Saturday, March 31, 2012

A Twisted Symbol (Apr 1 2012, Palm Sunday)

Homily.  Year B, Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, April 1th 2012
Readings:  Mk11:1-11; Is 50:4-9a; Ps 31:9-16; Phil 2:5-11; Mt 11:1-15:47

Each of us received a palm cross as we came in this morning.  The palm cross is, if you think about it a rather curious symbol.  As a palm branch, it is the symbol of a king who wins great victories in battle, defeating the enemies of his people.  That’s how we used it in our opening procession, as we waved our palm branches and sang hymns of praise to Jesus the king, shouting Hosanna which means “Save us”.

But that’s not all there is to the palm branch your holding.  There’s a twist.  Quite literally!  In order to turn a palm branch into a cross you have to twist it.  And the cross as a symbol has a meaning which is almost exactly the opposite of the palm branch that acclaimed the king.  It is instead a symbol of what Caesar did to anyone who messed with the Roman Empire.  That person, the rebel, the criminal or the runaway slave, was executed in a painful, public death on the cross.  That is the reality that we encountered in our dramatic reading of the passion gospel.

And so the palm crosses that we hold in our hands are a contradictory symbol, a symbol full of tension.  Our liturgy this morning is also full of tension.  On the one hand we have the Palm Sunday liturgy, with its joyful procession that feels like a celebration.  Then we follow that immediately with the liturgy of the passion.  The word passion is derived from the Latin word for suffering.  In our readings we hear first Isaiah’s prophecy of the suffering servant, and then the gospel account of the trial, torture, and death of Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but putting the two together makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.  Did you notice how we all played two roles in the dual drama that we acted out this morning?  First we were the crowd who praised Jesus, who sang and waved palm branches in his honour.  But then, only a short time later, we were again the crowd but now we called out “Crucify Him, Crucify Him”.  We stood by while Jesus was falsely accused, we participated in the mocking, we spat upon him.

How could we turn so quickly?  How did that crowd in Jerusalem turn so quickly?  How did our palm branches get twisted into crosses?

At least part of the answer seems to revolve around our assumptions, around the question of expectations.  The crowd on Palm Sunday had expectations of Jesus, high expectations.  They expected him to become king.  They expected him to overthrow the Romans.  But Jesus defied their expectations.  He refused to engage in the violence of military struggle.  He understood that what was ailing his people was much more profound than political oppression.

The crowds expected Jesus to reveal the glory of God by becoming king.  Instead, Jesus revealed the glory of God by becoming vulnerable, allowing himself to be put to death.  The crowds expected Jesus to save the people of Israel by overthrowing the Romans.  Instead he saved all people, Israelites and Romans included, by reconciling us to God through the cross.

Each of us comes here with our own understanding of who Jesus is.  You might think of Jesus as a teacher, or as a healer, or as King, or as Son of God.  But whatever your understanding of Jesus is, whatever expectations you have of Jesus, whatever are your assumptions, you need to prepared to bring those understandings and expectations and assumptions before the cross.  There, they will be deepened, expanded, re-shaped and perhaps overturned.

What might this look like?  You might think of Jesus as a great teacher, and he is a great teacher.  But what happens to that understanding of Jesus as teacher when you bring it before the cross, what happens when the teacher is put on trial, when he suffers, when he dies.  Maybe you get a deeper understanding of what Jesus was trying to teach.  Maybe you get a sense of how scandalous that teaching was.  Maybe you start to realize that there is more going on here than just teaching.

Each of us has our own expectations of Jesus.  We may expect him to be on our side, or to help us to prosper, or to provide moral insights, or to comfort us in times of trouble or to just leave us alone.  But whatever our particular expectations are, when we bring them before the cross, Jesus has a way of overturning them, of going against the conventional wisdom, of nudging us into new and sometimes uncomfortable ways of looking at things.  Jesus is the one who turns our reality upside down, opening up for us a new and bigger reality, a reality which he calls the Kingdom of God.

