Inspiration comes from the strangest places…

This past week I was in Tallahassee at the spring meeting of a colleague group, Downtown Episcopal Clergy of the New South (DECONS). I always leave the DECONS meeting energized and renewed for ministry in the Church, and I always enjoy the company of my colleagues and friends.  Even so, this time the most memorable nugget I received came from an interview in the hotel’s complimentary copy of Details Magazine (May 2013).

The interview is with Bradley Cooper, he of such cinematic breadth as “Silver Linings Playbook” and “The Hangover.” Yes, that Bradley Cooper. Yes, seriously.

But permit me to digress. Often I hear people inside and outside of the Church discuss the demise of institutional religion. Some lament and others rejoice at this supposed fact. It is claimed that corporate worship no longer connects with the prevailing culture. It is suggested the things of worship are arcane and bankrupt of spiritual heft and meaning.

And then an interviewer in Details Magazine asks the reigning king of Hollywood–and thus The Lord of All Things Pop Cultural–Bradley Cooper whether he (Bradley) is religious. I winced before reading Mr. Cooper’s answer, because I am conditioned to expect the famous either to caricature and lambast Christianity or else peddle a superficial and half-baked practice of Kabbalah or Buddhism.

But here is what Bradley Cooper says:

“I grew up Roman Catholic.  I was baptized. I always loved the pageantry of it. A lot of it had to do with loving my father and looking at him wear his tweed blazer to Mass. I loved the way he prayed, so I would pray like he would. Not for any other reason than I wanted to be like my father–I wanted to be like Charlie Cooper. But in so doing, through the ritual of it, I started to have faith in God. Am I a spiritual person today? Yes. I don’t know how I could not be. It’s like saying, ‘Do you breathe?’”

It’s difficult to imagine a better articulation of why corporate worship matters, why liturgy matters, why family observance of ritual matters, why the Church matters.

And all from Bradley Cooper. Inspiration comes from the strangest places.

Two weeks ago, Italian businessman Antonio Fiore was finishing up his business trip in Houston.  He had a few minutes to spare before heading to the airport, and so he chose to walk around downtown and take photos of the impressive gleaming glass buildings of our city.  As Antonio progressed through the streets, something out of place caught his eye in the distance.  In an email of somewhat broken English, this is what he says:

“From far away I noted a church, which was quite difficult to believe, that a low building could stay among such tall buildings in the city.  And by the time I was getting near to it I was feeling delighted, as it is nice to me each time I am around the world and I discover a church on my path…I had a chance to walk through your garden but then my timing was short and I had to return fast to my hotel and to the airport…Now I am in Africa [on business], but I haven’t stopped thinking of the lovely Christ Church Cathedral of Houston…God bless all of you.”

It is difficult to believe that a low building could stay among such tall buildings in the city.

Don’t eat that fruit!

Of course, the biblical narrative begins not in a city but in a garden, one I would like to imagine resembled—just a little bit—our own courtyard.  Genesis describes that garden in detail, and in it there are no tall buildings.  Through the garden flows a great river, the river of the water of life.  In the garden there is also the tree of life, but from it human beings are prohibited to eat.  Adam and Eve have already illegally eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God casts them out of Eden before they can also eat of the tree of life and become like God.  They—we—are cast out of the garden, away from the river and the tree, away from God’s very presence.

That is the beginning of the human story.  And the rest of the story is marked by two competing strands of narrative.  In the first, we defiantly walk away from Eden and thumb our noses at God.  Beginning with the Tower of Babel, we build cities—Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, New York, Houston—monstrous opposites to the garden, with buildings that reach the heavens as if to say to God, “See, we don’t need your tree of life to be like you!”

The Tower of Babel: Striving to be God

From biblical times until today, human cities have been marked by energy and exhilaration, but also by crime and poverty and pollution and the striving of men and women to reach the top, both literally and figuratively.  In our attempt to create heaven, we’ve sometimes created a version of hell.

The other strand of narrative that makes up the human story since our ejection from Eden is the attempt to sneak back into the garden.  I experienced this as a revelation when I studied in London in college and took my first trip to Hampton Court Palace at the edge of the great city.  In the early 1500s, Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court as an escape from the smells, disease, and turmoil of the city, and nowhere on the grounds does one grasp this better than in the gardens.  Hampton Court’s gardens intend to transport us back into Eden, to grant us a brief experience of amnesia so that we can forget our separation from God.

But we don’t need royal palaces to underscore this strand of the human narrative, do we?  Our poetry, our music, our literature extol the virtue of the pastoral, the rural, the garden over and against the city.  This is what the mid-century flight to the suburbs was all about: the vain hope that a quarter acre of yard and a curbed street could become a small slice of Eden beyond the reach of the city.  Of course, what we got instead was the city creeping out to meet us as urban sprawl.

The constant tension between the city and the garden.  That has been the human story.  Do we surrender to the city and accept our separation from God, or do we flee the city and yearn for God and the entrance to Eden?  If we reflect upon our own lives—where we have sojourned, where we have recreated, where we have worked, where we have lived—I suspect many of us will find this question lurking somewhere beneath the surface.

But what if it’s a false choice?  What if we misunderstood our expulsion from Eden in the beginning?  What if we mistook what reunion with God looks like?

Consider the end of the human story, the last chapter of Revelation, which bumps up against the back cover of your Bible.  St. John the Divine’s vision gives us a glimpse of what God’s ultimate salvation looks like.  And to the surprise of the poets, it is not a return to the garden.  Hear again what John says:

“And in the spirit he carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. [The city’s] gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there…Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Houston

Did you catch that?  Our redemption does not equal a return to Eden.  It is in the city that God redeems us.  It is the city that God redeems!  In ways mysterious to us, our expulsion from Eden after eating of the fruit was for our good.  It was not apart from God that we created cities.  God was with us all along.  Our failure was that we did not know it.  We built our cities pretending to be God[i] rather than acknowledging in humility that ours was God’s work.  Whatever else God’s redeemed world includes, Revelation says forthrightly that it includes the diversity of peoples, the languages, the din of activity that mark the city.  Through the city God will redirect the river of the water of life.  In the city God will replant the tree of life.  And the fruit of that tree will be balm to all who enter the city’s open gates.

Not Eden, but Houston.  God is here, offering light and life.  And that lays upon us the profound, immediate, and central responsibility to serve as God’s agents of redemption here.  We are to be the fruit of the tree of life for God’s people.

Antonio Fiore was startled and amazed to find the church nestled right in the midst of Houston’s tall glass buildings.  In his wonder he caught a glimpse of St. John’s vision: that the garden exists not apart from, but in the very center of the city.  We, like the nations in Revelation, stream here to Christ Church each week from Katy and Sugarland and Pasadena and Tanglewood and River Oaks, and it matters.  We are called through our sacred worship, through our glorious music, through our spiritual formation, and through our indispensible work with the homeless and the poor—through all these things—to make the presence of God flow from here down Texas and Fannin and Prairie and Main, like the water of the river of life.  Until God fulfills all things, it is not too much to say that we are his vanguard.

