Easter is a Way of Life

Forty (or so) days ago, I wrote in this space about Ash Wednesday-for Christians, the beginning of a long Lenten journey culminating in the holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. This Lent has, in fact, felt very "Lenten"-Waltham has suffered from violence and pain in the shooting death of Tyler Zanco and the revelation of the connection between the Boston Marathon bombers and the homicides that happened in our city in 2011. We live in a world where profits win out over people and the vulnerable are often left with even less. We don't need Good Friday to remind us that there is sin in the world. We can do that ourselves-no calendar or extra church attendance necessary. 

What we can't do all on our own is get out of it. That's where the grace and transcendence of God comes in. As a Christian, I'm committed to the notion that there is a way out of all of this: that in the person of Jesus Christ God did something new in the world. Jesus forgave from the cross-betrayed and in pain, still he forgave. That's where Easter comes from. Somehow-some mystical way-the world changed on that day.

In forgiveness, in love, in restorative justice-that's where we are invited to be partners in God's healing of the world. The Christian faith doesn't have a monopoly on this-whether the Jewish idea of tikkun olam--repairing the world-- or the freedom that comes from the Buddhist commitment to end suffering through transcendence of the self, there are plenty of examples of people of all different faiths doing this work. As a Christian, though, this is the language I speak, so it's Easter I'm committed to.

Easter is wherever we offer love instead of hate. Easter is whenever we put someone else's good above our own. Easter is when someone finds housing after having been out on the street. Easter is when someone has the courage to leave their abuser and begin a new life. Easter is money raised to pay for a funeral, Easter is the One fund, a scholarship for a child on the other side of the world. Easter happens in the State House when legislators find a way to work together, when human persons win over the influence of money and the desire for power. Easter is when the murderer is forgiven, when hungry people are fed. Easter is marriage equality coming state by state 45 years after Stonewall. Easter is when we meet another person exactly where they are, not wanting to change them but being willing to be changed.

Easter isn't just a day-Easter is an action. Easter is a way of life. Easter isn't just about the curious spiritual experience of some wandering disciples. That day showed us that the power of God is stronger than the power of hatred. No matter how we are divided from one another, no matter what evil we suffer, it doesn't have the last word. Easter can be slow work, and we don't always see it. But person by person, day by day, the heart of God is with us. Amen, Alleluia.

What Holy Week Asks Us...

Dear People of Christ Church,

By now, you've heard my pitch about why you should do Holy Week, so this year I'm not going to give it. The fact is, I don't know why you should do Holy Week. I'm thinking about why these stories still have something to say to us so many years later. Maybe in some of these questions you'll find your answer. Maybe in these questions you'll discover that Holy Week has already come to you, and you want to go there with others in worship as well.

Tonight, at our Maundy Thursday service, we read the story of the Last Supper. Jesus alarms everyone by kneeling on the floor to wash the disciples' feet, Peter says: "Lord, you will never wash my feet." He fears the vulnerability, the intimacy this will create. Now, I wonder how often we still try to shut God and each other out of our lives; is it that we'll never let anyone see us cry? Never admit how much something hurts? Never tell another how they've hurt us?

Late into the night, we sit in Vigil with Christ in the sacrament. Church-speak calls it an "Altar of Repose," but there isn't much that was restful about that last night for Jesus. When we sit and pray with him, we stay awake-one of us will be in witness there all night, trying to offer our prayers and presence. What is the long night that you're experiencing now? Whose long night are you sitting with, in support of someone you love?

Friday, we reverence the cross, a sign of torture and suffering. Jesus goes to the cross in taking on the worst of human cruelty, taking it on for love, unwilling to respond to violence with violence. What is at the cross for you? What is the pain that you are trying to keep for yourself? Is it possible to share it with God there? Or does the cross hold something else? Is there something that God is longing to share with you, some work in the world that you are being asked to take up your cross to accomplish? Is there some witness to God's peace, some relationship to nurture that God asks of you?

Saturday, we celebrate. We really, really celebrate. But first, we watch and listen. With the new fire at the front steps, we remember the light of Christ that could not be extinguished. We hear the stories of the Old Testament where God stayed with God's people, again and again, offering life out of death and comfort in suffering. We renew our baptismal promises and ring in Easter with bells and rejoicing. What will be raised for you?

Sunday-we celebrate some more! We celebrate for weeks and weeks, into Easter's Great Fifty Days.

Thanks be to God!

Blessings, Sara+ 

Where _is_ Jesus?

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week in our Tuesday 6:00 group, we had a conversation about Jesus.  We were kind of all over the place. We were responding to this quote from our book, The Restoration
Project:  

If you were to imagine that Jesus is with you right now, where would he appear? Would he be  beside you, a companion on the way? Is he ahead of you, leading to an unknown destination? Is he behind you, holding you up in ways known and unknown? Or is he in front of you, holding you in his gaze, teaching or commissioning you for some work only you can do?  (p. 85).

Where is Jesus?   
In a literal, spatial way? I didn't quite have an answer.
The answer is...all over. Jesus is in the sacraments, feeding me. Jesus is kind of laughing at me when I spin out wild story lines of anxiety and self-criticism, gently inviting me to be quiet and be loved. Jesus might sit next to me when I meditate, when I'm fidgety and can't focus.  But is Jesus the person, the first century Nazarene Jew really there? I don't know. Where is Jesus?
I don't know...maybe he stepped out to fill the bird feeder or turn over the compost?  

It's much easier to encounter God in the abstract; praying with the Spirit who "intercedes with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26). It's easier to imagine God as Creator, bringing life out of nothing in primordial banging planets, then receding from consciousness.  It's easier to imagine Jesus walking dusty roads long ago, turning upside down the consciousness of those he met. I love the Emmaus Story when Jesus walks with the disciples and they only realize it was him as they are eating-and then he disappears.  

But here's something. This morning, with the Sisters of Saint Anne, we celebrated Eucharist in the chapel surrounded by huge paintings of Jesus from artist Janet McKenzie-her rendition of the Stations of the Cross. We read her book, Holiness and the Feminine Spirit a few years ago in our daytime book group. McKenzie's Jesus doesn't have much in common with the Good Shepherd in our window. Her images are dark skinned, dark haired, dark eyed. They're honest, his face in pain but also love, a body in motion, but also deep exhaustion and a moment of rest. We don't after all, know what he looked like, but chances really are not that good that he was blue eyed and blond. It's not just the "more accurate" picture of the paintings that makes you pay attention-it's texture, nuance, and light. Jesus is somehow there in those paintings. I have traditional icons in my prayer space both at home and in the office, but I don't quite encounter Jesus like I did this morning.   

So there's that. I sometimes wish I had the kind of spirituality where I could just go for long walks and have Jesus by my side in glorious and mutual back and forth conversation.  Usually it's more subtle than that, and for the most part I'm OK with that (you may be relieved to know that the Donatist heresies settled the question as to whether the piety of the priest impacts whether the sacrament works-it doesn't-so you are all OK even if I edge into theological danger zones!)

Either way, the life of Christ in the church is as real as my own kitchen table, the pattern of death and resurrection near to me as my heart. And for that I am grateful, even if I can't put it on a seating chart, locating the transcendent love of God with the right preposition.  Maybe someday. Where is Jesus for you?

Blessings,
Sara+

Who is my neighbor

Dear People of Christ Church,

A week later, I'm still mentally reeling a little in the wake of the murder of Waltham High student Tyler Zanco last week. I didn't know him or his family, but something about the murder of a teenager-a child, really-feels like it demands our attention. My son Isaiah turns seven on Saturday-where will he be when he's 17?    

In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the murder of Jorge Fuentes, a parishioner at St Stephen's in the South End, who came up through the ranks of the B-Ready afterschool program and the B-Safe summer camp program we volunteer with. It was in response to his death that our diocese kicked off the "B Peace" program to work against violence in Boston.  Last year we participated in the Mother's Day Walk for Peace, which we'll join again this year. The Mother's Day Walk, too, was founded in memory of a child who died-Louis Brown, whose mother started the Peace Institute in his memory. Louis Brown Peace Institute has partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health in their Peace Zone Curriculum for middle and high school youth They hold the Walk as an annual fundraiser for their work in in peace education and support for survivors of violence. In our diocese, along with support of the walk, the other aspects of the B Peace program are summer jobs for youth and anti-gun work, which has particular resonance with the news coming out this week about one of the alleged perpetrators of last week's murder.

In this whole bundle of complication and grief, it's hard to know how to respond. Whatever the circumstances, wherever it happens, it's still tragic. Spiritually, it feels like it comes back to that question the lawyer asks Jesus when he's trying to test him-"Who is my neighbor?" We all know how that ends-we become neighbors when we are in community with each other, when we help, when we provide for each others' needs. Neighborliness isn't about being part of the same group-on an ordinary day, the traveler in the story and the Samaritan wouldn't have had anything to do with each other at all-they both would have wanted it that way! We aren't just neighbors because we are, literally, near ones.    Tyler, Jorge, the families who come for diapers, or food, those who wait for the bus outside-these are all "near ones," but how can we actually become neighbors?

That's the invitation of the Gospel. I don't immediately know the answer to how we live into the call to be neighbors-it's always different. Events like the Mother's Day walk appeal to me as a way to act-like "Ashes to Go," for me they fall into the "make the right mistakes" column-it may not fix everything, but it is something. We still need to do more to support our teenagers and make our neighborhoods safe. We still need to do more to get outside of our four walls and share our faith. But we can do this.

Blessings,
Sara+

A sacrifice of thanksgiving

Dear People of Christ Church,   

This week, I'm still mulling over what it means to "do" Lent-what offering could we possibly make, what could possibly be meaningful to God?  One idea from Scripture that has struck me particularly forcefully lately is a line we heard from Psalm 50 from our Tuesday Eucharist:

For every wild animal of the forest is mine... 'If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High.

And again, the prophet Isaiah on Ash Wednesday-we don't really quite know how to honor God. On that day, we hear that God chooses a fast of justice-making, not just a fast of abstinence. God wants service to the oppressed, not liturgies and ritual. 

Psalm 69 says something like this, too:
I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify God with thanksgiving.  This will please the Lord more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs.

We don't offer sacrifices of animals anymore, but that doesn't mean this comparison has nothing for us.  As I wrote in this space last week, there is something "to" giving things up, not so much for stopping that particular behavior, but to make us more mindful of what we might experience without it.  On another level, though, somehow it can feel more 'worthy" to do things that are hard.  Making a sacrifice of just "thanksgiving" somehow doesn't seem like it would be enough. (note that I'm not even getting into all the theology about Jesus' sacrifice-for sure it's linked, but let's leave it off the table for now)

But, but, but. What if we took seriously the idea that we can offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving? What if gratitude to God could shape us more and more in God's image? What if offering thanks actually is hard because it's so simple?  Or if we were really thankful for the fact of our own lives,  maybe we'd spend more of them doing the work of God?   Thanksgiving for gift of life is something that everyone-of every circumstance-can offer. Gratitude to God for life isn't about the stuff of our life-not about your house or your car or lack thereof.  It's about understanding that it's not that you would have nothing if not for God, it's that you would be nothing. Let me say that again: it's not about having nothing if not for God, it's about not being in the first place.  And that's quite a paradigm shift.

So give whatever you can-obviously. Give your money, give your time, give your abstinence from whatever it is you're giving up. But remember, too, as winter turns to spring, the pleasure of oxygen drawn deeply into lungs, the strength of tiny crocuses coming up from underground.  Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, for your life and for all there is.

Blessings, 
Sara+

Praying as you can

Dear People of Christ Church,
  
One week in, I hope you've been able to enter into Lent in a peaceable way. I almost wrote offering hopes for a "good start" to Lent, which sounds like it's a race or something we're trying to accomplish, which it's not, exactly. But we are going somewhere.

So what is it? This time of year, I often remember Dorothy Day's desire in her work in creating the Catholic Worker Houses-she said she wanted to create a society in which it was easy to be good. I think Lent is a time when we try to take on practices that make it easier to be close to God; of course we're not distant from God at other times of year, but in Lent we're invited to a certain sense of quiet intimacy with our Creator that the dynamism of Easter or the long days of summer Pentecost don't exactly share. A colleague's wife, Joy Howard has written about the traditional Lenten practices of giving alms, praying, and fasting. She recasts them as "three C's"--compassion, connection, and clarity.

Compassion: we give to others because we are moved by the Spirit of God and see Christ in them. Compassion is different from pity-compassion moves us to respond to the needs of others, whereas pity keeps them at arm's length, separated from us. Pitying "the poor" makes "them" different, not "our kind." Being compassionate, though, allows God to move through my heart in action, not just words.

Connection: we pray. We pray to be more deeply connected to God, and we pray to be conncted to each other. We had some wonderful conversations in our Lent groups this week (you can still join!) about how we are made in the image of God-and how it can be hard to remember that. In prayer, we remember who we are-beloved children of God. That opens our hearts to each other (see: compassion) and allows us to respond with grace. The 2014 www.prayworshipserve.org challenge invites us to give 20 minutes a day to prayer, one hour a week to going to church, and four hours a month to service. If you can't pray for 20 minutes, what about ten?

Clarity: we fast. You don't have to give something up for Lent, but if you were to, what could it be? Think beyond the usual stalwarts of chocolate and alcohol. What about excess noise? What about shopping for stuff you might not need? What about gossip or complaining? Is there anything that would help you simplify or look more clearly at your life? My Lenten discipline for the last three years has been fairly minor, in that I give up the radio in the car. I'm an NPR junkie with a 20-30 minute drive to work, so taking that extra sound out of my life has created 40-60 extra minutes of silence in my day.   There's nothing wrong with knowing what's going on in the world-it's really important!-but to spend some extra time witnessing the chaos and noise of my chattering brain is always kind of sobering, an effect that usually lasts for a while even after I happily return to Bob Oakes in the morning.

I'm a big fan of the phrase "Pray as you can, not as you can't"-don't spend too much time regretting what you think isn't possible. But don't take it as an excuse that your life doesn't permit you to do one BIG thing to get you off the hook of doing the little things you can.

Here are a few other resources:
The Daily Office online: also a  podcast.  
Hear Scripture and the ancient prayers of the church. Pray together with others knowing that they hear and say the same words, whether or not you're in the same room. (it's in the Book of Common Prayer, too-you can even do it without a screen!) Also check out our local monastery, SSJE, and their Give us a Word series.

How's your charitable giving? Is your pledge to church really where it could be? Could you add some extra giving to a community charity like the Community Day Center or the Waltham Family School?   

Blessings, 
Sara+

Making the right mistakes

Dear People of Christ Church,

As you know, next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, but there is some partying to be done before then. We're doing both jazz Mardi Gras (Friday, 6pm, Steve Taddeo concert) and taking up the traditional English practice of eating pancakes before Lent, using up the indulgent eggs and butter before the Lenten fast. On Sunday, we also celebrate and offer our thanks to Bishop Shaw, who retires this year, along with our partner congregation, St Peter's Ugandan Anglican, who will join us for worship.

Ash Wednesday morning, we begin with ashes at the train station. This year, we're partnering with Chaplains on the Way, which I particularly appreciate since, as a mostly-homeless ministry, the street is their church. I wonder about how many people, who, for whatever reason, don't feel comfortable coming into a church, and how powerful a witness it is to leave our comfort zone of having people come to us. Will someone have a more "deep" experience in coming to church? As a priest I'd probably hope so, but I also shouldn't make assumptions about what happens between an individual and God, no matter where they're standing. I heard a quote about meditation once that said that you could open the window, but you couldn't make the breeze come in. That probably applies here-when fewer and fewer people having traditional church backgrounds, we need to throw open as many windows as we can.

It's not an easy question, though-how far can you go from tradition before you've lost the center of what you're committed to in the first place? What are we inviting people toward if we compromise too far? How much do we ask of people who come to have a child baptized? Do they have to come for a few weeks, months, a year? Do they have to officially join the parish by making a financial pledge? What about receiving communion? It's the practice in our diocese in many places, including Christ Church, to offer communion to everyone, whether or not they're baptized. The prayer book and church canons say baptism should come first. Here, again it trying to open the windows.

Adherence to tradition is one of those places where we strive for faithfulness, not necessarily the 100% always-and-everywhere-iron-clad rule. Faithfulness, it seems to me, is deciding which side you're going to err on.   Will we be devoted to orthodoxy or openness? What's at stake on both sides? There are a lot of times when I defer to tradition-the Nicene Creed, for example-but here, I think there is actually something to say for asking what Jesus would do. His first goal, most often, was to get people to the table. Once you're there, you can talk more, debate, pick sides. As the parable in Luke 14 tells it, when the nice, qualified guests wouldn't come for the feast, the host told his servant quite unequivocally: "Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame." When he does that and there's still space, he goes out to make everybody else come in. Would it have been a better party if the well-educated and polite people had come? It's completely possible. Would they have appreciated the expensive wine more? Maybe. But that's not what God's table is about.

I do appreciate, though, that it's a discussion to be had. It's not an uncontroversial stance, it's not an "of course!" moment. And once-if-this gets settled, there will be something else to struggle with. As we grow into the church we're called to be, we are trying to follow a Jesus who's always just a little ahead, taking us a little further than we thought we could go.

Blessings,
Sara+
   
PS: For a more general intro to Lent piece about Ashes to Go, see my editorial in the Waltham News Tribune today!