“Perhaps if we stopped setting ourselves enormous anxiety-producing quantitative goals and instead focused on building fewer but deeper relationships, across difference, we’d actually shift more hearts and minds.”—Charlie Wood
“What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”—Paul Hawken
In his journal entry from April, 1961 found in Turning Towards the World: The Pivotal Years, Thomas Merton described his own Easter experience. A gay, bright, glorious day and a very fine Easter such as I do not remember for a long time. The Vigil was tremendous for me and the glory of Christ was in it. There has been splendor in everything (including the emptiness of Good Friday morning, when rain came down in torrents and I stayed in the hermitage)… The hills are suddenly dark blue. Very green alfalfa in the bottoms. Yellow or mustard or sienna sage grass in my own field. Here there is no impatience. I am a submerged dragon. The peace of the Easter Alleluias. (April 2 and 7, 1961 – also found in A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, April 9th reading, page 154, 155) While my own experience this year was definitely different from Merton’s, this year’s experience for me was exceptional.
This morning, the good people of Swift Presbyterian Church in Foley, Alabama (where I am serving as their Interim/Transitional Pastor) gathered for Easter worship. It was a wonderful experience with family and community. We sang, we prayed, we shared our joys and concerns, and we had a lovely fellowship after worship (I was assured by one of our Fellowship Deacons that her fresh baked Easter cookies were calorie free😉). Yet I know that many of us had in the back of our minds the experience of our Good Friday worship two days before.
We remembered our Good Friday Ignatian experience of placing ourselves into the gospel story where we saw Jesus’ broken and battered body taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb; we watched today as Peter and John raced to the tomb, found it empty, and returned to their homes. We lingered a bit longer with Mary Magdalene at the tomb feeling a combination of grief and curiosity. We were there when the angels spoke to her. We were there when Jesus himself lovingly called her by name.
I know that I could quite literally hear him calling me by name. Jesus called each one of us who were gathered in that sanctuary by name. He calls us, he loves us, and he encourages us to follow him and be his hands and feet in this world. On this Easter morning, were called to go forth and share the good news of Jesus’ love with the world. A love which brings good news to the poor, release to the captives and recovery of sight (physical and spiritual) to the blind sets free those who are oppressed, and proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)
Like Merton on Easter morning in 1961, I saw the vivid beauty of our neighborhood and the inter-coastal waterway on our walk this afternoon. I hear his call once more to be his hands and feet in this broken and hurting world. Will you join me, dear reader, in this calling? Believe me, we are all needed in this effort to transform the world from a world of violence, hatred and fear into a world of agape (love) and shalom (peace).
“Corporate charters were once based on an implicit social contract that they operate for the public good, which as been forgotten. We don’t have to look hard to notice the public harm of allowing corporations to have all of the freedoms of an individual without any of the responsibilities.”—Hazel Henderson
On the Sabbath, the disciples would have gathered once more in the room where Jesus had broken bread with them 24-hours before. It would have been a day of mystery and terror for those who had gathered in the upper room. On that Sabbath day they must have felt lost and alone. Would the authorities come after them? Who would be the next to be executed. Would life ever return to normal? What was normal after the three-year transformative journey with Jesus?
Nearly two thousand years later, we can lose that sense of the unknown his followers experienced between Jesus’ burial and finding the empty tomb. Last night as our Good Friday worship service concluded, we left the sanctuary in silence. It was and still is difficult to put into words what Denise and I were feeling as we drove from the church back to our townhouse. All day today I have been thinking about Jesus’ followers and wondering how I would feel if I didn’t have the knowledge that Easter Sunday was coming. Yet that knowledge also challenges me to truly consider what the resurrection means in my own life as a Christ-follower.
In an Easter Sunday sermon that Thomas Merton gave at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani he offered those gathered a challenge. He also offers the same challenge to me. To what work am I being called by Jesus and through Merton’s own reflections? Christ lives in us and leads us, through mutual encounter and commitment, into a new future which we build together for one an- other. That future is called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is already established; the Kingdom is a present reality. But there is still work to be done. Christ calls us to work together in building his Kingdom. We cooperate with him in bringing it to perfection… His death and resurrection were the culminating battle in his fight to liberate us from all forms of tyranny, all forms of domination by anything or anyone except the Spirit, the Law of Love, the “purpose and grace” of God. (Thomas Merton – Easter Sermon)
When the ushers bring the offering forward during Sunday worship my prayer over the offering considers the work of the Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. Take these gifts and our lives and use them for the building of your kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. A kingdom of love, justice, mercy, and peace. That is my hope and that is my prayer every day as I seek to live into my calling as a faith leader and a follower of Christ.
“Calming allows us to rest, and resting is a precondition for healing. When animals in the forest get wounded, they find a place to lie down, and they rest completely for many days. They don’t think about food or anything else. They just rest, and they get the healing they need.”—Thich Nhat Hanh
Good Friday… after a brutal night of beatings, harassment, condemnation, and abject hate being poured upon him like some caustic and boiling liquid, Jesus was forced to carry the cross, an instrument of torture and humiliation used by the Empire to silence opposition, to Golgotha where he was nailed to it. His disciples had vanished into the mist, one had betrayed him and one had denied him… only the women and the disciple whom he loved stood at the foot of the cross as he endured the agonizing physical, mental, and spiritual hell of this barbaric means of execution.
My mind and my heart cannot comprehend what he endured at the hands of the Empire and the Religious establishment which was in cahoots with them. What put him on the cross? Fear… the fear of losing power and control by the establishment and Empire. Hatred… the hatred, based upon that fear which drove them to make Jesus a caricature instead of seeing him as one created in God’s image. Greed… the lust for power and control which divided the people into an “us versus them” artificial distinction.
In his book No Man Is an Island Thomas Merton wrote the following words: God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. — Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island, p. 67)
The repentant thief was far more perfect than the “holy ones” who had him nailed to the cross… wow! I hear Merton asking us to consider who God calls us to be and what God calls us to do. I believe that God calls us to use our God given lives to live out Jesus’ summary of the Commandments—Love God with our entire being and to love our neighbors as ourselves (yes, even our enemies). That was not what happened when Jesus was tortured and brutally executed on Golgotha.
Further on Merton said that the Religious establishment (my phrasing… he used the word Pharisee) had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it. (p. 67)
On this Good Friday I have been contemplating my own life and the past thirty-six years of ministry. How can I be a better Christ-follower and pastor/chaplain/Padre… not a perfect one but rather a better follower of Jesus. Each day is a new opportunity to learn and to grow as I seek to follow the one who cried out my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46) As I seek to follow the one who forgave his tormentors and torturers. Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing. (Luke 23:34) As I seek to follow the one who cried out, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)
Good Friday challenges me to be more loving, more forgiving, and more humble. Good Friday challenges me to live out the call of the prophet Micah to Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Micah 6:8 Even if that means, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, getting into some “good trouble.” Will you join me on this journey, dear reader? I believe that the world depends on it.
For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. I had been warned so often against pride and conceit that I came to consider it a good thing to deprecate myself. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.
Verse of the day
And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” … Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.
– Matthew 27:46, 50
Voice of the day
The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree.
– James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2013)
Prayer of the day
Irony of all ironies is that the darkest Friday is called good, / because though it put you in the tomb, it brought you back again. / … So we fast and pray, / and in our attempts to understand, / we stop and say that we will never quite grasp / the greatest irony of all: / that you take us in our tired skin and bones / and tell us we’re worth / all the ironies of the cross.
– Kaitlin Curtice, “A Prayer for Good Friday”
Just before the pandemic lockdown, Denise and I were able to visit San Francisco. The Balmy Street Murals were both powerful and beautiful. This photo is of one of the murals we saw.
Today is Maundy Thursday in the Christian liturgical calendar. On this day during Holy Week we remember the last Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples before his arrest, torture, and execution by the forces of the state. At that meal, Jesus washed the disciples feet according to the Gospel of John (John 13:1-17). The Teacher and Lord took the role of a Servant and modeled the sort of work Jesus had called his disciples to do. He even washed the feet of his betrayer, Judas Iscariot.
In churches and places of worship all over the world, feet will be washed and Jesus’ followers will break bread and share the cup as Jesus did with his disciples long ago. As a pastor and Air Force chaplain, I have served communion in many different settings around the world. Perhaps my most memorable experience was when I shared communion with a gathering of exhausted and dusty airmen in the desert north of Las Vegas, Nevada. They were in the middle of a training and selection course to earn the honor of going to the Army’s Ranger training. When I offered communion at the end of worship each one of them came up to receive. I didn’t know their faith background and before that moment we had been strangers who shared the common bond of service in the Air Force. The table was big enough for each of them to come forward to receive the bread and the cup.
In today’s society, separation and differences highlight how we interact with each other. There have been and continue to be squabbles over who is worthy to come to the table (news flash—none of us are) and receive the gift of love and grace which Jesus offers us. Instead of being an instrument of disunity, I firmly believe that the table should be a place of unity. My fellow blogger and faith leader John Pavlovitz talks about that table and the call to make it bigger in his book A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community. Jesus reached out far beyond the boundaries of his own faith community with his message. The outcasts (in the eyes of the religious purists of his day) were the ones he spent time with. They received healing and hope that wasn’t offered by the religious purists. His ministry sought to unify all of God’s children. Yet it was the religious divisions created by the powers that be that murdered him.
Thomas Merton reflected on such a unity in his Asian Journals which he wrote during the last few months of his life. The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are. (The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton)
My prayer is that as the followers of Christ gather around the table on Maundy Thursday, they might make room at the table for all of God’s children. In so doing, May our original unity be recovered.
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