Speak, Memory! (Easter C)

 

 

“Speak, Memory!”
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Easter C
30 March 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;1 Corinthians 15:19-26 ; Luke 24:1-12

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

One of the great blessings of being a parent is knowing and having an adult friendship and relationship with your children after they have grown.  One of the stranger elements of this sweet relationship, however, is being confronted with the divergence of your memory of events you shared with  your children when they were little and how they as adults remember the same events.  Often, you would not know that they were the same events at all.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote an autobiographical memoir called, Speak, Memory!  Different forms of it appeared in English and Russian, and the profound differences in the editions has led many editors, critics, and historians—and Nabokov himself—to wonder whether remembered “reality” is a will-o-the-wisp, and that memory itself is an act of imagination and creation where the remembering story-teller and the reader or listener are at an equal disadvantage. 

Memory has a mind of its own, and much of this has to do with our emotions, our heart.  

Christine Cleary, who works with cancer patients and their families and helps them come to grips with their memories, wrote the following essay as part of the “This I believe” series: 

I believe that memory is never lost, even when it seems to be, because it has more to do with the heart than the mind.

At the same time my 44-year-old husband, Ed, was losing his life, my mother was losing her ability to remember. As Ed’s lungs filled with cancer, Mom’s brain was becoming tangled in plaque. She forgot how to start the car, whether or not she had eaten and which family members had died — including my father.

I became afraid that one day I, too, would be unable to recall my husband, not because of Alzheimer’s, but simply because my memory of him might fade. So from the day of Ed’s diagnosis until his death a year later, I set out to memorize him: his crooked smile and vigorous embrace, his woodsy smell and the way he cleared his throat when he reached the top of the stairs. I knew I’d always be able to recite his qualities — kind, gentle, smart, funny — but I wanted to be able to conjure up the physical man in my mind, as fully as possible, when he was gone.

Back then, I thought memory was a deliberate, cognitive process, like remembering multiplication tables or lyrics or where the keys were. Unable to rescue Ed from cancer, I was determined to save him from the only thing worse than dying: being forgotten.

Later I learned that memory has a will of its own. You can’t control it any more that you can influence the weather. When it springs up, a person loved and lost is found, if only for a few seconds.

Recently when I was driving, I had a deep and sudden sense of Ed and the way it felt to have him next to me in the car. My body softened as it used to when we were together seven years ago, living a shared life. I wasn’t remembering his face or the way he walked; the careful details I had stored had nothing to do with this moment in the car. Looking in the rearview mirror, I recognized in my own face the same look I once saw on my mother’s face in the nursing home. I had asked her a question about my father, and she became confused about his identity. Yet, as she sat there, dressed in a shapeless polyester outfit, she briefly appeared young and radiant, her face filled with love and her eyes misty. Her brain couldn’t label the man correctly, but that was not important. It was clear to me that her husband was vivid in her heart, a memory even Alzheimer’s could not crush.

I believe there is a difference between memory and remembering. Remembering has to do with turning the oven off before leaving the house, but memory is nurtured by emotion. It springs from a deeper well, safe from dementia and the passage of time.  (http://thisibelieve.org/essay/10417/)

In recent decades, a great deal of research into the neuro-biology of memory has explained much of this.  What we remember when we call up an event from the past is not a sensory record from that event, but the neural impressions, narrative, and feelings from when we last remembered.  In very fact, memory is a creative and imaginative act.  The development of the way our brain registers and creates memory in this way seems to have been to our evolutionary advantage: at a subconscious level, we are able to apply new things we have learned since past events and experience them in new and useful ways.  If you want to read a good book on this, try Oliver Sack’s book called (what else?) Speak, Memory!

On this brightest of mornings, the Sunday of Resurrection, Easter Day, why do I talk of memory? 

John Dominic Crossan, writing in the Huffington Post this week, said:

“The details of Jesus' death were not fact remembered and history recorded. They were prayer recollected and psalm historicized.  … If Jesus' death was a communal crucifixion [i.e., a crucifixion story created by community for community purposes], must there not have been also a communal resurrection?”

Here at Trinity, we have just finished reading and studying Crossan and Marcus Borg’s book The Last Week.  We welcomed Marcus here in Ashland just two weeks ago and heard many of the reasons that he and Prof. Crossan believe that we must understand the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection as not simply historical fact remembered, but rather, meaning, hope, value, and faith told in narrative form. 

