Lent IV B Serving God

As our Lenten journey nears its end, we see that gentiles seek to see Jesus.  The word about him as reached the Greeks, has spread outside the circle of faithful Jewish followers and into the culture of Palestine, where Jesus has been preaching, teaching and healing.  Everyone begins to know about him, even gentiles.

The seeking of Jesus is our main duty as Christians. To know Jesus better through prayer, worship, contemplation of his acts of healing, his words pulls ever closer to God’s will for us.  Not to worship him alone, although he is divine, but to also see where he points to the God that has created and sustains us, who nurtures and loves us, in good times and in troubling times.  Today Jesus’ words tell us about the sacrifice of life for eternal life, how, to be close to God, we must be far from the parts of ourselves that only see our little world and nothing outside.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” the Greeks say, but do they know what they really are asking?  Jesus says that seeking him is to seek to be a servant.  Whoever serves Christ will serve God.

So on this last Sunday before the passion, Jesus asks us to give up our life in service to him and to God.  What is your service?  What do you give of yourself?

Service calls us to use what God has given us, our talents as parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents.  Our gifts of vocation, whether around the house or outside in the workaday world.  Our money and time in service to the world, to reduce suffering and build up God’s peace and justice.  Our very self is asked in service to God.

Our Lenten study has taken us into the rule of the Benedictines, to see how the life of monks can inform our own life as servants who live in the world.  We have seen that both work and rest need to be balanced.  While the monks pray and work together in a more intense way, our own balance of prayer and work can be nurtured.  We have looked at the word obedience, how it is connected to the word hearing.  Obedience then first leads us to listen to God around us in order to follow where God leads us.   All this leads to conversion of life—a turning around where we are shown how we fail ourselves and God.

Benedictine spirituality has many things to teach us who live in the world, many life-giving words of wisdom for living faithfully as servants of God.

The public television series Downton Abby had as its theme the life of servants in a different sense—these servants of a British nobleman worked not for God but for another person, giving up their homes and family life for the life of the baron’s family. In return they were cared for, but the series clearly showed that the life of household servants was secondary to the life of the family they served. This is not how service for God works.

When we are God’s servants, we are loved for who we are, our talents are nurtured, our gifts multiply and we enter into the full understanding of all that we are and all that we have been given. We put God as central to our lives, and begin to see that God has made us central to his work for the world.  Instead of second-class citizens working for a self-consumed boss, we work together with God to make the world a place of love for all.

Instead of working for the glory of the boss, we glorify God in our service, and thus work for the dignity of every human being.  God’s service doesn’t require that we ignore our needs, but that we put them in balance with the needs of the world, as the Benedictines have taught us to do.

Our life of service calls us out of our self-centered pettiness, into a life of living for the peace and justice of all God’s creation.  Instead of being cast out of creation, we become co-creators with God, listening for the word of God and heeding its call.

Where God will call us to serve we do not know.  I got called to this parish in Boone County Illinois.  God called some of you to be parents, some to be teachers, some to be caretakers of the environment.  Your service means that God’s work can be done, perhaps not in our time, but in the scheme of eternity. Jesus tells us that our service bears much fruit. Without dying to self, our fruit will fall to the ground and wither, but with our service, our self will die and we will bear the fruit that gives life.

May you hear where God calls you into service that feeds you and builds up the peace and justice of the world.

lent III B Jesus Cleanses the Rituals

Today we see an angry Jesus, a side of Jesus that may be perplexing, and certainly does not match the gentle and humble picture we would rather paint of the Son of God.

Why is Jesus so angry at the temple money-changers and sellers of animals?  These marketplace people were allowing Jews to buy animals for sacrifice in rituals in the temple.  In the gospel of John this story follows the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana—his first miracle of changing water into wine.  The jars the water was in were used for Jewish purification rites. Jesus, by changing the water, is changing the purification rites of the Jewish temple, and in a sense he is purifying the temple again by running out the marketplace people with a whip of cords.

Biblical scholars refer to this story of the angry Jesus running out the marketers as “the cleansing of the temple”, but it should be called the cleansing of the temple rituals.  Jesus is now the new sacrifice, not animals like the doves that were sold to be sacrificed.  As Jesus gets rid of the animals, he begins to substitute himself as the new sacrifice.  To Jesus, the ritual of the temple is meaningless unless it means true sacrifice, a sacrifice not of something outside ourself, but of something inside ourself.

The sacrifices did nothing for the temple, but keep it afloat financially.  The chief priests were kept busy with the sacrifices and were fed from the sacrificed animals.  Did God care about sacrifices of animals?  It seems only the priests would have cared, as they were the ones who would benefit.

Perhaps we can now see why Jesus was so angered. To him the ritual sacrifices of the temple did not come from the heart, but were an obligation that signified little.  Jesus has constant run-ins with the scribes and Pharisees to whom these temple rituals, the strict rules of the Sabbath, and the rules of eating and washing hands, were their life.  He calls them hypocrites because they engage in meaningless actions for the sake of rule and order, but don’t really connect with true worship and true sacrifice.