Christ Church Cathedral (Photo by Jim Olive)

As we are about this work, let’s remember that God is here—at Christ Church Cathedral and in this city.  God’s love shades us like the arbor of the tree of life.  God’s love heals.  God’s love draws God himself from heaven to abide with us, among the tall buildings, in the city.

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[i] Which is what the story of Babel is all about.

On the video, the first thing one notices is the brightness of the sky.  It is a near perfect day.  The sun is shining, and the temperature reaches a crisp and refreshing fifty-four degrees.  On this same date last year, the thermometer soared into the nineties, leading to a medical tent overflowing with heat-related illnesses.  But not this day.  This day is a near perfect day.

The second thing one notices is the discrepancy between the few people running in the road and the multitudes lining the sidewalks.  Two-thirds of the runners have already finished their race.  Those who remain on the road are the determined, the dogged, the ones for whom merely competing in and finishing this historic route has been a lifelong dream.  One is a seventy-eight-year-old man.  Even so, the crowd lining the sidewalk has not thinned.  These final runners are cheered as though they’re about to win the Olympics.

The third thing one notices is the array of colorful flags waving in the breeze.  From the vantage point of the video I’m watching, I count thirty national flags, and there are more extending beyond my line of sight.  They represent the runners, the spectators, and all of us who look to events like the Boston Marathon for reminders that occasionally the best impulses of humanity emerge.  Runners from across the globe gather not only to compete but also simply to share in this iconic experience.  Kenyan standing next to Canadian standing alongside American all shout encouragement for the runners and, really, for the whole human family.

It is an earthly approximation of the heavenly vision in Revelation.  St. John the Divine tells us, “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…”

Those colorful, international flags are waving in the breeze when the bomb goes off.  The force of the blast shreds some of them.  The seventy-eight-year-old runner crumbles to the ground.  Three people are immediately killed.  Hundreds are wounded, many gruesomely so.  In an instant, the world is shattered.  Essayist Patricia Adams Farmer reminds us, “If we live long enough and deep enough, at some point in life, we will experience a quaking and breaking of everything we considered solid and sure.”[i]

True indeed.  But must it happen so often?  I have only recently joined you from Roanoke, Virginia, just down the road from Blacksburg, where the Virginia Tech massacre is still so recent its pain is searing for many.  I have just returned from the North American Deans Conference, where the dean in Oklahoma City tells me his parishioners are still, so many years later, reminded daily of the grotesque attack on the Murrah Federal Building, which killed one hundred sixty-eight people including nineteen children.  And there is Columbine.  And there is Sandy Hook.  And there is 9/11.

Add to such news-worthy events all the mundane tragedies of our lives—the illnesses, the accidents, the failures, the injuries we do one another—and it seems that Patricia Adams Farmer is wrong in one respect.  We don’t really have to live very long or very deep to experience the quaking and breaking of everything.

As news of the bombings in Boston quickly spread on Monday afternoon last, countless people succumbed to such reflections.  I did, too.  But then I watched The Boston Globe’s video of the explosion a second time, and when I did, something new stood out in stark relief to the carnage.  I have no idea who held the video camera.  I don’t know his name, his occupation, or what he had for breakfast Monday morning.  What I do know is that exactly two seconds after the first bomb detonates—two seconds—the cameraman breaks into a run.  But he does not run away; he does not run for cover.  He runs toward the blast; he runs into the smoke.  And as his video camera jostles and shakes, we can see all around him the multitude of people doing exactly the same thing.  They run toward those shredded flags representing so many peoples and nations.  They run into the chaos.

“Look for the helpers.”

The beloved children’s television host Fred Rogers shares this: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”[ii]

And with new eyes I look back upon all those tragedies, the headliners and the personal ones, and I see the helpers.  I see the group of people who tackled the knife-wielding assailant at Lone Star College just last week so he couldn’t harm anyone else.  I see the clients of The Beacon—homeless men and women—who rushed into the busy street to protect our own parishioner who was clipped by a hit-and-run driver three weeks ago.  I see the stranger bringing an exhausted father a cup of coffee in a surgical waiting room.  And I see—until my dying day I will see—the hundreds of emergency responders who rushed into the hell of two smoking towers in lower Manhattan a decade ago.

In Revelation, St. John asks his angelic guide who the multitude might be, streaming to and surrounding the throne of God.  The guide says, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  For this reason they are before the throne of God.”

It turns out Monday’s scene at the Boston Marathon truly was an earthly vision of that heavenly scene.  Those who streamed into that great ordeal represented a multitude of peoples and nations.  Some of them undoubtedly pray to God-in-Christ; some pray to God by other names; some likely don’t know what to call God at all.  Regardless, it wasn’t the smoke that attracted them; it wasn’t chaos for chaos’ sake.  They ran into the ordeal, and they washed their robes in the blood of the wounded, because they were attracted by love, instinctively and overpoweringly.  And God is love.

On his blog, Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes responded to the Boston Marathon bombing by saying, “It’s not easy. Love is not quick, and does not produce immediate results. It’s a marathon. It takes dedication and training and a lot of commitment. It’s not for the faint-hearted…Love takes guts. It takes faith, confidence that a greater love is at work even when we cannot see it. And it takes patience, like a marathon—the willingness to go the distance, to keep at it when your body cries, “Quit!,” when your mind thinks of better things to do, when pain and weariness make you want to give up —it takes guts to keep going anyway…To share in the world’s pain and sadness, and still keep up hope and love—that is the world’s oldest marathon. The good news is that we do not run alone. Nor do we run on our own energy: we are moved by the desire of God for the healing of the world.”[iii]

The final promise of Revelation today is that, in God’s good time, the ordeal will end.  “[We] will hunger no more, and thirst no more…for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be [our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to springs of the water of life.  And God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.”

I believe that promise.  But we live in the meantime, in which two misguided young men possessed by anger and fear set off bombs and destroy near perfect days.  The author Frederick Buechner, never one to sugar-coat, says, “Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.”[iv]

We need not fear, even in the meantime, because God is love, and God has disciples who will always stream into the chaos on behalf of that love.  Look for the helpers.  There are so many of them.

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[i] Farmer, Patricia Adams, “The Quaking and Breaking of Everything.” Quoted from the blog of Jay McDaniel, http://www.jesusjazzbuddhism.org/boston-the-beautiful-finding-faith-after-the-quaking.html.

[ii]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/mister-rogers-and-newtown-quote-and-image-goes-viral/2012/12/17/a462f598-485c-11e2-820e-17eefac2f939_blog.html

[iii] http://unfoldinglight.net/

[iv] From Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith.

Under the right circumstances, we like to be scared.  In a controlled space, like a movie theater or gathered around a campfire, fear can be thrilling and even fun.  As a scary story is told, tension slowly mounts; goose bumps rise on the arm; cold sweat gathers on the brow.  Finally, the moment comes when the storyteller yells “Boo!” or someone jumps from the shadows.  We shriek and spill our popcorn.   We’re surprised at how fast our feeble courage fails, and we’re secretly relieved that the fright was only an artificial one.

Over time, certain standard motifs have developed in scary stories.  As soon as they appear, we know what’s coming next.  But rather than diminish our fear through their familiarity, these motifs raise our level of ominous foreboding.

