Author Archives: mbj

Faithful in doubt

I’d like to say a few words about the disciple we remember as Doubting Thomas.  Someone once said that two sorts of people please God: those who serve God with all their heart because they know God, and those who seek God with all their heart because they don’t know God.  Most of us have probably spent time in both camps.  We are finders of God when we have a sense of wonder and awe before the living Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being.  And we are seekers of God when we wrestle with questions and doubts and know that we can never come to end of what there is to know about God.  At one time or another some of you may have been members of churches that allowed no room for questioning or doubt–churches that taught you to be ashamed of your doubts and to keep them secret.  But as the wonderful Christian writer Fredrich Buechner once put it, “If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

Today’s Gospel reading from John is for all of us who dare to admit that sometimes we have doubts—maybe doubts about the literal truth of Scripture or about the goodness of God or about the presence of the risen Christ.  Thomas is the disciple who gives voice to our doubt.  He is the one who is unwilling to settle for second-hand testimony about the Risen Lord.  It is not enough when the other disciples report to him, “We have seen the Lord.”  No, to them Thomas insists, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

Somewhere along the line we may have been taught to treat Thomas with a touch of contempt.  After all, as Christians we want to be people who are deepening in faith, and here is a disciple who shamelessly puts it out there that he has some doubts.  Thomas–and all those, like him, who are willing to express their doubts–can make us uncomfortable.  We may be tempted to look down on him or to brush him aside.   But I believe that the disciple Thomas–and the Thomas that we all carry within ourselves–deserves our sympathetic attention and respect.  To entertain doubt is to be spiritually alive.  And through the grace of God, our doubts can draw us to God just as surely as can our faith.

I know this may sound strange.  Can doubts really draw us to God?  Is that possible?  I’d like to give three suggestions about how we can be faithful to doubt in a way that actually deepens our faith.

The first suggestion is this:  (1) Honor your doubt.  Listen to your doubt.  Be curious about your doubt.  As Fredrich Buechner also said, let your doubt be the ants in the pants of your faith.  Or to change the metaphor, let your doubt be the wind at your back that propels you toward the holy mystery of God.  Doubt can be a wake-up call to our faith.

Perhaps you are troubled by doubts about some aspect of Christian doctrine or belief.  If you are, I hope you will pay attention to those doubts.  Maybe they’re an invitation to learn more about contemporary theology and to realize that good people of faith understand these doctrines in very different ways.  The last formal Christian education that many of us received may have been years ago in Sunday School, and it is no wonder that we now chafe under the uncomfortable sense that our God is too small.  We have grown up and matured since then and learned a lot more about life, but maybe we’re still laboring under some childish conceptions of what we are “supposed” to believe and to accept as truth.  Doubt may be a sign that we’re moving from the stage of passively receiving our faith, of accepting what our elders or teachers told us simply because that was what they said was so, to appropriating our faith and making it our own.  Sometimes the way to honor our doubts is to dive more deeply into the life of the mind and to learn more about modern theology.

On the other hand, sometimes the way to honor our doubts is to recognize that we’ve reached the limit of what the human intellect can understand.  The doubts that assail us painfully in the middle of the night are not likely to be neat little questions about Christian doctrine.  They tend to be urgent, personal questions that can’t be answered adequately simply by reading a book or memorizing a creed.  Why is there so much suffering?  Given the state of the planet today, do we really have any grounds for hope?  Why has someone I love died?  How will I face my own death?  Is there really a God?  Does God really love me?  We can wrestle all we want to with questions like these in small group discussion and debate, but we can never resolve them with a glib, intellectual answer.  The big questions of life can’t finally be grasped by the intellect alone.  So when we are persistently aware of doubts, aware of questions, it means that we’ve come to the edge of mystery.   One of the great mystics, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, pointed out that “By love may [God] be caught and held, but by thinking never.”  It’s a sacred moment when we confess that our intellect can go only so far, and no further.

This brings me to my second suggestion about how doubt can draw us to God.  And that is (2) to pray our doubts.  Doubts are part of who we are, and if we want to grow closer to God, if we want to be real with God, we must be willing to share our doubts with God in prayer.  Doubt is a form of spiritual pain, and we can pray our doubt much the same way that we might pray our physical pain.  How do we do that?  We lean into the doubt.  We breathe into it.  We go into its center.  We don’t flee from our doubt or deny it or avoid it.  We let it be exactly what it is.  As we bring careful attention to our doubt, and share it very simply, very honestly, with God, we may notice that something is hiding behind the doubt. 

For example, maybe behind the doubt is anger: maybe I discover in prayer that what is really troubling me is not that I doubt the reality or the goodness of God, but that I am angry with God.  Or maybe I discover in prayer that what lies behind my doubt of God’s presence or care for me is a deep sense of abandonment and loss and grief.  Or maybe behind my doubt there lurks some kind of fear: maybe the fear of commitment, the fear of taking myself seriously as a spiritual seeker.

When we pray our doubts we open ourselves to discover the feelings that lie beneath the doubt, and then those feelings become our prayer.  We pray our anger and grief, our longing and fear.  It is in sharing our feelings with God that we often find our relationship with God becoming more authentic.  We often reveal more of ourselves to God by expressing our feelings — however briefly — than we do by spending an hour rehashing our thoughts.  So I invite you to pray your doubts and to be alert to whatever feelings may lie beneath them.  Doubt may become the doorway through which you discover a fresh and more authentic relationship with God.

My third and final suggestion is this: (3) Be ready to move beyond your doubt.  I’m not urging you to suppress or squelch your doubt or to force it away.  That would be to avoid the truth and to pretend to be someone you’re not.  But after honoring your doubt and praying your doubt, there may be a time when God invites you to move beyond your doubt.  There may be a time when you realize that doubt is holding you back from God, and keeping you from even dipping your toes into the ocean of God’s presence.

