Off Balance through Lent and Easter
Submitted by Maren Tirabassi on March 10, 2008 – 9:26 amNo Comment
Reflections on the Lectionary for March 2008
Lent goes scrape and shovel at the roots of things just before the earth turns over for spring. This is an early Lent and an early Easter. Preachers have hardly settled into the star shine of the Epiphany that illuminates in a paced way the rushing truth of incarnation from the wait and hurry of Advent and the festival of Christmas. We did not have a chance to feel Ordinary time, to be Ordinary people. This is an early Lent and an early Easter. Since 1875 only on one other occasion did Easter come this early — 1913. The records continue into the future to 2124, but in all those years, Easter won’t be so early again. Enjoy it!?
For the preacher it is a bit like holiness riding roughshod over the smoothness of church life. Easter demands to be released with all its morbidity and mystery, regardless of New England and North Dakota Lenten programs being snowed out, lilies needing to be forced, the questionable morality of Saint Patrick’s Day green beer in Holy Week, or the effect on the budget of the inevitable fall-off in attendance.
The impact of March’s raw Lenten texts and the erupting of the “Alleluia!” is to insert them in the middle of our lives where we become aware of just how scrappy and uncompromising some of these texts can be. March is always called the windy month.
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 2, 2008
1 Sam 16:1–13; Jn 9:1–41
Campaigns and primaries are the focus of much of our attention — at least the media’s attention — in the United States this spring. The choosing and not-choosing of leadership is based often on “look,” byte, campaign fund. The text from 1 Samuel throws this political concern into high definition. How does God view and discern leaders? How do God’s people view and discern leaders? How do God’s people disentangle the dishonest interconnections of earlier religious-based voting?
We have intense sympathy for Samuel — confused, grieving misplaced trust and betrayal from an earlier leader, but not at all sure how to go about trying again in the anointing business. We applaud his dangerous journey to Bethlehem and remember that the one chosen because of a heart for leadership was himself terribly flawed. We recognize that the jobs of chooser and chosen are never finished.
John 9 inhabits a more personal realm. We reflect on the belief that people cause their own misfortunes, that parenting is culpable, that some kinds of healing – often of mental illnesses and addictions — are suspect. Do congregations welcome recovering sex offenders or are they driven out? We reflect on the divisions of parents from children and the ways in which parents become ashamed of their children or so comfortable with dependence that they do not celebrate independence. We reflect on the ways authority of all kinds, particularly religious authority, but also medical authority, can be challenged by healing outside of its control.
Ultimately this text, like many others that invoke healing as proof of God’s power, must be preached with great sensitivity. People with particular disabilities and corresponding unique abilities have experienced a history of scripture-fueled violence. If you had enough faith … Contained within this story is the appropriate response. Jesus, in the last powerful scene, seeks the one driven out, kept out, un-welcomed and criticizes as unperceptive all those who define and judge and make beggars of others through physical and mental barriers.
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2008
Ezek 37:1–14; Jn 11:1–45
It does not help that this scripture is one of the two or three from Ezekiel that preachers encounter on a regular basis so that it’s as much textured wallpaper as the Twenty-third Psalm is for the congregation. It doesn’t help that, having met it so often, we trivialize it with “leg bone connected to the thigh bone …” or fast-forward to the curiosity of the two-phase resuscitation and the wonderful foreshadowing of the resurrection.
To experience its power, we need it to be Picasso’s Guernica, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Scott’s Black Hawk Down, or what my father saw — and dreamed till his death — the morning they liberated Dachau prison camp. Then the preacher can metaphor those dry bones as her or his church, unholy undeclared wars, scattered lives from the detonation of domestic violence, or the almost-on-the-outside skeletons of young people with eating disorders.Then, only then – preach flesh, preach spirit, preach hope. And they will come.
John 11 is a deeply complex story yielding a wealth of preaching themes: when God doesn’t come; how to be angry with God; why Christ weeps; the necessity of human stone-shoving and tourniquet-loosing to cooperate with God’s miracles; the Christological affirmation of Martha, who is the much-maligned multitasker. And, finally, what is the one thing the Jerusalem authorities cannot ignore? Lazarus risen.
This deeply complex story – the last before Holy Week – contains clues to both the crucifixion and the resurrection.
Palm Sunday
March 16, 2008
Mt 21:1–11
In her memoir Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on exhaustion-colored perception: “I started seeing things that were not there. Driving home in the evening, I would see the crushed body of a brown dog lying in the middle of the street up ahead … By the time I reached the ‘corpse’ I realized it was a crushed cardboard box instead. When this happened twice in a row, I knew I was tired.” Though misperceptions may be caused by exhaustion, true perceptions see God and God’s creation, even in the most unlikely places. Barbara Brown Taylor grew up with a sense of God surrounding her in Kansas. “I will visit the small crystal stream that runs through my field to see what is moving in it today. God’s Presence is there lighting up everything … I have met salamanders there, tadpoles, crayfish, and water bugs. I have watched the moss on the bottom ripple as the water runs over it. Years later I discovered that this was no crystal stream … it was a drainage ditch.”
Palm Sunday is a day of perceptions. Those Jerusalem pilgrims who sang, “Hosanna — save us,” saw a Messiah. They spread cloaks on the road and waved palm branches. Contrary to their hopes for an earthly leader, Jesus chose a donkey rather than a horse to set his message in the visual context of peace and humility. Perceptions continued to diverge in the week that followed — the songs turned to “crucify,” the cloaks to thorns, the psalm to dice.
At the end of the week the disciples experienced death and despair. We retrospectively call the Friday “Good.” The power to name and claim our own experiences is a gift. We can see, instead of a pile of brown cardboard, roadkill, while we can also see in a drainage ditch, a crystal stream. In “hosanna” we have the back-story to “alleluia!”
