Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
5th Sunday of Lent, Year B
Now my soul is troubled. What a striking line. From the lips of Jesus I hear what is often said inside my heart: my soul is troubled. Very often it happens when I am faced with hard choices or decisions, or being asked to reexamine something or change direction. Usually it indicates I am in need of repentance or am coming to a point of growth. Yes, paradoxically it can happen at moments of light and moments of darkness. Such is God’s troubling way.
The trouble for the soul that Jesus is pointing to is encapsulated by one word: obedience. It’s a word that has gone out of favor. Rather than conjuring up noble allegiance or loyalty to something greater it is seen as old-fashioned, repressive, denying of personal freedom. Obedience in application in the world has a side that can lead to bypassing ethical and moral autonomy and personal integrity. Just think how much evil has been justified by variations on “just following order”. But that is distorted obedience. Regardless, obedience is a negative word in our culture. It entails restraint, limits, responsibility to others and that grates against our culture of instant gratification, entertainment and consumption. It doesn’t gel well with an individualistic, me-centered view of the world that seems to be so prominent in our society.
When I find that conventional use of a word seems too limited I pull out my trusty dictionary. Here is what I found regarding the word obedience: 1. To carry out orders, instructions of; 2. To be guided by, submit to control of. Very interesting. And I feel that looking at the second definition may be much more helpful to me when dealing with my troubled soul. I think Jeremiah as thinking of this kind of obedience when he writes: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” To have God’s law written on my heart would mean I would be guided by God’s law, submit my will to the control of God’s will. And as God’s law is not to deny our selves, our uniqueness, our integrity it would not be that God is this internal despot, but rather that law that leads us to love God above all else and in so doing live in loving, right relationship with each other. Would the kind of law would ease my troubled soul!
The question is raised then for me, what must happen first so that the law of God can be inscribed on my heart and be woven within my soul? God’s grace and call first, but then my decision, my choice. Would it be too easy to say a change of heart?
Thinking on hearts I remembered my grandfather who died 7 years ago. My grandfather was a tough old guy. He’d picked crops as a kid during the depression and worked hard his whole life to succeed and escape a hard childhood. He was intelligent, critical, and remote in some ways. He was fiercely independent and quite stubborn. Didn’t want to let on he needed anyone or had a side that needed some tender loving care. That was how he was to me when I was quite small. One didn’t hug grandpa and one was always waiting for some critical zinger to dart one’s way. Then, when I was around 7 or 8 or so, he needed to have a triple by-pass operation. The surgery was much riskier in those days and the recovery longer. The doctors were clear that some habits needed to change. And part of what needed to change was his relations to his nearest relations, which were often a bit stressed and strained. There we were, gathered around his bed (I was fascinated by the tubes and all the equipment) trying to bumble through our words, awkwardly standing around. We can be so clumsy when we aren’t sure how to love!
When he came home his heart, and his failing eyesight due to glaucoma, meant he needed his family to care for him in new ways. And for that to happen without it being a mere duty or guilt-induced response meant that he had to change his way of being with us. He had to make some choices. He had to listen again to his heart, both literally and figuratively. There was a new direction he ought to be guided by. In the months and years after his surgery he became a new person in some ways. The hard edges were smoothed away a bit. He became much more demonstrative with his affection. He was able to receive help and not cut out others so much do his stubborn independence. He learned to be less critical. In short, he had a change of heart.
Now, I don’t want to say that he became a totally different person without any of his former shortcomings. No, those remained. But they were tempered and his choice led to new things guiding his actions and relationships. A grandpa I thought I would never be close to or have the unqualified approval of became a grandpa I grew to love dearly. He became someone who showed affection to me and appreciated me for who I was. I miss him very much. And I am glad he made the choice he made. To be obedient to a new way of living. To be guided by a new spirit.
In Jesus’ life this is much more profoundly realized, of course. Paul is quite insistent on the choice Jesus had and that obedience, submission to his calling, is central in what makes him the source of eternal life for us. Within the obedience lay the working out of the Divine’s hope for us. And that hope meant suffering, suffering for others, suffering for a larger vision than the world’s, suffering at the hands of a fallen world that wants to go its headstrong, stubborn way. Obedience to God, as best we can, is to enter into dying to this world and the ways it would have us believe it is God, the final answer and giver of meaning (note this a the social reality of the world of which I speak). The hard truth is that the discovery and gift of eternal life is the result of such obedience. There is no shortcut. There is no way to reconcile a faith that accepts the world’s values as it is, lives by then and thinks that herein eternal life is found with a faith in the Obedient One who loves and suffers for others to reveal eternal life through living a life that leads to the cross. I know deep down that to be obedient to Jesus will mean struggle and turmoil and suffering in some way. I cannot follow him at no cost in the world the way it is. It will not do. Jesus says it quite bluntly.
