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February 27, 2005
Third Sunday of Lent: That Most Precious Gift
I think it would be safe to say that all of us, we who live on planet earth, never became more aware of the power of water than we did on the twenty-sixth day of December 2004, the day the earth suddenly became unbalanced and the waters of the Indian Ocean and South Asia began to move with tremendous force across those fragile islands which dot that part of the earth.
True, everyone knows that water often floods the land in many parts of the planet, but never anything like this, never with such tremendous force. On the other hand, we also know that in some parts of the world there is no water at all, only miles and miles of dry desert.
But on the twenty-sixth day of December 2004, we suddenly realized as never before that we are a fragile and vulnerable people living on a very fragile planet. There are obviously some things on this planet over which we humans have little control. This became very evident when the waters overwhelmed the land and people could do nothing but run away, some successfully, but thousands of others, tragically, to their deaths.
It occurred to me as all this was happening that so many other events that were taking place around the world on that day suddenly became very unimportant: football championships, political squabbling in Washington or Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip. Indeed, even on that day for a change, the war in Iraq fell from the headlines. When 150,000 people die in a matter of a few short hours, you begin to wonder what is really important and what is not important on the life of this planet.
Many also realized, perhaps for the first time in our history, how much we are dependent upon one another. Like never before in our history we decided to set aside our petty differences and pitch in to help those who could do little for themselves. Like never before, many countries pulled together their human and scientific know-how in the cause of compassion for people most of us had never met before.
I imagine that we never fully realized until then how much impact water has on the life of people who live on this globe. Undoubtedly, we take it for granted each day: We take our showers each morning, never caring whether there might be enough to go around tomorrow. People casually walk around everywhere with their little plastic containers of water, holding them tightly for fear of losing them. Water is recreation; water gives joy and delight to heart. Children know that better than most
Perhaps for the first time too, because of its destructive force, many people began asking: “Why did this happen to us, of all people? Did God suddenly decide to punish us, punish this lovely part of the planet? Did we do something wrong? Why us and not others around the world?”
To that I can only say that once we claim that God uses this fragile earth on which we live to punish us for whatever reason, then we have some gigantic problems before us.
It seems more reasonable to say that God simply allows all creation to do what it was created to do. The natural universe does not always operate in our best interests. It simply does what it does by its nature; it’s not a perfect creation, obviously, and, cruel at as it may sound from our point of view, sometimes we humans are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sorry!
At any rate, the great tragedy that befell us on the twenty-sixth day of December has been a great lesson to us: Appreciate what you have, thank God for it and take care of it, take care of each other.
The scriptures for this Third Sunday in Lent, as you have just noticed, also speak clearly and forcefully about water. You may wonder why we are hearing these two water stories on this particular Sunday in Lent. Well, it all has to do with baptism. In many churches through the Christian world there are people who have asked to be admitted to the Catholic Church. They have been preparing themselves for this for many months. On the evening of Easter, therefore, they will be plunged into the church’s baptismal font in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and they will be welcomed into the body of Christ’s faithful.
But why with water, you may ask? Why not just say some words of welcome over these folk and let it go at that? Well, the answer to that is because water stands for something, and what it stands for, above all else, is life. Without water we die, simple as that.
On this Sunday in Lent, therefore the catechumens, the learners, those asking for welcome into the church are presented with two stories from scripture to help them understand what water does for them and will do for them in a few short weeks as they become Christians. They are invited to listen to the story of Moses who found a spring in the desert and made it possible to keep the Israelite people from dying of thirst. For Moses and for the desert wanderers, it must have seemed like God’s gift.
The lesson, of course, is that for those who are thirsting for eternal life, the church offers them baptism and the opportunity to join the Christian community where they will be able to experience Christian life first hand.
The catechumens, the learners, are also invited to listen to the story about the day Jesus had run out of water in his desert wanderings and ended up at the famous Jacob’s well, but without a bucket to draw it up. He had no qualms about asking a woman who had also come there for water to draw some for himself and is friends. While Jesus and the woman were sharing water, they got into this conversation about the meaning of life, physical and spiritual, and Jesus saw the opportunity to help her get a grip on her life. She had been married five times. So, in exchange for natural water, Jesus gave her spiritual water which quenched her thirst for life’s fuller meaning. A good exchange, obviously.
