Through Stained Glass: Becoming an Easter People

 Easter Sunday – The Resurrection of the Christ

“The Resurrection is not one thing. It is a prismatic mystery. It is an unwordable story of God and Jesus and us: an experience of the beyond breaking in, the reality of love and life and justice and joy no matter the power of death.” Diana Butler Bass

Reflection Title: Becoming A People of the Resurrection

Scripture: Mark 16.1-8 & John 20.1-18

 
             Happy Easter! Alleluia! Resurrection Day! Christ is Risen!

                 What began with a reminder of our death begins again with a reminder of life! Though we know the reality of Good Friday and the sacred silence of Holy Saturday, our story is found in the emptiness of the tomb and the blooming of creation. Like the Tulip and Daffodil bulbs germinating in the dark soil of the Eairth, Lent was a season preparing for the next: Easter—the season of becoming a people of the Resurrection.

                 We have come a long way, church. In the darkness of Advent, we read stories of a deep incarnation. We encountered stories from Scripture that spoke of God’s presence in and through God’s creation. Christmas told us the story of God born to us in the Christ child, the incarnation of God’s ‘yes’ to all that is! Epiphany took us on a journey where the wisdom of God was revealed and celebrated by all the world. Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany spoke to order and belonging – to our place in the flow of the Triune God!

                 Lent was a journey, too. One in and through the wilderness, confronting our separation, choosing life, and recognizing our call to become God’s beloved. Lent was about the disorder we experience in our lives. We named our pain and suffering and how we participate in both. The entire time, we read stories about God’s covenant with God’s people, who are traveling with us as we transition from one phase of life to the next. We traversed the rugged terrain with God’s promise never to leave or forsake us, no matter how disordered we become. In our mortality, in our humanity – God never, not once, gave up on us – nor will God ever. Instead, God enters our vulnerability and reveals what is the next right move towards our becoming.

                 Before the cross became the symbol of Christianity, other symbols existed. These symbols represented not the death and suffering of the Christ, but the Resurrection and the new creation of Easter Sunday. These symbols were green palm branches, the ‘Jesus’ fish, and images of water! We are not a people of the cross but of the Resurrected Christ! We are not a people of death but of new life – resurrection life! We must and have and will wander through death, pain, and suffering. But, the Resurrection promises that through them, God goes with us – and is reordering all that is back to God’s self.

                 I [Adam] love what Richard Rohr says about this idea when he writes, “The Resurrected Christ is the icon of reorder. Once we can learn to live in this third spacious place, neither fighting nor fleeing reality but holding the creative tension, we are in the spacious place of grace out of which all newness comes. God is now in charge, not us.” We need not fear death, for life is ours in the Christ. Or, as the funeral liturgy says, “Life is not ended; it is merely changed.”

                 Now, the real work – or the liturgy – begins! We all know the power of the Resurrection because we’ve encountered it throughout our lives. We are now sent into the world to become people of the Resurrection – doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. To become a people of the Resurrection, we must go with Mary and declare as she did, with words and with our lives, ‘I have seen the Risen Christ!”

                 Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

The Questions for the Week:

• What memories does Easter stir within you? How can you share those feelings with others?
• Where do I see new life in this world? Where is it peeking through the events and relationships of my life, even if it is as tiny as the humble crocus or tender snowdrop?
• How have I experienced that I am God’s beloved one?
• Where have I witnessed God’s tender care for others in my world?
• How do I want to rest in or savor these gifts?
• How can I share, in action, these gifts with others?
• If there are places in my life where I still await new life, can I wait with hope and even expectation that God will surprise me?

The Practices for the Week:

• During the Easter season, put together a puzzle. As you do, think about the transformation we experience because of the Resurrection of Christ.
• Gather several small stones. Write or paint milestones in your faith journey on them. Place them in your meditation or prayer space and build a mall altar. Return to them as a focus of prayer.
• At the center of the star below, write your star word. Then, in each of the rays, write one of the becoming words from this guide. Reflect on how your star word informs your understanding of our Lenten themes or vice versa. Then, at the tip of each ray, write another word that celebrates this connection by describing how your Lenten study and practice have brought you closer to your true self, to the person God loves and holds.
• Plant some starter herbs: rosemary (for remembrance); basil (love); laurel (strength); hyssop (brother love); lavender (healing); oregano (joy); sage (wisdom).

