Sin

It’s About the Bread

shelliwilliams Betrayal, Betrayed, Forgiveness, Holy Week, LENT, Sin , ,

Communion-breadScripture Passage:  John 13: 21-32 (Holy Wednesday)

After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.  When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

(Sorry…Wednesday’s post is a little late!) We started this week with the account of the anointing of Jesus, a story that shows us what it means to extravagantly serve our Lord. Tuesday’s text was one that showed us the meaning of following Jesus, indeed what it means to “take up our cross”. And then today…no extravagant anointing, no taking up any crosses…just a prediction of a betrayal of the worst kind as the dark pall of death begins to enshroud our week.

This passage is indeed a difficult one. Look how it begins…”Jesus was troubled in spirit.” He knew. He knew that a friend would betray him. It made him angry and indignant. But, more than that…it had to hurt. That has to be one of the worst pains imaginable. Because…think about it…betrayal is not something that you do to a stranger. You do not speak of inadvertently cutting someone off in traffic as a “betrayal”. For, you see, betrayal…true betrayal…is a deep-cutting blade that that can only cut into the closest of relationships. As painful as it may be, betrayal only happens in the midst of true intimacy. And that is the most painful of all.  “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” What? The disciples looked at each other flabbergasted. NOT one of us. (And even if it was one of us, it is certainly not I. Maybe him or him or him. But I KNOW it’s not me! I love you! You are my Lord!) So Simon Peter leans in…Jesus…come here…come on, you can tell me…who is it? And Jesus, with perfect parabolic eloquence responds…It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish. And then he hands it to Judas. Do quickly what you are going to do.  But the disciples didn’t get it. Well, of course not…because it really doesn’t make sense. So they began speculating. You know what I bet he really MEANT to say? He MUST have been telling him to buy something for the festival or to give something to the poor. (After all, just a few days ago, Judas was worried about the poor and why money was not being spent on them rather than on the extravagant anointing of our Lord!) NOW it makes sense. Because NONE of us could betray Jesus. And so the other disciples are removed from the betrayal, relieved of the blame.

So Judas leaves immediately. Even in the midst of betrayal, he is quietly obedient, knowing in his heart of hearts where he really belongs and is not going. And the passage ends as the darkness of night falls.  We know what happens after that. It was Judas who led the authorities to the garden a little way east of the walls of the city and it was Judas who signaled to them which of the men standing there in the dark was Jesus. It all changed with a single kiss as Judas’ lips graze Jesus’ cheek.

But I think, in all honesty, we may be a little too eager to jump on the “blame Judas” band wagon. After all, there is probably a little Judas in all of us. There are those times for all of us when we inadvertently choose the darkness, either intentionally or unintentionally. There are those times when our greed or maybe even our fears drive us to choose the security of wealth or the selfishness of our own preservation, fleeting as it may be, over trust in Christ. There are times when our own blindness toward others compels us to choose our own personal bread, rather than a community feast. And there are times when even our love for our Lord is so shrouded in the darkness of greed, and insecurity, and selfishness towards others that we once again hand him over to be crucified in our hearts. We all must ask the question “Is it I”? And we all must face the uncomfortable truth that sometimes it is.

And we know what happened to Judas. As the writer of Matthew’s Gospel accounts, when Jesus was condemned to death, Judas could not face himself. What had he done? And so he hanged himself, a victim of his own choices and his own action. And to this day, Judas lives on as the veritable poster child of the worst sin imaginable, known to all as the one who handed the Savior of the World over to be crucified. His name has literally become a noun, the description of the worst that one can do. Dante places him on the 4th level of the 9th circle of the inferno, hanging out for the ages in the bowels of hell between Brutus and Cassius, who conspired in the assassination of Julius Caesar. And we, like the other eleven disciples, breathe a collective sigh of relief that it was not us, that we were not the one that betrayed our Lord.

And yet, the story does not end there. With all respect to the 14th century Italian poet, I think he may have missed that. I do think that Judas ended up in hell, the worst hell imaginable, a self-imposed banishment from God, a place where he could not conceive that he would ever be forgiven because he could not forgive himself. So in that place with the blood of Christ on his hands, he saw no end other than his own.

I’ve read this Scripture many times. I’ve even preached on it a few. But this time, something else leapt off the page for me. (I love it when that happens!) I missed it before. It was the bread. Jesus said “the one to whom I give this bread.” The point is, he gave it to all of them. They were all betrayers but, more importantly, they were also all beloved.  I once heard Walter Brueggemann talk about the liturgy that we use for our Eucharist. Before we take the bread, before we take the cup, we confess. We name our sin. We name our betrayals. And then, we are told “In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” The words do not specify that we are forgiven if we are good or that we are forgiven if we’re only on the first couple of circles of Dante’s vision of hell. Nowhere does it say that we are forgiven of limbo or lust or gluttony but if we get to the fourth circle (which is greed) or below, we are doomed. Nowhere does it say that. And Brueggemann points out that with those words, with the simple words “In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven,” we are wiped clean, spotless, if only for a moment. Oh, but what a moment!

