Fifth Sunday of Lent

This is my sermon from today.

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Anthony MacWhinnie II
St. Augustine of CanterburyEpiscopal Church
Fifth Sunday of Lent B

In the name of One God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Good morning.  It is the fifth Sunday of Lent today.  For five weeks now you’ve been struggling with your Lenten observances.  How are they coming along?  Are you still keeping up with them?  Or have they bested you?  Well, if you are anything like me then you’ve fallen down.  You’ve faltered.  You have failed in some way to keep at this daily taking up of your cross that is the season of Lent.  You know, and I had good excuses.  I got sick.  I had this cold and it drug me down.  And then I had this medical procedure this week that got in my way of doing the writing that I was supposed to do.  And they are all good excuses, but in the end they’re just that… excuses.  The bottom line is that I didn’t keep up with my Lenten observance.  And you know why?  It’s because I’m human.  These things happen.  Things come up and get in the way.  That’s just the way that it works.  It is the rare person that makes it all the way through Lent perfectly completing their Lenten observance.  We falter.  For whatever reason, we do.  And you know, the Gospel lesson today gives us a little bit of hope in this area.  Over all, the message from John’s Gospel today should be alarming for us, but there is one part that shows us a glimpse of Jesus’ human side.

You know, in the Gospel of John, Jesus knows everything before it happens.  He has a ready explanation for every event.  So, he has every reason to be supremely confident in everything that he does.  He knows how it’s going to turn out.  But did you notice?  In verse twenty seven, what does he say?  “Now is my soul troubled.”  “Now is my soul troubled.”  Jesus is afraid.  He’s afraid of what comes next.  He’s afraid of the beatings.  He’s afraid of the shame.  He’s afraid of the nails.  He’s afraid of the cross.  He’s afraid of dying.  He’s just like us.  For this Jesus to be afraid, that’s a very human moment.  Jesus shows us his humanity when he shows us his fear.  For the Jesus of John’s Gospel, this is faltering.  This is missing a beat in the omniscient being that is John’s Jesus.  This is falling down.  This is our connection to and relationship with the real person of Jesus Christ.  He is us.  And we are him.

So we are connected to this Jesus, like the people around him were connected to him.  And the whole world in this passage is streaming to Jesus.  Just before our lesson today, the Pharisees lament “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”  The Pharisees want him dead at this point.  They’ve even conspired to re-kill Lazarus.  Lazarus has been raised from the dead by Jesus of Nazareth so Lazarus must die again!  All evidence of the messiahship of Jesus must be blotted out.  All evidence that Jesus is the Son of Man must be erased.  They are jealous.  He is taking their glory and pointing out their hypocrisy.  He has got to go.  But the whole world is streaming to him.  Even the Greeks are coming to him and these Greeks that they mention were special Greeks.  They were Greeks who had taken on Judaism as their religion.  They had submitted to circumcision.  They had converted to Judaism even in the face of the significant hurdles that they would face simply because they weren’t ethnically Jewish.  These were people that wanted to be Jewish.  They had chosen to be Jewish.  And now, Jesus is drawing even them from their old life into this new one.  When they ask to “see” Jesus, it’s from the Greek word “eidon” which is more than just to apprehend with one’s eyes.  It carries with it a connotation of knowledge, of understanding.  It’s like when you say “Do you see what I mean?”  The Greeks don’t just want to see Jesus.  They don’t just want to meet Jesus.  They want to know Jesus.  They want to understand Jesus.

So, they arrive on the scene and they approach Philip, the disciple with the Greek name and ask to see Jesus.  The message gets to Jesus and he says to them ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.’

And that’s the scary part for us, isn’t it?  The hour of the Son of Man is our hour as well.  Jesus is the grain of wheat that must fall into the earth and die so that he can bear much fruit.  The problem for us is that he does.  Yes it’s the means of our salvation.  Jesus’ death and resurrection is how we are saved.  It’s just that death part that’s tough for us to get past, isn’t it?  Jesus says, 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.’

It’s hard going where Jesus goes.  It’s hard to give up our lives.  It’s hard to die and to do so willingly.  But that is what is asked of us.  If we want to serve Jesus Christ we must follow him.  And where he goes is to a cross.  Where he goes is to a cross.  But, when we go there, we don’t go alone.  We have help.  We have assurance.  When we die to our old self we have an assurance of a resurrection to our new self.  If only we ask, Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’  He will glorify it again, in you.

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Die to yourself.  Bear fruit.  And see Jesus.

