The Marathon

Done:

Maundy Thursday Renewal of Vows for Clergy
Maundy Thursday Evening Service
Pastoral Visit/Memorial Service Planning
Picking up gray fabric for our human "rocks that sealed the tomb"
Good Friday Noon Service

To Come:

Good Friday Interfaith Stations of the Cross at the neighboring Catholic Church
Pastoral Visit
Good Friday Interfaith Evening Service at the neighboring Lutheran Church
Easter Vigil Saturday night service
Easter Sunday 8:15
Easter Sunday 10:30
Pastoral Visit

Eating Wheaties and Taking Vitamins...

Sermon for Maundy Thursday I Cor 11:23-26

Family meals. They can be transformative experiences, can’t they?

Many years ago, I hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family. This included my mother, who was a formidable woman with strong opinions about everything, and my mother-in-law, who was equally formidable and had equally strong opinions. Although such a big-family Thanksgiving meal was traditional, frankly I dreaded it, because I feared I’d be caught in between these two women, both of whom I wanted to please. All this in the midst of cooking a meal for thirty or so people.

I did the usual massive grocery buying and stuffed every corner of the refrigerator with the supplies for the feast. And I arose early on Thanksgiving morning, and realized that I was sick. Dreadfully, awfully, nastily sick, with some sort of flu. Perhaps it was a wee bit psychosomatic, more likely something that the kids brought home from school. And it was eight in the morning, and I was standing at the kitchen sink wrestling the innards out of the defrosted twenty-eight pound turkey, weeping silently because I was so miserable. I knew I had to get the stuffing prepared and into the bird, and the bird into the oven, if we were going to have the meal at the right time. I was not feeling particularly thankful.

I could hear my mother talking to the kids out on the back porch. She was drinking coffee and smoking the ubiquitous cigarette – she never quite forgave me for making her smoke outside – and then I heard the creak of the chair as she rose to come into the kitchen and refill her coffee cup. She wandered in, nearly bumping into my mother-in-law, who was coming into the kitchen from the living room with the same agenda, another cup of coffee, and saw me at the sink.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you crying?”

I blubbered, “I’m sick with the flu, and this bird is enormous, and I’m never going to get it stuffed and into the oven on time, and…” …and I dissolved into another fit of tears.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, move over. I’ll do it,” she said.

My mother-in-law, who did NOT get along with my mother at all, stood to one side, head cocked, and then said, “Yes, go back to bed. Your mother and I will get the dinner on the table. Take some tea upstairs with you and go back to bed, and we will take care of this. Between the two of us, we’ve put many a Thanksgiving meal on the table, haven’t we, Ann?” And my mother growled her agreement.

And I went up to bed. I half expected that I would hear arguments and slamming of doors and pots from the kitchen which was right below my bedroom, but I heard nothing. And so I dozed off, and awake several hours later feeling somewhat better. What was that I smelled? Roasting turkey, vegetables, pie, the coffee maker continuing to perk away.

I washed my face and dressed and came downstairs to the meal just about ready to put on the beautifully set table (my mother-in-law was famous for setting a pretty table). The two women were sitting at the kitchen table, having yet another cup of coffee, and they smiled as they saw me come down the stairs. “Feel better?” they chorused. “We’ve got it all under control. Just call the children inside and we’ll be ready to serve.”

You would have thought that they were friends of decades’ duration. But they were not. They still didn’t particularly like one another or agree about things. But they came together, and we had a meal that was a particularly poignant gift, since one of them would be dead by the next Thanksgiving.

They were transformed, at least briefly, by the need to share a meal full of love and care.

On this evening, we too share such a meal. It is Maundy Thursday, traditionally thought of as the time when Jesus instituted the meal which we are about to celebrate, the Lord’s Supper, as a part of the Passover celebration.