So hang onto your palm cross.  It’s the twisted symbol of the one who was expected to be king, but was nailed to a cross.  It’s the symbol of the one who was expected to save his people from their enemies, but instead saved his people and their enemies through his death on the cross, reconciling all people to God and showing us what it truly means to love and forgive.

Amen.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Re-Imagining God (Lent 3, March 11 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 3, March 11 2012, St. Albans
Ex 20:1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1:18-25; Jn 2:13-22

When I say “God”, what picture or image comes to mind?  I expect that we all conjure up various images, pictures and names whenever the word God is mentioned.  Most of us have a default mode that we go to when we imagine God.  Perhaps it’s the old man with the long white beard sitting on a throne and acting as judge.  Perhaps it’s the mysterious force that we hear about in the Star Wars movies when they say “may the force be with you”.  In our psalm today, the psalmist imagines God as both Creator, the great artist and architect of nature, and as the Giver of the Law, the one who gave the law to humanity.  For good measure he also throws in the image of God as a rock.  We may have our own images of God.  We may think of God as huge like a galaxy, or God as tiny as a sub-atomic particle, or as invisible like the wind.

How do you imagine God?  What image or name or word comes to mind?  Take a moment, turn to your neighbours and tell them about your images for God.

Our tradition and our Scriptures are full of images.  It is a way of acknowledging that none of our images can fully capture what God is.  When St. Augustine, the great bishop and theologian of the 4th century, was asked what God is, he replied “God is Mystery”.  It was his way of saying that none of our names for God and none our images for God can contain all that God is.  God is, if you like, too big for our words and pictures.

And that’s why it’s good that we have so many images and names for God, a multiplicity of metaphors that can at times contradict one another and at other times open up new inspiration for our imaginations.  Paul Ricoeur, a French theologian, called this a “polyphonic naming of God”, and considered it a good thing.

But whatever image or images you use, when is the last time you set them aside and re-imagined God?

Even though there are many images available to us, we often tend to get stuck on a particular one.  Maybe it’s God the omnipotent being.  Maybe it’s God the king, sitting on his throne.  But whatever it is, we can sometimes focus on this one image and make the error of mistaking our image of God for God herself.  And we can wrap all sorts of theology around that, and years of tradition and history until the image becomes so strong that it becomes very difficult to give up and takes on a life of its own.  Our image becomes an idol.

We are warned about the dangers of idolatry in our first reading from the book of Exodus, the reading of the Ten Commandments.  Right near the top of the list, God tells the people of Israel, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or on earth below or water under the earth.  You shall not bow down or worship them.”

Now idols can come in many forms in our modern world.  The love of money, self-centredness, pleasure-seeking, materialism, these are all idols that are worshiped in our time and place.  But it is also idolatry when we think we have God all figured out, if we think we have God by the tail.  When we get stuck on any one image of God and build our religious practices around that we run the risk of idolatry.

Which is why it is very healthy spiritually to re-imagine God from time to time, and allow ourselves to consider new pictures and names for who God is.

However dealing with a new image of God can be a very difficult thing.  Paul writes about that in the second reading that we heard this morning, his letter to the Corinthians.  In Jesus* we have been given a radically new and disturbing image for God:  the God who in Jesus hung on the cross and was crucified.  It is an image of humiliation, of suffering, of vulnerability, of weakness.  This is the message about the cross that Paul proclaimed, the image of Christ crucified.  And people were disturbed by it.  To the Jews, who were expecting God to send a triumphant Messiah to defeat the Roman oppressors, this image of a Messiah crucified by the same Romans was a stumbling block.  To the Gentiles, their image of God was inspired by Greek philosophy.  God was the supreme being, omnipotent, omniscient, impassible and all those other fancy words the Greek philosophers used to describe God.  The God of Greek philosophy couldn’t possibly suffer at the hands of human beings.  The image of God as Christ crucified was utter foolishness.  And yet, that is what Paul proclaimed*.

