Ask: Second Easter

Second Sunday in Easter, Year A

"Still Doubting" - John Granville Gregory

I have always loved this painting. I love the look on Jesus' face, and on Thomas's. I expect Thomas to jump with surprise at any moment and his Rabbi and friend to laugh, and hug him, and laugh a little more; with that impetuous twinkle in his eyes.  Jesus delights in this friend who needed to see for himself, who needed to experience. And here is Thomas, honest Thomas who will not pretend to be something he is not. Here is Thomas, doing what those other two chaps just aren't brave enough to do. I love the intimacy of touch, the familiar closeness, the humanity here. For who has not been one of these figures time and again in our lives.

We are Thomas. And that isn't a bad thing! So far from it, dear friends. Thomas is the voice inside all of us that demands more.  Thomas demands a personal experience of God and of Christ.  A family member has commented that she just doesn't get the warm fuzzy personal God feelings many of those around her in church seem to. She sees them lifting their hands, swaying with the music, even crying and she wants it.  Who wouldn't be frustrated to not have found it. But she refuses to pretend. She is Thomas. Demanding to touch, and refusing to fake something she hasn't experienced.

Would that more Christians were like Thomas, that more of us could be honest about our doubts and our fears. The title "doubting Thomas" has been used as an insult for so long we are afraid to let our natures show. But it isn't just Thomas who doubted. When things got bad all the disciples fled. When Mary proclaimed the resurrection to the 11 they did not believe her. But only Thomas had the courage to admit his doubt. Thomas is not our warning, but our model.

Thomas asked for a personal experience of Jesus. He wanted to know for himself, to have the Christ once more in his life. Thomas could have hidden his doubt, he could have celebrated with the rest, and buried his need for a personal experience of Jesus deep inside.  Certainly it must have taken courage to stand as the obstinate odd-man-out while the rest spoke so excitedly.  He could have followed along with his friends, afraid to admit that he wasn't sure. He could have failed to demand that Jesus come back into his life. But he didn't. He was honest with his sisters and brothers, and he was honest with God. And for that honesty, he was rewarded. As one of my favorite hymns says: Ask and it shall be given unto you. Thomas revealed his need, he asked, and Christ came.

And lest we fall into the old trap of believing that Jesus condemned Thomas for his honesty listen to Christ's words again:

"Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." John 20:29

Jesus does not condemn Thomas, instead he speaks words that should be comfort for us. Jesus blessed all those who find themselves doubting in the face of a personal distance from Jesus and yet following anyway. This is perhaps the last beatitude. For here our doubt is affirmed as honesty, our demands for a personal experience of God and of Christ acknowledged, and our times of loneliness, and isolation from God, blessed.

Jesus comes for Thomas, for even one sheep. And Jesus will come for us as well, though it may well be when we least expect him. So, my doubting brothers and sisters, let us be honest. Let us be as Thomas. 

Ask for resurrection! 

Ask to touch Christ with your own hands, and see him with your own eyes! 

Ask for the experience of God within your own life! 

Let your hunger for God be your song, and it will be answered. Though the doors of our hearts be locked, or we be afraid, or lonely, or lost. Christ will find us, take our hand in his and with the light of Love in his eyes draw us close to touch his side. If only, if only, we would ask.  Amen.

Holy Saturday

It is cold this morning. Good Friday had not rain, but a blizzard of snow. The tears have been shed, the darkness has come, now we wait. I teased a friend this morning that I wanted to get in a few little Alleluias in anticipation. We just don't like to wait.

But Saturday, this day of waiting, of holding our breath, of empty deserted sanctuaries, must be. I think of the darkest times in my own life, and in the lives of those I love. Never has the darkness been followed immediately by light. The problems that seem impossible to surmount are never solved overnight. There is always waiting; when the crushing sorrow, or fear, or anger has passed, and the darkness has turned to grey fog. Those days of waiting are, perhaps, the hardest and longest times of our lives.

Even as Christ hung on the cross yesterday those who loved him best, his mother, Mary Magdalene, and a few others stood nearby. But now, closed in the tomb he is alone, as they are alone. Wrapped in their grief, isolated by their confusion. How could this happen? How could this be? I imagine Mary, the Magdalene, slamming her fists against Peter's chest. She is angry, betrayed, and hurt. "How could you let them kill him?" She sobs, and Peter, lost in his own betrayal would have no reply.

