Easter Prayer

He is Risen, Alleluia!  

An Easter Prayer:

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well 
pleased with ourselves, 

when our dreams have come true 
because we have dreamed too little, 

when we arrive safely 
because we have sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things 
we possess, 

we have lost our thirst for the waters of life;

having fallen in love with life, 
we have ceased to dream of eternity; 

and in our efforts to build a new earth, 

we have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, 

to venture on wider seas 
where storms will show your mastery; 

where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. 

We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes; 

and to push into the future in 
strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our sure captain, 

Jesus the Risen Christ. 

AMEN.

Holy Saturday

Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you as few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart today

Has made my eyes so tired, 

My voice strained,

My need of God

Absolutely clear.

Holy Week invites us into a world full of betrayal, abandonment, mockery, violence, and ultimately death. The Triduum, those three sacred days which constitute one unfolding liturgy, call us to experience communion, loss, and the border spaces of unknowing and loneliness. Holy Saturday is an invitation to make a conscious passage through the liminal realm of in-between.

The wide open space of Holy Saturday can be difficult to tread: we walk between the suffering and death of Jesus on Friday and the eventual proclamation of the return of the Easter fire on Sunday. Holy Saturday evokes much about the human condition—the ways we are called to let go of things or people, identities or securities and then wonder what will rise up out of the ashes of our lives. In reality, much of our lives rest in that space between loss and hope. 

Before we rush to resurrection we must dwell fully in the space of unknowing, of holding death and life in tension with each other, to experience that liminal place and its disorientation.

Good Friday

Tenebrae: a Latin word meaning darkness or shadows. 

Tenebrae also connotes a Christian religious service celebrated on the evening before or early morning of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, which are the last three days of Holy Week. The distinctive ceremony of Tenebrae is the gradual extinguishing of candles while a series of readings and psalms are chanted or recited. 

But we do not observe this day as a people without hope. We know how the story ends and begins again...

Making Good Friday and Easter morning real requires an awareness of God's presence regardless of the storms of life, accepting a practice of ruthlessly trusting in Him. Brennan Manning writes: 

Ruthless trust is an unerring sense, way deep down, that beneath the surface agitation, boredom, and insecurity of life, it's gonna be all right. Ill winds may blow, more character defects may surface, sickness may visit, and friends will surely die; but a stubborn, irrefutable certainty persists that God is with us and loves us in our struggle to be faithful.

No matter how well or poorly you are doing, God is present. No matter the nature of the tragedy, God is present. In the sweet moments of joy, God is present. In the darkest and most embarrassing moments of life, God stands close.

God's presence shows us the tenacious nature of Good Friday and Easter. It is God's mercy, which follows us, whether we realize it or not. 

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 

Yes...

Maundy Thursday

Today we celebrate Maundy Thursday: "Maundy" comes from the Latin meaning mandate or command. Jesus gives his disciples and all of us a command: Love one another as I have loved you. 

But, unlike an earthly ruler, Jesus doesn't just bark a command and return to royal duties. Instead, Jesus shows us how to enact this love. In following the example set by Jesus, we come to see that this love is much more than a warm fuzzy feeling. It is a giving love, not a needy love. It is a love that calls us to dive into the dirty mess of life with one another, washing each other's feet and serving others along the way.  

Over and over, God's call to us means that we must be willing to push our comfortable boundaries, embrace outsiders, and give up the notion that there is not enough to go around. We may resist, lose our tempers, but the call of God is insistent, calling us all, individually by name, until we finally step over the lines we have drawn for ourselves and discover a whole new world of plenty on the other side.

Jesus' enemies counted on his fear of death to shut him up and shut him down, but they were wrong. He may have been afraid and even disappointed. But, he spent his last free moments serving others, breaking bread with those whom he loved. 

Love one another as I have loved you; step out of your comfort zone, push a limit, take a risk, give up playing it safe. You have nothing to lose but your life the way it has been; and if you get scared, which you will, and if you get mad, which you probably will too, remember today's gospel story.

With Jesus as our model, we are called to step over the lines we have drawn for ourselves in loving and serving one another, not because we have to, and not because we ought to, or even because we always want to, but because we know that it is God's own self who waits for us with his grace, His unending gift love, on the other side of the Cross.

