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John alone gives us this summation of the extended talk Jesus had with his disciples on the night he is arrested. It is a farewell conversation. Jesus knows he is going to die, and he wants to prepare the disciples with instructions and reminders. It goes on for 4 chapters. So our scripture this morning is just brief piece of it. But there is plenty here to chew on. And John, of course, throughout his gospel, doesn’t really distinguish between what he says as sermonic reflection and what Jesus himself says. There are no quotation marks around any of this.
So, on their last evening together, John recounts Jesus telling the disciples not to be worried or stressed, and to keep believing, both in himself and God’s presence in the world. It is all part of his final conversation with them as he tries to fortify them before his death. As we know. their faith will be tested–not only by Jesus’ death but ultimately with events in the world and their own untimely deaths. Stephen, who we heard about in our first scripture, was the first martyr, but certainly not the last.
Philip – (for once you note it is not Peter speaking up) Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father. He wants one of those dramatic mystical experiences –Perhaps he feels it will be a little easier to “Keep the Faith” if he just had a little more to go on; something more dramatic he can hold on to!
Probably most of us feel that way at times, – You know –“Lord I need a little help here, -something a little more Concrete- there are so many things that don’t seem right in this world, and so many questions!” Philip apparently doesn’t remember the parable about the Mustard seed faith – Jesus says simply, –“If you have seen me you have seen the Father” —If you have heard my teaching, If you have observed my works, and my caring—healing the untouchables, and eating with those called sinners, you should know this is the way God is…and the way you need to be. If you wonder what’s happened, and why, just know that I am with God — and God is with me…. And God’s infinite and intimate embrace is there for you also.—Just keep following me and the way I have shown you. In this context Jesus’ words in this passage, which seem to have exclusivist overtones, do not actually refer to an exclusion of all other faiths, or present a hard edged condemnation of all who all who do not take him to be the messiah. Instead, his words point to the extreme nature of God’s love and grace revealed through him and the call for them to follow him in trusting God.
Jesus’ life and ministry clearly is a rejection of narrow minded exclusivism which would deny access to God for anyone not washed in orthodoxy. When Jesus tells the disciples “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places” he is speaking metaphorically. Dwelling with the Father, or being in a close loving family relationship with God, is not a narrow, exclusive club, but a spacious, roomy place to dwell. Maybe he is even suggesting: “You’ll be surprised at some of your neighbors!”
Dr. A. B. Masilamini was a Baptist theologian and evangelist in India, where he had to come to terms the exclusivity claims of some in Christianity, commented on this in one of his conferences on inter-faith dialogue:
“Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.’ Your western ears hear Jesus saying that he is the only way to God, but that is not what he says. He is an eastern mind speaking to eastern minds. They hear the emphasis being on the Father (Abba). What Jesus is saying is that he is the only way to come to know God in personal relationship similar to that of a child to his daddy”. This does not weaken a sharing of the gospel, as you might think. Instead it allows a Christian to say to someone of another faith, that Jesus offers something unique, a close relationship to God.”
So, what’s God like? God is like Jesus, who will sit down with five thousand strangers. It doesn’t matter, prostitutes and Pharisees, Greeks and Jews, peasants and priests – He shared a meal with them all, with no opportunities to check the purity of the kitchen where the bread was baked, or the cleanness of the countless pairs of hands that got the food to you. God is like Jesus, who was reviled, persecuted, tortured, and executed, and yet spoke words of forgiveness to his tormentors. God is like Jesus, who taught us that the kingdom of God would be ushered in not with the political and military muscle of kings and generals, but quietly raised from mustard seeds of faith. Faith that could touch the unclean, feed the hungry, heal those bound by disease, invite the outcast, and reconcile enemies. God is like Jesus, who could humble himself and wash other people’s feet.
All the major faiths have some exclusive edges to them. What we have to do as Christians when we encounter these passages in our multicultural society and world, is simply remember that Jesus never used, or misused religion to attack others except for the pompous and phony ones of his own faith background. His focus was on bringing the grace of God into the places of this world where it was needed most.
John doesn’t tell about the Last Supper, he knows that others have told that story. Instead he tells of foot washing and an intimate conversation underlining that God is with us, even, or maybe most especially, in the dark and uncertain times. And that by knowing Jesus we know what God is like! —
Today we come to that meal the other gospels tell of, the meal that was the sacrament of God’s grace. We eat in remembrance of Jesus, acknowledging and embracing his words of forgiveness and God’s continued embrace of us. This meal expresses what God is like! –Amen.
We read a portion of this passage from the gospel of John every year around the 4th Sun. after Easter. The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one everyone knows.
To get John’s setting right we should note that this passage comes right after Jesus has healed a blind man –on the Sabbath. It had created quite a controversy because the Pharisees didn’t believe the healing was authentic and accused the man of faking blindness to support Jesus. They then kicked the man out of the synagogue. We had that story back in March. Jesus tells this parable as a response.
So, for all its bucolic imagery which we all remember from Sunday school, this parable starts with the backdrop of the religious elite being frustrated and angry. –Angry, that this upstart from the hinterlands, is causing a lot of clamor on a holy day, even though they deny the healing even happened. They are no doubt saying their equivalent of “Fake News!” about the man’s healing, on the one hand, and then chastising Jesus for violating the Sabbath by healing right in the Temple courtyard.
-And this was no ordinary holy day. It was the Feast of the Dedication (the holiday we know today as Hanukkah, when Jewish people celebrate the rededication of the Temple after the victory of Judas Maccabeus in 2nd century BCE). So this holy-day was loaded with political ramifications, especially the hope of freedom from foreign domination. It was something of a religious 4th of July celebration. With Jerusalem’s population swelling to around two to three times its normal population for this festival, the air had to be filled with religious and political anticipation. The Romans, understandably, don’t want crowds getting too excited with religious fervor as they celebrate the ancient fight for independence.
And so, here Jesus is, in trouble again! Mind you he has already done his Temple cleansing in John, you remember, overturning tables & critiquing how the Temple is being run. Not to mention he has all along been breaking some of the religious rules, and now this, stirring up this emotional crowd with a healing on a high holy day. A healing that demonstrated God’s power in the world and his own prophetic credentials.
Caiaphas, who was the High Priest during Jesus’ ministry, had the longest tenure of all the high priests appointed by Rome, -there were 18 appointed during the 80 year reconstruction of the temple- so we assume he worked the hardest to accommodate Rome’s expectations of keeping the protests and unrest down during the religious festivals as well as overseeing the workings of the temple and its staff. Perhaps he didn’t want the festival goers getting too excited about this messianic prophet during the Hanukkah celebration.
