Lent 2 C Grief

Lent 2C March 17, 2019 Grief

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

The last parish I served full time was Redeemer, Shelby, west of Charlotte, 1980 to 1989.  Redeemer recently called a new rector, the Rev. Caroline Kramer, from Christ Church, Ponte Vedra Beach, south of Jacksonville, Florida.

Lucy and I left Shelby with some unresolved grief. Between 1983 and 1988 we had lost all four parents to death, and that small parish grieved the untimely deaths of two young mothers – Florence Schwartz to cancer and Diana Macintosh to a tragic automobile accident on the way home from her grandmother’s funeral. Diana’s children were staying with friends in the parish and one of the hardest things I have had to do was to wake those children and tell them their mother had been killed. It was a second marriage and after the funeral the children had to go back to South Carolina to the biological father they had fled.

We all live with some kinds of grief and loss. I’m feeling some grief as Pat and Paul Hobart leave us after 20 years to go back to live in Wadsworth, Ohio, south west of Cleveland. And in today’s gospel Jesus expresses his grief over Jerusalem and its continued refusal to receive God’s love and God’s word revealed by the prophets. The first part of the gospel reading, the warning of Herod’s plot, we read only in St. Luke. Herod had murdered John the Baptist and killed many others he thought were a threat to his rule. Jesus is a man of courage; he continues his ministry of healing and justice. But he knows his ministry is not in Galilee, but to all God’s people, and he must go to Jerusalem. Jesus grieves over Jerusalem. In St. Luke’s gospel Jesus expresses his grief toward the end of his ministry in Galilee. In St. Matthew’s gospel (23: 37-39) Jesus says this in the Temple toward the end of his controversies with the leaders of the people. In St. Luke Herod plotted to kill Jesus because Jesus was a threat to his rule. In  St. Matthew the leaders of his people plot to kill Jesus because Jesus was a threat to their rule. We try to ignore Jesus, try to kill his influence in our lives, because Jesus is a threat to our self-rule. We are not autonomous rulers of our lives if Jesus is Lord.

We grieve our losses; we grieve losing friends and fellow parishioners when they move, when they die, when we can’t see them anymore. We grieve losing family members to death; we grieve the loss of their companionship, their expressed love for us, the opportunity to express our love for them. And in our reflective moments we grieve our sins, the things we have done and left undone that we have put in the way of God’s love for us and our love for God.     

We are forgiven sinners. By God’s grace in Jesus’ sacrificial death we receive God full and perfect forgiveness. We share in Jesus’ resurrection. Each day we have a new life. By God’s grace we can truly say, “Blessed is Jesus, who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Fifty years ago Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born Chicago psychiatrist, wrote of her experiences with terminally ill patients as they faced death and dying. She identified five spiritual and psychological stages through which they passed. They are tools to help us deal with my own griefs.

The acronym for the five stages of grief is DABDA, DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. They form a framework, a vocabulary to help us name what we feel. They are not stops on some linear timeline of grief. We cycle around through these feelings, each of us in our own unique way.

Denial helps us survive loss. We go numb, and we wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. God’s grace in denial lets us absorb as slowly as we need to. As we begin to absorb  reality, we can begin to heal. We can begin to feel our feelings; we can begin to recognize our continuing relationships.

Anger is part of the healing process. We live in an unjust world, a world of sin and death. Life is not fair, not just, and we sin, and are sinned against. Anger is an expression of fear, and it is also an expression of the strength of our feeling of love.

Bargaining is central in grieving loss. We get caught in feelings of  “If only…” or “What if…?” Feelings of guilt and shame come with bargaining. We want to make promises we know we can’t keep to relieve the spiritual and psychological pain we feel. God loves us as we are. We do not have to do anything more than open our selves to accept the free gift of God’s love and acceptance.

Depression.  When our bargaining doesn’t work , we may feel empty and depressed. Depression is a normal and appropriate response to loss. Sometimes depression feels like anger turn in on ourselves. Depression seems to absorb all our energy.

Acceptance.   But winter passes and eventually the sun comes out. We don’t cease to grieve, but we learn to live with the new reality. We can begin to feel bits and pieces of new life, new energy, new enjoyment, new relationships, a new understanding of God’s unconditional and everlasting love.  It takes time to come to acceptance. Frequently we cycle through grief again, and again. But in God’s good time we can come spiritually and emotionally to the good place to which Jesus calls us. We do come through Lent and Holy Week to Easter, to the place of saying, “He is risen!” We begin again to see Jesus at work in our lives and we begin to be able to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, DABDA.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Lent 1 C Bread Alone?

Lent 1C March 10, 2019 Bread Alone?

I’m tempted to preach from today’s Old Testament reading about immigration, about the wandering Aramean who “went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous” and about the command to celebrate with “the aliens who reside among you . . . all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.” But I’ll resist the temptation. For one, the subject is too difficult for a short sermon, and second, we have today Jesus’ word to the power of evil, “'One does not live by bread alone.” 

That’s Deuteronomy 8:3. “This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you.”  

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Genesis begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God said, “Let there be a firmament.” And God said, “Let the dry land appear.” And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament” And God said, “Let the waters bring forth living creatures, and birds fly above the earth.” And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; male and female. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. 

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” The Gospel according to St. John begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”  “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” 

God spoke us into being. For many of us, and in the best of circumstances, we are here because one parent asked and the other said, “yes,” and it was so. For others the circumstances may not have been the best, but we are here because God spoke us into being. We are made in the image of God, male and female, and God gives his ability to give and receive love, God’s love, shared with and among us. 

And when we fall into sin, when we fall short of God’s perfect will for us, and know it, and repent, by God’s word, Jesus offers us forgiveness, redemption, and new life. On the cross, the word of Jesus, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.”  And then on Easter evening, Jesus in the upper room where the doors were shut for fear, Jesus’ word to the gathered disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven!”    

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” In today’s gospel Jesus’ response to every temptation put before him by the lying power of evil is from the word of God as written in the Book of Deuteronomy. “You shall not live by bread alone.” (8:3) “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” (6:13, 10:20) “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (6:16)  

Deuteronomy is the 5^th book of the Bible. The name comes from the Greek for second law, deutero nomos. Deuteronomy repeats the 10 Commandments and other parts of the Law from Exodus. It is the last teaching of Moses, spoken just before the people moved into the promised land of Israel. Since the early 19^th century scholars have seen in it a law code for an agricultural rather than a nomad people, and we see it as the book found in the Temple in the time of King Josiah’s reformation about 620 years before Christ. Deuteronomy 6:4 is the core statement of ethical monotheism: Shema Israel Adonai elohenu Adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One. We know this as the first part of Jesus’ Summary of the Law. It is the first thing observant Jews say each morning and the last thing said at night, and it is said at the hour of death. As the gas poured down in the showers of Auschwitz, they sang the Shema.

Jesus resisted the temptations of the lying power of evil by speaking God’s word from the core of God’s revelation. So let us today and this Lent, pay attention to Jesus’ words, to his words to the power of evil, to his word to us sinners and to the sin-filled world where we live and move and our earthly being.  “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”