Atonement: Jesus as fully human and fully divine

2 Lent 2013

Isaiah 49:5-6; 1 John 1:5-2:2; John 7:53-8:12*

Father Adam Trambley

February 24, 2013, St. John’s Sharon

“I am the Light of the World”

I am the light of the world.

Today we continue our Lenten focus on “Who is Jesus?”  This week we look at Jesus as fully human and fully divine, and why these two natures are so important for his work of reconciling us back to God and making us like him.  When Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” we can see the human and divine in him. God is light in whom there is no darkness, and the world is the created order where too often darkness is found.  

One of the places Jesus says “I am the light of the world” is in John’s Gospel after this powerful story of Jesus, the Pharisees and the woman caught in adultery.   While Mosaic law requires both parties in an adulterous affair to be stoned together, the scribes and Pharisees bring only this guilty woman to Jesus.  They are testing him to see if he will tell them to stone her, which was as harsh and inappropriate in Jesus’ time as it is in ours, or if he will contradict the law.  Jesus does neither, instead biding his time while writing in the dust.  When they push him farther, he stands up and says, quite simply, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Since they aren’t seeking judgment with a heart for God’s law, they slink away, one-by-one.  They don’t want to be responsible for killing someone; they don’t even really care if the law is upheld.  They are just using this woman as a pawn, and wouldn’t care if Jesus decided to kill her so they could use it against him later.  They leave the woman with Jesus.

Jesus writes some more on the ground, then addresses the woman who is still standing in the middle of a circle of accusers who have all left.  No one else condemns the woman, and Jesus says he won’t either.  Then he tells her to go and sin no more.  An important Lenten message for us is this: Jesus doesn’t condemn us, yet he tells us not to sin anymore either.  We aren’t supposed to hurt ourselves or others by sinning, yet whatever is past does not need to be held against us.  We are always able to start over, as far as Jesus is concerned.  We are never defined by our past sins and failings.  No one else on earth really has standing to condemn us, and Jesus is too busy loving us and helping us to be the people we were made to be in the future to condemn us himself.

I am the light of the world.

Jesus came to be one of us because he loves us.  He was made man so that we might be made God.  The gap between God and humanity caused by sin could only be bridged by a person that was both God and a human being.  That bridging act of Jesus Christ that reconciled us to God is often called the atonement.  Neither the universal church as a whole nor the Episcopal Church in particular have never given a definitive explanation of how that atonement was achieved in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We can’t fully and completely understand Jesus’ saving act.

All understandings of the atonement have in common a requirement that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.  The light needs all the radiance of God and must come fully into the world.  At the most basic level, whatever humanity has lost because of human sinfulness can only be obtained again by God, and Jesus therefore must be fully God.  However, humanity can only actually benefit from that divine gift if Jesus is able to receive it as fully human. 

In the 300’s, writers like Athanasius of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa were writing about how Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God overcame the corruption and death caused by sin.  For Athanasius, much of Christ’s work could be summed up by Paul’s statement in First Corinthians that the corruptible has put on incorruption.  Jesus comes as the incorruptible God into the corrupted human bodily condition.  He teaches and heals and casts out demons, and everything he does on earth helps restore human beings to what they were meant to be.  He dies so that he can transform the corrupted body in death into the uncorrupted body that is resurrection.  The crucifixion is not a punishment, but Jesus’ death could not be secret and it needed to be caused by others in a way that was troubling enough to let everyone know that any death could be brought to resurrection.  A quiet philosopher’s death at home wouldn’t allow the necessary witness, and the incorruptible Son of God wouldn’t have died naturally. But by going through human life and death, Jesus brought God’s life back to us so that our own deaths are the same experience as Jesus' – a short death that is almost a seed-planting followed by resurrection.  By being part of our human life, Jesus allows all of us to access God’s life in the fullness of our human lives. 

Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding is that through sin, human beings put themselves in bondage to death and the devil.  Only God is stronger than death and the devil and only God is able to break those bonds.  Unfortunately humanity, and not God, was trapped in them.  The devil was smart enough not to trap God, until one came who was fully God and fully human.  Jesus as human died and went down to death’s dungeon.  But he could not be trapped because he was sinless and hadn’t put himself in death’s power.  And since he was God, he broke out and took all of us with him.  Sort of a Trojan Horse understanding of salvation.

Eight hundred years later, in the eleven hundreds, Saint Anselm writes about substitutionary atonement.  He is a monk, and understands how communities work.  He says that in sin, we have impugned the dignity of God.  The offence isn’t about God’s pride or about punishment, but more about a damaged relationship that needs to be repaired so that we are able to live comfortably in God’s community without guilt hanging over us all the time.  It is like we broke God’s favorite vase and need to replace it or else we feel bad every time we walk into the room.  The problem comes in because we have nothing we can pay our debt to God with, because everything we have is actually his already.  On our own, we have no way to restore the relationship.  Jesus comes as fully God with stuff that is actually his own, and as fully human he is able to give it to God in a way that makes it from all of us.  Jesus, fully divine, has another vase to replace the broken one, and his being fully human means that the attached card has all our names on it. 

More recently, Anselm’s substitutionary atonement has been taken by some extreme evangelical and fundamentalist churches to a further step of what is called penal substitutionary atonement.  In this understanding, which we have all heard preached in modern America, we sinned and broke God’s law.  The punishment for sin is death and so we all have to die.  God’s dignity requires that the punishment is carried out or else he wouldn’t be a just God.  So God’s Son comes and takes the punishment for us, which appeases God and his justice, and we are now freed for eternal life.  I personally do not find this the most helpful understanding of how Christ’s atonement works.  While scripture in some places speaks in ways that support such a very strict judicial model of our salvation, in other places scripture uses different models.  Churches that require their members to subscribe to this or any particular sense of atonement seem to me to miss the depth of Christ’s redeeming work that cannot be captured by one human metaphor for it.  Certainly Christ does take any punishment for sin that is there, but I do not think that God is the kind of being who wants or demands punishment.  To me, understandings of atonement that focus on changing us back into the full image of God we were made to be are more helpful than ones that see Jesus’ as necessary in order to placate God.

Amid all the things we can’t fully know about the atonement, however, we do know a few things.  First and foremost, we know that Jesus loves us, and through the work of his life, death and resurrection, our sins are forgiven.  We also know that because of what the fully human and fully divine savior has done, we can go forward no longer in darkness, but walking in his light, becoming more and more like him. 

I am the light of the world.

*Note: with permission of bishop we are using alternative readings this Lent to focus on “Who is Jesus?”

On Spiritual Gifts

Epiphany 2B 2013

Isaiah 62:1-5; Ps 36;1 Cor 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

January 20, 2013, St. John’s, Sharon

The Rev. Adam T. Trambley

Over the past few months, most of us have received any number of gifts.  Some may have been the perfect gift, and have been worn, played with, gazed upon or otherwise heavily used already.  Some gifts may have been useful for the time and season, and were eaten and drunk shorty after being received.  Some may have been quirky or odd, calling to mind the interesting personality that gave it.  And some may still be sitting on a table somewhere until we can figure out what exactly to do with them.

We also are too well aware of how the loving generosity of gift-giving can turn into something not-so-loving.  We feel entitled.  We want the biggest and best.  We want what someone else, or what we think everyone else, is getting.  We show off.  We decide not to share.  We exhibit all the qualities of a spoiled child, or at least the feelings creep into the back of our hearts, even if we are too polite, most of the time, to exhibit or act on those more selfish feelings.

In our second reading, Saint Paul is talking to some people who have been acting rather selfish and spoiled about their gifts from God.  We don’t know what all the issues might have been, but we can tell by what Paul says that there were a number of them.  People decided that their gifts were the most important.  People decided that their gifts made them the most important.  People decided that their gifts were due to their own holiness or specialness or hard work.  People decided that they didn’t need to use their gifts if they didn’t want to.  People in Corinth two thousand years ago acted the way people still act today, which is why we are still reading this letter.  Paul is so delicately straightforward: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uniformed,” which is so much more helpful then screaming “If you don’t play nice, Santa will never bring you another Christmas present again.”

From what Paul says here and in other places, we should keep in mind a number of things about our spiritual gifts.

First, Paul says that there are many different spiritual gifts.  So many different kinds, in fact, that some churches don’t recognize them all.  Hear how he starts by saying that no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.   His point is not that there is some sort of verbal test to prove you are Christian.  His point is that if people are making a real confession of faith and following Jesus as Lord the best they can, then they are Christian, and the Holy Spirit is active in their lives, and their spiritual gifts count.  Some hard-core Calvinist churches don’t see the ability to make beautiful liturgical items out of gold or brocade velvet or to play an organ as a spiritual gift.  They see it as some kind of popish idolatry.  Similarly, some intellectual churches see speaking in tongues or prophecy or supernatural healing ministries as contrived entertainment.  But Paul wants us to know that even though we don’t have a gift, or we don’t use it in our church, all spiritual gifts are manifestations of the Holy Spirit. 

Second, in all the varieties of gifts, services and activities, it is the same God who activates all of them.  The gifts of the Spirit are, well, gifts.  God gives them to us.  God lets us use them.  God gives them freely.  Gifts aren’t given on the bases of pious merit or spiritual work.  Then they would be wages.  But God gives gifts.  We have no room for pride or envy, but only gratitude for whatever gifts we find given to us.

Third, God activates them in everyone.  Every member of the body of Christ has spiritual gifts from God.  We may not all know what they are.  We may not all choose to use them.  But God has given every member of the body a particular mix of gifts to carry out the purpose he has called and created us for.  Not everybody has the same gifts, in fact almost everyone has a different set of gifts.  From the smallest infant on up, everyone in the household of God is able to help build up their brothers and sisters in some way.

Finally, the gifts are the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  Spiritual gifts are designed to help us build up the body of Christ.  Spiritual gifts aren’t intended primarily for our own sanctification. They aren’t meant to draw us to God, except through obediently using them.   They are meant to allow other people to draw closer to God, either directly or indirectly as the Body of Christ grows.  Spiritual gifts are only effective as they are used for others. 

So if there are many spiritual gifts, they come from God, we all have them, and we are meant to use them for each other, the main question for us is how do we find out what ours are and how do we use them?

We can start by asking God to show us what he has given us and how to use them.  Since we are his and his gifts are his, he’s the best guy to ask.  We can also work with other Christians to learn about different spiritual gifts and discern which ones we may have.  Hopefully, we will be putting together a spiritual gifts group in Lent to focus on discovering our spiritual gifts for those who haven’t looked at them before.

One of the ways we can identify our gifts is by recognizing where our joy is.  When we are using our spiritual gifts, what we do seems to come naturally and can be fun.  For people with a gift of hospitality, putting together table decorations is almost intuitive.  Getting everything set up may take work, but to people with those gifts, the work is joyful and fulfilling, and people who come feel welcome in a strong way.  People with gifts of healing want to be praying for people to get better.  They feel blessed when they can lift others up to God.  Even when the prayer is tiring, they feel part of an important purpose.  People with a gift of administration can actually organize files and go through numbers in a way others can’t, and when they get their figures balanced at the end of a month, they haven’t just checked a duty off the list, but have built up the Kingdom of God in a fulfilling way.

