March 28, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 45:21-25, Ps. 72, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 19:29-40
Palm Sunday, Year C
On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out in to the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark,
obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to,
forward.
The donkey—patient, trusting, not bold, not an eye-catcher like his relative the horse. What sort of heart does it take to follow not knowing exactly where you will be taken? Is it for good or for ill? What strength of soul does it take to have one's ordinariness invited into the birth of the extraordinary?
As he steadily climbs the Mount of Olives he sees a view new to his eyes. All Jerusalem in her pain and splendor spread out before him, the temple shining gold in the spring light, a vision of joy and hope. It is worth it for this, he thinks.
These are cloaks, the donkey thinks. But why cloaks, when I usually carry olives or bottles of wine or bundles of grain? It is a rare day when my passenger is a person. Who is it, if not my owner?
And then a gentle hand touches him and a forehead leans against his own with a voice offering thanks for the donkey's coming. The donkey looks into eyes that are fiery and passionate yet also kind and open. There is a tiredness behind them, not of the flesh but of the heart, when it knows the course is set and that the road ahead is arduous, but it is the only road to take. The donkey knows that road, and so he lifts his shoulders proudly and stands firm as this man seats himself upon his back. In all his donkey-ness he has been picked as he is to carry this man to something, something out of the ordinary... or maybe all too ordinary. In his heart the donkey knows this is no ordinary passenger, but someone of great hope, great love, great challenge. He has picked a donkey to ride into town, not a powerful horse bedecked in a saddle and bridle. He doesn't play to the worlds ideas of power and importance, but yet the donkey knows, he has a power and importance that is worth far more for it is of a different order. He knows this from the way this Galilean sits upon him and the way he guides him.
As they move forward, the donkey hears the people shouting, but it is the palms and the cloaks that he speaks to. They too are thinking their thoughts: how they make the path smooth, how they keep the dust from flying into the donkey and his rider's eyes, how they are able to do something other than their usual task.
But they all wonder, do the people see the new thing being done? Or is this merely a stepping stone towards a different version of the way things have always been done? Will the vision of God's equitable justice, of universal care, of healing prevail? Are they waiting to exchange the donkey, the branches and the cloaks for stallions, canopies of brocade and silk, guards and well-dressed attendants? Is the Mount of Olives to be exchanged for a palace and scribes and orders? Can they see the transformation being made alive before their very eyes, the unmasking of society's illusions? Or do they only look for reversal, for replacement?
The stones cry out, the palms rustle till their fronds fracture, the cloaks reweave their patterns, the donkey brays for them to notice, but is it all in vain?
For the donkey carries the Christ, the anointed one, not to political victory in terms of taking charge, of human-centered power, of killing and expelling the enemy, but to a victory that is to break that very cycle. The cycle is so strong; it is so a part of the life of civilization. Will his victory ever be embraced? For the donkey carries the Christ towards both his death and his life, toward good and ill, into the heart of paradox. He carries him into the cycle to go beyond it.
Caught up in their joy, the crowd is ready for a reversal of fortune. Use your power to bring the rich and powerful down and put us in their place! Let those who have been used and misused be vindicated and let those who used and misused experience our lot! But a reversal of fortune changes nothing; transforms nothing. And the Christ is serving the transformation where the user and used, the exploiter and the exploited, the wounder and the wounded, both find a new reality, a new kind of life that needs such ways no longer.
The man knows this, the donkey senses. And as nears the city the donkey hears his lament, the catch in his throat, and he feels the tears drop onto his dusty mane: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”
It must be done! The moment the transformation is defined and revealed must pass. For if not, the hope of it will be lost. And some will see it; some will understand; some will embrace it. It will begin a new thing, again, in the world. The hope of God will penetrate and shine forth to those who can see, those who long to see. The celebration of the crowd can not last. It will turn against the Christ; we know that this is so, for it is still so, but the hope is still there too, being spoken of in the trees, being heard in the footsteps of the donkey and the beggar and the humble ones, being shouted by the mountains and the river rocks. The path is carved by Christ, but do we finally love the one that rides so lightly on our backs? And when we lift our dusty foot and step, which way do we go?
Will I lay my cloak before you,
when they arrest you on olive mountain,
or pull it tighter around me,
fading into the ranks of the deserters;
will I shout
'Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord!
