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Epistle Reading: Colossians 3: 1-4 Gospel: John 20: 1-18 This Lent we have followed a theme of wilderness. We have been traveling through the wilderness, sometimes feeling worn out and barren like the branches on the altar; sometimes feeling lost in the challenges we face personally, the challenges our very divided country is facing and the challenges of war, famine, disaster, and conflict that our world faces. It is easy to feel so lost in the wilderness of pain and anger in this world, that we cannot see the path out. We feel like we are surrounded by thorns pricking us from every direction. But we have also been reminded that we are never alone. Even when we step off the path, getting lost, God is there walking with us, ready to guide us back. In fact, many of us have realized that we need our quiet times in the wilderness to regroup, to begin anew, to finally hear God calling us: that time in the wilderness gives us new hope, even joy. Time in the wilderness of struggle, doubt and pain, for ourselves and the world, prepares us to encounter resurrection. And on this day, of all days, we want to sing out the alleluias and celebrate the resurrection, as we will. But we have to begin by acknowledging the wilderness that Jesus went through between that last meal with his disciples, his friends as he called them, and the magnificence of the resurrection. Let me take you back. On this past Thursday night, sixteen of us shared in a Maundy Thursday service downstairs in the fellowship hall where we recalled that last meal that Jesus had with his disciples. In his final time with them, he served them by washing their feet, breaking bread and telling them that this was his body, given for them and sharing wine saying that this cup was the new covenant of his blood. Jesus enjoyed this meal among his closest friends even though he knew that Judas would betray him. He used the post meal time as a final time to teach them and some of his last words were to tell them to love one another and really, by the example of his life and his earlier teachings, he was telling them to love everyone, just as they are, just as he does. After their meal they went for a walk to the Mount of Olives, to the Western slope where the Garden of Gethsemane is. There Jesus went to pray with Peter, James and John. Jesus told them to sit and wait for him while he took some private time, his own wilderness time, to pray. As it says in Matthew 26: 39, he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but you want.” Here we see Christ’s humanity in full force. As the son of God he knows what he has to do; as a human, it is scary, he knows it will be painful, and like we would, he would rather avoid it. But he defers to God, “Yet not what I want, but what you want.” He is deep in this wilderness time, knowing what is ahead but struggling with the reality of it and he needs the support of his friends, so he turns back to them only to find them asleep. 40: “So could you not stay awake with me one hour?” he says to them in frustration feeling more alone than before. He goes away two more times and each time finds them sleeping upon his return. By the time he wakes them up the 3rd time, Judas and a crowd of chief priests and elders are approaching with swords and clubs: certainly a difficult wilderness time. After an ironic kiss of betrayal from Judas, Jesus is arrested and, although one of his disciples pulls out a sword to defend him cutting off a servant's ear, Jesus, as always, stops the violence and in Luke’s Gospel, he heals the servant even as he is being taken away to his death. He shows love to his enemies to the very end. He is taken to the home of the high priest at this late evening hour for a kind of informal trial where they sought to gather witnesses against him, questioning him, but Jesus does not respond until finally the high priest said to him in Matthew 26:63-64 “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the son of God. Jesus said to him, “You have said so, but I tell you from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven.” This was enough. Those who wanted Jesus dead thought of this as blasphemy and began to spit on him. They blindfolded him and hit him. They asked him to prophesy and say who had hit him. Then they took him early Friday morning to the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate seeking his crucifixion. Despite finding him to be innocent and trying to release him, since no evidence was really offered against him, Pilate goes along with the crowd and allows the criminal Barabas to be released for Passover and Jesus to be crucified. Before they crucify Jesus, they mock him. Give him a purple robe, put a crown of thorns on his head - a literal representation of the wilderness that is painfully pricking him. In John’s Gospel, Jesus had to carry his own torture device, a wooden cross, alone. In the other Gospels, a bystander, Simon is pressed into service to help. Imagine the wilderness of that walk, being among people but feeling alone. The disciples have scattered. Peter who followed along has denied association with Jesus three times as predicted and is now full of remorse. A very painful death is close at hand and yet Jesus still forgives those torturing him saying as he is on the cross in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus is nailed to his cross between two criminals being similarly crucified. But on Jesus’ cross, Pilate has written: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. One criminal, even as he is crucified with Jesus, mocks him. The other rebukes him noting they deserve to be there but Jesus does not. He says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” and Jesus, loving and welcoming all people even as he was dying said, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”. Consider the message of hope from God who forgives even those torturing him and who welcomes a repentant sinner as one of the first people to join him in paradise. Jesus showed that it is never too late to learn and emerge from the wilderness. Crucifixion is a slow and painful death that could take days. Instead for Jesus, the sky went dark for three hours from noon to 3pm and Jesus dies, by Luke’s account saying, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” In John’s account, some of Jesus’ female disciples are there at the base of the cross watching this: his mother Mary, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. They would have to witness the soldiers pierce his side to ensure that he was dead, watching the water and blood run out. You can imagine the wilderness of their grief watching this happen. In some accounts, they were able to watch Jesus be placed in the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea, a secret follower of Christ, purchased and placed him in. All of the disciples, male and female, felt lost as that tomb was closed. They were plunged into the wilderness of sorrow, disappointment and doubt as they did not yet understand about the promise of resurrection despite Jesus’ teachings. They had believed in Jesus as their savior yet they saw him crucified like a common criminal. What hope was there now? Wilderness times of pain, doubt, and sorrow cannot be avoided, no matter how much we try. They are a part of humanity as Jesus showed. But what Jesus also showed us is that our time in the wilderness is what brings about the resurrection, that hope is never lost, even when we are. Hope was reborn with Jesus in that empty tomb on that first Easter day. Throughout Lent our altar and our window ledges were adorned with the wilderness of barren branches, sand, rocks and moss. Today we have grown from that wilderness time and our altar shows the beauty of new growth even in the wilderness. Flower bulbs are living models of resurrection. They die only to be buried anew in soil; nurtured by living water and the sun above, they burst forth in glorious beauty. We give flowers to the sick as a sign of beauty and hope. We give flowers to our friends and partners as signs of love. The Easter Lily is sometimes referred to as the “white robed apostles of hope”. My friends let us embrace our struggles, our wilderness times, knowing they are part of our journey towards the hope and beauty of resurrection. Peter and John believed but ran back home after seeing the empty tomb. Mary stayed at the tomb in the wilderness of her pain and sorrow and because she was still and waited, she met the risen Christ. Remember Psalm 46. Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. And from the stillness of the wilderness comes the birth of hope. Theologian Father Richard Rohr calls Easter the Feast of Hope, noting, “This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty. What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life.” After school on Good Friday, I realized I needed some contemplative time to consider what Jesus went through on that day so I took an hour around the perimeter of the Evergreen Cemetery in Rutland. As I considered all of what happened to Christ from Maundy Thursday to today, I occasionally stopped to read a monument or tombstone. One in particular caught my attention. It was an obelisk style monument for Solomon Foot, a U.S. Senator from Vermont who died while he was in office in Washington D.C. In 1866. On the back of the monument, facing the road is carved these words: “As he was expiring he said, “I see it, I see it! The gates are wide open. Beautiful, beautiful!” To be a Christian means to believe in that beautiful mystery as Rohr explains it, “nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love,” Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen. Pastor Michelle Fountain
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3/17/2024 0 Comments March 17, 2024: Jesus WeptOld Testament Reading: Ezekiel 37: 1-14 The Gospel: John 11: 17-45 I have never seen my father cry. He was raised in a culture that said, “Men don’t cry” presumably because crying showed weakness. Men were supposed to buck up and keep going, no matter what. Even women, in order to be stronger, to move up the corporate ladder, are encouraged not to show emotion or not as much. I think that is very sad. Crying shows compassion and it is also a release, a cleansing of sorts. If you think about it, crying is breath work. A good cry involves having to catch one’s breath, to breathe more deeply - a kind of automatic reset - a calming mechanism almost like yoga breathing. One wonders where society got this idea that crying was bad when even Jesus cried not once but twice in the Bible. The first recorded time was the story that we read today about the death and resurrection of Lazarus. And one has to wonder, why did Jesus cry when he knew he was about to resurrect Lazarus? He had even already told Martha that. Jesus cried because he was experiencing empathy. He could feel the pain of Mary, Martha and all the others who loved Lazarus and were mourning him as well as his own