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GOOD FRIDAY

3/30/2018

I used to have a member of my congregation who hated Holy Week, and especially Good Friday. The days were too sad and she did not want to be reminded that there is grief and sadness in the world. She wanted to go straight to Easter, and complained bitterly when we insisted on acknowledging the pain that leads up to Easter. She wanted only the happy ending.

Well, don't we all? I have often "jokingly" commented that if I were in charge, I would have designed this whole "living" thing differently, with no death involved. And yet, oddly enough, God didn't ask for my input, my deep wisdom when creating all that has come to be.

And so, today, like many of us, I will sit in a church, attending a Good Friday service. I will hear the story of betrayal and death one more time. I will reflect on the suffering and doubt that Jesus experienced. I will grieve for Mary, having to watch her child suffer all this and suffering with him. I will recall and mourn my own griefs, and mentally review today's all-too-common news stories of broken bodies and broken minds and broken trust and broken hearts.

I will acknowledge that this is a sad world much of the time. I will acknowledge our inhumanity toward each other and the inherent frailty of these human bodies. And I will mourn.

But I will get up Easter morning and go to church and rejoice in our risen Lord - and I will rejoice and give thanks for life and goodness and beauty and love -- and I will go out and do what I can to lessen or at least share in our communal grieving. Because ours is not an either/or world, We live with birth and with death. And Good Friday -- much as we may dislike it -- reminds us that we just don't get one without the other. And I trust that God knows the reason for this.

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WHAT WE DID LAST SUNDAY - PALM/PASSION SUNDAY

3/25/2018

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I opened my message last Sunday with these words: Depending on how long you have each been a member of this worshiping community, you may have heard what I have to save about Palm Sunday and Holy Week as many as twenty times. Maybe it's time we listen to someone else's words.

And so I introduced my plan for the day -- instead of reading the scriptures from one bible translation or another, I decided to share the stories from other sources -- from the reflections of some of my favorite writers about the scriptures, rather than the scriptures themselves.

I faced every pastor's Holy Week dilemma -- Palm Sunday or the Passion Readings? My choice this year was to go with Palm Sunday and Good Friday. And for the individual reflections, I chose two of my own favorite writers: Frederick Buechner on Palm Sunday, and Barbara Brown Taylor on Good Friday.

The results were better than I had even imagined. We've all heard these scriptures so often that we don't necessarily always need the words from the gospels themselves, and hearing the stories discussed by two masters of their crafts brought them to life in a whole new way for us.

Our post-reading discussion was interesting - questions were asked and (hopefully) answered, we learned new things (all of us - me, included) seeing the stories from a new point of view.

For me, and, hopefully, for the congregation, it was an engaging way to enter into Holy Week and prepare our hearts for the journey to the Easter story.

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GOD HAS A PLAN

3/18/2018

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Jeremiah 31:31-34 (International Children’s Bible)

“Look, the time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new agreement. It will be with the people of Israel and the people of Judah. It will not be like the agreement I made with their ancestors. That was when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt. I was a husband to them, but they broke that agreement,” says the Lord.

“I will make this agreement with the people of Israel,” says the Lord. “I will put my teachings in their minds. And I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. People will no longer have to teach their neighbors and relatives to know the Lord. This is because all people will know me, from the least to the most important,” says the Lord.

“I will forgive them for the wicked things they did. I will not remember their sins anymore.”

Jeremiah – Jeremiah, of all people – the man whose very name has come to mean a long, bitter lamentation or complaint – Jeremiah, in today’s reading, brings us a word of hope and good news!

When we read the writing of the Old Testament prophets – let’s call them writings, for convenience sake, even though these were spoken messages, only later transcribed from people’s memories of them and put into written form – the writings of the prophets, both major and minor, are almost always accusations and warnings to the people. You’re screwing up big time, now shape up or else bad things are going to happen.

And, of course, they rarely did shape up and disaster would fall, and God would end up saving them again. Jonah is the only story I can think of offhand where the people actually listened and changed their ways and retribution was averted.

According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah also authored the Books of 1st and 2nd Kings as well as Lamentations, but for Christians he is probably best known for the Book of Jeremiah itself.

