Words and Relationships

A college student who discovered that he needed a Bible for a religion course wrote home asking that his Bible be sent to him. His father wrapped it carefully and took it to the post office. The clerk took the package and shook it. “Anything in here that can be broken?”, he asked. With a wry smile on his face, the father replied: “Only the 10 Commandments!”

The so-called 10 “commandments” mean, literally, “words” in Hebrew. Whenever I think of them, I remember how, as seminarians at St. Joseph’s College in Indiana, we were allowed to go off-campus to see Cecil B. DeMille’s new classic movie The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston, whose commanding presence had us riveted to the screen. Who could forget the magnificent special effects when God parted the Red Sea, and when God engraved the 10 words of the Law on stone tablets?! My enthusiasm was somewhat dampened, however, upon reading a negative review of the movie a short while later. Referring particularly to the “orgy scene”, while Moses was busy up on the mountaintop, the review critic tersely dismissed the film with the comment: “Dancing girls and dogma don’t mix.”

As you and I think about our lives during this Lenten season, we realize first-hand how easily God’s commandments can be broken. They have to do, more than anything else, with relationships: relationships with God and with one another. Experience confirms how fragile our relationships are: how easily damaged and broken through careless actions and words. The ancient laws of Israel’s early history make it clear that God wants people to be faithful, not only in worship, but especially in their relationships.

On pp. 847-848 the Book of Common Prayer clearly notes that the first four commandments have to do with recognizing that God alone is worthy of worship. God is to be the focus of our belief and trust. The remaining six commandments describe human relationships and how we’re responsible for the way in which we treat one another. Someone has defined sin as “treating people like things and things like people”, and in the words given to Moses on the mountain there’s a firm warning against such a confusion of priorities. When things become idols, relationships inevitably suffer.

It’s not uncommon to read the commandments and to conclude, just as Paul did: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it...I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Most of us identify with Paul’s sense of weakness and frustration. In his letter to the Christians in Rome Paul describes a kind of civil war taking place inside us. The sense that “I can will, but I cannot do” articulates that inner conflict between desire and power, raging within human beings ever since the Fall. Agnes Rogers Allen humorously quips:

“I should be better, brighter, thinner

And more intelligent at dinner.

I should reform and take pains,

Improve my person, use my brains.

There’s lots that I could do about it,

But will I?...Honestly, I doubt it.” 

Are the commandments even still possible for followers of Jesus who, in modern times radically different from Moses’, are trying to serve God faithfully? The BCP asks, on p. 848: “Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful at all?”

And it answers: “Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need for redemption.”

When reading the commandments, it’s easy to forget that they’re part of a much larger narrative: the whole story of the Exodus of God’s people from Egypt and their children’s wandering in the desert wilderness for many years. These words preface the commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” The Law is given to people who have been saved from slavery. The salvation of God’s people isn’t earned through their obedience to a code of law. God’s action came first. Observance of the Law, however, is their appropriate human response to what God has already done.

It’s difficult for any of us to observe God’s words on any given day, keeping both the letter and the spirit of what
God asks of us. The commandments’ specific details help to graphically remind us that we are selfish, sinful, and that we need redemption. The different commandments emphasize God’s absolute claim on all of our life. But in our conscientiousness about observing the commandments, we need to bear in mind that God gave them to people whom God had already saved. It’s also important to remember that, because God’s words describe God’s claim on our lives in terms of specific things to do, we can too quickly be distracted away from God and focussed on “requirements”.

As he grew spiritually, Paul began to understand the problem resulting from attempts to earn God’s approval merely through keeping the commandments. He came to recognize that the Law is different from legalism. Paul wrote to the Philippian community that he’d been keeping the Law, but entirely for the wrong reasons: “If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead...”

