“How to Get More Out of Communion”

Christian Men’s Fellowship Breakfast | Saturday, May 4, 2024

First Christian Church, Garland, Texas | Dr. Douglas Skinner

This is a Communion Token…

Most denominations begin with a flash of spiritual insight. Something that’s gotten lost or been neglected by the larger church gets discovered by a person or a group of people in the church, and as this rediscovered practice or idea becomes explosively real for them, they turn to the larger church, asking them to make room for it in their life. When these pleas go unheeded, these people separate themselves from the larger church to begin a new expression of the church, one that more prominently features the idea or the practice that they’ve recovered. What they’ve found matters enough for them to say – “We are no longer that — from now on we are this…”

Most denominations can point to the moment of spiritual courage when this happens, when their founders acted on their convictions, even though doing so immediately put them at odds with the church to which they had previously belonged.

• This is the story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg on the errors of the church in which he himself was a priest.

• This is the story of Menno Simons rebaptizing people upon their public profession of personal faith as an act of spiritual defiance to the State Church which regarded anyone born within its borders to be members.

• This is the story of John Wesley who was excluded from preaching the Gospel from the pulpits of the Church of England of which he was a minister, and going outside to preach the Gospel from the front doorsteps of those same churches, and in the village square, and out in the middle of open fields.

• This is the story of William Seymour, a poor African American preacher, who conducted a meeting at a storefront church in Los Angeles at the turn of the last century, and midwifed the birth of the modern Pentecostal Movement – the most vibrant expression of Christianity in the world today – as the Spirit of God drew people from every race and place, filled them with power, united them with purpose, and sent them out with a message of promise and a personal experience of Christ’s indwelling presence.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) began with one of these flashes of spiritual insight and moments of spiritual courage as well, and it all had to do with this (the Communion Token).

Our Scottish Presbyterian Roots

On the family tree of churches, we are a shoot off the branch of Scottish Presbyterianism. That “X” shaped cross on the red Communion Chalice that is our denominational symbol, that’s a St. Andrew’s Cross. If you hear – “St. Andrews” – and think golf, then you’ve got it! “St. Andrews” is the oldest golf course in the world, and where is it? It’s in Scotland, in the very place where legend says that St. Andrew the Apostle preached the Gospel and planted a Church. This is why St. Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland.

Another tradition about St. Andrew is that he didn’t consider himself worthy to die on the same kind of cross that Jesus died on, and so just like his brother Peter who was crucified upside down, when it was time for Andrew to die for his faith, he asked to be crucified on an “X” shaped cross. That “X” shaped cross is on the national flag of Scotland (it’s on the national flag of Great Britan for that matter), and it’s part of our denominational symbol as well because we come out of Scottish Presbyterianism, and communion tokens were part of the settled practice of that church.

Communion Tokens

You see, the only way you could get a seat at the communion table in a Scottish Presbyterian church back in the day was by having one of these (a communion token), and the only way you could get one of these (a communion token) was by convincing somebody like me, an ordained minister, that you were “worthy” of a seat.  Now, as awful as that sounds to our ears, understand, their motive was good. It truly was.

In that same passage we quote every Sunday morning at the Lord’s Table about how on the night when He was betrayed, our Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it, and how after supper He took a cup and said that it was the new covenant in His blood (I Corinthians 11:23-26), well, right after saying all that, Paul went on to warn his readers about eating the bread and drinking the cup in an “unworthy” manner and thereby becoming guilty of “profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27), eating and drinking it to their condemnation (11:29-32).

“This is why many of you are weak and sick,” Paul told the Corinthian Christians, “and (it’s) why some have you have died” (11:30). I think this is a description of their spiritual rather than their physical condition. I think Paul was saying that some of them were spiritually weak, and spiritually sick, and spiritually dying, and the reason why was their inattentiveness to and  carelessness with the things of God, something that was evident in the way that they were approaching the Lord’s Supper. They were trifling with spiritual things. They were taking for granted God’s grace. They were presuming upon His kindness. They were profaning the body and blood of the Lord.  So, the Scottish Presbyterian Church “fenced” the Lord’s Table. They erected barriers and then policed the gates to ensure that only those people who were spiritually prepared could sit at the Table and commune, and they would have argued that it was for people’s own good that they did this.

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854)

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who served a congregation in Ireland. He had grown weary of the squabbling in his church over things that he thought were matters of private interpretation, things best left to the freedom of each person’s conscience. He was troubled by having to exclude people from the Lord’s Table because they had convictions that were at slight variance with the official stances of the church, often on matters that the Bible never addresses. Grieved by the divisions in his church, Thomas Campbell resigned his ministry position, and immigrated to America where he hoped that new ways would be more welcomed in the new world.

When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1807, it just so happened that the American version of his Scottish Presbyterian Church was meeting in session, and so he presented himself to them, was immediately endorsed as a minister, and was given a circuit of churches to serve in the Alleghany River Valley just outside of Pittsburgh. His primary job there was to go from church to church to celebrate Communion with them.

Since in Scottish Presbyterianism only an ordained minister could preside at the Lord’s Table, there were lots of Scottish Presbyterians in remote places on the American frontier who rarely got Communion. And so, it was Thomas Campbell’s job to ride into those out-of-the-way villages to preach, and teach, and pray with the church members there for several days to get them ready for a Communion service, all the while taking careful note of who showed up at his meetings, and assessing the state of their souls.

But because ordained ministers were far and few between in those isolated areas, other kinds of Presbyterians would invariably show up at his meetings as well. They were fellow Presbyterians who read the same Bible in the same way that Thomas Campbell did. They recited the same creed and adhered to the same Confessions as Thomas Campbell did, but because they had taken positions on some secondary matters that were at variance with the positions that Thomas Campbell’s branch of Presbyterianism had taken, he was prohibited from sharing Communion with them. “No Communion token for you!”

In one of these remote areas, during one of those Communion weeks, in a moment of real spiritual courage that was the result of, if not a flash of spiritual insight, then at least a slow burning spiritual realization, Thomas Campbell put the Communion tokens away and he opened the Lord’s Supper to any believer there who in their hearts felt spiritually prepared to meet with their Lord at His Table, who had heard Him inwardly say, “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if you open the door I will come into you, and sit with you, and sup with you” (Revelation 3:20). It wasn’t long after this that Thomas Campbell was charged with heresy by his church, tried, convicted, and stripped of his ministerial credentials. But by then, it really didn’t matter to him. He’d moved on to a new place spiritually.

Declaration and Address (1809)

This is a facsimile copy of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that was givento the delegates of the Centennial celebration of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held in Pittsburgh back in 1909. It’s a real treasure. But it’s just for show. This is my working copy of this same document (a tattered book held together with a clip). This (my old, tattered copy) is what got me here. You see, I wasn’t born into this church. Just like that bumper sticker you see that says, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here just as quickly as I could,” I made my way to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in high school.

At its heart, Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” is a set of principles, which when taken seriously, change the way we think as Christians and operate as a church. Four of them are at the very heart of “why we do what we do the way we do it” –

The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.

Division among Christians is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils.

It’s the neglect of what the New Testament actually says and the acceptance of human opinions as our authority on matters of faith and practice that has caused every division that has ever plagued the church.

While we are all free to have our own opinions and interpretations, nothing should be made a requirement on the church’s faith and practice that is not as old as the New Testament.

You can’t say things like that, believe them, and still have things like this (Communion Token).

Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866)

It was based on the principles of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper became the most characteristic feature of our life together as a church. Even people who know nothing else about us can usually tell you that in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866), Thomas Campbell’s firstborn son and his successor to the leadership of the Movement that his “Declaration and Address” launched, said that in the future, if we were to be “conspicuous” for anything as a church, that it be for the attention we give to the Bible and to its ordinances. Alexander Campbell called the Lord’s Supper a Gospel ordinance that’s “pregnant” with the grace of God, and he said that it was “silly” to think that somebody could be spiritually vital apart from their personal and habitual participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Not Magic

But this doesn’t just happen.

The Lord’s Supper isn’t magic.

You can’t just show up on a Sunday morning, take a bite of bread, have a sip of wine, and think that it’s going to be of any benefit to you spiritually. In that same passage where we get the words of institution that we say at the Lord’s Table every Sunday morning, Paul told the Corinthians that even though they were going through the motions of a communion service when they got together, that it was “not for the better but for the worse” (I Corinthians 11:17). He told them – “When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat” (I Corinthians 11:20). This was the concern that our Scottish Presbyterian forebears tried to address with these (the Communion Token), and our Founders were not indifferent to this concern, they just weren’t convinced that this (the Communion Token) was the best way to address that concern, after all, hadn’t Jesus told us to “judge not, lest we be judged,” and that rather than worrying about the speck that’s in your brother’s eye, we should rather be attending to the log that’s in our own (Matthew 7:1-5)? And in Romans 14, hadn’t Paul specifically asked – “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?” – explaining, “It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Master is able to make him stand… [so] let us no more pass judgment on one another…” (14:4;10).

