Lent 5 - Compassion, April 10

Lent 5 – April 10

Do: Compassion

Matthew 15:29-38

 After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.

 Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?’ Jesus asked them, ‘How many loaves have you?’ They said, ‘Seven, and a few small fish.’ Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children.

As we get closer to the events of Holy Week, more and more attention is given to Jesus “Passion,” by which is meant his “sacrificial” suffering and death. The recent film “The Passion of the Christ” focused entirely on the end of Jesus’ life, with a special emphasis on the suffering and the blood. What is not talked about as much is “The Compassion of the Christ.” Jesus and his actions are more defined by his love for people than by any kind of understanding of being a cosmic atoning sacrifice to right the wrongs of humanity. Borg and Crossan say that the true passion of Jesus was God and the Kingdom of God.

The words for “compassion” in both the Hebrew and Greek hearken back to a similar etymology. Translated variously as “deeply moved, moved in his guts (often phrased as bowels), feeling for.” But the “guts” it refers to are actually feminine plumbing. In the Old Testament, one passage clearly says “as a mother feels for her child.” To feel in your guts, biblical compassion, is uterine. It is love for the ones formed within your womb. Jesus’ compassion is an example of the feminine aspect of God.

The clip from DreamThinkBeDo makes an interesting observation. Anthropologist Margaret Meade said that the first evidence of civilization is a healed femur, which tells her that someone cared for the injured person. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiWCwF_uqSg) Human civilization began with compassion.

How would it change our celebration of Holy Week and Easter if we focused on Jesus’ Compassion instead of “The Passion?” We’ve explored both Jesus and the issue of violence and have talked about how ours is not a God of violence. God did not want Jesus to suffer and die. Jesus endured his torture and death because of his compassion for the poor, the oppressed, and even his enemies and persecutors. Hopefully, Jesus’ example will inspire in us a similar compassion.

1. GOOD NEWS: Jesus’ ministry is motivated by deep love and compassion.

2. DIRECTION: Christ’s compassion can transform, feed, and heal our world. “Civilization” continues.

3. ANCHOR: Love with Guts

EXPERIENTIAL FIELD: We experience God’s deep love for Creation and us when we share in Christ’s compassion.

April 3

Lent 4 – Be: Mystery

April 3, 2011

Exodus 33:18-23

Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ And he said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The Lord”; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’ And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’

We started this series by entertaining uncertainty, then we talked (with that uncertainty) about who Jesus is for us. Last week we tackled (hah!) the topic of violence. This week we face the Mystery. The Mystery is not a puzzle to be solved; instead it is the vast unknown that is what we name God.

Moses, arguably the person in the Bible who knew God best (other than Jesus, I guess), still never saw God face to face. The closest he ever got was seeing God after the divine presence had passed by. Moses saw god in retrospect, and so often so do we. Our human minds are incapable of grasping God’s true essence. Our souls, though, maybe because that is the part of us that reflects the divine presence, can feel when God is near. Facing the Mystery is not demanding all the answers; it is standing on the edge of the abyss and drinking in the vastness. It is standing before God honestly, finitely, open and waiting to be filled.

“BE” means to love with the soul. John O’Donohue says that we are not souls contained within bodies, but being that exist within souls.

In this week’s video clip Megan McKenna, teacher, storyteller, and mystic talks about how much we do not know.  The not knowing leads to the “what if…” Admitting that we do not know opens us up to possibilities we cannot even imagine. This is greater than uncertainty; this is mystery with a big M. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bhHP1Hwf8Y

It is not just that we do not know. We cannot know it all. It is falling silent in the presence of grandeur: standing at the Grand Canyon, climbing a mountain, listening to the surf, facing a Rothko painting is all entertaining Mystery. Mystery is that God shows up. Mystery is that God shows up even sometimes when the preaching is awful, the music is crappy and the theology atrocious.  But it is also the Mystery that beckons us to ask the deepest questions.

To help us hone in on our direction, I want to introduce a couple of tools to add to our kit. I was taught that all Christian worship is Good News (even when it is sometimes difficult news – remember that gospel literally means good news). Worship begins when we discern the good news from within the scripture text we are opening. So I will propose the good news I see.

Next is Direction. What direction does that good news point us to as we try to put it in the context of our lives and our world? What specifically does this text speak to in our experience?

Finally, an Anchor. The anchor is a root metaphor through which we might explore this good news and direction, the image we tie our worship to.

All this I hope will help get a handle on our experiential field.

1. GOOD NEWS: The vastness of God is approachable in human experience. God is not totally other.

2. DIRECTION: When God passes near, new possibilities open in us and our world.

3. ANCHOR: Swimming in a sea of holiness.

EXPERIENTIAL FIELD: When we love God with all our soul we experience God’s nearness.

3rd Sunday of Lent

Third Sunday of Lent: March 28

Think- Violence

Luke 6:27-36
Love for Enemies

 ‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
 ‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be compassionate, just as your God is compassionate.

In Lent, Christians often give up things or practice fasting: from red meat, chocolate, computers, etc. But as we take a week to “THINK” about our faith, it is our (individual and societal) addiction to violence that begs the question as to what we are really willing to give up to follow Jesus.  Though Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers, the humble, those who hunger and thirst for justice” we see examples everyday of Christians who declare their right to own and use guns, who argue that this war or that is God’s will, who defend the violence that unchecked capitalism wreaks on the poor. It is all too easy to name violence in our world and particularly in our nation.

