The 2nd Sunday of Lent: Our Journeys

         Years ago I went on a guided retreat at the Convent of the [Episcopal] Order of St. Helena.  The nun leading the retreat used the following prayer by Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations from 1954 - 1961 and a man of deep faith: 

“Creator of the world's joy

Bearer of the world's pain:

At the center of all our distress

Let unconquerable gladness dwell.

To see you is the end and the beginning;

You follow me and you go before;

You are the journey and the journey's end.”

This week, with these readings [Genesis 12: 1-4a; Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17; John 3: 1-17] and with what has happened in my life, this prayer seems remarkably apt.  For Fred [my husband] and I have embarked on an unplanned journey—many of you have experienced this journey yourselves or accompanied a loved one or a friend on it.  As most of you know, we have begun a journey into an illness marked by hard choices and difficult treatments with no guarantee of what the outcome will be.

Journeys can be through physical space, psychological space or spiritual space--or some combination of these.  As people of faith--as was Hammarskjold, as was Abram, and as was Nicodemus--we see our journeys as taken in hope and grounded in our faith that God can be trusted to accompany us from beginning to end.

“Creator of the world's joy

Bearer of the world's pain:

At the center of all our distress

Let unconquerable gladness dwell.

To see you is the end and the beginning;

You follow me and you go before;

You are the journey and the journey's end.”

Abram's journey from Haran came about because he understood God was calling him away from much of his family and familiar surroundings.  Scripture doesn't tell us why God chose Abram to undertake this journey.  Tradition suggests that he had come to know God in a way unlike the people in Haran and elsewhere.  God could not be seen and could not be shaped into a statue to worship.  But Abram had faith in God who could be trusted to keep God's promises. So Abram left the safety of all he knew to follow God's leading.  He could not know what God's promise meant for sure.  He had no idea about his final destination. But he believed; he had faith.  In his letter to the Christian community in Rome, Paul quotes Genesis 15: 6: "And he [Abram] believed the Lord [that his descendants would be as great in number as the stars]; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness."

“To see you is the end and the beginning;

You follow me and you go before;

You are the journey and the journey's end.”

Nicodemus's journey was mainly a spiritual one. This Pharisee had seen God more clearly in Jesus' ministry and teaching than most of his fellow religious leaders did.  His journey was inward for he used the word "know."  He said to Jesus, "We know you are a teacher who has come from God. . ."

Hammarskjold wrote this about this sort of inward journey:

“The way to insight does not pass through faith. First through the insight we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is. How many have not been driven out into the darkness by empty talk about faith as holding something to be true.”  (1941-42: Waymark 24)

To say it less poetically:  We gain understanding by searching the depth of our being for God's light.  Eventually we reach the point of understanding what faith is.  Declaring some statement must be accepted as truth drives out faith.

Nicodemus came to Jesus searching for truth and Jesus pushed him to look deeper within himself.  What Jesus said can be translated as "born again," "born anew," or "born from above."  Jesus is telling him that he must be willing to be transformed by water and Spirit—in other words—he must experience the power of God in his very being.  Nicodemus know the truth external to himself—the Law—but he appears not to understand the power of God to reveal God's self in the movement of the Spirit within him and within other seekers.  God's love for Nicodemus--and for us--caused Jesus to come to us, to live as one of us.  Understanding God's love for us as a deep truth within ourselves will lead us to eternal life.  This is faith!

So have we come this morning ready to allow the Spirit to blow where it will?  Even in the quiet moments of our liturgy, the Spirit may blow through us to transform us. It may blow away the dust and grime of our sins and allow us to see deep within ourselves, to see there the light of God. And seeing this light we come to understand what faith means, to trust in God's goodness and God's steady, loving and supporting presence for our journeys.

“Creator of the world's joy

Bearer of the world's pain:

At the center of all our distress

Let unconquerable gladness dwell.

To see you is the end and the beginning;

You follow me and you go before;

You are the journey and the journey's end.”

