I have been gifted with two wonderful children. I treasure the memories of watching Ryan and Kristin being born. There were a couple of problems with Ryan’s birth and they had to whisk him away. But after a few minutes, the nurses brought him back, all wrapped up like a mummy in warm cloths, and placed him in my arms. That was 27 years ago, this past March 27th. I can still remember every detail of that day.
Kristin’s birth was more routine, being born by caesarian. We set an appointment and had a baby. Ryan’s birth ended up being a caesarian as well, but Kristin’s was without any problems. As the doctors worked at stitching her mother up, I got to have some immediate one-on-one time with our daughter. The instantaneous affection and love for each of my children, when they were placed into my arms, was overwhelming.
A large part of what I felt was that I had just witnessed a holy moment. I had been entrusted with each of my children, in a holy work. These two infant lives had been “commended” into mine by God. To commend means giving something or someone into the care of another. You are entrusting something or someone to someone else, believing they will treat what is given with the same preciousness you would.
That’s what having a child, or adopting a child, feels like. It feels like God is taking this child and saying, “He or she was mine. I was taking care of this little one with all my love and tenderness. But now I am commending this child into your hands and into your care. I am trusting you to take care of this child just as I did.” And then God lays this child into your arms, and the sacred trust is overwhelming.
The act of commending is not easy. I don’t know what it was or is like for God. I know what it has been like for me. Commending my children into the care of a day care worker, a teacher, someone I didn’t know that well, someone I wasn’t sure I could trust, was hard. There have been awful times when a child care worker, and a coach betrayed the commending trust I gave them when I allowed my children to sit under their influence in their home, or later, on the basketball court.
When Ryan and Kristin learned to drive, commending them to themselves and a coffin-on-wheels was hard for me. Accidents are capricious, and they can happen so quickly, and be so deadly. But even if I refused to let them drive, and I relegated myself to being their chauffeur, that still wouldn’t keep someone from running into us. Or me into someone else.
Part of what I have discovered is that the act of commending is not one big step. It’s a series of many steps. In little ways throughout our lives, I have been commending my precious children to others, and, ultimately, to themselves; and finally to their destiny or fate.
Each act of commending is risky. My natural inclination is to hold on for dear life, to be untrusting, to not commend anything or anyone I value to anyone else. So, in little and large ways, throughout our lives, we are challenged to be commending with that which is precious to us. Sometimes the challenge is more of a struggle than we could have imagined.
One Easter season, I arranged to purchase some caterpillars that would spin a chrysalis and turn into butterflies--hopefully right around Easter. At each children’s message, during worship, all the children and I would look at the progress of the caterpillars and their transformation.
What we discovered--and this became a huge teaching moment for children and adults--is that caterpillars don’t yield themselves to the cocoon at the same time. When the moment to spin the chrysalis arrives, some of the caterpillars actually resist. They cling to life as a caterpillar, rather than “commend” themselves to the transformational process. They put off entering the cocoon until the following Spring, postponing their change to a butterfly a year or more.
In pondering this resistance, this clinging, Sue Monk Kidd, in her wonderful book, When the Heart Waits, wrote:
It seems that at the moment of our greatest possibility, a desperate clinging rises up in us. Then I ask myself, “What’s behind all my clinging?”
That’s the main question when we think about all the times we are challenged to commend one of our treasures to another, whatever or whoever that treasure might be. Ultimately, with my children, as I mentioned, I had to be willing to commend them over to themselves. They have had plans and dreams for themselves that I may not have chosen for them. But they are theirs. I had to trust them and their judgment. I had to commend them to their own choices, wishes, and dreams.
Trust seems to be at the heart of all acts of commending. Can we trust the person into whose hands we are commending this precious one or thing to? Can we let go? Can we stop clinging? Can we trust?
Most importantly, can we do that with our lives and God?
There was a man who was a master at walking the high wire. To prove how great he was, he had a long wire stretched above a water fall. The day of his fete came. He got up on the wire, with a wheelbarrow. He proceeded to walk from one side over the falls to the other. When he got to the other side, the crowd erupted into applause that was almost louder than the falls itself.
Looking down at the crowd, he shouted, “Am I the greatest high wire walker ever?”
“You are the greatest!” the crowd shouted back.
Then pointing to a woman in the crowd, he said, “Do you, ma’am, believe I am the greatest high wire walker ever?”
The woman shouted back up at him, “I believe you are the greatest.”
The wire walker then asked the woman another question: “Do you believe, my dear woman, that I can walk back over to the other side with this wheelbarrow, as I have just done?”
“I believe you can!” she shouted back.
“If you believe,” called the wire walker, “then climb up here and get in the wheelbarrow.”
Believing is not commending. Believing is simply believing. Getting in the wheelbarrow is commending. It is the act of putting your trust on the line. It is the act of putting that which is precious to you--even your own life, or the life of a loved one--in the wheelbarrow someone else is pushing.
Jesus said, as he died, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In little and large ways, throughout his life, through acts of commending, Jesus discovered that God could be trusted. Commending was not this one, big act Jesus did at the end of his life. It was the way Jesus lived his whole life, in relation to the Father God.
Jesus discovered he didn’t have to cling. He was trusting and willing to take the risk and climb into the Father God’s wheelbarrow time after time. So, as he came to the last breath of his life, with the very last words of his life, he could commend everything he was--his very soul--into his Father God’s arms. Jesus died the way he lived.
Take the risk. Commend yourself to God, not just at death, but also in life. Get in the wheelbarrow. Live, by commending yourself, and those you love, into God’s hands.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
"Last Words from the Cross" (part 5)
When my son, Ryan, was looking at colleges, we took a trip out to California to look at a few schools. We went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that was a bizarre experience. We were walking around the campus with some other parents and prospective students. A girl in one of the dorms stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Don’t come here; all the students are on drugs.” Fortunately, Ryan didn’t go there.
We ate lunch in Capitola, a little town just south of Santa Cruz. It was a little fish and chips place right on the ocean, called Stella’s. We sat outside, watching the surf. The salt air breezes tousled out hair. The sky was blue. The seagulls were lifting on the hot air currents billowing up from the warm sand, and then falling back to the beach or the water.
Suddenly a falcon swooped in and struck a seagull out of the air. The stunned seagull lay on the beach. The falcon landed on top of it and pinned it to the sand. The gull tried to fly away. The falcon kept its huge talons gripped around the seagull’s body. The falcon pecked at the gull’s neck a few times, keeping a strangle hold until the struggle was over. Then the falcon lifted into the air and flew away with the dead gull dangling from its scary talons. In a matter of a couple of minutes it was over.
I felt like getting up from the table and my fish and chips and run out to the beach. I thought maybe I should chase that predator away. But there was another part of me that was transfixed, realizing this is the way things are in the world. The falcon was only doing what it naturally does. The gull was the hapless prey of the day. The falcon’s fish and chips, if you will.
As Ryan, Kristin, and I watched I wondered if that’s the way I would have been on the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Would I have looked on, wanting to rush in and do something to help Jesus get out from under the talon hold of the cross and its spikes? Or would the same transfixion take over, holding my feet to the ground, stunning me into just watching the life and death drama? After Jesus died, would I have just gone back to my fish and chips? “It’s all over folks; move along; nothing to see here.” It is finished.
The scene with the falcon and my thoughts about the dramatic similarities with the scene at the Cross reminded me of the movie, La Dolce Vita. The opening scene of that movie shows a beautiful panoramic view of Rome’s skyline. The grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral gleams in the center of the postcard-like picture.
Then the sound of a helicopter is heard. At first it is a speck in the distant skyline. It is dragging something through the air with guide wires. As the helicopter flies closer, it becomes clear that what it being towed through the air is a huge stone statue of Christ.
As the helicopter flies over a beach filled with people sunning themselves, they look up and point. They are clearly annoyed by the intrusion of sound. They laugh, mockingly as the statue is flown overhead.
Then the helicopter is shown hovering over a slag heap at a rock quarry. The cables release their cargo and the statue of Christ plummets in slow motion until it hits the rubble below, breaking into thousands of pieces.
The message of that movie’s opening scene is clear: modern society has relegated Christ to the trash heap. Christ is no more than a piece of old stone--some historic relic, but no longer fitting in with the world’s current scheme of things. Christ is only worth mocking as the world of technology and modernity carries him away to be jettisoned with the rest of what we deem worthless and are ready to get rid of. The world, falcon-like, has pounced. It has carried away its prey. We go on with our meal and our lives. It is finished. And the world thinks it’s finished with him.
Is that what Christ meant when he uttered this anguished cry: “It is finished!” Is he simply saying, “I’m a dead man. I’m being carried away. The world has won and I have lost.” Is that what Christ is saying?
I don’t believe so. I hear these last words of Christ more as a statement of faith. A three word sermon. A proclamation. A shout of acclimation. It is not as much, “It is finished,” as much as it is, “It is accomplished.” The word Jesus uses means more than, “It’s over.” (That’s why the Savior wasn’t a woman. Because, as the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.”) Jesus is not just saying, “My time in this world is up. And the world has won.”
If something is finished, as in accomplished, that logically means it had to first be started. Something can’t be finished that hasn’t been begun at some time. If something was started and then accomplished, that means there was a plan. That plan would have certain steps that headed toward a set-forth conclusion. If something is finished or accomplished, then there has to be intention. There is a will involved--a will with desires and expectations.
When Jesus said that everything was done, he meant the plan had been accomplished. He meant that the intentions of God, that had been going on for all of history, were now culminated. God’s intentions to save the world from sin and from itself had been carried out. Each step of the way had been taken. Christ was that final and ultimate part of the plan.
Do we ever feel like we totally accomplish anything? Aren’t there always loose ends? For example, artists who seldom feel a painting is totally finished. A couple of weeks ago I drove to Wichita on my day off to go to the Wichita Art Museum. There was a couple of special displays that I wanted to see. Looking at a painting up close is always a kind of tingly experience for me. This is what the artist was actually working on. It’s not just some kind of print. Those are the artists knife and brush marks.
Several of the paintings were done with bold and broad strokes. But other paintings I looked at used thousands upon thousands of brush strokes. Van Gogh painted that way. I wonder, as I gaze at that kind of artwork, if the artist still wondered, “What if I just put a few more brush strokes of color over here, or over there.” When are they, if ever, fully satisfied, feeling the piece is “accomplished?”
Or authors who work on a poem or a short story for possibly years, still tweaking a word here or a phrase there. Do they ever get to the point where they feel their work just can’t be edited anymore, and it’s done?
The same holds true for that moment when we know our lives are over. In a flash, in an instant, we wonder, “Have I put all the brush strokes on my life?” “Have I written all the story that I wanted to write?” This is the only chance I will get to live my earthly life. Can I come to the end of it satisfied, and with a final sense of accomplishment?
A popular movie of a few years back was, “The Bucket List.” It starred Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. It was about a couple of older guys who were oddly thrown together in a hospital room as patients. After they had gotten to know each other a little bit, they decided they needed to each make a “bucket list.” That is, a list of things they wanted to do in life before they “kicked the bucket.” It’s a fairly funny movie, and certainly thought-provoking. I’m sure there were a lot of bucket lists written down after people saw that movie.
A bucket list has a way of helping you evaluate your life. What have you done with your life so far? What are you proud of? What aren’t you so proud of? What would you do if you could make a change? What’s keeping you from making those changes before you die? What do you have to look forward to? Those are all huge questions that just this one kind of list forces you to take a long look at.
What happens when time is up? You have more lists than you have time to accomplish what you’ve written on your lists. How can you come to the end of life and feel like you have done what’s been on your list--whether it be a list on paper or a list in your mind?
Jesus is on the Cross. He’s at the end of his life. Death is but a matter of moments away. One of the last things he says from that dreadful Cross, and that dreadful death is, “It is finished.” In another gospel, it says Jesus shouts this out. It’s a triumphant, shouting statement; not a statement of agonizing woe. He’s making a bold statement of faith: “Everything I set out to do, is now accomplished! It feels so good to be able to affirm this as I die!”
Wouldn’t it be great to feel the same when that moment arrives for us? Maybe that’s what we call “dying a good death.” We can say, as our Lord did, “It is accomplished.” All my lists are taken care of. I haven’t left anything unresolved or undone that I was meant to do. I have used my life well, and accomplished all that I hoped for with this life. I wouldn’t ever wish to have another life, because my lists are done. The time has come when I don’t get to have any more choices--but I’m good with that, because I have taken care of all my choices. And all is well.
The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836. The decree, though, was not valid until the following year. So, on June 30, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica. At 11:00 p.m. of that day, all were dressed in white gowns. They knelt down. Faces were turned up in anticipation as the clock ticked towards midnight, and the beginning of the new day of July 1, 1837, the day of their emancipation. As the clock struck one second after midnight, those twenty thousand people rose to their feet as one, and joyously shouted together, “We are free! We are free! We are free!”
In the same way, but on a global and historic level, God established a decree thousands of years prior to the Cross. At a certain time, on a certain day, the arms of the Cross, not of a clock, would set the world free. The power of that old slave owner sin would be no more. At the same time Christ shouted out in triumph his last words, “It is finished,” a responding cry goes up from millions of people--past, present, and future: “We are free! We are free! We are free!”
What a great acclimation of faith. That which ultimately and most importantly needs to be accomplished, is done so by Christ on the Cross. It’s not something we can do for ourselves. We can’t include it on our bucket list, because we can’t accomplish it. Only Christ can do that for us. And if it’s not done, we are still lost, we are still slaves to sin.
If something is finished, that means there is nothing else that can or needs to be done. What was set out to be done, has been accomplished. No further acts of salvation are needed. No further saviors need to be sent. No other words need to be spoken. Everything God intended to be done, in order to free the world from sin, has been accomplished in Christ. There was an evangelist who was asked by a young man, “What must I do to be saved?”
To which the evangelist replied, “To late--it’s already be done.”
It is finished! We are free!
Prayer
O God,
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
that, in Christ,
our salvation is finished--
it is complete
it is accomplished and fulfilled.
We need that same sense of accomplishment.
We want to come to the end of our lives
knowing that we have done
all we were meant to do.
Give us the faith,
by your Holy Spirit
to do that.
We know that unfaith builds no cathedrals,
unfaith sings no songs,
unfaith never reaches,
never hopes,
never dares.
Unfaith walks alone,
weeps alone,
dies alone,
and leaves a life unfinished.
Give us the accomplishing kind of faith of the Savior:
a faith that stares into the shadows
and sees the form and shape of hope;
the kind of faith that peers into the unknown
and sees the promise of meaning in accomplishment.
We want the kind of faith that can only come from the Savior,
that liberates and sets us free to live,
fully
and abundantly.
In Jesus name,
Amen.
We ate lunch in Capitola, a little town just south of Santa Cruz. It was a little fish and chips place right on the ocean, called Stella’s. We sat outside, watching the surf. The salt air breezes tousled out hair. The sky was blue. The seagulls were lifting on the hot air currents billowing up from the warm sand, and then falling back to the beach or the water.