Maundy Thursday
March 20, 2008
Jn 13:1–17; 31b-35
On that Thursday with the rough wooden table and savory lamb and bitter herbs, there’s the basin of dirty water where hammertoes have been washed, not to speak of rough old walking heels, bunions and corns, and arches high and delicate as a girl’s, by the teacher on his knees with the smudgy towel. Some kind of example, that!
On that Thursday with the broken flat loaf and the last cup of red wine, bloody as Passover, bloody as a smeared door, he dips his hand in a bowl of meat and oil with the one with the damning bagful of silver under his chair who goes out into the dark. But that one, too, got a piece of the bread.
On that Thursday in the night shade of leafy garden, where flowers and olive trees rinsed by spring rain are fragrant it’s easy to sleep and get away from it all. Nobody really wants to hear lonely prayer or sobs in the throat. Eyes are so heavy.
We wake startled like we have fallen in our dream and it smells like angels have been here. No, it’s only the greasy smoking of torches. There is the swirl-sound of capes, the castanet of hidden weapons, and, anonymous as a lynching, we shuffle around – cowardly, guilty, lethal, and without names. On that Thursday, there’s the kiss.
But it’s not over till the cock’s crow, the tears, the morning light.
Good Friday
March 21, 2008
Is 52:13–53:12; Jn 18:1–19:42
Good Friday preaching is rare. Certainly there is preaching about Jesus’ execution as part of a combined Palm and Passion Sunday service or the Realm of Christ Sunday at the end of Ordinary Time. The full red palette of atonement theology is often preached in the context of gospel cross-predictions or cross-retrospective texts from Acts and letters.
On Good Friday itself faith communities combine in ecumenical services that lift up the final words of Jesus variously remembered. Some faith communities participate in processions or reenactments. Some attend movies together, as diverse as The Passion of the Christ or Jesus of Montreal. Some host silent vigils. Many come together just to let these long passages of scripture wash over them. Isaiah describes one who is despised and rejected, afflicted and oppressed, stricken for the sins of sheep who have gone astray. John’s narration — best heard in a translation which identifies Jesus’ opponents as “religious authorities” rather than “Jews” who are our neighbors — tells of apprehension and fears, denial and trial, condemnation and holiday-clemency, sentence and torture, hanging, piercing, and burying.
We listen; we do not often preach. One preaching possibility emerges that perhaps only needs a sentence (a self-restraint I rarely boast). Isaiah’s text was written for a contemporary who suffered, or about the nation, or to describe the prophet’s own situation long before Jesus. Knowing this, the words still offer a powerful poetic interpretation when heard beside the faith story of Jesus’ death.
We go back in history to understand. So can we go forward to a March 2008 situation of affliction and sacrifice to help us understand how “we are still there” when God’s children are crucified.
Easter
March 23, 2008
Jn 20:1–18
The crèche is barely put away. The Christmas story, even its incarnation mystery, is portrayed tangibly. Butterflies, eggs, bunnies, and new shoes are only marginally symbolic of the emptiness from which Peter and the beloved disciple ran away. This far-too-early Easter in many climates cannot call forth the seasonal metaphors that help to express its even more radical mystery.
The people in the congregation who come to hear about Jesus being raised from death are thinking about … a child’s classmate who committed suicide, a neighbor lost in an automobile accident, a bullet tearing through a living-room window or the white board in a classroom, friendly fire, enemy fire. Some are thinking of a beloved spouse seemingly dead while alive from Alzheimer’s disease, which is a bit like the anti-resurrection.
Mary thinks her teacher is the gardener. Then she wants to cling to him inappropriately. Comfort is elusive and evasive. The dilemma for the preacher is that a misperception is followed by a tender story about someone learning to trust the invisible resurrection. Although polished performance values, gracious hospitality, and familiar hymns help people have a called-by-name experience of vibrancy, confidence, and new life, the Easter that happens in this story from John comes nearly at its end when Jesus gives Mary a mission — go and witness to other people. There is something ominous about alleluia sung as an acceptance of responsibility. All Lent, there have been teachings, healings, raisings, drinks of living water, and even pedicures – care for the Christian. A child once described Easter as runner-up Christmas without the presents. It certainly has the running.
Second Sunday of Easter
March 30, 2008
Jn 20:19–31
If I doubt enough, I can put my finger inside the hole in the hand of God. For some people the path to believing travels through doubting, and a test is the way to joy. For those people the story of Thomas the twin cannot be told too often. It legitimizes doubt, and it has become many preachers’ favorite because it honestly describes the discouragement, resentment, and anger of being left out of the party, of not having that God’s-breath-right-in-the-face reassurance that some Christians recount with such light and delight that others feel a skeptical grumble-reaction to the very over-sweetness of it.
I am not describing wild-eyed liberals as the Thomas’s. No, those are folks who are often so clear (irritatingly clear) that Jesus has walked through contemporary walls with a new peace. Evolution. Stem cell research. Same-gender marriage. God doing startling Easter-like things and these Christians absolutely believe Jesus’ words echo something like this: “ I’m still not dead. And there are no doors which bar me.”
Other Christians respond, “Wait a minute. I wasn’t there when that spirit was passed out. I can’t find it in the Bible. I definitely don’t want the definition of what can be forgiven expanded, and I need to see the cut open side of Jesus on this before I’ll trust anything you say about a new way of new life.” These are faithful doubters — as courageous as Thomas who was willing to go with Jesus even to death (Jn 11:16), and the promise mirrored by the story is that Jesus always comes back to these troubled ones to demonstrate just what terribly broken hands reaching out for love look like these days.
Jesus did (and does) many other signs which are not written in the book. (Jn 21:31)