Ash Wednesday

As we stand before an open grave, saying the final prayers, these are the words we use: "In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother (or our sister) and we commit his (or her) body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

This holy season of preparation by alms giving, fasting and prayer we call Lent has bookends: Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.  Our prayer at the graveside shows the theological tie between them. We should not fear death--becoming dust--because we are filled with hope.  Our hope in the resurrection to eternal life should be unshakeable--"sure and certain hope" the prayer says.

Easter Sunday shines gloriously--even if the day is rainy--and lots and lots of folks come to worship.  What is your favorite part of the Easter worship service?  Music, flowers, preaching?? What I wonder is why many folks who worship on Easter don't show up on Ash Wednesday?  But all of you came to worship today for a reason.  Where are the others?

Is that celebrating resurrection, Christ's overcoming death, much more comfortable than facing our mortality?  Of course, it is! We understand death's sting, the pain of our grief when a friend or loved one dies.  Yet we usually live expecting to have tomorrow as a time to correct our mistakes and to do whatever is truly important to us, but which we have postponed for one reason or another.

Besides asking us to own up to our mortality, the ashes of this day remind us of our shortcomings, our sins, if you will. We intend to live as Jesus taught us, but we fail, we miss the mark and we find ourselves covered in the grime of the messes we have made. When today's ashes were blessed, they are called a "sign of our mortality and [our] penitence."

Perhaps truly admitting our shortcomings--even in the midst of everyone else admitting theirs--is just more than we want to do. Do our minds wander during the general confession on Sunday to our grocery lists?  Perhaps we don't even recognize our sins for what they are.  And if we have an inkling of how we might be hurting someone else or injuring ourselves, we can justify all that we have done.  I sometimes wonder in today’s world if true confession of sin has lost its relevance?

The practice in recent years of "Ashes-to-Go" calls into question the need to make a connection between recognizing our mortality and our sinfulness and confirming our sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life.  When we impose ashes on someone's forehead, should we check to see whether they have heard about the grace of God and the overcoming of death's power through Christ's resurrection? Are we cheating them or even harming them by this disconnection? 

The imposition of ashes and the words, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return," has real spiritual power.  A priest who participated in an Ashes-to-Go event reported that he was asked to impose ashes on some folks who weren't familiar with Christian ritual.  He noted: "I think they sort of realize it's an invitation to acknowledge limits. To bow down in public and say, 'I'm not in charge; I'm not going to live forever. [Even if they don't go to church they are] "really, really interested in doing that."

Yes, that would be a beginning, but this should not be where our witness to the world stops.  We always must share our Easter hope!

Walter Brueggemann, a contemporary theologian, has written a poem called, "Marked by Ashes" that shows the clear link between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.  I want to close by reading a portion of that poem:

" . . .but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes—

we begin this day with the bitter taste of ash in our mouth:

 of failed hope and broken promises,

 of forgotten children and frightened women,

     we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

     we can taste our own mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with

  some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes

  anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you—

   you Easter parade of newness.

  Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,

    Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;

    Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth. 

  Come here and Easter our Wednesday with mercy

     and justice and peace and generosity."

Last Sunday after Epiphany - Revelation and Transformation

In the 19th chapter of Exodus we find that Moses and God have been conversing on Mount Sinai.  Now God tells Moses to prepare the people for a great revelation of God's self "on the third day."  How did the writer of Exodus describe that revelation?  "Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended up on it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln while the whole mountain shook violently . . "  God consented to have Aaron join Moses in ascending to the top of the mountain and entering the cloud.  To them God spoke words of commandment.  The last verses of chapter 20 give a slightly different view of the context where the author says the people were afraid of having God speak to them directly--rather than God telling Moses to keep the people away--and asked Moses to be the go-between.  So Moses alone "drew near to the thick darkness where God was."

