Reconciliation

Living with God as Thou and I
Martin Buber (1878-1965)

I was in college in the 1970’s. Though at first I was an agnostic art student while attending two Lutheran liberal arts colleges, many of my friends and two housemates were religion majors. This was at a time when the curricula for religion majors still included courses in Bible and in fundamental theology. Paul Tillich’s three Systematics volumes were still much read, as were Bonhoeffer and Barth. And Martin Buber’s once better-known book, I and Thou, was often recommended as a reading for various liberal arts majors.

The significance of Buber’s book was something I only came to realize much later, after grappling with Jean Paul Sartre’s rather dark, or as some would say ‘more realistic,’ view of human relationships. Those familiar with Sartre’s play, No Exit, may recall a phrase penned by Sartre, “Hell is other people.”

As I remember it, Sartre had in mind our experience of ourselves as being regarded by other people as an object. For Sartre, we function primarily, and are aware of ourselves, as subjects – subjects who resist being seen as the objects of other person’s perceptions and especially their judgement. Only later did I perceive the paradoxical affinity between the views of Sartre and Buber. For both were sensitive to the experiential problems that arise when people feel they are regarded as objects rather than as fellow-subjects. It is no coincidence that the lifespans of Buber and Sartre overlapped.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

How hard it is for us then, spiritually and in religious terms. to be open to a related idea. For we find it difficult to experience and therefore to accept ourselves as being an object of God’s love. To see ourselves in this way is understandably uncomfortable for us, given how our fundamental way of living and of perceiving ourselves is to function as subjects who regard, come to know, and evaluate everything as an object of our perception – even and more especially, other people. And yet, as one of John’s New Testament Letters teaches us, we were first loved by God… before we were aware of it, much less come to believe this as true or live by it.

In view of these observations, we might want to invert Sartre’s rhetorical phrase regarding how our experience with other people can be ‘hellish.’ We might also say that for religious believers and especially Christians, our fellowship with other people may provide us with real experiential glimpses of what has traditionally been meant by ‘heaven.’

Here we can employ another often superficially-used phrase about certain experiences as being moments of ‘heaven on earth.’ With that phrase, we may need to expand our perception of ourselves in this way: Consciously and intentionally we want to live as an object of God’s love, of God’s enduringly positive regard and embrace, within God’s shared Trinitarian-fellowship. To see ourselves and others, as well as then to live, in this way, may require us to cease to think in terms of subject and object in a binary, either/or way. We learn from Buber that with one another we can be “I and Thou.” And each day, when first emerging from sleep, we can begin our morning with prayerfully re-orienting words like these: “Regardless of what I may have dreamed, Thou art, and as a result, I am.”

For as Jesus promised, saying, “Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (John 14:19-20). Every day can be, and is, that day.

Our Baptism recalls Jesus’ Baptism, for both function – in part – as moments of designation. For us, it is the sacramental act when we are told that we have been included among God’s own children, made a part of Christ’s Body, and named for the community by the celebrant. In all these ways, we are the objects of God’s redemptive work through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, by means of the Church. God chooses us before we are ever aware of our choice to respond.

“I recognize Thou, who first knew me before I ever became conscious of myself. Thou first loved me before I ever felt a challenge to love myself.”

Mary’s Joy-Filled Acceptance

 

Picture the scene: About 750 years before Jesus, at the Lord’s bidding the prophet Isaiah goes out to the south side of Jerusalem near the aquaduct. He has been asked to do a difficult thing, to meet the fearful and apprehensive Ahaz, king of Judah. This happens at the moment when God’s people are threatened by Tiglath-pileser, king of the Assyrians. Making a bad situation worse, the Assyrians have been joined by armed forces from the separated northern kingdom of Israel, who have already been brought under subjection by the threatening foreign power. Ahaz does not respond as God would like. When he demurs from asking God for a sign of assurance, Isaiah confronts him with the Lord’s Word:

“… Listen to this, government of David! It’s bad enough that you make people tired with your pious, timid hypocrisies, but now you’re making God tired. So the Master is going to give you a sign anyway. Watch for this: A girl who is presently a virgin will get pregnant. She’ll bear a son and name him Immanuel (God-With-Us). By the time the child is twelve years old, able to make moral decisions, the threat of war will be over. Relax, those two kings that have you so worried will be out of the picture. But also be warned: God will bring on you and your people and your government a judgment worse than anything since the time the kingdom split, when Ephraim (northern Israel) left Judah. The king of Assyria is coming!”

What a strange promise! How could the promised birth of a child be a gift for a troubled world?

This is the kind of promise that Mary later received through the Angel Gabriel. We all receive a similar promise when we are called to acknowledge and accept that same Gift-Child that Mary received.

During Advent this year we have reflected on how there can be several aspects of our response to God’s call, and to the promises latent within God’s Gift to us. Fear is often our first reaction, followed then by wonder and uncertainty about the fit between God’s promise and our own suitability for receiving it. By attentiveness to God’s Grace, our uncertainty can be transformed into a humility ~ a humility that is willing to accept the Word of Promise and the Call to receive it. And if we come that far, if we are willing to believe and remain attentive, we may experience a wonderful moment. We find it in a fourth aspect of Mary’s response to God’s Word of Call. It is quite simply, Joy! There is no other word for it. Both Mary and Joseph, each in their own way, accept God’s unlikely and unexpected Word of promise. By accepting and receiving God’s will for what it is, they find a beautiful joy.

