Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

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posted in Guest Preachers, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 03.21.2010 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

“Be reconciled to God.”

We can take Paul’s exhortation in two ways this morning. In Lent we are most often asked to consider how we can be reconciled to God from God’s point of view, in light of our sin which separates us from God. That is indeed an important and necessary part of our reconciliation. And, this morning our scriptures invite us to consider also how we can be reconciled to God from our point of view, in light of the resentment and distrust we often hold toward God.

At first glance, the story that has come down to us as “The Prodigal Son” is a straightforward redemption story that focuses on the younger son. He asks for his share of the inheritance, squanders it “in dissolute living”, comes to rock bottom, and then “comes to himself”. He realizes that while he cannot have the life he had, he can still have a good life. So he goes back to reconcile with his father, to serve him as a servant if he cannot serve him as a child and heir. The father on his part greets him with joy and is quick to reconcile, restores him as a child if not an heir, and throws a luxurious party to celebrate his return. All well and good. But Jesus does not end the story with this happy ending. Instead, he continues the story with the arrival of the elder son, who bitterly resents the father’s joyful reception of the younger son with no retribution. He resents also the father’s lack of appreciation for his, the elder son’s, hard work. The elder son refuses to join the party even when his father pleads with him to come in. He refuses his relationship with his brother (“this son of yours”, he calls him). He questions his father’s love for him himself. We never do find out if he joins the party or not.

If we are honest, as we are called to be in Lent, it is often a challenge for us – the good people, the Christians, the members of the Church – to be reconciled to God in the face of what God and others choose to do. Even if others repent or undergo the consequences of bad or even evil choices, we still find it hard to believe that God can or should love them as much as we should be loved in our goodness and hard work. Some of you may remember the denial and outrage when it was reported that Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, had repented and become a Christian in prison, and that when Dahmer was killed in prison the chaplain stated that he himself did believe that Jeffrey was saved and would be in heaven with God. Likewise the denial and outrage when Charles Colson, Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, repented in prison and went on to found his Prison Fellowship. Some folks found it very hard to pray for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney as they professed to be brothers in Christ, and some folks find it very hard to pray for Barack Obama as he professes the same. And in any given church deliberation more and more progressives and conservatives draw lines in the sand, with no allowances that God might even conceivably be present with the other “side”. These are just some of the challenges within Christianity. How much more are we encouraged by our culture and our own privilege to demonize the poor, the uneducated, the different, the refugee, the “uncivilized”, even as our delicate sensibilities call us to resent or distrust God on their behalf. Like the elder brother with his father, we often feel that we have worked very hard as good people, and have very little to show for it, or that what we have may be taken away. We feel more and more uncertain of our place in an entangled and globalized world. Climate changes and the decisions of others who we may not even know affects us and those around us in frightening ways. The complexities of our lives make us complicit in wrongdoing without our knowledge or consent. How can we be reconciled to God, who insists on love toward that which so deserves punishment?

In any relationship, there are times when one party has a grievance against the other, a big one or a small one. That is not the problem; the problem arises when the aggrieved party does not talk about the grievance with the other party. This then becomes a problem for both; as the Psalmist says, “when I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all the day long”. As with sins we have committed, so with sins we feel are committed against us. If we do not express our grievances, they fester, and turn to distrust and resentment. The problem is then compounded when the other party may not realize there is a problem. The elder brother at least expressed his resentment and distrust toward his father. The father then had an opportunity to respond. And he clearly stated his affection and plans: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” The reason the father celebrates, and pleads for the elder brother’s celebration, is that the younger brother has come back, come back not just from dissolute choices, but from his own death and being lost to his family, the true evil of his choices. In his response toward the elder brother’s grievance, the father invites the elder brother also to “come to himself”: to realize and claim for himself his own place as his father’s son and only heir, and to rest in that true identity. Maybe to claim it to the extent that he could just take a goat and celebrate with his friends, and not work all the time. Maybe to claim it to the extent that he could join the party for his brother, back from the dead to be a son and brother again in a different way, but a son and a brother nonetheless.

