March 24, 2024
Mark
15.1-39
+ This
coming week is, of course, Holy Week.
As this Holy Week begins, I find myself
a bit emotional.
Jamie Parsley+
Mark
15.1-39
+ This
coming week is, of course, Holy Week.
As this Holy Week begins, I find myself
a bit emotional.
Jeremiah 31.31-34; John 12.20-33
+ I have never made a secret of a simple fact of my spiritual
life: I am a seeker.
I was talking to someone this past week about my spiritual journey—my
journey from being Lutheran to being Roman Catholic to Zen Buddhism and
Unitarian-Universalism to Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church.
I said to this person, “I don’t regret any of my journey. All of
those places I stopped at and rested along the way have influenced me in some
way or the other, and I’m grateful for each of them.”
The fact that I found my home here in the Episcopal Church also
doesn’t mean that I still don’t find comfort in other spiritual expressions.
I still read and explore Judaism deeply, as well as Buddhism.
In fact, you have heard me say many times that Buddhism and Judaism
have made me a better Christian.
I find comfort in those places.
I have a deep respect for other religions, I think we can all
learn so much from other religions.
The reason I do is because I am seeker.
I am seeking after God in my life.
Certainly, I am seeking after God in my vocation as a priest, in
my life as a Christian, and as a human being who is part of this world.
I am seeking, just as you all are seeking.
We’re here—whether in this building, or joining us through
livestream—seeking something.
People who aren’t seekers don’t need to “come” to church.
They don’t need to listen and ponder the Word.
They don’t need to feed on and ponder the mysteries of the
Eucharist that we celebrate at this altar.
People who don’t seek,
don’t come following the mysteries of their faith.
I have discovered in my own life as a seeker, that my seeking, my
asking questions and my pondering of the mysteries of this life and my
relationship to God, are what make my faith what it is.
It makes it…faith.
My seeking allows me to step into the unknown and be sometimes
amazed or surprised or disappointed by what I may—or may not—find there.
In our Gospel reading for today, we also find seekers.
In our story, we find these Greeks seeking for Jesus.
“Sir, we wish
to see Jesus,” they say.
This one line—“we wish to
see Jesus”—is so beautifully simple.
There’s so much meaning and potential and…yes, mystery, to it that
I don’t think we fully realize what it’s conveying.
What is it they think they’re seeking?
Do they know they are seeking Jesus, the divine Son of God?
Do they know they are seeking this Messiah?
Do they—Greek Gentiles—even know what the Messiah is?
Or are they seeking the God who dwells in Jesus—the God who sent
Jesus, whom Jesus embodies, the God they see that Jesus shows them?
Well, we never find out.
In fact, as beautiful and as simple as the petition is—“we wish to see Jesus”—we never, if
you notice, find out if they actually get to see him.
The author doesn’t tell us.
We find no resolve to this story of the Greeks seeking Jesus.
However, despite it being a loose end of sorts, it does pack some
real meaning.
What’s great about scripture is that even a loose end can have
purpose.
One interpretation of this story is that that the Greeks—as
Gentiles—were not allowed to “see” Jesus until he was lifted up on the Cross.
Remember our readings from the Hebrew scriptures and the gospel from
last week in which we heard the story of Moses lifted up the bronze serpent on
a staff to heal the people, and how Jesus made reference to it?
Well, h references it again in this reading.
Only when he has been “lifted
up from the earth,” as he tells us this morning will he “draw all people to [himself].”
Jesus’ message at the time of theGreeks’ approaching the apostles
is still only to the Jews.
But when Jesus is lifted up on the Cross on Good Friday, at that
moment, he is essentially revealed to all.
At that moment, the veil is lifted.
The old Law of the Jews has been fulfilled—the curtain in the
Temple has been torn in half—and now Jesus is given for all—for everyone, Jews
and Gentiles alike.
It’s certainly an interesting and provocative take on this story.
And it’s especially interesting for us, as well, who are seeking
to “find Jesus” in our own lives.
Like those Greeks, we are not always certain if we will find
him—at least at this moment.
But, I am going to switch things up a bit (as I sometimes do).
Yes, we might be seekers here this morning.
But as Christians, our job is not only to be seekers.
Our job, as followers of Jesus, as seekers after God, is to be on
the receiving end of that petition of those Greeks.
Our job, as Christians, is to hear that petition—“show us
Jesus”—and to respond to it.
This is what true evangelism is.
Some might say evangelism is telling
others about Jesus.
Possibly.
But true evangelism is showing
people Jesus.
And, let’s face, that’s much harder than telling people about
Jesus.
So, how do we show Jesus to those who seeking him?
Or, maybe, even to those who might not even be seeking Jesus?
We show people Jesus by doing what we do as followers of and
seekers after Jesus.
We show people Jesus by being
Jesus to those around us.
Now, that sounds impossible for most of us.
The fact is, it isn’t.
This is exactly what Jesus wants us to be.
Jesus wants us to be him
in this world.
Jesus want us to embody within ourselves the same God who was (and
is) embodied in Jesus himself.
Jesus wants us to be like him in every way.
We, after all, are the Body of Christ in this world.
We are to embody Jesus, and by doing so to embody the God of
Jesus, in this world.
He wants to be our hands, helping others.
He wants to speak through our voices in consoling others, in
speaking out against the tyrants and despots and unfairness of this world.
He wants to be our feet in walking after those who have been
turned away and are isolating themselves.
He wants us to bring healing to those who need healing, and hope
to those who have lost hope.
When we seek to bring the Kingdom into our midst, we are being
Jesus in this world. We might not always succeed in doing this.
We might fail miserably in what we do.
In fact, sadly, people might not find Jesus in us, at all.
Sometimes, whether we intend it to or not, we in fact become the
“Anti-Jesus” to others.
But that’s just the way it is sometimes.
In seeking Jesus and in responding to others who are also seeking
him, we realize the control is not in our hands.
It doesn’t depend on any one of us.
Which, trust me, is actually very comforting.
I personally don’t want all that responsibility.
Nor, I’m sure, do any of you.
Who would?
In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus saying: “Very truly I tell you,
unless a grain of wheat falls on the earth and dies, it remains just a single
grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
In those moments in which we seem to have failed to be Jesus to
those around us, when those who come to us seeking Jesus find, rather, nothing,
or, worse, the “Anti-Jesus,” we find that even then, fruit can still come
forth.
God still works even through the negative things life throws at
us.
God still works event through our failures and our shortcomings.
Jesus can still be found, even despite us.
Jesus can still be found, even when we might not even be seeking
him.
Jesus can be found, oftentimes, when we are least expecting to
find him.
Certainly, Jesus is here this morning in our midst.
He is here in us.
He is here when we do what he tells us to do in this world
He is here when we open ourselves to God’s Spirit and allow that
Spirit to speak to us in our hearing of the Word.
Jesus is here in the Bread and Wine of our Eucharist.
Jesus is here in us, gathered together in Name of Jesus.
And let me tell you, Jesus is definitely out there, beyond the
walls of this church, waiting for us to embody him and bring him to them.
He is never far away.
So, let us, together, be Jesus to those who need Jesus, who are
seeking Jesus.
Let us show them Jesus.
Let us together search for and find God, here, in the Word where
we hear God speaking to us.
Let us search for Jesus in this Holy Eucharist, in which we feed
on his Body and Blood.
As we near the end of this Lenten season and head into Holy Week (next
week!), let us take to heart those words we heard God speaking to the prophet
Jeremiah:
“I will
forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
Let us, a people whose iniquity has been forgiven and whose sin is
remembered no more, search for God.
In going out from here, let us encounter those people who truly need
God.
And, in encountering them, let us also help those who are seeking.
“We wish to
see Jesus,” the Greeks say to the disciples.
And people still are saying that to us as well.
“We wish to
see Jesus.”
Let us—fellow seekers of Jesus—help them to find him in us.
Amen.
March 10, 2024
Numbers
21.4-9; John 3.14-21
+ Well, you know what day it is.
It’s one of my favorites.
Today is Laetare Sunday, also known as “Rose Sunday.”
Laetare, as I remind everyone every year on this Sunday, is Latin
for “joyful” and it is called this because on this Sunday, the traditional
introit (or the psalm that was said by the priest in the old days when he
approached the altar in the old Latin Mass) was “Laetare Jerusalem”—“rejoice
Jerusalem.”
It’s also known by other names. “Mothering Sunday” or “Refreshment
Sunday.”
It is, of course, traditional on this Sunday to wear the rose or
pink vestments.
And to have simnel cake, which we will have at coffee hour, thanks to Sandy
Holbrook.
It’s a special Sunday.
It is sort of break in our Lenten purple, so to speak.
We get to rejoice a bit today.
Notice how I said, rejoice “a bit.”
It’s a subdued rejoicing.
We’re still in Lent after all.
We might get a break from the Lenten purple.
But we don’t get a break from Lent.
After all, the purple returns tomorrow.
But this Rose Sunday is a reminder to us.
We are now passing into the latter days of Lent.
Palm Sunday and Holy Week are only two weeks away and Easter is
three weeks away.
And with Easter in sight, we can, on this Sunday, lift up a
slightly subdued prayer of rejoicing.
No, we’re not saying the A-word yet.
We’re not allowed to be quite that
joyful today.
But, we’re close.
The Easter light is within in sight, though it’s still pretty far
off.
Now, I know Lent can be a bummer for us.
I know we don’t want to hear about things like sin.
I don’t want to hear about sin.
I don’t want to preach about sin.
Most of us have had to sit through countless hours listening to
preachers go on and on about sin in our lives.
Many of us have had it driven into us and pounded into us and we
just don’t want to hear it anymore.
Yes, we know we’re sinners sometimes.
But the fact is, we can’t get through this season of Lent without
at least acknowledging sin.
Certainly, I as a priest, would be neglecting my duty if I didn’t
at least mention it once during this season.
As much as we try to avoid sin and speak around it or ignore it,
for those of us who are Christians, we just can’t.
We live in a world in which there is war and crime and recession
and sexism and homophobia and horrible racism and blatant lying and morally
bankrupt people and, in looking at all of those things, we must face the fact
that sin—people falling short of their ideal—is all around us.
And during this season of Lent, we find ourselves facing sin all
the time.
It’s there in our scripture readings.
It’s right here in our
liturgy.
It’s just…there.
Everywhere.
I certainly have struggled with this issue in my life.
As I said, I don’t like preaching about sin.
I would rather not do it.
But…I have to.
We all have to occasionally face the music, so to speak.
The fact is, people tend to define us by the sins we commit—they
define us by illness—the spiritual leprosy within us—rather than by the people
we really are underneath the sin.
And that person we are underneath is truly a person created in the
holy image of God.
Sin, if we look it as a kind of illness, like leprosy or any other
kind of sickness.
It desensitizes us, it distorts us, it makes us less than who were
are.
It blots out the holy image of God in which we were created.
And like a sickness, we need to understand the source of the
illness to truly get to heart of the matter.
So, we need to ask ourselves: what is sin?
Well, let’s take a look at what the Catechism of the Episcopal
Church says.
We can find right there, in our Book of Common Prayer on 848.
The question is, “What is sin?”
The answer is, “Sin is he seeking of our own will instead of the will
of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people and with
all creation.”
If we are honest with ourselves, if we are blunt with ourselves,
if we look hard at ourselves, we realize that, in those moments in which we
have failed ourselves, when we have failed others, when we have failed God, the
underlying issues can be found in the fact that we were3 not seeking God’s
will, but our own will.
This season of Lent is a time when we take into account where we
have failed in ourselves, in our relationship with God and in our relationship
with each other.
But—and I stress this—Lent is never a time for us to despair.
It is never a time to beat ourselves up over the sins we have
committed.
It is rather a time for us to buck up.
