(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)
I guess Jesus liked to people-watch, and the temple courts were great places to observe human behavior, good, bad and indifferent. One day he decided to watch people putting their offerings into the temple treasury.
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny.
Giving was clearly a very public activity, as it can be today. In some churches the collection of financial gifts takes a whole section of the Sunday service, with an exhortation, an invitation to people to rise from their seats and walk their money to ushers waiting with baskets, a lengthy prayer of blessing over the collection, a counting during the service and sometimes a second offering if the first fell short. Giving is public, expected, and celebrated.
In contrast, many of our mainline churches make as little fuss as possible. Pledges are secret, money or checks are folded so no one can see how much – or how little – was given, and people are often uncomfortable discussing their offerings. The only pageantry is when the offering plates are brought to the altar during the singing of an offertory refrain, and the celebrant raises them heavenward for blessing, as if to say, “Dear Lord, please multiply these like the loaves and the fish…”
Giving is intrinsic to our Christian faith, and one of the most tangible ways we can express our faith and put it into action in the world. Giving is something to be celebrated – that we have something to give, that we’re willing to part with it, that we’re excited to add our money to that of others in our faith community and see what God will make of what we bring. We don’t have to be apologetic about discussing money, handling money, or celebrating money.
If you are a regular church-goer, you’ve probably been sent a pledge card recently and asked to “prayerfully consider” how much you can envision contributing to God’s mission at your church in the coming year. What if that prayer begins with, “Lord, thank you for giving me everything I have. How much do you want me to pledge to see your mission in this world carried forward through my church?” See how God replies!
At my churches our pledge theme this year is “Giving and Growing in Gratitude." We’re encouraging people to give not just out of their excess, but out of their principal, and to give joyfully. Maybe on Harvest Sunday we should put on some dancing music and dance our pledge cards to the altar. Think I can get away with that in an Episcopal church?
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(You can listen to this reflection here.)
Next Sunday’s Gospel reading finds Jesus on familiar ground: ragging on the religious leaders. This time it is the scribes who have raised his hackles. He has been in an extended exchange with scribes seeking his learned opinion on several matters – or trying to entrap him. Maybe he’s had enough, for he does not mince words:
As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
Jesus doesn’t use the term “vipers” here, as he elsewhere describes Pharisees – but he lambastes these scribes for acting like VIPs. I suppose we’ve all known clergy like this, who take as given their country-club memberships and access to the halls of power. These scribes seem to have expected and exploited the elevated status accorded them as religious leaders. Perhaps the limits on their power, under the ever-present thumb of the Roman occupiers, made them all the more eager to take on airs.
People who have been given the power of high position have extra responsibility to regard themselves as no better than those whom they serve. We all know that, but privilege is very seductive. It is human nature to enjoy, even exploit it.
True humility comes from seeing ourselves as God sees us – as beloved sinners, redeemed royalty, capable of tremendous good and immense damage. When we know how loved we are despite our flaws, we are better able to love others instead of using them to make us feel important. That’s a prayer for today: “Lord God, show me who you see when you look at me.” The answer always surprises.
Tomorrow we will go to the polls and elect leaders to serve us. Everyone who offers herself for elected office, and anyone who exercises his right to vote, would do well to remember Jesus’ advice:
Take the worst seats, greet people with humility before they have a chance to butter you up, seek justice for all people - and keep your prayers short!
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(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)
How could anyone watch a dead man four days buried walk out of a sealed tomb, and not believe in the power of God? Jesus said that's why he was doing this great work of power, "So that they may believe."
So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.
Could anyone see this and not believe? Yet soon after this, Jesus himself was executed by people who observed this miracle and did not believe (or perhaps believed to the point of terror...). And a short while after that, Jesus stood among his disciples, himself risen from the dead, and even some of them did not believe. Thomas, whom the writer of John's gospel places with Jesus during the Lazarus story; Thomas, who watched Jesus bring Lazarus back from the dead, is unable on the testimony of others to believe that Jesus is risen. He has to see for himself. And in that story, Jesus says, "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe."