Some commentators even suggest that “The Wolf” in the parable might be a veiled reference to Rome –that dominating power that had devoured Israel –and all else in the Mediterranean area.
Rome considered Judaism an historic faith, but it wasn’t about to let any longings for independence and self-determination go unchecked. -Not unlike Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine, I suppose.
Coming as it does then, in the context of religious and political holy-day tension between Jesus and the established religious authorities this Shepherding passage takes on a harder edge in its tone. Might Jesus have been making a jab at those “Hired hands” of Rome when he contrasts himself as the true shepherd, not a hired hand who runs away when the sheep are in danger?
There was a biblical history of course of using the shepherding metaphor. –In Psalm 23 God is the Good Shepherd. The Prophets often accuse religious and political leaders as being bad shepherds in their critique of the injustice of their times.–And, of course, King David was viewed as the epitome of the “Good Shepherd King” who looked after the welfare of the people and gave the nation security –not to mention, he started out as a shepherd boy.
Shepherding in itself is far more gritty than the image often conjures up in our minds. We usually have that pastoral picture in mind of a quiet green pasture with a flock of gentle sheep with a shepherd calmly standing by leaning on his long staff… Or perhaps, the pristine picture of a smiling Jesus carrying a young lamb on his shoulders. He’s dressed, of course, in a flowing clean white robe. –Never mind that most shepherds in the first century had only one robe that they wore all the time and it rarely stayed clean –even when they got a chance to wash it every few weeks! –They were a part of pheasant class after all, out with the animals, the grass, the dirt and the manure.
Domesticated Sheep are gentle animals, but they do get sick and lost, and preyed upon, all of which the shepherd has to be on watch for…twenty four seven. –Shepherding was not a “White Collar” job…any more than herding cattle is. You are in the fields spring through fall no matter the weather.
The truth is first century Judeans may have romanticized the job just as we romanticize being a cowboy. For them shepherding had all these associations with King David, with a purer, freer, more gallant, earlier life in their history. But in truth it was a low wage pheasant job in the first century. That’s why “Hirelings” or hired hands were not the most dependable folks and not too often willing to risk their lives for some wealthy man’s sheep. –And yes, human beings do sometimes act like lost sheep! Rollo May the esteemed psychologist once said, “Humans are the strangest of all God’s creatures, because they run the fastest when the have lost their way.”
–All that added to the backdrop of the contrast between the “Good Shepherd” and the “Hired Hand”.
In the parable then, Jesus says more than one simple thing. Yes, he says rather clearly that he represents the authentic caring of God. That he is God’s representative on earth… trying to guide and nurture… lead and protect… providing security and a full life for those in his care….those who follow him. –And says rather emphatically that as the ‘Good Shepherd’ he willingly is ready to lay down his life for the sheep.
But Jesus may also be making a rather pointed jab at the religious elite who are appointed from the upper classes by Rome… to serve the interests of Rome…
He may even have been hitting at that domination system of first century politics which saw the small upper class own most of the land –which was the primary means of wealth– and hired out laborers for subsistence wages. –It was an economic system of domination as well as a political system of domination.
God’s coming kingdom, you remember, Jesus said, was to be different than this one: –“The first will be last and the last first” –A rather revolutionary statement when you consider the politics of the day. At the very least he was saying that God’s intention for the world was something totally different than the setup that had privilege for the few and poverty and domination for the masses.
From the start, John’s gospel has a very elevated sense of who Jesus is –The One who comes as the incarnation of the Creator, “The Word made flesh”, – who critiques the world and all its systems. But John also portrays Jesus as one who offers himself as reconciling gift and as a light to shine amid the darkness and a shepherd to follow and rely on through all the trials of our lives, and finally the Risen Christ who reigns on high.
May that Christ shepherd your lives and give you peace and strength.
As Luke tells his version of the Resurrection, we have to remember that in his Easter story the women have reported the empty tomb, and Peter has gone to see the tomb opened but seen nothing else. There has been no Resurrection appearance. In fact, the apostles we are told, think the story of the angels appearing to the women and telling them that Jesus had been raised is “An idle tale”.
So, in Luke it is a very grief stricken, couple who are walking back home from Jerusalem to Emmaus this Easter afternoon. We assume that since Luke says one of the pair was Cleopas, and John says that the wife of Cleopas was there at the Crucifixion with Mary and other women, that this is a husband and wife, Cleopas and his wife, who is another Mary.
They had to be weighted down with grief and disillusionment. They had been a part of that larger group of followers and may have been relatives of Jesus. When you picture them walking it must have been with their heads down, in a very dispirited journey home. They had thought God was with Jesus, that he was the Messiah, but now they wonder. They can hardly believe what has happened. Everything they believed has come crumbling down around them.
There have been a few things that have happened in my lifetime that have caused me to have that stunned disbelief when I first heard it. You know, that kind of shock that almost makes one say, “Can that be true”? –For me it was when President Kennedy was shot… when I heard of the Oklahoma City bombing, when I saw the pictures of the Challenger explode and break apart as it launched, and when I saw the planes plow into the Twin Towers in New York. One had to ask “How can this be! -Is it real?” I was shaken by the impact of those images.
That has to be what was going on with these two as they walked that Emmaus road. There would have been no spring in their step.
So, when this stranger comes walking up to join them and asks what they are talking about, it stops them in their tracks. They couldn’t help but wonder where he had been the last few days.
“Have you not heard?”, they ask. “All of Jerusalem has been in an uproar, we thought Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet of God, the Messiah, but our leaders turned him over to the Romans and they crucified him. This morning someone had moved the stone from in front of his tomb and it was empty. Some of the women had an angelic vision that he was alive, but no one has seen him, or found his body.
They continue their walk along together, towards Emmaus. -It takes most of us more than two hours to walk 7 miles usually, so there was plenty of time to discuss bible prophecy and interpretation, as well as the week’s events, which they did. They were trying, with the help of this stranger, to put some understanding and meaning around what had happened.
As they approach the couple’s home, they ask this stranger to stay with them since it was getting towards sunset. He joins them for the evening meal. Luke clearly intends it to have allusions to the Last Supper. The stranger blesses the bread and gives thanks. It is then that they realize this is not a stranger, he is the Risen Christ.
Luke pictures this as a mysterious revelation of the Risen Christ, but also a reminder, of Jesus saying, “Where two or three of you are gathered in my name I am there in the midst of you.”
