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When I Open Your Graves

3/31/2020

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Ezekiel 37: 1-14; 16-18  John 11: 1-45

These days, we are surrounded by death. Social media is quick to keep us up to date on the latest casualties. The rise in the peak of death due to Covid-19. Accidents on the freeway. Lives claimed by cancer. What was your first encounter with death? 
When I was 14, I witnessed my brother die from a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills.  He didn’t really want to die.  He just didn’t know how to live. This was not death buffered by a funeral home, but in-your-face death – a vivid presence of death, at home in the living room, where you can feel life dwindling, leaving gray-blue cold skin in its wake. Just like the Presence hovering over Ezekiel’s valley of bones. Like the Presence enveloping mourners weeping at the tomb of Lazarus.
        The topic of death, even for church-goers, people who believe in God and struggle to follow Jesus, is difficult to engage even as we trust in divine mercy.  Who would go around talking about death?  Who wants to be around someone talking about death?
So, we push death away. We have become successful: we live in an era that has seen the average life expectancy jump from 46 years to almost 79 years in just over one century.  In our battle against death we have discovered vaccinations, procedures, surgeries and treatments, diets that have prolonged life considerably.         Yet are we better prepared to deal with death? Are you? Am I? Can we ever be?
        Dealing with death is hard, but, then, dealing with life can be just as hard and painful. People live in ugly, unjust ways.  People live alone and unloved.  People live with bitterness, anger and resentments, consumed by fear.  Life wounds us in ways that are hard to recover from. We entomb life and joy.  Neither life nor death are for the weak of heart.  We must come to terms with life as we must come to terms with death.
        We see an intimate portrait of death in our scriptures today. These lessons demand we contemplate the broad face of death.  In the gospel of John, we view a death that comes to a small village, a single family.  Death that is fresh, raw, stinking and has a name, Lazareth.  There is weeping and wailing.  There are all those futile questions and comments:  “Lord if you had only been here…”   Why did you delay, Jesus?”  If only I had done this… If only I had encouraged her more   If only I had called….why didn’t I see the signs?  Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?  Where were you when I needed you God? Why didn’t you come sooner?  Why, Why, Why?
        The horror of communal death illustrated by Ezekiel in his vision of the valley of dry bones.  Bones, bones, for as far as you can see.  Death that is out in the open.         Death comes to a people, community, nation.  In his vision of rebuke and warning, death has been a way of life for so long it no longer stinks.  Flesh is gone. Sinew is gone. The Spirit is gone. There are no mourners, instead of weeping and wailing there is utter stillness and silence in the Valley. Just death, alone.
        Our Bible lessons don’t explain death, even as we, as do thoughtful people, seek answers in the face of this devastation. But our texts do invite us in, to sit in the valley or by the tomb. By keeping faithful company with death, we are promised by God that we come to know the Lord.
        So, we sit today at the tomb and the valley of death. The Spirit of this presence speaks to us.  We learn about sorrow, unfinished business and broken dreams. We come to see more clearly the source of our suffering, the true “dis-“ease. It is the lack of love and loss of love connection. Our hearts are broken by chronic isolation, love loss in our guilt, shame and despair.
        Death is not the problem. Life is not the problem.  The problem is the conditions we place on love.
Jesus wept after he showed up in Bethany. When Jesus first received word that his friend Lazarus was ill, he had just had a hostile encounter with some religious leaders.  They were ready to stone and kill him.  Jesus had to flee to safety.  By responding to the call of Mary and Martha, Jesus placed himself at great peril.  He returned to the territory where his enemies were planning to do away with him.  As Jesus stood before the grave of Lazarus, calling him back to life, Jesus was signing his own death warrant.  At the conclusion to Chapter 11, we read that the chief priests and Pharisees called a council to terminate Jesus once and for all.   Jesus would soon be exchanging places with Lazarus in the tomb. We see love in action, in death, in life.
        As holy week draws near, our texts prepare us for this mystery of love and death, suffering and sacrifice, mercy and resurrection. The Love that breathes on the bones and restores life. It is Love that opens graves. Shatters tombs.  Love is present, unfelt, unsummoned, even when we are at our lowest. That is the sacred mystery we will encounter This Holy Week, this Easter, even in isolation, even in quarantine, even in the storm of Coronavirus pandemic, God’s Presence, God’s love finds us, calls us, summons the flesh back on our bones.
So, Love, through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross for us on Good Friday, asks us: how do we really experience God?  Is Love just a quaint title we give God that has a nice ring to it? Only death can make us sit and realize this is not an intellectual exercise.  Death is not an abstract experience. And neither is God.  Unless we have been restored to life by God while alive that we can have no idea what Jesus means when he calls himself the Resurrection and the life. 
        Life and death are not the problem.  It is whether we chose to love in life and death that makes all the difference.  So, sit in the valley. Sit by the tomb. Shed those tears. Rage if you must. Seek out Jesus, who  has come to awaken us. Jesus is the Resurrection and Life and points the way  to God’s glory – made manifest. Let uss rise from death to new life as we witness Jesus suffer, die and rise.  May we, encounter in our final week of Lent as we journey to the cross, in he shadow of death may know the stirring, hovering, enveloping  presence of Life. Amen.

