2 Lent

 

February 25, 2024

 

Mark 8.31-38

 

+ Every week, without fail, I stand here and talk about “following Jesus.”

 

After all, it’s the basis of everything I believe as a Christian.

 

For me, as you hear me say again and again, being a Christian equals “following Jesus” or being a “disciple of Jesus”

 

And I believe that with all my heart.

 

But…but…what I don’t share with you is how difficult it is for me to say that.

 

Because, in fact, it is not easy for me to “follow.”

 

You know me.

 

I’m not that guy.

 

I don’t like taking orders.

 

I don’t do what people want me to do.

 

You all figured that out a long time ago.

 

And I don’t like following anyone.

 

I’m not used to following.

 

I find it difficult to follow.

 

Following, for me anyway, means having to humble myself, having to slow down. To breath, and to let someone else lead the way.

 

And I don’t really enjoy that.

 

I’ll be honest: I kind of like doing my own thing.

 

It’s like being so used to driving all the time and then finally having to allow someone else to drive you.

 

You find yourself sitting in the passenger seat being critical of the speed of their driving, how they come up a little too quickly to a stop sign, how they don’t make the turn signal at the right time.

 

When I let someone else drive, I often find myself pumping that invisible break on the passenger side sometimes.

 

For me, that is often the way I feel about following Jesus.

 

I often, when following Jesus and trying to live out his teaching, find myself pumping the invisible break on the passenger side.

 

I’m often asking Jesus, “do you know where we’re going? Because it seems like we’re just circling the block.”

 

I often find myself thinking, well, I wouldn’t do it this way.

 

There are plenty of examples in the Gospels.

 

Turning the other cheek?

 

I wouldn’t normally be all right with that.

 

Loving my neighbor as myself?

 

If I had the choice not to, I’m not sure I would.

 

Not that one neighbor, any way.

 

But this is what it means to follow.

 

It means that, pump that invisible break as much as we want, it is not up to us.

 

We are the followers.

 

We are the ones who must bring up the rear.

 

And doing so is humbling and difficult and hard at times.

 

It means we’re not in control.

 

And here at St. Stephen’s, where many of us (not just me) have major control issues, that’s hard for a good many of us.

 

In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus explaining to us in very blunt words what it means to be a disciple.

 

For him, being a disciple, means being a follower.

 

A follower of him.

 

And, as we know, because we’re not the ones in control when it comes to following Jesus, being a Christian—being a follower of Jesus—means that we are sometimes being led into some unhappy circumstances.

 

Being a follower of Jesus doesn’t mean closing ourselves up intellectually.

 

It doesn’t mean we get to stop thinking for ourselves

 

Trust me.

 

I know too many of these kind of Christians.

 

These are the people who think being a Christian means not having to think anymore.

 

Just believing that all will be well and there aren’t any problems.

 

I think we all, at times, find ourselves lulled into a false sense of what it means to be a follower.

 

We think that being a follower of Jesus means that everything is going to be happy-go-lucky and wonderful all the time.

 

We think that  following means not really having to think about bad or difficult things anymore.

 

It’s easy, after all, to be a lemming.

 

But that isn’t the kind of following Jesus wants us to do.

 

The kind of follower Jesus wants us to be is not easy.

 

For many Christians, they don’t even want to follow Jesus.

 

They want to worship Jesus.

 

They want to put Jesus up on an inaccessible altar and worship him.

 

Because. . .well. . . as you hear me say on a regular basis, it’s easy to worship Jesus.

 

It’s safe to worship Jesus.

 

Worshipping Jesus but not following Jesus feels like Christianity.

 

Worshipping Jesus makes one feel like a Christian, without actually having to do anything as a Christian outside of our own safe little insular world. world.

 

Christianity is great when you strive to be pious and holy—or at least look like you’re pious and holy.

 

But actually following Jesus doesn’t have much to do with being either pious or holy.

 

And it sure isn’t safe.

 

It’s messy. It’s dirty. And it’s hard.

 

It means doing things we might not really want to do because they make us uncomfortable.

 

It means going places we really don’t really want to go.

 

And it means thinking in a way that oftentimes seems counter to what we have been taught being a “good” Christian is and should be.

 

It means not just worshiping Jesus as some inaccessible ideal, but actually trying to BE like Jesus in this world.

 

And let’s face it, do we REALLY want to BE like Jesus?

 

It’s hard to have someone else’s standards essentially be my standards.

 

It can be depressing.

 

Now that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be joyful in our following of Jesus.

 

Yes, we should be filled with a deep and sincere joy.