We live in a world where “stranger” seems to be synonymous with danger! We’ve just recently had four young people shot because they went to the wrong house or went to the wrong car, or the wrong driveway! -Someone immediately feels threatened and because they have a gun -they shoot. Fear overruns common sense! None of those shooters were expecting to meet Christ in the form of strangers safe to say, or had any plans to invite the stranger in certainly. I have to wonder, are people living with a constant sense of threat, or with this lingering paranoid feeling that anyone they don’t recognize, especially if they look a little different, is out to get them? Maybe all the vitriol and violent language, as well as images that have become a part of our culture have scarred the American psyche.
But Luke invites us to see the stranger in a sacramental way. Imagine, an hours long conversation over religion and politics, as they walked, and it ends with diner and the Risen Christ being seen in a stranger!
It’s no surprise I guess that Luke would be the one to give us this exploration of the Resurrection story. He is the one who tells of the Good Samaritan, who rescues a stranger on the road, and the healing of a Roman Army officer’s servant by Jesus. He is the one who tells of the Spirit of God coming to another Roman army officer and his family and an Ethiopian eunuch being baptized. In Luke the Risen Christ and the Spirit of God bridge all divisions.
Change gears with me for a minute. We just had the Boston marathon last Monday. I used to follow it more closely than I do now. In 1982 the race came down to a duel between two Americans, Alberto Salazar, and Dick Beardsley. Salazar won down the home stretch, by a mere second and a half, one of the closest races ever. Both men were under the American record.
Beardsley returned to his farm in Minnesota after the race and continued to run well on the national scene for a while. But in 1989 he suffered a tragic accident. While getting set to hook a piece of equipment up to the power take-off shaft of his tractor his pant leg cuff got caught in the shaft. Before his son could run over and shut off the tractor it had literally wrapped him around the shaft and splintering his leg in multiple places and slamming him into the ground several times. Doctors weren’t sure if he would ever be able to walk again without crutches. -Surprisingly two years later he was running again, though not so prominently. Dr.’s said it was a miracle.
Beardsley himself felt blessed by God in his recovery but even more said how moved he was by acts of love friends and neighbors and even strangers. He had no medical insurance, but funds were raised to pay all his medical expenses. People chipped in volunteering their time to help keep his farm going for almost a full year while he was recovering. Early on in one of the moments of crisis and despair he said he felt the presence of Christ in the embrace of those contributed in so many different ways to help him and his family survive. Unfortunately, that was not the end of Beardsley’s troubles. He was involved in three serious car accidents in the early 90’s plus had a fall while hiking that hospitalized him. He’s had three back operations. He wound up getting hooked on pain medications for a while but now is a nationally known motivational speaker, has written a book and has even ran several sub 3 hour marathons in his 50’s. Beardsley says: “Every morning when I wake up, I try to wake with a Smile on my face, Enthusiasm in my voice, Joy in my heart and Faith in my soul.”
Luke might ask us: Do you think, per chance he saw the Risen Christ in both friends and strangers who helped him survive? Is it too simple to say that the Christ revealed to him through those who helped him was an expression and experience of the Risen Christ? May the power of that Christ inspire and bless your lives.
Theologian and writer, Brian McLarens, commented a while back that, “We are just suckers if we let the reigning intellectual fashion decree that the resurrection is unbelievable. What is believable changes from generation to generation. In a universe that becomes more amazing with each new discovery, it is arrogant to declare the resurrection impossible. That is not my problem with it; my difficulty comes from the claim that the resurrection is an objective fact, like the division of cells or the Los Angeles earthquake. The resurrection appearances did not, after all, take place in the temple before thousands, but in the privacy of homes. They did not occur before the religious authorities, but only to the disciples hiding from those authorities. The resurrection was not a world-historic event that could have been filmed by “60 Minutes,” but a privileged revelation reserved for the few. I believe people are saved not by objective truth, but by Jesus. Their faith isn’t in their knowledge, but in God.” –Life in our modern age is still filled with mystery!
In a book called “The Clown in the Belfry” the late Frederick Buechner, another highly esteemed theologian and writer tells of an incident that startled, and to some extent, mystified him. It picks up that theme of mystery in life.
He writes: “A year or so ago, a friend of mine died… One morning in his 68th year he simply didn’t wake up. It was about as easy a way as he could possibly have done it, but it was not easy for the people he left behind because it gave us no chance to start getting used to the idea… or to say goodbye.
He died in March, and in May my wife and I were staying with his widow overnight when I had a short dream about him.
I dreamed he was standing there in the dark guest room where we were asleep, looking very much himself in the navy blue jersey sweater and white slacks he often wore. I told him how glad I was to see him again—He acknowledged that somehow. –Then I said, ‘Are you really there Dudley?’ –I meant was he really there in truth, or was I merely dreaming he was. His answer was that, Yes, he was really there.
‘Can you prove it?’ I asked him.
‘Of course,’ he said.
Then he plucked a strand of wool out of his jersey and tossed it to me. I caught it between my thumb and forefinger, and the feel of it was so palpably real that it woke me up. -That’s all there was to it.
I told the dream at breakfast the next morning, and I’d hardly finished when my wife spoke. She said that she’d seen a strand of blue wool on the carpet as she was getting dressed. She was sure it hadn’t been there the night before. I rushed upstairs to see for myself, and there it was a little tangle of navy blue wool.”
Buechner is not the kind of person who did séances or sold new-age mysticism books and he hadn’t been keeping company with Shirley McClain as far as I know.
He is, he says, just as much at a loss to explain this incident as anyone else – and he knows that many would explain it away as simple coincidence.
“BUT,” he says, he can’t help but wonder –what are the odds of having such a dream and then finding the matching blue strand of yarn? –He asks himself, and us, “Can this be the whispering of the Eternal–a hint of Transcendence–a brief peek at the mystery of life and death- and the Grace of God?”
Certainly none of us wants to go jumping off the deep end and give up questioning or scientific reasoning, but is it more unreasonable to find some strengthening of faith and assurance of belief in this kind of incident than it is to place all our faith in a rationalism that denies all mystery and demands that everything in life have a logical and provable answer?
Should we reduce life to some mechanical model that makes everything predictable? –I don’t think that model even squares with modern quantum physics—Much less the kind of dramatic unquantifiable experience Buechner had.
At best don’t we have to admit that life is far more complex, far more wondrous than we can explain with provable logic at this point?
Certainly, Buechner is not the only one who has had such an experience. I’ve known a number of people who’ve had something of a similar mysterious experience- flagrant invasions of the mysterious that sets them back and causes them to rethink, or think more deeply, about life’s connections and life’s meaning.
Does it happen every day? –NO, not to anyone I know—But it has happened enough to make me say, “There is more to the picture than we know!?”
