Abiding with Those We Lost

Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower… Abide in me as I abide in you.”

If you have been to my house you know that wisteria covers the pergola on my backyard deck.  Once established, wisteria is a hardy vine, to say the least.  You can do just about anything to it and it keeps coming back.  A year ago I had to cut it all down to replace the deck structure that had rotted and two months later the wisteria had recovered the entire pergola.  That penchant for growth translates into a lot of trimming.  I have noticed that within five minutes of cutting off a shoot it begins to wither.  The affect of being separated from the vine happens just that fast.

Jesus drew on this imagery – although he was thinking of grape vines, not wisteria – to highlight one of the most important features of the spiritual life: our need to be connected to him if we are going to have healthy, productive lives being able to make sense and draw meaning out our existence. 

Parker Palmer tells the story of a three-year-old girl who was the first-born in her family.  Upon learning that her mother was pregnant again, the girl became excited at the thought of being a big sister.  When a little boy was born and brought home, the girl made an odd request of her parents.  She wanted the door to the nursery to be shut so she and only she could be in the room with her new brother.  The parents were not sure what to make of this, but remembering that they had a baby monitor in the room figured they could grant their daughter’s request while still being able to listen in for signs of trouble.  So they left the room, closed the door, and listened attentively from a short distance away.  After a period of silence, the three-year-old girl, surely standing next to the crib, said to her newborn baby brother, “Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten.”

There is something wonderful about a child’s faith.  It is so pure, so innocent, so trusting, so open.  And yet, as the little girl’s story suggests, it does not last.  Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, describes the change that occurred in him in a poem called “On Turning Ten.”  The thought of adding a second digit to his age made him feel like he was coming down with something – “a kind of measles of the spirit.”  He recalls how he began to look at the world differently.  He reflects on seeing his bicycle leaning against the garage and how it appeared to him as if “all the dark blue speed [had] drained out of it.”  Collins concludes with this:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe

there was nothing under my skin but light.

If you cut me I would shine.

But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,

I skin my knees.  I bled.

Abiding in God seems to come naturally the younger we are, but its ease begins to slip away; perhaps by the time we turn ten; certainly as we reach our teens and early twenties when the harsh realities of life, with its difficult questions, become our everyday reality.  Consider Colleen’s story.  She spent her years in public education preparing to go to college.  It was very important both to her and to her parents.  She got good grades and was accepted at several schools.  Unfortunately, her parents were not able to provide much financial support and even with a few scholarships Colleen faced incurring a mountain of debt in student loans.  Then she heard about a fertility clinic that paid really good money to egg donors.  She researched the subject on the internet, but was still left with major questions: Does the church have a position on the issue?  What does the bible have to say about it?  Would God approve, or be unhappy?  She decided to talk with the youth minister at her church but that person was completely unequipped to help her think through the moral and spiritual implications of her decision.

Colleen is representative of many in her generation who are entering that age when we all start to ask serious questions about God and life and meaning.  Sadly, at this key point of searching, 36% of Christians in their teens and twenties report they don’t feel the church is a place they can go to ask their most pressing questions in their life.  The result, young people are leaving the institutional church in droves.

To the degree that we here this morning believe it to be our calling to help young people grow into an abiding relationship with God we ought to be concerned.  What is going on in our society?  Is it merely today’s expression of teenage angst that every generation experiences and works through, or is it something different, something more permanent? 

In his book, You Lost Me.  Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith, researcher David Kinnaman identifies six areas of disconnection between young people and the church:

Young people want to engage the culture and find expressions for their creative impulses, but they experience the church as over-protective – giving the message that the culture is to be avoided.  They want to reimagine, recreate, and rethink everything – including how to be the church – but their drive is being neutralized by those guarding the status quo.

Young people experience the church as being shallow – a place to be told easy answers that do not help them to connect their faith with their gifts, abilities, and passions.

They grow up in a world saturated with the benefits of science and technology while at the same time receiving a message from the church that is strongly anti-science.  Half expect to have a career in science and technology, but get little or no guidance from the church on how to understand this as their calling.  The message they receive is that you can be a person of faith or a person of science, but not both.

