Perfection

I finally broke down and bought the book, The Hunger Games. It is simply written, fast-paced and incredibly violent. But I must say, I was captivated to the end. And it was the end that fascinated me the most.

The story is about the future, when a demented government has taken over this country and divided it into twelve districts.  In order to keep control of the districts, the government enforces and once-a-year tribute called The Hunger Games. One boy and one girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, are chosen from each of the twelve districts. They are dressed up and paraded before the cameras like celebrities, then they are helicoptered to an amphitheater where the world watches as they are forced to battle to the death.  Young people are killing each other for sport.

The boy and girl from district 12 fall for each other and the crowds love it. When the two of them are left,  they decide to commit suicide together rather than have one of them die. And the government relents, letting both of them live.

Then the most interesting thing happens. The boy and girl are drugged and brought to a kind of treatment facility. By the time that the games are over, they are scarred and bloody. The boy has a gash so deep in his leg, he does not know if he will ever walk again. The girl has a huge cut on her forehead and multiple bruises and burns. But in this treatment facility, all their wounds are treated until they completely disappear. By the time they are released, their skin is picture perfect, like a newborn baby. They are paraded in front of the cameras as if they were not hurt by any of it. They are made perfect, as if nothing had happened at all.

Did you know that, when you look at a picture of a celebrity or movie star, more often than not, you are looking at a mirage? The stars are airbrushed, colored over by impressive computer technology. They are made to look perfect: no wrinkles, no cellulite, no blemishes or bruises, just perfect and flawless. That is what we all want to look like, right? So why not help the stars out a bit, after all, they have to do this for a living. Let's help them be beautiful.

When Jesus appeared in the resurrected form, he came to us with scars.  I find that strange, don't you? God could raise a person from death to life, surely God
could have fixed up all those messy wounds. So it must have been intentional, for Jesus to return to us with scars.  Why?

When Jesus appears, he is recognized by his wounds. It is not his face that the disciples look at, or his voice that they hear.  Jesus is identified by his scars.

When Thomas misses the first appearance, he tells his friends that he will not believe that Jesus has returned until he touches his wounds, until his puts his finger in the cuts and feels them, with his own hands. He does not say that he needs to look at Jesus' face or hear his voice, no he must touch the scars.  That is how he will know that Christ is alive.

So God kept Jesus' wounds. Because they were necessary so that people could know him.  It is our wounds that make us who we are.

I also believe that God was trying to tell us something. God was trying to tell us that resurrection is very different from perfection.

We Americans find perfection beautiful. To be without blemish, without wrinkle or scar, this is beautiful. But God does not see us this way. No, for God, it is precisely our wounds which make us beautiful. They are signs of the pain and suffering that we have had to endure, they mark our greatest lessons in life, they shape us until we are marked as Christ's own forever.

Did you really think that God found perfection beautiful? Perfection is incomplete.  No, Jesus shows us that the Resurrected Christ was marked by his wounds. His wounds marked his identity. They were good.

When you look in the mirror, consider the fact that God may find you more and more beautiful the more marked and wrinkled and scarred you are by life. Look at yourself. Your scars make you who you are, and God finds them beautiful.

Staying Me

Most of us are afraid to die. What scares us the most is oblivion, I think. We are afraid that we will simply cease to be. Many Christians who profess belief in eternal life have another fear.  We fear that we will somehow be absorbed by God, that we will live with God forever but that we will no longer be ourselves. We will become so perfected, so much a part of God that we will no longer be truly ourselves.

The answer to both of these fears is contained in the story that we will hear in just a few moments. This story addresses all of our fears. It is a story about the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus.

Mary Magdalene became a disciple the day that Jesus healed her. She was tormented by eleven demons. Her mind was not her own. She could not lead a normal life but was plagued by misery, depression and some sort of mental incapacitation. She was imprisoned in her own mind. She was in darkness. And then he came.

We do not know how Jesus cured her, whether he touched her face or spat on the ground, but I do believe that he spoke her name. He said, Mary. That is how you call someone away from their demons, from who they are not. You call them back to their true selves. So he must have spoken her God-given name, Mary.

