View archived copy here.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
14 April 2009
The Tuesday of Easter Week

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I missed my usual Friday morning missive last week. In the midst of sermon and service preparation time ran away from me. I decided you wouldn’t miss it too badly, what with the plethora of opportunities to attend church and the paper Easter Letter that also went out. Now we arrive at the Tuesday of Easter week and I’m writing you a Friday Letter even though it isn’t Friday.

I have just two quick things to share with you (after all those sermons, I’m quite out of religious things to say), the first a thank-you and the second a see-you-later. First, thank you for all of you who participated in our Holy Week services. Whether you were reading, serving, or attending, your presence made the week truly holy for me. Many moments stand out: the slowly dying candles of Wednesday evening’s Tenebrae, the choral anthem at Maundy Thursday, stripping the altar (upon which a nameless and unknown priest spilled rather a lot of communion wine) in preparation for Good Friday, our late evening vigil service, and the flowers and fanfare of Easter Sunday morning. Thank you for marking these momentous worship times with me again this year.

Second, part of the reason I’m sending you this on a Tuesday is that I’ll be away this Friday, and the one after it as well. After tonight’s Vestry meeting I’m taking two weeks of vacation. I’ll fly to Colorado tomorrow to spend a week with my brother and his wife. Much hiking and video gaming will ensue, I’m sure. The following Wednesday I’ll fly from Colorado to Arizona. While I’m leaving Denver Jieun will be leaving Seattle and by great airline coincidence we will both land at exactly 2:17pm in Phoenix (yeah, right). We’ll spend that next week with my mom: more hiking, less videogames, and a trip to Tucson to experience the Sonoran desert. I leave you in the capable hands of Ann Saunderson, and will see you on the first Sunday of May.

My thanks again for the wonderful Holy Week services we shared. May the joy of the risen Christ be amongst you, and the peace of this Easter season be with you always.

Peace,

Ben.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on Easter Sunday Morning
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Acts 10:34-43
John 20:1-18

I still remember first Easter services I attended of my own free will. I was fifteen years old and this was at All Saints Episcopal Church in Richland, Washington. The Rector was new that year, so it was his first Easter as well. I’d only known him for a few month, but already I knew he was one of those people who are overly fond of puns. The more you groaned the better he liked it. So I wasn’t all that surprised when he started of the Easter sermon by telling a series of really awful jokes with punny punch lines.
This is a time honored tradition in sermons as well as in many other forms of public speaking. Tell a joke or two to get people loosened up, make folks more comfortable. It provides verbal lubricant for the message that is to come. Even at fifteen I knew this, but come on! How many bad jokes does this guy need to tell? His message must be terribly boring.
It turns out that the message was the jokes. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, said Father Chuck, they tell jokes on Easter morning. They tell jokes at church, and at the fancy dinner afterwards. Why do they do this? Certainly the Russians are not known as the world’s most light hearted people? And why on Easter? Do they not respect the solemnity of the occasion? They tell jokes on Easter, he continued, because they honor God, and the truly great joke that God has played on the Devil by letting him think that Jesus was dead. Here is the greatest joke of all: that the world had killed its only hope of salvation, but salvation wouldn’t stay dead.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene hurries to the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid. She finds the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. She runs to fetch Peter and John, who come and find the same thing. They do not understand. They return home. Mary stays.
There are not enough women in the Bible. Too many of their stories are left untold, too many of their lives are left out of the scriptures. Thank God then, that the women we do have are such amazing people. It is Mary Magdalene who refuses to leave Jesus’ side on Good Friday, and Mary Magdalene who will not leave him Easter Sunday. Her persistence is rewarded, for Jesus is indeed there, and not in the tomb where she expected to find him, but standing behind her alive.
Then follows a bit of light comedy in the Shakespearean mode: Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus. We all know it’s Jesus. There is no attempt at suspense, for the text tells us it’s Jesus before Mary even mistakes him for the gardener. 99.999% of the people who have read this story down through the centuries knew the ending before they got there. The lack of suspense is the poignancy of Easter: Jesus is just there, no fanfare, no special effects. Yet Mary does not recognize him.
Until, that is, he says her name. “Mary!” says Jesus, and the punch line of the joke is revealed, and she knows at once that here is her beloved teacher, not dead as she supposed, but alive in a way that no human being has ever been alive before, and in which all human beings are to be made alive from now on. Easter is not a surprise, though it is an epiphany. Yes, we know God is stronger than death. Yes, we know the gardener is Jesus. Yet when we hear again Jesus calling the name of one he loved, the power of her response is renewed: I have seen the Lord.
Thus it is that we come to this blessed day knowing how the story will end, knowing each hidden character, knowing it all from many times before. We think we know. And yet we still make the same mistake that Mary did: we think that Jesus is just the gardener. Beware, then, of gardeners. For one day one will speak your name, and you will recognize that Jesus was there all along. ALLELUIA, CHRIST IS RISEN!