For those of us who are gathered here this morning, Christians all, I imagine it could be said that we pretty much take for granted the fact that someone in our past, our parents, for example, thought it important enough to bring us to the church for baptism. All they wanted to do was to make sure that we had the same opportunity to share in the life of Christ that they had. They wanted to pass on their faith to us and expected us to do the same for our children or for those who might come to us asking how they could find their way into the church.
Finally, it might be well for us to think seriously and often about natural water and its life-giving power in all the ways we use it in our daily lives: In our family, as I was growing up, there was always a little holy water font near the front door of our home where we could bless ourselves as we left to go to school in the morning. My mother had great faith in the power of water: Whenever a storm threatened, she would sprinkle the entire house with holy water and ask for God’s protection. It always worked!
So, what is the lesson in all this? Something so simple as water, so abundant, so beautiful, so refreshing, so life-giving, so taken for granted, is God’s gift to us, a gift for our bodily and spiritual life. It might be a good idea to say thanks the next time we lift a glass of cold water to our lips, take a shower or bless ourselves with it as we go to work. Think what we would do without it?
The scriptures:
Exodus 17: 3-7; Romans 5: 1-2, 5-8; John 4: 5-42
Posted by Deacon Eric Stoltz at 02:25 PM.
February 20, 2005
Second Sunday of Lent: Our Human Restlessness
It is astonishing, when one thinks about it, how much discomfort one will put up with these days in order to do our traveling. All human beings by nature love to travel and we are willing to endure practically everything to get there, wherever “there” is. We will sit patiently in our cars on blocked highways, we will be kind and considerate to TSA people who “wand” us, check our shoes, our brief cases, and our lap tops. It is all worth while just to get to our destination.
But this desire to travel is not simply about getting on the road and reaching the place for which we have planned. If we think about it in a metaphysical or spiritual sense, traveling to some exotic or not so exotic place is all about fulfilling our life’s deepest desire, our best dreams, indeed, even about becoming a different person once we have experienced the goal we have set for ourselves.
Obviously, people have been traveling for centuries and putting up with the inconveniences of the road or air. Think, for instance, about the Mormons traveling by ox cart to Utah, or about Lewis and Clark and their Voyage of Discovery. Those were surely no “joy rides.” But they had a vision, a dream of what it might be like at the end of the road. Hence, they were willing to put up with the inconveniences on he way.
So, we come to this Second Sunday in lent and we find two scriptural stories of people who were travelers with visions and dreams.
First, the story of Abram and his wife Sarah who lived in a metropolitan city (for those days) called Ur of the Chaldees. They were not happy with the Land of Chaldees. It had a lot of conveniences in the city of Ur, but it lacked pasture lands for their flocks. So, they set out across the desert, even to an unknown destination. (It was the Nomadic thing to do in those times.) It was just a dream, after all. But their dream also told them that when they arrived, they would be the father and mother of a great nation and that their progeny would be as numerous as the sand and the stars. So, they put up with the heat, the distance and even the possibility that they might never reach their promised homeland. The dream of something better was enough to keep them traveling. We know the final chapter of this story, of course. They eventually arrived and dwelt in what we know today as the Land of Israel and did, indeed, become a huge nation.
Our second story also involves travel, but in this instance not out there somewhere, but rather up, up a mountain, or at least a modest hill. The characters in the story are Jesus and three friends. He invites them to climb to a place where they will experience something sacred or at least different.
The question, of course, is why up, why to the top of a mountain? The answer is that humankind has always considered mountain tops as a place where one can experience life in a different, a clearer, a more unobstructed way. Think for instance, about Moses climbing Mt. Sinai, or the prophets who went to high places to experience God.
