4-2-20 - Hosanna

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

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Does it amaze you that the same throng who laud Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem could a few days later call with equal ardor for his crucifixion? Maybe it shouldn't; anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows how quickly strong and seemingly incompatible emotions can pass through us in swift succession. “I love so-and-so!” “I can’t stand so-and-so!” “I’ll die if you don’t let me go to that concert!” “I’m never leaving my room!”

Sure, but these are supposed to be adults in the crowd, not adolescents. Yet any rational behavior we might expect from a group of adults is neutralized by the Crowd Effect – which can quickly morph into mob rule. Something happens to humans in crowds; normal inhibitions and rational thinking can be overcome by fervent emotion, which can quickly grow destructive. We see it in stadiums, where excitement about a team can turn into a murderous rampage.

And when you add a threat to people’s security, it’s not difficult to see how this crowd turned on Jesus. The temple authorities not-so-subtly suggested that Jesus’ continued activity and renown would awaken the wrath of the Romans, and all Jewish subjects would suffer. “…It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish,” said the high priest Caiaphas. Anyone who’d witnessed Roman brutality would do much to avoid a repeat occurrence.

In a way, the “crucify him!’s are easier to understand than the adulation when Jesus entered Jerusalem. The chant of the crowd explicitly acknowledges Jesus’ Messiahship as the Son of David. People put their own cloaks on the ground, presumably so the feet of the donkeys’ bearing the holy cargo don’t have to touch the dirt. Those who shouted “Hosanna!” were putting their trust in Jesus. When they saw him a few days later, in custody, beaten, seemingly powerless, perhaps their sense of trust felt betrayed, which fueled their rage.

Christians the world over normally participate in the reading of that story on Palm Sunday, asked to join the crowd in both the hosannas and the calls for execution. I suspect many have trouble relating to both cries. We’re too familiar with the Jesus story to feel the excitement of recognizing the Messiah, and too removed from oppression to feel a strong need for a savior; and to call for his death feels bewildering. Where do you locate yourself between those positions?

It can be helpful to pray through the whole story before Sunday (Matthew 26:14- 27:66), being attentive to where you respond, who you relate to as it unfolds. Can you find in yourself that impulse to praise Jesus for who he is to you? If you feel he’s a stranger, if you’re one of the curious in the crowd, you might ask him to show you who he is.

“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” they shouted, something many of us sing every week in the eucharist. If you feel Jesus has blessed you, tell him. See what that opens up.

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4-1-20 - Provision

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

As Jesus moved through his final days in human life, many details seemed to be supernaturally pre-arranged. Twice when he sends out disciples to take care of needs, there is a mysterious element – “Go to x, do y, and if anyone asks you, here’s what you say…” When they need a room in which to celebrate the Passover feast, it’s very cloak and dagger: “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there.”

And here, when the need is for a donkey, the disciples sent are also told what signs to look for: 

“Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.”

How did Jesus know they would find a donkey as soon as they entered the next village? And that the donkey’s owner would respond affirmatively to the notion that “the Lord” needed the animals? That means he was someone who knew Jesus to be Adonai, the Lord, not just Master and Teacher.

We can see a principle at work in the Bible: God provides what God needs in order to accomplish God’s mission, whether stables, rooms, loaves and fish, donkeys – or tombs. AND we see that God relies upon human beings to cooperate, collaborate in that mission if it is to bear fruit. Theoretically the man with the donkeys could have refused, or asked a fee, or the man with the guest room said, “It’s rented.”

Can you think of a time when you’ve received provision unexpectedly as you went about God’s work? I bet that’s a story to tell… who needs to hear it? I think of the sudden outpouring of new volunteers for our Food Pantry just when we lost five core leaders in a two-week period. God is good!

And how would you respond if something as precious as livestock were asked of you? 

Think back… What have you given for God’s use? What have you held back?
What do you sense God asking you to offer or lend at this time in your life – or in the life of the world? Funds for those out of work? Time? Family? A skill or talent? A house or car?
I’m not asking what you have to offer – I’m asking what you sense the Holy Spirit asking for. It could be that there isn’t anything… or it could be that we need to ask, to offer, to make ourselves receptive to the request.

Think about it: God tied himself in with human beings a long time ago, at least in the Story we have (maybe God has a whole other story going with wolves or pigeons or bees…). God created the world without help, and then created humankind to help tend the whole enterprise. And even after that little initiative ran into trouble, God continued to rely upon people - upon the movement of patriarchs, and the voices of prophets, and the hands and feet of apostles to spread God’s message and reveal God’s power. It’s an intricate relationship between us and the Holy Spirit at work in us – and it’s how God will continue to reveal God’s self in the world until God has restored all things to wholeness.

Which makes me wonder how much more “whole” things would be if we all offered our donkeys and extra rooms and special gifts as generously as the unnamed people in our stories did. What you got?

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3-31-20 - The Donkey(s)

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

This is why it’s good to really spend some time with a passage. You notice all kinds of things that you often miss. Like, a donkey and a colt? Which was it?

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet, saying Tell the daughter of Zion, ‘Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.

He sat on them? That’s a stretch, to say the least! Do we chalk this up to Matthew’s insistence on tying every event he can to an Old Testament prophecy, no matter how far a reach (ba-dum-bum...)? Mark and Luke each speak of a colt, singular. Maybe Matthew wants to be sure we get the connection to kingship, even at the risk of absurdity. This event is not a mere victory lap – it is the entry of a king into his capital. But this is a king so humble, he not only rides upon a donkey, but even upon its foal.

Kingship and humility don’t always go together – but they do in so many stories of Jesus’ earthly life, from his birth in a rough-hewn animal shelter to his traveling company of fishermen, party girls and tax collectors. In fact, the humility isn’t hard to locate in this story – the kingship is. We have the royal gifts presented by the magi, the defensive measures of King Herod, and ultimately the crown of thorns to remind us of Jesus’ true nature, a monarch disguised as a commoner. That is why the epistle reading for Palm Sunday is always the hymn about Jesus found in Philippians 2:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.

Unless we really consider where the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, came from, it can be hard to grasp just how dramatic a lowering of status he endured, consenting to be bounded in a human body, in time and space, to be subject to the care and cruelties of limited human beings. (Matthew West and Vince Gill sing a Christmas song called Leaving Heaven, which flips the perspective nicely.)

Today in prayer let’s try exalting Jesus, even imagining him in the courts of heaven or a throne room, whatever that might look like for you. Then imagine yourself there with him. What feelings come up in you? Do you want to praise him? Flee from that presence? Go nearer? 

Go with the feelings, pray into them.

The divine reality we celebrate is that the God who made everything loved us so much, s/he decided to come into our earthly reality to woo us, to court us, to come and sit with us. Maybe that other colt is meant for you, for me, to ride along next to Jesus, to the cross and beyond, into Life.

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3-30-20 - To Jerusalem

You can listen to this reflection here.

Choosing a focus for Water Daily the next two weeks is tricky; the Gospel for Palm Sunday is the whole Passion story, and the following week it’s the resurrection. But I don’t want us exploring the empty tomb while we’re still in Holy Week; that’s like peeking at the last page while you’re still in chapter 5. Thus, this week we’ll focus on the gospel story for which Palm Sunday is named.

So… onward, to Jerusalem, where the week begins with Jesus’ riding in triumphantly, lauded by crowds, and goes horribly, horribly wrong, ending with his brutal crucifixion. Jesus had been saying for some time that he must go to Jerusalem, where he will be arrested, tried and executed. Earlier, Pharisees had warned him to avoid Jerusalem, because Herod wanted to kill him. Jesus responded,

“Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.' O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”

The people of Israel had a funny relationship to their prophets – they revered them, and frequently sought to kill them because they didn’t like their messages. Those messages often veered between, “You’d better, or else…” or “It’s too late; you’re in trouble now..” Woven among these, though, another message emerges from God: “I love you. I want so much for us to be together. If you might only do what you promised, honor me, honor each other…” But the people never could. How could they relate to such a God they’d been taught to fear?

Philip Yancey offers an analogy to the incarnation in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew – he talks about how the fish in his fish tank regarded him with terror, even though he fed them faithfully, and kept their water clean and chemically balanced. His interventions seemed to them like destruction, and they fled to their hiding places whenever he came near. “To my fish I was a deity. I was too large for them, too incomprehensible.” He thought one day, “I would have to become a fish and ‘speak’ to them in a language they could understand.”

Only, it turned out that even when God came among us in a form like ours, in a language we might understand, those who were deeply invested in the old ways, who had gained power by fostering people’s fear of God, weren’t any more receptive. This prophet, too, must be silenced, eliminated.

How would you have regarded Jesus in his earthly time? Would you have been drawn to his miracles and messages, or put off? Would you have gone to him for healing or forgiveness? Would you have been unsettled by the threat to good order he represented, or thrilled that at last deliverance from oppression might be at hand? With what aspect of Jesus do you most easily connect? Least?

Knowing how we most naturally connect to Jesus can help us strengthen the relationship, and balance it. There is no wrong answer, even if we identify with the Pharisees. We know Jesus forgave them too.

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3-27-20 - Life Wins

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

Why did Jesus restore Lazarus to life when he was so very, very dead? Was it “for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it,” as he indicated to his disciples a few days earlier? Was it because he was so moved by Mary’s weeping that he started to weep himself?  "When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved." The King James Version rendered that verse, “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible.

Or was Jesus “greatly disturbed in spirit” because he knew what God was equipping him to do next, and it scared the daylights out of him? Certainly, he was in some turmoil – the most literal translation suggests actual gut-wrenching. Jesus weeps – and then Jesus acts. 

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."

It can be hard for us, from this side of Easter Sunday, not to hear the echo of the women on their way to Jesus’ tomb, wondering who will roll away that stone. Stones are to keep death in, and the living out. And here comes God to overturn all of that order… just as God had said long ago s/he would.

There is also reviving of the dead in our reading from the Hebrew Bible this Sunday – but it is only a vision, in which dry bones, representing Israel’s defeat and dead hopes, are given sinews and flesh and have the breath, the life of God, blown back into them. Included in Ezekiel’s bizarre vision, though, is a prophetic promise: “And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,’ says the Lord.” (Ezekiel 37:12-14)

Scripture suggests that death is something God tolerates until s/he can do away with it – which is what we claim God did in Christ on Good Friday, and proved Easter Sunday. That is central to our belief as those who bear the name of Christ. One of our greatest faith challenges is to live that belief, that death has been neutralized, while in this life it is still so very real and so very destructive. These stories we read and learn and tell are counter-narratives to the one we live out in this physical life. So we must develop our spiritual selves as well as our physical selves – to see Life beyond death, and to see it so fully and clearly it carries us through “the valley of the shadow of death” when we find ourselves there.

What is your relationship with death? Do you fear it? Dread it? See it as natural, as a release, or an enemy? Does your view change when it’s the death of another you’re contemplating? 

What is your relationship with life – the kind of life that transcends death? Does it feel real?
Where is God for you in the whole subject of death?

In another nine days or so, the Church will enter into a deep, week-long contemplation of death and life, so this is a good time to entertain these questions and take them into prayer. If it feels to you like death still has the upper hand, still wins – that’s something to talk with God about, to ask questions and see where answers might emerge. We can say, “Lord, I don’t understand death, why it’s still part of life when you’ve vanquished it – but I do understand life.”

God’s Life is already in us. As we learn to dwell in that Life, it will carry us into the life beyond this one. We can ask daily to be filled with that Life that truly overwhelms death – and gradually that Life is what we become.

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3-26-20 - Lazarus, the Unbound

You can listen to this reflection here.

The Gospels tell us almost nothing about Lazarus, yet he is the centerpiece of Jesus’ most powerful and unsettling miracle. We’re told he lived in Bethany outside Jerusalem, that he and his sisters were beloved in Jesus’ inner circle. We hear he was felled by an illness and died somewhat unexpectedly, from which we might surmise that he was not old. And that he made a journey into death and back into life – only to die again at a riper age. He has inspired numerous works of literature and art - yet the only scene in which he appears, he enters bound in grave cloths, four days dead:

Jesus said, “Where have you laid him?” They said, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” 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, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. Jesus 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. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

We are endlessly fascinated with tales of those who have physically died and somehow been revived. Proof of Heaven, Heaven is for Real, 90 Minutes in Heaven are only a few bestselling titles. But we have no record of what Lazarus experienced being revived after so long, what it would be like to undergo a reversal of decay, movement in limbs long set in rigor. Yet Jesus’ command, “Unbind him, and let him go!” reverberates through the centuries, a powerful metaphor for release and new life.

Few of us have experienced being physically revived, but I suspect we have all seen life returning to people bound in one way or another, whether by poverty, addiction, crime, illness, abuse, self-destructive patterns. Yet we are more often stuck in the place of those onlookers who said, “Could not Jesus have kept this man from dying?” As we, as a global community, go through the extreme dislocation, disease and death wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, those words echo all the more. I need to return again and again to what I have learned about the mysterious ways of God: that God seems rarely to be in the business of prevention. God is always in the business of resurrection. This is what Jesus demonstrated that day, what the four-day wait was about.

“Unbind him and let him go” might be said of us. May we be unbound from worldly expectations and set free to trust in this God whom we cannot see, but whose power and love we have experienced. I heard in prayer today, “Trust me – and don’t take a step without me in this time.” Somehow I believe God will help us navigate this crisis and be God’s agents in redemption, in the face of unimaginable loss and suffering and fear. That is our calling as people of faith.

You know who I think had the most faith of anyone in this scene? The guys who rolled away that stone, and Lazarus, who came out when Jesus called him. Few people are so open to the impossible they are willing to go with it when it comes their way. The more open we are to the impossible, the more possible it becomes every day. Choose life.

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3-25-20 - Mary, the Reflective

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

Isn’t it amazing how people can grow up in the same family and be so different from each other? As action-oriented as Martha is, her sister Mary is geared toward reflection and a quiet devotedness. It is Mary who sits at Jesus’ feet listening to his teaching instead of helping Martha cook; Mary who anoints Jesus’ head and feet with a whole jar of expensive ointment shortly before his arrest, an act of extravagant worship – arguably, the way worship should always be.

And so it is here, in this story. Mary stays at home when she hears that Jesus has arrived. But as soon as Martha tells her that Jesus is asking for her, she goes to him:

… [Martha] went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” When she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Mary utters the same words of gentle rebuke and profound faith as Martha did. But where Martha and Jesus engaged in theological conversation about death and life and resurrection and Jesus’ identity, with Mary it is her open display of feelings that touches Jesus’ spirit. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.

In these two sisters we see different aspects of a spiritual whole. A healthy spiritual life makes room for emotions and intellect, receptivity and action. Most of us tend to emphasize one mode over another. How is it that you most readily experience holiness or the presence of God? 

In thoughts and actions? In silence and feelings? Some combination of these?

How do you most naturally express your spirituality? 

Are your emotions available to you in your prayer and worship life? 

 Are you able to sit still on occasion and wait on the Lord, see what the Spirit is saying?

It’s good to know how we’re wired spiritually. Then we can look to see if we’re missing anything. Is God inviting us to play with a form of spiritual expression or reception that comes less naturally to us, but opens us to a new dimension of God-life? If you only ever read the bible (or this...) as a devotion, how about singing a hymn in your personal prayer time? If you only feel connected when serving dinner at the shelter, how about going on a retreat alone, and seeing where God is in silence and inactivity.

Martha and Mary of Bethany are among the most fully drawn characters in the Gospels, and of course we know little about them. But they are a rich gift to us, these sisters, embodying different ways to love Jesus, and different modes of receiving his love.

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