Good News!

 

As many of you know, I had been struggling with my career as a poet for the last few years. For over 30 years, I worked hard, writing and publishing poems. Over those years, I published 13 books of poems and a collection of short stories. I have also served as an Associate Poet Laureate for the state of North Dakota and currently serve as Poet in Residence at Concordia College. I have won awards and been honored for my poetry. 

            However, following the death of my mother, my career seemed to stall. Suddenly, I found myself struggled to write. In the long, dark days of grief following her death, I somehow managed to chisel out a collection of poems in which I chronicled my grief. However, every publisher to whom I sent the book responded with silence. Not rejection. Just an echoing silence. I did not know how to respond to this silent rejection. I thought maybe I had lost my poetic voice and that whatever talent I had had simply dried up on the vine.

            Earlier this year, I finally decided to give up; o give up not only on the book which was met with silence, but also to give up on my career as a poet. I felt depleted and useless as a poet. And, I can say in all honesty, I mourned that realization. I mourned my career which had meant so much to me and was so much a part of who I was. In fact, as I went on vacation to Florida this year, I carried with me a somewhat heavy heart over this stark reality.

            As any of us who are Christians know full well, out of despair and frustration and brokenness and uselessness, God always finds a way for rebirth and renewal.

            I was back from vacation for a week when I received an email from the last publisher to whom I sent my manuscript with the subject line: “Acceptance Letter and Contract for “Salt” and an opening line which read:

 

Dear Jamie, Thank you for your excellent poetry submission: Salt. We would love to publish your book!

 

            Suddenly, I felt renewed. I felt as though the barren desert of my career had suddenly bloomed. More importantly, I felt a sense of wholeness that I had felt lacking for several years.

            This is what our journey is like when we follow Jesus. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by darkness and despair and the brokenness of our lives. But somehow the God of Jesus breathes a resurrected life in us and into the broken landscape in which we all sometimes find ourselves.

            Even now, in the midst of Lent, we are able to see glimpses of resurrection and renewed life. As we do so, I invite you all to the observation of a holy and meaningful Lent. I also invite to keep yourselves open to those beautiful, life-affirming moments in which God breaks through into the sometimes overwhelming cloud-filled moments.

 

I Lent

 

February 26, 2023

Gen. 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11

 

+ One of my Lenten disciplines this year is to re-read the theologian who has probably influenced me more than any other.

 

Any of you who know me well have heard me talk about him  ad nauseum.

 

He is the great Scottish theologian and poet George MacDonald.

 

I first read MacDonald when I was in my mid-20s.

 

I happened to pick up a book about him at a Christian bookstore.

 

I was intrigued by the claim on the cover of the book that MacDonald was THE major influence in the life of C.S. Lewis.

 

So, I picked up the book, and I devoured it.

 

I then devoured almost everything MacDonald wrote.

 

MacDonald was really one of the first Christian theologians that I read who was unapolgetically a Christian universalist.

 

Meaning, of course, that he did not believe that anyone would suffer in hell for all eternity, that all would, in the end, be saved.

 

He actually was influenced in this belief by the great Anglican theologian F.D. Maurice (whose work I would later also devour).

 

Universalism is still such a controversial belief in the Church.

 

But in MacDonald’s day, and throughout history, Broad Church and Hugh Church Anglicans, as well as Anglo-Catholic Socialists and others embraced and expounded these beliefs.

 

None were quite as appealing as MacDonald.

 

MacDonald’s Universalism came from a reclaiming of the belief that God was truly our loving Parent.

 

And from that idea sprang all of MacDonald’s theology, including his Universalism.

 

God is our loving Parent.

 

And a loving Parent would never send a loved child off to a metaphysical hell for all eternity.

 

However, according to MacDonald, that does not mean that disobedient children, children who do bad things, get off scot-free.

 

There are consequences to our actions.

 

And worse yet, even good children sometimes have to suffer the effects of a comic evil that simply exists.

