2-19-21 - Proclaim, Repent, Believe

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.“

That one sentence contains everything we need to focus on during Lent – and the rest of our lives as Christ-followers. We are to proclaim the Good News that the Life of God has broken into our lives. We are to live in the Already – the time is fulfilled! We are to repent of the ways we fail to live in the fullness of that message. And we are to believe in the Good News. Proclaim it, live it, repent and believe it.

I said the other day that Ash Wednesday is threshold leading into Lent. Lent too is a kind of threshold, an antechamber if you will, leading into the greater mystery and promise of Easter life. And the life we inhabit in this world, embodied, constrained by time and the laws of nature – this life is also a threshold, a foyer, an antechamber leading into the Life we will enjoy for eternity with God. That’s the Good News we have to proclaim – that thatLife begins here and now, in this life, as we open ourselves to it.

Why do we need a practice of repentance? Because big parts of us are not on board with entering that Life God invites us into. We fear too much will be asked of us, it's too hard to pin down, we can't see it. But we don't repent to feel bad about ourselves. Repentance is about inviting our whole selves to join into the movement toward God.

And why stress believing? Because we’re more convincing when we talk about things we believe in. There is always room in belief for questions and doubts, but we don't have to give them a lot of space or make up a bed for them.

No one can make another person put God first. All we can do is call out from our own place on the path, “Hey, the view’s pretty good over here. Come walk with me a ways.” That’s why clergy want their congregants to participate in everything, all the time – not to gratify us, but because we’ve found satisfaction in shifting our center Godward and we want that for everyone.

Lent is a time to walk intentionally so that we might find our center shifting… and then we’ll want to stay on that path all the way to its End.

Save the Date! On March 6th I will host an online “Spa for the Spirit,” a Lenten retreat morning focusing on the spiritual practices that help sustain us as peacemakers. (Becoming Peacemakers is our Lenten focus at my congregations.) More info and a registration link will come next week.

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2-18-21 - Wild Beasts and Angels

You can listen to this reflection here.

The Ash Wednesday detour behind us, we return to our gospel passage for Sunday and its two whole sentences about Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness. Mark may be short on details about the actual temptations Jesus faced, but he does include an odd note: “He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

Were I an artist, I would paint a beautiful wolf and a chipmunk and maybe an owl hanging out with Jesus, with tuxedo-clad angels hovering around carrying trays. This line echoes stories about the prophet Elijah, who at one point during his time on the lam from the wicked Queen Jezebel, was fed by angels, and another incidence when he was fed by ravens. Is Mark drawing the parallel to Jesus as the new Elijah?

Wild beasts and angels: two kinds of creatures over which human beings have no control. Was that part of Jesus’ trial? To have to rely on help he couldn’t control, to prepare him for a life in which he had to depend on others for basic sustenance? Or are these two kinds of creatures over which ordinary humans have no control, but who acknowledge Jesus’ authority and help him out? Mark doesn’t tell us. Mark doesn’t even tell us that Jesus fasted for the forty days – Matthew and Luke throw that in. Maybe Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness was not so much about withstanding deprivation as boot camp for the spirit.

Today we fully dwell in the season of Lent – we’ve left the threshold day of Ash Wednesday and make our first foray into whatever wilderness we might find ourselves led. Let’s keep our eyes out for “wild beasts” – companions who might at first seem scary, but could have gifts for us. These “wild beasts” may be other people, ambitious callings, wrestlings with failure. They may even come from inside us, what Jungians would call the “shadow,” parts of us, even buried or wounded parts, that are calling us to look, notice, welcome, re-integrate. Making changes in our daily life, allowing more silence or space, can invite these parts of us out of hiding. If we can bear with the discomfort their presence elicits, we might be able to receive their gifts and experience some healing.

And let’s stay tuned to the presence of angels bearing the gifts we need to most fully benefit from this Lenten sojourn. We do not do this work of growing in God alone.

Some American Indian traditions teach that, whenever we encounter a wild creature, it has a message for us. I pray we experience some wildness this Lent, within and without, and just enough angelic waiters, as we wait upon the Spirit.

