Sermons: March 2010

Sermon for Lent 3

March 7, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

I have heard from others on their way to ordination in the Episcopal Church of the joys of the General Ordination Exams.  While I recall the Methodist Church had its own brand of torture for such seekers, the GOEs seem to function at a special level.  I arrived in the priesthood mercifully by an alternate route -  through the apprenticeship of a year here at Grace, preaching, interviews with Bishop Jerry and interviews with the Standing Committee. 

Recently the writer Sarah Dylan who regularly shares her scholarship and thinking on an internet site I frequent, was recalling the GOEs and told of how she and friends rehearsed practice questions.  One such question was called the “coffee hour question.”    The candidate would be asked to respond to a situation such as this –  A 7 year old girl is part of your congregation.  Her mother has recently and suddenly died.  The little girl approaches you during coffee time and asks, “will I see my mommy in heaven?” 

Sarah recalled that in her rehearsal group there was a spirited conversation about resurrection, the immortality of the soul, the nature of life after death and how to explain this to a 7 year old.  However, Sarah offered this simple response to the little girl as a beginning point - “It sounds like you really miss your mommy.” 

In everything we have heard from our storytellers this morning in Exodus and Luke, from Sarah’s coffee hour question, even from a Sequence hymn dealing with religious persecution, from the day to day pictures of rubble that once was Haiti and Chile on the news – all of this lays before us a defining question – how are we to sort through when bad stuff happens to people; how can we explain it; how do we deal with it?  

I am convinced that the explanatory rhetoric we use reflects some of the most core component material of who we are and how we manage the living of our lives. When bad stuff happens whether at the most personal level or within the community of our friends and acquaintances or even in the larger world community, we are confronted with a flood of questions that swirl around the simple “why did this happen” which often quickly morphs into “why did thishave to happen, “ and which is the beginning of our attempt to connect meaning with the tragedy.  Often this connection is challenged by how we understand God in our lives. 

So, in the next few minutes I will try to offer a few things to consider about the pain of tragedy and suffering and what God may have to do with this. 

One unsettling thing is that in most cases of tragedy and suffering we really know the cause, we really know WHY – a drive by shooting, a dui accident, a heart attack, or from the Exodus account, the suffering and uncertainty of 40 years the Hebrews wandered the desert, or Jesus’ stories of the insidious act of violence by Pilate against some pilgrims and the surprising collapse of a tower, killing people without warning.  We know what happened – but we yearn to find meaning that breaches the chasm, offering a sense of fairness, assuring us that the loss is not in vain to speak in the language of military angst at loss of life in battle.   

To this discussion and the formation of an explanation, gods appear from all directions.  A god may appear from our childhood.  Bill Cosby is known for a famous routine about Noah and our childhood God at work.  God has called Noah to build an ark which he sets about doing most reluctantly.  Finally he is gathering the animals by two’s, male and female.  It is not going well and near the end he is shoving two hippos up the ramp when God calls.  “What!” cries Noah.  And God breaks the news that he has two males.  Go get a female.  Noah, exasperated, declares “You change one.”  God responds – you know I don’t work that way. 

It is this childhood god we want to change things, or at least to exercise better control!  Then there are the gods from an abusive guilt generating religious experience which can breed even greater pain and suffering.  Rex Hunt, a pastor, describes this as the “ghosts of old gods that refuse to completely go away.”  We hear them in the strident sadness of the rhetoric.  God is one of anger and retribution for the unrighteous, who rewards good health and prosperity to the righteous.   And we wonder filled in guilt, what awful thing have we done to deserve what has happened? 

Many in Jesus’ day believed in this behavior of God.  If you live in poverty or have a bad accident or disease, you are revealed by God as a sinner.  If you are healthy and proper you are revealed by God as a righteous person.   This view remains very much operative today causing one warped soul recently during a sound-bite moment to conclude that sinful living was the real cause of the Haitian earthquake.  Just this morning on CBS Sunday morning I heard a Hollywood celebrity who I will not name – Shaun Penn – who spoke of the Haitians as being “pushed down by the hand of God.”  The residual echoes of this  still disquiet our lives.  Other gods are found in the 1000 funeral clichés – “God needed him/her in heaven. . .We can never completely understand the will of God.. .  God is testing our faith.”  This last one is a particularly effective sword through the heart of the one who is suffering.   

None of this of course has much to do with the God of Jesus. 