Over the course of Advent, I shared with you three images portraying aspects of the Angel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary of the promised gift of a child ~ a child who would be God with us. In the image above, El Greco beautifully captures the sublime quality of the moment. Having accepted God’s Word in humility, Mary’s eyes and her whole being are uplifted to receive the message. Her up-turned hand says it all! The gilded and hovering angel points upward, in the direction where all this is supposed to go, into the realm of Spirit. This is where the Lord will ascend through his Resurrection, taking us and our humanity with him into the very being of God.

Joy may not be the defining feature of our lives today. Yet, we can find the fullness of joy in the beautiful Gift we celebrate this week. For we receive a gift whose meaning and value we can never fully anticipate in advance.

To this gift, Mary says “Yes!” And, with her, we can say, “yes,” as well. Yes to God’s Word that comes to us as both promise and call – a promise that he will be with us always, as we accept him for who He really is. And, a call for us to become new persons in him. For in him we find a spiritual maturity that this world can never give.

In raising our hearts in assent to God’s promises, and by receiving God’s call to be transformed by the Spirit, we grow. We grow into that quiet joy which was Mary’s, instilled by the Angel’s visit. Behold – a virgin has conceived, and has borne a Son, and we call his name Immanuel – for God is with us!

The image above is of El Greco’s Annunciation (1600). The biblical quotes from Isaiah are based on Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message. This post is based on my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2019, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Learning from Mary’s Attentive Openness

 

Perhaps people living at the time of our Lord’s first coming were in some important ways like us. They may have been just as prone to orienting their security and sense of wellbeing around material concerns, while being generally indifferent to the spiritual life. Yet, in this season of Advent when many sing “O come, O come Emmanuel,” it is easy to imagine the people of Roman-occupied Palestine crying out with longing for the God of Israel to draw near in power. Even so, God chose an out of the way place in which to appear among us, incarnate in human form. Paradoxically, for this and other reasons, the arrival of the Holy One was largely overlooked. At least until his person and message provoked enough reactivity to cause the authorities to have to deal with him. Otherwise, the periodic waves of public attention that he received were most often inspired by the miraculous works of mercy attributed to him. While he encountered significant examples of deference to the revealed Law among his contemporaries, lived-adherence to God’s hope-shaping promises appeared to be rare.

This is why the Lectionary features a particular aspect of the Christian Gospel story at this time of the year. It does this by presenting some notable counter-examples to what may have been – in the first century – a widespread indifference to or loss of confidence in God’s promises. We learn about Zechariah, the father of the ‘forerunner,’ John the Baptizer, and about Elizabeth, John’s mother, who was a cousin of Mary and another woman that would bear a promised child. These three stand out for having been open in heart and mind to the heavenly glory that God was about to reveal in the midst of the lives of his wayward children.

In particular we remember the spirit of attentiveness that we find displayed in a third aspect of Mary’s response to God’s call through the Angel Gabriel. God’s call often challenges us to live in a different way; or to try and be a different person, especially in our relationships with our family, our friends, and those with whom we work. Receiving this call, we can react at first in fear at what this call will mean in practice. We can also respond with uncertainty, wondering about our worthiness or suitability for what God may have in mind for us. We have reflected on these themes in the last two web posts on this site.

But we can also see that —in faith— we are able to go into the heart of our fear, and find God’s power. Receiving God’s grace, we may move beyond relying on our own strength, and resist depending upon our estimate of our own abilities and worthiness for what God may have in mind. And we can choose to respond to God’s gracious invitation to participate in the Spirit’s redeeming work, just as Mary did, by saying, “Yes!” As John Lennon so simply captured the spirit of it, in the words of his famous song, “Let it be!” As Mary said to God through the Angel, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy Word.”

This is the spirit of Mary’s response to the message of the angel as portrayed in the third image I am sharing with you this Advent ~ Trygve Skogrand’s photo-collage, pictured above. The artist has skillfully placed a traditional painted figure onto a contemporary scene, juxtaposing an image of something old within a contemporary setting. We see a simplicity and spirit of humility in Mary’s posture, as she kneels in her plain gown. In the plain ‘bed-sit’ room in which she prays, we notice her uplifted eyes. They are now focused on the divine source of the message she is receiving.

Attentiveness is key to meaningful perception, just as we find in the Gospel reading for the third Sunday in Advent. John the Baptizer sends his disciples to Jesus with what should be our most persistent question ~ “Are you the One?” ‘Are you the One for whom we are looking, and whom we are awaiting?’ Notice Jesus’ response: “Go and tell John what you hear and see…” For they only hear and see if they are attentive. This is one reason why the Church sets aside this season of Advent ~ to encourage our attentiveness, so that we can hear and see, and then accept God’s Word to and for us.

