Lent 1: Temptations

View of Colorado Blvd, A. Hanson 2011

This week's discipline asked us to reflect upon what temptations that rule us and make us turn away from those in need.

The picture in this post was from my Colorado Blvd apartment building.  Just a few blocks to the north of my apartment was the intersection of Colorado and Colfax.  There was always someone on that corner with a sign asking for money. 

Even for all the years that I worked in homeless services, I still turned away from these signs and did not meet the eyes of those asking for money while flying cardboard signs.  Part of this was evolved street smarts from living in a city, part of it was self-interest, part of it is undoubtedly judging those people who are holding the signs, but most of it was mortification and pain that I just felt overwhelmed by the problems of poverty and homelessness. I was closer to this than most people, I worked at a homeless shelter, I did case management, I worked in a food bank, I had friendships with people who were homeless.  Yet I still had that lump in my throat that was hard to work around.  

There is an attitude among many people that those men and women who hold the signs are only using the money to buy drugs and alcohol.  Which is probably partially true and I don't deny that.  My reluctance to look these people in the eye and turn away from their need is a temptation to stay ignorant about their humanity.  And that cuts me to the bone. It means that anyone could end up homeless and lose their dignity.  

Dear Lord, in this season of Lent, please break our hardened hearts that we might more fully love others as you love them.  Amen. 

Ash Wednesday

The entire city of St Peter is currently engaged in a food drive during the month of March.  For Ash Wednesday, we are asked to reflect upon the basic needs of our community and how we might participate in meeting those needs. Hunger is an insidious beast.  When I lived in the inner city, it was relatively easy to see hunger.  It was in the face of the person standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Broadway.  It was in the faces of the people lined up outside the Denver Rescue Mission.  Here, in a small town, that is relatively well-off, hunger is harder to see.  But it still exists.  Because we have a busy food pantry just down the street from my house. So I am participating in this city-wide food drive by bringing canned goods to church, donating a few extra dollars to the campaign every time I shop at the grocery store, and encouraging others to do the same.

Lent 2014

Illuminating the path to the cross…a sermon on the transfiguration, Matthew 17:1-9

A.Hanson, Minnesota 2014

Matthew 17:1-9

Grace, peace and mercy are yours from God who is the light of the world.  Amen

Sometimes I like to imagine bible stories acted out on a stage.  I imagine the backdrops, the scenery, the actors, the scripts. And I think that the Transfiguration story falls more within the realm of bizarre performance art or something like Cirque du Soleil than anything else.  There are a lot of things happening with bright light and clouds and booming voices and ascents and descents of mountains. Let us set the scene…

            Just before we catch up with Jesus and the disciples in today’s Gospel, we have the group walking through the desert.  Peter has just declared that Jesus is the Messiah, but Jesus has sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone.  I imagine that the disciples are eagerly trotting after Jesus, attempting to take in as much as they can.  One day as they break from their long hours of walking, Jesus begins to teach his disciples that he will have to undergo suffering and die before being resurrected. Peter, whose eagerness often gets in the way of his listening, says, “Lord, this must never happen to you!”  Peter knows that Jesus is the Messiah, and so cannot fathom why he wouldn’t just destroy his enemies and take control of things. The normally gentle Jesus snaps at Peter saying, “Get behind me Satan.  You are setting your mind on human things, not divine things.”  It is six days after this dramatic revelation that we find Jesus and three of his disciples on top of a mountain.

            Jesus is lit up from within with a brilliant, painful white light. Transfiguration means to change in form or substance, particularly in a spiritual sense.  When the disciples get their bearings, they see Moses and Elijah there with Jesus.  The three of them are sitting around having a conversation like this is the most normal thing in the world.  Somehow the linear timeline of life on earth has gotten all jumbled together, and past, present, and future are in a glorious mess on top of this mountain. Peter recognizes that something pretty exceptional is taking place, and has the most human response of all, a desire to box up the entire experience and keep it contained there on top of the mountain. He offers to build tabernacles, or little structures, for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah to live.  As Peter blathers on, a huge cloud rolls in.  Imagine something like the thunderheads that roll over the prairie with a summer storm, with cloud-to-cloud lightning, and this massive cloud surrounds the disciples.  A voice rumbles from within it saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased.  Listen to him!”  The disciples shudder in fear and fall to the ground.  The cloud rumbles away, and Jesus is left standing over his three disciples who lay in the dirt.  He gently touches them, saying, “Get up.  Do not be afraid.  Let us go down the mountain.  There is work to do.”