In commenting on such occurrences, Dr. William Willimon a former chaplain and prof. at Duke U. –and now a Methodist Bishop says,
“Maybe God flirts,and loves to tease us toward a reality that we –with our facts and figures, empiricism and suburban common sense, routinely walk past without a twitch of curiosity. Maybe we are all like the kid who wore earphones so long, with the volume turned up that the heavy metal music rendered his eardrums impervious to Debussy or a whisper.”
We can’t know factually exactly what the Resurrection was like; the scriptures give us a number of different impressions. What the New Testament does is bear witness to the testimony of the disciples and a few others about this mysterious experience they had of a Risen Christ –that convinced them God was acting in Jesus of Nazareth— Even when Peter speaks about the Resurrection to a skeptical crowd, as in the Acts passage today, he doesn’t try to prove the Resurrection to them… he simply announces it as something he and his fellow disciples have experienced. It has given meaning, new direction, and power to their lives. It has enthused them and redirected their lives.
In our Post-Easter season and our Post-Easter world we are confronted with the incredible experiences of the disciples. We are asked to make sense of them –in some way, over and against our modernist scientific and rationalist thinking.
Some would dismiss those experiences; some would simply put those experiences in a box –as belonging to a special time and place. –Others would say, “No. listen, God is still whispering those messages of eternal hope, still showing glimpses into the depth and breadth of life, still speaking a language of mystery and awe… if we but listen.”
God doesn’t ask us to give up being rational human beings, or to put away science, God only asks that we learn to listen for the dream like whisperings of the Eternal –to catch a greater sense of who we are and what life is about.
Buechner says that his own experience with a dream and a small thin strand of wool just re-confirmed for him that, “Our lives are a great deal richer, deeper, more intricately interrelated, more mysterious and less limited by time and space than we commonly suppose.”
Maybe, the joke’s on us, we think we’ve figured everything out and God has gone one beyond our understanding, waiting for us to catch up and catch on to the unfathomable miracles embedded in life.
Being a minister is one of those positions where one sees a lot of tears: tears of grief, tears of joy, tears of anger, and tears of frustration and regret. It is a part of the privilege and responsibility of being a minister. Tears are a very human phenomenon. If you haven’t felt a tear in the last couple of years, chances are you either have buried your emotions pretty deep or you’ve lived a remarkably charmed life.
The gospels tell us that Jesus wept on more than one occasion. He wept over Jerusalem and he wept with Mary and Martha over the death of their brother Lazarus. And here in our scripture today John tells of Mary Magdalene’s tears. Mary had been one of the women who followed Jesus, and even aided him in his ministry. There was a tradition that developed that she had been a prostitute, but modern scholarship says there is no evidence to support that idea. The gospels do tell us she had been healed of some ailment. We don’t know if she was old or young, and there is nothing to indicate she had any relationship with Jesus other than being a follower along with several other women, some of whom were relatives. Mary was one of those women standing near the cross when Jesus died supporting his grieving mother.
She was among those women who watched where they buried Jesus when Joseph of Arimathea took his body to put it in a grave just before the Sabbath was to begin.
And then, of course, on Easter morning she is the one all the gospels say came to anoint Jesus’ body. (Matthew Mark and Luke all say there were others there also, but John only mentions her.) She came in those early morning hours fully expecting to anoint a dead body now that the Sabbath was over as was the burial custom. She got to the tomb only to discover that the stone closure had already been moved away. She immediately assumed there has been some foul play and runs back to the house where the disciples are staying to tell Peter and perhaps, whoever else might be up at the early dawn hours.
When she gets there she blurts out to Peter and John that someone has broken into Jesus’ tomb and already moved his body. They all rush back to the tomb and John, who is probably the youngest, gets there first, and just stops and gasps at the open cave. Peter arrives next and just rushes in to find the burial cloths rolled up but no body. Peter and John then leave. They are assuming that, indeed, someone has taken the body.
Mary just stands outside crying. It’s another stab in the heart. Was it the authorities, she wonders? It means she will not be able to give Jesus the last rites, just one more indignity in this painful and bewildering last week. As the dawn lightens just a bit more she peers into the tomb. She sees two people dressed in white, who John tells us are “angels”. They ask her why she is crying. She tells them someone has stolen the body.
Her tears are so heavy and her suspicion so is so strong about what has happened that she cannot recognize or fathom that the voice she hears behind her is that of Jesus, she assumes it’s the cemetery caretaker. He also asks her why she is crying. She tells him. And then he calls her name. Only then does she recognize him. It’s a dramatic Easter story John tells.
It is not hard to understand how she doesn’t recognize him at first. The emotions of the last few days are overwhelming. I wonder if she’d even slept. The reality of standing with the other women and watching the brutality of the Roman execution was traumatizing. And when you are tired and your emotions are running high you often only see what you expect to see. The brain just fills in details you expect to anticipate to be there.
It happens to all of us sometimes, most famously with police officers sometimes. They think they see a gun, or someone going for a gun but in reality there was no gun. It takes a lot of training to overcome that tendency, to see beyond our expectations, especially in emotional situations.
Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus until he speaks to her a second time, calling her by name. It’s only then that the mystery of his Resurrection can take shape in her mind. Only then does it register in her grief-stricken mind. It is Jesus.
The other side of the equation is that it is often through our tears of struggle that we see most clearly. Tears may be the catharsis of emotional understanding and change. It is when we come to grips with something we did not want to see. Sometimes we are pulled by the force of events and the emotions involved to look at things differently. We have this capacity to avoid looking at the things we don’t want to see. And we sometimes won’t see them until we are brought up short, until facing them becomes our only option.
Therapy can often bring tears. When we break through the emotions that have been blocked up inside us, emotions we have been avoiding, trying not to see. When I was in seminary back in the mid 60’s Andover Newton required us to do a summer of clinical training. Besides doing a stint as a hospital orderly and then serving as a hospital chaplain we had to participate in a small group therapy sessions. The therapist who led our group at our first meeting looked at the eight of us mid-20 year old seminarians and said, “I know you clergy types I know what makes you tick and I am going to break you.” -It was intimidating. We sat in silence for an hour or so. None of us wanted to be the focus of his psychological unwrapping. Eventually of course we all talked, and were glad we did. All of us shared tears before the summer was over, and I’ll give you one guess who was the first one.
Like Mary, we don’t always want the tears we experience, but sometimes the grace of God is seen through tears. We are opened to things we had not been opened to before. We may see both ourselves, and God, in ways we had not seen before. Possibilities emerge in the misty-eyed moments that we had not been able, or willing to, see before. Sometimes it is only through tears that resurrection begins in us.