“Come and see.  Come and see.”  That is what Jesus said over and over again to the people who paused to look at him, and wondered who he was and what he was up to.  “Come and see.”  Come and discover for yourselves what theologian Rudolf Otto calls the “awesome and rapturous mystery” of God (mysterium tremendum et fascinans).

In our parish programs of Christian formation and education, in our Foundations class, in our concluding series on sin and our upcoming series on the Bible, we have a place to grapple with our doubts and to open to a deeper faith.  And just as Jesus invited Thomas to stretch out his hands to touch the wounded hand and side of the risen Christ, so in our Eucharist this morning we too are invited to stretch out our hands to touch the body and blood of Christ.  Maybe we reach out with a hefty dose of doubt and only a smidgen of faith.  Maybe we reach out with serene confidence.  I hope you will let Jesus see both your faith and your doubt, and let him speak in your depths the words our troubled hearts so long to hear, “Peace be with you.”

Wherever we are on our spiritual journey, whether we think of ourselves as people who have found God or as people who are seeking God, whether we are wrestling with doubt or filled with faith, the questions before us are the same:  Are we honoring our doubts?  Are we praying our doubts?  And, when the time comes, will we set our doubts aside?  When the Living Christ breaks in upon the closed doors of our minds and hearts, will we hold back from love, or, like our brother Thomas, will we utter those words of joyful trust and faith, “My Lord and my God”?

The Power of Easter

Americans like us don’t put much stock in miracles.  Most of us are a pragmatic, down-to-earth lot.  Give us cold, hard facts, something we can measure, predict, and – best of all – control.  Scientific proof is what we like: objective evidence, the laws of nature, reason, logic, a universe whose workings can be grasped by the human mind.

Miracles violate scientific proof.  They fly in the face of the laws of nature.  They make light of reason and logic, and blow apart the constructions of our minds.  We may come to church on Easter.  We may come to church every Sunday of the year.  But something in us likes to whisper: just don’t go too far with this stuff.  Miracles aren’t really real.  Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead.  It’s obviously impossible.  There’s got to be a logical explanation.  Maybe some disciples came in secret and stole the body so that they could point to the empty tomb and claim that Jesus had risen from the dead.  Or maybe Jesus was only in a coma when he was taken down from the cross, and eventually recovered.  Or maybe the story of the resurrection is only that: a story, a metaphor, a legend – and nothing more.

Into this rational, skeptical world explodes the miracle of the first Easter: an earthquake–an angel bright as lightning, who rolls away the stone–an empty tomb–two women overcome with terror and joy–the discovery that Jesus is alive.  This is no petty miracle, no bizarre story straight from the local tabloid or a consumer item like MiracleWhip or Miracle-Gro that we can buy for a few bucks, use up, and throw away.  This is the miracle that makes a difference, the miracle that the powers that rule this world tried in vain to prevent, and that they try to this day to deny. 

Matthew’s account of the Resurrection begins and ends by describing how Pilate and the religious authorities try to keep the miracle at bay: to stop it from happening in the first place and, when it happens anyway, to hide it.  A squad of Roman soldiers seal up the tomb and stand guard before it.  As Pilate had ordered them, they make the tomb secure.  But human efforts to prevent the Resurrection are impossible.  God’s life, God’s power bursts forth.  In a wonderful touch of irony, the guards, who are there to guarantee the finality of Christ’s death, become themselves “like dead men,” terrified by the new life that has been unleashed before their very eyes.  The miracle has taken place.  Nothing can stop it.  The religious and civic authorities are shocked, and, as Matthew tells it, they rush to set up an elaborate scheme of bribes and lies to conceal the news as best they can.

It should come as no surprise that Jesus’ enemies did everything in their power to destroy Jesus and his works, including, above all, the fact of his resurrection. The Resurrection is a miracle that makes a difference.

If Christ is alive, then there has been unleashed into our world a power that is greater than death, a source of love and energy and hope that nothing and no one can destroy.

If Christ is alive, then there is no suffering we can endure, no anguish we can bear, no loss or disappointment we can undergo, which Christ himself does not suffer with us.

If Christ is alive, then we are, each one of us, equally beloved and cherished by God, and drawn irresistibly to create new forms of community that overturn the systems of rank and privilege and domination that divide us and set us against each other.

If Christ is alive, then there is no need to settle for a life that is under-girded and overshadowed by the nagging fear of death.

If Christ is alive, then eternal life begins not at the end of time, nor on our deathbed, but right now.

If Christ is alive, then eternal life exists on both sides of the grave, and we are invited to enter the life and light and power of God right now.

If Christ is alive, then we are free to be our largest, truest selves: a people free to be vulnerable, free to be generous, free to fall in love with life.

If Christ is alive, then there is nothing more real than love, nothing more true than love, nothing more enduring than love.

The Resurrection is a miracle that makes a difference, but it is not a miracle that ignores the reality of suffering or the fact of death.  The first Easter did not come in soft pastel tones, shrink-wrapped in plastic.  Jesus despaired and groaned and bled on the Cross.  His suffering was real and his death was real.  Our faith has nothing to do with wishful thinking, with gazing off fondly into space and imagining away the suffering and brutality of the world.  Our faith looks squarely into suffering and brutality, and discovers that God accompanies us even here, when we are frightened or overwhelmed, confused or ashamed.  In the crucified and risen Christ we find a love that grieves with us, that comforts us and empowers us, a love that is infinite and that will never let us go.