In our gospel today we have the account of Jesus clearing the animals and money-changers out of the Temple.  This too is an instance when people were forced to re-imagine God.  The Jewish authorities thought that they had things figured out. 
  
Yahweh was the law-giver whose presence on earth was in the Temple in Jerusalem.  When people broke the laws that Yahweh had given, they had to come to the Temple and offer sacrifices in order to atone for their sins.  A well-defined religious system had been built up around this image of God.  And yet, it had gone wrong.  Religion had become a business, the temple a marketplace.  Money from the poor ended up in the pockets of the rich.  Worship of God was being confined to a single place.  In the gospel, Jesus takes a public stand against the materialism that had become part of worship and against the idea that God’s presence was confined to the Temple.  If this is what you think God is all about, then it’s time to re-think.  A re-imagining is needed.  God’s presence is not to be found in the Temple, but rather in the actions and person of Jesus.

It is spiritually healthy for all of us to re-imagine God from time to time.  A few years ago I went to a conference on Evolution organized by the Vatican in honour of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of the Species.  Now, as you know, there are some Christians who are disturbed by the theory of evolution.  The account that evolution provides of how the various living things on earth came to be conflicts with their image of how God created the world.

One of the dominant images of God the creator in our tradition has been that of an omnipotent father-like figure who lives in heaven, who reaches down into our world and crafts the various plants and animals at the beginning, and from then on intervenes from time to time in our affairs as necessary.

Immersing myself in the story of evolution for a week provided an opportunity to let go of that image of God and to do some re-imagining.  If we take seriously the idea that the world was created through the processes of evolution, what image of God can emerge?

Nature reveals certain things to us.  As Psalm 19 tells us, nature declares the glory of God.  It reveals that the world is in continuous creation, that new species are emerging as others disappear.  Creation is not static, but rather dynamic.  Nature also reveals that there is an impulse towards life on this earth.  Life is found in the most unlikely places, in the driest, coldest deserts of Antarctica and in the super-heated water of undersea volcanic vents.  The trajectory of creation on our planet is towards abundance of life.
  
And not just abundance, but variety.  The variety which is found in the millions of species that have lived on our planet is stunning.  However, there is a shadow side to this dynamism and variety, and that is that the same combination of order and chance that produces the variety of life also results in the disappearance of life forms.  Suffering, at least in this sense, seems to be an intrinsic aspect of a dynamic creation.

Another surprise that awaits us as we study evolution is the importance of relationships.  Whether it is the molecular relationships created by finely balanced electro-chemical attractions or the symbiotic relationships created by different life forms living in close contact, relationships have emerged as central to our understanding of how life evolves.  All of the major transitions of evolutionary theory, the origin of life, the first nucleated cell, the emergence of humans, all of these transitions have happened because of relationships, either through symbiogenesis or the emergence of behaviours that are for the good of the group rather than the individual.

And so what is the image of God the creator that emerges from all this?  It is the image of a God who loves life in all its abundance, who loves variety and diversity, for whom relationships are central.  It is a God who is dynamic rather than unchanging, who is present rather than remote.  It is not a God who acts by overwhelming power and control, rather it is a God who acts from within, as a subtle presence within creation, inspiring, sustaining, nudging things along, a God who favours relationships, a God who suffers along with her creatures.

This image of God may sound familiar.  In our Christian tradition, this is a lot like our image of God as Spirit.  In our Trinitarian understanding, we tend to focus on God the Father and God the Son, but maybe we should allow ourselves to spend time with God the Spirit.  The week I spent studying evolution gave me that opportunity.
However you do it, and whatever your image of God is, I hope that from time to time you too will have the opportunity to do some re-imagining.

Amen.