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Eyes Wide Open

3/24/2020

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In his book, An Anthropologist on Mars, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about Virgil, a man who had been blind from early childhood. When he was 50, Virgil underwent surgery and was given the gift of sight. But as he and Dr. Sacks found out, having the physical capacity for sight is not the same as seeing.
Virgil's first experiences with sight were confusing. He was able to make out colors and movements but arranging them into a coherent picture was more difficult. Over time he learned to identify various objects, but his habits--his behaviors--were still those of a blind man.   Dr. Sacks asserts, "One must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person. It is the interim, the limbo . . . that is so terrible."
Learning to see is a process – adjusting, naming, integrating all the subtle features and processes that someone who has had sight from birth has gained naturally, without thinking.  So, it is with our spiritual sight – it takes time to learn about compassion, forgiveness, love, justice and peace.  It takes time to get to know Jesus, the Light of the World. It takes us time to act with love in a consistent manner, to forgive, to go from spiritual blindness to eyes wide open. This is especially true as we seek to navigate the heightened fears and anxiety brought upon us by the Coronavirus. We see pain and heartache and uncertainty.  What would God have us see?
        Our lesson from John present us with a situation where there is spiritual blindness because hearts are not aligned with God.  What can we learn from them?
There are layers of blindness in this story of the blind beggar whose sight is restored by Jesus.  The physical blindness of the beggar, the spiritual blindness of the disciples, the trained, educated religious leaders. First the disciples want to know how this man, or his parents sinned, that he was born blind.  They think they are asking an enlightened, reasonable question.  They are seeing this beggar through their prevalent cultural lens that considered deformities, disabilities or illnesses as caused by a demon or sin.  Jesus’s vision is different.  This situation was not caused by sin – and furthermore, God’s glory manifests even in a lowly, blind beggar, worthy of being restored to sight.  With mud and spittle Jesus anoints the blind man and sends him to be washed in the pool of Siloam.  The blind beggar obeys Jesus and his sight is recovered. Cause for celebration, no?
No. The healing of the blind man, instead of causing joy and praise – creates suspicion among the elite, religious leadership. They go on and on – this Jesus can’t be sent from God, why, he dared to work on the Sabbath!   They doubt the miracle – was he really blind? They interrogate the blind man at least twice, as well as his parents, and then they interrogate Jesus. They conclude the blind man and Jesus as sinners, while exalting themselves as disciples of Moses.  Ironically, throughout this saga, these trained leaders remain blind to God’s truth in Jesus, that Jesus is the light of the world.  Their rigid interpretation of the laws and their pride leads them to deny that the miracle came from God. They are like the story of the Pastor and his assistant praying together: the Pastor says, Oh God you are Great, but I am nothing. The assistant says Oh God you are wonderful, but I am absolutely nothing. They go back and forth like this until they hear the janitor, cleaning the floor praying, Oh God you are marvelous, but I am nothing. The pastor nudges the assistant and says, “Look who says he’s nothing?!”  Or put another way, one Buddhist monk leaned over to another and quietly asks, "Are you not seeing what I'm not seeing?" Spiritual blindness manifests in many ways.  Can we count the ways?
Jesus heals this overlooked blind beggar to show that God sees. God sees the blind man in need of sight.  God sees what we are blind to; how are habits are those of being spiritually blind; how we have taken the Truth and twisted it to our own benefits. God sees the heart of the matter.  It is our sin that organizes and interprets truth through the lens of our blind spots.  Jesus, who is the Truth, heals us so our eyes can be open wide – and our lives ordered by the Truth that awakens us to spiritual sight.
We have about two more weeks in our journey of Lent to Holy Week, and possibly many more in this battle with coronavirus.  New York State is going on a lock down Sunday night.  The future is unknown, and we move into a “new normal” every week. We are in a terrible state of limbo, blind to the rapidly changing world around us, we cannot see where we will end up. As people of faith, our task before us is not to give into the blindness of fear but to learn to see – as Jesus sees.  To see all we overlook – in others and in ourselves especially in this time of heightened anxiety.  As we are in quarantine, mandated isolation and social distancing, we ask ourselves what does God want us to see? Where are the opportunities to engage and love and care for each other? Through our inconveniences we are called to see the daily ongoing struggles of others. Beauty and pain.  The sinful and the holy.  The prejudice and the diversity – the mundane and the mysterious – the tragedies and the miraculous. oppression and the freedom.  The connectedness and the brokenness.  The known and unknown.   How to die to our blindness so we can be reborn with the eyes of Jesus.  A friend emailed me this week a poem aptly entitled Pandemic. I’d like to share it with you.
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath--
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20
In our time of captivity may we die to our blindness and be born again seeing, through the vision of Jesus – the light of the world.  Amen. 