The way Paul told the Corinthians to address his concern for their “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper was not for them to stand in judgment on one another, but rather for each one of them to carefully examine themselves (I Corinthians 11:28), to “see whether they were holding to our faith, …to see if Christ was (truly) in them” (2 Corinthians 11:5).  This isn’t something that anybody else can do for you. There’s nobody with a Communion token out there somewhere who can truly know what’s going on inside you. This is only something we can do for ourselves, as Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, famously said – nobody else can do your believing for you, or your living for you, or your dying for you. So, “Let a man examine himself,” Paul told the Corinthians, “and so eat the bread and drink the cup” (I Corinthians 11:27). But, how do we do this? Where do we begin? How do we start?

Robert Milligan (1814-1875)

Right after Thomas and Alexander Campbell began the spiritual movement on the American frontier that put the Lord’s Supper at the very center of its life and mission, a Lord’s Supper to which everyone was invited and at which everyone would be welcomed, along came another early leader of our Movement, a man named Robert Milligan (1814-1875), who took the big ideas that the Campbells said about things like the Lord’s Supper, and he made them practical. There was a time that every minister in our spiritual tradition was taught from Robert Milligan’s book “The Scheme of Redemption.”  Today it’s hardly known, and in my mind, that’s telling. We’re out of touch with the spiritual discipline that our spiritual tradition said was the key to the Lord’s Supper having the kind of importance and making the sort of impact on us that it promises to.

The Campbells said that the Lord’s Supper really matters, and then Robert Milligan came along right behind them and said that there is something you have to do if you expect the Lord’s Supper to really matter to you the next time you take it.  After explaining that the bread and wine of Communion are “spiritual nourishment” for the soul in the same way that food and drink are physical nourishment to the body, and warning that any outward religious practice can become an empty, meaningless gesture if it is approached without prayer and care, Robert Milligan got specific about we need to do if the Lord’s Supper is to be a means of grace for us, a “koinonia,” a participation, a fellowship, a  sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ rather than just a bite of bread and a sip of juice.

“The means ordained by God to prevent the growth and prevalence of formalism in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, is the practice of self-examination. ‘Let a man examine himself; and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup’ (I Corinthians 11:28).  If this were properly attended to by all who profess to be followers of the Lord Jesus… what an interesting occasion every Communion [service] would be… but how few, alas, how very few, have ever learned the art and mystery of self-examination!”

For the Lord’s Supper to be the kind of spiritual nutrition that our souls require to thrive, Robert Milligan insisted that we come to the Lord’s Table “prepared,” and to do this properly, he gave four specific instructions. These are the “nuts and bolts” of the spiritual discipline of self-examination that make taking Communion such a powerful means of grace.

The First Instruction | “In the light of God’s word…”

The first instruction was that “the self-examination (before Communion) should be conducted faithfully and honestly in the light of God’s word.” This is an old fashion plumb line. When building a wall and you want it to be vertical, this and gravity will help you know if it is. In Amos 7:7-8 the prophet saw the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line in his hand, and the Lord told Amos, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people.” The Church, right from the beginning, viewed the Ten Commandments as that plumb line God uses to take our moral and spiritual measure.

I grew up in a church that read the Ten Commandments out loud to us every Sunday morning. It was the first thing we did un worship each week. We would open with a prayer about how we were coming into God’s presence with our hearts open wide, with all of our desires known, with no hidden secrets, and we would ask God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit so that we might love God perfectly and worship God worthily. Just as soon as we prayed these words each week, our minister would read the Ten Commandments to us, and at the end of each Commandment, we would say, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.”

Each commandment took our measure, and we always came up short. That’s what the “have mercy upon us” was about. But we wanted to do better, to be better, and so we also always prayed, “incline our hearts to keep this law.” We were in church each week to tell God that we were sorry for the ways that we had done things that week that He told us not to do, and for the way that we had not always or fully done the things that He had told us to do. But we were also in church each week to tell God that it was our intention to lead a different kind of life in the coming week following His commandments and walking in His ways.

For the Lord’s Supper to be the feast of forgiveness and the means of grace that will nourish our souls to walk in newness of life, we need to come to it each week with the Word of God like a two-edged sword, cutting us to the heart, laying open our thoughts and making our desires known (Hebrews 4:11-13). As Jesus said, it’s the sick who need a doctor (Luke 5:31-32). It’s only when we know that we’re wounded that we seek to be healed. This is why Robert Milligan’s first instruction was to conduct a faithful and honest examination of oneself “in the light of God’s Word” before coming to the Lord’s Table.

The Second Instruction | “Searching our Hearts”

The second instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be conducted with prayer: the prayer that God would himself search our hearts, and that he would help us to search them honestly, faithfully, and thoroughly; that he would purify them. And that he would enable us to forsake every false and wicked way.”

Dan Snow is an artisan who builds walls, terraces and structures out of dry stone.  His books are wonderful reads, not just for their descriptions of his amazing work, but for the spiritual wisdom that he has discovered through the years of eating his bread by the sweat of his brow with his hands in the ground.  For instance, he begins one of his essays about building a series of retaining walls at a farm in Vermont by explaining that, “Construction begins with one stone… until there is one in place, there is nothing to inspire the selection of another… every choice is a response to the choices that have come before it.”  He’s talking about working with stones.  As people of Biblical faith, we work with stories, and the very same truth applies.

The way our Bibles are structured, the stories we read at the very beginning of the book of Genesis “set the table” for everything that follows. We are created in God’s image.  Like reflections in a mirror, we are designed to correspond to Him.  We are built for a relationship with Him. I take the story in Genesis 3 of God coming in the cool of the day to walk and talk with Adam and Eve in the Garden as the Bible’s defining picture of what our relationship with God is supposed to look like.  We are built for that kind of intimacy and immediacy with God. Of course, in Gensis 3, right after their tangle with the serpent, when God showed up for his evening stroll with Adam and Eve, they hid from His presence, prompting Him to ask two questions: “Where are you?” (3:9) and “What have you done?” (3:13).  

We don’t get the tone of words from a printed text. So, some interpreters read these two questions in Genesis 3 as the “mad” words of a deeply offended God. I tend to read them instead as the “sad” words of a brokenhearted God. It’s the two questions that God asks in Ezekiel 18:23 – “Do you think that I take any pleasure in the judgment of sinners?” and “Do you not know that I would prefer sinners to turn from their ways and live?” – that help me hear God’s questions in Genesis 3 as more anguished than angry.

In his little book “Our Faith” (1954), the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889 – 1966) gave voice to the what he thought was the toe of God’s questions – “As children lost in a woods, are fearful of the sinister darkness — and then, suddenly, hearing a sound from the somber blackness, a familiar voice, a loving, seeking, helping voice, their mother’s voice — so prayer is our reply to the voice from the Word of God in Jesus Christ which suddenly cries out to us in the mysterious, dark universe. It is the Father calling us out of the world’s darkness. He calls us, seeks us, wants to bring us to Himself. ‘Where are you, my child?’ Our prayers mean ‘Here I am. Father. I was afraid until you called. Since you have spoken, I am afraid no longer. Come, I am waiting for you, take me, lead me by the hand through the dark terrifying world.’”

When Robert Milligan tells us that our self-examination before Communion should be “conducted with prayer: prayer that God would himself search our hearts,” it makes a big difference whether we think that God is mad at us and is just gathering more evidence to condemn us, or if we think that what we’ve done and who we’ve become makes God very sad, and that by searching our hearts, God is looking for ways to repair what’s gone wrong and to restore what’s gotten lost.

In the healing of memories, they tell you to take the hand of Christ and to go back into your painful past with Him in tow, to show Him just exactly what was said and done that wounded you, so that He can speak peace to the hidden storms that rage inside you and to apply grace to the sources of your life’s deepest hurts, and when we ask God to search our hearts in the process of self-examination before Communion, we are, in the same way, not looking to be further shamed and condemned, but rather to be healed and helped, to be restored and repaired.

The Third Instruction | Fasting

The third instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with fasting. We’re more accustomed to feasting aren’t we? Somebody once said that in a thousand years when the archeologists dig up our churches and find the remains of church kitchens with their stainless-steel appliances and steam tables, they will wonder about what kind of strange rituals we Christians were performed there! 

This gathering here this morning was built around a meal. It’s a men’s “breakfast.” I’m not sure that as many of us would be here this morning if it had been promoted as a men’s “fast.” That doesn’t even make sense to us. But it did to Christ. When He was criticized by the Pharisees because His disciples didn’t fast like the disciples of John the Baptist did, Jesus explained – “Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days” (Matthew 9:15; Mark 2:19-20; Luke 5:34-35). Jesus expected us to fast.

