Sunday, March 27, 2011

In Impossibility...



Throughout Lent, at LNPC we are exploring the Biblical Stations of the Cross.  We have the stations up in our sanctuary, and the congregation is doing a Lenten Worship Project, bringing in images that we find in media, our lives, art, etc. and helping to construct one of the stations during worship each week.  This week, we explored Jesus' Promise of Paradise to the Crucified Thief: Station 11.


Station 11: Jesus Promises Paradise to the Crucified Thief
Lenten Worship Project Words: hopelessness, despair, impossibility


(Each person selected a rock from a basket when they came into worship).

I invite you to hold this rock through the reflection time. Feel the weight of it in your hand.  Let it sit in your palm as you listen.

We’re walking an unusual journey this Lent- we are spending the whole five weeks of Lent in Jesus’ last week of life. His last conversations, last connections with people, last words and encounters, his fears and his choices that week, we are immersing ourselves in that experience.

We’ve seen Jesus’ presence in our places of pleading and sorrow, we’ve seen him there in our places of shame and regret, and today, we meet him in our places of impossibility. Where there is nothing we can do, no way forward, those places we’ve given up as lost.  And to do this, we are focusing on Jesus’ conversation on the cross.

In addition to the outer dialogue happening, I imagine the inner monologues that day on the cross.  The crowds below, yelling, jeering, and way up on the cross, the three men. Sharing this moment, their last earthly moment.  The end.
The first one looks over at Jesus, at the other thief, at the crowds around them and his thoughts go something like this…

This is a nightmare.
Suspended here in front of everyone, the heat and the flies and the gasping, persistent pain. The end. This is how it ends?  How could this have happened? 
I was great.  Smart, resourceful; no common criminal, a master thief.  Is this even real?
Look at that fool. King of the Jews. Look at those crowds gathered around us, mocking him. And they should be. He’s pathetic. 
I’m not supposed to be here.  This is not how I am supposed to end.  Don’t look at me.
At least I am not pathetic. I’ll never be pathetic. I may be dying, but I am not a spectacle.  
He doesn’t even answer!
He just hangs there.  King of the Jews, HA!  Some savior; hanging there and taking this abuse. 
I would never take it. I would tear down from here and smash them for what they say.  I would grab the two on either side of me and we would climb down and leave in a royal chariot, kicking dust on them and their empty crosses. 
Some king.  At least I am not that poor loser.  At least I have some dignity. 
 “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”

The second thief gasps.
 How could he say that?  Doesn’t he get it?  The rule of justice has him hanging here, and yet he still would mock that man?  Has he no fear of God?
 Even now, he has no awareness that his life is over; his deeds have caught up with him and he is paying the penalty he deserves for what he has done. 

But that man, he has done nothing! He hangs here innocent.  No justice holds him to that cross.  He should not be here!
They mock him. And that shame will be on their own heads when they answer before God. But him, how could he say that?

“Do you not fear God? You and I hang here under the very same sentence that he does.  But we have been condemned justly!  We are getting what we deserve!  This man is not like us.  He has done nothing wrong!”

I have nothing to say to my charges. I am guilty. I am dying a just death. I have earned my place in hell.  It is over for me. There is no more.
Nobody will mourn me. Nobody will hold my place, speak fondly of me, commemorate the day of my death.  When this day is over, it is as though I had never been.  I am nothing. 

But he, he will surely live on.  He will surely be with God.  This innocent one, dying here alongside me.  If there is any justice at all, God will surely take him. He shared this end with me, he saw me bleed and heard me struggle for my last breaths.  If he would remember me, wherever he goes from here, that would be enough. 
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And Jesus looks at the man. 
And if he could have put his hand on him he would have, but instead, he holds his gaze and the noise of the crowd seems to fade to the background for a moment and it seems it is just the two dying men, in a room alone that nobody else can reach; Jesus says to him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

And into that place of finality and loss, the place of utter hopelessness, Jesus pronounces these strange words of promise – today you will be with me in paradise.

How much more out of place can these words be? Today you will be with me in paradise?  These are words of safety, joy, abundance, these are words of vacationing and now and relaxing and celebrating. What in the world is going on up there while the rest of the crowd sees only death and defeat? What is happening in this moment, between these three men, while the onlookers see only someone’s end? The story is wrapping up, folks. Jesus’ story. The thief’s story. Their run at it is complete. The story of the Christ, the King of the Jews, this Jesus-preacher was over.  Everyone could see it, even the thieves knew it.  Life ends in death.  Period.

But this story, for as much as we have considered it to be for all the times we’ve heard it, was never about the two thieves, the good thief and the bad thief, the unbelief of the one and the faith of the other.  This was always about our God. Our Christ, alongside them, alongside us, sharing the same fate but not the same view. Where they saw death, he saw new life.