Before his life-changing encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul had been living as if he could, according to C. K. Barrett, “gain control of God by paying his fee”. Paul acknowledged that the law, indeed, sets out God’s holy expectations of the way we should act towards God and each other. Yet the very way in which it redirects our attention and focus towards our activity and away from God’s is the law’s weakness. In and of itself the law can’t lead to life. It doesn’t resolve the inner conflict, the civil war, in the soul.

This insufficiency of the law is a real issue in Jesus’ ministry and teaching. Jesus is a controversial man in John’s Gospel. John’s narrative of how Jesus enters the Temple and chases out the money-changers and the animal-sellers is a good example [John 2:13-22]. The confrontation between Jesus and the merchants is really a conflict over priorities. In it, who Jesus is (the Son of his Father) and what he represents (the living God), clashes with the values espoused by the religious institutional leaders which Jesus challenges. After chasing out those who had set up their businesses in the immediate Temple area, Jesus speaks rather mysteriously about the destruction of the Temple and its being “raised” up again. Generations later, you and I understand Jesus’ words to be an image of his own death and resurrection, whereas the Jewish authorities think he literally means the Jerusalem Temple. And that offends them! 

It’s important to bear in mind just how sacred the Temple building was in Jewish religious life. It was the external witness to God, and the place where people drew most near to God. It was holy and unique. It stood at the center of Jewish faith. But Jesus saw that the Temple, a human construction, had become the object of devotion: an idol, rather than God; an end in itself. Despite all the good things which the Temple was supposed to represent for the Jews, Jesus knew that, in their misplaced devotion to the building, people had let their focus be redirected away from the living God. The Temple was, without question, important. The problem was that people gave to their rites, customs, holy places, even to their laws, the special devotion due only to the one and living God. They missed entirely the spirit of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”

Jesus understood that even our religious practices and preferences can become lesser gods, idols, for us if they become the chief objects of our devotion. The universal temptation we face today is to become so preoccupied with the desire to excel and to succeed as “Christians” that we begin to focus on what we are doing instead of on what God continues to do for us in Jesus.

The commandments are important words about what God intends for us. We and the society in which we live need to take them much more seriously than we do. That being said, we have to continually remind ourselves that our Christian faith and practice entails far more than rules and regulations. It has to do primarily with relationships. William Barclay writes that, while morality is knowledge of what to do (a code), Christianity is the knowledge of Jesus Christ (a person). Paul understood that clearly. Important as the commandments are, we don’t secure God’s favor simply by observing them. A narrow focus on mere things, rituals, rules, and appearances can’t resolve the civil war within ourselves.

“Wretched man that I am!” exclaims Paul, “Who will free me from this body of death?” His answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It’s only when we’re centered and focussed on Jesus that we’re able to do what we know we ought to do. It’s only through faith in Jesus that we can grasp, as he did and as Paul must have, the depth of the words of Psalm 19:

“The law (word) of the Lord is perfect

and revives the soul...

The statutes of the Lord are just

and rejoice the heart...

By them also is your servant enlightened,

and in keeping them there is great reward...” 

Baptism: Possessing Heavenly Strength of Bone

72 years ago today, two weeks after I was born, at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Dayton, OH, at the hands of Reverend Cletus A. King, at the baptismal font which you see above, I received the greatest blessing possible for a human being: rebirth in the Love which is Creator/Redeemer/Life-giving Breath. Though I, a newborn infant, couldn't even walk, I was set on a journey in that Love which has carried me through 72 years by the power of that Love, and which will culminate in returning to that Love on the unknown day in the future when I take my last human breath.

An article appearing in Julian Jottings, a small publication of "Thoughts on Things Spiritual" which the Order of Julian of Norwich issues to its Affiliates every couple of months, arrived in the mail a few days ago.  The article, entitled "Passages", was written by our dear and venerable Sister Cornelia, OJN: a reflection on the passage in Ezechiel 37, the prophet's experience in the Valley of the Dry Bones. [It'll be posted soon on: www.order of julian.org/home.html.  Go to "iPublications", then click on "Julian Jottings"]  How can one ever fully understand, much less express, what happens at Baptism? As I come to gradually appreciate the reality in my own personal life, it becomes clear that I experience quite vividly what Sister Cornelia calls "exegetical poverty" in speaking about it.  Nevertheless, Sister Cornelia does a pretty good job, and I want to share just a few of her thoughts with you as I invite you to rejoice with me today on this anniversary of my "rebirth".