I have said before that I think Americans in general have more confidence in the way of John Wayne than in the Way of Jesus. The myth that a strong man with a fast gun can solve the problems of society holds sway even today (along with the myth of the independent man who rides away into the sunset when he has triumphed). Outside of churches (and maybe too often inside) people can quote lines from Westerns or other “action” movies more than they can quote the teachings of Jesus. By the way, most of those “action” movies seem to be based on the idea of justified vengeance (Payback, the Punisher, Death Wish, Gladiator, Kill Bill, Rambo…).

Jesus taught us to love our enemies, not to revenge upon them. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, to do for others as we would have them do for us. As Crossan says in this week’s clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0HKA4ryKds) the kingdom Jesus talked about was the kind never seen on earth: a kingdom not enacted by force but by compassion.

The quandary of Jesus’ penchant for peace is that it frames our understanding of who God must be. When we look at Jesus, we see a God committed to peace, a nonviolent God. A nonviolent God will never choose violent means to accomplish Divine desires. To say that God effected reconciliation with us by means of sacrificing Jesus on the cross is to affirm that God relies on violence. There must be another way of understanding Jesus’ death than to say that God willed it. To believe that God will wage a war with evil at the end of time, destroying with finality all Creation is to believe in a God of violence. I cannot see how a God of violence will ever transform our world into the peacable kingdom. Only a God of peace and compassion can do that. That is the God that Jesus’ unswerving commitment to peace and nonviolence shows us.

Here are the lyrics to a song by John McCutcheon that evokes this challenge. It is entitled, “El Perdon.”

Era soldado, (I was a soldier) I was only eighteen

When the orders came down, I remember

Santiago awoke to a terrible dream

When the sun rose that day in September

We raided the shantytowns, churches and homes

We gathered the greatest and least

En el hospital San Juan de Dios he rose

When we shouted, “We’ve come for the priest”

He stood at the railing, his back to the guns

Hands bound, a blindfold on his head

At the hour of his death he spoke to the ones

I still hear the words that he said     Chorus

Chorus

Matame de frente

Porque quiero verte

Para darte, para darte

El perdon

Face me when you kill me

For I want to see you

To give you my final perdo

El Rio Mapocho flows on to the sea

The banks and the beaches run red

Con la sangre de Cristo y de Chile y de mi (with the blood of Christ, Chile, and me)

Still echo the words of the dead      Chorus

En la Villa Grimaldi la memoria vive (In the Villa Grimaldi, the memory survives)

Hoy el Parque por la Paz (Today it is a Park for Peace)

En Auchwitz, en Darfur, Argentina y Chile

We cry, “Nunca mas, nunca mas!” (“Never again!”)    Chorus

Are we willing to give up violence for Lent? For Life?

Second Sunday in Lent - March 20

March 20, 2011

Dream, part 2: Jesus

Mark 8:27-30

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’ And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

One of the central questions we must ask, especially as Christians observing Lent, is “who do we think Jesus is?” Part of the question implies who we think Jesus was, but it really asks who we continue to think Jesus is today for us to follow his teachings in 2011. And for us particularly as progressive, evolving Christians, I believe it is imperative to be articulate about who we know Christ to be and what we see it is that Christ does for us, the world and the entire cosmos. To call ourselves “Christians” means to have something to say about Christ. And with so many others saying things about Christ that are at best unpalatable to us, we have to tell the world our vision and experience.

So, here are my words: I believe that in Jesus we see a life lived as divinely as humanly possible. Jesus is not different from us in substance, and if different from us it is a matter of degree (the degree of Jesus’ ability to be open to God in his life). When we look at Jesus as the Christ, we do not directly see God. We see what a human can reflect of God to others. I experience Christ in the creative spirit, in arts, often in worship, in acts of compassion, in humor and joy. Does Jesus save me? Yes, Jesus saves me from a meaningless, joyless life. Christ connects me to the Source of life.

The clip from DreamThinkBeDo is not as dynamic as last week. Marcus Borg doesn’t have the presence of Yvette Flunder. But what he has to say about an ongoing Easter is gripping. Here is the link for clip from the study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HblDiNywdMw

Experiential Field: In worship, in service, in community we experience Christ.

So, how do we experience Christ? How do we help others experience Christ? And especially for those of us who struggle to experience Christ (or for whom the usual definitions of experiencing Christ do not make sense), how do we invite them (ourselves) to continue the journey toward Easter? Even a great soul like Mother Teresa came to say: "I am told God lives in me -- and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

So, in the grand scheme of things, who do we say that Christ is?

First Sunday of Lent, March 13

First Sunday of Lent – March 13

Mark 12:28-34

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “God is one, and besides God there is no other”; and “to love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbor as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

“Dream, Think, Be, Do”

To “Dream” is to Love with the heart. To love with the heart is often to give oneself over. For us as followers of the Way, to love with the heart is to give ourselves over to the journey. Too often we want to map out the whole itinerary, start to finish with no surprises. To give ourselves over to the journey means to dream open-endedly. It means to follow without knowing.

At the beginning of this Lenten journey, though we know its end is ultimately Easter, it means to dream of a journey that we don’t fully know. We are invited to entertain uncertainty. “I don’t know” is also a statement of faith. This is not a case of the blind leading the blind. It is a proclamation of faith that ultimately God will guide us, no matter how confused we seem to be! It is also not that we give ourselves to irrational behavior, but to admit that our best rationality still cannot grasp the depths of God.

We experience the overwhelming awe of God when we admit the limits of our won knowledge.

Yvette Flunder preaches powerfully on the gift of not knowing:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXtE7zmN5MM

This is a clip from the DreamThinkBeDo study and I want to run at least part of it on Sunday.