Such stories are out there all over the place of how individuals and groups have lived into this obedience. Recently, I read about Bishop Bell who was the Bishop of Chichester, England during WWII. In a time when any sympathy towards Germans was tantamount to treason, in a time of the mass and indiscriminate destruction of life was happening on all fronts from the death camps to the fire-bombing of Dresden to Hiroshima, he stood as a voice of witness to love and peace. He challenged some of the Allies most extreme, annihilating violence and stood for values of dignity of life, compassion, mercy and love in a time that wanted to escape into easy answers of pure evil on one side and pure good on the other which then could justify any actions no matter how horrific and conveniently forget the complex and complicit history leading to the war. It cost him the opportunity to be Archbishop of Canterbury and it circumscribed his future life, but he was a voice pointing to the light of Christ in a time of deep darkness and one who kept his eye on eternal life in the face of great personal loss.
As I approach Holy Week I am asked to walk with Jesus and make my choice to be obedient or not. Perhaps the question to be pondered in my troubled soul is where am being asked to submit, to obey, in order for God’s law to be written in my heart and his love to be known in the world? What are the choices for me around obeying God or going my own way? To what and to whom do I submit? By what and by whom am I guided in my inmost self? Is it God? Is it the call of Jesus? Or is it the power of the world: power, wealth, status, prestige, self-assertion, dominance, sex, amusement, division of the human family into the good guys and the worthless ones? Surely it is a mixed bag, and therefore the choice is still ever before me. Where do I love my worldly parts so much that I cannot bear to think of losing them, even for the grace of eternal life? Where is my faith so that I can take the hard steps of being obedient with trust in your ultimate goodness? Not a trivial question to be asked. They are rather essential, aren’t they, as I walk with Jesus towards Jerusalem and the cross. Can I be obedient, even to death on a cross? I don't know. But if obedience becomes more a habit of soul, maybe I can, maybe I could. Obedience in small things will prepare me for obedience in big things. I pray in the weeks ahead as you come into Jerusalem, Jesus, in triumph and die in shame that you will help me see the way to lose my life in order to gain it back again.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
March 22, 2009, 4th Sunday of Lent
March 22, 2009
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
4th Sunday of Lent, Year B
Dear God,
Back again. It's week four of Lent and I am getting a bit tired, a sort of mental writer's cramp. So, it was so good to read the words of John. They've always been really beautiful, encouraging words to me. They were probably the first piece of scripture that I memorized. If not, they were certainly among the first I learned or recognized given I saw it on banners on every televised football game. I particularly like the version in “The Message”. “No one has ever gone up into the presence of God except the One who came down from the Presence, the Son of Man. In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life. This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, any one can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness.”
At times, though, I’ve been ambivalent about this passage. I hear the words that God did not send the Son to condemn us, but to save us and my heart lifts. I hear the words everyone who believes in him shall not perish but be saved and my heart sinks as those words seem to so many to mean only Christians are saved (but, then, which Christians? It gets dicey pretty fast!). But in my heart of hearts I hear the whisper I have always heard that says—salvation of others is God’s labor and determination, not yours. Don’t miss the point! This is speaking to you. Can you let it speak to you? What light illumines your heart? What are you looking up to? Yes, those are the questions. What illumines my heart? What am I looking up to? Where am I running to the darkness, afraid of exposure?
Part of the issue is that this piece is pulled out of a much larger story. This is the last part of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, who comes to him in the darkness of night to seek light for his soul. He cannot grasp what Jesus is saying. He is too locked in his way of thinking. He leaves too still in the dark, both physical and spiritual. But God is not done with Nicodemus; he does in time open his eyes to new things. It is to Nicodemus that I must pay attention for surely there are parts of me that are stuck in darkness; parts of me that are in need of the light, but are afraid of it too. Certainties will falter, ideas will change, my spirit will be shaken. Familiar sounds better even if it is in shadow.
What Jesus is saying is that salvation is happening now. It is what theologians call a realized eschatology—that is salvation as already in progress, happening right now among us and within us. Responding to Jesus’ light now is to find life, now, and to live in God’s eternal life, now. John isn’t too interested in the question what happens to me after I die? Will I be saved? To him, that is a less essential question. What I have is the minute I am in. That can be a moment of knowing God’s saving love and presence or not. If not, then I am dead in spirit and that is a tragic fate. God-light is streaming into the world all the time, and yet I can put on my sunglasses and draw the curtains. The light can hurt my eyes or my skin when I’ve been out of it for a while.