Because, you see, the good news is that God does not love us in spite of who we are; God loves us because of who we are—the betrayer and the beloved, the Judas and the one whom Jesus loved. God loved us before any human person could show love to us—a “first” love, an unlimited, unconditional love—loved us so much that when we are handed this bread, we are handed the real presence of Christ—all of us—the bumbling disciples, those unnamed people that were in the periphery of the picture that day, the beloved and the betrayer, and me. I, Judas, no matter what I do, am forgiven. That was the part of the story Dante forgot. Forgiveness is not payment for a job well done; it is our chance to start again.

Judas was there at the table. Jesus served him as one of his own. It still hurt. But God’s unfathomable grace and God’s forgiveness is bigger than our own selfish betrayal, bigger than any hell we could ever imagine or conjure up for ourselves.  You know, it’s about the bread…

And so, Madeleine L’Engle tells an old legend that after his death Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept his repentance, and when the tears were finally spent he looked up and saw, way, way up, a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to try to climb up towards it. The walls of the pit were dank and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top, and then he slipped and fell all the way back down. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance, and then he started to climb again. After many more falls and efforts and failures he reached the top and dragged himself into an upper room with twelve people seated around a table. “We’ve been waiting for you, Judas. We couldn’t begin till you came.” (From “Waiting for Judas”, by Madeleine L’Engle, in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 312.)

That is the crux. None of us are innocent. All of us are forgiven. Holy Thursday does not end in betrayal; it ends in love. Perhaps rather than trying to lay blame for what happened at the Cross, perhaps rather than using Judas as the scapegoat for all of our own sins, we should let the Cross be what it is—a place of healing, a place of reconciliation, a place of forgiveness, a place of life recreated. Because of the Cross, all of us are invited to the table and each of us, no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, no matter what we will do, is handed the bread. Each of us is the one to whom I give this bread.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.

(In the Name of Jesus Christ, I, Judas, am forgiven.)

The body of Christ given for you. Take, eat, in remembrance of me.

The soldiers are there with their swords and lanterns.  The high priest’s slave is whimpering over his wounded ear.  There can be no doubt in Jesus’ mind what the kiss of Judas means, but it is Judas that he is blessing, and Judas that he is prepared to go out and die for now.  Judas is only the first in a procession of betrayers two thousand years long, If Jesus were to exclude him from love and forgiveness, to one degree or another he would have to exclude us all.  Maybe this is all in the mind of Jesus as he stands with his eyes closed, or possibly there is nothing in his mind at all.  As he feels his friend’s lips graze his cheek for an instant, maybe he feels nothing else…It is not the Lamb of God and his butcher who meet here, but two old friends embracing in a garden knowing that they will never see one another again. (Frederick Buechner)

We are journeying through Holy Week.  Things are changing and what we know will come is imminent.  But forgiveness is abundant.  We are all Judas’s.  What are the Judas parts of you?  What does it mean to be forgiven?  Have you forgiven yourself?  None of us are innocent.  All of us are forgiven.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

 

 

Psalm 32: A Season of Clearing

shelliwilliams Confession, Forgiveness, LENT, Repentance, Sin

WeedingPsalter for Today:  Psalm 32: 1-5

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah

We don’t really like talking about confession very much, do we?  Oh, we come that one day a year and get ashes on our forehead and then quickly wash them off that night.  We’d rather just assume that the whole notion of the cross just covered all sins past, present, and future so that we can talk about things that are more to our liking–love, grace, acceptance, even forgiveness.  And the language of iniquity and confession is so archaic to many, not really part of our mainstream thinking about what church and faith should hold.  (I suppose it doesn’t hold a lot of attraction for our “feel good” society either.)  And so, to be honest, we sort of just look at our “light” side, so to speak, burying the dark and the unmentionables behind closed doors, keeping our sins and transgressions hidden from sight hoping maybe, just maybe, they’ll just somehow evaporate and go away.  Maybe if we quit talking about them, just take them off the table, they’ll just slip away unnoticed.  The words of the Psalm sort of haunt us though.  Keeping silent is not the same as reconciling. Silence should be revealing rather than something that hides. Burying one’s transgressions and shortcomings just takes too much of our life and too much of who we are to handle. (And they usually eventually get exposed anyway!)