Suddenly a falcon swooped in and struck a seagull out of the air. The stunned seagull lay on the beach. The falcon landed on top of it and pinned it to the sand. The gull tried to fly away. The falcon kept its huge talons gripped around the seagull’s body. The falcon pecked at the gull’s neck a few times, keeping a strangle hold until the struggle was over. Then the falcon lifted into the air and flew away with the dead gull dangling from its scary talons. In a matter of a couple of minutes it was over.
I felt like getting up from the table and my fish and chips and run out to the beach. I thought maybe I should chase that predator away. But there was another part of me that was transfixed, realizing this is the way things are in the world. The falcon was only doing what it naturally does. The gull was the hapless prey of the day. The falcon’s fish and chips, if you will.
As Ryan, Kristin, and I watched I wondered if that’s the way I would have been on the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Would I have looked on, wanting to rush in and do something to help Jesus get out from under the talon hold of the cross and its spikes? Or would the same transfixion take over, holding my feet to the ground, stunning me into just watching the life and death drama? After Jesus died, would I have just gone back to my fish and chips? “It’s all over folks; move along; nothing to see here.” It is finished.
The scene with the falcon and my thoughts about the dramatic similarities with the scene at the Cross reminded me of the movie, La Dolce Vita. The opening scene of that movie shows a beautiful panoramic view of Rome’s skyline. The grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral gleams in the center of the postcard-like picture.
Then the sound of a helicopter is heard. At first it is a speck in the distant skyline. It is dragging something through the air with guide wires. As the helicopter flies closer, it becomes clear that what it being towed through the air is a huge stone statue of Christ.
As the helicopter flies over a beach filled with people sunning themselves, they look up and point. They are clearly annoyed by the intrusion of sound. They laugh, mockingly as the statue is flown overhead.
Then the helicopter is shown hovering over a slag heap at a rock quarry. The cables release their cargo and the statue of Christ plummets in slow motion until it hits the rubble below, breaking into thousands of pieces.
The message of that movie’s opening scene is clear: modern society has relegated Christ to the trash heap. Christ is no more than a piece of old stone--some historic relic, but no longer fitting in with the world’s current scheme of things. Christ is only worth mocking as the world of technology and modernity carries him away to be jettisoned with the rest of what we deem worthless and are ready to get rid of. The world, falcon-like, has pounced. It has carried away its prey. We go on with our meal and our lives. It is finished. And the world thinks it’s finished with him.
Is that what Christ meant when he uttered this anguished cry: “It is finished!” Is he simply saying, “I’m a dead man. I’m being carried away. The world has won and I have lost.” Is that what Christ is saying?
I don’t believe so. I hear these last words of Christ more as a statement of faith. A three word sermon. A proclamation. A shout of acclimation. It is not as much, “It is finished,” as much as it is, “It is accomplished.” The word Jesus uses means more than, “It’s over.” (That’s why the Savior wasn’t a woman. Because, as the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.”) Jesus is not just saying, “My time in this world is up. And the world has won.”
If something is finished, as in accomplished, that logically means it had to first be started. Something can’t be finished that hasn’t been begun at some time. If something was started and then accomplished, that means there was a plan. That plan would have certain steps that headed toward a set-forth conclusion. If something is finished or accomplished, then there has to be intention. There is a will involved--a will with desires and expectations.
When Jesus said that everything was done, he meant the plan had been accomplished. He meant that the intentions of God, that had been going on for all of history, were now culminated. God’s intentions to save the world from sin and from itself had been carried out. Each step of the way had been taken. Christ was that final and ultimate part of the plan.
Do we ever feel like we totally accomplish anything? Aren’t there always loose ends? For example, artists who seldom feel a painting is totally finished. A couple of weeks ago I drove to Wichita on my day off to go to the Wichita Art Museum. There was a couple of special displays that I wanted to see. Looking at a painting up close is always a kind of tingly experience for me. This is what the artist was actually working on. It’s not just some kind of print. Those are the artists knife and brush marks.
Several of the paintings were done with bold and broad strokes. But other paintings I looked at used thousands upon thousands of brush strokes. Van Gogh painted that way. I wonder, as I gaze at that kind of artwork, if the artist still wondered, “What if I just put a few more brush strokes of color over here, or over there.” When are they, if ever, fully satisfied, feeling the piece is “accomplished?”
Or authors who work on a poem or a short story for possibly years, still tweaking a word here or a phrase there. Do they ever get to the point where they feel their work just can’t be edited anymore, and it’s done?
The same holds true for that moment when we know our lives are over. In a flash, in an instant, we wonder, “Have I put all the brush strokes on my life?” “Have I written all the story that I wanted to write?” This is the only chance I will get to live my earthly life. Can I come to the end of it satisfied, and with a final sense of accomplishment?
A popular movie of a few years back was, “The Bucket List.” It starred Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. It was about a couple of older guys who were oddly thrown together in a hospital room as patients. After they had gotten to know each other a little bit, they decided they needed to each make a “bucket list.” That is, a list of things they wanted to do in life before they “kicked the bucket.” It’s a fairly funny movie, and certainly thought-provoking. I’m sure there were a lot of bucket lists written down after people saw that movie.
A bucket list has a way of helping you evaluate your life. What have you done with your life so far? What are you proud of? What aren’t you so proud of? What would you do if you could make a change? What’s keeping you from making those changes before you die? What do you have to look forward to? Those are all huge questions that just this one kind of list forces you to take a long look at.
What happens when time is up? You have more lists than you have time to accomplish what you’ve written on your lists. How can you come to the end of life and feel like you have done what’s been on your list--whether it be a list on paper or a list in your mind?
Jesus is on the Cross. He’s at the end of his life. Death is but a matter of moments away. One of the last things he says from that dreadful Cross, and that dreadful death is, “It is finished.” In another gospel, it says Jesus shouts this out. It’s a triumphant, shouting statement; not a statement of agonizing woe. He’s making a bold statement of faith: “Everything I set out to do, is now accomplished! It feels so good to be able to affirm this as I die!”
Wouldn’t it be great to feel the same when that moment arrives for us? Maybe that’s what we call “dying a good death.” We can say, as our Lord did, “It is accomplished.” All my lists are taken care of. I haven’t left anything unresolved or undone that I was meant to do. I have used my life well, and accomplished all that I hoped for with this life. I wouldn’t ever wish to have another life, because my lists are done. The time has come when I don’t get to have any more choices--but I’m good with that, because I have taken care of all my choices. And all is well.
The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836. The decree, though, was not valid until the following year. So, on June 30, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica. At 11:00 p.m. of that day, all were dressed in white gowns. They knelt down. Faces were turned up in anticipation as the clock ticked towards midnight, and the beginning of the new day of July 1, 1837, the day of their emancipation. As the clock struck one second after midnight, those twenty thousand people rose to their feet as one, and joyously shouted together, “We are free! We are free! We are free!”
In the same way, but on a global and historic level, God established a decree thousands of years prior to the Cross. At a certain time, on a certain day, the arms of the Cross, not of a clock, would set the world free. The power of that old slave owner sin would be no more. At the same time Christ shouted out in triumph his last words, “It is finished,” a responding cry goes up from millions of people--past, present, and future: “We are free! We are free! We are free!”
What a great acclimation of faith. That which ultimately and most importantly needs to be accomplished, is done so by Christ on the Cross. It’s not something we can do for ourselves. We can’t include it on our bucket list, because we can’t accomplish it. Only Christ can do that for us. And if it’s not done, we are still lost, we are still slaves to sin.
If something is finished, that means there is nothing else that can or needs to be done. What was set out to be done, has been accomplished. No further acts of salvation are needed. No further saviors need to be sent. No other words need to be spoken. Everything God intended to be done, in order to free the world from sin, has been accomplished in Christ. There was an evangelist who was asked by a young man, “What must I do to be saved?”
To which the evangelist replied, “To late--it’s already be done.”
It is finished! We are free!
Prayer
O God,
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
that, in Christ,
our salvation is finished--
it is complete
it is accomplished and fulfilled.
We need that same sense of accomplishment.
We want to come to the end of our lives
knowing that we have done
all we were meant to do.
Give us the faith,
by your Holy Spirit
to do that.
We know that unfaith builds no cathedrals,
unfaith sings no songs,
unfaith never reaches,
never hopes,
never dares.
Unfaith walks alone,
weeps alone,
dies alone,
and leaves a life unfinished.
Give us the accomplishing kind of faith of the Savior:
a faith that stares into the shadows
and sees the form and shape of hope;
the kind of faith that peers into the unknown
and sees the promise of meaning in accomplishment.
We want the kind of faith that can only come from the Savior,
that liberates and sets us free to live,
fully
and abundantly.
In Jesus name,
Amen.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Last Words from the Cross (part 4)
"Last Words from the Cross" (part 4)
Matthew 27:45-46
Abandonment. We're looking at some pretty tough words from Jesus on the Cross. But then, I guess we need to remember that he was nailed to a Cross. We usually don't know how we will feel about some horrible situation until we're in the middle of it. We think about it. We imagine how we would react. We fantasize about what we might feel. But we never do, really, do we. Until such a time arrives.
As close as Jesus is to God, you might think abandonment would not be something that Jesus would feel. In those Cross kinds of situations, I guess you are allowed to feel what you are feeling. Nothing is more grating than to be hurting, deeply, and then have some well-meaning person tell you, "You shouldn't be feeling that way." When you're on the Cross, you get to feel however you're feeling. As well as any other critical experience in life.
In a sermon by the Scottish preacher, Frederick Robertson, he said this:
There is a world of untold sensations prodded into that moment when a man realizes his hour is come. It is all over--his chance is passed, and his eternity is settled. None of us know, except by guess, what that sensation is. And to every individual, that sensation, in its fulness, can come but once.
We don't know, do we. We don't know exactly how we will feel when we get to that point when we realize our one chance is passed. Certainly Jesus must have felt the flood of human emotion that we feel when we blew a chance: I could have done better; I could have done more; I could have done different. Maybe not for Jesus. I'm not sure. If the Bible is accurate, and he was like us in every way, maybe he had those thoughts.
In his masterpiece work, Imitation of Christ, Thomas a'Kempis wrote:
I never yet found any religious person so perfect that he did not experience at some times the absence of grace or some diminishing fervor.
I guess that holds true for the most perfect religious person in the history of the world, Jesus Christ.
Abandonment. Feeling abandoned. Being onlookers at the Cross, we're having to look at some tough stuff. Russell Baker was a New York Times columnist. He wrote an autobiography titled, The Good Times. I read it a long time ago. One of the most gut-wrenching pieces in his book was when he told about his mother giving him away. This was during the Great Depression. She couldn't afford to feed her children. So she gave a couple of her children away to shirttail relatives. Russell was one of her children she gave away.
Baker told how he was sobbing as he was hauled away by his arm. His mother standing silently on the porch, watching him go and doing nothing. Baker wrote of that moment: "I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost dearly in pain."
I have, sadly, heard a number of stories of similar abandonment. Adults, who as children, were left behind. One of my dearest friends, as a child, came home one day after school, and her mother had moved from the house. Gone. Didn't tell her grade school daughter where she had moved to. Never saw her again for years.
My friend talked to me about having little trust for/in others, especially those who tried to get close to her. She became a loner, because it was safer that way. She was self-reliant and (on the surface) self-confident. But inside she was so afraid.
One of the main emotions that drives people who have been abandoned is self-doubt. Or self-punishment. The nagging question that rips at their spirit is, "There must have been something about me." Certainly Russell Baker asked that question. Why was he given up, but other siblings got to stay with their mother? What was it about him that his own mother was comfortable giving him away to someone she barely knew?
Psychologists have found that we are born with only a couple of innate fears. One of them is the fear of abandonment. It is as if we are born knowing how hopeless we are. How utterly dependent. It's like we know, as infants, what would happen, if those into whose hands we've been entrusted, would suddenly abandon us. What it would be like to have our life-line totally cut off and leave us to ourselves.
Jesus, being fully human, got to come to a personal, and terrifying understanding of that basic, human fear of abandonment. Certainly, part of what lays behind that fear is an expectation. It's the expectation that the one who is supposed to take care of us, will. That the one we have been entrusted to, or entrusted ourselves to, will always be there for us. A lot of the anguish of being abandoned, is not just the abandonment itself, but the anguish over having a pivotal expectation dashed.
Jesus' words on the Cross may have been a recital of something he remembered from Psalm 22. There the psalmist cries out:
My God, my God, why have you deserted me?
Why are you so far away?
Won't you listen to my groans
and come to my rescue?
I cry out day and night,
but you don't answer,
and I can never rest.
And then the psalmist expresses the expectation he has for why God should listen to him:
Our ancestors trusted you,
and you rescued them.
When they cried out for help,
you saved them,
and you did not let them down
when they depended on you.
That's the expectation the psalmist, and Jesus, voice behind their sense of abandonment: You did it before, God; you took care of me before; you were close before; why are you being inconsistent and leaving ME alone? That's the expectation: that God has consistently watched over, and taken care of his people. So why, now? Why has God become so suddenly inconsistent? Why has God chosen not to act for me?
Corrie ten Boom, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, wrote that she learned to hold everything loosely in her hands. When she grasped things too tightly, it would hurt when God would have to pry her fingers loose. Maybe one of the things we grasp so tightly onto is our expectations about how we think things should be.
Like the little girl with the polka dot dress. The expectation is that polka dots are supposed to stay on your dress. They are supposed to be permanent. They are supposed to always be there. The polka dots were always there to share life with the little girl in the past. Why, now, are the polka dots going against their apparent nature, jumping off the dress, rolling away, and leaving the little girl alone? It's so much harder when those expectations are about God, and how we think God should be. Especially if you're hanging on a Cross.
Chaim Potok, in his novel, In The Beginning, tells about a Jewish family living in New York City. Everything is going wrong with them, and seemingly with the world. Listening to all the bad news one night on the radio, the father blurts out, "It is God doing his usual bad job." Maybe when things are going so wrong, and you start out with low expectations, you aren't disappointed when it seems God is messing up.
When is faith and trust in God hardest? When are we tempted to blurt out, "It's God doing his usual bad job?" Maybe when a person is under excruciating physical pain. Chronic pain that doesn't let up. Pain, that looks like it's not going to go away, has a way of getting us to ask God some tough questions.
Or maybe when life turns dark. There just seems to be a total absence of light in any corner of your world. I remember a Frank and Ernest cartoon. They are standing in front of three mail boxes. One mail box is labeled "Local." The second is labeled, "Out Of Town." The third is labeled, "Forget It!" That's when life is the darkest: when you feel like just saying, "Forget it! Nothing's going to work anyway. Nothing matters. Whatever I do, it's not going to work."
I was a double major in college, and one of my majors was philosophy. I remember reading one modern philosopher who said that our feverish activity is without meaning or purpose; that all the great empires and all the great human ideals count for no more than an anthill crushed by a heedless traveler's foot. Now that's fatalism. That's the kind of thinking that takes over when life turns dark and there seems to be a total absence of light or meaning. That's the time when a person begins to wonder where God is.
Or maybe faith and trust in God is hardest when death is close, and it doesn't seem timely or fair. There was another cartoon that showed a deep-sea diver who was walking around on the ocean floor investigating a shipwreck. Above him was the mother ship to which he was connected by a life-line and an air hose. He looks up and sees the mother ship he is connected to sinking towards him. Imagine the questions that race through the mind in an instant: I'm doomed. It's not fair! Why me? How could this happen? etc. etc.
If these are the kinds of situations where faith and trust in God are hardest, maybe we also need to ask the opposite question, which is: What creates trust and faith in God?
Certainly, as I have already mentioned, predictability has to be a part of trust. It's the anticipation that life should go a certain way based on past experience. That can be either negative or positive. If life has been a bugger all along, than you might predictably expect that life is going to continue to be that way. But if life has been good, and God has been good, then you would expect life and God should continue to be trustworthy.
Dependability also must be a characteristic of trust. You trust, and have faith in those who have been the most dependable. If someone has been reliable when it counts--and even when it doesn't--then you certainly grow to trust those people. Conversely, people who are chronically undependable are people we have the least faith in.
And, thirdly, part of building trust is faith itself. Faith, as the writer of Hebrews tried to describe is finding a sense of security beyond any available evidence, history, or experience. When writer, Katherine Mansfield was battling tuberculosis at age 34, she wrote in her journal:
I should like this to be accepted as my confession. There is no limit to human suffering. When you think, "Now I have touched the bottom of the sea--I can go no deeper," you go deeper. But I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome. For I do believe it.
That's the kind of faith that builds trust: believing even when believing doesn't make sense. Seeing what cannot ultimately be seen. Knowing for sure, even though you can't prove it, logically. That kind of faith has to be a part of what it means to trust.
So, where does Jesus' statement come from? In all that predictability, dependability and faith that we've been looking at--where does it break down for Jesus in that one awful moment:
"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
"My God, my God, can I trust you anymore?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me in such a pitiful and painful condition?"
"My God, my God, don't you care about me at all?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me so utterly alone?"
"My God, my God, can't you just be with me when I am most dejected?"
"My God, my God, I thought I was your beloved Son?"
"My God, my God, how can you treat me as if I don't even exist?"
"My God, my God, why have you become so unpredictable, so undependable, and so faithless?"
Did you notice God didn't answer Jesus' question? So much has been written in defense of God, and what God was up to at that moment, and why God couldn't respond to his beloved Son. I'm not going to do that. Jesus agonized that question out there as one of the last things he said. God let it come, and let that agonizing question be carried about, to and fro, on the wind. But no one can really answer that question, save God alone.
And that's where I'm going to leave it this morning. A question. No answer. That's part of the experience of the Cross. We must force ourselves to gaze upon it, to ask our own questions. Only by being willing to ask God those questions will what is to come make sense.
Matthew 27:45-46
Abandonment. We're looking at some pretty tough words from Jesus on the Cross. But then, I guess we need to remember that he was nailed to a Cross. We usually don't know how we will feel about some horrible situation until we're in the middle of it. We think about it. We imagine how we would react. We fantasize about what we might feel. But we never do, really, do we. Until such a time arrives.
As close as Jesus is to God, you might think abandonment would not be something that Jesus would feel. In those Cross kinds of situations, I guess you are allowed to feel what you are feeling. Nothing is more grating than to be hurting, deeply, and then have some well-meaning person tell you, "You shouldn't be feeling that way." When you're on the Cross, you get to feel however you're feeling. As well as any other critical experience in life.
In a sermon by the Scottish preacher, Frederick Robertson, he said this:
There is a world of untold sensations prodded into that moment when a man realizes his hour is come. It is all over--his chance is passed, and his eternity is settled. None of us know, except by guess, what that sensation is. And to every individual, that sensation, in its fulness, can come but once.
We don't know, do we. We don't know exactly how we will feel when we get to that point when we realize our one chance is passed. Certainly Jesus must have felt the flood of human emotion that we feel when we blew a chance: I could have done better; I could have done more; I could have done different. Maybe not for Jesus. I'm not sure. If the Bible is accurate, and he was like us in every way, maybe he had those thoughts.
In his masterpiece work, Imitation of Christ, Thomas a'Kempis wrote:
I never yet found any religious person so perfect that he did not experience at some times the absence of grace or some diminishing fervor.
I guess that holds true for the most perfect religious person in the history of the world, Jesus Christ.
Abandonment. Feeling abandoned. Being onlookers at the Cross, we're having to look at some tough stuff. Russell Baker was a New York Times columnist. He wrote an autobiography titled, The Good Times. I read it a long time ago. One of the most gut-wrenching pieces in his book was when he told about his mother giving him away. This was during the Great Depression. She couldn't afford to feed her children. So she gave a couple of her children away to shirttail relatives. Russell was one of her children she gave away.
Baker told how he was sobbing as he was hauled away by his arm. His mother standing silently on the porch, watching him go and doing nothing. Baker wrote of that moment: "I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost dearly in pain."
I have, sadly, heard a number of stories of similar abandonment. Adults, who as children, were left behind. One of my dearest friends, as a child, came home one day after school, and her mother had moved from the house. Gone. Didn't tell her grade school daughter where she had moved to. Never saw her again for years.
My friend talked to me about having little trust for/in others, especially those who tried to get close to her. She became a loner, because it was safer that way. She was self-reliant and (on the surface) self-confident. But inside she was so afraid.
One of the main emotions that drives people who have been abandoned is self-doubt. Or self-punishment. The nagging question that rips at their spirit is, "There must have been something about me." Certainly Russell Baker asked that question. Why was he given up, but other siblings got to stay with their mother? What was it about him that his own mother was comfortable giving him away to someone she barely knew?
Psychologists have found that we are born with only a couple of innate fears. One of them is the fear of abandonment. It is as if we are born knowing how hopeless we are. How utterly dependent. It's like we know, as infants, what would happen, if those into whose hands we've been entrusted, would suddenly abandon us. What it would be like to have our life-line totally cut off and leave us to ourselves.
Jesus, being fully human, got to come to a personal, and terrifying understanding of that basic, human fear of abandonment. Certainly, part of what lays behind that fear is an expectation. It's the expectation that the one who is supposed to take care of us, will. That the one we have been entrusted to, or entrusted ourselves to, will always be there for us. A lot of the anguish of being abandoned, is not just the abandonment itself, but the anguish over having a pivotal expectation dashed.
Jesus' words on the Cross may have been a recital of something he remembered from Psalm 22. There the psalmist cries out:
My God, my God, why have you deserted me?
Why are you so far away?
Won't you listen to my groans
and come to my rescue?
I cry out day and night,
but you don't answer,
and I can never rest.
And then the psalmist expresses the expectation he has for why God should listen to him:
Our ancestors trusted you,
and you rescued them.
When they cried out for help,
you saved them,
and you did not let them down
when they depended on you.
That's the expectation the psalmist, and Jesus, voice behind their sense of abandonment: You did it before, God; you took care of me before; you were close before; why are you being inconsistent and leaving ME alone? That's the expectation: that God has consistently watched over, and taken care of his people. So why, now? Why has God become so suddenly inconsistent? Why has God chosen not to act for me?
Corrie ten Boom, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, wrote that she learned to hold everything loosely in her hands. When she grasped things too tightly, it would hurt when God would have to pry her fingers loose. Maybe one of the things we grasp so tightly onto is our expectations about how we think things should be.
Like the little girl with the polka dot dress. The expectation is that polka dots are supposed to stay on your dress. They are supposed to be permanent. They are supposed to always be there. The polka dots were always there to share life with the little girl in the past. Why, now, are the polka dots going against their apparent nature, jumping off the dress, rolling away, and leaving the little girl alone? It's so much harder when those expectations are about God, and how we think God should be. Especially if you're hanging on a Cross.
Chaim Potok, in his novel, In The Beginning, tells about a Jewish family living in New York City. Everything is going wrong with them, and seemingly with the world. Listening to all the bad news one night on the radio, the father blurts out, "It is God doing his usual bad job." Maybe when things are going so wrong, and you start out with low expectations, you aren't disappointed when it seems God is messing up.
When is faith and trust in God hardest? When are we tempted to blurt out, "It's God doing his usual bad job?" Maybe when a person is under excruciating physical pain. Chronic pain that doesn't let up. Pain, that looks like it's not going to go away, has a way of getting us to ask God some tough questions.
Or maybe when life turns dark. There just seems to be a total absence of light in any corner of your world. I remember a Frank and Ernest cartoon. They are standing in front of three mail boxes. One mail box is labeled "Local." The second is labeled, "Out Of Town." The third is labeled, "Forget It!" That's when life is the darkest: when you feel like just saying, "Forget it! Nothing's going to work anyway. Nothing matters. Whatever I do, it's not going to work."
I was a double major in college, and one of my majors was philosophy. I remember reading one modern philosopher who said that our feverish activity is without meaning or purpose; that all the great empires and all the great human ideals count for no more than an anthill crushed by a heedless traveler's foot. Now that's fatalism. That's the kind of thinking that takes over when life turns dark and there seems to be a total absence of light or meaning. That's the time when a person begins to wonder where God is.
Or maybe faith and trust in God is hardest when death is close, and it doesn't seem timely or fair. There was another cartoon that showed a deep-sea diver who was walking around on the ocean floor investigating a shipwreck. Above him was the mother ship to which he was connected by a life-line and an air hose. He looks up and sees the mother ship he is connected to sinking towards him. Imagine the questions that race through the mind in an instant: I'm doomed. It's not fair! Why me? How could this happen? etc. etc.
If these are the kinds of situations where faith and trust in God are hardest, maybe we also need to ask the opposite question, which is: What creates trust and faith in God?
Certainly, as I have already mentioned, predictability has to be a part of trust. It's the anticipation that life should go a certain way based on past experience. That can be either negative or positive. If life has been a bugger all along, than you might predictably expect that life is going to continue to be that way. But if life has been good, and God has been good, then you would expect life and God should continue to be trustworthy.
Dependability also must be a characteristic of trust. You trust, and have faith in those who have been the most dependable. If someone has been reliable when it counts--and even when it doesn't--then you certainly grow to trust those people. Conversely, people who are chronically undependable are people we have the least faith in.
And, thirdly, part of building trust is faith itself. Faith, as the writer of Hebrews tried to describe is finding a sense of security beyond any available evidence, history, or experience. When writer, Katherine Mansfield was battling tuberculosis at age 34, she wrote in her journal:
I should like this to be accepted as my confession. There is no limit to human suffering. When you think, "Now I have touched the bottom of the sea--I can go no deeper," you go deeper. But I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome. For I do believe it.
That's the kind of faith that builds trust: believing even when believing doesn't make sense. Seeing what cannot ultimately be seen. Knowing for sure, even though you can't prove it, logically. That kind of faith has to be a part of what it means to trust.
So, where does Jesus' statement come from? In all that predictability, dependability and faith that we've been looking at--where does it break down for Jesus in that one awful moment:
"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
"My God, my God, can I trust you anymore?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me in such a pitiful and painful condition?"
"My God, my God, don't you care about me at all?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me so utterly alone?"
"My God, my God, can't you just be with me when I am most dejected?"
"My God, my God, I thought I was your beloved Son?"
"My God, my God, how can you treat me as if I don't even exist?"
"My God, my God, why have you become so unpredictable, so undependable, and so faithless?"
Did you notice God didn't answer Jesus' question? So much has been written in defense of God, and what God was up to at that moment, and why God couldn't respond to his beloved Son. I'm not going to do that. Jesus agonized that question out there as one of the last things he said. God let it come, and let that agonizing question be carried about, to and fro, on the wind. But no one can really answer that question, save God alone.
And that's where I'm going to leave it this morning. A question. No answer. That's part of the experience of the Cross. We must force ourselves to gaze upon it, to ask our own questions. Only by being willing to ask God those questions will what is to come make sense.
Monday, March 28, 2011
"Last Words from the Cross" (part 3)
Jesus was going to die. Jesus wasn’t going to come down off the cross as his taunters demanded. “If you really are the Son of God, jump down; then we’ll believe,” they bellowed. That wasn’t going to happen.
There was one thing Jesus had to take care of before he died. His mother, Mary, was there. Mary’s sister was there. Though she is not named, in the other gospels, we find out her name is Salome. Mary, the wife of Cleopas, was there. We know nothing about her. Mary Magdalene was there. Lots of speculation about her place in Jesus’ life. And John, the disciple was there. Three Mary’s, Salome, and a disciple. None of them taunted Jesus to come down from the cross. That doesn’t mean they weren’t wishing and praying for it to happen. That Jesus would some how be taken off the cross. That he would live. That this horrible scene would go away. But it wasn’t.
Jesus has to take care of his mother and the disciple. He’s thinking of them, as he is dying. By telling them they have each other, Jesus was trying to reinforce in their minds the fact that they won’t have him anymore. That this wasn’t going to end as they may be hoping. Jesus’ fate and short future were already sealed on the cross. Nothing was going to change that.
In a way, Jesus, as we all must some day be, was on his own now, in facing death. Comfort and solace was like an echo that was receding in the distance. There comes a point, when you are dying, where you can take your loved ones no further. You must go the rest of the way without them.
As in the song, “Lonesome Valley,”
Jesus walked
that lonesome valley
He had to walk
it by himself;
Oh, nobody else
could walk it for him
He had to walk
it by himself.
Jesus saw that lonesome valley ahead of him, and it was time to give his mother and John over to each other. He had to know they would be taken care of. He had to know that they would do that for each other. Once that was done, Jesus was ready to walk into that lonesome valley.
Jesus knew that the images and scene the Mary’s, Salome, and John were having to look at from the foot of the cross would stay with them the rest of their lives. There are some images, like a gruesome death, that sear themselves in your mind’s eye forever. For John, that ended up being a long number of years. He didn’t write his gospel until maybe 50 years after he witnessed the Crucifixion. So he had a long time to think about and contemplate those images--what they meant, and how they affected his life, and the future of the humanity.
So, what is happening in this scene of Jesus hanging on the Cross, and using his last statements to his mother and John: “This is your son...This is your mother?” What is Jesus signaling by saying this to them?
It seems Jesus is marking a change--a different way we view and organize our relationships. You’ve heard the saying, “Blood is thicker than water.” Maybe some of you watch the KU basketball games. The Morris twins have attracted most of the attention this season. They are so identical that even their tattoos are the same. One of their tattoos are the letters “FOE.” They stand for “Family Over Everything.” It’s one of the values they uphold to the point of imprinting it on their bodies.
But it’s not just their blood family. The Morris twins have pulled the players on their team into their family. The KU team has had a lot of ups and downs and deep grief this season, and they have done that as a family. It’s part of the leadership the Twins have brought to the team.