We all have times of doubting that miracles can happen.  That’s OK.  What actually took place on that first Easter no one really knows.  God is not afraid of our doubts, and it is good to question, to test, to explore for ourselves what this miracle might mean.  At their best, our minds are dim and the ways of God are a mystery: no wonder our intellects balk and our words stumble if we try to “explain” the Resurrection!  But I am convinced that Jesus’ rising from the dead is one miracle that can’t be assessed and understood from the outside: we can only know its reality and power if we dare to step inside it and make Jesus’ resurrection our own.  The Resurrection is not just something that happened once, two thousand years ago.  Nor is the Resurrection something that happened only to Jesus.  Christ has been raised, and we have been raised: eternal life is a present reality, not just a future possibility.  It’s not enough just to gaze on the Resurrection from afar: this is not only Jesus’ miracle, it is our miracle, too, a miracle that we are invited to make more real every day of our lives, a miracle that we will know in full when we pass at last through the weakness and helplessness of our own death.

 In the quiet joy of this night, maybe you hear the sound that rings out as Easter dawns–not only here in Amherst, but across the United States and around the world. There is an Alleluia springing up today from the depth of the human spirit.  Today, as Easter dawns on the earth, in our different languages and liturgies Christians around the world remember the history of God’s love affair with creation.  God has loved us since the beginning of time, guiding us safely through the Red Sea, across the wilderness, and through the darkness – and the light of Christ will carry us safely home.  This miracle is God’s miracle.  It is our miracle, too, God’s gift to us in Christ.

        O Death, where is thy sting?  O Grave, where is thy victory?

        My friends, we have been set free.

        Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!  The Lord is Risen, indeed!

 

Do you remember?

“Remember!  Do you remember?” That’s what I imagine they were saying to each other, this group of men and women gathered in the upper room of a house somewhere in Jerusalem.  It was a night not so different from tonight: an evening at or near Passover, the Jewish festival that celebrates the exodus, the liberation from Egypt.  Who knows whether the disciples understood what would come next – Jesus’ arrest and trial, his crucifixion and painful death.  Of course they had no way of imagining what would come after that – his rising to new life, bearing all of them – and all of us – with him.  What they did know was that the night outside was dark.  The forces of Caesar, like the forces of Pharaoh, were gathering around them, and in the face of the world’s brutality and violence, in the face of all the powers that try to crush the human spirit and burden us with cynicism and despair, hard-heartedness and fear, the disciples wanted to remember the truth of who they really were: a community gathered in love and, by the power of God, set free from slavery, set free from fear, and made partners with God in the transformation of the world.  They wanted to remember not only the story of the Exodus, but the story of their own lives, which somehow seemed lit up from within – awakened, energized – the more deeply they knew Jesus.

Remember!  They said to him.  Remember how we took one look at you and dropped our nets, dropped everything, to follow you!  Remember the miles we tramped, going from village to village, sometimes being met with hospitality and sometimes with scorn!  Remember how the crowds listened to your words, and how you’d stand offshore in a boat so that everyone could hear!  Remember how shocked we were when you spoke to the woman at the well, and how surprised when you blessed the sinful woman who burst into the dinner-party and washed your feet with her tears!  Remember our amazement when you healed the lepers, and how frustrated we were when we tried and tried, but just couldn’t heal the epileptic child all by ourselves!  Remember the joke you played on Simon Peter, when you filled his nets so full of fish that the nets started to break!  Remember how funny it looked when the paralyzed man was lowered to you through a hole in the roof!  Remember the surprise and happiness in that little boy’s eyes, when you accepted his gift of five barley loaves and two fish, and used them to feed a crowd of thousands!  Remember the sweet taste of the wine you made at the wedding feast of Cana!  Remember!  Remember!

Laughter, tears, talk, memories – a last supper in the presence of the one whose eyes and voice, whose words, touch, and actions were such that each of these men and women, gathered by candlelight to share a meal, dared to whisper to themselves: If God could take human form, this is what God would be like!  Remember this night – they must have been telling themselves.  Remember!

And in that last supper, Jesus gave them something else to remember.  He gave them a gesture of profound tenderness and humility: he washed their dusty feet.  He gave them to each other, so that whenever they washed each other’s feet – whenever they carried each other’s burdens, whenever they reached out in kindness or spoke a word of truthfulness and love – he would be with them.  He gave them his very self in the bread and wine, ordinary things that from now on would be filled with his presence.

The next day, on the cross, he would give them his life, so that they – and we – might have life to the full, so that they – and we – might not fear the power of death or the power of any adversary, so that they – and we – might know that our own Passover has arrived, our own Exodus has come. 

The forces of violence are all around us tonight – in the blood being spilled in Darfur, Iraq, the Middle East; in the poverty and pain in Red Lake, Minnesota; in the shortsighted greed that is trying to pillage the Arctic refuge.  The forces of violence are as close as the anger, hopelessness, and fear that may grip our own hearts.

But tonight Jesus draws near to us and says: Remember.  Remember who you are.  Remember the love that sent you into the world and the love that will gather you up when your earthly life is done.  Remember that in my name and spirit you take your place in a community of love, a community that celebrates together and searches together for ways to bring freedom, justice, peace and healing to this beautiful earth.  Remember this night, he says, and remember my love.  Do this in remembrance of me.

Can these bones live?

Today we reach the turning point in Jesus’ ministry.  Raising Lazarus is the crowning miracle or sign that reveals Jesus as the giver of life and that also precipitates his death.  The raising of Lazarus provokes a meeting of the Sanhedrin, the official Jewish court, which reaches the decision that Jesus must be killed.  And so next week we come to Palm Sunday and begin the anguish and joy of Holy Week.

Today’s story begins where we all find ourselves at one time or another: in a place of desolation, loss, and despair.  Lazarus has been dead for four days, and his sisters Mary and Martha are in shock, weeping with family and friends.  We know what that’s like, times when just getting up in the morning feels like an accomplishment.  Either we’ve gone totally numb or we can’t believe the intensity and volatility of our feelings.  One minute we’re handling things OK, juggling responsibilities and talking sense like a rational human being; the next minute we’re bursting into tears at the sight of a McDonald’s commercial.