Many young people are putting off marriage until the late twenties or early thirties, but are exposed to sex at a very early age.  The church, preferring rules to reasons, comes off as repressive and, as a result, there is a growing disconnect between what the church teaches and the reality of young peoples’ lives.

This age group has a difficult time embracing the notion that the church has an exclusive hold on the truth.  They value open-mindedness, tolerance, and acceptance and prefer to find common ground as opposed to identifying differences.

Finally, young people report that the church is not a safe place to express doubts.  When faith doesn’t make sense, the church’s response is trivial and fact-focused, as if a person can be talked out of doubting.

All of this might suggest that young people are no longer religious.  This may be true for some, but Kinnaman’s research reveals that people in this age group are spiritual tinkers who have a cafeteria approach to faith – a little of this from over here, a dash of that, and a helping of something new I have never tried before.  I have no doubt that young people will continue to seek the Holy and search for an abiding relationship with God.  Given the amazing access they have to information and the global, cultural mixing that is a part of their reality, they will be able to get input from a multitude of avenues that did not exist when we were that age.  The real question is how influential and involved the church will be in their pursuit.  Up until now the church has been reluctant and ill-equipped to abide with its young people as they inhabit a landscape so alien to our experience.

As I read You Lost Me I could not shake the notion that its research sounded more reflective of young people who grew up in the Roman Catholicism or fundamentalist churches.  That’s not to say that we in the Episcopal Church have it all figured out – we don’t.  Still, Kinnaman offers three broad suggestions which, as it turns out, are not exactly foreign to our branch of the faith. 

First, he calls on the church to rethink relationships by recovering the biblical notion of a generation.  We think of a generation as marketers do – the boomers, the busters, the millennials, the mosaics, etc – a clustering of a twenty year (or so) age range based on experiences and world views.  When the bible talks about a generation it is refers to everyone alive right now.  This means we are not here to prepare children and young people to be the church someday when they are older, but rather we all are the church right now – together – a partnership to fulfill God’s purpose in our time.  While this notion has many implications, at its heart it calls for all of us to be in relationship – an abiding of all the fruit on the vine now matter where it is in the process of ripening. 

Next Kinnaman says the church needs to rediscover the ancient understanding of vocation.  Our young people lack clarity about what God is asking them to do with their lives.  This has got to change.  Like the hymn says about saints, “And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green… and there’s not any reason, no not the least, why I shouldn’t be one too.”  Each of us can use our gifts, talents, interests, and passions in a career inside or outside the church in service to God’s kingdom.

Finally, the author suggests we focus less on rules and more on wisdom, which is the “spiritual, mental, and emotional ability to relate rightly to God, to others, and to our culture.”  That is, after all, what we ultimately hope for each member of the church, not that he or she merely does the do’s while shunning the don’ts.  These are important, to be sure, but there is more – so much more – to an abiding faith than being a good little boy or girl.

If it clears up later today I will have some yard work to do.  On my list is trimming the wisteria.  No matter how much I cut, it will grow back, but what is cut off is lost.  I can’t say for sure if the trimmings represent young people who are leaving the church or if they represent the church itself.  The faith will go on because as St. Paul tells us faith, hope, and love abide.  For the church, however, there is no such guarantee.  Its role in life is related to an interesting blend of fidelity to God and cultural relevance.  The good news is there is still time for us to discern and to change.  There is still time to be what God asks the church to be – a place where all people can come to abide in God with one another.

Companions & Conversation

Perhaps you recall that before I went to the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, VA, I spent a year at a conservative, evangelical seminary on Boston’s North Shore.  Fridays there were my favorite days because we always had a fresh, sea-food salad sandwich for lunch (still the best I have ever had) and dinner was always some kind of fish straight off the dock that would have cost us poor seminarians $50 at a Boston restaurant.  Outside the entrance to the large dining hall there was a bulletin board that served as the place for the student body to carry out running discussions or debates.  Back in the mid-80’s, at that school, abortion and the role of women in the church were hot topics.  I leave it to your imagination to conjure what I saw posted there as I waited in line for my Friday fish lunch and dinner.

