John 3:1-17
Second Sunday of Lent: March 30, 2011
Last week we were with Jesus in the wilderness as he was being tempted by Satan. Satan gave him the opportunity to be like God, and Jesus instead chose to be human. From there, he went on to do his ministry here on earth – as a human being who understood all the joys and pains, all the ups and downs, all the ages and stages of life that we do.
In the gospel of John, there are a number of stories of Jesus meeting individuals that are not in the other gospels. John seems to ask the question, what happens when someone meets Jesus – the human being who lived, loved, worked, and died 2000 years ago.
This week – the second week of Lent – we get to be a fly on the wall when Jesus meets a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a great character for us to identify with. If you listen carefully to the text, you realize that this is not a story about a non-believer becoming a believer in Jesus. This is a story about someone who comes with belief in Jesus and is converted to a new kind of faith. This story is about us. We come with our own knowledge of who we think Jesus was and is, and what we think it means to believe in him, but we may be challenged by this story. As Jesus asks Nicodemus to take a look at his beliefs, we too may be challenged to look at our own beliefs and to see if we need a new kind of faith.
Nicodemus comes with a very particular belief in Jesus. He tells Jesus that he knows he is from God because of the signs Jesus performed – the miracles – the amazing feats and healings and turning water into wine – all the magic stuff. And two verses before our passage, we were told that many believed in Jesus because of the signs, or miracles he performed. Nicodemus thinks he understands what it means to have faith in this person. But what he found when he met Jesus was that the knowledge that informed his belief was getting in the way of finding what he was truly looking for.
A colleague shared a parable this week that she thought shed light on Nicodemus:
Once upon a time, there was a man who set out to discover the meaning of life. First he read everything he could get his hands on—history, philosophy, psychology, religion. While he became a very smart person, nothing he read gave him the answer he was looking for. He found other smart people and asked them about the meaning of life, but while their discussions were long and lively, no two of them agreed on the same thing and still he had no answer.
Finally he put all his belongings in storage and set off in search of the meaning of life. He went to South America. He went to India. Everywhere he went, people told him they did not know the meaning of life, but they had heard of a woman who did, only they were not sure where she lived. He asked about her in every country on earth until finally, deep in the Himalayas, someone told him how to reach her house—a tiny little hut perched on the side of a mountain just below the tree line.
He climbed and climbed to reach her front door. When he finally got there, with knuckles so cold they hardly worked, he knocked.
"Yes?" said the kind-looking old woman who opened it. He thought he would die of happiness.
"I have come halfway around the world to ask you one question," he said, gasping for breath. "What is the meaning of life?"
"Please come in and have some tea," the old woman said.
"No," he said. "I mean, no thank you. I didn't come all this way for tea. I came for an answer. Won't you tell me, please, what is the meaning of life?"
"We shall have tea," the old woman said, so he gave up and went inside.
While she was brewing the tea he caught his breath and began telling her about all the books he had read, all the people he had met, all the places he had been. The old woman listened (which was just as well, since her visitor did not leave any room for her to reply), and as he talked she placed a fragile tea cup in his hand. Then she began to pour the tea.
He was so busy talking that he did not notice when the tea cup was full, so the old woman just kept pouring until the tea ran over the sides of the cup and spilled to the floor in a steaming waterfall.
"What are you doing? !" he yelled when the tea burned his hand. "It's full, can't you see that? Stop! There's no more room!"
"Just so," the old woman said to him. "You come here wanting something from me, but what am I to do? There is no more room in your cup. Come back when it is empty and then we will talk."
The whole interaction with Jesus must have been pretty frustrating for Nicodemus at first. Nicodemus comes in the dark of night, searching for Jesus. I imagine a man who was looking for something more, something more profound than what he knew. He was looking for answers about this person he believed was from God. He finally reached the wise one who would be the key to unlock the meaning of life. And as soon as he gets to Jesus, he starts talking – telling him what he knows. Jesus does not invite Nicodemus in for tea, but his response must have been just as baffling. He starts in with puns – you know, puns…like:
Your golf addiction is driving a wedge between us.
Lightning sometimes shocks people because it just doesn't know how to conduct itself.
Did you hear about these new reversible jackets? I'm excited to see how they turn out.
Jesus starts to tell Nicodemus puns. Obviously, the humor in puns depends on words having two meanings. Wedge. Conduct. Turn out.
Now, Jesus’ puns were a bit better than these and they carried a lot more meaning. But the problem is – the problem for us – is we are likely to miss the pun. The New Testament was originally written in Greek, and when we translate into English the key words of the pun – the words with double meaning, we have to choose one or the other. The word that’s supposed to have two meanings no longer does. The pun no longer works. This means we don’t hear the text as the author intended the reader to hear it.
For example, Jesus says we have to be born anothen. That’s the Greek word: anothen. It has two meanings at the same time: it means both from above and again. It’s a pun – the first readers of John…greek speakers…would know that. If you look at different English bibles, you will see that about ½ use “again” and ½ use “above”. In neither case does the word still have double meaning – so while we can laugh at Nicodemus trying to figure out what Jesus is saying, we fail to identify with him.
Nicodemus chooses the wrong meaning of the key word. He chooses “again”, instead of “from above.” And so the reader gets a good laugh as Nicodemus goes on to try to figure out how to get himself back in a womb in order to be born again. It would be like saying, “Your golf addiction is driving a golf club between us.” Jesus meant being born from above. But understanding that it’s a pun, meant to illuminate something, helps us understand that Jesus was trying to empty Nicodemus of what he thinks he knows and fill him with another kind of faith based on a completely different understanding of just one word.
The larger point the author is trying to make with those puns is Jesus himself is like the key word of a pun. He is one human being that can be understood different ways. We understand him in one way, but we need to rid ourselves of that understanding before we can know him in a new way.
There is a second pun at work in this story that is also critical to its meaning. And because we only read it in English, I think we have missed it altogether. Again, we translate a word with two meanings by choosing just one of those meanings. And we can look as foolish as Nicodemus when we try to explain what we think we know based on this choice.
The word is pistuo. This word has two distinct meanings at the same time and John can assume his readers know both meanings of the word. Pistuo means both “to believe in,” and “to entrust oneself to.” Remember that right before Nicodemus meets Jesus, we are told that he is one of many who believed in – pistuo – Jesus because of the signs or miracles that Jesus had done. The gospel writer intends for pistuo to have the “believe in” meaning at first, as he sets up a pun that will upset our understanding of the word pistuo later. “Pistuo” here means believing Jesus is from God based on knowledge of some events. John says that when we think pistuo is the same as belief in, we are making it knowledge based, and it ends in an intellectual assertion: I believe in you.
Nicodemus “knew” Jesus. Nicodemus knew Jesus was from God. Nicodemus came with all sorts of knowledge about Jesus, and it was getting in the way. Yet he did search Jesus out. I think he, like the man in the parable, wasn’t quite satisfied with what he knew. He wasn’t quite satisfied with believing in Jesus. He wanted more. What he learns is that the right meaning of the word pistuo when it comes to Jesus is, “entrust yourself to me.”
After the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, we get what is arguably the most famous passage of the bible. In English it reads, “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him with never perish but have everlasting life.” Pistuo. Our English bibles have to choose one of the two meanings, but John is finishing the pun – he relies on the double meaning.
Jesus just told Nicodemus that believing in Jesus was the wrong choice for pistuo. He and the others were getting it wrong when they believed because of signs. Yet every English translation I have seen chooses “believe in” for pistuo in John 3:16, not “entrust oneself to”. The author would have been counting on the fact that the reader has fresh in her mind the pun just used that turned on the word pistuo. This famous verse has so often been misunderstood because something gets lost in translation. It has been used to say that we have to believe something about Jesus in order to be a part of God’s realm.
But it seems to me, after the challenge Jesus made to Nicodemus, when we choose “believe in” as the translation we look as ridiculous as Nicodemus appeared when he tried to make sense of being born a second time. Short of having one English word that retains both meanings of the one word …if we have to choose, the translation here should be “entrust oneself to” – not believe in. Nicodemus and the others tried “belief in”, and Jesus told them they were picking the wrong meaning of the word. To entrust oneself to someone is a different way of coming to know them than to believe facts about them. Entrusting ourselves to Jesus is not the same as believing something about Jesus. It’s relationship with, not knowledge about someone.
How do we make the shift from believing something about Jesus to entrusting ourselves to him? When we entrust something to another person, we give it completely over to them. When we entrust ourselves to Jesus we are giving ourselves completely over to him – to his way of life. We may not know if we believe Jesus was “the Son of God,” or if Jesus did miracles, but we can choose to trust that his way of life is what will bring us the satisfaction and meaning we search for. We can choose to live a life of service to others, instead of trying to make some kind of assertion about Jesus. We can be in relationship with outcasts, instead of making claims about Jesus.