If we compare the story of the giving of the Law from Exodus with the story of the Transfiguration from Matthew's gospel, we will be struck by the similarities: it takes place on a mountain, the vision of God is in a cloud and the observers show fear at God's revelation.  Another similarity also strikes us: the people who know what has happened are expected to listen to the one through whom the words of God are conveyed.  What's happening then?  As a seminary professor said of this passage, "This is God being God."

Christians over the centuries have interpreted this passage as Jesus' being identified as the one whose message will supersede the Hebrew Scriptures containing the Law and the prophetic writing (Moses and Elijah).  But it may be more fruitful to see the Transfiguration--called "a luminous story of a mystical encounter" by Barbara Brown Taylor--as God's continuing revelation in which all parts of this revelation are important for us.  Jesus came to live in the context of God's continuing revelation. He said he did not come to change the Law of the Hebrew Scriptures in any way, but to fulfill it.

We have three different versions of this mystical encounter.  Matthew, Mark and Luke  describe it in slightly different ways--so we hear each version once in the three year cycle of readings.  One detail that distinguishes Matthew from the other two versions is the cloud.  Mark and Luke refer to a cloud as overshadowing Peter, James and John.  Going even further, Luke describes the overshadowing cloud as engulfing the disciples: "and they were terrified as they entered the cloud." But Matthew calls it a bright cloud.  So it appears that scripture offers these two visions of God's revealing God's self: dark cloud and bright cloud. 

For an anonymous English writer in the Middle Ages, this dark cloud was the "Cloud of Unknowing."  This cloud was what keeps us from experiencing God.  This writer, usually just called The Cloud, describes three stages of Christian living.   In the first stage our love of God can be seen in "corporal works of mercy."  In the second will be characterized by our meditating on our "own sinfulness, the Passion of Christ, and the joys of eternity."  This may happen during our time of corporate worship, meditative reading of scripture and in our private prayers for others and for ourselves.

The final stage is described by The Cloud this way: "a person enters the dark cloud of unknowing where in secret and alone he [or she] centers all his [or her] love on God."  The Cloud says our prayer without words send arrows of love for God into the cloud and--on occasion--God shows God's self as the cloud separates momentarily.  He described this "unoccupied" prayer, this prayer without words, this contemplative prayer as the highest form of spiritual practice.  Yet he also says God may or may not respond with revelation.  God chooses when to reveal God's self--we do not earn this grace.

Yet Matthew describes the cloud from which God speaks as bright, not concealing.  The brightness causes just as much consternation and fear as the enveloping cloud did.  The disciples fall to the ground overcome by their vision of glory and by the voice from the cloud.  For me, and perhaps for you as well, this bright cloud explains how I understand God.  God's glory is apparent; the light of God will illuminate the dark corners of my world. It could very well frighten me, but I also find comfort in the clarity of such a revelation.

Barbara Brown Taylor describes it this way: "Most of us are allowed at least one direct experience of God (within bounds)--something that knocks us for a loop, blows our circuits, calls all our old certainties into question."

Calling "all our old certainties into question"--that could describe God's purpose in the Transfiguration and the words from the cloud--dark or bright as it may be. Peter's certainty appears to have been this: if you encounter God and no place for God to dwell, build one so God will hang around. Peter's new understanding: God will not be contained or kept just for us.

What certainties do we cling to?  In ways less dramatic than the Transfiguration vision, is God calling us to see things with new eyes?  Might God be calling us to a deeper understanding of God's will?  Might God be calling us to be less fixed in our beliefs and more open to what others have to say?  Might God be calling us "to respect the dignity of every human being" in ways which we are just now beginning to understand?

The Transfiguration vision continues a long tradition of "God being God."  Let us be aware of such moments in our lives-- transformative moments when we discover a new way of seeing, a new understanding, a new openness.  I believe God creates these moments for us.  Then God uses them to help us become more faithful followers of Jesus. Look out for these moments--be ready to be changed!

Barbara Brown Taylor quotes from "The Bright Cloud of Unknowing," a sermon published on Day1.org - for March 2, 2014 on Matthew 17: 1-9.