Sunday, March 12 2006

Click here to read Mark 8:27-38.

His teacher was the Messiah. Not just another run of the mill holy man, passing magic tricks off as miracles. Jesus was the anointed One, the Beloved Son of God, the Christ. This peasant from Nazareth was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the answer to centuries of hope. God finally walked the earth, and soon his full glory would be made manifest. The Roman government would flee from the Israelites’ land, and once again the people of God would have a mighty Kingdom on Earth. Peter was delirious with joy, and spoke the truth on his heart: You are the Messiah.

And then the object of Peter’s hope dashed his hopes with a new teaching, that he would “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

Peter rebuked Jesus. We don’t know quite what he said, but he led the Son of God away from the Disciples like a misbehaving child, and attempted to put Jesus in his place. I can imagine his alarm as he desperately struggled to convince Jesus that the Messiah isn’t supposed to suffer and die. I can imagine this because I would have had the same reaction.

Many of us have heard the story of Jesus Christ so many times that we forget how radical it is. God doesn’t merely walk the dusty roads of Galilee; God walks to his death with a cross on his back.

One of the best novels I’ve read in recent years is called The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The protagonist, Pi, is unusually precocious when it comes to faith. Although he was born a Hindu, the young Indian boy is equally captivated by Islam and Christianity. There is a great scene in which his three religious teachers discover he has been moonlighting in other religions.

But what Pi has to say about the strange new story of Jesus Christ echoes Peter’s bafflement. He reflects,

“That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers … But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified -- and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying… divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar (His Son) die. That is tantamount to letting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.”

What Pi is encountering here is the scandal of the Christian Faith. We have, in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique, offensive, and saving story of a God who suffers and dies on account of his compassionate, insatiable love for Creation.

Pi was familiar with many gods, and they were all invincible and immortal. Peter wanted a powerful God who saves his people from suffering, not a weak and broken God who bears the burden of suffering and death himself. Jesus rebukes Peter because Peter is wrong, but the fire behind his rebuke is pure fear. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and instead of the mighty Superhero we long for, he is a vulnerable, breakable human being.

Jesus Christ reveals a God who suffers. And though we might think that suffering and death spoils what is perfect, the crucifixion of Jesus on the Cross reveals an utterly different sort of perfection—a perfect love. And this love is more powerful than pain, more powerful than sin, more powerful than death itself. It is a love that saves and reconciles, and it is a love that understands, profoundly, the breadth and depth of human experience.

The vulnerable God of Jesus Christ suffers alongside humanity, making himself known among the poorest and weakest of his children. A painting by W. Maxwell Lawton offers a powerful illustration of this (you can see the painting here). Lawton is a Christian painter who is living with AIDS. His experience of the Christ who bears the burden of human experience led him to paint a portrait called Man of Sorrows. At first glance, the painting seems very similar to the many portrayals of the Passion of Christ. But gazing at the painting, you soon recognize the gaunt features and skin lesions of a person dying of AIDS.

Along with the relentless blight of violence throughout Creation, the global AIDS crisis is one of the most painful contemporary expressions of human suffering. Forty million people are infected throughout the world; that many people standing in a line could stretch from Los Angeles to New York not once or twice, but three times.

In the United States and Europe, people who are HIV positive are treated with expensive drugs that increase their quality of life. But seventy percent of those who are HIV positive live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS drugs are scarce. Without treatment, these people suffer from a terrible wasting illness and repeated bouts of pneumonia. Eleven million African children have been left orphaned by the pandemic, and many of these children carry the virus themselves.

The Crucified Christ doesn’t avert his eyes from the pain and injustice of HIV/AIDS. He doesn’t wash his holy hands of the isolation and shame the virus brings about. He bears the cross of ultimate compassion, experiencing the utter brokenness of humankind.

He becomes the Christ with AIDS. He becomes the Christ with depression. He becomes the Christ with hunger pains and alcohol addiction and intense loneliness. Through the cross, God identifies himself once and for all as a God who loves us enough to share our pain.

But the story doesn’t stall out on Calvary. By accepting our vulnerability and bearing our sorrow, “God has claimed our weakness as a resource for divine power. God has claimed our wounds as a potential means of healing.” (Bishop Kenneth Carder) The love of God in Christ Jesus transforms suffering and death into joy and new life. Even as Jesus discloses the frightening, difficult path ahead, he reveals God’s staggering promise of resurrection. After three days, he will be made whole again. The power of his vulnerability and the force of his love will shatter the suffering, brokenness, and sin that hold God’s people in thrall. Even the taste of death will be vanquished.

I have heard two great lies that relate to this text, both of which are incredibly popular among Christians. The first is the lie of Peter. Somehow the very real crucifixion of Christ and the obligation to carry one’s own cross is thrown out entirely. The Christian faith is seen as little more than comforting life insurance. At its worst, this lie turns God into a pawn at the beck and call of believers, doling out fancy cars and job promotions to those who “name and claim” what they want.

Not only is this lie an affront to the sacrificial love of Christ, it is also thin ice for Christians. If you believe that your problems will vanish when you become a Christian, your faith is bound to crash. We are assured that when the work of Christ is fulfilled, “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” But in the meantime, we must rest in the assurance that through Christ, God has intimate understanding of our suffering, and bears it with us.

The second lie is even more dangerous. This lie exploits the call to carry one’s cross to condone unjust suffering. Are you a slave? Endure your humiliation as Jesus did. Are you abused? Accept the beatings as Jesus accepted his. This lie corrupts the meaning of the cross. It turns the sacrificial love of Christ into a tool for cruelty.

By challenging us to take up our cross, Christ “calls us to live the life he has made possible for us through his death and resurrection- a life where we speak his name without shame, and do his will, knowing that there may be a cost to our discipleship, but that we've already gained life with the divine.” (Lori A. Cornell)

Like Peter, we do not like to hear about rejection and crucifixion. We would prefer to skip ahead to the resurrection. But God chose to transform weakness into power through Christ’s sacrificial love. We are called to follow Christ, even to the point of death. The divine logic of losing your life to save it certainly isn’t rational. But if we are blessed with enough wisdom to know our weakness, we will put our trust in the wisdom of a vulnerable God.

May we each live the new life we are given through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, who is the Messiah, the Son of God who lives, and dies, and lives again.

First Sunday of Lent: March 5, 2006

Click here to read Mark 1: 9-15.

Boundaries are a fact of life, and for the most part, a fact we appreciate. Boundaries preserve and protect us. When you close and lock the front door of your house, you create a boundary that prevents unwanted guests from entering your home. When you drive down Pacific Coast Highway, you depend on the other drivers to mind the double yellow lines that separate the north and southbound lanes. The boundary between sound and silence is part of what makes music so beautiful. Even the foundation of the universe was accomplished by means of boundary-making; God separates light from darkness and water from dry land.

Sometimes the breaking of boundaries is tragic. Paint on the road cannot stop a drunk driver from drifting into oncoming traffic. We have seen images of the wreckage that happens when raging waters transgress the boundaries between land and sea. Violence breaks a multitude of boundaries—the boundaries of skin and trust and safety. We mourn when these boundaries are broken.

But then there are boundaries that are unjust, limitations that prevent Creation from embodying the will of God. The racist segregation laws in the American South were rules meant to be broken. The Disciples of Christ emerged as boundary-breakers on the frontier. The movement was fired by a Holy Spirit of protest. Thomas Campbell, one of the founders of the Restoration Movement, could not reconcile the practice of excluding people from the communion table if they didn’t accept the church’s creeds. If it is the Lord’s Supper, who are we to determine who gets an invitation?