What do we learn about God and suffering from Jesus?  First, Jesus does not invent a new concept about God – the God he speaks of is very much part of the Hebrew scriptures, from Job and Hosea. Here from Exodus pay close attention to the conversation between Moses and Yahweh.   From the burning bush God assures Moses that he has seen “the misery of my people. . . I know their suffering and I have come to lead them to a good land.”  Yahweh goes on to tell Moses the name by which he is to be known - “I AM will be with you.”   Sarah’s answer to the little girl - “It sounds like you really miss your mommy” - arises from the pastoral recognition of pain reflected in this name.  Being with you is a beautiful extension of God the creator, the birther, the one who continues to care and nourish what he brings into being.   

But then the God of Jesus is different; there is an intentional, assumed weakness – a setting aside of an all powerfulness, all knowingness.  Something in our creation as beings of his image, our thinking and deciding capabilities and the necessity for an environment of freedom to flourish has led God to set aside something of himself in the journey from the empty void to a created world teaming with life. 

Our collective life journey is coming to what God has created humanity to be.   Our journey includes moments of great thought,  creativeness, compassion, but also moments of lostness by our choices and our self-centeredness, moments when our history becomes engulfed by great evil and times of confrontation with our bodily mortality.  In the midst of these life-long wilderness crossings the God“I AM will be with you” cultivates and nourishes our pressing onward.  The God of Jesus weeps among us, beside our graves, takes upon himself our pain and our moments of lostness and our evil and in Jesus continues to lead to repentance and to what we are called to be. 

That Jesus chose to speak of God in parent language is a great gift toward our understanding of God.  As a parent should wish good things for their children; as a parent stands ready to bandage and minister to a child’s needs, so God walks among us, in our valley of darkest shadows through fearful places always with us and always leading to a Table prepared for us in that final banquet. 

Let me close by calling your attention to our Sequence Hymn today.  I am sure that you did not know it – that would have been unlikely.  It is unlikely it has ever been sung in an Episcopal Church before.  The text as we have it was written by a Morman pioneer during the persecution period which led to the church’s exodus experience, the migration to the Salt Lake Valley.  As they struggled to understand the hatred of other Christians toward them and the martyrdom of their leader, this hymn is a confession of confidence in the God “I AM will be with you.”  I think as a community of faith it is important for us to embrace and affirm and make our own these times within the story threads of all God’s people  that celebrate with confidence the promise of God “I AM will be with you”.  For the ending words of the hymn belong to us as well – “Fear not, and be just, For the kingdom is ours, The hour of redemption is near.” 

This Lent might be a good time to think on Jesus’ own words of promise – “Lo, I am with you always.”     Amen. 
 

Sermon for Lent 4

March 14, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

In 1972 as a United Methodist minister I first arrived at Trinity Church in Sunnyvale and I went through all the normal things the new pastor should do including address a rather sizeable stack of mail that had gathered in the office. 

Among the pieces was a letter from a girl of about 18 who had grown up in the church and was now going to University of the Pacific in Stockton.  In her letter she asked to withdraw her membership since she was now active in another church.  I responded in those pre-email days in my friendly style with a note explaining that normally we would transfer her membership to this new church if she would supply an address.  She wrote back explaining that now she was a true Christian and hadn’t been before so there was nothing to transfer.  She had found Christ.

I have never forgotten that letter, nor have I forgotten what I wrote in return.  I said to her that I felt sorry she felt that way and that I hoped that as she grew in her Christian faith she would be able to fully embrace her ENTIRE life story as one where God had always been present and was always leading her.

If there is any one place that we can go to know the mind of Jesus it is to the story we have today - the parable of the Prodigal Son.  For in this brief story is Jesus’ view of our struggle to do what is right.  The story teaches us about ourselves and gives clarity to understanding life as a redemptive journey.

The Prodigal story is an amazing illustration of what we heard in the readings and sermon last week about God’s relationship to us when bad stuff happens.  Today the bad stuff is completely our own creating, it is our lostness and our evil; it is our attempt to go away, our rebellion, our leaving home; yet Jesus offers this up as part of the journey of faith, a journey that includes repentance and a return home MUCH different from what we were and more closely made in the image of what we have been created to be.

