Stages of Faith, Part II

You may have heard of Fred Phelps, he is the minister from Topeka, KS known for his picketing at anything that he determines has to do with the abomination of homosexuality – Matthew Shepherd’s funeral 10 years ago, military funerals, Episcopal Conventions, high schools named for Walt Whitman, or those presenting the musical Rent – like Corona del Mar. His extended family, including children, carries signs that declare “God hates fags” and that’s kind of the nicest one. He’s been attracting a new kind of attention lately – people aren’t taking it anymore. Friday, students in Corona del Mar met Rev. Phelps’ minions with their own pickets – in vastly greater numbers, their signs said “God doesn’t hate anyone!” “God is love.” And “Do you need a hug?” Those signs proved to be like sunlight to vampires and the Phelpsites quickly retreated. The kindest thing that I can think to say about Rev. Phelps is that he appears to suffer from a case arrested spiritual development. He has no interest in moving beyond Stage 2.

For those of you who were not here last week, I preached a sermon for Samantha’s baptism about how we would work to honor our promises to her, to support her in her journey in faith. To do so, we have to understand how her faith needs to be nurtured and encouraged. To help with this, I used James Fowler’s work Stages of Faith. This 1981 classic work identified six stages of faith development, which follow the stages of moral and psychological development in humans. To recap quickly, Stage One is the faith of childhood in which an understanding of God comes from parents and being cared for. God is everywhere. Stage Two begins to see God as a supernatural being that is ultimately in charge of handing out approval or punishment. It’s a very literal and rule oriented time. Fred Phelps is the extreme example of adults who never move on. Stage Three, which corresponds with adolescence, is the troubling time of relationship building and wrestling with authority. Symbols and their meaning are inseparable so if inconsistencies are encountered, particularly for religious symbols, there can be a wholesale rejection or a refusal to acknowledge the inconsistencies. Stage 3, is not deeply analytical. But what comes next requires critical reflection on self and what you believe.
Here at Faith, our Journey to Adulthood leaders work with our young people in ways that honor where they are and how they are most likely to perceive the world and what we do here. But they also take part in the greater task of introducing the dynamics that move people beyond Stage 3. Fowler says that Stage 3 is a place of permanent residence for many adults. The transition out of 3 and into 4 is a most difficult one because it requires the deconstruction of much of how things are understood. It’s the traditional time of leaving home, physically and emotionally, which leads to self-examination and questioning. The more I work with this material, the more convinced I am that the majority of Americans do not make this journey. It is one reason the Episcopal Church is so small, for one committed to the view of Stage 3, it is too uncomfortable to pull away from a habitual way of understanding the truth. To continue your journey, you need to decide for yourself what is true and how you find it.

The discomfort of this time begins with the necessary demythologizing of the stories and doctrines. A myth is a story that tells a deeper truth. At this point in faith development, the details of stories are peeled back and set aside in search of that truth underneath. I’ve been telling you since I came here that the way to read the stories of our faith is not to ask if they are true but what they mean. What do they teach you? You are empowered to decide that. The authority that was previously held by family, religion and culture in Stage 3 is now relocated, in you.
In many situations, this will not win you approval and you’d have to be prepared for that. Jesus acknowledged this challenge – he said that all that you know, your families and your religion will turn against you when you challenge and walk away from where you were. This is a frequent topic of conversation for our Rome to Canterbury group. It is not the Anglican way to tell people what to believe, here you are allowed and indeed, expected to question. Part of our mission statement has to do with offering the hospitality of the gospel – that’s not just making someone glad they came – it is about creating an atmosphere that is conducive to spiritual growth.

The hospitality of the gospel is an invitation to go even further. Stage 5 is best understood as the change from either/or thinking to both/and thinking. Symbols and their meaning can comfortably come back together for now you begin to suspect that everything is part of one big whole. A level of self-understanding and peace has replaced defensiveness and duality. Mystics and Buddhists speak of detachment and it is at this stage that it is possible. Fowler says about this time that it is rare before mid-life and “knows the sacrament of defeat….Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience.” Someone who has achieved this depth is acutely aware of the divisions within the human family because they have to come to know the true possibility of an all inclusive community.