In hindsight, I see now how that bulletin board set the table (so to speak) for every conversation that took place in the dining hall.  I remember countless discussions, some with near strangers, where the object was to mine down through our commonly held beliefs to find a point of disagreement.  This then became the place where we met – some inconsequential nuance of the amillennial understanding of the end times or a trivial aspect of John Calvin’s thinking on total depravity.  On more than one occasion, friends parted a meal no longer friends, and strangers who broke bread departed as combatants.

Hold that image in your mind as I give you my condensed version of the 23^rd Psalm, boiling down this beautiful poem to its contextual heart:

The Lord is my Host

who sets a table for me

in the presence of those who trouble me.

This, I believe, is the core of the 23^rd Psalm.  The author has been invited to a meal at which his enemies will also be at table.  In the midst of this ‘threat’ the poet meditates on the image of a shepherd leading his flock and takes comfort in the knowledge that God is present with him at that table.

Two words have been with me since the beginning of Lent; they are words central to the 23^rd Psalm: companion and conversation.  The word companion literally means “with bread”.  A companion is someone with whom you will break bread.  We in the Episcopal Church break a lot of bread.  Here at St. Paul’s it happens twice on Sunday and at various points throughout the year during the week.  Last year the Eucharist was celebrated in some form or fashion 139 times in and through our parish.  In addition to its frequency, our bread breaking is a sign of welcome.  Communion is open to every person baptized into the Christian faith and life regardless of age or denomination.

Through the Eucharist we become companions with one another; people who are gathered together in joy at a Table set by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Our children are the ones who exhibit this joy most clearly.  They are the ones who run up to the altar rail with bright smiles and outstretched hands.  Believe me, they don’t get excited because the wafer is the best thing they will taste all day.  They are excited because they are doing something with their parents and with all of us.  They are excited to be a companion.

As happened in that seminary dining hall, being companions often leads to conversation.  The word conversation means the “art or act of living with another.”  This definition suggests at least two things:

First, we have to talk with another in order to maintain relationship.  Amy, our parish administrator, and I have conversation every day of the work week.  It may be extensive in the office about things that need to be done or it may be a brief text she sends to me saying a child is sick and she will not be able to come in or it may be me saying I will be on the road in the morning heading to a meeting and will call to check in.  Imagine how difficult it would be for Amy and me to live together without this basic conversation. 

The second thing suggested by the definition “the art or act of living together” is the more we talk with another person the more we know about that person.  And the more we know about another person – her views on life and politics, his innermost thoughts and worries – the more we either will open ourselves to deeper companionship or withdraw from it.  It is through conversation that we determine who we want in close relationship and who we do not. 

This has a tremendous implication for the church, doesn’t it.  Ironically, it hints the less we know about another person the more we may be willing to enter into the deepest act signifying our unity – communion (with unity) – and conversely, the more we know another person the more difficult it may be to be to break bread together.

Here is a question we might want to ask of the 23^rd Psalm: why would the Shepherd/Host host invite us to a meal with those who trouble us?  Wouldn’t it be a much more pleasant table if it was just the Shepherd/Host, me, and the people I like?  What kind of shepherd invites the wolf to graze with the flock?

Believe me, I have sat in silence many times in my life for long periods of time pondering this question in one form or another and I have concluded there is no sugar-coated answer easy to swallow.  Over and over again all I come up with is this: the Shepherd/Host of the psalmist is also the Shepherd/Host of the enemies.  We are all God’s children.  The Shepherd/Host extends the sign of comfort and welcome – the anointing of the head with oil after a long, hot, dry journey – to all.  The Table is made ready for all.  The over-flowing cup symbolizes God’s abundant love and grace and mercy extended to all people. 

The Genesis story of the Tower of Babel suggests that language is God’s gift to us so that, through conversation, we might learn the art and action of living together.  The story also reminds us of language’s limitations.  It is confusing at times.  We speak different dialects and even within our own tongue it is challenging to say what we mean and to hear the words of another as he or she intends them to be heard.  But the struggle and challenge of conversion is necessary because, as Jesus tells his disciples:

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” 

Conversation – the art and act of living together – is the way the entire flock learns how to be companions – and the bread we break at Table is the very body of the Shepherd/Host who brings us together.

