Wednesday, March 28, 2012


Fifth Sunday of Lent

March 25, 2012

John 12:20-33


All of us can remember at least one time in our life when we fell head over heels, madly in love with someone.

All other concerns and obligations in our life suddenly became secondary and we were absorbed and consumed with our newfound object of affection.

Few experiences in life have the power to place such a claim on our attention and our hearts as does love.

When it is discovered it can be all consuming.

It may be difficult for us to fathom it, but God’s pursuit of us is very similar.

Our images and descriptions of God can often be very serious looking or even stern.

While serious is necessary, have we ever thought of God actually being delighted, consumed, and totally absorbed with gaining our affection?

God is relentless.

God does not give up.

And, God is incredibly patient.

Love must be offered freely for it to be real.

There can be no coercions, catches, conditions, or hidden agendas.

God will not manipulate us into loving him as he fashioned us with that wonderful gift of free will that allows us the freedom to discover him on our own, at our own pace.

God’s law is written in our hearts; all we need to do is realize it.

In our human relationships, we will put great effort into discovering and embracing human loves.

The search for God involves a journey of great depth and, even more importantly, an intense desire to find him.

Our technological world places less value on journeys.

We are bombarded with quick answers and rapid searches.

All we need to do is recall the last time we had to wait two full minutes for the Internet to bring us where we wanted to go!

You know the frustration of which I speak!

If we are expecting the “quick connect” deal with God we have to think again.

It just will not happen this way.

The journey is more involved and requires time and patience on our part.

We cannot simply plug our iPod into the God PC and expect results.

We may use an online dating service to find the love of our life, but the service will not provide the relationship; that’s our job.

Our journey through Lent has been about some serious business.

For many, the time has been used wisely, taking an honest assessment of how well we are living up to the ideals of the Gospel.

In terms of our relationship with God, however, the extra time for thought and reflection that we are able to put into our lives can provide the means for discovering not only God’s delight in us and his relentless pursuit of our heart but also our thirst and desire to meet and connect with him as well.

If what we want or need to discover does not come quickly enough, we all too easily abandon the search.

We cannot do this with God.

God and God’s ways came before technology.

We have to discover our original design.

Growing, becoming, changing, and developing do not occur simply as the result of additional knowledge or experience.

Authentic growth and change comes as the result of a lot of hard work; bumping up against our weaknesses and acknowledging our failures.

Unfortunately, many of us delude ourselves into thinking that we can achieve success without sacrifice.

Even with all of our comforts, gadgets, and fast connections working at their very best, we will eventually be forced to realize that this is simply not possible.

True success comes at a price.

True love requires an investment.

We must fall and die.

Human beings will never discover their true identity or potential unless they are willing to embark upon the search for their Creator and accept difficulty and suffering.

We are always looking for the cushion to soften our fall.

We are more concerned about the door that closed rather than the one that is opening.

Our Lenten journey has taught us to die to sin and rise to life.

As Jesus faced his last hours on earth his heart broke.

He felt abandoned, alone, betrayed, afraid, conflicted; left by himself with that deep ache that dread has the power to bring to one’s soul.

He not only felt betrayed by humans but unsure of what his Father wanted him to do.

Jesus was troubled.

Even in the face of all of this doubt and confusion, Jesus remained obedient.

He remained obedient to the relationship he had with his Abba, his Daddy.

He found the courage to face the suffering and was able to rekindle his understanding that no matter how horrible things may become, Abba would bring redemption!

Do we believe that our Creator, the One who delights in every fabric of our being, who continues to pursue us despite our deafness and ignorance, will also do this for us?

This is why we continually need more Lents and Holy Weeks.

We are slow learners.

We think that we can control everything, even our path through suffering.

When life looks like it is starting to get difficult or challenging, we search for the quickest path around it.

Worse yet, we deny that it is even happening or look for the first person to blame as its cause.

Others look for someone or something to take the pain away or use it as another reason to justify why a loving God cannot possibly exist.

Suffering, anxiety, and discomfort can all too easily become reasons to separate us from God.

Once we have learned the lesson of obedience, we can overcome anything!

We can triumph over a failing economy that makes it more and more difficult to find employment,

a broken government that can’t seem to get out of its own way,

an unexpected divorce, the death of someone we love, our sinfulness,

the disappointment of a broken relationship, our resolution of past hurts, fears, and memories, and even our own eventual death.

The way through all of these life situations cannot be sought through a computer. The only real way is through a journey deep within and into the presence of the One who will never leave us behind and is always there to save.