One thief looks at him with our questions.  
If you are God, then save us! Take away the suffering, end evil. Why don’t you, God?  But it’s a bigger question than that the thief asks, he isn’t asking to be spared, really. He’s not crying to the heavens and asking God to save him or to end suffering in the world.  He is saying what is even harder for us to grapple with, and that is this:
If you really are the God of all, the savior of the world, then come down off that cross- because good gods don’t die.  What would you be doing in those places of suffering? Why wouldn’t you avoid the pain and torment of the rest of us? 
We like to see our gods in glory, we like our kings to have some authority and wield some power… What kind of savior would just let themselves suffer too, with us, for us?
 It makes no sense whatsoever. 
If you are really God, get down off that cross. Save yourself.  And us too, while you’re at it.  It’s impossible to accept a dying god.

The other thief looks at him with our resignation.  
We’ve gotten what’s coming to us and this is our just end. So when you get out of this mess, this mess we’ve made and perpetuated, this mess we’ve suffered and inflicted upon each other, when you do save yourself, when you do get back to wherever you really live, God, your holy place, your set apart place, that place where we humans can’t go and screw everything up like we’ve done here, when you finally give up on us and return to your kingdom, when this world has done its worst and is eventually given over to the defeat that awaits us, then please, remember us. 
Just remember us.  
When you leave and we are left to what we deserve, please at least hold our memory.

But Jesus’s answer is earth-shattering, course-correcting, cosmos-altering. Today – YOU will be WITH ME in paradise. I don’t go away and leave you all to yourselves. And I don’t get down off this cross and spare myself your suffering. I endure and hang in there with you so far and so long that I take you all with me, that I move all of it forward from death to life, I bend the whole thing back to God again and there is no way, in life or death or anything present or yet to come, that I will ever leave you or forsake you.

We come up against impossibility every day. If not in our own lives, just turn on the news for three minutes.  People dying because they can’t have clean water. Terrible impossibility.  Thirty people, death warrant signed, standing between their country and nuclear disaster. Hopeless.  That relationship that cannot, no matter how hard you try, ever be truthful, caring, respectful, mutual.  Impossible. 
We live in a world where the struggle never seems to end, where people fight and die seemingly for nothing as corrupt governments hang on and squash the people’s voices and lives, where people are still searching for the missing and the rebuilding can’t even begin the destruction is so massive, where no matter how many applications or interviews or prayers there is just no job, and where the chemo drains away strength and the tumor holds strong – we know impossibility. 
We don’t have to be hanging on a cross breathing our last to recognize hopelessness.

But as certain as you are that you have defined yourself irreversibly, that our trajectory has been cemented, or that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, our story today says two things:
One, Jesus is right here. With us, alongside, right in the middle of it. All of it.  
And two, this is not the final word; this is not even remotely the end.  The whole thing goes in a direction that we could never begin to imagine, beyond anything we could conceive of hoping for or would dare to ask. 

You’ve been holding this rock the whole time.  It is warm with the heat of your body. It has begun to feel natural to hold it, the weight has become, if not comfortable, then familiar.  We carry the weight of our impossibilities. We carry the weight of the world’s hopelessness. Every day we do. Those things that have no promise of ever getting better. Those things we’ve given up on. They are with us.

Now imagine your body and your mind, your heart welling up these things, they don’t have to have words you can articulate, just feelings or impressions, sadnesses or impossibilities, imagine them coming out of your thoughts and feelings and muscles and memories and flowing down your arm into this rock. All the places you’ve given up on, in yourself, in the world, all the questions and the anger and the fears, and the deadness where no life has been in a long time. All the things you wish you could share with God but you can’t.
 Imagine them in the weight of this rock. Squeeze the rock as hard as you can. Now relax your hand and hold it gently. Imagine it as a prayer. Your prayer. Your prayer without words, but with weight. You can feel it and it feels heavy, it presses on you.  As our prayer today, we are going to lay it down.  I will invite you come forward when you are ready and lay your rock at the foot of the cross.  Come lay your burden down. Come and find the place where hopelessness meets the suffering savior.

Prayer
Jesus Christ, we can’t imagine that you would share our place, really. That you would suffer here with us and be found in our times of guilt or pain, the most painful suffering and awful darkness in the world.  Forgive us when we demand you come down off the cross and show yourself in distant power. 
In the places of impossibility and hopelessness, help us to recognize your face and know that we are not alone.