“Let it be as God would have it.” Let things be as God wills. Let God be God! Perhaps nothing will be so hard in our lives, as to say those words in faith and in humility. Our pride objects. Our desire to be at the center of reality intrudes. But to say, “Let it be…,” in faith and in humility, is to return to the grace of the Garden of Creation. And it is also to begin to live forward into the fullness of the Kingdom, manifest in the New Jerusalem, as God will have things be.

The image above is a detail of Trygve Skogrand’s photo-collage, Bedsit Annunciation (one of my favorite artistic renderings of the Annunciation). This post is based on my homily for the Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2019, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Fearing an Unexpected Holy Invitation

Advent can be a providential season for reflecting on how the Holy Spirit invites us to go to a new place for the sake of God’s Kingdom. There is no question that this can happen at least spiritually, whether we hear the call or not. The real question, when it does happen, is how we will respond to God’s holy invitation.

This is the season when we focus especially on how God’s Kingdom enters the world in a new way. We look back to the earthly kingdom of Israel, and her difficulty fulfilling her spiritual vocation. We also look back to the promised first coming of the Messiah, who was to bring God’s Kingdom into the world with power. During Advent, we also look forward, to the Messiah’s coming again in glory. But here is a crucial fact about the first coming of the Messiah: Without Mary’s acceptance of God’s overture, there would have been no Jesus of Nazareth. In order for God’s great “YES” to us in Jesus to become manifest, Mary had to say “yes” to God.

As Luke tells the story, God’s call to Mary embodies God’s holiness and righteousness. In like manner, our encounter with God’s presence and holy invitation causes everything in us that is less than godly to undergo judgment. The bright light of God’s glory illumines all the dark corners of the world ~ and all the dark corners in our lives. The purity of God shows up all that is less than pure.

Our reaction to all this may involve at least one thing: fear! God’s call comes to us as Good News. And yet, we experience God’s call for us to become new persons, and do new things, as a fearful invitation. For me, it has involved a call to consider moving away from one beloved church and congregation to what I could only hope would be another. For both you and for me, it may be a call to go and speak to someone with whom we have a disagreement, or to reconcile with someone whom we have failed to forgive. When God calls us to new life, by inviting us to do something challenging, our first reaction is often fear. We think of all the things we are afraid might happen: like losing the security of a familiar home and community; or setting aside our own pride and sense of right; and opening ourselves in vulnerability to being hurt by another person.

In the above detail of Simone Martini’s Annunciation, we see what may have been Mary’s first response to the presence of the holy angel. Gabriel comes to her sharing God’s good news about a child she will bear, who will bring salvation for the world. And in Martini’s image of the event, Mary draws back in fear at the message, frightened about what it might mean for her and her life. We all know the end of the story, how it all turned out for good. But in that moment, as may happen for us, God’s call surely had a frightening aspect to it. Because a change to something always means a change from something else, from where we started.

Martini’s painting reminds me of spiritual advice I received years ago ~ spiritual advice that gave me the courage to leave a tenured faculty position at one of our seminaries and return to parish ministry. The prospect of this change, for which I had a sense of call, was frightening. And the good advice I received was this: When you go toward the heart of your fear in faith, God will meet you there with power.

We know that this is what Mary did. For she moved beyond her reaction to the seeming strangeness of the angel’s greeting, not knowing what it would mean for her. She then opened herself to embrace the angel’s message and all that it would entail for her ~ and for the world.

It was my CREDO Institute team leader and colleague, (The Rev. Dr.) Bob Hansel, who offered the wonderful spiritual advice that I share above. I continue to benefit from it. The image at the top is a detail of Simone Martini’s painting, The Annunciation (a painting I have shared before). This post is adapted from one that first appeared here in 2019, and is based on my homily for the first Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2019, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Wrestling With God
Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestles with the Angel (and receives a blessing)

Recently, the Lectionary included a familiar reading from Genesis (chapter 32). It describes Jacob’s dilemma concerning his brother, Essau, from whom he is alienated. Alone at night in the wilderness, Jacob lays down on the ground and places his head upon a stone to sleep. In the darkness, Jacob then contends with an angel in what becomes a wrestling match that lasts through much of the night.

In parsing the elements of this deeply symbolic story, we must remember that in much of the Old Testament, angels appear and act as divine representatives. They also function as a literary device where the angelic figure is a stand-in for God. This is why it is appropriate to read this passage as a story about Jacob wrestling with God, as well as the more literal reading of it as an account of his wrestling with an angelic being. In either case, we are right to understand that the story portrays Jacob’s struggle to discern, and then accept, God’s will for him and for his future.

We are told that Jacob is fearful about meeting Esau, who is traveling with a large band of men. For, as we may remember, Jacob has wronged his brother by ‘stealing’ Esau’s birthright blessing, which Esau was to have received from their father, Isaac. As recorded in a well-known earlier story, Jacob had deceived their aged father by masquerading as his twin brother, who was only-minutes-older than him, thus receiving the blessing that Isaac had intended for Esau.