That’s one thing I cherish in Scripture: the way it meets us just as we are, the way its stories intersect with ours.  Mary and Martha taste the same bitterness that we taste when a loved one dies.  They know, as we do, the pang of loneliness that can seize you in the middle of the night, the grief that empties life of zest and meaning. 

Even if we haven’t recently suffered a personal loss, there is still plenty these days to mourn and protest.  Sorrow is no farther away than the house next door, the pew close by, or the next morning paper.  No wonder we’re tempted sometimes to flee from one distraction to another – to buy something we don’t really need, to dive into one more task or space out in front of a TV sitcom.  It can be hard to bear the pain we sense around us and within us.

“Out of the depths,” says the psalmist, “have I called to you, O Lord.”  His voice – and ours – joins the cries for mercy and help that resound the world over from human and non-human creatures alike.  I wonder sometimes what it would be like if we could press our ear to the ground and hear the sound of the world’s pain.  What would change in us if we could hear all at once the blended sound of the world’s great sadness? The prophet Ezekiel uses a different image: what if God picked us up by the scruff of the neck and set us down in the middle of a valley full of bones, so that we saw nothing but dry bones all around, as far as the eye can see?  “Can these bones live?” we would ask ourselves.  “Can hope possibly spring out of this desolation?”

That’s where our gospel passage begins: in darkness, in the pit, in the valley of the shadow of death.  Like mourners the world over, Martha and Mary are utterly bereft.  And then – something happens. Jesus arrives.  When he sees Mary weeping, and the crowds around her weeping, Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”  [bbllink]John 11:33[/bbllink].  As if the gospel writer wants to make the meaning perfectly clear, the next sentence is the shortest verse in all of Scripture, a verse often translated by just two words: “Jesus wept” [bbllink]John 11:35[/bbllink].  He wept.  Here is no distant God, no far-off deity untouched by grief, but a God who comes as one of us, a God willing to meet us in our suffering and to share its pain.  This may come as a shock to those who take the hard fact of suffering as proof that God is not real or that God does not care or that God is punishing us.  Gazing at Jesus in this story reveals an astonishing truth: when our hearts are breaking, God’s heart is breaking, too.  

Not only that.  The fact that Jesus wept suggests that the first step in healing, the first step in birthing new life, comes when we step toward the pain, not away from it.  The God who enters into our suffering knows that new life begins only when we are willing to feel pain.  If we are able to grieve then we have moved out of numbness, out of inertia, out of the denial that pretends that everything is fine, when in fact it is not.

And I must add this, too: the powers-that-be in this world don’t want us to grieve.  They don’t want us to protest, to feel outrage and sorrow when we face many of the patterns of this society: the racism and militarism, the abuse of the helpless, the poisoning of air and water.  The powers-that-be would rather keep us numb, zombies too busy, too bored, too distracted or too defended to feel the pain that allows something new to be imagined, something new to be born. “Jesus wept,” and in that weeping begins the healing that leads to new life.

But of course there’s more.  Jesus comes to us not only with vulnerability and an open heart.  He comes with power.  “Take away the stone,” he says to the astonished crowd.  Can you imagine what the crowd must have been saying to themselves just then?  Probably something along the lines of, “Hey, who is this guy?  He must be nuts.”  Martha, a sister of the dead man, lays out the situation as tactfully as she can: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”  In other words, Martha says to Jesus: “Hel-lo.  When someone’s dead, they’re dead.  Don’t torment me by pretending you can do something about it.”

But reluctantly or eagerly, maybe shaking their heads in bemusement, maybe daring to hope against hope, some folks in the crowd do move forward.  They lean their weight against the stone and push it away from the entrance of the tomb.  I give thanks for people like these, people who do what they can to make a difference, however small it may seem, however absurd.

And then comes Jesus’ voice.  In the midst of weeping, there is a voice.  “Lazarus,” he cries.  “Come out.”  It is a voice of power, a summons, a command, and it addresses us by name.  You’ve heard that voice before, and I have, too.  And we are sure to hear it again, for deep inside you and inside me is a Presence, a Voice, a Someone, impelling us with an unshakable longing to grow.  Becoming our true selves in Christ is a life-long, persistent, and sometimes explosive invitation to keep moving from a half-hearted, unlived life to a life that we inhabit with every ounce of our being, a passionate life that is truly our own.

A friend of mine once commented that she had spent her life trying endlessly to please her parents, adding sadly, “I feel as if I’m living somebody else’s life.”  What a waste!  To some degree, we all do that for a while, sometimes a long while, doing what we think we “should” be doing, following the rules, coloring inside the lines.  We get locked into the tomb of habit, of people-pleasing.  Or maybe we get trapped by addiction, or by self-doubt, by cynicism, or by frittering away our life on trivial things.  “That’s OK,” murmur the powers-that-be within us and around us.  “Get comfy in that nice little tomb of yours.  Make peace with it.  Decorate it.  Stay small.”

But then comes that insistent, disturbing Voice again, calling us by name.  “Sally,” it says. “Come out.  Rob, come out.  Margaret, come out.”  “I love you,” God says to us.  “I want you to be fully alive, not just partially alive, not just going through the motions.  I want you to be free.” 

My own first step out of the tomb came 23 years ago when I went to my first 12-step meeting after a lifetime of food addiction.  I remember how nervous and self-conscious I felt, blinking like Lazarus in the sunlight, wondering if I might have been better off if I’d stayed safely in the tomb.  In the years since, that Voice has never left me, urging me to make sometimes scary moves out of a deathly comfort zone and into new life. 

Thank God we don’t have to do it alone.  Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, but he also calls a community into being.  “Unbind him,” he says to the circle of villagers who are standing around, gaping.  “Let him go.”  We can’t just watch each other grow.  We need each other to help unwrap the layers that have bound us, to uncover who this beautiful new person is, and to steady our feet when we feel tempted to tiptoe back to the familiarity of the old.