She says:  "When in the [Ezechiel] story God breathes his Spirit into the bones, a miracle occurs and the bones rise up, fully clothed again in humanity and life.  It is easy to see how extraordinary that is.  But when God's Spirit enters you in baptism silenter than a breath and because you have a body and seem to be already alive, the enormity of the miracle is lost in the prettiness of the symbols.  It is hard to realize that the birth of the Spirit happens so quickly and so silently, to be aware that the bones of the soul have jumped up to meet their God...We are brought completely to life at baptism: by water, chrism, candles, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most Holy Trinity...But the amazingness of baptism may take years to impinge.  To realize that it is an hour struck on the world clock: one more stone knocked from Satan's empire of wickedness and sinful desire; the raising up of one more person possessing heavenly strength of bone that could lead to holiness and the service of righteousness -- one more living breathing person for Love in the mystical Body of Christ..."

According to my baptismal certificate, my godparents were my aunt, Florence Fries, and John Froehle, likely my mother's cousin.  Aside from them and my parents, Robert and Grace Allagree, I don't know who else was present. Baptisms, in those days, were generally silent, private little events done off in some corner of the church on a Sunday afternoon.  That I was "done" within two weeks of being born may or may not have been motivated by the then common Catholic anxiety that a child should be baptized as soon as possible lest something dire happen in the meantime and the child be shuffled off to, as they called it then but never clarified what "it" was, "Limbo".  Whether there was any sort of celebration of the event afterwards is also unknown, although given my family's propensity for "the drink", I would imagine that this occasion was eagerly welcomed as a time to share the happiness!  But, then, none of that matters, really.

By God's grace I've been privileged to walk since then in the power of that Love originally given, to dedicate most of my years to the Church and to share the mutual ministry of the Good News with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. The words of the Book of Common Prayer may differ somewhat from the Rituale Romanum, likely used at my Baptism, but surely sum up what this anniversary is all about:

"Do you believe in God the Father?"

"Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?"

"Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?"

"Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?"

"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"

"Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?"

"Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?"

"Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?"

Yes, yes, yes: I will, with God's help!

    

Strength in Weakness: A Portrait of The Humble Bishop of Haiti

I never cease to be amazed at my lack of awareness and understanding of the rich and humble sanctity, dedication and often groundbreaking ministries of African American Episcopalian pioneers.  James Theodore Holly was, until this week, a name I didn't recognize.  What a refreshing discovery it has been!

In Facts About the Church's Mission in Haiti,  published in New York in 1897, when he was 68, Bishop Holly gives a glimpse of what he'd accomplished there to that point, as well as specific needs for the future.  He writes about this so humbly that you might get the impression that he's referring to another person.  What was even more helpful for me, since I knew nothing about him, was his autobiographical information.

James was born on October 3, 1829, in Washington, D.C., near Georgetown, and received his schooling there until the family moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1844.  His older sister taught him in an "infant school" when he was five.  He notes that when his father, James Overton Holly, was thirteen, in 1799, his grandfather, Reuben Holly, migrated from St. Mary's County, MD to Washington and was one of the laborers on the construction of the U.S. Capitol building.  

