Monday, April 10, 2017

Palm Sunday 2017 (with photos) -- Philippians 2:5-11

Palm Sunday A 2017
Isaiah 50; Phil 2:5-11; Matthew’s Passion
                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  
April 9, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

In the reading this morning from Philippians, Paul tells us to think like Jesus. Specifically, Paul is taking about how Jesus was willing to empty himself of the power and privileges we imagine he had as God to become a human being. Paul writes that though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness…and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.  We read this passage from Philippians with our Passion narrative today because Jesus’ entire passion and death speak of his refusal to stay aloof in heaven, but instead to come down and do whatever is necessary to reconcile us back to God.

I want to look particularly at the line, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.  The passion has very little to do with the qualities most associated with God, especially in the ancient world.  We often think of God as all-powerful, invincible, the head of armies of supernatural angels or other beings.  We see in our gospel how Jesus refuses to take advantage of that kind of divine power to save himself. 

While he is in the garden being arrested, one of his followers pulls out a sword and attacks a slave of the high priest.  Jesus says that he could have twelve legions of angels if he wanted them.  But he doesn’t call for them. 

When he is being interrogated by the high priest, Jesus says that they will see him on the right hand of God and coming on the clouds of heaven.  But at that moment, Jesus doesn’t wow them with rhetorical brilliance, or perform miracles, or do any other signs or wonders that might secure his release.  He remains silent before the many accusations made by the chief priests and by Pilate. 

Later, while hanging on the cross, bystanders mock him.  They note that he did miracles to save others, and he should be able to save himself.  If he could raise Lazarus from the dead, he should be able to get himself off the cross and heal his wounds.  But he doesn’t.  He doesn’t even surround himself with a happy glow, or use some sort of divine meditation technique to remove any feelings of pain or suffering.  He doesn’t exploit his equality with God even to feel God’s presence surrounding him in his death.  Instead he cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.  In all things, Jesus has refused to take advantage of or exploit his status as Son of God in order to make things easier for himself.  Instead, he has given up everything, so that when we too die, we can remain reconciled to the God of life. 

Paul may be talking about something even beyond the personal choices that Jesus is making, however.  When he says that Jesus didn’t regard equality with God as a thing to be exploited, maybe he didn’t mean only that Jesus decided he wasn’t going to do it.  Maybe he also meant that Jesus knew that equality with God wasn’t something that it was possible to exploit.  My colleague in North East, Pastor Carol Carlson, talks about this understanding.  Maybe being God isn’t really about smiting folks or ordering hosts of angels around.  Maybe a crucial component of being equal with God is about letting go of anything except an all-consuming love of God and neighbor.  What Paul is trying to tell us is that we can’t possibly understand what God is really about if we don’t understand that Jesus exhibited his equality with God by loving God enough to be obedient and by loving us enough to die to reconcile us back to God.  Maybe what makes God God is love, and that the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-everything are just incidental characteristics.  Too often we think that being God is all-everything, and we’re lucky that God is also love, but I think that’s backwards.  Jesus didn’t regard equality with God as something to be exploited because equality with God is about loving like God, and once you start taking advantage and exploiting, you’ve stopped loving.

Think about God hanging out as Trinity before the creation of the universe.  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit just existing in love.  Then they have a longing.  They want to create a universe to love.  Certainly, not having a universe would be a whole lot less trouble.  Fewer prayer requests, no betrayal and intrigue with Lucifer, avoid the whole crucifixion piece.  Nevertheless, we hear, “Let there be light…let there be dry land and animals and birds and fish and creepy crawly things…and let us make humanity in our image and likeness.”  Out of that initial decision to love, God ends up having to go through all kinds of other actions throughout history that also exhibit love.  We see the covenant with Abraham, the saving of Israel through the Red Sea and bringing them the long way into the promised land, the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and, most powerfully of all, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, teaching and healing, and eventually dying so he can rise again. 

I think there are some parallels with parenting here.  Studies repeatedly show that parents without children are happier.  They have fewer stresses, less financial pressure, more sleep, more freedom, and more time for each other and themselves.  Yet, people decide to have children, and even yearn for that opportunity, sometimes going to great lengths for fertility treatments or adoptions.  As a result, they get more difficulties, more sleepless nights, less financial stability, and more suffering, as they suffer when their children suffer even more then when they themselves suffer.  More importantly, they also develop more love.  Children, at least in my experience, have a way of drawing love out you that you never knew you had.  They call forth willing sacrifices that you never knew you could make.  Even if the kids do some chores now and then, there is nothing about real parenting that involves something to be exploited.  There is only a call to ever-increasing opportunities to love. 

This same attitude is exactly what we see in the life of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.  When Jesus teaches us to call God, “Our Father,” he wants us to see God as that incredibly loving parent.  When Jesus looks at Jerusalem and compares himself to a mother who wants to sweep together all his beloved children and protect them, he is sharing that he sees himself as our loving parent, as well.  We shouldn’t really be surprised by Jesus’ willingness to undergo whatever suffering is necessary, even this extraordinary painful and horrible death, in order to offer us reconciliation, healing and new life.  This kind of love is what parents always want to show their children.  Most of us fall short because we aren’t Jesus, but we would want to go to those lengths if necessary.  Jesus, through whom all things came to be and in whom we live and move and have our being, exhibits that kind of love for us because that is precisely what equality with God is about.  As God, Jesus is able to love fully and completely, and he chooses to do just that for us through his passion, death and resurrection.
 
Paul says that we should have that same mind as Jesus, meaning we should strive to love one another as Jesus loved us.  We should strive to be like God, and God is about love.  We don’t need to be parents to have this kind of love, and, in fact, God is calling us to this kind of amazing sacrificial love for each other even when we don’t have family or other ties.  We love one another because that is how we become like God. 

Paul ends this section by saying that God highly exalted Jesus for his sacrifice and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.  Since loving is the defining characteristic of God, then Jesus’ ultimate act of love resulted in him being exalted as God and Lord above everything else.  As we share in Christ’s love through our own acts, we, too, grow more deeply into the life of God and we can rest assured of a place with our Father in heaven.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.


Monday, April 3, 2017

Lent 5 2017

Lent 5A 2017
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11
                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  
April 2, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This week we had a sudden death in the parish.  Gary was our senior warden and had gotten involved in many of our ministries in the relatively short time he has been at St. John’s.  He was taken too soon generally, and way too soon from those of us who were just getting to know him. 

When tragedies like this occur, especially at times when someone seems to be doing everything right, we have a lot of questions.  We mostly want to know why, but our desire to make sense of death has a host of corollary inquiries, as well.  Our fundamental response as Christians to these questions is generally not the easy explanation we would like.  Our response is not to minimize the tragedy of death or the suffering of those left behind. Instead, our response looks squarely into the bleakness of the grave and proclaims that we have something even more powerful.  Our response is hope.  Our response is the good news of Jesus Christ.  Our response is that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

We see one aspect of this hope in our first reading this morning.  Ezekiel is writing to people who were driven from their homes, carried off to Babylon, and dying in a strange land.  He looks over a valley filled with bones, and sees that they were very dry.  Ezekiel prophecies to the bones and they come together and take on sinews and flesh and skin.  Then Ezekiel prophecies and they are filled with breath and spirit.  Instead of a valley of dead bones, the whole multitude of God’s people are standing there.  They are resurrected from the dead – brought out of their graves.  We aren’t talking here about some zombie apocalypse with animated corpses running around.  Ezekiel’s vision is of those who have died being fully restored to life.