This season of Lent brings up a lot of discussion about sin and confession.  Have you noticed that?  We also hear quite a bit of farming and gardening language, don’t we?  We hear words like “fertile ground” and “new growth”.  We like those.  They give us hope and a chance at new life.  But even the most inexperienced of gardeners knows that plants do not grow and flower without a little preparation, without a little room.  I am feeling that right now each time I look at my sad flowerbeds that are still full of winter brush choking out most promises of growth or life.  (And the little tornado that shot through them a couple of weeks ago did not help!) There are a few apparently detrermined plants peeking through or trying desperately to scale the dead branches of their former selves.  They are literally begging for me to help them.  We are no different.  We need room.  We need to clear the underbrush and all that is choking out our life.  We need to recognize and acknowledge those things in our life that separate us from God and separate us from who we are before God.  From that standpoint, acknowledgement of sins, confession, is life-giving.

The French philosopher, Simone Weil once said that “all sins are attempts to fill voids.”  You see, I think we’re a lot like those growing plants.  God left us a little room for growth, a little breathing space.  But emptiness is hard to hold, hard to maintain.   And over time, it is easy for things to seep into that space that do not belong, things that choke out life for us.  It is imperative for us to know that, to acknowledge those things, so that we can then let them go.  That is what confession does.  It’s not a matter of wallowing in guilt or proving one’s remorse.  Confession is the clearing.  It once again leaves room to grow.  It frees us to be who God calls us to be.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think God is standing back waiting for us to confess our sins so that forgiveness can be handed to us.  This is not a barter system or even a divine reward system.  I believe that God has already forgiven us, is already making that space ready.  God does not demand our confession like some sort of callous judge.  The confession is for us.  It is the way that the door opens again.  It is the way that we make room again.  Silence denies that open door.  Silence denies the grace that God is always and forever offering.  Repentance is a way of beginning again.  It doesn’t change what has happened.  It doesn’t erase the consequences or the hurt or the change in one’s life.  It just once again makes room to grow.  The fact that we don’t talk much about confession anymore is not short-changing God; it is short-changing us.  Oh sure, there will always be those wonderful parts of who we are that peek through like fledgling plants.  But think what life would look like if you got rid of all that underbrush, if you truly allowed room for God to work.

Providence watches over each of us as we journey through life, providing us with two guides:  repentance and remorse.  The one calls us forward. The other calls us back.  Yet they do not contradict each other, nor do they leave the traveler in doubt or confusion.  For the one calls forward to the God, the other back from the evil. And there are two of them, because in order to make our journey secure we must look ahead as well as back.  (Soren Kierkegaard)

On this first Sunday of Lent, what are those things that you have buried in your life?  What needs to be done to reconcile so that you can begin again?

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

It’s About the Bread

shelliwilliams Betrayal, Betrayed, Forgiveness, Holy Week, LENT, Sin , ,

Communion-breadScripture Passage:  John 13: 21-32 (Holy Wednesday)

After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.  When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

We started this week with the account of the anointing of Jesus, a story that shows us what it means to extravagantly serve our Lord. Yesterday’s text was one that showed us the meaning of following Jesus, indeed what it means to “take up our cross”. And then today…no extravagant anointing, no taking up any crosses…just a prediction of a betrayal of the worst kind as the dark pall of death begins to enshroud our week.

This passage is indeed a difficult one. Look how it begins…”Jesus was troubled in spirit.” He knew. He knew that a friend would betray him. It made him angry and indignant. But, more than that…it had to hurt. That has to be one of the worst pains imaginable. Because…think about it…betrayal is not something that you do to a stranger. You do not speak of inadvertently cutting someone off in traffic as a “betrayal”. For, you see, betrayal…true betrayal…is a deep-cutting blade that that can only cut into the closest of relationships. As painful as it may be, betrayal only happens in the midst of true intimacy. And that is the most painful of all.  “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” What? The disciples looked at each other flabbergasted. NOT one of us. (And even if it was one of us, it is certainly not I. Maybe him or him or him. But I KNOW it’s not me! I love you! You are my Lord!) So Simon Peter leans in…Jesus…come here…come on, you can tell me…who is it? And Jesus, with perfect parabolic eloquence responds…It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish. And then he hands it to Judas. Do quickly what you are going to do.  But the disciples didn’t get it. Well, of course not…because it really doesn’t make sense. So they began speculating. You know what I bet he really MEANT to say? He MUST have been telling him to buy something for the festival or to give something to the poor. (After all, just a few days ago, Judas was worried about the poor and why money was not being spent on them rather than on the extravagant anointing of our Lord!) NOW it makes sense. Because NONE of us could betray Jesus. And so the other disciples are removed from the betrayal, relieved of the blame.