 

But, as the old song goes, no one promised us a rose garden. Nowhere in scripture have we been promised that life is going to be rosy and sweet all the time.

 

Being a follower is not always so much fun.

 

Being a Christian means not always strolling around in comfort and joy all the time.

 

As we are reminded in this season of Lent and especially in that week preceding Easter, being a Christian means following Jesus wherever he goes.

 

And where he goes is not to the rose garden.

 

It is to the garden of Gethsemane—to that place where he too would be feeling anguish, where he too would sweat blood, where he too would cry out in anguish to God.

 

Following Jesus means essentially being like him.

 

And being like him, means having the same relationships he had.

 

And when we look at the relationships he had, we realize they were not normal relationships.

 

His relationship with God was intense.

 

For Jesus, God was a parent.

 

God was “Father,”  “Abba!”

 

But the relationship was even more than that.

 

It was also almost like lovers.

 

Jesus loved God.

 

God loved Jesus.

 

And that, too, is what our relationship with God should be like, as followers of Jesus.

 

We should love God.

 

Our relationship with God should be intense as well.

 

It should intimate.

 

It should be so intense and intimate that other people will say, “That’s really weird!”

 

My goal in my relationship with God is that people will say, “”That’s weird, that relationship Fr. Jamie and God have with each other.”

 

I used to joke about getting t-shirts made for people saying, JESUS IS MY BOYFRIEND.

 

But there is some truth to that.

 

We should have a deeply intimate relationship with Jesus, in which such a t-shirt is funny and weird, but kinda true too.

 

But it should be that intense, because God loves us.

 

Deeply and intensely.

 

But it doesn’t end there.

 

There is also the relationship Jesus had, because of his intense and deep love of God, with others.

 

Jesus loved others.

 

Intensely.

 

Deeply.

 

He cared for them.

 

Jesus loves us.

 

Intensely.

 

Deeply.

 

And because he did, so should we.

 

Because Jesus loves us, we should love others.

 

In everything we do as followers of Jesus, we should let love always be our driving force.

 

It is that love that makes us feel the anguish he feels.

 

It is that love that makes us suffer with him.

 

It is that love that makes us bleed with him.

 

Following Jesus means not just following him through the moments of teaching ministry, not just through the miracles he performed.

 

It means following him through the dark days of his last week, through the blood and excruciating moments of his dying.

 

It means that, like him, our love for him causes us take up our crosses and follow him wherever he might go.

 

It means paying the anguished price for love!

 

Jesus knew, as we find in our Gospel reading for today, that there were certain things he had to do.

 

He had to “undergo great suffering,” He had to be killed.

 

He understood that fully.

 

He in turn tells us that we too must realize that we will have to bear our share of suffering in this life.

 

We too will have to take up our own crosses.

 

The cross is the reminder to us that following Jesus doesn’t just mean following him through the rose gardens of our lives.

 

It means, following him all the way to that cross.

 

It means taking up our own crosses and staggering with him along that path.

 

It means sweating blood with him in the garden of Gethsemane.

 

It means crying out with him in anguish.

 

It means feeling with him the humiliation and loneliness of being betrayed—yes, even by one’s own friends and followers, by people we love.

 

But, it also means following him to the very end.

 

Just as the cross is a symbol of death and torture and pain—it is, for us Christians, also the symbol of the temporal nature of those things.

 

The cross is the doorway to the glory that awaits us beyond the cross.

 

The cross is the way we must travel, it is what we must carry, it is what we must be marked with, if we wish to share in the glory that awaits us beyond the cross.

 

I said earlier that no one promised us a rose garden in scripture.

 

I should revise that.

 

While we might not have been promised a rose garden, we have been offered glory.

 

Glory comes to us, when we follow Jesus.

 

It comes to us when we let our love for God lead us through the dark and frightening places this world can throw at us.

 

If we let that love guide us, if we let ourselves be led by Jesus, we will find true and unending glory awaiting us.

 

So, as we encounter the crosses of our lives—and we will—as we allow our love for God to lead us into places we might not want to go, let us do so with the realization that glory has been offered to us.

 

One day, what seems to us a symbol of pain and loss and failure, will be transformed.

 

It will be transformed into a crown upon our heads.

 

And, on that day, there all our pains, all of our sorrows will, once and for all, be replaced with joy. Amen.

 

 

1 Lent

 

February 18, 2024

 

Genesis 9.8-17; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15

 

+  This coming Wednesday at our Wednesday evening Lente Mass, I will be celebrating an auspicious milestone in my priestly life.

 

I will be celebrating my 2,000 Mass!

 

Now I know that probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to anyone other than me.