Amen.

Listen to the suffering

We can not assume anything about another’s suffering.  Well, in fact we shouldn’t assume anything about another’s suffering.  We can and we do all the time.  And when we do, that is when we run into trouble.  And by “trouble” I mean we let our SELVES get in the way of whatever it is that we are trying to accomplish.

In my work as a hospital chaplain there were many, many instances of this.  When I would assume that I understood where someone was in their grief or suffering or even in their physical health or the course of their treatment, invariably I found out I was wrong.  Now, it could be that I’m incredibly stupid.  And it could be that I have no ability to gauge anything in life.  But, I tend to doubt that.  That’s not been the usual case.  It’s just that dealing with suffering is a complex issue, one that we have to rely on the other person to report accurately on for us.

One of the areas I worked as a chaplain was a critical care unit.  People would come there in the direst of states.  Most times they would make it.  Others they did not.  On one occasion a woman came in who was at death’s door.  I was convinced that she was one of the ones who would not make it.  She came in in a coma and remained that way.  I made it a practice everyday to step into her room and say a little prayer “with” her.  For a week this went on.  She grew no better.  Two weeks went by.  Her physical symptoms abated and returned.  Somehow, during my daily prayer visits with her, I developed an affection for her.  She was my “friend” in room one.  I continued my prayers “with” her.  Finally in the third week of her stay I walked into her room and she was sitting upright, looking fine and eating her lunch!  I was overjoyed!  I blurted out happily “Oh my gosh it’s so good to see you!”  Fire flashed into her eyes and she yelled “What the hell are you doing in my room?!?”  I was flabbergasted!  I stuttered and stammered.  ”Oh. Uhm. I’m the chaplain here…”  I tried to say a few more words but she was having none of it.

And rightfully so.  I had walked in on a bad situation.  Her family had been ushered out of the room because there was a code in the critical care unit.  It was hospital policy.  I had no idea of the goings on.  I walked in at the wrong time.   And of course she had no idea who I was.  She was angry that her family could not be there but I could.  She was totally justified.  I’d made all sorts of assumptions in this and was gloriously reminded of them all when she bellowed at me.  I had let my SELF get in the way of that for which I was there.  And it came crashing down on me in one fell swoop.  I had no idea what was going on with her in any of this and she taught me very quickly that very lesson.

Now, she and I actually became friends the next day.  Or, at least pleasant acquaintances.  She was genuinely happy to see me and I her.  It turns out that her mother was very nice as well and they were happy to know I’d been praying for her all along.  I couldn’t know all this, though, without communicating with them.  Without her telling me what was going on with her I had no way of knowing.  I was in my own little world.  And she was in hers.  Her suffering, her helplessness, her joy and her anger were unknowable to me until she made it known.

Communication is the key.  I find that more and more in life.  Communication is everything.  To be effective at anything in life we must communicate.  And by this I mean real communication.  We can not assume that because we feel a certain way that others feel this way as well.  If WE were in THEIR shoes we know that we’d feel a certain way, so they must feel that way now… No.  That is not the case.  Let them communicate.  Listen, really listen, and then act.  Suffering is real and it can be made worse by good intentions that aren’t matched with good communication.

Listen to the suffering.

Suffering cont.

So, we have this love affair with suffering, don’t we?

No pain, no gain.  Hazing.  Aerobics.  College algebra…

Okay, so maybe aerobics and college algebra aren’t suffering for some, but neither are starvation and and chronic pain for others.  Suffering is in the eye of the beholder in many cases.  What is suffering for me may be the activity of choice for you.  We find this all the time in our lives.  People are different.  We like different things.  We loathe different things.

And the thing is, from the outside, we can not know if another person is suffering.  Oh, we can know that something looks like suffering.  And we can suspect that we would be suffering were we in their place, but we can not know for sure.  And simply the look of a person can not be a proof for us that they are suffering.  So many times people assume that they know that someone is suffering just because of the situation in which they are.  But those people would be making a false assumption.

Now, this is assuming that the other can not communicate their own situation.  I’m having an epistemological issue with whether they can communicate this or whether they can not, even if they try.  Let’s assume for the purposes of this piece that they can not, for now.  This would mean that there is no way for us to know whether another person is suffering.  The only way we could know if they are suffering is if we become them.  And that’s impossible, isn’t it?

All this is to say that we should never assume that we know what someone else is going through.  We should never sit outside their situation and fool ourselves into thinking that we understand another person’s suffering or the lack thereof.