The starkness of Mark’s narrative brings boundaries into sharp focus. The gospel of Mark is not like the coastline, with jagged edges and shifting tides and a wide expanse of sand that is sometimes land and sometimes sea. The gospel of Mark is like a map of the coast: “land here, boundary, water there.” (Breaking the Boundaries). Green land meets blue ocean, and there is no doubt as to which belongs where. Mark doesn’t give us a genealogy. Mark doesn’t give us a story of an unmarried mother and a census and a host of angels. There is no infant Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Here we have the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he is all grown up and ready to dive in.

And dive in he does. Jesus comes from Nazareth of Galilee and is promptly baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist. The force of his baptism punctures the boundary separating the heavens from the earth, and a voice addresses Jesus: “You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” And Jesus is immediately pushed out into the desert, where he remains for forty days, withstanding temptation in the company of beasts and angels. At the close of the 40 days, Jesus passes his test and John loses his freedom, and the time has come for Jesus to proclaim, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Here we have a story full of contrasts and boundaries. The one who will prepare the way, and the one who is the way. River and desert, heaven and earth, Satan and angels. Some of these boundaries are emphasized. Over the course of those 40 days in the desert, Jesus triumphs over Satan by resisting every temptation set before him. When he comes out of that desert, there is no question that he is indeed the beloved Son of God, strong and Spirit-filled enough to rebuff the corrupt persuasions of the evil one.

But other boundaries are blurred, and some are fully broken.

Jesus is the Son of God. His deep communion with the Spirit of God means that he is holy—so full of love and light and compassion that there is no room left over for sin. John the Baptist is a magnet for sinners—men and women with heavy burdens of guilt. People flock to John the Baptist because they recognize their brokenness, and the last thing they do before John dunks them in the Jordan River is confess their sins and repent. The waters of baptism wash away their sins, and they ascend from the river with the assurance that they are forgiven.

So why on earth would the beloved one of God allow himself to be submerged in the river alongside sinners? Shouldn’t the Son of God protect his image? If he is supposed to be sinless, shouldn’t he be on the riverbank, acting as a sort of holy cheerleader? Certainly it makes more sense for Jesus to stay dry and comfortable on the sidelines, there to simply welcome the repentant sinners into the new life of baptism.

But this isn’t how Jesus works. The boundary separating the sinless Son of God from sinful humanity is torn to shreds when Jesus wades into the water and leans into the arms of John the Baptist. God doesn’t simply peer through the veil of heaven and wonder what it is like to be a man. Through Christ Jesus, God stands in the midst of the human experience, stands in the middle of a river surrounded by sinners, and loves.

And before we have a chance to catch our breath from Jesus’ startling baptism, God pushes Jesus out into the desert, and Mark takes us along for the ride. From the river to the desert, and we are still in the presence of the beloved Son of God. Jesus walks away from the voice of benediction, away from the river that teems with life, and crosses the boundary into the dangerous, unlivable wilderness of the desert.

This scripture shifted into focus for me a few years ago when I went on a camping trip to Anza Borrego, the State desert park in San Diego County. Growing up in green Ohio, I had never been to the desert. And I have to be honest with you, I didn’t particularly like it. The desert was vast, unbearably dry, too hot during the day and too cold and night. The badlands were parched and brown, and the vegetation looked like it was more dead than alive. The desert wilderness feels like an empty and abandoned place—abandoned by life, and perhaps even abandoned by God.

It is no mistake that in the letter of Revelation, John imagines the fulfillment of Christ’s reconciling work as a great gathering by a river. Water is a powerful, sacramental image. God’s abundant grace is as vital as rain and as boundless as the ocean. The moisture of baptism is a tangible reminder of the life-giving Holy Spirit.

And the desert, with its lack of water, symbolizes the absence of Spirit. One of my preaching colleagues noted that “the dryness of the desert matches the dryness of life separated from God.”

The gospel surprises us again. Why would Jesus spend forty days in the most godforsaken of landscapes? The beloved Son of God, with whom God was well-pleased, spent forty days in the presence of evil. Forty days resisting temptations that Mark didn’t dare attempt to imagine.

The Spirit wasn’t supposed to be in the desert. But once again, Jesus demonstrates that God will not be contained, that no place is too barren for the angels of the Lord. In the wilderness, surrounded by wild beasts and tempted by the enemy of God, a team of angels ministers to Jesus, sustaining him with gifts of water even in a physical and spiritual wasteland.

Just as Jesus refused to stand on the riverbank and coolly observe God’s broken children seek healing, neither could Jesus stay in the safe places where we expect to encounter the Holy Spirit. We encounter God in this sanctuary when we open our hearts for worship. But the God whose praises we sing is present even in the least sacred places, the places where the threat of death is fierce and persistent.

Through Christ, we learn that the Holy Spirit is present in the wilderness. The desert of the cancer ward? The Spirit is there. The desert of the AIDS clinic? The Spirit is there. The desert of Skid Row? The Spirit is there. The desert of Iraq? The Spirit is there.

Jesus comes out of the desert, and instead of a warm reunion with his spiritual brother, he finds that John has been arrested. In other words, this is a really bad time to follow the way that John the Baptist prepared for him. The same Public Relations guru who would have directed Jesus to refuse the waters of baptism and resist the Spirit that drove him into the desert would recommend that Jesus should go underground for awhile until the buzz about John tapered off. It was just a bad time for good news. But the Kingdom of God does not operate according to our time frame. The time is fulfilled, so in the shadow of John’s arrest, Jesus finally begins giving voice to his mission: to reveal the forgiving and ever-present character of God.

This is the good news: in this messy world, full of sin and death and a million different reasons to feel pain, God loves us so much that he sent his beloved Son to bear witness and share the burden. This Son will not observe the regulations that separate holy and unholy. He will not respect conventions that segregate God from his people. Jesus will heal on the Sabbath, touch lepers with his bare hands, and eat with a reviled tax collector. On this Lenten journey, we remember again the Christ who breaks boundaries and suffers the consequences, all because of a love that cannot be contained. May own hearts be broken and filled with such love. Amen.

February 26th: Feast of the Transfiguration

Click here to read Mark 9:2-9.

Last Wednesday evening, I preached at the Disciples worship service at Chapman University. The new chapel is a sight to behold. It is architecturally, aesthetically, and spiritually breathtaking. My favorite part was the set of stained glass windows. These windows don’t have the exquisitely detailed designs of our sanctuary windows. They are plainly colored with the shades of the lectionary—red, green, purple, and white. And supposedly, they are placed in such a way that the appropriate liturgical color will be dominant during each extended liturgical season. How the designers managed to calculate this is a mystery, but during the long months of Ordinary time, the sanctuary is filled with light filtered through the green glass. It is a beautiful reminder of the deep connection between the seasons of the Church and the seasons of the earth. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany—the last reminder, for the time being, that God’s light blazes even in the darkness of winter. Beginning this Ash Wednesday, we take a sharp turn into a very different season— a season of journeys, shadows, and sorrow.

Even though I trust the logic and spirit of the liturgical year and the weekly lectionary scriptures, this week I was caught off guard. This being my first year of preaching on a weekly basis, all the curves in the road are still unfamiliar. I had gotten pretty used to working through the first and second chapters of the Gospel of Mark in a tidy, sequential way. Studying Mark’s purposeful narrative offers such a clear portrait of the amazing beginnings of Jesus’ ministry. I was all ready to dive deeper into the second chapter of Mark, all ready to tag along as Jesus eats dinner with Levi the tax collector.

But the lectionary points us to a very different time and place in the Gospel according to Mark. We skip past teachings and parables, healings and miracles, and we land at the foot of a mountain. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, and on this last Sunday of the season of Light, we join Christians the world over to gather with Peter and James and watch as a supernatural event unfolds.

