Thursday: Naked and Unashamed

Here’s the really strange thing about Maundy Thursday: in our scriptures appointed for today we don’t even read about one of the most important events that happened that night.

The name for Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment, and refers to what Jesus says in the text we do read from the Gospel of John.

Right after the footwashing, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

The footwashing comes in conjunction with the institution of the Last Supper. These are hugely important parts of what happened on Thursday night, but they’re not the whole story.

What we’re missing from our readings is the Garden of Gethsemane. Continue reading

Wednesday: We Are April Fools

How could it be that it was only a week between the crowds shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David!” and then shouting, “Crucify him!”?

We’re stuck right the in the middle of that week, trapped between triumph and despair, and today is the day of betrayal.

How apropos that today is also April Fool’s Day.

The interesting thing that I learned is that the placement of April Fool’s Day on April 1st may be related to the fact that it is exactly one week after the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25.

One week ago today, the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would bear a son, a child, and name him Jesus.

The promise of the salvation of the world awoke like a star within her that day. And today, just a week later, we are reading of Judas betraying Jesus unto death. Again—just a week!

How could things turn to such disaster in just a week?

I imagine people began celebrating April Fool’s Day a week after the Annunciation because it must have been about a week later that Mary realized what a fool she was to say yes to Gabriel’s crazy proposal. Continue reading

Tuesday: When God Runs Out of Courage

No one is brave all the time.

Not even Jesus.

Not even God.

That is the message of our scriptures today.

Courage and fear are poles that we bounce between all the time.

Our hope is that we will be able to stand in the place of bravery when the most important moments come, and our faith is that God will undergird it all even when our fear rises up to choke us and we fail at the moment of testing. Continue reading

Monday: Who Are You at the House in Bethany?

Jesus has come to our house tonight.

He has less than a week to live, and he has chosen to spend time with us.

Why?

What can we offer him?

It depends on who we are in this story in the gospel of John.

First of all, the reason I say Jesus has come to our house tonight is because we are all Lazarus. We were baptized in the death of Christ and raised to new life in Christ.

Just like Lazarus, we died in our sin and Jesus brought us back to new life.

So place yourself in that symbolic reality, because there is more than one part to play in the little house in Bethany tonight, and it is very easy to slip from one role to another. Continue reading

Not So Much With the Atonement

“If it were a snake, it would have bit me!”

This is an expression you use if you’ve been looking for something and can’t find it only to discover it’s been right in front of you the whole time.

I thought of this expression as I studied our scriptures for this week about serpents and poles and whatnot, but it did not come true. There is nothing obvious about our texts today.

We’re going to have to dig a little deeper for meaning.

In our Gospel today, Jesus is trying to explain to Nicodemus who he is. He says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” That’s John 3:15.

Of course, the verse that everyone quotes all the time and puts on signs at football games is John 3:16, for God so loved the world. But I think this verse right before it bears an equal amount of fruit for us to harvest.

Jesus is referring to the story we read today from the book of Numbers, when Moses and the Israelites were in the wilderness.

The Israelites are misbehaving and complaining to Moses again, and the Lord finally gets fed up and sets a bunch of poisonous snakes on them.

Moses prays to the Lord to have compassion on them, and the Lord tells Moses to take a snake and raise it up on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.

The interesting part of this story is that while it does say directly that it is the Lord who set the serpents among the people, which is bizarre at best and just mean at worst, the Lord never says that the serpents are there to punish the Israelites for their sin.

The Israelites draw that conclusion themselves. Continue reading

Jesus’ Premeditated Rage

This is such a fascinating Gospel story.

I think the reason many of us find it intriguing is because it cuts across our customary image of Jesus.

Jesus is so gentle and loving in many of the stories about him, taking children in his arms and blessing them, washing the disciples’ feet and so forth, that we run the risk of domesticating him, making him one dimensional.

Jesus as our Good Shepherd is tender and gentle, but he is so much more than that.

Jesus was a person, a man, and he experienced the full range of complex emotions that humanity has to offer.

Jesus is so intense in this story of driving the moneychangers from the temple.  It’s almost embarrassing to think about it, especially for us extremely polite Anglicans.

The last thing we would ever think of doing is creating a shouting ruckus in church, which is essentially what Jesus does here.

He descends on the Temple like a furious storm, sweeping through with incandescent rage and leaving wreckage behind him.

The difference, of course, is that instead of a harvest of death, the storm that Jesus unleashes on the Temple is in the service of life.

Rather than the people dying, Jesus offers his own life as the price of the sin and evil in the world being destroyed.

This event of Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the Temple is described in all four gospels, which lends it an extra force of realism.

