Lent I A—You are my hiding place
When I was a very little kid, I craved a spot all my own to play. A very farm-like spot was on the hay elevator—that long piece of equipment that would extend up into the hay loft to carry bales of hay from the wagon after they had been baled, where others would stack them. The elevator was one of the only places you could go to see from above, since our farm was on very flat ground and there were no good climbing trees around our house. The elevator was also just outside the barn area where my dad milked cows. He always turned on the radio while milking because he said the music calmed the cows.
So I would go sit on the elevator, look around at the fields and sky, and play radio. It was a time of feeling invisible, above the ground, and in my own space. I imagine many of us had these spots as children—maybe a play space or outdoor spot that felt like our very own--a place of safety and getting away from adults for a while.
As a child, I also had a hiding place for a different purpose. This was the need to feel invisible when mom and dad had arguments, or when I had done something I wasn’t supposed to. I recall the time I was doing flips over the back of the couch and my feet came crashing down on the glass coffee table and fish bowl, sending glass and water and fish everywhere. Poor fish. It was the longest ten minutes of my life waiting until my mom drove in the driveway that afternoon.
We also crave these hiding spaces as adults. We need a place where we can go to have some quiet time, away from the tax forms, bills and checkbooks, from teachers’ notes and children’s questions, from household chores and leaking faucets; away from the day we had at work or at school, the worries about getting it all done. And we also need the safe spaces to go to when we do something wrong—the time we pushed a send button on an email, when we immediately regretted sending it. The moments in the boss’s office when we know we have been called in about that thing we did or did not do, a place to deal with our guilt and shame and need for forgiveness, to lick our wounds, to maybe feel a little sorry for ourselves, or just grieve whatever our lack has been that day.
Hiding places are what lent can be about, where God can attend us and we can find God.
The hiding place on the hay elevator is one of joy and rejoicing, of playfulness and getting in touch with the child within us—the hobby, the music, the reading we do that helps us refresh ourselves. Finding this kind of hiding place is finding God in Sabbath. We are required to keep the Sabbath in the ten commandments. It is not just something nice we do for ourselves, it is a place where we go to do some soul-making. It is not just a time to refresh ourselves because we are tired and need energy to keep going. It is necessary for us to have a relationship with God.
The second kind of hiding place, of guilt, regret and shame, is like the place Adam and Eve went to be after they had eaten of the tree that was forbidden to them. It is then they discover they are naked and have shame. It is a place away from comfort and forgiveness. Sometimes it can be a place of depression and despair. But it can also be a wilderness place where our eyes are opened and we discover our nakedness and our need for God’s forgiveness.
Both places of hiding, our place of Sabbath and our place of wilderness are what the psalmist speaks about when writing that God: “You are my hiding place. You preserve from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.”
Jesus goes to the wilderness entering a hiding place. In this wilderness place, he meets tests about the command over creation and the laws of nature, and worldly powers. Like the Israelites in the wilderness forty years, Jesus’s forty days had challenges. But unlike the Israelites, who moaned about food, water and their leaders, Jesus passes his test, and is waited upon by angels. In the wilderness, Jesus finds the spirit of God’s care for him.
This story of Jesus’ testing in the wilderness reminds us that we will be tested. Finding Sabbath in our wilderness experiences is a challenge that is especially appropriate for us to work on during Lent. When we can take the tests that life gives us, like shattering glass and sending water and fish everywhere, and stand up to ask forgiveness, we know we are close to the love of God. When we can find that place where there is rest, then our souls can find rest in God.
Our hiding place is in God. This hiding place is one of love and compassion for all who seek it. It is a place where you can look over the scenery and get your bearings, get a better sense of things that may not make a lot of sense. It’s place to let your hearts sing and enter playful places that breathe life into our soul and into our relationship with God and with others. When we are being nibbled to death by ducks during the day, we go to God’s hiding place.
As we enter Lent, I invite you to ponder for yourself where your hiding place with God is.
