A Day of Pause and Reflection

For Christians it is the day in-between. We have had the the Footwashing, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, Calvary. As I have said a number of times on this blog we have the advantage of knowing how the story ends. We know who won't be in the tomb when the women arrive tomorrow morning. We should not forget our privileged position of awareness- nor try to read it back into the original story. I saw a church sermon title for tomorrow that did that.

Afraid- But Filled With Joy

is what it read and I have assumed that it is trying to put those two feelings into the original disciples on Easter morning- a certain way of getting it wrong. Just as we don't need to be afraid today because of yesterday's Crucifixion, they had no sense of joy, even when the women reported the tomb empty.

Joy came later.

When we try to give definitive answers to what the events of that Holy Week (I still like Passion Week, by the way!) we will always fail. I don't care who you are or how educated you are, we cannot get into the First Century mindset to understand what it meant then, let alone what it means today.

I came to that realization sitting in church on Thursday evening in the silence prior to the start of the Maundy Thursday Footwashing and Eucharist. I wanted to be there and it was a calm, refreshing and renewing place to be. I thought about all the 40 years as a pastor on this evening or the years when I was first a Christian and went to the Good Friday services. I pondered the changes in the service, as the pastor said, since in most of those years there was no such thing as a footwashing service. We did those things as a "Camp-thing" but few would have thought of that for a Maundy Thursday experience.

I remembered our Moravian Lovefeasts or Tenebrae services of darkness. I reflected on the words of the liturgy:

• Do this
• My body
• My blood
• In remembrance
• Until He comes

But if you had asked me what this all means to me today, I couldn't have answered you. Nor would I have tried. I know far, far less today than I have ever known; I have far fewer final answers than I have ever had or been given. I don't need to know the answers anymore. I don't need to believe some iron-clad, no-way-around-it theology or theological ideology. I know these words express a deep, personal and universal reality. I know there is truth, no, there is Truth here that I will never grasp with my head or logic.

Nothing about this is logical. Nothing about this makes any intellectual sense in spite of what many want to find. What makes the words of Jesus and the actions of God so powerful to me today is that they don't have the same narrow meaning they may have had 2000 years ago. They are words that lead us to something far more than I can ever grasp.

Because the spiritual reality that I can fully understand will not be the spiritual reality of God. God is greater than that. God speaks in each time and each place. The events in an Upper Room, a Garden or on the garbage hill of Jerusalem in 30 AD are actions of God. No doubts there. They are part of a Truth that I will never humanly understand.

So all I can do is thank God for what God has done and is doing for me and for all. All I can express is what I have seen and heard and received.

• Grace
• Peace
• Forgiveness
• Salvation
• God's love.

So I let that surround me, wash over my feet in the footwashing, be a blessing as I washed another person's feet and then enter through me in the Eucharist.

Thanks be to God!

First Sunday in Advent: The Mystery Continues

I was sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops the other day thinking about today- the First Sunday of Advent. Here's part of the assigned lesson today from Mark 13:35:

Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,

This is part of Mark's little apocalypse where tradition says Jesus is talking about the "Second Coming." It is used on this First Sunday in Advent to make sure that in these weeks of Advent we don't lose sight that this isn't just about something that happened a long time ago in a world far away. It has a future as well.

But if course as anyone who knows anything about the church is aware, the study of the "Second Coming" is fraught with multiple interpretations, misunderstandings and textual abuse. As I was thinking, I overheard a conversation at another table. Some of the people there were in some sort of "seminary" program. One person said his first class in the morning was "The Mystery of Salvation." What a great phrase! It says in four words my whole theology of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. Every Sunday as part of the Episcopal Eucharist we see, hear and say:

Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:

Celebrant and People

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Don't ask me to explain it. It is

• beyond rational, 
• deeper than logic, 
• older than any theology trying to make sense of it.
• It is an experience of God! 

It isn't, I believe, expected to make sense. Yet we Christians spend so much time trying to explain it so we- or others- can understand.

We have come to dislike mystery. Even the greatest hero of our mystery stories, Sherlock Holmes, solves all his cases by sheer logic, an "uber-rationality" that can always be explained, even if those explanations are so deep that normal people would miss them. Someone, somewhere can describe the events and understand what they mean, even if I can't.

I find that kind of life quite dull. I like mystery. It humbles me. It keeps me on my toes- "What else is there I don't know and can't explain?" That is exciting.

So I Googled "mystery of salvation" and found a good quote from the website "Today's Christian Woman." Since it is from a more conservative web site, I was pleased to read of their acceptance of the great and unexplainable mystery of salvation. It is something to ponder today as we start our annual journey to one of the three great mysteries of our faith, the Incarnation (life) of Jesus.

God has decided to leave us with mystery that we're expected to embrace—even when we don't fully understand. But mysteries are difficult to control and grasp, and so we try to make sense of them all.

While a rationalized approach to reading Scripture makes us feel better because we have everything "figured out," this approach reduces the meaning of Scripture to the human limitation of "sense." In the end, it doesn't make God more knowable and it risks his nature, character, and will. So although it may make "sense," it negates Scripture's authority because it's superseded by our limited reason.
--Link