Sometimes, people have a sense that we are only doing God’s work if we are really suffering.  The less we want to do something, then the better it must be for our soul.  As if God is pleased when we make a list of unpleasant jobs, then guilt people around the church into signing up for them.  But we know that isn’t really what God wants.  In fact, one of our guiding principles says that we enjoy our work together and have fun doing it.  That statement speaks to our love for one another, but also to our desire to allow people to use their gifts in their ministries.  If we are doing what God has made us to do, then we are going to love doing it.  If we have gifts that aren’t being used currently, then those gifts will probably tell us a direction God is calling us to move in.  The more we all use our gifts for the common good, the more joy and the more growth we are going to find in our common life.

I want to end with what we might consider a parable, but from an unlikely source.  Some years ago, Tom Hanks was in a movie called Castaway.  He played a FedEx executive who crashes with a load of packages on a deserted island.  After years on the island with only a volleyball for a conversation partner, he manages to make a raft and is picked up by a passing cruise ship.  When he returns home, he delivers the final package he kept over all these years. 

Now during the height of Castaway’s success, there was a Saturday Night Live skit depicting what happened after the movie’s final scene.  The package recipient opened the box and found water purification tablets, a radio transmitter and other items that would have been very helpful to the castaway. 

I mention this because too often we have refused to open and use our spiritual gifts.  We could come up with any number of good, pious, noble-sounding reasons why we need to keep our gifts from God sealed up, either permanently or until the right future time.  But refusing to explore the spiritual gifts God has given us only makes our lives harder, keeps us from feeling the joyful fulfillment God wants for us, and might end up with us talking to a volleyball.

Instead, God’s people need all of us to learn about our gifts, develop them, and use them to build up the kingdom of God.

Who Is Jesus: Creator and Sustainer

1 Lent 2013

Wisdom 7:22-31; Rev22:12-17; Col 1:15-20; John 15:1-11*

Father Adam Trambley

February 17, 2013, St. John’s Sharon

“I am the Alpha and the Omega” “I am the vine, you are the branches”

I am the Alpha and the Omega.  I am the vine, you are the branches.

During Lent this year, we will be doing something special.  We will be focusing on the theme of “Who is Jesus?”  Over the next five weeks, we will explore different aspects of Jesus’ existence, life, ministry, and what that means for us.  Our launching place will be some of Jesus’ own “I AM” statements about himself.  Then during Holy Week, we will be invited to follow Jesus through his passion, death, and resurrection.

This week, we are focusing on Christ as creator and sustainer and how that same person of God who orders all creation has come to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

I am the Alpha and the Omega.  The book of Revelation gives us this statement of who Jesus is.  Alpha is the first letter of the Greek Alphabet, and Omega is the last letter, so this is a way of saying that before anything else came to be, Jesus was.  After everything else is finished, Jesus will be.  Between the beginning and the end, Jesus is.  These statements may seem obvious if we have been hearing sermons in churches all our lives, but the implications are pretty profound.

Jesus as Alpha and Omega is unpacked for us in our reading from Colossians, which may be part of a great early hymn.  Paul tells us that Christ is the image of the invisible God and that in him all things in heaven and on earth were created.  Everything was originally created through him and for him. 

Understanding Christ as the agent of creation brings together a number of threads in the Old Testament, and even in Greek philosophy.  In our first reading we hear of Wisdom.  Wisdom in later Hebrew poetry is seen as a part of God that is not God in his entirety.  Wisdom becomes the agent of God in the act of creation and also enters the created order.  Wisdom is the fashioner of all things, does all things, renews all things, and orders all things well. 

Greek philosophy and philosophical Jewish thinking also develops an understanding of the Word, also known as the Logos in Greek.  The Greeks saw a need for an intermediary between the unknowable God and creation, and they came up with a concept of the Word as that intermediary.  Usually they understood it enough like God to be from God, but enough like creation that all creation could come through him.  Some Jewish thinkers interpreted the word God spoke in creation in Genesis as the Word understood by the Greeks.