Blood may be thicker than water, but family may become inclusive of others; and that seems to be what Jesus is saying from the Cross to John and Mary. Remember the instance when Jesus was preaching in a house. Someone came and told him his mother and brothers were outside to see him. Remember what Jesus replied? “Who are my mother and brothers? And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:32-35).
Jesus is transforming the meaning of “family” to be much broader than what is normally thought. Which was revolutionary in Middle Eastern culture. Jesus is saying, from the Cross, that love, family love, is not just reserved for blood relatives but is now multiplied through Jesus to include others.
For the disciple John, and Jesus’ mother, Mary, standing beneath the Cross, that new relationship he calls them into is not only defined by faith, but by shared grief. In order to continue on, as mother, as disciple they now need each other. In a short while, Jesus would be dead and entombed. But they would still be alive. Mary and John would have to go on. The best way to do that, according to Jesus, is to lean on each other as if they were family--as if they were mother and son. In their mutual loss, emptiness and endings, there is a new beginning, a new relationship that is forged.
For those who live on after a loved one dies, that grief may never be entirely gotten over. That is especially true if those who grieve isolate themselves. One research study discovered that widows spend at least 14 out of the first 18 months after their husband dies, at home, isolating themselves from family and friends. Jesus is saying to his mother and John, that’s not going to happen for you.
In my first church, I visited a lady who lived out in the country. She had invited me out for tea and to chat. When I asked about a picture of her husband, she immediately broke out into tears. He had died 15 years before my visit. Right after the funeral, her adult kids sent her on a two week trip to Hawaii to “get her mind off it all.” When she came back, no one wanted to talk about her loss. They wanted to hear all about her trip and what she did. But she was aching from loneliness and loss. All her friends assumed she was ready to put her loss behind her when she got back from Hawaii. Subsequently, no one ever really helped her with her grief. That is, until I came along and innocently asked a question about her late husband’s picture, 15 years later.
People don’t get over their grief by themselves. It’s not something you can just tough it through by yourself. It doesn’t work to deny your pain and loss. We need others to tie on with us, to be compassionate companions along the way of our grief.
When I was in Bakersfield, I started a ministry called “Compassionate Friends.” I wish I would have called it the “Mary and John Ministry.” I did a survey of the congregation (and it was a huge congregation) asking them to check off items on a list of life experiences that they had faced. I had every bad thing I could think of that can happen to a person on that list. I was utterly amazed at what came back to me--what people in that congregation had experienced, what awful things.
I then asked those people if they would be willing to let me train them in some basic counseling skills. I wanted to build up a human resource pool. I wanted to draw from these people so I could send them out. If I heard of someone who was experiencing what they had already gone through, I had someone I could send out to be a Mary or John for them. Not someone to just be a listener. But someone who actually had experienced what they were currently going through. It ended up being an amazing ministry of caring.
I didn’t want people going through those times alone. They needed “family.” Not blood relatives. But “grief sharers.” People who became family because they leaned on each other, needed each other to just get through each day.
“Here is your son...Here is your mother.” Instead of looking out for his own grief and pain on the cross, Jesus was making sure a relationship of support was created for those he loved that would last after he was gone. Jesus knew he wouldn’t be around to take care of Mary or John. But Jesus knew they could take care of each other’s grief. That they could become family--a family much deeper and richer than blood relations could ever be.
So, as I ponder Jesus’ statement from the Cross to his mother and his disciple, I wonder if this is also a vision of Jesus for the church? This is your mother--maybe not a woman who is your real mother, but who none-the-less is in need of you to treat her as if she is. This is your son. Maybe not the boy you gave birth to, but someone who needs you, at some point in his life, to tie on with him and let him know he’s not alone.
There’s a lot of grief out there. A lot of grievers. A lot of loss and heart hurt. A lot of hits on a person’s spirit. How are we to handle it all? Job, when he is losing everything in life, laments, “Suffering is all part of life, like sparks shooting skyward” (Job 5:7). If suffering is such a large part of human experience, then we need to make sure we have others to help us live. Help us go on. Help us get through. Be with us as the “sparks shoot skyward.”
There was a woman whose child died unexpectedly. She went to a monk who was supposed to have the gift of healing. She wanted him to restore her daughter’s life. Instead, the monk sent the grieving mother on a mission. He told her to go out into the town and collect an onion from each family who had not experienced grief like hers. He told her to return to him when the basket was full of onions.
Mystified, the woman began her quest. When she finally returned to the monk, her basket was still empty. She had no onions. But she had so many new friends. New “family” to who helped restore her heart in her pain. Though her basked was empty, her heart was full. She had gained so much strength from being with people who had experienced loss as she had. And she gained so much from being able to share her new found strength with others whose loss was great.
“Here is your son...Here is your mother. In the face of their emerging grief over his death, Jesus directs them to each other. In the face of the fact that grief is part of the human condition, Jesus directs us to other mourners, suffering from all of life’s reasons for grief. Jesus says, “This is your son, your daughter, your mother, your father, your brother, your sister.” Jesus, in his dying words, makes us into a family, related not by blood, but by grief. We are a family related in faith through the Christ on the Cross, and are directed by that Crucified One toward each other.
In the book, Living With Grief, Patrick Del Zoppo wrote,
It is essential that the religious community offer homecoming to the bereaved. Homecoming is the communal soul responding to the individual’s soul. It is the essence of being alive and fully connected to a larger and healing group of believers. (page 172)
What Jesus is doing from the Cross is starting that community of the bereaved. Jesus is showing Mary and John the importance of offering a place of homecoming for each other. And by so doing, Jesus is starting a way of being the church that embraces each other in a place of homecoming.
Prayer:
Lord,
you have given us yourself.
That we know.
Sometimes, what we don’t realize,
is that you have given us yourself
through others.
In their smiles,
is your smile;
In their hands,
are your hands;
In their words,
are your words;
In their touch
is your touch.
Forgive us,
and help us,
when we push you away,
by pushing away those whom you have given us
to be our loving and caring Christian family. Amen.
There was one thing Jesus had to take care of before he died. His mother, Mary, was there. Mary’s sister was there. Though she is not named, in the other gospels, we find out her name is Salome. Mary, the wife of Cleopas, was there. We know nothing about her. Mary Magdalene was there. Lots of speculation about her place in Jesus’ life. And John, the disciple was there. Three Mary’s, Salome, and a disciple. None of them taunted Jesus to come down from the cross. That doesn’t mean they weren’t wishing and praying for it to happen. That Jesus would some how be taken off the cross. That he would live. That this horrible scene would go away. But it wasn’t.
Jesus has to take care of his mother and the disciple. He’s thinking of them, as he is dying. By telling them they have each other, Jesus was trying to reinforce in their minds the fact that they won’t have him anymore. That this wasn’t going to end as they may be hoping. Jesus’ fate and short future were already sealed on the cross. Nothing was going to change that.
In a way, Jesus, as we all must some day be, was on his own now, in facing death. Comfort and solace was like an echo that was receding in the distance. There comes a point, when you are dying, where you can take your loved ones no further. You must go the rest of the way without them.
As in the song, “Lonesome Valley,”
Jesus walked
that lonesome valley
He had to walk
it by himself;
Oh, nobody else
could walk it for him
He had to walk
it by himself.
Jesus saw that lonesome valley ahead of him, and it was time to give his mother and John over to each other. He had to know they would be taken care of. He had to know that they would do that for each other. Once that was done, Jesus was ready to walk into that lonesome valley.
Jesus knew that the images and scene the Mary’s, Salome, and John were having to look at from the foot of the cross would stay with them the rest of their lives. There are some images, like a gruesome death, that sear themselves in your mind’s eye forever. For John, that ended up being a long number of years. He didn’t write his gospel until maybe 50 years after he witnessed the Crucifixion. So he had a long time to think about and contemplate those images--what they meant, and how they affected his life, and the future of the humanity.
So, what is happening in this scene of Jesus hanging on the Cross, and using his last statements to his mother and John: “This is your son...This is your mother?” What is Jesus signaling by saying this to them?
It seems Jesus is marking a change--a different way we view and organize our relationships. You’ve heard the saying, “Blood is thicker than water.” Maybe some of you watch the KU basketball games. The Morris twins have attracted most of the attention this season. They are so identical that even their tattoos are the same. One of their tattoos are the letters “FOE.” They stand for “Family Over Everything.” It’s one of the values they uphold to the point of imprinting it on their bodies.
But it’s not just their blood family. The Morris twins have pulled the players on their team into their family. The KU team has had a lot of ups and downs and deep grief this season, and they have done that as a family. It’s part of the leadership the Twins have brought to the team.
Blood may be thicker than water, but family may become inclusive of others; and that seems to be what Jesus is saying from the Cross to John and Mary. Remember the instance when Jesus was preaching in a house. Someone came and told him his mother and brothers were outside to see him. Remember what Jesus replied? “Who are my mother and brothers? And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:32-35).
Jesus is transforming the meaning of “family” to be much broader than what is normally thought. Which was revolutionary in Middle Eastern culture. Jesus is saying, from the Cross, that love, family love, is not just reserved for blood relatives but is now multiplied through Jesus to include others.
For the disciple John, and Jesus’ mother, Mary, standing beneath the Cross, that new relationship he calls them into is not only defined by faith, but by shared grief. In order to continue on, as mother, as disciple they now need each other. In a short while, Jesus would be dead and entombed. But they would still be alive. Mary and John would have to go on. The best way to do that, according to Jesus, is to lean on each other as if they were family--as if they were mother and son. In their mutual loss, emptiness and endings, there is a new beginning, a new relationship that is forged.
For those who live on after a loved one dies, that grief may never be entirely gotten over. That is especially true if those who grieve isolate themselves. One research study discovered that widows spend at least 14 out of the first 18 months after their husband dies, at home, isolating themselves from family and friends. Jesus is saying to his mother and John, that’s not going to happen for you.
In my first church, I visited a lady who lived out in the country. She had invited me out for tea and to chat. When I asked about a picture of her husband, she immediately broke out into tears. He had died 15 years before my visit. Right after the funeral, her adult kids sent her on a two week trip to Hawaii to “get her mind off it all.” When she came back, no one wanted to talk about her loss. They wanted to hear all about her trip and what she did. But she was aching from loneliness and loss. All her friends assumed she was ready to put her loss behind her when she got back from Hawaii. Subsequently, no one ever really helped her with her grief. That is, until I came along and innocently asked a question about her late husband’s picture, 15 years later.
People don’t get over their grief by themselves. It’s not something you can just tough it through by yourself. It doesn’t work to deny your pain and loss. We need others to tie on with us, to be compassionate companions along the way of our grief.
When I was in Bakersfield, I started a ministry called “Compassionate Friends.” I wish I would have called it the “Mary and John Ministry.” I did a survey of the congregation (and it was a huge congregation) asking them to check off items on a list of life experiences that they had faced. I had every bad thing I could think of that can happen to a person on that list. I was utterly amazed at what came back to me--what people in that congregation had experienced, what awful things.
I then asked those people if they would be willing to let me train them in some basic counseling skills. I wanted to build up a human resource pool. I wanted to draw from these people so I could send them out. If I heard of someone who was experiencing what they had already gone through, I had someone I could send out to be a Mary or John for them. Not someone to just be a listener. But someone who actually had experienced what they were currently going through. It ended up being an amazing ministry of caring.
I didn’t want people going through those times alone. They needed “family.” Not blood relatives. But “grief sharers.” People who became family because they leaned on each other, needed each other to just get through each day.
“Here is your son...Here is your mother.” Instead of looking out for his own grief and pain on the cross, Jesus was making sure a relationship of support was created for those he loved that would last after he was gone. Jesus knew he wouldn’t be around to take care of Mary or John. But Jesus knew they could take care of each other’s grief. That they could become family--a family much deeper and richer than blood relations could ever be.
So, as I ponder Jesus’ statement from the Cross to his mother and his disciple, I wonder if this is also a vision of Jesus for the church? This is your mother--maybe not a woman who is your real mother, but who none-the-less is in need of you to treat her as if she is. This is your son. Maybe not the boy you gave birth to, but someone who needs you, at some point in his life, to tie on with him and let him know he’s not alone.
There’s a lot of grief out there. A lot of grievers. A lot of loss and heart hurt. A lot of hits on a person’s spirit. How are we to handle it all? Job, when he is losing everything in life, laments, “Suffering is all part of life, like sparks shooting skyward” (Job 5:7). If suffering is such a large part of human experience, then we need to make sure we have others to help us live. Help us go on. Help us get through. Be with us as the “sparks shoot skyward.”
There was a woman whose child died unexpectedly. She went to a monk who was supposed to have the gift of healing. She wanted him to restore her daughter’s life. Instead, the monk sent the grieving mother on a mission. He told her to go out into the town and collect an onion from each family who had not experienced grief like hers. He told her to return to him when the basket was full of onions.
Mystified, the woman began her quest. When she finally returned to the monk, her basket was still empty. She had no onions. But she had so many new friends. New “family” to who helped restore her heart in her pain. Though her basked was empty, her heart was full. She had gained so much strength from being with people who had experienced loss as she had. And she gained so much from being able to share her new found strength with others whose loss was great.
“Here is your son...Here is your mother. In the face of their emerging grief over his death, Jesus directs them to each other. In the face of the fact that grief is part of the human condition, Jesus directs us to other mourners, suffering from all of life’s reasons for grief. Jesus says, “This is your son, your daughter, your mother, your father, your brother, your sister.” Jesus, in his dying words, makes us into a family, related not by blood, but by grief. We are a family related in faith through the Christ on the Cross, and are directed by that Crucified One toward each other.
In the book, Living With Grief, Patrick Del Zoppo wrote,
It is essential that the religious community offer homecoming to the bereaved. Homecoming is the communal soul responding to the individual’s soul. It is the essence of being alive and fully connected to a larger and healing group of believers. (page 172)
What Jesus is doing from the Cross is starting that community of the bereaved. Jesus is showing Mary and John the importance of offering a place of homecoming for each other. And by so doing, Jesus is starting a way of being the church that embraces each other in a place of homecoming.
Prayer:
Lord,
you have given us yourself.
That we know.
Sometimes, what we don’t realize,
is that you have given us yourself
through others.
In their smiles,
is your smile;
In their hands,
are your hands;
In their words,
are your words;
In their touch
is your touch.
Forgive us,
and help us,
when we push you away,
by pushing away those whom you have given us
to be our loving and caring Christian family. Amen.
Monday, March 21, 2011
"Last Words From the Cross" (part 2)
"Last Words From The Cross" (part 2)
Luke 23:39-43
I think I’ve mentioned before that I come up with some odd questions when I’m looking at a story from the Bible. Like this scene. The men, including Jesus, have been nailed to their crosses when still laying on the ground. Then the crosses are hoisted up and lowered with a thud into pre-dug holes. It’s an added part of the torture of crucifixion, to lower the cross sharply and brusquely into the hole, thereby forcing all your hanging body weight against the spikes in your wrists and ankles.