Friday, March 2, 2012

A Surprising Role Model (Lent 2, March 4 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 2, March 4 2012, St. Albans
Readings:  Gen 17:1-7,15-16; Ps 22:23-30; Rom 4:13-25; Mk 8:31-38

A Surprising Role Model

Many of us here are too young to remember the Cold War, the period of conflict and confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies.  The height of the Cold War was in the early 60’s.  In 1956 the Hungarian revolution was crushed.  In 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In 1961 the Berlin Wall was built and the Soviets threatened to take control of West Berlin, a small Western enclave surrounded by the Soviet Empire.  In the early 60’s the atmosphere in Berlin was tense.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy went to Berlin, to the farthest frontier of Western Europe.  And standing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, with a million people gathered in the streets, he made his famous statement “Ich bin ein Berliner”.  I am a Berliner.  And with those words he pledged the full might of the American military to protect the people of West Berlin against the aggression of the Soviet Union.  And the crowds cheered, because Kennedy had said what they hoped he would say, what they expected him to say, what they had been longing to hear.

In the year 33 AD, a man named Jesus went to Caesarea Philippi.  Caesarea Philippi was at the very northern frontier of the land of Israel, in what we now know as the Golan Heights.  It was a Roman city, built in honour of the Caesar, the Roman Emperor.  It had a gleaming white marble temple dedicated to Augustus Caesar, Son of God, Saviour of the World.  For a Jew in the year 33 AD, Caesarea Philippi was the symbol of everything that was wrong, everything that was evil in the world.  The Jewish people had been under Roman occupation since 63 BC, when Pompey had defeated them and had instituted a reign of violence and oppression that had brutalized them ever since.  The past century had been a time of festering resentment, violent protests, humiliation and shame.  Every Jew dreamed of the day that the Romans would be overthrown and defeated.

This was the context for Jesus decision to take his disciples and the crowds that followed them wherever they went on a long, tiring trek north from the sea of Galilee to the outskirts of Caesarea Philippi.  In that crowd were people whose mothers and fathers had been killed by Roman soldiers in the Galilean rebellions of the year 6 AD.  In that crowd were some who called themselves zealots, men who sought to expel Rome by force, who killed those who collaborated with Rome.  Whether they were terrorists or freedom fighters depended on your point of view.

And Jesus leads them all to the outskirts of that heathen town, with its blasphemous temple dedicated to Augustus Caesar, and its threatening military barracks housing the Roman Legion.  The crowd must have been nervous; they must have wondered why he was leading them to Caesarea Philippi.

And as they come within sight of the city walls, Jesus pulls his closest followers aside and asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”

And they answered him, “some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets.”

And then Jesus asks them, “But you, who do you say I am?”

And I can imagine Peter, looking at Jesus, and then looking with loathing at the Roman city with its temple and soldiers, then back at Jesus.  I can imagine the events of the past few months running through Peter’s mind, the huge crowds that gathered wherever Jesus went, they way he has healed them and fed them, they way they follow him and hang on his every word, Jesus acts of power, the growing conflict with the authorities.

And all of a sudden he gets it.  Jesus is the one, the one sent by God, the one that all of Israel has been hoping for and dreaming of for hundreds of years, the one who will save his people.  And Peter says it.

“You are the Messiah.”

The Messiah.  The one the prophets had promised that God would send.  The one the Jewish people were expecting to lead them in a revolution, the one who would end their oppression, overthrow the Romans and reestablish Israel as a kingdom.

I’m sure Peter expected that at any moment Jesus would address the crowd in the fashion of a great military leader and announce his mission, declaring that anyone who wanted to join with him to overthrow Rome must be ready “to deny themselves, take up their sword, and follow me.”   And with that they would begin the long march to Jerusalem, gathering strength along the way.

In that moment it all made sense.  But that moment didn’t last very long for Peter.  Before he could even say another word, Jesus orders him to be silent.

And then, Jesus begins to teach them that he must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the authorities, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And when Jesus addresses the crowd, there is no talk of taking up the sword.  Instead they are told to take up their cross.  The cross.  The instrument of Roman terror, torture and execution.  The cross, that burden, which as a final act of humiliation, the Romans would make a convicted rebel to carry to his own execution.  It was a final, shameful act of forced collaboration with the oppressors which made plain for all to see the weakness and brokenness of the one who had defied Rome.