Who knows if Mary and Martha, those notoriously feuding sisters, had made the food, or if it was a catered affair? Who knows if the disciples knew that this might be their last meal with the Lord, despite all his comments in the time before this night? Who knows if Judas knew that Jesus would mention what was going to happen next?

What we do know is that they came together as a family – a sometimes tense and argumentative family, but a family nonetheless – to share a meal over which their beloved teacher and Lord would preside. The disciples were surprised that Jesus decided to wash their feet, a sign of humility and service, as a part of the meal. It seemed out of the right order of things to them, but he did it for a reason – to teach them once again that the work they did together was not about who was the leader and who was the follower, but that they all should do it for each other, just as they should continue to share meals together, no matter what happened. That they should follow his lead and love and serve each other just as he was, putting aside rivalries and struggles as to what they should do next.

Just as my mother and my mother-in-law stepped out of the natural order of our Thanksgiving meal – that I as the host would prepare it – so too did Jesus step out of the natural order by washing the feet of his disciples at the meal. Just as I relinquished control of my kitchen, so too did Jesus relinquish control by kneeling before these disciples.

Family meals have the power to do that. They have the power to shake us up, to give us the opportunity to show the best of ourselves, to put aside the things that are irrelevant so that the important things are attended to, in love and in life.

I did not know that my mother-in-law was in the early stages of cancer that weekend, that she would go home to God within the year, just as the disciples did not understand what Jesus was telling them, that he would die soon. If I had, perhaps I would have worried less about my mother-in-law's annoying tendency to tell me how to raise my children and worried more about thanking her for caring about me and the children. If the disciples had really understood that Jesus was about to die, perhaps they would have worried less about who sat closest to Jesus at the table or how they wanted to appear holier than they really felt. Perhaps they would have asked more of the right questions, or helped him more, or they would have stood by him rather than running away when Jesus was arrested.

But at that meal, in that very human moment of family aaround the table, Jesus knew what he faced and what they faced. So he gave them something to remember him by, just as we all hold memories of family meals in our past.

He gave them these words: This is my body. This is my blood. When you get together again, and you drink the wine and eat the bread, remember me.

We do not know the gifts that we take from our familly meals. Sometimes they are recipes, sometimes they are memories. Sometimes they are the bittersweet knowledge that we missed the opportunity to say thank you, or to give something back. But what we do around this table continues, even when our family meals do not. The memory of what Jesus did stays with us, and energizes us to share him and what he did with others.

We may not get a second chance with our families, but we do with Jesus, because he is the Lord of second and third and fourth chances. He tells us to share this family meal each week, to remember him and to remember the love he bids us to share with the world.

So come to the table and be fed, and then feed the world with it.

Amen.

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2012

This is a long story, and a difficult one, that we’ve just heard. It is, as always, a little surprising to hear this saga, which extends all the way to the death of Jesus, on Palm Sunday. After all, didn’t we just do a triumphant march into church with our palms? Aren’t we supposed to be celebrating Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem?

The answer is a resounding “Yes, but.”

Yes, we celebrate Jesus coming into Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowds. But we cannot not appreciate the exquisite irony of that ride into the city with the crowds cheering and strewing palm branches on the ground if we didn’t know how the story was going to end. It’s a feeling of the world turned upside down when we move so quickly from cheers and adulation to arrest, trial, torture, and death. And the telling of the whole story is necessary for us to understand what this week is about.

We are not used to this: when we go to the movies, we see brief trailers that give us a glimpse of movies that are coming soon, tempting us to come back to the theatre in another week or month to see what they have teased us with. The producers give us the hottest moments of the greatest excitement or pathos to draw us in.

But what do we do today? Not teasers – what will happen to the Lord next, after he gets to the city for Passover – but the whole story, every bit of it. The dinner. The praying. The fear. The arrest. The ridiculous trial, with its foreordained conclusion. The jeering. The pain. The screams of the crowd. The blood. The nails. The sour wine. The weeping mother. The sigh of death.