At that point, you know for sure you are going to die. Some time in the next 24 to 48 hours you will be dead. No way out. Not many of us know when or how we’re going to die. These three did, Jesus and the two criminals on each side. We have this nagging thought, a thought that we push as far back into some cave in our minds, that we are all going to die. But, on the cross, that thought comes screaming out of that cave, and stares the crucified one in the face with an unswerving gaze.
So the question that came to mind as I was pondering this crucifixion scene was, If you and another person were going into a situation in which you knew that both of you would probably die, who would you want that other person to be? Who would you want to face death with, if such a thing were to happen? I thought of the few people in the nuclear reactors in Japan, who this week, stayed behind in some effort to keep a major meltdown from happening. All of them would be subjected to high levels of radiation. I heard one report that they probably won’t live past a month, because of how much radiation their bodies would absorb. As they looked around at each other, are these the ones they would normally choose to face death with?
I know it’s an odd question. But I hope you’re giving it some thought right now. It’s an odd question, because like I said a moment ago, no one knows what the circumstances of their deaths are going to be.
When I was at a church in Nebraska, a high school girl was struck by a truck while she was driving to school one morning. She was near death. I was part of the Crisis Team that went into the school that morning to be available to talk with students about what they were feeling. In one group that I talked to, the conversation turned towards ways the kids would NOT want to die. Most of the kids I talked to said the worst would be to die alone. They didn’t want to die alone.
Crucifixion is just one of the many dreadful ways to die. But I think for many of us, the thought of having to face death without someone at our side is a depressing image.
When I was in eighth grade, our homeroom studies teacher loved the author Charles Dickens. So we got a huge dose of Charles Dickens that year. One of the books we read was Tale of Two Cities. It’s a novel about the craziness that overtook France during the French Revolution.
At the end of Dickens’ book, one of the main characters, Sydney Carton, secretly traded places with a friend of his who was locked in the Bastille. They exchanged clothes, and his friend walked out of the prison wearing Carton’s clothes. Carton remained behind in his friends prison garb to await execution. It’s one of the great self-sacrificial scenes in all of fictional literature.
As Sydney Carton was being wheeled out to the guillotine in a cart with other prisoners, he caught the eye of a little girl. She was going to suffer the same fate as he that day. She had seen him earlier and was drawn to the gentleness and courage in his face.
She moved over next to him in the cart. “If I may ride next to you, will you let me hold on to your hand?” she asked Carton as they made their last, dread journey. She didn’t want to face the last ride by herself. So when they rode together to the executioner, her hand was in his. When they reached the place where the guillotine towered to the clouds, the blade’s edge reflecting off the sun, there was no fear at all in her eyes. She gazed into Carton’s quiet, composed face and said, “I think you were sent to me by Heaven.”
What a scary vision it is to know that in a short while, by the end of the day, your earthly life would be no more. But what a gift it would be to have someone, as if they were “sent by Heaven” to share those last moments with. To be with someone who, by their quiet encouragement, makes those last moments livable.
On Golgotha that day, what a privilege those two criminals had, as they climbed the hill with their crosses, to see another, who would share their same fate. What a comfort to look into his quiet, composed face and see there the very presence of Heaven. Jesus is able to redeem even the moment of death. At least one of the criminals recognized that.
The cross represents not only the final moment of life, but also all the bad moments of life that we experience. The cross represents all the times we go through, but when we get to those times we find out we’re not alone; Christ is there, voluntarily going through what we are going through. Christ is there to let us know we are not alone, to bring encouragement in a most scary experience.
Jesus is the one lying the hospital bed next to you, having undergone the same scary procedure or operation you are now facing. Jesus is the one sitting in the recliner near you with an IV of chemo in his arm, at the oncologists clinic, smiling encouragement to you. Jesus is the one sitting across from you at the Divorce Recovery Support Group. Jesus is the other patient in the Emergency Room with similar bruises or molestations or marks of abuse as your own. Jesus is the one standing next to you as you both look out the window and see the tsunami coming, higher than your house, speeding like a derailed freight train of debris.
So many ask, “Does Jesus know what I’m going through?” The cross, and the conversation with two thieves, is the answer to that question. The cross represents all the underserved atrocities, all the life-and-death situations, all the terrifying events we face in life. Those events may have been inflicted upon us. Or they may be a result of our own actions. It doesn’t seem to matter which it is to Christ. The cross represents how Jesus takes all those kinds of events we have to go through, and makes them his own, shares them with us.
At the place of crucifixion, two criminals being lifted up on crosses find there is a third person also being crucified. He is being lifted up between them. He is an unexpected friend on their day of humiliation--the day they would all three die--the day when no one was cheering for them.
In their common misery, the two criminals demonstrate they have some sensitivity as to who Jesus is. One of the criminals mocks Jesus, missing the power of being with Jesus in the moment. He is verbally abusive of Jesus, unrepentant, still scheming a way to get out of his predicament, in denial about the gravity of his situation as he thinks he can cheat death one more time. Jesus could have been such a source of power and encouragement for him in that dark hour, but all the criminal could think to do was to turn and attack Jesus in their common pain.
The other criminal also had some spiritual sensitivity about Jesus. It appears he maybe had some religious leanings his whole life, but never did anything about them. He knew at some time he was going to have to deal with God, but he just kept putting God off. Now, at the end, he could run no longer or no further. He is in no denial about why he and the other criminal are hanging there on each side of Christ. He knows he is getting what he deserves for a life spent badly. He knows now is the time to turn and face God.
Not to God, but to the other criminal, he makes a confession of sin and a profession of faith: “Have you no fear of God? You’re getting the same as him. We deserve this, but not him--he did nothing to deserve this.” That was the criminal’s confession of sin. That was his reflection that he had misspent his life and that he now realizes it could have been otherwise. And had it been otherwise, he wouldn’t be hanging there on that cross.
Then came the profession of faith, when he finally turned to Jesus. He stopped arguing with the other criminal and said to Jesus, “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.”
What could Jesus have replied? “Sorry, buddy, you don’t quite measure up?” Or, “You are in last place of the great race of life; I’m sorry, but you’re eliminated!” Or, “Why do you think you deserve to enter my kingdom along with all the other God-fearing people who lived religiously their whole life long? Do you think you, at the last moment of your life, can worm your way in?” Does Jesus say anything like that? We might have. But, no. Jesus replied to the man, “I tell you, today you will join me in Paradise.”
Paradise is another term for the Garden of Eden. It is the new Garden, unstained by sin. It is the place where the Tree of Life grows. It is the place where God will gather all believers. Jesus, with powerful encouragement tells the criminal his faith has given him a place in Paradise.
What an act of grace, not only to be sharing the moment of death with Jesus Christ, but also to hear him say that Paradise awaits you. Today! Today; not some time in the future, but today. You will be in Paradise, and you will enter with Jesus at your side. Wow! That’s who I want by my side when I die.
Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play major league baseball. As the first to break baseball’s “color barrier,” Robinson faced jeering crowds in every stadium. While playing one day in his home stadium in Brooklyn, he let a ground ball slip by him. His own fans began to ridicule him with racial slurs. He stood at second base, humiliated, as the fans continued their taunting.
Then the shortstop, PeeWee Reese came over, stood next to Robinson and put his arm around him in an act of encouragement. The fans immediately went quiet. Robinson later said that that arm around his shoulder that day saved his career.
Jesus, as best he could from the cross, put his arm of encouragement around the criminal on the terrible day of their deaths. With his arm around the shoulder of his fellow crucified, Jesus quieted the crowds and the other criminal, and saved the man’s eternal life: Today, you will be with me in Paradise.
These words of Jesus from the cross are words to us all when we are facing the worst that life has to throw at us, when we are facing the reality of our own sin and mortality. Jesus’ words come to us not as a kick when we are down, or a slap in the face when we are already in tears. His words come instead as deep encouragement, an arm around the shoulders, and as an affirmation that the best that God can give is yet to come.
Prayer
Forgive us, Lord,
when we think we’re in control
when we think our lives are only in our hands
when we use you -- or try to use you --
to get out of a mess
just so we can get ourselves into another
when we turn to our self made forms of power
thinking we are invincible,
that we are somehow protected from harm and death.
Turn our heads, Lord Jesus,
Catch our eye, as we try to catch yours,
Hoping that you will be with us,
that you will walk with us
through the valley of the shadow of death
and we won’t go that way alone.
Amen.
Luke 23:39-43
I think I’ve mentioned before that I come up with some odd questions when I’m looking at a story from the Bible. Like this scene. The men, including Jesus, have been nailed to their crosses when still laying on the ground. Then the crosses are hoisted up and lowered with a thud into pre-dug holes. It’s an added part of the torture of crucifixion, to lower the cross sharply and brusquely into the hole, thereby forcing all your hanging body weight against the spikes in your wrists and ankles.
At that point, you know for sure you are going to die. Some time in the next 24 to 48 hours you will be dead. No way out. Not many of us know when or how we’re going to die. These three did, Jesus and the two criminals on each side. We have this nagging thought, a thought that we push as far back into some cave in our minds, that we are all going to die. But, on the cross, that thought comes screaming out of that cave, and stares the crucified one in the face with an unswerving gaze.
So the question that came to mind as I was pondering this crucifixion scene was, If you and another person were going into a situation in which you knew that both of you would probably die, who would you want that other person to be? Who would you want to face death with, if such a thing were to happen? I thought of the few people in the nuclear reactors in Japan, who this week, stayed behind in some effort to keep a major meltdown from happening. All of them would be subjected to high levels of radiation. I heard one report that they probably won’t live past a month, because of how much radiation their bodies would absorb. As they looked around at each other, are these the ones they would normally choose to face death with?
I know it’s an odd question. But I hope you’re giving it some thought right now. It’s an odd question, because like I said a moment ago, no one knows what the circumstances of their deaths are going to be.
When I was at a church in Nebraska, a high school girl was struck by a truck while she was driving to school one morning. She was near death. I was part of the Crisis Team that went into the school that morning to be available to talk with students about what they were feeling. In one group that I talked to, the conversation turned towards ways the kids would NOT want to die. Most of the kids I talked to said the worst would be to die alone. They didn’t want to die alone.
Crucifixion is just one of the many dreadful ways to die. But I think for many of us, the thought of having to face death without someone at our side is a depressing image.
When I was in eighth grade, our homeroom studies teacher loved the author Charles Dickens. So we got a huge dose of Charles Dickens that year. One of the books we read was Tale of Two Cities. It’s a novel about the craziness that overtook France during the French Revolution.
At the end of Dickens’ book, one of the main characters, Sydney Carton, secretly traded places with a friend of his who was locked in the Bastille. They exchanged clothes, and his friend walked out of the prison wearing Carton’s clothes. Carton remained behind in his friends prison garb to await execution. It’s one of the great self-sacrificial scenes in all of fictional literature.
As Sydney Carton was being wheeled out to the guillotine in a cart with other prisoners, he caught the eye of a little girl. She was going to suffer the same fate as he that day. She had seen him earlier and was drawn to the gentleness and courage in his face.
She moved over next to him in the cart. “If I may ride next to you, will you let me hold on to your hand?” she asked Carton as they made their last, dread journey. She didn’t want to face the last ride by herself. So when they rode together to the executioner, her hand was in his. When they reached the place where the guillotine towered to the clouds, the blade’s edge reflecting off the sun, there was no fear at all in her eyes. She gazed into Carton’s quiet, composed face and said, “I think you were sent to me by Heaven.”
What a scary vision it is to know that in a short while, by the end of the day, your earthly life would be no more. But what a gift it would be to have someone, as if they were “sent by Heaven” to share those last moments with. To be with someone who, by their quiet encouragement, makes those last moments livable.
On Golgotha that day, what a privilege those two criminals had, as they climbed the hill with their crosses, to see another, who would share their same fate. What a comfort to look into his quiet, composed face and see there the very presence of Heaven. Jesus is able to redeem even the moment of death. At least one of the criminals recognized that.
The cross represents not only the final moment of life, but also all the bad moments of life that we experience. The cross represents all the times we go through, but when we get to those times we find out we’re not alone; Christ is there, voluntarily going through what we are going through. Christ is there to let us know we are not alone, to bring encouragement in a most scary experience.
Jesus is the one lying the hospital bed next to you, having undergone the same scary procedure or operation you are now facing. Jesus is the one sitting in the recliner near you with an IV of chemo in his arm, at the oncologists clinic, smiling encouragement to you. Jesus is the one sitting across from you at the Divorce Recovery Support Group. Jesus is the other patient in the Emergency Room with similar bruises or molestations or marks of abuse as your own. Jesus is the one standing next to you as you both look out the window and see the tsunami coming, higher than your house, speeding like a derailed freight train of debris.
So many ask, “Does Jesus know what I’m going through?” The cross, and the conversation with two thieves, is the answer to that question. The cross represents all the underserved atrocities, all the life-and-death situations, all the terrifying events we face in life. Those events may have been inflicted upon us. Or they may be a result of our own actions. It doesn’t seem to matter which it is to Christ. The cross represents how Jesus takes all those kinds of events we have to go through, and makes them his own, shares them with us.
At the place of crucifixion, two criminals being lifted up on crosses find there is a third person also being crucified. He is being lifted up between them. He is an unexpected friend on their day of humiliation--the day they would all three die--the day when no one was cheering for them.
In their common misery, the two criminals demonstrate they have some sensitivity as to who Jesus is. One of the criminals mocks Jesus, missing the power of being with Jesus in the moment. He is verbally abusive of Jesus, unrepentant, still scheming a way to get out of his predicament, in denial about the gravity of his situation as he thinks he can cheat death one more time. Jesus could have been such a source of power and encouragement for him in that dark hour, but all the criminal could think to do was to turn and attack Jesus in their common pain.
The other criminal also had some spiritual sensitivity about Jesus. It appears he maybe had some religious leanings his whole life, but never did anything about them. He knew at some time he was going to have to deal with God, but he just kept putting God off. Now, at the end, he could run no longer or no further. He is in no denial about why he and the other criminal are hanging there on each side of Christ. He knows he is getting what he deserves for a life spent badly. He knows now is the time to turn and face God.
Not to God, but to the other criminal, he makes a confession of sin and a profession of faith: “Have you no fear of God? You’re getting the same as him. We deserve this, but not him--he did nothing to deserve this.” That was the criminal’s confession of sin. That was his reflection that he had misspent his life and that he now realizes it could have been otherwise. And had it been otherwise, he wouldn’t be hanging there on that cross.
Then came the profession of faith, when he finally turned to Jesus. He stopped arguing with the other criminal and said to Jesus, “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.”
What could Jesus have replied? “Sorry, buddy, you don’t quite measure up?” Or, “You are in last place of the great race of life; I’m sorry, but you’re eliminated!” Or, “Why do you think you deserve to enter my kingdom along with all the other God-fearing people who lived religiously their whole life long? Do you think you, at the last moment of your life, can worm your way in?” Does Jesus say anything like that? We might have. But, no. Jesus replied to the man, “I tell you, today you will join me in Paradise.”
Paradise is another term for the Garden of Eden. It is the new Garden, unstained by sin. It is the place where the Tree of Life grows. It is the place where God will gather all believers. Jesus, with powerful encouragement tells the criminal his faith has given him a place in Paradise.
What an act of grace, not only to be sharing the moment of death with Jesus Christ, but also to hear him say that Paradise awaits you. Today! Today; not some time in the future, but today. You will be in Paradise, and you will enter with Jesus at your side. Wow! That’s who I want by my side when I die.
Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play major league baseball. As the first to break baseball’s “color barrier,” Robinson faced jeering crowds in every stadium. While playing one day in his home stadium in Brooklyn, he let a ground ball slip by him. His own fans began to ridicule him with racial slurs. He stood at second base, humiliated, as the fans continued their taunting.
Then the shortstop, PeeWee Reese came over, stood next to Robinson and put his arm around him in an act of encouragement. The fans immediately went quiet. Robinson later said that that arm around his shoulder that day saved his career.
Jesus, as best he could from the cross, put his arm of encouragement around the criminal on the terrible day of their deaths. With his arm around the shoulder of his fellow crucified, Jesus quieted the crowds and the other criminal, and saved the man’s eternal life: Today, you will be with me in Paradise.
These words of Jesus from the cross are words to us all when we are facing the worst that life has to throw at us, when we are facing the reality of our own sin and mortality. Jesus’ words come to us not as a kick when we are down, or a slap in the face when we are already in tears. His words come instead as deep encouragement, an arm around the shoulders, and as an affirmation that the best that God can give is yet to come.
Prayer
Forgive us, Lord,
when we think we’re in control
when we think our lives are only in our hands
when we use you -- or try to use you --
to get out of a mess
just so we can get ourselves into another
when we turn to our self made forms of power
thinking we are invincible,
that we are somehow protected from harm and death.
Turn our heads, Lord Jesus,
Catch our eye, as we try to catch yours,
Hoping that you will be with us,
that you will walk with us
through the valley of the shadow of death
and we won’t go that way alone.
Amen.
Monday, March 14, 2011
"Last Words From the Cross" (part 1)
"Last Words From the Cross" (part 1)
Luke 23:33-34
When someone is on the threshold of death, and they breathe their last, an often asked question by those who weren’t with the person at the time of death is, “Did he/she say anything just before they died?” It’s as if the very last words, spoken at the end of life, are somehow much more weighty than any of the words they spoke earlier in their lives. People remember last words.
Maybe some of you have read books by C.S. Lewis. He’s been an influential author in my life. Lewis died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, so his death went pretty much unnoticed. According to one of C.S. Lewis’ close friends, who was with him when he died, said that Lewis’ last words were, “It’s all kind of exciting, isn’t it?”
I’ve been thinking of something I can say, if I am conscious at all, at the point of my death, that will totally mystify people. It would be something like, “There’s a light in the attic.” Then I would die. Everyone would wonder what that meant. They would think that it’s got to be something profound, something imbued with deep spiritual meaning. They would puzzle over it for years. Pass the story down from generation to generation.
Probably what will happen is, after I threw out my last dying breath quip, and my soul is leaving my body, I’ll hear my daughter’s usual reply, “Quit being such an idiot, dad.” Even in death I hope to be an embarrassment to my children, fulfilling my role as a father.
After Jesus was nailed to the cross, he made seven statements. He’d lost a lot of blood after being whipped. He was weak, and hurting, and his time was short. These last seven statements from our Lord have captivated people’s attention ever since they were uttered. Mainly because they were the last things he said.
I’m going to take a look at Jesus’ so-called, “Seven Last Words” spoken from the cross. We’ll spend some time thinking about them during Lent, and leading up to Holy Week and Easter. Today, we hear the first statement made as the nails were being pounded through his wrists and ankles. The cross has not been hoisted up and planted in the hole yet. Laying on the cross, suffering excruciating pain upon pain, with each blow of the mallet on the spikes, Jesus says, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
At first hearing, we want to loudly disagree with Jesus. Of course those people knew what they were doing. They were putting to death another human being. Actually, three human beings. They were fulfilling their orders to carry out an execution. They were nailing three men to crosses. They knew what they were doing. They were putting an end to Jesus’ life in a most painful way.
But there’s another level of reality going on here, isn’t there. On another level, these executioners are oblivious to the fact, that one of the men they were putting to death that day was actually God’s Son. The Savior of the world.
Reading this story is like those well written plays, where the audience knows the truth about one of the characters, that the characters who are on stage don’t know or realize. That’s the ironic, and sad tragedy of this Crucifixion scene: not just the execution, but the ignorance of the executioners about who it is that’s being put to death.
So why is Jesus asking God to forgive them? What, exactly, is forgivable in Jesus’ mind? Their actions? Their sadistic pleasure in executing people? Their being caught in the middle of having to follow orders, even though those orders are causing them to execute an innocent man.
Or, is it their ignorance that Jesus is saying is forgivable? They get to be forgiven simply because they’re ignorant of what is really going on? They are being given a free pass, because they can’t see the truth behind the obvious? Wouldn’t that open up a can of worms for criminal prosecutors and defense attorneys? “You didn’t know what you were doing when you killed that guy, so I guess you’re off the hook.”
Also, why would Jesus need to plead for forgiveness for his executioners to God? Couldn’t Jesus just forgive them right then and there? Wouldn’t that take care of it? Is the temptation, if you want to call it that, for God to be unforgiving towards these killers? Does Jesus need to remind God of God’s forgiving nature? Does Jesus need to jog God’s attention back to “the plan” they are working on, because the Father God is getting too caught up in the atrocity of this scene? It would be a tough thing for any father to have to stand by and watch what is happening to his only son, even if you are God.
So what is Jesus up to, in asking for such forgiveness? Another question, that I usually ponder when I’m looking at statements Jesus makes is, “Who is Jesus’ real audience?” Who is Jesus actually speaking to? Sometimes he said things to the Pharisees, but they were actually aimed at the disciples. Sometimes he would say something to the disciples, but they were actually meant for the Pharisees, or the surrounding crowd. So who is Jesus’ intended audience in this first, of his seven last statements?
Could it be the executioners? (Remember, Jesus is speaking to God.) Did Jesus make this statement, hoping that they would overhear and remember what he said after-the-fact? What if one of these soldiers became a believer later on, and then, realizing he had a part in Jesus’ death, would be overwhelmed by that? Is Jesus giving them something to remember so they don’t become obliterated by guilt when they realize who Jesus really is?
Or, like I already mentioned, is this statement for the disciples? If they were there, at the Crucifixion, and not hiding out, did Jesus make this God-ward statement for their sake? Was it important for them to hear Jesus’ forgiveness of his killers? Most of the 12 disciples would be martyred, and die horrible deaths: Peter crucified upside down; James sawn in half; others tarred and set on fire. Is Jesus showing them the way, and giving them the prayer they will have to draw from when it’s their turn?
Or, could this statement of Jesus be for the crowd? Is Jesus making an affirmation that tragic, senseless death can’t be stopped from happening in the world? That the only thing we can do, in the face of such atrocious killing is deal with it with forgiveness. Is Jesus teaching the bystanders that even though forgiving doesn’t condone such senseless and cold-hearted death, forgiveness does show the survivors the way through their grief? Is Jesus teaching the people that authentic forgiveness has to do with God, can only come from God, since that’s who Jesus is addressing?
If I was in the crowd that day, hearing what Jesus said, I would have wondered how I can really forgive someone who has, in a determined sort of way, sought to do me harm? How could Jesus find it within himself to forgive those who were pounding nails through his muscle and bone? How can you forgive someone for that?
And who is the “them” that Jesus prays for? Is it just the soldiers who have to do the deed? Or is it also Herod, and Caiaphus, the Jewish Sanhedrin, and even Judas? None of them knew what they were actually doing. Is Jesus asking God to forgive them all?
Is this kind of forgiveness possible only because Jesus was the Savior, the Son of God? That forgiving others is what he’s supposed to do? But for us it’s impossible? Does God really expect us mere mortals to be just as forgiving as Jesus towards those who hurt us deeply and physically and emotionally and psychologically? “Impossible!” you might say.
I want to tell you three stories. These are true stories about real people. As I tell you these stories, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, could you have responded as the people in these stories did? You may respond in a quick, knee-jerk way, “No way.” If you do answer that way, my second question is, Why not? What is the power that Jesus tapped into that is available to all believers when evil is loosed upon us, and great harm is done? Is there a power in this forgiveness of Christ on the cross that is way beyond our ability to comprehend? And will we discover that power only when we, similarly to Christ, forgive?
Here’s the first story. In 1960 Adolph Coors (one of Nick’s heroes) founder of Coors Brewery, was kidnapped and held for ransom. He was beaten brutally and shoved in the trunk of a car. During the the kidnap negotiations he was shot and killed. His body was found on a remote area of the Rockies. The kidnapper was found, convicted, and imprisoned.
At the time of the kidnapping and murder, Coors’ son, Adolph, Jr. was 15 years old. His father was his best friend. He created an enormous hatred in his heart for his father’s murderer. The one thought that nagged him was, “If only I could have caught the man before the police did.”
In 1975, Adolph, Jr. became a Christian. He became active with the group, Prison Fellowship, started by Chuck Colson. The leader of Adolph’s group asked him one day, “Have you forgiven the man who killed your father?”
Coors replied, “Yes, in my heart I have forgiven him.”
The leader pressed further. “Have you been to see the man personally and have you forgiven him; and not only that, have you asked him to forgive you?”
With that, Coors became angry and retorted, “Why should he forgive me?”
“Because,” said the group leader, “you have hated him for so long.”
Coors went to the penitentiary to visit the man who brutally killed his father. He took the man a Bible. When he gave it to him, he said, “I’m down here today because, as a Christian, I have been commanded by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to ask for your forgiveness. I forgive you for the sins you have committed against our family. And I ask you to forgive me for the hatred I have stored in my heart for you.”
In the weeks that followed, Coors told his group leader that an amazing thing had happened. Ever since he had become a Christian, he had trouble praying. But in the days and weeks that followed his meeting with his father’s killer, giving and asking forgiveness, prayer now flowed easily and wonderfully.
So, my question is, Could you have done that?
Here’s another story. A missionary to Korea during the Korean War tells of an incident he witnessed. A South Korean Christian, a civilian, was arrested by the communists and ordered shot. When a young communist officer learned that the prisoner was in charge of an orphanage, caring for small children, he decided to spare the man and execute his son instead. So they shot his 19 year old son in the back of the head and made the father watch his son die.
Later, after the war turned, the young communist officer was captured by United Nations forces. He was tried and condemned to death for his war crimes. Before the death sentence was carried out, the Christian man, whose son had been executed, pled for the life of the communist officer. He testified that the leader had been young, and that he really didn’t know what he was doing. (Sound familiar?) “Give him to me,” begged the father, “and I will train him.”
The United Nations court granted the father’s request. The father took the murderer of his son into his home and began to care for him and teach him about Christ. That once Communist officer became the pastor of one of the largest Christian churches in Korea and the world.
So my question again is, Could you have done that?
The final story is about Goldie Bristol, who wrote a book titled, When It’s Hard to Forgive. The book describes the horror and pain she and her husband, Bob, felt when they were told their 22 year old daughter had been raped and murdered.
After some time, Bob and Goldie decided they wanted to meet the man who had murdered their daughter. Because of their faith in Christ, they decided they would embrace their enemy in love. After a number of attempts to arrange a meeting with their daughter’s murderer, the man finally agreed to meet them. Goldie wrote:
The door opened; the man entered the room. He was about 6 feet tall, a dark-haired, muscular, cleanly dressed person. God’s love welled up within me and overflowed. The man paused, his eyes filling with tears. My husband and I stood and each in turn embraced the man. The three of us wept together.
Bob and Goldie didn’t understand why this man had murdered their daughter. Yet they felt deep within them that they must forgive him. After meeting him that day, they felt free, at peace, purged of anger and resentment. Even though the man refused to accept their forgiveness of him, Goldie and Bob’s pain disappeared.
Could you have done that?
Goldie is often invited to speak at church gatherings. People are intrigued by her experience, and what it means to really forgive someone. She is surprised to find, though, that so many in the audiences where she speaks are hostile to her. She is frequently attacked with questions and accused of being unloving. People say she is naive and disrespectful concerning her daughter’s death. But I wonder what Christ thinks of Goldie and Bob for their act of forgiveness.
I have found story after story, similar to these of people’s forgiveness in the face of evil and atrocity and deep hurt. I hope you are thinking about any unforgiveness you may be storing in your hearts. What do you have to learn from our Savior’s words from the cross, and the stories I have told, about the power of forgiveness?
Because I think that’s what forgiveness is: it’s a power. It’s a power the forgiver has over the one who is inflicting the pain. Forgiveness is the power to cancel out even the gravest of hurts and harm. Forgiveness is the power to not let that destructive pain become a part of who you are as a person, and define you. Forgiveness is saying to those who are inflicting the pain, “I have power over you that you don’t understand. And this is it: I forgive you.”
Could you do that?
Luke 23:33-34
When someone is on the threshold of death, and they breathe their last, an often asked question by those who weren’t with the person at the time of death is, “Did he/she say anything just before they died?” It’s as if the very last words, spoken at the end of life, are somehow much more weighty than any of the words they spoke earlier in their lives. People remember last words.
Maybe some of you have read books by C.S. Lewis. He’s been an influential author in my life. Lewis died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, so his death went pretty much unnoticed. According to one of C.S. Lewis’ close friends, who was with him when he died, said that Lewis’ last words were, “It’s all kind of exciting, isn’t it?”
I’ve been thinking of something I can say, if I am conscious at all, at the point of my death, that will totally mystify people. It would be something like, “There’s a light in the attic.” Then I would die. Everyone would wonder what that meant. They would think that it’s got to be something profound, something imbued with deep spiritual meaning. They would puzzle over it for years. Pass the story down from generation to generation.
Probably what will happen is, after I threw out my last dying breath quip, and my soul is leaving my body, I’ll hear my daughter’s usual reply, “Quit being such an idiot, dad.” Even in death I hope to be an embarrassment to my children, fulfilling my role as a father.
After Jesus was nailed to the cross, he made seven statements. He’d lost a lot of blood after being whipped. He was weak, and hurting, and his time was short. These last seven statements from our Lord have captivated people’s attention ever since they were uttered. Mainly because they were the last things he said.
I’m going to take a look at Jesus’ so-called, “Seven Last Words” spoken from the cross. We’ll spend some time thinking about them during Lent, and leading up to Holy Week and Easter. Today, we hear the first statement made as the nails were being pounded through his wrists and ankles. The cross has not been hoisted up and planted in the hole yet. Laying on the cross, suffering excruciating pain upon pain, with each blow of the mallet on the spikes, Jesus says, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
At first hearing, we want to loudly disagree with Jesus. Of course those people knew what they were doing. They were putting to death another human being. Actually, three human beings. They were fulfilling their orders to carry out an execution. They were nailing three men to crosses. They knew what they were doing. They were putting an end to Jesus’ life in a most painful way.
But there’s another level of reality going on here, isn’t there. On another level, these executioners are oblivious to the fact, that one of the men they were putting to death that day was actually God’s Son. The Savior of the world.
Reading this story is like those well written plays, where the audience knows the truth about one of the characters, that the characters who are on stage don’t know or realize. That’s the ironic, and sad tragedy of this Crucifixion scene: not just the execution, but the ignorance of the executioners about who it is that’s being put to death.
So why is Jesus asking God to forgive them? What, exactly, is forgivable in Jesus’ mind? Their actions? Their sadistic pleasure in executing people? Their being caught in the middle of having to follow orders, even though those orders are causing them to execute an innocent man.
Or, is it their ignorance that Jesus is saying is forgivable? They get to be forgiven simply because they’re ignorant of what is really going on? They are being given a free pass, because they can’t see the truth behind the obvious? Wouldn’t that open up a can of worms for criminal prosecutors and defense attorneys? “You didn’t know what you were doing when you killed that guy, so I guess you’re off the hook.”
Also, why would Jesus need to plead for forgiveness for his executioners to God? Couldn’t Jesus just forgive them right then and there? Wouldn’t that take care of it? Is the temptation, if you want to call it that, for God to be unforgiving towards these killers? Does Jesus need to remind God of God’s forgiving nature? Does Jesus need to jog God’s attention back to “the plan” they are working on, because the Father God is getting too caught up in the atrocity of this scene? It would be a tough thing for any father to have to stand by and watch what is happening to his only son, even if you are God.
So what is Jesus up to, in asking for such forgiveness? Another question, that I usually ponder when I’m looking at statements Jesus makes is, “Who is Jesus’ real audience?” Who is Jesus actually speaking to? Sometimes he said things to the Pharisees, but they were actually aimed at the disciples. Sometimes he would say something to the disciples, but they were actually meant for the Pharisees, or the surrounding crowd. So who is Jesus’ intended audience in this first, of his seven last statements?
Could it be the executioners? (Remember, Jesus is speaking to God.) Did Jesus make this statement, hoping that they would overhear and remember what he said after-the-fact? What if one of these soldiers became a believer later on, and then, realizing he had a part in Jesus’ death, would be overwhelmed by that? Is Jesus giving them something to remember so they don’t become obliterated by guilt when they realize who Jesus really is?
Or, like I already mentioned, is this statement for the disciples? If they were there, at the Crucifixion, and not hiding out, did Jesus make this God-ward statement for their sake? Was it important for them to hear Jesus’ forgiveness of his killers? Most of the 12 disciples would be martyred, and die horrible deaths: Peter crucified upside down; James sawn in half; others tarred and set on fire. Is Jesus showing them the way, and giving them the prayer they will have to draw from when it’s their turn?
Or, could this statement of Jesus be for the crowd? Is Jesus making an affirmation that tragic, senseless death can’t be stopped from happening in the world? That the only thing we can do, in the face of such atrocious killing is deal with it with forgiveness. Is Jesus teaching the bystanders that even though forgiving doesn’t condone such senseless and cold-hearted death, forgiveness does show the survivors the way through their grief? Is Jesus teaching the people that authentic forgiveness has to do with God, can only come from God, since that’s who Jesus is addressing?
If I was in the crowd that day, hearing what Jesus said, I would have wondered how I can really forgive someone who has, in a determined sort of way, sought to do me harm? How could Jesus find it within himself to forgive those who were pounding nails through his muscle and bone? How can you forgive someone for that?
And who is the “them” that Jesus prays for? Is it just the soldiers who have to do the deed? Or is it also Herod, and Caiaphus, the Jewish Sanhedrin, and even Judas? None of them knew what they were actually doing. Is Jesus asking God to forgive them all?
Is this kind of forgiveness possible only because Jesus was the Savior, the Son of God? That forgiving others is what he’s supposed to do? But for us it’s impossible? Does God really expect us mere mortals to be just as forgiving as Jesus towards those who hurt us deeply and physically and emotionally and psychologically? “Impossible!” you might say.
I want to tell you three stories. These are true stories about real people. As I tell you these stories, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, could you have responded as the people in these stories did? You may respond in a quick, knee-jerk way, “No way.” If you do answer that way, my second question is, Why not? What is the power that Jesus tapped into that is available to all believers when evil is loosed upon us, and great harm is done? Is there a power in this forgiveness of Christ on the cross that is way beyond our ability to comprehend? And will we discover that power only when we, similarly to Christ, forgive?
Here’s the first story. In 1960 Adolph Coors (one of Nick’s heroes) founder of Coors Brewery, was kidnapped and held for ransom. He was beaten brutally and shoved in the trunk of a car. During the the kidnap negotiations he was shot and killed. His body was found on a remote area of the Rockies. The kidnapper was found, convicted, and imprisoned.
At the time of the kidnapping and murder, Coors’ son, Adolph, Jr. was 15 years old. His father was his best friend. He created an enormous hatred in his heart for his father’s murderer. The one thought that nagged him was, “If only I could have caught the man before the police did.”
In 1975, Adolph, Jr. became a Christian. He became active with the group, Prison Fellowship, started by Chuck Colson. The leader of Adolph’s group asked him one day, “Have you forgiven the man who killed your father?”
Coors replied, “Yes, in my heart I have forgiven him.”
The leader pressed further. “Have you been to see the man personally and have you forgiven him; and not only that, have you asked him to forgive you?”
With that, Coors became angry and retorted, “Why should he forgive me?”
“Because,” said the group leader, “you have hated him for so long.”
Coors went to the penitentiary to visit the man who brutally killed his father. He took the man a Bible. When he gave it to him, he said, “I’m down here today because, as a Christian, I have been commanded by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to ask for your forgiveness. I forgive you for the sins you have committed against our family. And I ask you to forgive me for the hatred I have stored in my heart for you.”
In the weeks that followed, Coors told his group leader that an amazing thing had happened. Ever since he had become a Christian, he had trouble praying. But in the days and weeks that followed his meeting with his father’s killer, giving and asking forgiveness, prayer now flowed easily and wonderfully.
So, my question is, Could you have done that?
Here’s another story. A missionary to Korea during the Korean War tells of an incident he witnessed. A South Korean Christian, a civilian, was arrested by the communists and ordered shot. When a young communist officer learned that the prisoner was in charge of an orphanage, caring for small children, he decided to spare the man and execute his son instead. So they shot his 19 year old son in the back of the head and made the father watch his son die.
Later, after the war turned, the young communist officer was captured by United Nations forces. He was tried and condemned to death for his war crimes. Before the death sentence was carried out, the Christian man, whose son had been executed, pled for the life of the communist officer. He testified that the leader had been young, and that he really didn’t know what he was doing. (Sound familiar?) “Give him to me,” begged the father, “and I will train him.”
The United Nations court granted the father’s request. The father took the murderer of his son into his home and began to care for him and teach him about Christ. That once Communist officer became the pastor of one of the largest Christian churches in Korea and the world.
So my question again is, Could you have done that?
The final story is about Goldie Bristol, who wrote a book titled, When It’s Hard to Forgive. The book describes the horror and pain she and her husband, Bob, felt when they were told their 22 year old daughter had been raped and murdered.
After some time, Bob and Goldie decided they wanted to meet the man who had murdered their daughter. Because of their faith in Christ, they decided they would embrace their enemy in love. After a number of attempts to arrange a meeting with their daughter’s murderer, the man finally agreed to meet them. Goldie wrote:
The door opened; the man entered the room. He was about 6 feet tall, a dark-haired, muscular, cleanly dressed person. God’s love welled up within me and overflowed. The man paused, his eyes filling with tears. My husband and I stood and each in turn embraced the man. The three of us wept together.
Bob and Goldie didn’t understand why this man had murdered their daughter. Yet they felt deep within them that they must forgive him. After meeting him that day, they felt free, at peace, purged of anger and resentment. Even though the man refused to accept their forgiveness of him, Goldie and Bob’s pain disappeared.
Could you have done that?
Goldie is often invited to speak at church gatherings. People are intrigued by her experience, and what it means to really forgive someone. She is surprised to find, though, that so many in the audiences where she speaks are hostile to her. She is frequently attacked with questions and accused of being unloving. People say she is naive and disrespectful concerning her daughter’s death. But I wonder what Christ thinks of Goldie and Bob for their act of forgiveness.
I have found story after story, similar to these of people’s forgiveness in the face of evil and atrocity and deep hurt. I hope you are thinking about any unforgiveness you may be storing in your hearts. What do you have to learn from our Savior’s words from the cross, and the stories I have told, about the power of forgiveness?
Because I think that’s what forgiveness is: it’s a power. It’s a power the forgiver has over the one who is inflicting the pain. Forgiveness is the power to cancel out even the gravest of hurts and harm. Forgiveness is the power to not let that destructive pain become a part of who you are as a person, and define you. Forgiveness is saying to those who are inflicting the pain, “I have power over you that you don’t understand. And this is it: I forgive you.”
Could you do that?
Monday, March 7, 2011
"Bohemian Believers"
"Bohemian Believers"
Matthew 7:7-12
I recently watched the movie version of the musical, “Rent.” I don’t recommend it to everyone. It was disturbing to me for a lot of reasons. But what was disturbing was also thought provoking. What caught me up the most were the characters of the musical: young, 20-somethings, who live, should I say, unconventional, nonconforming lives. There was the Columbia philosophy professor whose questions and searching had to do with trying to find the meaning of life. Suddenly, for him, none of the answers he’d found previously made sense. Therefore, none of his questions made sense. He resigned his teaching position. He began asking himself different questions, not about the meaning of life, but about the meaning and boundaries of love.
There was the rocker, who didn’t begin to question anything until he lost his girlfriend to a drug addicted suicide. He wants to write the one, pure song that will encapsulate all his questions. He’s seeking for answers to why life ends up so tragically. Like the prodigal son, he runs away, not to a life of sin, but a life of conventionality in New Mexico. He finally realizes he must take his old life on, rather than run away from it. Only then does his song start to come to him.
There’s the film maker who wanted to display life in all its rawness and reality, especially for AIDS and HIV patients. In ways films are not normally made, he puts together his movie as a visual montage. Sensitively and poignantly he gives his characters a venue and voice to ask, seek, and knock, as one-by-one they all die. His movie ends up serving as a powerful memorial for those whom “normal” society has deemed to have no voice. He chronicles the outcasts who are told they don’t deserve to have their stories told. His movie asks the question, “Why can’t these people be heard?”
And there’s the 19 year old stripper, addicted to heroin because she feels there are no more questions worth asking. Nothing worth seeking. No doors worth knocking on, except where to get her next fix. She gives up. When her friends finally find her, she is near death. She is cold from the winter outside, and the winter inside her soul. She is hungry, but unwilling to eat. She is poisoned with the drugs of heroin and fatalism. She breathes her last. The rocker, who has fallen in love with her, sings the one, pure song he has finally written to her lifeless body.
What I began to ponder while watching the movie--and continue to ponder--was the way the characters in the movie questioned everything. Nothing was too sacred. Nothing too profane. At one point they sing a song about being young bohemians--people who are trying to look at life differently, who refuse to succumb to conventional viewpoints, who renounce the answers most everyone else just swallow on a daily basis.
I sat there watching the movie, and as I am standing here now, I’m struggling with the approach to life depicted by the young bohemians in the movie. I began to interface that approach to life with the statements Jesus makes about questioning, seeking, and knocking. This sermon is my struggle with what it means to live a Christian, reflective lifestyle that isn’t afraid to ask questions.
It was the questioning, seeking and knocking that gave the characters in the movie their vitality. It wasn’t the answers they found. They even questioned their answers. It was in the process of always being curious, always being inquisitive, always wondering, never being satisfied. All of their questions were being bounced off of Mimi’s life--the drug addicted 19 year old. Mimi never questioned anything. Never wondered “Why?” or “What if?” It was her giving up and giving in to the river and current of an unreflective life that played off the energy of all the other character’s questions.
I began to wonder how many of us are Mimi. Our drug is not heroin. Our drug is conventionality. Only willing to go along with stale questions and even more stale answers. Our drug is the unwillingness to ask, seek, knock. To resist being what I would call “bohemian believers.”
I began to wonder if we are addicted to the same kind of quiet, desperate, traditional, unreflective, escapist life that is afraid to ask ourselves hard questions. Are we unwilling to go down a road, that at first sight, appears to be a dead end? Do we refuse to knock on doors of places that aren’t in the good neighborhood of orthodoxy?
Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you. Everyone who asks will receive. Everyone who searches will find. And the door will be opened for everyone who knocks.
Did you listen carefully to what Jesus is telling his disciples/us? Knowing what you’re looking for isn’t as important as the looking itself. Jesus doesn’t describe what you’re supposed to be asking about. He doesn’t even tell us what, exactly, we will receive, find, or have opened for us. He doesn’t give us a list or even a hint of the questions we’re supposed to ask. He doesn’t describe what you should be searching for. He doesn’t say which doors we should be knocking on. Jesus didn’t expand with any details because what he is emphasizing is the attitude, not the specifics. It is simply the continual attitude of asking, searching, knocking that Jesus emphasizes.
I think the assumption of Jesus is that as long as we are on that quest, God is going to bring us around to asking the questions we really NEED answered; that God is going to get us searching for that which we really need to find; that God is going to direct us to the doors we should be knocking on. The important thing is that God can’t do that if we don’t have the heart, or the will to ask, search, and knock in the first place. The heart and will and drive has to come first.
I think there’s something else going on for those who refuse to embark on what I’m calling the Bohemian Believers journey. It’s fear. For Mimi, in the movie “Rent,” the fear was that when she went asking there would be no answers. The fear was that when she went searching for something different, all paths would lead to dead ends. The fear was that when she went knocking, all doors would open up to emptiness. That’s one part of the fear.
The other part of that fear, for those of us who have not given into Mimi’s fatalism, is the fear that we will find answers, findings, and openings that will be different than what we want or expect. So, in order to protect ourselves from the unknown or the different, we just don’t ask, search, or knock. We keep ourselves sheltered in the secure and non-threatening questions and answers. We refuse to risk. We refuse to venture out on a journey of faith that may take us who knows where. Because, if we do that, what if we get different answers, discover something we didn’t expect, have a door opened up to a whole new environment? I had a poster once that read, “Ships in the harbor are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” What if we find out we’ve just been docked in our own familiar worlds too long, and that it’s time to put out to sea--that is, explore where we are in our faith, and where we need to move out to? To find out “what we’re built for.”
If we follow Jesus’ lead here, what we understand about God is that God is not afraid of our questions, our search, nor our knocking. Jesus is telling us that God wants us to do that. The only ones who are afraid of doing that is not God, but us. Our fear may be that we just might find out we’ve got it all wrong. Anyone who reads the Psalms, or the book of Job, or Ecclesiastes, or Lamentations, can see clearly that asking, searching, and knocking is the attitude God not only allows, but expects:
Job asks God: “Are people mere things to you? Why all this dodging and shuffling? Human life is nothing but a struggle, isn’t it?” (Job 6, 7)
One of the psalmists writes, “God, are you avoiding me?” (Psalm 10:1)
The writer of Ecclesiastes, in wondering about the meaning of life, starts out his book by asking a lot of questions. Questions like, “What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?” (1:3) And then follows that up with the question, “What has happened before that won’t happen again? Is there nothing new in the whole world?” (1:9)
And in Lamentations, a book of tears about the destruction of Jerusalem, and the awful human atrocities that took place, Jeremiah shouts at God: “Look at us, God. Think it over. Have you ever treated anyone as badly as this? Should women eat their own babies, the very children they have cared for?” (2:20) In that same book, Jeremiah asks so many tough questions about how it is that evil happens, and if God is behind it. He asks, “Do both bad and good things come by the command of the Most High God?” (3:38)
Here, in the Bible, there is page after page of people God allowed to ask some of the toughest questions about life that anyone could ask. Like I said, God doesn’t seem to be afraid of such questions, but desires we pursue them, with Him.
Jesus spoke, in our verses from Matthew 7, about the children who ask for bread and fish. So many of God’s children are asking their questions, searching the ins and outs of their lives, knocking on so many doors, looking for bread and fish, truth and discernment, answers and peace. I want to believe that any of God’s children, who may be asking for bread and fish, even though they don’t realize it, that for all of us, God will not give stones or snakes.
I think Jesus is telling us something really important, not just about what it means to be a disciple Jesus’ way here, but also about who God is. Jesus is telling us that God is a God who loves to direct people to the right questions, and then answer those questions. Our God is a God who loves to find people who are searching for something, even if they have no idea what it is, and then help them find it. Like the parable Jesus told, saying the Kingdom of God is like a man who happens to find a treasure in a field. The man didn’t know he was searching for a treasure. He just happened to be walking in a field. But God puts a treasure right in his path, helping him find what he’d been looking for all along, without knowing it. Our God is a God who loves to open doors people are drawn to, without really knowing why. Then God challenges them to find the courage within themselves to walk up the steps and knock on the door anyway.
I’ve been talking (emailing) with my somewhat bohemian son and daughter about all this. They are both accomplished questioners, searchers, and knockers. They are both struggling with their faith right now, and asking some fairly tough questions. For example, Ryan wrote to me:
I think we are all talking about questions of faith: What does faith mean? Who is God? Where does God fit into my life? Does God really have plans for us? Is God the church? Does the church know God? Are there any answers to these questions, or just interpretations? ... And then when you’ve asked all of those questions, you can question whether the “answers” you arrived at are still valid based on questions you’ve asked since you found your previous “answer.”
He’s asking questions and dealing with stuff I never did at his age (he’s 27). I love his question, “Is God the church?” What an amazing question, because for him, if God is the church, what he’s seeing in the church right now, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with God--especially with church’s like Fred Phelps in Topeka, who the Supreme Court, this week, allowed to continue their ranting and craziness. And the converse question is the same: Is the church God? If that is so, Ryan doesn’t want anything to do with the church, because to him, it’s make a very poor God. And he’s absolutely right.
Ryan and Kristin are preacher’s kids. Aren’t they supposed to have it all together? Another tough, and maybe unfair question. And what about their minister father? But, even though they are questioning their basic beliefs, can we not, by Jesus’ statement, be sure that God will honor their questions and search? That we can trust God to bring them around to where God wants them to be?
The point here, for me, according to Jesus’ words, is to keep asking, keep searching, keep knocking, because that’s where God is. It’s a lifelong process. And, as Ryan wrote in his email to me, the answers you get at one point in your life may not make sense at another time. So we have to be willing to ask those same basic questions all over again, at different times in our lives, even though we assume we already know the answer.
The worst thing in life is not to have a bad faith-quest, but to give up the search all together. The worst thing is to think you’ve asked enough questions, searched enough dead ends, knocked on enough doors. The sad people are those who just sit, and search no further, who slip their ships into the harbor, and then into the dock, and never untie again, to go out in the risky seas. To become the Mimi’s who have decided life is not worth asking about, that life’s troubling ins and outs are not worth searching, that closed doors are just better left closed. The sad people are those who have given up the quest, and by so doing, have given up on God, who is out where the asking, searching, and the knocking is going on.
Matthew 7:7-12
I recently watched the movie version of the musical, “Rent.” I don’t recommend it to everyone. It was disturbing to me for a lot of reasons. But what was disturbing was also thought provoking. What caught me up the most were the characters of the musical: young, 20-somethings, who live, should I say, unconventional, nonconforming lives. There was the Columbia philosophy professor whose questions and searching had to do with trying to find the meaning of life. Suddenly, for him, none of the answers he’d found previously made sense. Therefore, none of his questions made sense. He resigned his teaching position. He began asking himself different questions, not about the meaning of life, but about the meaning and boundaries of love.
There was the rocker, who didn’t begin to question anything until he lost his girlfriend to a drug addicted suicide. He wants to write the one, pure song that will encapsulate all his questions. He’s seeking for answers to why life ends up so tragically. Like the prodigal son, he runs away, not to a life of sin, but a life of conventionality in New Mexico. He finally realizes he must take his old life on, rather than run away from it. Only then does his song start to come to him.
There’s the film maker who wanted to display life in all its rawness and reality, especially for AIDS and HIV patients. In ways films are not normally made, he puts together his movie as a visual montage. Sensitively and poignantly he gives his characters a venue and voice to ask, seek, and knock, as one-by-one they all die. His movie ends up serving as a powerful memorial for those whom “normal” society has deemed to have no voice. He chronicles the outcasts who are told they don’t deserve to have their stories told. His movie asks the question, “Why can’t these people be heard?”
And there’s the 19 year old stripper, addicted to heroin because she feels there are no more questions worth asking. Nothing worth seeking. No doors worth knocking on, except where to get her next fix. She gives up. When her friends finally find her, she is near death. She is cold from the winter outside, and the winter inside her soul. She is hungry, but unwilling to eat. She is poisoned with the drugs of heroin and fatalism. She breathes her last. The rocker, who has fallen in love with her, sings the one, pure song he has finally written to her lifeless body.
What I began to ponder while watching the movie--and continue to ponder--was the way the characters in the movie questioned everything. Nothing was too sacred. Nothing too profane. At one point they sing a song about being young bohemians--people who are trying to look at life differently, who refuse to succumb to conventional viewpoints, who renounce the answers most everyone else just swallow on a daily basis.
I sat there watching the movie, and as I am standing here now, I’m struggling with the approach to life depicted by the young bohemians in the movie. I began to interface that approach to life with the statements Jesus makes about questioning, seeking, and knocking. This sermon is my struggle with what it means to live a Christian, reflective lifestyle that isn’t afraid to ask questions.
It was the questioning, seeking and knocking that gave the characters in the movie their vitality. It wasn’t the answers they found. They even questioned their answers. It was in the process of always being curious, always being inquisitive, always wondering, never being satisfied. All of their questions were being bounced off of Mimi’s life--the drug addicted 19 year old. Mimi never questioned anything. Never wondered “Why?” or “What if?” It was her giving up and giving in to the river and current of an unreflective life that played off the energy of all the other character’s questions.
I began to wonder how many of us are Mimi. Our drug is not heroin. Our drug is conventionality. Only willing to go along with stale questions and even more stale answers. Our drug is the unwillingness to ask, seek, knock. To resist being what I would call “bohemian believers.”
I began to wonder if we are addicted to the same kind of quiet, desperate, traditional, unreflective, escapist life that is afraid to ask ourselves hard questions. Are we unwilling to go down a road, that at first sight, appears to be a dead end? Do we refuse to knock on doors of places that aren’t in the good neighborhood of orthodoxy?
Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you. Everyone who asks will receive. Everyone who searches will find. And the door will be opened for everyone who knocks.
Did you listen carefully to what Jesus is telling his disciples/us? Knowing what you’re looking for isn’t as important as the looking itself. Jesus doesn’t describe what you’re supposed to be asking about. He doesn’t even tell us what, exactly, we will receive, find, or have opened for us. He doesn’t give us a list or even a hint of the questions we’re supposed to ask. He doesn’t describe what you should be searching for. He doesn’t say which doors we should be knocking on. Jesus didn’t expand with any details because what he is emphasizing is the attitude, not the specifics. It is simply the continual attitude of asking, searching, knocking that Jesus emphasizes.
I think the assumption of Jesus is that as long as we are on that quest, God is going to bring us around to asking the questions we really NEED answered; that God is going to get us searching for that which we really need to find; that God is going to direct us to the doors we should be knocking on. The important thing is that God can’t do that if we don’t have the heart, or the will to ask, search, and knock in the first place. The heart and will and drive has to come first.
I think there’s something else going on for those who refuse to embark on what I’m calling the Bohemian Believers journey. It’s fear. For Mimi, in the movie “Rent,” the fear was that when she went asking there would be no answers. The fear was that when she went searching for something different, all paths would lead to dead ends. The fear was that when she went knocking, all doors would open up to emptiness. That’s one part of the fear.
The other part of that fear, for those of us who have not given into Mimi’s fatalism, is the fear that we will find answers, findings, and openings that will be different than what we want or expect. So, in order to protect ourselves from the unknown or the different, we just don’t ask, search, or knock. We keep ourselves sheltered in the secure and non-threatening questions and answers. We refuse to risk. We refuse to venture out on a journey of faith that may take us who knows where. Because, if we do that, what if we get different answers, discover something we didn’t expect, have a door opened up to a whole new environment? I had a poster once that read, “Ships in the harbor are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” What if we find out we’ve just been docked in our own familiar worlds too long, and that it’s time to put out to sea--that is, explore where we are in our faith, and where we need to move out to? To find out “what we’re built for.”
If we follow Jesus’ lead here, what we understand about God is that God is not afraid of our questions, our search, nor our knocking. Jesus is telling us that God wants us to do that. The only ones who are afraid of doing that is not God, but us. Our fear may be that we just might find out we’ve got it all wrong. Anyone who reads the Psalms, or the book of Job, or Ecclesiastes, or Lamentations, can see clearly that asking, searching, and knocking is the attitude God not only allows, but expects:
Job asks God: “Are people mere things to you? Why all this dodging and shuffling? Human life is nothing but a struggle, isn’t it?” (Job 6, 7)
One of the psalmists writes, “God, are you avoiding me?” (Psalm 10:1)
The writer of Ecclesiastes, in wondering about the meaning of life, starts out his book by asking a lot of questions. Questions like, “What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?” (1:3) And then follows that up with the question, “What has happened before that won’t happen again? Is there nothing new in the whole world?” (1:9)
And in Lamentations, a book of tears about the destruction of Jerusalem, and the awful human atrocities that took place, Jeremiah shouts at God: “Look at us, God. Think it over. Have you ever treated anyone as badly as this? Should women eat their own babies, the very children they have cared for?” (2:20) In that same book, Jeremiah asks so many tough questions about how it is that evil happens, and if God is behind it. He asks, “Do both bad and good things come by the command of the Most High God?” (3:38)
Here, in the Bible, there is page after page of people God allowed to ask some of the toughest questions about life that anyone could ask. Like I said, God doesn’t seem to be afraid of such questions, but desires we pursue them, with Him.
Jesus spoke, in our verses from Matthew 7, about the children who ask for bread and fish. So many of God’s children are asking their questions, searching the ins and outs of their lives, knocking on so many doors, looking for bread and fish, truth and discernment, answers and peace. I want to believe that any of God’s children, who may be asking for bread and fish, even though they don’t realize it, that for all of us, God will not give stones or snakes.
I think Jesus is telling us something really important, not just about what it means to be a disciple Jesus’ way here, but also about who God is. Jesus is telling us that God is a God who loves to direct people to the right questions, and then answer those questions. Our God is a God who loves to find people who are searching for something, even if they have no idea what it is, and then help them find it. Like the parable Jesus told, saying the Kingdom of God is like a man who happens to find a treasure in a field. The man didn’t know he was searching for a treasure. He just happened to be walking in a field. But God puts a treasure right in his path, helping him find what he’d been looking for all along, without knowing it. Our God is a God who loves to open doors people are drawn to, without really knowing why. Then God challenges them to find the courage within themselves to walk up the steps and knock on the door anyway.
I’ve been talking (emailing) with my somewhat bohemian son and daughter about all this. They are both accomplished questioners, searchers, and knockers. They are both struggling with their faith right now, and asking some fairly tough questions. For example, Ryan wrote to me:
I think we are all talking about questions of faith: What does faith mean? Who is God? Where does God fit into my life? Does God really have plans for us? Is God the church? Does the church know God? Are there any answers to these questions, or just interpretations? ... And then when you’ve asked all of those questions, you can question whether the “answers” you arrived at are still valid based on questions you’ve asked since you found your previous “answer.”
He’s asking questions and dealing with stuff I never did at his age (he’s 27). I love his question, “Is God the church?” What an amazing question, because for him, if God is the church, what he’s seeing in the church right now, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with God--especially with church’s like Fred Phelps in Topeka, who the Supreme Court, this week, allowed to continue their ranting and craziness. And the converse question is the same: Is the church God? If that is so, Ryan doesn’t want anything to do with the church, because to him, it’s make a very poor God. And he’s absolutely right.
Ryan and Kristin are preacher’s kids. Aren’t they supposed to have it all together? Another tough, and maybe unfair question. And what about their minister father? But, even though they are questioning their basic beliefs, can we not, by Jesus’ statement, be sure that God will honor their questions and search? That we can trust God to bring them around to where God wants them to be?
The point here, for me, according to Jesus’ words, is to keep asking, keep searching, keep knocking, because that’s where God is. It’s a lifelong process. And, as Ryan wrote in his email to me, the answers you get at one point in your life may not make sense at another time. So we have to be willing to ask those same basic questions all over again, at different times in our lives, even though we assume we already know the answer.
The worst thing in life is not to have a bad faith-quest, but to give up the search all together. The worst thing is to think you’ve asked enough questions, searched enough dead ends, knocked on enough doors. The sad people are those who just sit, and search no further, who slip their ships into the harbor, and then into the dock, and never untie again, to go out in the risky seas. To become the Mimi’s who have decided life is not worth asking about, that life’s troubling ins and outs are not worth searching, that closed doors are just better left closed. The sad people are those who have given up the quest, and by so doing, have given up on God, who is out where the asking, searching, and the knocking is going on.
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