In the end, this gospel story is about how much God wants to set us free.  I invite you this morning to let Jesus draw close.  Are you in mourning?  Then let him weep with you.  Are you holding a vision for your life that you’ve never quite dared to carry out?  Then let him empower you to begin.  Are you wishing you could reach out to help another person but feeling shy or afraid?  Then hear Jesus calling you to “roll away the stone” and “unbind her; let him go.”  Or maybe you are the one who’s shut away in the tomb.  If so, take time to listen. Today may be the very day that Jesus summons you out. 

The world is full of grief, loss, and fear, but something else is going on, too.  If we press our ear to the ground and listen closely, perhaps we’ll hear it – not only the world’s pain, but also the steady heartbeat of God, the sound of a love that pulses through all things, seeking us out and making all things new.

Refusing to Live by Bread Alone

I’d like us to take a few minutes to imagine that we’re the director of a movie. Let’s say you’ve got a camera crew with you and you’re flying in a small plane through clear blue skies. Peering out the window, you can see miles of desert laid out far below you, an endless tumble of barren hills stretching to the horizon and baking in the hot noon sun. The pilot takes the plane down for a closer look. Now you can make out more details: jagged crevices, rocky slopes where a few shrubs manage to cling to life, and miles of chalky stone and sand. There’s not a tree in sight, no bit of shade, no water to be seen. The plane moves slowly over this barren landscape and then you spot something. What’s this? It’s a man, a solitary figure, completely alone. Why is he here and what is he doing? Because you’re the director of this movie, you get to decide. Maybe the man is pacing slowly back and forth, all his attention concentrated within himself, as if he’s deep in thought, as if he’s wrestling with something, locked in some kind of mortal combat. Or maybe he is sitting down, leaning against a rock in whatever shade the merciless sun will give him. He’s tired; he’s thirsty; he hasn’t eaten for days. Maybe he is looking out across the desert or maybe his eyes are closed. Maybe his face is motionless and calm, so that you can see nothing of the struggle that is going on inside him, or maybe he is grimacing, and you can see lines of tension around his eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, in his clenched jaw. Maybe the man is completely silent, or maybe from time to time you hear him cry out something so loudly that his voice makes echoes in the lonely hills.

During these 40 days of Lent we are invited to take our place beside this man, to do the work that we need to do to clarify our own deepest commitments. Let me say right up front that prayer, fasting, and self-denial – some of the traditional disciplines of Lent as we follow Jesus into the wilderness – may sound almost quaint to us today, and maybe even repellent. Heaven knows that many of us grew up thinking of Lent as a life-denying season in which we were supposed to sorrow morbidly over our sins – 40 days of wallowing miserably in a vague and relentless guilt, 40 days of beating our breasts and confirming our conviction that fundamentally we’re no good: not lovable, not good enough, not worthy of God’s concern unless we work very hard to earn that approval and whip ourselves into shape (just listen to the self-hatred in that metaphor!). The penitential focus of Lent can certainly be misused to increase our self-rejection and to encourage the fear that deep down we’re worthless.

But this image of Lent is a perversion of the truth and profoundly unbiblical. It’s worth remembering that in the early Church, Lent was not considered, as one writer puts it, “a dreary season of restriction and self-torture.” (1) It was considered, she goes on, “an opportunity to return to normal life – the life of natural communion with God that was lost to us in the Fall.” Adam and Eve refused to accept any limits to human freedom; they refused to accept their dependence on God; they refused to live within the limits that God set for them. So they reached for the forbidden fruit and tried to take God’s place. “They wanted it all.”

It is Christ who reverses Adam’s sin. Jesus begins the work of redemption by undertaking a forty-day fast. When Jesus is famished and the tempter comes to him, Jesus says no to every lie: no to the lie of self-sufficiency, no to the lie of self-promotion and self-display, no to the lie of empire and dominating power. Jesus freely accepts human limits and refuses to put himself in God’s place. He restores humanity to the harmony that Adam and Eve broke, to “a life in which God [is] once more the center and source.”

Lent is the beginning of our journey to Easter. It is God’s loving Spirit that leads Jesus – or, as Mark puts it in his Gospel, drives Jesus – into the wilderness to wrestle with his temptations. It is the same loving Spirit that sets us on fire with the desire to wrestle with and finally to be free of our attachment to anything less than God. God’s love is not in question: just as Jesus was baptized as the beloved with whom God is well pleased and only then was sent into the wilderness, so too we enter these 40 days grateful for our own baptism into God’s love and confident that we too are the beloved and marked as Christ’s own forever. We don’t need to waste time trying to earn God’s love or win God’s approval: we already have it. Already God loves us to the core. That’s not the issue. The only reason to take up a spiritual discipline during Lent or any other time is that we want to know that love more fully. We want to live more in tune with God’s Spirit. We want God’s love to be more manifest in our lives. We want to receive God’s strength and grace so that in these dark and troubling times, we can be better bearers of God’s light. In order to do that we have to identify where our energy for love has been trapped, so that God’s Spirit can move through us more freely.

Lent is the season for asking ourselves very soberly and honestly: What holds me back from loving well and wisely? What are the addictions or temptations in my life that damage my capacity to love and to be present to myself, to others, and to God? Where have I let fear, anxiety, or resentment constrict me and hold me in? Where has greed or shame or pride inhibited my capacity to love? If God’s love is like a river that wants to flow freely through me, where am I busy setting up dams and building walls that impede its flow? Is there a spiritual practice I might take up during Lent that would help make me more available to God?

For example, am I moving so quickly, am I so excessively busy, that I simply have no time to love well, to give anyone or anything my full attention? If so, then maybe I need a Lenten practice of slowing down, of giving myself the gift of daily time for quiet reflection and prayer and for unhurried conversation with someone I love.