Freed from having to believe something specific about Jesus in order to be saved, we are now empty enough to entrust ourselves to him instead. We are ready to live a new life as new people. Because God loved the world so much, God sent Jesus so that we could entrust ourselves to this new way of life, which allows us to live in the realm of God forever. Amen.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Meeting Jesus: Woman at the Well
John 4:4-42
March 27, 2011: Third Sunday of Lent
During Lent, we are reading a series of stories from the gospel of John in which different characters encounter Jesus and are changed. Last week we met Nicodemus who came to Jesus believing in him because of the miracles Jesus had performed, but he left with a new kind of faith that was not as much about believing in as entrusting one’s life to Jesus. This week we meet the Samaritan woman at the well.
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is the longest conversation between Jesus and any one person recorded in our gospels. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what this means – but I’m going to go ahead and assume that this encounter holds a great deal of meaning for the author of this gospel. Of course, figuring out why it was so meaningful is a little bit tricky since we know almost nothing about the author, including who he – or maybe even she – was.
But we know a little bit about the world in which the author lived. At that time women basically had no say in how many husbands they had. The woman at the well says she has had five husbands, but we don’t actually know the circumstances that led to this. In our modern times, there is an assumption made that because she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband she is a woman of questionable character and morals. However, this reading is really more about our culture than the Samaritan woman’s reality. If someone today has that many past spouses and now lived with someone to whom she is not married, it’s conventional, even though it’s really unfair, to see her as having questionable character.
However, what we know about that time is that women had few rights and so no real choices about whether to stay in a marriage or not. And as for the current man she lives with, culturally it wouldn’t be unusual for a woman to be taken in by a former husband’s brother, or other relative, without marrying him. It meant she was pretty low on the household totem pole, but it was better than being left to her own devices. Bottom line: Women not attached to a man in some way did not fare well in those days.
The significance of five husbands was that we know she was bouncing back and forth between security and insecurity without any control over the situation…it was, to put it mildly, a cruel life. Now she is with a man who is not her husband, like a dagger suspended above her head at all times. She was, in short, a victim of her time.
We know from the author of John that Jesus went to Samaria deliberately – he went out of his way, in fact. And once in Samaria, he goes to a well – knowing it’s the women who traditionally come to draw the water. In other words, Jesus is specifically seeking out a Samaritan woman. Could it be because he knew Samaritan women were victims of an oppressive religious system and he felt great compassion for them?
He meets this woman, and in the course of the conversation he names her precarious reality: you have had a long life of vulnerability and insecurity, he affirms, and now you live with someone who is not really dedicated to your well being. And then, he offers a new reality – a new possibility. One not restricted by the stale, stagnant culture in which she lives – instead, he tells her, she can encounter the living God – living water – and find a world where women could be freed from oppression. And something about Jesus – maybe his insight, his compassion, an aura she sensed – something was powerful enough that she believed such a life might actually be possible.
She calls Jesus a prophet – someone who can see possibilities others cannot. And then, we know from later in the gospel, after her encounter with Jesus she runs back to the village to offer this possibility to her whole community. She plants a seed that might flower into a community where women are treated more compassionately – more humanely. When the Samaritan woman meets Jesus, she is given a vision for an entirely new way of living, and she shares it with others. And they catch the spirit. It was quite a transformation!
But the woman is not the only one to encounter Jesus in this text. The author was keenly aware that the readers would be encountering Jesus through this story too. And so the story does not stop with the woman’s transformation. It continues on into a theological discussion.
What begins as a very personal encounter with Jesus expands to a symbolic encounter between two entire faith traditions. This becomes about an encounter between the Jews and the Samaritans. In fact, John emphatically sets this up when he goes out of his way when he introduces the Samaritan woman to remind the readers that Jews and Samaritans had nothing in common with each other.
The Samaritans and Jews had a long, long history of very complicated relationships and disputes. Samaritan is often seen by modern readers as synonymous with non-Jew. And it’s true that many Samaritans were not Jewish. However, there were some people in Samaria who were descendents of the Jewish people who lived in the Northern part of Israel before Israel fell into the hands of occupiers. When the United Kingdom of David split 1,000 years before Jesus lived, when Israel was divided into a Northern kingdom and a Southern kingdom, the Jewish faith also began to split into a northern Judaism and a southern Judaism.
By the time of Jesus, Samaria had been occupied by foreign nation after foreign nation; there was great diversity in the population – including a small group of people who were descendents of the Jewish remnant of Northern Israel – and the woman at the well is one of these people. She identifies herself to Jesus as a daughter of Jacob, a worshipper of Yahweh.
But, Jews – those descended from the southern faction, no longer recognized their brothers and sisters in faith in the Samaritans. Samaritans were foreigners with different practices and ways. The Jews of the day did, in fact, believe that Samaritan was synonymous with non-Jew. But, that would be a little like the days when Catholics and Protestants saw the other as non-Christian.
One of the biggest differences between these two branches of the same religious family was what constituted the right place and way to worship. Those who identified with the southern kingdom – with Judah – believed that true worship of Yahweh must take place in Jerusalem, the Holy residence of God. The Samaritan Jews, on the other hand, worshipped on Mount Gerizim – the place they understood to be chosen by God and prescribed in the law of Moses.
This passage isn’t just about helping Samaritan women in one small community. The author of John is setting up an epic scene. Most readers of the time would recognize the showdown. Jesus, the Jew, and the Samaritan woman; standing at the well at high noon. And they begin to talk to one another…with the weight of thousands of years of deep distrust and bitter resentment hanging in the air around them.
The woman says to Jesus, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say the place we must worship is Jerusalem.” She was reminding Jesus – and the readers – of the problem between the two religions. She was naming the elephant in the room. And Jesus – a Jew, who should be defending the worship in Jerusalem, says that ultimately those distinctions are meaningless. Completely meaningless. “The hour is coming when you will worship Yahweh neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…The hour is coming and is already here when true worshippers will be recognized as neither Jew nor Samaritan but as those who worship in spirit and truth.” It doesn’t have to be the way it has been for so long.
And the well is a symbol. It is a symbol for the sources of one’s faith and one’s religious life. A symbol for what makes a religion distinct from others. The woman at the start of the conversation is standing by the well of her ancestor Jacob. This is where she draws her water – it is her source of religion and it is distinct from how Jews understood themselves. The Jews had their own metaphorical wells that contained their own beliefs, practices, and traditions.
In our story, Jesus is offering the Jews and the Samaritans not another well from which to come and draw water. He is offering living water – no well necessary. Well water is contained and stagnant. Living water provides a way to move beyond the containers. Spirit and truth are living things. Only if the source of faith is LIVING can it continue to nourish and not go dry. When the first readers of this gospel encountered Jesus and the Samaritan woman, they were offered a new vision as well – one where religious hatreds and distinctions fall away and all become one. And notice, this is not just about Samaritans giving up those things that define their religion and taking on the Jewish way – worshippers, he says, will be neither Samaritan nor Jewish. All must give up their wells with distinct, stagnant, centuries-long beliefs and instead find the living water, which transcends our differences.
In the context of the story about Jesus and the woman, it’s about Jews and Samaritans giving up their identities defined by specific religious practices in order to transcend a deep rift between these two peoples. In the context of those reading this story 100 years later, the rift was between Christians and Jews. They were bitterly divided over which was the true religion over who was right and believed the right thing. And the author of the gospel seems to be saying, through this encounter between a Jew and a Samaritan, both have to let go of those things that divide them – even their very identity as a Jew or Christian. You are no longer Jew or Christian, he’s saying, you are a worshipper of the living God who transcends such entrenched particularities.
Our encounter with Jesus in this text is also two-fold. Like the woman, as individuals Jesus can help us see and transcend the things in our lives and our culture – religious or o otherwise – that oppress us. But there’s a larger message for us as Christians in general when we encounter this text as 1st century readers did. The religions of today, ours included, are too dependent on wells that will always run dry. Is there not another source for our faith that would suggest another way – a way to transcend so many of long time disputes, and the need to decide which religion is right, which is the way to heaven, who is saved and who isn’t?
Jesus’ notion of living water can actually become the source we use to transcend today’s bitter religious rivalries. Rivalries between different Christian denominations, between Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, and on and on. Christians, Muslims and Jews worship Yahweh – the same God. We just all believe we do it in the right way, with the right words, emphasizing the right person, choosing the right books for our scriptures. These are the wells from which we draw water – wells that go dry and don’t nourish our faith.
Religion is penultimate. It is a human construction, as much as a well is. It is the container and sadly it can be the very thing that keeps us from living in communion with our brothers and sisters of other traditions. For our part, as Christians, maybe beliefs like, “Jesus is the only way to heaven” are like believing Jerusalem is the only place Jews could worship. Maybe the well by which we stand, and from which we draw our water – the religion of Christianity – is only fueling centuries-long rifts and prejudices.
Living water – as opposed to the well water of distinct religions – is divine activity around us all the time. We are nourished when we see God’s activity in the world around us. Early Christians saw God’s activity in the world in the person and life of Jesus. But God’s activity is not confined to a historical person who lived 2,000 years ago. God is spirit and truth, God is hope and compassion, God is healing and grace, God is justice and peace. In those we see divine action in the world. Our brothers and sisters of other faith traditions see God’s spirit moving in the same ways. When we worship the God who is spirit and truth, rather than a God who is defined by limited, particular religious beliefs, we transcend religions altogether and become one.