Sir Edmund Hillary probably had the most correct answer when he was asked on one occasion why he decided to climb Mt. Everest. His response: “Because it’s there.” That may sound like a flippant answer, but in a sense it is the only answer one could possibly come up with. It’s all about the dream once again. Hillary dreamed about climbing that mountain simply because it was there. Hence, he was willing to endure all sorts of hardships in order to be the first person to climb that beautiful piece of ice and rock.
No doubt, this was on the mind of Jesus, Peter, James, and John. The mountain for them was not simply a piece of vertical rock It was a place of quiet, a place apart where God could be experienced, a place above the plain, the ordinary, the busyness of every day life, a place worth struggling to reach.
We do not know exactly what the experience was that Jesus, Peter, James, and John had, but we know that for the three, or at least for Peter, it was so overwhelming that they thought it would be worthwhile simply to stay there, set up an altar and pray. Better, obviously, than going back down to put up with the crowds all day.
Ultimately, of course, we know that they all came back down to the plain, but they were different people after what had happened to them in that sacred place.
I suppose it would not be too much to say that all of us have our sacred places, our “mountain tops” where we can experience our God in a unique way, different from the way other people experience God. This is always the human way of experiencing God: We choose a special place where we will not be disturbed. We hunt out our little hermitages, retreat centers, or simply walk in the woods where nothing will disturb our contemplation.
So, why are we hearing all this during Lent? I am not sure why the framers of the Lectionary chose these two stories about travel to tell us something about Lent. But my sense is this: There comes a time in all our lives when we decide that we need to separate ourselves and break from the ordinary, distracting ways of life. We feel the need to be in a holy place where we can think and try to understand the ways of God for ourselves.
I think of Lent in that way: The church provides a special time during the year for us to simply be separate from worldly matters, from distractions, indeed, even from temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil, to use a scriptural reference. Perhaps we simply need to get our life back together again and we need a time and place to do that. We could do it at any time of year, of course, but the church gives us Lent, that time of year we think of as spring, a time of renewal and freshness.
The point, of course, is that we need to “go there” we need to travel, whether up or out. We need to struggle with the matters of this world in order to realize our dream. Ultimately, it is worth all the effort, even if it is only forty days and forty nights. To experience something new, something special, something holy, something transcendent is indeed worth all the stress and trouble tht accompanies us along the way.
Obviously, we are all on a personal life journey. We have no idea what the future holds, but one thing for sure, if like Abram and Sarah, like Jesus and his friends, we cling to our dreams, life will never be a disappointment. Jesus promises us the kingdom. When we arrive there it will be home. Not a bad option when you think about it.
The scriptures:
Genesis 12: 1-4a; 2 Timothy 1: 8b-10; Matthew 17: 1-9
Posted by Deacon Eric Stoltz at 02:22 PM.
February 13, 2005
First Sunday of Lent: Back to the Basics
This is one of those years in the church calendar when we may feel crunched, crunched because the season of Lent begins about as early as it can. So, we are crunched between Christmas and Ash Wednesday. Christmas is hardly over and here we are already thinking about fasting. Actually, it’s probably not a bad idea that Lent begins early. Lots of people are probably working on ways to cut down on the carbs and sugar that were ingested during those feverish Christmas holidays.
An article in the newspaper some weeks ago made the point that most of the people who were once so faithful to the famous Atkins Diet are now “bailing out”. “Too much fuss,” they say, “kind of tiresome doing it everyday.” Perhaps Christians who decide to use Lent as the time to “take it off” will also decide that it can get kind of tiresome after a while. Of course, Lent was never meant to be a time dedicated to fat loss anyway.
So, what about Lent? What do we think about during these forty days? What should we be planning? Obviously, there is a deep and mysterious longing in all of us, in our deepest psyche to occasionally look seriously at our life and life’s habits. Even deeper than that, we sometimes ask ourselves the question, what does it mean to be a human being like me? Why am I the way I am? How did I get this way? We all obviously know that we are not terribly satisfied with ourselves. Our habits and customs seem to draw us in a direction we are not happy about.