Lord God of justice, we can’t imagine that you wouldn’t leave us to clean up our own messes. That you wouldn’t give us what we deserve. Help us to see that this world is your own, that no matter how we distort and pollute and destroy this planet or the people around us, our very own lives, your love embraces us and brings us back to God.  And you promise to restore and heal and renew.
In the places of impossibility and hopelessness, help us to recognize your voice and know that this is not the end.

We bring to you tonight the impossibility we carry, the hopelessness we wear next to our very skin.  And we lay it down at the cross. Give us courage to release the weight we carry.  And tonight we hold up these images that represent the world’s impossibility and hopelessness, and we put them into the story of your cross, the truth of your death and resurrection.  Give us the courage to keep seeing, and not forsaking, those places and situations in the world and in our lives, and holding them up to you.  Amen.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Shame and Regret

Throughout Lent, at LNPC we are exploring the Biblical Stations of the Cross.  We have the stations up in our sanctuary, and the congregation is doing a Lenten Worship Project, bringing in images that we find in media, our lives, art, etc. and helping to construct one of the stations during worship each week.  This week, we explored Peter's Denial of Jesus: Station 4.



Station 4: Peter Denies Jesus
Lenten Worship Images: Betrayal, Shame, Regret

I want you to think of a time when you did something that you are ashamed of.  For just a minute, remember something you've said or done that you regret.  
Now, show me shame.  Right now with your bodies, do regret. 
How many of you covered your face? Dropped your head, hunched your shoulders in, eyes closed to the world, hands hiding you?  When looking for images this week of shame and regret I was struck by the fact that that one thing was so common it was hard to find anything else.  Shame makes us want to hide.  To erase ourselves, to disappear.

We began our Lenten prayer journey last week with Jesus in the garden. We saw prayer as pleading, sorrow, raw and open before God. Not hidden. Exposed. Vulnerable. Deeply and frighteningly honest; not a smidgen of decorum or hint of duplicity about it. Utterly Transparent.
 Today we are seeing ourselves the opposite way. Hiding. Shame, Regret.  The need to cover ourselves because we are ashamed. We are aware of our own guilt, aware of what we’ve done and we can’t take it back.

I will never betray you! Peter says to Jesus. We say to one another. Our spouses. Our children. Our friends. Our neighbors and communities. The least of these.  
It’s the contract we make with the world.  I will be true. My word is my bond. I will never sell you out. But we do. The lies to save face.  The gossip about someone we love.  Sharing secrets that were not ours to share.  Saving our own skin at another’s expense. Sometimes it happens chillingly quickly, almost an impulse, like fight or flight response. Me or you? Me. Boom. Betrayal.

And there is nothing like that feeling of Guilt. Hot Shame that starts in your gut and rises to your neck and face, burning the whole way up. Horrible Regret. Who hasn’t felt this in their core at one time or another? That stupid decision you made that you can never undo. One little moment. One sentence. A look. Something you could have avoided but you chose not to.
It is never a hypothetical thing, betrayal, never an on paper, victimless crime, a private, individual sin. It is always about hurting another person. Directly. The guilt of it is precise as a laser and it’s all yours.  The sin of betrayal isn’t a clinical right or wrong misstep, it’s the brooding and churning darkness at the very heart of sin: saving me at the expense of you.

If prayer is, as we said last week, brutal honesty with God, opening your heart, being exposed in your need and pain – how in the world do we pray in experiences of duplicity? How do we pray when we are bathed in our own shame, wreaking of regret? Fresh off of a moment of betrayal? How do we pray when we knew better, when we knew what the right thing was and we did something else instead? How do we look God in the eye when we’ve just turned our back? If praying is baring your soul, splayed out before God in all trust and vulnerability, how in the world can we do that if we are curled in horror, frozen in self-protective shame?  We don’t deserve to have God hear us.  We don’t deserve to pray.

Look at Peter – arguably Jesus’ most passionate and committed follower. Peter in all his crazy and wild abandon, his whole-hearted love for Jesus, his ardent and true devotion. Peter, of all people… so confident in his loyalty!  Earlier that evening they were gathered at the table, Jesus saying all these terrible and confusing things…

Then Jesus told them, “This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written:  “‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’
 But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”
Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”
But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the other disciples said the same.

Fast forward to the moment, when the random stranger said to him the third time in a crowd of people he might never see again, you were his follower, right?  And Peter denies ever having known him.
Is there ever a worse moment than this, in the history of the world?  God of all creation and your closest friend raises his head and makes eye contact. Sees you in the core of your soul. The cock crows and you are found out. It doesn’t matter if anyone else there knows, or if the whole world is oblivious, you know. What kind of person are you?  How could you?
It’s no wonder Judas hangs himself.  It’s kind of a surprise, frankly, that Peter is able to go on at all. 