Jeremiah was called as a prophet at a very young age – called to call the people to account. Israel had forsaken their singular relationship with God and had gone so far as to even set up altars to the foreign god Ba’al and sacrifice their children to him thereby breaking the previous covenant. Jeremiah preached and warned them that they would suffer severely if they did not change their ways. Josiah, the king, tried to implement reform, and succeeded for a while, but ultimately failed, and the people sinned even more.

In time, Israel was invaded by Babylon and suffered greatly for long years in poverty and exile. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed – the cultural and religious center of their lives. It appeared that God had finally had enough and forsaken them, as they had forsaken him. Jeremiah’s years of preaching repentance were rarely happy or hopeful.

That is why today’s reading comes as such a promise of hope. The people had repeatedly broken trust with God and they knew that they brought their suffering on themselves and deserved nothing better.

God, in the role of the stern parent, had allowed them to suffer in order to break their proud spirits and bring them to the point where they sought salvation from the very God they had insulted and rejected.

And yet, God promises them a way out – a shot at a new beginning. “I’ll erase the past,” God promises, “We won’t even remember their past sins.” A new covenant is promised – one that will be so deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of the people that there will be no thought of forgetting.

You’ll notice that this promise from God begins with “a time is coming” when God will do this thing. The time is not here yet. And that is why this Old Testament reading is so important in Christian thinking. For Christians, this promised new covenant comes to fruition in the person of Jesus.

This is our covenant – the one under which we live. The unbreakable, everlasting covenant sealed in the blood of Christ.

But while we claim this covenant, it is important to remember and acknowledge, as Walter Brueggemann reminds us, that “this text about ‘the new covenant’ God makes ‘is not about Jesus or the Christian faith’: it is a promise to Israel and Judah, ‘this failed people, this time to make it new and to make it right.’”

Next Sunday is Passion or Palm Sunday followed by Holy Week with its long yo-yo-ing journey from loss to gain, abandonment to welcome, pain to hope, dying to living again. This is not the sole property of Christianity. The Jews of Jeremiah’s day as well as those today know this. Non-believers know it, too. And, yes, Christians know this journey.

And this is why we cling to the hope offered in this promised covenant – this promise that the word of God truly is so deeply written on and in human hearts that one day the time will come when, in the words of this reading: People will no longer have to teach their neighbors and relatives to know the Lord. This is because all people will know me, from the least to the most important.”

Two chapters before today’s reading, God had spoken through Jeremiah to tell the people this: I say this because I know what I have planned for you,” says the Lord. “I have good plans for you. I don’t plan to hurt you. I plan to give you hope and a good future. Then you will call my name. You will come to me and pray to me. And I will listen to you. You will search for me. And when you search for me with all your heart, you will find me! (Jeremiah 29:11-13)

This is why we’ve been talking so much about covenant this Lent – to remind ourselves when we are discouraged or frightened or exhausted or just too overwhelmed by the world’s demands that we still are held within this covenant – whether it feels like it at the moment or not. God has not -- God does not abandon us.

The covenant exists. The promise is made and sealed. God is with us always, even when we forget – and one day we will all know it in our hearts and minds and bones -- and we will live together in the peace of God.

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JUST A NOTE ...

3/11/2018

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Last Sunday was a Discussion & Feedback day - so no prepared message to share.
I strongly believe that those of us in leadership roles need to remember to take time to learn from the wisdom of our congregations. In this particular case, I was gathering feedback while preparing for a presentation I'll be making next month. We got so into the discussion that we ran considerably over our usual time and I finally had to cut us short.
I love my congregation and the insights they share with me!

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RECOGNIZING GOD'S GLORY -- ANYWHERE

3/4/2018

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Psalm 19:1-4   (Common English Bible)

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
    the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
One day gushes the news to the next,
    and one night informs another what needs to be known.
Of course, there’s no speech, no words--
        their voices can’t be heard--
    but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

Lent is a funny time for the Sunday readings. This week there doesn’t seem to be any solid connection between the four readings chosen in the lectionary. Usually there is some sort of theme running through the four, but this week it escapes me – if it’s there in the first place. The readings today also don’t seem to have much to do with last week’s theme, which was Abraham and Covenant, or with next week’s, which appears to be on crying out to God for mercy.

The Old Testament reading today is about the Commandments, the New Testament reading is about wisdom and foolishness, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, and the Gospel is about driving the money changers out of the Temple. Psalm 19 is the focus scripture chosen by the lectionary site I use most often – so -- here we are.

Psalm 19 is only fourteen verses long, but I could easily preach three full sermons on the different themes found within it – so I winnowed it down to just the opening four verses.

The Glory of God is, after all, a very large subject ranging from the immensity of the outward reaching universe to the minute infinity of the microscopic world.

... there’s no speech, no words--
        their voices can’t be heard--
    but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

That’s the ends of this discernable earth, mind you, and far, far, beyond.

In words attributed to Albert Einstein: "It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware."

That is a humbling thought all by itself. Every week, it seems, we see more proof of Einstein’s statement when news is released showing that scientists have penetrated further and further out into the unfathomable depths of space – and with each step outward, we – our world – our entire galaxy – recedes into a tinier, more minuscule, impossible to see dot -- lost somewhere in a mass of similar impossible to see dots that they tell us are likewise, galaxies – whole universes.

If we insist on our Sunday School image of God as an old man with a white beard floating about, “out there” somewhere, this all becomes an untenable concept and we have to reject it in order to maintain our own sanity. In order to be able at all to approach the glory of God’s creation, we have to be able to accept a God big enough and different enough from us to be capable of that kind of creation.

But there is more to that glorious creation than just size -- the macro and the micro – the immense and the miniscule. The ever-so-ordinary everyday is included – included not only in the creation, but in the glory. The clouds that pass overhead, the rain that falls, the pets who rush to meet us when we come in the door, the young man who bags our groceries and the garbage-collector who comes around every week – and, it is especially important for us to remember today – the guests with whom we will share the lunches we just made – all of these are a part of the glory of God’s handiwork, and all are as beloved as the most celebrated symphony, a first-born child, or a sunset over the tropic islands.

All loved. All cherished by their maker. Even us. All those things which – if we truly see them -- give us a feeling of awe, that fill us with joy.

C.S. Lewis, the writer of the Narnia books among others, was very fond of the word “joy” in his writings – and he had a very specific meaning in mind when he used it. He once wrote: "I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy," and when asked to elaborate on what he intended by “joy” he answered that is was something that was not a satisfied desire but an unsatisfied desire ─ a deep longing for God, a hungry pursuit of God’s heart that never ends and is more satisfying than any earthly happiness -- a bittersweet ache and yearning for something far-off, other-worldly, and unnamed.

Have you never been so moved by something or someone that it made you ache because you knew you could never quite come close to grabbing it, or putting it into words of any sort? Found yourself wanting something – longing for it -- with no idea of what?

It sounds silly when I write it down today -- trying to put it in words -- but I can remember when I first read the Narnia books as an adult. Lewis' words and story created just that longing in me. His description of the story's Christ-figure touched something in me that I wanted so much it made my chest ache. It was a bewildering experience at the time.

That something is this glory in God’s handiwork of which all creation sings – whether it is way out there, or way inside the tiniest speck that I can’t hope to see or understand on my own, or whether it is the everyday folks who inhabit this particular piece of the world close around me. It is what keeps us looking for something more, something bigger and better.

I can also remember holding each of my children when they were born and feeling so astonishingly in awe of their very being that I thought I would burst.

Or one time when I was a child, camping with my family up at the peak of Sonora Pass – at a time when a lot fewer people were camping and you could still get out by yourself and away from the crowds – and sitting up half the night just staring at the night sky and the millions and millions of stars that could be seen because we were alone up there and there was no ambient light anywhere to diffuse our vision and having it create such a longing in me, but having no smallest idea what it was I wanted.

God provides the occasions – it is our job to be aware and awake enough that we recognize and acknowledge that deep longing, that bittersweet ache and yearning for something far-off, other-worldly, and unnamed, of which C.S. Lewis wrote.

In the words of one of my favorite hymns, Marty Haugen’s Canticle of the Sun:

The heavens are telling the glory of God,
And all creation is shouting for joy!
Come, dance in the forest, come, play in the field,
And sing, sing to the glory of the Lord!

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GOOD FRIDAY

WHAT WE DID LAST SUNDAY - PALM/PASSION SUNDAY

GOD HAS A PLAN

JUST A NOTE ...

RECOGNIZING GOD'S GLORY -- ANYWHERE

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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