The case for saying that these stories are not simply fact remembered and recounted is unassailable.  There are far too many examples of the Hebrew Scriptures coloring different accounts’ details, and far too many tensions and contradictions between the various accounts to allow them to be historical chronicle.  In many ways, as Borg and Crossan write, these stories function as parables expressing deep Christian faith.    

After our last Lenten Soup supper, I received an e-mail from one parishioner.  He took exception to the message he got from Borg and Crossan:  that what they call the “post-Easter Jesus” was a mere object of the faith and hope of the community, and had no role as subject or actor apart from the perceptions and hearts of the believers.  “If the risen Christ did not exist apart from the imaginations and hopes of the believers, I am not sure it is worth believing in him at all” was the parishioner’s implication.  This sounds a lot like today's epistle reading, doesn't it?  

I am not sure this is, indeed, what Borg and Crossan are saying, but the question is fair and certainly worth pursuing when Crossan says these stories “are not fact remembered” but rather “prayer recollected and psalm historicized.”  

I agree that these stories are full of meaning beyond simple recounting of “what happened,” and admit that the details and differences in the stories handled down to us show the marks of oral tradition and story-telling that call into question their value as detailed chronicles of historical events. 

But I must say that as a historian, I find a purely mythological reading of the passion and resurrection stories to be unconvincing.

The earliest form of this tradition that has survived is not found in the Gospels.  It is not even a story.  It is a proclamation found St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians.  Writing only about 15 years after Jesus’s death, Paul tells us of the “tradition” of “Good News” that was passed on to him by earlier Christians: that Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and then appeared (1 Cor. 15:1-5). 

It was from this early apostolic proclamation—based on their experience and their memory, right after the events—that Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared, that the various stories about Jesus’ death and bodily reappearance later developed over the next 30-50 years.   

The pattern of the development is clear:  Mark, the earliest Gospel, in its earliest form narrated the passion and the discovery of the empty tomb, but places the earlier apostolic proclamation:  “he is risen” and “he [will] appear” on the lips of characters in the story.  Matthew and Luke develop this barebones narrative in separate ways, adding stories of appearances and details of the resurrection itself.  John, the last canonical Gospel, develops these story traditions even further and tells of additional appearances.  By the time you get to the post-canonical Gospel of Peter, you have details added and added to the narrative, even to the point of witnesses to flashes or light and angelic escorts to bring Jesus from the tomb and a floating, talking cross praising God. 

 It is clear that there is narrative development as the story is told and retold.  And it is also clear that reflection on Hebrew Scripture informs the process.  And, as Crossan points out, the Psalter was a major part of this.  But those of us who pray the Psalms daily know that this collection of poems and hymns is above all a book about emotion—the whole range of human emotion, from love, and adoration, to joy, to sorrow, to homicidal rage.  It is understandable why such a book would have exerted such a central role in the process of the formation of memory and the retelling of such emotion-laden stories.    The differences and similarities suggest a period of oral story-telling in congregations between the apostolic preaching and Gospel writers, with the stories with each retelling adding or reordering details, whether remembrances of events or parabolic references to Hebrew scripture.  The very malleable and changeable nature of memory that I discussed above complicates the problem for someone trying to determine what actually happened.  

But that does not mean that all the details in the canonical Gospels are simple artifacts of story-telling, with no grounding in events.  Remember—the earliest reports, even before the story tellers art began to spin these tales—was this:  “Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared.”   

The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful thinking and personal experience.  The idea that the reports of Jesus’ being raised arose in small groups sitting shiva for Jesus is to my mind hardly likely.  There is just too quick a shift—from utter demoralization and despair at Jesus’ death to bull-headed and joyful optimism and willingness to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake—at the origin of Christianity.  For me, it is a much more probable to say that something shocking and unusual, even unique, happened on Easter morning than to argue that the early apostolic proclamation arose simply as the result of proof-texting of the Hebrew scriptures.  The problem, of course, is whether we allow for the possibility of such a thing.

Sisters and brothers:  Christ died for our sake.  He was buried.  One and a half days later, he came forth again, and he appeared to his disciples. He appeared in such a way that they knew he was no resuscitated corpse no ghost, no dream, nor wish-fulfillment.  It was wholly unprecedented and the disciples clearly had problems finding adequate language to express what they had seen, felt, and experienced.  The details in the later stories only seek to underscore this. 

