One More Dollar...

Thanks to the work of "Preaching Peace" and "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary" in helping bring clarity to this week's sermon.

Mark 10:17-31

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."

This is the Word of the Lord.

“I went to find the pot of gold
That's waiting where the rainbow ends.
I searched and searched and searched and searched
And searched and searched and then -
There it was, deep in the grass,
Under an old and twisty bough.
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine at last...
What do I search for now?”

Shel Silverstein’s poem could have been written for the man who runs to Jesus and falls at his feet. He had all the stuff he could ever want, and in a culture which equated wealth with God’s favor, it was obvious to everyone that God really liked this guy, that the Almighty was blessing him above others.

This guy knew the rules. He followed the teaching of the Pharisees, he played the game the way it should be played...

Well, that really might not be a fair way to put it. After all, he believed in God, and believed he was doing the right things for the right reasons. And yet… it started deep down in his spirit, this emptiness, and it grew every day – the cold realization that in spite of all his strict observance of the law, in spite of his comfort and wealth, something was missing. Something big.

A man I once worked for had a saying: “The answers are easy. It’s the questions that are hard.” His point was that the key to finding solutions to problems was in asking the right questions.

I don’t know how true that saying is, but I know that for the man in our account today, knowing the right question isn’t hard at all.  It’s the biggest question of all, really: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus gave him a list: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”

In my imagination, the man’s reply, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth,” isn’t a statement of pride, but of desperation. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that, Jesus. Come on, I know there’s more!”

And the Scriptures tell us that Jesus looked at him and loved him. Did you know that this is the only place in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus is said to have loved someone? And the word there in the Greek is “agapeo,” which means for Christians an unconditional, complete, all-encompassing love.

So what Jesus says to him, the challenge, if you will, is said out of love. “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

The man gets up and walks away sad… not angry, convinced that Jesus has asked too much; no, the man knows that the Lord is right... and that he cannot.

As he walks away, Jesus says something that shocks and troubles his disciples: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

There is, of course, a strong temptation to water these statements down, to make it easier, more palatable to our 21st-century consumerist minds. To make believe that Jesus is not making the hard demands on the believer that he seems to be making here, where this living word of God cuts us to the core. The easy thing to do is to lessen the impact of the statement, qualify it to be less of a burden.

It is, after all, a dangerous thing to say that if anything at all is in the way of full and unfettered devotion to the Creator, it must be thrown away.

I should get to this part of the sermon, let the tension hang a moment, and give a theological interpretation that makes us all feel better about our faith journey as it is.

For years I was told that, in the “eye of a needle” statement, Jesus was referring to an actual location familiar to everyone in Judea. You might have heard this too: In Jesus’ day, when travelers reached the walls of Jerusalem after dark, and the main gates were closed, the only way into the city was through a narrow passage called the “Eye of the Needle.” They would have to take the packs off of the camels, and make the camels squat down on their knees and crawl through the gate to get into the city. Then they would follow, dragging the camels’ burdens behind them. It was a dreaded, difficult, time consuming process, almost impossible.

And it’s the “almost” that would make the statement OK, wouldn’t it? It would go from “impossible” to “possible, with the right tools.”

But even though that explanation for Jesus’ words has been around since at least the fifteenth century, and maybe as far back as the ninth century, it is painfully obvious that there is no historical or archeological evidence that the story of the hole in the wall is in any way true. There is no “Eye of the Needle” gate in Jerusalem or anywhere else. The hard statement, the perplexing problem of possessions must stand as it is.

It must be easier for literal, camel-sized camel to go through the literal, eye-of-a-needle sized needle eye than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

So… what do we do with it? How do we address the words of Jesus to the rich man: “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me?”

Surely, we can claim that it doesn’t apply to us. After all, wealth is relative, and we can all point to Bill Gates or Donald Trump or Ted Turner as examples of wealth who could stand to spread some of their billions around. We can join in the familiar cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that we are the ninety-nine percent, and demands that the one-percenters give all they have to the poor…

But did you know – as residents of a developed nation, as far as our income and life expectancy and freedom and affluence are concerned, you and I are the one percent, and everyone else, all over the planet, are the ninety-nine percent? What happens to those demands then, I wonder?