On this eve so long ago, Jesus shows us something very important: that our God wanted to do something to help real people, people who might be walking wounded like you and me—he wanted to feed them and to make them clean, to restore them to the glory of being Beloved Children. 

So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

I invite you to come tonight as we remember and enact the actions of our master, our Lord Jesus Christ. The greatest joy I know as a priest/pastor is in sharing the Word and Meal with you weekly; and tonight, in washing the feet of those who labor in Christ's vineyards every day.  

Spy Wednesday

Today is Spy Wednesday, so named because tradition tells us that this is the day that Judas betrayed our Lord. As we read the gospel about Judas' betrayal, I think we can heed a twofold warning: that we not push forward our own agendas, steamrolling over the will and the wisdom of others, the will and wisdom even of God; and, that we not choose the way of pride, the pride that insists on our own wisdom and the pride that thinks we can commit a sin so great that God cannot reach down as far as we have fallen. 

The Judas in us fails to hear God nudging us toward a better way, and then shuts out God's offer of forgiveness. The Judas in us would rather die than to look at the Cross. As much as we would like to think that the greatest crime ever committed had at least a great intention behind it, the truth is that it probably was done for very base motives. It is hard to comprehend someone living so closely to Jesus for years, yet succumbing to something like simple greed. Yet, don’t we do the same every day?

For centuries, scholars have debated the reason for the discrepancy of Judas' fate in Matthew 27:5 and Acts 1:18.  Several theories have been offered, but the one that makes the most sense to me is this: the  'gut spilling' incident is a metaphor that people of the time would have understood. The first passage about hanging is about how Judas died in the flesh and the second is about how Judas died in the spirit. To get your brain around the symbolism, you have to understand that the Jewish people equated compassion with the gut or bowels, the way we equate the heart with feelings of love. Now you have an image of Judas "falling" from God and losing his compassion on a field of blood.

Make no mistake: there are fields of blood all around us and people like Judas who have lost their way. Who among us has not felt the great pain of betrayal or even participated in such? There are the abandoned spaces of loathing and remorse in which God’s children have isolated themselves. The gut wrenching reality of isolation can threaten all of us, just as it threatened and enveloped Judas in the darkness of night. 

I am reminded of Brennan Manning's powerful words of hope: 

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last 'trick', whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

'But how?' we ask.

Then the voice says, 'They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'

There they are. There *we* are - the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. 

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.” 

― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

Gathered by the Holy Spirit, forgiven, blessed and together: may we turn our gaze to the Cross of Christ and mutually bear one another's burdens with hope and faith. May we not fail to offer a word of hope to those who have betrayed and hurt us, those who have isolated themselves in darkness. 

Beasts of Burden

We celebrated Palm Sunday a few days ago. As somewhat of a biblical nerd, there are interesting details in Matthew's story of Jesus' ride into Jerusalem. This same ride is told quite straightforwardly by Mark and Luke. But, unlike Mark and Luke, Matthew features an interesting scenario in which Jesus seemingly rides two animals simultaneously.

Matthew got this idea from a statement in the Jewish scriptures, "Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Mark and Luke correctly understand the mention of two animals as a form of Hebrew poetry known as parallelism. There aren't really two animals. The second line merely clarifies the meaning of the first. There's only one animal. But Matthew uses this poetry to create a striking image. 

Matthew has Jesus tell two of his disciples, "Go into the village and you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me." 

Matthew continues, "They brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat over them." Again, notice the plural. He sits "over them." Matthew deliberately literalizes the poetic parallelism to give us a picture of Jesus mounted astride two separate creatures. The first is a donkey, which was the kind of beast on which king Solomon rode to his coronation, as did all the kings of Israel after him. The second is, literally, "the son of a pack animal." It is a common beast of burden, whose life is lived serving people.

The story goes on to describe the lame and the blind coming to Jesus in the temple. To catch the significance of this, we need to know the story of King David's original royal ride into Jerusalem after the city had been taken from its occupants. King David rode majestically into Jerusalem not to serve its inhabitants but to order the murder of all the lame and the blind (2 Samuel 5:8). 