Be reconciled to God. The same principle of openness applies to our relationship with God. Part of the invitation of Lent is to examine our grievances toward God, to examine the sins we feel have been committed against us through the choices of God as well as the choices of others. This is for our benefit, so that we know the grievances that we carry and so that the grievances do not fester. It is also for God’s benefit, so to speak: we may feel that God already knows, indeed must know, what our grievances are, but to express them is to give God a chance to respond and to work with us to make things right.

So what does all this have to do with atonement? One of the preachers in my home
church used to say that the meaning of “atonement” was “at-one-ment”; the same word but hyphenated – at-one-ment; that in that great mystery of atonement/at-one-ment God became truly one with us, and we are invited to be truly one with God, in all the complexities and complicities of our lives. Indeed, Paul exhorts us to be reconciled to God “on behalf of Christ”, for Christ’s sake, for the sake of the one who was both God and Human, for the sake of the one who “was made to be sin who knew no sin.” for our sake, for the sake of the one who from the very incarnation in our humanity and human life is “God With Us.” While the mystery of at-one-ment finds its expression in all of Jesus’ birth, life and ministry, it finds its fullest expression in Jesus’ crucifixion. Crucifixion is a nice word for what it really was: Jesus’ execution -- by the state through injustice and torture and by the collusion of religion with political expediency and evil. The experience of crucifixion is the answer of God With Us. It is God’s answer in love and solidarity in suffering. It is God’s answer to our resentment, dist
rust, and fear of uncertainty. This is how much God loves us. This is how much God wants to be at one with us, even to our death in suffering and injustice. In the crucifixion together through Jesus Christ we may experience the worst that sin as evil has to offer, but we do not have to give in to it, we do not have to become it or retaliate in kind; we can keep the faith that evil does not have the last word, that same faith in which Jesus himself, even on the cross, knew himself reconciled to God.

Be reconciled to God. We do not know the end of the story of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother. But we do know the end of the story of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. He did indeed die. But evil did not have the last word. There was instead Resurrection and Pentecost and the birth of the Church (which while often oblivious and coopted and aggravating by its own choice is for all its faults still on a good day the Body of Christ) and there is our ongoing sanctification in the work of the Holy Spirit. But these are sermons for other days. For today, we have the possibility and promise of our identity precisely as we are Christians, those who have accepted the love of God With Us and love God in return, as we do indeed work to serve the good: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new."

One of my mentors in the ministry of reconciliation says that “you have to give people a way back in.” Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother in response to people who grumbled about the tax collectors and sinners who came to listen to Jesus, and grumbled about Jesus when he welcomed them and ate with them. The grumblers too were good people, religious people, who worked very hard for God, who also were challenged by the choices of God and by the choices of others. Jesus offered the story to give them a way back in, to recognize themselves in both the Prodigal Son and in the elder brother. If we are honest, as we are called to be in Lent, we too will recognize ourselves in both. As good as we may be, we are in no way perfect, in our own choices and in our judgments of the choices of others. Part of the recognition of the grievances we have with others is the recognition of the ways we may also be implicated in those grievances. To deny others a way back in is to deny it to ourselves as well.

In the mystery and paradox of atonement, God offers us a way back in to relationship, through our sin that separates us from God. God also asks us to give God a way back in through our resentment and distrust and fear of uncertainty. If we take the way back in, if we give the way back in, there is a new creation. We are no longer caught up in resentment, distrust, and the fear of uncertainty. We are reconciled to God, at one with God, able to claim our true identity as beloved and at home wherever we are, whatever happens. We also are entrusted, entrusted, God trusts us with the ministry of reconciliation for others, even those whose choices we may find challenging. We are trusted to offer others a way back in to reconciliation with God, with others, and with themselves. When we accept and offer reconciliation for ourselves with God, and accept and offer reconciliation to others, we go a long way toward the elimination of resentment, distrust, and fear of uncertainty for everyone. We go a long way toward helping to continue to create that new creation for ourselves and for the world.
Be reconciled to God. From both God’s point of view and from our own, it is love that makes reconciliation possible. May we accept our own at-one-ment, and offer at-one-ment to others, with joy and thanksgiving.