He was more alive than he had ever been, and more lively and free as a subject and actor.  This is why they quickly hailed him as Lord and God.

Speak, Memory!

Christ is raised.  And this changes everything in our world.   

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen. 

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[Note for on-line readers only:]

 Developing Narrative in the Resurrection Stories

The earliest preserved references are fragments of the earliest apostolic preaching found in 1 Cor. 15:1-5: “For I passed on to you the tradition thhat I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the [Hebrew] Scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose the third day in accordance with the [Hebrew] Scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, and then to James and the apostles.” 

The earliest story as such that has survived is in the earliest Gospel, Mark.  There, in the original form of the Gospel that ended abruptly with the women fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing because they were afraid (Mark 16:8), the story as such is just about the women returning to the tomb early on the morning after the Sabbath with spices to properly anoint the body of Jesus, which had been dumped unceremoniously in the tomb in haste before the Sabbath started the evening of his death.  They see the stone has been rolled back, and a young man in a white robe (we recognize him as an angel) tells them that “Jesus … has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6).  You see, the words of the early apostolic proclamation has been placed onto the lips of a character in the story: “He is risen.”  Then the angel adds, “Go tell the disciples … that he is going to Galilee.  There you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7).  Here again, the early apostolic proclamation is placed onto the angel’s lips in this narrative, but now in the future: he will appear. 

The next Gospels to be written, Matthew and Luke, about 15-30 years later, take Mark’s bare bones story and develop it further as narrative, using their own sources and concerns.   Matthew adds a great deal of narrative detail. He develops the story about the guards and the stone, and brings in an earthquake that opens graves throughout the city.  Thus detail in narrative is added to the simple proclamation “he was raised.” The women run excitedly to report to the disciples. As the women are running to tell the disciples, Jesus actually appears to them (Matt. 28:9) and the early apostolic preaching’s “and he appeared” becomes part of a narrative rather than simply a list of affirmations.

In Luke, the women tell the disciples, but they don’t believe them, thinking that they have heard just women’s “idle tales” (Luke 24:11).  But Peter runs to the tomb, and looks in—there he sees “the linen clothes by themselves” (Luke 24:12).  This is an added narrative detail, seemingly trying to explain the actual raising of Jesus proper, suggesting that somehow the corpse of Jesus had simply evaporated upon his resurrection, leaving the clothes lying there.    This element of the story is taken up in exquisite detail in John.  

Luke then adds the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening (Luke 24:13-35).  Jesus appears to them, talks to them, and finally they recognize him as he explains the scriptures (in the early apostolic preaching, Jesus died and was raised “according to the [Hebrew] scriptures.”    In looking back on it, they say they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.    This story in Luke was circulating among early Christians, for it shows up in extremely abbreviated form in the additions to Mark (Mark 16:12-13), added later to help bring that Gospel into harmony with the others. 

Luke then has the two disciples return to Jerusalem to tell the news.  All of this is on Easter evening.  When they tell their story, the disciples reply that Jesus has appeared to Peter (Luke 24:35).  Again, the apostolic proclamation is placed on the lips of characters in the story.  But then in Luke, Jesus appears them (Luke 24:36-43).  There is great detail—“See my hands and my feet—it really is me!” he says, “I am no ghost, look I have flesh and bones!”  Then to prove it, he eats some broiled fish they give him. 

A form of this story of Jesus appearing to the disciples the evening of Easter is taken up by John, another 20 or so years later.  It is the familiar story where Thomas is not present, but then is at a later appearance.   Interesting, for John, the sending of the Spirit occurred not on the Day of Pentecost, but on the evening of Easter Sunday, when Jesus “breathes” it into his disciples (John 20:19-29). 

Other snippets of differing stories show up in the four Gospels, with Jesus appearing also in Galilee, whether on a mountain or on the lakeshore. 

If we move another few decades ahead, we start seeing in the Gospels that were not included in the canon the telling in narrative of the actual resurrection itself.  In the Gospel of Peter, the two soldiers see it all:  the heavens open, two angels descend in a great flash of light, the stone rolls away by itself, and then three men, no two come out of the tomb, two of them supporting the one extra, followed by what seems to be a floating cross.  A voice comes from heaven “You have preached to the dead,” and the cross, which also is apparently a talking cross, replies, “Yes.” 