Fasting is a way of bringing focus. We choose not to do some things so that we can give our full attention to other things. When our hands are full, we can’t pick something else up. We’ve got to put some things down before we can pick something else up. If you’d stopped by Whataburger for a bag of egg and sausage burritos and eaten them in the car on your way over here this morning, my guess is that you wouldn’t have filled your plates quite as full as you did. William Berault described it well when he wrote –

“A cup must be empty before it can be filled.

If it is already full, it can’t be filled again except emptying it out.

In order to fill anything there must be a hollowed-out space.

Otherwise it can’t receive.

This is especially true of God’s word.

In order to receive it, we must be hollowed out.

We must be capable of receiving it,

emptied of the false self and its endless demands.

When Christ came, there was no room in the inn.

It was full. The inn is a symbol of the heart.

God’s word, Christ, can take root only in a hollow.”

Fasting during times of self-examination before Communion clears the field of distractions so that we can give our full attention to where we are in our relationship with God. It’s a way of saying to God nothing matters more to me than you, and because we don’t live by bread alone, fasting is a way of saying to God, I don’t desire anything more than you.

The Fourth Instruction | The “Sanctification of Time”

The final instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with what he called the “sanctification of time.” Just as the fourth commandment told our Jewish mothers and fathers to “keep holy the Sabbath day” (Saturday – the last day of the week when God rested at the end of creation), so as Christians we keep holy the Lord’s Day (Sunday – the day when Christ was raised from the dead). In the book of Acts we see the first Christians meeting on the first day of the week to break bread (and bless the cup) in remembrance of Christ (Acts 20:7), and the book of Revelation opens with John “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (1:9).

I grew up in Southern California. I knew nothing about “blue laws” growing up. It was when my wife and I got to Texas for seminary in January of 1977 that I had my first encounter with one. We were at a grocery store in Ft. Worth on a Sunday afternoon buying some groceries and a can opener. The clerk told us that we could buy our cans of corn, beans, and soup, but that he couldn’t sell us the can opener! When we looked confused, he told us that it was against the law!

At my student church in Melissa, we were invited home for lunch with some church members one Sunday. I could feel some tension building after the table had been cleared. Finally, after some hemming and hawing, the man of the house cleared his throat and said, “Preacher, I’ve got a question for you.” I braced myself for a question about the Trinity, or maybe the substitutionary theory of the atonement, or about women in church leadership. But no, what he wanted to know was what I thought about playing dominos on Sunday afternoons. I told him that I had never played a game of dominos in my life – a fact which troubled him greatly – but that if I did, then Sunday afternoons would be a fine time for a game. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together as his wife produced a box of dominos, and so began a never phase of my education for ministry.

The “sanctification of time” – keeping “holy” a day for God – is a way of taking God seriously. In practice, its restrictions can be silly, petty, and oppressive, but its intent is good.  You can tell me that Jesus Christ is the Lord of your life, and that church is a high priority, for you. But it’s by looking at your checkbook and day planner that I will see if you really mean it. When something matters to us, we give it our undivided attention.  That’s all that the “sanctification of time” is about. It’s about creating space and clearing the decks for God. Thomas Merton said that he became a monk not because he wanted to find God, but rather because he wanted God to find him, and he knew that his life was so cluttered and crowded, that it would only by stepping into the silence and solitude of a monastery that he would find the stillness where he could be found.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who does youth ministry sent me a picture of a youth gathering at his church. At his feet on the platform from which he spoke were the cell phones of all the students who were there. He told me that when he told them that they were going to become still to know God, he said that they spontaneously came forward one by one and laid their cell phones at the altar as their way of telling God that they were serious about what was going on there, that they were there to listen for what God wanted to say to them, and that no text or phone call was going to get in the way of that. My friend told me that this was the turning point of his ministry with them. This was when they finally got serious about knowing God and making God known. He couldn’t legislate it. No sign on the wall would about turning off their cell phones would have accomplished it. He couldn’t scold or shame them into doing it. It had to be a response of the hunger and thirst for God they felt in their hearts, and this is what Robert Milligan was talking about in his call for the “sanctification of time” as part of the way that we prepare ourselves for the encounter with God in Christ that the Lord’s Supper promises.

Conclusion

The whole point of the spiritual discipline of self-examination before Communion is not to establish our righteousness, but to diagnose our need. The Lord’s Table is not like a ride at Six Flags with a sign out front that says you must be this tall to get on. If our process of self-examination before Communion leaves like the Pharisee Jesus talked about who went up to the Temple to pray and who “stood and prayed this with himself – ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all I get’” – then we are doing it all wrong! Where it’s supposed to bring us is to our knees where just like the Publican in the story Jesus told would not even “lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:9-14). It’s the stanza of an old Gospel hymn that best describes where our self-examination before Communion is supposed to bring us –

“Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”

John Hunter, a 19^th century English Congregational minister, wrote one of the most widely used worship books for the churches of his day. Among its resources is an invitation to the Lord’s Table that I believe strikes exactly the “right” in tone and content –

“Come to this sacred Table,

not because you must,

but because you may:

come to testify not that you are righteous,

but that you sincerely love our Lord Jesus Christ,

and desire to be His true disciples.

Come, not because you’re strong,

but because you’re weak;

Not because you have any claim on Heaven’s rewards,

but because in your frailty and sin you stand

in constant need of Heaven’s mercy and help.”

The right inward disposition to have for a “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper is to come –

“Out of our bondage, sorrow and night…
Into Christ’s freedom, gladness, and light…
Out of our sickness, into His health,
Out of our want and into His wealth,
Out of our sin and into Christ’s self…                                                                                                           

Out of our shameful failure and loss…
Jesus, I come to Thee.”

I can’t do this for you, and you can’t do this for me. There’s nowhere to go for a Communion Token that will guarantee you an encounter with the living Christ or automatically provide you with an experience of saving grace. In that story Jesus told about the two men who went up to the Temple to be with God, only one of them went home in right relation with God, and that was the one who prayed: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Our weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper as a church is the Gospel moment when –

“Upon the cross of Jesus our eyes at times can see
The very dying form of One Who suffered there for us…”

And where –

“…from our stricken hearts with tears two wonders we confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and our unworthiness.”

When the World comes Apart

Death is an intruder, an uninvited guest who crashes the party. We don’t choose the times when death comes, or the places where death comes, or the way that death comes, or the people for whom death comes. Death just comes. It stalks us our whole lives long, and then one day it reaches out and grabs hold of us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Two of my son’s classmates from high school died this week. He’s shattered. Thirty-somethings are not supposed to be grieving the deaths of the people they grew up with. Grandparents – yes. Aunts and uncles – yes. Even parents – yes. But not the people you went through school with as a kid, people who have finally figured out who they are and what they want from life, and who are just beginning to make some meaningful strides in the direction of that future they have claimed for themselves. To be taken then is especially cruel. There is a special anguish to the death of someone who has just begun to live. The death of a thirty-something underscores the sinister nature of death, why it’s called our “enemy” (I Corinthians 15:26).

The author of Hebrews said that we live our entire lives as human beings in the bondage of our fear of dying (2:15). Vitezslav Gardavsky (1923 – 1978), the Czech poet, playwright, and philosopher, traced the outlines of this familiar fear when he hauntingly wrote – “That I die means that I cannot complete my work. I will no longer see those I have loved, and I will no longer experience beauty or sorrow. The unrepeatable music of this world will no longer ring in my senses; never again will I anywhere or in any way move out beyond myself.” Death destroys and denies. It strikes at the very heart of what we say we believe is true and value as good. Death, especially an early death, is a psychic fruit basket upset. It jumbles things.

When our worlds fly apart, the very first thing we need to do is to find the eye of the storm, the still point at the center around which things spin, and where we can be held secure. In the Eastern Church, praying the “Trisagion” is a reliable way of getting there. The “Trisagion” (The “Thrice Holy”) is a prayer that says –

“Holy God,

Holy Mighty,

Holy Immortal,

have mercy on me/us.”

The Eastern Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov explained the meaning of this three-fold invocation of the name of God –

“Holy God –

The Father, the source of holiness is the Holy;

Holy Mighty (and strong) –

The Son, who triumphs over death, is the Strong;

Holy (and) Immortal –

The Holy Spirit, the breath of life, is the Life-Giver.”

The Eastern Church prays this prayer at the moment of catastrophes. It is prayed in the burial service when the body is interred. It’s a prayer that expresses the Church’s faith in the resurrection, the re-establishment of what is normal, what they describe as its “ontological healing.”

According to the “Shepherd of Hermas,” an early Christian text, it is “the name of God that sustains the world.” As the Christ hymn of Colossians 1 explains, “In Him all things hold together” (verse 17). It is through prayer that we seek the experience of this equilibrium, and the “Trisagion” prayer is a specific way of seeking this healing of our woundedness. It’s a way of restoring order to the disarray. It’s a way of asking for peace in the storm by naming the God who stills the wind and calms the sea.