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God So Loved the World

3/9/2020

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Genesis 12:1-4       John 3:1-17
 
          One of the most memorable weddings celebrations I’ve known was that of my friend’s grandmother, who got married when she was in her late seventies.  She wasn’t looking to get married.  She had been widowed for over 15 years and was living alone happily, with no desire to change.  But then a good friend’s wife died, and the widower proposed to her … several times.  She agonized over what to do.  It would mean a big change for her.  Besides adjusting to a new person who had his own ideas and tastes, he had a winter home in Arizona, and she would have to give up her cozy home and community in Vermont for half the year.  But in the end, she said yes.  She decided she wasn’t too old to change and took a risk.  And they had four or five good years together before he died.

        Age didn’t hold back Abram, who  was 75 years old when God told him to pack up and leave; leave his father’s house, his country, and all his relatives, and go to a new land that God would show him.  This was a permanent migration to new territory, where Abram would start from the beginning, with only his wife Sarai, no children, his nephew Lot, and some servants.  Abraham would probably never see his father and mother, brother, other relatives and his homeland again. 

        What makes it most intriguing is that there was no precise destination.  God simply said, “Go to the land that I will show you.”  There was no travel agenda, no map pointing out rest stops, no description of the accommodations waiting for him when he arrived. Abram would have to find his own food and water, find his own place to set up a tent as he went, and face possible danger from the people he passed on the way.  Still, God reassured him that he would blessed there, and others would be blessed through his faith.  At an age when he should be settling down and enjoying his retirement, God challenged him to get up and change. Abram started this new life just by trusting in God.
        In our New Testament lesson, we have another lesson of someone starting life anew, in the story of Jesus and Nicodemus.  Nicodemus was also probably an old man.  He was a respected leader in the Jewish community, and a Pharisee who treasured the law and the tradition of the elders.  The Pharisees didn’t know what to think of Jesus, but they must have heard the stories of miracles and healings and his confrontations of Jewish leaders.  What was Jesus trying to do?  Was Jesus starting a new movement? 


Nicodemus went to Jesus to hear what he had to say about himself.  He said, “Rabbi (or teacher), we know that you … (have) come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” When Jesus replied, he didn’t talk about himself and what Nicodemus should think about him.  Instead he turned the conversation back to Nicodemus and what he should seek out of life.  He told Nicodemus, if you want to see the Kingdom of God, you have to be born from above, born again.  How do you experience God’s spirit and what does it mean to you?

        Spiritual life is not something we achieve.  It’s something we accept or receive.  When a baby is born it has little control over what’s going on.  It’s all the parents’ work.  And likewise, being born of the spirit is an act of God.  It’s a gift.  And like the wind, we can’t make it come or go.  All we can do is have our hearts open.  And now that it is God’s desire for us to receive in the way we are able – although this challenge may come to each of us in different ways.

 When Nicodemus heard these words, he took them literally and became defensive “Listen Jesus, I’m an old man.  I have already chosen a path for my life.  I can’t start over.” 
Like many other Pharisees, Nicodemus was attached to his traditions and laws and he believed that he was on the right path.  After all, the Pharisees had the highest moral standards of anyone at that time.  They were concerned with how to live a godly life on earth; what is proper to eat, when we should rest, how we should treat servants and neighbors, how we should deal with disease, what obligation we have to share our possessions.  These are all important things to work out.  How we behave on this earth matters.  According to Jesus, this is not about what real salvation is about. 
If we want to see and be part of God’s reign, and be transformed, we must be born from above.  We are born again by asking Jesus into our hearts and to be our Lord and Savior.  This is the free gift of God received with faith, because God loves the world and wants everyone to be saved. 