Where do you go to pray,
to listen to music,
to play,
to quiet your mind so you can hear your heart beat?
During this Lent, I invite you to find those places in your life and heart where you can hide in God. Go there for respite, for refreshment, for forgiveness. Go there to find God and God’s care for you.
During this Lent, may we all be able to say: “O God, you are my hiding-place.”
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Lent II
Lent II A Being Born Anew
We have plenty of scary things going on in the world lately. The demonstrations in the middle east that have sometimes turned violent, are cause both for concern and hope that leaders will give their people more freedom and act to repair problems and treat all classes fairly. These problems seem to be made by people—the greed and seeking of power through military force.
Then there is what we usually call natural disaster—hurricane Katrina, which still affects the people of Gulf Coast, the earthquake in Haiti, which keeps that nation under a pall of hunger and distress, and now ten days ago, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan with nuclear power plant explosions and the death of perhaps as many as 10,000 and the displacement of many more Japanese in the areas north of Tokyo.
And here across our states we see legislators struggling to make ends meet, by slashing, of all things, budgets for education and health care.
So, today, as I ponder these events around the globe, I feel a little like Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a scholar of Judaism, a leader of the temple, who comes to Jesus in the night asking questions. Someone has said Nicodemus goes from having all the answers to having all the questions. He acknowledges that Jesus’s power is from God, but when Jesus says anyone can have the power of God by being born from above, he skeptically asks how one can be born from his mother again?
When I see the crises of the world, I see both the sins of people and the power of creation. In the middle east and here I see how we have squandered our inheritance, made bad choices in how we care for each other, and do not take responsibility for the core issues like people’s right to dignity, the need for quality education and accessible health care.
In the so-called natural disasters, I see where we have engineered our way into the path of destruction of waves and fault lines. In the Mississippi River valley, we have built so many levees and been engineered so much that the river no longer meanders like rivers were meant to do, so it breaks the levees and washes away houses and lives that have thought they were safe behind the levee. We have the sense that we can control the power of creation.
Whether is it people and money or the natural forces of wind, earth, fire and water, we want control. We ask that our leaders do not surprise us, that our day not be interrupted by rain, sleet or snow, high wind, flood or earthquake, and like Nicodemus we do not understand how God is asking us to rely on the love and security that only God can give.
It’s a condundrum to be sure. God has given us the minds and technological know-how to be seemingly safe and secure, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we must ask how we have abused this gift of knowledge and technology and used it to control people and reduce the earth’s quality and ultimately the quality of our lives? How has people power displaced the trust in an all-loving God of creation?
Jesus tells Nicodemus that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Eternal life means life here and now, not life later in heaven. Eternal life means abundance for all whom God loves, not just the people we think should be loved. Jesus is stating that we have all we need now from God, all we need to do is say yes with outstretched hands.
We see this kind of trusting response to God in Abraham whom God leads into a new land, away from all he knows, the comfort of friends and family and the shelter of house and security of all he owns.
How are we being asked to leave security and comfort and go to a new place? How has the strife and disaster of our world and in our local states challenging you to rethink yourself as a link in our technologically secure world that masks the real lack of security we ultimately have? Where is God in your daily life as you go along not thinking about the many ways you participate in pushing God away?
The writer Parker Palmer calls our wanting control and feeling responsible for everything that happens to us as “functional atheism”. In other words, whenever we feel we have everything under our thumb, look out. God may be trying to help us understand how very much we need the guiding love and gift of God’s presence. To acknowledge this dependence on God is to be born anew. Just like Nicodemus, we bring our questions, and are told that God so loved the world, so loved us that all we need to do is say yes.
Saying yes to God makes us compassionate, so that when we see the disasters around us, we cry, but instead of seeing our technology and our power as the response, we can begin to see God’s creative power as the answer. Instead of blaming each other, we can pray that God help us to make the world the place of God’s kingdom, not ours.
We have plenty of scary things going on in the world lately. The demonstrations in the middle east that have sometimes turned violent, are cause both for concern and hope that leaders will give their people more freedom and act to repair problems and treat all classes fairly. These problems seem to be made by people—the greed and seeking of power through military force.
Then there is what we usually call natural disaster—hurricane Katrina, which still affects the people of Gulf Coast, the earthquake in Haiti, which keeps that nation under a pall of hunger and distress, and now ten days ago, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan with nuclear power plant explosions and the death of perhaps as many as 10,000 and the displacement of many more Japanese in the areas north of Tokyo.
And here across our states we see legislators struggling to make ends meet, by slashing, of all things, budgets for education and health care.
So, today, as I ponder these events around the globe, I feel a little like Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a scholar of Judaism, a leader of the temple, who comes to Jesus in the night asking questions. Someone has said Nicodemus goes from having all the answers to having all the questions. He acknowledges that Jesus’s power is from God, but when Jesus says anyone can have the power of God by being born from above, he skeptically asks how one can be born from his mother again?
When I see the crises of the world, I see both the sins of people and the power of creation. In the middle east and here I see how we have squandered our inheritance, made bad choices in how we care for each other, and do not take responsibility for the core issues like people’s right to dignity, the need for quality education and accessible health care.
In the so-called natural disasters, I see where we have engineered our way into the path of destruction of waves and fault lines. In the Mississippi River valley, we have built so many levees and been engineered so much that the river no longer meanders like rivers were meant to do, so it breaks the levees and washes away houses and lives that have thought they were safe behind the levee. We have the sense that we can control the power of creation.
Whether is it people and money or the natural forces of wind, earth, fire and water, we want control. We ask that our leaders do not surprise us, that our day not be interrupted by rain, sleet or snow, high wind, flood or earthquake, and like Nicodemus we do not understand how God is asking us to rely on the love and security that only God can give.
It’s a condundrum to be sure. God has given us the minds and technological know-how to be seemingly safe and secure, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we must ask how we have abused this gift of knowledge and technology and used it to control people and reduce the earth’s quality and ultimately the quality of our lives? How has people power displaced the trust in an all-loving God of creation?
Jesus tells Nicodemus that God so loved the world that he gave his Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Eternal life means life here and now, not life later in heaven. Eternal life means abundance for all whom God loves, not just the people we think should be loved. Jesus is stating that we have all we need now from God, all we need to do is say yes with outstretched hands.
We see this kind of trusting response to God in Abraham whom God leads into a new land, away from all he knows, the comfort of friends and family and the shelter of house and security of all he owns.
How are we being asked to leave security and comfort and go to a new place? How has the strife and disaster of our world and in our local states challenging you to rethink yourself as a link in our technologically secure world that masks the real lack of security we ultimately have? Where is God in your daily life as you go along not thinking about the many ways you participate in pushing God away?
The writer Parker Palmer calls our wanting control and feeling responsible for everything that happens to us as “functional atheism”. In other words, whenever we feel we have everything under our thumb, look out. God may be trying to help us understand how very much we need the guiding love and gift of God’s presence. To acknowledge this dependence on God is to be born anew. Just like Nicodemus, we bring our questions, and are told that God so loved the world, so loved us that all we need to do is say yes.
Saying yes to God makes us compassionate, so that when we see the disasters around us, we cry, but instead of seeing our technology and our power as the response, we can begin to see God’s creative power as the answer. Instead of blaming each other, we can pray that God help us to make the world the place of God’s kingdom, not ours.
Lent III
Lent III A And the rest of the story
I grew up in a household where self-esteem and self-regard were in short supply. Both my parents had abusive fathers. My mother in particular had a difficult time, with 10 brothers and sisters. Her mother died when she was 8 and a step mother was also verbally abusive, telling her how little she meant in the world, and that she was nothing.
Today we have another woman who most probably had very little self-worth. She was a Samaritan, a member of a tribe that the Jews do not consider very worthy because they do not worship in the approved manner. She is a woman in a world dominated by men, where she has had multiple husbands. There are many theories of why she has gone through so many husbands—some of them may have died, not unlikely in a society where the life expectancy may have been not much past 35, and perhaps 40 for those who could afford good food and shelter. She may have been set aside by husbands if they found she could not have children. All a man had to do was give her a bill of divorcement on the grounds of her barrenness. We don’t know why she had so many husbands, and we don’t know why she was living with a man who was not her husband, but we are certain that a woman could not live alone at that time and make a living. Women needed men and their access to financial security to live.
We don’t know exactly what was going on with this unnamed woman at the well. She is such a contrast to Nicodemus whom we heard about last week. Nicodemus is an educated Jewish leader, this woman is an uneducated outcast of the Samaritan sect. Nicodemus is a man with power in the synagogue, this woman has to come to get water in the heat of the day, as opposed to the other women of the village who would have come in the early hours to gather their water, so we know she was outcast within her village. Nicodemus knew a lot about the faith, but must see Jesus in the night, this woman knew nothing about her faith and met Jesus at noon. We know Nicodemus’ name, we have no idea what this woman was called.
But the one thing that links these two people who have conversations with Jesus , that while they are strangers to him, yet Jesus knows them both. Jesus calls Nicodemus a wise leader of the synagogue, and he tells the Samaritan woman he knows she has had all five husbands and is living with another man.
For the unnamed woman, an outcast in so many ways, this revealing of her situation is a shock. They start their conversation about water, and Jesus tells her she should be asking him, who asked her for a drink, for living water. First she is confused just like Nicodemus is about being born from above. Jesus is challenging the people he meets to think spiritually. Then Jesus talks about her husbands and she is amazed that she is so known by this man whom she calls a prophet.
As they continue to talk about living water and the worship of God in spirit and in truth, and she responds with what little she knows about the coming of a messiah. Jesus then names himself as that messiah. She runs back to her people to spread the word that it is not just a prophet she has encountered but the messiah who told her everything she had ever done.
Note that she there is an implication in her tone and something that is left out but could easily have been said. “he told me everything I have ever done…” and she could have added: “and he loved me anyway.”
This woman is transformed into the first apostle—the first to tell of the messiah, not to believing worshipers in the temple but to Samaritans who worship the wrong way. The Samaritans immediately come to believe because of her testimony.
What a transformation. The outcast woman who most Jews would not have even spoken to, Jesus has folded into his arms of love and understanding, and given the very words that she needed to understand that living water from God was needed for her and all those like her. The woman who could only draw water in the heat of the day has instead drawn living water and the knowledge of God’s great gift in the savior Jesus. The woman who didn’t even have a name has named Jesus the messiah, named the hope of the Jews, not only the perfect ones of Jerusalem, but the messiah of the imperfect ones of Samaria.
Jesus shows us a God who is doing great things. God knows us. God knows the dark things within us and about us, and God loves us not only despite who we are, but because of who we are. God in Christ has shown that God is a God of expansive openness and love, not of condemnation and exile. That while the Israelites wander in the wilderness of dry dust God is ready to give them the water they need, and in Christ God gives water that will quench our thirst today and always.
Such a great God who cares for us and about us may at times seem far away. The Samaritan woman who had been in six different relationships may have felt that no one cared about her or for her, and in fact loathed her and cast her out of their society. God must have felt very far away for her, and yet in her downcast state, she meets the messiah who tells her that she is worthy of God’s living water.
In our feelings of unworthiness, God is trying to reach us. God knows our challenges, and loves us even in the midst of them and perhaps because of them. Do you know how much you are loved by the God of living water today?
I grew up in a household where self-esteem and self-regard were in short supply. Both my parents had abusive fathers. My mother in particular had a difficult time, with 10 brothers and sisters. Her mother died when she was 8 and a step mother was also verbally abusive, telling her how little she meant in the world, and that she was nothing.
Today we have another woman who most probably had very little self-worth. She was a Samaritan, a member of a tribe that the Jews do not consider very worthy because they do not worship in the approved manner. She is a woman in a world dominated by men, where she has had multiple husbands. There are many theories of why she has gone through so many husbands—some of them may have died, not unlikely in a society where the life expectancy may have been not much past 35, and perhaps 40 for those who could afford good food and shelter. She may have been set aside by husbands if they found she could not have children. All a man had to do was give her a bill of divorcement on the grounds of her barrenness. We don’t know why she had so many husbands, and we don’t know why she was living with a man who was not her husband, but we are certain that a woman could not live alone at that time and make a living. Women needed men and their access to financial security to live.
We don’t know exactly what was going on with this unnamed woman at the well. She is such a contrast to Nicodemus whom we heard about last week. Nicodemus is an educated Jewish leader, this woman is an uneducated outcast of the Samaritan sect. Nicodemus is a man with power in the synagogue, this woman has to come to get water in the heat of the day, as opposed to the other women of the village who would have come in the early hours to gather their water, so we know she was outcast within her village. Nicodemus knew a lot about the faith, but must see Jesus in the night, this woman knew nothing about her faith and met Jesus at noon. We know Nicodemus’ name, we have no idea what this woman was called.
But the one thing that links these two people who have conversations with Jesus , that while they are strangers to him, yet Jesus knows them both. Jesus calls Nicodemus a wise leader of the synagogue, and he tells the Samaritan woman he knows she has had all five husbands and is living with another man.
For the unnamed woman, an outcast in so many ways, this revealing of her situation is a shock. They start their conversation about water, and Jesus tells her she should be asking him, who asked her for a drink, for living water. First she is confused just like Nicodemus is about being born from above. Jesus is challenging the people he meets to think spiritually. Then Jesus talks about her husbands and she is amazed that she is so known by this man whom she calls a prophet.
As they continue to talk about living water and the worship of God in spirit and in truth, and she responds with what little she knows about the coming of a messiah. Jesus then names himself as that messiah. She runs back to her people to spread the word that it is not just a prophet she has encountered but the messiah who told her everything she had ever done.
Note that she there is an implication in her tone and something that is left out but could easily have been said. “he told me everything I have ever done…” and she could have added: “and he loved me anyway.”
This woman is transformed into the first apostle—the first to tell of the messiah, not to believing worshipers in the temple but to Samaritans who worship the wrong way. The Samaritans immediately come to believe because of her testimony.
What a transformation. The outcast woman who most Jews would not have even spoken to, Jesus has folded into his arms of love and understanding, and given the very words that she needed to understand that living water from God was needed for her and all those like her. The woman who could only draw water in the heat of the day has instead drawn living water and the knowledge of God’s great gift in the savior Jesus. The woman who didn’t even have a name has named Jesus the messiah, named the hope of the Jews, not only the perfect ones of Jerusalem, but the messiah of the imperfect ones of Samaria.
Jesus shows us a God who is doing great things. God knows us. God knows the dark things within us and about us, and God loves us not only despite who we are, but because of who we are. God in Christ has shown that God is a God of expansive openness and love, not of condemnation and exile. That while the Israelites wander in the wilderness of dry dust God is ready to give them the water they need, and in Christ God gives water that will quench our thirst today and always.
Such a great God who cares for us and about us may at times seem far away. The Samaritan woman who had been in six different relationships may have felt that no one cared about her or for her, and in fact loathed her and cast her out of their society. God must have felt very far away for her, and yet in her downcast state, she meets the messiah who tells her that she is worthy of God’s living water.
In our feelings of unworthiness, God is trying to reach us. God knows our challenges, and loves us even in the midst of them and perhaps because of them. Do you know how much you are loved by the God of living water today?
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