Think about that.  How do you proceed in life?  Do you assume that others feel the same as you?  Do you look at someone’s situation and assume that they are feeling certain things?  So, how do you know that?  If you pass a woman crying on the side of the road next to her car, do make certain assumptions?  Why is she crying?  Why is her car stopped?

Think about that for a second; a woman on the side of the road, crying…

Why?

How do you know?

You don’t do you?

You can’t know.

Suffering is a deeply personal thing, isn’t it?  We can sympathize, but we can not empathize.  We can not literally feel their pain.  We can only know what we might feel were we in their situation and we always have incomplete information about their situation.

I’ll leave you with that for now.  Make no assumptions about another’s suffering.

Insufferable

AM Psalm 95 [for the Invitatory] 88; PM Psalm 91, 92
Gen. 47:1-26; 1 Cor. 9:16-27; Mark 6:47-56

1 Cor. 9:22  To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some.

I skipped yesterday’s post…  I was running from one thing to next yesterday and got home near midnight.  I sat down in my recliner and woke up in the AM.  I feel a little guilty.  But all is not lost.  Bumps in the road of Lent are bound to happen…

So, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of suffering.  I have many disparate thoughts on it, honestly, but for some reason I keep coming back to it.  I also realize that the few paragraphs I write for this blog will be completely inadequate to the task.  But, for now, this is what I have.  And, this is the first time I’m writing them down so please bear with me.

Suffering.

I’m against it.

Let’s just start with that premise.  I’m against it in a very visceral way, and my first reaction to it is that it is to be avoided at all costs.  I would revise “no pain no gain” to “no pain, yeah, that’s a good thing.”  I do not want to suffer.  I do not want others to suffer, in every case, even jerks (although being a jerk is its own form of suffering).

As I write this I’m realizing how huge this topic is.  There are many forms of suffering.  Physical and emotional suffering just begin to break the surface.  Physical suffering can be due to disease, or to other people, or to oneself, either self-inflicted in a positive way (exercise) or in a negative way (obesity, from which I suffer).  Emotional suffering, likewise, can be broken down in a similar fashion; emotional suffering brought about by external sources, internal sources and disease.  And if I tried hard I imagine I could break them down or combine them ad infinitum.  Suffice it to say that the word “suffering” is a complex one, one that we can’t always understand when someone says “I’m suffering.”

My problem here is that I’m a Christian.  And as funny as that statement is, we have this tradition of revering suffering and the sufferer.  We point to Christ on the cross and say, “Be like that.”  We point to Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane and say “Do likewise.”  We revere saints who were burned and crucified upside-down and eaten by lions and say “That’s the best thing we could ever do.”

With images like this, it’s a wonder there are any Christians left…  ”God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

That’s a lion, man…  Seriously.

Christ is the suffering messiah.  We have a God who suffers, depending on with whom you speak.  We have this tradition of the suffering servant.  Suffering is a part of our Christian DNA.

Romans 5:3-5  3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,  4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

By that logic, Paul is saying that eventually suffering produces hope, which doesn’t disappoint…

But what happens when it doesn’t?  What sort of suffering is this that he’s talking about that leads to good things?  What suffering in your life has led to good?  I have a problem with Paul on this.  And I will leave you with that for today.  I’m leaving it open-ended.  Think about suffering.

And thanks for suffering through with me…

Pass the idol bacon, please.

AM Psalm 119:97-120; PM Psalm 81, 82
Gen. 45:16-28; 1 Cor. 8:1-13; Mark 6:13-29

1 Cor 8:12  But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.

This is one of those texts that I have to work to find how it applies today.  It’s not often that any of us gets a chance to eat food that has been sacrificed to idols.  And those of you that know me, know that if it was bacon I would eat it.  Pretty much any grilled meat I’m on board for, idol or no idol.  If the cult of Isis is having a barbecue, count me in.  That’s ecumenism, baby.

Or maybe it’s e-cumin-ism.

Oh yeah. I went there.

But seriously, this isn’t an issue today for us, here and now.  Or is it?  Maybe alcohol is similar?  I’m an Episcopalian so alcohol isn’t an issue at all, even for me, the priest.  But what if I was invited to my Baptist friend’s barbecue?  Should I show up with a sixer?  Probably not…

The world says to force them to change.  Force them to see how your way is the right way.  Force them by doing what you want to do, in their face.  They’ll see how it’s harmless.  They’ll see how they’ve been wrong all along.  It’s my right.  It’s my freedom.  And if they have a problem with it, then to hell with them.