When our days “collapse into chaos” and we are left feeling helpless and hopeless, praying the “Trisagion” it is a way of deliberately placing ourselves and the world back into the hands of the God who made us, who loves us, and who is saving us. This act clears a space big enough for hope to sprout and for ways of helping to break forth.

What the Church wants you to know when there is an unexpected death…

First, stop kidding yourself, and start expecting your death. Every year on Ash Wednesday we get smudged with ashes, a sign of penance and mortality, and we are told straight-up that we are going to die. We are numbered among the things that are passing away as the liturgy says, and spiritual wisdom comes from numbering our days (Psalm 90:12). Every unexpected death is a chance for us to wake up (Luke 13:4). [P.S. – There are no unexpected deaths…]

Second, come to terms with what it is that Christianity is about. The way our Bibles are put together helps us see how underneath and behind all its different stories, characters, ideas. and instructions, there’s a unifying theme, an organizing principle. It’s said that what’s in the Bible solves a problem and answers a question, and it is unmistakably clear to me that the question that the Bible answers, the problem that it solves is death, physical death, certainly, but especially spiritual death. The Bible opens with a warning about what causes death (Genesis 2:17). It closes with the death of death (Revelation 19:14-15), and the promise of a time when death will be no more (Revelation 21:4). And in between that opening and closing, it tells a story that climaxes with Christ dying on a cross and being raised from the dead on the third day. The center of gravity for the Christianity that I know is John 11:25 about how Christ is the resurrection and the life and how that means that we will never die, and Romans 8:31-39 about how because Christ died and was raised that nothing, not even death, will have the power to separate us from the love of God. Because of this, we can trust ourselves and our loved ones when death comes, God made us. God loves us. God holds us. God can be trusted. Christ proves it.

Third, use the fact that you are going to die to rightly order your priorities and values right now. It’s been pointed out that, “No one on his deathbed has ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at work!” This popular proverb underscores the counsel of Ephesians 5:16 to “make the most of the time.” When we know that we aren’t going to be here forever, or even for very long in the grand scheme of things, it can “concentrate the mind wonderfully,” as Samuel Johnson put it. This is why Jesus talked about laying up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21), and why Paul spelled out what it is that “endures” when everything else passes away – faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13:13). Cultivating the eternal perspective will invest us in the things that last. Stop thinking that you’ll get to it in time. Time is not guaranteed.

Fourth, keep your bags packed. That’s how good Pope John XXIII put it in his spiritual journal. He said that he tried to live every day knowing that it could be his last, and that he would have to give “a strict account of his thoughts, words, and actions” to the One who sets the standards for what’s good, true, and beautiful. Knowing this is why the last request in the Order for Evening Prayer that I have most often prayed is that we might be given the grace “always to live in such a state that we may never be afraid to die; so that, living and dying, we might be thine.” And this is why in the spiritual tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, the faithful are taught to pray daily “for the completion of our lives in peace and repentance,” and “for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ.”

In his little book “On the Theology of Death” (Herder and Herder, 1961), the giant 20th century Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904 – 1984), pointing to the way that the two thieves on the crosses beside Jesus died, noted that death can be extinction or fulfillment. We all run the course of our lives toward the same finish line of death, but we don’t all run towards it in the same way. Some run “protestingly,” while others run “lovingly and trustingly.” We can experience the end of life as a matter of “falling into the emptiness and the powerlessness of death as remoteness from God,” or as “a falling into the hands of the living God, who is called Father.” And what it will be for us, he said, is fixed by our free choices for or against God now. Not to think about death because it is an unsettling thought to us, is not to take “this earthly life with radical seriousness,” and that would be a terrible waste, and such a shame.

“Befriending Death”

Peter Kreeft, the very fine Christian Philosopher who teaches at Boston College, says that death wears five faces – that of an enemy, a stranger, a friend, a mother, and finally, a lover (“Love is Stronger than Death” – Ignatius Press – 1992). This continuum moves from negative and alienating perceptions of death – “enemy” and “stranger” – to more positive and intimate perceptions – “friend,” “mother” and “lover.” This book with its development of these fives “faces” of death is more than worth the effort it takes to read, but the big idea I’m interested in is the journey by which this change occurs, how death ceases to be the enemy we avoid at all costs to the friend that we welcome and perhaps even embrace.

This is what the spiritual author Henri Nouwen described as the process of “befriending death.” In his 1994 book”” (Harper Collins), Henri Nouwen asked –

“Is death something so terrible and absurd that we are better off not thinking or talking about it? Is death such an undesirable part of our existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real? Is death such an absolute end of all our thoughts and actions that we simply cannot face it? Or is it possible to befriend our dying gradually and live open to it, trusting that we have nothing to fear? Is it possible to prepare for our death with the same attentiveness that our parents had preparing for our birth? Can we wait for our death as for a friend who wants to welcome us home? “

The Gospel Shape of Worship

In his essay on “The Gospel in the Prayer Book” (1966), J.I. Packer (1926 – 2020), the English, Evangelical, Low-church, Anglican Theologian, wrote that “a good (worship) service is not a set of unconnected bits and pieces,” but is rather “an integrated unit, having an overall ‘shape’ and a clear, planned ‘route’ along which worshippers are led.”

Reflecting on the “journey” that his own Anglican tradition of worship takes its worshippers, Dr. Packer observed that it has “an inner structure consisting of a sequence of three themes: sin, detected and confessed; grace, proclaimed and celebrated; and faith, focused and expressed.” He explained that “in the proclaiming of grace, Jesus Christ, the Mediator, must be central, so we may formulate the sequence as, first, facing our utter need of Christ; second, acknowledging God’s merciful provision of Christ; and third, expressing our trustful, thankful response to Christ.” He saw this as the “Gospel Shape” of Christian worship.

First it makes us face “our present badness. “Second, it tells us of “the new life of grace.” And third, it leads us into “the right response,” which he said was “multiple,” including “prayer and praise for pardon; a joyful trust in God’s promises of mercy; learning of God from his Word; asking for help both for ourselves and for others; professing our own faith; and giving ourselves directly to God out of gratitude for all he has given to us.”

Growing up in this Prayer Book tradition and adding back into my spiritual repertoire now in retirement, not as a replacement for but as an addition to my Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) identity, vocation, and practice (spiritually, you can go home again), I find that I am greatly mindful of and deeply grateful for the way this “Prayer Book Path” has shaped me, and continues to move me.

Baron Friedrich von Hügel guided the people who came to him for spiritual direction into personal participation in the sacramental worship of the Church. He believed that such worship exerted “a crucial, inexorable force in the gradual spiritual formation of believers.” He said he’d seen some trees as a child on a family holiday in Brussels that had been permanently bent in the direction the wind blew, and those trees shaped by the wind became for him a picture of how the sacramental worship of the Church shapes and forms the souls of believers.

I make my home, spiritually, in churches where architecturally the Lord’s Table is front and center, and where liturgically I am led to and sent from the Lord’s Supper every time we gather. The Quaker Theologian Thomas Kelley wrote about how the two beats of Biblical religion are God pulling us into His heart where He tells us that we are His beloved daughters and sons, and then God hurtling us out of His heart and into the world where He asks us to carry its hurts and hopes with Him in “infinitely tender love.”

The liturgy of my Anglican practice with it “Prayer Book Path” insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the Biblical rhythm every time I worship with them, just as the hymnody of my Disciples practice with the richness of its “Lord’s Supper” selection (#384 – #430 in the Chalice Hymnal – That’s 46 Communion Hymns and Readings!) insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the rhythm of Biblical religion as well.

In my Anglican practice, it is the “Prayer of Humble Access” that gathers everything that I am thinking and feeling inside when it’s time to go forward for Communion, and gives it voice –

“We do not presume to come

to this your table, O merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your abundant and great mercies.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up
the crumbs under your table;
but you are the same Lord
whose character is always to have mercy.
Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies

may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed

through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore

dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.

And in my Disciple practice, it’s hymns like Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane’s standard “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (#197 in the Chalice Hymnal) that does the very same thing for me –

“Upon that cross of Jesus
mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of one
who suffered there for me;
and from my stricken heart with tears
two wonders I confess:
the wonders of redeeming love
and my unworthiness.”

David Naugle, a Professor at Dallas Baptist University, writes about the “bits and pieces” problem that we have in the church today.  Things don’t touch from one Sunday to the next. In fact, quite often things don’t even touch on the same Sunday morning!  Worship is just a series of separate acts, each one with its own content and concern. We don’t see how things fit together. They’re like a bunch of pearls in a great big bowl. We reach in, pick one out, and hold it up all by itself. It has nothing to do with what came before. It has no connection with what comes next. It’s just one pearl at a time, and one pearl after another.