Weeks ago, on Epiphany Sunday, we recalled the brilliant star that led the Magi to the newborn Christ child. That light revealed that Christ would be the light of the world. Today we celebrate the fulfillment of that light, the Christchild grown up into a man in dazzling white clothes, conversing with the great figures of the faith. These stories are seasonal bookends of light and life—the first the light of incarnation, and the last the light of resurrection. Here we are given the gift of a foretaste of what is to come, and just in the nick of time. The 40 days of Lent can be exhausting. Even though we need to grapple honestly with the journey toward the cross, we also cannot afford to lose hope. So today we are given a supersized dose of hope—a supernatural sized dose of hope.

The story of the transfiguration is big and marvelous, and if we’re going to be completely honest, it’s a little weird. Peter and James certainly experienced the event as terrifying and strange. Peter offers the feeble suggestion that they build a dwelling—a tabernacle to commemorate the transfigured Jesus in communion with Elijah and Moses. This is a silly suggestion, and Peter knows it right away. For all of the miracles that Peter and James have seen in their travels with Jesus, nothing prepares them to see the Son of Man in full glory. They are terrified. It doesn’t help that this event transpires immediately after Jesus foretells his death and resurrection. These two disciples are startled by the realization that their fraternity with this holy man is even bigger, even more cosmic than they could have imagined.

On that mountain we witness such a medley of glory and confusion. Jesus has taken on a transfigured shine, Elijah and Moses have stopped by for a midnight chat, and Peter and James are trembling with terror. And in the midst of this mountaintop experience, a cloud overshadows the whole mountain, and the thunderous sweet voice of God proclaims, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”

Let’s stay here a minute, tarry for awhile in this moment and on this mountain. In our fast-paced world of constant entertainment and amusement, we’re in danger of missing the terrific depth of the transfiguration. Glory is a difficult concept for us to wrap our minds around, for it isn’t a concept at all. The glorified Jesus emanates the presence of the divine source of all light and life and love. This isn’t some second-rate special effects show. This is God, dramatically and purposefully breaking into the orderly brokenness of Creation. God can and does show up— and nothing is ever the same. This moment in time was transfigured, and so too will God continue to burst into history, transfiguring and redeeming the whole of Creation through the glorious light of Christ.

Of course, the moment doesn’t last. Peter’s suggestion to build a tabernacle to memorialize the transfiguration of Christ was a desperate attempt to capture the moment and make it last forever. But God’s glory cannot be contained any more than God’s voice can be recorded and marketed at the Christian bookstores. The moment ends, but the commandment that descended from the Heavens remains: “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”

Listen to him. We might not have been on that mountain, seeing what Peter and James saw, but they preserved the most important piece of the whole story—God’s commandment to listen to what his Son actually had to say. This commandment is intimately related to the transfiguration, inextricably bound to the revelation of God’s glory.

How so? By listening to the beloved Son of God, we glorify him.

And this is how one of the most supernatural stories in the whole gospel gets very, very practical. In the course of foreshadowing the glorious resurrection of Christ, we are reminded once again that there is a purpose behind the scandalous incarnation. There is a reason for the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not walk the dusty roads of Galilee only to die that violent death on Calvary. If that were the case, the evangelists wouldn’t have bothered to document the parables and miracles that Jesus shared with his people. The gospel story would be completely alien without the gentle, ordinary, glorious voice of Jesus speaking a new word to Creation.

Listen to him. Listen to him through the call to compassionate giving on this Week of Compassion Sunday. Listen to him throughout the contemplative season of Lent, calling you toward a life more closely aligned with his shining love. Listen to him as you pray, listen to him as you share meals around the holy table of communion. Listen to him through the relationships you nurture with friends and family. Listen to him through the scriptures. And by the grace of God, let what you hear empower you to glorify Christ Jesus, the light of the world. Amen.