The awareness of that gap is often what calls a few souls into the radical actualization of Stage 6. This is the domain of a disciplined, active incarnation of universal truth. This would best describe Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton and others. The work of true inhabitants of Stage 6 reveals an inclusive community, a radical commitment to justice and love and a selfless passion for a transformed world. These people are not perfect but they do believe that the Kingdom of Heaven can come on earth. Often we kill them because they frighten us. Chances are that the ones that do the killing see such spiritual growth as a threat to their narrowly ordered understanding of things and that’s why this is important work. Without the courage of these way-showers the world will not change.
The last two weeks I’ve spent immersing myself in understanding the stages of faith have helped me understand Fred Phelps and his followers a bit better. And it helps me admire all the more the kids from Corona del Mar High School. They chose a spiritually mature uplifting way to engage unevolved, hate-filled rhetoric. Their willingness to engage as they did was in invitation to a few angry people to consider a new way.

Everyone walks their path at their own pace. There are people who have left Faith because what we talk about here made them uncomfortable. Growth is change and it is hard. But Christianity is called the Way, not the way-station. We are to keep moving and the best way to do that is to know where you are going. On our spiritual journeys, we continue to die to old ways of knowing and being known with the promise of Easter life in ever more expanded ways of understanding the mystery of God.

Stages of Faith, Part I

A sermon for April 19, 2009

Thomas the apostle must have been from Missouri, he was living in a “show me” state. Although he had been with Jesus and the others, and seen all that Jesus had done and how people responded to him and were healed and changed by him, he needed things to be concrete. Up until this story in the Gospel of John, he appears to have been a bystander, not really understanding what it meant for him. His doubt was not a sin and Jesus didn’t treat it that way. Thomas’ doubt is an indication of where he was on his spiritual journey, of what and how he was capable of understanding.

James Fowler, was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emery University for a long time until he retired in 2005. He is best known for his 1981 book The Stages of Faith; The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Fowler linked cognitive and moral development to illustrate how faith changes as we grow and grow up. He provided some markers for our work here as we “seek a deeper understanding of the mystery of God.”
Today we are welcoming into the Body of Christ, Samantha Sophia Roberts. Although she has already been welcomed into the hearts of this congregation, this is her official entry into the church. It is the beginning of her journey in faith as a Christian, and as a member of Faith Episcopal Church. We are committed to her journey because her journey is our journey and she will be formed by ours. At her age, all of a year, it’s pretty uncomplicated. Her spiritual journey begins as she relates to her world.

Those who study humans and their brains and their minds know that we cannot learn what we are not ready for. My daughter Melanie, the librarian and voracious reader had a really hard time learning how to read. She struggled along, frustrated until she had broken the code between the idea of the word and the squiggles on the page. When all of her was ready, her eyes, her brain and her desire, reading happened and a new world opened up for her. In many ways, faith is like that. Our learning and thinking about God develops in stages as we are ready. In infancy, our faith is, not surprisingly, infantile. Without a concept for God, a baby learns all that it knows through physical contact and care. When hungry or frightened an infant cries out for the presence that will provide food and comfort. It’s how a child learns to trust and to hope and it will have an impact on the later development of faith. Because we can’t get a lot of good testimony from Samantha it’s hard to be sure, but Dr. Fowler tells us that in this very beginning, he calls infancy a pre-step, the idea of God is unformed, like air. Care and comfort come from out there. For our little ones here at Faith, they begin to expand their understanding of the source of comfort to Claire and the familiarity and safety of the nursery as well as the regular community that is overjoyed at their presence. Samantha learns about God through being adored.