Sometimes church people think too much like the Pharisees.  I read a post by pastor who engaged in an experiment.  He visited some Sunday worship services in his city, wearing earrings, baggy pants, with his hat on backwards and pretending he didn’t know much about how church worked.  He did this because he had talked with some people outside of church who told him they were sure they would not be welcome inside a church.  These were people from rough backgrounds, and they looked the part.  So, the pastor decided to dress like one of them and see what would happen if he walked into a church service like that. 

Sure, enough it was true.  In almost every church he visited, no one greeted him.  Instead they stared at him, and in one church someone tapped him on the shoulder and told him to take his hat off.  He didn’t get the idea that anyone cared about who he was inside.  What he got was suspicion and judgment.  I pray we would be among those welcoming anyone, smelly, disheveled or not!

God does not just love the people who follow the rules and fit in, who know what to say and how to dress for church. God loves those who dress shabby, are smelly, with disheveled hair, and speak in a salty fashion.  God so loves the world.  Anyone who comes to God with an open heart, anyone who is willing to say yes to God and start on a new life adventure, is welcome.  No matter how young or old we are. We are all called by the spirit to a journey of love and openness to the Spirit.

 John 3:16 is one of the most famous verses in the gospels.    “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

        In many ways this one verse summarizes the whole message of the gospel.  God is love.  Jesus is an expression of God’s love.  And in Jesus is the path to eternal life – to the entire earth.

Jesus offers his life to us and calls us to offer our lives to God, by serving others. Just like he called Abram and Sarai. Like he called Nicodemus.  Like he led a 75-year-old woman to marriage again. Like he calls each one of us on a spiritual journey to the unknown.  God is calling us to a good place, full of life. What journey is God calling you on?  Who are you being called to open your heart to? We are never too old or too young to be born from above; to be invited by God to a new holy adventure of blessing. Say yes to God’s life-giving spirit, be born again, and be blessed. .Be a blessing to others in turn. Amen.    

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"Temptation"

3/3/2020

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Genesis 2:15-17,3:1-7, 22-24; Matthew4:1-11

The trouble all began in the garden. Paradise. The man and woman who God made were placed in the newly created blessed garden with only one prohibition: not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  “For in this day you shall eat of it you shall die” God warned.

The rest is history. It seems a day didn’t go by when the craftly serpent asks the woman the first question recorded in scripture “Did God say, you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” The snake asks a misleading question and turns the woman’s attention to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. On closer examination, the woman saw that the tree was good for food, appealing to the eye, and it was desirable to make one wise. All good things. Emboldened by the snake the woman and then the man go ahead and eat and indeed, as a result of their disobedience, they are banished from the garden. They lose paradise.

        It just figures.  The first thing the human couple do in their new life is disobey. The first thing they create is wilderness.

In the Hebrew, wilderness means “that which is beyond.” It is terrain that lies beyond the bounds of settled communities.  It includes the desert, poor steppe lands, land that is marginally cultivated, thick forests that are uninhabitable.  Thesy are home only to wild beasts, nomad tribes, and evil spirits.  Cursed harsh land that is a constant reminder of the human experience of temptation, exile and disobedience.  Rejected areas to which refugees must flee—where Cain is sentenced after killing Abel, where Hagar flees an abusive Sarah.  Like when David runs away from a jealous King Saul. Wilderness, the first creation of humanity, becomes the place where unwanted people are sent to or where innocent people must flee to escape oppression.

But it is in the wilderness where Moses encounters the burning bush. I It is in the wilderness that God declares he will deliver his people. It is to the wilderness that the people of Israel are led to when God delivers them from the slavery of Egypt.  There is the wilderness God reveals a covenant, a new hope of community. In the wilderness God forges a redeemed people.

Because of this, it is not surprising that the Holy Spirit sends Jesus to the wilderness after his baptism. Not to a garden or to a great city of learning, but to the wilderness.  God sends Jesus to the wilderness to understand the primordial human experience of alienation, brokenness and fear. 

        The devil, crafty as ever, finds Jesus just as it found Adam and Eve. And just in the experience with Adam and Eve, the devil tests Jesus with food.

Jesus has just been fasting for 40 days and he is famished.  The devil coaxes, “If you are the Son of God, turn those stones into bread.”  Now what damage would Jesus have done to turn one small stone out of the millions of stones in the desert into a morsel of bread to appease his hunger?  

In the pain of hunger, Jesus knew his destiny was to be one with us, how hard it is to face all the trials and temptations we face in life.  Jesus knew that to turn that stone into break might appease his physical hunger, but it would also deaden a more important hunger, a Godly hunger to be a child of God. The devil is not interested if Jesus is hungry or not. The Devil is seeking to destroy Jesus’ mission before it begins. The Devil is trying to focus Jesus on himself, his own needs, and not the hunger of the world.  Jesus knew he was the son of God.  He didn’t need to prove it to the devil.  And so, Jesus refused.

The devil is also not interested if we are hungry or hurting.  When we are hungry or hurting, sitting there in the wilderness, it’s easy to focus on our own needs and not the destiny God is calling us to. Tragically our spiritual hunger to know ourselves as children of God contributes to ongoing real hunger and deprivation in the world.   We must learn to discern what satisfies for a moment and what will satisfy for a lifetime.

In the second temptation Jesus faces, the Devil takes Jess to the pinnacle of the temple the most exalted place in the holy city.  And there the Devil says “If you are the son of God, just throw yourself down. God will not allow you to be hurt.  The angels will catch you.”  If we read between the lines the Devil implies ”Jesus, just think of the publicity this will offer you, just as your getting started in your work. This will prove to the people and the religious authorities that God’s hand is upon you.  This is what the people what to see. Signs and wonders.  Go for it, Jesus.”

How quickly the Devil can take us there. If the Devil can’t get us to succumb to the body’s hungers, then the Devil will test our emotional hunger and our pride. The pinnacle is not the space of sorrow and lack in our heart, nut rather the place of exaltation and fulfillment.

The Devil knows us well. Not just where we are weak but where we excel, where we belong, and have real power and authority. Where we crave attention and affirmation.  So, the Devil takes us to our pinnacles and says “Go ahead. Razzle and Dazzle them.  Doesn’t God want you to shine? Show them the stuff you’re made of.”
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Who are we, deep down, when we’re standing on the pinnacle?  Who are we really when things go well?  Because when we are the object of human praise and admiration, it is easy to forget God’s will.

The Devil is not interested in our gifts or our development. The Devil wants to sever our connections to others so the gifts we have we hoard, not share. So, are we going to jump and show off even if it makes all the human sense in the world?  Will we use our skills and talents to elevate ourselves or to serve?  Who are we really, not when times are hard, but when they’re going well?

In the third and final test Jesus faces, the Devil takes him to the top of a mountain, and he shows Jesus in the flash of a second all the kingdoms of the world throughout all time in their full splendor.  So, the Devil tests our physical hunger, then our emotional hunger, now the Devil tests spiritual hunger. The Devil wants Jesus badly. For the Devil is willing to give all the kingdoms of the world over to Jesus if Jesus would just once fall down and worship him.

The Devil doesn’t care about our dreams; The devil doesn’t want to share power. The Devil knows as God knows, that the human soul is of far more value than all the kingdoms of the world.  The Devil is not stupid.  It would not offer of deal in which it would come out on the short end of the stick. The Devil knows our value to God, that we were made for a loving relationship with God, and how much, how much the devil wants to keep us from the loving embrace of God and replace it with the false love of the powers of the world.

So, in this final test we encounter the hunger of the spirit.  Who will we ultimately worship?  Will we worship God, or will we worship the Devil by enslaving our souls to the wealth and glitter of the world.   The issue boils down to this, as Jesus put it:  We cannot serve both God and Mamnon or Money.

Temptation is real, and through our journey of Lent the Devil will coyly and overtly try to damage our relationships, our relationship with our selves, with others, with God. The Devil endlessly manipulates all our hungers, physical hungers, hungers for acceptance and approval, for success in the world.

But because Jesus overcame temptation in the wilderness a way has been forged. Because of Jesus we can endure that hunger and put down the stone.  Because of Jesus we can stand on the pinnacle and not jump.   Because of Jesus we can stare at all the grandeur of the world and not kneel before the counterfeit god.
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Because of Jesus we discover the wilderness can be a place of renewal of covenant, that God is with us in our trials.  May the wilderness of Lent lead us to our true self, connected in spirit to our souls, to each other, and to God.   May the wilderness of these forty days lead us back home. Home to Paradise Amen

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