2 Lent

March 16, 2025

 Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Luke 13.31-35

 + All of us, I know, have been processing the election last November in our own various ways.

 For those of you who deal with me on a regular basis know how I have been dealing with it in my own, very weird way.

 Beginning shortly before the election, I started obsessively reading books.

 Now, I have always been a voracious reader.

 But not any where near the level I’ve been reading since November.

 I am talking about 2 books a week.

 I have read 36 books already since the beginning of this year.

 36!

 And all of this while doing my work here, during precious free time, as well as teaching and writing my own latest book of poems, which should be published in April or May.

 I have been getting up at 5:00 a.m. to read, that’s how obsessive this has been.

 I have been obsessively following Booktok on Tik Tok or Booktube on Youtube or going through book recommendations on Instagram.

 If you are not my friend on GoodReads, please contact me there, and you can see the books I’ve been reading.

 Throughout all of this, I have followed a few rules as well.

 Any book I start, I will finish.

 No matter how bad that book is.

 And yes, I can now say, thanks to Booktok, I have read the worst novel ever written, in my humble opinion.

 It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover.

 Absolutely terrible!

 But I finished it. Like having a tooth pulled without anesthesia, I finished that damn book.

 My main obsession during this weird book reading frenzy has been binging one particular author: the novelist Cormac McCarthy.

 I have binged every published (and a few unpublished) works of McCarthy.

 You probably have read McCarthy.

 He wrote All the Pretty Horses and The Road.

 Great books!

 Horribly violent books, but great books nonetheless.

 And yes, I have also read the Vanity Fair article about McCarthy published last November.

 But in the midst of it all, just as I found the worst novel I’ve ever read with Colleen Hoover, I have also read the best novel I’ve ever read.

 And that is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

 This book absolutely blew me away.

 And when I say obsession with this book and McCarthy’s books, I mean it.

 In fact, when I was in Arizona last month, I made a point of visiting places referenced in Blood Meridian, such as the San Jose de Tumacácori Mission and the San Xavier Del Bac missions south of Tucson, the Presidio in Tucson, as well as driving down the Miracle Mile in Tucson, where McCarthy lived on and off over in the 1970s while writing his books.

 Now, if you know anything about Blood Meridian, you may be asking yourself this:

 “Why is Father Jamie, a committed vegan pacifist so obsessed with a horribly violent western-themed novel about cowboys buying up scalps in 1849?”

 Why would your vegan pacifist priest find such violent books so compelling?

 Well, I don’t know.

 Let’s just say my therapist is having a field day trying to unpack not only my weird book frenzy but especially my Cormac McCarthy obsession.

 But I think it’s actually quite simple.

 My being a vegan and a pacifist are my reaction to violence in this world.

 As any of you who have known me well have heard me say, I grew up with violence in my world.

 When I was six, a sixteen neighbor girl my family knew well, who attended my little Lutheran country parish, was brutally murdered during a home invasion.

 A few years after that, an older woman who was like an aunt to me moved to New Mexico, married a local man and was then killed by him in a fit of rage in the restaurant she owned there.

 I grew up hearing stories of my mother’s cousin and her husband who were killed in 1957 tornado that hit Fargo (I even wrote a book about it).

 These events affected me in ways I never realized then. 

 I think my reaction to all of this has been purposely choosing the opposite of violence in my life as a way to counter the violence I experienced earlier in my life.

 But, at the same time, I know that ultimately, despite those decisions in my life, it’s sometimes important to face and confront things like violence, rather than avoid it.

 For most of us, violence is simply something we don’t even consider in our personal day-to-day lives.

 It very rarely rears its ugly head in our personal lives.

 At least, I hope it doesn’t.

 But let me tell you, when it does, it is terrible.

 And you are not the same person afterward that you were before.

 And also, very importantly, we realize that violence is not always expressed physically.

 Violence can be expressed in multiple ways, including through intimidation, bullying and downright terror.

 Yes, our words and actions have consequences and can cause violence.

 There’s no getting around violence in our lives.

 Even today, in our scriptures readings, we get some truly violent images.

 First, let’s take a look at the reading from Genesis.

 In it, we find God making a covenant with Abram (soon to be called Abraham).

 God commands Abram to sacrifice these different animals, to cut them in half and to separate them.

 Violent and strange, yes.

 But the really strange part of the reading is the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch passing between the pieces.

 If we don’t know the back story—if we don’t understand the meaning of the cut up animals—then the story makes little sense.

 It’s just another gruesome, violent story from the Hebrew scriptures.

 But if we examine what covenant is all about, then the story starts taking on a new meaning.

 Covenant of course is not a word we hear used often anymore.

 In fact, none of us use it except when talking about religious things.

 But a covenant is very important in the scriptures.

 A covenant is a binding agreement.

 And when one enters into a covenant with God, essentially that bound agreement is truly bound.

 In the days of Abram, when one made a covenant with someone, it was common practice for that person entering the agreement to cut up an animal and then to stand in the middle of the cut-up pieces.

 Essentially what they were saying by doing so was: “let this happen to me if I break our covenant.”

 Let this violence come upon me if I break what we have sworn to do.

 What we find happening in our reading this morning is that it is not Abram standing in the midst of those cut-up animals.

 Rather it is God.

 God is saying to Abram that if I ever break this covenant with you let happen to me what has happened to these animals.

 God is saying to Abram: “my word is good. If this relationship between the two of us breaks down it is not I who breaks the covenant.”

 What appears so gruesome to us, was normal to Abraham, who lived with violence regularly in his life.

 It is interesting though how graphic God gets here, though.

 God gets very graphic in making this promise.

 Then, we come to our Gospel reading.

 Here too, we find a sense of impending violence.

 The Pharisees ominously come to tell Jesus that he is in danger from Herod.

 This is real danger.

 Life-threatening danger.

 And how does Jesus respond to this danger and impending violence?

 He is not concerned at all over Herod or even the danger that he himself is in.

 His concern is for Jerusalem—for the city which, no doubt, was in sight as he was speaking.

 His concern is for the city he is about to enter and in which he knows he will meet his death.

 His violent death. 

 As he does so, Jesus does something at this moment that really is amazing.

 He laments.

 He uses words similar to those found in the lamenting psalms.

 He uses poetry.

 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

 It is beautiful.

 And it is powerful.

 It’s incredible poetry.

 Knowing what he knew—knowing that in Jerusalem he will be betrayed and murdered—Jesus laments.

 He knows that what essentially is going to happen in Jerusalem is what happened while Abram slept.

 In Jerusalem, God will once again stand in the midst of a shattered body, the shattered body of God’s very Son, and say to God’s people: “I will remain faithful. My word is good.”

 But, as wonderful as that may sound to us, to Jesus it must’ve been frightening, even though he knew full well that it had to happen.

 And even here we see Jesus using this impending violence as a means for us to rise above violence and fear.

 Jesus is letting us see his fear and his sadness.

 Jesus is letting us see the fear he has in knowing that he, in a sense, has become the sacrifice that must be cut in two as part of the covenant God has made with us.

 He is letting us see him for what he is about to be—a victim of violence.

 When we hear that phrase “Lamb of God,” we need to remind ourselves that is not some sweet sentiment.

 This lamb on the front of our altar is not just some sweet lamb standing on a mountain.

 Look at that wound in the lamb’s side.

 See that blood.

 The Lamb of God is a sacrificial lamb—a lamb that is to be sacrificed.

 In fact, Jesus lays it all out before God and us.

 He wails and complains and lays himself bare before God. 

 He is blatantly honest in his lamenting.

 The fact is: sometimes we too do fear and despair.

 Sometimes, when we are afraid, we do not want to pray to God,

 It is in those sometimes awful moments, that it is completely all right to complain to God.

 It is all right to vent and open ourselves completely to God.

 Because, the important thing here is not how we are praying or even what we are praying for.

 It is important that, even in our fear, in our pain, in our despair, in our horror at the gruesomeness and violence we find in this world that we come to God.

 We come before God as an imperfect person, full of insecurities, exposed and fearful and vulnerable.

 And we come angry at injustice and violence.

 We come angry that we still have to deal with white supremacy and blatant fascism in this day and age!

 We take what it is hurting us and bothering us and we release it to God.

 We let it out before God. We are, in that moment, blatantly honest with God.

 Because God knows.

 God has stood in the midst of that violence.

 And God still stands in the midst of the violence that we see in this world.

 So, let us follow the example of Jesus, who even in the face of violence and death, was still able to open his heart and his soul to God in song and poetry.

 More importantly, let us, as Jesus himself did over and over again in his life,  pray when we are afraid or angry or frustrated.

 Let our prayers release our own anger to the God who loves us and knows us more completely than anyone else.

 In the shattered, cut-open pieces of our lives and this world, in this shattered open world we know that God, even here and now is a bright light, passing back and forth.

 Even in that “deep and terrifying darkness” God appears to us as Light.

 All we have to do is recognize God in that midst of that darkness.

 And in doing so, all we can sometimes do is open our mouths and let them the poems within us sing out to our God.