pain at his loss. The scripture says when Jesus saw Mary and the Jews who came with her weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”. After asking where Lazarus was entombed, he began to weep. He joined all of Lazarus’ family and friends in their sorrow even as he knew he was going to end that sorrow by resurrecting Lazarus. To me, this shows Jesus’ full humanity more than almost anything else. Theologian and Catholic Priest Richard Rohr says, “In Jesus, God reveals to us that God is not different from humanity. Thus, Jesus’ most common and almost exclusive self-name is “The Human One” or “Son of Humanity.” He uses the term dozens of times in the four Gospels. Jesus’ reality, his cross, is to say a free “yes” to what his humanity daily asks of him.” After Lazarus’ death, being fully human for Jesus meant being there for and with his friends and family - feeling with them, which is what empathy is. This, however, is not the only time that Jesus weeps. He also weeps as he reaches Jerusalem riding in on a colt in Luke 19 just before he reaches the Temple and drives out those who were selling things there saying in verse 46 “It is written “My house shall be a house of prayer but you have made it a den of robbers.” In this scripture he foreshadows the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In verses 41-44 it says, “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God. “ Here Jesus is not crying with empathy but with frustration and sympathy. He cannot connect to them empathetically because they have not listened, they have not recognized what Jesus has been teaching. And what was he teaching, what do they need to recognize? “The things that make for peace.” Jesus always cares, always loves: feeling with us when we let him in and feeling sympathy for us when we don’t. Father Richard continues, “ It seems we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The worshiping feels very religious; the latter just feels human and ordinary. We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit; we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder—precisely because it is so ordinary.” Jesus showed us both what it means to be fully human and to be fully divine. While we are not divine, we can live into Jesus’ model of being fully human. We can do that journey. Joyce Rupp in her daily meditation book, Fragments of Your Ancient Name, gives 365 names for God, the one for March 12 is “One Who Weeps” partially inspired by the passage from John that we read today as well as the Luke passage. Hear her reflection: Scripture tells twice of your weeping. But undoubtedly there were other times besides your tears for a friend entombed and a heartless city swept up in selfishness. Surely your tender tears continue to emerge as you look upon this hurting planet today. Tears for children who are brutally betrayed and every person’s wrenching desolation, Tears for the world’s greed and plunder and the careless way we treat one another. I don’t know about you, but it is not uncommon for me to start crying at the news. Watching the continued war in Ukraine and the attacks on Gaza, my heart breaks with concern and worry for everyone involved: the Ukranians, Russians, Palestinians and Israelis. Seeing the continued acts of prejudice, violence, hatred, and cruelty in our country and world, I am saddened and frustrated like Jesus was with Jerusalem. I want there to be peace but I sometimes feel like those useless, dry bones thinking what can I do? I feel lost in the wilderness of my own challenges, let alone the world’s and I am not sure of the way out. But then I pause, take a deep breath and sit with God. I sit with my questions. What can I do for x situation and y situation? I sit and breathe, pray and listen. And a lot of the time I don’t get an answer and I learn to sit with that too. I learn to live with the questions and the mystery. With enough prayer and meditation, it gets a little bit easier to not have the answers but to trust in the possibility - to remember that in all of my feelings, I am not alone. If I let God in, I can be reassured by the empathy - the shared feelings of sadness, frustration, even anger and I can remember that I am not alone on this journey but walking through the wilderness with God. And sometimes, I can feel God breathing new life into me, inspiring me to do something, to change something. But I can only feel God’s breath of energy, God’s guidance, when I make the room for it, when I quiet my mind and heart to listen, to feel, to see God’s outstretched hand, to see the tears that God is crying with us and for us. And it is then that I remember that we cry for a lot of reasons. We cry in frustration, sadness and anger, but we also cry tears of joy and love and amazement as I am sure that Mary, Martha and all those mourning Lazarus did when Jesus resurrected him. Isn’t it strange that the very thing we do in our negative emotions, we also do in our most positive ones? Maybe but maybe not. Instead, might tears of joy be a resurrection of sorts? A washing away of the worry, sorrow and all the negatives? Now that I think about it, I do remember hearing that my father cried at least once, but they were tears of joy. My maid of honor bet my father $5 that he would choke up at my wedding. Dad confidently took that bet but as we all processed out at the end of the ceremony, he was caught on video handing Joanne a $5 bill, while wiping his eyes. Pastor Michelle Fountain |
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