Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B: March 11, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Fourth Sunday in Lent Year B- Sunday, March 11, 2018

Preached at St. Mary’s, Arlington, VA

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC 

We are all snake-bit. From Adam and Eve on down, we’ve been trying to find the medicine that will work against the poison of the snake.

The trouble is, as with so many human endeavors, we look in all the wrong places. Nowhere is that truer than in the Church.

The first snake that we hear about, of course, is the trickster serpent in Eden. Adam and Eve, goaded on by the serpent, want to be like God. And so, what happens?

They eat—not from the tree of life—they’ve been eating from that since they were created. No, they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And they do it in order to become like God. The clear implication in this story is that it is the determination of what is good and what is evil that is the chief attribute of divinity, the one aspect of godhood that humankind cannot live out.

From that mythical moment, we humans have been rather obsessed with categorizing and judging: what belongs and what does not belong; what is sinful and what is holy; what is sacred and what is profane; what parts of ourselves or others are acceptable or not. This is not just ancient history. We clearly see the results in our national and ecclesial lives today in schism, rejection of the immigrant, white supremacy, income inequality greater than at any point in American history, the massacre of children in schools, and the list goes on.

This need to judge good and evil also plagued our Israelite ancestors on their trek through the wilderness. They were so excited to leave Egypt, so impressed with the power of their God, who drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea. By now, though, they’ve been wandering for a bit. They’re tired. The text tells us they’re impatient. What they had thought was deliverance seems, in the harsh desert light, to be destruction. And so they murmur against God and Moses.

And if it wasn’t bad enough that they’re starving and thirsty, now they’ve got to deal with poisonous snakes, biting their ankles. I bet they started to complain a lot more bitterly at this point. And I bet they were pretty certain that they could rightly judge the good and evil of the situation in which they found themselves: Egypt, even with its slavery, had food, water, and no snakes. The desert, though God is with them, has become a place of famine, poison, and death. Which would you choose?

But, as there always is with God, this story has a twist. In an astonishing about-face, the very source of the poison becomes, through God, the cure for death and disease. God tells Moses to make a likeness of the snake. And it is when the people look on that which has been tormenting and killing them that they are healed. The wound of the snake bite becomes the womb through which they are reborn into greater unity with one another and with God, and the poison that killed becomes the elixir of life.

Snakes, of course, carry all sorts of associations for us, as they did for our ancestors, most of them unpleasant. They are tricksters, tempters, poison bearers. Satan is often imagined as the great serpent, the dragon or Leviathan. Many monsters have something of the serpent about them. And we can’t forget the greatest contemporary association of the snake with that most evil of houses: Slytherin.

But snakes are also symbols of transformation, healing, and wisdom. They shed their skin. Their poison becomes medicine. They’re close to the earth. They rarely travel in straight lines. And you can’t easily get ahold of one, if you would even want to, before it slithers out of your grasp.

Jesus tells his followers that, like the serpent of bronze Moses lifts up in the wilderness, he, too, lifted high upon the Cross, will be the medicine for a snake-bit people. The innocent one, condemned as a criminal, will be the cure for the judgmentalism, hatred, and violence that plague humanity.

It should shock us that Jesus compares himself here to that most ignoble, that most obscene, that most sensual and tricky of creatures, that creature who so often represents Satan: the serpent.

In this passage, as in so many other stories in the gospels, Jesus identifies himself as the cosmic outcast, the one who is completely outside the boundaries of what is acceptable, and yet at the very same time lives at the center of God’s limitless love for creation. The most reviled animal is the symbol of healing; the source of the venom is the cure itself; the stone the builders have rejected becomes cornerstone of the temple; the wound becomes the womb.

So much for our ability to judge between good and evil.

As he so often does with the despised and rejected of his society, here Jesus upends all our comfortable ideas of what is good and what is bad and reveals the sham of our smug self-righteousness.

The judgment that Jesus is about is not condemnation, which would see our faults and failings and shame us. That is the sort of judgment the world offers. That’s the way that we, infected with an inflated sense of our ability to know what is good and what is evil, judge the world, ourselves, and one another. And that sort of judgment leads only to exile, fear, and shame.

And Lord knows, shame never healed a broken heart.

No, Jesus tells us, the judgment is this: that the light has come into the world and people preferred darkness rather than light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world, and we have chosen and continue to choose to live in the dark, to keep the truth of who we are hidden and secret because we are afraid that God will judge us the way we judge one another and ourselves.

We all know the burn of shame and fear, the sense that somewhere, deep within us, lies a truth that, were it known publicly, would lead others to push us beyond the boundaries, to abandon us to the outer darkness. We all have some aspect to our lives that we would rather jettison in favor of a more acceptable, beautiful image of who we should be. Our denied hopes, the unmet yearnings of our deep hearts, disappointments at the way life has turned out, shame at our bodies, memories of abuse and neglect, and the list goes on.

We have been so maimed by the violence and shame of our world, by a society that denigrates and commodifies anyone who deviates from a fantasy norm of the wealthy, straight, white, cis-gendered male that we are terrified to bring all of ourselves into the light. And so we dwell in darkness, cut off from the healing and reconciling light of Christ, and we do so by our own choice.

But to deny the fullness of our experience does not bring healing. It only brings further fragmentation. These parts of ourselves we would deny, are actually the gateway to our salvation. They are the poison that becomes, in Christ, the water of life; the wound that becomes the womb from which we are born into new and deeper life in Christ.

If we, like Jesus, bring to the center that which we have hidden away in the darkness, if we choose to embrace those parts of ourselves we find least acceptable, to bring them into the light of Christ, to lift them high and gaze upon them, we may just find something astonishing happening. We may look up, in the midst of our lives, and find that it is actually Jesus who is, gently and slowly, walking into the midst of the darkness of our lives, shining his light into corners we didn’t even know were there, revealing the hidden wholeness and loveliness within, showing us that there is no place within us that is beyond the revelatory power of his love. In fact, there is no place within us that is not already Christ.

The 10^th century mystic Symeon the New Theologian puts it this way:

If we genuinely love Him,we wake up inside Christ’s bodyevery most hidden part of it,is realized in joy as Him,and He makes us, utterly, real,that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,maimed, ugly, irreparablydamaged, is in Him transformedand radiant in His lighthe awakens as the Belovedin every last part of our body.[1]where all our body, all over,and everything that is hurt, everythingand recognized as whole, as lovely,

You see, there is, ultimately no part of us that is truly outside the boundaries of God’s love, and there need be no place within us that is outside the boundaries of our own love. In fact, such boundaries are a fiction to begin with. There are no barriers between us and Christ the Beloved, no inner darkness too deep for his gaze to penetrate. We are already one, and we always have been. There is nothing and no one who does not belong fully to God in Christ: not the serpent, not even Satan, and certainly not you and certainly not me.

[1] http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2010/10/22/symeon-the-new-theologian-we-awaken-in-christs-body/

Third Sunday in Lent Year B: March 4, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Third Sunday in Lent- Sunday, March 4, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Robert Sevensky  

Today's Gospel passage, often referred to as the Cleansing of the Temple, might well begin with a warning:  “Spoiler Alert.”

 

The event appears in all four gospel narratives. But in the Synoptic Gospels, it comes just before Jesus is arrested.  Indeed, for these gospel writers, it is this disruptive action by Jesus in the Temple precincts which is the proximate cause of his arrest and ultimately his crucifixion. 

Many scholars and preachers see it as primarily a political event, or at least a prophetic action caught up in a tense and volatile political/religious setting, with disastrous results.

Not so with John's Gospel.  Rather, the event occurs very near the beginning of Jesus' ministry, just after he has performed his first sign by changing water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana.  It follows on the heels of a slightly testy exchange between Jesus and his mother, and I have sometimes wondered if Jesus was just having a bad hair day or was going through a particularly difficult period of transition and growth. Whatever the actual timing, the writer of our Gospel uses the event to let us in on the secret: that Jesus will die and be raised from the dead.  There's the climax of the story, right there at the outset.  I suppose, though, that this was implicit from the very start when John opens his Gospel by telling us:  “In the beginning was the Word...and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The rest is, in a sense, commentary.

In considering this event, I am put in mind of two other stories of Jesus and the Temple, not from John's Gospel, but from Luke's “Infancy Narratives”, those wonderful, fanciful stories of the young Jesus found in the first two chapters of Luke.  Taken together, these three Temple stories tell us something important both about our own faith lives and about Jesus.

The first story, from Luke, is that of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple when he is 40 days old.  In fulfillment of the Jewish ritual Law, Jesus is brought to Jerusalem by his parents and “ransomed”.  It is a tale of surprising prophecies and expectations and warnings given by an old man and an even older woman, and it is all very numinous.  And throughout it, the infant Jesus remains mute.  He does not speak, indeed he cannot. He comes to the Temple vulnerable and dependent and passive, carried, as one hymn has it, upon the throne of his mother's gentle breast, as were we all. He is but an infant. Yet he is the focus of the action and the attention and the hope.

The second Temple story, also from Luke, is that of finding the child Jesus in the Temple. Now at age 12, so still technically a child but on the cusp of manhood, the boy slips away from his family while on a journey home from Jerusalem. After three days of frantic searching, his parents find him seated in the Temple with the religious teachers: “listening to them and asking them questions.”  The Evangelist adds: “And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.”  In response to his mother's complaint, “Son why have you dealt with us this way?” Jesus says, rather naively it seems to me:  “Did you not know I must be in my Father's house?”  They—his parents—do not understand.  But then who does?

And of course there is today's passage from John who presents us with an adult Jesus entering the Temple and, in anger or sadness or disgust, driving out at least some of those who, for quite understandable religious or cultic reasons, bartered in the goods and services necessary for Temple worship.  It's easy to overemphasize the extent of Jesus' disruption of the Temple system. The temple precincts were huge and a single man, Jesus, could perhaps overturn a few tables at most.  Imagine Yankee Stadium or Grand Central.  Jesus's actions might then be the equivalent of turning over one or two concession stands on the concourse level. Not a total disruption by any means, but enough to make a point and to be noticed and reported to the authorities. Just as it would be today. It was also the opportunity for Jesus to intimate that the future belongs to God and not to the money changers, as the disciples would later remember.

Three Temple stories, two of them somewhat fanciful, one of uncertain timeliness. What do they teach us?

I would suggest that just as Jesus came to the Temple, to his Father's house, in these three ways, so Jesus still today comes to us, who are (as St. Paul teaches us) his Temple, both corporately (together) and individually, in the very same ways.

Jesus still comes to us, God's Temple people, as did the baby at the Purification: helpless and vulnerable.  Jesus comes to us and our world in the person of the voiceless ones, who like him have no way to gain our attention or to make their desperate needs known except through a cry.  He comes in those who are marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, unheard, indeed unseen.  He comes in the person of the stranger, the  oddball, the misfit.  He comes, as Mother Teresa says, “in the distressing disguise of the poor.”--in the refugee, the immigrant, the Other, however we define the other, as well as in the familiar but unlovely and unloved.   Jesus is still coming to his Temple in this way.  And we who claim to dwell in the Temple, who are that Temple, are asked to open wide the gates of our hearts and our substance and our privilege.  He still comes.

Jesus comes to our Temple/world with the challenging questions and the listening ears of the young, those on the cusp of adulthood who perceive, perhaps as we cannot, the ever-widening gap between our rhetoric and our realities, both within the church and without.  I think of those students from Parkland and from around our country who are rising up to become the ears and the eyes and the voices of conscience to our nation and who cry: “Enough already!”

And yes, Jesus still comes to us, to our Temple/world, with a whip of cords, overturning familiar patterns of behavior and relationships, driving out distortions from within our systems and our hearts, and the tyranny of commodification, yet never destroying the good structures of creation.  Rather, through his own life-giving death, he renews and transforms them.  His dying, this final act of human hate and ignorance, marks the beginning of the end of the forces of destruction everywhere...or so we pray.

None of these second comings is easy.  I am reminded that on the feast of the Presentation, when we remember the bringing of the baby Jesus into the Temple, we read from the book of the prophet Malachi:

“The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. … But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”

It is seldom easy.  We are tempted to faint back or withdraw.  We aren't quite sure we want this Jesus to come, thank you very much.  Perhaps our Lenten prayer now is to ask for the grace to want what God wants, to desire what God wills. To ask for the  grace to welcome this Jesus when he comes to us, his Temple people, in innocence and vulnerability and need; and with his questions and his listening heart; and yes, even with his whip of cords.  And who knows, perhaps in a thousand other ways as well, each bespoke and tailor made for you and for me.  Maybe our Lenten prayer is none other than our Advent Prayer:  Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!