The Lord Is Risen In Deed.

Easter

Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones]

At The Eucharist
Romans 6:3-11
Psalm 114
Luke 24:1-12

Today I'm going to write about my father's resurrection. I expect that everyone who's been reading this blog over these last several weeks (all four of you) knows that my dad died about a year and a half ago. He did not want to die. At one point in his life, he really believed humans would find a way to cheat death so that we could live virtually forever. He once told me that he was jealous of me because he knew that for him it was too late, but that I would probably live to see those days. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I wasn't sure I'd want to take advantage of eternal mortal life.

Our was a cordial but rather distant relationship in adulthood. I had come to learn and accept that the type of relationship I wanted to have with him was not a relationship he was capable of having with me. I think he had to come to similar acceptances about me. There were many times that I kept in contact or initiated a visit specifically because I didn't want to regret my behavior after he died.

Yet when he died, I was devastated and full of regret. I questioned every interaction I had with him. I examined our time together like a dumped teenager--what did he mean when he said this? If I had done that, would things have been different? Was I fair to him? Was I faithful? Was I good?

So I know--I think most of us know--why Peter took off and ran to the tomb as soon as the women said that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Because if Jesus was, like Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, "only mostly dead," Peter wanted his chance to say all those things he should have said, and he didn't care who laughed at him for believing what his friends called an idle tale.

But I was going to talk about my father's resurrection. My father was an atheist, so by most understandings of Christianity, Heaven was not really a comfort to me when I considered Dad's death. Thank God nobody told me in the funeral that he was in a better place, because I'm sure I would have burst into tears. I'm not even sure Dad would be happy in Heaven, being expected to serve a God he never knew, or at least, never recognized as a friend. So, clearly, heaven and eternal life are not the resurrection I'm thinking about when I write that Dad has been resurrected from the dead.

His resurrection has happened inside of me. Not at first, because at first I was too ripped apart by grief and confusion for him to be anything but dead. His death was a presence in my life.

But a few months ago, things began to change. One morning I realized that Dad had begun to occupy a different place in my brain. A place where things didn't really hurt--they just were. Somehow Dad became a different kind of alive in my imagination and memory. Things that he had said to me or done with me took on new and different meanings as they percolated through all of my memories. And as I continued to live, my life experiences informed my memories, and helped me to understand things in new ways. I ran with my fifth-grader in a 5K, just like Dad had done with me, and I found myself handing down some of the same advice he's given me. My Dad continues to influence me and advise me because he lives again, resurrected and re-resurrected in my mind, and in my stories that I tell my own children about him. In some ways, I grow closer to him as I live into the fullness of his life--as my children grow older and I go through what he went through with me, I know him better as I walk in a version of his shoes.

I don't want to water down the great hope we have in Easter by saying that my father's resurrection is Jesus' resurrection--that we make Jesus live again by telling his story and letting his words enlighten and inform us, and by letting the example of his life be a shining beacon to us when the darkness of the world seems like all there is.

But certainly, we, the Body of Christ, are part of what keeps his heart thumping. When we participate in the eucharist, or allow Jesus' teachings to inform our behavior and open our hearts, we are participants in Jesus' resurrection. When we give hope to the hopeless, homes to the homeless, food to the hungry, and a compassionate ear to those who are troubled, we are re-resurrecting Christ. Every time we choose to live, as much as we can, the way Jesus lovingly, desperately wanted us to live, that is when we are, as Paul said, baptized into his resurrection.

As Christ's body, we are all, always, being asked to do and believe in the impossible. Moses lead his people away, safely, from his oppressors. Ezekiel turned corpses into an army with a few commands. We are able to hold our hearts open to the people who need us and the people we need, even after those hearts have been damaged by the very people we're opening them to. And we are asked to live hopefully even when hope is so thin and spare that it seems like it would just be safer to close ourselves off to the possibility of hope--to dismiss rumors of the miraculous cynically as idle tales.

So, lent is over now. Easter is here. Jesus is alive. He was only ever mostly dead, and now there is a great deal to do. Let's go do it. Because the Lord is risen. He is risen in deed.

Reclaiming the Passion

The Liturgy of the PalmsLuke 19:28-40
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
The Liturgy of the Word

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 22:14-23:56 or Luke 23:1-49

Remember way back on the first Sunday in Lent, I wrote this post about how God lets really horrible things happen to people all the time? And I mentioned that I didn't think a loving God would devise a plan that ripped children from the arms of their mothers, or forced parents to watch their children die. I still don't think that. Which makes a lot of our doctrine about the crucifixion a little problematic, to say the least.

