FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, you teach us that without love, our actions gain nothing. Pour into our hearts your most excellent gift of love, that, made alive by your Spirit, we may know goodness and peace, through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35.

Anyone familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures knows that the commandment to love is not new. It is a central tenant of the Torah. Leviticus 19:18. Moreover, as illustrated in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, the commandment applies as much to the stranger, the foreigner and the outsider as it does among God’s chosen people. Leviticus 19:33-34. Such love is not to be construed as mere sentiment or as some unachievable ideal. It is central to human thriving. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning observes, “[w]e cannot live, except thus mutually [w]e alternate.” The commandment to love is “new” only in the sense that it was actualized in human flesh within time and space by the Incarnate One. Henceforth, it cannot be said that divine love is humanly impossible.

But it’s damned hard. For one thing, love is dangerous. It got Jesus killed. Jesus warns us that the same fate may well await those who follow in his footsteps. John 15:18-20. Furthermore, even when love is not lethal, it can hurt like nothing else. Nobody is capable of wounding me like those I most love. A stranger can insult me, criticize me and call me all manner of demeaning names and it won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. But when someone I trust betrays me, someone I admire criticizes me, someone I care deeply about turns away from me-that hurts. Perhaps that is why appeals to blood, soil, race and nation are so appealing to so many. Maybe that is why remarks such as “charity begins at home” resonate with us. By keeping the circle about those we love and trust small and well defined, we reduce the chance of getting hurt.

For most of us disciples, love does not take the shape of martyrdom in terms of a violent death. It is more like being nibbled to death by ducks. Church leaders, who thought they were agreeing to a three year term on the council, find out instead that they have been sentenced to life without parole when no one steps forward to take their place when the term ends. And for all that, they frequently receive more criticism than praise for their sacrifice. There are plenty of Church musicians who seldom know a Sunday when someone doesn’t complain about the choir anthem or which hymns are or are not being sung. There are pastors who find themselves held personally responsible for declining membership, sermons that rub people the wrong way and decisions of their national church over which they have little control. And of course, there is no shortage of stories about people who have been judged, rejected and deeply wounded by the words and actions of church people. Church is not for the faint of heart. I can understand why so many people leave it in disgust. Churches are typically not communities in which you find the kind of love Jesus is speaking about.

But the church is not the place you come to find love. It’s the place you come to learn love. You can’t learn to love people different than yourself if you surround yourself with people like you. You can’t learn forgiveness if you surround yourself with people who don’t offend you. You can’t learn to love your enemies if you insist on surrounding yourself with friends. So if you are looking to find in the church the loving, accepting and affirming family you never had; or if you are looking to find in the church a safe place where you can’t get hurt, you are bound to be disappointed. The church has never been such a place. It is, instead, a place where people chosen by Jesus are brought together. They might not be people who like each other. They might not be people who agree with one another. They might not be shining examples of kindness, compassion and dedication to justice. But if we believe what Jesus is telling us in John’s gospel, the church is made up of people chosen by him. John 15:16. That means, hard as it may be to swallow, everyone in every congregation is there because Jesus called them. Everyone in my congregation has something to teach me that I cannot learn from anyone else.

Once again, I understand why people give up on the church. I have been tempted to give up on it more than once in my life. But just about the time I am ready to throw in the towel, something happens to change my mind. The meanest, most bigoted and seemingly heartless person in the congregation knocks my socks off with a selfless act of heroism, courage and kindness. A congregation hopelessly turned in upon itself discovers a new purpose and is renewed by responding to a critical need in its neighborhood. The young person I thought would never darken the church door again after confirmation expresses an interest in ministry. Somebody tells me about how something I said or did that I cannot even remember inspired them in a transformative way. These things don’t happen very often. But they happen just often enough to convince me that the love released into the world through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is real and active in the church.

Here is the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to which I alluded above.

Love

We cannot live, except thus mutually

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,

Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there

We live most life, whoever breathes most air

And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

Source: This poem by Elizabeth Barret Browning is in the public domain. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was held in high regard throughout her lifetime surpassing nearly all other female poets of the English speaking world eclipsing even the work of her poet husband, Robert Browning. She had a formative influence upon American poet, Emily Dickinson who hung her portrait in her bedroom. Browning was highly skilled in multiple languages reading voraciously the Greek and Latin classics as well as the Hebrew Scriptures. Though the beneficiary of a privileged upbringing, she was a passionate advocate for the oppressed on the issues of slavery, child labor and the exploitation of colonized peoples. You can read more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

Prayer of the Day: O God of peace, you brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, the great shepherd of the sheep. By the blood of your eternal covenant, make us complete in everything good that we may do your will, and work among us all that is well-pleasing in your sight, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” Revelation 7:9-10.

Saint Paul reminds Timothy that “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” II Timothy 3:16-17. Yet in every age, particular scriptures percolate up to address with new urgency the unique circumstances of the times. I can think of fewer passages than this speaking with greater clarity to the oneness of the human family and God’s desire to unite that family as one holy people without regard to “nation, tribe, people or language.” Furthermore, I can think of no period in my lifetime when that message needs to be heard more than the last decade over which we have witnessed in our own country and throughout the world a rising tide of nationalist, populist and racist sentiment often advancing under the banner of Christianity. Under these circumstances, says the Lutheran World Federation in its introductory statement to a collection of thoughtful essays on this subject, “[c]hurches are called to reflect more deeply on their public role in view of populist exclusionary policies. In a situation where populist movements misappropriate Christian rhetoric to justify their aspirations, churches cannot remain silent, but need to resist exclusionary strategies.” Introduction by Eva Harasta and Simone Sinn to Resisting Exclusion: Global Theological Responses to Populism, (pub. by Evangelische Verlangsanstalt GmbH, Leipzig, Germany, under the auspices of The Lutheran World Federation) p. 11.

Of course, it is hard to “resist exclusionary strategies” when you are part of them. And it is hard to deny that Christians in the United States are neck deep in the politics of exclusion as anyone watching news clips from the January 6, 2021 insurrection can attest. Recall the flag at the head of the mob proclaiming “Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my president.” Recall the large wooden cross that stood near the gallows constructed for then vice president, Mike Pence. Recall Rev. Franklin Graham’s bold assertion that Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 was by the will and act of God. Many of us would argue that this is not the Christianity we believe, teach and confess. But the public, particularly those people without much in the way of religious commitment or involvement, frequently do not recognize such fine distinctions. They see the symbols and rhetoric of our faith woven into the hateful ideology of Trumpism and draw the conclusion, quite reasonably, that the two are one. Moreover, as much as we mainline protestants talk the talk of inclusion, we are far from successful in walking the walk. We remain overwhelmingly “white.” Despite our acceptance of women as pastors and priests, these women continue to face obstacles of stubbornly patriarchal institutional frameworks. Though we claim on a national denominational level to welcome persons of all sexual identities, there remain many congregations that are far from welcoming. As long as these conditions persist, the credibility of our prophetic witness to God’s inclusive reign will suffer.

This Fourth Sunday in Easter has become known as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” I am not sure whether that is so because the lectionary texts happen to focus on the theme of shepherds and sheep or whether the observance of the day dictated the texts. However one resolves this chicken/egg question, we are left with a day on which we are invited to consider what it means for Jesus to be our shepherd. That is the single most important question for disciples of Jesus. Yet much of what passes for Christianity these days has more to do with “culture war” issues than Jesus and his priorities. I doubt Jesus has any interest in bullying LGBTQ+ families into silence, banning books about slavery and Jim Crow in public schools so as not to hurt the feelings of white people, placing the bodies of women under state control or putting up plastic images of the holy family in the same public parks from which flesh and blood homeless people are chased away. Nor do I believe that congregations consisting in the main of straight, white, upper middle class Americans reflects the kind of Church Jesus had in mind when he sent his disciples to make disciples of all nations. The sad truth is that most of what passes for Christianity these days has little to do with Jesus.

But Jesus has his spokespeople-and they are not all in the church. I recently came across a website run by He Gets Us. I have no idea who these people are and cannot vouch for them except to say that they seem to “get” Jesus in a way that a lot of us in the church don’t. A message on their site states:

“Jesus understood what life was like for people in his day — especially for the marginalized. He was drawn to those on the fringes because he was one too: An immigrant. Homeless. Arrested. Bullied. Through it all, Jesus welcomed outcasts, stood up for women, hung out with troublemakers, even befriended enemies. He did it because of his radical love, empathy, and acceptance for all of us…Jesus’ radical compassion stands in stark contrast to all current hate and intolerance.”

