Passing on the Faith

 

John 20:19-31

Easter 2 / Year A

Biblical scholars refer to it as “The Community of the Beloved Disciple.”  John is a teenager when he begins to follow of Jesus.  He is the youngest member of the group and, not surprisingly, outlives all his colleagues, being the only apostle to escape martyrdom.  At some point he moves from Jerusalem to Ephesus in Asia minor where he leads the local church... his community.

As the years go by, a predictable challenge emerges within his flock.  Its roots go all the way back to the first Easter morning: Without a firsthand experience, how is a person supposed to believe God became a human being, lived as one of us, was crucified, dead, and buried, then rose from the dead?  Think about it.  From the first women at the tomb who cannot believe what an angel tells them to the disciples gathered in the upper room fielding initial reports of resurrection sightings to Thomas who is not present when Jesus first appears to his followers, no one believes their friend is risen from the dead until they see him, hear his voice, and touch his body.  But for each person present at one of these encounters, it is life changing.  Each becomes passionate about sharing the good news of God in Christ; gladly enduring hardships, persecutions, and even death to proclaim their message.

But as time goes by, John finds himself in a unique position.  Fewer and fewer people in the community he pastors had met Jesus in person, let alone seen him risen from the dead with their own eyes.  If the first disciples needed concrete proof to believe, how can their faith be passed on to subsequent generations who never encountered Jesus in the flesh and blood? 

John’s answer?  Write it all down.  Tell the story in such a way that by the end every reader might echo the words of Thomas, “My Lord and my God.”  The words Jesus speaks to Thomas John redirects to his faithful flock, “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 

Did you notice in the reading how the lesson changes from story-telling to narration: 

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Then, as now, passing on the faith can be a real challenge.  One researcher interviewed hundreds of people to see if he could discern common factors in how they came to have faith.  He identified four:

·       Having some background experience with a church, perhaps as a child or in your youth, even if you didn’t connect deeply with it at the time – your parents dragged you to church.

·       Later in life becoming a part of some kind of faith community where you feel an immediate sense of welcome – We are glad you are here and invite you to be one of us... no conditions.

·       A feeling of being free to explore in this new setting – to learn about its rituals and practices, feeling safe to ask questions about the faith and what it means for everyday life, and discerning meaningful ways to contribute which emanate from your own interests, passions, and talents rather than be driven by organizational needs.

If you notice, these are factors we in the church can shape in our common life which then play in significant role in passing on the faith. 

Here is the fourth common factor: Having a sense God wants to know you.  For the disciples in the Upper Room and for Thomas, this feeling must have been overwhelming.  For the rest of us, we have a written record to help us. 

When I was a sophomore, one of our youth group seniors became the valedictorian of our high school.  He went on to attend Harvard and from there has enjoyed a prolific career in academia.  I still remember one of our meetings where he shared his “testimony”, a personal story of how he came to the faith.  He described a time when, after church on a Sunday afternoon, he decided to read the Gospel of John from the beginning to the end in one sitting.  When he was finished, he sat in silence for a time and, deeply moved, then and there embraced the Christian faith.  John’s record led him to say, “My Lord and my God.” 

Ultimately, passing on the faith is God’s work.  Just as Jesus appears in the Upper Room and greets his followers, so too he comes to each one of us.  Yes, now it is in spirit rather than in the flesh, but still, it is unmistakable.  It may be in a moment when you are completely alone, like what happened to my friend.  Or it may come through a community event, like so many of us experienced at Bill Peachy’s visitation and funeral when we sensed something bigger than ourselves was present in our midst.  It may come when we are intentionally seeking, perhaps praying in private on a retreat, or it may come at a completely unexpected moment when we become aware of something deeply profound, holy, and other.  No matter the setting or circumstances, God’s touch bestows in us the gift of faith.

We become like those to whom Peter wrote in our second lesson:

Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy.

Today we give thanks that those who did see Jesus, who touched him, and had fellowship with him, thought enough of us to record their experiences and pass them on.  And we ponder what we too can do to pass on the faith we have received.  But most of all, we give thanks that the Risen Lord has appeared to us, moving us to confess him as “My Lord and my God.