What are the markers of true sacrifice?  For Jesus they are his very life.  His every act of healing and teaching aided in the work for God’s kingdom to come on earth. The sacrifice of Jesus was giving of his very self, his entire life for God.

How can we hope to be followers of this angry Jesus?  Where are we being called to run out the marketplace from out temple, where do we find our heart in our faith?

Think about where your heart is in your own rituals. Where do you just go through the motions of praise and thanksgiving, and where do you really connect your heart and soul with God?  Can you think of moments, of places, of relationships, where God seems really alive for you and you are alive for God?

What does your own sacrifice for God look like?  Does it exist as something outside yourself that you can buy, or does it look like a piece of your heart and soul that is given freely for truth and justice, for the dignity of every human being? Does it look like being first or being last?

Our sacrifices do occur here in worship, but they are only the training for the sacrifices given of our hearts the rest of the week. We say our faith aloud here every Sunday, so that we may live our faith through the rest of the week.  We are nourished at the altar here, so we may nourish others.  We sing praise here, so we can notice the abundance of thanksgivings all around us.  We give money and time here, to practice that same giving for the world all week.

Sacrifice is a word we have used dangerously. It has been used to make women subservient both at home and in the workplace.  But I am talking about the sacrifice that all make—both men and women—to live into their faith and thus build up the world for God’s justice and peace.  That kind of sacrifice takes full advantage of all the gifts and talents God has bestowed upon each of us, calls us into account for the nurturing of those gifts and their appropriation for the good of the world, not for just the ones we love, but for the ones whose love fails us.

Where is your heart and soul this Lent?  Have you noticed the places, times, relationships that feed the world’s peace and justice through you?  Where is your sacrifice for the God?

Lent I B Losing your life to save it

Lent II B    Losing your life to save it

Our friend Peter is again showing his human side today, as he rebukes Jesus after Jesus talks about his upcoming passion and death.  “Get behind me Satan.  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Well of course, Peter sets his mind on human things, because Peter is our most human disciple.  Peter wants to stay and build tents on the mountaintop. Peter later cowers in fear after Jesus is arrested. 

Peter, who will be given the keys to heaven, had a ways to go before he could put his mind on divine things.  Peter may be the disciple we understand best, perhaps because he is doing and saying the same things we might do, had we been present when our rabbi told us these awful things that were about to take place.

I visited an old and very sick parishioner at home for a couple of years, who, as she began to be more frail and in pain, began to tell me she was ready to die.  Her children always chastised her when she said this to them, but she was only saying what she felt inside, that her time was here and that she was ready.  Her adult children were putting their hands over their ears because they didn’t want to hear that they would lose their mother, and as many of us do, were thinking about their loss, not about their mother’s need to leave her spent body behind and be at peace in the next life.

Our instinct for personal survival gives us an aversion to any talk of death and dying, or loss of any kind.

Seeing a letter from the IRS in the mailbox may bring chills of fear as we avoid bringing into the house.  When you are expecting a phone call with bad news, perhaps you want to turn the phone off. When you see the doctor about unknown symptoms and she comes into the exam room you scan her face to see if it’s good news or bad.  Our survival instinct remains on twenty-four hours a day, and is nigh impossible to turn off. 

People who can turn off their survival instinct in a healthy way do exist—some are professional therapists who can listen to others’ sad tales objectively so that they can help them.  Others can turn off this instinct to run and hide for short periods of time so that they can be open to the experience of friends, listening and allowing another person to be in a dark place and not judge them.

But today, Jesus calls his disciples away from this instinct to survive at all costs, to take the easy way, shut their ears against things they don’t want to hear, shut their eyes to things they don’t want to see. Jesus says that turning a deaf ear and blind eye can be the start of evil, when it does not enter into suffering.

Because Jesus knows something that Peter has yet to understand—that the way of God is the way of truth, the way of justice, and the way of resurrection.  Jesus knows that by turning away from the hard things of life, Peter will inadvertently turn away from the very challenges God sends so that new life may be born.

You can’t follow me unless you take up your cross, Jesus says.  And it does no good to act on your survival instinct if it keeps you locked up in a closed house, in a closed mind, in a closed community that lacks the courage of love.

Our parish knows what it feels like to reach out when we would rather stay home on Saturday morning to give away a coat to a grateful person or to work on a Habitat house.  Entering into the suffering of others or ourselves places us squarely into the stream of lifegiving water that comes from God.   It keeps our mind on divine things not human things.

Jesus says that human things are the things that cause us to lose our life. Our survival instinct may seem like the way to life, but Jesus says it is ultimately the way of death.  It does not allow us to be in the mind of Christ, the mind that openly accepts the challenges of life, even unto death.  The mind of Christ is the way that opens us for new life, even while it may seem like the death of the old life.

This paradox of losing your life to save it requires us to turn away from automatic responses to the suffering around us, whether ours or another’s.  Losing our life does not mean denying our gifts, but actually embracing them for others.  Losing our life does not mean being lost in someone else’s ego, but putting our ego in the service of others to reduce the suffering of the world. Losing our life does not mean losing our personal uniqueness, but being uniquely God’s gift in love.

Take up your cross by having the mind of Christ—the mind that does not run away from the hard things, but understands them to be the way to new life.