Somewhere between age 2 and 3 she will enter the first real stage of Faith development as she begins to differentiate between herself and others. For quite a while, she will not be able to understand that others don’t see what she sees. It’s always so cute to see a little one think that they are hiding when they put their hands over their eyes. To them, if they can’t see, neither can anyone else. Brady was sure he was invisible if he put a towel over his head. Games like peek-a-boo teach about the reality of things unseen. Little ones learn that things still exist even when they slip out of sight. Stories are the main source of learning and they help birth the imagination. For years, Amy Shimizu has given our little ones the stories of gardens and floods and animals and seas that part. They trust what they are hear and in their little minds and spirits, the stories and the feelings about them are the same thing. So we don’t give them stories with graphic, frightening details. They’ll learn about crucifixion when they are ready. For them are the stories of shepherds and angels. It’s easy for them to accept that God is just everywhere.

Somewhere around age 7, a big change takes place as they begin to decide for themselves what seems to be real. For these inhabitants of Stage Two, the stories that they create begin to take the perspective of the other and God becomes the biggest Other. It is at this age that God become a being – white beard, robes, throne in the sky because language in the stories is understood very literally. Their stories usually have a fairness component because they need to trust in some sort of order. God, or something is in charge of fairness. This stage usually ends around pre-teen, puberty years but there are adults never leave it completely and what results is a pretty rigid and highly controlled understanding of how things are to be.

What brings a child out of Stage Two is an awareness of contradiction in stories that lead to a search for meaning. It is a time of disillusionment with previous teachings and teachers because they are teenagers. Reality for this group can be seen through the lens of this little verse; “I see you seeing me; I see the me I think you see.” It is a time of great conformity. Authority becomes a real issue because it is held by “them” and for the most part it feels tyrannical, whether it is parental or even a peer group. For us here at Faith, this is when the hard work begins. Nancy and Lisa, who lead our Journey to Adulthood Groups are very brave women. They are faced with skepticism and the increasingly complex relationships of their young friends. There are plenty of people who check out of religion at this point – religion is one authority that it’s apparently acceptable to reject. But in the best of circumstances, when these teenagers chose to stay open, they are ready for the transcendent experiences that many of them have. God is experienced as a divinely personal significant other. At this stage young people are best helped by honoring and working with them about relationships. Our Journey to Aduldhood program is packed with lessons about relating. As relationships become deeper and richer, so too does can the relationship with God.

Dr. Fowler says that this is the average stage at which most people stay. Religions that stress authority of doctrine and behavior organize themselves around that. In stage 3, the importance of the group is stronger than any discomfort about ideas. Teens and those who remain at this level can forsake values rather than be ostracized. To move beyond stage three, one must be in contact with people who have already done so. They represent an invitation to greater awareness. Moving out of Stage Three is probably the most difficult step on a Spiritual Journey. I hadn’t intended to make this a series, but the fact that I’m at the end of my time and we’re trying to get out of Stage 3, with three more to go, means this is that point when my kids would angrily realize they had no closure and shout at the television, “Oh no, it’s a continue!”

As we welcome Samantha into this mystery that is the Body of Christ, it is with great awareness of our responsibility to the journey that that is ahead of her. We commit ourselves to understanding as much as we can about such a journey so that we may be helpful guides and companions along the way. But we also keep an open mind and heart for the joy and blessings that she will bring and with which she will teach us.

Believing in Easter

An Easter sermon, 2009

Well, Alleluia! Welcome happy morning! Good Christians all rejoice and sing! Now is the triumph of our King! This joyful Easter-tide, away with sin and sorrow! My Love, the Crucified, hath sprung to life this morrow. The words of our Easter hymns say it all. They retell and celebrate the story of the Easter miracle. Jesus who was dead is alive. The tomb is empty, he is not there. We should not look for him among the dead, but among the living. This story needs no more to be the greatest story ever told. And yet…to be merely amazed by something that happened to a Galilean preacher and healer two thousand years ago, albeit something marvelous that happened for us, is to sidestep the immense truth of this day.
I want you to consider the difference between believing that a miracle happened in a tomb outside the walls of Jerusalem and believing in Easter. That difference has been extraordinarily liberating for me because I confess that I don’t know what happened in the tomb. I know too much about how the Gospel texts were written and how the story of Jesus grew as the years passed. I don’t know that I believe, or that I need to believe, that Jesus’ corpse was resuscitated by some divine defibrillator but I know that I believe in Easter. Here’s what believing in Easter looks like…