We don’t, of course, need to give Jesus up, or the bible, anymore than a Muslim should give up Mohammed or the Koran – but we can stop trying to contain God by saying our well is the right one; that Jesus is the only way the divine can be known in this world. The spirit of God, the ongoing activity of God, is our living water. We make sense of it through our stories, our scriptures, but those are only ultimately containers. Maybe a day is coming when we won’t need those containers, when we can come together with those people of faith from whom we are long divided and distanced and say we all worship God – the God of spirit and truth. Amen.
March 27, 2011: Third Sunday of Lent
During Lent, we are reading a series of stories from the gospel of John in which different characters encounter Jesus and are changed. Last week we met Nicodemus who came to Jesus believing in him because of the miracles Jesus had performed, but he left with a new kind of faith that was not as much about believing in as entrusting one’s life to Jesus. This week we meet the Samaritan woman at the well.
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is the longest conversation between Jesus and any one person recorded in our gospels. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what this means – but I’m going to go ahead and assume that this encounter holds a great deal of meaning for the author of this gospel. Of course, figuring out why it was so meaningful is a little bit tricky since we know almost nothing about the author, including who he – or maybe even she – was.
But we know a little bit about the world in which the author lived. At that time women basically had no say in how many husbands they had. The woman at the well says she has had five husbands, but we don’t actually know the circumstances that led to this. In our modern times, there is an assumption made that because she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband she is a woman of questionable character and morals. However, this reading is really more about our culture than the Samaritan woman’s reality. If someone today has that many past spouses and now lived with someone to whom she is not married, it’s conventional, even though it’s really unfair, to see her as having questionable character.
However, what we know about that time is that women had few rights and so no real choices about whether to stay in a marriage or not. And as for the current man she lives with, culturally it wouldn’t be unusual for a woman to be taken in by a former husband’s brother, or other relative, without marrying him. It meant she was pretty low on the household totem pole, but it was better than being left to her own devices. Bottom line: Women not attached to a man in some way did not fare well in those days.
The significance of five husbands was that we know she was bouncing back and forth between security and insecurity without any control over the situation…it was, to put it mildly, a cruel life. Now she is with a man who is not her husband, like a dagger suspended above her head at all times. She was, in short, a victim of her time.
We know from the author of John that Jesus went to Samaria deliberately – he went out of his way, in fact. And once in Samaria, he goes to a well – knowing it’s the women who traditionally come to draw the water. In other words, Jesus is specifically seeking out a Samaritan woman. Could it be because he knew Samaritan women were victims of an oppressive religious system and he felt great compassion for them?
He meets this woman, and in the course of the conversation he names her precarious reality: you have had a long life of vulnerability and insecurity, he affirms, and now you live with someone who is not really dedicated to your well being. And then, he offers a new reality – a new possibility. One not restricted by the stale, stagnant culture in which she lives – instead, he tells her, she can encounter the living God – living water – and find a world where women could be freed from oppression. And something about Jesus – maybe his insight, his compassion, an aura she sensed – something was powerful enough that she believed such a life might actually be possible.
She calls Jesus a prophet – someone who can see possibilities others cannot. And then, we know from later in the gospel, after her encounter with Jesus she runs back to the village to offer this possibility to her whole community. She plants a seed that might flower into a community where women are treated more compassionately – more humanely. When the Samaritan woman meets Jesus, she is given a vision for an entirely new way of living, and she shares it with others. And they catch the spirit. It was quite a transformation!
But the woman is not the only one to encounter Jesus in this text. The author was keenly aware that the readers would be encountering Jesus through this story too. And so the story does not stop with the woman’s transformation. It continues on into a theological discussion.
What begins as a very personal encounter with Jesus expands to a symbolic encounter between two entire faith traditions. This becomes about an encounter between the Jews and the Samaritans. In fact, John emphatically sets this up when he goes out of his way when he introduces the Samaritan woman to remind the readers that Jews and Samaritans had nothing in common with each other.
The Samaritans and Jews had a long, long history of very complicated relationships and disputes. Samaritan is often seen by modern readers as synonymous with non-Jew. And it’s true that many Samaritans were not Jewish. However, there were some people in Samaria who were descendents of the Jewish people who lived in the Northern part of Israel before Israel fell into the hands of occupiers. When the United Kingdom of David split 1,000 years before Jesus lived, when Israel was divided into a Northern kingdom and a Southern kingdom, the Jewish faith also began to split into a northern Judaism and a southern Judaism.
By the time of Jesus, Samaria had been occupied by foreign nation after foreign nation; there was great diversity in the population – including a small group of people who were descendents of the Jewish remnant of Northern Israel – and the woman at the well is one of these people. She identifies herself to Jesus as a daughter of Jacob, a worshipper of Yahweh.
But, Jews – those descended from the southern faction, no longer recognized their brothers and sisters in faith in the Samaritans. Samaritans were foreigners with different practices and ways. The Jews of the day did, in fact, believe that Samaritan was synonymous with non-Jew. But, that would be a little like the days when Catholics and Protestants saw the other as non-Christian.
One of the biggest differences between these two branches of the same religious family was what constituted the right place and way to worship. Those who identified with the southern kingdom – with Judah – believed that true worship of Yahweh must take place in Jerusalem, the Holy residence of God. The Samaritan Jews, on the other hand, worshipped on Mount Gerizim – the place they understood to be chosen by God and prescribed in the law of Moses.
This passage isn’t just about helping Samaritan women in one small community. The author of John is setting up an epic scene. Most readers of the time would recognize the showdown. Jesus, the Jew, and the Samaritan woman; standing at the well at high noon. And they begin to talk to one another…with the weight of thousands of years of deep distrust and bitter resentment hanging in the air around them.
The woman says to Jesus, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say the place we must worship is Jerusalem.” She was reminding Jesus – and the readers – of the problem between the two religions. She was naming the elephant in the room. And Jesus – a Jew, who should be defending the worship in Jerusalem, says that ultimately those distinctions are meaningless. Completely meaningless. “The hour is coming when you will worship Yahweh neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…The hour is coming and is already here when true worshippers will be recognized as neither Jew nor Samaritan but as those who worship in spirit and truth.” It doesn’t have to be the way it has been for so long.
And the well is a symbol. It is a symbol for the sources of one’s faith and one’s religious life. A symbol for what makes a religion distinct from others. The woman at the start of the conversation is standing by the well of her ancestor Jacob. This is where she draws her water – it is her source of religion and it is distinct from how Jews understood themselves. The Jews had their own metaphorical wells that contained their own beliefs, practices, and traditions.
In our story, Jesus is offering the Jews and the Samaritans not another well from which to come and draw water. He is offering living water – no well necessary. Well water is contained and stagnant. Living water provides a way to move beyond the containers. Spirit and truth are living things. Only if the source of faith is LIVING can it continue to nourish and not go dry. When the first readers of this gospel encountered Jesus and the Samaritan woman, they were offered a new vision as well – one where religious hatreds and distinctions fall away and all become one. And notice, this is not just about Samaritans giving up those things that define their religion and taking on the Jewish way – worshippers, he says, will be neither Samaritan nor Jewish. All must give up their wells with distinct, stagnant, centuries-long beliefs and instead find the living water, which transcends our differences.
In the context of the story about Jesus and the woman, it’s about Jews and Samaritans giving up their identities defined by specific religious practices in order to transcend a deep rift between these two peoples. In the context of those reading this story 100 years later, the rift was between Christians and Jews. They were bitterly divided over which was the true religion over who was right and believed the right thing. And the author of the gospel seems to be saying, through this encounter between a Jew and a Samaritan, both have to let go of those things that divide them – even their very identity as a Jew or Christian. You are no longer Jew or Christian, he’s saying, you are a worshipper of the living God who transcends such entrenched particularities.
Our encounter with Jesus in this text is also two-fold. Like the woman, as individuals Jesus can help us see and transcend the things in our lives and our culture – religious or o otherwise – that oppress us. But there’s a larger message for us as Christians in general when we encounter this text as 1st century readers did. The religions of today, ours included, are too dependent on wells that will always run dry. Is there not another source for our faith that would suggest another way – a way to transcend so many of long time disputes, and the need to decide which religion is right, which is the way to heaven, who is saved and who isn’t?
Jesus’ notion of living water can actually become the source we use to transcend today’s bitter religious rivalries. Rivalries between different Christian denominations, between Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, and on and on. Christians, Muslims and Jews worship Yahweh – the same God. We just all believe we do it in the right way, with the right words, emphasizing the right person, choosing the right books for our scriptures. These are the wells from which we draw water – wells that go dry and don’t nourish our faith.
Religion is penultimate. It is a human construction, as much as a well is. It is the container and sadly it can be the very thing that keeps us from living in communion with our brothers and sisters of other traditions. For our part, as Christians, maybe beliefs like, “Jesus is the only way to heaven” are like believing Jerusalem is the only place Jews could worship. Maybe the well by which we stand, and from which we draw our water – the religion of Christianity – is only fueling centuries-long rifts and prejudices.