Two reflections by Benjamin J. Newland on the Great Vigil lessons.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a (The Story of Creation)

In the Beginning. Thus begins the story. Genesis. Newness. Creation. Beginning. On this night we mark the beginning of something the world had been waiting for since its first beginning. On this night, in the darkness, fire is kindled. On this night, light begins to shine, and the darkness shall not overcome it.
There is rhythm to God’s work of creation. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. The second day, the third day, and each day a distinct work of creation. God works in time, in season, in rhythm. This is not 24 hour clock time, but God’s time. Not, “What time is it?” but, “It is time.” And on that final day: rest. Peace after striving, rest after laboring; that the world newly created might grow. And God blessed it.
Tonight we tell the stories of our own beginnings. We read aloud the stories we all know about how God created the world, then saved it from itself, then tested it, and then set it free. Creation. Flood. Sacrifice. Freedom. These are the stories that are our foundation. With what came before, how should we tell what comes next? How could we talk about that new fire, kindled in the darkness?
Creation is not an act accomplished, but a love lived out. God did not create and then stop. God created, and creates, and will create again, kindling within us a fire, and the darkness shall not overcome it.

Genesis 22:1-18 (Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac)

This story describes the final conversation between God and Abraham. After the events described with such dramatic poignancy, Abraham and God would have no more of these dialogues. Something was finished here, that had not been finished before. Abraham has had faith in God, but did God have faith in Abraham?
This story demands our attention, and we pay it, usually to the terrible idea that God would require and parent to kill their own child. We spend our time attempting to explain this—with anthropological or theological slight of hand—or refusing to consider the story at all. Tonight let us look at it backwards, for this is a backwards story: it’s not about Abraham. It’s about God.
It is easy to miss God’s vulnerability in this story because we are not accustomed to thinking about God as vulnerable, and because everything seems to go as God orchestrates it. Yet what if it hadn’t? What if Abraham had refused, as any parent in their right mind would have refused, to sacrifice his own son? God must have suspected that Abraham would do as God asked, but God was not sure.
How dare I say such a thing? How dare I suggest that God is not all-knowing? Easy. I don’t say it; God does. “…for now I know that you fear God.” Now I know, says God, as in, I didn’t know before, but now I do. It isn’t Abraham that learns something new here. It is God.
Why tell such a tale on this most holy night? The connection is there. In the first century of the common era, Abraham and Isaac were both long dead and gone to live with God. Yet it came to pass that another Son was required for sacrifice. This time the son was God’s own, and perhaps what God had learned from Abraham meant that God could choose to make that sacrifice, and that the death of a Son might come to mean live for the whole world.

View archived copy here.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
Before I begin, there is a glass on the edge of the pulpit here. It is 50% occupied by water, and 50% by air. You all know this trick: I ask you if you think the glass is half full or half empty. If you say one you are an optimist. If you say the other you are a pessimist. I am here to tell you that there is a third option. Or rather, knowing you as I do, I am here to tell you that there is a third option which does not consist of a bad joke. I am going to leave this here, and let you wonder about it, until later. Let us begin:

…he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way,
and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Thus reads Isaiah, and it is nearly impossible for us to remember that he wasn’t talking about Jesus. How could these words not be about Jesus, we wonder? Of course, for us they are about Jesus, yet it’s worth remembering that Isaiah didn’t say them to us—didn’t say them about Jesus. These lines from Isaiah are part of what we’ve come to call his Suffering Servant poems. Again, even the title is perfectly applicable to Jesus, yet Isaiah’s suffering servant is not a single man, but rather the whole nation of Israel.
In Isaiah’s vision the nation of Israel serves as scapegoat for the community of all nations. We still know this word, scapegoat, and it still taps into the meaning Isaiah used it for. In Isaiah’s time and before, the ritual sacrifice of a goat was literal: the sins of the people were transferred onto the goat, which was then sacrificed in a liturgy of atonement wherein the people’s sins were forgiven. We no longer have a religious service of scapegoating, though the concept survives in nearly every other sense.
With or without goats, it is so very tempting to interpret Isaiah’s talk of Israel’s purpose amongst nations as being Jesus’ purpose amongst humanity at large. The goats are irrelevant; the text is clear: “upon him was the punishment that made us whole.” The technical term for this idea in theological words is “vicarious atonement”, as in, someone else (Jesus) has made atonement for us. This theology is tempting because it’s easy. Repentance and forgiveness are hard. Better if Jesus has died for our sins so that we don’t have to. Better still for us these two thousand years later, because it feels like the sins Jesus died for belonged to someone else a very long time ago and our own personal sins can be forgiven pro forma with little fanfare.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I don’t really like the theology of vicarious atonement. I think it is too easy. I think it makes God into a horrible person who would follow the letter of the law while his own son suffered and died. The problem with me not liking vicarious atonement, however, is that it’s true. Jesus did die for our sins, whether I’m comfortable with that or not, and whether I know exactly what that means or not. You needn’t really on Isaiah either; Jesus himself has a pretty clear idea that what he’s doing, he is doing on behalf of us, and not because he’s guilty of anything. That Jesus suffered and died for us isn’t all of the truth, but it is a very important piece of it.
Last Sunday we read the passion narrative from the Gospel of Mark. Today we read John’s version of that story, in which Jesus himself has a pretty clear idea about everything. For those of us who find John’s Gospel more difficult than the others it is generally for this reason. John’s Jesus is harder to relate to. Yet while he may seem less human, he has something to teach us. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is in control—his sacrifice is willing and loving. Here is not a helpless goat killed without understanding, but a conscious human being who gives intentionally with full understanding of the gift. While the world offers its very worst, Jesus returns only kindness and benediction.
If ever someone had reason to be pessimistic about the human race, Jesus should be that one. Sent by God to do only good, to heal and teach and bring the world into a better place, Jesus endures suffering and humiliation and torture and death. Yet the real scandal of the crucifixion lies not in its unique vision of suffering, but in its very normalcy. We tend to think of the crucifixion as unique, yet while Jesus was unique, the cross is common. Crucifixions happen every day. People suffer every day. People are humiliated everywhere all the time. Even today people are tortured, and every day people die in ways every bit as painful as the way that Jesus died. Pessimism, it seems, is no more than an open set of eyes in the world.
Yet no one ought to call Jesus a pessimist. Pessimism is less than our calling as Christians. Jesus’ very message negates pessimism as a valid response to the world for those who wish to be his followers. What option have we then? Optimism? The problem with optimism is that it flies in the face of reality all too often.
Before the crucifixion, the disciples were pulled out of whatever personal pessimisms they might have been living with, into a messianic optimism; a feeling the Jesus would right all wrongs immediately and permanently. On Good Friday, that optimism was forever destroyed.
What answer then, will I give? Half full, or half empty? I give neither. I give the answer I have not yet mentioned, the secret answer, which is hope. Not A, or B, but C: none of the above. If the glass is half full you are an optimist, if the glass is half empty you are a pessimist, but if you see the glass and its water as the body of Christ you might choose to live in Hope. In the end, we have no real choice but to live in hope, for on Good Friday optimism is simply not an option. Worse, neither is pessimism. For on Good Friday the glass is not half full, nor is the glass half empty, but the water is poured out, like Jesus’ life on the cross, and the vessel is shattered.
We have no real choice but to live in hope. And not the hope of Easter Sunday, which is too easily missed in the celebration and joy of resurrection, but the hope of Good Friday. It is a dark and secret hope. This hope is a small thing: a mustard seed in the face of a terrible drought, a human drought of misunderstanding, and suffering, and tragedy. The hope of Good Friday must be found beneath the hopelessness of pessimism, behind the falseness of optimism, deep in the heart of a creator who was killed by his creation.
It is the hardest kind of labor to find hope in the dark heart of Good Friday, but find it we must. For we cannot live in a world of Easter Sunday, except that we also live in the world of Good Friday.
In the name of our God who is a God of hope, AMEN.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you know what I have done to you?” He does not pause to give them a chance to answer, for which I can only imagine they are relived. Yet another uncomfortable experience at the feet (this time literally at the feet) of Jesus. This is how Jesus the teacher teaches those who wish to follow him: by one uncomfortable example after another.
We gather tonight to mark Maundy Thursday, the first of the Three Holiest Days, the Triduum. Maundy Thursday is a service of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. Many churches mark this night with an agape meal, a special community sharing of food, or with a Seder meal, in recognition of the Jewish roots of this festival day. The Maundy Thursday service is also specially marked by its closing actions. Instead of waiting for everyone to go home before cleaning as they do each week, on Maundy Thursday the Altar Guild cleans the sanctuary while we watch. All implements of worship are removed, the Altar stripped and washed, the lights turned out. We leave tonight with our sanctuary empty in preparation for Good Friday.
In addition to these two special features of the Maundy Thursday worship is that ritual for which Maundy Thursday is most famous—or infamous if you don’t like taking off your socks in public. The source material for this ritual is our Gospel text for tonight. “Do this in remembrance of me,” says Jesus in our lesson from I Corinthians. We have assumed for these last two thousand years that he meant the Bread and the Wine. “Do this,” he says, which isn’t very specific, and so we share the Lord’s Supper which draws its meaning from that Last Supper. Yet John’s Gospel has no such supper, and it is John’s Gospel we read this night. In John’s Gospel the disciples gather the evening before the festival not for bread and wine, but for foot washing. In John’s Gospel there is no Paschal feast, because Jesus is the Paschal feast.
When Jesus said to keep doing “this” in remembrance we assume he meant the Eucharist, but he could have meant the foot washing. He could have intended for us to get together each Sunday, to read from scripture, and recite some prayers, and sing some hymns, and then come forward, pew by pew, not to receive a bit of bread and a sip of wine, but to take off our shoes and have our feet washed. How about that? Every Sunday a foot washing Sunday? What would that say about us that would be different from how we do it now? Jesus said that it is not what goes in that has meaning, but what comes out. If we take that seriously, then foot washing, which is an action, is more significant that Eucharist, which is merely consuming. How embarrassed are we going to be when Jesus returns to find us at worship some Sunday morning and says, “You’ve been snacking on bread and wine all these years? I wanted you to serve people!”
I think most of us are probably relieved that the ceremony of foot washing comes just once a year. If we’d been doing it every week for two thousand years I guess we’d be used to it by now, but we haven’t been, and we aren’t. Foot washing is generally uncomfortable, even for those who enjoy participating. It is uncomfortable because it is humbling. No, let us use the stronger form of that word, it is more than humbling, it is humiliating. Ask anyone who has moved from their own house into a nursing home. Ask anyone who has been forced to allow others to wash them instead of doing it themselves. Allowing another to physically wash you is at least humbling if not humiliating.
However, (and this is the point Jesus was making to Peter) while having someone clean your body is humbling, having someone clean your soul is much, much worse. If we cannot suffer to be washed physically, how can we ever even admit that we might need to be washed of our sins? Much simpler to snack on bread and wine. You may have come here tonight planning to participate in the foot washing. You may have come here tonight dead set against it. Perhaps you came undecided. However you came, I sincerely invite you to participate. I know it’s uncomfortable; it’s uncomfortable for me too. It is not mandatory, of course, any more than receiving the bread and wine on every other Sunday is mandatory; if you choose not to participate that is OK, as long as you know why you’re not, and are willing to offer that reason to God in prayer.
OK, hard sell over. “Do you know what I have done to you?” asks Jesus, and of course they don’t. Even with knowing what is to come next, I’m not sure we know either. What has Jesus done to us with this object lesson on washing feet? Are we supposed to learn how to be served? How to serve? How to be vulnerable with one another, or care for the vulnerable in the world? How to lead through being last instead of first? All of these lessons I suppose, since Jesus was never one to say a single thing clearly when he could say several things obliquely.
He most likely meant for his disciples to hear all of those lessons as well. I can’t imagine they would remember them though, what with the events of the next three days to distract them. The lessons of foot washing are lessons to be remembered after the fact—to be drawn upon once things have settled down and it’s time to get to work. Lessons, therefore, for us. AMEN.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
3 April 2009