Am I drinking too much or eating more than my body really needs? Then my Lenten practice might be to eat less or none of certain foods, or to eat what I eat with full attention, sensing within my hunger for food my deep hunger for communion with God.

Am I avoiding any honest encounter with myself by distracting myself with hours of television or talk shows? Am I afraid to turn off the radio and TV set and actually to discover what is going on inside me? If so, then this might be a good season to fast from the media.

Am I caught up in the grip of negativity, of persistent self-blame and self-criticism? Then my Lenten practice this year might be to pray and to listen for God’s love, or to make a sacramental confession and receive the gift of absolution. I know one person who’s decided that her spiritual practice this Lent will be to renounce putting herself down. Someone else I know has decided to spend these 40 days renouncing the impulse to gossip and to put other people down.

Am I tired of consuming too many fossil fuels and leaving too big a footprint on the earth? Then maybe I can give up driving one day a week or buy some shares in clean wind power to help my family move toward being a carbon neutral household.

Or maybe this Lent you find yourself burdened by despair or fear. The world’s many troubles may seem too daunting to deal with and you may feel like ducking under the covers until everything sorts itself out. If so, then maybe your Lenten practice this year could be to ask God to cast out the spirit of fear that is in you, and to help you find just one thing you can do, one place to volunteer or to contribute your energy, so that when you get up in the morning you know that in some small way you are helping to mend the world.

These are only ideas to spark your own thinking about where temptations may be imprisoning your spirit and what spiritual practice might help to set you free. Spiritual disciplines don’t have to be grim. If right now you feel depleted and distant from God, the best discipline to take up might be the discipline of play – maybe you need to have some fun, to go play that musical instrument you’ve always wanted to try or to pull out that box of watercolors.

During this season we wrestle, as Jesus did, with the tempting voices that urge us to pull away from love. It’s a hard battle that we undertake in Lent, but it’s a worthy one. It’s also one we do not wage alone, for Jesus fights beside us. And when we come to the limits of our own power, when we feel helpless to face down temptation, when we discover, no matter how hard we try, how many times we fail to love ourselves and others well, we can fall to our knees and appeal for help to our dear Savior, the one who has power to save. And then, by God’s grace, the devil leaves us and suddenly angels come and wait on us.

(1) Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 72. The ideas and quotes in this and the following paragraph are gratefully drawn from pages 72-73.

Transfiguration: Christ’s and Ours

It is wonderful to be with you again. To those of you whom I haven’t yet met: I served for 8 years as Priest Associate at All Saints until my family and I began packing up last June for a move to western Massachusetts, where I now serve at Grace Church in Amherst. This is my first trip back, and I can’t think of a happier occasion to return than today – and I’m not referring only to the Superbowl. Today we mark the end of Epiphany, its literal high point. Epiphany is the season of light – it begins with the star that guided the wise men to the holy child, and it ends with Jesus’ radiance on a mountain.

Today is also Annual Meeting Sunday, and I’m told that this year’s Annual Report is focused on the topic of “forming.” That’s what our whole Christian lives are about: being formed by Christ, being changed, as the Collect says, “into his likeness from glory to glory.” And what a glory it is, as we heard in today’s Gospel! Soon after Jesus announced to his disciples his coming Passion and death, he went up a high mountain to pray. What began as deep prayer grew into an intense religious experience: his face and clothes began to shine as if he were lit up from within.

You probably know that mystics from a variety of religious traditions 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 enlightenment in many Eastern traditions is associated with a flow of energy throughout the human body. (1) Christian mystics likewise speak of the Holy Spirit as a Presence or energy that moves through the body; it can’t be seen with our eyes or touched with our hands and yet it lights up the edges of things or shines out from within.

At the top of the mountain, Jesus is swept up in the love that sustains the universe. What Dante called “the love that moves the sun and other stars” (2) penetrates and embraces Jesus completely. The God who met Moses on Mount Sinai, the God who met Elijah on Mount Horeb now meets Jesus so powerfully on Mount Tabor that he is changed. He is transfigured, so that who he really is – in fact, who he has always been – is revealed at last. He is the light that is shining through him. Even the three disciples can see it.

It can be a fearful thing to become aware of the radiance of Christ. Like the disciples we may fall to the ground, acutely aware of our brokenness and sinfulness, needing to cry out, as Peter did to Jesus on another occasion, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). But sometimes we may be willing to bear the love a little longer, to open to it and to let it affect us. Gradually, through God’s grace, we become able to open ourselves completely to Christ, to love without holding back, to offer everything in us and to let ourselves be loved to the core. The more steadily we are able to be present to the glory of God in Christ, the more we are changed. Epiphany begins with Jesus’ baptism and it ends with his transfiguration. And that is our destiny, too – the transfiguration of our human nature. As Athanasius put it dramatically many centuries ago, “God became human so that we might become God.”

The Eucharist is our training ground, our own hike up Mount Tabor. At the Eucharist, our human nature meets the divine light and power of God. Week by week we offer God our open hands, our bodies, our worries and fears, our very selves, and week by week God gives God’s self back to us in the bread and the wine, the Body and the Blood. We may have no clue that we’re being changed. We may not feel any more holy or peaceful than we did when we walked in the church door. But in every Eucharist God meets us on the mountaintop. We offer our selves to God in Christ and his love touches and transforms us a little bit more.

Sometimes we do feel the radiance, and how sweet that is. But even so we can’t stay on the mountaintop forever, though we may want to stick around and build those “dwellings” that Peter proposed. No, like the disciples and like Jesus himself, we must head back down into the darkness where the world cries out for healing and where the cross awaits. 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 based on flight from the world but rather on the willingness to plunge into life and gradually to discover Jesus in every aspect of existence. (3) As we head back down the mountain we take the light back with us, and we hear Jesus’ words to his disciples ringing in our ears too: “Get up and do not be afraid” (Matthew 17:7).

