Why Is This Day Different?

Good Friday – St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC April 14, 2017

Jim Melnyk: “Why is This Day Different From All Others?”

During the Passover Seder, the youngest child at the table asks those gathered, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”  The answer, of course, is that on that night – on every night of Passover – God leads the people of Israel from their bondage of slavery in Egypt into freedom.

As followers of Christ we may feel led to ask a similar question.  “Why is this day different from all other days?”  The answer: because on this day Jesus, the incarnate presence of God – Emmanuel – God with us – on this day Jesus – lovingly gives his life to call us back to freedom and life – to call us back into the heart of God.

Just as our Jewish sisters and brothers listen to the story of the Exodus at Passover, considering themselves to be participants in that ancient story, we listen to the story of Christ’s Passion on Good Friday, and consider ourselves to be active participants in that fate-full day. As we listen to the telling of John’s version of the story we are struck by the violence of crucifixion, and perhaps we are struck by the various roles people play in this horrible drama – harsh words and dismissive mindsets which accompany the so many violent actions surrounding the death of Jesus.

But it’s not the mind-numbing violence surrounding the death of Jesus that makes this story so important to our faith.  There is nothing remarkable about hate.  We see too much of it, don’t we?  Rather, it’s the willingness of Jesus – who sees clearly the handwriting on the wall well ahead of time – it’s the willingness of Jesus to stay true to his message of reconciliation, and the inclusivity of the kingdom of God, even in the face of betrayal and death, which strikes us as remarkable.  And make no mistake about it - regardless of how much John's Gospel seeks to be an apology for Rome - Pilate was by note a tyrannical ruler - the Judean leadership could not have made Pilate do something he wasn't fully willing to do.  The cross is Rome's doing.  The power of the story is the willingness of Jesus to submit to the might of Rome, to the puppetry of Herod, and to the duplicity of Caiaphas.  “No one has greater love than this,” Jesus tells his disciples, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).  Ultimately, the power of Jesus’ gift is his willingness to give his own life as a way to bring a broken world to its senses.

We tell these stories time and time again and I think that every once in a while we need to stand back and ask, “Why do we keep telling them?  What do they mean for us after nearly 2,000 years of life and faith in this world?  Why are they such compelling stories for some of us – so compelling that we come here year after year to hear the same drama again and again – and yet seem to hold so little power or meaning for others?”  My guess is that for as many of us who are here today there are equally as many reasons this day holds meaning. 

For each of us, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus holds some particular significance – even if that significance is hidden from our hearts and minds at this moment in time. Still, there is something significant for us about this particular young man, Jesus, as he hangs dying – stretched out on the hard wood of a cross.  Somehow – across the vastness of time – somehow in the mystery of our faith and our own spiritual universes – this self-giving – this suffering – this death – holds meaning for each of us.  And this day, as we stand before the cross of Jesus – and perhaps even take a turn holding or carrying the cross before us – we bring something of ourselves – we bring something of our own hearts and souls – in an attempt to find a way to stand with Jesus, and to stand for Jesus, in our own day. 

We come, possibly, to find meaning in one person’s willingness to give everything in an attempt to show us – in an attempt to make real for us – the power of God’s love.  Perhaps we come hoping to find meaning for our own suffering – our own sense of feeling lost and alone – hoping that this one selfless act by Jesus will give us a clue.

But in our wrestling to make sense of the crucifixion, or the suffering in our own lives, let us never fall into the trap of thinking anyone’s suffering and death – even the death of Jesus – is God’s will for this world.  How can we ever believe that the God who brings all of creation to life – the God who somehow becomes incarnate in the life of Jesus – would demand that anyone’s life must be sacrificed, or that the shedding of blood is somehow pleasing in God’s sight?  Perhaps this once worked for those whose way of life was centered in warfare and bloodshed – who saw their God or gods as angry deities who were always in need of appeasement. 

In his book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg asks the question, “Was the cross God’s will?”  That’s a question I struggle with every time I recite Eucharistic Prayer “A” saying, “He stretched out his arms upon the cross and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world” (BCP, 362, italics mine).   Borg’s answer is a resounding “No.” “It is never the will of God,” Borg writes, “that an innocent person be crucified.  Yet retrospectively,” he adds, “the community can affirm the providence of God in the events of Good Friday and Easter.”  The cruelty of the cross is human cruelty.  The will of God is reconciliation and love.  Jesus is obedient to the will of God’s love – and although it grieves him deeply, in the end he sees in the cross a way to finally get our attention.

Good Friday, in effect, is the political and religious leaders’ “no” to Jesus and all he proclaims – the means of consolidating power when threatened with its loss.  The crucifixion is the handiwork of systems set in place to keep the powerful in power and the weak on their knees. Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas stand together – unlikely and unlovely allies – allies who stand against the One who preaches Good News to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and who binds up the brokenhearted (Luke 4, Isaiah 61). On Good Friday the authorities say “no” to Jesus, and perhaps that response was so predictable we are tempted to call it God’s will; because how could God’s will be bent to the will of this world?  But the cross is the act of human beings – the nightmare of this world standing in defiance of the dream of God.   

Easter will be God’s “Yes!” to the Good News proclaimed by Jesus; and come Sunday we will find ourselves standing in the presence of love so great, that even the hard face of death cannot stay its course.  But for now, we stand with Jesus who says “no one takes my life from me, but I lay it down willingly.”  This is Jesus – “the heart of God made flesh” (Nouwen quoted by Borg).  This is Jesus – who is for us the revelation of God, and who shows us – who is – the human face of God.  This is Jesus, whose very death brings life.  This is Jesus, who even as he breathes his last breath proclaims, “God is…God is…God is!”  Amen.

Palm Sunday; Matthew’s Passion Narrative; St. Paul’s, 4/9/2017

Jim Melnyk: “An Uncomfortable Story”

In a few minutes we will hear the story once again – Matthew’s take on the Passion of our Lord.  It’s not a pretty story.  There’s a certain amount of ugliness about it.  It is not a comforting story.  And although as Christians we believe it has a glorious outcome, we don’t have permission to read it all the way to the end today.  The story ends with the grave.  The story and the hymns we choose to sing today, temper the glory of the Eucharist which foreshadows next Sunday’s joy.

It’s “a strange day.”  “It has two names, two themes, [and] mixed moods.” (Don Armentrout, Synthesis)  It’s been known as both Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday.  But I’m thinking perhaps a better name for this day might be Paradox Sunday because of the extreme shifts in tenor and tempo.  This Paradox Sunday underscores the contradictory realities of the Christian faith and the Kingdom of God – a kingdom “in which the least are the greatest, weakness is strength, and death brings life to all” (Paula Gooder, Sojourners On Line).  Paradox Sunday serves as an entry way into Holy Week – a week where, as theologian Jürgen Moltmann once proclaimed, “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh” with God (Synthesis).

The paradoxical nature of the day is heightened by the two parades we bear witness to in our liturgy.  The first parade begins for us with the blessing of palms and the proclamations of “hosanna” – which means “save us.”  We recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem through streets crowded with those who proclaim Jesus as the “One who comes in the name of the Lord.”  The gospel which we’re about to hear reminds us of a second parade – one that will take place before the week is out.  We call it “The Passion of our Lord,” or, “The Way of the Cross.” It is a death march to a lonely hill outside the city of Jerusalem – a place where under darkened skies Jesus will breathe his last.  In truth it is paradox – it is irony – it is scandalous – that the Messiah of God would die in such a cruel and torturous way.

Even the opening parade is paradoxical.  We call it Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem, and many Christians proclaim it as a fulfillment of an ancient prediction; but that causes us to lose the symbolic power of the event.  Theologian Marcus Borg challenges us to see this parade in a different light.  Rather than the triumphal fulfillment of an ancient prediction, Borg says “it was what scholars of the Jewish Bible call a ‘prophetic act,’” much like when Jeremiah smashed a piece of pottery before the priests of Jerusalem to show Israel how the city would be broken and the people taken into exile. (Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, Harper San Francisco, 2006, p231).

           

The so-called Triumphal Entry was actually a prophetic act by Jesus, “based on a passage from the prophets that spoke of a humble king who would enter Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey.  He would be a king of peace,” Borg tells us, “who would banish chariots, warhorses, and battle bows from the land and command peace to the nations (Zech. 9.9-10).  By riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey,” writes Borg, “Jesus enacted his message: the kingdom of God of which [Jesus] spoke was a kingdom of peace, not violence” (Borg, 231-232).

It seems to me that the paradoxical nature of Palm Sunday and Holy Week is troubling for many of us.  Jesus’ gospel message of justice, grace, and love resonates with us.  It’s the Good News we want to experience and know for ourselves and for our world, not the evil of Good Friday – because the ugliness of the crucifixion honestly chills us. 

The revolutionary, anti-imperial entry of Jesus into Jerusalem works for us as long as the demonstration doesn’t touch a part of our lives that is sacred to us.  When the revolutionary aspect of the gospel challenges how we live in this world it becomes uncomfortable – disquieting – perhaps even something to be discounted or ignored.

“What do I need to be saved from anyway?” we may ask.  “What’s so wrong with my life that I should need to be saved?  Isn’t that just the language of all those evangelical Christians who like to beat us over the head with their Bibles?”  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why many of us gathered here this day may not make it back for the theologically and personally challenging liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

           

Listen to the story once again with fresh ears.  Listen with fresh ears to the call for God’s kingdom – God’s community of justice, peace, and love.  Listen with fresh ears for the revolutionary challenge inherent in that call by Jesus.  Listen once again to the reality of brokenness in the human condition and how familiar and perhaps even comfortable the challenges of Herod, Caiaphas and Pilate might sound.  Do their mutterings not sound at least a bit familiar – perhaps even just a tiny bit familiar? 

Listen to the story with the knowledge that the Herods, the High Priests, and the Pilates of this world don’t have the last say.  Our brokenness, and the brokenness of this world - actions like the Palm Sunday church bombings in Egypt earlier today - don’t have the last say.  Death – even the violent death of an innocent man on a cross – doesn’t have the final say.

Walk through this hard week together as the Body of Christ gathered and called as witnesses to God’s love.  Listen with new ears – with fresh ears – as we hear the tale of betrayal and trial – as we experience a Jesus who is both agitated and grieved – who struggles deeply with what will come next.  . 

Gather at the table in the upper room as we wash one another’s feet on Thursday night, experiencing the mystery of Christ’s self-giving and our own sacramental gift of self to one another and to God as well.  Watch with Jesus as he agonizes over the coming storm.  Stand one more time at the foot of the cross and experience the paradox that in the Kingdom of God humility is greatness, weakness is strength, and most of all, that even in death we will find life.  Amen.

The Air-Stirring Spirit of God

Lent 5A; Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45; St. Paul's, Smithfield, NC 4/2/2017

Jim Melnyk “The Air-Stirring Spirit of God”

A long time ago the people of Israel, lost in exile, despaired.  Their city and temple in ruins, they felt they had lost their God.  The psalmist proclaimed:

“By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither and forget its skill.

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” (Psalm 137:1-6 NRSV and BCP combined)

             

Into the midst of this great despair a prophet arises – one called upon by God to proclaim a new hope for God’s people – forgiveness and return.  Just as God had heard Israel’s cry while they were captives in Egypt, God listens to the cry of those in exile and responds in grace, offering words of hope, and a desire for a renewed commitment of love.  And still the people struggle to believe – struggle to accept that God is not only with them in exile, but is also ready to deliver them, and bring them back home. 

“The people [are] moaning: ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off’ (Ezekiel 37:11)…. But then one day God [plops] Ezekiel down in the middle of a valley of dried-up bones. This time, [it is] God [who despairs]. God [takes] a good look at God's people and [sees] dried up hopes, dried up dreams, dried up programs, and dried up congregations. And God [says to the prophet], ‘Can these bones live?’  Ezekiel [has] the wisdom and humility to respond with a confession, ‘I don't know.  Only you know, God’" (Nancy Hastings Sehested, Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/5/2017).  And so God takes the initiative – God speaks a word of resurrection power through Ezekiel – and the bones begin to rattle and shake – they are drawn together by the Spirit of God – en-fleshed and given breath.

We come across exile of a different sort in today’s gospel lesson.  At the death of their brother Lazarus, Martha and Mary both find themselves lost in despair – their deeply felt grief leaving them feeling as desolate as the dried up bones that once confronted Ezekiel.  Many of us looked at this story the first Wednesday evening in Lent.  We wondered, “Why the four days?”  Someone quite correctly pointed out that four days made us sure that Lazarus was really dead – stone dead – dead enough to stink in the grave – as dead as the bones in Ezekiel – so dried up that not even the marrow is left!

Martha, seemingly always the member of her family quick to engage Jesus with a challenging word, complains that Jesus “could have prevented this tragedy if he had gotten his priorities straight. But [even] then she [speaks] confidently of her faith in the God who hears and answers. Jesus [tells] her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life…. Do you believe this?’ [and] Martha responds in confession, ‘Yes, Lord. You are the Christ’” (ibid).

As The Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested puts it, “Resurrection comes to despairing, dried-up people. The only hope we have is in a God who can breathe life into our dried-up lives. Beyond our despairing no and our optimistic yes comes the bone-rattling, air-stirring Spirit of new life” (ibid).  What an incredible image – “the air-stirring Spirit of new life.”

Earlier last week we explored the Lazarus story during our Clergy Lenten Quiet Day with Bishop Anne Hodges-Copple.  Concerning the raising of Lazarus, Bishop Anne offered a question I had never before considered.  “Is there something baptismal about this?” she asked.  In Holy Baptism we proclaim that we have died to this world and are raised to new life in Christ.  Isn’t this something of what happens with Lazarus?  Isn’t this something of what happens for Martha and Mary in the deepest reaches of their grief?

Lazarus does, indeed, become a baptismal figure – buried with Christ in his tomb – all of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song….  Lazarus becomes a symbol of resurrection power as well – four days dead and in the grave; and yet by the grace and love of God in Christ he lives again – becoming what Bishop Anne called the nascent sign of the Jesus Movement.  The world changes in that moment of life-giving action – for it sets in motion the final events in the life of Jesus – moving him unwaveringly toward the cross and beyond.  Lazarus’ death and new life becomes the harbinger of Good Friday – and the promise of Easter.

And while Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones is not meant to be baptismal in its original context, it was part of the earliest glimmerings of resurrection theology – the promise that God can and does bring new life out of death.  And as modern day Jesus followers, we can see in the exile and return of Israel reminders of baptismal life.  Israel, buried in her brokenness and exile, feels the breath of God upon her dried out bones, draws the very breath of God into her newly reformed lungs, and comes alive!

Of course the easy questions to ask might be, “When have we felt like a pile of dried up, dusty, lifeless bones?” or “When have we felt grief so deeply that, like Mary, we can hardly move, or like Martha, we want to cry out in despair?”  Perhaps the easy question might be, “When have you felt bound up like Lazarus, left in tomb-like darkness, hoping for new life?”  And those are good questions to ask – simply because most of us have experienced those realities in one way or another in our lives – perhaps even right now.

In both stories, the nightmare of the world is shaken awake by the dream of God. As theologian C. S. Lewis once wrote, “God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders” (C. S. Lewis, Synthesis Today, 3/18/2017).  And as much as we struggle to remain in the midst of Lent, we see constant reminders of the promise God has in store for us and for all creation – as God’s Spirit moves around us and within us, breathing new life into our lungs.

Speaking through Ezekiel God proclaims, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”  Martha began with the understanding that new life would come about in some glorious future Day of the Lord, only to hear from Jesus that resurrection life happens in the here and now. The Apostle Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God is a constant force living and moving within us – that, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, “Resurrection is not only an event; it is also a continual state of empowered living” (Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/2/2017). 

Perhaps, then, the best question we can ask ourselves has to do with what it means to live day-to-day lives as resurrection people.  What can it mean for us to live as if resurrection is real – unbound and unafraid?  How does that change the way we seek to live together in community – within the full wonder and diversity of the human race?  What are we willing to risk of our own lives knowing that the air-stirring Spirit of God is alive in us, and has the final say over death?  “I am the resurrection and the life,” says our Lord.  “Do we believe?”  

Artwork by John August Swanson: Take Away the Stone