Hearts of Flesh

 

“Hearts of Flesh”
Great Vigil of Easter C
30 March 2013 8:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24-28)

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

The Great Vigil of Easter is by any figuring a long service, and homilists are well advised to keep their remarks short on this most rich of liturgical nights.  With all the texts we read during the Vigil itself, plus the scriptures we use as lessons during the Vigil Eucharist, you have a wide selection of texts to preach, and given the gravity and depth of the themes of creation, covenant, liberation, death and resurrection, there is no shortage of worthy themes. 

Tonight I want to say a couple of things about the reading from Ezekiel 36, since it is one of my favorite texts of the Bible, but occurs in the Lectionary only here, during the Easter Vigil.  

Ezekiel speaks at a time when the Kingdom of David and Solomon, which God had covenanted to support and sustain, was a thing of the distant past.  The kingdom itself split into two in an ugly civil war 350 years before; the Northern Kingdom of Israel and its people had been annihilated by the Assyrians 150 years before.  His own homeland, the Southern Kingdom of Judah, had lasted a bit longer, but then in 587 BCE, itself was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire.   They burned the capital city, Jerusalem, and leveled to its foundation the Temple of the Jews’ God, Yahweh, a symbol for them of the obstinate, uncompromising national religion that had in some ways been the driving force in the rebellion of the district.  No stone was left standing on another stone.   The entire ruling class of the country—those who escaped being massacred outright or sold into slavery—were transported en masse into exile in Mespotamia to prevent further political mischief in the new named “province” of Judah. 

This was a disaster of overwhelming and unfathomable proportions.  The Jews had believed that Yahweh had promised to protect his people them and keep them from harm.  He had promised, they thought, to protect and preserve the line of the kings descended from David and protect their rule.  Now all that was gone. 

The Jewish way of worship had ceased; the Temple was a mere memory.  Almost all families had lost members, if not been wiped out entirely.  They had tried to keep God’s commandments, and in the very doing of this had provoked the wrath of the Babylonians.  Judah had ceased to exist. 

It is hard for us to understand how hopeless and desperate this situation was.   The nation simply didn’t exist any more.  God had broken the covenant with his people.  Indeed, they were no more his people, no more even a people.  And he was no more their God.  How could one understand these events any other way?  Maybe they hadn’t kept the commandments well enough.  

It was easy enough to blame the disaster on a failure to love God enough, and see in it God’s punishment.  The Book of the Law, after all, had said,

 

“When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.  He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors.  The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. (Deuteronomy 30:1-6)

Just before the Babylonian conquest, the prophet Jeremiah had prophesied of a renewal after the disaster,

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).

Among the exiles, Ezekiel reflected on the national disaster.  He realized that the problem was far more complex than simply Deuteronomy’s description of the great cycle of God’s people not living up to God’s intention, God as a result sending disaster, disaster as a result stirring the people to repentance, and God as a result God saving and restoring, with renewed prosperity and blessing.  The problem was far deeper for Ezekiel.  The problem was the human heart itself.  Where Deuteronomy thought that as a result of repentance, God would make kosher the hearts of his people because they have repented, and where Jeremiah said that God would put the law in their hearts and minds, Ezekiel says that God will sprinkle them with water to purify them, but then give them new hearts entirely. 

This is placed within an “envelope” of repeated texts (Ezekiel 36:22 and 32) that say that this is not the result of repentance on the part of the people: “It is not for your sake, O House of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.”    It is God’s honor, it is God’s nature, it is God’s love that drives God to this new act of creation, not a reward for us pathetically trying to change our pathetic ways. 

The problem for Ezekiel is this:  when we are alienated from God, we are also alienated from ourselves.   He says, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you.”  Importantly, the words in Hebrew for “body” and “flesh” here are the same:  “I will remove from your flesh the heart of stone that is there, and put in its stead a heart of flesh.”   

In this passage, Ezekiel is saying that God will act, out of the love that is God and for no other reason, to reconcile us with ourselves, to heal us, to make us fulfill the fullness of our creation, with a heart that corresponds to our intended nature. 

You who have heard many of my homilies know that I regularly start them with a short prayer drawn from this passage:  Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  I chose this prayer to begin my homilies when I was ordained.  It is a prayer that we be human, simply human.  It is a prayer that we be compassionate, and wholly integrated, as God intends. 

Some are startled that I would be praying for a heart of flesh, since some consider the “flesh” to be a way of talking about something unworthy, about our animal natures.  But this is not so.  Flesh as God intended it is a good thing, very good indeed.   

The problem is our heart that is not flesh:  our heart that is hardened to feeling, to compassion, to vulnerability, to pain.  The problem is humanity that is alienated from itself and its true nature. 

There are two longer forms of the prayer. 

This is from St. Ambrose of Milan: 

O Lord, you have mercy upon all.

 Take away from me my sins,
and mercifully kindle in me

the fire of your Holy Spirit.
Take away from me a heart of stone,
and give me a heart of flesh,
a heart to love and adore you,
a heart to delight in you,
to follow and enjoy you, for Christ's sake, Amen.

This is from Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day:

Dear God, let us not accept that judgment, that this is all we are. 

Enlighten our minds, inflame our hearts with the desire to change—

With the hope and faith that we all can change.

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

St. Paul recognizes that alienation is one of the basic human problems:  that is why, among all the images he uses to describe what Christ did for us on the cross and by being raised from the dead, reconciliation and new creation. He describes at one point people he had ministered to as “a letter,” “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh written by God” (2 Corinthians 3:3). 

One of the reasons we talk about an empty tomb when we tell the stories of Christ’s great victory over death and human failure is this:  when Jesus came back from the grave, he was more alive than he had ever been, not less alive.  And that means full integration of spirit and flesh.  That means body; that means flesh. 

Ezekiel’s insight into human alienation, of our heart of stone in our body of flesh, is deeply imbedded in our Christian view of salvation, hope, and victory in Christ’s being raised from the dead.  We find our hope and reconciliation with ourselves and each other in Christ raised from pain, horror, and death.  And in Him we will live and be raised as well. 

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen. 

In Memory of Her (Mid-week Message)

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Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 27, 2013

“In remembrance of her”

April D. DeConick, Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University, in today’s Huffington Post ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/april-d-deconick/ ) reminds us that all the New Testament stories we are about to read about the passion and resurrection of Jesus are told from the perspective of Jesus’ male disciples.   The role and perspectives of women in those stories have been minimized, and the women are seen as marginal participants in the events.  The problem is summed up in the story about a woman anointing Jesus at a meal shortly before his death.  Though in the story itself Jesus says that “wherever the Gospel is preached, this story will be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:9; Matt. 26:13), the woman’s name has been lost, and she is not named in the story.  

As DeConick writes,

“The Gospels agree that at the most difficult moment in the Christian story, when Jesus hung on the cross exposed and suffering, a throng of his women followers remained with him at Golgotha and watched him die. Then they helped Joseph of Arimathea take down his body and lay it in the tomb before dusk fell.

“If we are to believe the author of the Gospel of Mark, his male followers deserted him. And we know from multiple sources that Peter betrayed ever knowing him. But the women remained steadfast and faithful.

“What do we know about these devoted and courageous women? Some of the Gospels record their names, but not much else about them, like Mary the mother of James and Joseph, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, Joanna and Salome. The Gospels agree that, at the cross, there was a collection of women who had followed him, some who had followed him all the way from Galilee.” 

Importantly, the first witnesses to the resurrection were all women.  And the male disciples would not believe their report, thinking it was “simply idle women’s talk” (Luke 24:11; cf. Luke 24:22, “and now some of our own women, frankly, have amazed us with their tale”). 

DeConick concludes her article with a great suggestion: 

“This Easter, let's remember the women in the life of Jesus, let's reimagine their faith as they stood and watched Jesus die. I invite you to set aside an hour to remember them on Holy Saturday, the most solemn day in the Christian calendar when the altars of churches are stripped and mass is performed only for the dying. I think that it is appropriate for the silenced stories of the biblical women to fill this vacancy on Holy Saturday, that it might become a traditional time for Christians everywhere to remember the women as the followers of Jesus who remained steadfast and faithful as Jesus died and was buried.”

DeConick’s suggestion is a good one, and makes liturgical sense:  Holy Saturday is traditionally the biggest day of the year for Altar Guilds, who must take the stripped altars and prepare them fully for the glories of Easter.  And Altar Guilds are predominantly made up of women believers. 

On Holy Saturday at 11:00 a.m., we will have our Parish “Plant-In” finally to create the garden between the Church and the Parish Hall originally planned when the Trinity Labyrinth and Garden were built.  

In the afternoon, as we rest between the morning preparations for Easter (including the “Plant-in” and the Altar Guild’s work) and the Great Vigil of Easter that will begin at 8 p.m., let us take an hour to remember the women in these stories, and to use our imaginations and hearts to envision what these events must have been like for them, who were, after all, the apostles who first took the message of the Risen Lord to the (male and to-that-point Christ-abandoning) apostles. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Be With Me (Palm/Passion Sunday C)

“Be With Me”
Palm/ Passion Sunday C
24 March 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

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

Last year about this time, I found myself at the bedside of one of our parishioners who had been suffering for a long time from a terminal illness.  He was still lucid on occasion, but often floated between a painkiller-induced semi-sleep and the reenactment of vivid memories that seemed to me to be almost like waking dreams.  I did all the things that any of us can do in such situations, and a few that are a priest’s special calling, like granting absolution after hearing confession and celebrating Eucharist at his bedside.  I anointed him with oil and prayed.  I sang to him, held his hand, and listened to him recount stories from his long courtship and short marriage.  On the last day I saw him, I asked him what he wanted me to do that day.  He seemed a bit more withdrawn than usual, and was clearly close to death.  He smiled and replied simply, “Just be with me.” 

“Just be with me.”  This is the voice of basic human need.  It doesn’t demand that we fix anything, figure anything out, or make anything right.  It just asks for companionship, for being present, for mutual sharing of joy and sorrow.  Joys thus shared are multiplied; sorrows thus shared are made lighter. 

“Just be with me.”  This is another way of saying what someone told me, just after I came to Trinity, that what the congregation wanted and needed in a pastor above all else was this:  “Someone who will love us.” 

“Just be with me.”  It is a call we hear from friends, siblings, co-workers, neighbors, children.  Sometimes it is not—and cannot be—put into words, but is there all the same.  Our pride, or our fear, or our need to establish our own personality and life sometimes prevent us from phrasing the words.  But the appeal is the same regardless:  A parent suffering through the rough times of an adolescent or young adult child; a spouse suffering through the illness or decline of their partner:  “Just be with me.” 

This Lent, I have had the experience of hearing many confessions and giving quite a bit of pastoral counseling.  Hearing a person’s private demons, fears, and regrets and then reassuring them of God’s love and pardon is one of the many ways we have of being present, of responding to the call, expressed or left unsaid, “Just be with me.” 

It has been hard on me.  When someone shares their pain and you are truly present for them, you feel pain.  When you see their anguish, you feel anguish.  You share in their suffering, take on some of their pain.  Part of my own spiritual discipline this Lent has been practices that help me fully be present for those whom I pastor and fully share in their joys and pain, but at the same time keep a quiet place of safety and grounding in my own heart apart from what is shared with me. 

This has made me have a different perspective on what it means to be present, to have compassion, to love, and to be a channel of God’s grace.  It involves sacrifice and going through pain along with someone. 

Sacrifice, you see, is not about doing some ritual or act to placate an angry deity or drive away impurity or guilt.  It is not about proving to God or anyone else by some action that you or someone else is okay and deserve some respect or love. 

Sacrifice is about giving up, letting go.  It is about sharing yourself and what is yours with someone else, whether God or one of God’s creatures, and letting that other person share with you, whether a meal, a feeling, or an experience.     

Love is not about having your way or being in control. 

Love is about being vulnerable, seeking the good and the will of the beloved.  Love is about being present for the beloved, about responding to his or her call, “Just be with me.”  Love is by its very nature sacrificial.  

Being a channel of God’s grace, or God’s love, is not about forcing conformity to some conception we have of God or of God’s will.  It is about opening oneself to God’s grace, to God’s one-way and totally undeserved love, and gently, lovingly, passing such love on to others.  It is about letting go and letting God work God’s love in God’s way and on God’s schedule. 

Today is Palm Sunday, the Sunday of the Passion.  The word passion comes from the Latin word meaning suffering, and the Gospel today is Luke’s retelling of Jesus’ sufferings. 

But in a real sense, this is the Sunday of the Compassion.  These stories about Jesus’ sufferings are about Jesus suffering along with us, being one among us, fully present with us, and sharing our common lot of living in a world of pain, brokenness, fear, death, and apparent meaninglessness. 

The story that we will hear next week tells of the first Easter, when all such pain, brokenness, fear, death, and meaninglessness were put to flight.  Easter  led the earliest Christians to see in Jesus the human face of God.  This led them to see in the Cross something far beyond a simple case of profound and deadly injustice and all-too-typical human suffering.  

Easter redeemed the Cross for the early Christians. It turned a Roman instrument of torture and execution into something with far deeper and broader meaning.  From the beginning, Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as something that changes everything.   St. Paul, writing just a couple of decades after Jesus’ death, writes, “For I delivered to you as of first importance the tradition that I also received: that Christ died for our sins … was buried, … was raised on the third day … and then appeared…” (1 Cor. 15:3-5).  “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, no longer counting against them their over-stepping of bounds, but rather giving to us what it is that reconciliation really means” (2 Cor. 5:19).  “[Through Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”  (Col. 1:20). 

When we hear such things as “Jesus died for us,” “Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins,” “By his wounds we are reconciled, and by his stripes we are healed,” or even, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the World,” we often understand these as if they were saying “Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins, to suffer in our place the punishment we deserve for our misdoings and for the original sin we all inherit from Adam and Eve.”   

This doctrine of transferred punishment is a relatively recent innovation in Christian thinking, first expressed as such around the year 1100 by St. Anselm of Canterbury and only becoming the most popular Western Christian theology of salvation since the Renaissance.   This way of thinking expresses well the sense of relief and deep gratitude we experience when we realize that Jesus, indeed, died for us and as a result all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. 

But it is based on a way of understanding God that Jesus himself would have been uncomfortable with:  an angry Deity who demands violence and blood to make things right.    But Jesus taught again and again that God is a loving Parent, a God who sends the blessings of rain and sunshine on both the righteous and the wicked, and who takes delight in the creation.

“The wrath of God” as an image does not describe the heart of God.  Rather, it expresses how our relationship with God feels when we are alienated from God.   The doctrine of transferred punishment is rooted in the idea of a Deity demanding to be placated, regardless of whether this demand is called “the justice of God” or “the wrath of God.”   To take this doctrine literally and use it as the central way of understanding the meaning of the Cross demeans the Cross and belittles God.   And this is so because it is not God, but human beings—flawed, imperfect human beings—who believe in the myth of redemptive violence, the lie that things can be made right simply through bloodshed and the infliction of pain.    God is not a divine schizophrenic child abuser.  God is a loving parent.  Jesus on the cross is what God’s love looks like:  self-sacrificing, fully present, and moved by compassion alone.   

A fuller, more biblical understanding is found in today’s Epistle, where Paul is quoting from an early Christian hymn: 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death--

even death on a cross.  (Phil. 2:5-9)

The image here is that of God emptying himself, humbling himself in the incarnation and taking on the human face in Jesus, and then further emptying himself and taking on not just all the pain and suffering it means to be human, but also taking on some of the worst of that, death, death on a cross.  In this, God is sitting along with us, answering our cry, “just be with me.”  God loves us, and loves us sacrificially, taking on himself our pain and suffering, our fear, our unknowing.  The passion of Christ is thus the compassion of God, the Deity’s sharing with us all the worst of what our lives as human beings can throw at us.    In this light, we see that Christ is our priest, our pastor, our parent, and our friend. 

In the passion story, there is a detail in the garden of Gethsemane:  Jesus asks his closest friends to go with him to pray.  In Matthew, he begs them, “watch with me.”  Jesus too asks us, “just be with me.”  "Take up your cross, and follow me," he says. 

We can be there for Jesus in the garden, and on the Cross, by being present to his children around us. Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said, “Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.”

Friends.   With the early saints I believe that Jesus died for us, and suffered for us on the Cross.  In this great token of love, God shows his solidarity with us, and manifests compassion.  The great resurrection of Christ from the dead redeems this pathetic Roman execution and makes it the emptying of God himself for us. 

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen.