by Elizabeth | Apr 6, 2010 | Learning Story
Michael Card tells us more about what it means to live as followers of Christ:
“…it was not the kind of success that Peter and the others had envisioned. ‘From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things,’ writes Matthew. When Peter strongly objected, Jesus chastised him. ‘You do not have in mind the things of God,’ He said, ‘but the things of men.’ (Matthew 16:21, 23).
Then Jesus tenderly, firmly revealed what ‘the things of God’ would look like in their lives:
‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.’ (Matthew 16:24-25
The simple fact is, if we take the name ‘Christian,’ we, too, must be recognized by our scars. The visible proofs of crucificxion, not our accomplishments, degrees, possessions, or wealth — will become our identifying marks.
That is the only kind of kingdom of which Jesus is King! And all the disciples who heard him that day would take up their own crosses, receive their own scars on this earth, and with the exception of one, die for love of the Lord.”
The idea that there is a ‘cost to discipleship’ traces its way back to the One who demonstrated the redemption of suffering. And yet, in our self-fulfilling era, neither ‘discipleship’ nor ‘cost’ are popular concepts. When have you ‘suffered’ for following Christ? How has Christ met you in that suffering?
by Elizabeth | Apr 5, 2010 | Learning Story
What are we to do after Resurrection Sunday, besides putting away the pretty bunnies and consuming or giving away the extra Easter candy?
Jesus seems to think his disciples need to look at his scars. Yesterday, I chose to wear a sleeveless blouse to church. Thanks to Michelle Obama, sleeveless dresses are in. And frankly for me, I’ve always hated sleeves, because I never can seem to find ones that don’t feel confining to my broad shoulders. So more often than not, once it hits 75 degrees, I eschew sleeves.
Why am I talking about sleeves? Because my right shoulder looks like someone used it to sharpen a knife. There are random slash marks trailing around my bicep and shoulder, where I first lost and finally won, a war to make my shoulder work properly. Yesterday at church, a dear friend, one who wept with me during many of the days that my shoulder was not healing, gently teased, “Have you had some work done on your shoulder?” I smiled and said, “When I see these scars, I remember HIS scars.”
And it’s not a bad thing, to remember Jesus’ scars. Michael Card, in his book A Violent Grace, offers these thoughts on the scars of Jesus and their meaning for our lives:
“Have you ever wondered why the Father chose not to erase those marks of humiliation from the Son’s otherwise perfect resurrection body? After all, God’s power had overcome all the violence — long hours of suffering, a spear to the heart, and death itself. Why not remove the reminders of Christ’s injuries? Why have the wounded Messiah, the crucified King, carry His scars into eternity?
I believe the answer is found in the final act of violent grace.
This violence is not like the ones that fell on Jesus — those ended with his death on the cross. Neither is it like the violence that occurred when Jesus destroyed death — that was accomplished by God’s power when Jesus walked out of the tomb.
The final violence is an invitation from the Crucified One to a crucifixion. And the crucifixion is ours.
If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. Matthew 16:24-25
I’m not ready to leave Easter, or at least I’m not ready to leave the pondering of the Resurrected Christ, something I imagine we should ponder 24-7-365, so tomorrow we will continue to think about what this cross is that we must pick up. In the meantime, be thinking about scars you bear, whether literal or metaphorical. What stories do they carry with them? What do they reveal to you about Christ’s scars?
by Elizabeth | Apr 4, 2010 | Learning Story
Those of you who follow this blog know I usually take Sunday, the Sabbath, off from posting.
But TODAY is my favorite day of the year, the day Christians say to one another: “Jesus Christ is risen today,” waiting for the answer “The Lord is risen indeed!” These truths form the basis of our joy and hope; they guide us in our daily lives. It is too good to pass up.
Today I’ll share with you just a bit more from N.T. Wright’s book, Christians at the Cross, a wonderful small collection of Holy Week sermons that again I encourage you to buy and read. (And no, it’s not too late; in fact, now might be a good time to read it, because part of his point is that today is the BEGINNING of a new story, not the end.)
“…[now] we really should do is have a forty-day party, or maybe even a fifty-one day one, all the way through to Pentecost. If we’ve given up something for Lent, or even if we haven’t, we should take something up for Easter. But how you do that is up to you. My job now is to help you celebrate the first day of God’s new creation.”
“Easter Day is the eighth day, the first day of the new week. This isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.