 

Early Christians understood both Wisdom and the Word as early religious intuitions of the Second Person of the Trinity.  We know from John’s Gospel that Jesus is seen as the Word, and that all things came into being through him.  We know, however, that the Word by whom all things were created, also entered creation as Jesus of Nazareth.  The divine cosmic force that created us is the second person of the Trinity who we know loves us because he became one of us and lived and died for us.  The person of Christ in creation is the same person revealed to us as Jesus, so we know that everything was created with love and a purpose.  Everything was created through the action of Christ because Christ decided its existence was a good thing.  That everything includes every one of us.

Just as Jesus is our Alpha and our beginning, Jesus is also our Omega and our end.  Colossians says that through him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven.  The same cosmic Jesus Christ that created everything is also going to be responsible for the new creation of everything.  All creation’s redemption and renewal is in the hands of the one who made it and then came to die and rise for it.  Revelations draws on this understanding when is describes Jesus coming as the light of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem. 

Once we know we were created with love through and for Jesus, and that we are eventually going back to Jesus, we want to recognize how important Jesus remains for our being even now.  As Colossians says, in him all things hold together.  The letter to the Romans puts it this way: “In him we live and move and have our being.”  As we hear in today’s gospel, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  Two implications follow.

First, if we are alive we are living in the power of Jesus Christ.  We could see Jesus as the air we breathe, or like the water surrounding a fish that gives it life.  We might see ourselves as the melody of the song that Christ sung to create the universe.  We might be ships sailing down the streams of Christ’s living water.  We are branches on the vine of Christ.  We only exist because the same Jesus Christ who created all things continues to sustain it.  No matter how broken, how sinful, or how un-Christian we or others may be, the fact that we exist means we are somehow a part of Jesus Christ.

Second, if Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, then we have access to that creative, sustaining power of Christ.  Jesus says that we are called to bear fruit while we abide in him.  We are not just mindlessly swimming in the waters of Christ’s sustaining presence.  We are called to draw on the nourishment that comes from Christ to spread his power.  We are made to do work like he does, and he tells us to be connected to him.  Jesus tells us that this work is keeping his commandments, and his overarching commandment is love.  We live in his love so that we can go out and love.  Love is the nourishing sap flowing from the vine of Jesus into us his branches.  The deeper we ground ourselves in his love, the better we are able to love others.  We branches are made to receive this love from Jesus and then to bear fruit that passes Jesus’ love to others.  We have access to that love because Jesus Christ is love and he continues to sustain the universe.

Practically, what does this mean mean?  It means we are able to tap into the power that created the universe and is working out its renewal so that we can love each other better.  Think about that.  You can tap into the sugar sap that ran during the seven days of creation and make a maple syrup to gladden the hearts of a universe of starving pancake eaters.  (Obviously I’m speaking metaphorically here.)  More concretely, though, think about those times when we are so frustrated by certain people in our lives and we decide we have no more patience, that we can’t deal with them and that we have to write them off.  The truth is that we actually do have access to a power strong enough to let us love them in spite of everything they have done to us.  When we want to be extravagant with our time or our resources to help change someone’s life, we are branches on a vine that can give us every nutrient we need to bear the fruit of extravagant love.   If we see all sorts of suffering and war and tragedy on TV and want to help, but feel powerless and stuck in our living rooms, we are grounded in Jesus Christ who will prune away all the fears and barriers we surround ourselves with so that we can bring his saving love to someone who is desperate for it.  Everything we need to love like Jesus is available, if we want to take advantage of it, and in the beginning Jesus made us for nothing less. 

We know the ways to ground ourselves in Jesus and his love.  Come to worship, confess our sins and receive the body of Christ.  Pray and be present to God, especially by setting aside a certain time each day to show up in prayer.  Read the Bible, looking especially for the inspiring vision of God’s love unfolding and renewing creation in the Psalms and Isaiah and John and Revelation.  Find other Christians and meet regularly to talk about our own calls to love more deeply and the barriers we are stumbling over to live into them.  Right now, take a minute and picture yourself as a branch on the vine of Christ, feeling his love flow from him to you and you using it to make a large, plump, juicy cluster of grapes.  Then think of who God is calling you to share that love with when you leave here today. (Pause for a minute or two.)