            This is the last Sunday before Lent begins.  It is not a coincidence that Lent is marked on either end with mountaintop experiences.  Strange things happen on top of mountains in the Bible.  Encounters with the divine. And this story is no exception. God shows up to make the definitive statement about who Jesus is, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased.” Transfiguration is the point where Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem and what awaits him there. The light from the transfiguration is illuminating his path all the way to the cross.  Because as you know, Lent ends on top of a mountain as well.  Golgotha, the mountain with the cross.  

            The transfiguration story is a pivotal point in the life and work of Jesus.   He has been definitively claimed by God for the salvation of the whole world.  But this is a new thing.  This is a terrifying thing.  It does not make one bit of sense to the disciples. It doesn’t make one bit of sense to us. But in a way, isn’t this kind of what it is all about? Since when has anything that the God of heaven and earth has done in Christ Jesus made sense? The transfiguration is about us seeing, in searing brilliant light, the sort of God that we have, not the one that we wish that we had. It is about seeing the beauty in the absurd.  It is the crazy revelation that God came to earth fully human and fully divine to keep company with all of us sinners and loves us so much as to die on a cross for our sake.

            But God also knows that we, like the disciples, fall down in fear and shield our eyes from this truth carved out in brilliant relief from the bright light of Christ.  The most hopeful part of this Gospel story for me is Jesus reaching out to the disciples in their fear, actually physically touching them, and saying, “Do not be afraid.”  We too are so very often afraid.  Uncertainty threatens to devour us.  Financial insecurity and job loss..  Aging parents.  Illness. The creeping darkness of depression in a winter that never ends.   War and violence around the world.  

The disciples are wrestling with what it means that their Lord will suffer and die and the crippling fear of things to come that they cannot understand.  As we enter into the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday, we too dwell in fear with mysteries that we cannot understand.  But God reaches out to us again and again and again and again through the Word, through bread and wine, through the waters of baptism, and through one another, touches us, and says, “Do not be afraid.” 

            Let us pray:

Dear God, you come to us in mystery and in ways we cannot understand.  Bear with us and continue to make yourself known when it seems like you are far away from us in our fear. Amen.

A sermon on reconciliation: Matthew 5:21-37

A. Hanson France, 2009

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from God who is the Light of the World.  Amen.

Today’s Gospel text is one of those readings when you are not entirely convinced that you want to respond, “Thanks be to God” or “Praise to you, O Christ” when it is over.  This portion of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is really painful to hear, so let’s break it down and put it into context. Throughout his Gospel, Matthew is making the claim that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah.   That Jesus is the fulfillment of all the prophecies from the Hebrew scriptures.  The Sermon on the Mount is deliberately intended to be a parallel to Moses teaching the people from Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus. Just as Moses taught the Ten Commandments, we have Jesus doing the same thing. Jesus is not issuing new laws, but rather engaging in the Jewish tradition of faithfully wrestling with the laws and continuing to apply them to ever-evolving situations. The law was never intended to be a static prescription for right and wrong.

Today’s Gospel reading is just sixteen verses out of the Sermon on the Mount, which spans three full chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and is actually 111 verses.  I counted. We do a great disservice to this text if we separate it from what comes immediately before it, the Beatitudes and the proclamation that we are the Salt of the Earth and Light of the World, and what comes immediately after it, a command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount we hear the many ways that we are blessed by God and interwoven with all of the directives on the law throughout this sermon, Jesus is saying that being in relationship with God also means being in relationship with others. We are called upon to love God and love our neighbors.