Living water – as opposed to the well water of distinct religions – is divine activity around us all the time. We are nourished when we see God’s activity in the world around us. Early Christians saw God’s activity in the world in the person and life of Jesus. But God’s activity is not confined to a historical person who lived 2,000 years ago. God is spirit and truth, God is hope and compassion, God is healing and grace, God is justice and peace. In those we see divine action in the world. Our brothers and sisters of other faith traditions see God’s spirit moving in the same ways. When we worship the God who is spirit and truth, rather than a God who is defined by limited, particular religious beliefs, we transcend religions altogether and become one.
We don’t, of course, need to give Jesus up, or the bible, anymore than a Muslim should give up Mohammed or the Koran – but we can stop trying to contain God by saying our well is the right one; that Jesus is the only way the divine can be known in this world. The spirit of God, the ongoing activity of God, is our living water. We make sense of it through our stories, our scriptures, but those are only ultimately containers. Maybe a day is coming when we won’t need those containers, when we can come together with those people of faith from whom we are long divided and distanced and say we all worship God – the God of spirit and truth. Amen.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Who Is This Guy, Anyway?
Matthew 4:1-11
First Sunday of Lent
During the Sundays of Lent we are going to be exploring what can happen when we meet Jesus. Starting next week, we will read stories from the Gospel of John about people whose lives were changed when they encounter Jesus; people who were given a new start, who were healed, loved, and even raised from the dead. In reading these stories, we will ask if such changes are possible for us when we meet Jesus.
Today, we start with two questions that begs: Who is Jesus and how do we meet him?
Obviously, we spend our lifetime trying to answer the question of who Jesus was and is. Such a question surely cannot be answered satisfactorily in one sermon. But today we get a glimpse of one piece of the puzzle in the temptation story.
The author of Matthew announces in the first sentence of his gospel who he thinks Jesus is: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,” he writes. The Messiah. The anointed one. Which might seem clear enough. But Matthew spends the whole rest of his gospel telling us what kind of Messiah Jesus would be. And in the end, we find out it is a most surprising kind of Messiah.
After 40 days and nights in the wilderness, Jesus is tempted with three of the greatest temptations for people who are expected to change the world – and the Messiah was definitely expected to change the world. The power to create resources for others out of nothing – in this case resources feed the world. The power to get people to follow you. And the power to live forever.
Jesus resists each of these temptations. Satan tells Jesus he has the power to make bread from stones – to make food materialize out of essentially nothing. He could feed the hungry any time he wanted. But Jesus refuses this. Then Satan tells Jesus he can be the ruler the people need – finally they could have a faithful, just, merciful ruler who looks out for the oppressed and poor. As a ruler, the one with all the power, he could affect in such positive ways the day to day lives of all the people who lived in his kingdom. He could use political power for good. Jesus rejects this. Finally Satan tells Jesus he can save himself from his own death – he can rule forever. Never again would the people have to experience the suffering that comes from corrupt rulers. Never again would their welfare be sacrificed to the king’s greed. Jesus, the Messiah, could rule forever and ever. But again, Jesus says “no.”
Jesus is not against feeding people, making people’s lives better, or even staying alive. It is not really these things he rejects. The thing he rejects is the power – a God-like power where one can do whatever they please. Instead, Jesus chooses to be human…human like you and me. This Messiah would redeem people by becoming one of them. This is a Messiah not of a palace, but of the cross. Jesus is the Messiah not because he is a miracle-worker (though he is that), or a great teacher (though he is), or a good man (though he is). Jesus is the Messiah because he chose limitation, suffering, solidarity, and in the end the cross.
Who was Jesus? Jesus was the one who could have taken all power to himself, even in service of saving the world, but chose instead to become human. It’s the great irony of our faith. Remember what happened in Genesis with Adam and Eve: At first they lived lives of immortality, but the serpent tempted them – told them they could be more like God by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. And they succumbed to the temptation. As a result, according to our earliest faith ancestors – those who wrote the book of Genesis – they became limited human beings. They caused the fall of humanity. By trying to be God, they became human – subject to limitations, pain, suffering, and death.
Jesus also was tempted with the chance to be God, but he chose to be a limited human being – subject to pain, suffering, and death. As a result, we now call him divine and say that he saved humanity. Jesus believed there was more saving power in being one of us, than in being a god-human, using power over us to somehow make our lives better.
As we read the stories from the Gospel of John over the next few weeks, we will see Jesus perform miracles, heal people, and teach people. But that’s not what matters most when these characters met Jesus. There were other miracle-workers, other teachers, other healers in Jesus’ day. That was not unique. What made Jesus unique was that even though he had the option to become God, he did not. People found him powerful because he gave up power. Jesus was a God who rejected God-hood, a Messiah who rejected Messiahship, and the Son of God who instead chose to be the Son of Humanity.
That is the who. The Jesus we meet is the one who in, in the wilderness, rejected being God in favor of being one of us. But we are separated from this person by 2000 years. How in the world do we meet him today? Nicodemus, the woman at the well, a blind man, Lazarus and his sisters – we will read their stories, and see how their encounters with Jesus affect them, but they actually met him…in person. But what good are they to us when we can’t meet Jesus in person like they did. We can talk about meeting Jesus in the risen Christ, or through the Holy Spirit, but for most of us, that is a bit nebulous.
So what does it mean for us to meet Jesus? Well, clearly we meet Jesus in the bible. That is a foundational principle of our faith tradition. We believe the bible gives us meaningful access, by describing who Jesus was – the stories of his birth, his words and actions, the stories of his death and resurrection. These things may not be history in the sense that we are used to, but we get a picture of the Jesus of our faith, and that is one way we meet Jesus.
We also do meet Jesus because some of those stories are stories about people just like us. When we can identify with a character in the gospels, we can imagine what it was like to be healed by Jesus, for example, and so we have an idea of what it means to be healed today. We read about someone who couldn’t walk being lowered on a mat through a roof and set down right in front of Jesus. There are times we feel like we can’t get up, can’t walk spiritually, can’t get through our day. When Jesus tells the man to get up off his mat and walk, we can wonder what it was about Jesus – about the encounter – that made that possible, and then apply it to our own crippled state.
But I think our best gift in scripture is that we see how the authors met and were affected by Jesus. It’s our best gift, because they were essentially in the same position as us. Paul, and the gospel writers did not know Jesus first hand. We see we have hope of being changed because these writers were changed – and they only met Jesus in stories. They wrote decades after his death, and had only second hand accounts to draw from. Yet somehow they met Jesus in a way that changed their life. If that encounter – whatever it meant for them – hadn’t been life changing, we wouldn’t have the bible we have. Not only can we look at the stories themselves to see who Jesus was and is, but we can look at how the authors told the stories, what meaning they made of them.
There are many faith traditions out there, and most are full of meaning and provide stories and practices that can lead people to transformation. But we have chosen this one – not because it is best, or the only valid choice – but because it’s compelling to us. And Jesus stands at the center of our stories. So let’s really choose it. I worry that in our well-intentioned efforts to not diminish another faith tradition, we don’t look for and experience the true power of Jesus. It is as if saying he is powerful is saying others have to find him as powerful as we do. But that is of course not the case. I think the value of any faith tradition comes in part from its adherents entering as fully as possible into its stories and beliefs.
The gospel writers allowed the stories of their faith, the stories about Jesus, to change them. And they wrote about Jesus in hopes that others would be changed as well. And because their own experience was that it was more than just the facts about the historical Jesus that affected them, they used myths, stories, folk lore and poetry to try to bring that transcendent encounter with Jesus to others.
Look at our story this morning: the temptation. This is clearly not an historical account of something. In fact, according to the story itself, no one was present with Jesus for this experience – except Satan – and it doesn’t seem likely that he passed on the story of his failures. There is no such thing as an eye witness account here. It’s a myth, full of metaphor and symbolism, meant to help us meet the Jesus the gospel writers met. We don’t have to see the stories as literal to be affected by them. In fact, trying to read them all as literal, historical accounts will likely get in the way – because they weren’t written that way. We don’t have to meet a literal Jesus to be changed by him, which is good because we can no more literally meet Jesus than the gospel writers could.
We meet Jesus the same way the authors of our sacred texts did: through myth, story, metaphor, symbolism. It’s when we open ourselves to this kind of encounter that the Holy Spirit does work within us to allow the possibility of transformation. Our job is to trust that there is truth in these stories – not just good ideas, or good literature – but truth.
We have chosen a faith built on paradox: Power comes through weakness, life through death, healing through humility, greatness through service. If we believe there is truth in this, I think it would truly change how we see the world, and what we choose to do. Jesus is the revelation of these paradoxes, Jesus is the revelation of a God who loves us in unexpected ways, Jesus is the symbol of what it means to be most fully human, Jesus shows us the way to live out these radical, subversive, counter-cultural paradoxes. Let’s open ourselves up to encounters with these stories, with Jesus, and with the divine power that can completely change our lives. Amen.
First Sunday of Lent
During the Sundays of Lent we are going to be exploring what can happen when we meet Jesus. Starting next week, we will read stories from the Gospel of John about people whose lives were changed when they encounter Jesus; people who were given a new start, who were healed, loved, and even raised from the dead. In reading these stories, we will ask if such changes are possible for us when we meet Jesus.
Today, we start with two questions that begs: Who is Jesus and how do we meet him?
Obviously, we spend our lifetime trying to answer the question of who Jesus was and is. Such a question surely cannot be answered satisfactorily in one sermon. But today we get a glimpse of one piece of the puzzle in the temptation story.
The author of Matthew announces in the first sentence of his gospel who he thinks Jesus is: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,” he writes. The Messiah. The anointed one. Which might seem clear enough. But Matthew spends the whole rest of his gospel telling us what kind of Messiah Jesus would be. And in the end, we find out it is a most surprising kind of Messiah.
After 40 days and nights in the wilderness, Jesus is tempted with three of the greatest temptations for people who are expected to change the world – and the Messiah was definitely expected to change the world. The power to create resources for others out of nothing – in this case resources feed the world. The power to get people to follow you. And the power to live forever.
Jesus resists each of these temptations. Satan tells Jesus he has the power to make bread from stones – to make food materialize out of essentially nothing. He could feed the hungry any time he wanted. But Jesus refuses this. Then Satan tells Jesus he can be the ruler the people need – finally they could have a faithful, just, merciful ruler who looks out for the oppressed and poor. As a ruler, the one with all the power, he could affect in such positive ways the day to day lives of all the people who lived in his kingdom. He could use political power for good. Jesus rejects this. Finally Satan tells Jesus he can save himself from his own death – he can rule forever. Never again would the people have to experience the suffering that comes from corrupt rulers. Never again would their welfare be sacrificed to the king’s greed. Jesus, the Messiah, could rule forever and ever. But again, Jesus says “no.”
Jesus is not against feeding people, making people’s lives better, or even staying alive. It is not really these things he rejects. The thing he rejects is the power – a God-like power where one can do whatever they please. Instead, Jesus chooses to be human…human like you and me. This Messiah would redeem people by becoming one of them. This is a Messiah not of a palace, but of the cross. Jesus is the Messiah not because he is a miracle-worker (though he is that), or a great teacher (though he is), or a good man (though he is). Jesus is the Messiah because he chose limitation, suffering, solidarity, and in the end the cross.
Who was Jesus? Jesus was the one who could have taken all power to himself, even in service of saving the world, but chose instead to become human. It’s the great irony of our faith. Remember what happened in Genesis with Adam and Eve: At first they lived lives of immortality, but the serpent tempted them – told them they could be more like God by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. And they succumbed to the temptation. As a result, according to our earliest faith ancestors – those who wrote the book of Genesis – they became limited human beings. They caused the fall of humanity. By trying to be God, they became human – subject to limitations, pain, suffering, and death.
Jesus also was tempted with the chance to be God, but he chose to be a limited human being – subject to pain, suffering, and death. As a result, we now call him divine and say that he saved humanity. Jesus believed there was more saving power in being one of us, than in being a god-human, using power over us to somehow make our lives better.
As we read the stories from the Gospel of John over the next few weeks, we will see Jesus perform miracles, heal people, and teach people. But that’s not what matters most when these characters met Jesus. There were other miracle-workers, other teachers, other healers in Jesus’ day. That was not unique. What made Jesus unique was that even though he had the option to become God, he did not. People found him powerful because he gave up power. Jesus was a God who rejected God-hood, a Messiah who rejected Messiahship, and the Son of God who instead chose to be the Son of Humanity.
That is the who. The Jesus we meet is the one who in, in the wilderness, rejected being God in favor of being one of us. But we are separated from this person by 2000 years. How in the world do we meet him today? Nicodemus, the woman at the well, a blind man, Lazarus and his sisters – we will read their stories, and see how their encounters with Jesus affect them, but they actually met him…in person. But what good are they to us when we can’t meet Jesus in person like they did. We can talk about meeting Jesus in the risen Christ, or through the Holy Spirit, but for most of us, that is a bit nebulous.
So what does it mean for us to meet Jesus? Well, clearly we meet Jesus in the bible. That is a foundational principle of our faith tradition. We believe the bible gives us meaningful access, by describing who Jesus was – the stories of his birth, his words and actions, the stories of his death and resurrection. These things may not be history in the sense that we are used to, but we get a picture of the Jesus of our faith, and that is one way we meet Jesus.
We also do meet Jesus because some of those stories are stories about people just like us. When we can identify with a character in the gospels, we can imagine what it was like to be healed by Jesus, for example, and so we have an idea of what it means to be healed today. We read about someone who couldn’t walk being lowered on a mat through a roof and set down right in front of Jesus. There are times we feel like we can’t get up, can’t walk spiritually, can’t get through our day. When Jesus tells the man to get up off his mat and walk, we can wonder what it was about Jesus – about the encounter – that made that possible, and then apply it to our own crippled state.
But I think our best gift in scripture is that we see how the authors met and were affected by Jesus. It’s our best gift, because they were essentially in the same position as us. Paul, and the gospel writers did not know Jesus first hand. We see we have hope of being changed because these writers were changed – and they only met Jesus in stories. They wrote decades after his death, and had only second hand accounts to draw from. Yet somehow they met Jesus in a way that changed their life. If that encounter – whatever it meant for them – hadn’t been life changing, we wouldn’t have the bible we have. Not only can we look at the stories themselves to see who Jesus was and is, but we can look at how the authors told the stories, what meaning they made of them.
There are many faith traditions out there, and most are full of meaning and provide stories and practices that can lead people to transformation. But we have chosen this one – not because it is best, or the only valid choice – but because it’s compelling to us. And Jesus stands at the center of our stories. So let’s really choose it. I worry that in our well-intentioned efforts to not diminish another faith tradition, we don’t look for and experience the true power of Jesus. It is as if saying he is powerful is saying others have to find him as powerful as we do. But that is of course not the case. I think the value of any faith tradition comes in part from its adherents entering as fully as possible into its stories and beliefs.
The gospel writers allowed the stories of their faith, the stories about Jesus, to change them. And they wrote about Jesus in hopes that others would be changed as well. And because their own experience was that it was more than just the facts about the historical Jesus that affected them, they used myths, stories, folk lore and poetry to try to bring that transcendent encounter with Jesus to others.
Look at our story this morning: the temptation. This is clearly not an historical account of something. In fact, according to the story itself, no one was present with Jesus for this experience – except Satan – and it doesn’t seem likely that he passed on the story of his failures. There is no such thing as an eye witness account here. It’s a myth, full of metaphor and symbolism, meant to help us meet the Jesus the gospel writers met. We don’t have to see the stories as literal to be affected by them. In fact, trying to read them all as literal, historical accounts will likely get in the way – because they weren’t written that way. We don’t have to meet a literal Jesus to be changed by him, which is good because we can no more literally meet Jesus than the gospel writers could.
We meet Jesus the same way the authors of our sacred texts did: through myth, story, metaphor, symbolism. It’s when we open ourselves to this kind of encounter that the Holy Spirit does work within us to allow the possibility of transformation. Our job is to trust that there is truth in these stories – not just good ideas, or good literature – but truth.
We have chosen a faith built on paradox: Power comes through weakness, life through death, healing through humility, greatness through service. If we believe there is truth in this, I think it would truly change how we see the world, and what we choose to do. Jesus is the revelation of these paradoxes, Jesus is the revelation of a God who loves us in unexpected ways, Jesus is the symbol of what it means to be most fully human, Jesus shows us the way to live out these radical, subversive, counter-cultural paradoxes. Let’s open ourselves up to encounters with these stories, with Jesus, and with the divine power that can completely change our lives. Amen.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Rend Your Hearts
Joel 2:1-2,12-13; Matthew 1-6,16-21
Ash Wednesday: March 9, 2011
“Rend your hearts, not your clothing,” says God to the Hebrew people. Rend your hearts. Tear open your hearts. It’s a powerful image even for those of us who don’t regularly “rend our clothing.” In Joel’s day, people would tear their clothing when mourning, or when feeling remorseful. It was a symbol of coming before God humble and bare.
Joel believed they were in a clothes-rending time. Things were bad all over. They had been for a long time. But Joel said this was nothing compared to what they were about to experience. “Sound the alarm,” he yells, because God is coming to judge, and Joel was sure it was not going to go well for people. The prophet thought it was time for the people to humble themselves before God and be contrite and await the judgment they deserved.
This text is used every Ash Wednesday, and often it is interpreted as a call for us to admit how awful we have been, and to await the judgment we deserve. But I think in this passage, in spite of what Joel believed, what God is asking is far more comprehensive than that – and far more intimate than that. “Yet even now,” God says, even now when so much has gone wrong, and you have ignored what I have asked of you, even now, God says, “return to me with all your heart, and rend your heart.”
Rending one’s heart is not an act of masochism. It is not punishment. In another part of the Hebrew bible, Isaiah, we hear the people asking a similar thing of God. “O God,” they beg, “rend open the heavens and come down.” In the bible, “rending”, or tearing open, is something you do to allow the divine and human to meet. It is as if the divine light shines, but there is a barrier between that light and us. When the fabric is rent, when the barrier is torn apart, the light comes flooding in. The divine and the human meet.