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

This past week I started reading a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I’ve read the introduction and the first chapter and so far I’m really enjoying it. It has that wonderful combination of personal resonance (“That’s exactly what I do!) and counter-intuitive insight (No way!). Thus far, the main theme seems to be that as human beings we are profoundly ill-adapted for nearly everything that has to do with driving. Nothing in our community history or intellectual development has prepared us for traffic, and thinking about it only seems to make it worse.

Over the past few weeks—during this season of Lent—we have spent a fair amount of time thinking about religion. My sermons have tended toward practical, intellectual pursuit of an understanding of faith and God (at least I think they have; I’m always surprised by what God manages to say while I think I’m saying something completely different…), perhaps in response to the excellent adult education series we enjoyed on Wednesday evenings. Discussing, analyzing, and just generally thinking about science and religion moves us into certain way of talking about faith—not a bad way, but a certain way.

This can get pretty frustrating, even if you enjoy it. Like traffic, nothing in our evolutionary history or intellectual development has prepared us for understanding God, and thinking about it only seems to make it worse. I’m emphasizing ‘understanding’ because I think that’s a fairly new thing for us to try to do to God. There are other ways of being with God that we are developed and prepared for, but now we so want to understand.

If you find yourself joining me in this frustrating place of wanting to understand but not feeling particularly well-adapted to it, I have good news for you: next week is Holy Week. The liturgies of Holy Week do not lend themselves to intellectual understanding. You can wield intellect against them if you wish, but they are meant to be emotive, not instructive. The liturgies of Holy Week contained in our Prayer Book and given life in our Churches are meant to touch us at a deeper level than brain alone. I invite you to join me in walking through this week not with mind alone, but with heart and soul open to hearing God’s call to relationship, whether we can understand it or not.

Peace,

Ben.