When they parade you
before the authorities,
or will I tell any one-and every one- around me
I never met you in my life;
will I lay my palm branches at your feet,
as they march you to Calvary,
or use them to put more stripes
on your bloody back;
will I run behind you
when they carry you to the tomb,
or turn away
as the ashes of my hopes
are rubbed into the
wounds in my heart?
And the donkey, well, he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to, forward.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
March 21, 2010, The Fifth Sunday of Lent
March 21, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 43:16-21, Ps 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
5th Sunday of Lent, Year C
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. These words of Paul are the expression of the purpose of his life. How many of us would frame our life’s purpose in this way? We want to follow Christ. We want to experience the presence of his love in our lives. We may say that we want to know Christ. But what does that mean, to know? For Paul it is clear, to share in his suffering and death so that we can know Jesus as the risen one, for without the former we cannot truly know that latter. To share in his suffering and death is not something most of us desire. We want to think on it, ponder it, claim its saving power for us, but to have it be what he does and did, not something that we too must do each in our own way. And to do this we must be clear on the nature of that suffering and death; it is love.
We hear this definition if we pay attention to the implications of the readings. Paul’s rejection of all that made his life meaningful in worldly terms is a way of saying love is at the center. The righteousness of which he speaks means forgiveness and mercy, both of which are impossible without love. We also see it clearly in the story from John’s gospel.
In John’s gospel, we hear the story of an early Christian community grounded in the act of loving service to one another. Today’s passage is a very clear example of that. As is often the case in John’s gospel and indeed the other gospels as well, it is women or an outsider, not one of the inner circle, who demonstrates the point first. When hearing this story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet we are meant to think of the foot washing that Jesus does for his own disciples just days later. Her gift is one based on love for him and for God. She understands without being told how to respond to Jesus, to the love and ministry and life he embodies and points us to. As Gail O’Day writes: “In the anointing, she shows what it means to be one of Jesus’ own. She gives boldly of herself in love at this hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.”
The hour in question is, naturally, the hour, the time of his crucifixion and death. All that is happening in this portion of John is prefiguring his coming Passion. He is under a death sentence that makes incarnate our human fear of divine love and selfless surrender to serving others and God. Mary keeps her heart open to the place where true life lies, even if the path leads through death. Surely she knows that Jesus’ human life is coming to its end, but that only draws her further into love of him, not abandonment or trying to avoid the path of life in God that includes both joy and suffering, a particular kind of suffering.
The community that wrote John’s gospel understood itself to be partaking here and now in the resurrected life, not in its entirety, but in a true and real way. Heaven, service, salvation and love are all words that are pointing towards the same truth, in this Gospel and in the others. They are all part and parcel of the same understanding and same call to a way of life. Jesus was clear, as most of our later theologians were not, that heaven and salvation were not places distanced from us that we got to later; they were meant to be revealed and known within and among us. And, incidentally, so was what we signify by the word hell.
Last week in the adult confirmation class we were talking about these ideas of heaven and hell. And one person shared a wonderful Chinese story about them. I did say that the story would probably appear in a sermon someday. Little did I know it would be a week later! When we are paying attention God gives us so often exactly what we need. The story goes like this. We are given a glimpse of hell. It is a banquet hall, full of tables mounded with wonderful food, and the guests are seated along both sides of them. The place is full. All these delicious dishes, mouth-watering smells, and abundance are there for the taking. But no one is eating. Each guest has a pair of chopsticks that are four feet long. Try as they might, contort their arms as they will, not one of them can manage to scoop up any food and get it into their mouths. The room is full of frustration and anger. We are then given a glimpse of heaven. It is the exact same set up: banquet tables full of food, guests lining them table, and even the four-feet long chopsticks! But this room is full of feasting, laughter, and happiness. How is this possible? Because each guest is taking his or her own chopsticks, picking up the food before the guest opposite and feeding it to them.
This story is, I feel, a profoundly powerful image of service, love, salvation and heaven all woven together. It is simple on the surface, but that is deceptive. There is a lot we can learn by contemplating it. In its own way, it is playing on the same ideas as the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where the sheep and the goats are sorted based on who gave food, water, clothing, compassion and companionship in this life to others and who did not. In today’s reading Mary reveals heaven; Judas reveals hell.