Everybody who was writing about Jesus agreed that this happened, and that it was important to remember it. Continue reading

A Covenant Worth Our Very Lives

This sermon originally appeared on the Episcopal Digital Network’s Sermons That Work.

We human beings love our rules.

The security that comes from knowing how things should be done comforts us in our chaotic world.

God understands this about us, and so God comes to us in terms of covenant.

In our lesson from Genesis, God provides a clear agreement that Abraham can refer to and rely on to know that God will come through on God’s promises.

God willingly limits Godself out of love, knowing that making this clear and concrete covenant, promising to be our God forever and make our descendants fruitful, will bring us comfort and security.

Where we get into trouble is when we think that our ideas about rules and regulations should govern God.

Once we understand that God will always be faithful to us and care for us, we start to think we know better than God who God should be and how God should act. Continue reading

Saying Goodbye

It’s easy to get caught up in the supernatural fireworks of our stories today from 2 Kings and Mark.

People are flying around in the air, there are clouds and lightning and chariots of fire and prophets appearing and disappearing—it’s very Hollywood.

But the truth is that these stories are really about human relationships, and they have a lot to teach us about God and ourselves.

The story of Elijah’s departure from earth, taken up to heaven as Elisha watches, is incredibly poignant, partly because of the events leading up to it.

This is a long and drawn out departure.

They travel together from Gilgal to Bethel to Jericho to the banks of the Jordan River—all powerfully symbolic locations for the people of Israel, and probably places Elijah and Elisha had traveled together to many times before in their prophetic partnership.

They weren’t alone.

The company of the other prophets was with them, and they kept asking Elisha over and over again, “Do you know that today the LORD will take your master away from you?”

And Elisha replies, “Yes, I know. Keep silent.”

Elisha doesn’t want to hear it, hates the truth he has to admit that his beloved teacher and friend is about to leave him forever.

We don’t know what the tone of the company of prophets was.

They could have been mocking Elisha, taunting him about his pain.

Or they could simply have been trying to get through to a friend, seeing that he was in denial about what was coming and trying to prepare him for reality.

This gets to the heart of the human truth of this story: it is so hard to say goodbye to someone we love. Continue reading

Take a Deep Breath of God

What is the best thing you’ve ever done?

What is the moment in your life when everything you ever wanted came together with every ability you have and it just clicked?

For some people it might be the moment of giving birth, or the moment of making or accepting a marriage proposal.

Others might remember an ostensibly smaller moment that ended up having great impact, like helping a stranger who became a best friend, or making an apology and saving a relationship.

In the strange mix of hectic confusion and dull monotony that swirls through our days, we live for those moments when we accidentally step into the center of God’s will.

Today’s gospel holds just such an important moment for the disciples.

Jesus is still very new to them and they’re not sure if they’re witnessing a talented charlatan or a prophet sent from God.

They left their jobs and their homes under the strange power of his invitation, and they have witnessed a demon being driven out of a man in the synagogue.

In what will possibly be their last chance to turn back, they return to Simon Peter’s house because his wife’s mother is ill.

No doubt some of their family members are hoping they will see reason and go back to their fishing boats.

No doubt some of the disciples themselves are thinking, well, this was an interesting week, but it’s time to go back to reality. Continue reading

Things We Don’t Talk About: Jesus and Mental Illness

Today is Superbowl Sunday, that festival of all the sacred American traditions: football, junk food, and most of all, commercials.

If you think of the Superbowl as a high holy day of secular American culture, you will notice that people are much more demonstrative at this ritual than they are in most churches.

Even stoic, polite Episcopalians lose their inhibitions when their favorite team is down to 4th and goal with one minute to go.

Nor am I innocent of devotion to this American religion. I may be a priest of the Episcopal church first, but second, I love football.

I mean, I really love football, in the most undignified way possible.

I used not to care about sports at all, and then once I got to college and had a big state university team to root for, I started to get interested. Four years of college plus three of graduate school transformed me into a rabid fan–win or lose, rain or snow, you’ll find me in the stands for a home game and in front of the T.V. for any team I can watch.

I have to watch myself or I’ll be one of those crazies who paint their stomachs and scream like banshees into the camera on the front row of the stands.

What makes people act so crazy at sports events?

And why do we find this type of behavior perfectly normal and acceptable in this particular context?

Anyone who painted their stomach and screamed random slogans at church or in the office or at the grocery store would be thought to be insane.

And we Americans do not do well with insanity.

You can have almost any medical problem in the world and still be taken seriously and treated like a human being, except for mental illness.

Why is that? Continue reading