And that is why Easter is the start of the church’s mission. Let’s be quite clear. The church’s mission isn’t about telling more and more people that if they accept Jesus they will go to heaven. That is true as far as it goes (though we ought to be telling them about the new heavens and the new earth rather than just ‘heaven’), but it’s not the point of our mission. The point is that if God’s new creation has already begun, those of us who have wakened up in the middle of the night are put to work to make more bits of new creation happen in the world as it still is. And that is why we need to leave behind, on the cross, all the bits and pieces of the old creation that have made us sad, that have depressed us and our communities, and start to pray for vision and wisdom to know where God can and will make new creation happen in our lives, in our hearts, in our homes, and not least in our communities. That is what ‘regeneration’ is all about.”
“[We’ve come…]” on a journey through bereavement and grief to the foot of the cross, and to have planted some seeds have hope. And, as you remember from earlier chapters, the point about planting seeds is that you have no idea what they will do when they come up. What we do know is that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, that God’s new creation has begun, and that we have to do two things: first, to be true to our own baptismal vows to die with him and to share his new life, and, second, to allow his Spirit to work through us to make new creation happen in this world.”
Jesus Christ is risen today!
by Elizabeth | Apr 3, 2010 | Learning Story
Lamentations 1:1-22, John 19:28-42
It’s hard to be glum on Holy Saturday, because we are getting so close to Resurrection Sunday. We know what happened, but it is good to remember the shock and awe of Jesus’ family and friends as they wondered how everything went so very wrong.
Wright takes us to the topic of waiting in hope, one we must live in daily as Christians. He refers us to Jeremiah’s words in Lamentations, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow…” (1:12a) It is the sheer awful pointlessness, the hopelessness of it all, that should overwhelm us at this time, like the prophet looking around Jerusalem, which had been full of people going about normal life, a thriving town in all directions, and seeing instead devastation, ruin, families torn apart, utter hopelessness.”
But the first Easter has passed, and we do have the whole story, so we see more than just sorrow. Even Jeremiah saw more: “…he insists that God is in this too. You have done this, he says. You have brought us to this point. You have allowed all this to come upon us. Now you might think that this is a pretty dark view of God, and in a sense it is. But the point is that only by clinging on to the sovereignty of God is there still hope. If you say that God has no idea what’s going on either, and is just as helpless as we feel, then things are bleak indeed.”
In the story of the first Holy Saturday, we can find our own stories in certain seasons of our lives. With the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may at times say, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’ — with the sense of, ‘But he can’t have been because they have killed him.’ Our sentences will fit our stories, though, “We had hoped that God was going to bring our lost child home, that God was going to give us a baby this time, that God was going to cure the illness this time…” Wright says, “We have expressed our sorrow and anger, and we have brought it to the cross and will leave it there. Now we must wait quietly to see what God will do.”
Most of us have such seasons of waiting for resurrection in particular stories. Wright says, “Holy Saturday is the moment when everything stops and waits.
“And waits — for a different kind of answer. If you want God’s hope instead of yours; if you want God’s love instead of yours; if you want God’s thoughts instead of yours – then you will need to go through a time of silence, of resting, of ignorance and dispossession….Only when, in days and years and decades to come, people look back and see the new things that God will have done, things we can’t at the moment imagine or plan for, we will say, ‘Yes: we needed to let go of that anger and grief, to leave it on the cross of Jesus, to see it buried in his tomb; because God’s new creation is God’s new creation, always a surprise, always a shock.”
For reflection: What about you? Where does this Holy Saturday find you? Do you have stories of disappointed hope, of dreams deconstructed today? What might it mean to wait on God in the midst of these stories?
Do you have stories of seeing the new things that God has done in previous stories of dashed hopes? Write them, remember them, ponder how God worked redemption and resurrection in those places.
by Elizabeth | Apr 2, 2010 | Learning Story
Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; John 19:16b – 37
It’s frustrating to try to summarize and offer a few quotes from these remarkable sermons by Wright — I always want to offer you the whole thing because so much of it is meaningful. So again, I am forced to choose and again I suggest you buy this wonderful book and read it in its entirety: Christians at the Cross by N.T. Wright.
About God Friday, Wright says that it is the “cataclysmic event” of Holy Week, an event that made no sense at all at the time, especially to Jesus’ friends and followers: “the stupid and pointless snuffing out of the brightest light and best hope Israel ever had. Jesus’ crucifixion must have made his followers wonder if Satan had been tricking them all along, if God had not after all been at work in Jesus, if Israel’s God was maybe not the world’s creator and judge after all, if maybe Israel’s God didn’t exist, if maybe there was no God at all….Watching Jesus get dragged off to a mockery of a trial, a brutal and degrading beating and then the worst torture and death imaginable would force all those questions on them. If we don’t recognize that, then we have domesticated the cross, turned it into a safe symbol of private faith, and forgotten what it was really about. And then we wonder why we are left with nowhere to turn when things in our own lives, our own families, our own communities, our own civilization, seem to go not just pear-shaped — at least a pear still has a shape! — but utterly chaotic, totally random. Good Friday was chaos come again: darkness, earthquake, violence and the death of the one who had given life to so many.”