The group claims not to be affiliated with any church or denomination, though it is the initiative of a charitable foundation controlled by the Church of the Servant in Oklahoma City. How passing strange it is that we need a group outside the church to clarify for the world who Jesus is. Have we really gotten Jesus so terribly wrong that he can no longer be recognized among us? Has the cross become so empty of meaning that it can be hijacked by racist mobs? Has the Bible become no more than a rabbit foot for authoritarian leaders exploit for photo opps? Is Jesus nothing more than the embodiment of white American middle class respectability? These are not rhetorical questions, nor are they of recent vintage. They are as old as Jesus’ query to his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” As Saint Peter learned, the answer cannot be given in a glib one line response. It must be revealed within communities for whom Jesus is Shepherd; communities that read the Bible through the prism of Jesus; communities in whom the mind of Christ is formed through worship, prayer, generosity and service; communities that understand themselves to be resident aliens with no true citizenship anywhere but under the reign of God Jesus proclaims; communities that know the only way to serve God is to serve, rescue, heal, advocate for and stand with those deemed “least” among the human family.

Here is a poem by Maya Angelou that speaks of what disciples of Jesus recognize as the reign of God and the way along which the Good Shepherd would lead us.

A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Source: Maya Angelou, The Complete Poetry, (c. 2015 by the Estate of Maya Angelou; pub. by Penguin Random House, LLC.) Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was a multi-talented American poet, author, singer, dancer and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She is perhaps best known for her well known autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969. The book earned her the National Book Award. Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2010. You can read more about Maya Angelou and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 9:1-20

Psalm 30

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

Prayer of the Day: Eternal and all-merciful God, with all the angels and all the saints we laud your majesty and might. By the resurrection of your Son, show yourself to us and inspire us to follow Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” John 21:18-19.

As dark as these words appear, they are good words for Saint Peter. Peter famously vowed to go with Jesus to prison and to death-only to deny him when he was presented with the opportunity to do just that. But Jesus will not deny Peter. Jesus assures Peter that our God of the second chance will give him another opportunity to put his life on the line for Jesus. He will have another chance to glorify God and God’s reign of peace though imprisonment and death.

Aside from their obvious context, these words of Jesus strike a nerve with me. Perhaps it is because over my forty years of ministry I have seen so many people grow old, lose their health, their stamina and their cognitive abilities. I have seen so many once strong, independent men and women rendered helpless in old age, needing others to make important decisions for them with which they are not always happy. Or maybe these words strike me with increased urgency because I am entering into the autumn years of my own life. Whatever the reason, these words of Jesus to my namesake speak to me in a personal way and bring home what I have always known on an intellectual level but struggle with existentially, namely, that the day will come when “someone else will…take you where you do not wish to go.” Unless I die suddenly as a result of accident or some traumatic medical event, such as heart attack or stroke, I will experience physical and mental decline in the coming years. At some point, my wife and I will be unable to live independently in this home we built together. At some point, we will become dependent on others for transportation, housekeeping, meal preparation, dressing and personal hygene. This is not where I want to go. But it is clearly where I am headed.

Nobody likes to contemplate the end of one’s own life. Perhaps that is why we never speak of the end as such. We speak in glowing terms of retirement and the “golden years.” “Independent living” communities, an Orwellian term describing living arrangements for persons who have lost or are losing their capacity to live independently, have increased geometrically over the last two decades. Advertisements abound for medications that are supposed to improve memory, exercise routines that stave off the effects of aging and lotions designed to erase years from our faces. We tell each other stories about one hundred year old men and women who are still climbing mountains, as though this were achievable for anyone with enough discipline, determination and the right dietary/exercise regimen. But that is not way most of us will end our lives.

It was not always so. During medieval times, death was at the very center of life. According to church teaching, the whole purpose of life was to prepare for death. Participation in worship and the sacraments was understood as a process of formation, readying one for a “good death.” Time was measured in saint’s days marking the death of biblical and post biblical heroes of faith. The landscape was dominated by parish churches and towering cathedrals which were the sites of local graveyards. The faithful were challenged to so live that in death their hope and confidence in the resurrection and eternal life might glorify God. Death was surrounded by familiar communal rituals and symbols of comfort and hope. It was sad, to be sure, but not terrifying and hopeless.  

Over the last few centuries, however, the cultural influence of religion in defining the meaning of life and death has receded. Discussion of all the reasons for this is beyond the scope of any single article. Suffice to say, there no longer exists a strong cultural consensus about what constitutes a “good life” or what “meaning,” if any, life has. Yet despite the demise of faith, death remains. In the absence of the myths and religions that once made sense of death, nothing is left but, to use Dillon Thomas’ words, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”[1] That is, by and large, what medical science has done. Improvements in medicine, the availability of health care to more people and a deeper understanding of how the human body works and how it can be maintained have decreased infant mortality worldwide and pushed the average life span to historic lengths.[2] No one has to convince me that modern medicine is a blessing. I have medical science to thank for the fact that members of my immediate family are living normal active lives rather than residing in the cemetery. But for all that medicine can do for us, it cannot change the stubborn fact of human mortality.

In his book, Being Mortal,[3] Dr. Atul Gawande explores the role medicine plays in our experience of dying and finds it wanting. The goal of medicine, Gawande points out, is healing. Medical doctors are trained to “fix” their patients. To its credit, modern medicine has extended the average life span by decades, eradicated diseases that formerly killed millions and enabled persons with medical conditions that would have killed them in childhood a century ago to live normal lives. But there is no cure for mortality. A discipline designed to heal, repair and extend life is ill-equipped to assist people who can no longer be “fixed.” Too often, medical treatment has served to prolong suffering, foster false hope and create unrealistic expectations while providing no meaningful relief. Gawande writes in his Epilogue:

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was the central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

“If to be human is to be limited, then the role of caring professions and institutions-from surgeons to nursing homes-ought to be aiding people in their struggle with those limits. Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the greater aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric.” p. 259-260.

That, of course, brings us to the question of what “the greater aim” of our life is. As far as disciples of Jesus are concerned, John’s gospel is clear on that point. “[T]his is eternal life, that they may know….the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [God has] sent.” John 17:3. This “knowing” is more than just theoretical understanding. It is relational. To know God is to be drawn into the love that binds the Trinity as One, love that is the very essence of God. John 17:20-24. And because God is love, love alone is eternal, as Saint Paul reminds us. I Corinthians 13:13. Eternal life, then, is not so merely by virtue of its duration, but because of its quality. A life grounded in love participates in what is eternal, what is real and what outlasts our mortal existence. Such a life, as well as the death in which it ends, glorifies God.

So the question I ask myself is this: How can I ensure that I will die well? I cannot do that anymore than I can ensure that I will live well this day. What I can do is give myself to the ancient practices of discipleship: worship, prayer, witness and generosity. I can pray that God will grant me grace to exist in love; to care for, serve and advocate for my neighbors near and far; to live gently on the land loving its creatures, reverencing its network of living and non-living communities; to live joyfully, thankfully, generously and obediently within my creaturely limits, trusting God to manage what is beyond those limits. I can pray along with the Psalmist that God will grant me a “heart of wisdom” that I might “order my days” and that the work of my hands might be established. Psalm 90. I can pray that something of my life might be graciously woven into the fabric of God’s new creation and so glorify God. I pray that when I draw my last breath, I will know the company of the Good Shepherd, the peace that passes all understanding, the love of family and friends and the prayers of the church as I pass through the valley of shadow into the light of God’s nearer presence.

Here is a poem by George Herbert that speaks both the harsh reality of death and the confident faith with which it can be met.

Death

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,

                           Nothing but bones,

      The sad effect of sadder groans:

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

For we considered thee as at some six

                           Or ten years hence,

      After the loss of life and sense,

Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.

We looked on this side of thee, shooting short;

                         Where we did find

      The shells of fledge souls left behind,

Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood

                           Into thy face,

      Thou art grown fair and full of grace,

Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,

                           As at Doomsday;

      When souls shall wear their new array,

And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust

                           Half that we have

      Unto an honest faithful grave;

Making our pillows either down, or dust.

Source: This poem is in the public domain. George Herbert (1593 –1633) was a Welsh-born poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. He was born into a wealthy family and raised in England. He was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge where he went with the intention of becoming a priest. Instead, he became the University’s Public Orator. His skill attracted the attention of King James I through whose patronage he entered the Parliament of England. There he served for about a year. Following the death of King James I, Herbert gave up his secular ambitions and took holy orders in the Church of England. He spent the rest of his life as the rector of a small parish in Salisbury. You can read more about George Herbert and sample more of his poems at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas.

[2] Though, of course, the distribution of these benefits among the world’s people have been grossly unequal and inequitable!

[3] Gawande, Atul, Being Mortal (c. 2014 by Atul Gawande; pub. by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company LLC).

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 5:27-32

Psalm 118:14-29

Revelation 1:4-8

John 20:19-31

Prayer of the Day: Almighty and eternal God, the strength of those who believe and the hope of those who doubt, may we, who have not seen, have faith in you and receive the fullness of Christ’s blessing, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” John 20:19.

It has been a violent Holy Week. In addition to the ongoing carnage in Ukraine, we have seen seven people killed and scores more wounded in mass shootings here in the United States. Pope Francis referred to this holiest of Christian days as an “Easter of War,” in his address from the Vatican. Yet Jesus comes to us as he did to his terrified disciples hiding behind locked doors to say “Peace be with you.” This salutation sounded no less dissonant then than it does today. The disciples were living under a military occupation force whose willingness to employ torture and crucifixion to “keep the peace” had just been made graphically apparent. The world was no less dangerous on Easter morning than it was the week before.

So what are we to make of this “Peace” with which Jesus meets us? Peace has many meanings in common parlance. It can mean simply the absence of violent conflict-such as we experienced during the days of the “cold war.” It can refer to resolution of a conflict by means of cease fire, treaty or alliance. Peace can refer to an inner condition of the self, such as a sense of wellbeing, acceptance of conditions and circumstances of one’s life or the result of a spiritual connection with the divine, the universe, the spirit world, the force-or whatever. But none of those definitions seem to fit here. Though Jesus has been raised, nothing has changed on the street. The people who had it in for Jesus are still out there. Roman forces are still occupying Judea. The war in Ukraine continues to escalate. People are being gunned down in our shopping malls and our political and religious leaders counter with “thoughts and prayers.”

The peace Jesus imparts is nothing like the peace we long for. In fact, Jesus tells us flat out that he is not interested in our kind of peace. “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth?” asks Jesus rhetorically. “No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided against two and two against three; they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” Luke 12:51-53. By peace, Jesus does not mean anything like the “peace of Rome” imposed by the sword. Jesus does not want the kind of peace made by ignoring and smoothing over a racist remark made by uncle Harry so as not to “spoil Thanksgiving dinner.” Jesus has no interest in the peace white supremacist politicians are trying to make through legislation erasing from our school curriculum every trace of Black American experience by banning books, threatening teachers and encouraging disruption of local school board meetings. Jesus does not approve of peace made by and for bigots through effectively denying the existence or legitimacy of LGBTQ+ families. Jesus stands with the prophet Jeremiah in refusing to “heal[] the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace.” Jeremiah 6:14.   

The peace to which Jesus calls his disciples is “not such as the world gives.” John 14:27. It is not quickly or easily achieved. The peace of God is not made by sweeping conflict under the rug. It cannot come without acknowledging and addressing systemic racism that permeates our culture, including the church. The peace of God cannot come without our facing the sexist and patriarchal structures that continue to disfigure the personal, educational and professional growth of women and girls. Peace will not come without our coming to grips with the ongoing ecological ruin of our planet by the ruthless greed of a capitalist society. Peace without justice is no peace at all. Jesus will tolerate no shortcuts when it comes to peacemaking.

Moreover, as Jesus warns us, living in and making this peace does not come without risk. Rev. Franklin Graham found that out when he got reamed on social media for having the audacity to call upon Christians to pray for Russian president, Vladimir Putin.[1] Society of Friends, Mennonites and the other peace churches have known for generations the hatred, ridicule and sometimes violence that can result from urging love for those our nation has declared “enemies.” When you reach out the hand of friendship across national, tribal, ideological lines you risk getting a nail pounded through it. But if peace, real peace, reconciling peace is to prevail, disciples of Jesus must be as willing to put their lives on the line for it as soldiers are to put their lives on the line for nation, blood and soil.

Here is a poem/hymn by William Alexander Percy that speaks eloquently to the peace of God Jesus proclaims and offers.

They Cast Their Nets in Galilee

They cast their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown;
Such happy, simple fisher-folk,
Before the Lord came down.

Contented, peaceful fisherfolk,
Before they ever knew
The peace of God that filled their hearts
Brim-full, and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,
Homeless, in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod.
Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing–
The marvellous peace of God.

Source: Episcopal Hymnal (1982) (Hymn 661). William Alexander Percy (1885 – 1942) was a lawyer, planter,and poet from Greenville, Mississippi. His autobiography Lanterns on the Levee (Knopf 1941) became a bestseller. His other works include the text of the above hymn and the Collected Poems (Knopf 1943). Percy spent a year in Paris before going to Harvard for a law degree. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father’s law firm where he practiced until 1916 when he joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the US declaration of war in April 1917. He served in the US Army in World War I, earning the rank of Captain. From 1925 to 1932, Percy edited the Yale Younger Poets series and published four volumes of poetry with the the Yale University Press.

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[1] Everyone who follows me with regularity knows that I am no admirer of Rev. Franklin Graham, the brand of Christianity he preaches or the hateful political agendas he has promoted under the cover of religion. Nonetheless, he is right as rain in saying that we ought to pray for our enemies and persecutors. That is about as central to Jesus’ teaching and example as anything can come. To follow Jesus is to believe that God hates nothing that God has made, that all human beings bear the image of their maker and that God’s Spirit is capable of transforming even those in whom that image has become extremely distorted.   

EASTER SUNDAY

Acts 10:34-43

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

1 Corinthians 15:19-26

Luke 24:1-12

Prayer of the Day: O God, you gave your only Son to suffer death on the cross for our redemption, and by his glorious resurrection you delivered us from the power of death. Make us die every day to sin, that we may live with him forever in the joy of the resurrection, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Acts 10:34-35. 

Saint Peter understands that God knows no partiality. In so doing, he declared the ancient gods of nation, blood and soil dead. He declared all claims of national sovereignty null and void. Whatever salutary purpose humanly drawn borders might serve, they cannot be invoked to deny anyone access to safety, nourishment, shelter or any other basic human need. Henceforth, people are judged by how their actions square with what is acceptable to God. The “nations” will be judged solely by how well or poorly they treat the most vulnerable in their midst. See Matthew 25:31-46. Once that sinks in, the world cannot help but know that its priorities have to change!

Alright. But what does any of this have to do with Easter Sunday and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Everything. Understand that nobody in the First Century doubted the power of God (or the gods) to raise someone from death. The ancients did not suffer from the conceptual handicaps imposed on us moderns who find resurrection incompatible with our mechanistic view of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus was not remarkable insofar as what happened, but to whom it happened. Our religion would look very different had God raised Alexander the Great, Augustes Caesar, Peter the Great, Winston Churchill, General Patton or some other great personage. In fact, however, God raised the man who never wielded a weapon, never wore a crown, never held any political office or aspired to any position of leadership. The one God raised was poor and belonged to a people having no substantial legal standing with the government under which he lived. God raised the one who had the audacity to confront the might of empire and the machinery of oppression armed only with words and and acts of mercy and peace. And he lost. He was rejected by the leaders of his people, deserted by his disciples and executed by the state. Jesus was, by every reasonable standard of success, a failure.

But Saint Peter would have us know that it is not our judgment that counts, but the judgement of God. In raising Jesus from the death sentence we impose upon him and people like him, our judgments about right and wrong, power and powerlessness, justice and injustice, rights, privileges and entitlements are overturned. This Jesus, says Saint Peter, “is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.”

The resurrection of Jesus is meaningless unless you know about the life Jesus lived and the way he died. So it is that Saint Peter begins by pointing out to his audience how “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” He then went on to declare that Jesus was duly executed by state authority, thereby letting his hearers know in no uncertain terms that the good Jesus did was an intolerable afront to the powers that be. His death was therefore entirely predictable. It is what happens when powerless people speak truth to power. That much is hardly surprising. What shocked Peter’s audience is the assertion that God raised this Jesus, that God is not on the side of the global, societal or ecclesiastical winners, but on the side of the vulnerable, the outcast, the refugee, the sick and the homeless. “God,” Saint Peter tells us, is not who we thought God was. God’s priorities are not what we thought they were.

This is good news because it means neither the powers that wield the specter of death nor even death itself need be feared. And how much more so our lesser fears. Jesus’ resurrection is good news because there is a lot of crap we don’t have to worry about anymore. We don’t have to worry about what college we do or do not get into. We don’t have to worry about getting to that much coveted Nirvana of “financial security.” We don’t need to worry about what we look like in the latest style or whether we are wearing anything close to the latest style. We don’t need to sleep behind locked doors with a loaded revolver next to the bed. We don’t have to worry about whether the nation we live in has enough bombs and missiles to protect itself. We don’t need to obsess over who other people love and marry or any of those other culture war issues that get so many so called Christians’ underwear in a bunch. We don’t need to agonize over the past or fret about the future. That frees us up for what matters.

And what matters? How about the 6.6 million refugees worldwide who are living in refugee camps in squalid conditions without any nation or people willing to claim them as its own? What about the forty-five hundred children confined in adult prisons exposed to ruthless abuse on a daily basis? What about the LGBTQ+ kids in Florida and other states now subject to legislatively approved bullying and exclusion? The list could go on to include aged and infirm persons institutionalized in substandard long term care institutions; homeless folks who are prohibited by law from begging for their subsistence; and many others who have been deprived of even a voice to cry out for justice. These are the priorities for which Jesus’ resurrection frees us up to address with undivided attention.

Here us a prayer/poem by Michel Quoist reflecting the radical reorganization of priorities occasioned by Jesus’ resurrection.

Lord, I Have Time

I went out, Lord.
People were coming and going,
Walking and running.
Everything was rushing:
Cars, trucks, the street, the whole town.
People were rushing not to waste time.
They were rushing after time,
To catch up with time.
To gain time.

Good-bye, Sir, excuse me, I haven’t time.
I’ll come back. I can’t wait. I haven’t time.
I must end this letter–I haven’t time.
I’d love to help you, but I haven’t time.
I can’t accept, having no time.
I can’t think, I can’t read, I’m swamped, I haven’t time.
I’d like to pray, but I haven’t time.

You understand, Lord,
They simply haven’t the time.
The child is playing,
He hasn’t time right now…Later on…
The schoolboy has his homework to do,
He hasn’t time…Later on…
The student has his courses,
And so much work…Later on…
The young married man has his new house;
He has to fix it up…He hasn’t time…Later on…
The grandparents have their grandchildren.
They haven’t time…Later on…
They are ill, they have their treatments,
They haven’t time…Later on…
They are dying, they have no…
Too late!…They have no more time!

And so all people run after time, Lord.
They pass through life running–
Hurried, jostled, overburdened, frantic,
And they never get there. They haven’t time.
In spite of all their efforts
They’re still short of time,
Of a great deal of time.
Lord, you must have made a mistake in your calculations,
There is a big mistake somewhere.
The hours are too short.
Our lives are too short.

You who are beyond time, Lord,
You smile to see us fighting it.
And you know what you are doing.
You make no mistakes in your distribution of time to men.
You give each one time to do what you want him to do.
But we must not lose time,
waste time,
kill time,
For it is a gift that you give us,
But a perishable gift,
A gift that does not keep.

Lord, I have time,
I have plenty of time,
All the time that you give me,
The years of my life,
The days of my life,
The days of my years,
The hours of my days,
They are all mine.
Mine to fill, quietly, calmly,
But to fill completely, up to the brim,
To offer them to you, that of their insipid water
You may make a rich wine
Such as you made once in Cana of Galilee.
I am not asking you tonight, Lord,
For time to do this and then that,
But for your grace to do conscientiously,
In the time that you give me,
What you want me to do.

Source: Quoist, Michel, Prayers (c. 1963 Sheed & Ward, Inc.) Translated by Agnes M. Forsyth and Anne Marie de Cammaille. Michel Quoist (1921-1997) was ordained a priest in1947. A French Catholic of the working-class, Quoist reveled in presenting Christianity as part of gritty daily reality, rather than in forms of traditional piety. He was for many years pastor to a busy city parish in Le Havre, France serving a working class neighborhood and developing ministries to young people through Catholic Action groups. Prayers, the book from which the above poem was taken, has been translated from the original French into several languages including Hungarian, Polish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and English.

PALM SUNDAY/SUNDAY OF THE PASSION

Luke 19:28-40

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Psalm 31:9-16

Philippians 2:5-11

Luke 22:14 — 23:56

Prayer of the Day: Everlasting God, in your endless love for the human race you sent our Lord Jesus Christ to take on our nature and to suffer death on the cross. In your mercy enable us to share in his obedience to your will and in the glorious victory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying,
‘Blessed is the king
   who comes in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven,
   and glory in the highest heaven!’
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’” Luke 19:37-40.

The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, also authored by the apostle, takes a more favorable view of Pharisees than we find elsewhere in the gospels. A few weeks ago we find them warning Jesus that Herod is out to murder him and advises him to flee. Luke 13:31. It was the Pharisee Gamaliel who persuaded the ruling council in Jerusalem to refrain from punishing the apostles for preaching the gospel. Acts 5:33-39. Saint Paul was a Pharisee and the Pharisees sided with him when he was brought before the same Jerusalem council in connection with a riot at the Temple. Acts 23:1-10. Thus, it is entirely possible that the Pharisees in Sunday’s gospel were well meaning when they told Jesus to dial back his disciples’ enthusiasm. After all, their praises were charged with subversive political significance. In the Medeterranian world of the first century, there was only one “lord,” namely, Caesar. There was but one peace, namely, the peace of Rome imposed by raw power. Whoever dared assume the title of “king” made himself a rival to Caesar and a sure candidate for crucifixion.

But we have known since chapter nine of Luke’s gospel that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Luke 9:51. He is under no illusions about what awaits him there. Jesus is about to confront the death dealing power of empire armed only with God’s limitless, patient and suffering love for the world. The result is all to predictable. Were it not for the fact that God raised Jesus from death, the passion narrative we recite each year at this time would be just another story about the tragic end of an idealist. It would be a cautionary tale about what happens to people whose dreams run away with them. We might then end our telling of this story with a salutary admonition for our hearers to be “realistic,” to temper expectations, to understand that, however much we would like to believe otherwise, ours is a cruel, violent world where the good must give way to the achievable and “nice guys finish last.”

If that is not what we preach, it is too often reflective of what we believe. In my first parish, I was teaching an adult Bible Study group examining the Sermon on the Mount. A gentleman in that group, who I knew to be a sales executive for a pharmaceutical company, shook his head at one point and told me, “pastor, if I had to do my job the way Jesus says we should live, I’d be crucified.” I don’t remember what I said then. I am never as witty and articulate as I often wish I had been in retrospect. But I sometimes think I ought to have said, “No, my friend. You would not be crucified. You might lose an account or two. You might miss out on a promotion. You might even get fired. Yet even so, you would still be a long way from the cross Jesus calls us to bear with him.”

Years ago, in a similar setting, a career military man and dear friend told me to try and imagine the kind of world we would be living in had the world dealt with Hitler according to the Sermon on the Mount. Again, I do not recall exactly what I said. But I would have been tempted to tell my friend that I do not know what the world would have been like if the churches in Germany and, indeed, throughout the world stood up as one in solidarity with fascism’s victims. I don’t know what would have happened in the 1930s and 40s had pastors, priests, bishops and other church leaders throughout the world been demonstrating consistently through their actions and teachings that humanity is one single family made up of persons uniquely reflecting the image of their Creator and that there is no greater blasphemy than to desecrate that image through oppression, discrimination and violence. What I do know is that, after two bloody world wars that were supposed to eradicate evil from the face of the earth, we are on the brink of yet another one. So please do not lecture me from the terminus of the dead end to which your road has led us about the futility of the road not taken.

Perhaps it is better that I did not respond in the way I wish I had. The old adage holds true here: whenever you point a finger at someone else, three more are pointing back at you. I am no more successful than anyone else when it comes to taking up the cross. Like Judas, I am tempted to cash out and leave the church and its ministry when it looks like things are going south and my own needs are no longer being met. Like Peter, I sing hymns about following Jesus and bearing the cross. But when following puts my reputation, livelihood or safety in danger, I lose my nerve. Like the disciples as a whole, I desert Jesus when following becomes too dangerous. Though I would not express the views articulated by my past parishioners, I know that I often live by them. I am skeptical of Jesus’ way and I frequently devise in my own head any number of rational excuses for making end runs around the cross in my day to day life.  

Perhaps that is the point of juxtaposing Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with his passion and death in that self same city. This day of the Palms and the Passion compels us to reflect on the depth of our commitment to Jesus, the sincerity of our belief in the kingdom he proclaims and the price we are prepared to pay for our allegiance to God’s way of overcoming evil with limitless love and forgiveness. As I have often said before, there are no heroes in the passion narrative. We find only traitors, cowards and deserters. The first community of disciples, those closer to Jesus than any others, the earliest manifestation of the church failed miserably to take up the cross. Yet it is to these same people huddled together behind locked doors that the Resurrected Christ comes with the same call, the same mission, the same challenge to take up the cross.

We are invited to find ourselves reflected in the passion narrative. It isn’t a flattering picture. We find there a people that fail miserably to follow Jesus. But we are nonetheless people Jesus continues to follow, continues to seek out and continues to offer new opportunities for discipleship. Jesus refuses to give up on us. God means to make something beautiful out of the mess we’ve made of our lives. So we dare not give up on ourselves or our world.

Here is a poem by Beatrice Goldsmith about failure, brokenness and the slow work of redemption.

Lullaby for A Failure

Slumber, slumber,

Slumber till the last

Crushed tallus of your days,

The last of broken rock and mangled flower,

Turn seamless ground and smooth

Sweet soil for blossom.

Oh, sleep, sleep,

And let this scentless sleep,

This long slow sleep,

Solder the years wreckage, softly sew

The ragged edges of your patterns-

Your desperate design.

Source: Poetry, (September 1934). Beatrice Goldsmith (1915-1950) was born and raised in New York City. When she was young, she worked as a sales person in Brooklyn. During the 1930s she worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. Her first poems were written in Yiddish and published in a New York children’s magazine. Her later work, written in English, appeared in Poetry magazine. You can read more about Beatrice Goldsmith and sample more of her work at the Poetry Foundation Website.

FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT

Isaiah 43:16-21

Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4b-14

John 12:1-8

Prayer of the Day: Creator God, you prepare a new way in the wilderness, and your grace waters our desert. Open our hearts to be transformed by the new thing you are doing, that our lives may proclaim the extravagance of your love given to all through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Do not remember the former things,
   or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
   now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43:18-19.

“Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13-14.

So much of our living is done out of the past. Geopolitics is driven by ancient historical blood feuds dating back to the middle ages and before. We struggle in this country with the heritage of inequality, injustice, systemic racism and ethnic cleansing rooted in our founding and built into our government, educational institutions and workplaces. The wounds of our tortured past continue to fester and erupt into violence. This last week we have witnessed the worsening of a conflict born of Russian imperialism and western nationalism, a shameful show of raw racism on the floor of the United States Senate and a flood of new legislation aimed at dehumanizing gay, lesbian and transgender folk. Now, as we stand once again on the brink of what could erupt into yet another world war, I have to wonder whether the human race ever makes any progress on any front. It seems as though we are caught in a retributive vortex of prejudice, resentment and violence that has no end. If, as is often said, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, it is a long arc indeed and the bend is often impossible to discern. These days I find that my prayers often echo that of Abbot Dom Zerchi, a protagonist in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novel, Canticle for Leibowitz:    

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix, in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America– burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?”[1]

The Prophet Isaiah’s answer to Dom Zerchi’s (and my) lament is a resounding “no.” “I am about to do a new thing,” says the Lord, “Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” The Lord goes on to say through the mouth of the prophet, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” That is a big ask. As painful as the past might be, it is hard to let go of it. “Remember the Alamo” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “Remember 9/11.” “I’ll never forget what she did to me.” “I can’t just erase his hurtful words.” As much as it hurts us, there is something about past wrongs that clings to us. There is something perversely comforting in nursing them, rehearsing them and wallowing in self pity over the pain they cause. It takes courage we too often lack to reach past centuries of personal and cultural animosity to forge new and better relationships. Repentance is hard work. It is not for the faint of heart.

It is harder still to believe that the future holds anything really new. Ours is a cynical age, an age that looks with suspicion and outright contempt upon any claim of newness and hope. Perhaps that is why Jesus’ remark in our gospel lesson to the effect that “You always have the poor with you” has been so tragically misconstrued. John 12:8. Jesus tells us that there always will be those in our midst who are vulnerable and unable to care for themselves. He does not say that these people must invariably live in poverty and misery. We are not to understand that poverty is inevitable and so fighting to eradicate it is a waste of time. To the contrary, as anyone familiar with the Torah (as Jesus clearly was) would understand, care for the poor is the corporate responsibility of any just and righteous society. See Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 15:7-8. There is no rational reason why anyone should be without food, shelter, medical care, dignity and respect. The earth is capable of providing for everyone’s need (though not everyone’s greed); forgiveness and reconciliation, individually and globally, are real; life, not death, has the final word. The gospel truth shining through the call of Abraham and Sarah to found a nation of blessing; the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and the resurrection of Jesus is simply this: It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lenten practices, to be sure, are not a “new thing.” Our disciplines of prayer, fasting, alms and liturgy reach back to the time of the matriarchs and patriarchs. Yet they are designed to focus our gaze on the future, on the God whose reign breaks into our present age, turning our expectations upside down, revolutionizing our perspectives and rearranging our priorities. The startling truth is that the power of evil hit a dead end at the cross. There violence, cruelty and death did its worst. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to crack the Son’s unwavering trust in the Father. It wasn’t enough to extinguish the Father’s love for the world God made. It wasn’t enough to erase the image of God in humanity. Jesus’ resurrection released a new thing into the world, a God factor challenging the reign of the past over the future. The old assumptions, beliefs and expectations still are not enough to extinguish God’s new thing. Do you still not perceive it? 

Perceiving “newness” is recovering the capacity to be surprised. It is to recognize the possibility of breaking with the past, believing in a tomorrow that is not merely the product of yesterday. For a world imprisoned in and driven by its past, there are no surprises. What will be is nothing more than a continuation of what is. This lack of surprise, says poet Conrad Aiken, amounts to death. Our Lenten practices are designed to prepare us for the surpise of Easter Sunday.

When You Are Not Surprised

When you are not surprised, not surprised,

nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow   

or from shadow into sunlight   

suiting the color of fright or delight   

to the bewildering circumstance   

when you are no longer surprised   

by the quiet or fury of daybreak   

the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage   

over the edges of torn trees

torrents of living and dying flung

upward and outward inward and downward to space

or else

peace peace peace peace

the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy

far hidden in the forest of the mind   

while slowly

the limbs of light unwind

and the world’s surface dreams again of night

as the center dreams of light   

when you are not surprised

by breath and breath and breath

the first unconscious morning breath

the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane

and do not cry out come again   

blest blest that you are come again   

o light o sound o voice of bird o light   

and memory too o memory blest   

and curst with the debts of yesterday   

that would not stay, or stay

by death and death and death

when you are not surprised

death of the bee in the daffodil

death of color in the child’s cheek

on the young mother’s breast

death of sense of touch of sight

death of delight

and the inward death the inward turning night

when the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference   

for hated self and beloved not-self

when you are not surprised

by wheel’s turn or turn of season

the winged and orbed chariot tilt of time   

the halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring   

and solar rhyme

woven into the divinely remembered nest   

by the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast   

and the tides of space that ring the heart

while still, while still, the wave of the invisible world   

breaks into consciousness in the mind of god

then welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed   

and join again in the ceaseless know-nothing   

from which you awoke to the first surprise.

Source: Collected Poems (Random House Inc., 1970). Conrad Potter Aiken (1889 –1973) was an American writer and poet honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, a play and an autobiography. Aiken had a troubled childhood. His father murdered his mother and then committed suicide when he was only eleven years old. After his parents’ deaths, Aiken was raised by his great aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attending Middlesex School and then Harvard University. At Harvard, he edited the Harvard Advocate along with the renowned poet, T. S. Eliot. The two became lifelong friends. Aiken was thrice married and fathered three children. After spending time in England and Cambridge Massachusetts, Aiken finally settled in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. There he ran a summer program for writers and painters named after his antique farmhouse, “Forty-One Doors” Despite having lived for many years abroad and receiving recognition as a Southern writer, Aiken always considered himself an American New Englander. You can read more about Conrad Aiken and sample more of his work at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Miller, Walter M., Jr., Canticle for Leibowitz, (c. 1959, pub. by HarperCollins). Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of humanity’s scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.

FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT

Joshua 5:9-12

Psalm 32

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Prayer of the Day: God of compassion, you welcome the wayward, and you embrace us all with your mercy. By our baptism clothe us with garments of your grace, and feed us at the table of your love, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation…” II Corinthians 5:16-18.

From a human point of view, I am a spouse, parent and grandparent. My identity is grounded in two families, one rooted in Montana and the other in Minnesota. Prior to that, my roots extend across the Atlantic to southern Germany and Norway, though that part of the story is all but lost to memory. From a human point of view, I am the product of a blue collar family and my home town of Bremerton’s public education system. Beyond that, I am, from a human point of view, a United States citizen formed by a national mythology defining who I am and what my duties are. Who I am is the sum total of these and other formative associations, social contracts and blood relations.

But no more, says Saint Paul. When anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation in light of which we regard no one any longer from a human point of view. This has radical implications as it relativizes all other defining claims and loyalties. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” asked Jesus rhetorically. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister and mother.” Mark 3:34-35. Our commonwealth is in heaven, Paul reminds us. Philippians 3:20. We have no lasting city to which we owe ultimate allegiance. Our loyalty is to the “city which is to come.” Hebrews 13:14. No loyalty or moral claim comes before allegiance to the gentle reign of God. Not family values; not civic duty; not duty to one’s country. In Christ, my primary identity is determined by my membership in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church that transcends and supersedes all family, tribal, cultural, national and organizational boundaries.

This new reality that comes about through being in Christ necessarily changes the way I view all others. No longer is it possible for me to create an “us” and “them” dichotomy. “The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one man died for all; therefore all have died.” II Corinthians 5:14. It is no longer possible for me to see another person as anything other than one for whom Christ died, as one of the many persons created in God’s image and destined to be joined to that “multitude which no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the Lamb…” Revelation 7:9. To be in Christ is to be an ambassador for God’s reign entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation, the task of building bridges across hostile borders, entering upon private property, violating the etiquette of class distinction, disregarding the racial stratification of white supremacy and all other humanly devised lines of demarcation between “us” and “them.”

That brings me to the heartbreaking plight of Ukraine. Let me begin by acknowledging that, no matter what argument might be made for any possible legitimate Russian national interest vis a vis Ukraine, nothing can or ever will justify the savage invasion and ruthless carnage unleashed by Vladimir Putin against the Ukrainian people. When one sees the baby strollers lined up in Lviv’s Rynok Square, row after row, one each for the 109 children across Ukraine known to have died under the brutal Russian siege, it is impossible for anyone with an ounce of feeling not to be outraged. That outrage and sympathy for the Ukrainian people has led to so many of us wearing the national Ukrainian colors and even flying the Ukrainian flag. An otherwise hopelessly divided congress has come together in a rare showing of bipartisan support for the Ukrainian military and NATO. While it is tempting to applaud such unity and solidarity, I am not convinced that disciples of Jesus should. The stark reality is that the crisis in Ukraine has evolved into a global “us” against “them” show down that cannot be resolved militarily. Here the idiocy of the NRA mantra that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is clearly exposed. Where the “good guy” and the “bad guy” are both armed with weapons of mass destruction, victory is meaningless.

At this point, more than ever, we need Paul’s reminder that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12. The devil, of course, would like nothing more than for us to believe the contrary, namely, that our struggle is against enemies of flesh and blood; that there is a flesh and blood “them” that “we” need to defeat. The devil wins evey war, no matter who prevails on the battlefield. The devil’s logic always seems to dominate in circumstances like these, convincing “us” that peace can only be achieved by defeating and, if necessary, destroying “them.” As one political pundit put it this morning on ABC’s This Week, “this [war between Russia and Ukraine] is a contest between good and evil. Everybody is going to have to decide on which side they stand.”

The pundit is partially correct. This is a struggle between good and evil. But the line between the two does not run neatly between Russia on the one side with Ukraine and NATO on the other. We ought to know by now that the line between good and evil runs right through the middle of every human heart. Lest we forget, the NATO countries that are now welcoming Ukrainian refugees were just a few years ago meeting Syrian refugees from Russia’s ruthless bombings of Aleppo  with barbed wire and bayonets. Before we become too critical of Russia’s crack down on dissent within its borders, we ought to recall the spectacle of federal officers teargassing and bludgeoning peaceful protesters in front of the White House to make way for the former president’s photo op. And before we condemn President Putin for his autocratic ways, we should reflect on how close our country came to similar tyranny when the former president incited a violent mob to attack the Capital in order to prevent his duly elected successor from taking office. I am not suggesting a moral equivalency here. As I said before, the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine is an inexcusable act of savagery about which the rest of the world ought to be concerned. But we need to recognize that the ugly and demonic engines of white supremacy, nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism driving Russian aggression are also very much a part of our own national politics and that of our NATO allies. Americans are as much in bondage to these “principalities and powers” as is Russia-and all the other flesh and blood peoples we like to demonize. For more on that, see Resisting Exclusion: Global Theological Responses to Populism, published by the Lutheran World Federation. If we think by defeating Russia we will overcome the evil inhabiting both our cultures, we are deceiving ourselves.

If being alive to a new creation means anything, it means thinking about and addressing age old problems in new ways. It means thinking less like Americans (and Ukrainians, Russians, NATO members) and more like people whose loyalties have been reoriented by incorporation into God’s gentle, just and inclusive reign of peace. There is no better time than the season of Lent to think about what it means to be an ambassador for God’s inbreaking reign. What does it mean to be conducting a ministry of reconciliation in a world on the brink of war? Are we, as disciples of Jesus, just as prepared to put our lives on the line for reconciliation as soldiers are prepared to put their lives on the line to fight wars? What would it look like for disciples of Jesus to enter into the midst of the conflict “presenting [their] bodies as a living sacrifice”? Romans 12:1. Have we become so thoroughly indoctrinated into national militaristic mythologies and so servile to the interests of the state that we have lost the capacity to imagine, much less believe in the reality of a new creation?

Perhaps, as the poet suggests, new creation, like peace “can’t be imagined before it is made.” Maybe the seeds of new creation are buried in small groups like Russians for Peace, a community of Russian speaking people living internationally who do not support militaristic and destructive actions of the government of the Russian Federation. Maybe a new creation begins with the church looking first at its own complicity with nationalism and calling out this sin as, for example, the recent statement by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center. Maybe new creation begins with more and more parents and grandparents like me in all nations speaking to our leaders in language even warmongers can understand: You can have our children to fight your wars when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers. Maybe the new creation is right in front of us and the only thing keeping us from seeing it is our own paralyzing fear that keeps us hanging on for dear life to the false assumptions upon which the current world order is based and ossified beliefs in the old idols of nation, tribe, blood and soil.

Here is the poem by Denise Levertov to which I alluded above.

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,

             ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                   But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

                                       A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

                                              A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

Source: Breathing the Water (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987) Denise Levertov (1923–1997) never received a formal education. Nevertheless, she created a highly regarded body of poetry that earned her recognition as one of America’s most respected poets. Her father, Paul Philip Levertov, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England where he became an Anglican minister.  Levertov grew up in a household surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in London. Levertov came to the United States in 1948, after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman. During the 1960s Levertov became a staunch critic of the Vietnam war, a topic addressed in many of her poems of that era. Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four. You can read more about Denise Levertov and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.  

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

Prayer of the Day: Eternal God, your kingdom has broken into our troubled world through the life, death, and resurrection of your Son. Help us to hear your word and obey it, and bring your saving love to fruition in our lives, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“O God, you are my God, I seek you,
   my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
   as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Psalm 63:1.