When we hear this text, we are immediately drawn to the loaded words, “adultery” and “divorce” and the fierce word, “murder”.  This text is going to hit all of us deeply in one way or another, so it is worth naming that right now.  These words of Jesus sting, because they hit us right in our broken hearts. I think there are two major mistakes that can happen when reading a text like this: first, to make it a simple morality lesson.  This interpretation might go something like this:  “Well, Jesus said that divorce is prohibited, so you simply must stay in a relationship at any cost, because to marry again or enter into another relationship after divorce would mean that you are committing adultery.  And we can see what happens to adulterers.”  This leads to profound unhappiness in a relationship at best, and at the worst, can create an environment that perpetuates abuse and effectively closes off escape routes for those who experience abuse. It puts up a barrier between the “righteous people” (which is where we would like to see ourselves) and “those other people” (those who are not quite as righteous as we think that we are). 

Another mistake that is just as damaging, although more subtle, would be to read this text as a history lesson. A directive that applies to a different people at a different time, and could not possibly have anything to say to us now.  This interpretation could go something like this, “Jesus lived in a patriarchal society.  Women had no way of providing for themselves and needed to be cared for by men, so divorce would cause a woman to become destitute.  And Jesus didn’t want that, so he decided to prohibit divorce.  But since women are perfectly capable of providing for themselves now, we can just ignore what Jesus is saying.”  If we dismiss the text as an ancient legal prescription for how to live, we do not have to hear how it speaks to our lives now.

In both of these mistaken interpretations, the text is used to create a barrier between us and our neighbors. And this is exactly what Jesus is commanding us NOT to do.

Human nature doesn’t really change all that much over the generations.  The Ten Commandments were given to the people of God so that they might be in right relationship with God and with one another.  But mere hours after Moses received the Ten Commandments the people were worshipping a golden calf and killing each other over who is holiest and closest to God. Fast forward many generations, and those gathered around Jesus at the sermon on the mount are still fighting with one other, hurting each other, even on their way to the temple. In their efforts to be righteous in the eyes of God, they are neglecting their relationships with one another. Jesus is calling out those people who are on their way to enhance their personal relationship with God, yet all the while ignoring their broken relationships with others.  Jesus is making the bold claim that it is not possible to love God without loving your neighbor. And how often do we do this too? From the little things…fighting with our families in the car on the way to church, but pretending like nothing happened as soon as we walk into the sanctuary, to the much larger things…holding onto a grudge for decades that poisons our relationships with all those around us.

In today’s Gospel text, Jesus is not providing a to-do list for how to be a better person.  That is not what this is about. Jesus is talking about what it means to live abundantly in the light of God. The spirit of the law given to Moses and preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount was never about “do this… but don’t do this and then you’ll be saved”, a how-to plan for salvation if you will, it was about how to live now in a broken world that will one day be redeemed and made new by a loving and gracious God.  It is about reconciliation with one another in the broken present.

But that is hard and scary and sometimes downright impossible.  To reconcile with someone means to own your part of what went wrong. It means to be vulnerable and open yourself up to being hurt.  It feels better to hang onto what we perceive to be our righteous indignation.  Because anger can be useful for us.  It can inspire action. However, it can also be destructive. There is a saying in twelve step recovery programs, “holding onto anger and resentments is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”  And there is incredible truth in this for all of us, not just alcoholics and addicts.  Anger just creates a steel box around our hearts that prevents us from loving fully and drastically reduces the quality of our lives. This is not who we were created to be.

All of the words that Jesus says about divorce and adultery and bearing false witness, otherwise known as lying, all come down to looking at the ways that we deeply hurt each other and the ways that we continue to be hurt by others. This command of reconciliation is NOT about never getting angry or impatient ever again or taking the abuse of others in the name of Christian piety, it is about God breaking in to our lives, and loving us so completely that we are able to see Christ in the other.  God gave his own heart to us in the person of Jesus Christ, knowing that it would be broken, yet did it anyway. God’s heart is not clenched in anger against us. This is about God doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves, helping us to forgive those who hurt us, make us angry, and God loving us back into wholeness.  And God is going to keep on doing that regardless of how we feel about it. This is the true freedom of the Gospel.

            This reconciliation is not dependent on us deciding to make it happen.  When Christ tells us all the ways that we are blessed in the beatitudes, and that we are salt of the earth and light of the world, he is saying, you are mine.  You already belong to me.  I live in you.  I know that it’s not always easy to love one another and you are going to stumble along the way, but always remember, I have claimed you and I will give you all that you need.  You are reconciled to God in Christ, no matter what you have done or failed to do, you are saved.  And that’s pretty great news.  Thanks be to God!