Christianity has traditionally understood the cross as the way to salvation for sinners. If you spent any time in fundamentalist circles during your life, then you've seen the diagram where human sinners are on one side of a deep chasm, God is on the other side, and the cross is suspended like a bridge in between. Usually there are Bible verses printed for each part of the story, and these pages were printed up in pocket sized tracts so that you could always have one handy if you needed to share the gospel.

Here's a good example:

Bridge to Life Illustration from Navigators website

We're so used to thinking about the crucifixtion as the place where the cosmic deal went down--often preachers and teachers will focus a great deal on the suffering that Jesus had to endure in order to pay the price for our sins, and they even encourage us to think about how our sins are hammering the nails into Jesus' hand and feet.

But what if Jesus' suffering wasn't necessary? What if the crucifixion was never part of the plan? I said before that I didn't think God was the kind of douchebag God who would purposely force a mother to watch her child die in her arms, and I don't think his own son is any exception. You can tell from Jesus' behavior in the gospel lesson that he's a little wigged out. He's repeating himself about the bread and wine. He tells his disciples to get some swords and money even though he's never placed any value on such things before. I mean, let's be honest, he's acting a little bit drunk and a whole lot crazy.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

And I think he's acting crazy because he's engaged in a mighty struggle. Is he going to be the Messiah that was part of the plan--the one who speaks truth to power and hangs with the powerless? Is he willing to die for that vision? Or are the people throwing the palm fronds the ones who are right? Maybe the Messiah needs to be a military ruler who gathers the chosen people together to rise up against the powerful oppressors and usher in the kingdom of God by force? It certainly seems like he's toying with that possibility in Luke's gospel.

You want to talk about torture? What do you suppose it's like to throw your whole self into a new and radical vision for the world, one that includes people who were formerly excluded, one that knocks everything everyone knows about power and worthiness on its end, and then, when you know people are coming to kill you, to suddenly see that you may have gotten it all wrong? That you've given your whole life to a vision that's going to come to nothing. That you've failed the universe. In that state, I'm not sure he'd even notice when the nails went in.

But then, he goes to Gethsemane, and something happens there. Jesus reclaims his true vision. He lets go of orchestrating own survival and gives himself back over to the big picture. He surrenders himself and says, "Not my will, but yours be done." As far as I'm concerned, this is the turning point of the story. Everything else is denoument.

Because despite what's been implied from pulpits and Sunday school flyers and televangelists' broadcasts for generations, Jesus was not born to die. Jesus was born to live, and to live so purely and abundantly that we who could ignore the world's distractions would see in his life a way to find real lives of our own. Lives of connection and inclusion and compassion. Lives of reclaiming a vision of what our lives are really for.

In my very first post introducing this blog, I rather flippantly said that Lent was all about guilt. I was wrong. Lent is about reunion, revision and recommitment. Lent is meant to be our time in the garden of Gethsemane, which gives us the vision to do what we are meant to do, regardless of how much of a beating we take for it. Because this part of the Good News is called the passion for a reason.

Art is what you do when there's nothing you can do

Readings for the fifth Sunday in Lent:
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

 

Do not remember the former things,

or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

--Isaiah 43:18,19a

 

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." --John 12:1-8

The Gospel lesson is so short this week, I decided to just paste it above so that it would be there for reference.  Also, because it's an awesome story and you should read it.

What's not really stated in this part of the passage is that Jesus has been hiding out at this point. He's raised Lazarus, very publicly, from the dead, and now that he's called attention to himself, the Pharisees are looking to kill him. So when he gets to Bethany, everyone knows he's a dead man. I believe this is also the same evening when, in other gospels, Mary sits at Jesus' feet while Martha does all the heavy lifting of hosting a dinner, and then she kind of flips out on Mary. So it's an emotional night at Lazarus's house.

But the thing about this passage that always strikes me is what a desperate, irrational act Mary commits in breaking the bottle of perfume and washing Jesus' feet with it. It's too bad that there's all this editorializing about how Judas was a bad, bad man, because I think a lot of us, if we didn't know where the story went from here, might agree with Judas. Three hundred denari would buy an awful lot of peanut butter and jelly. So Judas looks kind of reasonable to me on the surface, through the lens of someone living in the "real" world.

Mary's not living in the real world though. She's insane with fear and grief. I imagine she's desperate to do something with all these feelings that are roiling around inside her. I mean, first her brother died, then Jesus came, and she knew he could have saved Lazarus, so she sort of chews him out for not being there. Then Jesus brings Lazarus back, which is joy beyond reason, but then that very act of reanimation is what really gets the bullseye painted on Jesus' back, which must cause Mary and the whole family a great deal of guilt. Plus, you know that after his experience, Lazarus can't be the same. He must be very changed, which would be stressful for a sister who just wanted her brother back, and didn't quite get him. And now Jesus is at the house, about to walk right into Jerusalem, where people are waiting to have him killed. What is the reasonable response to all of that?

I don't think there is one. So Mary does what many of us do when life has dealt us a blow that we can't respond to in any rational, reasonable way. She does something completely irrational, because it feels right. She takes an incredibly valuable jar of perfume, smashes it, pours it over Jesus' feet, and then uses her hair to rub it all over his feet. She essentially commits an act of art. I think she was trying to say that compared to what she was going to lose in Jesus, nothing had value, nothing was important at all. But like all good art, her actions say a lot more, maybe even more than she knew at the time.

Because at another level, I don't think she meant anything at all. I think she was just beside herself, and she had to do something, something big, as big as her feelings, and the perfume thing was what she came up with. It felt right to her, so she did it.

And Judas, who may be in denial at this point--maybe he's still expecting Jesus to find a military solution to his situation--can't get out of the everyday here-and-now to see that Mary's logic and actions belong to Someplace Else.

In her book Walking On Water, Madeline L'Engle talks a lot about chronos, or linear time, and kairos, which is time out of time. Chronos, L'Engle says, is good for baking and catching the train, but in prayer or in creating, we do our best work in kairos. Kairos is that state when you are so absorbed in your task that you can spend hours working, though it only feels like minutes are passing by. Or you can pray or meditate and feel like you've said and understood so much, you must have been sitting there for an hour, and discover it's been ten minutes. Time stretches and contracts and you hardly perceive it, because you are so completely in the moment. We're in Kairos when we're creating and it's going well, and we're also in Kairos when we're knocked breathless by grief. In today's Gospel, Judas is living in chronos; Mary is in Kairos.

And Jesus gets that, and honors it. In both of them really--like the father in last week's parable of the prodigal son, Jesus meets both Judas and Mary where they are. His response to Judas has nothing to do with him being a thief and a betrayer. He just says, you can take care of the poor later--I'm not going to be around for much longer.

And to Mary, the prodigal child in the act of squander, he holds out his feet. He lets her do what she needs to do, not to make sense of it all, but to discharge some of that emotion in a meaningful way. I really do think this is what all artists do--create not so much to make sense of the world, but to try to make concrete their own response to it, even if their response is just to say, "This cannot be." And Mary's act of art seems to have been meaningful, even moving, for Jesus--because if the bible were a novel, you would be a very bad English major if you said it was just an interesting coincidence that a week later, Jesus decides to wash everybody's feet.

And he, perhaps, is being an artist as well, when he takes the bread, breaks it, and commands his followers to eat it, and likewise with the wine. It's an act of art that has taken on a life of its own for the past two thousand years. 

In a grand coincidence this week, I accidentally dropped a full bottle of perfume in the bathroom at the back of the house, so I can report with confidence that Mary's nard would indeed have filled the entire house with its odor. It would have lingered for days. Every time anyone entered that house, they would have smelled it and thought back to that last dinner they all had together. Mary would have thought of it every time she brushed her hair. It was as close as she could get to sleeping in his t-shirt, and I imagine it was a comfort to her in the days that came after. Because that's the thing about living in Kairos and making art. It leaves its scent behind and colors your experience for a long time afterward. The very act of acting--out of desperation, fear, frustration--it changes you. It lingers with you, and flavors your life like the scent of something much more lovely than anyone could rationally expect.

Dad always liked you best.

Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32


Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; *
who must be fitted with bit and bridle,
or else they will not stay near you.

--Psalm 32:10

We love the story of the prodigal son. We love to tell people (and to hear about) how God is just like the father in the story when we, like the younger son, turn back home with the idea of throwing ourselves at God's feet, willing to do anything if we can just be back home again. It's a nice cozy scriptural hot water bottle. And I don't dispute it. God loves it when "sinners" choose God again. But what often gets overlooked in this story is that there are three people in it, and only one of them is doing any repenting.

Right, you're thinking, because the older brother doesn't have anything to repent about. He's been doing everything right all along. To which I say, Oh really? I mean, he certainly thinks so. Here's the dutiful son, doing what his father says, being the good, faithful, child, pretty much being his father's servant and waiting for his father's death so that he can finally have everything that's rightly his. So if he's so great, why do we all want to cast ourselves at the prodigal child--why do we all identify with the fuckup?