I am the Alpha and the Omega.  I am the vine, you are the branches. 

*Note: with permission of bishop we are using alternative readings this Lent to focus on “Who is Jesus?”

Ash Wednesday 2013 -- Dismantling Our Own Plans for Happiness and Letting God In

Ash Wednesday

February 13 2013, St. John’s, Sharon

Dismantling Our Own Plans for Happiness and Letting God In

Today again we begin our Lenten journey.  The Church calls us to a holy Lent, a time of prayer, fasting, and good works.   We examine our lives and repent of our sins, turning anew to the fullness of life in God.

Too often, though, we overlook the deep possibility that God offers us in Lent.  We can stay focused on the marginal details at the fringes of life, instead of opening ourselves up to the unquenchable love of God.  Instead of getting to the root of our problems and beginning a Holy-Spirit aided struggle against them, we frequently decide to obsess about the number of our desserts, the expletives we use when frustrated, or the clutter level of our dining room table.  God, however, invites us to rich banquets, has filled his Holy Writ with some of the most appalling curses you’ll  ever hear, and is perfectly capable of blowing in a storm to clear your house of clutter and leave it somewhere near Jackson Center. 

Instead, Lent is a gift to call us to the work of dismantling the lies and the fears that we let control our lives instead of living in the peace, love and joy God wants us to know.  The Lenten work of repentance is about turning away from the all the plans for our own happiness that we have devised, which will never be able to satisfy us, and turning toward a deeper relationship with God and all that such a relationship means. 

Our basic problem, which can be called original sin, is that at some point in our very young lives, we did not get what we needed.  The world is broken, and bad things happen to us before we can understand why, even as early as in utero.  Maybe we were in pain, and no one could figure out why.  Maybe we were sick and it took a while to get well.  Maybe we were hungry but had to wait to eat longer than we were able to manage.  Maybe we needed to be held and looked at lovingly, but our parents were dealing with illness, or depression, or working three jobs to pay the mortgage or whatever it was.  These events can be traumatic to a little person with no control over their body or their situations, but who are setting in place their personality and emotions.  And these events occur in the best situations, with the best parents, and the most love possible. 

As we experience difficulties when we can feel them but can’t understand them, we begin to set in place emotional drives to avoid similar situations in the future.  The three main categories are a desire for security, a desire for affection or esteem, and a desire for comfort.  Some call these our plans for happiness, because we can live under the mistaken but compelling belief that if we only can obtain this thing we feel we need, then we will be happy and our lives complete.  Yet, these human plans for happiness can never work because they are grounded in fears and built on lies.  The fears are the irrational but powerful desire to avoid ever being in the situations that caused us so much past pain.  The lies are that we can ever actually receive enough of something like security or affection or comfort to finally make us happy.  As soon as we reach a certain level of the goods we want, our desires expand and we need more.   We understand this.  Someone whose life is directed toward physical comfort is always concerned about where the next meal is coming from and what it is.  But as soon as that next meal is always guaranteed, than the obsession becomes that dessert is included or that it is all organically grown.  Public figures spend their lives being adored by thousands go into a depression because they get a letter from one person saying how terrible they are.  A multi-millionaire stops giving to charity because the market dropped ten percent and they are worried about their future.  The world is broken, and our experience in it has left painful holes that we can try to cover and fill.  Then the more we try, the less happy we really are. 