All of this tells me that relationships will always contain both blessing and challenge, be they in the family, among friends, at work, in the community, or here at church.  The challenge comes from knowing we are not the same.  We have different ideas, different tastes, different values, different views.  These differences can and do stretch the bonds of common affection.  The blessing of these relationships is found as we move through our differences to gather at the Table of the One who calls us together.  This Table fellowship must be important to Jesus because he gave his life for it and continues to give us his life through it today.

I want to close by sharing with you this blessing by John O’Donohue.  It is intended for a new home, but I think speaks equally well of our hope for many places in our life, including our church home:

May this house shelter your life.

When you come in home here,

may all the weight of the world

fall from your shoulders.

May your heart be tranquil here,

blessed by peace the world cannot give.

May this home be a lucky place,

where the graces your life desires

always find the pathway to your door.

May nothing destructive

ever cross your threshold.

May this be a safe place

full of understanding and acceptance,

where you can be as you are,

without the need of any mask

of pretense or image.

May this home be a place of discovery,

where possibilities that sleep

in the clay of your soul can emerge

to deepen and refine your vision

for all that is yet to come to birth.

May it be a house of courage,

where healing and growth are loved,

where dignity and forgiveness prevail;

a home where patience of spirit is prized,

and the sight of destination is never lost

though the journey be difficult and slow.

May there be great delight around this hearth.

May it be a house of welcome

for the broken and diminished.

May you have the eyes to see

that no visitor arrives without a gift

and no guest leaves without a blessing.

And I might add,

May this home be a place

where a Table is always set for you

and for those who trouble you most

   so that we may be one flock with one Shepherd.

Loving Proof of the Resurrection

In many respects, Mark’s account of the Resurrection is the least satisfying of the four gospels.  Three women go to Jesus’ tomb to anoint the body with spices.  They know the location because they were there when Joseph of Arimathea placed the corpse in it and sealed it with a large stone.  They are concerned they will not be able to move the stone to do their work, but when they get to the tomb they find it is open.  They go inside to inspect and encounter a young man.  Who is he?  The text does not provide a single hint.  This mysterious person tells the women that Jesus has risen from the dead.  He instructs them to tell the news to the disciples.  He suggests they head to Galilee where they will see Jesus.  The women flee to tomb, terrorized by what has happened, and say nothing about the incident to anyone.

This is how the earliest, best, most accurate, manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel end.  Over the passing decades at least two editors, unsatisfied with the abrupt conclusion of the story, tacked on alternative endings, which scholars recognize as helpful, but not original.  Keep in mind this was the first gospel to be written.  Readers couldn’t flip to Matthew, Luke, or John to fill in the missing details. 

Plain and simple, there is not much here to convince a skeptic.  You don’t need to be a C.S.I. investigator to shoot holes in this resurrection story.  Perhaps the women went to the wrong tomb; an unlikely explanation because eventually someone would have gone to the actual tomb, found the body, and put the whole story to bed.  More plausible is that the young man stole the body.  He snuck to the tomb at night, broke in, took the body, hid it somewhere, and returned to tell his concocted story of a person rising from the dead.  Why would he do it?  Who cares?  Its an easier story to swallow than the resurrection.

So lets ask a basic question: why didn’t Mark provide more “proof” that Jesus had risen?  Why didn’t he include a story about the women meeting Jesus or Jesus appearing to the Disciples?  Why didn’t he tell us more about the young man in order to make him more credible and less suspicious?  If Mark submitted this story for publication today a reviewing editor would say, “Great story, but the ending needs some work.”

Here is what I think.  Mark was not writing to prove anything.  He was writing to tell people the story of Jesus.  People were curious to know more about him; what he said, what he did, and why he died.  They were not looking for proof for one plain and simple reason… they already had it.  Proof #1: people who encountered the Resurrected Jesus and told others about it.  Proof #2: people experienced closeness and companionship with the Resurrected Jesus just as we do today.  And proof #3 (which in my estimation is the most compelling): people met the living Christ in the lives of his followers.  Mark’s audience was not looking for proof, it craved understanding; who is this Jesus who makes such a profound difference in the lives of his followers?