[And now I am skipping a lot of excellent writing about the cross to get to the best good news about the Cross…]
“…in Jesus’ world that word ‘finished’ is what you wrote on a bill when it had been settled: ‘Paid in full!’ But underneath these is the meaning John intends, I believe, most deeply. When God the creator made his wonderful world, at the end of the sixth day he finished it. He completed his work. Now, on the Friday, the sixth day of the week, Jesus has completed the work of redeeming the world. With his shameful, chaotic, horrible death he has gone to the very bottom, to the darkest and deepest place of ruin, and has planted there the sign that says ‘Rescued’. It is the sign of love, the love of the creator for his ruined creation, the love of the saviour for his ruined people. Yes, of course, it all has to be worked out. The victory has to be implemented. But it’s done, it’s completed; it’s finished.”
Did you hear that: “IT’S DONE!! IT’S COMPLETED!!! IT’S FINISHED!!!!”
What are the sorrows, confusions, pains, betrayals, sins you want to place in the basket and put on the Cross? Perhaps for you it would help to write them down as the people at Easington Colliery did. Perhaps kneeling and naming would be an act of relinquishing your efforts to carry them. Or perhaps like me, it would help you to have a permanent tattoo stamped on your forehead so you can never forget: PAID IN FULL! (In case you’re wondering, I don’t have such a tattoo, but i have wondered, due to my penchant toward gospel memory loss, if it might be a good idea:)
Whatever you do, sing, dance, cry, celebrate — GOOD FRIDAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF CHAOS!
by Elizabeth | Apr 1, 2010 | Learning Story
Exodus 12:1-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-29; John 13:1-17, 31b-35
N.T. Wright tells us in his powerful book of sermons delivered Holy Week 2007. “Maundy” comes from the Latin word commandment, “because at that Last Supper Jesus gave them a new commandment, to love one another as he had loved them.”
Yesterday, rightly so, a friend emailed me to ask HOW do we lay betrayals at the foot of the Cross? Of course I have no 4, 5, or 6 step answer. Nor does Wright. But he does offer some thoughts that may help me and my friend as we struggle to forgive and live in the freedom for which Christ set us free.
Maundy Thursday, and Wright’s writing on it, are about the meal. He says, “This meal is therefore simultaneously part of our journey through bereavement, acting out the dying of Jesus within which our sorrows can be held and dealt with, and also part of our mission, because it is the powerful declaration that on the cross of Jesus Christ the living God has dealt with all that distorts and defaces human life. And this meal therefore propels us out, to go into the community in the confidence that God is at work, that Jesus is Lord, that the Spirit can and does heal and renew.”
Wright moves further into our HOW do we live in forgiveness question with these reassuring thoughts:
“When I was a student chaplain I often had to listen to all kinds of stories of sorrow and anger as my young folk found their lives in a mess of one sort or another. I knew I didn’t have the answers. But I also knew that if they would only come to the Lord’s Table, bring their problems here, offer them up with open hands and then receive Jesus’ own life in return, there was the strong hope of freedom, of change, of healing, of transformation. I pray that it will be so with us.
And remember, when God is up to something new, it doesn’t always have to start with a bang. If God is going to hear our prayers in Holy Week and do new things in the Colliery, and in our lives, by our working through our sense of loss and bereavement in the light of the story of Jesus, it pretty certainly isn’t going to mean that suddenly hundreds of people are going to flood into church, hundreds of new houses are going to be built, crime and drugs will stop and all the problems out there and in here are going to be solved at a stroke. No. Jesus often told parables about sowing seeds, about things growing secretly, little by little.”
I don’t have the answer to my friend’s “how” question nor the solution to my own struggles to move into sorrow, betrayal, and confusion of some of life’s stories. But if I hear Wright correctly, and far more, understand the contour of the grand narrative of Scripture, I think it means to keep moving toward the Cross. To dine on his body and drink of his blood, that being the nourishment that works inexplicable changes in heart and life. To let this nourishment grow a new way of living for me and to be energized to go into a broken world and tell this amazing story of grace. And to go to the Cross on Good Friday and wonder again why they call it “Good” when it is so tragic. But that topic we will save for tomorrow.
P.S. For more on Maundy Thursday, read Scotty Smith’s prayer for the day.