Edgar Allan Poe published “The Tell-Tale Heart” in 1843. It’s still scary after all these years!

One such motif is the returning, haunting voice or sound one thought dead.  Remember Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart”?  It was, I think, the first really scary tale I ever read.  The narrator kills his elderly housemate and hides the body under the floorboards, and when the police pay the murderer a visit he plays it cool and thinks he fools them.  But then he hears—first softly in the background and then crescendoing to a fevered pitch in his ears—the steady heartbeat of the man he’s killed.  He can’t get the sound out of his head.  The murderer, clawing at his ears, finally breaks down before the policemen and admits his crime.  (I’ll tell you, the night I read that story, I didn’t sleep a wink.)

Another standard motif in scary stories has a frightened group of people fleeing some horror: a vampire, the blob, a flock of mad birds, until the terrorized group find themselves barricaded and cornered in a closet or a phone booth or a room at the end of the hall.  They are trapped.  There is nowhere else to go.  And something wicked this way comes!

Remember “The Shining”?  The movie begins with a happy family arriving at an idyllic mountain lodge where the father is to serve as winter caretaker in the off-season.  This happy beginning doesn’t last long, though, as the father slips into madness.  Who can forget the scene late in the movie, when Shelley Duvall is trapped in the bathroom.  A snow bank outside blocks the window.  She can’t escape; she has nowhere to run.  And a clearly deranged Jack Nicholson shuffles down the hall toward the bathroom door with an ax in hand.  It is scary stuff, no matter how many times you watch it.

Too dark for the Sunday after Easter?  Well, no scarier than the beginning of the Gospel today.  If we have eyes to see, St. John actually utilizes the same motif as Stephen King.  For us, a full week has passed since Easter, nine days since the horror of Good Friday.  But not for the disciples.  Today’s reading takes place on Easter evening.  All these events have just happened.  Let’s think back for a moment and reconstruct their experience.

On Maundy Thursday, the disciples gathered with Jesus in the upper room, likely the top floor of a house, with the only access being a single door and a narrow back stairwell.  The week had been a glorious one, with parades and adoring crowds and their leader Jesus repeatedly besting the authorities whenever they tried to debate him.  Eating and drinking in the upper room on Thursday had been like a celebration.  The disciples had no inkling that it was a “last supper.”  Sure, Jesus had tried to talk to them of somber things and trials to come, but John tells us the disciples murmured to one another, “We don’t know what he’s talking about.”  And we get the impression they didn’t try very hard.

When Jesus tells them he will soon find himself all alone in the world, Peter speaks with bravado saying, “Lord, I’ll lay down my life for you!”  And the others agree with a hearty harrumph.  Dinner ends with rosy cheeks flushed with wine.  Except for Jesus, everyone is cheery, lighthearted and glad.

It really is like the early scenes in scary movies, like that idyllic mountain lodge in “The Shining” or the guilt-free fun at Crystal Lake in the first half of “Friday the Thirteenth.”  But as in those movies, we can sense that something horrible is about to happen.

And, of course, it does.  We don’t need to rehearse all the events in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Good Friday.  We know that the horrors of those days exceeded anything Hollywood could put on film (though Mel Gibson certainly tried).  Jesus is killed, brutally and torturously so.  But then, on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene discovers that Jesus’ tomb is empty.  Seconds later she meets a strange man who, to her shock, turns out to be Jesus alive again.  She runs back to town and tells the disciples.

And this is where John’s story veers from the other Gospels.  In John, when Mary tells the disciples what she’s seen, most of them do not then run to the tomb to see for themselves.  What do they do?  They cling to one another and flee back to that upper room, the scene of such revelry just a few days before.  They clamber up that narrow staircase, furtively looking over their shoulders.   They huddle together and barricade the door.  John tells us, “The door was locked for fear of the Jews.”

I once heard Marty Field, who is now the Bishop of West Missouri, discuss this passage.  Bishop Field offered an eye-opening insight: “Just which Jew,” he asked, “do you suppose the disciples were most afraid of?”

Think about that.  The disciples rode Jesus’ coattails into and through Jerusalem.  They basked in his fame and they siphoned his power.  They swore with bravado never to leave him.  They created and projected this image of who they were, and it centered on being almost as good as Jesus himself.  And then as soon as the mob arrived in Gethsemane, the disciples fled into the night.  Their bravado crumbled like cheese.  They hid in shadows.  They abandoned Jesus at his trial.  They forsook him on the cross.  They did not protect him or even hold vigil for him.  They ran away, and he died.

And then Mary Magdalene comes and tells them he’s not dead after all.  He’s alive, and he’s coming for them.  Would we be excited in those circumstances?  Would we await Jesus with a smile and open arms?  I doubt it.  The man who knows best their false image is coming back.  The man who was on the receiving end of their failings is returning.  Were it us, I suspect the tension would slowly mount; the goose bumps would rise on our arms; our hair would stand on end.  And then we’d run headlong to some place of perceived safety—like the upper room—and barricade the door.  Which Jew are they afraid of?  The disciples are terrified of Jesus!

We like to be scared in pretend.  We enjoy campfire ghost stories and B movies.  But what about the real bump in the night that jars us awake?  Or, what about those moments in our lives when life catches up with us and we feel cornered and pursued?  What are we afraid of?  We’re afraid of the same thing that undid the disciples.  We’re afraid that the image we project to the world will fail us.  We’re afraid that our false bravado will crumble, that our secret moral failings will come to light, that we’ll flee when the moment comes for us to stand firm for good and for God.  That real terror can paralyze us, and it is, I believe, the real reason we Episcopalians get nervous when talk turns to Jesus. We’re afraid he might be alive after all.  Easter might just be true, and if it is, what might Jesus think of us—what might he do to us—when he shows up and sees our failings?  That might scare us to death.

The disciples are cornered in that upper room.  The door is locked, and they huddle in fear.  Before they know it, and passing through the locked door as though it is smoke, Jesus appears.  The disciples’ pulses are racing.  The combination of their fear and flight response must be dizzying.  Jesus raises his hand and opens his mouth to speak.  And this is what he says:

“Peace be with you…Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.  Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Fear melts.  It’s not that Jesus doesn’t know the disciples’ failings.  It is, rather, that Jesus does know them; he forgives them; and he loves the disciples anyway.  Most importantly, Jesus redeems those failings.  You see, he knows the disciples could not be of any use to him or to God until those false self-images and false bravado were shattered.  Only now, when the disciples know who they truly are, when they have seen how far they can flee and that God still seeks them out in acceptance and love, can they do Jesus’ work in the world.  Only now—at that moment when fear flees and peace settles in—do they receive God’s Holy Spirit within them and truly become disciples.

It is the surprise twist to a passage that began as a horror story.  It upends the expected motif, which is, after all, what God is all about in our world.  It replaces fear with peace; failing with acceptance; the old bravado with a new mission in life, for the disciples and for us, to serve the living Christ in honesty, in humility, and in love.

A man, his wife, and his mother-in-law, all of them unchurched, went on vacation to Jerusalem.  While they were there, the mother-in-law ate a bad matzah ball and died.  The undertaker told the man, “You can have your mother-in-law shipped home for $5,000, or you can bury her here, in the Holy Land, for $150.”