Early in the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadria wanted to know why Christianity was spreading so rapidly throughout the land.  An investigator named Aristides gave him this explanation:

“Christians love one another.  They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them.  If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother.  They don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God.”

The Christian faith grew one person at a time as a person met the living Christ in the love of one of his followers.  No military force, no intellectual idea, no government sanction, no cultural craze, and not even brutal waves of persecution could stop it.  This passion for the living Christ was all the proof Mark needed. 

If this is how the Christian movement began, we might want to ask how is it doing today?  The answer… not so well.  Recent surveys indicate an alarming number of people today associate Christianity with hate and intolerance.  Jesus’ followers are not winning over the world with love, we are pushing people away with hypocrisy and judgmentalism.  If our lives are supposed to be the proof that Jesus is risen, many of the folks who are looking at us are not convinced.

Throughout Holy Week I spent time meditating on and praying over the poem “African Easter” by Abioseh Nicol, a writer from Sierra Leone.  The poem consists of three parts: Good Friday, Easter Eve, and Easter Morning.  He begins Easter Morning with this:

Another day…

Sleep leaves my opening eyes slowly

unwillingly like a true lover.

But this day is different.

The lonely matin bells

cut across the thin morning mist,

the glinting dew on the green grass,

the cool pink light before the heat of day,

the sudden punctual dawn of tropic skies,

before the muezzin begins to cry,

before the pagan drums begin to beat.

Easter morning.

For Nicol, the day breaks like any other.  If we were writing it, we might describe the challenge of waking children and getting them dressed for church.  We might speak of a desire to stay home and relax before the beginning of another busy week.  Nicol acknowledges this as the poem continues:

But still for me

the great rock remains unrolled.

Within my wet dark tomb

wounded peace remains embalmed,

the pricking thorns still yet my crown.

Easter morning.

He goes on to describe the tribal religion he embraced in his youth, but turned from to Christianity.  Listen to how he describes his faith now.  It is mechanical, institutional, lacking substance, lacking life.

I am a good Churchman, now.

Broadminded, which means past caring

whether High or Low.

The priest may hold the chalice,

or give it to me.  It depends

on where he trained.  I only mind

that he wipes the wet rim

not to spread dental germs.

A tenth of my goods

I give to the poor

through income tax.

Easter morning.

Then something begins to stir deep within the heart of the poet:

Yet you Christ are always there.

You are the many-faceted crystal

of our desires and hopes,

behind the smoke-screen of incense,

concealed in mumbled European tongues

of worship and of praise.

In the thick dusty verbiage

of centuries of committees

of ecumenical councils.

You yet remain revealed

to those who seek you.

It is I, you say.

You remain in the sepulcher

of my brown body.

Isn’t that an incredible line, “You remain in the sepulcher of my body.”  I know exactly what Nicol means by that and I suspect you do as well.  But, just as it happened at the closed tomb in the garden, Resurrection comes.  Nicol concludes his poem by breaking forth with a shout:

Christ is risen, Christ is risen!

You were not dead.

It was just that we

could not see clearly enough.

We can push out the rock from the inside.

You can come out now.

You see we want to share you

with our masters, because

you really are unique.

What a powerful image: “We can push out the rock from the inside.  You can come out now”; the stone that covers our hearts, that keeps Christ’s love entombed in us, being rolled away from the inside.  Nicol discovers from within that he can be – even to his masters – what those Christians of old were to the world… living proof that Christ is alive. 

His poem leaves me with several questions; questions which I will leave for you to ponder on this joyous day.  What keeps you from rolling away the stone in front of your heart and letting the love of Christ resurrect in you?  Is it fear?  Is it doubt?  Is it indifference?  Something else?  How would your life be different if that stone got pushed away?  How would you approach the day?  the people you encounter? the world in need?  And finally, what would the world look like if you and I became irrefutable, loving proof of Christ’s resurrection?  How would it transform Suffolk?  How would it change this parish?  How would it bring life to your life?