It looks like hope. Easter means that there is no situation that is beyond God’s redeeming grace. In every broken relationship, Easter lurks as the possibility of reconciliation. Fear drove powerful people to kill Jesus. In any other story that would be the end. But the Easter story says no to fear and despair and yes to eternal possibilities. A bad ending may be the end of a chapter but it is not the end of the story. It may be frustrating for us to have to wait more than three days for God’s saving action to be seen, but Easter says that God will find a way to redeem tragedy, God will find a way to redeem injustice, and God will find a way to set right what once went wrong. It was on Easter Sunday 60 years ago that Marian Anderson sang a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She was already a world renowned performer – an extraordinary voice with three octaves at her command. The concert was arranged by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt because Marian Anderson had been denied the opportunity to sing at Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the Hall, had turned her down because she was black. This was not just an attempt to keep black performers off the stage but a move to keep black audiences out of the seats. The First Lady was outraged and she became an instrument of Easter. 75,000 people stood in the cold as Ms Anderson opened her concert with “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” Before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Marian Anderson became a accidental evangelist for the dignity of every human being. That concert gave hope to many.

Believing in Easter looks like comfort. In the post-resurrection stories in the gospels, we see the redemption of many kinds of human pain and failings. Mary, grieving and frantic at finding the tomb empty could not consider the possibility that what Jesus had told them had actually come to be. Life had not given her much reason to be optimistic. She could not allow that kind of hope lest she be hurt again. Isn’t it sad when we carry disappointment with us and it keeps our view dark and gloomy. It is a kind of pessimism about what is possible – we don’t dare hope. But when you believe in Easter, you have a different outlook – even the deepest grief can be redeemed, defeat can become triumph, pain can become bliss.

Believing in Easter looks like compassion. During his earthly life, Jesus gave sight to the blind. As two of his disciples were walking along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, the resurrected Jesus walked along with them but they couldn’t recognize him. They could not see him in the face of the stranger. But then he broke bread with them and they could see. In this story, we are given the gift of Easter sight so that we might be true to the promise we make in our baptismal covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons. When we don’t look for him in others and when we fail to serve him in the lives of others, we are as blind as the disciples walking to Emmaus. And yet, we are not left in our blindness. There is no one we meet in whom we cannot seek Christ, even if that image of Christ is greatly obscured in them, hidden by hard-heartedness, warped by arrogance, beat down by disappointment and fear, if you believe in Easter, you will find it and you will have redemption.

Believing in Easter looks like confidence. Another familiar story is that of Thomas and his doubt. And who among us cannot identify with this human condition? And it’s not just doubt, it is feeling that we have to have an answer for everything, as if we might be diminished by something that is beyond our knowing. Thomas’ doubt was standing between him and his ability to believe in Easter. He was not ready to see beyond obstacles, to love without limits. Jesus gently honored Thomas’ doubt and redeemed it. To believe in Easter is to allow doubt and the need to have all of the answers to be overcome faith.

Believing in Easter looks like forgiveness. One of the saddest things of past week was Jesus’ solitude in his suffering. His friends all ran away and Peter, his right hand man, denied that he even knew him. Peter carried the shame, assuming that he would carry it to his grave for he would not have the chance to atone for it, after all, Jesus was dead and no matter how many tears he shed, his cowardice remained. He could not forgive himself for his words of denial. But in the only post-resurrection story in which Jesus speaks to Peter – Peter’s betrayal is redeemed. It happens in Galilee, the disciples have spent the night on their boat but had caught nothing. Jesus appears on the shore and when someone shouts “It is the Lord!” Peter jumps overboard. Now it is important to remember that Galilean fishermen did not swim, they did not know how to swim. So we wonder if Peter’s shame caused him to attempt to drown himself. Apparently he does not drown because after they all share their communion breakfast of bread and fish, Jesus asks Peter, three times, “Simon Peter, do you love me?” Three times, as many times as he had denied knowing him, Peter is given the gift of redemption and the chance to say, “Yes, I love you.” By the third time, he is even ready to receive Jesus’ charge to him “If you love me, then feed my sheep.” Peter’s shame and guilt are redeemed and if Peter’s shame and guilt are then so are mine, so are yours.