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2-17-21 - Dust and Ashes

You can listen to this reflection here.

Welcome to Ash Wednesday – one of the weirder holy days in the world. What kind of religion asks people to wear a smudge of ash on their forehead as a reminder of their mortality? Who cherishes a reminder of insignificance, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return?” Granted, this is a faith that ritualizes eating the flesh and drinking the blood of its founder-God…

Some of our practices on Ash Wednesday are rooted in medieval piety. There’s more than a little of the hair shirt in our Ash Wednesday liturgy – we read the penitential psalm 51, which petitions God, “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.” We engage in a long litany of confession with no provision for the priest to confer absolution. We remind each other that we are no more permanent than dust – even as we glory in the promise of eternal life.

Why should we “do” Ash Wednesday? Why did I for so many years get up at 5 to stand at the train station offering commuters the briefest brush with the ashes and the dust? Partly because it’s good to mark our transition into the season of Lent. Lent can pass without notice – or we can allow it to become special, holy, consecrated, set apart, a time to remember that our lives revolve around the God who made the universe, not around ourselves or even those whom we love. The rituals and prayers of Ash Wednesday form a threshold over which we cross into this holy season.

And it’s never a bad thing to be reminded how temporal our lives are, how little impact we really make, so that we might stop defining success by how much of an impact we make. To hold together these two great truths: that God is all, and next to God we are barely discernible AND that this same God has deemed us so precious and beloved that he sacrificed what was most precious to redeem us… that takes more than a day to reconcile. It takes more than a season, and possibly longer than a human life span. That is our Lenten work, always.

The beautiful hymn, “Come down, O Love divine,” comes to mind – in particular these words:
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear, and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn, till earthly passions turn to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light shine ever on my sight, 

   and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.

As we seek to allow the fire of God to burn away everything in us that is passing away, to embrace the ashes and the dust, let’s remember that we do this work in the glorious light of the One who showed us what it means to truly empty oneself. Lent is a season of sober reflection, not of stumbling in the dark. He will illumine our path.

You are welcome to join the Christ Churches for our Ash Wednesday service at 7 pm, online this year, with a symbolic imposition of ashes and home communion. Click here to join on Zoom, or watch on Facebook Live here.

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2-16-21 - Forty Days of Testing

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

“Tempted” is a loaded word, and for us can have associations beyond what it may have meant for Biblical translators. When we read that Jesus was “in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan,” we may imagine him out there with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue or an all-you-can eat buffet. Since Mark, unlike Luke and Matthew, includes no details about the nature of these temptations, our imaginations have free rein.

The other Gospels explain that Jesus was being tempted not so much to garden variety sin as to misuse his divine nature, or to relinquish it in a grand bargain with Satan, an allure more cosmic than venial. A more useful word for what happened to Jesus in that wilderness is “tested.” His faith in the unseen power he had received was tested. His trust in the guidance of his heavenly Father was tested. His commitment to the mission for which he had come into human life in the first place was tested.

Thinking of Jesus in his humanity, imagine how bewildering the experiences related in the gospels must have been for him. Many of us have a sense of mission. But how does a human hold the mission we believe Jesus had – a mission we see perhaps more clearly in hindsight than he might have on any given day – and not be wracked regularly by questions and doubts?

Perhaps this is why the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, so that his conviction of his identity could be tested and tried until he could withstand those doubts, whether they came from within or from others. Jesus could not have exercised the ministry we read about in the gospels were he not able to return time and again to his solid center, his sure knowledge of his Father’s love and power flowing through him. Indeed, faith in Jesus could not have spread so far and endured for so long had he not been able to maintain that center to the grave and beyond.

What if we look at Lent as a forty-day period of testing rather than temptation? Do we really need to know we can resist wine or chocolate, or that we can sustain a spiritual discipline for six weeks? Wouldn’t we be more joyful followers, more effective apostles if we knew our faith and sense of mission to be bearers of Christ could withstand the arrows of scheduling, convenience, complacency, anxiety, embarrassment, priorities and their like?

We don’t have to go to the wilderness looking for testing. Life hands it to us – every time we are tempted to allow an item on our to-do list to replace the time we had planned to spend in quiet prayer (guilty!), every time a friend or family member tries to talk us out of investing in our spiritual life, every time we are tempted to look at an area of pain or disease and agree with the world that God has no power there. These are just a few of the tests that come our way.

How has your faith or your commitment to God in Christ been tested lately? Are you pleased with the way you responded? How might you respond differently? We may need to become more aware of the tests themselves, and then how to resist.

One thing we can always do is call on the power of Jesus to help us and re-center us. We claim he was “tempted in every way as we are, yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) That means he did not give in to other demands or to what the devil told him was “reality.” With his Spirit in us, we can withstand those attacks too, and remain centered in our identity as bearers of Christ.

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2-15-21 - Spiritual Highs and Lows

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Thirty years living at home, presumably apprenticed to his father’s carpentry trade, settled into the rhythms of small town life – work, meals, rest, punctuated by weddings and funerals and festivals… we know nothing about the longest part of Jesus’ earthly life. Were there friends? Girlfriends? Drama? And then, suddenly, he is activated, like a member of a sleeper cell who gets the cue to commence his mission. After that, did he ever know an “ordinary” day again? Certainly the beginning of his ministry is marked by the highest possible honor, being affirmed by God himself, followed by forty days of trial:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

Immediately. No resting in the spiritual high of the anointing, the voice from heaven, the assurance of belovedness to fill his spirit before he embarked on a life of emptying himself. No, this Holy Spirit had no sooner anointed him than it drove him away from everything that sustains a human being, to be tested in a setting of deprivation and danger.

It can be like that for us. A time of felt spiritual connection may last days, weeks, even months – and then it seems like the line went dead, or we’re going through motions and rituals that used to bring us closer to God but now leave us empty. The literature of Christian saints and mystics tells that story over and over – “What happened, God? You were right here, and now it seems you’ve gone away.” Among the most eloquent was St. Theresa of Avila, writing about the loss of the “consolations” God gave her. In our own day, we have the testimony of another Teresa, of Calcutta, who wrote that she experienced the absence of God much more than moments of connection.

When we are enjoying a time of spiritual engagement, we should bask in it and allow God to fill us, the way animals squirrel away food for times of hunger. In our connected times, we don’t need to think about the wilderness. But when we find ourselves in more desolate spaces, let’s remember this is also part of the deal. It’s not an aberration, only another way in which we can open ourselves to receive more of God’s life. (Here’s a good song about that…)

We are about to embark upon a five-week season in which we intentionally try to put ourselves into wilderness time. Some years that matches where we are spiritually and other years it doesn’t. That’s why I’m more keen on taking on spiritual practices than giving up comforts during Lent. How are you feeling about your relationship with God going into Lent? Are you already in a "dry" place, or feeling the flow of Spirit? Are there practices you might take on to grow toward God? Our focus at the Christ Churches will be on honing those practices that make us effective peacemakers in this time of division.

Whatever you choose to do this Lent, which begins Wednesday, remember that Jesus in the wilderness was still “my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Wherever you find yourself in the spirit, know that your belovedness has not gone away; perhaps God has just allowed some other space to open up in you, to increase your capacity for love.

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2-12-21 - Shhh! Don't Tell...

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

What an amazing series of events Peter, James and John experienced on that mountain. They must have been bursting to tell what they’d seen and heard. But Jesus had other plans: As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Maybe he did them a favor - what would that story have sounded like, anyway? A very, very weird dream?
“Well, all of a sudden Jesus face completely changed, and then his clothes became a blinding white, like the whitest white you ever saw…"
"And then all of a sudden he wasn’t alone. Two men were with him – and we realized it was Moses and Elijah!”
“How did you know it was Moses and Elijah?”
“Well, you know… Moses had that staff, and Elijah that cloak…. I don’t know. It was obvious.”
“Okay….”
“And then Peter wanted to build three little huts so that Jesus and Moses and Elijah could just stay up there—”
“Oh, but all of a sudden we were in the middle of a huge cloud; couldn’t see anything!”
“But we heard a voice, a booming voice… ‘’
“God’s voice—”
“Saying, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved! Listen to him.’”
“And then it was all gone – everything was back to normal. Just us and Jesus. Like it never happened.”
"Yeah. Right. And what were you smoking up there?"

Perhaps more perplexing to them was Jesus’ strange reference to the Son of Man “risen from the dead.” Mark tells us, So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.

Did they think it some figure of speech, a metaphor, perhaps? How could one conceive of anyone rising from the dead? That event itself was hard enough to accept. Perhaps this surreal experience, accompanied by Jesus’ prediction, prepared them to comprehend that incomprehensible. And once they received the Holy Spirit, they no longer “kept the matter to themselves.” They couldn’t shut up about Jesus and his resurrection.

How about us? This isn’t a bad description of many 21st century church-goers – “…they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.”

Those who have trouble “buying” Jesus’ resurrection are more apt to keep the matter to themselves. There is always room for questions and even doubts – AND at some point, we need to decide that we accept this spiritual reality we claim as foundational truth for Christians. Our questions, even doubts, can persist beyond that point, but so can our being released into ministry and faith-sharing.

Our whole Christian story must sound far-fetched on first hearing. That’s why it needs to come from each of us in our own words, as we talk about how our stories have intersected and been enriched by The Story. I pray we will feel settled enough about who Jesus is, and his rising from the dead, to stop keeping it to ourselves and let a thirsty world hear our Good News.

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2-11-20 - The Urge to Stay

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

I once attended an eight-day retreat for clergy. Oh, there was some work to do, but it was self-nurturing work – reflection on who I was and wanted to be, how I could best serve God and God’s people. There was wonderful and abundant food, interesting people, beautiful surroundings – and enough prayer and worship that I was able to connect with Jesus in a way I had not for a long time. By mid-week I was wondering why I ever had to leave this place, ever had to go back to my day-to-day life and to-do list. Only when I was actually at the airport did my thoughts begin to turn back toward home. When we are in a sweet spot, the urge to remain there can be powerful.

Maybe Peter was having one of those moments, blown away by the spiritual revelations coming one after another on that mountain top. He had proof he’d backed the right horse. He was experiencing holiness and the holiest men he knew of. Why not try to fix it all in time and space, right here, right now? Or was he just babbling out of fright, as Mark suggests?

Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

We often associate holy encounters with heights. We talk about “spiritual highs” and “mountain-top experiences.” Often these encounters come when we’ve stepped out of our quotidian patterns and gotten away geographically or temporally, on retreat or in an unstructured day. Just as people in the throes of “in-love-ness” can’t conceive of their relationship ever becoming dull or predictable, It can be hard to believe, in a time of spiritual connection, that life will ever go back to normal, that our prayer life might become ho-hum.

It doesn’t have to become “normal” or “ordinary” – but it will never stay at the same pitch all the time, for God is always on the move, leading us forward. God is rarely in the last place we caught a glimpse. God can be found around the next corner, down the next road, in the next person we meet. In this life of faith we are invited to live in a delicate balance – present and aware to the fullness of joy around us in this moment, and always open to where the Spirit is leading us next.

When was the last time you experienced an intense time of connection with God? What were the circumstances? How long did you feel connected? If it was less time than you’d like, you might ask the Spirit to help you stick around longer next time. Can you repeat some of the circumstances so that you might feel that connection again – not in an identical way, but as God leads?

If you can’t remember a time when you felt close to God, are you holding yourself back, or do you feel God stays apart from you? Why this distance? Lack of trust? Disappointment? Unwillingness to put our weight in the unseen realm?

We know we’re growing spiritually when we are able to exult in times when we feel the Spirit so close – and look forward to the next adventure God has for us. It may not be on a mountaintop, and it may not feel exhilarating – but if the Spirit of God is there, it’s real and true and will move us deeper into Love.

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