Of course, the catch is, even though we often think of light as good, there’s a reason we don’t always want to rend our hearts. We have secrets, and shadows. We keep things about ourselves hidden because we don’t like them. We don’t want them to be seen. For most of us, it’s our biggest fear… we’re afraid that people will find out who we “really” are. We think that if people really knew what we were like, really knew the thoughts that run through our mind, the things we have done in our past, they wouldn’t like us, accept us, respect us, love us.
We yearn to be loved, so we spend considerable amounts of energy constructing masks, screens, shields, anything that might hide those parts of ourselves we are sure will make others reject us. The thought of exposing those things to the light so all can see is not necessarily a comforting thought.
But the more energy we spend hiding our shadows from others, the more we live in denial of who we really are. We might keep others from seeing those parts we don’t want them to see, but in doing so, we become estranged from ourselves. Our lives become about trying to live up to the image we have projected to others, rather than being authentically who we are – who God created us to be. And we become estranged from God and the divine light, and so we don’t know what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Letting light in does expose those hidden things. And Ash Wednesday is, in part, about choosing to do this – admitting our sins, our brokenness, bringing to light those things we keep hidden; we lay our whole selves before God. We rend our hearts. But Ash Wednesday is not only about exposing those hidden things and then feeling bad about it. Ash Wednesday is about shining light on the shadows while trusting what God says next – after telling the people to rend their hearts: “Return to your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”
In our worship service tonight, we didn’t stop at the ashes. We heard the words of assurance, we heard the grace-filled word of God in scripture, and we will have communion – which always reminds us that our brokenness becomes whole when we commune with the divine. We expose ourselves, admit to the shadows, in order to learn about God’s boundless love – in order to learn what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Matthew knows about hiding parts of ourselves, and knows that there are consequences when we do. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. If we seek love by hiding the shadows in us, the treasure will only ever be a shallow love – a treasure that is easily stolen or eroded. If we think the treasure is to be liked by others, we will shape our lives around other people’s expectations. Then our heart, our true selves, will remain covered.
The consequence of keeping our hearts closed – of hiding the parts we don’t like or think others won’t like, is that we begin to believe we are the false self we project to others, and that only our false self is lovable. More than that, once we deny those human frailties in ourselves, when we see those frailties in others, instead of having compassion, we judge them. We have to believe they are different from us – other. Maintaining the denial means refusing to see ourselves in others. Judging them proves that we are not like them. Being separated from our true selves, denying parts we don’t like, keeps us from knowing God’s love for us and keeps us from loving others.
The choir is about to sing an anthem called, “Take Root In My Heart.” It’s a song that asks God to enter our hearts. To be able to ask this of God our hearts must already be rent – torn open, exposed to the divine light. Listen to the words as they sing: “My soul awaits your holy presence,” the song declares. God can only take root in our hearts – become a holy presence – if they are rent open. That’s the ashes part – we have a mark on our forehead that indicates we have torn open our hearts.
But that’s just the beginning. Once we have come to terms with who we are and laid it all bare before God…shadows and all…God can take root in our hearts. God can take up holy residence there, and we can learn that God is merciful, and loves us as we are. When our hearts are open and filled with holy presence, we are fed and healed and loved into wholeness, even in the most hidden, hurting, shame-filled parts of ourselves. Then, and only then, we can be a part of God’s feeding, healing, loving work in the world.
Lent is about allowing God to take root in our hearts. In order for this to happen, we have to come before God as our authentic selves. We have to come humble and bare. But not to hear a pronouncement of judgment, not to get the punishment we think we deserve, but to open ourselves to the light we know is at the end of Lent – the resurrection – and when we let that light in, we will learn that we are loved completely, wholly. That is the treasure that never fails. Amen.
Ash Wednesday: March 9, 2011
“Rend your hearts, not your clothing,” says God to the Hebrew people. Rend your hearts. Tear open your hearts. It’s a powerful image even for those of us who don’t regularly “rend our clothing.” In Joel’s day, people would tear their clothing when mourning, or when feeling remorseful. It was a symbol of coming before God humble and bare.
Joel believed they were in a clothes-rending time. Things were bad all over. They had been for a long time. But Joel said this was nothing compared to what they were about to experience. “Sound the alarm,” he yells, because God is coming to judge, and Joel was sure it was not going to go well for people. The prophet thought it was time for the people to humble themselves before God and be contrite and await the judgment they deserved.
This text is used every Ash Wednesday, and often it is interpreted as a call for us to admit how awful we have been, and to await the judgment we deserve. But I think in this passage, in spite of what Joel believed, what God is asking is far more comprehensive than that – and far more intimate than that. “Yet even now,” God says, even now when so much has gone wrong, and you have ignored what I have asked of you, even now, God says, “return to me with all your heart, and rend your heart.”
Rending one’s heart is not an act of masochism. It is not punishment. In another part of the Hebrew bible, Isaiah, we hear the people asking a similar thing of God. “O God,” they beg, “rend open the heavens and come down.” In the bible, “rending”, or tearing open, is something you do to allow the divine and human to meet. It is as if the divine light shines, but there is a barrier between that light and us. When the fabric is rent, when the barrier is torn apart, the light comes flooding in. The divine and the human meet.
Of course, the catch is, even though we often think of light as good, there’s a reason we don’t always want to rend our hearts. We have secrets, and shadows. We keep things about ourselves hidden because we don’t like them. We don’t want them to be seen. For most of us, it’s our biggest fear… we’re afraid that people will find out who we “really” are. We think that if people really knew what we were like, really knew the thoughts that run through our mind, the things we have done in our past, they wouldn’t like us, accept us, respect us, love us.
We yearn to be loved, so we spend considerable amounts of energy constructing masks, screens, shields, anything that might hide those parts of ourselves we are sure will make others reject us. The thought of exposing those things to the light so all can see is not necessarily a comforting thought.
But the more energy we spend hiding our shadows from others, the more we live in denial of who we really are. We might keep others from seeing those parts we don’t want them to see, but in doing so, we become estranged from ourselves. Our lives become about trying to live up to the image we have projected to others, rather than being authentically who we are – who God created us to be. And we become estranged from God and the divine light, and so we don’t know what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Letting light in does expose those hidden things. And Ash Wednesday is, in part, about choosing to do this – admitting our sins, our brokenness, bringing to light those things we keep hidden; we lay our whole selves before God. We rend our hearts. But Ash Wednesday is not only about exposing those hidden things and then feeling bad about it. Ash Wednesday is about shining light on the shadows while trusting what God says next – after telling the people to rend their hearts: “Return to your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”
In our worship service tonight, we didn’t stop at the ashes. We heard the words of assurance, we heard the grace-filled word of God in scripture, and we will have communion – which always reminds us that our brokenness becomes whole when we commune with the divine. We expose ourselves, admit to the shadows, in order to learn about God’s boundless love – in order to learn what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Matthew knows about hiding parts of ourselves, and knows that there are consequences when we do. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. If we seek love by hiding the shadows in us, the treasure will only ever be a shallow love – a treasure that is easily stolen or eroded. If we think the treasure is to be liked by others, we will shape our lives around other people’s expectations. Then our heart, our true selves, will remain covered.
The consequence of keeping our hearts closed – of hiding the parts we don’t like or think others won’t like, is that we begin to believe we are the false self we project to others, and that only our false self is lovable. More than that, once we deny those human frailties in ourselves, when we see those frailties in others, instead of having compassion, we judge them. We have to believe they are different from us – other. Maintaining the denial means refusing to see ourselves in others. Judging them proves that we are not like them. Being separated from our true selves, denying parts we don’t like, keeps us from knowing God’s love for us and keeps us from loving others.
The choir is about to sing an anthem called, “Take Root In My Heart.” It’s a song that asks God to enter our hearts. To be able to ask this of God our hearts must already be rent – torn open, exposed to the divine light. Listen to the words as they sing: “My soul awaits your holy presence,” the song declares. God can only take root in our hearts – become a holy presence – if they are rent open. That’s the ashes part – we have a mark on our forehead that indicates we have torn open our hearts.
But that’s just the beginning. Once we have come to terms with who we are and laid it all bare before God…shadows and all…God can take root in our hearts. God can take up holy residence there, and we can learn that God is merciful, and loves us as we are. When our hearts are open and filled with holy presence, we are fed and healed and loved into wholeness, even in the most hidden, hurting, shame-filled parts of ourselves. Then, and only then, we can be a part of God’s feeding, healing, loving work in the world.
Lent is about allowing God to take root in our hearts. In order for this to happen, we have to come before God as our authentic selves. We have to come humble and bare. But not to hear a pronouncement of judgment, not to get the punishment we think we deserve, but to open ourselves to the light we know is at the end of Lent – the resurrection – and when we let that light in, we will learn that we are loved completely, wholly. That is the treasure that never fails. Amen.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Some Sabbath Day
Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9
Transfiguration Sunday: March 6, 2011
Have you ever had one of those days? A day where, by the time you put your head on the pillow at night, it feels like about three days have passed since you woke up that morning? When I was in my last year of college, I went on a number of interview trips. One interview was in South Bend, Indiana. I honestly can’t remember the company, but I remember it was winter. I had a full day of interviewing, spent the night in a hotel, then woke up the next morning to face a couple more hours answering questions and trying to impress people. After I was finished talking to what seemed like the last person in the company, I got in a shuttle van to go to the airport. I was running a little late, it was icy, and about a ½ mile from the terminal, the van slid off the road. I knew I didn’t have time to wait for someone to come, so I grabbed my suitcase and walked/ran to the terminal in my suit and pumps.