Part of the reason is that we've all been fuckups at one point or another, and that experience has serious staying power. You fuck up bad enough, you can have a residual feeling of being damaged goods for the rest of your life, easily. But I think there's a more compelling reason for choosing to align with the prodigal child. He's interesting, adventuresome, impulsive. He's likeable. And honestly? Don't you think his big brother is kind of a douchebag?

I mean, here's a guy who, by his own description, is dutiful, never gives his dad any trouble, home by curfew, no loud parties, perfect behavior in every way. Except for the judgmental prig part at the end, where his brother comes home, and instead of running to embrace him and hear all the stories of the prostitutes and the starving, big brother stays outside and pouts because Dad always did like the younger brother best. I mean, seriously, who wants to be that loser? Like the mule in the psalm, the older brother has fitted himself with a bit and bridle of his own making. They help him to play it safe. Wouldn't we rather be the kid who screws up royally, but still somehow survives, and makes it home in rags, destitute, having fully lived? Of course we would. Which is why I have some bad news for you in the next paragraph.

We're the big brother. The judgemental prig. The Pharisee. And we're the ones the story is really about. I'm not sure, but I think I can prove both those assertions: first, that the story is not about the prodigal son at all, but about the older brother who stays home, and second, that we all are the older brother.

The first assertion is pretty easy. When Jesus tells this story, it's in response to the Pharisees, who are complaining about his dining companions, which is to say, they're taking offense that he's not falling all over himself to eat exclusively with them. They, like the second brother, have no doubt of their righteousness--they are right by God's side, doing the work he has given them to do, and doing it faithfully, without so much as an extra glass of wine on their birthdays. So when Jesus tells this story in response to their complaint, yes, there is a teaching about the quality of God's enthusiastic devotion to the "unworthy," but, more importantly, there's a tacit scolding about their hospitality, and frankly, about their inability to cut loose and remove proverbial sticks from parts of the anatomy that they (and the rest of us) would consider unclean.

The second assertion is tougher. But I would say that if we've ever been convinced that we're "saved," or if we know that God has reserved a mansion for us in Heaven; if we've lived our lives trying to do all the things we've been told we ought to do in order to be good Christians (including repenting when we've done wrong), then I would argue that we're a lot more like the Pharisee/older brother than we are like the sinners/prodigal son. And if those of us who don't affiliate with any kind of organized religion have ever looked at a church, whether it's the Catholic church with their sex abuse scandals, or the Westboro Baptist Church with their appalling demonstrations, or the Episcopal church with its scandalous ordination of women and gays, and thought something along the lines of, "Well, God will give them what's coming to them in the end," I think we've got way more in common with the non-prodigal brother than we might be comfortable admitting. If that assertion really annoys you, may I suggest that you sit with it for a little longer before we move on? 

OK, so we're at least entertaining the possibility that we are as much like the older brother as we are like the prodigal son. This is kind of a problem, because as we see in the story, it's the guy who thinks he hasn't done anything wrong who ends up excluded from the party by choice--through his own pig-headedness. Which just goes to show that the two brothers aren't so different after all--apparently, you can screw up just as royally playing it safe at home as you can squandering your father's life savings.

Which is why, in a twist that I find much more meaningful and touching than the reunion with the younger brother, the father comes out to tend to his older son. When we read the parable, I think we might sometimes miss the emotion and intensity of this moment. But this guy has been the dutiful son, never saying a word, never disobeying, probably having to hear over and over again from his father, "I wonder what your brother is doing right now." He has probably never complained to his father in his whole life. But this time, when his dad comes out to find out what's going on, it all spills out. All the ugliness of sibling rivalry, all the unsavory self-righteousness, and what does the father do?

Well, he doesn't do what I would do, which is to say, "What's wrong with you? Your brother's home! You should be ashamed of yourself. Now go in there and give him a hug." Instead, the father does with his older son exactly what he does with his younger son: accepts him, affirms him, and invites him back into the fold.  And the amazing thing is that the father does all this without his older son being in any way repentant about his own small-heartedness. Both children are in a state of grace by the end of the story.

Of course, it would be interesting to know what happens the next day. Does the father accept his younger son's offer and allow him to work as a servant? We assume not, but we don't know. Do the brothers enjoy their old relationship, or is there always a rift between them? Only time will tell. I imagine the brother having to shell out half of his half of the inheritance at some point, but again, we don't know, because we close on the scene, not back at the party, but outside with father and faithful son, as the father tries to persuade the faithful one to join the spendthrift inside, and not to mention the way his robe looks so big on his brother's emaciated frame.

So the big question for us is, do we go in? Whatever it is that makes me judge my brothers and sisters in Christ, whether it's the wealth of their denomination or their politics and protests or their wastefulness of the world's resources, it is Lent, and they have come back to the father. He is celebrating, and it is up to us--are we able to welcome them home?

Popeye Goes Sci-Fi

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

"God said, 'Time, time belongs to me
Time's my secret weapon,
My final advantage'
God turned away
From the edge of town.
I knew that I was beaten
That now was all I had..."

from "God Said No" by Dan Bern

You know, I love the readings for this week because they're full of crazy. First, in Exodus, we have Moses taking care of some livestock, when he sees a bush on fire. Then he has a discussion with God, which, frankly, makes me wonder exactly what kind of bush *cough cough cannabis* was burning. After a conversation about appropriate footwear and the future of Israel, God tells Moses his name: IAM. Then, in the Psalm we have what reads like an erotic love poem to God. In Corinthians, Paul basically pulls a Star Trek The Next Generation-style time travel move and tells Christians that their ancestors drank from a rock, which is Jesus, even though they preceded him by hundreds of years. Finally, we have a parable in which a man has planted a fig tree in his vineyard, and it hasn't borne fruit in the three years since, so he wants to chop it down until his gardener intervenes. Do you know how long it takes a fig tree to grow to maturity and bear fruit? I looked it up: three to four years. So that fig tree is only just barely at the age that you might expect figs from it, but this guy has been looking for figs every year for three years. Like I said, lots of crazy.

Now, I know that I'm about to ignore the elephant in the room, because we traditionally interpret the fig tree to be God's people who are getting one more chance to get their act together and bear the fruit of God's kingdom. And I know that there's a whole lot of repentance talk in today's readings. But many of us have heard those interpretations all our lives, and really, I just don't think I will have anything to say that's going to blast the lid off the whole repentance thing. At our house repentance looks like this: 1. ask if the person is okay; 2. say I'm sorry; 3. ask what you can do to make it better; 4. promise to do things differently from now on. Number four is the hardest part. And that's what I've got on repentance.

But all this talk of turning back toward the straight and narrow masks the really cool sci-fi thread running through these passages. And I really like those time episodes in Star Trek the Next Generation. They're fun to think about. I take a great deal of solace in the fact that when Moses asks God's name, God says, "I AM who I AM," and not just because it's fun to imagine God as a salty sailor who gets stronger when he eats a can of spinach. No. In all seriousness, I think God's name here is profound. This is just my pet theory, and I'm not sure I have enough evidence to actually back it up, but I believe that God is perpetually in history's every moment, in the present. I believe that one of the essential things that separates us from God is that we only move through time in one direction--forward--and at just the one speed, which makes us regret the past, worry about the future, and care way more about right now than the big picture.

In contrast, God, if God is not bound by time, is capable of experiencing every moment of our lives simultaneously in the present--our births, our deaths, our happiest days and the ones most filled with despair. What must that be like? A person's life would cease to be a narrative--partly because without past and future, causation becomes a lot less relevant, and if God experiences all time at once, in the present, there's not going to be very much narrative tension in our stories. In fact, I think our lives, taken that way, must be very much like poems, capturing the essence of a thing, or one of those word maps, where the more often a word is mentioned, the bigger the word is. You can't ever find a coherent sentence, but you still get a good idea of what the piece of writing was about.

word cloud of this blog post

This is not to say that God is distant or aloof. After all, when we are in the midst of great pain, God is right there with us, experiencing our present pain with us, and when we are, like the psalmist today, enraptured, God is also enraptured. But what would it be like for us if, when we imagine God beside us, feeling our regret about the wrong road taken, we imagine that God is simultaneously with us as we take that road, knowing how we're feeling about it after the fact? For me, this makes God more approachable, more sympathetic than an all-knowing, all-seeing God who knows our fate before we live it. God knows our fate as we live it. The distinction is as essential as the difference between reading a piece of music and playing it. 

Paul seems to be thinking of something similar to my little thought experiment when he writes to the Corinthians. Because if Christ exists out of time, then of course he can be saving those who, in our one-way-only perception of time, came before him.

And even though we typically interpret the fig tree as the children of God who have not born the fruit of their faith, I do think it's possible that Jesus is also talking about our limited perception of time. He was a guy from a farming community who ought to have known how long fig trees took to mature.  Maybe he's telling us something similar to Paul: You people are impatient. You get angry at an immature tree for not bearing fruit? Step outside of time, he might be saying. If you want fruit, nourish the tree. Give yourself over to the task. Don't worry about when it will finally bear fruit. I am eating the figs right now. They are delicious.