James Holly and I share something in common: the fact that both of us were born into and raised in the Roman Catholic Church.  Bishop Holly recalls that his first Bible was a Douay-Rheims version, as was mine, given to him when he was about fifteen by Rev. Felix Varela, pastor of Transfiguration Catholic Church, New York.  He notes that Fr. Varela, a Spaniard, was apparently a relative of Queen Isabella of Spain.  Since James Holly had indicated a interest in ministry, it was only natural that Fr. Varela would want to send James to Rome to study for the priesthood.  I'd be interested to know the motivation for sending him to Rome, since there were any number of U.S. seminaries operative at that time.  My guess would be that, with the existence of slavery in this country for another twenty or so years beyond this time, this was, perhaps, the only option. As it turned out, the very gift of the Douay-Rheims Bible, "full of explanatory notes in the Roman Catholic sense", which Holly assiduously read, "...gradually weaned me away from the unscriptural ways of that church, and when I was in my twenty-second year I withdrew from membership therein..."  He doesn't elaborate on which "unscriptural ways" led to his transition into the Episcopal Church, but I can identify with his choice, having made the same one myself in 1977 for different reasons.

When James Holly was 26 he was ordained deacon by Bishop McCoskry at St. Paul's, Detroit, MI, on June 17, 1855. 

James returned to New York the next month with a letter of recommendation from Bishop McCoskry, which he had requested earlier, to be sent as a missionary to Haiti.  The Foreign Committee of the Episcopal Church commissioned James to visit Haiti and to collect information on the feasibility of establishing a mission there.  He arrived in Port-au-Prince on July 31, 1856, and spent a month gathering data which he presented to the Foreign Committee upon his return to New York in September, 1856.  In the meantime, he was made Rector of St. Luke's, New Haven, CT, where he'd been ordained a priest, January 2, 1856, by Bishop John Williams, then Assistant Bishop of Connecticut.  The Foreign Committee, in the meantime, though it was favorable to Holly's report, didn't find itself immediately able to establish a mission in Haiti.  Five years later the President of Haiti invited the "colored people" of the United States to send a pastor and a group of emigrants to Haiti.  The Bishop of Connecticut concurred with the request, approved James Holly as a missionary to Haiti, and provided commendatory letters to the President of Haiti, since there was no Episcopal/Anglican bishop there.  Holly set sail on May 1, 1861.  He began his ministry immediately by baptizing a child of one of the emigrant families, who had been born during the trip.  The baptism took place at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, "...the President of Haiti and Mrs. Geffrard standing as godfather and godmother of the child..." The President further made a spacious hall available in his private mansion for the celebration of Sunday Eucharist.

Then came a time of testing.  A deadly fever broke out among the colonists, and within six months there were 43 deaths. Holly notes that it was so bad that "...as many as four persons in one day had been committed to their last resting-place..."  Most sadly, Holly's family itself was touched directly.  Having sailed from New Haven with his family of eight, within nine months after their arrival "...only three remained alive, myself and my two little sons, aged respectively three and five years..."  Where people of lesser mettle would have given up, James Holly reflects on his life then with unshakeable faith in the face of adversity:  "...God remembered me in mercy...in eduing my soul with patience under my affliction, and with resignation to His blessed will.  He comforted me with a sense of His goodness;...gave me peace by bringing to my spiritual apprehension that, as the last surviving apostle of Jesus was 'in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ,' on the forlorn isle of Patmos, so, by His Divine Providence, He had brought this tribulation upon me for a similar end in this isle of the Caribbean Sea.  St. John had a mission to fulfil...in writing to churches that had fallen away from their pristine Gospel integrity.  I had come to Haiti to bear a pure Gospel testimony to a nominally Christian people whose knowledge of Christianity had been received from a church which had also fallen away from its original purity..."

James Holly, leaving his two boys in the care of one of the member families, attended the General Convention of 1862, seeking a missionary stipend and funding for a house within the city.  Previously, he and the group had been living on a farm outside the city, where the environment was very unhealthy.  As a result of the devastating plague, most of the remaining emigrants, except for about 20 people, chose to return to the U.S.  In 1863 an American resident there offered a large hall in the city, free of charge, if they would conduct their services there.  Holly and the group, of course, readily accepted.  Having received a stipend through the American Church Missionary Society, he was able to rent a house in the city from which to carry on his ministry.  "From that moment the work went on encouragingly, so that Holy Trinity Church, Port-au-Prince, was organized" on May 25, 1863, and taken into union by the Episcopal Church's General Convention.  

Within three years, a deacon and a priest were ordained, and the Haitian Church Convocation organized.  Three new missions were established.  Within another six years two students, who'd been sent to the Mission House in Philadelphia, returned to Haiti as priests.  A church, rectory, and schoolhouse was erected at Port-au-Prince.  Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe, upon his visitation in 1872, ordained six deacons and five priests, and consecrated the new Port-au-Prince church.  All this within 10 years, and with much hard work and suffering!  Bishop Coxe was the catalyst in promoting the importance of the Haitian missions to the Episcopal Church and the idea that the time was ripe for a Bishop for the missionary jurisdiction.  The General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1874 entered into a covenant with the Haitian Convocation paving the way for this.  James Holly's consummate humility and servanthood is reflected in what he writes next about this:  "...Under this covenant the first Bishop of the church in Haiti was consecrated on the 8th day of the same month [November], in Grace Church, New York City, by Bishop [Benjamin Bosworth] Smith, then presiding Bishop of the church in the United States, assisted by six other Bishops, among whom was the Bishop of Kingston, Jamaica.  Since the conscration of the Bishop for Haiti he has confirmed upwards of 500 candidates, ordained ten deacons, and advanced nine deacons to the priesthood..."

Bishop Holly concludes his small treatise with a simple statement of what is currently needed for the Church in Haiti, and commends them to "American Christian patriots" for generous contributions:  a new parish rectory in Port-au-Prince; the means to reopen and carry on the program of the Primary Normal School; a dispensary and hospital at Port-au-Prince; and a training school for candidates for Holy Orders. 

Today, 112 years after Bishop Holly wrote his small treatise, Haiti has 96 parishes/missions; 83,869 baptized members; 8597 church school pupils.  Each year approximately 1182 children and 917 adults are baptized; 180 marriages are celebrated; and 200 burials performed.  And all because of God's grace of a missionary vocation given to a young man, who, acting on that grace, found strength even in the weakness of his circumstances.  And a "Roman retread" at that! How happy I am that both James Holly and I found our way into the Episcopal Church! 

  

 

Evil - A Recompense for Good?

A passage from the prophet Jeremiah (18:1-11; 18-20) strikes a responsive note because it ends with a bothersome question for us all:  "Is evil a recompense for good?"

You and I couch the question in different words:  

"Why did God cause this (fill in the blank) to happen?"  

"I don't understand it: I pray and pray, and God never answers."

"There's no justice in this world! The rich just get richer and the poor, poorer."

You could say that Jeremiah was a sort of "visual learner".  God had a message for him, but told him to go to potter's studio.  "...there I will let you hear my words."  Jeremiah watches intently as the potter works at his wheel, fashioning a clay vessel.  But he goofs (the potter, that is).  Perhaps he pressed too hard, used too much water on the clay, didn't spin the wheel fast enough; whatever, the pattern he'd set out to make was spoiled.

Jeremiah noticed that the potter didn't become upset and throw the piece of clay angrily against the wall.  Ever so patiently, "he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do..."  It was then, after watching how the potter handled the situation that God conveyed the message which Jeremiah was to proclaim to Israel.

God compares Godself to the potter, with Israel (humankind) being the clay, in God's hand.  If the people are "bad" clay, i.e., they are not as clay should be, God can still choose to fashion them into something useful, to accomplish God's purposes, if the clay will yield to God's expert touch.

If, on the other hand, people who are "good" clay, capable of being fashioned into a vessel of God's choosing, willfully allow themselves to be deficient clay, then even God will not exercise God's artistry.  God will not contradict the laws of nature which are the expression of God's creative goodness and truth.  The logical consequence, despite God's creative hand, will be the creation of a misshapen vessel.  The potter's creative purpose will have been purposely frustrated by the clay.  

"Is evil a recompense for good", therefore?? Does God cause evil in our lives: bad things to happen to good people?? Absolutely not! For God is like a potter, after all, and what is a potter like? Is the message of Jeremiah, using the image of the potter, meant to convey simply that the potter has dominion, that he "calls the shots", that the clay isn't important, that the potter exercises arbitrary control over the vessel's existence?? that he can shape ugliness and deficiency regardless of the quality of his clay?? 

Or does the prophet's message have a much different thrust? Perhaps this:

- that a potter is one whose delight is in creating, in giving things the possibility to be.

- that a potter is careful, precise, patient.

- that a potter puts something of him/herself into what is created.

- that a potter fashions things that are useful, things which benefit and serve others.

"Is evil a recompense for good?"  No.  But to say that doesn't mean that this is a complete answer, or that you and I understand or can ever fully understand the mystery of evil in the world and in our lives.  It isn't a complete answer, but it is a firm and sure answer, nonetheless, based on God's Word, revealed to us in Jesus.

The reality of being human and limited and the inheritors of our first parents' sin is that sooner or later we'll each find ourselves as spoiled vessels in the Potter's hands.  But our faith tells us that God can and does rework us into another vessel, "as it (seems) good to the potter to do."  St. Paul puts it this way:  "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.  We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies."

Costly Faith

If there’s something we might think long and hard about this Lent, it’s the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. He knew the cost. 

Mark wrote his account of the Gospel 40 years or so after Jesus’ death, at a time when hope within the Christian community might have been fading. In perhaps the most difficult passage in all Scripture for us modern believers to understand in the context of the first-century Church (Mk 8:31-38), Mark writes that “[Jesus] said this bluntly...”: The Son of Man, God’s anointed, must suffer many things; be rejected by his community’s civil and religious leaders; and be killed in order to rise again.

Jesus’ followers can’t comprehend this. Peter, who only moments before had acknowledged Jesus as “the Christ”, in the name of all the other apostles, doesn’t want to hear this. He and the others don’t understand the mission. Peter’s idea of the Messiah, and that of his contemporaries, was of a powerful leader who would: 1) overthrow Israel’s enemies with the “shock and awe” of military might; 2) purify worship at the Temple; and 3) make Israel the exemplary People of God: economically, politically, and spiritually. What Jesus was now saying didn’t meet Peter’s or the others’ expectations.

What does it cost to have faith in Jesus and to be his disciple? I suggest at least three things:

1) TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS TO MEASURE PEOPLE AND REALITY BY GOD’S STANDARDS, NOT BY HUMAN STANDARDS.
Mark writes: “But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Out of my sight, Satan (adversary)! You do not have in mind the things of God, but human things.’” Evil is the “human thing” here. The issue is clearly between God’s standards and ours. As modern followers of Jesus, you and I struggle to live our faith in a society and a world which seems intent on honoring just about everything, except the self-sacrificing, self-giving service which Jesus modelled in his life. We, as Peter, presume that God should deal with evil as we do, namely, by not dealing with it. Like Peter and the others, we really don’t like to dwell much on the suffering Jesus, or on the Cross. Much less do we choose to deal with it when it touches our own lives. We’d rather reject it, deny it, run away from it, get it over with as quickly as possible if we must deal with it, even if resurrection is promised. TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS TO MEASURE PEOPLE AND REALITY BY GOD’S STANDARDS, NOT BY HUMAN STANDARDS.

2) TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS TO EXPECT A FATE NO DIFFERENT FROM JESUS’ FATE.
Mark, through Jesus’ words, addresses his hearers who would, by this time, be very familiar with the threat to their movement of the confiscation and destruction of their own property, and of the possibility of experiencing martyrdom because of their beliefs. “If anyone would come after me, you must deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me. For if you want to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose your life for me and for the gospel, you will save it.” To deny myself means that I have to reject all those favored ties which hold me back from committing to Jesus wholeheartedly. Jesus poses two rhetorical questions in the Gospel:  a) “What good is it for a person to gain the whole world, yet forfeit one’s soul (life)?”  b) “What can a person give in exchange for one’s soul (life)?”
Jesus challenges our continual attempts to preserve ourselves and protect our own interests: by securing our lives through trust in wealth and power, by surrounding ourselves with material possessions, by clinging to other people in selfish, possessive, dominating relationships. It’s as though we presume that we can somehow evade death by clinging for dear life to the “good life”, that we can be in control of every aspect of our life. We foolishly run from the sure knowledge that ultimately all those things and people will have to be given up and let go. What is it so worth protecting that makes us so terrified of handing our lives over to Jesus in faith?? Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: “To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us...”
TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS TO EXPECT A FATE NO DIFFERENT FROM JESUS‘ FATE.

3) TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS REMAINING LOYAL TO HIM, WHATEVER THE CHALLENGE TO OUR DISCIPLESHIP.
Jesus‘ warning is uncompromising. Whoever is ashamed of Jesus to the point of denying him is “selling out” before God. Paul, in Romans 8, asks what could possibly justify denying our loving God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” -- trouble?? hardship?? persecution?? famine?? nakedness (shame)?? danger?? the sword (death)?? Is there anything in our experience which could cause us to deny that Man on the Cross?? Nothing “in all creation”, Paul says, could merit our utter devotion as much as the living God who, not sparing even the Son, “gave him up for us all”; nor as much as God’s beloved, only Son, Jesus, “who loved us.”
TO BE A FAITH-FULL DISCIPLE OF JESUS MEANS REMAINING LOYAL TO HIM, WHATEVER THE CHALLENGE TO OUR DISCIPLESHIP.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis during World War II, a truly faithful and courageous disciple of Jesus, has left us this moving testimony in his book The Cost of Discipleship:

“...Jesus Christ must suffer and be rejected. This ‘must’ is inherent in the promise of God -- the Scripture must be fulfilled...Just as Christ is Christ only in virtue of his suffering and rejection, so the disciple is a disciple only in so far as [one] shares [the] Lord’s suffering and rejection and crucifixion...If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering...It is not suffering per se but suffering-and-rejection...for the sake of Christ...The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ and his cross...Discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ...”

Peace

George Bernanos' book The Diary of a Country Priest describes a situation where the main character, a self-effacing but unappreciated priest, helps a woman in her dying hours to surrender to God's mercy.  Reflecting later on the event, the priest says: " 'Be at peace', I told her.  And she knelt to receive this peace.  May she keep it forever.  It will be I that gave it to her.  Oh, miracle, thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands."

Peace is always God's gift.  Peace is healing when God's grace is applied to our wounds.  Isn't it ironic, humbling, that we who are so often not at peace ourselves are invited to be instruments of God's peace, to pursue peace?

The word shalom = peace is so rich in meaning that it defies a one-word definition.  In its Hebrew root it's associated with finishing, completing, perfection: a condition where nothing is lacking.   Biblically, it can be summarized as being the condition where a person is at one with oneself, with God, and with others.

And So...Into the Desert

The Gospel readings of the first and last Sundays after Epiphany and the first Sunday in Lent have a common feature: the testimony of the Holy God that Jesus is "the Beloved" and that God is "well-pleased" with him.  Surely that's a tip-off that this is something extremely important for us to notice; in fact, last Sunday's reading verbalizes the need to "listen to him!"

Jesus, then, is the model, the exemplar upon whose words and actions ours are to be articulated and done.  In addition to Mark's Gospel reading today (1:9-15), the Collect reminds us that the "blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan...", and it asks that God who "know[s] the weaknesses of each of us" -- far better than we even know ourselves -- will come "quickly to help us..." 