Is faith that is ignited by signs and wonders less worthy? I hope not - for Jesus went about doing many signs which brought people to faith, and the book of Acts is full of such wonders. Witnessing the power of God is the beginning of faith for many. I confess that sometimes when I pray for healing, I remind God of the benefit his reputation might enjoy from a positive outcome. (Surprisingly, God has not hired me to be his agent...)
Jesus did invite people to believe based on the signs and wonders he performed, but not to rest there. We go astray when we focus on the signs themselves instead of who they are pointing to. Mature faith endures during times when it is harder to see God's hand in the world about us. That doesn't mean God is less active. It's an invitation to pray for keener faith vision to see how God is all over our lives.
Where do you see evidence of God in your life, in this world?
And where is it hard to find? That's where we pray...
Evidence of God's power can be like the romantic phase of a relationship; it invites us to go deeper into knowing the Other, and allowing ourselves to be known. Finding ourselves known and yet loved can be the most transforming miracle of all, bringing back to life parts of us that have died, inviting us to emerge fully into the light of God’s overwhelming love.
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(You can listen to this reflection here.)
Hearing this gospel story on the day after Hallowe’en may set up some jarring mental images. What did Lazarus look like, emerging from that tomb at Jesus’ command, “Lazarus! Come out!” It’s hard not to summon one of those old-time B movies about mummies coming to life. Here comes this form, wrapped in cloth from head to toe, unable to walk:
The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.
It must have caused pandemonium. Or utter silence. And Jesus didn’t say anything like, “Whew – glad that worked,” or “Welcome back, Lazarus!” He simply said, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Unbind him. Undo all the work you did to prepare his body for burial. Now you need to prepare him for life, renewed life.
Unbind him. Release him to move freely, to reenter relationships, to fully be who God made him to be.
Unbind him. Set him free forever from having to fear death.
That is the work we are called to as saints in God’s mission of reclaiming, restoring and renewing all of creation to wholeness in Christ. We unbind people from the bondage of poverty and addiction, from the pain of infirmity and broken relationships, from the paralysis of depression and materialism. We unbind structures of injustice and cruelty that hold back people, animals, this creation itself from fully living. We are in the business of releasing the captives, as Jesus has released us. “Unbind her, and let her go.”
Tuesday was the birthday of my older sister Paula, who died in 1996, tightly bound by ailments and addictions. A few months after her death, I was given a picture in prayer of Jesus taking her hand and leading her out of the door of the apartment in which she died. I knew that now she was free from the turmoil that often mitigated the many joys of her earthly life; free to be fully herself, fully the saint she was made to be, with all her uniqueness, her incredible gifts and intelligence and love. She is a saint unbound, fully alive.
That is our invitation too – to become more and more free in this life, released to love and be loved; and in the life to come completely unbound. What a dance of joy that will be!
We may as well start dancing now - it's what all the cool saints are doing.
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(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)
Many things in this world smell bad, but I’m told there is no stench like that of a decomposing corpse. (I have no first-hand experience.) One reason we put our dead into graves and tombs is to insulate us from the smell of decay. So I can only imagine the shock to those gathered outside Lazarus’ tomb when Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone.
Martha, ever the housekeeper, so much more earth-bound than her spiritual sister Mary, has no trouble speaking what everyone was no doubt thinking. “The stench, Lord; did you forget the dead smell?” I can hear the subtext: “Are you so lost in the clouds in your holiness and preaching, you don’t know what a dead person can smell like?”
Martha, bless her, is naming reality. The world needs more people like her, who will just say what needs to be said. And yet, that very gift, of stating the unpleasant facts in a given situation, can also keep one from believing in an outcome better than anyone can imagine. And Jesus was promising an outcome that no one could ever have imagined.