 

But for me that’s a pretty big deal.

 

That’s a lot of masses in my 20 years a priest!

 

I love celebrating milestones like this because they are markers for our lives.

 

They are ways for us to put our lives in perspective.

 

They are ways for us to say: this is how far we’ve come.

 

Which of course is what this season of Lent is all about as well.

 

It is a time for us to pause.

 

To look around.

 

To say, for one moment, here we are.

 

We have come this far.

 

And we still have something in the future toward which to work.

 

Most people enter Lent thinking, “it’s going to be doom and gloom and sadness” all morning at church.

 

But, guess what?

 

No.

 

Lent isn’t all doom and gloom.

Certainly, if we were expecting doom and gloom and sadness in our scripture readings for this morning, well, we don’t get any of that.

 

Ah, no. Instead, we get… water?

 

We get Noah and the ark?

 

We get a rainbow.

 

(Oh, and also the Devil. And temptations. And the desert. But it’s Lent--what did you expect?)

 

Now, this is my way to begin Lent!

 

In our Gospel reading, we get, in a very brief scripture, an upheaval.

 

What?

 

You missed the upheaval in our Gospel reading?

 

You missed the reversal?

 

You missed, in that deceptively simple piece of scripture, a mirror image of something?

 

It’s easy to miss, after all.

 

Our Gospel reading is so simple, so sparse.

 

But then again, so is haiku.

 

 But let’s look a little closer at what we’ve just heard and read.

 

In today’s Gospel, we find three elements that remind us of something else.

 

We find the devil.

 

We find animals.

 

And we find angels.

 

Where else in scripture do we find these same elements?

 

Well, we find them all in the Creation story in Genesis, of course.

 

The story of Adam is a story of what? --the devil, of animals and of angels.

 

But that story ends with the devil’s triumph and Adam’s defeat.

 

In today’s Gospel, all of that has all been made strangely right.

 

Jesus—the new Adam—has turned the tables using those exact same elements.

 

We find Jesus not in a lush beautiful Oz-like place like Eden.

 

Rather we find Jesus with wild animals in that desert—animals who were created by God and named by Adam, according to the story.

 

We find him there waited on by the angels—and let’s not forget that these same angels turned Adam and Eve away from Eden.

 

And there, in that place, he defeats the devil—the same devil who defeated Adam.

 

I have found this juxtaposition between Adam and Jesus to be a rich source of personal meditation, because it really is very meaningful to us who follow Jesus.

 

In this story of Jesus we find, yet again, that it is never the devil who wins.

 

It always, always God who wins in the end.

 

God always wins.

 

That is what the story of Jesus is always about—God always winning in the end.

 

Jesus tells us again and again that God will always win.

 

If we lived with the story of Adam, if we lived in the shadow of his defeat, the story is a somewhat bleak one.

 

There doesn’t seem to be much hope.

 

The relationship ruined with Adam hasn’t been made right.

 

But today we find that the relationship has been righted.

 

The story isn’t a story of defeat after all.

 

It isn’t a time to despair, but to rejoice.

 

The “devil” has been defeated.

 

And this is very important.

 

Now, by the Devil, I am not necessarily talking about a supernatural being who rules the underworld.

 

I’m not talking about horns, forked tail and a pitchfork.

 

I’m not talking about Hot Stuff the Devil. Remember him? (I was once, back in my twenties, going to get a tattoo of Hot Stuff after someone jokingly said that Casper the Friendly Ghost would not look so good on my very white skin).  

 

By Devil I mean the personification of all that we hold evil.

 

This time of Lent—this time for us in the desert, this time of fasting and mortification—is a time for us to confront the demons in our lives.

 

We all have them.

 

In our wonderful collect for today, we prayed to God to “come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations.”

 

The poet that I am, I love the traditional language of Rite I better here.

 

“Make speed to help thy servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations.”

 

We all understand that term “manifold temptations.”

 

We all have those triggers in our lives that disrupt and cause upheaval.

 

Sometimes this upheaval is mental and emotional, sometimes it is actual.

 

We have our own demons, no matter what name we might call them.

 

I certainly have my own demons in my life and sometimes I am shocked by the way they come upon me.

 

I am amazed by how they lay me low and turn my life upside down.

 

They represent for me everything dark and evil and wrong in my life and in the world around me.

 

They are sometimes memories of wrongs done to me, or wrongs I’ve done to others.

 

 Sometimes they are the shortcomings of my own life—of being painfully reminded of the fact that I have failed and failed miserably at times in my life.

 

They are reminders to me that this world is still a world of darkness at times—a world in which people and nature can hurt and harm and destroy.