The man thought about it and told the undertaker he would have his mother-in-law shipped home.  The undertaker asked, “Why would you spend $5,000 to ship her home, when it would be wonderful to have your mother-in-law buried here in this holy place, and you would spend only $150?”

The man replied, “Yesterday our tour guide told us about a guy who died here, was buried here, and three days later rose from the dead.  I just can‘t take that chance!”

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Folks who are unchurched have a hard time understanding resurrection.  When we insist that Jesus rose from the tomb, they imagine that we Christians are talking about something like “The Walking Dead.”  But that’s o.k.  Those of us who do darken the door of the church have trouble with resurrection, too.  We’ve walked a long road since last Sunday.  On that day, we celebrated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, but with a bittersweet edge kind of like when you know you’re celebrating a terminal friend’s last birthday.  On Thursday we remembered Jesus’ poignant last evening with his friends before his chaotic goodbye.  On Friday we grieved his death and our own sense of bereavement and loss.  Each of those three days—Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday—is visceral.  They connect with basic and familiar human emotions and sensibilities.  They amplify experiences we have in our own lives, and that’s why our smiles on Palm Sunday are tender, our expressions on Maundy Thursday are shell-shocked, and our tears on Good Friday are real.

Easter is infinitely more difficult.  Unbridled joy is the emotion of the day, and the locus of that joy, we are told, is resurrection.  But though we search for another human experience similar to this particular kind of joy, we come up lacking, so we clothe our joy in what are some admittedly strange customs, for instance, celebrating giant rabbits who sneak into our homes at night and lay colored eggs.

Perhaps the best analogy to resurrection we can come up with in our lives is what I’d call the “New Year’s impulse,” when we make all those resolutions at the turn of the calendar year to reform or amend some part of our routine to better our lives, and then think of that as a kind of rebirth: This year I will lose 20 pounds, or This year I will learn to play the guitar, or better yet, This year I will attend church more regularly.  While all of these are commendable (especially the last one), is that what resurrection means?  Is that what it looks like?

To answer that question, we need to join Mary Magdalene, who has just approached the tomb of Jesus.  It is misty early morning, and Mary’s eyes swim.  For her emotionally, you see, it is still Good Friday.  Mary had staked her life on Jesus and pinned her fortune to his.  But there have been consequences to that.  On Friday when he died on the cross, every hope in her life was crucified with him.  She might as well have died, too.  The one she loved most in life is gone.  No New Year’s-type resolution to better her life can change that.  No reordering of things will make any difference.  Even to try would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Can we step into her reality?  Can we imagine what it’s like for life’s course to feel irrevocably set and headed downhill fast?  Many can.  The news is replete with those who go so far as to harm themselves and others because they experience life—either due to their own decisions or due to circumstances beyond their control—as fixedly doomed.  This must be what Mary feels.  She goes to look at Jesus’ body in the grave as final confirmation that all is lost.  And when he isn’t there—when the tomb is empty—for her the pit becomes unbelievably deeper.  She is without hope, and the silence of a life without hope is deafening.

In that silence and through the dark and tears she barely sees the man who emerges from the mist.  But when he speaks her name, the voice is so unexpected that her hopeless world is shattered, and a new world takes its place.

Mary sees Jesus in the dawn of that new day, and she sees him for who he truly is.  He is alive, and she realizes that even her earlier expectations of who he was and what he was about are nothing more than a pale shadow of this reality.  Being one with Jesus is not about simply reordering the old life, even a good reordering.  Being one with Jesus is about looking upon his resurrected self and realizing that the future that had stretched before us—the fixed future of diminished possibilities and sometimes hopelessness—is blessedly gone.  In its place the new future is wide open.  That’s the source of this crazy joy we feel today.

This is a joy that realizes—unbelievably—that the future isn’t determined by the events we have already experienced or endured in our lives, even those bad decisions in which we are complicit.  The ultimate future, whatever we must endure at this moment, is, through Jesus’ rising, opened wide by grace.

New Year’s Day is always a letdown.  But for college football bowl games, the wide-eyed hopes of the night before look foolish in the bleary exhaustion of January 1.  It is just another day.  But what if you woke up this Easter morning, and everything were different?

It is.  From this day forward, nothing is the same, not for Mary and not for us.  The reality that Jesus has bested death and risen now accompanies us in all our endeavors, all our lives.  It blows the future wide-open.  Horizons are broader, and even what had seemed like the deepest pit is made shallow because Jesus stands at its other side.

We are invited to participate in Jesus’ resurrection both now and at the end of days.  His resurrection remakes us, so that the very basis—the ground—of who we are is found in his resurrected self.  This is not a reordering of the old; this is new life altogether.

Today Christ Jesus speaks our name as he did Mary’s in the garden, and for us, too, the deafening and hopeless silence is ended.  This is Easter Day.  The Lord is resurrected, and we can be, too.

Slow runs my heart. A summer’s bud by winter held. And if in faith my heart should fail, bring to my lips the cup, thine own sweet grail.
Philip Riley

It’s already been a long week, and Jesus must know what’s coming.  Some say that Jesus was gifted with God’s own omniscience and knew in advance exactly how events would play out.  Of course, Philippians argues compellingly against that view, but even if Jesus weren’t gifted with the seer’s eye, he must know the game is almost up.  He entered Jerusalem four days earlier, and he’s done everything possible to antagonize the authorities during the Passover Festival, the one week of the year in which they are the least likely to forgive rabble rousers and causers of disruption.  Jesus has made a scene in the Court of the Gentiles, driving out those who sell sacrificial animals and change Roman money into temple coin.  He’s debated, bested, and even ridiculed every faction that wields any power.  And he has reasons to believe that Judas, one close to his own heart, has changed his mind about the Gospel and sided with the devil.

It’s bound to be that last that’s the hardest to take.  We can face many things so long as we know we have the unwavering commitment and support of our friends.  But to know that a soul-friend has not only lost faith yet is also actively working against you…that can steal the wind from your sail and sap the very strength from muscle and bone.

Jesus has seen the Herodians pointing at him and whispering at the edge of the crowds.  He has witnessed the Sadducees conspiring with the Pharisees, two groups who under normal circumstances are mortal enemies.  He has watched the nervous Roman legionnaires patrolling the streets.  They’re coming for him, and he knows it.

With all this on his heart and mind, Jesus steals into a quiet garden for what he must know is his last opportunity for quiet and peace.  But though he prays alone, he knows neither of these things.  Jesus the Christ is fully god and fully man, but he is not Superman.  Bullets don’t bounce off his chest, and against his flesh the dagger does not bend.  He is not Stoic in the face of danger.  In the throes of his anxiety, Jesus trembles.  In the anticipation of what is to come, he falters.  Mark tells us “He threw himself on the ground” in distress and agitation, and Luke adds with literary flourish, “His sweat became as great drops of blood falling from him.”

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Let’s stop there and ask a question: What is your Garden of Gethsemane?  Where in your life is the anxiety so great that you can’t think straight, your body reacts in foreign ways, your emotions take on a life of their own?  Where does your strength so ebb that you can’t lift yourself off the ground, whether to face pain, combat demons, or repair relationships?  Where is your Gethsemane?

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Rewind several hours.  Jesus is in room with those closest to him in all the world.  Though Judas has already betrayed him, Jesus doesn’t even exclude him from this gathering.  Only the two of them realize what’s coming.  The others likely cling to the idea that this week in Jerusalem is moving toward a different kind of crescendo, one in which all their hopes will be realized.  Patient with their ignorance, Jesus peers at them with piercing eyes, willing in them understanding of the heart where understanding of the mind is absent.  He lifts bread from the table and he says, “This is my body” and wine with the words, “This is my blood.”

They don’t yet understand it, but too soon they will, because Jesus will arise in Gethsemane.  He will face his betrayer, his captors, Rome’s military might, and the Cross.  He will face and endure every conceivable physical and emotional trial the world can concoct.  He isn’t Superman, but he does know God so intimately as to be one with God.  This does not spare Jesus anxiety and distress, but it does give him the power to walk into them in faith.

And in the Eucharist, through the bread and the wine, Jesus gives to the disciples—and to us—access to that same power.  They have not his strength, nor do we.  But he gives us, most literally, himself to take into ourselves, granting us his faith when and where ours is lacking.  The lyricist Philip Riley says it this way:

Slow runs my heart.  A summer’s bud by winter held.  And if in faith my heart should fail, bring to my lips the cup, thine own sweet grail.

And if in faith my heart should fail, bring to my lips the cup, thine own sweet grail.  Each and every time we approach the altar rail, we take into ourselves Jesus himself.  And when we recognize this, then he mediates his own intimate relationship to God to us, and the Gethsemanes in our lives lose just enough of their darkness that we, with Jesus’ faith as lantern light, can navigate them.

But there is yet another way that Jesus passes his faith on to us.  In the prayer at this final meal, Jesus reveals that those who love him are destined to become his body in the world when he is gone.  “I in them and you in me,” he prays to God, “that they may become completely one.”  The faith of any one of us may not be strong enough to arise in Gethsemane, but the faith of us together surely is.  Together we embody the faith of Jesus, and when we share that faith through acts of love we share Jesus’ power one with another.

In the Upper Room, after the meal, Jesus shows the disciples what this looks like.  He gets up from the table, removes his robe, and ties a towel around himself.  He bends down onto the dust of the ground and washes the feet of his friends.  They—Peter especially—are at first horrified, both at the thought of what Jesus is doing and at the thought of allowing their feet to be washed by him.  But this act is a sacrament, no less than what Jesus does with the bread and the wine is a sacrament.  Through it Jesus reveals the vulnerability, the humility, and the willingness to risk discomfort that being his body in the world requires.  It is not enough, Jesus tells us, to say we love one another.  “Just as I have loved you,” he says with a back bent by this enacted labor of love, “love one another.”

At some point, we all enter Gethsemane.  We all come to those moments where we throw ourselves to the ground in distress and anxiety, when we know that our own strength is too feeble to pick us up again.  In those dark places, Jesus stands ready to meet us, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and in the committed love of one another.

Tonight of all nights, he will walk where we cannot.  He will stare into the eyes of death, and he will begin a three day journey that ends when death dies, and we forever live.

If in faith my heart should fail, bring to my lips the cup, thine own sweet grail.

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
John 12:1-3

There sits on the dresser of my bedroom a small wooden box.  Once upon a time, a quarter century ago, it was a jewelry box.  But now it is a treasure chest.  Were you to open it, you wouldn’t recognize any of its contents as treasures: a deck of old playing cards, a stained coffee mug, a luggage tag, an empty bottle that once contained “Witch Hazel” astringent.  To me, though, they are priceless.  They are the relics of my grandmother, taken by me from her bedroom along with the box itself when I was in the eighth grade, just after she’d died.

Occasionally I sit on the edge of the bed to open the fragile wooden box and sift through its contents.  My daughter Eliza likes to sit with me when I do so.  She is fascinated by the random menagerie of old things.  But she also gets frustrated because as we review our little treasures I’ll pause mid-sentence, almost as if entranced.  My catatonia is triggered when I hold the box just so and its aroma wafts to my nose.  My grandmother has been gone more than twenty-five years, but it is a fragrance of her, of McGehee, Arkansas, where she lived, and when my olfactory sense is triggered, the nostalgia is overpowering.  For a moment she is there, and I am with her, and the love is as real as it was the last time she embraced me.  Indeed, were the treasures themselves all gone, the fragrance would be more than enough.

The sense of smell is our oldest and most primitive sense.  Before humans had a gleam in our eyes, before our fingertips gained their sensitivity, before our ears were so finely tuned, we could smell.[i]  Like many of the oldest things, our sense of smell is, in many ways, the most powerful.  We are told that mothers, sometimes separated for years from their biological children, can nevertheless detect them by smell.  Siblings can do the same with one another.  Additionally, pheromones are detected by smell, attracting us to our mates.  Forget those love songs and sparkling jewels.  The way to our hearts is, in fact, through the nose!

There’s an interesting thing about the hardwiring of smell in human beings, which we share with almost none of God’s other creatures.  Our olfactory sense travels to the brain along two routes.  The first is to the frontal cortex, where the brain detects and identifies the scent.  That might be enough.  But the second pathway is to the limbic region of the brain—also old, also primitive, also powerful—where emotion and motivation and deepest memory live.  There aroma travels, and there it takes hold.  And the result is that we scarcely ever forget where we first sensed that smell; we are transported back to the origin of that scent; we discover our hearts and souls filled with the fragrance of that perfume.

You know this, don’t you?  You’ve been in the line at the grocery store and caught the scent of the perfume or cologne of the person in front of you.  Immediately, in your memory you were in the presence of the first person you ever kissed, who wore that same fragrance.  You blushed right there in the supermarket to no one in particular at the folly of your youthful infatuation all those years ago.

Or, you’ve walked into a house to discover someone baking that particular loaf of bread or pan of brownies or dish of herbs and spices and were suddenly transported back to that dinner party so long ago permeated by that self-same aroma.  All over again, you chuckle at the jokes that were told then and smile to yourself at the company you kept.

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The story John’s Gospel gives us today was clearly an important one to the followers of Jesus.  It appears in some version in John, Mark, and Luke.  Details of the story differ.  Sometimes Jesus is in Bethany, sometimes not.  Sometimes the woman who anoints him is Mary, sometimes she is unnamed.  But in every version we find the perfume.  In every version we imagine, as John tells us specifically, that the fragrance of the perfume fills the house.

It is clear that this was no dime store aftershave.  Both John and Mark stress how costly the perfume was, and John adds that Mary anoints Jesus with a Roman pound, or twelve full ounces of the stuff.  It’s also important to remember that first century Palestine was a place without antibacterial soap, without deodorant.  The few who could afford to do so powdered, perfumed and otherwise masked the noxious odors of their world in any way they could.  Perfume was among society’s most valued and cherished possessions, and what Mary poured upon Jesus likely equaled a full year’s wages.[ii]  Mary’s gift is not incidental.  She is making a profound sacrifice.  Through this material gift, she is sacramentally giving Jesus the all of her.

Was this, do you think, the first time those gathered around Jesus had smelled this particular scent?  What associations might have been conjured to mind when Mary broke open her jar?  No matter, because the implication is that the aroma of the perfume mingles with the blessed presence of Jesus, and a new experience is forged among those present.  It travels along their olfactory sense to the limbic brain, and there it settles into the deepest, oldest, most primitive part of them.  There it transforms emotion and motivation.  This experience with Jesus will become the most profound memory, one that will be pulled back into the present and made operative in their lives again and again whenever the fragrance of Jesus fills their souls.  For Mary the new experience will come to life in her again in just two weeks’ time, when on Easter morning she takes this same anointing perfume to what she believes to be the tomb of Jesus.  There, too, the rock-hewn room that aspired to be a grave is instead filled with that sweet fragrance…

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’     John 12: 4-8

But it’s still Lent, and we’re not there yet.  Back in today’s story, there is one person whose nostrils are closed to the fragrance.  There is one whose soul will not be filled with something new, whose motivations will not be changed, who willfully and obstinately refuses to allow his experience to be, then and forever, upended.  Judas masks his closed heart well, protesting that Mary’s extravagance should have been spent on the poor.  (We often pretend at virtue to disguise our vice.)  The whole house is filled with the fragrance of God, and Judas can’t smell a thing.

And so, granted a metaphor as powerful as our olfactory sense, we are left with two options.   We can close our nostrils, so to speak, and thus our souls this day.  We can walk through the virtuous motions of worship, pretending that on their own they matter.  We can mask our obstinate hearts.  We can leave here unchanged.

Or, we can inhale deeply the fragrance of God that fills this house.  We can take in the aroma of Christ Jesus, who will transform us heart and soul and will begin to emerge in our consciousness at both the profound and mundane moments of our lives: in that supermarket line, crossing the threshold at home, sitting on the edge of the bed sharing a memory with a child we love.  We, like Mary, can give Christ the all of us.  We can break ourselves open as Mary broke open the jar and allow the fragrance of God to settle into all the cracks and rivulets, changing us.  What better Lenten preparation could there be?

Christ’s love is with us and is as real as it was in Mary’s home in Bethany all those years ago.  His fragrance fills this house.  Amen.

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[i] The details of our olfactory sense come from Dr. Maggie Grotzinger, http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2011/09/sense_of_smell_can_bring_back.html.

[ii] Yancey, Philip, What Good is God?: In Search of a Faith that Matters, 87.

Not long ago I re-watched the Christopher Guest Indie comedy “Waiting for Guffman.”  The film takes place in the tiny and fictional town of Blaine, Missouri on the occasion of Blaine’s one hundred fiftieth anniversary.  As part of the anniversary celebration, the town’s community theatre troupe decides to present an original patriotic play entitled “Red, White, and Blaine.”  Anyone who has ever participated in small town community theatre (and I might have played the part of Friedrich von Trapp in Paragould’s production of “The Sound of Music” once upon a time) recognizes how hilariously accurate “Waiting for Guffman” is.  The characters—local travel agents; a dentist; an auto mechanic; and Corky St. Clair, the small-town director who supposedly once actually performed off, off, off Broadway—put everything they have into the show.  And their expectations rise when Corky receives word that famous Broadway producer Mort Guffman plans to travel to Blaine to attend opening night.

It’s important to know that each of the community actors believes he or she is better than Blaine, Missouri.  Each wants to escape Blaine and make it big in the world, and for much of the movie we hear vignettes from the characters about who they envision Mort Guffman to be and what his arrival will mean for them and their star-struck aspirations.  Guffman will be their savior, on their side.  The problem is, none of them (including Corky, really) has ever met Mort Guffman.  In the absence of that experience, and with no reliable evidence on which to base their expectations, they choose to imagine the Guffman they want to meet and what he will do for them.  As time goes on, their delusions of grandeur grow.

On opening night, with a chair in the front row reserved for the Broadway dignitary, the cast is bereft because Mort Guffman is late.  His chair sits empty.  Throughout the play, the actors are preoccupied staring at that chair, almost as if they can make the Guffman of their dreams materialize by sheer force of will.  Finally, a man saunters down the center aisle and takes Guffman’s seat.  Euphoria washes over the cast members, and when the show ends the presumptive Mr. Guffman is ushered backstage.  But then it’s revealed that the stranger isn’t Guffman at all.  He’s just a man in town visiting relatives, who wandered into the play.  Hopes are dashed; the real Mort Guffman never appears.

The characters in Luke’s Gospel today similarly discuss with Jesus a God they’ve never actually experienced or met.  And in the absence of actual encounter, they imagine a God who suits their needs and conforms to what they want God to be.  They imagine a God who smites people who aren’t like them, a God who sometimes uses the brute force of government as his instrument and other times directly causes calamities such as collapsing buildings to punish some while sparing others.  The people imagine God as they’d like God to be, but the problem is that they’ve never actually met God, and the irony is that they’re so convinced of the God of their imagination that they don’t recognize God in Jesus standing right in front of them.

There is danger here.  We can be found both in the absurdly comic characters of “Waiting for Guffman” and in the crowd surrounding Jesus.

How often is our conception of God bound up in the worldly things we want God to do for us, in the heights to which we want God to take us, in the ways we want God to set us apart as exceptional among all his creatures?

How often does the image we conjure of God implicitly put God on our side, with the assumption that those others are the sinful, those others merit God’s disdain and maybe even punishment.

But God won’t be bound by our conceptions.  When we quit staring so intently at the version of God to which we’ve long and subconsciously clung, we may find that the chair in which we think God sits is empty.  We’ve never actually met the God who sets us above others and who sides with us against others.  That God is not there, because that God is not God.  When we encounter the real God, and not the God of our own making, the experience is wholly different.  What is it like?

Today, Exodus tells us, Moses leads his flock “beyond the wilderness.”  If the wilderness borders the edge of our expectations, then “beyond the wilderness” is outside anything we can imagine.  And it is there, we’re told, that Moses quits staring squarely ahead and turns aside to see a flame erupt from a bush, but not an earthly flame, and the bush is not consumed.  From the flame comes a voice that says, “Remove the sandals from your feet, Moses, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”

Then the voice of God—the true and real God—says, “I have heard the misery of my people, and I appear to you now because I will use you to free them.  I will send you, and I will go with you.”

Remove your sandals, Moses. For the place on which you stand is holy ground.

Moses realizes that everyone he meets will have his own notion of who God is, so Moses asks, “What name do I give them?”  To which God responds, “Say that I AM…This is my name for all generations.”

In other words, God declares, once and for all, that God will not abide by the names we give him.  God will not bow to our imaginings of what God should be and should do.  God is I AM, bigger than and beyond all our categories.  We don’t get to make God in our image.  We don’t get to fashion a God who supports our views or follows our agendas.  God will be what God will be, and ours is only to listen and respond.

And God’s message does not change through age upon age.  God says through Jesus the Christ what he said to Moses millennia before, and God says the same to us this day: “I hear the misery of my people.  I have come to free them, and you will be my instrument.”

As we walk through our lives, especially this Lent, do we ever travel beyond the wilderness?  Are we willing to risk moving outside the realm of our expectations, where we might actually meet God?  Will we quit staring so intently with blinders on for the God we want to see and imagine we already know, and instead turn aside—as Moses did—to perhaps catch a glimpse of the real God when that God discloses himself?

Of course, there is danger in that, too.  Because once God has appeared, he refuses to be unseen.  Once God has spoken, he will not be unheard.  That is, I think, what Jesus is conveying in the latter half of the Gospel today.  Once we have seen and heard the God of redemption—once that God has called us forth to his work of grace in the world—our course is set.  We are become fig trees called to bear fruit.  We are agents of grace.  We are the ones to speak truth to Pharaoh.  We are to deliver those in misery.

We are to cease imagining what God might do and be for us and instead imagine how we might live for God.

Even here, in this place, the ground is holy.  God is in the candle flame and in the soaring music and in the Word spoken.  God is surely in the bread and in the wine.  We are beyond the wilderness here.  Perhaps we should remove our shoes.  Turn aside.  Listen and look.  I AM is here, and he is speaking to us.  Amen.

Carl Beresford Barkley, A.K.A. “Pop”

As all people do, biologically speaking, I had two grandfathers.  My paternal grandfather, as you may have read, was born and raised right here at Christ Church Cathedral.  His family have a storied history, and their heritage is inextricably linked with that of Texas.  My paternal grandfather died young, and I never knew him.  Someday, as we grow in relationship with one another, I’ll tell you the stories I know about him.  But not today.  Today I want to tell you something about my other grandfather, the one I did know, the one I and everyone else unfailingly called “Pop.”

Pop was not from Texas.  He was born and raised in Eastern Arkansas, in the Mississippi River delta, that river bottom region about which the nicest thing Mark Twain said is that the mud only comes up to the top of a man’s boots.  Specifically, Pop was from Cane Island, Arkansas, which holds the distinction of neither having any sugarcane nor being an island.  Even the little hamlet called Oil Trough, Arkansas once had an oil trough, so it’s a mystery how Cane Island got its name.

Pop’s real name was Carl Beresford Barkley.  (My first name comes from his last.)  “Beresford,” Pop’s middle name, may seem a little too sophisticated for someone from Cane Island, Arkansas.  The story goes that when my great-grandmother was pregnant she read a dime-store pulp fiction romance novel in which the dashing hero’s name was Beresford.  I’m not sure what that suggests about her hopes for her son, but there it is.

As a child, I loved visiting Pop.  I loved the things he could build with his two hands, the barbeque he could smoke, and the stories he could tell.  Some stories were pithy and short.  He was always partial to this one: “Algy met a bear.  The bear met Algy.  The bear was bulgy.  The bulge was Algy.”

Mark Twain on the Arkansas delta: “All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn’t nothing else BUT mud – mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two or three inches deep in ALL the places.” (From Huckleberry Finn)

Other stories Pop would tell about himself, and so it happened that one day I asked him, “Pop, what is the strangest thing that ever happened to you?”  He leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment, and then he told me this story:

“When I was a boy, round about 1920,” he said, “I stepped out the front door of my granny’s house to go home for dinner.  My granny was sitting in the rocking chair on her front porch, with a quilt tucked tightly around her legs.  She was old and withered and pained by severe arthritis.  She could barely move.  But she loved me, and she kissed me goodbye before I bounded off the porch, headed straight for home.  It didn’t take long to run from my granny’s house to my own, a few minutes at the most.  And when I arrived there, on my own front porch there she sat.  She’d beaten me there.  I don’t know how.  No one in Cane Island had a car.  I never knew.  I was too afraid to ask.  But there she was.  She’d been with me when I set out, and she was waiting for me when I arrived.”

The Genesis passage we read this morning is arguably the lynchpin of the entire biblical narrative.  St. Paul relies on this passage for the crux of his argument about law and faith in Galatians.  The great theologians St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth all lean heavily on this story as well.

Abram, who will soon be renamed Abraham, has already set out on the life’s journey to which God called him several chapters before.  There, God visited Abraham and told him to leave his home in the land of Ur and move to a new place with the promise of blessing.  God sees Abraham off the front porch, so to speak, and God sends him on his way.

Abraham then travels the road, and when he finally enters that Promised Land, he discovers that the same God who was with him when he set out is also there waiting for him when he arrives.  Abraham doesn’t know how this is so, and he doesn’t know what to make of the presence of this God who saw him off in Ur.  He fumbles to say the right things to God, but he’s too startled to make any real sense.  So God speaks, and God reiterates his promise to Abraham.

And then we arrive at the verse that so captivated St. Paul, the fourteen brief words that led Augustine and Luther and Barth to write tens of thousands of words in response.  These words: “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

What does it mean, that Abraham believed?  That’s what the great theologians have pondered and argued about for thousands of years.  All they really agree upon is that everything about our relationship with God relies on this moment.  This is the moment in which Abraham’s faith is defined.  This is the moment when the ancestor of us all—the very founder of faith in God—gets it.  This is the moment when God looks at a broken and flawed man and nevertheless says, “I claim you as righteous.”

But what does it mean?  It’s easier to recognize what it does not mean.  Abraham’s faith—his belief—cannot be that he completely understands God, that he has all the right answers, which is, unfortunately, what is often meant by belief in our day.  Abraham’s fumbling questions make it clear that he doesn’t have all the right answers about God.  God and God’s purposes continue to be a mystery to him.

Neither can Abraham’s faith be about doing all the right things, about behaving and achieving in ways that result in God’s prosperity and favor, because both before and after this encounter with God, Abraham’s life is often a train wreck.  In fact, in the very next chapter of Genesis Abraham makes a huge mess of things.

And finally, Abraham’s faith cannot be understood as an absence of doubt.  Abraham does doubt, again and again and again throughout the Genesis narrative, both before and after today’s passage.

What, then, is Abraham’s faith that’s to serve as the model for our own?  If it’s not having all the right answers, if it’s not about doing all the right things, and if it’s not the absence of doubt, what’s left?

What’s left—what is the sum of Abraham’s faith in God—is that from this moment forward Abraham never forgets, and always seeks, the God who set him on his journey and who also awaits him upon his arrival.  Even when Abraham answers wrongly, even when he fails, even when he is riddled with doubt, Abraham always remembers that he travels God’s road, with God at its beginning, with God at its end, and with God met at rest stops all along the way.  God is Abraham’s source, his strength, and his goal.

That is Abraham’s God.  That is our God.  That is the God who sees us off the front porch and sets us on the path with the promise to bless us, as he blessed Abraham, but not for our own sakes; rather that we may be a blessing to those we encounter on our journey through God’s world.

It is not always an easy journey.  Even today, hot on the heels of his conversation with God, we are told that a “deep and terrifying darkness” descends upon Abraham.  And that is why true faith is so crucial.  When darkness and doubt and terror threaten us, by faith we remember that it is God who set us on our course, and it is God with whom and toward whom we travel.  And that’s where we find our strength.