How would you expect Peter to react?

At first he tries to convince Jesus that he’s got it all wrong.  He protests.  He takes Jesus aside and rebukes him.  And Jesus in turn lets Peter have it, right in front of all the others.  There is to be no misunderstanding on this.  Jesus will not be the Messiah they are expecting.  He will not subscribe to their human agenda, but only to what God wants.

And with this, Peter’s hopes and dreams, his expectations are crushed.  He is angry, he is embarrassed, he doesn’t understand, but most of all he is profoundly disappointed.

Like Peter, sometimes we don’t get the God we want.  What do you do when God doesn’t meet your expectations?  When God disappoints us?

I was told a story recently of a small rural congregation in which one of the woman became very ill. 

This congregation rallied together.  They held prayer vigils for the woman who was ill, they visited and provided support, and they had a tremendous faith that God would heal the woman.  They expected God to restore her to health.

Sadly, after some time, after many prayer services, the woman died.  And the congregation was devastated.  They experienced doubt.  The God they had hoped for, that they had expected, didn’t show up.  And they were profoundly disappointed.

Somewhere along our journey, something of the same sort will happen to us.  We talked about the wilderness parts of our journey last week.  There will be times in life when things are hard, when we are lonely, when there is sadness or illness or brokenness.  There will be times when the God we want and expect doesn’t show up.  What do we do when God disappoints us?

You know, the first time I read today’s Gospel earlier this week, I came at it with the assumption that Jesus was my role model.  That I am to try to be like Jesus.  That this Jesus who teaches that he will suffer and be put to death, that this Jesus who teaches us to deny ourselves and take up the cross like he did, he’s to be my role model.  That’s what I’m supposed to be like. 

But as I read the gospel over again, that started to worry me. I don’t know if I can be like that.  Honestly, I don’t think I can ever live up to that standard.  I don’t know if I even understand what it means to take up my cross and follow Jesus.  This gospel became more and more disconcerting to me.  I started to have doubts.


It’s not that I don’t accept Jesus teaching.  I do.  When I read about someone like Fawzia Koofi in yesterday’s Citizen, a woman who is running for president of Afghanistan to try to preserve the gains that women have made there in the last decade, who knows full well that she is much more likely to be assassinated than to win the presidency, I am awestruck and full of admiration.  It’s just that I’m not sure that I’m up to that sort of thing, in fact I’m pretty sure I’m not.

And that’s when I discovered that there’s another role model for me in the gospel story, a better role model if I can dare say that.  And that’s Peter.  Peter.  The one who gets it wrong.  The one who gets chewed out.  The one who doesn’t understand, the one who is profoundly disappointed.  Because you know what Peter does?  He continues to follow Jesus.  He doesn’t know why Jesus is doing what he’s doing.  He is full of doubts and fears.  He doesn’t understand.  But somehow, in spite of all that, he has faith.  In John’s Gospel, as the crowds start to disappear, Jesus asks Peter if he too wants to go away.  Peter answer is this, “Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Somehow Peter realizes that even though Jesus may not be what he wants, and Jesus may not be what he expects, Jesus is the one in whom he can put his trust.  And so at a time when most of the crowd turns away from Jesus, Peter follows.  Peter walks the journey of faith, dogged by doubt and fear and misunderstanding and missteps along the way.  It won’t be until Easter morning, three days after Jesus prediction of his own death has come true, that Peter will finally get to look into an empty tomb, and start, just start, to understand.

Our journey is like that.  We don’t have to have it altogether.  We don’t need to understand everything.  We’re more focused on our stuff than God’s stuff.  We will be disappointed, we will have doubts along the way.  We will be tempted to turn back.  But all these things are part of the journey of faith.  Just ask Peter.   And keep going.  And get ready for Easter.


Amen.