She was born at that moment, the moment that she became free from her demons. Her life began on that day. And she wanted nothing more than to follow Jesus.

Mary was the only disciple who is present in all four of the gospel accounts at the foot of the cross. She would not leave him.  There is no disputing the fact that Mary Magdalene did not leave Jesus, not even when he was a bloody mess. She just would not leave.

When he died, she must have felt that part of her heart was extracted.  Deep grief is like that.  When your beloved dies, you feel that only a fraction of yourself remains.  Mary was encased in darkness once more. 

Early in the morning on the third day, she came to the tomb. The sun was just beginning to rise.  She came because she could not be without him, her Master.  She was drawn like a magnet.  Whether consciously or not, she thought maybe she could find a piece of herself amidst the tomb, that just being close to his body might help her feel alive again. She could not stay away.

But the tomb was wrong. The stone had been rolled away.  His body was gone.  Mary fell down weeping.  When a gardener asked her what was wrong, she said, "They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have left him."  She is grieving all over again.  Her Lord's body has even been taken away. There is nothing left.

At that moment, Jesus speaks her name: "Mary," he says.

 "Mary."

At that moment, she recognizes him.  And everything has changed.

Often people ask me, 

"Will I be myself in heaven?"

 Notice that it is when Jesus speaks Mary's name that she recognizes him. He doesn't identify himself, he identifies her. Mary. Just like when he healed her of her demons, Jesus restores her to her true self with her name.  His resurrection restores her to herself.

We are going to baptize five beautiful women, both tiny and grown, this morning.  As the sun rises, we will wash them pure and mark them as Christ's own forever.  I will say 

You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's own forever. 

Sealed.  Marked.  Forever.  As yourself.  You are God's and you are yourself. Forever.

Once you are baptized, you will never lose yourself. You will be in a relationship with Jesus that will seal you as your true self forever.

We believe in a radical thing.  We believe that at the moment of their baptisms, these five will begin a life with God.  From this moment on, they will be alive in God, possessing a kind of eternal life that will seal them as themselves and mark them as Christ's forever.  What happens on this Easter morning can never be taken away from them.  Not even death can separate them from God and from themselves.

You will be you, perfected and in your body.  You will be you when you die.  This life is just the introduction.  We are getting ready here.  Your eternal life begins now.  Jesus rises from the tomb and he says your name.  He says your name.

The Shift

Year after up year, since I was a young child, I have lived through this Sunday, Palm Sunday, and yet I am no closer to understanding it than I was as a child. 

How could the same people who cheered for Jesus and waved palms as he rode into Jerusalem scream for his murder just a few days later? Was anyone thinking straight? How could they justify those words in their minds when they screamed, "Crucify Him!" How could they speak such hatred? How could they shout Hosanna one moment and Crucify the next?

Jesus went from being adored to being hated in a matter of days. And Jesus did not change. Jesus did nothing but speak the truth. He did nothing.

There is a shift that happened in the minds of Judas Iscariot and the Pharisees. A similar shift happened in the minds of the common people.  All of these rational people were able to move mentally from tolerance to pure hatred. What caused this shift in their minds? What brought them to the brink of insanity, to the point of justifying the murder of an innocent man? And how can we resist such a shift in our own minds?

In the garden of Eden, when we lived in harmony with God, we felt no pain or fear or anger.  But once we fell from God's grace and we faced death, fear and anger became necessary for our survival.  They are part of our broken world. But, if we are not careful, fear can turn to desperation, anger to rage, competition to revenge. Emotions that can help us survive can shift in us until our actions are misdirected and evil. But how does this shift occur?

Judas was Jesus' friend. He was a disciple.  He had followed Jesus for years. He had given up life as he knew it to follow Jesus. He loved Jesus.  And yet, when Jesus failed to take up arms against Rome, something in Judas seemed to crack. His devotion turned to hatred, scorning his Master, he handed him over to the authorities. Did Judas know that Jesus would die? We do not know. But we do know that in a matter of about three days, a disciple turned into a traitor. And the only reason for his betrayal was his deep disappointment in his Master. So for Judas, the shift came when he felt betrayed himself, when he was disappointed and his disappointment turned to rage. There is a danger for all of us, when we feel hurt or betrayed, that we do not let these feelings justify vengeance.