 

And that power and influence of evil over my life is, I admit, somewhat strong.

 

Trying to break the power of our demons sometimes involves going off into the deserts of our lives, breaking ourselves bodily and spiritually and, armed with those spiritual tools we need, confronting and defeating those powers that make us less than who we are.

 

For me, I do find consolation when I am confronted by the demons of my life.

 

I am reminded that there is no reason to despair when these demons come into our lives, because the demons, essentially, are illusions.

 

I came across a cartoon recently that I had as its caption:

 

HELL IS EMPTY!

 

ALL THE DEMONS ARE IN YOUR HEAD!

 

It’s true.

 

The demons are essentially ghosts.

 

They are wispy fragments of my memory.

 

They have no real power over me despite what they make think sometimes.

 

Because the demons have been defeated by God.

 

Again, returning to our collect for today, we prayed, “as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save.”

 

God has been “mighty to save” us.

 

The demons of our lives have been defeated by our God.

 

So, as we wander about in the spiritual desert of Lent, let us truly be driven, as Jesus was.

 

Let the Spirit drive us into that place—to that place wherein we confront the demons of our lives.

 

But let us do so unafraid.

 

The Spirit is the driving force and, knowing that, we are strengthened.

 

Let us be driven into that place.

 

Let us confront our demons.

 

Let us confront the very devil itself.

 

Let us face the manifold temptations of our lives unafraid, knowing full well that God is “mighty to save.”

 

After all, Easter is coming.

 

Lent is not eternal.

 

Easter is eternal.

 

This time is only a temporary time of preparation.

 

So, let us wander through this season confident that it is simply something we must endure so that we can, very soon, delight in the eternal glories of a morning light that is about to dawn into our lives.

 

“The time is fulfilled,” we can say with all confidence.

 

“The Reign of God has come near.”

 

It is time to repent.

 

It is time to turn around.

 

It is time to believe this incredibly good news!

 

Let us pray.

 

Holy God, bless us. Bless us as we walk this way of self-denial during these days of Lent. Help us to look ahead—toward the Cross, yes, but beyond the cross, to the Light, to your Light, the Light that was revealed in the days following Jesus’ encounter with the Cross. Help us to keep our eyes on your Light and, in our following of Jesus, to remember that we are following him not to the death of the Cross but to the eternal life of the Resurrection. It is in his name, that we pray. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ash Wednesday

 

February 14, 2024

 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6.1-6,16-21

 + One of my favorite things to do in preparation for Ash Wednesday si preparing the ashes we use for this liturgy.

 Last night, we had our Shrove Tuesday panske suuper.

 At the end of it, we “buried” the Alleluia, and then we all processed outside to the front of the church, where we burned last years palms.

 This morning I came in and took the ashes of those palms and shifted them with a sifter and made the fine ash we will be using tonight to mark ourselves.

 I love doing things like that.

 It’s very meditative.

 And doing so makes me very mindful of the fact that these ashes we use are important to what this season of Lent is all about.

 In fact, preparing these ashes reminded me of a meme that was going around a few years ago.

 The caption read I JUST TRIED THAT NEW APP THAT SHOWED WHAT I

WILL LOOK LIKE IN 40 YEARS

 And the photo was of a pile of ashes.

 It’s kind funny.

 And it’s kinda sobering.

 Because, it’s real.

 It is the perfect meme for Ash Wednesday.

 Because Ash Wednesday—and these ashes we are using tonight—are also ways in which we too face the harsh reality of our lives.

 They are reminders that we, one day, will die.

 That yes, in 40 years the bodies of most of us who are here this evening will, in fact, be ashes.

 Now hopefully that doesn’t shock you too much.

 I hate to be the one to tell you that News, just in case you hadn’t realized that before.

 We are all, one day, going to die.

 The traditional phrase for a reminder of our death is Momento Mori.

 Back “in the day”—we’re talking the medieval and renaissance day—it was common for people to keep some kind of momenti mori around—a reminder of death.

 Often, that was a human skull- a real human skull.

 Of course, when you think of it, what makes a better reminder of death than a skull?

 In those days, one was encouraged to look at the skull as one would look into a mirror, realizing that what one was looking at was really themselves.

 Well, tonight, we have our own momento mori.

 These ashes that we are about to receive are, truly our momento mori—our reminder that we are al going to die one day.

 To some extent, as morbid as it might seem, I think it wouldn’t hurt us to think about and ponder such things in our own lives.

 In our lives, we do go about oblivious to death.

 We go around as though we are invincible, that we are eternal, that this moment in which we are living will last forever.