The prodigal story is not a singular event.  It is the pattern of our lives – the going out, leaving home, the running away from all that has formed us, its our self-centeredness, followed by the wasting and the squandering of that which has been given and the confusion and loss of direction.  But the pattern of the story continues with a coming to the truth about ourselves and what we really know.  And the coming back and reconciliation.  The mystery of God’s redemption is that even when we are unfaithful, absent of gratitude for our very breath, when we miss the mark, we are still in the journey of faith, drawn back to what we were created to truly be.  As I said last week, the God “I AM will be with you” cultivates and nourishes our pressing onward.”   This is powerful stuff.

You and I repeat this pattern over and over because it is what we do in our actions and inaction – our unkindnesses, by what we say in harshness, by who and what we fear, by our misjudgements and misunderstandings and mistrust of those unlike ourselves. It is what we do even when we try to walk away from God.  It is hard to understand and to accept that confusion and losing our way as part of the life of faith, perhaps even a necessary part of the journey, but it is.

There were two sons - the younger wants to leave home because he sees no future for himself and he asks for his share of what might be his inheritance (though in reality no property would be rightfully his).  His request is an insult to the father and to the family, but the father knows there is no point in trying to hold on to him so he agrees to share his property with both sons at this point.

Armed with what his father has given he sets out for a far land (as far from home as possible) – an immigrant to a new place perhaps even with somewhat worthy motives, but he is soon lost in extravagance.  He is over whelmed.  And he wastes everything – his inheritance, his dignity, his worth.  Left with nothing, all is hopeless among the pigs - - - oink, oink.

And then there is the MOMENT of interior self-recognition and MEMORY or as the story says - “But then he came to himself.”  Absolutely amazing words.  He came to himself.  With that he begins the long journey back to his Father, little knowing that the Father had never left him.  And now we have another AMAZING MOMENT for the Father was always watching and waiting and loving, and now he sees his son coming home.  Ignoring the teachings of some Hebrew scriptures – remember the younger Son by his behaviour had brought great dishonour to his family and even the village – the father runs out to meet him and perhaps even to protect him should someone attempt to harm or even  kill him as justifiable revenge.  The father welcomes the son back with an extravagant homecoming party.

The father, you see, chose to recall a different message from the Hebrew scriptures, those many places where we find the Prodigal paradigm played over and over.  It is in fact the story of Israel.  Israel forgets itself; it brings disgrace to its birth as the chosen people of God.  It wanders from the truth of its creation; It looses its way.  The Hebrew story-tellers speak to us of the pain of the Father who must watch and wait for the CRY from memory to bring Israel back.   The prophet Hosea opens us to this heart of God as God ponders simply ending the relationship with Israel, asking – “How can I give you up?  I made you in love.  You are my sons and daughters and I shall draw you back to myself.”  Such is the heart of God.  Such is the father in this story of Jesus.

Now what about the other son?  What we usually don’t recognize in him is ourselves when we become unable to celebrate, to dance and party over his “coming to oneself”, his repentance and turning around, and the joyful reconciliation. Unlike the Father who has never stopped loving either son, this older son cannot see in the absence of his joy that he is also in a faraway place from the Father.  He has turned his back on his Father’s generosity and compassion even though he thinks he has never left and honors his father.  The eldest is wasting the gifts every bit as much as the son who left and we are left at the end unknowing when or whether the older son will “come to himself” and understand.  Will he ever get it?  The father waits.

Our life of faith includes both sons.  It is a journey of birth, of growth, of setting out and using the gifts of freedom and choice.  It is of moments of self-centeredness, of becoming confused and even lost; and of remembering – coming to ourselves, to what we really know about ourselves and that which is of God within each of us, and the reunion of the broken pieces.  The journey is also about our struggle with jealousy and our self-serving sense of fairness, which blinds us to the total truth of God’s love.

The redemptive moment begins with a MEMORY, a soft cry of memory that whispers out of the darkness and emptiness the truth about us.  The Dutch pastor, Huub Oosterhuis speaks of this in his song “The Lord has seen me.”  [from Prayers, Poems and Songs by Huub Oosterhuis,  page 146]

The lesson of the Prodigal is not that we have faith in God, but that God believes in us; not that we hope in God, but that God’ s hope for us remains unshaken.  God chooses us. 

Every Sunday we gather here for a home-coming, a celebration meal of the simple symbols of bread and drink, symbols of life and nourishment.  Each time Jesus says to us, “Do this In the remembrance of me.”  To remember, to come once again to what God truly calls us to be;  to understand how fully God loves  you and welcomes you to this table no matter where you might be on your journey of faith, this is the work of grace.  Listen carefully within the sounds and silences of the liturgy and you will hear the words spoken again and again and again – welcome home.  Amen.