Now, with our modern understanding of psychology, contemporary readers of the nighttime angelic wrestling story may prefer to understand it as simply a symbolic portrayal of Jacob’s wrestling with his conscience. Though partly true, accepting such a univocal reading of the story comes at the expense of a profound dimension of the narrative. For this episode is what students of the Bible call a ‘theophany,’ a story about divine self-revelation, as Jacob himself (as well as the narrator) understood it to be.

So how might we appreciate this story of a nighttime struggle, involving unresolved aspects of a particular person’s history having to do with family relationships, as well as recording a pivotal moment within his long term quest for divine guidance?

I find it helpful to read the story within the following interpretive framework. When we refer to ‘struggling with God,’ I believe that what we often mean is our struggle to accept what we perceive to be (or suspect is) God’s will for us. As such, it has much to do with our understanding of prayer.

Jacob Wrestling With the Angel (attribution uncertain)

As I noted in a recent post, our Prayer Book teaches us that prayer is first of all a matter of responding to God. Responding to God, and responding to our perception of God’s will for us, are not often automatic or straightforward activities. Our natural disposition may be to fall back into thinking of prayer as enacting our desire to bring God’s will into accord with our own wants and hopes. For our prayers may often take this form. Yet, prayer is most holy when prayer is pursued in a way where we give ourselves up to an acceptance of our real need, not our wants. This is to accept our basic need for our wills to be brought into accord with the divine will. When this comes to be our more usual pattern of response to God, we are less likely to find ourselves having the feeling that we are struggling with God, and more likely to experience the peace of living harmoniously with God’s hopes and plans for us.

Alexander Louis Leloir, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

When the Genesis story refers to Jacob’s having prevailed we will do better than to settle for the conclusion that he has ‘won’ or achieved a goal. Jacob hung on to the angel; he did not let go. And in the process he came to have a limp, the struggle having dislocated aspects of his prior way of being. The limp was therefore less a sign of an injury and more a sign of a deep change within him, and within his mode of engaging the world that lay before him. Jacob could then utter his famous words: “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” Encountering God’s awesome and holy presence did not consume him as fire would dry tinder. Instead, Jacob was transformed, and received a new name, Israel.

Responding to God – and God’s will for us – with acceptance, will likely disrupt aspects of our present ways of living. And we may feel that some important parts of our lives, even of ourselves, have been dislocated in the process. But if we cling to God, even through the feeling of struggle, with the aim of coming to be more fully in accord with God, and God’s ways, we will be blessed, just as Jacob was.

Note: among the many symbolic elements in Chagall’s painting, shown at the top, you might see if you can discern elements of the larger context of Jacob’s story, including those related to Joseph, in Genesis.

Our Doorway Into God’s Trinitarian Being
William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death (1870-73)

When we as Christians pray, we don’t simply pray to God. With faithful assurance, we pray with and through God! As Paul tells us, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit…” This is because, when we pray “to the Father,” we also pray with and through the Son. We are enabled to pray with and through the Son following our Baptism. For after Baptism, we are assured that we pray in the Holy Spirit. We therefore pray to God not ‘from the outside,’ but ‘from the inside’ of God’s own being and nature!

Well, how can this be? As we can easily discover, every Eucharistic Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer has a common shape. For all of our Eucharistic Prayers are prayed to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. This is not an accident. Jesus modeled this in his own life, and particularly at the Last Supper.

When we repeat Jesus’ pattern, offered at that supper, we stand with him around the same table. And by his graceful invitation, we join his prayer to the One he called, ‘Our Father.’ Our prayer with him, to the Father, is in the power of the Spirit, the same Spirit he spoke about at that table. He modeled at that supper what grace means in practice.

Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, Jesus shares with us his own particular intimacy with the Father. Inviting us to stand with him as he prays, he offers the whole world back to the Father-Creator. By this, Jesus – and us with him – fulfills the divinely intended-but-failed stewardship vocation of the mythical Adam and Eve. And so, this is also our vocation, to offer up to our Father all that truly belongs to the Creator. Sharing with Jesus the grace of the Holy Spirit allows us to join him, the Son, in his ongoing Eucharistic vocation.

A good way we can live into the saving implications of God’s Trinitarian nature, is to engage in some creative imagining. Imagine that, in this moment, Jesus reaches out his hands to us. In reaching out his hands, he does not simply extend his greeting. Extending his embrace, he invites us to join him by standing with him, closely at his side. By his invitation, and our acceptance of it, he shares with us his own intimate and particular relationship with our Father.

And with this invitation, he gives us the power of the Spirit, making it a reality in our lives. Because the invitation comes from him, the power of the Spirit he shares with us is God’s grace-filled power. Jesus makes all this actual and true, whether we feel it or not.

This Trinitarian shape of prayer is different from how we usually imagine prayer. Commonly, we think of prayer as our communication to God. When we feel aware of God and close to God, we speak to God of what is good and well and of that for which we feel thankful. And we often ask for help. But, when there seems to be a veil between us and God, we speak to God with lament or we complain, sometimes in anger. This concept and experience of prayer is ‘subjective,’ and therefore narrow. That is, it is a concept of prayer based primarily upon our personal, interior, experience. It reflects our experience of being the subjects of perception and action. Yet, as the Prayer Book Catechism teaches us, prayer is first of all responding to God.

As we learn from Jesus, and by the Holy Spirit, true prayer is not something we do, which we somehow manage to achieve through our faithfulness, devotion, or energy. True prayer is something we allow God to do within us. True prayer is the kind of praying that we find God already making real within us through the indwelling Grace of the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are constantly engaged with one another, in what the Eastern Christian tradition calls ‘a dance,’ a perichoresis. Prayer involves being drawn into this dance. Prayer is sharing in the Trinitarian relational being of God. Prayer is participation in the community of fellowship that exists within God’s own being.

The Trinitarian pattern of our lives rests upon the Trinitarian shape of our prayers. We can accept Jesus’ invitation to stand with him. We then experience his own fellowship with the Father, in the grace-filled power of the Holy Spirit. This enables us to live truly. To live truly, is to live to the Father. It is to live with and through the Son. And true prayer is to live in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And so, we seek to live in the way that we pray: to the Father, with and through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

Note: This post is based on the Western Church’s observance of Trinity Sunday, on June 15, 2025. My title is based on a well-known metaphor found in John’s Gospel. The text here is based on my homily for that occasion, which may be accessed by clicking here.

My goal is to commend the assurance of hope that lies within the Gospel. And while being aware of concerns about the so-called ’scandal of particularity’ associated with Christianity and Judaism, we should be aware that God is free to offer a similarly positive spiritual experience to those of other religious traditions, or of no particular tradition with which they may identify. I hope to address Hunt’s evocative painting, featured above, in a subsequent post.

Easter Sunday 2025

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Peter Koenig, Christ as Second Moses (The Rainbow Resurrection)

 

Having six granddaughters, aged twelve down to two years, I’m very familiar with unicorns and rainbows. There is something about little girls and pastel colors that seems universal. So, when I go into the stores these days, and see all the Easter decorations, I think of our granddaughters. Because everything I see on display seems to be a rainbow of pastels, colors, and patterns, which our little girls love.

Well, as we know, our culture has tamed and domesticated Easter. Good Friday with its silence and its dark remembering is a challenge for us. For we seem to have enough darkness and bad news everyday as it is. And Easter Sunday morning provides the antidote we long for. For a few hours, and even for a few days, we can get a lift, a happy bounce, in a way that we hope for.

But deep down, we know that we want more than a brief lift in our mood, a brief enhancement of our sense of well-being. Our hearts truly long for a lasting joy. For we hope that though happiness may be fleeting, blessedness is abiding. And it was blessedness that Jesus was announcing and commending in his Sermon on the Mount. So here is our question this morning: How does the Gospel Good News about the discovery of an empty tomb help us find a sense of blessedness, and, in a way that might be lasting.

This morning I share with you three images by the English painter, Peter Koenig, images which I think can help us on our spiritual journey this Eastertide. This is our Easter journey toward discovering and experiencing a lasting sense of blessedness. For we discover the kind of blessedness that does not overlook the darkness, or pain, or sadness, that may be a real part of our lives. What we celebrate at Easter is not the simple replacement of what has come before, with something new that wipes away the past. We are not celebrating the spiritual equivalent of a vacation from daily life. For then, in a few days or weeks, we would have a sense that ‘we must now return to reality.’ The reality we celebrate today and throughout Eastertide is the reality of Resurrection transformation.

Now, how do we know this? We know this first from the reports of the Disciples – both the women and the men – who saw the Risen Lord. And who recognized him when they saw his healed scars – not absent scars, but healed scars! They were the first witnesses to the transformation that God brings to us in Resurrection Life. And Resurrection Life is God’s great culminating chapter of what we call Salvation History.

So let’s set our spiritual awareness within the sweep of biblical Salvation History. Here, I offer you a simple phrase with which to help identify and to remember the heart of this mystery. “Through the waters of death into a new covenant life with God.”

Left side panel for Christ as Second Moses

I invite you to look at Peter Koenig’s painting, Jesus as a Second Moses (or, The Rainbow Resurrection), along with its two glorious side panels. Here we notice several details, at least one of which will direct our thoughts toward Easter. We readily notice the rainbow, along with the pastel colors at the top and bottom of the central panel. These – of course – suggest the pastel colors we associate with Easter cards and Easter eggs, and other holiday decorations.

But let’s remind ourselves of what that rainbow first represented. In Salvation History, a rainbow came after a forty day period of massive death and destruction. Most of what we would consider to have been ‘life on earth’ was destroyed and lost, most people, and almost all animals and plants. Noah and his family, and the animals on the ark, traveled through the waters of death into a new covenant life with God. That death, however extensive, however gruesome and abhorrent, was and never would be the last word. God’s Word is – and always has been – a word of promise, a word of covenant. Where we aim for good, things often seem to go bad. Yet, God always aims for good, and achieves good.

Next, we should think of Israel, walking between and through the waters of death at the Red Sea. This brought them to Mt. Sinai, and to the great new Covenant between God and Israel, where blood was sprinkled upon the altar of God, and also upon God’s people. They were then led on a forty year journey through the wilderness to the threshold of their Land of Promise.