The Pharisees had always been threatened by Jesus. They had always hated him.  But they were religious men, men who had been taught to abhor violence, so they waited for the moment when someone else would do their dirty work.  And why did they hate Jesus? Because he did things differently and he threatened their very way of life.  Jesus told them that they were not as holy as they thought. And when a man is used to respect, he cannot stand the sting of a reprimand. The shift to murder happened for the Pharisees at the moment when they discovered that someone else would do it for them, at the moment when they discovered how Jesus could be killed without tarnishing their reputations. So we too must beware not to think too highly of ourselves.

As for the crowd, the best explanation that I have ever come across as to their shift comes from the great theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.  In his book, Moral Man, Immoral Society, Neibuhr observes how people who are good individuals can get carried away in a crowd and stop thinking.  Thus crowds are capable of much greater atrocities than the average person. The people who gathered and screamed, "Crucify!" were carried away in the exultation of a crowd.  They were angry from being oppressed for so long. They needed someone to die to appease their anger.  Someone needed to die. It was pure emotion that carried them forward, not reason. And yet, if you took each one of them individually alone to a private place and questioned them, I believe that they would not have called for Jesus' execution.  The power of a mob is like a tidal wave and they all got carried away in its power.  The shift happened because no one stopped to think. Not one single person stopped to think.

Thus the greatest injustice of all history was carried out because hundreds, perhaps even thousands of men and women shifted from adoration to violence.  And we murdered the Son of God.  We killed the best thing that ever happened to us. 

So what can we do, today? What can we do to prevent this shift from happening inside our own minds?  How can we stay aware and awake to injustice?

There are moments in all of our lives when emotions run high and injustice seems to have come upon us. It is in these crucial moments that we must stay awake, pause and pray.  The greatest defense against the shift is awareness, time and prayer. Just stay awake, pause and pray.

Awaken to the complexity of this world.  Black and white answers are often not the truth.  Simple solutions often neglect part of the problem.  Hear all the facts, look around you, give thanks for your life, and remember to breathe.

Pause because the God who moves mountains will often take decades to right a wrong. Because quick actions often involve less thought and lead to violence.  Pause because it never hurts to take a moment to just be.

And pray.  Not just with words, but try to listen to God. When people shift to sudden violence, it is often because they sense an urgency and feel that they must act now. Ask for God's guidance and ask yourself, why must I rush? 

I pray that you and I may have the strength and courage to never make our decisions based on the rashness of emotion or the rage of a crowd.  I pray that you and I will have the courage to stop, to ask questions, and to take time.  

Feel

Jesus is drawing closer and closer to Golgotha and to the cross.  He is the only one who senses his own path, the only one who seems to know that something terrible is coming.  Scholars have surmised for centuries about how much Jesus knew. Did he know he would be crucified? How much could he see? How much could he know?

Jesus seems to feel that something terrible is coming. He seems to know that he will die, but not how or precisely when.  His impending death creates pain for him.  He becomes troubled, lonely, he struggles with God. He offers us small glimpses into his struggle both in John's gospel and in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus seems to get more and more lonely. As he approachea the cross, the disciples do not seem to be able to hear his distress. Though they are physically present up until a few days before his death, yet Jesus seems incredibly alone.

Meanwhile the disciples are having a great time.  They are planning the rescue of Jerusalem from the Romans. They are trying to gather a large following for Jesus. They are busy making introductions. There are some Greeks in town and they want to see Jesus.The disciples seem excited to raise Jesus' profile, to get things moving. The Greeks speak to Phillip, who tells Andrew and together they go to Jesus to try to schedule a meeting.  When can you meet with the Greeks, Jesus? And Jesus gives them the strangest response.  He doesn't answer their question at all. Instead he starts talking about dying...

The hour is coming for the Son of Man to be glorified, he says.  And then Jesus launches into this speech that the disciples don't seem to get at all. He talks about how a grain must fall into the earth and die before it can bear fruit. And in the middle of this speech, Jesus stops explaining theology and has a moment of vulnerability. 