I believe that Easter is God’s primary mode of being. What ever we do, God’s response is some kind of Easter. Even if what you do looks like a mistake, God will respond with a way to bring you and your choices to redemption. Imagine if people really believed that – how free we would be and how courageous. It would be the greatest step toward collective mental, emotional and spiritual health that we could imagine. If we truly accept that wounds inflicted by life and the people with whom we share it are redeemable, that we can hope and trust in the power of grace and reconciliation, and then no situation is without hope.
Christ is Risen! Alleluia! I believe in Easter!

The End of Estrangement

A sermon for the Easter Vigil, 2009

This is the night of mystery and wonder. It is a night of the pure potential and newness of life. On this night, we celebrate Christ’s passage from death to eternal life. We celebrate Azita and Sara’s passage into new life – a life of thoughtful and intentional belonging. In the early church this was the only night on which people were baptized into the faith. So it has special significance for us when we welcome new members of the Body of Christ during this Great Vigil of Easter. With their presence we are made new, something has changed in us as well.
This night began with a spark – it is the symbol of creation and the symbol of resurrection. It sets things in motion. And what it sets in motion is the transformation of chaos into order, the transformation of sadness into joy, the transformation of anger into peace, the transformation of death into life,
Easter is God’s gentle, dynamic insistence that we are continually drawn more and more deeply into the divine life. God’s power is persuasive not coercive. God will not make us accept joy and love and peace. In fact, God allows our bad choices – as evidenced on the cross on Calvary. That action was humankind saying “no” to God’s invitation to live in love. Easter is the proof that no matter what we do, God will continue to offer us a new opportunity. On a daily basis, moment by moment we have the choice to accept or decline God’s invitation.
That invitation is conscious belonging. Sara told me today that for her, part of her baptism was the sense of opening her eyes and heart to a loving presence that would always be with her. In the 18th Century, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel identified the human condition as something he called estrangement or alienation. The journey on which we find ourselves is to overcome that estrangement from, as he put it, a unified reality. Not a very cuddly way of putting it but I believe it was 18th century German speak for what Sara so simply described. As creatures of this world, we perceive a distance between us and God. The way we have told the story says that the gap is because we have sinned and removed ourselves from God’s pure presence. Hegel saw it differently. He felt that the estrangement we experience is because we haven’t yet learned who we are. He saw human history working itself out through the process of dialectic, that old Socratic teaching of the tension between a thesis and its antithesis which results in something new – a synthesis. These deadly dull sounding ideas are actually the fertile soil for a helpful understanding of how God works in the world to bring us out of our estrangement. God responds to our thesis of estrangement, the idea that we are somehow isolated by prophetic messages – Isaiah’s beautiful image of the peaceable kingdom, God’s promise to guide and be with us. God even goes so far as to respond to our stubborn insistence that God is out there and we are struggling along by ourselves here with a novel gift of self – the incarnation – the living presence of the Divine in our midst. The crucifixion, however, was an emphatic refusal of God’s invitation to embrace the divinity in our midst. Easter is the antithesis of that execution. The synthesis of those two ideas is us. We are the church, that community that seeks to live the message of welcome and belonging. Throughout the two thousand year history of the church, we have lurched along, sometimes drawing near, sometimes wandering far off course. But the process, move/counter-move relationship with God continues. As the church, we try to accept God’s invitation, and the response is the joy that we find in one another. We are a part of God’s long-term plan to overcome our misguided sense of estrangement. The more we respond to God, the more God has to work with in us.
Accepting the meaning of Easter – that we are loved and that God is committed to us is ongoing work. It appears that estrangement, like other bad habits is hard to unlearn. Brain scientists tell us that bad habits are wired into the processes of our brain and it takes persistence to change them. The bad habit of estrangement or isolation was developed throughout human evolution and no doubt helped early members of the human race keep from being eaten by other residents of the neighborhood. We had to learn to take care of ourselves, look out for #1, we learned to compete for resources. We did not initially know that we need each other. But now that we have been knit together into the Body of Christ, it is time to break our old isolating, suspicious, competitive, fearful habits.
We do so regularly here – one of the miracles of being a congregation is that we are with people that we would never meet otherwise. And we do more than simply come into contact with them. We share joys and sorrows, we celebrate and we mourn together, we become a part of one another, and estrangement recedes a bit. Together we are the mystical body of Christ. We are that spark of God’s future born and reborn this night. Alleluia, Christ is risen and so are we.

