Vigil with the Word: Year C, Second Sunday in Lent

It's not a mother hen, but its close enough!
A.Kumm-Hanson, NYC, 2014

The texts for the Second Sunday in Lent are:

Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35


I have chosen to focus my commentary this week on the Gospel text.

Luke 13:31-35

 At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’

Most of the texts during the season of Lent are those leading up to the events of the passion in Jerusalem. Jesus seems to be exasperated in this text.  He is busy healing people and casting out demons and restoring people to life, and the Pharisees are running him out of town. He knows that he is on the way to Jerusalem, he knows what awaits him there, his followers, or the people of God at large, do not yet know. In this text, Jesus is lamenting the willfulness of the people of Jerusalem. A community that “kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” A community who cannot hear hard truths and lashes out in anger. Jesus states that he wants to “gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” and that the community at Jerusalem is still unwilling to be gathered.

I love this imagery.  A mother hen, feathers puffed up and wings spread over a flock of chicks, is delightful. It is nurturing, it is a promise of warmth and protection. It is a sort of promise of “I will bear with you through hard things, through hearing the hard truth about the world and yourselves, and I will bear with you until the end of days.”

And yet, the people of Jerusalem rebel from this promise of care.  Because of the pain of acknowledging the reality of death, brokenness and sin, is far too great, they would rather “kill the messenger.”  We are really no different when we hear some piece of news that reminds us of our mortality.  The most human of responses is to deny, out of self-preservation, news about our death. 

I have been seeing a ton of people lately who have been admitted onto hospice services just hours or days before their death. Who themselves struggle to come to terms with death, and whose families vehemently deny the inevitable process of aging and death and broker prayer deals with God. I also see families in extreme suffering in the hospital, whose loved ones have exhausted every possible avenue of modern medicine in an effort to stave off death, and who bargain with God to stop this mortal inevitability. These kinds of deaths are the most difficult to bear witness to, and they break my heart.

I wonder how living, aging, and dying might change if we nestled into the bosom of a mother-hen God who nurtures us and tends us as the world rages around. We cannot deny that our bodies will fail us, some due to trauma or cancer, some due to age, but that death is not the end, but merely a stop on the way.

Vigil with the Word, Year C, First Sunday in Lent

The texts for the first Sunday in Lent are as follows:

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

I have chosen to focus my commentary on the Gospel text from Luke and the epistle text from Romans.

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” ’

 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’

 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,
“He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, 
and
“On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” ’ 
Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Romans 10:8b-13

But what does it say?
‘The word is near you,
on your lips and in your heart’
(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

I find these two texts put into conversation with one another to be particularly interesting. In the Gospel text, Jesus is in the wilderness.  He is being tempted by what the text calls the devil.  I do not believe in the personification of evil, but that is a discussion for another time.  The important takeaway for me from this text is that Jesus is repeatedly tempted by a force outside himself to do something to better his immediate circumstances of suffering (40 days in the wilderness). Jesus’ final comment to his adversary is, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

I find myself frequently wanting to put God to the test.  To say, “I need you to do something to save this patient or alleviate this child’s suffering or show up and do a miracle so that I can believe in you.”  And I am not the only one who does this. Many of my patients suffer crises of faith as they pray fervently for healing and healing does not come. I have done nearly all the theological gymnastics that I can stomach about this issue.  I have tried to be okay with things such as “healing doesn’t come in this life sometimes” or “We are just not seeing the bigger picture and God’s plan” or so on. And I have yet to be satisfied.  What I have settled on is that I just do not know.  I do not have an answer, because sometimes there are not answers.  I am not Jesus, and neither are any of my patients—to the best of my knowledge—so I probably would not be able to resist the temptation of doing something to alleviate suffering in my immediate circumstances.

This Gospel text warns against putting God to the test, but the text from Romans says, “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” So how are my patients who cry out for salvation from their pain and suffering supposed to reconcile these texts? 

I don’t have an answer.  But as I told one of my patients the other day, the only thing that I am 100% sure about is that God knows what it is to suffer because of the cross, and because of that, they are never alone when they suffer. Is it okay to “put God to the test” to alleviate suffering or intractable pain?  Is it acceptable to pray for very specific things (safety in surgery, a brain bleed to be healed, and so on) or is that putting God to the test? Furthermore, what does it mean to be saved?  Is it merely an existential, far off, sort of idea? Like you shall be saved from this life…eventually. But there is a lot of pain you have to endure first. Or is salvation more immediate? Saying that you will be saved and have eternal life is absolutely ridiculous to someone who is enduring the excruciating pain of cancer or trauma from a hospital bed.

