Jesus: First "saint of brokenness"

Again I'm remembering the voices of students at the Episcopal Center @ UGA singing another hymn in a manner only they could sing.  It was the Lesbia Scott hymn, #293 "I sing a song of the saints."

Like so many of those elements obviously indicating or meant at least to appeal to children in our worship this hymn exudes a charm as well.  Wikipedia has a fine article, here.

The hymn means to be generous in imagining who our saints might be by saying "you can meet them" . . . anywhere!  And we always had fun with the verse that goes:

And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,

and one was slain by a fierce wild beast:

and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,

why I shouldn’t be one too.

We learned instead to sing "and one was a beast, and one was slain by a fierce wild priest:"   It was fun.  It became a distraction.  As charming as the hymn is there is more going on than light hearted imagination.  Clearly the intent is to get us to consider the presence of sainthood.  Instead of it being ascribed to "those who have gone before us in the faith" we are to consider our pew partners, our Mah-Jong partners, our Rotary partners, our brothers and sisters as saints.

Several of St. Paul's letters begin with calling the members of the congregations receiving his instruction "saints."  So the concept of a present sainthood is not new to Christian thinking.

Then how do we move from the proper observance in thanksgiving and mourning of our "saints" to a proper observance to us as saints? For sure we delay and count on God to bring us to perfection in resurrection.  But in so doing could we be avoiding the harder task of seeing sainthood as made really present in brokenness?

The potential ubiquity of sainthood must meet that condition, not avoid it.  Thanks be to God that is exactly how sainthood works.  If perfection were the first qualifier then no saint would be known as:

patient and brave and true,

who toiled and fought and lived and died

for the Lord they loved and knew.

Yes there are "those who have gone before us."  Jesus was the first.  But his brokenness paves the way for all to follow as much as his always being perfect.  We are being perfected, then fully in resurrection but for now some of us will need patience, others will toil, all will die. I'm pretty sure none will be slain by this fierce wild priest.   

Jesus: The clear sun of righteousness

Our modern culture is spoiled by light. So spoiled that we are surprised by the stars in the sky when we are away from the glare of the city at night.  It takes an effort to get to where we can see the Milky Way.  The trouble that our constant use of electricity and that the convenience of 24 hours of illumination causes is caught up in the term "light pollution."

Pollution in all the other ways we describe it's impact is more dark than light.  Oil spills in the Gulf, coal ash ponds pushed into flooded waterways, smog, sewage pipes broken and over-flowing are all images of a kind of darkness.

So there must be more to make the term light pollution make sense.  It must have something to do with clarity, something to do with the binary contrast between the two.  Light pollution keeps us from seeing the stars by diluting the darkness between them.

When we look out at night and the precision and clarity we should expect is undone by our invention, bit by bit we settle for what is available, smile at and wish on the stars we can see and eventually forget how much we are missing . . . until.

My camping this past summer found such gifts on more than one night: Ponca State Park in Nebraska, Trail Creek Campground in Idaho and Arches National Park in Utah.  But as I returned through Austin and Houston, Texas I also was reminded that our southeastern humidity does some hazing over, too.  Even without human intervention the sky is not usually as clear for us.

Still we know the difference between clear and stained, between clean and muddy, between light and dark.  We crave the clarity as much as the light itself but we also crave light to see the difference, to know the precision, to show us the contrast.

That's what the Gospel of John tells us early on about the Word made flesh.  "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (John 1:5 NRSV)  With Jesus what was distant and alluring was now proximate and definitive.

When the students at the Episcopal Center @ UGA sang hymn #490, "I want to walk as a child of the light," it was missing the smooth lyrical flow and was instead syncopatingly punctuated and profoundly so at that one beat after the chorus phrase "the Lamb is the light of the city of God!" Slap!

When our pianist graduated we lost the rhythm that made the moment work but at least during her years there was this sharp, clear demarcation in our lives.  We want to walk in the light! Pow!  We want to follow Jesus! Smack!  I've never felt a hymn so profoundly and now have missed it so much.

The more sublime way we sing this hymn and we will Sunday, assumes we will walk in the light, rest in the light, bath in it.  But there is more to that light that meets us in the contrast and shock as it compares to a world darkened and foggy.  Those UGA singers craved clarity.  Sometimes we should, too.

I want to walk as a child of the light

I want to follow Jesus

God sent the stars to give light to the world

The star of my life is Jesus

In Him there is no darkness at all

The night and the day are both alike

The Lamb is the light of the city of God *

Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus

I want to see the brightness of God

I want to look at Jesus

Clear sun of righteousness, shine on my path

And show me the way to the Father

In Him there is no darkness at all

The night and the day are both alike

The Lamb is the light of the city of God *

Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus

Jesus Leading the Way

Seems like anytime we recognize that God is with us à la The Rev. Martin Smith, known to me in the saying "You can never talk behind God's back" we have to talk about incarnation.  That is the presence of God in the "Word made flesh," Jesus of Nazareth.

Historic and orthodox Christian understanding is that there was nothing of God's divinity missing and nothing of Jesus' humanity missing within that divine/human "encounter."  That is also to say that as Jesus dies and is raised and from the dead and 40 days later ascends we understand that he takes all his humanity with him into the gift of perfection that is being fully within God's presence.  Thomas touches the scars verifying the effect of incarnation and to heaven they go, too. 

This is not usual or an ancient human understanding of how one moves from this existence into the next.  Even the Bible shows a variety of attempts to understand life and after life.  Faithful Jews of the first century, as portrayed in the gospels, understood themselves has having a means of attaining perfection on earth and by virtue of that perfect righteousness a place with God beginning on the 'last day."

Jesus as the incarnate one did everything he could to change the minds of those "perfectionists" so they understood the limits of their own efforts and the effect of that practice on all those they deemed outside it's provisions.  I hear this need for change argument everytime Jesus says "the first shall be last and the last shall be first." 

So here's a look at Jesus that hopes to see his "work" as more than perfecting a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.  I'm not negating that function but expanding my understanding his work.  Jesus also leads the way. 

Jesus is the leading presence of God,  always "pushing our envelope," urging us forward into a future described better by God's mercy than either our failures or our accomplishments. 

Indeed there is sacrifice but there is even more so leadership. So the old hymn can be sung,

Jesus calls us; o'er the tumult

of our life's wild, restless sea;

day by day His sweet voice soundeth,

saying, "Christian, follow me."

Jesus calls us from the worship

of the vain world's golden store,

from each idol that would keep us,

saying, "Christian, love me more."

Jesus (and the Church) as Midwife?

Brene Brown said “I went back to church thinking that it would be like an epidural, like it would take the pain away, like I would just replace research with church. And then church would make the pain go away…. Faith in church was not an epidural for me at all, but it was a midwife, who just stood next to me saying, “Push, it’s supposed to hurt a little bit.” It was a completely new experience going back for me…

I believe God is love. It makes total sense to me that Jesus would have to be the Son of God because people would want love to be like unicorns and rainbows. And so then, people go, “Oh my God, love is hard, love is sacrifice, love is eating with the sick, love is trouble, love is rebellious.” And so I was listening to this Leonard Cohen song, and it said,

Love is not a victory march,

Love is a cold and broken Hallelujah.

Love is not easy. Love is not hearts and bows. Love is very controversial, really…. In order for forgiveness to really happen, something has to die…. Whether it’s your expectations of a person, there has to be a death for forgiveness to happen. In all these faith communities, where forgiveness is easy and love is easy, there is not enough blood on the floor to make sense of that. And so I thought about why forgiveness is so hard in our culture. Because there are two affects (or emotions) that people fear the most,  and it’s  shame and grief.

If something has to die in order for forgiveness to happen, and people are deathly afraid to feel grief, then we just won’t forgive anybody. Because I don’t want to feel grief. I thought faith would say, I’ll take away the pain and discomfort. But what it ended up saying is that I’ll sit with you in it.

I just think for me, it’s about being with you. It can’t take away the pain. When we set that up as the parameter, that just does not work… Love weeps.”

Transformed instead of fixed

Still thinking about Jesus and looking at the stories of healing especially those in the Gospel of Luke.  Theologian Jürgen Moltmann sums this up beautifully. “Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly ‘natural’ thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized, and wounded.”  The thirteen occasions Luke records for us do not match.  Some are exorcisms, some restoring sight or hearing, others are healings someone not immediately present.

Often Jesus adds something to the actual healing.  My favorite is the story embedded in the story of Jesus bringing Jairus' daughter back to life, Luke 8:40-56. It's the moment when a woman described as "suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years."  This would have been understood at the time as a sign of guilt as well as a health issue.  Easy to imagine her neighbors wondering what she or even her parents had done for her to deserve such punishment.

She does the unthinkable and squirms her way through a crowd to get close enough just to touch the hem of Jesus' garment.  He notices and asks his disciples who has touched him.  They don't get it.  But he does and seeing her and hearing her explanation is immediately able to say "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace."

Time and time again Jesus does more than just fix what's wrong.  Instead he proclaims the transformation of a life because of faith.  In other settings his proclamation is even more radical, "Your sins are forgiven!" and a man who was paralyzed can walk.  Not only does he walk he goes about proclaiming his good news.

We are not nearly as good at this transformation stuff.  Fixing is more our way of dealing with broken-ness.  As a parish it shapes much of how we typically respond to problems and conflict.
But in faithfulness we are to seek a new life, not just a cure; a changed mind and heart, not just a question answered or problem solved.

Our Bishop Wright has a blessing he pronounces often that speaks to this notion of transformation:

"Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.  

Make us, 

melt us, 

mold us, 

fill us, 

use us.  

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us. " 

Amen.