And anyway, is that really all there is to it? Just getting rid of stuff?

Well, first let’s get one thing off the table: there is nothing we can do to merit God’s favor, nothing we can do to earn eternal life. The man who falls on his knees before Jesus in our reading today is approaching the whole matter from the wrong direction – what must I do, he asks. I think that’s why Jesus reacted to being called “good teacher” in the first place, by the way: to make the point that, apart from God, no one is good, no one can be good.

That being said, I think that what Jesus is challenging the man to do is profound for us in our day and age and location on the globe.

After all, what is money? Colored paper and shiny coins, and nothing more – though more and more these days money isn’t even that, it’s a collection of numbers on a bank or credit union’s computer hard drive.

Yet this paper or metal or binary code represents value – the value we place on the portion of our lives we spend earning the money. Further, it represents security – the more of it we possess, the greater the likelihood that we won’t starve or go naked or be homeless. Moreover, it represents the idea of self-sufficiency: if we have enough, we won’t have to work or worry or depend on anyone or anything else, ever.

Yet history proves that, even when someone arguably reaches a place of self-sufficiency, the drive, the desperation for more never stops! At the height of his wealth, a reporter asked John D. Rockefeller, “How much money is enough?” Rockefeller answered, “One more dollar than I have.”

This man who knelt before Jesus was, like us, looking for security: security in this life, and assurance of eternal security in the Kingdom of God. What Jesus told him to do was to let go of self-sufficiency – divest himself of any hope of ever being able to depend on himself for anything – in favor of finding his sufficiency, security, and salvation in God.

What Jesus calls us to is a relationship where nothing – nothing! – is more important than following Him. Jesus calls us to the place where the camel meets the eye of the needle, where we can go no further. Jesus calls us to give up more than just our possessions, just our desire for wealth and security, just our desire for one dollar more than we have. Jesus calls us to give up our selves. Jesus calls us to follow him.

Today’s reading calls us to serious reflection, challenges us to give up the things dearest to us in order to walk more closely with Jesus. if anything at all is in the way of full and unfettered devotion to the Creator, it must be thrown away. This is something we must confront on a daily basis, through prayer and study, daily meeting the place where the camel-sized camel of our lives reaches the eye-of-the-needle sized hole that leads to the Kingdom of God. And when we reach the eye of the needle, and that camel won’t go through, and we at last agree with Jesus that with mortals, this is impossible, there is a wonderful promise awaiting us.

No, we can’t do it – be good enough or earn enough or do enough things to merit God’s favor. We can’t build a bridge long enough or a ladder high enough to reach the Kingdom of God. For us, it is impossible.

But it is not hopeless. We do not have to walk away, consumed with grief. We are not alone.

We have within us the Holy Spirit, through which God works to bring us into that glorious, now-and-coming Kingdom, by which God brings that camel through the needle’s eye and into eternal life.

This is the Good News: “For God, all things are possible.”

Alleluia, amen.

Flesh and Blood...

I am indebted to the work of the Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton, "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary," and Rev. Lindy Black for help in composing this week's sermon.

For those of you offended by the graphic language of the audible gnawing of flesh... that's kind of the point.

John 6:51-58

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."

This is the Word of the Lord.

Sometimes, getting a little distance between yourself and a given situation allows you to gain perspective, to look at the big picture, to examine a situation logically, without the emotion of the moment getting in the way.

Sometimes, though, that distance actually serves to cloud perspective, blur the big picture, and confuse logic.

Two thousand years removed from the day on the lakeshore, it seems that, for many Christians, we suffer – at least in part – the latter fate when it comes to what Jesus is telling us in our Gospel reading today.

Though, to be honest, it’s easy to interpret what Jesus is saying here in a merely Eucharistic manner – in the language of the Lord’s Supper. After all, even though our Reformed Theology does not interpret the elements of the Lord’s Supper as being altered in any substantive manner in the ritual of communion, we use the language of the Body and Blood at the Lord’s Table. “The Body of Christ, broken for you…” “The Blood of Christ, shed for you…”

This passage has been used as an argument for the Catholic and Episcopal theology of transubstantiation, where the elements of communion become in some manner substantially transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ, as well as for the Lutheran theology of consubstantiation, where the fundamental substance of the body and blood of Christ are present alongside the bread and the juice, or wine.

And after all, hasn’t Jesus been talking this whole time about bread?

Well, yes. And to those of us on this side of the Resurrection, it’s a very familiar conversation, manna in the wilderness, bread from heaven, Jesus as the Bread of Life. It is a comforting, reassuring picture for those of us who have taken the name of Christ. And please understand that there is nothing wrong, and everything right, about that picture! We have the words, as well as the testimony of the body of believers and the affirmation of the indwelling Holy Spirit to help us make those connections.

Yet there is more… and the picture is violent and troubling, but it is a picture of liberation.

The people listening to Jesus that day were getting their face rubbed in the picture, you see. Jesus’ words were challenging them, pushing them to expand their understanding of the Almighty, to open their hearts to a measure of love they had never imagined, an inconceivable truth.

Here was this human being standing in front of them… granted, an extraordinary human being, someone who could perform great signs, who spoke the oracles of God… but a person, nonetheless. Bad enough he claimed to be better than Moses, but the crowd really got steamed when Jesus went so far as to say, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Our reading says the people “disputed.” The Greek word there actually carries a much stronger connotation – one of physical fighting! The crowd had erupted into violence! They were coming to blows with one another over this! Jesus had better say something quick to calm them down!

Well, Jesus did speak... but...

Have you ever actually seen someone throw gasoline on a fire? The closest I’ve come is starter fluid on flaming charcoal, but I’m willing to bet that it’s a pale comparison to what Jesus’ next words could have done to the crowd…

But they stood there, stunned, frozen, aghast, sickened and horrified.

“Eat my flesh… drink my blood?” Could he really be telling the crowd to roast him up and make a feast of him, like some band of ancient pagans? No wonder they stood there gape-mouthed, speechless!

But it goes further than even that! Jesus is not merely using the language of cannibalism, he is using words of violence. “Eat my flesh?” The Greek, trogein, is generally used of animals gnawing audibly on their food! No wonder we so quickly retreat to the comfort of the language of the Lord’s Supper! No one wants to dwell on such an abhorrent image!

And I can, in good conscience, do nothing to lessen the dreadfulness of the language… I dare not, because of the Cross.

Why would Jesus use such violent, such graphic and bloody language, when he knew it would offend and enrage the crowd, when he no doubt knew that even we, who call ourselves by his name, would recoil at these words?

Yes, it is a visceral, bloody, discomforting picture that Jesus paints for us in our reading today. Out of the mouth of any other person in history, it is the language of hyperbole, of gross exaggeration, of wild and fevered fantasy.

But not that many days after Jesus speaks to that horrified crowd, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords will, of his own free will, and out of a deep and abiding love for humankind, bear the torture of the scourge and the humiliation of the crown of thorns, take up his cross, and as his blood drains from him, Jesus will allow death to gnaw at his flesh until he appears to have been consumed.

The cross is offensive. The very idea! That the God of all creation would hang, naked and bleeding, until his life is drained from him, and do it as an act of love for that creation… it’s ridiculous. Gods don’t die, and they certainly don’t die to redeem humankind to themselves.

Besides, even if God could die, why choose such a slow, torturous and humiliating method? Why the cross?

Because, quite simply, it is in that act of submission to the will of God that death itself will be defeated in the Resurrection. It is in that act of unrestrained, vibrant love that humankind will at last be reconciled to God. Jesus not only said the offensive, shocking, gruesome and horrifying thing, he lived it… and he died it! And through it all, Jesus demonstrated for us, lived for us, the truth of what God’s love for you and for me and for the whole world is!

Oh we have done our best to calm it down over the millennia, distilling it into theological statements and doctrines and creeds. In fact, the very community that the Gospel of John is written to had been struggling with a Gnostic heresy which said that Jesus hadn’t really been human, he had just appeared human.

But make no mistake, Jesus stood before that crowd as a real person, with real flesh and real blood, and that real flesh and blood was sacrificed as evidence – stark, shocking, irrefutable evidence of God’s love – a violent, passionate, burning, all-consuming love.

God’s love is the kind of love that finds us at our lowest point, on our worst day, takes our hand, lifts us up, and guides us through.

God’s love finds us in the darkest corner of the farthest reaches of our separation, when we have done the thing we swore we would never do, when we have done our best to alienate ourselves from our Creator, when we have consciously and willfully done the worst we could do, God shines a light, destroys that darkness, and brings us out, forgiving us before we have even asked for it.

God’s love knows no bounds. God’s love doesn’t wait for permission, doesn’t pay attention to propriety or convention, is not at all interested in cultural mores or acceptable standards. God just loves.

Yes, it is really that simple.

The Gospel – the Good News – is that Jesus really, truly came down from heaven to live among us as the fleshly love of God – the wildly passionate, recklessly abundant, vibrantly inclusive love of God.

The Gospel is that Jesus really, truly died upon the cross, giving up his flesh and spilling his blood, to save us from our sins.

The Gospel is that God really, truly raised Jesus from the dead, brought him out of the grave to a new and eternal life.

The Gospel is that God, through Jesus Christ, really, truly has just such a future in store for each and every one of us.

Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us. May we, every day, walking in faithful fellowship in the Holy Spirit, keep the feast!

Lent I - Patience

The list of folks I am indebted to this week is long. So many good ideas, angles, and thoughts. First off, my thanks to Paul J. Nuechterlein, Gil Bailie, and the writings of Rene Girard; also Laurel A. Dykstra and Sojourners, and Fred B. Craddock.

In case you're wondering about the commentator I mention in my sermon, both Vanity Fair and Mother Jones reported on it. The Vanity Fair article includes a video link.

Though the prayer does not appear here, I have once again adapted the World In Prayer for the Prayers of the People.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Romans 5:12-19
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned —sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.
But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”But he answered, “It is written,
‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

This is the Word of the Lord.

You spend long enough in church, and you realize that Christians tell the same story over and over even though we know how it ends. We dread the Crucifixion even as we anticipate the resurrection. As we turn from Epi¬ph¬any to Lent we leave the joy and wonder of the incarnation, moving from revelation and recognition to the hard work of repentance.

Forgetting that we were created for joy, many of us wrongly equate repentance with renouncing pleasure. We act as if our greatest sins were watching too much TV or eating too many chocolates. By “giving them up for Lent,” we continue to participate in the culture of consumption and individualism by adopting something that is little more than a program of self-improvement.

We forget that Lent, like Christianity, is not about us.

Well, Lent is a little bit about us, because Lent reminds us of who we are, and whose we are, and what we are called to be, over against who our surroundings, the media, and our society tell us we should be.

We live in a self-centered society. It seems that, from birth, we are conditioned to view every event, every disaster, every new development through a filter of what it means to me, what do I get out of it, how will I be affected.

I saw a striking example of this on CNBC this past week. As the world was reeling from the shocking news coming out of Japan – so many hundreds killed in the strongest earthquake ever recorded, so many more hundreds drowned or washed out to sea in the tsunami which followed, and so many more rendered homeless, either from earthquake or flood damage, or from evacuation from the vicinity of two nuclear power plants – one commentator, seeing that the US stock market had not fallen, said, and I am quoting, “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

When I heard this, I confess that I sat there gape-mouthed. I wondered how anyone could be so callous, so tone-deaf, so disinvested in the human race to think that the stock market is more valuable than human life?

We people of faith know where it all began. It all began in the Garden.

Paul writes, in our reading today from the book of Romans, that “…sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned…” Sin brings death. We all know this. It’s one of the most basic lessons of Christianity. It began in the Garden and continues today.