I am not willing to settle on any quick and easy answers nor am I willing to preach them to others.  It is not as simple as advising “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” or offering the platitude “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Maybe the only comfort is that God knows what it is to suffer and even Jesus called out to God from the cross.  In dying, suffering, and pain, we are not alone.

Vigil with the Word, Ash Wednesday, Year C

I have always resonated with the season of Lent and in particular, Ash Wednesday which starts this season of the Church Year.  The season of Lent is sometimes understood to be penitential, and some traditions understand Lent to be a time of giving things up in order to draw closer to Christ through what I call “small scale suffering.” Lent is also understood to be a time of contemplation, and historically, has been a time of preparation for baptism. For me, and my tradition, Lutheran Christians, it is a time of drawing closer to God in preparation for bearing witness to Christ’s death on a cross and what that act means for us.  The crucifixion is the vanquishing of the finality of death, but also represents the passage from death into life. You cannot skip the suffering.

Personally, I resonate with Ash Wednesday because we are given the opportunity to name, without qualification, that we are mortal.  That at the end of this life lies death. That no matter how we try or what we do, life ends the same for all of us.  That when we are marked with ashes on our forehead and our preacher proclaims, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.”

It’s the one day in the church year where Christians slow down enough to notice the ever forward movement towards death that begins at our birth. Where so many other people get to witness what I witness every single day in the chaplain trade…that death is inescapable.

It’s hard to see this as good news.

That no matter what you do or where you go or how many life-prolonging procedures you might undergo, you too will die. Just like everyone else.  Exceptionalism is a farce when it comes to death. There is often a lot of frenetic activity up until the moment a patient or family recognizes that death is inevitable.  Then, time seems to open up and expand and be intense and emotional, in a way that happens at no other time. Its a Kairos time instead of a Chronos time. There is freedom when we look death into the face. 

Ash Wednesday represents freedom to me.  Freedom from the burden of fighting mortality. Freedom to say boldly, “I cannot save myself.”

The Gospel text for this day, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, seems to call out all those practices, such as almsgiving, fasting, and so on, that would make you publicly appear to draw closer to God. Jesus uses the word “beware” in this text.  Because activities will not bring you rewards or everlasting life or comfort.  You cannot orchestrate your own salvation through the things that you do. The only thing you have to do is the most difficult there is, which is to surrender. 

And Ash Wednesday is a profound surrender.  Dwell deep in the fact that you are mortal…you are dust….and to dust….you shall return.

Lent is not about spiritual self-improvement…a sermon on Mark 1:9-15

Credit to Angie van Broekhuizen

Mark 1:9-15

Grace, peace and mercy are yours from the Triune God.  Amen

It’s the first Sunday in Lent. Lent has an undeserved reputation as a season of penance.  If popular culture knows anything about Lent, it is generally limited to “giving things up” such as facebook or chocolate or red meat.  The popular theory about why we crazy Christians give things up for these forty days is that in some way, our menial “suffering” without our morning coffee, is supposed to bring us closer to Christ and his suffering.  Our discomfort is supposed to make us draw closer to God.  A time of attempting to atone for our inescapable humanness.

One year I tried to give up swearing for Lent, it lasted about 6 hours.  I also tried giving up refined sugar, but I found that chocolate has a much louder call to me than the call of obedience to self-denial. Coffee brings me far too much joy to willingly excise it from my life and while I probably shouldn’t spend so much time on social media, I am not willing to give it up either because it is the way I connect with many friends around the globe. About six years ago I dreamed up the brilliant idea of adding something positive to my life during Lent, so that I would become more spiritual or something.  I would spend time doing contemplative prayer or doing yoga or volunteering. I thought I was being more evolved by avoiding the concept of self-denial and trying to embark on some spiritual self-improvement program. My best attempts at self-improvement failed too.  I fall asleep during contemplative prayer, I often start laughing uncontrollably during yoga, and finding time to volunteer regularly with an organization is not as easy as you would think. All I concluded is that I failed at both abstaining from things that I chose to designate as unhelpful and failed at trying to add things to my life that were positive and life-giving. Because truthfully, I am not good at running my own life or drawing closer to God.

It’s kind of unfortunate that the Gospel text for the first Sunday in Lent is about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  It’s unfortunate that it’s so easy to make a parallel between Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the forty days of Lent. And it’s really unfortunate that Mark’s Gospel is so brief and lacks the clear commentary of Matthew, the prose of Luke, and the poetry of John’s Gospel. It makes it really tempting for us to want to fill in the details.  It is tempting for us to want to cast ourselves in the role of Jesus.  To see ourselves as wandering through a Lenten wilderness filled with the overwhelming temptations of refined sugar, red meat, and social media. We try to substitute more life-affirming practices that will help stave off the wilderness of loneliness, aging, despair and even death, so that we can emerge triumphant from the wilderness. But in this understanding of the text, and of Lent itself, we are succumbing to the greatest temptation of all, to think that God is not present and that we are alone in this crazy world.

Wilderness in scripture is the place where people just like you and me meet God.  Abraham met God on the mountaintop with Isaac, Moses met God on Mt Sinai, and Jacob wrestled with God alongside a river.  The wilderness genre in scripture tends to follow a particular script: a person goes into the wilderness, they encounter some sort of trial, they have a conversation with God, then they emerge triumphant. With that in mind, this short text from Mark is particularly troubling to us.  Mark’s Gospel doesn’t give us any description of what happens to Jesus in the Wilderness. We only know that Jesus ultimately makes it out because he came to Galilee to continue John the Baptist’s message of repentance after John’s arrest. I am not sure about you, but I’d sure like some dialogue between Jesus and his heavenly father, some sort of spiritual reinforcement.  But we don’t get that. Mark’s short description of Jesus’ time in the wilderness sounds pretty terrible.

It took me about five times of reading through this text and wondering where God was to make the connection between Mark’s description of Jesus’ baptism, in which God’s voice from heaven proclaims, “You are my son” and the fact that the son of God, Jesus, was actually God taking on flesh, living and breathing, and entering into the wilderness.  So if you also had questions about this text, you are in good company. This reading from Mark’s Gospel is not about putting ourselves in the role of Jesus and wondering how we would respond when and if Satan tempts us.  It is about God entering into the darkest places of this world and conquering evil.  It is about the message of, “it has been fulfilled.  It is done.  It is finished.” 

 The temptation to think that we can go it alone without God is far more insidious than a sugar craving that we think we can conquer for 40 days, and then celebrate our self-control by eating a three pound chocolate rabbit on Easter morning. On Ash Wednesday, we were reminded of our mortality, our bondage to sin and self, and our brokenness.  We confessed our deep need for God’s mercy. We were finally given space to admit to who we are, without pretense, without the façade that we so carefully construct to pretend that we are okay.  The season of Lent reminds us of our inescapable humanness.  The truth of Lent devastates our sense of self-sufficiency, our sense of holding it all together, and our sense of saving ourselves. The Gospel is the worst good news ever, because it WILL kill you.  Or at least the carefully constructed image of you that is presented to the world.

We seem almost hardwired to resist God’s presence in our lives. I generally spend time praying when things are going really bad, and tend to attribute the calm and content moments of my life to my own efforts. I am more likely to get mad at God for God’s silence in times of grief and injustice than to give thanks to God when I experience grace and renewal and forgiveness. I’ve spent most of my life trying to prove God’s very existence beyond a shred of doubt, and lacking a confirmation letter delivered by an angelic messenger, it’s pretty easy to default to doubting God’s existence. In the course of all of this self-justification, it is really easy to miss that God is already here.  All of this is what it means to be in sin. Sin is not the things that we do or fail to do, but our self-inflicted separation from God. The season of Lent is about God loving us so much that God would send Jesus to live and die among us for our sake.  Lent is a time of drawing closer to God, because God is already here. It is NOT about our attempting to earn our salvation in time for Easter, through penance and self-discipline.

Lent is kind of hopeful for me. Hope and Lent are not generally two words that go together, so bear with me. I don’t want a God that lives in a palace on a cloud and has never walked among us, because there is no way that I can believe that God is real, and would probably be kind of a jerk.  Just as we are reminded of our own humanness during the season of Lent, we are reminded of God’s taking on flesh and being human, and ultimately doing the most human thing of all, dying. It’s really the most undignified kind of exit for a God who chose to enter the world to save it.  But this is good news, because I need to know that God knows what it means to be human.  I need to know that God knows what it is to suffer. Because it is only then that I can believe that God continues to show up in my own suffering and in the suffering of this world. That is the hope of Lent. Lent is about God entering into the darkest places of this world for our sake, and firmly saying, “Sin, death, and evil have no dominion over me. You are my beloved, and with you I am well-pleased.

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