Holy Week

Did you ever see a movie or read a book for a second time?   The first time, one wrestles with the novelty, the unknown, the sequence of thought, meaning and actions.  The second time around, there is no need to concentrate on the story line.  One is freer to concentrate on nuances, shades of meaning, subtleties, word plays and other characteristics since the story line is known beforehand.

That is our starting point as we enter into Holy Week.  We know the story’s plot, laid out by the sequence of events reenacted on Passion Sunday, Holy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter.   We know that we enter Jerusalem with exuberance and uplifted spirits, to be followed by the horrifying sequence of events leading to Christ being hung on a tree to die.  And we all know the happy and triumphant outcome that follows in our Lord’s rising three days later.

Time out!  Not so fast! As the Holy Week drama unfolds, we must straddle a gaping hole of death, suffering, and grief, before the blessed joy of Christ’s Resurrection.   

We must be immersed in an I-Max three-dimensional panorama of death and fear. It is beyond disgusting.  There are bones all over, the place reeks of death and putrid blood and body parts; dogs and vultures are feeding on the carcasses lying about. This depressing pit, Golgotha, is filled with countless shrieks of terror, torture and gore.  This is the place where the ruthless Romans torture any rabble-rouser, criminal and the scum of the earth to be nailed to trees to writhe in pain for hours, to be laughed at humiliated and to die in disgrace.  And then to rot!  This is a totally disgusting, scandalous, putrid and gruesome dump.

Good Friday! Death!  I sink to the depths of despair and existential emptiness as I listen to the last words of Christ, and the refutation of his entire ministry. I hear the hammer hitting the head of the nail; the nail that punctures and gores Christ’s tender flesh before reaching the hard wood of the cross to where he will be affixed so as to suffer a most excruciating death.   His last three hours are an eternity.  I am in abject despair.  There is no up or down, past or future, happiness and sadness; just emptiness, listlessness and paralysis.

Oh, if only we could “fast-forward” to Easter and the celebratory joy that we know is awaiting us once we get past this horrific chapter of the Passion narrative.  No can do!  We must remain for a while steeped in the deepest depths of death, scandal, terror and suffering first, horrifying beyond all comprehension.

I see, by extension, my own life—my past, present and future—conforming to the story line of Christ’s life with its ups and downs, joys and despair.  Death, mine and yours included, is the only looming certainty and this is what I am fixating on right now.   

Following this story line—yours, mine and that of Jesus Christ—provides the framework for being assured that whatever the roadmap of our lives look like, the end destination—a.k.a. death—will transition us to our sacred eternal home.   Like Christ, we will follow along, after death, just as we followed his footsteps during life.

In this post-Enlightenment world where “reality” needs to be verified and proven, the joy and reassurance that death is not the definitive last word to the story line—the Resurrection—is taken on faith.  Faith in the life hereafter is the climax and outcome of our jointly-shared the story line.  It is the Christian hope.  How amazing is that?

* * *

Recently, I had the honor to serve the Chalice to a parishioner in my church.  She was a week away from death’s door.  She knew it; cancer allows for this understanding to sink in.  Was she terrified?   She must have been as I am certain I will be when my time comes.  But, here is the thing.  When taking the Chalice to her lips, our eyes met.  Through the ravages of cancer and excruciating pain, her eyes were dancing with joy and celebration of the Eucharist.  Her spiritual bags were already packed for the journey ahead.  I could very palpably FEEL it.

This lovely parishioner passed away a week later.  Very saddened, I attended her memorial service. Her death was a painful loss; nothing takes the sting out of death.  Not even the comfort of knowing that death transitions to triumph and eternal peace. 

However, her joyfully-dancing eyes that last week, as she drank Christ’s sustaining Blood, testifies to the fact that she knew where she was going, prepared emotionally and spiritually.  And I take comfort having experienced and shared this insightful moment that reassures me she is now in a place where death is conquered and nothing worse can possibly happen to her, or any of us for that matter.   She is blessedly safe.

* * *

Next year, I will have a different experience and “take” of Holy Week.  But I know it will be under the same story line of our Christian faith and, by extension, our lives.   

Simply amazing as I gaze at that horrid Cross and the vacuous emptiness that surrounds it. 

James A Harrison

Progessive Lenten Wednesday Retreats

The progressive Lenten retreats were wonderful. They concluded last night (March 29th) with a deeply moving Taizé service led by Brian, Loren, Ann, and Emily.

Photos by the Rev. Martha Hubbard.

Staring difficulties in the eye

Back in the mid 1990’s singer, songwriter Alanis Morissette had a hit song titled Thank U. It’s a ballad in which she thanks the difficult situations and moments of life.  She sings:

thank you india

thank you terror

thank you disillusionment

thank you frailty

thank you consequene

thank you, thank you silence

I have been thinking of that song lately as I have walked alongside parishioners, friends and family members who are facing situations that range from deeply disappointing to downright terrifying.  I think you know what I mean.  Maybe you are out of work with no idea where your next job will come from, or in the midst of a health crisis that is ravaging your body, mind or spirit or that of someone you love.  Maybe something you have always enjoyed doing, that gave your life meaning, is suddenly feeling hollow, or a relationship you thought was for life has ended.  Maybe your children have grown up and moved on into their own lives and you have to retool your definition of parenting. Maybe someone you loved has died.  The variety of changes and chances of life are infinite, but we all go through them along our path.