 

Bad things happen, MacDonald believed.

 

And we sometimes simply get caught in the path of bad things.

 

For us, those bad things are sometimes nameless things.

 

Things that we can’t really define.

 

Things that don’t seem to have names.

 

You know what I’m talking about.

 

When we’re dealing with emotions, when we’re dealing with heavy things in our lives, we don’t worry about labels and names of things.

 

But sometimes, when something is given a name, we find it’s easier to confront and deal with.

 

It’s easier to deal with depression, when we know it’s known as depression.

 

It’s easier to deal with anxiety, when we know it is known as anxiety.

 

It’s so much easier to fight our demons when we know the names of our demons.

 

But there are those things in life that don’t seem to have names.

 

An example is: the fact that we are growing old.

 

There are limitations that go along with growing older.

 

We find ourselves not being able to do things we did when we were younger.

 

There is nothing we can do about it.

 

It’s just a fact of life.

 

Or the fact that sometimes we get sick and it has nothing do to with anything we have done.

 

We can get treatment for our illness.

 

We can follow that treatment.

 

But we can’t rush the healing process.

 

It happens on its own.

 

So, for the moment, we simply must be sick.

 

Or, in the case of losing a loved one.

 

There’s no getting around this loss.

 

We can’t hide from this loss.

 

We can’t pretend we haven’t experienced this loss.

 

It’s just a reality in our lives.

 

And we must simply live with it—with all its pain, with all of its heartache, with all its frustrations.

 

In all of these things, we know they’re realities.

 

But we don’t have a name for all of these things.

 

But…there actually is.

 

One of my personal heroes (secondary to George MacDonald), someone I mention on a very regular basis, is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

 

Teilhard was a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest.

 

He was also a paleontologist.

 

In fact, he found the Peking Man, an important link in the Evolution of Humanity.

 

He was also a great philosopher.

 

And he coined a term to describe these unavoidable, somewhat unpleasant facts of our lives.

 

He called them “passive diminishments.”

 

According to Teilhard, these passive diminishments were simply the acceptance of suffering that we cannot change.

 

Robert Ellsberg describes Teilhard’s passive diminishments in this way:

 

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements, and our conscious choices.

So, in essence, is it accepting ill fortunes, whether disease, old age or accident, as part of our journey to holiness.

 

The great novelist Flannery O’Connor, who also was devoted to Teilhard and who suffered throughout most of her adult life with lupus, described passive diminishments as “those afflictions you can’t get rid of and have to bear.”

 

As we enter this Season of Lent, I think it’s a good thing to understand our passive diminishments and how we deal with them.

 

Do we accept these unavoidable moments of suffering in our lives?

 

Or do we fight them?

 

Or worse, do we try to avoid them?

 

The fact is passive diminishments are the boundaries of our lives.

 

They keep us within this human condition in which we live.

 

And I think acknowledging these diminishments in our lives draws us closer with Jesus.

 

 After all, no one knew more about passive diminishments than Jesus.

 

He too knew these limits in his very Body.

 

Being limited is just a reality for us.

 

But… it is not a time to despair.

 

Our limitations, especially when we place them alongside the limitations of  Christ endured, has more meaning than we can fully fathom at times.

 

Jesus shows us that in our limitations, we realize we can no longer feel separated from God, our truly loving Parent, by those limitations, those diminishments in our lives.

 

It is a moment in which we are, in fact, uniquely and wonderfully joined TO God in our shared limited existence.

 

And what we glimpse today in our scripture readings is, on one hand diminishment, and on the other hand, wholeness.

 

In our readings from the Hebrew Bible and from the Gospel, we get two stories with one common character.

 

In our reading from Genesis, we find Satan in the form of a serpent, tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden.

 

In our Gospel, we have Satan yet again doing what he does best—tempting.

 

But this time he is tempting Jesus.

 

What we have here is essentially the same story, retold.

 

We have the tempter.

 

We have the tempted.