Through Stained Glass: Palm Sunday -- Becoming Humble

The Sixth Week of Lent: Holy Week

Palm Sunday, March 24, 2024

Becoming Humble

Scripture: Mark 11:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Psalm 31:9-16;

Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 15:1-39

For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness, and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Thomas Merton

For three years, Jesus walked with his disciples throughout Palestine, teaching and preaching and healing—gathering disaffected people with messages of a new kind of community that would flourish in hope and love. He turned expectations upside down, tore apart familiar systems of power and injustice, offered alternative ways of living. His was a “bottom-up” message, a story of inclusion and liberation designed to redefine the traditional social and political hierarchy—and one that brought him into direct confrontation with history. Jesus broke things—not to destroy, but to restore. Not to enable complacency, but to insist on action. Not to promote despair, but to announce joy.

It would be easy to identify with those who cheered and threw down their palm branches before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday—especially in the chaos and suffering of today’s world—but we would be mistaken. The “festal processions” and “Hosannas” are just one part of the story, and they are not the end of it. They are a story of exuberant expectation, but they belie the internal pain and external humiliation Jesus would suffer. He was a “broken vessel”— “wasted from grief;” the “scorn of adversaries;” a “horror to his neighbors;” a victim of “whispering and scheming.” Simply looking for someone to get us out of the mess we are in today would be to ignore our complicity in the world’s injustice and abdicate our responsibility to help fix it. It would give us an escape route from suffering—our own and that of others. Yet sacrifice is part of the redemptive, transformational love Jesus embodied, and this week we feel—perhaps more than any other time—the external and internal turmoil manifested in our journey as Christians. It is helpful to remember that feeling when we are tempted to withdraw into whatever security and safety we have created for ourselves.

During his last week, Jesus did indeed stand before the existing power structures, but he did so not in glorious resplendent triumph as folks hoped, but in quiet defiance and humility—the epitome of stubborn determination, obedient “to the point of death.” To recall the words of Howard Thurman from an earlier meditation this month, he “yielded the nerve center of his consent” to a need greater than himself. He may have been publicly humiliated, but that did nothing to destroy his steadfast inner humility, a deep courage that manifested itself in strength—not in passive surrender but in extreme nonviolent resistance. Sir Thomas More wrote that humility is “that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot,” and Jesus shows us how to live from our “roots” and not by flashy ostentatious displays of power or influence—even in the face of our most challenging circumstances. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, it was not just about him—it was about us, too—about how we fit into the ongoing story—about our “becoming who we are” by taking risks, living into our freedom, exercising our commitment and neighborly hospitality, and stepping humbly into the footsteps of Jesus.

            

                                         

Whitney Plantation, Louisiana

Becoming our best selves—living solidly by our roots—reflects our capacity for humility through listening, witnessing, and offering ourselves to receive the grace that changes us forever and leads us to act on behalf of a hurting world. “The Lord has given me a trained tongue,” writes the psalmist, “that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word…and I was not rebellious; I did not turn backward.” Humility, Jesus teaches us, is the greatest demonstration of strength—the certain pathway to joy. It is not about giving up or giving in—about denying who we are or succumbing to corrosive power structures—but rather about courageously becoming who God imagines and wants us to be. It requires sacrificing our delusions of control, relinquishing the idolatry of our own egos, and accepting the wonder of un-knowing. It is in humility, said Mother Teresa, that “our love becomes real, devoted, and ardent.” We are not imprisoned by our humility; we are liberated and empowered by it. Liberated to act on behalf of a hurting world even as our nerve centers become raw with the effort.

During his life and ministry, Jesus emptied himself; he took risks and made commitments that shaped, freed, and transformed him into his best self—both divine and human—and this is our most sacred work as well. Because Jesus was humble, God “exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name.” And this we can know for certain: God searches us and knows us and calls us, too, by name—if only we are humble enough to be silent, listen and pay attention. 

The Questions for the Week

· How do you define humility? When does humility become mere servility or obsequiousness? How can it involve taking risks?

· How does humility relate to service and compassion?

· Have you ever suffered because you chose humility over ego? Have you ever stood bravely and quietly in resistance to power? What did you learn from this experience? 

· Are there people in your life who model the kind of humble strength Jesus taught? Do you?