Amen.

posted in Lenten Series 2010: Atonement, The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation on 03.14.2010 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

posted in Lenten Series 2010: Atonement, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.7.2010 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Well, dear friends, here we are, once again, plodding through the liturgical season of Lent. The weather has decided, this year, to cooperate with the penitential feel of the Lenten season. Here in Boston, unseasonably warm temperatures have yielded a series of rainy, dreary days instead of the usual snow. Snow, of course, is too beautiful to be penitential, although New York and Washington, DC may wish to point out that they have been experiencing penitential snowfall by sheer quantity.

Now, it must be said, and at the outset, that natural occurrences and calamities, be they rainfall and snowstorms or the earthquakes that rocked Haiti last month and Chile yesterday, are simply not a result of divine malign. In theology, like in statistics, correlation is not causation. The facts that rain and snow fall from the skies and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes rain and snowstorms. The facts that the earth shifts and shakes and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes earthquakes, any more than rainfall, snowstorms, or earthquakes are excuses for human sinfulness. While natural events may provide an emotional canvas on which to paint our spiritual journey, it is both a spiritual and a theological mistake to confuse the painting for reality.

Having set aside the temptation to equate natural events with divine intent, it is our task in considering the theme of atonement to investigate the equation of human sinfulness and divine grace. Temptation and addiction are two central figures in the drama of human sinfulness. Here at Marsh Chapel we may be prone to an addiction to excellent preaching. This is why it is important for me to step into the pulpit occasionally, to break the habit and remind everyone not to take for granted the homiletical extravaganza they are blessed to hear every other week.

It is no easy task we have set ourselves, to speak of atonement. Not that we at Marsh Chapel are prone to taking the easy road. Last summer we tackled the theme of Darwin and Faith, one of the greatest sources of tension in contemporary religious life. Now we delve into one of the greatest controversies in the history of Christian doctrine: how is it that the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth almost two thousand years ago effects a transformation from sin by grace in you and in me today and every day?

Rehearsing the myriad theological treatments of this central question in Christian faith and life would consume our time together and almost certainly result in even more snoring than is already emanating from the congregation. Alas, I am afraid that the vast majority of atonement theologies would not touch on the lived experience of so many of us in the second decade of the 21st century. In our question of the atonement we are not looking for the correlation between sin and Jesus, but for a causal relationship. We expect God in the person and work of Jesus Christ to actually do something to or for us on account of our sinfulness. But I wonder if the way we pose the relationship is not the source of our trouble in understanding atonement in light of our lived experience.

You see, in our posing the question, we expect something of God; that our sinfulness causes God to do something. Our Gospel lesson today sets things up differently. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Paul too understands the discrepancy when in our reading from his letter to the Philippians he says “For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” What Jesus and Paul explain is that we understand very well what God does for us; what we do not understand is ourselves and our sinfulness. We are not willing. Our minds are set on earthly things.

There are four movements of atonement: confession, repentance, mercy, forgiveness. Atonement theologies have historically been arguments about the relationships among these movements. But our lived experience, and the breakdown in the atonement process, that Jesus and Paul knew and that we live daily, is not in the process itself but before and between its movements. In my admittedly brief time in ministry, my own experience is that people are often in one of two places with regard to their lived experience.

The first place many of us find ourselves is stuck in the starting gate; the atonement process never even gets going. As anyone who has ever moved from addiction to recovery can tell you, the first step in overcoming the addiction is admitting that you have a problem. Yes, dear friends, many of us are in denial, and I do not mean a river in Egypt. (Clearly, that for which I most need to atone is a predilection to bad puns).

The most obvious form of denial is the excuse. The most thoroughgoing excuse conceived in human history is the strict determinism of scientific materialism, resulting in the statement, “the universe made me do it!” Indeed, many of us cannot identify the exact cause of our failures of responsibility, but the sense that something beyond our control must have impinged upon our actions is prevalent. And the conclusion is that whatever it was that intervened should be held responsible for our failure.