 

We have the temptations.

 

But we have two very different results.

 

In fact, we have exactly opposite results.

 

But ultimately these stories tell us this:

 

No matter how diminished we are, no matter how much we are at the whim of our passive diminishments in this life, somehow God renews us in the end.

 

When it comes to God, what seems like a failure—the fall of Adam and Eve—eventually becomes the greatest success of all—the refusal of God’s chosen One, Jesus, to be tempted.

 

And whatever is broken, is somehow always fixed and restored.

 

Still, we must deal with this issue of temptation.

 

It is the hinge event in both of the stories we hear this morning from scripture.

 

Alexander Schmemann, the great Eastern Orthodox theologian, once said that there are two roots to all sin—pride and the flesh.

 

If we look at what Satan offers both Adam and Jesus in today’s readings, we see that all the temptations can find their root mostly in the sin of pride.

 

Adam and Eve, as they partake of the fruit, have forgotten about God and have placed themselves first.

 

The eating of that fruit is all about them.

 

They have placed themselves before God in their own existence.

 

And that’s what pride really is.

 

It is the putting of ourselves before God.

 

It is the misguided belief that everything is all about us.

 

The world revolves around us.

 

The universe exists to serve us.

 

And the only humility we have is a false one.

 

When one allows one’s self to think along those lines, the fall that comes after it is a painful one.

 

When Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, they are ashamed because they realize they are naked.

 

They realize they have nothing.

 

They realize that, by themselves and of themselves, they are nothing.

 

This realization is that it is not all about them, after all.

 

They have failed themselves and they have failed God in their pride.

 

But the amazing thing, if you notice, is that Adam and Eve still have not really learned their lesson.

 

They leave the Garden in shame, but there is still a certain level of pride there.

 

As they go, we don’t hear them wailing before God.

 

We don’t see them turning to God in sorrow for what they have done.

 

We don’t see them presenting themselves before God, broken and humbled, by what they have done.

 

They never ask God for forgiveness. Instead, they leave in shame, but they leave to continue on in their pride.

 

From this story, we see that Satan knows perfectly how to appeal to humans.

 

The doorway for Satan to enter into one’s life is through pride.

 

Of course, in scripture, we find that Satan’s downfall came through pride as well. Lucifer wanted to be like God.

 

And when he knew he couldn’t, he rebelled and fell.

 

We see him trying to use pride again in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

 

When Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness, he tries to appeal to Jesus’ pride.

 

He knows that Jesus knows he is exactly who is.

 

Satan knows that Jesus truly does have the power to reign and rule, that he has all the power in the world.

 

And Satan further knows that if he could harness that power for himself—for evil—then he will have that power as well.

 

Because Jesus was fully human, Satan knew that he could appeal to the pride all humans carry with them.

 

But Jesus, because he, in addition to being fully human, was also divine as well, refused to succumb to the sin of pride.

 

In fact, because Jesus, this divine Son of God, came to us, the ultimate sign of humility came among us.

 

So, these two stories speak in many ways to us, who are struggling in our own lives.

 

As we hear these stories, we no doubt find ourselves relating fully to Adam and Eve.

 

After all, like Adam and Eve, we find ourselves constantly tempted and constantly failing as they did.

 

And also like them, we find that when we fail, when we fall, we oftentimes don’t turn again to God, asking God’s forgiveness in our lives.

 

We almost never are able to be, like Jesus, able to resist the temptations of pride and sin, especially when we are in a vulnerable state.

 

Jesus, after forty days of fasting, was certainly in a vulnerable place to be tempted.

 

 As we all enter the forty days of fasting in this season of Lent, we too need to be on guard.

 

We too need to keep our eyes on God—who, in addition to being our God, is also our companion in this earthly adventure we are having.

 

Whatever failings Adam had were made right with Jesus. And, in the same way, whatever failings we make are ultimately made right in Jesus as well. Jesus has come among us to show us the right pathway. Jesus has come to us to lead us through our failings and our brokenness to a place in which we will succeed, in which we will be whole.