We have a notion that holiness smells good. There are psalms about our prayers rising before God as incense. This story reminds us that, on the way to seeing the glory of God, we often pass through some pretty revolting messes. We want to be protected from the messes, but as Good Friday, not to mention our own experience, teaches us, that’s not how God works. Our Good News affirms that God walks with us through the muck and mud, enduring the reek of things dead and decaying, and shows us in ways we cannot imagine how life can break forth, even there.
Think of the way a rose bush might grow through, even because, of the dung used to fertilize it, its fragrance the sweeter for the fetid ground in which it was born.
Jesus knew life was breaking forth. Martha trusted Jesus.
So they took away the stone.
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(You can listen to this reflection here.)
There’s a whole lotta weepin’ goin’ on in the Lazarus story. Nowhere else in the Gospels is Jesus shown being this emotionally expressive. His response to the grief of Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha, is not surprising, given his closeness to that family. But it stands in marked contrast to the coolness with which he talked to his disciples about delaying going to Lazarus after being summoned to help (here's the first part of the story). Now, we’re told, Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep.
Whatever the reason for Jesus’ open weeping – and I suspect the reasons were multiple and complex –this scene reminds us that before we get to the Good News and life everlasting, we need to acknowledge our need to weep. Even Jesus. Our Episcopal funeral liturgy is so Easter-focused, and I am often in such a hurry to proclaim the life beyond death, the life we can experience even in the midst of death – “Even at the grave we make our song, Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” – that I wonder if I give people the freedom to rest in grief awhile.
This story we tell this week, and the Feast of All Saints in general, are very much about the Life that lies beyond death. Yet we need to take our time getting to that life. This Friday, on All Souls Day, I am having a eucharist and lunch at my church, intended particularly to make space for those who are carrying deep burdens of grief. It’s a reminder that when we need to, we can pause with Jesus, and weep.
In fact, when we weep, we might invite Jesus to pause with us, knowing he is no stranger to strong emotions. After all, he came into this life with a heart like ours, and he died and rose again that we might have a heart like his.
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(You can listen to this reflection here.)
Next Sunday we mark All Saints Day, which to me is more about celebrating the living saints we are than the ones who’ve gone before us into glory. At first glance, the gospel reading appointed has an “All Souls” feel, more focused on death than on sainthood. Or does it?
The story is about Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, who was very dead, and three days buried. Before we get to that big death-into-life moment, though, John brings us right into the very human emotions being experienced by those close to Lazarus – and by Jesus. We start with disappointment
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
“If you had been here.” How often do we feel that when someone is hurt or dies? “Lord, where were you?” A theological answer, “Right here, standing with you in the pain and the mess,” doesn’t always satisfy. In the moment, we are with Martha and Mary: “You could have prevented this. Why didn’t you come right away when we called?”
Disappointment always accompanies death. Even when death brings relief, there is disappointment that the person we love came to the point where that was the best outcome. Disappointment comes because we always hope for a better outcome, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. That is faith, isn’t it? Mary and her sister knew that Jesus could have healed Lazarus from his illness if only he’d come sooner.
How can we better balance our faith in what God can do, with greater faith in what God is doing beyond where we can see or imagine? It takes that kind of faith to accept death, which St. Paul called “the final enemy.” We get there, I think, by putting our focus onto life, the life around us, and the Life to come. God-Life is the antidote to all our dashed hopes, broken dreams, unfulfilled expectations.
I once read an article about new approaches to breast cancer. One woman with some early indicators who decided to take a “wait and see” approach rather than medical interventions said, “What I am doing is not foolproof, I know that. I also know life is finite and that death is unavoidable. For me it came down to the quality of life I want to live… And come what may, I think we really hurt ourselves by trying to just not be dead.”
Jesus came that we might have Life, in abundance. God wants so much more for us than just not being dead. Accepting death's inevitability, and the Life with God beyond, can make us more aware of God with us in the times of loss. This side of the grave or the other, as Lazarus discovered, there is Life.
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