Good Friday

There is a strong strand in Christian spirituality that invites us to feel personally responsible for Jesus’ agonizing death.  As a youth I was taught that if I was the only person in the world ever to sin Jesus still would have hung on the Cross for me.  I was told that my sins are the nails that hold him to the Cross.  It was led to believe the question, “is it I Lord?”, should be my question because I betray Jesus and I deny Jesus again and again and again.

Given this spirituality, it is easy to see how Good Friday becomes a day of extended confession for many.  Each swing of the hammer and each drop of blood are meant to elicit in us deep remorse and complete remembrance of every wrong we have ever done.   In some form or fashion the focus of this day becomes me and what I did to Jesus.  Let me suggest we lay aside this strand of spirituality and approach this day and this moment in a different way: as a sign of love… God’s enduring love for us and our Christ-like love for the world.

During Holy Week I have been meditating on and praying over the poem “African Easter” by Abioseh Nicol, a writer from Sierra Leone.  The poem consists of three parts: Good Friday, Easter Eve, and Easter Morning.  Let me read Good Friday for you, which has the subtitle The Wounded Christ:

I am not your God

if you have not denied me once, twice,

if I have not heard you complaining,

or doubting my existence.

I am not your Love,

if you have not rejected me often.

For what then am I worth to you

if you are always sinless.

Pace these sandy corridors of time,

turn again and live for me your youth, listening

to the gently falling rain, the distant cock crow

then proceed once more to deny

that I had a part in your being.  Say

that I am an invention to keep you held

always in thralldom.  That I was

the avant-garde of your disintegration.

After me, the stone jars of cheap gin, ornamental

glass beads, the punitive expeditions, your colonial status,

I have heard it all before; hide your face,

bury it, for fear that finding me, you may find peace.

For in this hour when the dying night lingers

unwilling to surrender its waking darkness

over your face and fevered brow, my torn fingers

will stray bringing such comfort

as may claim your doubting heart.

From Nicol’s perspective, human sin and shortcomings are an inevitable; they are something God expects and accepts as inherent in the relationship between creature and Creator.  To focus exclusively on our sin is to “hide our face”, to “bury it” – as Nicol puts it – so as to miss completely the depth of relationship God seeks to have with us.  It would be like a child who knows nothing of the parent except “I told you not to do it, now go to your room and stay there.”  Yes, this is a facet of the parent/child relationship, but only a small part.  The relationship is so much richer than just rules, remorse, and reprimands. 

“I am not your God if you have not denied me once, twice, if I have not heard you complaining, or doubting my existence.  I am not your Love, if you have not rejected me often.”  As a youth Nicol believed otherwise and it led him away from God.  He embraced doubt and distraction because at a deep level he believed himself unworthy of God.  His great fear was that he might learn God loves him and in that love would find peace with God and himself.  Nicol says this day – Good Friday – is an invitation to do just that… to face not our sins, but God’s overwhelming, all-encompassing love for us.

Each year at this service I say essentially the same thing.  The distinctive feature of the Good Friday liturgy is The Solemn Collects which we will pray in just a moment.  These biddings and prayers are comprehensive; no person or need is left out.  Placed where they are in the liturgy, the Collects suggest that once Christ’s work in the world is completed on the Cross, our work in the world begins.  His love for the world becomes our love for the world.  And the starting point for us as we seek to manifest this love is prayer.

As I said, Good Friday is many things.  Certainly this includes the spirituality that was instilled in me as a youth.  Today I add to it this… God saying, “O.K., I get it.  You sin.  I know it and I expect it.  It is a part of the contract I signed on for when I created you.  Don’t look away in shame.  Don’t hide your face.  Look at me and see the love I have for you.  Look at me and find peace.  And then look out and look around.  See the world I love so dearly.  See the world through my eyes.  Help me show my love for the world by sharing my love for you with others.”

African Easter

by Abioseh Nicol (1924-1994)

Good Friday

The Wounded Christ:

I am not your God

if you have not denied me once, twice,

if I have not heard you complaining,

or doubting my existence.

I am not your Love,

if you have not rejected me often.

For what then am I worth to you

if you are always sinless.

Pace these sandy corridors of time,

turn again and live for me your youth, listening

to the gently falling rain, the distant cock crow

then proceed once more to deny

that I had a part in your being.  Say

that I am an invention to keep you held

always in thralldom.  That I was

the avant-garde of your disintegration.