So Judas leaves immediately. Even in the midst of betrayal, he is quietly obedient, knowing in his heart of hearts where he really belongs and is not going. And the passage ends as the darkness of night falls.  We know what happens after that. It was Judas who led the authorities to the garden a little way east of the walls of the city and it was Judas who signaled to them which of the men standing there in the dark was Jesus. It all changed with a single kiss as Judas’ lips graze Jesus’ cheek.

But I think, in all honesty, we may be a little too eager to jump on the “blame Judas” band wagon. After all, there is probably a little Judas in all of us. There are those times for all of us when we inadvertently choose the darkness, either intentionally or unintentionally. There are those times when our greed or maybe even our fears drive us to choose the security of wealth or the selfishness of our own preservation, fleeting as it may be, over trust in Christ. There are times when our own blindness toward others compels us to choose our own personal bread, rather than a community feast. And there are times when even our love for our Lord is so shrouded in the darkness of greed, and insecurity, and selfishness towards others that we once again hand him over to be crucified in our hearts. We all must ask the question “Is it I”? And we all must face the uncomfortable truth that sometimes it is.

And we know what happened to Judas. As the writer of Matthew’s Gospel accounts, when Jesus was condemned to death, Judas could not face himself. What had he done? And so he hanged himself, a victim of his own choices and his own action. And to this day, Judas lives on as the veritable poster child of the worst sin imaginable, known to all as the one who handed the Savior of the World over to be crucified. His name has literally become a noun, the description of the worst that one can do. Dante places him on the 4th level of the 9th circle of the inferno, hanging out for the ages in the bowels of hell between Brutus and Cassius, who conspired in the assassination of Julius Caesar. And we, like the other eleven disciples, breathe a collective sigh of relief that it was not us, that we were not the one that betrayed our Lord.

And yet, the story does not end there. With all respect to the 14th century Italian poet, I think he may have missed that. I do think that Judas ended up in hell, the worst hell imaginable, a self-imposed banishment from God, a place where he could not conceive that he would ever be forgiven because he could not forgive himself. So in that place with the blood of Christ on his hands, he saw no end other than his own.

I’ve read this Scripture many times. I’ve even preached on it a few. But this time, something else leapt off the page for me. (I love it when that happens!) I missed it before. It was the bread. Jesus said “the one to whom I give this bread.” The point is, he gave it to all of them. They were all betrayers but, more importantly, they were also all beloved.  I once heard Walter Brueggemann talk about the liturgy that we use for our Eucharist. Before we take the bread, before we take the cup, we confess. We name our sin. We name our betrayals. And then, we are told “In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” The words do not specify that we are forgiven if we are good or that we are forgiven if we’re only on the first couple of circles of Dante’s vision of hell. Nowhere does it say that we are forgiven of limbo or lust or gluttony but if we get to the fourth circle (which is greed) or below, we are doomed. Nowhere does it say that. And Brueggemann points out that with those words, with the simple words “In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven,” we are wiped clean, spotless, if only for a moment. Oh, but what a moment!

Because, you see, the good news is that God does not love us in spite of who we are; God loves us because of who we are—the betrayer and the beloved, the Judas and the one whom Jesus loved. God loved us before any human person could show love to us—a “first” love, an unlimited, unconditional love—loved us so much that when we are handed this bread, we are handed the real presence of Christ—all of us—the bumbling disciples, those unnamed people that were in the periphery of the picture that day, the beloved and the betrayer, and me. I, Judas, no matter what I do, am forgiven. That was the part of the story Dante forgot. Forgiveness is not payment for a job well done; it is our chance to start again.

Judas was there at the table. Jesus served him as one of his own. It still hurt. But God’s unfathomable grace and God’s forgiveness is bigger than our own selfish betrayal, bigger than any hell we could ever imagine or conjure up for ourselves.  You know, it’s about the bread…

And so, Madeleine L’Engle tells an old legend that after his death Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept his repentance, and when the tears were finally spent he looked up and saw, way, way up, a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to try to climb up towards it. The walls of the pit were dank and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top, and then he slipped and fell all the way back down. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance, and then he started to climb again. After many more falls and efforts and failures he reached the top and dragged himself into an upper room with twelve people seated around a table. “We’ve been waiting for you, Judas. We couldn’t begin till you came.” (From “Waiting for Judas”, by Madeleine L’Engle, in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 312.)