This was the moment when Joshua and God’s people crossed the Jordan. This water crossing echoed and recalled our forebears’ two prior journeys through the waters of death into a renewed covenant relation with God. Israel’s renewed covenant relation with God upon the west bank of the Jordan, within the Promised Land, signaled their desire to be faithful to God, and to God’s ways, no matter what.

Right side panel for Christ as Second Moses

And yet, the next most significant event embodying this pattern was the baptismal practice of John at the same river Jordan, centuries later, and Jesus’ own Baptism, by John. Of those who came out to John, many if not most of them were Jews by birth and also upbringing. To them, baptism was foreign. For baptism was what Gentile converts did, not Jews! And so, for them to submit to, and receive, John’s Baptism, was a genuine act of living into God’s holy covenants with their ancestors. Yet it was also a submersion into the waters of death ~ death to old ways and old ideas, as well as death to certain prior social and family relations. For John pointed to the renunciation of sin, and a return to God’s ways. It was also the path into a re-newed covenant life with God.

Jesus’ own acceptance of Baptism at the hands of his cousin, John, symbolized something other than a personal need of his. Scripture instead suggests that Jesus, himself, chose to live into this moment. He did so out of his deep identification with all of us, in what would become his world-wide family. Through John’s ministry, and in Jesus’ acceptance of it, Jordan waters once again became a symbol ~ a symbol of going through the waters of death to sin, and acceptance of a renewed or new covenant life with God.

And so, when each of us was or is baptized into Christ, we join all of these faithful people who came before us. In Baptism, with them we cross through the waters of death, into a new covenant life with God.

This may prepare us to acknowledge how we are portrayed in Peter Koenig’s painting. For we are represented by those depicted as standing in the purple shadows, behind the ‘Christ-as-Moses’ figure. We are people who live and walk in darkness until we meet the true light, the Light that comes into the world to enlighten everyone. On what, then do we base our hope? Surely, it is on the hope represented by the fruit of Jesus’ death and Resurrection.

The Son of God embraced the human body, and he became one with it. His body has become the Body we have embraced, and with which we have become one. The Body of his transformation has become the Body of our own transformation. His death and Resurrection was and is our doorway into a new life. This is what this day and our liturgy are all about.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

 

Additional note: here I offer my Easter homily, shared this morning at Grace Church, St. Francisville, LA.

Good Friday 2025

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Stanley Spencer, The Cruicifixion (1958)

 

(I am offering here my Good Friday homily for this year, based on one previously shared)

In the passion reading we have just heard, we are reminded of the dark spectacle of what human cruelty can accomplish. With Jesus, it was a vain attempt to obliterate the most beautiful human being who ever lived. Thank God, we have no photographs of the horrifying things that were done to him, but only paintings. But consider this paradox: the beauty of art has provided a way for us to a reflect on one of the darkest examples of human violence.

Paintings of our Lord’s Passion seem divided into two broad groups. There are those concerned to portray the grim reality of Roman execution. And, there are those inclined to explore and express the inner redemptive significance of what happened.

At the center of any portrayal of the Crucifixion of Jesus is an inescapable fact ~ it was an act of political and judicial violence, where the forces of earthly injustice pretended to act in the name of human truth. The corollary to this is how Jesus’ subsequent Resurrection restored heavenly justice in the name of divine truth. Paintings of Jesus’ Crucifixion, and those of his Resurrection, usually give attention to his wounded body, even though his wounds then appear transformed on the Third Day. After all, this is one way the disciples recognize him after his death. How the death-marked body of Jesus looked after his resurrection, also provides a preview of his appearance at the end of time.

Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn, “Lo! he comes, with clouds descending” offers words that also apply to Good Friday.

“Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him,
pierced and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing…
shall the true Messiah see.

Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshippers;
with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!”

It is natural to imagine how the people directly responsible for Jesus’ death, from Judas and the high priests, to Herod and Pilate, might be overcome with grief at the triumphal Second Coming of the Lord. Those who pierced him might feel themselves pierced by awakened guilt and remorse. Indeed, for every one of us, seeing the fruit of our mischief and misdeeds can provoke us to tears.

But I think Wesley was getting at more than repentance and contrition. Surely, seeing the full beauty of the glory of our Lord, with his wounds transfigured, will also summon our tears — but with tears of joy. Wesley, prayerfully and with sensitivity, has given voice to the profound power of beauty. Especially when it is discerned in the most unexpected of places – in the face and body of the crucified One. Love… the most profound love beyond human imagining, is manifest in the face and gestures of the crucified messiah. For he reaches out his hands even to forgive those who have tortured and sought to kill him. This is the most beautiful thing we could ever see.

As we pray in a Morning Prayer collect, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace…”

Perceiving all this helps us make sense of the paradox at the heart of Jesus’ Crucifixion. For, in it, we perceive the dramatic juxtaposition of serenity with antagonism, of beauty with its dark opposite, and of moral good with apparent evil. We can see this in two paintings I have included with your worship bulletin: Hieronymus Bosch’ painting of Christ Carrying the Cross, and Stanley Spencer’s 1958 painting, The Crucifixion. Looking at them, I encourage you to join me in asking an awkward question: with which person or persons in these paintings do we identify?

