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civilized vices

Excerpted from “The Cross and the Cellar” by Morton T. Kelsey (as found in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter)

Let us look at some of the people who brought Jesus of Nazareth to crucifixion. They were not monsters, but ordinary men and women like you and me.

Pilate receives most of the blame for Jesus’ death, and yet Pilate didn’t want to crucify the man. Why did Pilate condemn Jesus? Because Pilate was a coward. He cared more about his comfortable position than he did about justice. He didn’t have the courage to stand for what he knew was right. It was because of this relatively small flaw in Pilate’s character that Jesus died on a cross. Whenever you and are willing to sacrifice someone else for our own benefit, whenever we don’t have the courage to stand up for what we see is right, we step into the same course that Pilate took.

And Caiaphas, was he such a monster? Far from it. He was the admired and revered religious leader of the most religious people in that ancient world. He was the High Priest. His personal habits were impeccable. He was a devout and sincerely religious man. Why did he seek to have Jesus condemned? He did it for the simple reason that he was too rigid. He thought that he had to protect God from this man, thought he had to protect the Jewish faith, and so he said: “It is good for one man to die instead of a nation being destroyed.” Caiaphas’s essential flaw was that he thought he had the whole truth. People who have fought religious wars, those who have persecuted in the name of religion, have followed in his footsteps. Those who put their creeds above mercy and kindness and love, walk there even now.

Why did Judas betray his master? He wasn’t interested in the thirty pieces of silver, at least not primarily. Judas had wanted Jesus to call upon heavenly powers, to take control of the situation and throw the Romans out of Palestine. When he failed to do this, Judas no longer wanted anything to do with him. Judas’ fault was that he couldn’t wait. When we can’t wait and want to push things through, when we think we can accomplish a noble end by human means, we are just like Judas.

Then there was the nameless carpenter who made the cross. He was a skilled workmen. He knew full well what the purpose of that cross was. If you questioned him he probably would have said: “But I am a poor man who must make a living. If other men use it for ill, is it my fault?” So say all of us who pursue jobs which add nothing to human welfare or which hurt some people. Does the work I do aid or hinder human beings? Are we cross makers for our modern world? There are many, many of them.

These were the things that crucified Jesus on Friday in Passover week A.D. 29. They were not wild viciousness or sadistic brutality or naked hate, but the civilized vices of cowardice, bigotry, impatience, timidity, falsehood, indifference – vices all of us share, the very vices which crucify human beings today.

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my messy house

Like I said yesterday, I’m using Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter to guide my thoughts over the next forty-plus days. The entry for Day 1 is by Kathleen Norris, and I think she sums up particularly well what the Lenten season can be for all of us… young or old.

WHEN I’M WORKING as an artist-in-residence at parochial schools, I like to read the psalms out loud to inspire the students, who are usually not aware that the snippets they sing at Mass are among the greatest poems in the world. But I have found that when I have asked children to write their own psalms, their poems often have an emotional directness that is similar to that of the biblical Psalter.

They know what it’s like to be small in a world designed for big people, to feel lost and abandoned. Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday morning.

Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work through their desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him: his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.”

“My messy house” says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

Have mercy on us, Lord.

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this joyful season

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow and it signals the beginning of Lent. I’ll be participating in a Lenten observance again this year, and I’m looking forward to this time of renewal. In addition to the few “indulgences” that I’ll be giving up this spring, I also plan to read Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. That’s right, the very same book I read for Lent last year, and the year before that. The familiar repetition of Lent is something I have come to appreciate, and I am hopeful that this book will likewise become a familiar companion for me in the years to come.

As you can see from the cover, it is a collection of readings from Christian writer/thinkers spanning most of the church’s history. Some other contributors include, Kathleen Norris, Thomas a Kempis, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Kahil Gibran, Jurgen Moltmann, Wendel Berry, Mother Teresa, to name a few. Here are some thoughts to consider from the opening pages…

First popularized in the fourth century, Lent is traditionally associated with penitence, fasting, alms-giving, and prayer. It is a time for “giving things up” balanced by “giving to” those in need. Yet whatever else it may be, Lent should never be morose – an annual ordeal during which we begrudgingly forgo a handful of pleasures. Instead, we ought to approach Lent as an opportunity, not a requirement. After all, it is meant to be the church’s springtime, a time when, out of the darkness of sin’s winter, a repentant, empowered people emerges. No wonder one liturgy refers to it as “this joyful season.”

Put another way, Lent is the season in which we ought to be surprised by joy. Our self-sacrifices serve no purpose unless, by laying aside this or that desire, we are able to focus on our heart’s deepest longing: unity with Christ. In him – in his suffering and death, his resurrection and triumph – we find our truest joy.

Such joy is costly, however. It arises from the horror of our sin, which crucified Christ. This is why Meister Eckhart points out that those who have the hardest time with Lent are “the good people.” Most of us are willing to give up a thing or two; we may also admit our need for renewal. But to die with Christ?