Now my soul is troubled, he says. I wish I could make it go away...but what can I say? Father, glorify thy name...

I wish that I could make it all go away.

Jesus sensed that he was going to die. He felt restless, troubled, conflicted. His anticipation of something terrible was causing him emotional pain. But he did not avoid this feeling, he just articulated it as he walked closer to his death. He did not try to change anything or argue with God. He did not pretend that everything was OK. He just spoke about what was on his heart, like he was making an observation. I am troubled. I am in pain, he said. It is his pain that alerts him to his predicament. 

Now my soul is troubled. The word in the ancient Greek means to be disturbed, agitated, like boiling water...

Jesus told the disciples exactly what he was feeling and the disciples didn't listen. They could not or would not hear him because what he was telling them was troubling. He was saying that he was upset and no one could bear to hear it.

It is hard for us to hear one another's pain. It's hard to look in the face of trouble. We tend to want to fix peoples problems, to get rid of their pain as soon as possible. The worst kind of counselors are people who  give lots of advice or tell you that everything is going to be OK. I had a counselor like that in Seminary.  My father-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer and I felt so sad for him that I went to a counselor in Washington DC.  

This woman was terrible. She told me not to feel bad.  She told me that her father was in much worse shape.  I felt completely ignored and even angry after my session with her.  It was as if she could not bear to really hear me out.  She just wanted to cure my pain, get rid of it.  And somehow that just made it worse. I felt like she should have paid me!

Americans hate pain.  We are disciples of numbness. We try to anesthetize ourselves at the slightest provocation. When we have an ache, Advil,  fever, Tylenol. Our mantra is get rid of the pain. Make it go away.  Pain is bad.  It is a sign that something is going wrong, a sign of failure. That is what we believe.

But pain is not always a bad thing.  It is something that needs to be heard.  It is a warning sign.  Pain delivers a message.  And God asks us to feel it, and to listen to it. And then, perhaps most importantly, to ask ourselves how God can be glorified in it.

The country has been rocked by the killing of young Trayvon Martin. A young black boy was shot by a neighborhood watch president in a gated community. The boy was walking home from a convenience store with a bag of skittles. He was an honor student. And now he is gone.

What happened? Well, the matter is under investigation, but we can safely say that this man made a horrible mistake.  This man assumed that because the boy did not look familiar, because he was black, because he was a stranger, that he was up to no good. The man was wrong.  He made an assumption and he was wrong and now a child is dead.

We do not want to listen when bad things happen, when people are upset, when there is injustice. But moments of pain, moments of great injustice are moments when God can be glorified. People's hearts and minds can change because something has gone terribly wrong. If the pain causes us to wake up, we can change, grow, become better disciples.

From the pain of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, we have much to learn, about how we judge one another too quickly, how we judge based on appearances, how we do not listen to one another.  We have much to learn about our culture of fear and retribution, about the violence that we promote in movies like the Hunger Games where young people are rewarded by shooting one another to the death. This tragedy was horrible but shame on us if we do not look at it carefully and learn from the pain of our mistakes.

I have always wondered, if someone had really heard Jesus, would it have helped him, even just a little? But no one wanted to hear his pain.  And so Jesus gets more and more lonely the closer her gets to Golgotha and to the cross. We could not stand the pain so we abandoned our Lord. The disciples didn't just abandon Jesus at the cross, they abandoned him much earlier, when they did not acknowledge his pain.

You could say, in many ways, that the greatest failure of all eternity was the cross in all its pain and agony. And God used that pain for glories that would change the world. If we admit our failures, our mistakes, our pain, God can be glorified in them.

What if we, like Jesus, went to the pain instead of running from it? Instead of running and hiding, what if we let ourselves try to understand why we suffer? What if we looked at our pain, examined it? What if we asked ourselves, "Why does it hurt? Where did the pain come from? What can we learn from it and, most importantly, how can it be used to bring us and others closer to God?"

Pain is not evil. It is just hard. It is a sign of trouble and a sign of change.  Pain is a messenger. Pain is a teacher. Wake up and listen to your own discomfort and pain. We have so much to learn.

Lifting Up

The Hebrew people did not know how to be grateful. Perhaps their time in slavery had made them so miserable that all they could see was the negative. Once a slave, always a slave? Maybe God needed them to wander for forty years, and for an entire generation to die, just so that they could begin to lift themselves out of this mindset. It is your perspective which plays a large role in your happiness.

Free for the first time in their lives, they were upset because Moses did not offer them better food. They were complaining about the menu!

This complaining made God really mad, so God sent snakes. Poisonous snakes. And the people began to die. So they forgot about the menu or the long waits or the heat and they realized that all they really wanted was to stay alive. So they begged Moses to pray for them.  And Moses asks God for forgiveness.

Make a snake, God instructs. Put it on a pole. And when the people gaze upon it, they will be healed.

What a strange idea. God wanted Moses to display the source of their pain. And it would heal them.

When you speak the truth, you bring things into the light and that brings you closer to God, writes John's gospel. When you hide in the darkness, you hide from God.

Christ hung upon the cross as a model for what it means to bring the worst kind of human existence to light. This was an unjust death; the execution of an innocent man. It was brutal, unfair and extremely painful. And yet, God did not hide this death as an embarrassment or as a failure. God lifted up the sacrifice of His Son so that all of us might learn from it, so that all of us might be healed from it.

And that is why we wear the object of an execution around our neck, because it has become for us the source of healing and hope. And when you wear a cross, you are telling the world that you are willing to share your pain. You are called to lift up your cross, put the source of your pain on a pole and lift it up, for all to see.

AJ was a rower in college. He knew that he needed to loose weight. He kept exercising hard but the weight wouldn't come off, so he started to fast. From time to time, he would eat a lot and then throw up his food. He told no one.

AJ's coach praised him for getting the weight off. He was faster and stronger than ever. He was at the top of his game. But slowly, he became detached from his life. Things did not seem to matter much. He lived solely inside his own mind, a dark place where he thought of what he was going to eat and when. For five years, he ate and purged himself. His bones were depleted of calcium. He began to have tooth decay and his athletics floundered as he got weaker and weaker. He lived in a world of obsession and secrecy, a world of shame.

After five years, he was hospitalized. Like the Hebrew people, he realized that he could die. He began to speak. He told the truth and brought his illness into the light. He began to tell everyone, to speak about it in public. He lifted up his eating disorder as a way of educating others. "Everyone thinks that only women suffer from this illness, but men do too, especially athletes." This was the truth that he told.

When AJ began to tell the truth, he began to feel better. The battle was still on in his mind, but light was beginning to fight the darkness. When he began to lift up his illness as a witness to others, he began to really heal. And so did others.

Take up your cross, said Jesus, and follow me.

The symbol for medicine is a snake strung around a pole. This symbol has roots in ancient Greek mythology but it also has Biblical roots. It harkens back to Moses' serpent on the pole.

The work of darkness is rooted in shame, fear and secrecy. If you want to live your life fully, you must not be afraid to share your pain with others. Vulnerability is Christ-like. It takes courage. All creativity, ingenuity, and change comes from a place of vulnerability. Lift up your pain and let everyone know that God is at work in you.

Dale Regan, the headmaster of Episcopal was shot and killed just a week and a half ago. This was an act of incredible violence that shook the entire city. Killed by a teacher who had been terminated, the entire school was caught in shock, fear and grief. As the media descended upon us, we all felt this instinct to want to run and hide. Who wants to admit such a tragedy at a school? What if it hurt our reputation? What if parents decided to no longer send their children? Fear came down upon us all. What if we became known as the school where the headmaster was shot?

But as our pain was lifted up for all the world to see, the most amazing things happened. Love came pouring in. Pastors of all denominations came to us without us having to ask. Counselors came. A media firm came to help us manage the media. Emails poured in from all over the world; even the Archbishop of Perth in Australia sent his love and prayers. And the students started coming back. By Friday, there were four thousand people on the campus. And a rainbow came into the sky.

Our pain was lifted up. And miracles happened. We still have a long way to go to heal, but the first step is lifting up that cross. We were hurt, badly, but that is by no means the end of the story.