Holy Week will, once again, illumine this path and help us with the search.

Saturday, March 17, 2012


4th Sunday of Lent B

March 18, 2012

John 3:14-21


During the first three weeks of Lent we considered various aspects of our covenant relationship with God and the privileges and responsibilities that flow from it.

Today we turn our gaze on God’s covenant relationship with us, and we are astounded at what we perceive.

Despite our infidelity, God remains faithful to us;

despite the steps we take toward our own destruction, God continues to offer us a second chance at life.

Such is the “depth and breadth and height” of God’s love.

However—and it is a significant however—God does not force anything upon us. We are free to choose.

We can accept God’s loving gestures, or we can refuse them.

We see this in today’s readings.

Before the Israelites could return to the land, they had to return to God.

In the Gospel account, Nicodemus was told that people can choose to believe or not believe in Christ;

they can prefer darkness to the light.

There has always been a choice.

Today the choice is ours to make.

Will we make it?

Very few people explicitly choose against God, but can we honestly absolve ourselves of actions that resemble those described in the first reading?

Haven’t we—today’s political leaders, religious leaders or ordinary people—sometimes “added infidelity to infidelity?”

Do we heed the warnings of God’s messengers, or do we scoff at them—even silence them?

Are we not sometimes so entrenched in our own transgressions that we do not see how the consequences of our arrogance may cause our world to fall down upon us?

If we are honest, we must admit that this has indeed been the case in our personal lives;

lately we recognize that it has happened in our church;

it has certainly been the situation in our country and in the broader world.

This may have been the case in the past and perhaps even in the present, but what about the future?

We are not bound to perpetuate such deplorable situations.

We are able to make new choices.

So—what will we choose?

Despite this focus on our own sinfulness and the dire consequences that flow from it, the predominant theme for this Sunday is divine mercy.

But we can comprehend its magnanimous character and boundless scope only if we see it in relation to our own culpability.

As the readings show us how important it is to acknowledge our guilt and to return to God,

they concentrate on God’s eagerness to enfold us in the warm embrace of divine mercy.

Confident of God’s merciful love, we are able to repent, return to God and start anew.

Like the people of ancient Israel, we can indeed rebuild our broken lives and our disgraced church.

We can create a world based on cooperation rather than competition, on respect rather than discrimination.

God’s love has been offered; the choice is ours.



Wednesday, March 14, 2012


3rd Sunday of Lent

March 11, 2012


Mark John 2: 13-35

The news is constantly filled with scandals.

The Bible, too, is full of scandals and fools.

Jacob the cheat all the way to the chosen twelve disciples, one of whom was a coward and another a traitor.

Yes, we might wonder about God’s discernment of character.

God seems to need a better personnel manager or casting director. Another of God’s scandalous choices was Paul.

Paul started out as a persecutor of Christians.

He assisted in the stoning of Stephen.

Paul seemed no good.

When God told Ananias that he was to anoint Paul as his “chosen instrument,” Ananias said, in effect, “Lord, you must be mistaken.”

It seemed foolish, scandalous.

Perhaps that is why later, when Paul was writing to the church at Corinth, he reminded them: things that seem like low foolishness to us may be high wisdom to God.

Paul then pointed out the most apparently foolish, scandalous thing God had ever done:

God had come into the world as a peasant carpenter from the backwater town of Nazareth.

Next in this Corinthian letter, Paul calls Jesus a “stumbling block to the Jews.”

He meant that the idea of God coming as a peasant was such a scandalous thing the Jews couldn’t believe it.

They were expecting a powerful king; instead, they got a baby in a barnyard surrounded by animals and stench.

This was a scandal.

The very word Paul used for this, translated in English as “stumbling block,” is the Greek word skandalon, from which we get our English word scandal.

Jesus was born into scandal: from his parents’ disgraceful marriage, to a smelly barn, then escaping to Egypt. Jesus grew up in a place of which they said, “Nothing good comes from there,”

then became a friend to prostitutes, tax collectors, and working-class roughnecks.

Jesus was indeed a stumbling block, a scandalous offense to those who wanted a pure Messiah.

Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 8:14 (CEB): “He will be a stone to trip over and a rock to stumble on.”

The Israelites overlooked the prophecies.

They expected a military ruler, a king, a superhuman.

Instead they got a baby in a manger, and finally a bleeding, beaten figure dying ignominiously on a cross.

The message of scripture is clear: God chooses the scandalous.

