4 Lent B 2009
(Num 21: 4-9; Ps 107: 1-3, 17-22; Eph 2: 1-10; John 3: 14-21)
Creating is costly for God.
Rabbis long ago told the story that, in the beginning, there was only God, and God was everywhere. In fact God filled all things, and there was no room for anything else. So God voluntarily withdrew and made an open place. In that open space the world came to be.
Creating is costly for God. Healing is even more costly.
Today the Hebrew Scripture tells a bizarre story of how God cures snakebite. The people of God are on their desert journey, and as usual they “grumble” and complain about not enough water and the dull food that God provided. God is stung by their complaints and sends poisonous snakes to sting them back. The people cry out and Moses prays. And God prescribes the strangest cure for snakebite—make a bronze serpent and hold it up, and anyone who looks on the snake will be healed.
The last thing in the world I want to see after a snake-bite is a snake! We could dismiss this story as a tribal tale that remembers sacred snake-images. A number of cultures, including Druid beliefs, associated snakes with healing power. But there is much more in this story than old symbols.
Every day people undergo surgery. We accept the strange notion that in order to heal a body, it is often necessary to wound it, to cut it. And those who seek psychotherapy learn that healing involves exploring their pain, re-visiting those actions and events that gave birth to their symptoms. Only by entering again into their pain do they have hope of healing.
Deep and true healing does not mean fleeing from pain, but rather entering into pain and pain’s source. In the desert the people are wounded by their alienation from God and from one another as they continue to walk towards freedom and encounter their lack of faith and trust. So facing an image of their deep pain in order to be saved from suffering may not be so strange. But what of God in all of this? Where is the God who paid a cost to bring creation itself into being?
The God who sent snakes and then proscribed a healing serpent image is not some cold punishing deity. This God who paid a cost at creation itself loves the people who journey in the wilderness—he hears their cries and set them free, feeds them and carries them. They were made and known and loved in the divine heart who made room for them. This relationship is passionate and committed, it’s a blood-bond, a covenant. Even if God is involved in their suffering, God suffers with them, God feels the pain they feel. That bronze serpent is not some clever symbol made for a people who respond to magic images. It is an ikon meant to express beyond words the God who suffers with his people’s pain. The bronze serpent expresses the wild, strange, wounded heart of the God who takes to heart the pain of his beloved people.
Jesus in John’s Gospel calls himself the bronze serpent. He is lifted on the cross as Moses’ healing serpent was lifted up. God’s wild, wounded, suffering heart is more than a bronze symbol. God made flesh is lifted and wounded and is one with his suffering people. God will be our healing and our hope for ever.
In whatever wilderness in which we walk, in whichever desert, in whatever desolate place that we God’s beloved people find ourselves today, look up. Long ago a strange image was lifted high in front of desperate people in the wilderness, and they were made well. Today look upon the heart of God, lifted up before us on the cross. Look up and know healing, hope, and new life.
archived musings and preachments
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Not alone
2 Lent B 2009
(Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16; Ps 22: 22-30; Rom 4: 13-25; Mark 8: 31-38)
Years ago a young man entered a strict monastery not far from here. He was devout and filled with ideals, and he loved the life he found—the simple diet, the silence, the manual work, the hours of prayer in the church and the private meditation in his cell. He loved it, even after the first glow wore off and he realized he had just done everything that he was going to be doing for the rest of his life. Then three years went by and things just kept getting harder. Each day felt like an uphill climb. He just wanted a change, any change. His life seemed to stretch ahead of him like a bleak desert landscape, featureless and dry. Finally he went to the Abbot and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I think of that monk as I hear these readings. We’ve settled into our Lenten walk, and today we hear some straight stuff from Jesus as to what his own walk will be. Not exactly joy and delight—suffering, rejection, and death, and only then resurrection. Peter himself takes him on and, for his pains, gets called “Satan.”
Maybe Peter was scared at the dark, “emo” kind of things his teacher and friend was saying. Maybe in the tense politics of 1st century Palestine Peter knew that all that talk was dangerous. As usual, the Bible doesn’t give us Peter’s inner monologue. Instead, it leaves us with our own.
I had this text before me one night back in the early ‘80’s in the Philippines. The student community and I had decided to stay in the village where we were subject to paramilitary attacks and ambushes. During the silent meditation period late one afternoon, I was reading that part about “those who want to save their life will lose it” when a burst of automatic rifle fire went off a couple of hundred yards away. We sheltered frightened villagers that night, and I waited with the farmers holding their pathetic cultivating knives in the shadow of the chapel while the guerillas crept close enough to silence the crickets in the bushes. To this day, I do not know why they did not fire.
Several weeks later, like the monk with the abbot, I went to my superior and said “I can’t do this.”
Is this bad news, or good news? None of us can shoulder our personal cross alone. No one really “handles” their lives. No one can face their own burdens, their own vulnerabilities, their own challenges alone. We do not have to. We are not meant to. The Gospel is not about our being strong. The Gospel is about God being strong in us.
“I can’t do this anymore,” said the younger monk to the abbot. The abbot grinned, for he had been there before. So has everyone who has tried to follow a Gospel path, to follow Jesus amidst the stresses and challenges of their own lives and that of a world indifferent to the Gospel’s strange power. “Good,” replied the abbot. “Stop trying. Just keep showing up for stuff.” After thirteen years, the monk is still there.
Keep showing up—to our lives, to our faith, to our God. It’s not a magic formula, it does not make everything feel all right. But everything is somehow different. We let God be God when we let go of trying to get it clear and get it right and instead journey humbly with one another, listening, praying for the grace to love another day, pray another day, trust another day.
Old Abram in the desert had come a long way, and was tired and squinty-eyed from looking at the sun. Sarai was way beyond the stresses and changes of pregnancy and childbearing in the desert. But they were not done. They trusted in the one who spoke. New names, an old promise made new, new life and new strength to live it. When we let God be strong, we set free the strange power of the Gospel. We set free Christ’s power to transform us, transform the world.
(Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16; Ps 22: 22-30; Rom 4: 13-25; Mark 8: 31-38)
Years ago a young man entered a strict monastery not far from here. He was devout and filled with ideals, and he loved the life he found—the simple diet, the silence, the manual work, the hours of prayer in the church and the private meditation in his cell. He loved it, even after the first glow wore off and he realized he had just done everything that he was going to be doing for the rest of his life. Then three years went by and things just kept getting harder. Each day felt like an uphill climb. He just wanted a change, any change. His life seemed to stretch ahead of him like a bleak desert landscape, featureless and dry. Finally he went to the Abbot and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I think of that monk as I hear these readings. We’ve settled into our Lenten walk, and today we hear some straight stuff from Jesus as to what his own walk will be. Not exactly joy and delight—suffering, rejection, and death, and only then resurrection. Peter himself takes him on and, for his pains, gets called “Satan.”
Maybe Peter was scared at the dark, “emo” kind of things his teacher and friend was saying. Maybe in the tense politics of 1st century Palestine Peter knew that all that talk was dangerous. As usual, the Bible doesn’t give us Peter’s inner monologue. Instead, it leaves us with our own.
I had this text before me one night back in the early ‘80’s in the Philippines. The student community and I had decided to stay in the village where we were subject to paramilitary attacks and ambushes. During the silent meditation period late one afternoon, I was reading that part about “those who want to save their life will lose it” when a burst of automatic rifle fire went off a couple of hundred yards away. We sheltered frightened villagers that night, and I waited with the farmers holding their pathetic cultivating knives in the shadow of the chapel while the guerillas crept close enough to silence the crickets in the bushes. To this day, I do not know why they did not fire.
Several weeks later, like the monk with the abbot, I went to my superior and said “I can’t do this.”
Is this bad news, or good news? None of us can shoulder our personal cross alone. No one really “handles” their lives. No one can face their own burdens, their own vulnerabilities, their own challenges alone. We do not have to. We are not meant to. The Gospel is not about our being strong. The Gospel is about God being strong in us.
“I can’t do this anymore,” said the younger monk to the abbot. The abbot grinned, for he had been there before. So has everyone who has tried to follow a Gospel path, to follow Jesus amidst the stresses and challenges of their own lives and that of a world indifferent to the Gospel’s strange power. “Good,” replied the abbot. “Stop trying. Just keep showing up for stuff.” After thirteen years, the monk is still there.
Keep showing up—to our lives, to our faith, to our God. It’s not a magic formula, it does not make everything feel all right. But everything is somehow different. We let God be God when we let go of trying to get it clear and get it right and instead journey humbly with one another, listening, praying for the grace to love another day, pray another day, trust another day.
Old Abram in the desert had come a long way, and was tired and squinty-eyed from looking at the sun. Sarai was way beyond the stresses and changes of pregnancy and childbearing in the desert. But they were not done. They trusted in the one who spoke. New names, an old promise made new, new life and new strength to live it. When we let God be strong, we set free the strange power of the Gospel. We set free Christ’s power to transform us, transform the world.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Temptation
1 Lent B 2009
Genesis 9: 8-17; Ps 25; 1 Peter 3: 18-22; Mark 1: 9-13
I have had two great temptations.
One happened at my diaconal ordination. Seven of us stood in the impressive sanctuary of St. James Cathedral a great deal of fuss was made over us. A tall and stately bishop pressed his hands on our heads, we were vested in finery, and finally we stood proudly in front of a packed house while people applauded. Then a voice from somewhere said quietly, “Congratulations. You really are this, the lights, the vestments, the attention, the applause. You really are a little better than average.”
This temptation still happens, at least once a week, only without the bishop and the cathedral.
The other temptation happened when I left my old Catholic Order. The first job I had was a pretty good match, but I resigned after a serious disagreement with the boss. My second job I quit because I hated it and I was terrible at it. So that year I was unemployed over Christmas and I had no idea what to do with the rest of my professional life. A voice came to me again—“You’re really no good at much of anything useful, you know. You’re just not worth a lot.”