It was the great psychotherapist Carl Jung who first talked about the “Wounded Healer”, the one who’s own woundedness serves as a vehicle, not only for self-understanding, but for themselves to be used in the healing of others.
Mary’s tears certainly are the natural expression of pain and grief. In that pain something else is revealed, the goodness and grace that she knew in Jesus has not been terminated or extinguished by forces of empire. The jealousy, the greed, the quest for power, the cruelty that put Jesus on the cross has not negated the work of God that was in him. The force of God’s presence in the world has not been overcome. Or as John says, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”
I think Jesus’ died on the cross not so much because God needed some payment for human sin but because humanity needed some clear way of seeing the horror of human brutality and the extent of God’s readiness to forgive and redirect us on a better path. If we are moved to tears on Good Friday, then our tears become a vehicle for understanding God’s Grace and hope for us, and the calling to live towards the kind of world Jesus called for and proclaimed as God’s true vision for humanity.
May the God of Easter inspire your tears with hope and blessing! –Amen.
Palm Sunday represents a paradoxical turn of events in the story of Jesus. —Here we are at this big parade — Jesus is the Grand Marshall — everyone is excited, but we know what is coming -And it isn’t pretty! — All of the gospels build up to this dramatic and brutal last week in Jesus’ life.
–The parade of Palms –The welcoming of Jesus to Jerusalem. And then everything soon turns ugly. The Parade of celebration turns to a Parade of Pain as Jesus is hit with Rome’s ultimate punishment, Crucifixion. The crowds, egged on by the temple leaders, turn on him. Shouts of “Crucify him! Crucify him!” echo through the centuries, not with disdain for first century simplemindedness, but with some recognition of universal human folly.
–I can only conclude that that which holds our emotions, our violence, our scapegoating, in check is often only a thin veneer of civilization that is little more than skin deep. Leaders so inclined can easily whip a crowd into a violent mood.
What we see in the brutal scenes of the Passion of Christ is not sadistic first century Jews or Romans; — it is rather a look at the sad, sick side of humanity reflected in every century.
-Mankind projecting Evil, out there, in some other, someone who becomes the recipient of our alienation and anger. We may wonder why the crowds, so excited about Jesus on Sunday, were shouting “Crucify Him” on Friday. What happened to make things turn so negative? Matthew indicates that the leaders of the Temple, who were appointed by the Romans remember, convinced the crowds that that Jesus was some kind of threat. – Either because they were afraid that any popular movement might ultimately threaten their position or because they believed Jesus might incite a disturbance which would bring repercussions from the Romans.–Either or both might have negative consequences for the leaders. –Like most folks in power, they wanted to keep their positions of power and authority.
Then as now, real or imagined threats have been used by leaders to whip-up folk’s patriotism or religious fervor for their own ends. We’re still seeing it today— all you have to do is watch the news. It’s not all that uncommon.
The crucifixion gets so much space in the gospels not because the Jews or the Romans were so much worse than the rest of us, but rather, they were so much like us. The Crucifixion lays it all bear, control, power, manipulation and violence all on display.
One of the first attempts to revise the faith and make it less offensive came from those steeped in Greek mythology who wanted to say, that surely Jesus didn’t really suffer. –As God, he must have been above human pain. –This was not real flesh pierced by nails. -This was not a real man beaten and whipped. –They expected a God who was above the pain of human life; One removed from suffering, or doubt, or loss. It negated some of the human responsibility in the pain and cruelty and put Jesus beyond our common place.
–But the early church insisted, Jesus was a real person with real flesh & blood. Those who walked with him, those who witnessed his crucifixion, said this was a real man — a person burdened with all the human emotions and feelings, a man who truly suffered physical pain.
His followers proclaimed that in Him God experienced the worst of human brutality and pain. He bore human life as it is, and still said, “Father forgive them.”
Words of forgiveness with no real experience of struggle or pain behind them would be empty.
Words of hope from afar with no sense of real life, real struggle would be shallow imitations. A suffering world needs a suffering savior to express the truth of God.
This, then, was not a god of trite phrases removed from life, but a God who had come to Redeem from the inside. –To share the worst of our common lot– and still say “I forgive” and to live out the truth that God’s unfaltering love and presence is an unequivocal part of our lives too. This one betrayed, beaten and brutally killed mirrored our violence back to us with God’s compassion and forgiveness to stir in us the gift of forgiveness and hope.
So, Matthew’s gospel begins with Jesus being pursued by Herod after his birth, –you remember with the Slaughter of the Innocents, and Mary and Joseph escaping to Egypt. –Then the gospel ends with Jesus finally put to death by the authorities –who enlist the cooperation, or at least the acquiesce, of pilgrims who have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover which commemorates the ancient escape from Egypt.
It is an ironic twist of fate. –And we might note that whereas the Wise Men from afar, resisted the cajoling of Herod to betray where Jesus was, one of the disciples turns him over with a kiss! And then, all the disciples fade into the background. They surely didn’t want to be cowards, and yet here they were, riding the wave of popular sentiment, elated and soaking in the cheers on Palm Sunday, and then hiding themselves away on Friday. –They knew, after all that Rome tolerated NO dissent… And the crowds that turned on Jesus might just as easily turn on them. –IT’s never easy to stand alone, or almost alone, as a voice for change and right.
What makes this story a little less grim is that we know how it all plays out –Easter’s coming –And guess what! –God’s Redeeming Grace makes all things new! – God’s Forgiveness, God’s hope, is acted out in this tragic week and God’s grace becomes transformative for those who let it touch their lives.
But that is getting a little ahead of the story. Today we simply face the reality of how people may “go along” when their hearts should be saying something different. And how evil lurks so tenuously in the human psyche.
Today we commemorate Jesus last meal with his disciples. He promised his presence with us in the bread and the juice. His words from the cross: “Father, forgive them” also echo in our hearts.
We invite you to let his grace touch your life.
So what do you make of this Lazarus story? –it is the most spectacular of all Jesus’ miracles recorded in the New Testament. I mean, a man dead four days, already buried and Jesus calls him back to life! People are expecting that his body has already started decaying! –What’s surprising is that the other three gospels leave that story out! All the disciples must have known Lazarus. Jesus went to his home more than once.
