“Be With Me”
Palm/ Passion Sunday C
24 March 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Palm/ Passion Sunday C
24 March 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
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He seemed a bit more withdrawn than usual, and was clearly close to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.
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