God uses the weak and the meek.

God redeems the sinful.

This fragile vessel of flesh is God’s tool of choice.

It is to God’s glory that the foolish and weak are used to achieve a grand purpose. Nowhere is this more clear than in the concept of incarnation, of God coming into mortal flesh to touch us and die for us.

We have a God who comes into a scandalous and brutish world to touch and heal our wounds.

The first part of that incarnation story is Jesus’ birth and ministry of healing; the second part is what we remember during Lent.

It is a journey that culminates with Holy Week, commemorating a painful and shameful torture upon a Roman cross.

Even the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday, was an earthy and scandalous occurrence.

Jesus did a very undignified thing.

He poked fun at both his worshipers and his detractors.

He rode humbly on the back of a baby donkey.

Imagine if our president rode in the inaugural parade on one of those little go-carts that clowns drive.

But with that silly donkey ride, Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies and taught us something about humility.

Scandalous.

Are we willing to appear foolish for the sake of the cross and the gospel?

I was once asked to play a part in a lighthearted Christmas skit in which the animals of the manger scene discuss the coming of the Christ Child.

I had the role of a talking donkey, in a costume with ears.

The children greatly enjoyed seeing their pastor in a different persona.

But after it was over, an irate parishioner showed up in my office.

This, she insisted, had been undignified and disgraceful for the office of the pastor to be portrayed as a donkey.

Shameful.

I simply said, “Well, I guess you are also embarrassed by the fact that our Savior rode a baby donkey into Jerusalem.”

I am proud to be a part of a long lineage of “fools” who have been criticized for proclaiming the gospel in new, “scandalous,” ways— from Saint Francis of Assisi (a self-proclaimed “fool for Christ”); to the troublemaking Martin Luther; to the shunned John Wesley, who preached while standing on his father’s tombstone;.

Most of the characters of the Bible, the Christian martyrs, and the reformers of the church could be called “The Fools for Christ Club.”

Are you willing to be a member?


Wednesday, March 7, 2012

2nd Sunday of Lent




Mark 9:2-10

March 4, 2012


Today we join Jesus climbing another mountain with his closest friends.

We get to see Jesus’ true self: clothes dazzling white, conversing with long dead prophets—Moses of whom God said, “never have I had such a friend of Moses” and Elijah who could find God in the “still, small whisper” and who will return in the day of the Lord—

overshadowed by a heavenly cloud with a voice claiming him as a beloved Son giving directions to listen to him.

This reality is captured well in the novel The Shack, where we can hear Papa’s love and affection for Jesus, even though “he is a little clumsy on his mother’s side.” We are invited into an intimate reality that transfigured Jesus before the apostles’ eyes, that invites us into the loving circle so that we can find our true selves.

The mount of Transfiguration is a high hill in the Galilee of the Holy Land.

To approach the top today you must ride up in taxis and vans, not huge tour buses, because the switchbacks are very sharp.

Whipping around those corners, since the drivers are paid by the trip, it is easy to become nervous about your safety.

It is disorienting to see the hillside and the open drops at that speed.

But the view is worth the trip.

At the top you can see for miles.

You can smell the sweet fragrance of flowers and hear the lowing of the cattle just below the church walls.

In this peaceful setting it is easy to search deeply within and let the desire to be one with the Lord surely touch your heart.

Can we be transformed?

Can we be transfigured by the presence of Jesus?

When Jesus looks deeply into our hearts, what does he see?

Beyond the superficialities, deeper than the roles we play or the hats we wear, Jesus sees our real selves and loves us anyway.

He knows our temptations.

He knows what we are willing to sacrifice and what will be asked of us.

He stands with us when we are accused and the world, or at least the economy, seems against us.

His eyes can see the precious cloth of our lives.

When we are feeling stripped or naked, battered or bruised, Jesus will build a tent, or as they called them in the Old Testament, a tabernacle, and stay with us.

It is good to be here, at this shared table, before this tabernacle.

Here Jesus intercedes for us, listens to us, and lets his Papa-God call us beloved daughters and sons.

We are transfigured with Jesus today, clothed in royal robes listening for the voice that affirms who we really are.

Forty days of Lent is good.

Thirty days of Lent can be enough if we truly climb mountains with Jesus to get a better perspective, find our true self, and spend time in his tabernacle of grace. Jesus didn’t offer this tabernacle to Peter, James, and John, or even Moses and Elijah.

He offers to share it with us so that our eyes will be prepared for the Easter light.