If we are going to be rational about it, we almost have to assume that Lazarus is not really dead- maybe just in one of those coma states, or else John has exaggerated the story to make his theological point. We know John has told the story to make his theological point clear, that Jesus “Is the Resurrection and the Life.” -which is what Jesus tells Martha when she comes out to meet him. This is another one of the Johannine community’s faith statements woven into story form. You Remember John puts them throughout his gospel, “I am the Bread of Life” “I am the Good Shepherd” “I am the Way the Truth and the Life”… There are seven of them, eight, if you count his telling the Woman at the Well that he is the Messiah. John is not so concerned about telling history as telling who Jesus is. In fact John tells us his whole gospel, we are told in chapter 20, was written, “So that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ… and that believing, you will have life in his name.”
Our faith is not so much built on believing this miracle happened just as John recounts it, as coming to the faith affirmation that underlies John’s gospel. My Meditation Thought in the bulletin by theologian, Marcus Borg, makes that point.
The problem with a miracle like this is that we begin to define our expectations for miracles around grand extravagant happenings that defy all logic we and begin to overlook simple everyday miracles around us.
Let me just tell you a story from the news recently. -Many of you have already seen or heard it I’m sure. It is from the Turkey/ Syria Earthquake. A CNN reporter was interviewing one of the clean-up and rescue workers, Ozer Aydinli. Aydinli recounted how he and his team rescued a 13-year-old boy named Mustafa from the rubble 228 hours — nearly 10 days — after the quake.
“We, of course, thought this wouldn’t be possible. When [our friends] said, ‘We found a person alive,’ we thought, ‘No, they must be hallucinating.’ We couldn’t believe it. It is a miracle. … The only thing we can say is that this is a great miracle,” he said. “I have no clue how he survived for 228 hours, because the excavator was in operation, there was more debris falling around, filling the space above and under him, and so we couldn’t see any intact residential structure, because it was all rubble.” Amid the rubble, Aydinli, said, there was just a pair of eyes and then the call of ‘Brother!’ We got him out, digging him out by hand. When we saw it, when we heard it, there were 70, 80 people in the crew, and when we said there was a person alive, all our friends swarmed the area,” Aydinli said. “Nobody moved, and we all cried. And even now, we get tears in our eyes from time to time.”
Clearly, we would all call it a miracle. Of course, there are ways of explaining it, but that doesn’t make it less of a miracle, -a wonder, -a mystery of blessing,- it is something that goes beyond the expected order of things –not a miracle with no possible rationalizations; there will always be those who find “Miracle” to strong a word. -And yes, we know it happens from time to time, in accidents and disasters, someone survives beyond all expectations, but that doesn’t negate wonder. Many more “Little Miracles” go un-acknowledged and often unnoticed.
Probably only you know the times in your life when things could have gone another way, a more painful way, but didn’t, or an un planned and unexpected blessing came into your life. Someone has said, “Miracles are the coincidences in life we can’t explain” –And we often let them slip by almost unnoticed, or unrecognized for what they are.
John wants us to understand that Jesus’ Life, Death & Resurrection was a miracle of
God’s of God’s grace. And that God works in lives in ways we don’t always recognize.
This holy season may the power of Jesus’ presence be a continuing miracle in your lives.
John likes to tell stories that are a little more involved. We’ve had two in a row now. Last week it was the Woman at the Well, and this week it’s the Man Born Blind. The central point in all of his stories is the affirmation of Jesus as the Word of God made flesh, the Light of the world, the bearer of Eternal Grace. But he always gives us lots to chew on as he fills out his stories with details.
This morning’s story focuses around a man who is blind –but we know John is setting the man’s blindness alongside the myopia of the temple Pharisees. They are the ones who can’t see the forest for the trees. They are the ones who are so focused on the minutia of the Law that they can’t leave room for grace. In fact, John’s distain for the Pharisees and Temple leaders is quite clear as we move closer to the crucifixion. We have to remember that John is written after the contentious separation of Christians from the synagogue was complete and Christianity was struggling with its relationship with Rome.
Today’s story begins with that age old question “Why.” -Why does tragedy seem to single out some people in such painful ways? Is this man’s blindness from birth some kind of punishment, the disciples ask, either of his parents or himself somehow? Jesus absolutely rejects the idea that it is anyone’s fault.
While the disciples seem like they are ready to debate this philosophical/ theological question, Jesus, simply dismisses the issue of blame and instead focuses on the opportunity to do something good. He is rather asking, “Where can God’s Love come into this situation?” Tragedy is always an opportunity to bring God’s grace into the world for Jesus.
Jesus simply approaches the man and heals him. And did you notice, he does so even without the man asking for healing, or the man expressing faith, or saying anything! Jesus simply responds to the need that is in front of him and turns tragedy, not into an issue of blame, but into an opportunity to highlight and demonstrate God’s grace.
It’s not hard to find a sermon there. We still live in a world that finds it easier to fix blame than trying to fix pain! –Perhaps we think that if we can find the reasons rationally enough we can keep such troubles at arm’s length from ourselves. –Even though we know it’s not quite that simple. If we were to see life’s sadness less as questions about God’s fairness and more as questions of us –and our ability to demonstrate God’s goodness wouldn’t the world be a better place?
But this is not just a story about healing, or even about seizing the opportunities for sharing God’s love. It is a story of spiritual blindness in all its ramifications. It is about the myopia of those who cannot see the bigger picture. It is about the proclivity of people, even good religious people, to fall victim to their own small mindedness, to become caught in ruts of their own making and to let lesser values trump greater ones. While John’s main focus is on Jesus as the Word of God Made Flesh, he also wants to make clear that the Pharisees have both misunderstood who Jesus is, and how God’s love is to be lived out in the world.
There is more than one story in the gospels where the Pharisees are opposed to Jesus because he is not following the rules, either about the Sabbath, or hand washing, or eating, or those with whom he shares meals. — Respect for tradition, and convention was important to Pharisees. They were not bad people; they were simply too caught up in the minutia of religion. They sometimes let that override the greater concern for love and caring.
Indeed, they could quote the bible itself and point out that it said, even demanded, that work should not be done on the Sabbath. —–And they reasoned if this man has been blind for 20 years or more does one more day matter that much? –Why can’t Jesus just wait a day and heal him when it was acceptable. It seemed perfectly reasonable to them.
The Pharisees were trying to follow one of the Ten Commandments after all!
“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” It’s the second longest and most drawn out of the Ten Commandments. –There wasn’t any doubt in their mind where the Bible stood on this issue. Jesus had broken the rules. – They just wanted him to wait for the appropriate time!
–We’ve heard that kind of argument before in our own time. There have always been those who said to the activists, “Wait a minute, you can’t break the laws, Women’s Rights will come, racial rights will come, Gay rights will come, but you have to follow the rules. You can’t upset things or cause a disturbance.” –That was basically how the Pharisees thought. -If exceptions are made for good causes chaos ensues.