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross

Though some 500 years apart, both painters portray the tranquil appearance of the peaceful heart of Jesus, even in the face of vicious hostility. And like Bosch, Spencer helps us see what the beautiful One in our midst sometimes provokes. Especially when the shining light of his presence exposes the dark shadows within and around us. For his light sometimes prompts fierce anger and envy, as well as a callous indifference to cruelty and suffering. Things of which we are all capable. And we are likely to have much invested in denying this ugly truth. Strangely, when confronted face to face with the divine opposite of our perversity, we will either fight the light that we encounter, or surrender to it. The Passion narratives give us examples of those who resisted and even fought against the Light of the World. For we sometimes fight against the disturbing possibility that Jesus will conquer our pervasive ungodliness. And so, consciously or not, we try to do away with his godliness.

An encounter with true beauty can be unsettling and troubling, especially if we have already settled for so much less. We may often hope for the triumph of good over evil, that beauty will overcome darkness, and serenity will displace antagonism. But we cannot find it within ourselves to do more than hope. We cannot achieve the redemptive resolution for which we haltingly reach out with our feeble hands and hearts.

It is not an accident that the figure of Jesus in Stanley Spencer’s painting visually recedes in the foreground, while those who oppose and crucify him grab our interest and attention. Spencer, after mastering traditional realism, adopted what he called a neo-primitive style. He was a gifted colorist, and highly proficient with composition. And so, as Spencer has rendered him, Jesus’ skin tone and color roughly match that of the wood of the cross, as well as the clothing of the man with the hammer swung over his head. Spencer’s rendering of the Lord’s skin tone and color also match much of the sky and the ground below… including the tunic of Mary Magdalene, prostrate at the foot of the cross. This forms a compelling visual symbol. For Jesus totally identified with us, in his Incarnation, and in his Crucifixion. His crucifixion symbolizes his complete joining with us, and with our world of wrenching hurts and suffering.

In fact —as we see in Spencer’s composition and coloring— it is precisely because Jesus blended in so well with everyday life, that those who opposed him could literally gain the upper hand, ultimately with hammers and nails. (For he did not call down an army of angels to help him, as he could have.) But this is the marvel of the incarnation of our God in Jesus. The fullness of divinity thoroughly became joined with our fallen humanity. As the Gospels attest, this joining was so complete that many did not notice or have regard for his divinity. When we do notice his total identification with us, when we come face to face with the truth it represents, we have either one or the other of two reactions. We throw ourselves down in humility before him. Or, we seek to throw him down, to humble him before us.

These paradoxes are brought to their greatest prominence when, as he predicted, he is lifted up. His lifting up is his glorification, and the glorification of God within him. Yet his lifting up is on a cross, and in the agony of a humiliating public execution. Here we see the ‘strange beauty’ of our Lord — a beauty for which churches and museums better prepare us than do our malls and most TV shows.

So, let us “behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and … seek him in his temple.” We will find him! We will find him in the “temple” that he promised to raise in three days.

 

Additional note: Those interested in further reflection on some of the Holy Week themes raised here might wish to read my prior post, “What God Can Do, and Is Doing.”

A Friend’s Beautiful Repentance

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James Tissot, The Pharisee and the Publican

 

This past week I witnessed a beautiful act of repentance. A new friend shared with several of us that he had done something he clearly regretted. I began to see the shame and grief he was carrying within himself, despite his initial display of upbeat friendliness. I suspect that he had not joined us consciously intending to share details about what he had earlier done. But, after a bit, his sense of accountability to us, as well as his desire to reconnect with us, overcame his reluctance to be candid. His face became dark, and we could see anguish in his facial expression while – embarrassed – he described what had happened. His principal regret, he said, was that he had let himself and his family down, and he was sad that he had let us down, as well.

It was an uncomfortable few minutes, both for him, and for us. But I was struck not only by the pathos of the moment, and of his admission. I was moved by the beauty of his expression of repentance, and especially by his at-first discrete and then winsome smile as he received and responded to our assurances. We told him that he was beginning to make things well by sincerely sharing his recent experience with us.

The moment passed by all too quickly, especially given how profound it had been for several of us.

We had personally witnessed a touching illustration of what I believe Jesus was getting at in his parable found in Luke 18:9-14, often called The Pharisee and the Publican (or Tax Collector). This parable and other related Gospel sayings or stories are often described as providing us with illustrations of God’s love for us, and of what God’s love for us seeks to nurture in and elicit from us. To me, an often missing word in such characterizations of Jesus’ vision and teaching is ‘beautiful.’

I doubt I will ever forget an observation made by a young aspirant to ordained ministry, about her loss of her father following his lengthy terminal illness: “it is a beautiful thing to have someone for whom you mourn.” There is a similarly strange beauty – and ‘strange’ because it is unexpected – to be found in offering, or in being invited to receive from a friend, grief-filled repentance. Otherwise, we are rarely ever so self-disclosing, so without guile and, hence, so vulnerable. Perhaps the beauty we find here in such moments is the reflected beauty of the divine nature, in whose image and likeness we have been created.

But the loving light of that same divine nature also illumines how our created likeness with God is now marred, and often obscured. This is what can keep us holding our hurts within, while foolishly thinking we are somehow different from others.

And then, on an occasion that can be a surprise even to the one who offers a painful admission, the reflected beauty of the divine nature is briefly revealed, shared, and there before us to behold.

When we find ourselves moved to share our pain and grief by our acts of repentance, we may experience a paradox. We may find that, in the embrace and assurances we receive from those with whom we have been candid, we have received something of even dearer value to us. We may find that we have received a beautiful gift, the gift of experiencing having been found by the One who has come to find us.

James Tissot, The Good Shepherd

 

Additional note: Jesus’ teaching, “blessed are those who mourn,” might best be understood in relation to the grief we can experience accompanying our acts of repentance. Charles Wesley may have had this idea in mind when composing verse 2 of his text for the hymn/poem, “Lo! he comes with clouds descending.”  For we are close to the Father’s heart when our grief is born of sincere repentance.

Every eye shall now behold him, robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him, pierced, and hailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see.

(Charles Wesley, in the words of Hymn 57 in The Hymnal 1982)

The Epiphany: Human Power Encounters Divine Authority

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James Tissot, The Magi Journeying (detail)

 

Instinctively, there is something we all seem to seek. We want to find purpose and meaning, and organizing principles for our lives. This desire is anchored in a larger one: we seek to discern what is real, and true.

But where does our common impulse come from? In what does this impulse consist? I think the best answer to these questions is found at the heart of the Feast of the Epiphany. On Epiphany, we celebrate how God has revealed to the world the real and true meaning and purpose for our lives. Epiphany is all about God revealing to us the divine center of everything. Epiphany highlights God’s self-revealing in the natural world, and preeminently in God’s Incarnation, which the Magi came to discover and then worship.

We are able to recognize that it is in the nature of a Creator to order reality, imbue it with purpose and meaning, and hence to bring order, purpose, and meaning to our lives. A perhaps-unexpected word that captures this broad idea is authority, in that God possesses the authorizing power to create things, and guide them. Specifically, we discern this authorizing power in God’s creation of the universe and in the divine agency shaping ongoing history. For God is the author of all that is real and true.

In human life, authority and power are not always neatly aligned, and we experience trouble when the two are at odds with one another. We see this dialectic between the two at work in the events of Holy Week, in the confrontation between divine authority (in the vocation of Jesus), and worldly power (as exemplified by Pontius Pilate). Less obvious is the way this dialectic is manifest in the events that are commemorated in our celebration of Christmas and the Epiphany of our Lord, especially in connection with the visit of the Magi from the East.

James Tissot, The Magi in the House of Herod

The Magi, also called ‘wise men,’ or ‘kings’ from the East, arrive in Israel having been guided by an authoritative power greater than themselves. Because of their witness to this higher authority and its implied power, the visitors pose a threat to Herod and his courtiers, who exercise earthly authority and its attendant power. This emerges in the interaction between people who are witnesses to divine authority and its power, and others who are possessors of worldly authority and power. The emerging conflict, later seen in the events of Holy Week, arises amidst the challenges surrounding the beauty revealed in what we call the Epiphany, the revealing of divine light to the whole world rather than to just a particular nation or the people of a particular religious tradition.

The Magi from the East, by explaining their quest, prompt Herod to act. He acts viciously and violently through orders given to soldiers under his command. The result is the series of murders we acknowledge every year on December 28, in the ‘red letter day’ we call the Massacre of the Innocents.

James Tissot, the Adoration of the Magi

What are we to make of the Epiphany of God in human form, and the tragic circumstances to which it led? At the heart of Christian belief is the conviction that God became present to us through a human birth. He revealed himself in a human person who embodied two natures, one fully divine, and one fully human, whose natures are distinguishable yet inseparable. Such a person, regardless of appearances, was and is the transcending center or heart of all that is, manifest in human form. He is, therefore, the One who truly possesses divine authority and divine power. Einstein – who was not in any sense a traditional believer – said this: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” The divine center of reality, manifest and revealed in a human being, is the most mysterious beautiful thing that we can experience.

Here is the wonder of it: in God’s mysterious Providence, the birth of the Messiah would bring death to many (in the Massacre of the Innocents). And – years later – the death of the Messiah would bring the possibility of new birth to all, through the redemption of human being from the power of sin and death.

Yet, it would be some decades later before those who proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, and the embodiment of God, could understand the connection between his birth along with those soon-resulting deaths of the Innocents, and his later death, along with its soon-resulting new births for those who came to believe in him.

Our proper response to all this — indeed our only response to all this can and should be to praise the Holy One of Israel, the one whose death brought new life to all who receive him. He has come to us. Come let us adore him. And let us receive him with renewed hope and joyful hospitality, in all his light-filled glory.

A blessed Epiphanytide to you and your loved ones.