At least one theologian suggests something very interesting about what Paul says. There is, it seems, an ambiguous statement in the original Greek there at the end. Gil Bailie says that the phrase is actually, “because of this all have sinned;” and it could refer either to Adam’s sin in the Garden… or it could refer to death: “because of death, all have sinned.”

I feel comfortable exploring this idea, because that is how the Eastern Orthodox Church reads the passage.

And it would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? Greed and self-centeredness all stem from impatience – and death makes impatience logically coherent – it makes immediate gratification make sense. Sebastian Moore said, "Death as ultimate horizon lets sin make as much sense as sin can make." In other words, if there is only death, then our impatience and our determination to have it now, and to have as much of it as we can before death takes it all away from us, makes that attitude as logically and morally coherent as it's possible for it to be.

If there’s only death, then we can justify doing whatever it takes to get ahead, and to do it quickly – not in God’s time, or God’s way, but in our time, which is always right now. We can put commerce and profit above people. We can ignore the suffering of others if it gets in the way of the stock market. We can make it all about me, and me alone.

I think that there’s an aspect of this in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus is being tempted. He's tempted in the wilderness, and these are not merely temptations to power or appetite, or what have you. These are Messianic temptations, and they’re centered around Christ’s mission on earth – the ministry.

“Jesus, you know, you don’t need to be hungry. Just say the word, and you’ll have more food than you could eat in a lifetime. No? OK. Look, if you’re gonna be the Messiah and all, you need to make a big entrance, I mean, bigger than Lady Gaga showing up at the Oscars in an egg, you know? Here’s what you do: jump off the highest part of the Temple here, a real swan dive, and when you don’t splatter on the ground, because angels show up and save you, then no one will be able to dispute who you are, right? It’ll be awesome! Oh, you don’t like that either? Well. OK, look, if you’re the Messiah, then you’ll be running things, so I can get you set up as king of the world, you know, fast-track the whole thing. I got connections, y’know? All you gotta do is follow my lead, and you’ll be king of everything in no time.”

Jesus is being offered the opportunity, as the devil presents it, to bring about the Kingdom of God, the full manifestation of Christ, right now, by doing something so dazzling that nobody could miss it. Everybody would recognize Jesus as Christ instantly! No muss, no fuss, no suffering, no cross! Of course, in each case, Jesus rejects these temptations. Think of it – Jesus forfeits the three greatest powers at his disposal, miracle, mystery, and authority. Instead, he accepts God's plan. Jesus will soon preach good news to the poor and release to captives, relieve the bruised, cleanse lepers, and heal the blind and crippled. Of course, he will be opposed immediately. Forces that traffic in human misery and reap huge profits from the poverty of others will try any means to turn him from such a ministry. But he will perform miracles with bread. He will survive violent attempts to make him king by force. People will come from all around to hear what he has to say. And he will do all of these things in God’s time.

Perhaps, then, the lesson for us in Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, and the lesson of Lent, is patience. It all began in the Garden, and for too many people, it appears to end at the grave, and because of this, nothing but the here and now and what we can get out of it matter.

So, yes, Lent is a little about us in that it reminds us of who we are, and it reminds us that the grave is not at all where it ends. It’s too easy to forget that we Christians, we are Resurrection people. We don’t need to rush, to have it all now, to do even good things in our time rather than God’s time. We have all the time in the world.

In the Resurrection of Christ Jesus, we have the promise that death is not our ultimate horizon; life is. That does not mean, of course, that we should not pour ourselves out to the very last drop. But it means that God is patient, and that we are patient, and that the Holy Spirit is bringing about the transformation of the world gradually, and that we needn't panic. The victory has already been accomplished at the Cross.

So this Lent, I invite you to join me in learning to practice patience, remembering that Christ is the Lord of History and the Cross is the turning point in history. The full presence of Christ in history is simply a matter of time, so give it time! Take your part in it. Don't be impatient. Don't be anxious. God is with us, Immanuel.