In contrast, Matthew makes the point that it was the lame and the blind who came to Jesus to be made whole when he arrived in the temple at the end of his ride. The two animals are a metaphor that point to greatness: Jesus is King David's royal son, known as the "greater David." He shows us what greatness really is.

In Lent we admit that it is easy to become a person who needs recognition and control, gets into a position of power, and then uses it to oppress others. In contrast, Jesus calls us to be a people who use greatness to serve humanity. 

How can we better use our "greatness," our power, our sphere of influence, our gifts, our talents, our treasure, our time to serve the Kingdom of God? 

We will have a beautiful opportunity to serve and be served on Maundy Thursday evening. It is my prayer that we find our greatness in humble service to one another, to the world, and in receiving the Bread of Life for our true sustenance.

Interstellar Space...

By request, I am discussing "interstellar space" today. Why? Because it is a reference that occurs in Eucharistic Prayer C and because when I first started praying that prayer I had a tough time saying this phrase (and a certain lady with the initials LB giggled each time I stumbled through it). 

The prayer begins: "God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of glory and praise. At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home."

So, someone asked "what is interstellar space?" To begin, I'll give you the NASA definition. At first glance, the answer seems simple. ‘Inter’ means between. ‘Stellar’ refers to stars. “Easy!” you think, “Interstellar space is the part of space that exists between stars.” Not so fast! Wouldn’t that pretty much mean that all of space is interstellar space? 

For interstellar space to be something different, then there must be some defined boundary between the space near a star and the space in between stars. But what is that boundary?

Scientists define the beginning of interstellar space as the place where the sun’s constant flow of material and magnetic field stop affecting its surroundings. This place is called the heliopause. The sun creates this heliosphere by sending a constant flow of particles and a magnetic field out into space at over 670,000 miles per hour. This stream is called the ‘solar wind.’ 

Like Earth wind, this wind pushes against the stuff around it. What it pushes against are particles from other stars—pretty much anything that doesn’t come from our own solar system. Once you arrive in interstellar space, there would be an increase of “cold” particles around you. There would also be a magnetic field that does not originate from our sun. Welcome to interstellar space!

Okay, that's as far as I can go with the scientific definition of interstellar space. Now to let my theological imagination take over with regard to our prayer.  

It seems that the first impulse I feel in uttering these words is acknowledging the majesty and power of God. At God's command, you, me, the birds, the earth, and the VAST expanse of interstellar space came into being. That's pretty powerful.

Connected to this reality are the words we hear in the Prologue of John's Gospel: through Him all things came into being.

Through the Christ, all things came into being. And Christianity is, at its heart, a call to follow that Christ, yes even when it feels we are following into unknown territory, maybe even interstellar space!

It is a call to engage purposefully and to live intentionally in the light of Christ. Yet it seems to me that we are tempted to add so much more to it-- Wear that.  Do this.  Don’t do that. Run in these circles.

Exactly how we follow Christ is a call that that you and I must wrestle with individually. How I follow Christ in my life may be nuanced a little differently than how you follow Christ in yours.  We will spend our whole lives trying to make sense of what this call means. We will go left and we’ll go right.  We’ll make U-turns. We’ll become lost in interstellar space and we’ll be found by God, again and again. As our prayer reassures: "again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages, you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace."

It is through trial and error and God's unending mercy that we will find our way by following the light of Christ, by being still and listening for the whisper of God. It’s the ultimate great unknown. The "final frontier" isn’t interstellar space, it is the interior space of our spirituality, our relationship to and with God.

If we truly follow Christ, and I mean truly follow Christ, that journey will lead us ultimately to the cross. That is the heart of all we do and remember this week.

Following Christ, living on the growing edge of justice and mercy, learning to love foolishly those who hate ruthlessly, and to give without thought of receiving, believing in life even while the specter death still haunts the shadows – following Jesus is hard work.

May we all give our heart and lives to this hard work no matter where it leads us. Indeed, interstellar space is not the final frontier.

Post-note: I learned to slow down while speaking the words of Eucharistic Prayer C--the...vast...expanse...of...interstellar space...and in slowing down I can pronounce the acclamation of our powerful and creative God with joy and great humility. I hope we can all slow down this week and digest the rich journey to Easter morning.