 As much as we might wish for that and hope for that, the fact is, it is simply not the case.

 We don’t realize that we are bones and ash essentially.

 In this service this evening, we are reminded in no uncertain terms that one day each every person in this church this evening will stop breathing and will die.

It’s sobering, but it’s what we are reminded of this evening and throughout this season of Lent.

We will stop breathing.

We will die.

Our bodies will be made into something that will be disposed of—either by burying in the ground, or by being cremated.

This coming June, I will be celebrating the 20^th anniversary of my ordination to the Priesthood.

In these last 20 years of my life as a priest, I have presided over many, many funerals, with embalmed bodies and cremated bodies.

And, let me tell you, doing so certainly puts into perspective the fact that we are all physically disposable.

With cremation so prevalent these days, out momemto mori is not so much a human skull anymore.

Our momento mori is nowadays ashes.

That essentially is what Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are all about.

It is a time for us to stop, to ponder, to take a look around us and to take a long, hard, serious look at ourselves and our relationship with God.

It isn’t easy to do.

It isn’t easy to look at where we’ve failed in our lives and in our relationship with others.

It isn’t easy to look at ourselves as disposable physical beings that can so easily be burned to ashes or buried.

It isn’t easy to imagine there will be a day—possibly sooner than later—when life as we know it right now will end.

It isn’t easy to shake ourselves from our complacent lives.

Because we like complacency.

We like predictability.

We like our comfortable existence.

However, we need to be careful when we head down this path.

As we consider and ponder these things, we should not allow ourselves to become depressed or hopeless.

We’re Christians, after all!

Yes, our mortality is frightening.

Yes, it is sobering and depressing to think that this life we find so normal and comfortable will one day end.  

But this season is Lent is also a time of preparation.

It is a preparation for the glory of Easter.

It is a preparation for Easter and the life after death.

It would be depressing and bleak if ashes and the skull were the end of our story.

It would be sad and sorrowful if all we are reminded of when we ponder these ashes is the finality of this life.

It would be horrible if we were not able to see the momento moris of our lives as gateways to something larger and more wonderful.

But for us, death is a gateway.

Death does lead not to eternal non-existence, but rather to eternal existence—a larger life in God, to the resurrected life in God.

The darkness of death leads to the glorious light of Easter.

What I like about Lent is that is shows us that, even though we are living in the glorious light of Easter, bestowed on us at our Baptism, it’s not always sunshine and flowers and frivolous happiness all the time.

If our Christian faith was only that, it would be a frivolous faith.

It wouldn’t be taken seriously because it would ignore a very important part of our lives.

But Lent shows us that, as Christians, we are to reflect about where we have failed—where we have failed God, failed others and failed ourselves.

And it reminds us that death—death of our loved ones and our own deaths—is simply a fact of life.

An ugly fact of life, but a fact nonetheless.

It is a part of who we are and what we are.

It forces us to realize that we are wholly dependent upon God for our life and for what comes after death.

Of course Ash Wednesday is not a time to disparage our bodies, to believe that our bodies are some kind of prisons for our souls.

All we do on this Ash Wednesday is acknowledge the fact that we are mortal, that our bodies have limits and because they do, we too are limited.

Lent is not a time for us to deny our bodies or see our bodies as sinful, disgraceful things.

Rather it is simply a matter of not making our bodies our treasures.

Jesus tells us in tonight’s Gospel not to lay up our treasures on earth, in corrupting things, but to store up our treasures in heaven.

A lot of us put more store in our bodies than we need.

We sometimes don’t take great joy in our bodies at all, but rather abuse our bodies or become inordinately obsessed with our bodies and in what used to be called “the way of the flesh.”

We eat too much.

We drink too much.

We get lazy sometimes.

And we let our bodies go sometimes.

This time of Lent is a time for us to find a balance with our physical selves as well as with our spiritual selves.

That is really the true meaning of Lent.

Where are our treasures?

Are they here, in the corruptible, or in they in the incorruptible?

This is the question we must ask during Lent.

This is the question we should be pondering throughout this season.

Where are our treasures?

What are the things that really matter?

o, as we head into this season of Lent, let it be a truly holy time.

Let it be a time in which we ponder whatever momento mori we might have in our lives.

Let us remember that, yes, we are but dust, but that we are also so much more than just dust.

Let Lent be a time in which we recognize that as limited as we might be—whether limited physically or emotionally or spiritually—we are all still fully loved children of our God.  

With that in mind, reminded of that, let this holy season Lent truly be a time of reflection and self-assessment.

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

Let us observe a holy Lent.

And by doing so, let us be truly holy.

Amen.