As we continue on our journey towards the cross, as we too set our faces towards Jerusalem, I offer you this story to contemplate this week. Rather than give examples of how I see this story lived out in the world, rather than offer more ideas about what it means, I will instead leave you with some questions or ideas on how to enter into it and allow its meaning to unfold for you. For the heart of faith is not having answers given to us. It is to come to our own understandings that are grounded in the story and life of Jesus as we seek to make them our own story.
So here are a few of them to prime the pump. What is the relationship between love and service? What does true service to and of others look like? What does it require of us? What is different in the heavenly banquet image other than creative problem solving? What changes in disposition and understanding does feeding one another involve? What characterizes it? What changes does it require of our own self-understanding? And of the nature of life with each other? And lastly, what does such loving service mean when the path it takes us on can lead to suffering? For this is the path Jesus is on and yet he keeps moving forward, not seeking death, but neither turning from such service to appease those who are threatened by it.
It is also the path that we are on if we, as Paul, want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. It is not simply telling a story; it is discovering how we are to live it, constantly, knowing that Jesus is with us on the way, ready to go with us to the very ends of heaven and hell, ready always to love us.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 43:16-21, Ps 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
5th Sunday of Lent, Year C
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. These words of Paul are the expression of the purpose of his life. How many of us would frame our life’s purpose in this way? We want to follow Christ. We want to experience the presence of his love in our lives. We may say that we want to know Christ. But what does that mean, to know? For Paul it is clear, to share in his suffering and death so that we can know Jesus as the risen one, for without the former we cannot truly know that latter. To share in his suffering and death is not something most of us desire. We want to think on it, ponder it, claim its saving power for us, but to have it be what he does and did, not something that we too must do each in our own way. And to do this we must be clear on the nature of that suffering and death; it is love.
We hear this definition if we pay attention to the implications of the readings. Paul’s rejection of all that made his life meaningful in worldly terms is a way of saying love is at the center. The righteousness of which he speaks means forgiveness and mercy, both of which are impossible without love. We also see it clearly in the story from John’s gospel.
In John’s gospel, we hear the story of an early Christian community grounded in the act of loving service to one another. Today’s passage is a very clear example of that. As is often the case in John’s gospel and indeed the other gospels as well, it is women or an outsider, not one of the inner circle, who demonstrates the point first. When hearing this story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet we are meant to think of the foot washing that Jesus does for his own disciples just days later. Her gift is one based on love for him and for God. She understands without being told how to respond to Jesus, to the love and ministry and life he embodies and points us to. As Gail O’Day writes: “In the anointing, she shows what it means to be one of Jesus’ own. She gives boldly of herself in love at this hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.”
The hour in question is, naturally, the hour, the time of his crucifixion and death. All that is happening in this portion of John is prefiguring his coming Passion. He is under a death sentence that makes incarnate our human fear of divine love and selfless surrender to serving others and God. Mary keeps her heart open to the place where true life lies, even if the path leads through death. Surely she knows that Jesus’ human life is coming to its end, but that only draws her further into love of him, not abandonment or trying to avoid the path of life in God that includes both joy and suffering, a particular kind of suffering.
The community that wrote John’s gospel understood itself to be partaking here and now in the resurrected life, not in its entirety, but in a true and real way. Heaven, service, salvation and love are all words that are pointing towards the same truth, in this Gospel and in the others. They are all part and parcel of the same understanding and same call to a way of life. Jesus was clear, as most of our later theologians were not, that heaven and salvation were not places distanced from us that we got to later; they were meant to be revealed and known within and among us. And, incidentally, so was what we signify by the word hell.
Last week in the adult confirmation class we were talking about these ideas of heaven and hell. And one person shared a wonderful Chinese story about them. I did say that the story would probably appear in a sermon someday. Little did I know it would be a week later! When we are paying attention God gives us so often exactly what we need. The story goes like this. We are given a glimpse of hell. It is a banquet hall, full of tables mounded with wonderful food, and the guests are seated along both sides of them. The place is full. All these delicious dishes, mouth-watering smells, and abundance are there for the taking. But no one is eating. Each guest has a pair of chopsticks that are four feet long. Try as they might, contort their arms as they will, not one of them can manage to scoop up any food and get it into their mouths. The room is full of frustration and anger. We are then given a glimpse of heaven. It is the exact same set up: banquet tables full of food, guests lining them table, and even the four-feet long chopsticks! But this room is full of feasting, laughter, and happiness. How is this possible? Because each guest is taking his or her own chopsticks, picking up the food before the guest opposite and feeding it to them.
This story is, I feel, a profoundly powerful image of service, love, salvation and heaven all woven together. It is simple on the surface, but that is deceptive. There is a lot we can learn by contemplating it. In its own way, it is playing on the same ideas as the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where the sheep and the goats are sorted based on who gave food, water, clothing, compassion and companionship in this life to others and who did not. In today’s reading Mary reveals heaven; Judas reveals hell.
As we continue on our journey towards the cross, as we too set our faces towards Jerusalem, I offer you this story to contemplate this week. Rather than give examples of how I see this story lived out in the world, rather than offer more ideas about what it means, I will instead leave you with some questions or ideas on how to enter into it and allow its meaning to unfold for you. For the heart of faith is not having answers given to us. It is to come to our own understandings that are grounded in the story and life of Jesus as we seek to make them our own story.
So here are a few of them to prime the pump. What is the relationship between love and service? What does true service to and of others look like? What does it require of us? What is different in the heavenly banquet image other than creative problem solving? What changes in disposition and understanding does feeding one another involve? What characterizes it? What changes does it require of our own self-understanding? And of the nature of life with each other? And lastly, what does such loving service mean when the path it takes us on can lead to suffering? For this is the path Jesus is on and yet he keeps moving forward, not seeking death, but neither turning from such service to appease those who are threatened by it.
It is also the path that we are on if we, as Paul, want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. It is not simply telling a story; it is discovering how we are to live it, constantly, knowing that Jesus is with us on the way, ready to go with us to the very ends of heaven and hell, ready always to love us.
Monday, March 15, 2010
March 14, 2010, the Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 14, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Joshua 5:9-12, Ps 32, 1 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3.11b-32
4th Sunday of Lent, Year C
In Alice Walker’s beautiful and painful book “The Color Purple”, one of the many characters we meet is Shug Avery, a traveling blues singer. Shug has been estranged from her pastor father for years because of her decision to sing secular music. One morning, while she’s visiting her hometown, she decides that she feels like singing. She opens the local juke joint and begins singing her signature song. As a crowd gathers around the singer, the scene shifts to her father’s church. As he is preaching, sounds from the juke joint drift in through the open windows. Someone in the congregation prompts the choir to begin singing “God Might be Trying to Tell you Something”. As the choir gets louder, Shug hears and begins singing along. As the song progresses, she leads everyone from the juke joint (band and all) to the church. She walks up to her father and puts her arms around, whispering, “See, Daddy, even sinners have souls.” He returns her embrace as tears fill her eyes.
Shug Avery’s world is a long way away from that of the younger son we hear about today. Some parallels are obvious. Both children take paths that the world judges to be morally suspect. Both are distanced from their fathers, though we do not ever know how the father in the story in Luke felt about his younger son’s decision. He may not have had the hardness of heart that Shug’s did. Both children find a way to come home through the interaction of life and the involvement of other people, though the choir in Shug’s story is a far kinder opening than the younger brother’s working as an exploited field laborer. And both, upon meeting their father again, confess.
And it is on this aspect that I would like us to focus a bit more. So often we hear sermons on God’s unconditional grace and acceptance as embodied by the father. Which is true. Or we hear sermons on the older brother and how often we may indentify more with him than the prodigal, being prompted to not let our narrowness cut out God’s incomprehensible grace and realizing grace for one doesn’t diminish it’s presence for the other. Which is also true. Or we hear the invitation to come home to God if we find our lives seem to be more like that of the prodigal son’s and trust that we will be received. Again, true. All are certainly ways into this story and pointing to the many meanings therein.
To confess. To acknowledge. To, as the story says, come to oneself, to face oneself honestly. This is not a popular topic. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We love to divulge in our culture. Why else are the antics of our stars and shows like Jerry Springer so popular? But such divulgence of our behaviors, our wrongdoings, our shocking mistreatment of others is not truly confession. It is self-indulgent revelation meant to garner attention, fame, money and a sense of importance. Confession is none of those things. It is about self-honesty and repair. It’s about seeing where we have not acted as we ought to have; it is about claiming where we have misused our lives at the expense of ourselves and others. We don’t look to blame; we look to own and to amend. It is an intimate act done without ulterior motives of gain, except perhaps that of the peace and calm that come with acceptance and owning what we have done without excuse or justification.
Some cynical types take the prodigal son’s words as a calculated ploy to win his father’s affection and get back into to the good life. He doesn’t really mean it, they say; he’s just once again being the selfish young git trying to protect his own skin. Perhaps such a jaded reading is a symptom of our times. I may be naïve, but I take the young man’s words at face value. He could have simply tried this ruse when the famine hit rather than trying to eek out a living as a laborer. He could have gone home with his tail between his legs. But he doesn’t. He chooses to work in a dirty, bottom of the barrel job because he realizes he has gotten lost, that he has misused his father’s trust and love, that he has been selfishly living, focusing on his own pleasure at the expense of others’ souls and his own. He has a moment of clarity into his own nature. And he realizes that no one owes him anything; he has to find his own path back to wholeness and dignity. He can’t do it alone, but he also can’t expect that there aren’t bridges to mend and accounts to be reckoned. He faces the emptiness and inner darkness and finds the courage to say this is where I am and it is from here that I start. May God send me people to help me find my way back.
This is the first movement of grace, the whisper on the edges of our soul that reminds us we do not belong to ourselves, but to our family, our neighbors, our world and our God. We are part of something holy and beautiful and all too often we trample on it in search of self-centered gratification. But to step back and see our interdependence and our interconnection, our need for good relations with others and our own soul is the first step of the dynamic of grace. God implants this earning, this longing within us. We can muffle it well, but when we are ready for something new it sends forth a whisper of longing from deep within us.
The son prepares his speech. Note how he doesn’t cast blame or try to paint himself as a victim of circumstance. Rather, he comes clean and says basically, I messed up and I don’t expect you to take me back as before. I have to re-earn your trust; I have to grow and I have to make amends. And he goes through with this even when his father greets him with unconditional love and joy. The son could have not said his prepared speech; he could have chosen not to acknowledge his own realization and instead said, phew, dodged a bullet there, I don’t have to worry about saying sorry. Instead he still says the words, at least most of them, to his father even after this amazing reception. He does so, not to guarantee the continued good reaction of his father, but rather for the sake of his soul.
And this is the second dynamic of grace. It is always being held out for us, but we have to come to a place where we see our need for it. Only then can we truly receive it, experience it as grace. We have to acknowledge our utter dependence on God’s love and that even at our best we get lost. Our ability to experience God’s unconditional loving grace is directly related to our humility and willingness to always acknowledge that our lives and actions are always in need of scrutiny and the participation of God. This is the life of the soul, the soul that Shug speaks of, the soul given back to the son. For our souls to blossom, they need to bask in God’s grace, and God’s grace comes to us in direct proportion to our willingness to admit our dependence on God and each other. It comes as we keep our eyes always open with honest clarity on who we are and what we do, asking always for God to come in and make it truly good.
Even the older son needs to learn this. He has confused grace with reward for always doing the right thing. Grace is an earned thing. In his self-righteousness he is angry that grace is given to someone who hasn’t played by the rules. For him, it seems, grace is about fairness not love. He is the good guy, right, so why hasn’t he gotten special favors? In his own way, he is just as self-absorbed as his younger brother. In his own way, he too needs to recognize his need for grace, his need to confess his arrogance, his superiority, his feeling of entitlement, his belief in that it he himself who is the author his salvation.
God wants us back together with him and each other safe and sound. God wants us back together to celebrate, to move to a place beyond blame and retribution, into acknowledgement of our wrongs against each other that leads to healing not continued division. Confession is an act of profound liberation. It is freeing; it is a tonic to the soul. To confess is to strip away all that has accumulated on our souls and allow the light of God to shine in and continue to build us up. To confess is to remind ourselves of the deep truth that as long as we are human and part of this human enterprise, we will get out of alignment. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but rather something essential to know about ourselves so that we can keep turning to the center to find God. It is not to make us focus on our faults and shortcomings and feel guilty, dirty and rotten about ourselves; rather, confession is about reminding ourselves that at our core we are holy people called to live a life of fulfilling love for others and in so doing find our souls to be enriched and blessed.
Confession done from this place, I believe, is at the heart of our growth as people, our ability to forgive and the possibility to live in new ways. It is also the soil from which social justice sprouts forth and why such work is so hard. It is more than saying we are sorry as a collective; it is to take the next step to make amends and restructure our world from a radically new place. That is why it is easy for governments decades later to issue formal apologies, such as ours did only last year for slavery, but nearly impossible for them to make monetary reparations or work to change systems of power without tremendous pressure from the people.
This Lent we are invited to revisit the meaning and the sacred power of confession and its intrinsic link to grace. We are invited to see ourselves as all the characters in this story because we are all the characters in it, and to live out the dynamic of grace in within ourselves and towards others. It is about seeing that we have souls and to see that soul in all others—the Christ within, the holy spark inside, the connection to the unifying reality of God. It is about a season of reunification that can only come when we see the breaks to be healed, the division to overcome. It is about believing that grace is God’s first gift and purpose for us and being willing to let ourselves be wrapped in those arms of divine acceptance and joy.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Joshua 5:9-12, Ps 32, 1 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3.11b-32
4th Sunday of Lent, Year C
In Alice Walker’s beautiful and painful book “The Color Purple”, one of the many characters we meet is Shug Avery, a traveling blues singer. Shug has been estranged from her pastor father for years because of her decision to sing secular music. One morning, while she’s visiting her hometown, she decides that she feels like singing. She opens the local juke joint and begins singing her signature song. As a crowd gathers around the singer, the scene shifts to her father’s church. As he is preaching, sounds from the juke joint drift in through the open windows. Someone in the congregation prompts the choir to begin singing “God Might be Trying to Tell you Something”. As the choir gets louder, Shug hears and begins singing along. As the song progresses, she leads everyone from the juke joint (band and all) to the church. She walks up to her father and puts her arms around, whispering, “See, Daddy, even sinners have souls.” He returns her embrace as tears fill her eyes.
Shug Avery’s world is a long way away from that of the younger son we hear about today. Some parallels are obvious. Both children take paths that the world judges to be morally suspect. Both are distanced from their fathers, though we do not ever know how the father in the story in Luke felt about his younger son’s decision. He may not have had the hardness of heart that Shug’s did. Both children find a way to come home through the interaction of life and the involvement of other people, though the choir in Shug’s story is a far kinder opening than the younger brother’s working as an exploited field laborer. And both, upon meeting their father again, confess.
And it is on this aspect that I would like us to focus a bit more. So often we hear sermons on God’s unconditional grace and acceptance as embodied by the father. Which is true. Or we hear sermons on the older brother and how often we may indentify more with him than the prodigal, being prompted to not let our narrowness cut out God’s incomprehensible grace and realizing grace for one doesn’t diminish it’s presence for the other. Which is also true. Or we hear the invitation to come home to God if we find our lives seem to be more like that of the prodigal son’s and trust that we will be received. Again, true. All are certainly ways into this story and pointing to the many meanings therein.
To confess. To acknowledge. To, as the story says, come to oneself, to face oneself honestly. This is not a popular topic. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We love to divulge in our culture. Why else are the antics of our stars and shows like Jerry Springer so popular? But such divulgence of our behaviors, our wrongdoings, our shocking mistreatment of others is not truly confession. It is self-indulgent revelation meant to garner attention, fame, money and a sense of importance. Confession is none of those things. It is about self-honesty and repair. It’s about seeing where we have not acted as we ought to have; it is about claiming where we have misused our lives at the expense of ourselves and others. We don’t look to blame; we look to own and to amend. It is an intimate act done without ulterior motives of gain, except perhaps that of the peace and calm that come with acceptance and owning what we have done without excuse or justification.
Some cynical types take the prodigal son’s words as a calculated ploy to win his father’s affection and get back into to the good life. He doesn’t really mean it, they say; he’s just once again being the selfish young git trying to protect his own skin. Perhaps such a jaded reading is a symptom of our times. I may be naïve, but I take the young man’s words at face value. He could have simply tried this ruse when the famine hit rather than trying to eek out a living as a laborer. He could have gone home with his tail between his legs. But he doesn’t. He chooses to work in a dirty, bottom of the barrel job because he realizes he has gotten lost, that he has misused his father’s trust and love, that he has been selfishly living, focusing on his own pleasure at the expense of others’ souls and his own. He has a moment of clarity into his own nature. And he realizes that no one owes him anything; he has to find his own path back to wholeness and dignity. He can’t do it alone, but he also can’t expect that there aren’t bridges to mend and accounts to be reckoned. He faces the emptiness and inner darkness and finds the courage to say this is where I am and it is from here that I start. May God send me people to help me find my way back.
This is the first movement of grace, the whisper on the edges of our soul that reminds us we do not belong to ourselves, but to our family, our neighbors, our world and our God. We are part of something holy and beautiful and all too often we trample on it in search of self-centered gratification. But to step back and see our interdependence and our interconnection, our need for good relations with others and our own soul is the first step of the dynamic of grace. God implants this earning, this longing within us. We can muffle it well, but when we are ready for something new it sends forth a whisper of longing from deep within us.
The son prepares his speech. Note how he doesn’t cast blame or try to paint himself as a victim of circumstance. Rather, he comes clean and says basically, I messed up and I don’t expect you to take me back as before. I have to re-earn your trust; I have to grow and I have to make amends. And he goes through with this even when his father greets him with unconditional love and joy. The son could have not said his prepared speech; he could have chosen not to acknowledge his own realization and instead said, phew, dodged a bullet there, I don’t have to worry about saying sorry. Instead he still says the words, at least most of them, to his father even after this amazing reception. He does so, not to guarantee the continued good reaction of his father, but rather for the sake of his soul.
And this is the second dynamic of grace. It is always being held out for us, but we have to come to a place where we see our need for it. Only then can we truly receive it, experience it as grace. We have to acknowledge our utter dependence on God’s love and that even at our best we get lost. Our ability to experience God’s unconditional loving grace is directly related to our humility and willingness to always acknowledge that our lives and actions are always in need of scrutiny and the participation of God. This is the life of the soul, the soul that Shug speaks of, the soul given back to the son. For our souls to blossom, they need to bask in God’s grace, and God’s grace comes to us in direct proportion to our willingness to admit our dependence on God and each other. It comes as we keep our eyes always open with honest clarity on who we are and what we do, asking always for God to come in and make it truly good.
Even the older son needs to learn this. He has confused grace with reward for always doing the right thing. Grace is an earned thing. In his self-righteousness he is angry that grace is given to someone who hasn’t played by the rules. For him, it seems, grace is about fairness not love. He is the good guy, right, so why hasn’t he gotten special favors? In his own way, he is just as self-absorbed as his younger brother. In his own way, he too needs to recognize his need for grace, his need to confess his arrogance, his superiority, his feeling of entitlement, his belief in that it he himself who is the author his salvation.
God wants us back together with him and each other safe and sound. God wants us back together to celebrate, to move to a place beyond blame and retribution, into acknowledgement of our wrongs against each other that leads to healing not continued division. Confession is an act of profound liberation. It is freeing; it is a tonic to the soul. To confess is to strip away all that has accumulated on our souls and allow the light of God to shine in and continue to build us up. To confess is to remind ourselves of the deep truth that as long as we are human and part of this human enterprise, we will get out of alignment. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but rather something essential to know about ourselves so that we can keep turning to the center to find God. It is not to make us focus on our faults and shortcomings and feel guilty, dirty and rotten about ourselves; rather, confession is about reminding ourselves that at our core we are holy people called to live a life of fulfilling love for others and in so doing find our souls to be enriched and blessed.
Confession done from this place, I believe, is at the heart of our growth as people, our ability to forgive and the possibility to live in new ways. It is also the soil from which social justice sprouts forth and why such work is so hard. It is more than saying we are sorry as a collective; it is to take the next step to make amends and restructure our world from a radically new place. That is why it is easy for governments decades later to issue formal apologies, such as ours did only last year for slavery, but nearly impossible for them to make monetary reparations or work to change systems of power without tremendous pressure from the people.
This Lent we are invited to revisit the meaning and the sacred power of confession and its intrinsic link to grace. We are invited to see ourselves as all the characters in this story because we are all the characters in it, and to live out the dynamic of grace in within ourselves and towards others. It is about seeing that we have souls and to see that soul in all others—the Christ within, the holy spark inside, the connection to the unifying reality of God. It is about a season of reunification that can only come when we see the breaks to be healed, the division to overcome. It is about believing that grace is God’s first gift and purpose for us and being willing to let ourselves be wrapped in those arms of divine acceptance and joy.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Sundays, February 28 and March 7, 2010
The Rev. Garrison did not preach on these two Sundays. Guest preachers were Nancy Gallagher on February 28, and Dave Beuerman on March 7.
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