I want to close with a story. It didn’t take place in February or at the end of Epiphany, but it’s a story about transfiguration, all the same. It’s a true story and it’s a story about you.

Maybe you remember the summer a while back when it just about never stopped raining. I remember that I grumbled a lot: it was definitely too damp and chilly for July. But that fall it was as if the trees gathered up the wet and the cold – even the complaining – and turned it into beauty, for by early October every maple, birch, and ash tree was ablaze. Commuters on the turnpike couldn’t help slowing down to stare in amazement as they passed through corridors of scarlet and yellow. City kids ran laughing down the street, hands outstretched, trying to catch the gold that was raining down on their shoulders and hair.

What magic God can work in us through the natural world! In that transfigured fall, something was happening to our eyes. I tried my best not to notice – I was as busy as anyone else, I had things to do – but I remember a Sunday in late October when I couldn’t put it off any longer. I decided that after celebrating Holy Communion at All Saints, I’d go outside. I needed to gaze at trees.

After church I went straight to the nearest bit of woods and wildness that I could find. Here in Boston, we can’t meet God on Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, or Mount Tabor, but we do have some humbler hills, so off I went to the Habitat Nature Sanctuary in Belmont to wander through its forests and fields.

As I pulled into the driveway I wasn’t surprised to find a row of parked cars. On days like that one, when the sky was blue, the wind was up, and every tree was apparently intent on proving the world’s beauty, even the most inveterate city-dweller must have felt an urge to gaze.

I walked up the path that led to a field, brushing against banks of tall grass. I nodded to a young couple with a stroller but I didn’t speak: silence seemed the only way to absorb such a feast. Luscious was what it was – on the other side of the field, I could see oak trees the color of chocolate and maple trees the color of blood. I could hear a chickadee sing.

You know how it is. Nothing can prepare you for beauty. We can only take in bits at time: here is bark that is rough and bumpy to the touch. Here is a line of trees bowing down in the wind. Here is a branch that curves across the sky.

I walk more and more slowly. I come to a stop and tug a leaf off a birch tree. I take a look: it’s small and yellow, with a tiny stem. It rests lightly in my palm. I glance up just as a red-tailed hawk bursts from the edge of the field and wheels overhead.

Can I see this? Can I take this in without defense? If I’ve seen it all before, then now I will see nothing. I want to stay awake, to pay attention and receive what I can.

You are too much to take in all at once, I say to God, but how beautiful you are.

It’s as if God is pouring out God’s self to me all over again, saying to me now, as in the Eucharist just hours before, “Here I am! I am giving myself to you and to everything that is.”

I spent the afternoon walking, gazing, and praying, and eventually the time came to head home. I turned back toward the parking lot and caught sight of one last tree. It was a maple standing tall and gold against dark pines, and it hadn’t yet dropped its leaves. The setting sun was shining straight into its heart and its leaves were a blaze of light. It was hard to say where the light began – whether in the sun or in the tree itself – for the two seemed to be calling back and forth to each other in an exchange of mutual delight.

I looked down at the leaf I still held in my hand. For the first time I noticed that it was the same size as the Communion wafer that I’d blessed and broken that morning, and placed in your hands. I remembered the faces of you dear people – the worry and hope etched in the lines around your eyes, the way that each of you knelt at the altar rail that day, slumping or erect, distracted or alert, all of you looking – as I am – for something that we sense all around us and yet none of us can fully grasp.

I wanted to let that leaf drop quietly into each of your outstretched hands. I wanted to bless the longing that we share. I wanted to ask you, Do you know that you are as beautiful as the trees? Do you know that you are shining like the sun?

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

2. Ibid.

3. “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

The Baptism of Our Lord

As the cycle of the church year turns, we’ve now entered Epiphany, the season when we consider the ways that God reveals God’s self to the world through Jesus’ life and ministry. You can think of Epiphany as the season of full disclosure – divine disclosure. Epiphany begins on January 6 with the three magi following the star to the stable and recognizing the Holy Child, and today, as we do every year on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we hear the story of Jesus’ baptism. It’s one of the few incidents in Jesus’ life that is recorded in all four Gospels, and though each Gospel writer tells the story a little differently, depending on which aspect of its meaning he wants to emphasize, the stories have the same basic shape: Jesus is plunged by John the Baptist into the waters of the Jordan River, and when he emerges from its depths, the heavens are opened, the Spirit of God descends on him as gently as a dove, and a voice says “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

We come back to this story year after year because the baptism of our Lord is one of the most important of God’s epiphanies. Jesus’ baptism is a decisive moment in his life, a moment from which there is no turning back, a moment that marks the beginning of everything that will follow. In his baptism, Jesus takes up the identity that was given to him since before the beginning of time: he is the child of God, the beloved of God, and nothing and no one can take that love away.

That is what happens in our own baptism, too: we, too, like Jesus, are changed forever: we are claimed as God’s children. We become members of God’s family. From that moment on, for the rest of our lives we are drawn into the life of God, caught up in an unbreakable relationship of love. In baptism we receive our true identity: we are the son, the daughter, the beloved of God with whom God is well pleased. We are joined to Christ forever. The priest places a hand on our head and traces on our forehead the sign of the cross, saying over us those simple but momentous words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” This means that wherever we go, whatever we do, wherever the Spirit sends us, we belong to Christ. We are loved to the core. We have been called deep into the heart of God, where we discover that we have been loved and blessed since the beginning of time.

I think it’s good to begin the New Year with our foundational story, the story that marks where this community, and every Christian community, begins. It’s good to steep ourselves again in our belovedness in Christ, because Heaven knows how often we forget it. It can take a lifetime, and maybe more than a lifetime, to learn how fully we are loved by God. I know that in my mind, as perhaps in yours, too, the voices of guilt and self-doubt, self-rejection and self-criticism, can sometimes loom very large. I remember reading about a psychologist who said that we all walk around listening to two clusters of voices in our heads, the Loud Family and the Wise Family. The Loud Family is – well – loud. It spews out words of judgment and contempt. “You’re no good!” it tells us. “You’ll never be able to do it! You’re lazy! You’re stupid! You’re pathetic!” – that kind of thing, that kind of biting remark. If you start paying attention to what goes through your mind in the course of a day, chances are pretty good that before long you’ll likely become aware of this kind of inner commentary. In my ministry over the years, I’ve come to learn how many people go through the day listening only to shaming inner voices like these.

But thanks be to God, we also carry within us the Wise Family, that cluster of voices that may be speaking much more softly but that always mediates the love of God. These are the voices that speak gently, saying things like, “I’m glad you’re here. It’s OK to make mistakes. It’s OK to have needs. It’s OK to have feelings, and it’s OK not to be overwhelmed by your feelings. You don’t have to hurry. You don’t have to do this alone. I love you just the way you are.”

One of the best ways to take hold of our baptism and to experience our belovedness in God is to listen every day to the inner voice of love. This is a Christian practice, both a moment-to-moment discipline and a practice to which we can give our full attention for ten or fifteen minutes every day. Sometimes it’s helpful to choose a word or phrase that conveys God’s love and to repeat it slowly over and over, letting it carve out a space in us so that we are open to receiving God’s love. I can’t think of a better phrase to choose than the opening lines from today’s reading from Isaiah. What would it be like to imagine God saying to you, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights”? Or try out the line from today’s Gospel, “This is my Son – my Daughter – the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” These words are not for Jesus alone; they are for everyone who has been baptized in his name.

Sometimes we may need instead to sit in silence and simply to breathe in the love of God, to imagine it filling us breath by breath, so that pore by pore, cell by cell, we are slowly filled by the love that will never let us go. And if verbal or silent prayer is not enough to restore us to the knowledge of our identity in Christ, we can always turn to bodily prayer. We can take our thumb and trace on our forehead the indelible sign of the cross with which we were sealed in baptism. Baptism is a sign of God’s continuous, unbroken and unbreakable relationship with us, and God’s love for us, God’s covenant with us (“covenant” being a word that shows up three times in our readings this morning, in the Collect, in the psalm [Ps 89:20-29], and in the reading from Isaiah [Is 42:1-9] – that covenant will never be destroyed.

Just as we can never plumb the depths of God’s love, so too there is always more to learn about the power and mystery of our baptism. The unfolding events in Southeast Asia – the tsunami and its aftermath – have made me think again about baptism. When the newspaper printed a picture of the seashore of Banda Aceh strewn with a litter of planks, branches, rubble, and human bodies, I reached out my finger to touch the page. “You are the beloved,” I whispered to each body, touching each one in turn. “You are the beloved. You are the one on whom God’s favor rests.”

Commentators have had a lot to say in recent days about the impassivity and indifference of the natural world, its readiness to sweep us willy-nilly away. Natural disasters like the tsunami certainly purge from us any temptation to romanticize or sentimentalize nature. In the course of its relatively brief existence, our planet has suffered all kinds of disasters – not only earthquakes and tsunamis, but volcanoes, pestilence, ice ages, asteroids, and five mass extinctions. Planets come and go – even galaxies do. We are a fragile species in a fragile world. As Job, for one, discovered in his dialogue with God, human beings are profoundly little in relation to the vast powers that create and destroy. This is all true.

And yet – I can’t explain it – there is a love that lies just under the surface of things, a love that we perceive vividly when it’s released in moments of crisis. It’s as if sometimes the hard stony ground of our hearts breaks open and we suddenly understand that the suffering on the other side of the world is our own suffering, too. This man cradling his dead son is me. This family whose members are being torn from each other in the surging waves is mine. We are interconnected, after all – we are part of one web. It’s a kind of spiritual earthquake, I guess, that breaking open of the rigid conviction that what happens to you has no bearing on me. And what is released in us is not a tsunami of death but a great wave of love. What an extraordinary, even unprecedented outpouring of love is going on right now around the world as human beings reach out to each other to help. At the depth of every major religious tradition – be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or anything else – is an experience of compassion that flows out to everyone, whoever they are.

So that’s one aspect of Jesus’ baptism that I want to lift up this morning: its power to remind us that in Christ, you and I and each singular, marvelous, unrepeatable human being is beloved by God. And let me add something else: baptism puts our death behind us. In baptism, we are immersed in the waters of death. We have died in Christ; we have died with Christ. Our death has taken place. It’s done. It’s over with. In baptism, we’ve died and been buried with Christ, and through the power of his resurrection, we are raised here and now to live with him. What this means is that that the fear of death that so often overshadows and undergirds our lives can now slip away. The water that we splash on a child at the baptismal font may seem trivial protection from the force of a tsunami’s waves, but it’s a sign to us that we have nothing to fear from the death of the body. In the early centuries of the Church, Christians were actually called “those who have no fear of death” [Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 107].

To whatever extent we can take this in and understand that through baptism, our death is behind us, we are set free from anguish and anxiety. We are set free to love without grasping or possessiveness, without anxiety and without holding back. Like Jesus, we are anointed by the Spirit in baptism and empowered by the Spirit to take up God’s reconciling, healing, and liberating mission in the world.

Listen. In a few moments we will have a chance to stand up and renew our baptismal vows. Are you ready to claim your baptism? Are you ready to claim for yourself – and to live out as fully as you can – the fact that, like Jesus, you are the beloved of God? Are you ready to claim the discipline that is necessary to live this out? It’s a new year, and a new life opens ahead of us. As Isaiah puts it, “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.” Through baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, you and I can become part of God’s epiphany. We can dare to hope, as Isaiah put it, that, in some small way, as individuals and as a community of faith, the love that moves through us will make us “a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison of those who sit in darkness.”