The whole story. Not just a sneak preview. Because we need to hear it.

Cynics will say that we read the entire Passion on Palm Sunday because it is unlikely that you will be here during the week. But I think it is something different. We read it because we have to know what we are facing in this hard, hard week.

Jesus knew that – the past few Sundays, the Gospel readings have been full of Jesus telling his disciples that what was to come was his death, before his rising in glory. That message so disturbed the disciples that Peter said, “Don’t say that!” But Jesus knew that they needed to be prepared for what was in his and their future, to brace themselves.

We, too, need to be prepared. We hear the entire passion today so that we can face what we live with this week. Not that we can become inured to it – no one could – but so that we can bear to hear it and be present to it. So that we can witness the experience of Jesus’ passion and walk with him in his pain. So that we can force ourselves to keep looking, not to cover our eyes. So that we can feel his agony as he always feels ours.

We know what will come next Sunday. We will be with Mary Magdalene and the disciples as they discover that Jesus is not in the tomb, that he is risen gloriously from the dead.

But we do not get to next Sunday directly from the palm-waving cheering crowds welcoming him to the city. First we have to remember the whole story, and relive it in all its ugliness. We have to own how we human beings failed Jesus, and how we continue to fail Jesus, and how he still was willing to carry that cross to Golgotha.

We have to earn the right to witness the empty tomb.

So we listen to the story again, from cheers to curses to the death-rattle. We force ourselves to pay attention. Only then can we see the final part of the story, not a clip from a preview, but the culmination of the most glorious of stories. Only then do we deserve what Jesus has given us. Only then can we sing songs of joy anew. Amen.

Friday Sabbath

A mixed bag for my personal Sabbath:

StrongOpinions left for home after spending a week with us. It was good to see her, but it was too short a trip (even though it is shocking how much stuff one 23 year old girl can spread around the house in a week). Her buddy D come down from NoVA to hang with us, and he drove her to the airport at 4:30 am.

Yes, I was awake, and not only because I needed to lock the door behind her. I really, really needed to give her a hug before she left, because I don't get enough of them these days.

Last evening was the usual chaos of trying to get stuff done prior to her trip, namely sewing three shirts for her (one black, one white, one ecru lace), washing laundry, picking up some items that are only available here...I was pretty fried after a long day going back and forth to meetings an hour away, and cooking for supper and such, but it was actually good to do this kind of stuff rather than the usual living in my monkey mind.

After she left this morning I dozed off for a bit, then got up, had a blessedly silent time of tea and the paper, then went off to spend an hour with my spiritual director.

And then I went to Bizarre Bazaar. Sort of a Southern-style craft fair on steroids. I saw a whole lot of personalized polka dot items, from dog dresses (yes, you read that right), to neoprene purses designed to hold your own personal six-back nice and chilled, to powdered dip mixes, to some of the trashiest jewelry since Dolly Parton had a bad dream, to stuff meant to evoke a trip to "The Rivah" (folks go down to their place on the rivah, meaning the Rappahannock River, in the summertime round heah). Best item of the day, which I did NOT buy: a sleep t-shirt that read "My sex life isn't dead, but vultures are circling overhead." I doubt PH would have thought it was all that cute.

I restrained myself from purchasing personalized rubber garden boots and simply found two solid color pashminas to add to the collection (aqua and cerulean), a pair of dogwood earrings and a calligraphed picture that will be a gift to someone getting ordained in June.

How tasteful of me.

I did, however, try a little taste of every damn thing that they were offering in the food vendors (fudge, of course; toffee; powdered mixes that you mush up with olive oil or cream cheese or sour cream to make party dips). I did not calculate the Weight Watcher points for all these tastes, since it is my sabbath...

thanks be to God.

Sermon for Sunday, March 25, 2012 Jer 31:31-34, John 12:20-33 "Write It On Their Hearts"

A student went to his rabbi and said, "Why is it that the Lord says 'I will write my Law upon their hearts?' Shouldn't it be 'IN their hearts'?"