I suspect I know how Pop’s grandmother arrived at his home before he did.  He was a boy.  The straight path between her house and his probably wasn’t so straight.  He likely wandered in the woods, became preoccupied with distractions, and even got lost a time or two.  The journey likely took a lot longer than he realized.  But when he finally arrived, the one who had set him off with a kiss was waiting for him in love.  And so it is with us and God.

Beginning this Lenten season, we—you and I—walk God’s road together, and God beckons us forward.  My prayer is that we’ll have the courage to walk in faith.  Like Abraham, we’ll find ourselves startled and surprised to find God already waiting for us in unexpected places.  Along the way, we’ll also meet those who are in darkness and those who are in light.  We’ll meet those who think differently about God, and behave differently, and sometimes harbor desperate doubts.  In other words, we’ll meet people a lot like us.  We’ll welcome them, any and all who seek to walk with God.  We’ll love them, and we’ll love one another.  I am grateful to be your traveling companion. 

There is a scene in the film Legends of the Fall, in which Tristan Ludlow, a Montana rancher, rides out into big sky country to check the perimeter of his ranch.  As with every scene in the movie, which won the Academy Award for cinematography in 1994, the viewer is drawn into the magnificent and sublime visual imagery.  Vistas are broad, colors are stunning, and (Jill would add) the fact that Tristan Ludlow is played by Brad Pitt only adds to the sweeping canvas.  The mythos of Montana is captured, with its soaring big sky, and the viewer is very nearly drawn out of the everyday world.

But in this scene, the viewer is dragged back to earth so quickly that the experience is wrenching.  Tristan Ludlow, checking on the perimeter of his ranch, comes upon a bleating young calf, completely tangled and bloodied in a mess of barbed wire.  The calf struggles to get free, but with each movement it draws the razor wire in on itself, increasing its entanglement and pain.  We don’t know how the calf became tangled.  Most likely it wandered from the herd, only to be chased by a wolf or some other predator.  The how doesn’t really matter.  The calf is lost.  It is trapped.  And with each attempt to pull itself free, it causes itself greater injury.

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To at least a very few of you—those with exceptionally good memories—this story is familiar.  It is the story with which I began my first sermon from this pulpit on September 16, 2007.  By my count, that was 280 Sundays ago, 1040 Sunday Eucharists ago.  By a measure of years, that’s not a lot of time, but by the measure of our shared lives together, it is season upon season.

I still recall with clarity my struggle to write that first sermon and to identify the illustration that would aptly capture both our human condition and the experience from which St. John’s Church was at that time emerging.  The Rev. Anne Hallmark has done remarkably faithful work as the interim rector of this place, but even so, there were many who came to see me in my initial days here, before I stood in this pulpit.  They shared stories of estrangement from this place or from their Christian brothers and sisters here.  They felt lost—like the sheep in Jesus’ parable, which was the Gospel text that day—but theirs was not a mere wandering in the woods.  It was constricting and suffocating; it was painful; it reminded me of Tristan Ludlow’s calf.

Trusting you’ll forgive me for straying from the lectionary, I appointed the Parable of the Lost Sheep as our Gospel text for today, as a bookend to our ministry together.  And so, Jesus asks, “Wouldn’t any of you,” Jesus asks, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you found it?”

I think we usually read this passage assuming the scribes and the Pharisees to whom Jesus is speaking would have nodded in agreement with his proposition.  But that’s not so.  In an impoverished place like first century Palestine, a landowner with one hundred sheep was a rare, rare thing.  And there’s no way such a landowner would endanger 99% of his wealth in order to save the remaining 1%.  When Jesus asks his question, the response of the scribes and Pharisees is undoubtedly, “Are you crazy?  Leave ninety-nine sheep to save one lamb?  What kind of sense is that?”

Indeed, it makes no sense by the calculus of the world, so long as we imagine ourselves as the shepherd with ninety-nine well-tended sheep securely in their pen.  But then, we’re not the shepherd, are we?  That’s not where we’re to be found in this parable.  We’re not, most of us, the one with the neatly ordered life who has it so together that we scarcely need take notice when a single sheep goes astray.

Despite outward appearances, we know in the deepest recesses of their hearts that there is no such thing as the neatly ordered life.  Those whose lives appear to be neatly put together—whether we’re talking about the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day or Episcopalians in our own—are often those who, just beneath the surface, feel hurt and tangled up spiritually and emotionally, like that hundredth lost sheep, or that calf caught in barbed wire.

Jesus knows this, too, because he, like all the rest of us, experienced it.  As a youth, he struggled with parents with whose expectations for him he disagreed.  As an adult after his baptism, he was tormented and tempted in the wilderness by the Devil himself.  And later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was so pained at the thought of the coming cross that he sweated drops like blood.

Jesus has been, in his own way, that hundredth sheep.  He may not have sinned, but he surely knows what it feels like to be starkly, desperately alone.  He knows what it feels like for cords of death to wrap ever more tightly around him.  He knows what it feels like to hang on the cross and pray to God for deliverance.  And because of this, he knows that there is nothing more important in the life of faith than seeking out the lost sheep and bringing it home.  This is what he does for us, because he is also the shepherd, and this is what he calls us to do for one another, because we are his Church.

In Legends of the Fall, Tristan Ludlow rides upon the calf caught in the barbed wire.  Indeed it is, by the world’s calculus, an insignificant thing: one small calf among hundreds of head of cattle.  It would be easy to draw away and pass the calf by.  But Tristan leaps from his horse without hesitation and struggles with all his strength to loosen the cords that cut and strangle this frightened and hurting animal.  What makes the difference?  Why does Tristan value this single and seemingly doomed creature?

Those who have seen the Legends of the Fall know that, though Brad Pitt may be beautiful, Tristan is utterly human.  He has suffered incredible pain and loss in his life.  In other words, he knows what it is to be pursued by wolves, to be constricted with razor wire that draws in upon him at every movement.  He knows what it is, and so in a moment of his strength he responds, seeking to be a blessing to one in desperate need.

When we experience circumstances in life that affect us like emotional or spiritual barbed wire and every attempt to struggle free only brings more pain, Jesus seeks to find us and bring us home.  And when we are strong, Jesus makes shepherds of us and commissions us to become the bearers of grace to the lost sheep.

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I said most of these things in anticipation and hope five and a half years ago.  280 Sundays ago, I claimed that Jesus’ faith, and the faith to which he calls us, is the faith that is drawn to the lost sheep and the tangled calf.  And friends, we have been faithful.

We have shared God’s grace with one another in these walls, especially when those among us felt lost and alone and experienced the barbed wire of life entangling us.  We have ridden out to the perimeter of our community to seek those who were lost there, too, just as Tristan Ludlow rode to the very edge of his ranch.  We didn’t ride alone.  Jesus himself went with us, because he knows what it is to be lost and alone, just as he knows what it is to be strong.  And though I’m headed to different ranches (populated by longhorns), Jesus still goes with you.  He goes with you.  Continue to be the Church that seeks the hundredth sheep.  Be the Church that untangles the barbed wire of life.  Because Jesus seeks you when you are lost, seek and find one another.  And when you do, rejoice.  Amen.