If you are wondering if you have ever actually had an experience that matches up with this abstract musing, just ask yourself this question. Have you ever found yourself saying, or at least thinking, “Oops! I forgot…”? “Oops! I forgot to turn off the stove!” “Oops! I forgot to make my rent payment!” “Oops! I forgot to fill the car with gas.” Really, it works with just about anything. “Oops! I slept through class.” “Oops! I cheated on my girlfriend.” “Oops! I pressed the wrong button.” The word “oops” serves a dual function in our experience. It signals that we know something is wrong, and that we should not be held entirely responsible. After all, how can I possibly be expected to remember everything? I forgot to turn off the stove, but I remembered to lock the front door. I forgot to pay my rent but I paid the cable and electricity bills. I slept through class but I work so hard and for so many hours that I get exhausted. I cheated on my girlfriend but I was drunk.

Another form of denial takes the form of “it’s not that big a deal.” This is the recognition that something is not quite right, but also the concomitant belief that the not-quite-rightness does not rise to the level of a real problem; certainly not to the level of sin. The “no big deal” form of denial is less verbal than the impingement form, mostly because we tend not to acknowledge such events since they are of supposedly negligible importance. Nevertheless, there is a sense that things could have been better. “I could have said that better.” “The sauce could use more oregano.” “The prelude would
have been better if I’d hit the F# instead of the F-natural.” Of course, Justin never hits a wrong note so he wouldn’t know.

As one great theologian, who is no stranger to this pulpit, has said, to be human is to be obligated. We are all responsible to fulfill all of our obligations. But, alas, our obligations are so many and various as to mutually exclude each other and overwhelm us. It is this condition that gives rise to the coping mechanism of denial. It is easier to simply say that fulfilling all of my obligations is impossible so I cannot possibly be responsible. Such coping mechanisms are reinforced when they are successful in getting us out of the consequences for our failures. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism is not entirely true, and thus not entirely helpful. The fact of the matter is that we do feel our obligations and resulting responsibility deeply. Even if it is the case that our obligations overlap and conflict, we still must choose which we will fulfill responsibly, and we are still responsible for the ones we choose not to fulfill. We are responsible. We ourselves. Not someone else. Not the situation. We are responsible and we have failed in our responsibility, despite any intervening agents and situational complexity. We have failed. We have sinned. We are responsible and culpable and in need of repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

The other place that many of us find ourselves is stuck in the middle. Of course, the truth is that in some sense we are all stuck in the middle. It is always the case that we have sinned again before the sin we just confessed and repented of can be forgiven. But this is a different kind of being stuck in the middle. This is the kind of stuck in the middle that gets depicted in the 1998 dramatic film, What Dreams May Come. The character Annie, wracked by guilt over the death of her husband Chris, commits suicide and is damned to hell, not by God, but by the psychological pain that brought her to commit the act in the first place. This middle place, which for many is a hell of their own making, is marked by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

The place of guilt is in many respects the opposite end of the pendulum swing from the place of denial. In guilt it is not that our obligations are overwhelming and therefore we cannot be held responsible, but that our obligations are overwhelming and we are so responsible that we can never escape. There is not enough mercy in the world to overcome our failures. To be stuck in the middle is to be stuck constantly repeating Hagrid: “I should not have said that. I should not have said that. I should not have said that.”

The problem here, once again, is not really a lack of confidence in God, but a lack of self-confidence that we are really worthy of forgiveness. God could not possibly forgive me, not because God is not capable, but because I am not worthy. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” The agony of the place of guilt is only partly our own agony in the face of our own sinfulness; it is also the agony of God who longs for relationship but we are unwilling. It is not God who counts us unworthy; it is we ourselves.

How, then, might we bring the pendulum back to the balance point? And what might life look like once it is there? Let’s take the second question first, shall we?

We, in the spirit of Lent, seek to live in the space between denial and guilt. If we are to avoid denial, we must be honest, first and foremost with ourselves, about our own failures and thus our own sinfulness. And yet, to avoid extreme guilt, we must learn humility. We must humbly acknowledge our faults and enter a place of deep contrition out of which those we have faulted may offer forgiveness. So too, we must humbly recognize that the mercy of God is far greater than any sin we might possibly commit. When I was last on silent retreat with the Community of Taizé, Br. Sebastian led our daily reflections. He pointed out that the only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility. Denial and guilt are both defense responses that attempt to fend off humiliation. But at the end of the day, neither are successful coping mechanisms. Br. Sebastian is correct. The only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility.

I often find myself saying to faculty and administrators that if students at Boston University learn nothing in the classroom, but during their time here learn to fail and recover gracefully, then we will have succeeded in our mission as an institution of higher education. To fail in our responsibilities is indeed inevitable in life. This inevitability does not absolve us of our responsibility. Only God can do that. But neither does it doom us to live guilt-wracked existences. We can, in fact, recover.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that there is more love in God than sin in us. “But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (Romans 3: 21-25).

From the perspectives of denial and guilt, it may appear as the saying goes, “you just can’t get there from here.” In the Protestant traditions there is a hesitation here, because justification is by faith, not by works. Indeed, it is God who delivers mercy and offers forgiveness of sins, and yet it is we ourselves who must make the spiritual journey of Lent from denial and guilt to humility. This journey largely consists in ritual.

There are two theories of ritual at Boston University. The first is that of the former Dean of Marsh Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, who points out that ritual is the cultivation of habits that allow us to live well in the world. The second is that of anthropology and religion professors, respectively, Rob Weller and Adam Seligman. For them, ritual is the creation of subjunctive, “as if” spaces in which our own brokenness and the world’s brokenness can be held together as if they were whole. In neither perspective is ritual identified solely with religious rites such as the one we are in the midst of now. Both understand that ritual consists in such mundane patterns of behavior as walking down the street and driving the car, all the way up to the patterns of ceremony involved in religion and civil society.

So who is right? Is ritual a set of patterned behaviors that allow us to live well, or the creation of “as if” spaces that help us cope with our own and the world’s brokenness? The mistake would be in assuming that the two views are mutually exclusive, and the Lenten spiritual journey is the perfect case for demonstrating that the correct answer is a resounding, “both!”

On the one hand, the rituals of discipline in Lent really are better ways of living in the world. To reject temptations, begin to recover from addictions, and honestly and humbly recognize our own sinfulness makes us better able to see ourselves and our world as they truly are. Furthermore, the ritual movements from confession and repentance through mercy and forgiveness help us keep balance between denial and guilt and to cultivate humility. When we do so we are better able to relate to friends, family, neighbors, the world and, above all, God.

But in order to have that effect on our lives, ritual must first pull us out of our world and then stuff us right back in. The rituals of Lent pull us out of our normal daily existence and confront us with that fact that human sinfulness is world destroying. According to the Christian narr
ative, it was human sinfulness that lead to the death of Jesus on the cross, not the sinfulness of some humans, but the sinfulness of all humanity. Jesus Christ, who in our ritual context was in the beginning with God and through whom God created the world, is destroyed by our sin. But just as surely as our sinfulness is world destroying, so too is the grace of God world founding. Sin is not the final answer, but is overcome by the victory of resurrection life by the grace and mercy of God. And so the ritual places us back in the world in the middle, not stuck but moving more fluidly through the process of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” In the Lenten journey let us participate in the drama of atonement, the movements of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness that we might become willing participants in the realm of justice and peace that resurrection ordains. To do so we must in all humility reject the extremes of denial and guilt by allowing the ritual discipline of Lent to do its work. The ability to fail and recover gracefully is the greatest learning we might hope for, and then give thanks that the love and mercy of God indeed triumph over sin and death.

Let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 02.28.2010 at 1:50 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Grace to you, and peace, in the name of Jesus our brother who embodies God’s love for us and leads us into life. Amen.

Taken into the wild at the Spirit’s leading, Jesus, the newly baptized, fasts forty days and nights, tempted by the devil even before the threefold test begins. The Spirit descendent like a dove had alighted on him at the Jordan, when John had drawn Jesus into waters and the Voice declared him ‘the Beloved.’ But the next thing we know, “full of the Holy Spirit” Jesus is led out. He’s led out deep into Judean wilderness, to desert landscape—that spare terrain—“location of choice in luring God’s people to a deeper understanding of who they are” (Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 46).

Like those before him whose sojourns in the wild are part of the ‘family story,’ Jesus’ time of solitude occasions not only struggle but, more basically, a stretching, a breaking-open if you will: exposure to elements and to the Elemental. In the desert, as on Dakota plains about which Kathleen Norris so famously wrote, “A person is forced inward by the sparseness of what is outward and visible in all [the] land and sky... what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state" (Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, 157).

The territory of Jesus’ testing is no small part of the story as a whole. That fierce landscape quite literally grounds him. It grounds Jesus out in the wilds; grounds him, in effect, beyond culture or class, in time and yet somehow beyond it; far-flung from the usual diversions by which we seek to transcend the distances of 2000 years and some 6000 miles. The evangelist Luke puts him there, on the margins, that we might see this Second Adam in quintessential struggle of identity: teasing out relationship and living into vocation. As with the psalmist whose moisture was “all dried up as by the heat of summer" (Psalm 32:4), so Jesus enters the time of his Testing with Jordan waters but a distant memory, the voice of God’s pleasure likely to be only a slight stirring amid groans of hunger and thirst. (Remember, Jesus is famished.) Trust will be all in all as the Tempter presses Jesus to exploit his equality with God (Philippians 2:6).

Famished. Hollowed out. Empty. That’s what Jesus is when challenged:
“Turn those stones to bread and satisfy your hunger!”
“Let angels bear you up!”
“Claim the kingdoms of this world and all their store!"

It is tempting, indeed! The lures of the world, easy satisfactions… But, remember the wilderness! The wilderness has stripped away more than food and drink, more than comfort and security. Laying waste all illusions, emptying him of all he does not need, Jesus has been drawn to his truest self—his deep hungers fed by God’s word in nurture, companionship, and strength that satisfies more than momentary fixes of food or fortune ever will. And thus, in touch with his truest self Jesus counters devilish words with deep trust. Over and again, the Tempter presses, “If you are the Son of God…” And yet it is because, it is because he is God’s Beloved that Jesus will live by (and even live as) the word that comes from God’s mouth, worshiping and serving only God, not putting the Lord to the test. Indeed, Jesus’ answer, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”, effectively becomes a cry. “Away with you!” he seems to say. And thus the Test is ended. Luke says “The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity" (The Message, Luke 4:13).

Each year the church’s Lenten journey begins with this narrative accompaniment to Jesus’ wilderness testing. And while we have scrubbed them from sight, still it is with ash-smudged foreheads that we link ourselves all Lent long. We link ourselves to Source and End: the dust we are, God’s very own. Turning and returning, we walk a pilgrim way—rarely as contemplative or purgative as with a forty day fast, but carving out such patterns of discipline as will take us deeper into the Word, feeding us with more than bread for bellies’ cravings. Like Jesus out in the wilds, in our forty days we open spaces; we open spaces within our hearts. In what we give up and let go of in Lent, we trim away the excesses as best we can so as to walk a road less burdened. It is a narrow way, a road that leads to awesome mystery: God’s Own for the world, given in love.

All the while, “The brutality of the cross casts a long shadow over Lent…” So says a spiritual companion to my Lenten journey this year. By this, Jan Richardson means to acknowledge the starkness of the season and the difficulty one sometimes has in learning to see the “beauty present in its starkness and the secrets in its terrain.”

Yet, she says, “Lent is a season that invites us to explore its hollows and, in so doing, to explore our own, to enter the sometimes stark spaces in our souls that we may prefer to avoid. The season challenges us to think of our own lives as vessels, to contemplate the cracks, to rub our fingers over the worn places, to ponder whether we are feeling full or empty, to question what we open ourselves to. [Lent] beckons us to ponder what we have shaped—or bent—our lives around, whether the shape of the container of our life offers freedom or confinement, and whether it opens us to the possibility of new life to which the empty tomb points" (Richardson, Garden of Hollows, 1).

Of course, what constitutes the stark spaces of wilderness will be different for each of us. Still, we should be clear: the landscape of our pilgrimage need not be that of a thirsty land. Topography is not the key.

• No, for us, the wild terrain might just as well be made of our horror in the face of natural disaster such as we witness in Haiti’s rubble, the painful truths of human tragedy blowing hard against us like strong, hot winds.
• The sands – they could be of loneliness or despair. The great gulf of distance separating many of us from families and friends “back home,” or the pain of separation right here in Boston when our relationships break apart and we are set on paths of our future once more alone.
• The night’s bitter cold? It may come through poverty… or plenty, from overwork or lack of work, from fatigue or even failure. Even as the day’s heat might scorch because one feels misunderstood or maligned…or because one has burdened another with the same.