So I’m wondering if we’d be any less likely to take offense at someone pushing the boundaries of our sacred cows. –Of course, working on Sunday isn’t one of them for us. –Even the folks who want to post the 10 Commandments in schools would soft pedal that fifth one, about working on the Sabbath.
But Jesus isn’t going to wait when he sees the suffering of a fellow traveler! –God’s healing and justice shouldn’t be put on hold just to make things more comfortable with tradition, or more in line with the smaller points of the Law Jesus seems to demonstrate.
The Pharisees didn’t see where they were wearing blinders. It’s not an uncommon problem for any of us, no matter how “Right” we try to be. We might ask ourselves, in fact, if this passage doesn’t push us in the opposite direction and remind us that there is a place for Sabbath in our lives. Isn’t life better, and humanity more human, when there is a time set aside to acknowledge the sacred and we step back from the pursuit of business” Aren’t we more whole when we make time to focus on things other than making a living or even the passionate pursuit of recreation. But that is another issue. It is really not in this particular text. –Let’s deal with it another morning.
In deference to the real central struggle going on here, don’t we need to ask: “Where am I blind to the real possibilities of the work of God’s grace?” “Where is convention keeping us from seeing how we might serve in God’s name?” –“Where is our fixation on lesser priorities blocking our willingness to see how we might be sharing the healing and hope of God?” —Where is our sense of convention and decorum keeping us from our central mission?
I think John wants the church to be asking those questions far more insistently rather than pointing fingers at ancient Pharisees and assuming we are so much beyond them.
In the end discipleship is about journeying with Jesus in our time.
John wants us to see with clearer eyes the issues of our own lives and our own times.
Seeing, in John’s story, and also for us, is not just about having eyes. It’s also about understanding, about perceiving truth. It’s about knowing what the world is like in all its many colors and shapes and finding where God fits. It’s about not being so locked into our preconceived notions that we can’t let new truth come into our world and have a vision of how God’s love can be more truly made manifest in the world.
We are trying to journey with Jesus in this Lenten season and John would remind us to open our eyes and see how God’s love might be better shared in our world.
In both these stories we know it’s not about the water -though water plays an important role in the biblical story. When Abraham sends a servant to find a wife for Isaac he finds her at a well. Jacob meets his wife at a well, and Moses meets his wife at a well. And, of course, the Jordan River looms large as the river that must be crossed to get to the Promised Land and it is the place of Jesus’ baptism.
But today the Israelites are having a crisis of faith because this journey to the Promised Land was so much harder and uncertain than they had bargained for. The water had run out. And in the Gospel the Woman at the Well is asked for a drink & comes to faith in Jesus.
We don’t know why Jesus decided to take the more direct route back to Galilee that went through Samaria. Most Jews traveling to and from Galilee took a route further to the east, to avoid the Samaritan territory. Samaritans were considered renegades to the faith. -Not to mention somewhat traitorous since they had refused to help rebuild the Temple after Jerusalem’s citizens had returned from Babylonian Captivity. But here Jesus is, even stopping at the edge of a Samaritan town to get some food and perhaps a drink.
It’s noon, not the normal time for women to come to fetch water. But this woman with no name shows up. We don’t really know why she is there at this time of day. Most women come when it’s cooler. The conjecture has always been that she must be avoiding the other women. Maybe she has a reputation. Five husbands, and a 6th man with whom she lives—I’m sure this would not go unnoticed in a small mid-eastern village 2000 years ago! Had she been widowed? -Or divorced? We don’t know. Maybe some combination of the two.
You notice there is no condemnation from Jesus, no judgement, (that, despite Matthew’s quotes about divorce.) Just a recognition of her circumstances. Also, there is no mention of children, so perhaps she had been cast aside by husbands for not giving them children. Whatever the cause of her situation it had to make for some painful history. She surely had been acquainted with tears.
There must have been more to the conversation than John tells us. -They are still talking when the disciples return. They are shocked to see him talking to a woman, and a Samaritan to boot, but they keep their composure.
Jesus, as he often does, becomes the vehicle for grace for her. –And the brokenness which she feels becomes the crack through which light comes, -both to her and ultimately to her community.
When Jesus tells her that “The time has come when it doesn’t matter where you worship God. As long as you worship with pure hearts and true lives”, he is letting her know that she is accepted by God, both in her life circumstances and her cultural tradition as a Samaritan.
Jesus is making it clear that the Grace of God transcends even the boundaries of formal institutional religion. –It is a gift of God that can move in our lives in ways beyond the bounds of preconceived human notions.
This woman, in a man’s world, this foreigner, this person with a history, then becomes an evangelist! –She goes back to her little village and because of her excitement and enthusiasm she gets folks to come out and meet Jesus. They even prevail upon him to stay another two days in their town! Whatever her reputation before, it had to be different after that!
One of my favorite stories of renewal is one told by Rachel Remen an MD and pioneer in holistic approach to medicine and the mind body connection tells of an angry young man she had as a patient some years ago. He had been a promising young college athlete until he developed bone cancer in his right leg. The leg had to be amputated just above the knee. The surgery saved his life but ended his ball playing career. He was bitter and depressed with the overwhelming feelings of the injustice of what had happened to him. He then dropped out of college, started drinking too much and had a car accident in short order.
When he first came to see Dr. Remen he was closed and sullen, still raging inside.
She gave him a pen and asked him to draw a picture of his body. He drew a sketch of a vase with a large crack in it. He drew it so intensely and hard that he ripped the paper. –It was a vase that could not hold water, could not function in any intended way. –An apt picture of how he saw himself.
Over the next months of physical and emotional therapy he began to release some of his anger and bring in articles of other people who had been victims of terrible accidents or illnesses.
He told Dr. Remen: “Dr.’s don’t really know what it’s like.” So she offered him a chance to talk to young patients who came to the hospital with crippling injuries or surgeries.
He began to be a regular volunteer and help many new patients come to terms with their own feelings. –he could relate in a way that Dr.’s couldn’t. More and more Dr.’s referred their angry patients to him. In the end one of those patients convinced him that he had a gift and encouraged him to go back to school and study psychology. He did.
A couple of years later he came back in to see Dr. Remen and she pulled the picture of the broken vase he had drawn that first meeting out of her file and asked if he remembered it.
He said, “Yes, but it’s not quite finished yet.”
She gave it to him and he took a yellow marker and filled the crack with bright yellow and then drew lines radiating from it.
She looked a little puzzled and he said, “See this crack, where it is broken is where the light shines through.”
