U.S. Memorial Day 2011

Memorial Day Service

U.S. Embassy Beijing

May 27, 2011

INTERFAITH U.S. MEMORIAL DAY LITANY
(adapted from the 1974 U.S. Forces Book of Worship)

Let us each give thanks to God Almighty for the land of our birth with all its chartered liberties. For the richness and wonder of our country’s story, its heritage of law and liberty, the varied peoples it has drawn together as one people, and its striving to better live its values:

O God,

R. We give you thanks. 

For the leaders of our nation, states, and communities, and all who labor and have labored for justice, prosperity, and the common good:

O God,

R. We give you thanks. 

For those who in all times and places have been true and brave in fulfilling their duty serving their nation, and those who in daily common ways have lived upright lives and served those about them:

O God,

R. We give you thanks. 

For those who have gone before, and through whose service and sacrifice you have brought about blessings for us in our day:

O God,

R. We give you thanks. 

Almighty and most merciful God, we remember these your servants with gratitude. We see in their courage and strength encouragement for us to be courageous and strong. We see in their sacrifices a model for us to follow. Look upon all your servants—them and us—with loving kindness. Give us strength and courage to love and serve, to work hard for the common good, for justice, prosperity, and peace. All this we ask in your name. 

Amen

A Chasm Bridged (Easter 4A)

 

A Chasm Bridged

15 May 2011

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year A

Congregation of the Good Shepherd, Beijing China

10 a.m. Eucharist

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25;  John 10:1-10

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

“The hardest thing in my life,” a dear friend once told me, “is that I always feel like I’m such a fraud.  When things are going well, I’m always trying to catch up and make it appear that I’m totally on top of everything.  When things aren’t so good, I seem to spend all my time trying just to appear normal.”   

I think that almost all of us have that feeling on occasion, and it is very debilitating.  It is a great drain on emotional energy to always be feeling behind the curve, trying to catch up, or always trying to stay on top. 

There seems to be built into life itself, as good as life is, a painful disjunction between where we are and where we ought to be, or where we feel we ought to be.

The problem with making coffee in the morning is that you haven’t had your coffee yet and can barely negotiate the fixings and the machinery. 

The problem with looking for your glasses is that you can’t see to find them. 

The problem with pleasure is that there always is a point where it is too much and becomes disappointing or hellish.  Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. 

The problem with marriage is that the attraction that leads us to commit to each other—despite all our desire for autonomy and freedom—can have a mind of its own, and tends to wander after a while. 

The problem with trying to not be so much a fraud is that you have to fake it so much.

The problem with making progress in spirituality is that you all too soon notice it and become very proud of it, and immediately lose it, or, worse, see it twisted into something ugly and unrecognizable.     

The problem with trying to put away bad behavior is that it always seems to crop up again, sometimes in much worse form.

The problem with trying to live ordered lives is that life just can be so damned messy.

I’m not saying that life isn’t good.  It is good, and sweet indeed.  All I am saying is that for whatever reason, there seems to be built into the very structure of our lives a gap between the is and the ought, between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are and how we should be.   

In the Hong Kong subway, there are little signs pointing between the station platform and the opened doors of the trains.  They say, “mind the gap.” 

The gap I am talking about is much bigger, and so pervasive we cannot “mind” it.   It is the chasm between what we desire and what we fear, what we hope for and what we dread.  In the story of Lazarus and the Rich man, it is the “great gulf fixed” between Abraham’s bosom and hell.  The chasm is found beneath and in almost everything in life. We see it in arguments, in disappointments, in unfulfilled hope, ruined expectation, and spoiled esteem.  We experience it in dissatisfaction, when we feel shame, when we taste guilt.  Law calls it a crime.  Morals call it sin. 

Trying to lower our standards to conform to our behavior doesn’t get rid of the gap, it just hides it for a while.  Trying to get rid of all desire, as Buddhism teaches, is itself still a form of trying. Resignation to the unacceptable is a recipe for no progress, either in society or in personal life. Careful efforts at following rules and written prescriptions of how things ought to be, whether in the Torah, the Quran, or a Christian Bible interpreted by the letter, may make things better, but only for a while. No matter how hard we try, the ideal always seems to retreat, like the horizon line, and the chasm between where we are and where we should be remains as great as ever.  

And therein lie the roots of cynicism, pessimism, and despair, despite all the good we see in our life.  The problem with moral improvement is that we fail.  The problem with health is that we eventually get sick.  The problem with living is that we all die. 

Today is the fourth Sunday after Easter.  In the Western Church’s calendar, it is called “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Note all the readings about shepherds.  The traditional collect or opening prayer for this Sunday is: 

O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

Today’s reading from 1 Peter describes Jesus as our shepherd because he, “suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.  Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”
 
I was raised in a tradition that taught that the reason Jesus had to die on the cross was to “pay for our sins.”  God was just and we all deserved punishment and death; God the Father sent Jesus in love and mercy so that he could take our place.  And all we have to do is have faith in Jesus, repent, and follow him.  And then we won’t suffer the punishment for our sins.  

As a result, whenever I heard a scripture like, “Christ died for us,” “he bore our sins in his body on the cross,” “so that you, free from sin, might live righteously,” I heard only the doctrine of transferred punishment.  The problems in such a view never occurred to me until I was much older.  One of my sons, at the time nine years old, asked me, “How can God love us and Jesus?  My Sunday School teacher says he sent Jesus to be die on the cross to pay for other people’s sins. Human sacrifice is wrong.  Punishing the wrong person isn’t fair, even if they agree.  Couldn’t God have just forgiven us, and not kill off his own son?” 

The undivided Christian Church has never defined its doctrine of the atonement. The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ came down from heaven and became fully human, and that it was “for our sake” that he was crucified. But it does not tell us how this was so.  In one of the earliest recorded statements of Christian faith, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins"  (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what he means by this. Does it mean, “as a result of how badly we treated him,” or “in order to accept the punishment for our individual violations of God’s Law,” or “in order to correct our tendency to go astray by his good example,” or something else? 

Paul elsewhere gives us a dozen or so vivid images for what Christ did:  he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased us back out of slavery, he reconciled us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of Law, he transformed us like in the Greek myth of metamorphosis.   He is clearly searching for images and is not completely satisfied with any of them.

Over the ages, the Church has explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a victor:  on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on Easter beat them all.  Once feudalism had become the main social arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never repay their debt of honor to such a superior.  In the High Middle Ages, secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the more churchly ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view, directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, which they called the sacrifice of the Mass.  It was only during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual; political economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining atonement as substitutionary punishment.

All of these ideas are simply different ways of describing how Jesus closed for us the gap between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are, and what God intends.  The different images and doctrines just emphasize different parts of the chasm.  And none is ideal, as my son’s questions revealed. 

Despite how I would have understood it as a younger man, today’s text in 1 Peter says that Jesus died for us and bore our sins in his body on the Cross to serve as an example to us, an idea close to Abelard’s: he died for our benefit by leaving us his example.   

In the person of Jesus, the gap between what ought to be and what actually is was as thin as it possibly could be.  It is because of this thinness of the gap shown in Jesus’ life and teachings, that his disciples interpreted what happened on Good Friday and then Easter morning in the way they did.  The resurrection was the ultimate closing of the gap, bridging of the chasm.

Soon his followers were saying that Jesus had in some way been God made present among us.  They knew that his resurrection showed that his death was not meaningless or random.    Within a decade of his death, they were affirming clearly as Paul reports in the passage I quoted earlier, “Jesus died for us in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-9), thinking of passages in the Hebrew Bible where a good person suffers wrongly but is delivered by God, thus bringing the wicked to a knowledge of God, and where this is described poetically as the wounds of those who suffer wrongly as a kind of medicine that heals  the wicked.

I have felt the healing and calming effect of Jesus’ victory, of his bridging the chasm.  Christ on the Cross and Christ risen again gives me courage to try again, to not lose hope, whether this is making amendment of life or trying to work for a better world around me.  The sweet comfort and the fierce joy we feel at Jesus’ victory is but a foretaste of a world with the gaps closed, the chasms filled, with all as it should be, all as God intends.  No frauds, no sickness, no guilt, no oppression, no fear.  Just the loving presence that enables us to do and be what we ought. 

Sisters and Brothers of the Congregation of the Good Shepherd:  Happy Good Shepherd Sunday.  May the image of a loving and dedicated herder of sheep, once wounded for his flock, who now brings back the stupid and wandering animals from where they are to where they ought to be help us all have courage and hope.  We need not fear the chasm, or be discouraged by our failings.  Christ the Good Shepherd calls us each by name, lays us on his shoulder, gently, and rejoicing, brings us home, brings us to where we should be.   Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen