Tag Archives: Psalm 51

Do We See Jesus: A Sermon for Lent 5B, 2024

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March 17, 2024

Among the many things that continue to fascinate and inspire me about our tradition, our worship, and our liturgical calendar, are the ways that themes reverberate and ring changes across the liturgical seasons and years. I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about how my experience and practice during Lent have changed over the years. In fact, I remarked to some clergy colleagues that I just don’t seem to have the energy and desire to engage in the sorts of spiritual disciplines and activities that used to be a central part of Lent for me. I think a bit of that can be attributed to the way in which Lent has been shaped for me by the experience of the pandemic—the shutdown, the isolation, the widespread suffering and panic. 

Still, the themes of Lent have their way of working on me, sometimes quite subtly. It can be a hymn, or in today’s worship, Psalm 51. As we were reciting and chanting the verses from Psalm 51 this morning, I was reminded that we had said this same psalm on Ash Wednesday, after the imposition of the ashes. Then, I and you were hoping for a Holy Lent, a time when we might deepen our relationship with God in Christ, experience repentance and forgiveness of our sins and grow spiritually. Now, as Lent draws to a close, those verses remind me of all the ways my actions and discipline in Lent have fallen short of what I had hoped for, another missed opportunity. I am grateful again, and continuously, for God’s mercy and grace.

I doubt few of us are sad that Lent is drawing to a close. There’s Easter to look forward to and the excitement and new life that arrives with Spring. Today is the 5th Sunday in Lent. It was traditionally known as Passion Sunday,–and its focus shifts from themes of spiritual discipline and penitence, toward an emphasis on the cross and Christ’s passion. 

We are also at a turning point in John’s gospel. The Sunday lectionary doesn’t provide us with a lot of help in understanding the overall structure of John’s gospel, but our reading today brings to an end the first half of the gospel. In the first twelve chapters we are introduced to Jesus’ public ministry. We see him engaging with the Jewish authorities, with the crowds in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Today, we encounter Greeks. From this point on, however, Jesus will focus on teaching his disciples. In John’s gospel, the Last Supper extends for four chapters—from 13-17, with a lengthy Farewell discourse in which Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure from them. His only interactions with people other than disciples comes during his arrest and trial.

Even as this passage marks a transition in John’s gospel, it also returns us to the very first chapter; to the powerful and symbolic scene of the Jesus calling his first disciples. For Philip and Andrew appeared there as well, as the first two disciples mentioned by name. Now, Greeks come to them imploring them, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Back in chapter 1, when Jesus discovered Andrew and another disciple following him, he turned and asked them, “What are you looking for?” They replied, “Where are you staying?” To which Jesus replied, “Come and see.” There’s something else fascinating about all this. Philip and Andrew—those two names are derived from Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, so are we meant to imagine that it wasn’t an accident that of all the disciples, the Greeks came to those two?

Now it is other seekers who come looking for Jesus, wanting to see him—Greeks, John tells us. It’s likely that either one of two possibilities are intended. Perhaps these Greeks were Greek-speaking Jews, having come from another part of the Roman empire to observe the Passover in Jerusalem. 

It’s also possible that they were proselytes—among those non-Jews who were attracted to the high ethical standards of Judaism, and while they hadn’t undergone full conversion, they observed some of Jewish law and worshipped in synagogues. Either is possible, and either makes John’s larger point, that this is the moment that Jesus’ ministry and message is expanding beyond the Jewish community, to the whole world.

What’s curious in this episode is that it’s not clear whether the Greeks are present throughout the scene. They are never mentioned again. We don’t know if they saw Jesus.

But that’s not really the point. It’s another, a final opportunity for the gospel writer, and Jesus, to reiterate central themes of the gospel. 

There is a great deal more I could say about these few verses, but I want to focus on Jesus’ final statement. The passage concludes with Jesus’ statement, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” This is the heart of John’s gospel, the heart of Jesus’ ministry and person. In the cross, we see Jesus, in the cross, on the cross, Jesus draws us and the whole world to himself. In the cross, on the cross, we see God’s love for us.

Ponder that statement a moment, “And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.” Do you get the significance of it? We’re inclined to think salvation is something we need to do, to get right, to believe the right thing. We are inclined to wonder whether we are saved or not, or if we certain we’re saved, whether those people over there are or should be. Jesus, the cross, are often divisive rather than uniting but here Jesus says two things of significance: first, that it’s for everyone, and second, that he is doing the work, he is drawing all of us to him, to the cross.

These are words of great comfort, of reassurance. They remind us that the cross is about love, God’s love for us, Christ’s love for us and for the world, and that the power of that love is drawing us, all of us, the whole world to the cross, to Jesus, to God. That is the God, the Christ we see on the cross.

Did the Greeks see Jesus? In the gospel of John, “seeing” is a prelude to faith, at most, it is an inadequate, partial faith. It is a first step, an entrance and first exposure to the abundant life that is offered through relationship with and in Jesus Christ.

Do we see Jesus? Do we see Jesus in our shared life and worship as the body of Christ, do we see Jesus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in the proclamation of the Word of God. Do we see Jesus in our outreach in the community? Do we see Jesus?