It is a time in which we seek to improve ourselves.
It is a time for us to seek God’s will in our lives and not our
own wills.
It is a time in which, acknowledging those negative aspects of
ourselves, we strive to rise above our failings.
It is a time for us to seek healing for the “leprosy” of our
souls.
The church is, after all, according to the early Christians, a
Hospital.
And, in seeking, we do find that healing.
In our reading from Numbers today, we find a strange story, that
also is about healing.
The Israelites are complaining about having the wander about in
the desert.
After Mass, Dan Rice is going to lead a class about the lamenting psalms.
I preach about the lamenting psalms on a regular basis.
Because lamenting psalms can often sound like complaining.
And, as I have said, sometimes complaining to God is not a bad
thing.
I always say, at least it’s better to complain to God, than
to complain about God.
Well, this story in Numbers shows us what happens when we don’t
complain to God, but complain about God.
According to the story we just heard, God sent poisonous serpents
on the poor, ungrateful people who were complaining about God.
The people acknowledge their sin—the fact that they maybe
shouldn’t complain when things weren’t really so bad.
So, God tells Moses to “make” a snake, put it on a pole, and raise
it up so all the Israelites can see it.
And in in seeing it, they will live.
Now, in case you missed it, for us Christians, this pole is
important.
For us, this is a foreshadow of the cross.
If you don’t believe me, then you weren’t paying attention when Deacon
Suzanne read our Gospel reading for today, which directly references our
reading from Numbers.
Jesus then, in that way,
turns it all around and makes something very meaningful to his followers—and to
us—from this “raising up.”
Just as the poisonous snake was raised up on a pole, and the
people were healed, so must Jesus be raised up on the cross, and the people
also would be healed.
As you have heard me preach many times, the Cross is essential to
us as Christians.
And not just as some quaint symbol of our faith.
Not as some gold-covered, sweet little thing we wear around our
necks.
The Cross is a very potent symbol for us in our healing.
Gazing upon the cross, as those Israelites gazed upon the bronze
serpent that Moses held up to them, we find ourselves healed.
And as we are healed, as we find our sins dissolved by the God
Christ knew as he hung the cross, we come to an amazing realization.
We realize that we are not our sins.
And our sins are not us.
Our sins are no more us, than our illnesses are.
Our sins are no more us than our depressions are us, or our anxieties
are or our disappointments in life are us.
For those of us who have had serious illnesses—and as many of you
know, I had cancer once—when we are living with our illness, we can easily
start believing that our sickness and our very selves are one and the same.
But that is not, in reality, the case.
In this season of Lent, it is important for us to ponder the
sickness of our sins, to examine what we have done and what we have failed to
do and to consider how we can prevent it from happening again.
But, like our illnesses, once we have been healed, once our sins
have been forgiven and they no longer have a hold over us, we do realize that,
as scarred as we have been, as deeply destroyed as we thought we were by what
we have done and not done, we have found that, in our renewal, we have been
restored.
In the shadow of the cross, we are able to see ourselves as people
freed and liberated.
We are able to rejoice in
the fact that we are not our failures.
We are not what we have failed to do.
But in the shadow of the cross we see that we are loved and we are
healed and we are cherished by our loving God.
And once we recognize that, then we too can turn our selves toward
each other, glowing with that image of God imprinted upon us, and we too can
love and heal and cherish.
See, sin does not have to make us despair.
When we despair over sin, sin wins out.
Rather, we can work on ourselves, we can improve ourselves, we can
rise above our failings and we can then reflect God to others and even to
ourselves.
So, on this Laetare Sunday—this Sunday in which we rejoice that we
are now within the sight of that glorious Easter light—let us gaze at the
cross, held up to us as a sign of our healing God.
And there, in the shadow of that Cross, let us be truly healed.
And, in doing so, let us reflect that healing to others so they
too can be healed.
See, it is truly a time
for us to rejoice.
March 24, 2024 Mark 15.1-39 + This coming week is, of course, Holy Week. As this Holy Week begins, I find myself a bit...