Paul says their belief is more important than our freedom.  If it’s going to hurt their faith and cause them to falter, then we are sinning against them when we force our agendas on them.  It’s our responsibility to help them in their faith and if what we consume has a negative effect on them, then we need to take that into account.

It’s a kind of gentleness with which I am not possessed, I’ll tell you.  I like my beer.  I like my pork.  And I’m perfectly willing to teach lessons about how they aren’t a big deal.

But should I?

Paul says maybe I shouldn’t.

Paul is a pain…

 

The return of Stinky

AM Psalm 78:1-39; 78:40-72
Gen. 45:1-15; 1 Cor. 7:32-40; Mark 6:1-13

Mark 6:11 If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.

I had to use that quote just for Stinky and his partner.  I wonder who that was.  Slim?  Tiny?  One of the Thunder Twins?

Thunder Twin powers… Activate!

Form of, an… Ok, you get the picture…

On to the text; they went out two by two into an uncertain world.  Their leader told them to carry next to nothing.  They went out armed with only their faith.  And their leader’s faith was… How was his faith, exactly?

How is it that Jesus had no power in his home town?  Doesn’t that just bug the heck out of you?  It does me.  Why can’t he do anything there?  Isn’t he the Son of God?  Or was he having an off day?  Was his humanity getting in the way?  What that heck was  happening there that the second person of the trinity could do no deed of power?  It doesn’t make sense.  So, let’s look at the text again.

“4Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ ⁵And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. ⁶And he was amazed at their unbelief.”

Wait, what?  ”Except that he laid hands on a few sick people and cured them.”  Mark is having fun with us, isn’t he?  That’s like saying “And Superman couldn’t use his powers, except that he flew around and around the Earth so fast that he turned time backwards.”

It’s not that he couldn’t do his thing there.  It’s that even in spite of doing his thing there, still the people didn’t believe.

That’s stubbornness.  That’s stupidity.

Who in your life experience do you believe is incapable of doing amazing things?  Think of them.  Who do you underestimate?  That’s not even a fair question is it?  You can’t know who you underestimate…  Who rankles you?  Who bothers you?  Who are you better than?

Well, I’m here to tell you; that person or those people can do amazing things.  You just can’t see it.  They cure people.  But you can’t see it.  They lay their hands on things and affect positive change.  And you can not see it.

Because you are in the way.  It’s you who prevents their awesomeness from getting through to you.  You.

Try that one on for size.

Yeah, it’s bothering me too…

Patience, now please

AM Psalm 80; PM Psalm 77, [79]
Gen. 44:18-34; 1 Cor. 7:25-31; Mark 5:21-43

Mark 5:28  ”If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

Can you get everything done that you have to do, to your satisfaction, every time?  Better yet, can you get everything done that everyone else wants you to get done, when they want them done?  How do you operate under a deadline?  What is your demeanor like?  What are the people like around you when you don’t get things done that they think you should have gotten done by a certain time?

I wish I had the patience and restraint that Jesus shows in this passage.  I try. I really do.

I think that my impatience with myself is directly related to the impatience of those around me.  I can cut myself some slack if the people around me can cut me some slack, usually.  But for them to do that, they have to have the confidence in me that I’m on the right course, that my decisions are wise ones.  It’s a matter of trust and experience.  On top of that, people vary widely in their ability to trust in any other person, much less me.  Sometimes it just doesn’t matter what I do or say or am.

And I have no control over that.

All I can do is what I can do, when I can do it.

Remember that Jesus stops on his way to the bedside of Jairus’ daughter to heal the woman with the issue of blood.  ”Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”  And during this stop to speak with and heal the woman, the little girl that he was going to minister to dies.  Was Jesus willing to let her die on purpose?  Was he distracted by the woman on the way?  Was this on purpose to demonstrate his power?

I don’t know.  But I do know that we are human beings and we can only do so much.  We aren’t Jesus.  We can’t arrive late to the scene and raise the dead from their death beds.  (I know. I know… Faith… Mustard seeds… All that jazz, but you know what I mean.)  And that means that we shouldn’t expect others to do that.  Obviously, we know our own capabilities, but somehow that doesn’t translate to the people around us.  We expect them to do and be and know everything.

We forget that even Jesus arrived late and that the little girl died.

And he’s the Son of God…

Have a little faith in the people around you.  Trust.  Cut them some slack.

Maybe it’ll be contagious…