Now in the waiting we are truly alone. In those long days and nights when we wait, helpless and powerless, we may feel utterly abandoned. But the truth is, we are not. Christ warned those who loved him that the road he walked was dangerous. That he had chosen to speak for the voiceless, to challenge the ways of the powerful, and that they would strike back. He warned those who loved him, but they did not understand. They continued to believe in the rosy utopia of their own creating and when their expectations were shattered, they fled.

We do the same, every day. We make little deals with God to get us the job we want, the house we lust after, to keep our family safe, and always to keep our lives on an even and balanced keel. But those things were never what God promised. Just like the disciples we don't see Good Friday coming, so when it does we scatter and from our dark hiding places we are sure that we have been left utterly alone, that we got it all wrong, that God isn't really with us.

Today, wherever you are in your own journey, remember and know you are not alone. Because unlike the Marys, or Peter, or the rest we have already seen the glory of Sunday morning. We know the rest of the story. God wins. And God waits here in the grey fog of the between times. The tomb today becomes a womb, waiting patiently, heavy with mystery to bring forth new life. Just so our own tombs of waiting, whether we wail without, or sleep within. God waits as well, God works while we stumble blindly, God is making creation new. Wait, here in the garden, and when He calls your name you will see.

Lectionary Meditation: Palm Sunday (Year A)

Lectionary Readings

"Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Don't those Hosannas feel good? Go ahead, give another one a try: hosanna! It's been a long Lent for me, I imagine it has for many of you as well. I'm more than ready for some celebration! So were the Jews. Sometimes we forget that Jesus didn't live among people like us. He lived with, taught, and served the poor and the outcast. He came not to the leaders and the powerful, not even to the comfortable, but to those the political and religious authorities of the day had ground beneath their heals.

Jesus came to the disenfranchised: to the poor, to slaves, to women, to children, to widows, the disabled, prostitutes, adulterers, and sinners. He came to the people on whom backs had always been turned and he told them that things could be different. He told them that God had bigger plans, better plans, than the ways of men.

But then the crowds listening to him did the same thing we often do, they misinterpreted. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey many scholars now believe Pilot (the Roman governor) was riding into the city through another gate. Two processions. One for the wealthy and the powerful, meant to show the unstoppable power of Rome; and one opposite it, different in every way. Except many of those spreading their cloaks on the ground and shouting hosanna didn't realize that. They thought this prophet, this one called the son of David came to take David's place. They still believed that the kingdom of Jesus was one of political and religious power.

We make those same mistakes, though perhaps ours are a bit different. Sometimes we make the assumption that the Kingdom of God is entirely not of this world, and from there come out pictures of that perfect afterlife for those who just do the right thing in this life. Ironically it was that very misunderstanding of the kingdom that was used to maintain the grinding poverty of serfs in feudal Europe. And it is the same thinking that leaves us uncalled to act in the world today.

The truth that Jesus proclaimed when he road a humble donkey over a road lined with palm branches and coats was something quite different. He announced a new creation here and now. A new creation we are called to be integral in creating. That is our call when Christ calls "Follow me!" But right now, on Palm Sunday is where that command to follow gets hard.

A great majority of Christians will take home their palm branches today and won't be back in church until Easter morning. I understand why, we're busy people and it's been a long winter and a long lent. We are hungry for hosannas and alleluias. But if we truly mean to obey Christ when he calls us to follow him then we must follow him not only along the palm strewn path but into that dark upper room, the midnight garden, the interrogation, the lonely cross, and ultimately into that cold tomb. Because without that walk the good news isn't really good news, it's hollow and meaningless.

I am old enough to remember when the Sunday before Easter was just Palm Sunday. When the Passion waited until Holy Week. I understand why the church has compressed the two into one, or at least I understand the logistics that made is seem sensible to someone somewhere. But here at least it is only Palm Sunday. Why? Because Palm/Passion Sunday does a great disservice to those who come to the church seeking to understand the dark times of their lives.