Of course, for many a Lent observance is too much “religion” for their taste. My hope is that taking part in this decidedly outward, structured, formal religious observance will produce a change in me that the wishful-thinking, go with the flow, heart-felt, spiritual sentimentality of our day seems entirely incapable of producing.

If you have a desire to take part in an Ash Wednesday service and don’t have a place to do so, you are welcome to join us at Fellowship North tomorrow at 7am, noon, or 6pm for a brief (30 minutes) time of reflection, liturgy, and marking with ash.

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Observing Lent in 2011?

A year ago, I was all geared up for Lent. I’m not entirely sure why, but for whatever reason, I was “feeling” it. The idea of celebrating Lent was sort of novel, and I was gung-ho to help people plumb the depths of falling into the rhythms of the Christian calendar.

Today was a much different story. I was sitting in a meeting and one of my beloved co-workers kindly reminded all of us that Lent was a few short weeks away. The indifference in the room was palpable. The enthusiasm of last year was a distant memory. No one said it, but it was like we were all thinking, “Yeah, we did that last year. What’s new?”

And the response of the Christian calendar is in many respects, “nothing.” We live in a culture that is obsessed with novelty and newness. I am already salivating over an iPhone that I haven’t even seen yet that is rumored to be released sometime this summer. And so something about entering into a Lenten observance this year feels like last year’s iPhone… obsolete.

But I’m coming to realize that this is precisely the beauty of Lent. It enters into one’s life this year (and every year) as an intrusion. My mind is on other things and Lent inconveniently shows up to remind me that I am in need again this year of creating space in my life to reflect on Jesus’ abundant life, sacrificial death, and life-giving resurrection.

So for these reasons – and more – I’ll be entering into the Lenten season in much the same way as I did last year. In fact, I’m going to read the very same resource that I did a year ago. It was good. It was thought-provoking. And I’ve forgotten almost all of it. Which is I guess is the point of Lent. That things forgotten are brought to the forefront again.

Here’s what I’ll be reading, as well as some other options.

So, three weeks from tomorrow, Lent will begin. And I will begin again to come to terms with all the truths that are so easily forgotten. How about you?

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The Cellar

We find ourselves in the midst of Holy Week; a time in which Christians all around the world are reflecting on the events leading up to Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection.  Throughout Lent, I’ve been reading Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, and while it may be a bit late for this year, I heartily recommend that you consider it for your next go around at Lent.

The readings have been what I expected.  Thoughtful, varied, rich, and nurturing.  In an attempt to help prepare our hearts for Easter, I thought I would share some recent comments pertaining particularly to the Passion.  Morton T. Kelsey writes:

“Each of us has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see.  And below that is a deeper hold in which there are dragons and demons, a truly hellish place, full of violence and hatred and viciousness.  Sometimes these lower levels break out, and it is to this lowest level of humans that public executions appeal.

In the cross this level of our being has thrust itself up out of its deepest underground cellar so that we humans may see what is in all of us and take heed.  The cross is crucial because it shows what possibilities for evil lie hidden in human beings.  It is the connection of human evil in one time and place.  Whenever we look upon the cross, which was simply a more fiendish kind of gibbet, we see what humankind can do, has done, and still does to some human beings.  It can make us face the worst in ourselves and in others, that part of us which can sanction a cross or go watch a crucifixion.  The cross is the symbol, alive and vivid, of the evil that is in us, of evil itself.”

There’s more, of course, but you get the idea.  I don’t know how Lent has been for you, but certainly for me it has been an opportunity to shed a little light into my own cellar.  And as you might expect, what I find down there is not pretty.

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Resources for Lent

Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks

It’s strange how the Christian calendar has grown in significance for me over the past several years.  I don’t remember when I was first introduced to the idea of Lent, but something about it resonated with me from my initial experience with it.  I’ll be talking more about that in the next week or so.

However, with Ash Wednesday (the beginning of Lent) just a couple weeks away, I wanted to make you aware of some resources that can help focus your heart, mind, and soul during the forty-six days leading up to Easter.

Last year, I used this great book by (of course) my man N. T.

Over Christmas, my beloved bought me Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent.  It is a collection of readings by various authors who in turn speak to the truths that are prominent during the Lenten season.  The line up is impressive…  Kathleen Norris, Thomas a Kempis, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Kahil Gibran, Jurgen Moltmann, Wendel Berry, Mother Teresa, to name a few.  Knowing that I’ll be “sitting down” with these folks during the days leading up to Easter has helped me to look forward to it all the more.

I was also recently made aware of another book that isn’t necessarily a Lent reading, but since it follows a popular “40-day” format, it will certainly fit for the season.

I realize that several of us already have a bit of a reading project going on, but I like to think that there is always a little more time for reading.