Mistaking Temptations for Blessings

"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted..." So begins today's gospel. It seems remarkable enough to me that Jesus wrestles with his identity and sense of call. But this scripture says that the event is necessary. The Spirit leads Jesus into it. In Mark's gospel the image is even more striking. There "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness." But regardless of whether Jesus is led or driven, it is a requirement that Jesus at least consider becoming a different sort of Messiah than the one God has in mind.

One need not believe in an actual devil to be moved by this story. In fact, I think the story has more power when the devil ceases to be a pitchfork carrying cartoon and instead becomes a symbol for genuine temptation rising up within Jesus, temptation to take a messianic path that will be easier, more self aggrandizing, or more in keeping with the sort of Messiah people wanted. Surely there was some way to bring God's kingdom while still being admired by all, getting invited to the best parties, and enjoying a nice, upper-middle-class lifestyle.

When I find myself wrestling with what it means to follow Jesus and just what I am called to do and be, it is seldom an appealing place. Indeed when the path before me seems uncertain or filled with great difficulty, it can feel like God has withdrawn from me, and I can despair over God's absence. But if this story is in any way instructive for a life of faithfulness, then such moments may be necessary. The Spirit may even have led me there.

Certainly the Church, as the body of Christ, finds itself tempted to be something less than God intends. Jesus taught his followers that they would face many of the same difficulties and opposition he did, but we sometimes think that being Christian should protect and insulate us from troubles. We may even come to see the sort of temptations Jesus resists as blessings. Consider the things we appreciate when thanking God for our "blessings." Most of us don't go so far as the Joel Osteens of the world who insist that God wants us to be rich, but we still think of our nice house and comfortable lives as blessings.

Jesus says that following him requires self-denial and taking up the cross, the very sort of thing we see Jesus doing in today's gospel. But if we consider the things Jesus must resist as blessings we should pursue, surely we will get this whole Christian life thing all wrong.

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Sermon video: Able to See the Risen One

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Put to Shame

The heavens proclaim his righteousness;
     and all the peoples behold his glory.  
All worshipers of images are put to shame,
     those who make their boast in worthless idols;
     all gods bow down before him.  - Psalm 97:6-7

John Calvin, the theological founder of my particular Protestant tradition (Reformed, of which Presbyterians are a subset), spoke of  human beings as prolific manufacturers of idols. Calvin, who lived in 1500s Geneva, Switzerland, was long removed from the days of actual carved or cast images. No one was making any animal sacrifices at pagan temples in Geneva when Calvin was its city manager. But Calvin knew that the impulse that led ancient people to create idols of metal or stone was alive and well. Indeed, it is alive and well today.

Most people need something they can believe in, can trust in. Most of us are too "sophisticated" to construct actual idols, but we have our substitutes. Obvious candidates are things such as family or nation. There is nothing wrong with such things. But when they become what we most fervently believe in and trust in, they do become problems. And they inevitably fail us and betray us when we put ultimate trust in them. Or, to borrow from the psalm, those who put their trust in them "are put to shame."

In our culture, acquiring things is an idol. Many believe that if they get enough of something: possessions, experiences, power, prestige, etc. they will be happy and content. Overtly religious folks often make idols of things such as the church or the Bible. In our increasingly secular age, ideologies make for nice idols. The Second Amendment crowd often seems to wander into idol territory. The faith that some people place in owning a gun strikes me as a greater leap of faith than that of believing in Jesus' resurrection.

I tend to run in more liberal crowds, and we have different idols. Education is often one. Not that there's anything wrong with education. I'm generally for it. But when you trust it to cure all that ails society, you've invested much more trust in it that is appropriate, and you'll end up being "put to shame."

There's a version of this sort of idolatry that especially afflicts church professionals and congregations. We sometimes believe that if we learn to do church just so, all will be well. Again, it's a good thing for pastors to learn leadership skills and churches to discover better ways of doing vital programs, but it is very easy for skills and abilities to become our idols, our gods, the things where we place our ultimate trust. And as the psalm says...

I think this sort of temptation is especially acute in denominations and congregations with highly educated clergy and members. We often find it much easier to trust in our impressive smarts and abilities than to trust in God. If you're not sure if this sort of idolatry afflicts your congregation, it may help to consider how people react when things are not going well. Do they devote more time to prayer and attentiveness to God's voice, or do they simply try to figure out what is wrong and fix it? Now clearly we can pray, listen for God, and also try to get better at church operations. These aren't mutually exclusive things. Still, it's worth asking ourselves where we place our ultimate trust. Otherwise we may find ourselves "put to shame."

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Sermon: Able to See the Risen One

Luke 24:14-35

Able to See the Risen One

James Sledge                                                                                                   May 4, 2014

When I was in seminary, I had a wonderful opportunity to take part in three week travel seminar to the Middle East. Fifteen students, five from my seminary and five each from two others, joined a group of lay leaders from various churches on a trip that visited sites in Jordan, Syria, the Sinai peninsula, Israel, and Greece.

One of the things you discover in the Middle East, especially outside the cities, is the remarkable hospitality of the people, much like the biblical culture of hospitality, except in Israel. That’s not a knock on Israel. It’s just that its culture is largely imported from Europe and America and so very unlike indigenous, Middle Eastern culture.

One day, after visiting a number of archeological sites in Jordan, we made our way to an out-of-the-way, little village. There was an old Crusader castle on the hill overlooking the village, but it did not draw many tourists. We were the only Westerners, or tourists of any sort, at the single, little hotel that was about halfway between the village and the castle.

We arrived a couple of hours before supper, and a few of us decided to walk the bit less than a mile down the hill into the village itself. As we walked along the road, people would lean out the windows of homes and talk to us, ask where we were from, how we were doing, where we would go next, and so on. One boy – I guess he was 10 or 11 – asked if we would come in and join him for tea. But we wanted to get to the village and back before supper, so we said, “No.” He was insistent, running from the upstairs window down to the front door, showing us the teapot he would use, telling us it would be no trouble at all.

We were very appreciative. We thanked him repeatedly, but we had to keep going. It is by far my single biggest regret from that trip, and it ranks way up there on my list of all time regrets. To have visited in his home and enjoyed his hospitality would surely have been one of the more memorable and meaningful moments of the entire trip, certainly much more so than the few closed shops we saw at the bottom of the hill.

I have kicked myself over the years for not stopping, and I’m often reminded of that day when I read a biblical account that features hospitality. When I read the story of Cleopas and another, unnamed disciple meeting Jesus along the way but not recognizing him at first, I wondered if I would have missed out had I been walking along the Emmaus Road that day.

After all, I did not have time even to accept someone’s hospitality that day when I walked down a Middle Eastern road. Cleopas and his companion meet the risen Christ only after they extend hospitality, insistently, not unlike that little boy in Jordan. And they do so even though they are tired, confused, and heartbroken. Had I been there that day and Jesus walked ahead as if he were going on, I likely would have said, “So long. Nice talking to you.”

What Is This Abide?

The other day someone asked the question, "Does anyone use the word abide anymore?" Most of us agreed that the word had fallen into disuse and that many probably did not know its meaning. Yet it is a wonderful word, and I'm not sure there is an adequate substitute.

I've always loved the hymn, "Abide with Me." Being and "evening hymn," it doesn't get sung much in worship so I'm not sure how I came to appreciate it. I enjoy the tune, but I especially like all the abiding that goes on in the verses. I suppose it could be rewritten, "Remain with me," but somehow that wouldn't seem the same.

Today's gospel reading is overflowing with "abide" on the lips of Jesus. The popular NIV translation uses "remain," so I've very grateful that my NRSV sticks with "abide." Perhaps it is just me, but there seems something a bit more complex and mysterious about "abide" than "remain."

I think we in the church could use some more complex and mysterious abiding. I know I could. "Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing." I in Christ and Christ in me, abiding in one another. I'm not sure "remain" quite covers that, but then again, I'm not always sure I quite understand what this "abide" is either.

I'm not sure I understand it, but I worry that I spend far too much time not abiding. Worse, I do so in my work as a pastor. Sometimes I think that it is very hard to do much abiding when you are straining or busy or working hard. It is even harder to do much abiding when you are worried and anxious. We live in an anxious world, and the church world is pretty anxious, too.

If you're not a church person, you may not know that most denominations and very many congregations are struggling with declining membership and giving. Compounding this, the average age of members is getting older and older. Survival concerns have become a driving force for many, and it is hard for anyone to completely ignore the numbers. But I'm not sure that institutional survival and abiding are compatible.

I wonder what people would think if one Sunday worship was given over to quiet reflection on abiding. Maybe we would read all the New Testament passages containing "abide" (it wouldn't take all that long), sing "Abide with Me" between the readings, and pray for Jesus to abide in us and help us abide in him. And we could just sit there and wait and wonder, and perhaps even experience a tiny bit of abiding.

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The Gift of Not Knowing

Earlier today, I was thumbing through Graham Standish's book, Humble Leadership, looking for some quote that I had mis-remembered. (Not only had I remembered it incorrectly but it wasn't even in this book.) In the process, I stumbled onto something I had highlighted a number of years ago.

...as we join God in an ever-deepening relationship, two things consistently happen. First, joining God in God's work leads us to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action. Most of us are under the assumption that the more we act in faith, the easier things should get. ...the opposite generally happens. Things don't get easier. Instead we end up coming to a point where we aren't sure what to do. There's little clarity. We are faced with decisions that might lead to something positive or negative, and we have no guarantees. We have no choice but to act on faith. We have to trust in God and trust in our discernment of God's will. (p. 153)

I hasten to add that "discernment" is not the same thing as our deciding something. It is a spiritual process of listening for and to God, one with which many of us in the Church have precious little experience. I know I don't.

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. - John 14:26-27

So says Jesus to his disciples shortly before his arrest. It is a remarkable promise. The Spirit will teach us everything we need to know, and we will have true peace. I'm reasonably certain that this teaching is of a very different sort than is so stressed in my faith tradition. We Presbyterians have long demanded a highly educated clergy, well versed in theology, Bible, and so on. But this often sees being a pastor or church leader mostly as a  matter of training and education, something that is almost entirely a human endeavor. Indeed at times, there is no room at all for us to be taught by the Spirit.

Our culture values accomplishment, expertise, skill, and production. But Christian faith and life in the Spirit are more about surrender and trust than they are about our abilities. Not that abilities and training don't matter, but I'm not sure they are of all that much good without the realization that, finally, God's work is beyond all our skills, demanding faith and discernment more than any expertise on our part.

This can be terribly deflating to me. I so want to be the "resident theologian," the one with clarity born of my understanding of theology and scripture. And yet the more I claim such a role for myself, the more likely I am to reinforce the culture of expertise and skill that makes it so difficult to trust in God rather than our own abilities. Not to mention how frustrated I can become if others don't trust my expertise.

At the same time, it is interesting to think that reaching a point where I don't know what to do, where I cannot find clarity, may be the very point I must come to if I am to live the abundant, Spirit-filled life Jesus wishes for me, and for all of us.

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Fearing the LORD

Back in my days as a pilot, I would frequently see the same poster in the airports I visited. I'm not talking about airline terminals but the part of the airport where general aviation aircraft, from little two-seaters to big corporate jets, were located. This poster was more prevalent in smaller airports where flight instructors plied their trade, teaching would-be pilots how to fly. It featured a picture of an antiquated craft from the days of bi-planes stuck in the top of a solitary tree with this quote. "Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."

 The origins of the quote are a bit obscure, though it may well be from the 1930s, spoken by a British aviator, Capt. A. G. Lamplugh. But regardless of who said it, the saying remains popular because of its truth. Aviation can be terribly unkind to those who do not treat it with a great deal of respect. As was once said to me when I was a young and invincible pilot. The are bold pilots, and there are old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

In the Exodus story, God saves the Israelites from Pharaoh's army by creating an escape route through the sea. But when Pharaoh, the leader of the ancient world's greatest super power, attempted to follow, the army was swallowed up in the waters. "Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great work that the LORD did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the LORD and believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses"

Interesting how the story links fear and belief, though this is far from unique. The term "fear of the LORD" occurs repeatedly in the Old Testament and a couple of times in the New as well. Perhaps the best known occurrence is from Proverbs. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge." (Writing the word LORD in this all caps fashion is how many Bible translations continue the Jewish practice of taking great care not to speak God's personal name unless absolutely necessary. This practice uses the Hebrew word for "Lord" rather than saying YHWH, the pronunciation of which is not certain.)

This notion of fearing God is quite unnerving to many modern Christians. Yet when the book of Acts speaks of the thriving New Testament Church it says, Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers." (Acts 9:31) As with Exodus linking fear and belief, Acts links fear with the comfort of the Spirit. Perhaps we should pay more attention to this fear of the LORD.

Many have pointed out that this "fear" is not about simply being terrified of God. The Hebrew word speaks of awe and respect, but that does include an element of fear. When I look upon the raging rapids of a great river surging through a canyon, I may be moved to awe and wonder, but if I get too close to the edge, fear is there, too.

I sometimes think that our being troubled by notions of fearing God is less about that being contrary to the intimacy of God's presence in Jesus and more about our very tame and domesticated ideas of God. God is often seen as a totally benign presence who give us stuff but makes no hard demands on us. In our consumer oriented society, God become a spiritual shop keeper whose job it is to give us the spiritual goodies we want, a post-modern, consumer version of what Bonhoeffer labeled "cheap grace."

But the living God is no shop keeper. Jesus tells us as much, saying that it costs us our very lives to follow him. We must deny ourselves and take up the cross. "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 16:25)

I think that the Church in our day desperately needs to discover a God who can prompt some real awe, maybe even a bit of fear. The Living God is a wild and free power who seeks to transform us, not simply to give us what we want. Writer Annie Dillard keenly observes this problem in her famous quote from Teaching a Stone to Talk.

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
     fools despise wisdom and  instruction.   - Proverbs 1:7
 Lord, help me wise up.

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Winners and Losers

God's delight is not in the strength of the horse,
     nor his pleasure in the speed of a runner;
but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,
     in those who hope in his steadfast love.   - Psalm 147:10-11

God may not delight in the strength of the horse or the speed of the runner, but most of us do. We are impressed with winners, and we don't have a lot of patience with losers. I went to Washington Nationals baseball game the other day. It was a close, low scoring affair until a relief pitcher "blew the game," giving up 4 runs in quick succession. This relief pitcher had been loudly cheered when he entered the game, but he left it to similar level of boos. He had lost. He had failed. Booooo!!

This is nothing new, of course, but I think it has taken on additional intensity in recent decades. Our world seems more and more competitive, more and more anxious, more and more stressed out. In such a setting, people are terrified of failing, and we worship those with superhuman focus and concentration, who flourish in the face of pressure, who "come through in the clutch."

In our hyper-competitive world, appearing weak is a cardinal sin. It's no wonder church folks prefer Palm Sunday and Easter to Good Friday. A cross is a place for losers, and we've never gotten completely comfortable with it. Some even go so far as to see it in "no pain - no gain" terms, as an extreme act of athletic accomplishment on the way to a remarkable victory. But that's not the picture in the gospels (at least not the synoptic ones). And it's not the picture Paul has in mind when he says Christ crucified is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles..." (Jew and Gentile covers all humans for Paul, and Jesus on the cross doesn't make sense from either point of view.)

Jesus says that his followers must take up their own crosses. In other words, they must embrace what the world sees as failure, becoming entirely dependent on God's care and grace. Yet even in the church, we tend to love winners and hate losers. "Successful" pastors and congregations often embody all the best leadership and business practices of our secular world, the things that will make us winners. At times we are so afraid of being losers that we become incredibly risk-averse, attempting nothing that could end in failure. We know better than to go to Jerusalem, raise a ruckus at the Temple, and challenge the authorities. What was Jesus thinking?

In my denomination, successful pastors - winners - get paid a lot more and have bigger pensions than those who are less successful - losers. In this we are little different from any other denomination. Not that I take much comfort from that. Part of our calling is to be like Jesus, to be different from the world that loves winners and hates losers. After all, Jesus spend a great deal more time with the losers than the winners. The losers tended to love him, the winner much less so.

When I think of the trouble I get myself into as a pastor, a husband, a father, a person, the lion's share of it comes from wanting so badly to be a winner and fearing so much being a loser. I don't want to admit failings of failures. I don't want to appear weak. I want to impress. I want to win. I want to be the reason things turned out well. And I think that the fear of losing is even more powerful and motivating than my desire to win.

I wonder how different my life might be, my relationships might be, if I wasn't so terrified of losing, of looking weak, of failing.

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Did Anything Really Happen?

O sing to the LORD a new song,
    for he has done marvelous things. 
His right hand and his holy arm
     have gained him victory.
The LORD has made known his victory;
     he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations. He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness
     to the house of Israel. 
All the ends of the earth have seen
     the victory of our God.         Psalm 98:1-3

For pastors and other church professionals, the week following the celebration of the Resurrection may feature more of a collective sigh and collapse than the days right after Christmas. Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday (and for some a vigil on Saturday) is followed by special music and fanfare for Easter Sunday itself, complete with sunrise services and other extras. Liturgically speaking, we go wild for Easter - and not without good reason - and then...?

On Easter I preached about how resurrection was so much more than butterflies and natural processes, so much more than the promise of life after death. I said it was about God intervening in human history to do something wonderfully and frighteningly new. But in the post-Easter letdown, things can seem terribly "back to normal."

Traditional Christian theology has spoken of the cross and resurrection as marking the close of an old age even though the age to come has not yet fully arrived. And so we live in "the time between the times," an interlude in history between how things have always been and how they will be in God's new day, what Jesus called the Kingdom. During this between time, we experience God's new day only provisionally, in the community of faith as it becomes the body of Christ, and within us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. But I must confess that the world/age that is passing away often seems much more real to me than that day that is coming, that Kingdom and newness that I proclaimed on Easter. And the post-Easter letdown only aggravates such feelings.

I sometimes worry about the future of the Church and my own Presbyterian denomination because it seems so institutional, so far from a Spirit filled beacon of God's new day. Over the years many have written about congregations and denominations that depend solely on their own resources, rarely doing anything that would be possible only with God's help. Such writings resonate with me, but if I am honest, I have to say that I'm as caught up in such patterns as anyone. I'll work hard and urge others to do the same, but I doubt anything significant will happen beyond our efforts.

Did anything really change because of the resurrection? It apparently did for those first disciples. The contrast between those who so regularly failed to understand and who scattered and denied when Jesus was arrested compared with the disciples who spread the gospel all over the Mediterranean at great personal risk and even death is remarkable. And they didn't have any of the books and consultants and resources and conferences that are available to me.

Sometimes I think the greatest challenge facing pastors like myself is not the need to figure out all the management, leadership, or programmatic tricks to help churches do well. Rather it is living as though something really happened nearly 2000 years ago that changed everything.

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Sermon video: All Heaven Breaks Loose

Audios of sermons and worship can be found on the FCPC website.

Sermon: All Heaven Breaks Loose

Matthew 28:1-10

All Heaven Breaks Loose

James Sledge                                       April 20, 2014 – Resurrection of the Lord

If you’ll pardon the expression, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on in Matthew’s account of Holy Week and the Resurrection. It started on Palm Sunday although it’s easy to miss that in the English translation. There it says that when Jesus had entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, but the word more literally means “shaken,” a word most often associated with earthquakes and the root of our word “seismic.”

The same shaking occurs when Jesus dies on the cross, an earthquake that leads the centurion and those with him to say, “Surely this man was God’s son.” And now on Easter morning, the shaking continues. An angel comes down from heaven to roll back the stone, setting off a great earthquake. This angel causes the guards to shake as well and become like dead men. Like I said, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on.

All this shaking is Matthew’s way of saying that something of cosmic proportions is happening. Earthquakes and angels are about the power of God bursting forth, about all heaven breaking loose. 

___________________________________________________________________________

A lot of you may not know about it, but our denomination recently put out a new hymnal. I love it. It has a lot more music than our current one, including lots of different kinds of music, music from the Iona and Taizé communities and from different world cultures. It’s a great hymnal, but when I was looking through the hymns and songs it has for Easter, I was a bit surprised, maybe even disappointed, to find one called “In the Bulb There Is a Flower.”

Some of you may know it. It’s a nice, pleasant tune that is easy to sing, but I’m less sure about its theology. “In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree; in cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free! In the cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”

It is true that bulbs turn to flowers, cocoons hold fledgling butterflies, and winter gives way to spring, but none of that has much to do with resurrection, to God’s power bursting forth and all heaven breaking loose. When two women named Mary go to a graveyard early one Sunday morning, they do not find spring, or butterflies, or daffodils, and if they had, it would not have been big news.

When Mary Magdalene and another Mary go to the cemetery, they expect nothing more than any of us do when we go to a cemetery to pay our respects. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in one of her Easter sermons, “When a human being goes into the ground, that is that. You do not wait around for the person to reappear so you can pick up where you left off—not this side of the grave, anyway. You say good-bye. You pay your respects and go on with your life the best you can, knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves, not in them.”[1]

But as Matthew has already alerted us via earthquakes and angel, something cosmic and unnatural is happening. God is doing something completely new and unprecedented. This has nothing to do with natural processes, nor with eternal souls that continue on after death. It is about heaven erupting on earth. When Jesus bursts from the tomb, it’s not about creating an escape route from earth for believers. It is the opening event in heaven’s invasion of earth, the first act in the coming of God’s new day, that event we pray for each week saying, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

When we gather to celebrate the resurrection today and on every Sunday, on every day of resurrection, we proclaim so much more than life after death. We proclaim heaven breaking loose, God’s resurrection power shaking things up. It is something so different and new and powerful that it is more than a little frightening for those who encounter it, which is why both the angel and Jesus must say, “Do not be afraid.”  This power can be especially frightening to religious folks because it cannot be controlled, and we do like things controlled.

But God’s power that shakes things up is also a power that makes all things, including us, new. It is God’s wild and free power to make us truly alive. It is, writes Walter Brueggemann, “…new surging possibility, new gestures to the lame, new ways of power in an armed, fearful world, new risk, new life, leaping, dancing, singing, praising the power beyond all our controlled powers.” [2]

It is the cosmic power of heaven, of God, breaking into our lives and into our world, and that is even more wonderful than it is frightening.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.

---

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Unnatural Truth,” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), 110.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “The Surge of Dangerous, Restless Power” in The Threat of Life (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), 157.

God's Absence

I just returned from our local, ecumenical Good Friday service. We followed the same format as last year (my first at the service) where pastors from various congregations reflected on the "seven last words of Christ." We each were assigned a verse relating something Jesus said from the cross. My verse was the one where Jesus quotes today's  morning psalm, Psalm 22. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I can only imagine that what Jesus experienced was a terrifically amped-up version of something many of us have felt, the absence of God. I've certainly experienced it, as have many I've talked to: those moments when life seems to be falling apart, when everything has gone wrong, when the world seems hopeless and hell-bent on self destruction, and God is nowhere to be found. When it happens to me with enough force, it can make me doubt my previous experience of God and make me wonder about the faith I profess. But how about Jesus?

Jesus' sense of God's presence, his intimacy with God, surely made the experience of God's absence even more terrifying. Given who he was, could he doubt God's very existence? And if he could not, what conclusion did that leave. Had God abandoned  him? Was he now alone and on his own? As I said, I can only imagine what might have gone through Jesus' mind, and I don't care to experience such depth of suffering myself.

Who wants to suffer or wishes suffering on themselves? Certainly much suffering is pointless and destructive, but by no means all of it. I've been touched of late by David Brooks' NY Times column "What Suffering Does," as well as Barbara Brown Taylor's recent work on darkness. Add to that  books such as Richard Rohr's Falling Upward and the writings of other spiritual giants who do not wish suffering on anyone but who also know its potential to be grace filled. As Julian of Norwich once wrote, Firsts there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!"

As David Brooks says, we live in a culture obsessed with happiness, yet we know, deep in our bones, about the power of suffering to shape and mold us, to help us "fall upward." I don't know if any of this applies to Jesus on the cross, but I find such a notion much more palatable than some of the brutal, substitutionary atonement posts by some of my Facebook friends. If Jesus had to suffer and die - and it seems he did - I hope it was not because God had to kill someone. Even if Jesus did jump up and take the bullet for us, we're still left with a terrible sort of God who must have blood.

And so I find myself looking upon Jesus, reflecting on the abandonment he felt, the suffering he endured, and wondering about if or how it changed him, wondering about its necessity and if that is so far removed from the fact that all human life entails suffering.

            _______________________________________________________________________

We'll have our own Good Friday Tenebrae service at this church tonight. We'll hear once more the story of betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution. We'll sing mournful songs and sit in silence, reflecting on the deepening darkness. ...And we'll hope, as does the psalm Jesus quotes from the cross, that all this leads somewhere good.

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