That good news I talked about is here. Our lives aren't made up of Palm and Easter Sundays. We all have our Gethsemanes and Golgothas. And our hope, our promise, our good news from God is that God is with us in those times. When we enter the church with Hosannas and then plunge straight through the darkness of the Passion in one short hour we give ourselves permission to skip over the darkness. We can hold our breath for a brief hour and go back to our lives for a week, emerging unscathed Easter morning. We turn the journey to the cross into a short play, and trivializes our own dark times. We run the risk of thinking darkness is something we can avoid, that we can live on the mountain tops. Christ new that wasn't true.

So I am inviting you to celebrate with me today, I am inviting you to celebrate Palm Sunday and then to walk the painful path of Holy Week. It will be dark, there might be tears, you may grow weary, and this is all right because we will walk through the darkness with Christ. We will walk through the valley of the shadow of death with God, and God will remind us of the Good News: that God has walked through the same darkness and God is with us in our dark times.

Relish today, dear ones. Relish the expectant joy of our Savior. Spend time in His presence, shout with joy, wave your palms, sing. And know that the coming darkness will pass and when it does the light will be infinitely more dazzling than anything we have dreamed of before. Amen.

Dry Bones: Lent 5 lectionary meditation

Lent 5, Year A, RCL

Ezekiel 37:1-14

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord."

So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, `Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act," says the Lord.

I love this reading, it's one of my favorites. First for its poetry; the sound of the words and the way they dance together, word building on word like the bones build upon one another. But I love it even more for what God promises within it.

Because this is a story about resurrection, rebirth, and new beginnings. This is a story for the church, and it is a story for each of us as all the best myths are; it imparts a deep and abiding truth that we desperately need to hear.

Yet, lest we misunderstand what God offers there is also the Gospel today.

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." - John 11

My rector preached on the Gospel today and he hit on something that I missed, given my earlier meditation focusing on the beautiful promise of Ezekiel. And yet the two are really the same promise. Let me explain.

I have a dear friend who has been battling illness for a long time, and like Mary and Martha what I want is healing, for God to bring healing and wholeness like magic. Our rector this morning told us about a vibrant young woman who, suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, slowly lost control of her body. She lost the ability to speak, to walk, even to smile. As each each of those things left her an empty place remained. After an hour, a day, or months of emptiness the hole was filled by something else. When she lost the ability to talk she taught herself to paint. And the rule at her home was, if you came to visit her you painted with her. Skill didn't matter, she handed you a brush and some paint and that was that. And she reveled in the creations of her guests, and they in hers until her home was filled with beautiful, love filled, artwork.

Those who sat with her as she died saw her fear of death fall away, and they said their own fear vanished as well. Her resurrection didn't begin at her death. It began long before. Lazarus was raised, but he would die again. Yet his miracle is what we still ask for: resuscitation, not resurrection. What Jesus offers, what the young painter found, what God offers in the valley of dry bones isn't the resuscitation of Lazarus, it is true resurrection.

I don't want to sit and watch a friend suffer. If we're honest, none of us want to see the resurrection experience in the midst of pain or illness, we want resuscitation! We want God to return us, or our loved ones to that mythical state of wholeness. If only God would heal us, how much could we do?

But God isn't offering the quick fix, the instant healing, God offers us something more. God takes the dry bones of our lives and gives them new life. Where we see only death and destruction God brings breath and strength and newness. It's not necessarily the message we wanted. We wanted the master to show up on time, to lay His hands on our broken bodies and make us feel better. We want God to perform on command. If only, if only.

Yet how much more powerful is resurrection? From the depths of our brokenness we find new gentleness, or new strength, or new wisdom, or new ways to love, or new ways to reach out. From the depths of our brokenness God offers the promise that He will take away our fear and use our resurrecting lives to bring resurrection to others.

It is Lent, and we are speaking of resurrection because here in Lent we can see what we must walk through to reach that resurrection. We must lay in the valley of dry bones, utterly spent, dry, scattered, broken. We must walk through the graveyard with the weeping Jesus. We must taste the bitterness of life before the sweet power of resurrection can break over us. Before we can be raised up from the dust and made to stand anew, before we can be loosed from death.

That is what I pray we may each find in our lives: true resurrection. The life that means we need not fear death.