The Filling up of Time to Completion

 

Matthew 26:14-27:66

Palm Sunday / Year A

Tuesday, January 25^th, 2056 should be a seminal day in my life.  According to the website deathclock.com, this is the day I am going to expire at the tender ago of 96 years, 3 months, and 15 days – just 10,893 days away!  To learn this, all I had to do was tell Deathclock my date of birth, gender, height, weight, outlook on life, and how much I smoke and drink – none and none.  Then, functioning like an actuarial table, it takes all of this in, mulls it over for a nanosecond, and then delivers its verdict.

I took this test years ago (back when I was drinking) and the results were not nearly as rosy.  Back then, when I shared what I learned with friends, most thought it was morbid, all except for one clergy colleague who said, “Hummm, January 25^th, that will be your saint’s day!  They always set it on the day you die.”

You might expect the news I have almost 11,000 more days to live would make me ecstatic, but, in truth, it doesn’t.  It feels like too much time, like I have all the time in the world, like nothing is pressing, like I can just put off X (whatever X might be) until another day.  Given this very real temptation, I worry I will not act on a wisdom Bernie Siegel identifies in his book Handbook for the Soul:

In many cases, people who’ve become aware of their mortality find that they’ve gained the freedom to live.  They are seized with an appreciation of the present: every day is my best day; this is my life; I’m not going to have this moment again.  They spend more time with the things and people they love and less time on people and pastimes that don’t offer love or joy.  This seems like such a simple thought – shouldn’t we all spend our lives that way?  But we tend not to make those kinds of choices until someone says, “You’ve got twelve months to live.”

We learn from the gospels how Jesus embodies this wisdom.  Three different times he tells his followers he must go to Jerusalem where he will die.  The first comes after the arrest and beheading of his cousin John.  The second comes after The Transfiguration, the mountaintop moment when Moses and Elijah appear to him and they discuss his impending visit to the Holy City.  The third comes a little before he enters Jerusalem on the day we now celebrate as Palm Sunday.  Each time we are told his disciples either do not understand what he is saying or state outright it will never happen.

If you ask Google about the significance of Jesus knowing he is going to die in Jerusalem, it will tell you first and foremost it shows he can predict the future.  Honestly, this doesn’t do a lot for me.  To me what matters most is not that Jesus knows he is going to die, but what he does with this knowledge.  I believe with all my heart Jesus’ life and ministry would have been far less impactful, would have born far less fruit if he had failed to embrace his own mortality.

The gospel of Luke is divided into roughly three somewhat equal sections.  The first takes us from Jesus’ birth to his baptism and then recounts his early days of ministry – gathering followers, healing, and teaching.  The second section, fully nine chapters, details all that happens as he travels for the last time to Jerusalem.  The final section records the events of his death, resurrection, and ascension.  Think about that for moment.  Jesus spends the first thirty-some years of his life in relative obscurity, working in a wood shop of some sort.  Then he emerges from the Jordon waters and becomes a public figure for a little more than two years.  What does it say to you that 2/3rds of the gospel are dedicated to the last few months of his life?  It says to me he made the most of his life once he accepted his time was limited.

There is a telling sentence in the gospel: “When the days drew near for him, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem.” ^{Luke 9:5} Scholars note the verb in the phrase ‘the days drew near’ literally means ‘in the filling up to the completion of his days.’  We would say Jesus set out to make the most of the time he had left.  Those nine chapters are filled with accounts of his teaching, stories of meeting and eating with all sorts and conditions of people, and restoring to all who were broken health of body and soul.  He savored when Mary anointed his feet with costly nard.  He cried at the grave of his friend.  He gathered his followers for one final meal.

Josephus, a historian during Jesus’ days, tells us that in one year alone the Roman general Varus crucified over 2,000 Jews, which is to say it was a prominent form of execution.  Of all who suffered this form of capital punishment we know the name of only one.  All the rest are lost to history.  Surely there are many reasons why Jesus is remembered.  One of the factors has to be how he filled up the time he had, not wasting even a single moment or opportunity to live out God’s dream for all people.   

Mitch Albom writes this in his book Have a Little Faith:

“The story of my recent life.”  I like that phrase.  It makes more sense than “the story of my life”, because we get so many lives between birth and death.  A life to be a child.  A life to come of age.  A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality – and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

I invite you, no matter what the phase of your current life may be, to consider how Jesus used his time and how, as the end approached, he tended to the things he did not want to leave left undone.  Even if, like me, you have 10,893 left, make each day count.  Make it a reflection of how you want to live and move and have your being in God.

Resurrection as Defiance

 

John 11:1-45

Lent 5 / Year A

I doubt we at St. Paul’s could have hand-picked a more appropriate reading from John’s Gospel than we just heard as we prepare to honor and celebrate the life and witness of Bill Peachy and as we offer our care and consolation to Dixie and her family.  While the customs and burial preparations of Jesus’ day differ somewhat from ours, as we reflect on this story we recognize what share in common:

·    The immense grief at the loss of a loved one.

·   The necessity of some kind of faith to keep us buoyant on the sea of despair that is death.

·    The community’s role of supporting those who are hurting the most.

The community.  We see ourselves in those who surround Martha and Mary.  We understand the initial confusion when the disciples first learn of Lazarus’ illness, from the “Oh no, what horrible news” to the desire to do something helpful to the humbling realization there is nothing we can do to change the outcome.  And we identify with their willingness to be with the sisters as they weep and mourn.  In these folks we see the time-honored truth our love is best expressed in our willingness to be steadfast companions.  We see in them how God’s power works through us not because we can make all the hurt go away, but as we remain close even as we feel inadequate to make a difference. 

As your pastor, I know firsthand how the power of the clergy collar is not manifested through fancy words I say when a person is dying, but in its unfailing ability to demonstrate God is present, God cares, God knows how you feel, God is holding you tight, and yes, someday, somehow, God will wipe away every tear from every eye and make all things whole again.

If you were to look at today’s reading as being an act in a play, notice how Lazarus, the person around whom the entire scene is centered, has no actual speaking lines.  In fact, he only appears at the end as the curtain closes and even then, he is shrouded in burial linens.  As a story element, this shifts our attention from him (the person whose experience is the cause of the story) to the people around him who are affected by what happens to him. 

Enter the two supporting actresses, first Martha, then Mary.  We already know them from the time Jesus visited their home with his disciples.  Mary reclined at his Jesus’ feet, taking in all the master had to say.  Martha toiled in the kitchen, working feverously to provide hospitality for their unanticipated guests.  Now, in this setting, their roles are reversed.  Martha is pondering deeper questions while Mary is swept up in the moment at hand.  They greet Jesus separately by saying to him the same thing: “If you would have been here, my brother would not have died.” 

Martha adds to this a statement of faith: “But even now I know God will give you whatever you ask.”  Then, responding to Jesus, she says, “I know my brother will rise on the last day.”  It is then Jesus proclaims, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  Something about this particular loss, and what Jesus says to her, reshapes Martha’s faith and thinking in a profound way.

Has this ever happened to you?  I think about how my own pastoral theology was formed by reading Rabbi Herald Kushner’s book Why Bad Things Happen to Good People on a plane flight from Richmond to Iowa as I returned to the church I served there to bury an eight-year-old girl whose sudden and tragic death rocked everyone who knew her, including me.  That horrible moment forced me to grapple with questions I had never considered with any real depth, but could no longer avoid if I wanted to be able to offer anything of value (or at least do no harm) in a time of such inexpressible need.  That flight, reading that book, being with a family that lost the light of their lives, changed my life. 

Jesus asks Martha a question, “Do you believe?” and when she responds “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God,” it is evident the loss of her brother has become an ‘aha’ moment in her life.  Through this horrible event, her heart and mind conceive, perhaps for the first time, a truth deeper than the darkness of death.

Unlike her sister, when Mary says to Jesus, “If you had been here my brother would not have died,” she offers no confession of faith; not even “I know he will rise again” or “I know he is in a better place” or “I know we will meet again someday.”  All she adds to her comment is weeping; utter, panged grief.  Whereas Martha’s faith moves Jesus to add to her faith, Mary’s distress touches his heart.  Twice we are told he is “greatly disturbed.”  Her deep, unconsolable sadness moves Jesus to recognize his own sense of loss and he too weeps.   

The prayer book, writing about the theology of the Burial Office, notes why this is significant:

The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy.  It finds all of its meaning in the resurrection.  Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, will be.  The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy… This joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian…  Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend.  So while we rejoice our loved one has entered into the nearer presence of our Lord, we sorrow in sympathy with those who mourn. ^{P. 507}

I am especially moved by funerals during the season of Lent when, among other things, the faithful refrain from saying the celebratory “A” word.  But come Saturday I will declare with boldness “Even at the grave we make our song Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.”  In the face of all that death is, this proclamation always feels to me like an act of defiance: “Death, you do not have the final word.”  And it feels like an act of rebellion: “Death, we refuse to live under your power.”  As I say these words, I always look up to our triptych and find comfort and strength and inspiration in its depiction our resurrected Savior surrounded by adoring angels.  It is Easter morning.  Death is banished.  Our Lord reigns.  This is our reality.  It is what we profess.  It is what we invite others embrace with us.

This week, as we celebrate Bill’s life, I invite you to bring your faith, your sorrow, your comforting presence, and your defiant allegiance to the One who proclaims, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”

A Humanizing Request

 

John 4:5-52

Lent 3 / Year A

The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.  ^{John 4:9}

When we say Jesus is the Word of God, we are saying we know what God is like through what Jesus says and through what he does.  The gospel reading we just heard contains some of Jesus’ most profound words and ideas – far too many for us to explore in a single Sunday sermon.  It also describes one action which says more than a thousand words ever could.  In the heat of the day, sitting by an ancient communal well steeped in tradition, Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water.

Perhaps you are aware of the cultural boundaries and taboos Jesus ignores in this seemingly simple request.  First, as a man he speaks to a woman who is a stranger – certainly not the norm in that society at that time.  And she is not just any woman, she has a “reputation.”  She falls far short of the community’s moral and marital standards, hence the reason she comes to well at noon while others are home sheltered or in shade.  She is a sinner with whom no holy person would deign to associate.  And finally, she is a Samaritan and, as the text relates, Jews and Samaritans are like oil and water, a product of deep-seated bias and hatred.

Jesus reaches beyond all that divides them and connects with her not as a caricature, not as a demographic, not as someone who is “other”, but as a human being.  In so doing he shares with her what is good within himself, thereby bringing what is holy and divine into their relationship. 

The more you strip a person or group of their dignity and worth the easier it is to mistreat them; to see them as anything but a child of God.  There is a reason why the most segregated societies are also the most violent and cruel.  You cannot hate another person or group until you have dehumanized them in your own mind.  You cannot mistreat another person or group until you see them as being less than human; of not being of equal worth with yourself and those you love.  Only when you begin to think in terms of “us” and “them” does it become easier to be dismissive of their value, their dignity, their experience, their concerns, their hurts, the wrongs done to them…  their basic humanity.

I am not proud to say I struggle to appreciate the human consequences of our military conflict with Iran.  I am concerned less with their hundreds of deaths than I am with our half dozen.  I am more tuned into the anxiety of parents stateside whose children are serving in the gulf, than I am with those living under the very threat of missile attracts and drone strikes on their homes, their schools, their hospitals, and their holy places.  I am aware of this inside me and I am not proud of it.

Last week, our Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, and the Episcopal Bishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Noaum, wrote letters to the church and I commend them to you.  I learned something from them I did not know but should have: There is an Anglican Diocese in Iran.  I went to its website and found a copy of the liturgy they use for their Eucharistic Prayers.  While some of its elements appear in a different order from ours, functionally they use the same words and liturgy we are using here this morning. 

What does it say to you there are people in Iran today offering the very same prayers we are?  There are ordained priests there who do their best to minister to a faith community, just as I try to do.  There are congregations there comprised of people who are afraid about the state of the world, concerned about the future, and not sure how to reach out with Christ’s love to others, just as we are.  There are people in Iran gathered to worship who are not all that much different from those of us gathered here.  And no matter the ways we differ, they, like we, are human beings.

Perhaps you have seen on social media a quote from the philosopher Erich Fromm: “Love for one’s country which is not a part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”  These words, spoken by a German Jew who was forced to flee Nazi oppression, ought to give us pause.  We have ample history to warn us patriotism can be coopted by those seeking power and perverted to something unrecognizable and unthinkable to generations before.  

I feel all of this tugging at me not only as I consider my diminished concern for people on the other side of the globe, but also when I stood in a grocery line as an elderly lady fumbled through her purse only to pull out a checkbook to pay for her purchase.  “Are you kidding me,” I thought, “this is going to take forever.”  Actually, it took about 90 seconds!  My gut reaction was to consider her only in terms of how she affected me, but then I began to ponder her life.  What had she contributed over all her years?  Who does she love?  Who has she lost?  With what does she struggle?  What are her fears?  Does she feel overwhelmed by the modern world and just wants to get home where she will feel safe?  My spirit shifted and I saw her not as an inconvenience to me, but as a human being.  And then I felt blessed just to be in her presence.

Yes, Jews in Jesus’ day did not share things in common with Samaritans and yet he enters into a conversation with a Samaritan woman.  He sees beyond all that divides because he recognizes she is a dearly beloved child of God.  What does his action say to you?

The Wind Blows Where It Will

 

John 3:1-17

Lent 2 / Year A

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.  ^{John 3:8}

One of the real joys and privileges of being a priest is the call to live with the assigned Lectionary readings from Scripture.  Over the course of each week, I ponder them prayerfully as I pay attention to what is happening in our lives, yours and mine.  There is always an intersection.  Always.

And so it was this past week.  As I stood mostly silent in a hospital room with Dixie and her children keeping vigil with Bill during his final hours, monitors charting their squiggly lines and manifold, mysterious numbers, tubes and lines dripping and puffing to do their best to stave off the inevitable, I was taken by how life, as Jesus said, is like the wind.  Sometimes, as with the sail of a boat, we harness it to great effect and benefit.  Other times, as with kite, we ride on it, dancing to and fro in an elaborate, joyful dance.  And then there are times when the wind overwhelms our lives, like Dorothy being swept out of Kansas.   At these moments the stark reality we are at the mercy of something we only think we control becomes is humblingly clear.

The wind blows where it will and we do not know from where it comes and where it goes.  We spend most of our lives manipulating it to our advantage, with differing degrees and success and failure, but there are times all we can do is admit we can never master it.  In the end, the wind blows in and around and through our lives as it will and when we sense and see we are only along for the ride.  We don’t choose to begin life and the end will come about when it chooses, how it chooses, as it chooses. 

This is what I pondered as I waited with Bill, who, at that moment, was receiving each breath of life through the forced intervention of a human machine, a ventilator.  Life is strange, isn’t it.  We think we know so much, but then realize how much we don’t.  We think we can do so much, but then realize what we can’t.  We think we are in control, but then realize we are anything but.

More than ever before, in that silence, I identified with Nicodemus.  A student of the law, a teacher of Israel, a leader who is supposed to guide the faithful, he recognizes something has happened, he doesn’t even know what, but it has brought him up short and left him grasping for answers.  “How can these things be?” he asks. 

Have you ever had a moment where, in one form or another, you have asked this very question?  How can these things be?  It may have been an experience in which you realized everything you thought you about life doesn’t fit together as neatly as you thought; a time when what you thought you knew about life doesn’t make sense of the moment at hand; a time when you felt humbled by recognizing the wind is going to blow where it will and there is nothing you can do to change it.

When Nicodemus brought all of this to Jesus, he was told something which, at first, was even more perplexing than the question he was asking.  Jesus says to him, “If you want to understand these things you must be born again.”  He tells Nicodemus he must begin to understand and receive life from a new perspective so revolutionary it will reorient everything he holds to be true.  What Jesus offers to him arguably are two of the greatest insights in all of Scripture.

First, he says “Out of God’s deep and abiding love for the whole world, I have been sent so that all might know of eternal life.”  Pondering this in Room 1030 of the River Pavillion, I leaned on the promise the wind of Spirit continues to blow in and through our lives even after our earthly life comes to an end. 

And then Jesus tells Nicodemus, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”  What the word saved has come to mean in our day is not exactly what it meant to Jesus and the people of his time.  For many today, in carries the connotation of not being condemned to hell as a consequence of your sins.  But the New Testament Greek word for salvation meant at the time health or wholeness.  “God sent the Son into the world that it might be whole” or “that it might be healthy.”  These two statements – John 3:16 and John 3:17 – for us people of faith are as sure and trustworthy as the law of gravity.

As I thought about this, I gave thanks for the thousands and thousands and thousands of ways and times Bill was caught up in the Spirit’s wind, bringing health and wholeness to so very many people and situations.  And as I looked at him lying there in a hospital bed, I held on to the sacred hope he was not encountering a wall which cannot be scaled, but a door which was beginning to open for him.

And then I experienced it anew… the wind blowing.  On my way home I stopped for groceries, my heart heavy.  I approached the Food Lion’s door at the same time as another man.  We each insisted the other go ahead and he prevailed.  “Thank you,” I said, then asked “How are you tonight?”  “I’m good,” he answered, “but I have to go back in because I forgot something.”  It was a little after six and the store was crowded.  I grabbed what I needed and went to check out.  The same man was in the end of one line, so I slid in behind him.  He had a bag of vegetables in his hand.  “What are the peppers for?” I asked.  “I’m making fajitas for my son,” he answered.  Then he told me his wife was at a hospital sitting with a loved one.  I could sense he was stressed.  Then I told him I was a priest and had just come from the hospital where a dear, beloved man was dying.  “How do you do it?” he asked.  “Pastors, police officers, firefighters, you have to deal with so much trauma.  How do you do it?”  “That is a good question,” I said.  “Well, it seems to me police and firefighters deal with it every day as a part of their jobs.  I don’t know how they do it, but in my role, it happens only every now and then.” “And,” I said, “I don’t face it alone.  As a part of a faith community, I have a deep sense of how we face it together, never alone, never just me.  I also remember it is not my job to fix people, just to help them remember God is present.”  I became aware others were now listening to us.  “And I’m grateful to have a deep, personal spiritual life to draw on.” We chatted a bit more and as he finished his purchase I said, “Enjoy your fajitas.”  And in that moment, I sensed the wind of the Spirit was blowing and I felt whole.

Coming home the next night after another visit, once again I was in a grocery store (this time Lidl’s).  As I checked out, I heard the most wonderful sound of a child’s laughter behind me.  I turned and saw a young father holding his son in his arms.  I couldn’t help but smile and laugh a little myself.  The father recognized I was entertained.  He was buying only two quarts of milk, so I said to the cashier, “I’d like to pay for his milk” and so I did.  The father thanked me and extended his hand to shake mine.  “I’m Anthony,” he said, “and this is Eric.”  Little Eric shook my hand as well and I said, “It’s nice to meet you.”  I saw he was wearing a t-shirt with a caricature of an animated Smore.  “Do you like Smores?” I asked, and he smiled broadly and nodded with enthusiasm.  “Me too,” I said and then wished them a good night.  And I felt it again.  The wind.  That wind once again was exactly what I needed and I still feel like a kite dancing on the breeze of God’s presence in that moment. 

So this is how I lived this past week with today’s Gospel reading.  Thank you for listening to me ramble on about it.  I only pray to you it feels like the wind of God blowing over you as it will.       

Temptations to Our Identity and Purpose

 

Matthew 4:1-11

Lent 1 / Year A

If it’s the first Sunday in Lent then we are reading one of the gospel accounts of Jesus going into the wilderness for forty days where, at some point, he is confronted by the tempter.  Notice how the temptation begins… “If you are the Son of God…”  In the biblical texts, this wilderness temptation occurs immediately after Jesus is baptized.  He rises from the Jordon waters and retreats to a place of solitude to reflect on what he has experienced.  He needs time to make sense of what he heard while in the river – the voice of God saying, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” ^{Mt. 3:17} 

“You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  “If you are the Son of God then turn these stones to bread.”  The temptations are at least a two-fold challenge.  The first is a question of identity: “Are you really the Son of God?  What makes you so sure you are up to the task?  I remember when you were just a little boy growing up in a nowhere town with nothing really all that special to your credit.  Why would you even think you now occupy such a lofty position?”  These are questions of identity. 

Perhaps they resonate with you and your own experience.  Maybe you have asked yourself questions from the same vein: “Am I really qualified to do this?”  “How can it possibly be I am now a parent when I don’t know the first thing about raising a child!”  “The preacher just said God has a plan for my life… at my age, right!  I am old and used up.”  Questions of identity.  Am I really the person God says I am?

This is one of the challenges the tempter lays before Jesus.  The other is this: “If you are the Son of God, if this really is your identity, what are you going to do with it?  What does it mean?  How are you supposed to live your life if this revelation about you is true?”  It is a question of purpose. 

Perhaps you understand this too.  If, for example, you are the biggest kid in your 6^th grade class, what do you do with your size and strength?  Do you use it to bully others, asserting your power to get your own way?  Or do you use your strength and stamina to help others achieve more than they are capable of doing on their own?  Given your identity, what are you supposed to do with it?

Perhaps the most basic, fundamental question each of us must answer for ourselves is “Who am I?”  Just for fun, Google this question and see what comes up… personality tests, psychological insights, philosophical explorations, debates over the role of nature and nurture (how is your identity shaped both by your heredity and the world we are raised in)? 

If you turn to the bible and ask “Who am I?” what will you learn?  The bible’s answer is this: You are who God says you are.  And God says, “You are my child, I love you deeply for who you are, just as you are.  Nothing can take away My love for you.  Nothing can make Me love you less.”  The bible describes God’s love as being steadfast – hesed in the Hebrew – and hesed is something in this life you can always count on.  In fact, God’s steadfast love for you may be the only thing in life you can count on… even more certain than death and taxes.

So, if you embrace the biblical proclamation you are a beloved child of God, what do you do with this knowledge?  The story of Jesus’ temptation tells us there are plenty of wrong paths you can go down. 

You can just go out a grab for yourself all that you want while ignoring all God wants to provide for you (like daily bread).  You can flaunt who you are in order to impress others (even climbing up to a pinnacle so all the attention is on you).  You can even go after what God wants for you, but in a way in which you are in control and calling the shots (like receiving dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth by bowing down to something other than God rather than gaining it by being lifted high upon the cross). 

Identity and purpose. 

There was a very specific moment in my teenage years when I decided to ground my identity fully in the belief I am a beloved child of God.  I decided this was going to be the bedrock on which I was going to build my life moving forward.  And I decided then and there I was going to embrace God’s plan and purpose for my life with all my heart and mind and soul and strength.  This was not a call to ordination, that came later.  To use the language of the times, I made the decision to give my life to Christ and to trust in him completely as my Lord, my Savior, and my Guide.  (Yes, I come from the Evangelical tradition!)  In our liturgical tradition the Baptismal Covenant and adult act of Confirmation carry the same weight if it is a dedication of your whole being, not just some words and rites you stumble through. 

No matter what led you to this point, unlike Jesus, who maintained God’s way not only in the wilderness, but throughout the entire course of his life, you, like me, have fallen short of living into the identity God gives to us and the purpose to which God calls us.  None of us is perfect.  None of us ever will be.  But we will always be loved by God.  These season of Lent gives us a time to engage in self-examination and reflection.  Aided by prayer, being attentive to God’s word, and acts of self-giving, we are afforded an opportunity to repent and amend our lives.  We are invited once again to follow Jesus Christ who is the true and living Way.