His wounds, our wounds

A sermon for Good Friday 2009.

This is the King of the Jews. The statement was meant to be an insult. How could a people be strong if their king was so weak? How many kings have been executed in the sight of their people so as to dispirit them, to make them pliable and obedient to some other authority? This was meant as an insult to him and to the Jews who were already oppressed enough. He was kingly in his lineage, in his love for his people and in his wisdom and in his courage. But he was not merely the King of the Jews as he hung on that cross. He was every person who has ever suffered.
His feet are the feet of every refugee who has been driven from his home. The roads are unkind and rocky as he struggles to take one more step away from misery and toward uncertainty. To sit down to rest his suffering feet is to risk dying in that place. All that drives each painful step is the challenge of the next one. Each step is a victory but one that feels as if nails have been driven through the feet of the refugee.
Jesus’ back, marked with the stripes of a whip is the back of every slave or prisoner. The slaves who had to consider whether the slim prospect of a successful escape was worth the lash. The lash would cut to the bone and take a long time to heal. The scars would cause his back to tighten and scream with every movement and yet he would have to carry on in spite of them, serving the one who had taken his freedom.
Jesus’ hands, screaming from the pain of the spikes through his wrists are the hands of everyone who has ever felt helpless as a loved one suffers. Our hands are so capable; we build, we hold our loved ones close, we comfort. Then when we can do nothing, our hands hang useless at our sides. When we cannot push away the evil, the sickness, the despair, what good are our hands? The hands of Jesus bleed our own helplessness.
Jesus’ eyes looked out from the haze of misery and saw his mother and Mary Magdalene and the other women. What they did not see were his closest companions, the ones who professed undying love and support. Those are the eyes of everyone who has ever been betrayed, abandoned, let down, and left alone. His are the eyes of children who wonder why their parents hurt them. His are the eyes of outcasts who cannot comprehend hatred and animosity directed at them. His are the eyes of Jews herded into ovens and Sudanese dying in refugee camps wondering if anyone knows or cares.
The heart of Jesus, perhaps more broken than the rest his body is the heart of the whole world. It seemed so clear, just love each other and yet they didn’t seem to understand. Maybe we don’t want to understand because it is hard work to let go of ancient ingrained hatreds. This is the heart of everyone who has ever known depression. That cloud that robs the world of color and joy and anticipation is not just a chemical imbalance that can be regulated with a pill; it is the lack of hope. Jesus’ heart draws in our despair and holds it on the cross.

O sacred head, sore wounded, defiled and put to scorn.
O kingly head surrounded with mocking crown of thorn;
What sorrow mars they grandeur? Can death thy bloom deflower?
O countenance whose splendor the hosts of heaven adore!

In thy most bitter passion my heart to share doth cry,
With thee for my salvation upon the cross to die.
Ah, keep my heart thus moved to stand thy cross beneath,
To mourn thee, well beloved, yet thank thee for they death.