Finding where these holes are in our lives is the real work of Lent.  Being able to discover the places we are acting on our own plans for happiness.  Ultimately, this striving for what we think we want that can’t satisfy us is what God asks us to repent of during our wilderness of Lent.  Jesus faced the same difficulties during his wilderness temptations.  He was offered the same choices by Satan.  Turn stones into bread and have all the physical comfort you could ever want.  Have all the nations of the world follow you and love you.  Never worry about security again since God’s angels will bear you up even if you throw yourself down from the top of a tall building.  Jesus says, “No,” to all those temptations, but not because bread is bad, or because people shouldn’t love and follow him, or because he doesn’t want angels watching out for him.  He says, “No,” because anything less than God isn’t ultimately good enough and eventually fails us.

Our Lenten work, then, is twofold.  First we want to deal with the false plans for happiness we have built to cover up the painful holes in our lives.  Then, second, we want to open those painful holes to God for his healing and redeeming.  Both parts of this Lenten project are really the spiritual journey of an entire lifetime.  But we can intentionally focus on this work in Lent, and consciously make a decision to allow God to deal with our scars instead of trying to cover them up ourselves. 

Most of the things we talk about giving up for Lent are designed to help us overcome our false plans of happiness, but they will only work if we are actually intentional about them.  Giving up chocolate doesn’t matter so much if what we spend our lives doing is trying to ensure everyone likes us and thinks nice things about us.  If the soothing deception in the back of our head is that we are fine as long as no one is angry at us, a good Lenten discipline might be to say what we think, especially when what we think is likely to upset someone.  Then we can live through the experience with fear and trembling and realize we are still God’s beloved children, even though someone thinks our opinions about the Cleveland Browns are incorrect.  Of course, if we need to have things just the way we want them and to be in control of every situation, we probably already say whatever we want.  For those of us with that plan for happiness, we may need to decide that we will just listen and do what people ask us to without whining, and be as happy as possible while doing so.  Then the people who might need to think about giving up chocolate are the people who spend the time immediately after lunch planning the dessert they will have after dinner.  Just like the people who probably need to give up anything are the people who spend the entire rest of their day thinking about getting that one particular thing, whether it is a cookie, a shopping trip, a romantic liaison, a computer game, a work project, a bubble bath or even a book.  If we keep obsessing about one thing, even a good thing, then we probably are using it as a screen to hide behind so we don’t have to face something else.   Lent is a good time to identify those screens and start to take them down. 

Then, as the screens start to come down, we are in a pretty vulnerable situation.  We are coming closer to face the various pain and tragedy at the core of our lives, and we have set down some of the coping mechanisms we have used to ward that pain off in the past.  For that reason, we also need the positive spiritual disciplines so that we can take that pain to God and allow him to begin to sooth and heal the traumas of life.  These positive disciplines mostly include different kinds of prayer that allow us to build a deeper relationship with Jesus, because the closer we are to him, the fewer lies we can tell ourselves and the more his love casts out our fears so that we can face our pain and move forward.  Centering prayer or other contemplative prayer can be key, where we can just sit and offer ourselves to God.  Bible study, Stations of the Cross, or other reading where we allow ourselves to find out more about Jesus and open our lives to him are also helpful.  Regular worship and receiving communion are also powerfully helpful. Good works can also be important, so long as they don’t become another way of substituting something good for a deeper life in God.  For us, the most important component, however, is the decision to turn away from our own plans in favor of walking with God, however painful that walk can be at times.  We need to draw closer to God to be able to deal with what comes to light as we become more honest with ourselves.  The road will not be easy for us, but it will be very good, and in the end, it will not disappoint.

I hope that this Lent we will all find opportunities to let go of the security, the esteem and the comfort that we crave, in favor of a brutal honesty about our lives and a closer walk with God.  I also hope that we at St. John’s will be the kind of community where we are able to support and care for one another as we do the very hard work of letting go of the plans for happiness we make for ourselves in favor of opening ourselves to the light so that Jesus can heal us.   God calls us to lives of love, joy and peace.  But we must turn aside from the dead-end paths we are on in order to make it home to Jesus.