My kneejerk reaction as a pastor is to try to sooth and comfort those in the midst of these changes and chances.  But lately my own personal changes and chances have led me to think comfort is not all that is needed.  Having someone to comfort us in the hard times is good, but not enough - having someone to stand with us while we stare the difficulties of life in the eye – that it seems to me is grace embodied.

Writer Ekhardt Tolle has said, “What we embrace we can move beyond; what we fight we are stuck with.” That is what I hear Alanis Morissette doing in her song – embracing the difficult and thanking it for the new life it possesses inside it.  Of course she is doing this from hindsight – and it’s often easier to say thank you to the difficult when looking back than when we find ourselves in the midst of it.   In the midst of it we need community standing with us surrounding us as we take the time to get our bearings so we can move forward again.  I have witnessed that is the sort of community we find in our Lower Merrimack Episcopal Churches.

In the second part of the chorus to her song, Alanis Morissette affirms the paradoxical power inherent in the process of facing, accepting and thanking the difficult:

The moment I let go of it was the moment

I got more than I could handle

The moment I jumped off of it

Was the moment I touched down

As he faced the difficult final days of his life, Jesus stared the difficult in the eye, and with bloody sweat was able to discern God’s purpose in it. This allowed him to embrace it and move through it so that the abundant new life of God’s full reign could be unleashed in the world.  As this story enfolds us again may we find strength and courage for our own struggles, and plenty left to share with the person in the pew next to us.

Blessings,

Martha Hubbard+

Good Choices

My grandson is rather loquacious.  Like all the kids in Lake Woebegone, he’s above average.  Way above.  This is his grandmother talking!  He’s three, but converses above expectations, which often makes me have to swallow a laugh.  Recently, as he was being reprimanded for trying something new but not sanctioned, whatever it was, he responded, “But Mommy, I just made a bad choice.”

Clearly, he had heard that language a lot and I was immediately glad my kids talk to their kids in those terms and teach them to make better choices.   So much of life is about making choices.  And the public examples of poor choices are legion these days.   The other day the principal of a school in Jacksonville, Florida made the decision to fire a teacher, who returned to the school later with a handgun and killed her.  How many bad choices in the life of that teacher led up to his tragic choice to end the life of another human being? 

In everything we do we have choices.  We don’t always make the best ones, but part of being a mature adult is to keep trying to make better ones.  Better ones consider other people and the impact of our choices on them.  They consider the common good.  God grant that there will come a time when good life choices, for ourselves and for the common good, cease to stand out because they’re so unusual.

The members of the community of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, SSJE, resident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now offer a daily word for meditation.  “Brother, Give us a Word” can be found each day on the brothers’ website at http://ssje.org/word/ 

Recently the word was “choice” and the entry was this:

“The life which you, and we and Jesus chose at our baptisms is a life where day by day we must choose to love, and not to hate, to be friends and not enemies, to forgive and not to hold grudges, to heal and help and hold and not to injure, wound and scar. It is the choice to live such a life that eventually cost Jesus his own.”

Loving choices are not always what the world expects of us or encourages in us, but they are what the world needs.  Jesus lived that we might know a better way, a selfless way of being together.  It is sometimes a costly way to live but it’s also the way to fulfillment and joy.

Blessings,

Susan Russell+

Squeamishness and Holiness

What makes you squeamish? What grosses you out? What disgusts you so much it leaves you without words?

Jane (see the previous post) wasn't the only one to be hit by a nasty virus recently. It happened to me. It happened fast. At the time I was in church walking in a solemn procession being led by Bishop Gayle chanting the Great Litany. I remember thinking to myself, "oh no, why this long white robe? why not a black cassock today? easier to clean." I was getting ready to be grossed out by my own "gastrointestinal malfunction."

Before long all my concerns about disgust were forgotten. If I had any thoughts at all, they were along the lines of "Lord, have mercy." When the disease was over, my disgust was washed away, replaced with relief and gratitude.

Last summer in worship we read the account of the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah. You may recall they were told by the King of Egypt to murder all the Hebrew boys at birth. The words of Exodus (1: 17-21 NRSV) continue:

"But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families."

Those two tough women harnessed the king's sense of disgust at another bodily function and turned it to a holy and life-giving purpose. Can't we imagine them saying, "O King, let us tell you how the Hebrew women come to be so strong at childbirth?" We can imaging the King getting all squeamish, clapping his hands over his ears, and saying, "never mind, it's OK, forget it, I don't want to hear it, get out of here!"

My point is this: squeamishness (mine and Pharoah's) is strong and leaves us speechless. Many disputes in our churches and our culture are aggravated because we're squeamish. The priest and the Levite were grossed out by the half-naked, half-dead mugging victim on the road to Jerusalem. They didn't just ignore him, they stayed as far away from him as they could. They didn't want to be contaminated. We all do things like they did. We treat strangers differently from people we recognize. We stay away from food we're not used to. We recoil from signs of our mortality (like my intestinal malfunctions and the messiness of birth).

Shiphrah and Puah turned this squeamishness upside down and made it life giving. So does Jesus, in the Holy Eucharist. He radically welcomes all his disciples, even the one who would betray him. He holds up the signs of his own mortality, his body and blood, and invites us to eat them! In the Eucharist Jesus directly confronts our squeamishness, and changes it into holiness.

And, by teaching us to embrace and own all our squeamishness, he prepares us to do the messy and hard work of building up the realm of God.

(I'm grateful to Richard Beck for his book Unclean and his blog Experimental Theology.)

Peace and blessings,

Ollie Jones+