What do others see when they come to us? Do they see, in the quality of our relationships, in the way we support and help each other, in our interactions with each other and with our neighbors, do they see Jesus? 

People come to us asking, sometimes overtly and openly, but more often quietly, leaving the question unspoken; they ask “We wish to see Jesus.” Do we even hear them? And if they are persistent, if they have the courage to ask the question out loud, what is our response? Embarrassed silence? 

As we continue to explore our mission and ministry in this neighborhood and city, as we seek to reach out to our neighbors, I would hope that these questions are at the heart of our work and our reflection. To those who come seeking Jesus, wishing to see Jesus, I hope that we can show them in our common life and in our work, that Jesus is present among us fills us with life and love, and that through us, they may not only see Jesus but enter into the abundant life that comes through relationship with him.

And for those who do not come in search of Jesus, who are blinded or scarred, uninterested or opposed, are we able to show them that their assumptions are wrong, that among us, in us, through us, Jesus offers new life and hope.

Can we see, know, and share, that when Jesus is lifted up from the earth, his love draws all people to himself? 

A God who searches for us … and finds us: A sermon for Proper 19C, 2019

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I hate losing things. One of the worst is books. A few weeks ago, I was looking for a book I had used regularly when I was teaching. I went through the shelves in my office several times and finally gave up. I have no idea where it is. Perhaps it’s in a bookcase at home, perhaps it’s in Corrie’s office. It may even be that I lent it to someone years ago who never returned it.

It’s even worse with paper documents. Grace lay leaders and staff know better than to give me hard copies of important documents. It will land in a pile on my desk and stay there, perhaps for years. Much better to send it electronically. Then I will have it, and can easily find it by conducting a simple computer search. Year end financials from 2010? Sure, just give me a second. Still, I remember what it’s like when you are looking for something; you can’t find it. As you keep looking for it, your anger and frustration grow; you start lashing out at everyone and everything. And finally, that moment of discovery—relief and happiness that overwhelm you. It might be a valuable object, a document you need, or some cherished memento of a loved one.

We all have had such experiences, so when we hear stories like the two we just heard in the gospel reading, we regard them as commonplace, ordinary tales, and put ourselves in the roles of the shepherd going back for the lost sheep or the woman searching for the lost coin, and overlook the strangeness of the stories themselves, and the possibilities that there might be other ways of connecting with the stories than by connecting them with our own experiences of search for lost items.

In fact, I think we allow our own experiences of searching for lost things to so dominate our minds as we hear these parables, that we interpret the story about the shepherd in light of the story of the woman with the lost coin, and overlook the introduction to both which might put a completely different spin on things.

Luke’s introduction to the parables strikes one of his overarching themes: sin and forgiveness. The Pharisees were once again complaining that Jesus spent time with tax collectors and sinners. Remember that these two groups were reviled by most first-century Palestinian Jews. Tax collectors, not because they worked for the federal government but because in the Roman system, their profit came by being able to extract more money from the people whose taxes they were collecting than they had send on up the pipeline to Rome. And in this instance, sinners doesn’t mean people who made the occasional mistake, but rather notorious sinners, whose lifestyles put them outside of the community—especially people who were ritually impure.

So think of the people most likely to be excluded from polite society, from our community gatherings, from our church—that’s who Jesus was hanging out with, and if he were among us now, it’s likely we would be the ones complaining, not the ones with whom he would be spending time.

In response to these complaints, Jesus tells two parables, introducing each with a question that invites the listener to enter into the story: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Now, contemplate the absurdity of that question.

Which one of you would do that? None of us would. We would do a cost/benefit analysis and cut our losses, leaving the one to die while making sure the 99 were safe.

Or the second parable: The parable describes in great detail the woman’s actions, she lights a lamp, sweeps the floor. The narrative almost stops for a moment, heightening tension, so that the discovery becomes even more dramatic. But then what happens? She throws a party, invites her friends, spends what, as much or double the worth of the coin she had lost? We can see ourselves searching for something, but throwing a party, and throwing what we found away in rejoicing? Who of us would do that?

Two people behaving completely unexpectedly, in ways that make utterly no sense by any rational analysis. They were so overjoyed by the finding that it’s almost as if they lost their bearings. Nothing else mattered but that joy, and offering others the opportunity to share in that joy.

It’s clear that Luke wants us to see the point of the story to be God’s extravagant joy in welcoming a repentant sinner. So be it. No doubt it fills us with love and gratitude toward God to imagine ourselves welcomed in such a way. So we should think about it in light of the final sentence in the passage: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Joy over one sinner who repents.

As important as that is, there is another aspect of the behavior on display in these two parables that might be key to our understanding of God’s nature and disposition toward us. The shepherd abandoned 99 sheep to look for the one lost one. The woman did everything in her power and persisted until she found the lost coin. What if God acts that way toward sinners? What if God does everything in God’s power, obsesses if you will, certainly persists, until finding that lost sinner—until we are once again safely in God’s protective arms? What does that say about our sin and the power and persistence of God’s grace and mercy?

We don’t like that word, sin, although it’s all over our readings today. We heard about the sin of the Israelites, who abandoned their faith in God to worship a golden calf in the wilderness. We heard Psalm 51, that great psalm of sin and repentance. Many of us may have bristled at its language: “

Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, *
a sinner from my mother’s womb.

Even if the Christian tradition has emphasized human sin, we don’t like to think about it. When we go about revising the liturgy as we did in 1979 and are in the beginning stages of doing again, one of the first things we look to remove from our Eucharistic prayers is an over-emphasis on sin; we may even do it with the confession of sin.

But at the same time, in our heart of hearts, we know our sin and brokenness. We know all of the ways that we have fallen short of our best intentions, and fallen short of being and becoming the human beings God is calling us to be.

Confession of sin is the first step. Acknowledging our faults, looking at ourselves with clear eyes, with honesty, and recognizing who we are and what we have done. But of course, it doesn’t end there. That’s only the beginning. The next step is repentance, to ask God’s forgiveness of our sins.

Sometimes, I think we are reluctant to acknowledge our sins and sinfulness because we don’t think God will forgive us. But that’s not the case. True confession, true repentance open us up to receive the grace of God’s forgiveness, God’s overwhelming and abundant mercy.

And that’s where the parables teach us about God as well as about ourselves. The joy expressed by the shepherd and the woman are not just like the joy we might experience when we find something we’ve lost; they are describing the joy that God experiences when we confess our sins and ask God’s forgiveness.

That joy, experienced by God when we approach him as the psalmist did when he confessed his sins and asked God:

Purge me from my sin, and I shall be pure; *
wash me, and I shall be clean indeed.

9 Make me hear of joy and gladness, *
that the body you have broken may rejoice.

 

That’s the joy we experience, the joy of repentance and forgiveness, a response to our experience of God’s abundant grace flowing in us, remaking us in God’s image, and restoring us to right relationship with God and with our fellow humans. God doesn’t abandon us; God doesn’t give up the search, even when we don’t know we’re lost or we don’t want to be found. God is here, searching for us and the joy we experience when we repent of our sins and are forgiven is nothing compared to the joy God experiences when we are embraced in God’s mercy and grace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dust, Ashes, and God’s steadfast love: A Homily for Ash Wednesday, 2019

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I have been surrounded by death the last few months. There was the death of my mother before Christmas, and two funerals at Grace in recent weeks. Yesterday morning, I visited someone in hospice care and we talked about death as I prayed and read Psalms with her. After that visit, I came to the church and burnt the dried palms from last year’s Palm Sunday and prepared the ashes that I will use to mark the sign of the cross on our foreheads and say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This is now my tenth Ash Wednesday at Grace and I’m increasingly conscious of those people whose foreheads I daubed with ash and said, “Remember that you are dust…” and who in the years since, I’ve said while committing their remains to their final resting place, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Of all the intimate and powerful acts I perform as a priest, there may be none so intimate or powerful as what I do today, for as I say, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return…” I am saying it as much to myself as to you.

In our culture, we do almost everything we can to avoid talking about, thinking about, or being near, death. We don’t even use the word—someone has passed, they don’t die. We go to extraordinary lengths to avoid looking old, spending billions on cosmetic surgery to look young. We are so averse to speaking about death that we’ve invented a word, “cremains” so we don’t have to confront the reality of ashes.

But then we come hear and have our foreheads smudged with ashes and hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

To face our mortality with honesty and admitting our vulnerability is no easy thing. But it is an important first step in the work we need to do. Lent is a season of repentance and spiritual discipline. But to ask God’s forgiveness, to receive God’s forgiveness requires that we first admit who we are, acknowledge our sin and brokenness, open our selves and our hearts to God’s redemptive and forgiving grace.

We see that in Psalm 51, which we will recite together later. It’s a psalm of repentance but as the psalmist acknowledges his sinfulness and prays to God for forgiveness, there’s a moment when the tone changes:

Make me hear of joy and gladness, *
that the body you have broken may rejoice.

 

It is only through such confession, and honesty about oneself, that one can fully experience the joy of God’s forgiveness.

There’s another image that haunts me each Ash Wednesday, a verse from the Joel reading, “Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.” My attention was first drawn to it years ago by Tom Davis, a priest who has himself now entered the larger life, as we were preparing for services at St. James, Greenville.

The image of priests weeping between the vestibule and altar, or as we might say, between the sacristy and the altar haunts me because it evokes a moment of intense repentance and it goes against the priestly decorum we display and that is expected of us. In the larger passage, the prophet Joel is talking about an imminent catastrophe, a natural disaster, a plague of locusts that has come upon the land and destroyed the crops. Interestingly, he does not attribute this natural disaster to punishment for the evil of the people. He offers no explanation for the coming destruction.

But he does offer hope: “Return to the Lord…”

The prophet continues:

Return to the Lord, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.

As we confront our mortality this day, as we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return, as we confess our sins, and acknowledge our brokenness, as we weep between the vestibule and the altar, may our broken bodies and spirits be filled with the joy of God’s forgiveness, and know the immeasurable power of God’s loving grace.