"Ah," the rabbi said. "The Lord understood how difficult would be for us to understand his great Word. He knew that the only way would be for us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. So He wrote his word on our hearts. It is only when our hearts break that those words can fall INTO our hearts, treasured forever."

When the prophet Jeremiah wrote the passage we just heard, he was facing a people who had for a long time been estranged from their God. They had failed in the relationship.

Jeremiah could have simply said "you guys have messed up, yet again." In point of fact, Jeremiah did say that on a regular basis. But God gave him a different message to share with these wayward people.

It was a message of forgiveness, of faithful love, of promise for a changed future.

What does Jeremiah say God's message is?

"We're going to change the ground rules in this relationship. We're going to craft a new contract between us. The old one didn't work. You got overwhelmed by rules that no longer made sense. So we are going to keep it very simple in this new contract. The slate is wiped clean. I'm not going to beat you over the head about past mistakes. Suffice it to say, mistakes were made. But this isn't about the past, it's about the future. So no more rules. It will not be about rabbis and scribes teaching those complicated rules. It will be about you and me. Only you and me. You will feel me in your heart, no middleman. That's because I love you, and Ihink you love me, too."

That was an odd thing for a prophet to pass along to God's people...aren't prophets always about telling people to obey the rules to ensure a good relationship with God?

But here was Jeremiah, saying that God's messsage was that the old model hadn't worked, that there needed to be a new covenant. The word would be upon them...but how would they feel it, how would they realize what was happening?

Perhaps, as the rabbi said, their hearts would have to be broken open to fully experience what God was putting upon them.

Perhaps our hearts have to be broken open to fully experience what God is putting upon them.

This prophecy foreshadows the bearer of the New Covenant - Jesus Christ. The evangelist John makes clear that Jesus is that Word, written on our hearts. He begins his gospel account that way: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

And by the time we get to the point of today's story in John's gospel, Jesus is clearly understood to be the one who brings that new covenant that Jeremiah prophesied. But simply bringing the word is not enough. How do we start to feel the love that the word brings in our hearts?

What has to happen? Our hearts have to be broken open. And how are they broken?

A thousand different ways.

The theologian in me reflects on Jesus' death, a story that we will relive through the next two weeks very closely. Every time I read the passion story, it breaks my heart. I see this tired and aching man, with black and blue marks on his face, with whip marks visible through his tattered robe, with a thin stream of blood running down the side of his face, with stupid but powerful people asking stupid but damning questions. I see him, and my heart breaks.

The ex-politician in me reflects on the discourse in the political arena in recent weeks, with people using their religious beliefs as weapons against those with whom they disagree - a gross misuse of God's Word - and my heart breaks.

The pastor in me reads the story of the shooting of a young man by a local watch vigilante, not in self-defense but simply because he didn't want him walking through his neighborhood, and I think of all the times that Jesus was in places where he shouldn't have been...and my heart breaks.

And when my heart breaks, I feel God's word falling into it, Jesus saying "I will draw all people - ALL PEOPLE - to myself."

And I feel the healing of those words around the torn edges of my heart.

Jesus tells us that he is about to do something that will break his heart,and our hearts. He reminds us that he does it not because he walks with joy toward his death, but with great trepidation. He also reminds us that he does it for a reason - pure love for us.

Every day, we face bad news. It's on our computers, on the nightly news, on the radio. Every day our heart breaks. But if, through our heartbreak, we become vulnerable to God's love, it is worth the pain.

This is why Jesus is willing to walk toward the cross, to the horrific death of his human body. To Jesus, it is worth the pain to open up our hearts to feel God's redeeming love.

So in these next two weeks, as we approach the glory of the resurrection, we should not be afraid to let our hearts once again be broken. That is how God's Word, God's love, God's grace, comes into us in this season of Lent and beyond.

Amen.