What had started as a painful frustrated expression of his brokenness had now become a symbol of his calling, his gift to the world.
There was a certain grace at work in his life that, even without formal religious connection, had manifested itself in his healing and wholeness.
In John’s story Jesus breaks the religious barriers and customs of his day -but more than that- he becomes the instrument of God’s grace!–To this woman and to this village he offers a healing of heart and soul.
Maybe you would say it was just coincidence that he met this woman at the well..,
But maybe God works in the little coincidences of life to let Redemptive Love shine through us!
When you have experienced God’s Grace it changes you –whether you are like the Woman and the Well or like the young athlete who had his leg amputated. –God can provide a healing that goes beneath the surface of things. It renews the soul.
John records this story for a church that has become increasingly diverse near the end of the first century. He wants folks to know: that Jesus crosses all the boundaries; Jesus sees more than skin deep, sees beyond the cultural traditions, and even beyond the taboos.
Like a jeweler looking at old tarnished silver, God is not put off by encrusted layers of dirt or brine that dull the beauty and corrode the surface. God asks not just what you were but what you will be!
John tells this story not just to let us know what happened once upon a time –BUT to say that this Christ, this one who bore God’s presence still brings the water of life, the water that quenches the soul’s thirst—and all are invited to drink from this well.
Remember, in the play or movie, “The Miracle Worker” when Ann Sullivan takes Helen Keller to the pump and begins pumping water over her hands and over and over again spells out the word W-A-T-E-R. It was a moment of realization and of unlocking the doors to Helen’s real potential… Helen later said It was her “soul’s birthday.”
I think that is what the woman at the well would have said about meeting Jesus at the well that day—and what John would have us understand is that for those who truly meet Jesus it is still true!
I have probably said before that I often find Paul’s theological arguments a little tedious. He is so tied to his first century Jewish and Roman world and his arguments are sometimes so arcane that he loses me. He is, of course, an intense and dedicated defender of the Christian faith. No one did more to start churches and spread the faith in the first century than he did. Of course, it wasn’t always so. At first, he was adamantly set on stamping out Christianity. He was a part of the stoning of Stephen, just a couple of years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection. Then went on ardently seeking to arrest and try converts to Christianity for fraudulent religious claims and apostasy. He was one of those people who are strident in their opinions and gung-ho in putting them forward. Always 100% sure of his convictions. –If you wanted to have a friendly low-key family get together, he might be the uncle you would want to leave off the guest list. But surely, those are the qualities of a mover and shaker in any age. Elon Musk, I’m told, isn’t that easy to work with or for either.
Paul’s discussion of the meaning of God’s embrace of Abram fits into that category of intense and sometimes confusing arguments. But I sense here that it is because the issue is so personal to him. He sees his own journey as coming through those same doors. “Saved by Grace” is clearly his own calling card. He understands that though he was emphatic in his religious fervor before his conversion, he was, nevertheless, on the wrong road. –He still honors Judaism and believes his ancestors are God’s chosen people but believes God has worked out a way to bless all the earth through this one Jesus. He believes wholeheartedly that this is where Judaism was supposed to go.
As a rabbi and Pharisee trained in the religious traditions of Israel, Paul came to this insight not because of his intense study or brilliance, but because he had this dramatic and mystical experience with the Risen Christ. –In other words, it came through God’s grace not through work he did striving for insight or through being so dutiful in following the Law that he achieved it on his own. God, he understands, simply broke through to him in the person of Christ in a way he couldn’t avoid. The transforming nature of Christ’s appearance to him while he was on a journey to arrest Christ followers was a gift. And it made him rethink everything. He could take no credit. He simply thanked God.
That’s how he now saw it was with Abraham. Abram experienced God’s mysterious call and trusted. That trust was counted as righteousness. Even before Abram did anything, God called him righteous. –That’s how ‘trusting Jesus’ works to put us in a right relationship with God Paul said. It wasn’t about following the commandments for Abram. The Commandments hadn’t been written yet. The call of Abram, Abraham’s name before his covenant with God, is one of the crucial events of the Old Testament. Even NT authors name Abraham as a hero second to only Moses. He is one of the most often mentioned O.T. characters in other parts of scripture. Still today the religious significance of this biblical figure for all Middle Eastern cultures cannot be ignored.
Abraham’s “belief” in God was not just a belief that God existed, or even belief that God was speaking to him –it was a trust in God’s goodness and trust in his relationship with God. But beyond that, Abraham’s trust in God was the beginning of an ongoing sense of communion with God. –Abraham was not righteous because he was perfectly good, Paul would remind us. – In fact, in the story we see that he is not perfect. –He is, after all, prepared to give his wife Sara away, to a powerful ruler rather than risk his own life., –And he has a son, Ishmael, with his wife’s servant girl because they have both given up on God’s promise for them to have a son. Then he summarily sends the child and his mother away later. These are hardly the actions of a saint –and we certainly would not call them heroic!
Despite his lapses, Abraham goes as God calls him to go — trusting that God has a purpose and a plan for him.
Abraham, like many of the great saints of the faith, did not sweep his doubts and insecurities under the rug. He did not pretend with himself or with God. So called “Blind faith” was not his forte. In fact one might say his lapses in judgment were precisely moments when his doubts overcame his faith,—when his trust in God, was overridden momentarily by his anxiety or his uncertainty. His doubts were always cropping up front and center!
–Don’t most of us go through life that way? –Sometimes saying: “Hey God I know we’re supposed to have faith, –but what about this— What about my kid’s problems, or what about this pink slip, –at my age where am I going to get another job? Divorce?? –This wasn’t in the script I agreed to. — Are you serious God, about being with me? –About caring?
Faith, as trust, the way Paul sees it evidenced in Abraham, is not this little commodity we buy once and then carry it around in our pocket the rest of our lives. Faith must be purchased daily, –with our questioning, our doubts, our letting go and our holding again. The Abraham story ought to make clear that “Faith” is not about a set of verbal statements we make, as some people want to interpret John 3:16 (which was, by the way our Gospel lesson for today). It is much more complicated than that.
It is no wonder Abraham becomes the godfather of three of the world’s major religions, –He’s so much like us in his attempts to follow God’s call… so much like us in his halting attempts to trust God in the midst of life’s struggles that it is easy to see ourselves in him. Ultimately God shepherds him through his journey and we see him persevere in his faith.
In a similar way the grace of God stands before us Paul says, and our faith/trust is a response to that grace.
Today we come to the communion table. It is the table of God’s grace made evident in Jesus. We invite to come and take the elements of Grace God has provided. -All are welcome!
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