 

Jesus reminds us that, fail as we do, we are loved by God.

 

Always.

 

So, let us follow Jesus in the path of our lives, allowing him to lead us back to the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve were forced to abandoned.

 

Because it is only when we have abandoned pride in our lives—when we have shed concern for ourselves, when we have denied ourselves and disciplined ourselves to the point in which we realize it is not all about us at all—only then will we discover that the temptations that come to us will have no effect on us.

 

Humility, which we should be cultivating and practicing during this season of Lent, should be what we are cultivating and practicing all the time in our lives.

 

Humility is the best safeguard against temptation.

 

Humility is the remedy to help us back on the road to piecing ourselves back together from our shattered brokenness.

 

So, as we move through the wasteland of Lent and throughout the rest of our lives, let us be firm and faithful in keeping the God of Jesus as the goal of our life.

 

Let us not let those temptations of pride rule in our life.

 

In these days of Lent, let us practice personal humility and spiritual fasting.

 

Let Jesus set the standard in our lives on our path toward God.

 

And let God raise us up from the places we have fallen in our journey.

 

And let us let God piece our brokenness back into a glorious wholeness.

 

Let us pray.

 

Holy God, loving Parent, you know our limitations. You know we are fallible human beings, bound by our passive diminishments; give us strength to meet what we cannot avoid and let the Light of your presence guild us through the difficulties of this life; we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

 

 

 

Ash Wednesday

 

February 22, 2023

 Joel  2.1-2,12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6.1-6,16-21

 

 + Occasionally, people like to critique my sermons.

 I usually don’t mind.

 Though I also warn people who do so that they will be invited to give the sermon the next Sunday.

 And to be prepared for a critique in return.

 But one critique I received was one several years.

 I had a parishioner tell me that they were not appreciative of me preaching to them about sin during Lent.

 I responded to this person the only way I knew how to.

 I said, “I preach about sin during Lent because  I am a sinner too, right?”

 And that’s the truth.

 But the fact is, we all are sinners.

 Sin—falling short of what we are meant of what God created us to be—is something we all deal with.

 It is a common experience in our lives.

 And for, me, that’s what Ash Wednesday is all about.

 This is our time to admit God and to one another,

 “I am a sinner too.”

 We’re all in this boat together.

 It might be different for you as opposed to someone else who is here tonight.

 But each of our dealing with our own sins, in our own ways.

 That doesn’t mean we say that so we can then whip ourselves, or bash ourselves or be self-deprecating.

 We say it as a simple acknowledgment of our humanity before God, our imperfection.

 That is exactly what we do tonight and for these next 40 days.

 During Lent, we will be hearing about sin.

 We will be hearing about repentance.

 We will be reminded of the fact that, yes, we have fallen short in our lives.

 And tonight especially, we will be reminded that one day, each of here tonight will one day stop breathing and die.

 We are reminded tonight in very harsh terms that we are, ultimately, dust.

 And that we will, one day, return to dust.

 Yup.

 Unpleasant.

 But…

 …sometimes we need to be reminded of these things.

 Because, let’s face it.

 We spend most of our lives avoiding these things.

 We spend a good portion of our lives avoiding hearing these things.

 We go about for the most part with our fingers in our ears.

 We go about pretending we are going to live forever.

 We go about thinking we’re not really like everyone else.

 We think: I’m just a little bit more special than everyone else.

 Maybe…maybe…I’m the exception.

 Of course we do that.

 Because, for each of us, the mighty ME is the center of our universe.

 We as individuals are the center of our own personal universe.

 So, when we are confronted during Lent with the fact that, ultimately, the mighty ME is not the center of the universe, is not even the center of the universe of maybe the person who is closest to me, it can be sobering.

 And there we go.

 Lent is about sobering up.

 It is about being sober.

 About looking long and hard at the might ME and being realistic about ME.