When I got to the Cedar Rapids airport I picked up my bags and walked out to my car, which had been parked over night on one of the coldest nights of the year. When I turned the key, the car announced its displeasure, and then went quiet. I’m not sure what the actual temperature was, but I know with the wind chill it was well below zero. I had to call AAA, and this was before the days of ubiquitous cell phones. I went back into the airport, made the call, then went back to the car to wait. After what seemed like hours of waiting, I could feel my toes numbing up. Finally, they came, and got my car started.
It was about 2 p.m., and I had class in Iowa City at 3. And it wasn’t just a class I was supposed to attend, I was teaching a section of intro to religious studies. By the time I ran breathless into the classroom, the numbness in my toes had become a sharp pain. The students were a bit baffled by the suit and pumps. I taught the class, went home and changed, then ate dinner.
I had organized a campus ministry program for that evening, so I went after dinner to set up, greet people as they came in, and get things ready for the speaker. That night, I heard one of the best talks I had ever heard from a most surprising source – a gym teacher at the university. I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole time I was studying that evening for a test the next day, until I put my head on the pillow at about 1 a.m. It was a day I would not forget, but one I have yet to make much sense of because so much happened that day that affected so many parts of my life.
It wasn’t 24 hours for the three disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus that day. The whole thing probably took minutes, not hours. So many amazing things happened, so many emotions, so much to take in and make sense of. It was like having a lifetime of experiences in one, brief encounter. In fact, it was such a loaded experience, the authors of our gospels were still trying to make sense of it 50 years after it happened, and we are still trying to make sense of it today.
It probably began as an ordinary Sabbath day – as ordinary as things could be when you hung out with Jesus. They went up on the mountain to pray. When they got up there, boom! Jesus is transfigured – he begins to shine like the sun. We know, and the author of Matthew knows, this was a bit of a foreshadowing of the future event that would become the foundation of our faith – the resurrection. This is not an everyday occurrence.
But they get absolutely no time to take this in. “Immediately,” Matthew says - just as they are being shown a picture from the future – their entire past arrives on the scene…not theirs as individuals, but theirs as Jewish people. The whole past: the law and the prophets, the story of their scriptures. It’s laid out before them in the form of Moses and Elijah.
Peter tries to get a word in edgewise, he tries to slow things down by giving the three prophets a place to hang out for a while, but he doesn’t get to finish. “While he was speaking,” we’re told, God interrupts with the next extraordinary thing. They are jarred out of the distant past into remembering an earlier scene from Jesus’ life…his baptism. The same voice, saying the same thing: This is my child, the beloved with whom I am well pleased. And as they were reminded of this moment in Jesus’ life, they hear something that affects them in the present: “Listen to him!” God says. God – their God, their awesome God – was asking something of them.
It was all too much. We’re told they were terrified. They fell to the ground – probably the only response they could muster. Then all of a sudden, Jesus reaches out of his transfigured state, and touches them. “Do not be afraid,” he says. They look up, it’s all over. Then, as they are still reeling from this experience, they are shushed; don’t tell anyone what you saw, they are told. That was some Sabbath day.
We tend to think of the Sabbath as a time to rest. But this experience was anything but restful. In fact, it took the people involved on a ride that was completely disorienting – or maybe more accurately re-orienting, and not in a gentle, still-small-voice kind of way. It’s the whole story of God crashing down on them in one instant.
Our Sabbaths do not look like this. Each week we dole the story out in bits and pieces; one or two passages each week telling a teeny, tiny bit of the story. We also tend to downplay or ignore the more fantastical parts of the story. Given what we know of science, we don’t lend much credibility to the miracles and supernatural events. In short, we don’t experience the entire story of our faith in one, incredible moment – past, present, and future coming together all at once. Events like the transfiguration obviously had a powerful impact on the disciples and early Christians – this we know from reading the accounts in our gospels. We may not buy the story itself, but we can’t deny the impact it had. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect on us today.
I wonder, given our lack of Sabbath day experiences like the one described in our passages this morning, do we miss opportunities to feel the awe they felt, or even the fear? Do we even have a chance to be impacted so dramatically by the story we claim as sacred? And if not, what effect does that have on our faith and relationship with the divine? Are we missing a significant piece of the puzzle?
I think in telling his fellow Christians the story of the transfiguration, the author of Matthew was hoping to connect Jesus’ followers to the experience of the three disciples up on the mountain that day. He wanted them to have a transfiguration moment too. He wanted them to connect emotionally as well as intellectually to who Jesus was and why it is important to follow him even though he died on the cross and was no longer among them. In Jesus, he believed, heaven and earth met. In Jesus, the God of the past, present and future come together to reveal the extraordinary story of divine presence in this world throughout history. And Matthew thought this was inspiring, transforming. So he brought the story close to people by recounting the transfiguration. But the transfiguration is so distant from us – in time and in context. It doesn’t tend to inspire awe, or even fear. It tends to evoke confusion, if not indifference.
We can practice the Sabbath every week by coming to worship, but we can’t hear the whole story every week – it’s not practical. And we can’t have mountain top experiences all the time. We can’t force an experience or an emotional response to what we hear … So, short of seeing Jesus, Moses, and Elijah transfigured in front of us, how do we break through our indifference? How do we open ourselves up to encounters like that, at least symbolically, give us a glimpse of the radiance of God, and connect us to our story in a way that inspires awe and fear?
It is no accident that both Moses’ and Jesus’ mountaintop transformation happens on the Sabbath. This was a removed time; Sabbath was set apart. Going up the mountain in the bible symbolized being totally removed from the world. Mountains were special – they were like sanctuaries. They were a meeting place with the divine. The disciples experienced something transformative that day – but they were removed, suspended in time for a moment, and they had a true mountain top experience. Jesus had just predicted his death, and they were about to start the journey to the cross. Choosing to follow Jesus was not the easiest decision in the world. But in this Sabbath moment, this removed time, they encountered a truth that allowed them to at least take the next step.
Following Jesus is no less difficult today – at least at times. So if those set apart moments are necessary to help us on our way, how can we remove ourselves? How can we symbolically ascend a mountain? Can was have these mountain top experiences?
I’m reading a book about vocation – about how to discern what the most is the most faithful thing in one’s life. The way I ask this is “How do I connect with the divine movement in the world in any given moment, with any given decision?” Pro and con lists, thinking through the options, talking to wise people – these things are good and should accompany at least the “big” decisions in life. But the author also argues we should seek a moment of “connection” where our heart and bodies know intuitively “this is the right thing.” That connection is more emotional than intellectual, more mystical than tangible – and it requires time away from the noise that often influences what we do. Noise like other people’s expectations, societal norms that sometimes confine us in our decision making, business, and our own self doubt and criticism.
In looking back on my life, I think I have had moments of connecting with the divine movement and knowing I was making a “right” decision. Coming here, to Grinnell and this church, is one example of this. I wouldn’t necessarily call them transfiguration moments – I had no visions of Jesus shining like the sun, I heard no voice – at least not clearly. But they were moments, I think, of the divine and the human meeting.
At the same time, I have to admit there is much that is scary about seeking out those moments. I often avoid intentionally taking time for discernment about what I should do with my life, because my goodness, what might I hear? Whenever I take even just a small, mini-moment for such things, I get a strong sense that if I want to live guided by the incredible, huge story of our faith tradition, my life might need to look very different than it does now. I am humbled by our story. I am humbled by what I think I see of God in the lives of my faith ancestors – both those found in the bible and people throughout history who I think did “listen to Jesus.” And I’m afraid of the implications of all of this. Falling on my knees in both awe and fear might very well be the appropriate response at times.
We are about to enter Lent. Maybe this whole season can be a Sabbath time for us – a time to seek transformative connections with the divine. Traditionally during Lent we are more intentional about reflecting on our lives and the needs of the world. Some of us give something up or add some spiritual discipline during this time in order to open up a little more space for such reflection. Lent sits between the transfiguration and the resurrection in our faith tradition. In each of those events, we see the whole story of God illuminated in the person of Jesus. Maybe those stories can call us to a time that is set apart from our ordinary time. The story of our faith calls us to something larger than ourselves. Our God calls us to transcend the things in our daily lives that hold us back from following Jesus.
To use Lent for this kind of reflection might, in fact, be a little scary. It is risky because we might hear something we aren’t sure we want to hear. But remember that the transfiguration and Easter book-end time. Remember that we are surrounded by a transcendent and inspiring story. Remember Jesus’ words to the disciples that Sabbath day: “Do not be afraid.” May this season of Lent be a transforming Sabbath time for us. Amen.
Transfiguration Sunday: March 6, 2011
Have you ever had one of those days? A day where, by the time you put your head on the pillow at night, it feels like about three days have passed since you woke up that morning? When I was in my last year of college, I went on a number of interview trips. One interview was in South Bend, Indiana. I honestly can’t remember the company, but I remember it was winter. I had a full day of interviewing, spent the night in a hotel, then woke up the next morning to face a couple more hours answering questions and trying to impress people. After I was finished talking to what seemed like the last person in the company, I got in a shuttle van to go to the airport. I was running a little late, it was icy, and about a ½ mile from the terminal, the van slid off the road. I knew I didn’t have time to wait for someone to come, so I grabbed my suitcase and walked/ran to the terminal in my suit and pumps.
When I got to the Cedar Rapids airport I picked up my bags and walked out to my car, which had been parked over night on one of the coldest nights of the year. When I turned the key, the car announced its displeasure, and then went quiet. I’m not sure what the actual temperature was, but I know with the wind chill it was well below zero. I had to call AAA, and this was before the days of ubiquitous cell phones. I went back into the airport, made the call, then went back to the car to wait. After what seemed like hours of waiting, I could feel my toes numbing up. Finally, they came, and got my car started.
It was about 2 p.m., and I had class in Iowa City at 3. And it wasn’t just a class I was supposed to attend, I was teaching a section of intro to religious studies. By the time I ran breathless into the classroom, the numbness in my toes had become a sharp pain. The students were a bit baffled by the suit and pumps. I taught the class, went home and changed, then ate dinner.
I had organized a campus ministry program for that evening, so I went after dinner to set up, greet people as they came in, and get things ready for the speaker. That night, I heard one of the best talks I had ever heard from a most surprising source – a gym teacher at the university. I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole time I was studying that evening for a test the next day, until I put my head on the pillow at about 1 a.m. It was a day I would not forget, but one I have yet to make much sense of because so much happened that day that affected so many parts of my life.
It wasn’t 24 hours for the three disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus that day. The whole thing probably took minutes, not hours. So many amazing things happened, so many emotions, so much to take in and make sense of. It was like having a lifetime of experiences in one, brief encounter. In fact, it was such a loaded experience, the authors of our gospels were still trying to make sense of it 50 years after it happened, and we are still trying to make sense of it today.
It probably began as an ordinary Sabbath day – as ordinary as things could be when you hung out with Jesus. They went up on the mountain to pray. When they got up there, boom! Jesus is transfigured – he begins to shine like the sun. We know, and the author of Matthew knows, this was a bit of a foreshadowing of the future event that would become the foundation of our faith – the resurrection. This is not an everyday occurrence.
But they get absolutely no time to take this in. “Immediately,” Matthew says - just as they are being shown a picture from the future – their entire past arrives on the scene…not theirs as individuals, but theirs as Jewish people. The whole past: the law and the prophets, the story of their scriptures. It’s laid out before them in the form of Moses and Elijah.
Peter tries to get a word in edgewise, he tries to slow things down by giving the three prophets a place to hang out for a while, but he doesn’t get to finish. “While he was speaking,” we’re told, God interrupts with the next extraordinary thing. They are jarred out of the distant past into remembering an earlier scene from Jesus’ life…his baptism. The same voice, saying the same thing: This is my child, the beloved with whom I am well pleased. And as they were reminded of this moment in Jesus’ life, they hear something that affects them in the present: “Listen to him!” God says. God – their God, their awesome God – was asking something of them.
It was all too much. We’re told they were terrified. They fell to the ground – probably the only response they could muster. Then all of a sudden, Jesus reaches out of his transfigured state, and touches them. “Do not be afraid,” he says. They look up, it’s all over. Then, as they are still reeling from this experience, they are shushed; don’t tell anyone what you saw, they are told. That was some Sabbath day.
We tend to think of the Sabbath as a time to rest. But this experience was anything but restful. In fact, it took the people involved on a ride that was completely disorienting – or maybe more accurately re-orienting, and not in a gentle, still-small-voice kind of way. It’s the whole story of God crashing down on them in one instant.
Our Sabbaths do not look like this. Each week we dole the story out in bits and pieces; one or two passages each week telling a teeny, tiny bit of the story. We also tend to downplay or ignore the more fantastical parts of the story. Given what we know of science, we don’t lend much credibility to the miracles and supernatural events. In short, we don’t experience the entire story of our faith in one, incredible moment – past, present, and future coming together all at once. Events like the transfiguration obviously had a powerful impact on the disciples and early Christians – this we know from reading the accounts in our gospels. We may not buy the story itself, but we can’t deny the impact it had. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect on us today.
I wonder, given our lack of Sabbath day experiences like the one described in our passages this morning, do we miss opportunities to feel the awe they felt, or even the fear? Do we even have a chance to be impacted so dramatically by the story we claim as sacred? And if not, what effect does that have on our faith and relationship with the divine? Are we missing a significant piece of the puzzle?
I think in telling his fellow Christians the story of the transfiguration, the author of Matthew was hoping to connect Jesus’ followers to the experience of the three disciples up on the mountain that day. He wanted them to have a transfiguration moment too. He wanted them to connect emotionally as well as intellectually to who Jesus was and why it is important to follow him even though he died on the cross and was no longer among them. In Jesus, he believed, heaven and earth met. In Jesus, the God of the past, present and future come together to reveal the extraordinary story of divine presence in this world throughout history. And Matthew thought this was inspiring, transforming. So he brought the story close to people by recounting the transfiguration. But the transfiguration is so distant from us – in time and in context. It doesn’t tend to inspire awe, or even fear. It tends to evoke confusion, if not indifference.
We can practice the Sabbath every week by coming to worship, but we can’t hear the whole story every week – it’s not practical. And we can’t have mountain top experiences all the time. We can’t force an experience or an emotional response to what we hear … So, short of seeing Jesus, Moses, and Elijah transfigured in front of us, how do we break through our indifference? How do we open ourselves up to encounters like that, at least symbolically, give us a glimpse of the radiance of God, and connect us to our story in a way that inspires awe and fear?
It is no accident that both Moses’ and Jesus’ mountaintop transformation happens on the Sabbath. This was a removed time; Sabbath was set apart. Going up the mountain in the bible symbolized being totally removed from the world. Mountains were special – they were like sanctuaries. They were a meeting place with the divine. The disciples experienced something transformative that day – but they were removed, suspended in time for a moment, and they had a true mountain top experience. Jesus had just predicted his death, and they were about to start the journey to the cross. Choosing to follow Jesus was not the easiest decision in the world. But in this Sabbath moment, this removed time, they encountered a truth that allowed them to at least take the next step.
Following Jesus is no less difficult today – at least at times. So if those set apart moments are necessary to help us on our way, how can we remove ourselves? How can we symbolically ascend a mountain? Can was have these mountain top experiences?
I’m reading a book about vocation – about how to discern what the most is the most faithful thing in one’s life. The way I ask this is “How do I connect with the divine movement in the world in any given moment, with any given decision?” Pro and con lists, thinking through the options, talking to wise people – these things are good and should accompany at least the “big” decisions in life. But the author also argues we should seek a moment of “connection” where our heart and bodies know intuitively “this is the right thing.” That connection is more emotional than intellectual, more mystical than tangible – and it requires time away from the noise that often influences what we do. Noise like other people’s expectations, societal norms that sometimes confine us in our decision making, business, and our own self doubt and criticism.
In looking back on my life, I think I have had moments of connecting with the divine movement and knowing I was making a “right” decision. Coming here, to Grinnell and this church, is one example of this. I wouldn’t necessarily call them transfiguration moments – I had no visions of Jesus shining like the sun, I heard no voice – at least not clearly. But they were moments, I think, of the divine and the human meeting.
At the same time, I have to admit there is much that is scary about seeking out those moments. I often avoid intentionally taking time for discernment about what I should do with my life, because my goodness, what might I hear? Whenever I take even just a small, mini-moment for such things, I get a strong sense that if I want to live guided by the incredible, huge story of our faith tradition, my life might need to look very different than it does now. I am humbled by our story. I am humbled by what I think I see of God in the lives of my faith ancestors – both those found in the bible and people throughout history who I think did “listen to Jesus.” And I’m afraid of the implications of all of this. Falling on my knees in both awe and fear might very well be the appropriate response at times.
We are about to enter Lent. Maybe this whole season can be a Sabbath time for us – a time to seek transformative connections with the divine. Traditionally during Lent we are more intentional about reflecting on our lives and the needs of the world. Some of us give something up or add some spiritual discipline during this time in order to open up a little more space for such reflection. Lent sits between the transfiguration and the resurrection in our faith tradition. In each of those events, we see the whole story of God illuminated in the person of Jesus. Maybe those stories can call us to a time that is set apart from our ordinary time. The story of our faith calls us to something larger than ourselves. Our God calls us to transcend the things in our daily lives that hold us back from following Jesus.
To use Lent for this kind of reflection might, in fact, be a little scary. It is risky because we might hear something we aren’t sure we want to hear. But remember that the transfiguration and Easter book-end time. Remember that we are surrounded by a transcendent and inspiring story. Remember Jesus’ words to the disciples that Sabbath day: “Do not be afraid.” May this season of Lent be a transforming Sabbath time for us. Amen.
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