I wonder what it was like in the garden before. I mean the very first garden. I mean before before. Before betrayal. And not just Judas’s kiss betrayal, I mean Adam and Eve’s apple betrayal.  What was it like before shame and regret? When they were free and unaware of their nakedness. Whole. Complete. Connected - to God, each other, the world around them. Responsible for each other. Responsible for creation. Accountable to God. In harmony. Fulfilling their purpose, embodying their identity.  Before they thought they knew better. Before they said the slogan of sin, decidedly, irreversibly, Me, not You.

Sin drives a wedge between them and God, them and each other, them and themselves, their own bodies, their own wholeness.  And then shame keeps them there. So self-conscious that they hide in woods, wont show their faces, wont show themselves.  They’re stuck.  Shame locks your limbs in, seals over your soul. There is no escape.

It must have been worse for Peter than anyone else when Jesus died. To have turned your back on a friend in their moment of greatest need, and never be able to make it right again. Death separated them. Death made reconciliation impossible, and it ended forever Peter’s view of himself. His future. His legacy. It obliterated all that Peter had thought he was becoming when he was with Jesus. All that had existed between them. It was over for him. Done. Jesus was gone. Death made it final.

But we are not left there. Where Peter was, the darkest of all places, the place that drove Judas to hang himself and end his life, the place that led Adam and Eve to hide themselves from their Creator, and led Cain to bury his brother’s body and not come out when God called, and leads fathers to leave their families, and sisters to hide in drugs, and mothers to layer on bitterness and hardeness, and friends to cut off from one another permanently, and us to avert our eyes from the suffering of those around us, because after you’ve said Me, not You, there is no retracting it, the shame descends, regret takes hold, and there is no turning back.  But we are not left there.

God’s response to their shame in the garden, God’s answer to Adam and Eve, was to cover them. God covered them. God took away their flimsy layer of leaves and robed them in skins. God recognized their shame and met them there. Forgiveness does that.

We don’t see Peter’s forgiveness here - but it’s coming. After the resurrection, it’s coming. Out of death, life will appear. Into Peter’s life will come forgiveness. And not just that, but restoration, fulfillment of who he was meant to be, called by God, a friend of Christ.  Into Peter’s life will come grace – pouring in and lifting him up, opening his hands and arms to touch and heal and his mouth to speak. Upon this rock, THIS rock, this one who disowned me in my darkest moment, I will build my church.  This one who has known what it is to be utterly lost, who has felt the depths of disloyalty of which he is capable.  Feed my sheep. Jesus will say.  I want YOU to feed my sheep.

Resurrection is coming for Peter.  But resurrection always begins with death, death of who we thought we were, the death of relationships and belonging. Where shame and regret have calcified our sin and cut us off from one another and God.  It is into those places of impossibility that resurrection will come.

Lent, though, asks us to take it a day at time, one step at a time. Lent invites us to sit in the feeling of shame and regret. To stay with Peter in that week.  Exposed and aware.  To recognize that feeling, that you could have, should have, acted differently, and you didn’t.

We don’t practice the act of confession much. We don’t close ourselves in a little booth and slide open the window to dump our darkness on a hidden listener.  We are supposed to confess to one another. We are supposed to carry that for each other, that common burden of sin, the powerful message of forgiveness – to say it and share it and remind each other of both. But we don’t, at least, not often.
Instead we come to church and in unison we give a general confession. We’ve turned our back on you, ignored our neighbor in need. Sins of commission and omission blah, blah.  And our heads stay down, our arms crossed, our selves protected from the harsh light of grace that would demand we reveal our duplicity, that we be exposed as sinners.

But What would it be to live honestly, truly honestly? To find the places of confession in our prayer? To trust so fully that we could bare our souls even in our darkest shame – our betrayals of each other and God?
 What would it be if we stayed awake with one another in the garden of that kind of prayer? If we heard each other’s confessions and pronounced to one another that we were forgiven? If we were able to tell each other where we had hurt someone, and then hear that we are not defined by that sin or shame, but by the grace and love of God?

Return to the garden, Lent invites us, the place of honesty in prayer. Where God clothes us in our shame.  Where Jesus falls across a rock and cries out in despair.  Where we are not alone in our sorrow or our guilt, our betrayal or our shame.
Return to the garden. The source of our life, the place of truth.  The place of confession, of self-revelation. The place of acknowledging weakness and culpability.
Come sit in the garden for a while.  Sit in the darkness until we can open our eyes and lift our gaze just enough, to whisper, not Me, You. Or Not my will, but yours. And then wait.

The only way to wholeness is to live in our brokenness, and let God meet us there. Lent invites us again to the garden. May we have the courage to come.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

On seeking a faithful response to Japan and other international crises...