Fifth Sunday in Lent (Year C, RCL)

Isaiah 43:16-21   Psalm 126 
Philippians 3:4b-14   John 12:1-8

Sometimes I think I do more pastoring at school than at Grace.

In less than two years I’ve counseled
  • a vet with Post-Traumatic Stress Depression
  • a young woman whose boyfriend is in a coma; her not-quite mother-in-law was denying her access to their child
  • a young woman whose family drove her out of the house because she’s gay
  • another young woman took my course last quarter, failed it, and took it again this quarter. She recently disappeared for two weeks; when she returned she told me she’d just finished drug rehab. She came for a few classes, then disappeared again.
 

Is there something you all aren’t telling me? 

As you know, I teach Religious Studies at CSUB. I love teaching and I love Religious Studies, but each quarter my students and I have to deal with some pretty depressing stuff: this past quarter we covered, among other topics of sunshine and uplift, the Jonestown Massacre and the Holocaust; next quarter in my Christianity class we’ll read two ante-bellum sermons, one attacking slavery—and the other defending it. Both sermons are by Christians who use the Bible to support their positions. 

Given all this, and the world’s daily mayhem, I’ve found myself lately in the rather odd position of having to play the optimist to son David’s pessimism. David is really intelligent, but—or because of that intelligence—it seems that when he looks out on the world he sees mostly wrack and ruin. 

Should a 16-year old be doing that? When I was 16 I was too busy to be depressed—playing basketball, combing my hair, and editing an underground anti-war newspaper at my high school. 

Here I am now at the end of my fifth decade under heaven. I, like some of you, have walked through the valley of the shadow of depression; I, like some of you, have committed my share of crimes and misdemeanors, petty thefts and grand larcenies.  

Doesn’t the Collect for today, in that glorious Anglican style, capture our situation perfectly? 

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

“The unruly wills and affections of sinners.”  

“The swift and varied changes of the world.”  

Aren’t our unruly wills and affections ignorant armies that clash by day and night within us? Don’t we do seemingly endless battle against the swift and varied changes of the world? And the older we get, the more it seems like a losing battle.

So-called “realty shows” are the latest craze on TV. But compared with our unruly wills and the world’s swift and varied changes, those shows are escapist fantasies; the real reality is what happens every day in our spiritual being. 

And this is why we need Lent. Lent is our great reality check: it begins on Ash Wednesday when we anoint ourselves with our own ashes. Could God give us a greater wake-up call than that? 

Lent is our forty-day AA meeting. Lent is our best friend doing an intervention on our behalf. But Lent also hugs us to her breast when no one else will. Or perhaps Lent hugs us to her breast when everyone will. 

About 1600 years ago, a young monk very much like us, a spiritual sojourner, came with a question to Abba Macarius, one of the greatest early Christian spiritual leaders: "My father, I have committed a transgression. What do I do?” 

Abba Macarius, quoting both the Old and the New Testament, says to him,  

It is written, my child, “I do not desire the death of a sinner so much as his repentance and his life.”1 Repent, therefore, my child; you will see him who is gentle, our Lord Jesus Christ, his face full of joy for you, like a nursing mother whose face is full of joy for her child. When the child raises his hands and his face up to her, even if he is full of all kinds of uncleanness, she does not turn away from that bad smell and excrement but takes pity on him and lifts him up and presses him to her breast, her face full of joy, and everything about him is sweet to her.2  

This monastic parable invites us into its world, asks us to stay awhile, to rest and have supper; then, refreshed, we leave this transformative space changed in heart, mind, and soul. 

You may have noticed that the young monk says, “I have committed a transgression.” Macarius replies, in effect, “No, my son, you’ve sinned.” 

Isn’t this young man so us? We realize we’ve done something wrong; we feel bad about it, but not exactly guilty—guilt is, well, so Catholic! We know we need to do something about what we’ve done, but we can’t quite get ourselves to utter the “s”-word: sin. 

It may well be that, to our detriment, we Episcopalians are especially squeamish about talking about sin. 

Macarius, though, cuts right through our squeamish denial and dilettantish acknowledgement of transgression: he speaks of “death” and “sinner” with the same breath. Then he calls for repentance.  

This parable is written in Coptic, the final form of Egyptian, which was probably given an alphabet by Greek-speaking Christian missionaries. The Coptic words for both "repentance" and "repent" convey the idea of (re)turning, turning back, as in Latin convertere, from which we get “conversion.” 