In his classic work, Confessions, Saint Augustine of Hippo discusses at great length the nature of sin. In common parlance, sin is typically thought of in terms of behavior evaluated against laws, rules or community norms. A sin is thus a particular bad act-murder, adultery, theft or improper thoughts. While such conduct is surely sinful, it is the symptom rather than the root cause of humanity’s broken condition. As odd as it may seem, sin is driven by the same engine as righteousness, namely, love. The problem is that human love is disordered. Created to love God and, through that pure love, to love the neighbor and enjoy the world God made, human love is directed toward lesser things, things which often are good in themselves, but lethal when they are allowed to become the object of love which ought to be directed toward God alone. Love of country, love of family and enjoyment of the fruit of one’s labors, all appropriate “loves,” morph into nationalism, tribalism and avarice when they become dominant.

The psalmist’s prayer illustrates the appropriate focus of ultimate desire. The psalmist “thirsts” for God as eagerly as would a traveler passing through a waterless desert. This is right because we are only as good as what we love. It was because God’s reign of love was more real for Jesus than the raw power of Rome and the complicit religious establishment of his own country that he ended up on the cross. Crucifixion is a terrible way for a life to end, but Jesus obviously felt that the kingdom of God was well worth it. So too for disciples of Jesus. They are to be distinguished by a passionate love that is rightly directed toward God and toward one another. For in fact, the command to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor is actually the same command. There is no way to love God other than to love and serve the neighbor made in God’s image.

While our materialistic culture’s lust for wealth, power and pleasure are significant temptations for a disciple seeking to follow Jesus, the greatest danger lies closer at hand. Those who “thirst” for God are all too vulnerable to deception.  It was, after all, in a sincere belief they were doing God’s bidding that evangelical Christians supported a Florida law that, in effect, prevents elementary school teachers from protecting LGBTA+ children or the children of LGBTA+ families from bullying and intimidation. It is love for God that inspires extremists to strap bombs to themselves and detonate in populated places to kill as many civilians as possible. Love for God drove the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Thirty Years War. Religious people, people who share a zeal for God and a desire to do God’s will, are uniquely susceptible to temptations the religiously indifferent will never know.

ABC News ran a special this week recounting the origin, growth and tragic end of the Heaven’s Gate cult. For those of you who might have been on vacation that week and, like me, exclude during vacation any attention to the daily news, Heaven’s Gate was the name of a cult started in the early 1970s by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles. Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian preacher. Like his father, he had a deep sense of vocation and a charismatic personality. Applewhite was talented, intelligent and personable. He seems to have been precisely the sort of person I would have encouraged to consider parish ministry had I met him in my own church. But underneath his confident veneer, Applewhite was struggling with issues of self esteem and sexual identity. Shortly after graduating college, he began hearing voices.

Applewhite became acquainted with Nettles at a particularly low point in his life. She was a nurse, a mother of four children and a fervent believer in UFOs. Together, they began promoting through informational meetings around the country a religion constituting a mix of Christianity, pseudoscience and new age philosophy. In brief, Applewhite and Nettles taught that the human body was merely a “vehicle” for a soul on the verge of the next evolutionary leap from humanity to something much greater. In order to facilitate this transition, members of the cult were called upon to forsake all connections to bodily life, including family relationships, sexual relations, friendships outside the cult community and claims to personal property which was to become the possession of the cult. The beliefs of the cult evolved over the nearly two decades of its existence. In the end, thirty-eight members joined Applewhite in taking their own lives in an effort to make the final evolutionary jump. They were found poisoned to death in a suburban home, clad in homemade spacesuits for their final journey.

It would be slightly comforting, though no less tragic, if the members of Heaven’s Gate had been uneducated, illiterate, mentally ill or people of minimal intelligence. In that case, we could simply prescribe more education, better mental health care and access to accurate information as the solution to events like these. I could also take comfort in knowing that educated and sophisticated persons like me are immune to such nonsense. But, in fact, the members of Heaven’s Gate were mostly college graduates, some of whom even had advanced degrees. They were a lot like me in my twenties: curious, inquisitive, idealistic, eager to become part of something bigger than themselves and to make a difference in the world. So how did these bright, young, promising people get caught up in a movement like Heaven’s Gate? I have been pondering that question these last few days. I am not convinced that I have an answer.

The ABC commentators pointed out that some members’ involvement with Heaven’s Gate came at a point of crisis in their lives, i.e., divorce, loss of a job, death in the family or return from combat, etc. They also pointed out that the early 70s were fraught with social upheaval leading many to seek the comfort of certainty cults typically offer, even at the expense of surrendering their independence of thought and action. I am not sure any of that totally explains the Heaven’s Gate phenomenon. After all, few of us get through life without at least some severe personal stressors and we don’t get drawn into cult life. Moreover, has there ever been a decade without social upheaval? There is more going on here than can be explained away by appeal to ignorance, emotional instability and external social conditions.

The frightening truth is that, in spite of our American belief in individualism, self determination and freedom, we are more like “sheep without a shepherd” than we like to admit. Whether we admit it or not, we are who we are largely because of what has been allowed to shape us. Culture, family, church, professional colleagues, political leaders and peers have made us who we are. We are shaped by entertainment media that convinces us daily through shows like FBI, NCIS and Law and Order, that men[1] with guns, punitive laws and the use of violence are the only means by which we can live in safety. We are shaped by work places that value us in terms of our contribution to the company’s bottom line. We are shaped by news media that dictate to us what the news is, who matters and what does not even merit comment. We see and experience the world through the lens all these forces have made for us. When we think we are making independent decisions, we are using the reference points that have been hardwired into our brains by powers we are incapable of seeing or controlling. Saint Paul would call these “the principalities…the powers…the world rulers of this present darkness…the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12.

One purpose of Lent is to refine our appetites so that we do not “spend []our money for that which is not bread, and []our labor for that which does not satisfy” as the Prophet Isaiah admonishes us. Isaiah 55:2. Lent offers us the opportunity to examine critically our desires to be sure that the God we love is God indeed, that the kingdom we seek really is God’s gentle reign and that the power shaping us truly is the Holy Spirit working through God’s Word and the Sacraments. During this season, we practice fasting within a culture that markets to every imaginable appetite with the gospel of surfeit. We practice generosity over against the capitalist religion of acquisition. We practice confession of sin in a society where concession is a sign of weakness. We practice forgiveness toward enemies under wartime shouts for fighting to the last one standing. We do things that make sense only if God did, in fact, raise Jesus from death.

Lenten discipline is perhaps nowhere more important than among those of us entrusted with the responsibility for ministry. It is no accident that Jesus was assaulted by the devil immediately following his baptismal call. We, of all people, are tempted to invoke God’s authority to get what we want when we want it. We of all people need to recognize the temptation to grab the levers of power, be they governmental or ecclesiastical, and “do whatever it takes” to ensure that right prevails. We should know better than anyone else the temptation to employ the scriptures recklessly and inaccurately to support our own agendas-be they ever so progressive, right and noble. We, more than anyone else, need to be reminded that greatness under God’s reign is humility and service. We, more than anyone else, need to be sure about who is shaping us and certain that we are being sustained by “eat[ing] what is good” (Isaiah 55:2) and that our “thirst” for God is actually being satisfied by God.     

Here is a poem celebrating the discipline of prayer and its sustaining and shaping power directing us to the thirst only One can satisfy.

The Lamps are burning

“The lamps are burning in the synagogue,

in the houses of study, in dark alleys. . . .”

This should be the place.

This is the way

the guide book describes it. Excuse me, sir

can you tell me

where Eli lives, Eli the katzev—

slaughterer of cattle and poultry?

One of my ancestors.

Reb Haskel? Reb Shimin? My grandfathers.

This is the discipline that withstood the siege

of every Jew;

these are the prayer shawls that have proved

stronger than armor.

Let us begin humbly. Not by asking:

Who is This you pray to? Name Him;

define Him. For the answer is:

We do not name Him.

Once out of a savage fear, perhaps;

now out of knowledge—of our ignorance.

Begin then humbly. Not by asking:

Shall I live forever?

Hear again the dear dead greeting me gladly

as they used to

when we were all among the living?

For the answer is:

If you think we differ from all His other creatures,

say only if you like with the Pharisees, our teachers,

those who do not believe in an eternal life

will not have it.

In the morning I arise and match again

my plans against my cash.

I wonder now if the long morning prayers

were an utter waste of an hour

weighing, as they do, hopes and anguish,

and sending the believer out into the street

with the sweet taste of the prayers on his lips.

Today this creditor is at your office;

tomorrow this one in your home;

until the final creditor of all

places his bony hands upon your breast.

Faster!

Dig your heels into the dust!

How good to stop

and look out upon eternity a while.

And daily—at Shahris, Minha, Maariv,

in the morning, afternoon, and evening—

be at ease in Zion.

Source: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 (Black Sparrow Press, 2005). Charles Reznikoff (1894 – 1976) was an American poet. His multi-volume Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) followed by his Recitative (1934–1979) explored the experiences of immigrants, black people and the urban and rural poor in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His third great poetic work, Holocaust was published in 1975. His lines in this epic poem consist of versified court testimony about Nazi death camps during World War II. Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrants fleeing the Russian Empire and its pogroms. He entered the law school of New York University in 1912 and graduated in 1916, but practiced law only briefly. In 1918 he entered officer training school, but did not see active service before the end of World War I. Reznikoff lived and wrote in relative obscurity for most of his life, with his work being either self-published or issued by small independent presses. But in 1971, after endorsements from several distinguished poets, his work began to gain recognition. Reznikoff was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Prize by The National Institute of Arts and Letters. Around this time, he found a new publisher which published the aforementioned works. You can learn more about Charles Reznikoff and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Recent years have seen women increasingly playing the roles of tough cops facing down evil criminals. Maybe that is a good thing. I have to confess, however, my skepticism at the proposition that establishing women as equal to men when it comes to killing people and breaking things amounts to an advance for women.

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Psalm 27

Philippians 3:17—4:1

Luke 13:31-35

Prayer of the Day: God of the covenant, in the mystery of the cross you promise everlasting life to the world. Gather all peoples into your arms, and shelter us with your mercy, that we may rejoice in the life we share in your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Philippians 3:20.

The word translated as “citizenship” in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians is “politeuma,” from which we derive our word “politics.”It is better rendered “commonwealth” as the old RSV has it. As such, it refers to a body politic, a people governed by common laws, foundational beliefs and way of life. Citizenship, then, is membership and participation in a commonwealth. In the New Testament, citizenship is often used to describe a person’s status within the Roman Empire. Roman citizenship conferred certain rights and privileges unavailable to the vast majority of Roman subjects during the First Century. Among these were the right to trial before punishment of any kind, immunity from torture and the right to appeal from arrest or conviction to the imperial court. Cadbury, H.J., The Beginnings of Christianity (Volume 5, 1933) pp. 297-338; Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (1939) cited in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Volume 1 (c. 1962 by Abington Press).

Of course, the flip side of citizenship’s privileges are the obligations that come with it. Chief among these is loyalty to the sovereign and recognition of the rights of the commonwealth, be it an empire, nation or state. Though empires, monarchies and nation states have taken numerous forms over the centuries and have operated under diverse polities, there are some constants. The sovereign has the right to make and enforce laws obligatory for its citizens. It has the right to extract revenue to finance itself. Most importantly, the sovereign has the right to take human life both as a punishment for offenses among its own and as defense against hostility from foreign hostiles. As to the latter purpose, the sovereign has the power to conscript its citizens as soldiers authorized, or rather required to kill in order to protect the sovereign’s interests.

It is in stark contrast to this notion of citizenship that Paul describes the “commonwealth” to which Jesus’ disciples belong. This commonwealth is more than just the church. It is the coming reign of God, the “end” when God is “all in all.” I Corinthians 15:28. God’s reign, though yet to come in its fullness, has broken into our present existence compelling a radically different way of life. Under the reign of Jesus, a disciple might be called to die for the commonwealth of God, but never to kill for it. The only defensive weapons disciples possess are righteousness, peace and faith. The only offensive weapon in their quiver is the Word. Ephesians 6:13-17. The only response given to enemy attack is love, forgiveness, blessing and prayer. Luke 6:27-28. Loyalty to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims appears “foolish” and “weak” to a world in thrall to power, violence and wealth; a world in which it is taken for granted that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I Corinthians 1:26-31. But it is the way that will be shown to have been the direction, goal and end toward which God has been drawing creation from the beginning. Then the worthlessness, futility and folly of all misdirected loyalties will be exposed.

Too often, I think, we allow the issues of the day to be framed in terms of the vested interests of nation states, commercial entities and political associations. There has been much consternation these last few weeks over what should be done about Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. What kind of support and how much support should be given to Ukraine? What steps should NATO take to halt Russian aggression? What sanctions should be employed and against whom? I am not convinced that, as disciples of Jesus, we can shed much light on these questions-nor should we. Disciples of Jesus ought not to be thinking about global conflicts from the perspective of the nation states that purport to dominate our world, but from their own perspective as members of the commonwealth of God’s reign.

That brings me front and center to the question haunting me and that nobody else seems to be asking, namely, how is it that we have Orthodox Russian Christians and Orthodox Ukrainian Christians taking up arms against each other? How is it that the waters of baptism uniting all believers as one body are so easily cast aside for the sake of blood, soil and nation? That question, which, in turn, calls into question the faith, proclamation and witness of the church, is more fundamental in my view than the relative claims of the nation states currently waging this murderous conflict.

To be sure, the church in Eastern Europe is not the only one to whom this question must be directed. After all, the last two world wars were waged by the predominantly protestant and Catholic nations of Western Europe along with the United States. These examples illustrate, as does the present conflict between Ukraine and Russia, that for too many identifying as Christian, national citizenship is far more significant and formative than the baptismal community of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church we confess. I wish I could tell you how many parents I have met who would proudly send their sons to kill or die for their country yet who will not pull them out of basketball practice for confirmation class. Once again, blood, soil and nation trump loyalty to God’s reign-even among those who identify as disciples of Jesus.

Nationalism is perhaps the most destructive form of idolatry in our age. Contrary to Paul’s call for loyalty to the commonwealth under God’s peaceful reign whose salvation is from God and whose call is to reconciliation, we have pledged our loyalty to principalities and powers calling upon us to kill and to die to preserve borders, uphold privilege and advance state interests at the expense of outsiders. We should know better. We have seen the dead ends to which these gods have propelled us in the past throughout two world wars to a terrifying thermonuclear stalemate. Now they draw us to the precipice of an unwinnable third world war between nations equipped with all manner of weapons of mass destruction. Terrifying as this is, it should not surprise us. The security promised under the umbrella of national belonging, like the promises of all false gods, turns out to be a mirage. The blood sacrifices demanded by false gods never buy anything that is real.

So the question I would pose for our Lenten reflections is this: What should citizens of God’s commonwealth in Jesus Christ be saying and doing in a world dominated by armed nation states demanding bloodletting and shaking their thermonuclear swords? How do “we, though many throughout the earth…” who are yet “one body in this one Lord” live and witness faithfully in a nation that proudly and defiantly screams “America First?”[1] What price are we prepared to pay for being one with fellow disciples living within nations deemed “enemies”?

Here is a poem by Karl Shapiro suggesting what a disciple’s witness might look like in a world of war.

The Conscientious Objector  

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail

More tense than felons but relieved to find

The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped

From every mother’s windowpane, obscene

The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,

The dog authority slavering at your throat.

A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind

Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.

The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light

Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew

Troubling the captains for plain decencies,

A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out

To establish new theocracies to west,

A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas

Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.

These inmates loved the only living doves.

Like all men hunted from the world you made

A good community, voyaging the storm

To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;

Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,

The gaunt politicals construed our hate.

The opposite of all armies, you were best

Opposing uniformity and yourselves;

Prison and personality were your fate.

You suffered not so physically but knew

Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.

Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach

Erupting in his face damn all your kind.

Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us

Are equally with those who shed the blood

The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is

What we come back to in the armistice.

Source: Shapiro, Karl, Selected Poems (C. by Estate of Karl Shapiro; pub. by New York: Library of America, 2003). Karl Jay Shapiro (1913-2000) was an American poet and critic. His poems range from passionate love lyrics to social satire. Educated at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University, Shapiro first won critical acclaim in 1942 with the publication of his poetry collection, Person, Place and Thing. Three years later, his collection V-Letter and Other Poems, based on his experiences during World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Shapiro also wrote several works of literary criticism. He was a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, an editor of Poetry magazine and taught at the universities of Nebraska, Illinois, and California. You can read more about Karl Jay Shapiro and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website and Britannica.

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[1] “One Bread, One Body,” Text and music by John Foley; printed in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, (c. 2006 by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and published by Augsburg Fortress) Hymn #496.