send Naaman to me, “that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel” [2 Kings 5:8].

So Naaman travels with a grand retinue of soldiers and servants and horses and chariots.  They all march up to Elisha’s little house, stop at the front door, and Naaman says, “OK, here I am.  Give it your best shot.”

But Elisha stays inside.  He doesn’t even bother to come out and say hello.  He just sends a messenger with a very simple instruction: “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”

Naaman throws a fit.  “Who does this guy think he is?  Doesn’t he know who I am?  I’m important and I deserve an important cure!  I don’t want something simple – I want something elaborate!  I want Elisha to come out in person and do a special ritual, maybe use a lot of big words and wave his arms around and cure my leprosy in a dramatic way.  I’m not going to stoop to washing in the lousy river Jordan – I’ve got rivers of my own back home in Damascus!”

He turns away in a rage and there is a wonderful moment of suspense – is he going to go home, taking his leprosy with him?  Is he going to walk away from his own healing?  But his servants intervene – and you’ll notice that just as with the slave girl at the beginning of the story, again it is the humble people of low social status who have words of wisdom for the people in power.  His servants are deferential – “Father,” they say – and rather than tell him what to do or give him direct advice, they simply raise a question: “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?” [2 Kings 5:13]

Somehow Naaman has the grace to take a chance, take a risk, and so he “[goes] down and [immerses] himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God.”  We don’t see the scene in detail, but here is how I imagine it went.

Naaman strides angrily down the riverbank, wades into the chilly water, holds his breath, drops below the surface, and whoosh – his self-importance is washed away.  He comes up for air and then drops into the water a second time, and whoosh – his desire to be in charge is washed away.  He drops into the river a third time and whoosh – his desire to be in control is washed away.  In all, he makes seven plunges into the river – a good large number that for us might symbolize a washing away of the seven deadly sins, or a kind of baptism that heals him, body and soul.

When at last Naaman steps out of the river, the story tells us that “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean” [2 Kings 5:14], which means, I suppose, that not only his painful wounds and sores, but also his freckles, wrinkles and age spots, have been restored to healthy young flesh.  He has obviously received not only a physical healing, but a spiritual healing, too.  Naaman “[returns] to the man of God, he and all his company; he [comes] and [stands] before him,” and confesses his faith in the God of Israel. 

I hear this delightful story and I start thinking about our own stories of healing.  Every person in this room has a healing story, for we are all sinners in the process of being healed.  We are all fallen souls in the process of being redeemed, and surely there is a bit of Naaman in all of us, whether we like it or not.  For instance, maybe we know what it means to look good on the outside, as if everything in our life were going perfectly well and we hadn’t a care in the world, while secretly something was eating away at our soul.  Maybe we know what it is like to have many good deeds and accomplishments to our credit, to be leaders of one kind or another and to receive people’s praise and respect, while deep down we know that something within us is amiss and we cannot heal ourselves. 

Leprosy is a metaphor for the fallen human condition, for the lost-ness and sin to which human beings fall prey and which can’t be healed without God’s help.  “Leprosy” can take many forms.  Maybe we’re eaten up with resentment and complaint; maybe we’re grumbly, critical, and dissatisfied, and we secretly or openly scowl because the people around us never quite measure up.  Maybe we’re gnawed by self-doubt and insecurity, by a deep sense of unworthiness or shame, and compensate by spending our energy trying to please other people and make them like us.  Maybe our lives are poisoned by worry, by a constant, lurking, fretful dread that something awful is coming around the next corner.  Maybe, like Naaman, we’re riddled with pride, by the desire to be in charge and in control, and we take quick offense if we don’t get the respect we think we deserve.  Sure, Naaman wants to be healed, but he wants to be healed on his own terms, not on God’s terms.  He wants to be healed in a way that leaves his pride intact.

There are all kinds of leprosy going around.

Here’s another connection with Naaman: like him, we may need to open ourselves to God’s healing by doing something very simple.  Our deep healing often does not depend on doing something dramatic, but on being willing to take a small step – maybe to start going to Al-Anon meetings, or to begin a practice of daily prayer, or to walk up to that person we’ve hurt so badly or neglected for so long and to say we’re sorry.  Our first step to healing may be as simple as falling on our knees and asking Jesus for help.  I know that sometimes the step I need to take toward healing can be very simple, but – heaven help me – I can be as stubborn as Naaman and put it off as long as possible, and may even consider marching back home with my pride – and my illness – intact.

But, if we are willing, we will finally do what Naaman did: take Elisha’s good advice and take ourselves down to the Jordan, down to the healing waters of God, and give ourselves a good soak.  If you were to dip yourself seven times into that river of God, what would those cleansing waters wash away?  Every time you dunked your head and came up for air, you would be freer, more able to let the love of God flow through you without any hindrance at all.  What would those healing waters wash away from your soul?

And let’s say you’ve been cleansed.  What would happen then?  What would you do next?  I bet that, like Naaman returning to stand before Elisha and like the tenth leper who returned to thank Jesus for his healing, you and I would want to give God thanks.  That, of course, is what we do every Sunday, and what we come back every Sunday to do: to give God thanks.  Our whole service is about thanksgiving.  The lector reads a passage and says, “The Word of the Lord,” and we say, “Thanks be to God.”  At the Great Thanksgiving – note the title! – the celebrant says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” and we say, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.”  At the end of the service, the deacon says, “Let us bless the Lord,” and we say, “Thanks be to God.”

It’s all about saying thanks – thanks to the Creator who gave us the gift of life, thanks to the Redeemer who shares our suffering and heals our sin, thanks to the Holy Spirit whose love embraces us at every moment of our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not.  Someone [David Steindl-Rast] once said that the human heart is made for thanksgiving, and I think that’s true.  All the lepers had faith in Jesus and all of them were healed, but only one of them, the tenth, knew the joy of turning back and saying thanks.  I can’t help thinking that he was the happiest one of them all.

“I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart” – that is what today’s psalm says [Psalm 111:1], that is what Naaman said to Elisha, and that is what the tenth leper said to Jesus.  Healing ends in gratefulness, and sometimes healing begins there, too, for sometimes it is when we choose to be grateful rather than bitter, when we choose to give thanks rather than to be skeptical, critical, or sour, that God’s healing waters can begin to flow in us again and we can be drawn back into the stream of love that is our true home. 

I will give ee cummings the last word: 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
…….
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Blessed Unrest

I‘m going to ‘fess up right here.  On a beautiful summer morning like this one, I am sometimes tempted to show up in church, slide into my seat, and more or less doze through the readings.  But then – whoosh!  Along comes an urgent, edgy Gospel passage like this one and suddenly I have to sit bolt upright, startled awake.  Some contemporary New Testament scholars say that the pointed sayings of Jesus – the ones we want to set aside because they make us uncomfortable – are often the very ones that are most historically accurate.  So when I saw today’s Gospel reading, I had to sigh, OK, Margaret, forget about just showing up and offering a few casual remarks in your homily – Jesus has something else in mind.  Jesus wants to set us on fire.  

That’s how he puts it, right off the bat.  “I have come to start a fire, and how I wish it were kindled, how I wish it were blazing right now!”  Jesus comes with fire – that traditional biblical image of judgment and purification.  “I have come to change everything,” Jesus says to us this morning.  “I have come” – and now I’m quoting a contemporary rendering of this passage – “I have come to turn everything right-side up.”^[i]  “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to earth?” (Luke 12:51, NRSV)  “Do you think [that I have come] to smooth things over and make everything nice?  Not so.” (Luke 12:51, The Message)  I have come not to bring peace, but division.  “I’ve come to disrupt and confront!  From now on, when you find five in a house, it will be – three against two, and two against three; father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother….” (Luke12-51-53, The Message) And so on.  You know the rest.

And if we say we don’t understand, if we say that Jesus’ coming doesn’t present us with a decisive moment of choice that could be disruptive and that may separate people, even members of the same family, from one another, Jesus has some strong words of rebuke.  He says to the crowd, “When you see clouds coming in from the west, you say, ‘Storm’s coming’ – and you’re right.  And when the wind comes out of the south, you say, ‘This’ll be a hot one’ – and you’re right.” (Luke 12:54-55, The Message)  So if you know how to tell a change in the weather, “to interpret the appearance of earth and sky” (Luke 12:56, NRSV), don’t tell me you can’t interpret the present time.

What is the present time?  Well, it’s late-summer time.  It’s back-to-school-shopping time.  It’s time-for-a-haircut time.  It’s almost fall-TV-schedule time.  But above all it is God’s time.  In Jesus, God has come close; God has come into the world and entered human life, and from now on we are confronted with a daily choice: will we choose the ways of God?  Will we choose life rather than death?  Will we “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and… run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus”? (Hebrews 12:1-2a)  At first this might have seemed like another sleepy August morning, but instead we get a wake-up call, a summons to renew our commitment to Christ and to his proclamation of the kingdom of God.

But before I say another word, I must say this.  When Jesus announces that in a household of five, it will be three against two and two against three, I don’t believe for a moment that he wants us to be troublemakers for trouble’s sake, or to incite division for division’s sake.  Heaven knows the ordinary family has enough conflicts and misunderstandings of its own, and doesn’t need Jesus to encourage further division.  Heaven knows we don’t need to interpret this passage as license to bump against each other and revel in argument and controversy just because we’re in the mood.

In fact, the whole New Testament makes clear that Jesus’ overarching quest and his deepest longing was for God’s peace, God’s shalom – that Hebrew word that means not just the absence of strife or war, but well-being, wholeness, reconciliation with one another and with God.  Peace is what God desires and wills not only for the soul or for the human race, but for God’s whole creation.^[ii]  

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).  Jesus was recognized as a peacemaker at the very beginning of his life, when Zechariah welcomed him as the one who came “to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).  Near the end of his life, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus stopped those who were reaching for their swords, and when someone struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear, Jesus said, “No more of this!” (Luke 22:51), a cry for peace that echoes down through the centuries.

The early church carried forward Jesus’ message of shalom.  Paul wrote in one letter, “Be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thessalonians 5:13), and in another, “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual up-building” (Romans 14:19), and in yet another, “…agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11).  Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy says, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies: you know that they breed quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:22b-23).

At the heart of Christian faith is a quest for peace, what one commentator calls “an insatiable appetite for God’s shalom.”^[iii]  But Jesus makes it clear today that dedicating ourselves to God’s peace, God’s shalom means being willing to be passionate, to be set on fire, to give ourselves utterly to the quest for the wholeness and flourishing of all beings, even if it leads to division with those near and dear.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a 16 or 17-year-old in your life and you love him dearly and you’re committed to his flourishing, to his shalom.  And let’s say that he’s a good kid but he’s hanging with the wrong crowd and you know there’s some drinking going on.  If you like, you can keep the peace and look the other way.  You know that if you insist on keeping track of his whereabouts, or enforce a curfew, or call ahead to be sure that parents will be present in the house where his group plans to party, you’re not going to win any popularity contests with your son.  He’s going to be plenty annoyed with you, and he’s going to tell you so in no uncertain terms.  But the only way you can stay true to your commitment to be a good parent and to stand up for his wellbeing is to be willing to do what you need to do, to bear his wrath, and to let him be upset.  A false peace is no peace at all.

Or let’s say you’ve reached a point in your life where you sense that something in your life doesn’t ring true.  On the surface everything may be placid, but underneath you feel restless and edgy, or maybe you just feel numb, as if you’re only going through the motions.  As you listen to your deepest truth, you realize that something deep inside you is hungering for expression, something is calling you to make a change, something is asking you to take hold of your life in a more authentic way.  Doing that may create waves in the world around you.  It may disrupt some long-standing relationships.  But a fire has been kindled within you.  You want to discover who you really are and what you really value.  You want to get clear about what really matters to you, and how you want to spend what poet Mary Oliver calls “your one wild and precious life.”^[iv]  And you realize that you’re willing to stand up for your truth, even if that means upsetting some of those who are closest to you.

That’s what I hear in Jesus’ words today: a call to passion, a call to fire, a call to stay true to God’s longing for the flourishing of life within ourselves, within our families and communities, within the world at large, even when standing up for life means that we must go against the grain, provoke controversy, and refuse to do business as usual.

Blessed unrest – that’s a good term for it, our refusal to settle for a status quo in which the poor go hungry, landfills overflow, lakes die, entire species disappear, gas-guzzlers foul the air, and the global climate is scorched.  Did you know that Arctic sea ice is expected to reach record lows in September?  We may feel as if we’re living in that vineyard that Isaiah was talking about, the one that was on the verge of turning into a wasteland – un-pruned, un-weeded, choked by briers and thorns (Isaiah 5:1-7) – although this time it’s not God we can blame for its destruction, but only we ourselves.

Yet here is Jesus, living for us, dying for us, rising for us, standing with us and calling us out to a life of fire, to a life that is devoted to God’s shalom and to the healing and wellbeing of all, even when living such a life will disrupt the powers-that-be. 

Blessed Unrest is the title of a new book by environmentalist Paul Hawken that traces the extraordinary upwelling right now around the world of people and groups who are devoted to the renewal of life on this planet.  You won’t read about them in the newspapers.  You won’t see them on TV.  Most of their work is carried out under the radar of politicians or the corporate media.  But, he writes, across the planet, “groups ranging from ad hoc neighborhood associations to well-funded international organizations are confronting issues like [social justice], the destruction of the environment, the abuses of free-market fundamentalism… and the loss of indigenous cultures.  They share no orthodoxy or unifying ideology; they follow no single charismatic leader; they remain supple enough to coalesce easily into larger networks to achieve their goals… [And] they are bringing about what may one day be judged the single most profound transformation of human society.”^[v]

I believe we Christians are called to be part of this sometimes disruptive transition to a more just and sustainable world, where local communities can thrive with face-to-face contact, eating locally-grown food and learning to live within the “carrying capacity” of our planet, its capacity to maintain and renew life.  We do not do this work alone.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”  (Hebrews 12: 1-2a) 

This morning, I pray that the words we hear, the prayers we say, and the sacrament we share will strengthen our intention to become people of fire.  Dear Jesus, give us courage to stand with you and to become fearless agents of God’s healing and God’s peace.  Amen.

 

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