Remember

A sermon for Maundy Thursday, 2009

How much we owe to this night. This lovely and sad night in which Jesus gave us the way to remember him and to find him in the simplest of gestures. “Break bread and remember me.” This gift of the Eucharist is a special kind of remembering – the Greek word is anamnesis and it refers to the specific part of the Eucharistic prayer in which we proclaim the mystery of faith “We remember his death, We proclaim his resurrection, We await his coming in glory.” This anamnesis is like the tenses of verbs in Hebrew. When God tells Moses that his name is I AM THAT I AM, it’s not that simple. The Hebrews words could be translated any number of ways – I WILL BE THAT I WILL BE, I AM THAT I WILL BE. You can find any number of ways to say it; the tenses are maddeningly and richly vague. Eternity is found in God’s name. That same power is in the Eucharist. As we remember we become a part of that night at the Passover supper. Every Eucharist that has ever taken place is happening whenever we do this for the remembrance of him. That’s the mystical part of the mystical Body of Christ.
One of the members of our Altar Guild shared with me a moment that she had as she washed up the chalice after church one Sunday morning. She became acutely aware the she was repeating the same motions of every woman who had ever taken care of the altar vessels from that very first night. Somebody washed the dishes that night and here in our little sacristy, it was ancient and brand new all at once.
Jesus created this rite from within the context of the Passover Supper, the Seder. It is the central Jewish ritual of remembering – remembering when they were slaves, remembering their deliverance, remembering how God was and is present for them. A line from the Haggadah, the text for the Seder, says “In every generation, a person is obligated to feel as if he or she personally had gone forth from Egypt.” This ritual of remembering keeps this awareness current within the Jewish community. It is tradition that is often updated. Some people prepare their traditional Seder plate, with its symbolic foods, with the addition of an orange. Oranges are no where in the Passover story but as women were first being ordained as rabbis one disgruntled man opined that a woman had as much business being a rabbi as an orange had being on a Seder plate. Now an orange serves as a reminder of a time when women were enslaved to patriarchy. The orange becomes a symbol of liberation. Traditionally the seven plagues are recited as drops of wine are put on one’s plate. Now along with blood, frogs, lice, locusts and the death of the Firstborn, some Seders include war, hatred and violence, ruining the earth, injustice and corrupt government. The Seder’s traditions are maintained while they embrace the current condition. A valid tradition is elastic enough to maintain its power and integrity while being adapted to new times.
When Peter and I were in Lebanon in 2007, I had a long and surprisingly heated conversation with some of his Lebanese family. They are members of Maronite Church, a branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. When I told them that I gave the sacraments on occasion to people who were not baptized they were outraged. Somehow I was not protecting the sacraments of bread and wine from those who had not earned them. Try as I might, I cannot imagine Jesus denying himself to anyone who truly seeks him. He spread God’s blessing of healing to those who knew the God of Israel and to those who did not. He offered living water to a woman of questionable character at the well in Samaria. He accepted the ministrations of a woman of questionable reputation when she sought his presence. He allowed her to give of herself and he didn’t check her credentials by asking her what she believed. He allowed her offering to be sufficient. Her desire to belong to the kingdom about which he preached was enough.
As revolutionary as the new formula of “belong, behave, believe” seems to us, it is really a return to Jesus’ open table fellowship. Jesus scholar Dominic Crossan claims that Jesus announced a “brokerless kingdom” – a kingdom which has no gate keepers. Jesus freed people from the idea that paying the priests in the Temple to sacrifice an animal was necessary to be in right relationship with God. Jesus said, come and just be a part of it. All you need to belong to this kingdom is your desire to give yourself to the vision and to be changed by it.
For a long time the church has jealously guarded access to the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, the bread and wine in which Jesus said we would find him. But he said “whenever you do this, do it for the remembrance of me.” It seems to me that any meal we share then becomes a meal of communion if we remember Jesus when we do it. Why should a church doctrine stand between a seeker of God and God.
The openness with which we offer the sacrament of belonging here at Faith is done because of what Jesus said, not in an attempt to protect it. We owe so much to this night. Not only the gift and the means to have the presence of Christ alive in our midst but also the remembering that he gave his life for our good. Tonight we remember his servant leadership in the washing of one another’s feet; we remember his commandment to love one another as he loved us; we remember his gift of the Eucharist; we remember his arrest. All of this remembering prepares us for his death on the cross tomorrow. The anemnesis of the Good Friday brings his sacrificial death into our time, as it takes us to the foot of the cross. Remember.