I remembered, God, one of my fellow chaplains when I worked at the hospital back in seminary. He was a devout Christian of a more conservative strand of our Church family, had very strict views of doctrine and a rigid worldview, a heart that loved a lot, and he was stuck. He was at 6s and 7s with himself, struggling to make life (and he was going through hard times at home), his heart and his experiences as a chaplain squash into his well-defined, existing world and theological schema. If it didn’t fit he fought it tooth and nail. Prayer could only look one way. Belief in God had to fit a narrow slot, and so on. Slowly and persistently the rest of us nudged him to lift just a corner of the lid off, to let in new light and new ideas and new possibilities. Do you remember the Grinch who had a heart two-sizes too small? Well, he had a heart that was two sizes too large for the interior place he was confined to.We wanted him to move into deeper real life, a new birth of soul, and for that gift of grace by which we are saved, as Paul wrote, to touch his heart.
How he fought! How wrong we were to make him reexamine his understandings and views! How hard he tried to shut himself off from looking at his own heart that was wilting and dying! And then one day, something changed. I don’t remember what was said or who said it, but somehow at last he opened his hands and his heart and let the light in. He finally stopped running. What we saw were tears, many, many tears, but we also saw the shadows of death, the spirits of wrath begin to disperse. And while he was in pain—great spiritual pain--life was being born anew from above. He could look up to the cross and see that this death was part of the journey to that life eternal, not the end of the road. It was a small step and a huge step: courageous, humble and all too rare—to be so honest and open and exposed. But he was no longer running towards the dark. It was one of the most beautiful things I have been graced to see. He could begin to allow a larger God in, a more complex God, a lessened need to correct or fix others, a great ability to accept difference and variety. The big heart was taken out of its corset and began to thrive. Instead of worrying about saving souls—as if he could by making people sign on to his views God alone—he began to focus on loving them. The saving God-light could stream in and he could radiate its light. He could look up and see the cross at the center and thereby let God in anew.
Jesus asks me to let in the light, the God-streaming light. But it is a light that shines towards and radiates back from the cross. To be living in the light of Jesus I must have it always refracted through the lens of the cross. It is to look hard at the means of death, quite literally, to look up at the deadly serpent as Moses made the people do, and see through it to God’s life. I must draw up the death within me and hang it up. I must pull out of the dark to die in the light of God’s love my envy, certainty, denials, contempt, fear, control, and all other things that deny life and goodness in me and for others. They must go into the light and I must draw them there so that the God-light can stream in and renew me, grace my spirit with the ability to love others, love God, trusting in God’s presence in the world. I have to see more clearly and constantly the cross acting in the midst of all life, even when I can’t see the other side of the pain and the folly and the destruction. My fellow chaplain is still one of my models and teachers in how to do this.
If I can walk this spiritual path then things will move and things will change. My spirit will, by God’s grace, grow in depth and wisdom and love. There will be more room in me for God-light and less room for darkness or my own self-aimed light. To look up at the cross and believe that the life-giving suffering and loving gift of Jesus’ life for us is real and at work in this world this moment is to live my faith. Even when we do our worst (and that can be so horrific as we know), the cross is still there redeeming, still calling us to new life, still streaming God-light to dispel the darkness. So let me look up, God, and step into that light. Let me bear it into the darkness. Let me be part of your work in the world. Amen.
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
4th Sunday of Lent, Year B
Dear God,
Back again. It's week four of Lent and I am getting a bit tired, a sort of mental writer's cramp. So, it was so good to read the words of John. They've always been really beautiful, encouraging words to me. They were probably the first piece of scripture that I memorized. If not, they were certainly among the first I learned or recognized given I saw it on banners on every televised football game. I particularly like the version in “The Message”. “No one has ever gone up into the presence of God except the One who came down from the Presence, the Son of Man. In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life. This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, any one can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness.”
At times, though, I’ve been ambivalent about this passage. I hear the words that God did not send the Son to condemn us, but to save us and my heart lifts. I hear the words everyone who believes in him shall not perish but be saved and my heart sinks as those words seem to so many to mean only Christians are saved (but, then, which Christians? It gets dicey pretty fast!). But in my heart of hearts I hear the whisper I have always heard that says—salvation of others is God’s labor and determination, not yours. Don’t miss the point! This is speaking to you. Can you let it speak to you? What light illumines your heart? What are you looking up to? Yes, those are the questions. What illumines my heart? What am I looking up to? Where am I running to the darkness, afraid of exposure?