Please thank Macey and Kitty for the captivating display in our chancel area.  Spoiler… it is going to evolve as the season of Lent unfolds.  I love the little path of stone weaving its way to the foot of the Cross.  It feels to me like an invitation; an invitation come before Jesus with all we are and all we have in order to remember who God says we are and to reflect anew on what God calls us do.

Private Piety & Public Ashes

 

Matthew 6:1

Ash Wednesday

Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”  ^{Mt 6:1}

Perhaps you are familiar with the story of the state trooper who observes a highway motorist rapidly changing lanes, tailgating, flashing his lights, and honking his horn.  The trooper acts, turning on his lights and directing the driver to pull over.  Walking up to the passenger window he says, “Do you know why I stopped you?”  “Well,” the driver answers, “I guess it is because of my aggressive driving.”  “No,” the trooper responds, “I pulled you over once I read your bumper sticker which says ‘Jesus is my Co-Pilot’ and, based on the way you were driving, I figured the car must be stolen.” 

Piety is defined as reverence for God and the devout fulfillment of religious obligations.  Samuel Johnson, the 18^th Century English writer, held “Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings.”  Johnson is lockstep with Jesus’ instruction personal piety is not something to be put on display.  And yet, while we should not proclaim it on a bumper sticker, our private devotion ought to influence, if not completely direct, our outward words and actions. 

The word piety and its derivatives, such as pious, suffer from what one person calls “an image problem.”  They are used to describe a person who is very religious.  At the same time, they are used to highlight the hypocrisy of those who make a show of their religion to assert their superiority.  The first we admire and strive to be.  The second we hold in utter disdain.

There is something of a disconnect between what Jesus clearly teaches – “Don’t practice your piety before others – and what we do here this day – having our forehead smeared with ashes, thus putting our piety on full display.  It wasn’t always so.

The first English prayer books did not have a service for the imposition of ashes.  In fact, the 1552 book gives this endearing name to the service to be held on the first day of Lent: “A Commination Against Sinners”; commination being a popular word at the time meaning “threatening.”  If we were to use that liturgy for this service, you would experience what one liturgist called “a ritualized cursing.” 

It may surprise you to learn, as it did me, our current prayer book is the first to call for the actual use of ashes on this day.  And while it is new to our prayer book, it is not a modern innovation, but rather a return to an ancient practice running up through the Middle Ages.  And while we impose the ashes by making the sign of the Cross on the forehead as a reminder of our marking with chrism oil at baptism, this was not the custom in medieval times.  They imposed ashes by sprinkling them on the head, thus the “act of piety” disappeared into one’s hair, preserving Jesus’ teaching about keeping your devotion a secret.  It seems our forehead tradition evolved from an accommodation made for monks.  Because they had shaved heads the ashes were rubbed onto their skin to ensure it would adhere.  Over time this led to the public symbol of the ashen cross. 

In a recent article in The Living Church, Matthew Olver, a professor of liturgics at Nashotah House Seminary, suggests priests and congregations consider returning to the practice of sprinkling in order to reinforce Jesus’ teaching that our acts done in secret will be rewarded by our Father who sees in secret.  He also points out the prayer book rubric for this service (found on page 265) states “If ashes are to be imposed” then a prayer is to be said.  Then it directs “The ashes are imposed with the following words”.  The visible sign of the Cross is not directed… nor is it prohibited. 

I find it helpful to ponder ways in which my devotion may take on a more private character.  But, as with the aggressive driver, it ought to make a difference in my public persona.  Both are necessary.  I keep thinking about something Christopher Beha wrote in a recent article in The Atlantic:   

One of the reasons I love Ash Wednesday is that for one day these beliefs are conspicuous to others without my having to say a word.  I think I’m a better person on this day on account of that.  To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the women selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to someone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world. 

A key to understanding Jesus’ teaching about piety is found in these words, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”  In order to… if you are performing your religion as a show in an attempt to impress others… well, then… that will be your reward.  Yes, most of our pious acts should and will occur with no one to notice.  They will be like the fragrance of the desert flower which only God and the angels will ever smell.  But we should always practice our piety is such a way that when others see the ashes on our forehead they will know the reason for our devotion and give praise to our Father who is in heaven.