I don’t think this is how Christian worship is supposed to be.  

I think there’s supposed to be a logic, a progression, a unity to the things we do in worship. When we reach into that big bowl of pearls to pull one out, all the other pearls in the bowl come out with it because they’re all connected. They’re all strung together on the same string. There’s something that holds all its different “bits and pieces” together, and what I think that “something” is that holds together everything we do in worship is the Gospel. I think there is supposed to be a Gospel “shape” to Christian worship, an underlying skeletal structure that gets fleshed out in different ways from week to week, but that gives every worship service its basic shape and sequence.

William Sperry, (1882-1954), a Congregational Minister (the Pilgrims’ Church) and the President of Harvard Divinity School (1822-1953), wrote his book “Reality in Worship” in 1925. In it he suggested that ministers take a moment to review the order of the worship service of their churches to see if any “operative principle which determines the logical sequence of ideas and interests” is discernable, something that makes the service “a religious and artistic unity.” He observed that “the average minister, beyond picking a scripture lesson and hymn to anticipate the sermon and another hymn to follow the sermon, probably does not give five minutes thought a week to the rest of the service, and has no definite theory as to what is supposed to be happening or what a minister is theoretically doing.” Dr. Sperry said that the result is that our worship is “chaotic,” a “potpourri” of texts and gestures ransacked from diverse sources devoid of “a single guiding principle” which shapes and sustains the whole service, “flowing beneath the surface” in all of its acts.

To remedy this, Dr. Sperry turned to the narrative of the Prophet Isaiah’s encounter with the Living God (6:1-8). He saw this text as the Bible’s “formal transcript of the spiritual life,” the “simple, inevitable pattern” of the divine/human encounter.” He framed it as a dialectical sequence of two ideas colliding and then combining to create a brand new situation/condition –

Thesis: A Vision and Adoration of God – “I saw the Lord high and lifted up” (v. 1)

Antithesis: A Confession of Creaturehood – “Woe is me. I am lost” (v. 5)

Synthesis A: A Perception of a Redeeming/Reconciling Energy – “This (live coal) has touched your lips” (v. 7)

Synthesis B: A Reaffirmation of God’s Glory and a Rededication of the Self – “Here I am, send me” (v. 8)

“Why should not a religious service definitely follow this order?” Dr. Sperry asked. “What other order can it follow?” And because our worship services don’t, he concluded, more often than not, they fail to deliver the encounter with the living God that informs, forms, and transforms our lives as human beings, and we settle for entertainment, stimulation, and/or provocation instead.

The Eclipse: A Spiritual Rorschach Test

The eclipse today is proving to be something of a spiritual Rorschach Test. In a Rorschach Test a person is shown an ambiguous inkblot and is then asked to describe what they see. What a person says they see is then taken as an indication of their inner psychological and emotional state. Today’s eclipse has had this same effect on some people spiritually. Some are taking it as a sign of some impending apocalyptic upheaval.

“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken” Jesus said in his end times discourse on the Mount of Olives in Matthew 24:29-31. This imagery of cosmic shifts in the heavens and the disruption of familiar patterns here on earth were stock images in the Biblical worldview and vocabulary for a Theophany – a God appearance in time and space. Go back and read the accounts in the book of Exodus of the plagues in Egypt or Moses’ contact with the Living God on Sinai during the giving of the Law. Cosmic portends were vivid ways of talking about spiritual realities and Divine encounters. When God shows up, scary stuff happens.

This is the language Peter borrowed from the book of the Old Testament Prophet Joel to explain the events of the day of Pentecost – “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth beneath, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day” (Acts 2:19-20/Joel 2:30-31). Peter painted with these colors again in his second letter when he turned his attention to delay of the Second Coming of Christ that had unsettled some people in his churches (2 Peter 2:8-13). Peter assured them that the promise of “new heavens and a new earth” was sure, and that its arrival would be signaled by that same sort of cosmic disturbance. And you don’t have to read very far into the book of Revelation before the mayhem in the heavens begins as the end draws nigh.

The folks who are taking today’s eclipse as a sign of the end of the world (something human beings have almost always done with eclipses, comets, and all other strange astronomical happenings) are taking their lead from this part of the Biblical witness. It’s part of the story, and to just write them off as crackpots is not going to foster the kind of faithful conversation that ought to be characteristic of a community that names Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. Rather than scolding or shaming those who see the eclipse as a signal of doom, I’d like to talk with them instead about how there’s another faithful way to think about it. I see something else in this cosmic inkblot.

The Biblical portends in the heavens of the Consummation are all signs of cosmic disorder, disruption, and destruction. But an eclipse is a sign of the exact opposite of this. NASA keeps a precise record and has an accurate schedule of them. We’ve known for years now the exact moment of the exact day of the exact path of this total eclipse. And we already know this about the next total eclipse, and about the one after that, and about the one after that. An eclipse is a sign of cosmic order and of God’s continuing providential care, not of disorder, disruption, and destruction.

The Christ Hymn of Colossians 1 celebrates the way that “in Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth,” and how “in Him all things hold together” (1:15-20). An eclipse is a better sign of this than of the Bible’s standard description of the chaos that the final dissolution of creation causes. Peace not panic is the right response to an eclipse. The moon crashing into the sun like a pool ball careening into another pool ball on a pool table – that would be a cause for some concern. That would prompt some appropriate doom and gloom. It would be hard to live in a universe where planets moved in unpredictable and unexpected ways. But an eclipse is not evidence of this.

An eclipse is instead good evidence that God has “set the planets in their courses above” as both Scripture and our beloved hymnody proclaims, and we should probably see in the predictable patterns of the natural world the common grace of a God who has ordered the universe and sustains it in such a way that human thriving is possible. This common grace is what Paul talked to the people of Lystra about in Acts 14:15-17 when he established the reality and goodness of God by pointing to how God as the Creator “made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them,” and how God as the Sustainer “does good and gives us from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying our hearts with food and gladness.”

Richard Mouw says that the first and most important theological decision we all must make is whether we think God loves us and wants to bless us both temporally and eternally, or whether we think God is mad at us and wants to make us just as miserable as He possibly can both temporally and eternally. A long time ago I concluded that God is good and generous based on what I knew about the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ I know that God is not reluctant to save us. Sure, our freedom leaves open the possibility for us to turn away, but God’s grace – what I see so clearly in the face of Christ – means that this isn’t what God wants. As Eugene Peterson whispered into his son’s ear each night as he tucked him into bed when he was just a little boy – “God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless.” And I hear this same whispered message from our heavenly Father in today’s eclipse –

“The heavens are telling the glory of God;

and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4)

Gratitude and not fear is what I will feel as I sit in my backyard this afternoon wearing those special glasses from Walmart watching the sun darken as the moon passes between it and me. This eclipse is not a sign of God’s displeasure with us. We’re not on the eve of destruction. I take it as a sign of God’s care instead, and of His eternal desire to bless us all.

That’s what I see in the inkblot.

The “Eclipse of Heaven”

On Monday we witnessed an eclipse in the heavens. Today, deep into Eastertide, I’m thinking about the “eclipse of heaven.”

That’s the name the late A.J. Conyers gave to his 1992 book published by InterVarsity Press. In “The Eclipse of Heaven” he told the story of his family’s visit to a historical park in South Carolina called “Old Dorchester,” a Colonial era village and fort. Among the ruins are the bell tower of the village church and the cemetery surrounding it. Standing next to the flat headstone of one of Old Dorchester’s first citizens, Dr. Conyers said that the tour guide read part of the Burial Service from the 1768 Book of Common Prayer, words that would have been spoken over that grave 250 years ago.

With feigned seriousness and sanctity, he intoned the liturgy with a preacher’s voice –“Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live… In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O LORD, who for our sins art justly displeased? …Thou knowest, LORD, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us …suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

And then Dr. Conyers said that the tour guide looked up at them and winked. “Why did he wink?” Professor Conyers asked, and answered – “It was because he knew very well that he shared a secret with us – with all of us, whether from Ohio or the Carolinas, or Timbuktu. …The secret we share is simply that we no longer take ‘otherworldly’ sentiments seriously. Ideas about the brevity of life, the last judgment of present sinful life, in short, all that devalues this life and prefers the next world, all that fears lest we jeopardize an eternal state in the enjoyment of a temporal existence – all these topics are simply not part of common polite, serious conversation.”

Heaven is in eclipse. In 1982 Morton Kelsey began his book on the “Afterlife” with the observation that the very first Christians “outlived” and “outdied” their spiritual competitors “because of a conviction that their lives went on into greater meaning.” He said that they “even believed that they had tasted something of the reality of the future kingdom of heaven in their experience of their risen Lord.” But Morton Kelsey lamented the fact that more recent Christians have “not shared very deeply in this hope.”