Part of the issue is that this piece is pulled out of a much larger story. This is the last part of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, who comes to him in the darkness of night to seek light for his soul. He cannot grasp what Jesus is saying. He is too locked in his way of thinking. He leaves too still in the dark, both physical and spiritual. But God is not done with Nicodemus; he does in time open his eyes to new things. It is to Nicodemus that I must pay attention for surely there are parts of me that are stuck in darkness; parts of me that are in need of the light, but are afraid of it too. Certainties will falter, ideas will change, my spirit will be shaken. Familiar sounds better even if it is in shadow.
What Jesus is saying is that salvation is happening now. It is what theologians call a realized eschatology—that is salvation as already in progress, happening right now among us and within us. Responding to Jesus’ light now is to find life, now, and to live in God’s eternal life, now. John isn’t too interested in the question what happens to me after I die? Will I be saved? To him, that is a less essential question. What I have is the minute I am in. That can be a moment of knowing God’s saving love and presence or not. If not, then I am dead in spirit and that is a tragic fate. God-light is streaming into the world all the time, and yet I can put on my sunglasses and draw the curtains. The light can hurt my eyes or my skin when I’ve been out of it for a while.
I remembered, God, one of my fellow chaplains when I worked at the hospital back in seminary. He was a devout Christian of a more conservative strand of our Church family, had very strict views of doctrine and a rigid worldview, a heart that loved a lot, and he was stuck. He was at 6s and 7s with himself, struggling to make life (and he was going through hard times at home), his heart and his experiences as a chaplain squash into his well-defined, existing world and theological schema. If it didn’t fit he fought it tooth and nail. Prayer could only look one way. Belief in God had to fit a narrow slot, and so on. Slowly and persistently the rest of us nudged him to lift just a corner of the lid off, to let in new light and new ideas and new possibilities. Do you remember the Grinch who had a heart two-sizes too small? Well, he had a heart that was two sizes too large for the interior place he was confined to.We wanted him to move into deeper real life, a new birth of soul, and for that gift of grace by which we are saved, as Paul wrote, to touch his heart.
How he fought! How wrong we were to make him reexamine his understandings and views! How hard he tried to shut himself off from looking at his own heart that was wilting and dying! And then one day, something changed. I don’t remember what was said or who said it, but somehow at last he opened his hands and his heart and let the light in. He finally stopped running. What we saw were tears, many, many tears, but we also saw the shadows of death, the spirits of wrath begin to disperse. And while he was in pain—great spiritual pain--life was being born anew from above. He could look up to the cross and see that this death was part of the journey to that life eternal, not the end of the road. It was a small step and a huge step: courageous, humble and all too rare—to be so honest and open and exposed. But he was no longer running towards the dark. It was one of the most beautiful things I have been graced to see. He could begin to allow a larger God in, a more complex God, a lessened need to correct or fix others, a great ability to accept difference and variety. The big heart was taken out of its corset and began to thrive. Instead of worrying about saving souls—as if he could by making people sign on to his views God alone—he began to focus on loving them. The saving God-light could stream in and he could radiate its light. He could look up and see the cross at the center and thereby let God in anew.
Jesus asks me to let in the light, the God-streaming light. But it is a light that shines towards and radiates back from the cross. To be living in the light of Jesus I must have it always refracted through the lens of the cross. It is to look hard at the means of death, quite literally, to look up at the deadly serpent as Moses made the people do, and see through it to God’s life. I must draw up the death within me and hang it up. I must pull out of the dark to die in the light of God’s love my envy, certainty, denials, contempt, fear, control, and all other things that deny life and goodness in me and for others. They must go into the light and I must draw them there so that the God-light can stream in and renew me, grace my spirit with the ability to love others, love God, trusting in God’s presence in the world. I have to see more clearly and constantly the cross acting in the midst of all life, even when I can’t see the other side of the pain and the folly and the destruction. My fellow chaplain is still one of my models and teachers in how to do this.
If I can walk this spiritual path then things will move and things will change. My spirit will, by God’s grace, grow in depth and wisdom and love. There will be more room in me for God-light and less room for darkness or my own self-aimed light. To look up at the cross and believe that the life-giving suffering and loving gift of Jesus’ life for us is real and at work in this world this moment is to live my faith. Even when we do our worst (and that can be so horrific as we know), the cross is still there redeeming, still calling us to new life, still streaming God-light to dispel the darkness. So let me look up, God, and step into that light. Let me bear it into the darkness. Let me be part of your work in the world. Amen.
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