You’re better than the rest. You’re nothing. This is the face of temptation, at least for me, and for many of us. Serious temptation is not the urge to do naughty things. Temptation is not the urge to ask “What would Ned Flanders do?” and feel bad when we don’t do it. Serious temptation is the strange attraction to be something other than who we are, to trade the gift of our basic selves for anything else, anything less.
We are the beloved of God. We are bound to the God of heaven and of earth. We are in the image of God, participate in the nature of God, are in the process of becoming God.
The sole purpose of the Bible is to shout that good news in our ears. The Noah-story cries out that the deepest truth is not that of reward and punishment. God so loves us that God swears there will be no more flood to punish, no divine attempt to hit the “reset” button for humanity. God swears this. We live under the rainbow of that promise.
We are the beloved of God. God sets us free. Christ has taken all the basic temptations we face upon himself. His ministry began with his baptism, where he heard that astonishing voice—“You are my Beloved.” Then, Spirit drives him to the desert. Beloved, desert, temptation all live together in one mystery. And there are others with him—wild beasts, and angels. Jesus shows us the way to liberation, and takes us with him, so it is we who heard the voice saying “Beloved”, it is we who are driven into the desert, it is we who pass through temptation, it is we who emerge with Jesus transformed.
But the mystery is, we still need to walk our own path of temptation.
We walk it with complete hope, since strangely enough the victory is already won. But we each walk our path to make the victory our own. We each hear temptation’s voice—“You really are different from everyone else”, or “you really are nothing.” It’s one and the same.
When Spirit drives us into the desert this Lent, know that it is a Spirit-path we walk. Welcome the wild beasts, the earthy wild wondrous truth of our own nature and the wondrous freedom of the wild world. Welcome the angels, who come in many forms, who love disguises, but who will help us when we are most in need.
And hold close the echo of that wondrous voice—“You are my Beloved.” These are the words and this is the Speaker that transforms the desert into the place where we find our home.
Genesis 9: 8-17; Ps 25; 1 Peter 3: 18-22; Mark 1: 9-13
I have had two great temptations.
One happened at my diaconal ordination. Seven of us stood in the impressive sanctuary of St. James Cathedral a great deal of fuss was made over us. A tall and stately bishop pressed his hands on our heads, we were vested in finery, and finally we stood proudly in front of a packed house while people applauded. Then a voice from somewhere said quietly, “Congratulations. You really are this, the lights, the vestments, the attention, the applause. You really are a little better than average.”
This temptation still happens, at least once a week, only without the bishop and the cathedral.
The other temptation happened when I left my old Catholic Order. The first job I had was a pretty good match, but I resigned after a serious disagreement with the boss. My second job I quit because I hated it and I was terrible at it. So that year I was unemployed over Christmas and I had no idea what to do with the rest of my professional life. A voice came to me again—“You’re really no good at much of anything useful, you know. You’re just not worth a lot.”
You’re better than the rest. You’re nothing. This is the face of temptation, at least for me, and for many of us. Serious temptation is not the urge to do naughty things. Temptation is not the urge to ask “What would Ned Flanders do?” and feel bad when we don’t do it. Serious temptation is the strange attraction to be something other than who we are, to trade the gift of our basic selves for anything else, anything less.
We are the beloved of God. We are bound to the God of heaven and of earth. We are in the image of God, participate in the nature of God, are in the process of becoming God.
The sole purpose of the Bible is to shout that good news in our ears. The Noah-story cries out that the deepest truth is not that of reward and punishment. God so loves us that God swears there will be no more flood to punish, no divine attempt to hit the “reset” button for humanity. God swears this. We live under the rainbow of that promise.
We are the beloved of God. God sets us free. Christ has taken all the basic temptations we face upon himself. His ministry began with his baptism, where he heard that astonishing voice—“You are my Beloved.” Then, Spirit drives him to the desert. Beloved, desert, temptation all live together in one mystery. And there are others with him—wild beasts, and angels. Jesus shows us the way to liberation, and takes us with him, so it is we who heard the voice saying “Beloved”, it is we who are driven into the desert, it is we who pass through temptation, it is we who emerge with Jesus transformed.
But the mystery is, we still need to walk our own path of temptation.
We walk it with complete hope, since strangely enough the victory is already won. But we each walk our path to make the victory our own. We each hear temptation’s voice—“You really are different from everyone else”, or “you really are nothing.” It’s one and the same.
When Spirit drives us into the desert this Lent, know that it is a Spirit-path we walk. Welcome the wild beasts, the earthy wild wondrous truth of our own nature and the wondrous freedom of the wild world. Welcome the angels, who come in many forms, who love disguises, but who will help us when we are most in need.
And hold close the echo of that wondrous voice—“You are my Beloved.” These are the words and this is the Speaker that transforms the desert into the place where we find our home.
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