Part of the full restoration to life in being in community.  The whole house of Israel is restored in Ezekiel’s prophecy.  We don’t have people off in some private post death experience of afterlife, sitting in a nice garden by themselves.  Instead, we have everybody coming out of their graves and being restored to their own land, their own communities, their own cities, their own people.  The image that the book of Revelation uses for the eternal dwelling of the resurrected people of God is a city – the New Jerusalem.  The city is huge, something like fifteen-hundred miles on each side, and fifteen-hundred miles high.  The buildings must have some great views. The point is that we are going to be together as a restored community.  A community of love and righteousness.  A festive community of good wine and rich foods of every ethnicity and culinary palate. A community of art and culture offered in praise before the throne of the crucified lamb of God who was raised from the dead.  We are, in the end, restored to the fullness of a physical life beyond this current, mortal life so that we can be part of this eternal people of God.  This resurrected community is the hope we hold.

The good news that we proclaim is that we can get there because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.  For me the most powerful and compelling way to understand Jesus’ resurrection goes back to the early Greek bishops and theologians.  They saw Jesus as a victorious conqueror going down to the land of the dead and breaking free.  Jesus, being fully human, was able to die.  But Jesus, being fully divine, was not able to be held by death.  Imagine the Son of God going down to hell – not the hell of Dante’s inferno with fire and brimstone and torture, but the way that the ancient people understood the abode of the dead.  The light of the world descends to a place of darkness. The Word in whom all things came to be enters a land of shadows and gloom, of ghosts and shades.  Instead of staying, however, he goes to the entrance, beats up the devil guarding it, and kicks open the front door.  On the way out, he breaks the locks and rips the gates off their hinges so they can never confine anyone again.  Then he goes back to his Father, taking anyone in hell with him that wants to come with him.  The gates of death are broken and no one has to stay there anymore.  When we die with Christ, we follow him right out the front door to a place of paradise with his heavenly Father.  We don’t wait in darkness for that final resurrection Ezekiel describes, but we wait in a paradise with others in the nearer presence of God.  Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection that overcomes death for us is the good news of our gospel proclamation.

We also proclaim the message the Jesus preached when he was on earth – that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  Our faith is not just about something that happens to us after we die.  Our faith is that the power of God is breaking into the world right now, that our eternal life is so close that we can reach out and touch it, that we can live as if we are already citizens in that New Jerusalem we are moving toward.  The assurance of the Kingdom of God on its way right now is exciting and joyful, but also sometimes frustrating.  One the one hand, we see miracles, we find ourselves transformed, and we experience the love, joy, and peace of the Holy Spirit.  Yet on the other hand, we still experience the pain of loss, the tragedy of death, and the scourges of poverty, oppression, addiction and ignorance.  Yet even in the midst of what seems to be evil, we can find God to be present.  God is always redeeming, restoring, and bringing new life.

In our gospel today, we see Jesus bringing the Kingdom of God to his friends.  In perhaps Jesus’ most powerful miracle, he calls Lazarus out of the tomb after he has been dead for four days.  Lazarus is not resurrected as Jesus will be on Easter morning or as we look forward to ourselves at the last day.  Lazarus is just brought back to this life.  He’ll die again, at least for a while, before being finally raised to the fullness of life.  Jesus presence and miracle, however, is the profound demonstration he has brought the Kingdom of God with him.  Lazarus is restored to the community of his family and friends.  This loving miracle also brings people to a deeper faith in the power of God and the identity of Jesus as the Messiah.  Lives are transformed on a number of levels.  The coming Kingdom of God means that we have a King, Jesus, who is already making the power of his rule and his life felt today.  So much of what we do as a church is an sign of that power and life, at least when we are letting God work through us.    

Paul writes that if there were no resurrection of the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.  He’s right.  All our faith, our love, and our hope would be for naught if we had nothing to look for beyond this existence or if Jesus no longer had the power to shine into our lives.  But we have hope.  We proclaim the good news of the resurrection.  We have seen the Kingdom of God breaking into our lives in around us.  These are the answers we can give in the midst of tragedy and death.  The power of Jesus Christ is transforming the various nightmares that beset our present reality into the dream of God, and God’s vision includes an important place for each and every one of us with him for all eternity.  Gary and so many others whom we love and see no longer are with him now.  In our own time, we, too, will join them, moving from the struggle to claim the in-breaking Kingdom of God in this life to its fullness in the next.