He wrote about a conversation he’d had with a Lutheran pastor who told him that in ten years he’d never preached a sermon on life after death, and he talked a discussion he’d had with two Catholic priests who told him that it would be hypocritical for them to talk about life after death since they didn’t believe that there was “anything in store for human beings after this present life.”

Morton Kelsey said that this was something that had developed in the church over a long period of time. “Christians do not often speak with confidence today about life after death.” He said that there is precious little conversation in the average congregation about what becomes of human beings when we die. “Only at funerals is the topic mentioned,” Morton Kelsey observed, and then only in “a half-hearted way.” More recently, the Roman Catholic Theologian John Thiel has described this as the refusal of the preachers and teachers of the Christian Faith “to speak flourishingly about the ‘last things,’” leaving people who live on “the cusp of the afterlife” without the hope, courage, and peace generating resources that so many Christians before us found so helpful. Today’s Christianity is “thin” at precisely the place where the challenge to life is often the “thickest,” at the “boundary” of death and dying.

The eclipse of heaven was forcefully driven home to me by a blog written in 2021 by Frederick Schmidt, the Professor of Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, on the campus of Northwestern University.

He began by quoting things he said he’d heard his students say –

“I need to talk.  I’ve been asked to preach at my father’s funeral, and I don’t believe in the Resurrection anymore.”

“I don’t know what to say at a person’s funeral.  After all, they don’t have anything to look forward to.”

Dr. Schmidt wrote – “Statements like this are the kind of thing that one expects to hear at any funeral, when the death of a loved one cuts through the families and friendships of anyone who dies.  But they are both examples of things that I have heard seminary students say, deep into the course of their theological studies.” He says there are a number of reasons why a seminarian might say something like this –

“They may be working though their faith with seriousness for the first time.  That process can unearth questions.  It may test the degree to which a student has explored his or her faith.

Seminarians usually arrive with some kind of commitment to the church and its message.  (There is little good reason to pursue a theological education if you don’t.)  But the church itself may have done a poor job at catechesis.

The baseline materialism of contemporary America may further exacerbate a seminarian’s faith.  And it is often when confronted directly with the doctrine of the Resurrection that students discover just how deeply that materialist understanding of reality has invaded their thinking.

Then, again, seminarians are also taught not to believe in the Resurrection, or they are offered a version of it that is cast exclusively in terms that are metaphorical, symbolic or political.”

And then Dr. Schmidt concluded – “Almost every reason a seminarian might struggle that I have listed above makes sense to me.  To struggle with your own beliefs, to confront them and think through them, to realize that the culture around you has sabotaged your faith – this is the stuff of serious formation.  And clergy who have done their work and won-through to a robust Christian faith can be powerful defenders of the faith and skilled pastors to those who seek their help. The last reason, however, does not. …To be taught that the Resurrection didn’t happen or to be taught that it is a metaphor or symbol of something social, political, or personal, flies in the face of the church’s teaching. If seminarians are decisively shaped by that instruction, they will be seminarians to ‘cross their fingers’ when they take their ordination vows or – if they are at all honest – abandon their work for other endeavors.”

Sitting in church these past few weeks of Easteride, I’ve found myself deeply stirred when the Great Thanksgiving of the Liturgy that’s being prayed says – “It is right, our duty and our joy, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. But chiefly are we bound to praise you for the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who was offered for us, and has taken away the sin of the world; who by his death has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again has won for us everlasting life.”

Pastor Ben Haden said that “the world has a gurgle in its throat when it comes to death, but the Christian can speak with total confidence.” I hear that confidence in the liturgy, and it moves me. But when it’s a church that has “a gurgle in its throat when it comes to death,” then I know that heaven is in eclipse there. Their “bugle gives an uncertain sound” (I Corinthians 14:8) creating confusion and sowing the seeds of distrust and despair.  “By his death Christ has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again Christ has won for us everlasting life.” Preachers and churches are free to reject this, but I will not entrust the care of my soul, or the souls of those I love to them.

I need more than a gurgle.

“Swearing to your own Hurt” – Matthew 5:31-37 | A Sermon preached on Sunday, February 9, 2014

I have a nephew in the Special Forces of the United States Army.  My sister and brother-in-law never know when he is going to be sent out on a mission, or what that mission is going to entail, or how long he will be away.  His life is so secretive and mysterious to us that we eagerly devour anything that might give us some insight into what he does – articles in the paper or a magazine, features on the television news shows, books and movies about the Special Forces.  And so it was that a couple of weeks ago I found myself in a darkened theater to see the movie “Lone Survivor.”

I knew what to expect.  I’d read the book.  I already knew the wrenching story of “Operation Red Wings” in Afghanistan back in 2005, and how a mission to target a Taliban leader by a 4-man reconnaissance team went badly; very, very badly.  I knew that before the story was through, that 3 of those Seals would be killed and that 16 others would die in a failed attempt to rescue them.  I was prepared for the agonizing telling of this story.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the story of the Afghan villager who took the lone survivor into his village, and in the ancient tradition of something called “Pashtunwali,” put himself in-between the Taliban fighters and this gravely wounded American serviceman.

In the mountains of Afghanistan there is a code of honor among the Pastun people that goes back for more than 2,000 years, and part of it says that a host must protect a guest even if it means risking his own life and the lives of his family and friends.  And this is exactly what happened in the debacle that was “Operation Red Wings.”  The reason why there was a “lone survivor” in this story at all was because an Afghan village took him in and then defended him with their own lives, and that decision is still costing them. That village remains a Taliban target.  They have sworn to destroy it and to kill all of its residents, and yet, when asked if they regret their decision in taking in our wounded soldier, they say that they would do it all over again.  And when asked “why?” they will tell you about how their commitments define them as a people and dictate their actions.

Take a look at the Bible verse that we used this morning for our “Word Watch.”  Every week there is a Scripture at the top of the first page of your bulletin that we’ve deliberately chosen and put there for you to meditate on before worship begins.  This week it’s from Psalm 15 –

“LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle?  Who may dwell on Your holy hill?  He who walks with integrity… who swears to his own hurt and does not change…”

This is what the scholars call an “entrance liturgy.”  When people arrived at the Temple in Jerusalem for worship they were met by priests at the gates who asked: “Why should we let you in?” and “What makes you think that you have any right to be here?”   

Biblically, this is a question about “righteousness” – “Are you doing what’s right?” “Are you in a right relationship with God?”  And part of the answer that came back from the people who were trying to get in to worship was: “We are doing our best to live our lives with integrity.  When we say that we are going to do something, we do it even if it turns out badly for us and actually winds up costing us something.”  That’s what “swearing to your own hurt and not changing” means.

Recently the CEO of Thomas Nelson, the major American Publishing House of Bibles and popular Christian devotional books, learned that a former executive with his company had made a commitment to a third party via e-mail.

“It was obvious that he hadn’t researched the cost of his promise, nor did he get anyone else’s approval. The CEO was not even aware of the obligation until the other party brought it to his attention. And when he learned that the cost of the commitment was north of six figures, he gasped. Several rationalizations immediately popped into his head:

– The executive was no longer at the company.                                                   

– He obviously didn’t count the cost.                                                                    

 – He wasn’t authorized to make this commitment.                                           

– This project was already under water.                                                             

– This amount was not in their budget.                                                               

– He wasn’t even aware of the commitment.                                                       

– And the CFO wasn’t aware of the commitment either.

However, after a few moments, the CEO remembered that their first core value at Thomas Nelson is “Honoring God.” They amplify this by saying that “We honor God in everything we do.” They then go on to describe the behaviors that express this value, and the fourth item on that list is:

We honor our commitments, even when it is difficult, expensive, or inconvenient.”

That brought everything into clear focus for him, and he noted that this behavior was initially motivated by Psalm 15:1,4:

‘LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill? … He who swears to his own hurt and does not change.’

Simply put, the CEO of Thomas Nelson concluded, this means that our word is sacred.” (Michael Hyatt)

It’s the sacredness of our words, and the commitments that lie behind them that Jesus was talking about in our Scripture lesson this morning.  Jesus expected His people to be known for their integrity, for the way that we would keep our word and do what we promised to do regardless of the cost.  This is a rare quality these days. 

We live in an age of “the path of least resistance.”  We’ll do things for as long as it’s good for us, for as long as it’s meeting our needs and makes us happy.  But if a commitment should start to inconvenience us; should it start to cost us something; should some commitment that we’ve made start to pinch and scrape us, well then we’ll start looking for a way out that allows us to keep face.   This is why that story about those Afghan villagers and that story about the decision of the CEO of a major American Publishing House who each “swore to their own hurt and did not change” are just so striking.  They behaved in unexpected ways; in ways that run counter to the prevailing cultural flow. 

We expect politicians to lie to us.  We expect products to fail.  We expect relationships not to last.  We expect institutions to let us down.  But Jesus told us:  “This is not what I expect of you as My disciples.”  Let your “yes” mean “yes,” and your “no” mean “no,” Jesus said.  And then, to make His point directly, Jesus talked about one of the main areas where our commitments take daily shape – our marriages.  You see, for Jesus, integrity was not some abstract, ethereal concept; a philosophical ideal.  It was immediate and practical.  It had to do with how you treat the person with whom you are living in the most intimate relationship of all, your wife or your husband. 

Divorce is such a personal and painful experience for so many of us, that when the Scriptures talk about it, we get a little skittish; some of us might even feel like putting our hands over our ears and running away just as fast and as far as we possibly can.  I suspect we’re like this because we expect the Bible to condemn us.  We’ve got a pretty good hunch that whatever the Bible might have to say to us about divorce, that it’s only going to compound the feelings of shame and guilt that we’re already feeling.   We’re afraid that it’s just going to rough us up further.  But, if we would lower our guard just long enough to actually hear what Jesus is saying in our Scripture lesson this morning, I think that we might actually be surprised by the grace of what Jesus has to say.

Among the teachers of the Law in Jesus’ day there were some who had a rather lax view of the commitment of marriage.  They allowed a man to divorce his wife for any dissatisfaction at all that he might be experiencing with her, and this is what Jesus was opposing in what He had to say in our Scripture lesson this this morning.  The commitment of marriage was just too sacred in His eyes to be frivolously set aside by some whim of fancy or by the first whiff of difficulty.  Marriages are supposed to last. That’s the first thing that Jesus tells us in our Scripture lesson this morning.  But as we all know, not all of them do. 

Clearly, there are choices that we can make and actions that we can take that have the power to kill a marriage.  And that’s the second thing that Jesus tells us in our Scripture lesson this morning.  There’s a realism to His words.  Marriage bonds can be shattered by unfaithfulness, and it’s incredibly painful when they are.  But when this happens, we’re not finished.  Serious as it is, contrary as it may be to what God intends for us, destructive as it is to people and their highest hopes and deepest dreams, when a marriage fails, we do not come to the end of the story.  

Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. That’s the piece that’s missing in so many of the conversations about divorce that I’ve heard in the church through the years.  It seems to me that there are those who want to make divorce different from any other contradiction to God’s revealed will in which we might personally have a share.  The grace of God in Jesus Christ that promises to make us new and to give us a chance to start all over again as “new creations” apparently has an exception, and it’s divorcees. 

Even when this is not said out loud by the church – and frankly I’d be quite surprised if you ever heard it around here – it’s still heard in the hearts of so many divorcees, and that’s because divorce has this powerful and unique capacity to condemn us.  Divorce is a fundamental upheaval in our identity and intention that affects us in our deepest places. And when it happens, when there is a broken commitment, this is when we need to know that repentance, forgiveness and restoration is the pattern of the Gospel. 

When we confess our sins, “He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” John tells us in his first letter (I John 1:9).  As the refrain to an old Gospel song that makes me very happy every time I sing it puts it –

“Wonderful the matchless grace of Jesus, deeper than the mighty rolling sea; Higher than the mountain, sparkling like a fountain, All sufficient grace for even me; Broader than the scope of my transgressions, Greater far than all my sin and shame; O magnify the precious Name of Jesus, Praise His Name!“

God’s grace is broader than the scope of my transgressions, this hymn says; it’s greater than all my sin and shame.  So, just exactly what does this leave beyond the reach of God’s restoring grace?  Divorce? I hardly think so!

Of course, Jesus Christ wants us to be people of integrity as His disciples, people who keep their commitments, people whose “yes” means “yes” and whose “no” means “no.”  The reason why this matters so much to Him is because this is how He relates to us.  This is the basis of our relationship with Him.  When we keep our commitments it points to the way that God keeps His commitments to us, and that gives our lives a “question-posing” quality just like we experienced here this morning when we heard about those Afghan villagers and that Thomas Nelson CEO.  It’s unexpected behavior that cuts against the grain of culture and that leaves people who witness it wondering why – Why are they like that?  And the answer for us as Christians has got to be – because this is how God in Jesus Christ is with us.  And ironically, where this shows most powerfully is not in our stretches of faithfulness, but in our episodes of unfaithfulness.

When we don’t keep our commitments, God still keeps His.  As Paul told his young associate in ministry, Timothy – “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).  And this is the power of the Gospel.  We are loved by God in spite of ourselves, that’s the truth at the center of His commitment to us, and it alone has the power to change us. God’s forgiveness of our unfaithfulness when we fail to keep our commitments is an important part of God’s faithfulness to us.  And the renewal of faithfulness in us, seen in the way that we return to our commitments with even greater intensity and intentionality after we have stumbled is one of the first results of a genuine experience with God’s faithfulness.  And what Jesus Christ is telling us in our Scripture lesson this morning is that the life of faithfulness to which He is calling us is nothing more than a reflection of the kind of faithfulness that God has already shown us in Jesus Christ.  We learn how to keep our commitments by seeing how God in Jesus Christ keeps His.

Sources

Hyatt, Michael. “Keeping Your Word.” http://michaelhyatt.com

McKnight, Scot.  The Story of God Bible Commentary: The Sermon on the Mount. Zondervan. 2013.                                                                                                                                                

Pilate’s Wife

Brian Zahnd begins the eighth chapter of his book about the cross of Christ, “The Wood Between the Worlds” by writing –

“The Nicene Creed mentions three historical figures – Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Pontius Pilate. The appearance of Jesus and Mary is obvious, but that of Pontius Pilate is startling. Unexpected as he may be, there he is, for in the creed we confess that Jesus was ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ What this line does is to establish the life and death of Jesus in a particular historical context. Christianity doesn’t float above history as a timeless abstract. It was born in Judea in the fourth decade of the first century during Roman occupation. Pontius Pilate was the fifth Roman procurator of Judea, holding office from AD 26-36 during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. History has given us scant information on Pilate… Through what we know about Pilate is limited to the Gospels and a few lines from Roman historians, the governor who presided over the trail of Jesus of Nazareth has captivated the literary imagination of many a writer.”

And so has Pontius Pilates’ wife, in fact, in parts of the Eastern Church Pontius Pilate’s wife is officially a Saint! She is given a name, “Claudia Procula,” and a history beyond the bare reference to her dream and the warning she gave to her husband as a result of it as he was about to preside over the trial of Jesus – “While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream” (Matthew 27:19).

A reference to a “Claudia” in 2 Timothy 4:21 has been taken by some in the Eastern Church as a reference to Pontius Pilate’s wife and is offered as evidence of her inclusion in the earliest community of faith. It was Origen (185 – 253), the Alexandrian theologian of such great importance and controversy, who first wrote about how Pontius Pilate’s wife converted to Christianity.

“A more detailed account of the trial before Pilate, his wife’s dream, and her later life can be found in the apocryphal work, “The Letters of Claudia Procula to Fulvia”. It was written allegedly in the name of Claudia, Pontius Pilate’s wife, who shares the story of her life in Jerusalem with her friend, devoting special attention to events related to the Gospel story.” (orthochristian.com/102542.html)

But the most fascinating allusion to Pontius Pilate’s wife in litetature can be found in John Masefield’s 1925 play, “The Trial of Jesus” –

“Pilate’s wife stands with the centurion near the cross, watching Jesus slowly die. She asks the centurion at the end, ‘Do you think he is dead?’ ‘No, lady, I don’t,’ the soldier answers her. ‘Then where is he?’ ‘Let loose in the world, lady,’ the centurion declares, ‘where no one can stop His truth.’”

This is the perfect message for the day after Easter.

It’s not over.

It’s just begun.

Wayne Watson sang a story song back in the day about a carnival barker who “shut down the show” after “something happened” in his life.

“Old friends are mostly puzzled,

They don’t know what to say,

‘Cause ever since that afternoon

He’s just been that way.

It’s like the old man died,

And someone came to take his place.”

The song describes how that man took up a position on a downtown street corner after his change where all day, every day, with a great big smile on his face, he cried out to all who passed by –

“New lives for old.

Warm hearts for cold.

Have I got a deal for you today,

Come on, step right this way,

And get your new lives for old.”

Easter is about an event that happened in a borrowed tomb just outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and an experience that still happens in people’s lives, relationships, and worlds right now. This is the reason why the church has always baptized people on Easter Sunday. Romans 6 connects the Easter event with the Easter experience in its discussion of baptism –

“…All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death… We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. …Our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. …So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Excerpts of Romans 6:3-11)

The tradition that Pontius Pilate’s wife became a Christian, and then actually died for her faith is affirmed in parts of the Eastern Church where she is venerated as a Saint, and in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church both Pontius Pilate and his wife, Claudia Procula, are regarded as Saints and Martyrs. They detect the seed of saving faith in what Pontius Pilate had written on the placard that was nailed to the cross above Christ as He was crucified –

“Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross; it read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’ Many of the Jews read this title, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. The chief priests of the Jews then said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written I have written.’” (John 19:19-22)

Is this tradition of the conversion of Pontius Pilate and his wife historically true? I don’t know, I suppose it depends in large measure on how much credit you are prepared to give to traditions that come from the early church. What I do know for sure is that this tradition bears witness to a truth that is intrinsic to the Gospel and integral to the meaning of Easter. “We are born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (I Peter 1:3). “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

I don’t know if Pontius Pilate and his wife actually became Christians, but the fact that the Gospel says they could have, and that the tradition of the early church is that they did, is enough for the words of the Creed that I recite each week in church – “…and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried” – to flash with promise, power, and hope.

One more thing about Pontius Pilate’s wife.

There’s just one reference to her in the Bible, Matthew 27:19 – “While Pilate was sitting in the judgment hall, his wife sent him a message: “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, because in a dream last night, I suffered much on account of him.” It’s that reference to a “dream’ that captures my imagination.

Dreams as a vehicle that the Lord uses to make His will known is a prominent feature in the story of Jesus that the Gospel of Matthew tells. It was in a dream that the Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph as he pondered what to do about Mary, his betrothed, who was with child (Matthew 1:20). It was in a dream that the Wise Men were told to go home from Bethlehem by a different route in order to avoid additional contact with King Herod who was raging (Matthew 2:12). It was in a dream that Jospeh was told to take Mary and baby Jesus to Egypt where they lived as refugees outside the murderous reach of King Herod (Matthew 2:13), and then when King Herod died, it was in a dream that Joseph was told to pack up his family and go home again (Matthew 2:19), with an adjustment in the plan made in response to another dream (Matthew 2:22).

All of this is said against the biblical backdrop of the importance of dreams as a way that the Divine communicated with the Patriarchs in the book of Genesis, and under the promise of the new dispensation of the Spirit when “your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, and God’s Spirit will be poured out on His menservants and maidservants” (Acts 2:17-18).

In my own life I can think of 2, maybe 3 dreams, or dream-like states by which I think God unmistakably spoke to me about decisions I was making and issues I was facing that gave me some real insight into where God was and what God was doing in my life at those moments, in those circumstances. And I can’t help but wonder how many other times God was trying to use my dreams as a way of leading me “in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake” (Psalm 23:3), but I didn’t have an expectation of this being something that God did, or the resources to make proper sense of what it was that God was doing and saying?

Well, I’m now one of those “old men” that Peter/Joel was talking about who in the new dispensation of the Spirit will “dream dreams,” and I just want to say that I’m open to whatever it might be that God needs me to know at this point in my life.

A Contemplative Approach to the Cross

I’ve been reading Brian Zahnd’s new book, “The Wood Between the Worlds” (IVP  | 2024), this Lent. He describes it as a “Poetic Theology of the Cross.”  “I want to be drawn,” Brian explains early in the book, “into a contemplative orbit around the cross.”  So do I.

The Gospel doesn’t “yield its mysteries” so much to “analytical methods as to mediation,” Brian explains. Believing that theology is more like poetry than physics, and that the things the Bible tells us about God should be approached more like a painting in an art gallery than a law book in a library, Brian wants a theology that makes him sing. He wants to move past the dispassionate academic ways he was taught to critically analyze an ancient text and be ushered instead into an encounter with the same God those ancient texts report as living, and moving, and acting in the experiences of the lives and world of the ancient Hebrews and the very first Christians. He says he wants his Bible to be a “portal into the divine mystery.” When he visited Brite Divinity School as a guest lecturer when I was a student there back in the mid-1970’s, John Westerhoff, the Christian Educator, said that there are some things about our faith as Christians that are better sung than explained, and this is the same point that Brian Zahnd is making in his new book.  Our heads can only take us so far in our journey to God, at some point our hearts have got to take over. As Catherine de Hueck Doherty said, we need to “fold the wings of the intellect to open the door of the heart.” This is easier said than done for some of us.

I am given to explanation. My faith seeks understanding.  It always has. This is my ordinary mode. Loving God “with all my mind” comes naturally to me. But just about 20 years ago I came to what I perceived to be the outer limits of that way being and believing. I could argue the case that God is good. I’d read the books, sat through the lectures, written the papers, gotten a good grade. It wasn’t enough.  I desperately needed to “taste and see” that God was good too (Psalm 34:8). I needed a faith that was less a theory and more a love affair. I needed to undertake that 12-inch journey from my head to my heart again. It’s a familiar trip for me.

Earlier trips to this boundary on the spiritual journey of my life had gotten me born-again (Evangelical), Spirit-filled (Charismatically renewed), better aware of the inner light who is the indwelling Christ (Quaker), and a heart-strangely-warmed (Pietism/Emmaus). This time I set out on that trail intending to become a contemplative, or perhaps more accurately I should say, to open myself to a more contemplative way of being and believing, for this is the work of the Spirit, and as Jesus told us (John 3:8), the Spirit is like the wind. It blows when, and where, and how it wants.

We don’t control the Spirit’s movements. We can’t schedule the Spirit’s appearances.  We don’t manage the Spirit’s work. We can’t engineer the Spirit’s effects. The most we can do is to try to be open to the Spirit’s presence and power, and to try to position ourselves in those places and practices where the Spirit has a history of showing up. The terrain I consciously pitched the tent of my soul on 20 years ago was in the space where silence, liturgy, music, and icons all intersect, and from there the wind of the Spirit blew me eastward, into the world of Orthodox Christianity. And this is where I bumped into Mary. In Eastern Christianity, Mary traverses that same ground, the terrain of silence, liturgy, music, and icons. Twenty years ago she has become my companion on the contemplative way, and my example of what it means to be a contemplative believer.

In his epic 1968 poem on Mary – “A Woman Wrapped in Silence” (Paulist Press) – author John W. Lynch zeroed in on Luke’s description of Mary quietly observing the cosmic events unfolding in her life, and in the life of her Son, and treasuring them, “reflecting on them in her heart” (Luke 2:19; 2:51). Mary is at the Cross, but she is silent. Luke tells us that she “stood at a distance” with the other women, that “she saw these things” (Luke 23:49) but said nothing.  “Here a woman wrapped in silence,” John Lynch wrote, “and the words were closed within her spacious heart for pondering.” “Through long years of pondering God’s word and cherishing the memory of these mysterious events in her heart, Mary penetrated the truths they held and her understanding of them grew.”

Every Holy Week I return to a Pastoral Prayer I wrote for the last Sunday of Lent several years ago. I don’t just want to go to church this week, I want to enter into the mystery of faith, and so I pray –

Lord, our journey to Easter has turned the corner and is heading for home.  Today we find ourselves stand on the precipice of Holy Week.  From here we can hear the shouts of “Hosanna!” From here we can taste the bread and cup of the Last Supper, feel the wounds of the cross, see the sealed tomb and smell the fear and despair of shattered expectations.  This is familiar terrain.  We know this story well.  We know how it unfolds and where it winds up. 

Save us, Lord, from familiarity and complacency; from the boredom and inertia of being old hands at all of this.  We’ve sung all of the hymns before.  We’ve heard all of the sermons before.   We’ve gone through all of the rituals before.  We’ve prayed all of the liturgies before.  Our appetites have been honed by a culture that craves the new and improved, so teach us to love the old, old story.  Send your Spirit to close the circuit between the needs of our hearts and world, and the promises of grace that you made for us in Jesus Christ. 

Help us to discover the Gospel again, Lord, not just on the pages of Scripture and in the traditions of the church, but in the twists and turns of our lives and in the hopes and hurts of the world.

On Palm Sunday, when we hear about Christ’s triumphal entry, help us to join the shout of the crowd as they cry out for salvation.  Come as Prophet, Priest and King into our hearts and into this church to be our way, our truth and our life. 

On Maundy Thursday, when we hear about the Last Supper, make room at that table for us; a place where we can love and be loved; a place where we can belong and believe.

On Good Friday, as we hear about the way of the cross, gather up our suffering, and the suffering of the whole world, and carry it to the heart of the Father. 

On Holy Saturday, when we hear about Christ in the tomb and the disciples behind closed doors, come and sit with us in our own fears and disappointments.

And on Easter Sunday, when we hear about the empty tomb and the Risen Christ, shift our gaze from then to now, giving us hope for the possibilities of the newness of life, both abundant and eternal.

We don’t need another history lesson, Lord.  We need the assurance of your presence in our lives that are filled with struggle, and we need the provision of your grace to continue to live courageously and compassionately in this very scary world of ours.  We need to know where you are and what you are doing, Lord, so bring us to Holy Week where your story and our stories can intersect and intertwine once again, and then anchor us there where we can know that “resurrection is stronger than crucifixion, that forgiveness is stronger than bitterness, that reconciliation is stronger than hatred, and that light is stronger than darkness,” we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.