That is the crux. None of us are innocent. All of us are forgiven. Holy Thursday does not end in betrayal; it ends in love. Perhaps rather than trying to lay blame for what happened at the Cross, perhaps rather than using Judas as the scapegoat for all of our own sins, we should let the Cross be what it is—a place of healing, a place of reconciliation, a place of forgiveness, a place of life recreated. Because of the Cross, all of us are invited to the table and each of us, no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, no matter what we will do, is handed the bread. Each of us is the one to whom I give this bread.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.

(In the Name of Jesus Christ, I, Judas, am forgiven.)

The body of Christ given for you. Take, eat, in remembrance of me.

The soldiers are there with their swords and lanterns.  The high priest’s slave is whimpering over his wounded ear.  There can be no doubt in Jesus’ mind what the kiss of Judas means, but it is Judas that he is blessing, and Judas that he is prepared to go out and die for now.  Judas is only the first in a procession of betrayers two thousand years long, If Jesus were to exclude him from love and forgiveness, to one degree or another he would have to exclude us all.  Maybe this is all in the mind of Jesus as he stands with his eyes closed, or possibly there is nothing in his mind at all.  As he feels his friend’s lips graze his cheek for an instant, maybe he feels nothing else…It is not the Lamb of God and his butcher who meet here, but two old friends embracing in a garden knowing that they will never see one another again. (Frederick Buechner)

We are journeying through Holy Week.  Things are changing and what we know will come is imminent.  But forgiveness is abundant.  We are all Judas’s.  What are the Judas parts of you?  What does it mean to be forgiven?  Have you forgiven yourself?  None of us are innocent.  All of us are forgiven.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

 

 

Psalm 32: A Season of Clearing

shelliwilliams Confession, Forgiveness, LENT, Repentance, Sin

WeedingPsalter for Today:  Psalm 32: 1-5

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah

We don’t really like talking about confession very much, do we?  We’d rather just assume that the whole notion of the cross just covered all sins past, present, and future so that we can talk about things that are more to our liking–love, grace, acceptance, even forgiveness.  And the language of iniquity and confession is so archaic to many, not really part of our mainstream thinking about what church and faith should hold.  (I suppose it doesn’t hold a lot of attraction for our “feel good” society either.)  And so, to be honest, we sort of just look at our “light” side, so to speak, burying the dark and the unmentionables behind closed doors, keeping our sins and transgressions hidden from sight hoping maybe, just maybe, they’ll just somehow evaporate and go away.  Maybe if we quit talking about them, just take them off the table, they’ll just slip away unnoticed.  The words of the Psalm sort of haunt us though.  Keeping silent is not the same as reconciling. Burying one’s transgressions and shortcomings just takes too much of our life and too much of who we are to handle.

This season of Lent brings up a lot of discussion about sin and confession.  Have you noticed that?  We also hear quite a bit of farming and gardening language, don’t we?  We hear words like “fertile ground” and “new growth”.  We like those.  They give us hope and a chance at new life.  But even the most inexperienced of gardeners knows that plants do not grow and flower without a little preparation, without a little room.  I am feeling that right now each time I look at my sad flowerbeds that are still full of winter brush choking out most promises of growth or life.  There are a few apparently very hearty flowers peeking through with their little pink blooms but for the most part, they are literally begging for me to help them.  We are no different.  We need room.  We need to clear the underbrush and all that is choking out our life.  We need to recognize and acknowledge those things in our life that separate us from God and separate us from who we are before God.  From that standpoint, acknowledgement of sins, confession, is life-giving.

The French philosopher, Simone Weil once said that “all sins are attempts to fill voids.”  You see, I think we’re a lot like those growing plants.  God left us a little room for growth, a little breathing space.  But emptiness is hard to hold, hard to maintain.   And over time, it is easy for things to seep into that space that do not belong, things that choke out life for us.  It is imperative for us to know that, to acknowledge those things, so that we can then let them go.  That is what confession does.  It’s not a matter of wallowing in guilt or proving one’s remorse.  Confession is the clearing.  It once again leaves room to grow.  It frees us to be who God calls us to be.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think God is standing back waiting for us to confess our sins so that forgiveness can be handed to us.  This is not a barter system.  I believe that God has already forgiven, is already making that space ready.  God does not demand our confession like some sort of callous judge.  The confession is for us.  It is the way that the door opens again.  It is the way that we make room again.  Silence denies that open door.  Silence denies the grace that God is always and forever offering.  Repentance is a way of beginning again.  It doesn’t change what has happened.  It doesn’t erase the consequences or the hurt or the change in one’s life.  It just once again makes room to grow.  The fact that we don’t talk much about confession anymore is not short-changing God; it is short-changing us.  Oh sure, there will always be those wonderful parts of who we are that peek through like little pink flowers.  But think what life would look like if you got rid of all that underbrush, if you truly allowed room for God to work.