 And my relationship with the God who is, actually, the center of the universe and creation and everything that is.

 It’s hard, I know, to come to that realization.

 It’s hard to hear these things.

 It’s hard to have hear the words we hear tonight as those ashes are placed on our foreheads,

 “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

 You are dust.

 I am dust.

 We are dust.

 We are ashes.

 And we are going to return to dust.

 Yes.

 It’s hard.

 But…

 Lent is also about moving forward.

 It is about living our lives fully and completely within the limitations of the fact that are dust.

 Our lives are like jazz to some extent.

 For people who do not know jazz, they think it is just free-form music.

 There are no limits to it.

 But that’s not true.

 There is a framework for jazz.

 Very clearly defined boundaries.

 But, within that framework there is freedom.

 Our lives are like that as well.

 Our mortality is the framework of our lives.

 We have boundaries.

 We have limits.

 And I am going to talk about those limits during this season of Lent.

 I am going to be talking throughout these forty days about a term one of my heroes coined. 

That hero, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit priest and paleontologist, talked about something like passive diminishments.

 Passive diminishments, according to Chardin, are simply those sufferings in this life that we cannot avoid.

 They are the limits in our lives—the hard boundaries of our existence that we cannot avoid.

 I’m not going to go into them too deeply tonight.

 But I will during the Sundays of this season.

 Tonight, though I will say this:

 Within those limits, within the boundaries of those passive diminishments, we have lots of freedom.

 And we have the potential to do a lot of good and a lot of bad.

 Lent is the time for us to stop doing the bad and start doing the good.

 It is time for us to store up for ourselves treasure in heaven, as we hear Jesus tell us tonight in our Gospel reading.

 It is time for work on improving ourselves.

 And sometimes, to do that, we need to shed some things.

 It is good to give up things for Lent.

 The reality however is this:

 Yes, we can give up sugar or caffeine or meat or tangible things that might not do us good.

 But let me just say this about that.

 If we give up something for Lent, let it be something that changes us for the better.

 Let it be things that improve us.

 Let us not only give up things in ourselves, but also things around us.

 Yes, we can give up nagging, but maybe we should also give up those voices around us that nag.

 Or maybe confront those voices that nag too much at us.

 Yes, we can give up being controlling and trying to change things we can’t.

 But we maybe also try hard to push back and speak out against those unreasonably controlling forces in our own lives.

 Maybe Lent should be a time to give up not only anger in ourselves, but those angry voices around us.

 Lent is a time to look at the big picture of our lives and ask: what is my legacy?

 How am I going to be remembered?

 Are people going to say of our legacies what we heard this evening from the prophet Joel?

 “Do not make your heritage a mockery…”

 Am I going to be known as the nag? As that angry, bitter person?

 Am I going to be known as a controlling, manipulative person who always had to get my way?

 Am I going to be known as a gossip, as a backbiter, as a person who professed my faith in a loving and accepting God on my lips, but certainly did not live it out in my life?

 If so, then there is no better time than Lent to change our legacy.

 That is our rallying cry during Lent as well.

 Let us choose to be a good, compassionate, humble, love-filled follower of Jesus.

 That is the legacy we should choose during this season, and from now on.

 After all, we ARE ashes.

 We are dust.

 We are temporary.

 We are not immortal.

 We are bound by our passive diminishments.

 But our legacies will outlive us.

 In fact, in many ways, they are, outside of our salvation, ultimately, the most important thing about our future.

 Let us live in to the legacy that will outlive us.

 This is probably the best Lenten discipline we can do.

 Most importantly, let this holy season of Lent be a time of reflection and self-assessment.

Let it be a time of growth—both in our self-awareness and in our awareness of God’s presence in the goodness in our life.

As St. Paul says in our reading from this evening: “Now is the acceptable time.”

“Now is the day of salvation.”

It is the acceptable time.

It is the day of salvation.

It is time for us to take full advantage of it.