The Practices for the Week

• Keep an informal diary of “pride,” noting times when you insist on having your own way or silently feel resentment because you don’t get it. Write a prayer of humility. 
• Invite someone you haven’t seen for awhile for coffee or a meal. Make a conscious effort to learn more about their story. Listen with a humble, ardent and loving heart. 
• St. Francis said, “What a person is before God, that he is and no more.” Come and walk the labyrinth and make a special effort this week to participate in other Holy Week opportunities provided at First Presbyterian Church. Come just as you are and stand before God without pretense.

The Prayer for the Week

Disturb us, Lord, when

 We are too well pleased with ourselves,

 When our dreams have come true

 Because we have dreamed too little,

 When we arrived safely

 Because we sailed too close to the shore.

(Sir Francis Drake)

Inspiration: Humble

A SUDDEN STILLNESS by David Whyte

We love the movement in a seeming stillness,

the breath in the body of the loved one sleeping,

the highest leaves in the silent wood,

a great migration in the sky above:

the waters of the earth, the blood in the body,

the first, soft, stir in the silence beneath a strident

voice, the internal hands of our mind,

always searching for touch, thoughts seeking other

thoughts, seeking other minds, the great arrival

of form through all our hidden themes.

And this breath, in this body, able,

just for a moment to give and to take,

to ask and be told, to find and be found,

to bless and be blessed, to hold and be held.

We are all a sun-lit moment come from

a long darkness, what moves us always

comes from what is hidden, what seems

to be said so suddenly has lived

in the body for a long, long time.

Our life like a breath, then, a give

and a take, a bridge, a central movement,

between singing a separate self

and learning to be selfless.

Breathe then, as if breathing for the first time,

as if remembering with what difficulty

you came into the world, what strength it took

to make that first impossible in-breath,

into a cry to be heard by the world.

Your essence has always been that first vulnerability

of being found, of being heard and of being seen,

and from the very beginning

the one who has always needed,

and been given, so much invisible help.

This is how you were when you first came

into the world, this is how you are now,

all unawares, in your new body and your new life,

this is the raw vulnerability of your

every day, and this is how you will want to be,

and be remembered, when you leave the world.

BLESSING FOR A BROKEN VESSEL by Jan Richardson

Do not despair.

You hold the memory

of what it was

to be whole.

It lives deep

in your bones.

It abides 

in your heart

that has been torn

and mended

a hundred times.

It persists

in your lungs

that know the mystery

of what it means

to be full,

to be empty,

to be full again.

I am not asking you

to give up your grip

on the shards you clasp

so close to you

but to wonder

what it would be like

for those jagged edges

to meet each other

in some new pattern

that you have never imagined,

that you have never dared

to dream.

Through Stained Glass: Becoming Neighborly during the fifth week of Lent

“Becoming Neighborly”

Jeremiah 31.31-34 & John 12.20-33

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Fifth Sunday of Lent – Mister Rogers Sunday

                 On Sundays like today, two quotes come to mind when we delve into the essence of being a neighbor. The first, from the thirteenth-century poet Rumi, urges us to “Listen with ears of tolerance. See through eyes of compassion. Speak with the language of love." This resonates with our theme of understanding and compassion. The second quote from Death Cab for Cutie, “I want to live where soul meets body,” speaks to the depth of our relationships with our neighbors.

                 To love our neighbors, truly as they are, begins with deep listening. What is their story, the one they carry within them, and not the one we assume? Only when we listen to their lives can we truly know how to love them.

Joe Shaler shared about the
Central Illinois Veteran Commission
in Lincoln, Illinois.

                 What would you say if I were to ask you which instruction is repeated the most in the Hebrew Bible? Over 35 times, the Torah instructs God’s people to care for the stranger. I heard that the Seder meal is when our Jewish siblings seek out strangers to make them friends. This idea is straight from the Bible. In Exodus 23:9, we read, “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33 says, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. In Leviticus 19:34, we repeat this refrain, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”

                 All of us in this room were once strangers to each other, whether at work, in this city, or maybe at school. We know the feeling of isolation, alienation, and discomfort of being new. It is easy to forget what that anguish feels like. We need little reminders. It is we who make people strange to us, estranged from us. And it is we who have the power to make strangers friends!

                 You may be wondering why we're discussing strangers when discussing what it means to be a good neighbor. The answer is simple: everyone around us - in front, beside, behind, above, and below us - is our neighbor! To be a good neighbor, we must accept our interdependence with all that surrounds us. We are closely connected to our fellow humans and our more-than-human kin. How we treat all forms of life reflects our true beliefs about God. And we become good neighbors when we're ready to go out of our way for others!

                 No one understood this better than Mister Rogers. A Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers was a television icon whose show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ ran from 1968 until 2001. Empathy, compassion, and love saturated every Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episode. There are plenty of examples of these moments: Mister Rogers explains he is feeding the fish because he received a note from a girl born blind who was worried they were hungry. Did you know that in the first week Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired, Fred talked about the Vietnam War? In the land of Make Believe, King Friday the Thirteenth had built a wall to keep out the enemy, but his subjects breached it with messages of kindness and compassion, reminding his audience that it is better to connect than dehumanize. At the height of desegregation, he shared a cooling foot bath in a kiddie pool with Officer Clemmons, one of the first Black characters to be featured regularly on a children’s television program. Mister Rogers taught us that being neighborly means loving others without stopping to inquire if they are worthy of it.

                 In today's gospel, there is a line that I enjoy. At Passover in Jerusalem, a group of Greeks approached Philip and asked, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." We don't know much about them, but their request is relatable. I have often said, "I wish to see Jesus." I understand the desire to have his presence, guidance, and companionship. I want to see Jesus as a teacher, preacher, healer, prophet, and peacemaker.

However, I am puzzled by Jesus' response to the request. He talks about his death and says, "Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." While Jesus' response is not lost on me, I still need clarification. It appears he is saying, "If you want to see me, look for me in the suffering of others. Then, go and help them." We can hear the lesson Mister Rogers’ mother taught him when he was a boy, “When things get scary, look for the helpers.”

CindyAussieker and Marla Williams shared
about their work with "Moms Who Care" 
in Lincoln and how they are caring for others
in our neighborhood. 

Jesus is asking us to look beyond ourselves and serve those in need. To become neighborly means to love even if it leads to our crucifixion. Love is what lifts us from despair, love is what draws us into the fullness of Kin-dom of God here and now, and love is what will transform our neighborhoods. We are the helpers. God calls every one of us to join God in healing our neighborhoods. We help by caring for one another – especially the stranger. We bring about this love when we listen to one another, deepen our understanding of our neighbors’ experiences, and share our stories with others.

God's people have always been committed to caring for strangers and immigrants because they were once strangers themselves. We are to do the same. Jesus’ love for the outcast and marginalized threatened the status quo and ultimately got him killed. Fred Rogers understood that if everyone knew someone cared about them, they may care for others. In Fred’s words, “You know, I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they’re loved and capable of loving.”

To become neighborly means to love. Love boldly, extravagantly, and proudly. I love what Barbara Brown Taylor says, 

“So love God. Love a neighbor. Be a neighbor, and let us not complicate things by arguing about specifics. You know what it means to do love because some time or another you have been on the receiving end of it, but remember that knowing the right answer does not change a thing. If you want the world to look different the next time you go outside, do some love. Do a little or do a lot, but do some, and do not forget some for yourself.”

    The theme for our Lenten journey is becoming. It is inspired by the ancient Christ hymn from Philippians 2 that speaks of kenosis—to empty, to become nothing. We see this kenosis in Jesus' life, ministry, death, and resurrection. The John reading gets to this with the parable of the seed. The seed empties itself to bring forth fruit, new life. I wonder what in us must we empty ourselves of to become more neighborly? What prejudices need to die to see the stranger – in ‘real life’ or in media – as our neighbor? What’s one simple act I could commit to that will make my neighborhood resemble the Reign of God? How can we love our neighbor and ourselves so that it becomes reparative, healing, transformative, and liberating?

As we ponder these questions, I leave you with this quote from Mister Rogers.

“You don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you. When I say ‘it’s you I like,’ I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch…that deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive: love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed. So in all that you do, in all of your life, I wish you the strength and the grace to make those choices which will allow you and your neighbor to become the best of whoever you are.”

May his wisdom and commitment to being the best neighbor inspire us to do the same. May we believe what Jesus taught and Mister Rogers echoed—that we all are deeply cherished and loved. May we begin to live this love in such a way that everyone we meet, all our neighbors, because remember, no one is a stranger to God, feels seen and loved.