The point here is not so much the how but rather the what. The point is the “what” of an opening: of openings to metaphorical landscapes and their contours, openings to companions on our journeys. The point lies in openings to the emptiness of bellies and hearts and tables…the emptiness of our own solutions and self-satisfactions.
Friends, following the Spirit’s lead into wild places, often amounts to little other than opening ourselves to the sometimes painful places of life. And God knows, there are plenty of those places in a world such as ours.
Tuesday’s New York Times front page story above the fold opened with the question: “Will anyone remember that 17-year-old Angelania Ritchelle, a parentless high school student who wanted to be a fashion model, died of fright two days after the earthquake and ended up in a mass grave on the outskirts of [Port-au-Prince]?” Will anyone remember? Tha
t was the question 23 year old Emmanuella was asking as she grieved her young cousin’s death, noting that Angie “is just one of the nameless, faceless victims.” Wrenchingly, poignantly, she added, “And I hate that.”

To date, the quake is said to have killed 230,000 people. That seems to me to be a number incomprehensible to most of us, eh? To put it in some perspective, though, it is roughly equal to all the students attending every one of the 77 colleges and universities in metropolitan Boston. In other terms, it’s about 37% of the total population of our neighbors to the north in the great state of Vermont. 230,000 lives: and most of them buried unknown, without memorials. This quake has been called “an equal opportunity leveler with such mass deadliness that it erased the individuality of its victims.” Ah yes, there’s plenty of pain in the wild spaces to which we might open ourselves this season.

And still closer to home, we must know as well that aftershocks continue wreaking devastation among our Haitian neighbors. Our city is the third largest Haitian community in the United States. And Boston is trying to respond to the needs of the thousands here whose families back home struggle to stand in the aftermath of the quake. One such remarkable response to those needs is a concert to be held this Friday at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, downtown, adjacent to the Park Street T stop. At 7:30 on Friday evening they will host an effort spearheaded by many of our students called “Singing in the Aftermath.” Singing in the Aftermath: it’s a concert for Haiti with the Greater Boston Haitian Community. Financial contributions gathered there will support the extraordinary relief work of Partners in Health, while canned goods collected will restock empty shelves in local food pantries. A nice discipline to add to Lent’s rounds.

Of course, attending to the suffering of Haiti is only one way to open ourselves to the painful places of life. Surely, right here—even within our very selves—here also are great griefs to bear as each of us fails to live “as intended;” whether those disappointments come in coursework or relationships, in our jobs or by lack of living from our own core values. The reality is, we all fail. We all have broken places. Painful places.

But here is one of Lent’s gifts. It seems to me that this is a season that can bear the stark landscapes. The point is that we should not turn away from failings, from the broken in or around us. Indeed, the reality of our struggles – both outward and inward, both globally and locally – the reality of our struggles is part and parcel of why Lent stands to offer us more than just challenges to our willpower. Going into the wild places on a Lenten pilgrimage asks us, more deeply, to explore the very marrow of our being. As it did with Jesus in his forty days apart, Lent stretches before us pressing us to look at what ultimately satisfies, what gives us strength, what holds us safe.

Just so, however and wherever we find ourselves as we walk the ‘pilgrim way of Lent,’ I pray each of us finds what we need to face the fierce landscapes. In the emptying and refilling, in the turning and returning, may God’s own Holy Spirit among us be Energy for Life. May it lead us to the places we need to go, and strengthen us for all the testing ahead. Throughout, may the Lenten desert landscape be seen less as a place of temptation and more as a kind of proving ground, a place where emptying creates room enough to receive all God offers us. Thus, as with the One who has gone ahead of us—Jesus our brother with whose cross we have been signed—thus we would come through these forty days to ever-deeper understandings of who we are and how graciously God provides all that we need: grace upon grace upon grace.

Dear friends, companions on the way, traveling mercies I bid you. May we all keep a holy Lent out in the wilds! Amen.

posted in Guest Preachers, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 02.21.2010 at 11:00 am