My sister had to take a break from Facebook. She was feeling so overwhelmed by the situation in Japan, the conflict in Libya, the high school friend whose daughter died, that she was finding herself only half-present with her own kids, only partly engaged in her own life.  
The horror can be paralyzing.  And yet we cannot turn away.  Turning away would feel like abandoning them – not that we are actually WITH them anyway. We’re just watching their nightmare from afar, glued to every news story, every image, every facebook link, drunk on a stomach-churning cocktail of fascination and pity.  What are we to do?

The other day a pastor friend of mine shared with me that on 9/11, while the rest of the world shut down – neighborhood Starbucks closed, nobody outside, everyone glued to their TV screens, grieving, dismayed, afraid - the AA groups at his church still met. People still pulled up to the church building in their cars and filed inside to sit on folding chairs and share their struggle. They still came to offer one another support, to stand together in their common need.  My friend still marveled at what an impact that made on him.

We could use a little of that. 
Yesterday another friend sent an email asking for prayers for an upcoming job interview, but followed her request by immediately saying that her little need was nothing compared to all the suffering in Japan and the struggles in the Middle East, and so please, of course pray for those places first, but if we didn’t mind tacking on a prayer for her too, she’d appreciate it.  And I know she meant well – we all feel, in one way or another, so overwhelmed by the tragedy that we don’t know where we fit. Any needs we have pale in comparison. Anything happening in our neighborhood or home is nothing next to the sadness and horror of losing everything. 
We don’t want their tragedy to touch us-  West Coast pharmacies sell out of iodine pills because our fear-marinated society has people clamoring for protection against some effects of radiation, 5000 impossible miles away. We hold these tragedies at arm’s length with our prayers too, not intentionally, but it’s too much to take in.  We pray for the people in Japan. For Libya. For New Zealand and Egypt and Iraq and Haiti and Tunisia and the Gulf Coast of the United States and the homeless people in our own town. We pray for those people over there.  And we watch them like a movie.  Our lives colored by their suffering, but our sympathy making no impact on their situation whatsoever.  Soon it becomes something we say to placate our discomfort. We pray for them over there. Amen.  And if it goes on for too long, we become numb. We shut it off. They cease to exist and the next movie star scandal edges out their suffering on CNN.

So how do we live faithfully? How do we pray? How do we balance our own lives and needs and celebrations and struggles with what is happening in the world? 

 1- We live our lives. 
We are people grounded in time and space. We are embodied, in flesh and blood and experiences; we live in one place, and exist in one time.  And our lives are a gift. We are given to each other – family, friends, communities, to share life with one another.  We are called to do that faithfully. To be faithful friends, parents, brothers and sisters, faithful members of our communities and responsible for the place we’ve been planted for this time in life.  I cannot save anyone in Japan. Not even if I watch the news every second of every day.  Truth be told, I can’t even save the very people I love most on earth from suffering.  But I can be with them. I can stand by them and share their suffering. I can share joy and life with them, and that is being faithful.  Everywhere in the world right now, Japan included, there are people standing with other people, sharing suffering and joy, and that is the place God is present.  We are called to live faithfully where we are.

I sent some money to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance for Japan. But I also got an email yesterday from the owner of a little shop in our neighborhood that I frequent. The store, which was her dream for years, and then became reality, has been a source of joy and fun for my daughter and me.  It is now in financial trouble and may have to close if they don’t increase their business soon.  My mom loves their necklaces and I plan to go down there tomorrow and buy one for her.  I am here and need to live where I am.

2- We can pray from our reality.  
That God in Jesus Christ came into a specific time and place, embodied in flesh and blood and experiences means something.  And we meet Christ who shared life with us and bore death for us, when we share life and bear death with one another, in our concrete time and place.  We are called to live fully with the people to whom we’ve been given, the people who are given to us.

I cannot do that with people in Japan. I don’t know anyone there. I have never been there.  It might as well be a bad disaster movie, looping in the background of my life, for as much as it impacts my own world.  But my son has a friend in his kindergarten class who is from Japan. His dad is still over there. Out of harm’s way, he tells my son, but in Japan.  He must be afraid. And worried.  And how painful to be separated from your family when such a thing is going on?  Together my son and I can pray for his friend, and his dad, and the people they know and love who are impacted by the tragedy. That’s my human connection, my embodiment, my experience.

If you have no human connection to any of those places, you might find a single story, or a handful of stories, to follow. Something that connects to your own experience, that touches your life. The young mother your own age who lost both of her children, searching now on the Red Cross Lists for news of her own mother. Pray for her for a few weeks.  Or for the guy whose story gripped you because left his home to go help others and returned to find his home and family washed away.  Or the Red Cross team your niece's college roommate is working with. Pick one person or group and pray for them.

Or maybe give yourself 5 minutes a day to pray for these faraway places and people. Name the places of need, or write them down in a list. Hold them up to God. For 5 minutes give yourself over to the sadness and even pleading, that God would do something there. Haiti. Libya. Japan. Darfur. Afghanistan.  For five minutes pray for all the things you would otherwise carry around feeling heavy about. Then set it down. Leave it with God – who is there, with them, as they are bearing this with each other. You are here. Be here, with the ones you’ve been given to.

3 - We can notice beauty and speak hope.
Finally, as followers of Christ, as people with “eschatological imagination,” resurrection faith, hope in the God of eternity who is not bound by time and place, we are called to live from God’s promises and not from our fear. To notice what God is doing in the world and talk about it when we see it. We are called to join and participate in what God is doing in and around us.  
So another thing I can do is notice the stories of hope coming from these tragedies and share them. Against the cacophonic backdrop of incessant minute-by-minute reporting of horror and calamity, I can listen for and repeat the stories where people are sharing each other’s suffering. Stories of hope and solidarity; stories of life out of death and hope from despair.  Stories of beauty and of the presence of God.  For that matter, I can do that wherever I hear them, from whatever circumstances, communities or lives they arise.  I can practice seeing and saying hope.

A friend sent me this poem yesterday:
If you ignore beauty, 
you will soon find
yourself without it.

But if you invest in beauty,
it will remain with you
All the days of your life.
-Frank Lloyd Wright-

This is my stab at a faithful response: Turn off the never-ending news and live your life.  It's not very long. Invest in beauty and point out hope.  Love those around you. Bear their suffering.  Share their joy. Notice the connections - between people and people and people - that reach often into these situations of crisis so far away, and certainly into the ones right nearby. Be gentle with those connections and nurture them, you never know where they might lead.  Pray for the world from your own reality, and live faithfully in the time and place you have been planted.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

What the Garden really sounds like

Throughout Lent, at LNPC we are exploring the Biblical Stations of the Cross.  We have the stations up in our sanctuary, and the congregation is doing a Lenten Worship Project, bringing in images that we find in media, our lives, art, etc. and helping to construct one of the stations during worship each week.  This week, we began with Jesus Praying in the Garden, Station 1.

Praying at Gethsemane, by He Qi



Station 1: Jesus Praying in the Garden
Lenten Collage Words: Prayer, Pleading, Sorrow.





In the Garden - a reading in four parts

John:             After the strange dinner, where Jesus washed our feet, and Judas got up and left in the middle, we walked together up to the garden on the Mount of Olives as we had done so often before.  But this time Jesus was distressed and agitated, and the usually pleasant ritual was colored with a heavy sense of foreboding. 
When we arrived at our favorite spot we all began to find a comfortable place to sit under the stars and someone started building a fire.  It was a mild night, with the soft breeze rustling the olive trees, and the nervous small talk started up in the group while we waited for Jesus to sit down.

Peter:             But Jesus didn’t sit.  Instead he pulled aside me, James and John, and left everyone else gathered around the fire that was just starting up.

Jesus:            Stay here, you guys, while I go over there and pray.

Peter:            When we had gotten a little distance away from the others, he grabbed us by the arms, clinging to us.  His voice was strained, and there was anguish in his eyes.

Jesus:             This sorrow is crushing my life out! Please, Stay here and keep vigil with me.  I cannot do this alone. I need you to be with me.

James:            He walked a few paces away from us, and then he fell down on his face draped over a rock, and began to pray fervently.  We stood there for a minute in silence, then looked for a comfortable spot to sit down and wait.

Jesus:             My Father, please, if there is any way, get me out of this! Oh God! But, not what I want. I’ll do what you want. I will. But please, is this really what you want?!"

Peter:            He was so distraught!  He prayed so intensely, that the sweat was wrung out of him like great drops of blood.  But he didn’t let up – just prayed all the harder.  After a while, he got up and came back to where we were waiting.
He found us asleep.
James:             We didn’t know what to do.
He had never asked us to do anything like this before. 
He wasn’t teaching and we weren’t there to listen; he wasn’t asking us to run errands or take care of any details.
He just wanted us to sit there, near him, while he had this frightening utter breakdown. 
What can I say? We were embarrassed, self-conscious, overwhelmed and afraid.  I guess after the long, weird night, the dinner, the wine and the hours under the stars with no clear directions as to how we were supposed to help him, we just sort of… fell asleep.

Peter:             He shook us awake, well, kicked us actually, or me, at least. He was completely beside himself.  Soaked through with sweat, wild with frustration. 

Jesus:            You’re sleeping? Can’t you even stay awake with me for one hour? 

Peter:            He cried out at us, whether we couldn’t even stay awake with him for even one hour, though I am certain it had been much longer than that.  We felt terrible, ashamed but really uncomfortable too. What did he expect?

John:            He was afraid.  “This is so hard.”  he said to us. 
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is so weak.” 
He seemed deeply and genuinely afraid.  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, “and I pray for you – and you should too – that you never ever have to be in such a terrible time of trial as I am right now.

James:            It was then that the lights came bouncing over the hill and the sound of a raucous crowd met our ears.  He turned towards commotion, and said:

Jesus:            Get up.  My betrayer comes.  It begins.


Reflection


Tonight I want to debunk two myths about prayer.  The first one is that “prayer warriors", or those who pray a lot, those who rely on prayer, never doubt or struggle. I think we tend to picture people with strong prayer lives as those who have some kind of unshakable belief, some kind of certainty - that they pray with confidence, with sureness that they know what God wants, or even that they can tell God what God should do and God will do it.
This is one of many grave misconceptions about prayer. 

Here is Jesus praying. Jesus. Afraid. Alone. Pleading. Filled with sorrow. Knowing what is coming and wanting with everything inside him for it not to be so.  And telling God all of that. Just sitting with it in the presence of God and letting it all hang out. That Jesus – the very incarnation of God in humanity – would pray in this way, shows us that there is more to prayer than we might think.

Prayer is baring your soul to God. It isn’t censored for content; isn’t figuring out what we think God wants to hear and saying that. It’s trusting God enough to simply pour out our hearts. To plead. to beg. And it’s also trusting God enough to know yourself to be in God’s hands no matter what.

Being held by God doesn’t mean there wont be suffering. It doesn’t mean there wont be sorrow or pain. It means that those things cannot destroy you, you belong to God. And belonging to God means God wants to hear what we are afraid to say. And it means saying it can’t do a single thing to change the fact that God has got us.  God has got us.

Anne Lamott has said of her own life, "I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something [my friend] Father Tom had told me–that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns." 

Jesus showed us how to pray with this kind of faith.
Praying is the language of our life together. And it isn’t always expressions of gratitude, and it’s rarely declarations of certainty. Sometimes it is pleading. Sometimes it is sorrow. Sometimes it is groanings too deep for words. That is faithful prayer.

The other myth about prayer that I want to debunk tonight is that prayer is something best done alone.  Prayer, like everything about faith really – like reading scripture, like worship, like following Jesus and whatever that means in our lives – is best done with others. 
This is Jesus’ pain, Jesus’ grief. It’s his prayer here.  But he wants his friends around him. He wants them to be near him. Just to stay awake. Just not to leave him alone. Just to share – in some small way, and despite their confusion and discomfort – his sorrow, his terror.  His prayers find courage when others are nearby, holding him in love.  It’s not about what they say. There is nothing they can do. He doesn’t want them to give him good advice or religious cheer-ups!, he just wants them to share his grief so that he is not alone.  When they are there, God’s presence is tangible.  When they are with him, for him, he finds the strength, the voice, to trust God with his pain.

We gather tonight in the garden. The first Station of the Cross, the beginning of Jesus’ last week, and we seek to follow Jesus on this journey.  And truly this room is the garden.  Because earlier today, it was filled with flowers, and tears and people who were here to share sadness with someone they love.  People who have nothing to say, nothing to do, except to stay awake with and for their friends, to be near them in their terrible grief and unfathomable loss. 

As we lift up the world in prayer tonight, those we know and those we’ve never met, as we hold up tonight people suffering in unimaginable ways – earthquakes and tsunamis, losing children, and losing hope, and as we stand with each other in all the ways death breathes down our own necks, as we stand at the beginning of this journey to the cross, we do not shy away from pleading and sorrow.

We will encourage each other just to say what is, and not to try to clean it up with religious pep talks or give God easy outs.  We will come with the world’s pain and lay it before the cross.  In other words, we will pray. With Jesus in the garden, we will pray.

But we will also stand with and for each other, we will stand on behalf of the world, we will strive to do the very most basic thing we can – to stay awake and see and hear the pain and grief, not to hide from it or cover it up.  That is the way of faith. That is the way of Christ.
Amen.



"In the Garden" script copyright, Kara K Root. May be used with permission.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Entering Lent

In honor of Ash Wednesday approaching this week, I am reposting last year's Ash Wednesday Reflection. Enjoy.



image by Jan Richardson, used with permission
When I told Owen about Ash Wednesday, and making a cross on our forehead, he said, “But I already have a cross on my forehead.” 
He was speaking of his baptism. That he is marked as Christ’s own and claimed by God forever.  But his baptism was a baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ, that his very being is now taken up into the life of Christ – the death of Christ, the redemption of Christ.
And every experience he has in this life of death, each loss and pain he suffers and inflicts on others, each time something is taken from his being, each brokenness, each injustice – these things are all taken into Christ who bears them all on the cross.
So, I told him, “This time the cross we make on our forehead is one we can see. It is marked in ashes.  It represents death – Jesus’ death, but our own too. Because we are going into Lent, where we talk about how death has a hold on life, and how we participate in death, and how we all really need God’s life to destroy death.” 

He looked at me and touched his forehead and said, ‘Will you think of Grandma Root when you make your cross on your head?” 
“Yes, I will think of her," I answered, "because she is gone from us and death has separated her from us, and I will think of all the other ways that death separates us from each other. The ways death hurts us in life. Because when we spend some time remembering this, we know that even though death makes a mark on us, we belong to God and that can never change.  And we will be ready to talk about how God destroys death and brings life.”

We go into these next weeks, these 40 days of Lent following Jesus’ journey to the cross, and it helps us remember why.
Why do we celebrate the resurrection anyway?
Why does it matter that we have a God who died for us?
Why do we believe there is any hope in the story of Christ, in God’s story that we are part of? 

And we cannot know the hope, taste the promise, unless we are willing to really face the despair, unless we are willing to spend some time in the shadow side of life: 
the unanswered prayers, 
the guilt over relationships shattered 
and dreams traded away 
and promises broken 
and wounds gouged deep into our souls 
and inflicted on others by our own words or actions. 

Last week after Grandma Root’s funeral, Owen sat in the car holding his popped balloon that he had been playing with the whole day.  He finally sighed a big sigh and said, “Mommy, why are bad things happening?  Why does everything die?  Did God do a bad job making the world?” 

These are Lent questions.  
And too often we rush to answers instead of sitting in the questions.  
Lent gives us a chance to simmer in the questions.
Why do bad things happen? 
Why does everything have to die?  
Why did Jesus die?  
Why is the cross "good news"? 
We can’t know it to be good news until we spend some time in the bad, until we let ourselves stop faking or fearing, stop defending God and ourselves, stop ignoring our complicity and looking past the shame in our lives. 

Lent is an invitation to honesty.
It is a chance to clear away some of the noise- as cheerful or friendly or positive as the noise might be- to get rid of the distractions that protect us from having to face the doubts or the anger, the deep sadness or the piercing regrets.  It is an invitation to enter those things, as fearful as it sounds, to sit with those things and expect that God will encounter us. 

Lent is a time when we acknowledge sin and evil, and our participation in sin and evil, and recognize that we don’t deserve forgiveness but we stand here in need of it anyway,
It is a time when say we have a whole lot of questions and concerns about how the world is run and how life is going, and we are not going to hide them or explain them away; we’re going to swallow our fear and say them outloud, even if they seem too big to fix,
Lent is when we say from dust I came and to dust I will return, ashes to ashes, and we stare death in the face, and admit that we are unable to save ourselves or the world around us, and that we need a savior.

In Lent we stand with our flimsy faith drawn on our foreheads in ashes, of all things, and say as crazy a story as this is, as hard as it is to see hope sometimes,
I am going to risk it,
even with my doubt and my unfaithfulness and my hypocrisy and my self-righteousness, I stand here in the possibility that there might be more going on than I can see, and that redemption may be more real than I can imagine.

So we surrender ourselves to the story, our story, God’s story - that moves now through life’s horror and illusion and brings the Creator ultimately to death at the hands of his own creation and most astonishingly, on its behalf,
we submit ourselves to this story because in this story there might be a hope beyond what we can grasp, and we’re willing to risk letting it grasp us.

So we begin Lent today that we might be made ready for Easter. 
We begin Lent today that our eyes might be opened and our pain might rise to the surface, that our guilt might become obvious to us, that the world’s utter need might stand starkly before us – because there is a promise at the end of this journey,
and we can’t hear the promise in all its cosmic, world-changing power with all the religion and politics and business as usual in our ears,
and we can’t see the promise’s searing brilliance past all the self-importance and busyness, and personal agendas clouding our vision,
and we wont be able to really let the hope of our salvation wash over us, fill us, cleanse us and sustain us if our backs are turned because we’re too occupied being strong, or good, or right.

Lent prepares us for the good news of Easter. 
Bring your questions.  Bring your fears.  Bring your failures.
Lent is an invitation. 
May we accept it.

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