Palm Sunday contradicitons

I always find Palm Sunday to be a difficult day. It’s one of those days that no matter what you think it is, it's something else. It appears to be all about triumph and cheering. But what was it like for Jesus? Could he ignore what he knew in his heart was coming and enter into the festive moment? For Jesus this was not a ticker-tape parade after winning the Super Bowl or landing on the moon. It was a pre-funeral procession. I wonder if he didn’t have some sort of confusing disconnect between what he saw and what he felt.
Seated on that donkey people were shouting his name and reaching out their hands to him, hoping to catch a little bit of his power for themselves. Certainly he loved them but was he a little weary of their adulation and need for him. Did he know how hollow it would be in the days to come? It’s not that they were insincere. They were there for a festival. He was there to die.
So we have this day that begins in such frenzy and ends in such despair. We read the passion gospel and yet it is not quite time for it. Those days come later in this somber week. In my more cynical moments I wonder if the Passion Gospel was inserted here to accommodate those who will not come again until Easter Sunday. And that makes me sad. Can we not spare a few hours to stand in the presence of the cross at its most dangerous? It is after all more than wall decoration or jewelry. It is the statement of human brutality laid bare for all to see. In it we see every instance of cruelty, torture and violence. Do we not know that we have been saved from that? Have we not learned that violence leads to only one thing – more violence? This day violence comes into our church and it makes us appropriately uncomfortable.
How is it that Holy Week is too disturbing for us but violent movies and video games are always successful? Do we mean to be a people who enjoy violence? The entertainment industry has an ongoing competition to see who can fashion the most realistic gore in the most disturbing situations. The movies, television and video games enter our lives and desensitize us to cruelty. If you ask kids about their video games they will tell you “Oh yeah, it’s just fun, it’s not real.” The problem is that when we are faced with some examples of real violence, police caught on tape wielding their batons, the aftermath of suicide bombers or reports by the Red Cross that our country has approved and used torture; we have lost a bit of our ability to be outraged. We are used to our violence on a screen which we can turn off.
Palm Sunday – would that we might hear the tension between triumph and violence. It is important for us to understand the ordeal to which Jesus allowed himself to be led. Crucifixion is gruesome. It was meant to be – execution and example held high for all to see, a tacit warning to respect the power of the state. I imagine that if it were still the preferred method of execution, the debate on the death penalty would be short. It’s hard to wish that on your worst enemy. Oh my goodness, maybe that’s the point of it. What Jesus understood was that the only way to overcome violence is to shine a light on it and expose it for the sin that it is. If we are disturbed by what happened to Jesus, an innocent victim of powerful people and institutions, then we should be equally disturbed when it happens to anyone else around the world. He went to the cross so others might not have to.
This day gives us another contradiction – Jesus himself. This suffering and death is his most human moment. But he responds to it with superhuman grace. Who could minister to someone else when in such agony? “Take up your cross and follow me.” Darn, this Christianity stuff is hard. And there’s the contradiction for us. Most of the year we engage our faith around here as a response to God’s love and generosity. We talk about abundance and joy. Yet today’s we are face to face with the expectation that we will engage humanity’s violence with courage, compassion, and grace. If what was done to Jesus was horrible, then we should stand up for an end to violence across the board. The Quakers have managed to do so for hundreds of years. They are witnesses to harmony and a refusal to continue the cycle of violence. This sin against others, the breaking of their bodies and spirits as a tool of power in international relations, in our communities and in our lives is not necessary or healthy.
Jesus died for our sins – maybe the right way to say that is that Jesus died because we are sinful, violent and broken people. He did so willingly so that we might become otherwise. So this Palm Sunday, we hear and we sing Hosanna and we begin that long walk behind Jesus to Friday. Don’t close your eyes to it for only by facing the cross can we be healed by it.