Using the text from Matthew's Gospel (Epiphany 1) rather than today's (Lent 1), Sister Wendy Beckett, in a delightful little book (Sister Wendy's Meditations on the Mysteries of Our Faith, Liguori, 2007), comments: "We live in Lent for forty days in memory of the forty days Jesus spent in the desert...Matthew's Gospel is quite explicit: he was led by the Spirit into the desert 'to be tempted'..."   Using the magnificent painting of the Temptation on the Mountain, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, she meditates on temptation, both in Jesus and in us, and the themes of darkness and light, represented in the painting.  Duccio's work was part of his opus magnum, the Maestà, for Siena's cathedral.  Sister Wendy narrates how Jesus is put in an unwanted situation by Satan, and notes that "His face is very somber, and he clutches his cloak to his body as if to defend himself against contamination...", even as we cringe from temptations occasioned by unwholesome wandering thoughts, fantasies, and images of our "monkey-mind" which insert themselves so readily.  She is struck by the contrast Duccio has painted between Satan, the figure of "a moving darkness" and the figure of Christ, "tempted in every way that we are, but without sin", repudiating temptation with a firm gesture of his hand, giving us the strength and resolve to turn away in our own times of testing.  "In the desert, hungry and alone," she says, "Jesus concentrated on his goals: he examined his life and possible future.  We are taken into Lent each year to urge us to do the same..." 

The Lenten desert country into which we're invited once again is a landscape both "fascinating and terrifying”. We instinctively dread taking time to be face to face with ourselves before God, even for a short time like  6 1/2 weeks. Despite our best intentions, we often seek to fill the silences in our lives with diversion, with something to do, with something, as we say, “meaningful”.  But, as an anonymous Swiss monk writes: “...The essence of the desert is the absence of man;...Where man is not, is neither sin nor rumour of the business of the world...” 

We enter the weeks of Lent not to do or to accomplish or to make ourselves become anything; not to “give up” cookies, or chocolate, or lattes, etc.; but something much deeper and more costly: to give up our self-fullness. A young friend in the Order of Julian, Sister Therese, OJN, sent me a wonderful little card a few years ago which reads, “Abandon all hope of fruition.”  The only thing you and I are called to “do” during our desert journey these next few weeks is to get ourselves out of God’s way and to let God do what God wants to do.  Carmelite Sister Ruth Burrows poses this question:
“...For what is the mystical life but God coming to do what we cannot do..?[It] is beyond our power, nothing
we can do can bring us to it, but God is longing to give it to us, to all of us, not to a select few...The prerequisite on our part is an acceptance of poverty, of need, of helplessness; the deep awareness that we need Jesus
our saviour...who is our holiness...”
 

The desert is the place of essentials, of the bottom-line. It is the place where you and I are vulnerable to all our hidden demons and temptations. God bids us to withdraw to this place of spiritual inconvenience, in fact, God woos us to it. It’s the place of the unexpected. God doesn’t tip us off in advance as to what the Lenten desert has in store for us, and no two of us will encounter our desert in exactly the same way.

One thing is sure, however: despite its rigors, the desert will reveal to us, if we allow it, how totally God loves us, how utterly favored, "beloved",  we are by God. At the end of the desert journey there awaits the joy of renewed life, hope, and resurrection. But there is a cost. The anonymous monk quoted above gives us this advice: “...Humble and detached, go into the desert. For God, awaiting you there, you bring nothing worth having, except your entire availability...[God] is calling you to live on friendly terms with [God], to nothing else...You must be content to lose yourself entirely. If you secretly desire to be or to become ‘somebody’, you are doomed to failure. The desert is pitiless; it infallibly rejects all self-seekers...”

In the Prologue of his Rule for monks St. Benedict recommends that they willingly let the divine light into the desert country of their souls, “...and with startled ears” to “listen to what the divine voice is calling out every day...”:  an echo of the desire of our hearts which Psalm 95 voices: “Oh that today we would hearken to your voice!”