A Prayer and Reflection for Good Friday

Words Fail Me…..

The intensity of emotion overwhelms my ability to frame thoughts and find words. 

To speak feels indecent, like chattering about theology beside the bed of a dying person.

The only thing that works for me is the language of prayer.

As I sat in the chapel this morning the following prayer came to me,

“Lord God, grant me the courage to be present, simply present to the suffering of your son today.

As I meditate on his passion, I am afraid and I am overwhelmed, Lord God. Please hold on to me so that I will not turn away and run. Give me the grace to be present to the suffering of your son today.

Lord God, give me the grace to open my heart and mind to Jesus as he absorbs the hate of the world, the rage and fury of the world on the cross. Help me to see how he carries the scorn, betrayal, judgment, anguish, suffering, rejection, prejudice, shame and  violence of the world in his body today.”

As I prayed, a new sensation came to me….

It was like the feeling of a receding tide, sweeping the beach and pulling the sand and stone and driftwood out to sea.  It was as if God was tugging at me, inviting me to be present to my own shadow, the wrong in me, and to let it flow into Jesus as well. 

I recoiled at first. I backed away. I could barely face Jesus on the Cross, how could I see my suffering, my anguish, my hurt and my wrong put on him.  But this was the invitation.  Jesus was carrying away the sin of the world – like a receding tide – and my sin too could be washed away. 

Letting go feels like grief, feels like mourning, feels like dying.

And that is our gift this morning.  To be present to our beloved, tortured, dying  savior who offers himself – as a great receding oceanic tide - that sweeps up and receives the worst of the world, the worst in us, and sets us free. 

What if Death is Not the Enemy?

As we approach Easter more than one preacher is preparing a sermon about God vanquishing the power of sin and death in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Good News according to this highly Pauline trope is that we no longer need to live in fear of death, "death has lost its sting."  Theologically we are to understand that death is a product of sin and not an intended part of God's design for humanity.  Death is a punishment for human disobedience and another indicator of our alienation from harmony with God.  Sermons may go in many directions at this point assuring folks that death is a doorway to an individual after-life with God in heaven, or that freed from a fear of death we may take the risky path of faithfulness and discipleship here in this life.  I believe these are completely legitimate interpretations.

What if death is not the enemy, however?  The theologian David Ford recently introduced me to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who is a diligent smasher of all idols that we humans routinely mistake for God.  According to Levinas, death itself can become another idol to which we assign an ultimate power and a totalizing explanatory power, such as "most human behavior can be explained by fear of death."  Idols, and totalizing (or reductive) thinking is dangerous for at least two reasons: 1.  Our relation with a living God is obscured and 'managed' when we rely on such limiting constructs, and 2. People are dehumanized, defaced and generalized into a mechanistic series of traits and attributes making us 'manageable' objects more than infinitely unique and valuable subjects. 

What if death is just what happens at the end of life and the resurrection is about something else? This is not only a speculative question.  With a rapidly aging population and massive inflation of health care expenditure especially in the last year of life when massive life-saving and sustaining measures are applied for very little result in increased life-span, this is also a very concrete question.  Ironically enough two-thousand years of preaching the Resurrection has done little to effect our willingness to invest heavily in the extension of our mortal life.  Perhaps this is the case because the trope that says, "Death is the Enemy that Resurrection Defeats" has an odd way of re-empowering death as a totalizing concept, an essential 'bad guy' in the narrative that gains power in the constant retelling.  The glory of the victory depends on the estimation of the enemy.

A few weeks ago we read the story of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead and I wondered why did Jesus need to die if we already had this proof that God was stronger than death.  Why not celebrate Easter two weeks earlier!  My conclusion is simply that the resurrection is about something more than the generic defeat of death by life - everlasting, seasonal or otherwise.  Resurrection - to borrow heavily from Rowan Williams - is really more about the vindication of one particular life lived in radical faithfulness- indeed union- with God, that of Jesus the Christ.  That Risen Life is then incorporated in a community with a distinct mission of reconciliation, healing and compassion in the world.

One final implication of a re-appraisal of the theological position of death is to wonder how God the Creator's relationship with death changes as a result of the crucifixion of God the Son.  Much theology attempts to distance the 1st person of the Trinity from the suffering and death of the 2nd person.  Classically some atonement theories imply that God the Father requires the blood of the son to satiate God's thirst for recompense.  My notion is that God the Creator fully participated in the suffering and death of Jesus and that in some way the Godhead now includes the reality of death, not as eternal enemy but as a transformed part of ultimate reality. 

Where the Grapes of Wrath Are Stored: A sermon for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

150 years ago this week the American Civil War began and our Nation entered the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  By the end of the war over 6200,000 had died – a staggering 2% of the U.S. population. – and another 400,000 had been wounded.  At the start of the war 4 million Africans were enslaved in our country – 8% of the total population – and by the end of the war they still had more than a  hundred year struggle for freedom ahead of them.  

The prophet Ezekial took me to a valley of dry bones this week and we walked around.

I could hear the snap, crack and knock of brittle bones under my feet.   I could feel the tension in my body as I took immense care with each step.  I could feel the horror rise in my heart – the desolation and emptiness, the overwhelming loss of precious, distinct human lives.  This valley of bones had many names – Chancellorsville, Antietam, Wilderness, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Vicksburg …

As I walked and walked with the Prophet Ezekiel there was no end to the bones, the bones remained underfoot, a part of our landscape, even up to today.

William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”  I believe that as a nation we are still tripping over the bones of the fratricidal blood-bath that formed us as a people.  The bones that are still underfoot  are called white supremacy and racism, faction and rivalrous self interest, unequal distribution of sacrifice, suffering and opportunity, the equation of human value with class status,  a reflexive violence in act and in rhetoric.  We have still not decided what it means to be a diverse people and it seems to me that we are rapidly losing any sense of obligation to one-another at all, that the spirit of the age is “Every Man for Himself,”  and “Get mine while I can.”

In a season devoted to reflection on forgiveness we need to look hard at the bones that litter our past and our present.  We cannot really enter the process of reconciliation without a reckoning, a sober appraisal.  We avoid it, deny it, skim over it, put a happy face on it all the time.  We can tell it is highly charged and contested territory because blame, guilt, self-pity and fierce defensive anger erupt when we go there.  We like to prematurely and unilaterally declare past wounds healed without any significant effort or sacrifice on our part.  I agree with Dr. James Cone when he says that progress will be made toward racial reconciliation when white Americans take racism and white supremacy seriously as a subject for self-examination.    

I believe we need to put this work at the center of our reflection on reconciliation and forgiveness not to wallow in guilt but because that is where the path of new life in Christ leads.

We need a new spirit in our dry bones.  We need God’s spirit to return us to life.  I hear that spirit speaking in one of our greatest national prophets who literally spoke a word over the dry bones.  I would like to read from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, where I hear the spirit of God speaking….

"Neither party – North or South- expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes God’s aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through God’s appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that God gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

What does it take to move on?  It requires a clear reckoning, a spirit of sacrifice and a spirit of compassion – hearts expanded to meet and include our suffering neighbor as an indispensable part of ourselves.   It takes a spirit I have only ever experienced fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.  Collectively and individually we put on the person-hood of Christ in our  Baptism.  This is good news for us and for the world that need us so badly.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.