Last Sunday Vern preached beautifully on the prodigal son, who returns to his father. In this Coptic parable, the prodigal child returns to his mother, “our Lord Jesus Christ, his face full of joy . . ., like a nursing mother whose face is full of joy for her child.” 

The beauty of this parable is that it doesn’t shy away from ugliness: “when the child raises his hands and his face up to her . . .,” the abba says, “he is full of all kinds of uncleanness, . . . bad smell and excrement.” 

How many of you here have changed a diaper? Now we know exactly how sin stinks! 

Perhaps sin is not so much death as it is moral and spiritual stench. Perhaps death is not so much the result of sin as spiritual and moral death cause sin. 

But notice what Christ our Mother does here: when the child raises his hands and his face up to her, she doesn’t say “Already?! Yuck!” She doesn’t grab Mr. Poopy-drawers by the hand and, muttering all the way, drag him to the changing table, where she will clean and change him. Then, and only then, when his bottom is freshly laundered, will she give him a hug. 

No. Christ loves us, unreservedly loves us, poopy drawers and all: “when the child raises his hands and his face up to her, even if he is full of all kinds of uncleanness, she does not turn away from that bad smell and excrement but takes pity on him and lifts him up and presses him to her breast, her face full of joy, and everything about him is sweet to her.” 

Everything about him is sweet to her. Everything. 

Everything about us is sweet to Christ. Even when we’re full of excrement. 

Excrement requires changing. Christ our mother is always there to help us. 

If we can believe this, and truly accept it, we will then be better able like Christ to mother others—and even ourselves. Amen.

Sermon for Palm Sunday

March 28, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

A week ago this past Friday was Grandparent’s Day at the Olive Knolls Church Pre-school.  Melinda and I drove into town to see our grand-daughters, Paige(3) and Emma (5), do their thing among the cast of hundreds of ankle-bitters.  It is a huge pre-school attached to their K-8 school all of whom took part at their turn. 

Having been to these things at Christmas I knew what to expect in the large auditorium with the blasting Voice of the Theater speakers and canned music which the kids sing to, augmented by brief quotations of scripture from the kids – Emma had a part which she rendered with a flourish.  The theme was the death of Jesus – this is a church pre-school and it was almost Holy Week.  And so we listened as Emma and Paige and the other 100 sang out about how Jesus had died for their sins.  I had hoped for a brief respite – a bunny or two, a spring-time flower or the birth of pups or kitties.  But no – Jesus died for our sins, with a beat. 

As Bumble-Bear (their name for me), was I troubled by this for my 3 year and 5 year olds?  Am I still troubled?  Guess.  What I want to speak about for a few moments today comes from this; it is something which is very personal to each of us, something for which a right answer is still somewhat elusive.  Why did Jesus die?  What did he die for?   

For much of Lent our wilderness journey has caused us to face some difficult questions – why does bad stuff happen to good people, to the innocent?  Where is God at times when we confront horrific expressions of evil in the many forms of devastation and destruction?  The very questions may challenge how we have thought about God, inviting us in faith to set aside some ideas about God which simply do not work for us or that misrepresent the God we find in the life of Jesus.  As I said a few weeks back the God of Jesus is really different.  There is in the God of Jesus an intentional assumed weakness – a setting aside of attributes such as all powerfulness and all knowingness.   Something in our creation as beings of his image, our thinking and deciding capabilities and the necessity for an environment of freedom to flourish has led God to set aside something of himself.  The relationship between the creator and created have recast each other.  Of this Jesus speaks of the Godly creator who nurtures life, who wills for it to flourish, using the parent metaphor with all the complexities that includes.  God speaks through the words and actions of Jesus to reveal his heart.  

Today our reading of the Passion focuses on Jesus’ last week.  Let’s summarize the story again.  It is Passover, the celebration of the Exodus – the core experience of Jewish identity and an annual event causing great unrest for Jerusalem as thousands of pilgrims flooded the city.  As always there was a need to exercise control over the population.  Pilate was charged by Rome with that responsibility.  He was ruthless in the task.  His tool of choice to maintain the Pax Romana was the cross, a particularly cruel and public instrument to take the life of the unfortunate victim.  There were 100s of crosses in the area of the city as quiet testimony to Pilate’s commitment to order. 

