Providing a Place for Resurrection to Happen

 

Good Friday

An innocent man falsely accused and punished by the state.  An insurrectionist released.  Public influencers manipulating the thoughts and actions of the people.  The initial Good Friday, occurring almost 2,000 years ago, disturbingly mirrors what is transpiring in our country in our own day and time.  The cast of characters may have changed, but the dynamic of the events from back then, which we gather at this noon hour to lament, are being replayed once again. 

More and more, people are asking me as their spiritual leader what they can do – what they should do – at an hour such as this.  I wish I could climb Mt. Sinai and return with ten directives etched in stone for folks to follow, but I can’t.  Ranting on social media may make you feel good for a moment, but affects very little change.  Contacting your congressional representatives likely is going to be met with a form-letter reply.  Arguing with a family and friends is worse than fruitless. 

I have clergy colleagues advocating for people in my position to speak up and speak out because silence means complicity.  I continue to weigh my ordination vow to boldly and prophetically proclaim the word of God with my vow to care for all people in the flock I serve, regardless of age, gender, race, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.  I continue to seek discernment on the tension between prophet and pastor, but again, Mt. Sinai has not weighed in with something definitive.

In the biblical account of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution, we read about Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea, two people whose witness has something to say to us.  Both are members of the Great Sanhedrin, a Jewish legislative and judicial assembly of seventy elders.  It is this body which tries Jesus and finds him guilty, a decision neither Joseph or Nicodemus endorses.  They represent for us what it looks like not to support the status quo and yet be powerless to affect a different outcome. 

At a great deal of personal risk and no little personal expense, they approach Pilate and request permission to give Jesus’ body a proper burial.  By tending to the body, in spite of all the chaos and insanity surrounding them, Joseph and Nicodemus find a moment and an opportunity to reaffirm basic human dignity; to hold true to the standards and time-honored sensibilities of the Hebrew tradition.  Their actions do not bring Jesus back to life.  They do not sway public sentiment.  They do not set wrongs.  But here is what they did do.  By setting Jesus’ body in a tomb they provide the setting for the Easter moment.  They provide a place for Resurrection to happen.

These days, more and more, I find myself reflecting on the Velvet Revolution, a series of 1989 events unfolding over six weeks in Czechoslovakia which led to the downfall of the Soviet-backed communist party and the election of Hàclav Havel, a poet and playwright, as the president of a free country.  The revolution was fueled by students and other dissidents who gathered nightly for prayer and the singing of hymns before going out onto the streets to conduct peaceful protests.  In less than a month, the movement, starting with a relatively small number, began to double daily, and eventually drew over a million people.  Czechoslovakia became the first domino to fall in what resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain and the demolition of the Berlin Wall.  It would be impossible to pinpoint a specific factor which launched the Velvet Revolution, but it is fair to say what happened provided a place for Resurrection to happen.   

It seems every year I remind us the Good Friday liturgy calls the faithful to prayer, specially to the Solemn Collects.  They remind us now that as Jesus’ work is finished, ours begins… and it begins with prayer.  This year, a part of my prayer is our actions might provide a place for Resurrection to happen.      

A Mighty Purpose

 

The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday / Year C

Luke 22:14-5:56

Have you watched any of the Master’s Tournament this weekend?  I haven’t, even though it is the most prestigious event in the golfing world.  The purpose of golf is pretty straightforward: hit the ball down the fairway toward the green and into the cup using the fewest strokes possible.  Some are better at it than others. 

What is the purpose of life?  The answer to this question is a bit less clear and varies from person to person.  In fact, how we answer – if we have an answer at all – may even vary from day to day and certainly shifts over the course of one’s life.  If we don’t know what the purpose of life is, how do we know if we are living it well?  In golf you have a scorecard.  It tells you how you are doing over the course of eighteen holes.  But what about life?  How do we measure the way we are living?

I read of a gentleman who upon meeting a person for the first time never asked conventional questions such as “What do you do for a living?” or “Where are you from?”  He asked people “What have you done that you believe in and are proud of?”  For some it is an unsettling question, but not for all.  One woman told him that she was doing a good job raising her three children.  A cabinetmaker told him, “I believe in good craftmanship and practice it.”  Another person told him she had started a flower shop and it was the best for miles around.”  Perhaps the first step to finding your purpose of life is to have a good answer to the question “What have you done that you believe in and are proud of?” 

Every year as I listen to the Passion reading I am always struck by how Jesus was in charge of nothing yet in control of everything.  He lived his life with purpose and with passion: healing the sick, calling the lost, forgiving the sinner, lifting up the outcast, challenging the proud, confronting the powerful, and proclaiming the presence of the Kingdom of God in the midst of a society that looked like anything but.  He knew who he was, he embraced his calling, and he accepted the consequences that came with it.

In the preface to his book Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw wrote this:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one: the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, and being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. 

This quote helps me to understand why I so deeply admire Jesus.  He lived with a mighty purpose, he persisted to the end, and strove in all ways to make the world a better place.  I admire his singular clarity about living.  I suspect if we could ask Jesus what he had done that he believed in and what he was proud of, he would say he believed in the Kingdom of God and was proud of the way he lived and died for it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, contemplating Jesus’ example, wrote, “The purpose of life is not to be happy, but to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived life and lived it well.”

As you listen again to the Passion of our Lord I wonder if you come away with the same sense I do, that your life is small in comparison.  It is not that we have to be the Messiah, the one who saves all humanity.  This is not our goal, our calling, or our purpose.  But don’t you sit back and wonder if you are doing great things well within your ability and doing them to the fullest?  The old evangelist Billy Sunday once noted more people fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.  I suspect he is right. 

Jesus died because he had a purpose to his life; a purpose which called humanity to live as God intends and as a result he threatened those in power.  I am suggesting many of us fail to live because we have not discerned a great purpose in life; a purpose worthy of the name ‘Christian’ – a follower of Christ.

Perhaps you can identify with the main character in the Afghani author Khaled Hosseini’s novel And the Mountains Echoed who says,

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet – they all begin to blur.  I tell myself I am searching for something.  But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

For many of us Holy Week will be the most spiritual time of the year.  We will attend services, gather in fellowship, listen to the bible, and relive the last moments of our Lord’s life.  I encourage you to use this week to think about your purpose in life.  Perhaps your prayer can be, “O God, I want to be like Jesus.  Please guide me to something I can believe in that will honor you and make me proud of what I do.”