Thinking a bit more broadly, many of us also ask the question, why is the world the way it is? How did the world become like it is? Obviously, it is not in a very healthy state from many points of view. Whatever happened to goodness or honesty, truthfulness, to the search for justice and peace and all the rest of those human-Christian virtues? Whom should we blame for the evils that seem to corrupt our nature and our culture. I think we all know that there is something amiss in the world, but we would rather attribute it to human weakness, Original Sin or something such, anything that will absolve us of personal responsibility.
The story is told of G.K. Chesterton, the English philosopher and writer who once responded to a question in the London Times: “What’s wrong with the world today?” Chesterton responded with a one-line answer: “Dear sir: I am.” What Chesterton was implying was that if we don’t’ like the way we are, it’s our fault, we human beings with our great potential for good and evil. We could choose better but we do not. The point is, we make choices and they are not always good choices. “We have met the enemy and it is us” to quote a line from the comic strip Pogo of long ago.
The task of Lent, therefore, if we are not happy with ourselves, the challenge of Lent is to make good choices. Indeed, that is the very reason why we traditionally are presented with the story in the Book of Genesis of the temptation and choice of our first parents, Adam and Eve. The story teller wishes us to know that the reason “we got this way” is because there is something deep in our human nature which does not seem to be able to cope with the temptation to take the simple, the easy and comfortable way in life.
The story of Adam and Eve, therefore, is the story of every man and every woman who has ever existed on this planet. He is a good philosopher, this ancient story teller: He wonders why we are like we are. Why do we do evil? Why is there suffering? Why are we ashamed of our bodies, our actions? Why do we feel alienated from God and one another? These are good and deep questions that need to be asked and they all have to do with choice.
Obviously, good choices are also being made all the time. Human beings are not bad by nature. But we also know that we are responsible for our shame, our alienation. There is a natural desire in each of us, therefore, to escape this mess in which we find ourselves.
St. Paul in his letter to the Roman Christians admits this great human weakness: He had been a persecutor of Christians in his young adult life. But now he is honest enough to say that even though “sin came into the world through one person (Adam)”, we are all responsible because we are, each of us and all of us, sinners. We all make choices that harm us. Of course, we all know the choice Paul eventually made to follow Christ, a journey which led him to Rome…and death.
And, finally, we come to that wonderful story in Matthew’s gospel of Jesus’ confrontation with the choice between good and evil, the classic temptation story. We all know, of course, how it is going to turn out, but the interesting part is how Jesus’ dealt with it. In the story of Adam and Eve, the struggle was going on in their minds. Here too the struggle is going on in Jesus’ mind, his conscience. Adam and Eve struggled with choices. Here Jesus also struggles with choices. In both cases we are witnessing a psychological or mind game, the battle with the self.
Without trying to identify precisely the nature of the three temptation of Jesus, therefore, we could say that they resemble the temptations we all experience: The struggle, with self and the world, the temptation to take the simple and easy way out of hard decisions.
But what I think we also learn from the way Jesus dealt with the three temptations is that human decisions that affect our life, the decision to do the right thing is never easy. Nonetheless, if we do not fight valiantly, we will never be happy with ourselves. Deep in our souls we really want to believe that we can do the better thing, that we can “take the road less traveled” and feel good about it.
So, here we are back at the beginning of another Lent. I’m sure many folks on Ash Wednesday just passed have probably already thought about what they want to “give up” in order to strengthen their resolve to live as decent Christians. “Giving things up” is actually not a bad idea, but only if it is understood as a way to remind ourselves that there are other things in life that need to be dealt with beside our waistline.
We did all this last year, didn’t we? We will do it all again this year and next year because we recognize that we are still not “all together”: The old temptations, the world the flesh and the devil consistently keep coming back to haunt us. Oddly enough, if we were finally able to destroy them, once and for all, we would hardly have need for Lent. But we know ourselves well enough: Perfection has not happened yet. That is why Lent is good for us. Lent is the season of second chances even third or fourth or as many as we need.
The scriptures:
Genesis 2: 7-9; 3:1-7; Romans 5: 12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
Posted by Deacon Eric Stoltz at 02:19 PM.