Jesus enters the city in such a fashion that there is at least a minor demonstration.  Riding on a donkey carried with it not just an image of humility, but a prophetic reminder of the words of Zechariah (9:9) of a hoped for Messiah - “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you.”  Later, his disciples share a meal together.  There is talk of betrayal and denial, and arguments about who is most important among them. Jesus goes out to pray; those watching are not able to stay awake with him.  He is arrested, mocked, tried, and humiliated.  The Gospel accounts tend to shield Pilate for at the time when Luke writes, Christians are threatened with continuing persecution.  The crowd cries for crucifixion perhaps in their own way trying to demonstrate cooperation with Rome.  For Pilate it is always a matter of maintaining order and preventing civil unrest.  The brief Gospel reference to a “recent insurrection” indicates the severity of threats to the Peace and Pilate’s rule.  And with the case against Jesus he could also gain support from the Temple authorities in ridding this “difficulty” for them.  And so Jesus is crucified.  A guard at the cross observes, “Certainly this man was innocent.”  Jesus is buried in a tomb and the story concludes.  

As I said earlier, when we come to ask why did Jesus die, our answers often speak more about ourselves, how we experience God and how we deal with evil.  For me the story of Jesus in this last week is the story of evil and what happens when Garden Earth becomes catastrophically lost in darkness.  Theologically the Church has struggled with many answers to this question of Jesus’ death, what is sometimes called  Doctrines of Atonement(Redemption).   Most of the results are far too judicial in construction, too legalistic and mechanistic to help me much anymore.  For me the STORY itself is everything.  It is important to come to those final words of the passion and pause and listen to the absolute silence.  To ponder at that final moment a world as if God has died.  For when we meet this horrendous evil in its many forms that we humans have created, it is as if God has died.  This is Sin, not of careless speech or thoughtless action or careless inattention, but Sin that takes from others the true right to life as a beloved child of God.  It is our sin in so far as we play a part within the total human story; we claim by the accident of birth a contribution to the millions of choices and decisions made which shape the economic, social and political contours of our present world.  I have no patience to excuse evil as the activity of a Satan or in its most bizarre sense the punishment of God.  That divine image in our creation that made us choice-makers joins us to the beneficial AND the tragically wrong.  It is all our responsibility.  This is the unbearable, painful truth of our creation. 

I watched last Friday the program Who do you think you are?, the story following 13 entertainment personalities as they go back within their own family history to learn about their past.  Lisa Kudro was in last week’s episode.  Her family roots reach back into Eastern Europe into a small village of Ilya in what is now Belarus.  Her great-grandmother’s family including the children  had been murdered in WWII by the invading Nazis.  She learned how the SS had gathered up all the Jews they could identify, took them to a large open pit in town and machine-gunned them two or three at a time and then burned them, some still alive.  As she stood at the same spot now 70 years later, you could still hear the whisper – “Why?”

So it always seems each time we are forced to look into the pit of that horrible darkness, absent of light, driven by hate, fear, the quest for power or revenge or even the insane joy for brutality. Why?

In the past several years I tend to more and more understand the message of Christianity through the eyes of the writer of John’s Gospel and his opening words.  Without a star or manger, John begins the story with the simple truth “In the beginning was the Word. . . and the Word became flesh and lived among us.”  Incarnatus est – the Incarnation.   

To find redemption from within the events of evil in our human driven world you have to embrace the whole story of Jesus, not just the last few days or few hours. This is what John means by incarnates est.  There is a continuity between his life and his death – they are part of a single thread.  John reminds us, that which is God lived among us, raising up the forgotten, the rejected, the unloved, those thrown aside, the abandoned.  As he did this, those who saw it, who witnessed him, realized they were seeing God touch them, love them, defend them, seek after them and welcome them.  Jesus revealed to them the heart of God in his life and this revelation continues from the cross. 

Our sisters and brothers from the early church preached Christus Victor, of Christ’s death and resurrection as “overcoming death, sin, and the devil.”  This was Jesus’ whole life ministry – the healings, the parables all lead to the coming Kingdom of God, the Divine Community of Grace-filled Life.  Jesus reveals to us what God has always been.  God suffers with our suffering.  God has always been among the broken-hearted.  The cross becomes the culmination of Jesus’ life ministry.  God enters the pit of darkness because only from the pit can we be led toward the land promised for us by our creation.  The cross redeems because from it God embraces each of us in love leading us even out of death’s slavery – a new Exodus.  It is within the whole story of Jesus that we find ourselves driven by the unrelenting, compassionate, nurturing CRY of God’s love, lifting us always out of darkness toward light.  Amen.