After me, the stone jars of cheap gin, ornamental 

glass beads, the punitive expeditions, your colonial status,

I have heard it all before; hide your face,

bury it, for fear that finding me, you may find peace.

For in this hour when the dying night lingers

unwilling to surrender its waking darkness

over your face and fevered brow, my torn fingers

will stray bringing such comfort

as may claim your doubting heart.

Easter Eve

The African Priest:

I have sat down by the waterside

watching the grey river pulling away.

I have listened me with willing ears

to your vesper bells across the fields.

Come close to me, God, do not keep away,

I walk towards you but you are too far,

Please try and meet me here halfway,

because you are my all, my all.

What are you, Negro, Lebanese or Jew,

Flemish, Italian, Indian, Greek?

I know within my heart exactly what you are – 

What we would like to be, but never are.

The warm blood sticks to your whipped shoulders

(Drink this in remembrance of me).

Only when the whirling throngs have raised red weals

on our complacent bodies, then we remember you.

Change our salty tears of brown remorse

into your flowing blood, it tastes the same.

(Oh, River Niger, you too have come from far away),

Fill my uplifted silver calabash

with your sacrificial wine.

And I, your least novitiate, will sip,

with my thick lips, your ancient memory

So God the Father who art above,

Christ His Son, our only love,

Holy Ghost, eternal Dove,

make me a goodly man.

Easter Morning

The African Intellectual:

Ding dong bell

Pussy’s in the well.

Another day…

Sleep leaves my opening eyes slowly

unwillingly like a true lover.

But this day is different.

The lonely matin bells

cut across the thin morning mist,

the glinting dew on the green grass,

the cool pink light before the heat of day,

the sudden punctual dawn of tropic skies, 

before the muezzin begins to cry, 

before the pagan drums begin to beat.

Easter morning.

But still for me

the great rock remains unrolled.

within my wet dark tomb

wounded peace remains embalmed,

the pricking thorns still yet my crown.

Easter morning.

Where are my ancestral spirits now?

I have forgotten for many harvests 

to moisten the warm earth

with poured libations.

Where are you now, O Shango?

two headed, powerful

man and woman, hermaphrodite

holding your quivering thunderbolts

with quiet savage malice;

brooding over your domain,

Africa, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil,

slavery of mind is unabolished.

Always wanting to punish, never to love.

I have turned away from you

to One who stands

watching His dying dispossessed Son 

shouting in Aramaic agony

watching the white Picasso dove

hovering above the Palestinian stream

watching and waiting, sometimes

to punish, always to love.

Sleep confuses my tired mind

still the bell rings

I must up and away.

I am a good Churchman, now.

Broadminded, which means past caring

whether High or Low.

The priest may hold the chalice,

or give it to me.  It depends

on where he trained.  I only mind

that he wipes the wet rim

not to spread dental germs.

A tenth of my goods

I give to the poor

through income tax.

Easter morning.

Yet you Christ are always there.

You are the many-faceted crystal 

of our desires and hopes,

behind the smoke-screen of incense, 

concealed in mumbled European tongues

of worship and of praise.

In the thick dusty verbiage

of centuries of committees

of ecumenical councils.

You yet remain revealed

to those who seek you.

It is I, you say.

You remain in the sepulcher

of my brown body.

Christ is risen, Christ is risen!

You were not dead.

It was just that we

could not see clearly enough.

We can push out the rock from the inside.

You can come out now.

You see we want to share you

with our masters, because

you really are unique.

The great muddy river Niger, 

picks up the rising equatorial sun,

changing itself by slow degrees

into thick flowing molten gold.

Expectations & Disappointments

I wrote a paper in seminary on a 1941 book titled The Nature and Destiny of Man written by a theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr.  In it, Niebuhr argues that we human beings are both finite and limitless.  We are limitless because we are made in the image of the Creator.  Our minds are capable of soaring to fantastic heights and our souls are endowed with the possibility of infinite expression.  But we are also creatures and thus limited.  We are confined to space and time.  We are imperfect and lack omniscience.  Niebuhr said that humanity is both free and bound, both limited and limitless, sinner and saint, subject to history and social forces but also the shaper of history and society, creature of the Creator but potential lord of creation, egotistical but capable of living for others.

Niebuhr believed we are drawn into relationships with other people when we see the infinite in them; when we see in a lover or a mate or a friend the mystery of that person, his or her unique capacity for good and beauty and strength and virtue.  Conversely, these relationships are challenged when we recognize the other person’s finite nature; when we see how small and powerless and petty a person really is.

Niebuhr’s thinking sheds light on one aspect of the hugely complex events that envelop the Passion of our Lord.  Throughout the Gospels we see people being attracted to that part of Jesus which gives flesh to true Divinity.  Drawn by his miracles and his healings and his signs and his teachings and his personal aura, they came from far and near to meet Jesus.  He seemed to be unencumbered by the elements of this life that drag down the rest of us.  He contended fearlessly with oppressive politicians and corrupt, uncaring religious leaders.  He demonstrated a boundless capacity for compassion to all who were sick, lonely, anxious, or despondent and for those who were not accepted in society’s upper echelons.  Demons cowered at his rebuke and the raging seas lay still at His command.  He was God from God, Light from Light... of one Being with the Father.

And, as you know, by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man.  He emptied himself, as St. Paul says, and became humble as we are humble.  He was limited by thirst and exhaustion.  He was not able to right every wrong or exceed everyone’s expectations of Him.  His critics recognized his finite nature and wagged at the foot of the Cross, “He saved other but he cannot save himself.”  As he rode into Jerusalem, Jesus was praised by those whose held high expectations for what he would do and as he stood before Pilate the same people rejected him for disappointing them.

Expectations and disappointments: these are emotions born of our limitless potential and the finite nature of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual condition.  The cry of “hosanna in the highest” is raised for those from whom we expect great things and the shouts of “crucify” are aimed at anyone who lets us down beyond all measure.

It is a dynamic that we do not reserve just for the Savior of the world.  It plays out in every relationship between individuals, between groups, and between individuals and groups.  How many marriages have begun with two people singing hosanna only to end with demands for crucifixion?  How many politicians have strolled into office on a red carpet only to be booted out the back door when they fail to deliver the world to their constituents?  How many coaches have helped how many young people to graduate only to be fired because they did not win enough league championships?    How many churches have split when two sides can not agree on the ‘truth’?

We demand a kind of greatness and perfection from one another that only God can live up to, and even then, only on God’s best days.  As a result we have become an extremely cruel and unforgiving society that throws away those who disappoint us with a stunning, but predictable regularity.  We shun, sue, or sabotage anyone unfortunate enough to have their limitations exposed to our boundless expectations.  The cry may not be “crucify him,” but the intention is the same.

The great irony is that the words “crucify him” – aimed at those who, in their limitations, have disappointed us – these words are generated in us not from what is infinite and glorious and generous, but from what is finite and mean and unforgiving.  We condemn in another what fail to see in ourselves.

Each one of us has been victimized by unrealistic expectations and each of us knows what it is to be thoroughly uncharitable with regards to the short-comings of others.  It is an old phenomena, older than the Passion of our Lord for sure.  One of the things we learn from today’s story is that it should be O.K. to be human.  It should be O.K. to have limitations and to make mistakes.  We ought to cut some slack for others when they fail to attain the impossible standards we set for them.  We are not God.  We are not even gods.  We are limited human beings making our way through life as best we can. 

But we can be like God in this respect: God recognizes and accepts that we are finite and thus we will fall far, hard, and often.  The Passion of our Lord is the most powerful testimony imaginable of just how low we can sink.  Yet it also shows us that God’s mercy for us knows no bounds.  That very mercy is woven into the fabric of our being.  It is – should we choose to act upon it – a part of who we are in our limitless potential. 

Each week we come to the Lord’s Table to taste the bread and drink the wine which will promote in us that which is charitable to those around us.  Living on our own resources and left to our own devices, the cry of “crucify” seems to well up within us again and again and again.  Making ourselves present to God’s grace opens within us that which is limitless and capable of near-infinite mercy and compassion.