Providence watches over each of us as we journey through life, providing us with two guides:  repentance and remorse.  The one calls us forward. The other calls us back.  Yet they do not contradict each other, nor do they leave the traveler in doubt or confusion.  For the one calls forward to the God, the other back from the evil. And there are two of them, because in order to make our journey secure we must look ahead as well as back.  (Soren Kierkegaard)

On this first Sunday of Lent, what are those things that you have buried in your life?  What needs to be done to reconcile so that you can begin again?

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

After the Garden

shelliwilliams Awareness, Calling, Choices, Desire for God, Journey, LENT, Omnipotence, Sin

 

"The Garden of Eden with the Temptation in the Background", by Jan Brueghel the elder, c. 1600, (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
“The Garden of Eden with the Temptation in the Background”, by Jan Brueghel the elder, c. 1600, (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Scripture Passage:  Genesis 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7 (Lent 1A)

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;  but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”…Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’“ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

So at the beginning of this year’s Lenten season, the Lectionary propels us back into our somewhat sketchy past.  St. Augustine and myriads of theologians to follow would have called it the “original sin”, as if it is the cause of all other sins that follow.  Now, admittedly, I don’t like to get stuck on that idea of original sin.  I’m pretty sure that if the first humans had not messed up, someone soon after would have.  But this is the story we have.  We have images of humans walking in a beautiful garden hand in hand without a care in the world.  And then we have some sort of talking snake or prehistoric serpent or some other obnoxious creature that pulls them away from who they are and who they are meant to be.  And they give in.  They give in to the first temptation to be someone they are not.  Then they realize their mistake much too late to change the course of their action.  Well, we know the story.  (Oh, who are we kidding? We’re LIVING the story!)  They are no longer innocent and the beauty of the garden is lost forever.

This has always been an odd story to me.  Now, admittedly, I’m sure it is of no surprise to most of you that I tend to assume that this is fable rather than a literal historical account. But just because it probably isn’t “true” does not mean that it is not full of “Truth”.  In some respects, this is the rawest, most profound, most human Truth that there is.  After all, we all wander down the wrong road every now and again and some of us do it daily without even intending it.  And we all live with consequences of trying to overreach, trying to be someone we’re not, trying to assume things that are not ours to assume.  We all live with consequences of, essentially, overstepping and overreaching and trying to be the god of our own life.  And we all lose that innocence that we once had.

But, really, does God want a bunch of mindless innocents walking around in this world?  If that were the case, then God would never have shared the part of the Godself with us that is known as free will.  You see, God in God’s infinite wisdom gave up omnipotence for relationship.  God doesn’t want a bunch of robotic beings following the Great Divine because they know nothing else.  God created us to desire, to choose, to follow God of our own volition.  Innocence is way overrated.  You see, if God wanted us to stay in some sort of garden, fenced off from the rest of the world, I guess God would have left us there, protected from the world and, mostly, from ourselves.  I really don’t think that this journey we’re on returns us to the Garden, whatever that was.  That was our beginning.  The journey returns us to God, to who God envisions that we can be.  Think of the Garden as our womb, the place that protected and shielded us until we were ready for the journey, until we found that part of ourself that chose to follow, that chose God. 

So what do we do after the garden?  We follow where God leads us; we follow that innate sense that all of us have to return to God and to whom we are called to be.  You see, we have no more excuses.  Read the end of the passage.  Our eyes have been opened.  We know where we fall short; we know that we cannot do this by ourself; we know that God is God and we are not.  And in that is our beginning.  Thanks be to God!

Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.  (Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin:  The Lost Language of Salvation)

So on this Lenten journey, open your eyes.  Open your eyes and take a good hard look at yourself.  What do you need to choose to leave behind?  Where do you choose to go? What does your beginning, your escape from innocence, look like?

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Mirror, Mirror

shelliwilliams Awareness, Created, CREATION, Repentance, Sin

Lectionary Passage: 2 Samuel 11: 26-12: 13a
To read this passage online, go to http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=2+Samuel+11:26+-+12:15&vnum=yes&version=nrsv

Do you remember the story of Snow White?  The fantasy begins with a magic mirror.  And every morning, the hopelessly vain evil queen rises, dresses, coifs her hair, applies her make-up, and then admires herself in the mirror.  But as we know, it’s not an ordinary mirror.  This mirror can carry on a conversation.  Better than that, this mirror tells her exactly what she wants to hear.  Every morning the evil queen looks into the mirror and says, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”  And the dutiful mirror, perfectly rehearsed, answers, “You, my queen, you are the fairest of them all.”
But even brainwashed mirrors can go rogue now and then and one morning when the queen looked into the mirror with the familiar question, “Mirror , mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”, the mirror replied, “Snow White, my queen, Snow White is the fairest of them all.”  You know, the truth hurts, doesn’t it?  Sometimes we would rather just live our lives with a magic mirror affirming that everything we do is the right thing, one that would somehow allow us to hide in a fairy tale.  But life is not a fairy tale.
Our Old Testament passage is the continuing story from last week.  Remember that David, home alone while his armies were out fighting battles, had spied the fair Bathsheeba and, in what can only be described as a colossal failure of leadership and an implausible abuse of  power and authority, had sent for her, slept with her, impregnated her, and then in an attempt to cover up the deed, lied, schemed, and finally murdered her husband Uriah the Hittite.  So, Uriah is now dead and Bathsheeba mourns.  With Uriah dead, David then is free to take Bathsheeba as his wife, bringing legitimacy to their son.   Well, as you know, there are a variety of ways that this story is told.  Some will shift the blame to Bathsheeba, depicting her as some sort of harlot or something that wooed David into the affair.  But that, of course, ignores the fact that it was David that had all the power here.  Others will somehow characterize it as God’s work, as if God would call David to cheat, lie, scheme, and murder to further the building of the Kingdom of God.  Sorry, I don’t really think that’s quite what God had in mind.
So today we have the story of Nathan.  I love Nathan.  He confronts the problem head-on.  And he does it in quite a remarkable way.  He tells a parable.  (Where have we heard that style of teaching before?)  He tells the story of a rich man who possessed many flocks and herds—so many, in fact, that he didn’t even really know them all–and a poor man who possessed one lowly little lamb who the poor man actually had grown to love.   Yet when a traveler appeared, the rich man, replete with livestock, actually took the one lamb from the poor man to feed his guest.  Well, David was incensed.  After all, what a horrible man!  Someone should do something!  That is not justice!  That man should be punished!  That man doesn’t deserve to live!
You know, John Westerhoff once said that “if a parable doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable, [doesn’t make you squirm a little in your seat], you probably have not gotten it.”  So, obviously, David didn’t get it.  Obviously, it was much easier to hand out judgment for someone else’s acts than to recognize his own failures and shortcomings.  So Nathan, courageously speaking the truth in love, essentially, holds up the mirror.  “David,” he said, “You are the man!”
He then explains in detail what David has done, all the time holding a mirror, forcing David to look at himself, to look at his own actions, to realize that his actions have consequences, that they cannot be hidden from God.  And, maybe even more painful, they cannot be hidden from himself.  David has to face what he has done, look at the consequences, look at the pain and the suffering that he has caused.  And David finally admits his wrong.  He confesses.  It’s a hard thing.  It’s a hard thing to admit when you’ve done something wrong.  It’s a hard thing to be forced to take a good hard look in that mirror and see the reflection not of that image of God in which you were created but rather someone that you’d rather not be around.
Yeah, sin is a hard thing to talk about.  It’s a hard thing to look at, particularly, when that mirror is showing us someone that we don’t really want to be.  Where did we go wrong?  And what will everyone else think?   And, after all, we’re good Methodists.  We don’t need to talk about sin.  We have grace.  Really?  I think Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor has possibly written the most incredible book on sin that I have ever read.  I highly recommend it.  In her book entitled “Speaking of Sin:  The Lost Language of Salvation,” she depicts sin as our only hope.  Well that’s a new spin on it!  After all, aren’t we trying to avoid it?  She says that “sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.” (pg. 59)  In other words, no longer can we just sweep something under the rug hoping that it will go away, hoping that our good Methodist upbringing will shower us with grace and keep our sins closeted away where they need to be.  It’s a phenomenal way to think about it, to realize that in some way, holding the mirror up for ourselves or, if we can’t do that, hoping that someone in our life will be grace-filled enough to do it for us, can actually bring us closer to God, actually put us on the road to beginning again.
We often talk about sin as that which separates us from God.  Traditional Christianity loves to take it all the way back to Adam and Eve, as if the first couple’s transgression somehow changed the path for us all.  Do you think that’s a way of trying to cover it up?  (OK, I must admit, I’m not really an “Original Sin” type of person!)  Do you think that’s our way of trying to shift the blame from us a bit, a way to somehow transfer over to someone else’s mirror?  Well, I think we may need some sort of holy spurt of Windex or something.  Because tucking it away or covering it up or shifting blame does us no good at all.  It’s still there, still separating us, still standing in the way of the grace-filled relationship that God offers each of us. 
Truth is, the opposite of sin is not innocence.  I don’t even think it’s righteousness.  The opposite of sin is choosing God, choosing to look ourselves in the mirror and finally see that image of God in each of us. We don’t live in a fairy tale.  God did not create a bunch of robotic, perfect creatures and claim them as children.  God created us—sometimes cheating, sometimes lying, sometimes sinful, always wanting to do better, always wanting to find our way, always searching and wondering what it is God desires for us.  I don’t think God wants or expects us to remain innocent.  If God had wanted that, we wouldn’t be here at all.  We would have no reason to be.  Faith would be non-existent.  Innocence has no reason to choose God.  Innocence does not need faith.  Maybe we need a Nathan in our life unless we can somehow learn to look into the mirrors that God provides for us along the way, to truly see ourselves, where we fall short, where we choose darkness over light, where we choose or just acquiesce to those systemic sins that we see (hunger and homelessness over shared resources,  prejudice over acceptance, classism over equality, nationalism over patriotism ) and, most of all, to see that image of God that is always part of us somehow slip through and reveals itself in the most miraculous ways.
We are not innocent; we are forgiven.  But that’s not an eraser on the giant chalkboard of life.  God’s forgiveness comes when we don’t deserve it, when we haven’t earned it.  It comes in the darkness; it comes at our lowest point; it comes when sin is our only hope.  It is grace.  “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”  It is that you that is staring back—doubtful and assured, sinful and forgiven, speaking the truth in love with a tiny piece of God in you—only an image, a faint glimmer that holds your whole life in its hands.  That’s all that God needs to create beauty, to create wonder, to create life.  You see, God has done this before—many, many times.  It is the very mirror that shows us the image of God, that shows us who we are really called to be.
Grace and Peace,
 
Shelli
 
    

Light-Yielding

shelliwilliams Darkness, Hope, LENT, Light, Sin

In this Lenten season, we tend to focus on wilderness and darkness.  We are told to look at our selves honestly, compelled to confront our wrongs and name our sins.  The season begins in dust, with the faint sign of the cross made of oil and ash.  And as we sit in the dark, forboding wilderness, wrought with the tempations around us, we strain to see the light that we are promised.  We try hard to see even a small glimmer of the light that our faith tells us is up ahead.  We are told to let go, to relinquish the thinngs that we hold.  But how can we?  This season is too hard, too dangerous, too foreboding.  And so we stay in the darkness for now, content to wallow in our guilt and be comforted by our despair, hiding our shame from the world.  And we go on.  Someday the Light will come.

I don’t think we get it.  Surely this God of light and life does not want us to wallow here.  I mean, anyone that even knows the definition of psychology knows that healing starts with diagnosing our ills, confronting our demons, and naming our sins. In fact, in her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor contends that sin, that thing that we try to hide away from everyone, is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.  She says that “there is no help for those who admit no need of help.  There is no repair for those who insist that nothing is broken, and there is no hope of transformation for a world whose inhabitants accept that it is sadly but irreversibly wrecked.”  But most of us are not comfortable facing ourselves that honestly and so we become content with wallowing in the darkness.  We get stuck in cycles of guilt and self-denial and become well-versed in closing our eyes to our own shortcomings and those of our society.  We somehow convince ourselves and cherish the idea that we live in a classless, equal-opportunity society where everyone has the same chance.  We are taught to save face and tuck our blemishes and sins away so that no one will see.

I don’t think Lent is meant to be a season of wallowing.  No where is it written or implied that this is a season that shows us the way around the cross. (If that was the case, then why didn’t God somehow pluck Jesus off the cross in the nick of time?  But the story wouldn’t be the same.  It would be one of avoiding death, rather than recreating it into life.  It would be a fairy tale, rather than a vision of our eternity.) Rather, Lent is a season of journeying to the cross, of letting go of all those things that impede our vision of the Light, and laying them down and going beyond them as they, too, are recreated into Life.  In that way, it is a season not of wallowing in the darkness but one of yielding to the Light.  The Light is there, waiting.  But we have to yield to it.  We can no longer be content to sit here in the darkness, surrounded by those things we hide, and wait for the light to come.  That’s not the way it works.  We have to let go.  We have to let go of our sins, our despair, and our view that we are not ready yet or not “there” yet, of the notion that we have to somehow prepare ourselves a little bit more.  The Light is not going to magically move in and replace the darkness.  We have to yield to the Light that is already there.  We have to name what impedes our journey and let it go.  And when we let go of the hopelessness that we’ve created, we will finally see the Hope that is already there.  I don’t know about you, but I have some work to do!

On this sixteenth day of Lenten observance, name those sins that you have hidden.  Speak one out loud to someone.  Let it go.  Yield to the Light that is already there.

Grace and Peace on this Lenten Journey,

Shelli